MEMOIRS:
CHAPTER 4 ONE SMALL STEP
I have no recollection of the first years of my life and so have to rely on secondary sources to fill in the gaps.
My parents, like all parents I suppose, have a stock of cute stories about my early days. Apparently I took to potty training quite well, although put up a hysterical fight every time they tried to take away the fruits of my labour. According to psychologists, this anal retentive behaviour would explain my penchant in later years for the writing of lists, the pathological need for tidy work surfaces and the fact that on the way to the airport I check for my passport about twenty times.
They also have a small cache of black and white photographs depicting me in various stages of growth: there’s one of me in a cot, another with cake all over my face, and another next to the clothes line in a dressing gown and slippers. My favourite is of me sitting in a pedal car in nothing but a singlet.
Eventually I was wrestling with my first words. My mother was horrified that I quickly developed a pompous plum-in-mouth English accent, although my inability to pronounce the letter “l” had a certain cute appeal. A favourite party trick in front of guests was to say “There’s a yewow bawoon in the wovewy ambuwance.” Even at such a young age I could get a laugh.
Meanwhile outside my own world of bunny slippers and afternoon naps, a lot was going on. A teenage Evonne Goolagong won the New South Wales tennis championships. Winston Churchill died, as did TS Eliot, Nat King Cole, Stan Laurel, Somerset Maugham and Buster Keaton. American Marines and Australian troops went into Vietnam. The Montgomery Civil Rights March took place. Julie Andrews won the Oscar for Mary Poppins. The first black man graduated from an American University. The Seekers released “I’ll never find another you”. The Beatles got MBEs. Soviets and Americans “walked” in space. The Mariner IV sent back the first close-up pictures of Mars. Cassius Clay kept his world title. The Beaumont children went missing. India got Indira Gandhi as PM. Sir Bob Menzies retired as Australia’s PM. Australia converted to decimal currency. The Sound of Music won the Oscar for Best Film. The French let off a nuclear bomb at Mururoa Atoll. Harold Holt went for a surf and didn’t come out again.
I don’t remember any of that though. My first memory though is from the year 1969.
·
Memory is like a video tape.
We live in the present, and everything that we see and do and touch and taste is recorded somewhere deep in the infinitesimal electrical impulses and fathomless creases of the cerebral cortex.
Each day, each hour, each second goes by and the mental video turns and turns and turns.
Whenever you look back on your life, you rewind my memory tape and replay the sights and sounds and feelings of previous experience.
As an adult I can close my eyes and rewind to significant moments in my life; University graduation, wedding day, the births of my children, a dinner party with good friends, the family holiday to the Big Pineapple, that time I laughed so hard that red cordial came out my nose…. They all unfold like a moebius strip of memory on the mental viewscreen.
Then, like The Traveller in HG Wells’ The Time Machine, I can push the lever and rewind even further to my first year of high school, the time I got the chicken pox, the Christmas of my first skateboard, the cover of the first book I ever read (something scary about Tom’s Big Thumb).
But if I keep the rewind button pressed down, the picture and sound quality increasingly gets more distorted and disjointed. Unrelated and nonsensical images begin to flash before my eyes. There are enormous periods of static, interspersed with bizarre glimpses of a particular room or a smell or noise, a patch of carpet, a yellow toy, the Cat in the Hat poster by my bed, the scratches and 2B pencil scrawls underneath the kitchen table, Patsy from the TV show Skippy, sunshine through a teddy-beared curtain, an animated owl teaching road rules before the 7 o’clock news on ABC television.
Eventually the final image flickers and the tape turns to electronic hash and I realise I’m in the zone before my brain even had the capacity to perform long-term recording… either that, or I’ve subsequently killed off that part of my memory with too many good dinner parties.
Everyone has a “first moment” where their personal video-tape begins. Some people claim they have vague memories of warm fluid, weightlessness and a resounding heartbeat. Some just keep on rewinding until they’re Cleopatra or the Captain of the Titanic.
When it comes to first memories, there was a lot for me to choose from. China had a cultural revolution. Walt Disney died. The Beatles released Sgt Peppers. Amongst a storm of protest, Ronald Ryan became the last man to be hanged in Australia. The Seekers sang Georgy Girl and Gough Whitlam became the new head of the Labor Party. Australian aboriginals were counted in the census for the first time. Israel had a six day war with the Arabs. Dr Christiaan Barnard performed the first successful heart transplant. The world’s first supersonic airliner, the prototype Concorde 001, made its debut in France. Martin Luther King was executed. Robert Kennedy was gunned down. Richard Nixon became US President. Mexico City hosted an Olympics. The cast members of Hair introduced the era of nudity on stage.
What a wonderful smorgasbord from which to have a first memory.
Of course, 1969 is famous for one particular, earth-shattering, history-defining event. After millennia of people looking up to the heavens and wondering if the moon was cheese or a rock thirty metres deep in dust, the science-fiction fantasy of HG Wells took that one small step across to the realm of historical reality. Mankind finally broke the bounds of the earth and reached for the stars. It was the dawn of a new era.
After a fiercely contested and much publicised space race between the Soviets and the Americans, the entire world stopped and held its breath as at 12.56pm Eastern Standard Time on July 21, 1969, a man called Neil Armstrong stepped out of his small craft, Eagle, and took mankind’s first step on the surface of the moon.
It was without doubt one of the most important moments in the history of mankind. TCN-9 ran Australia’s longest non-stop live coverage of the event, an amazing 86 hours. Across the world, billions of faces were fixed to small fuzzy black and white screens, watching those now-so-familiar images beamed across several thousand kilometres of inky vacuum.
And to think, of all the times to be alive, I was there!
Unfortunately, I don’t remember a single moment of the moon landing.
Not a one.
I’ve tried and tried, but the video is blank. Static. Zippo. My parents assure me that I was parked in front of our tiny AWA television set with its bakerlite sides, enormous clunky knobs and massive valves at the exact and critical moment when Neil said those words. But obviously my five year old brain did not grasp the sense of import.
My generation never knew life without space travel, moon landings, astronauts and shuttles. And so they are taken for granted and considered as much a part of every day life as the automobile or electricity. Being a kid and wanting to be an astronaut was as ordinary and probable, therefore, as wanting to be a postman or baker.
To the billions of older people on the planet, however, who knew life before the space age, the moon landing must have seemed like a dream.
Yes, 1969 was the year of my first memory, but it was not of the moon landing.
My first memory was instead of the tragic episode of Steven Taylor attempting to set a new tricycle land-speed record down the ramp to the preschool toilets.
There was a long and gentle slope on the concrete path between the preschool hall and the outdoor toilet block. Nobody walked there. The girls rode fat white wheeled scooters and the boys rode one of the preschool’s fleet of Dinky trikes.
By using your sandalled feet as brakes, you could control your descent and safely lean in to the quick left hander, then to shoot out along the grass of the lower play area. It was extremely popular with all the boys and any moment would see a variety of trikes, scooters and pedal cars zooming down like a miniature grand-prix.
I don’t know if Steven simply lost control, misjudged the turn or whether in a misguided attempt to push the adventure threshold to the limit he decided to see what would happen if he kept on straight and true. Such conjectures are now academic.
The critical factors in the subsequent tragedy was that he didn’t slow himself down and he didn’t turn the handlebar. The pedals which a dizzying blur which cut the air and hummed like a turbine. Rocketing down the path, the bike looked like the Starship Enterprise achieving Warp 5. As little kids dived for safety, the big front wheel smacked into the toilet block step. The trike folded in on itself like a black hole, instantly launching its rider into space. Steven remained airborne across the entire distance of the tiled floor of the toilet block.
The sound his head made when it slammed into the urinal on the far wall was like the gong at the start of the old Rank-Arena movies when it was clobbered by the Herculean bloke with the elephantisus donger.
The teachers came from all directions to find him lying prostrate in the trough amongst the stinky pine-fragrance tablets. He would eventually recover and the ostrich egg on his forehead would eventually go away.
But the urinal was never the same again. For the remainder of the year, it sported a cranium size indentation that the flush could never reach, instead water-falling over the top like an entrance to a secret cave.
There are other memories of preschool: Milk in plastic cups. Afternoon sleeps on fold-up cots. A pale blue blanket which I rubbed against my top lip to go to sleep. Egg cartons with different coloured paints in each compartment. Singing to an out-of-tune piano with chipped yellow keys. Making Jamie Nunn cry by throwing sand on the plastic slide. At the end of the year I dressed up as a Prince and walked in a big circle with the other kids in their favourite dress-ups while the parents clapped.
They are happy and warm memories. And while I regret that I don’t recall Neil Armstrong’s historic step, I still get a smile out of remembering the noise Steven Taylor made – a curious cry of triumph and horror – as he flew towards his destiny in the urinal of the preschool toilets.
My parents, like all parents I suppose, have a stock of cute stories about my early days. Apparently I took to potty training quite well, although put up a hysterical fight every time they tried to take away the fruits of my labour. According to psychologists, this anal retentive behaviour would explain my penchant in later years for the writing of lists, the pathological need for tidy work surfaces and the fact that on the way to the airport I check for my passport about twenty times.
They also have a small cache of black and white photographs depicting me in various stages of growth: there’s one of me in a cot, another with cake all over my face, and another next to the clothes line in a dressing gown and slippers. My favourite is of me sitting in a pedal car in nothing but a singlet.
Eventually I was wrestling with my first words. My mother was horrified that I quickly developed a pompous plum-in-mouth English accent, although my inability to pronounce the letter “l” had a certain cute appeal. A favourite party trick in front of guests was to say “There’s a yewow bawoon in the wovewy ambuwance.” Even at such a young age I could get a laugh.
Meanwhile outside my own world of bunny slippers and afternoon naps, a lot was going on. A teenage Evonne Goolagong won the New South Wales tennis championships. Winston Churchill died, as did TS Eliot, Nat King Cole, Stan Laurel, Somerset Maugham and Buster Keaton. American Marines and Australian troops went into Vietnam. The Montgomery Civil Rights March took place. Julie Andrews won the Oscar for Mary Poppins. The first black man graduated from an American University. The Seekers released “I’ll never find another you”. The Beatles got MBEs. Soviets and Americans “walked” in space. The Mariner IV sent back the first close-up pictures of Mars. Cassius Clay kept his world title. The Beaumont children went missing. India got Indira Gandhi as PM. Sir Bob Menzies retired as Australia’s PM. Australia converted to decimal currency. The Sound of Music won the Oscar for Best Film. The French let off a nuclear bomb at Mururoa Atoll. Harold Holt went for a surf and didn’t come out again.
I don’t remember any of that though. My first memory though is from the year 1969.
·
Memory is like a video tape.
We live in the present, and everything that we see and do and touch and taste is recorded somewhere deep in the infinitesimal electrical impulses and fathomless creases of the cerebral cortex.
Each day, each hour, each second goes by and the mental video turns and turns and turns.
Whenever you look back on your life, you rewind my memory tape and replay the sights and sounds and feelings of previous experience.
As an adult I can close my eyes and rewind to significant moments in my life; University graduation, wedding day, the births of my children, a dinner party with good friends, the family holiday to the Big Pineapple, that time I laughed so hard that red cordial came out my nose…. They all unfold like a moebius strip of memory on the mental viewscreen.
Then, like The Traveller in HG Wells’ The Time Machine, I can push the lever and rewind even further to my first year of high school, the time I got the chicken pox, the Christmas of my first skateboard, the cover of the first book I ever read (something scary about Tom’s Big Thumb).
But if I keep the rewind button pressed down, the picture and sound quality increasingly gets more distorted and disjointed. Unrelated and nonsensical images begin to flash before my eyes. There are enormous periods of static, interspersed with bizarre glimpses of a particular room or a smell or noise, a patch of carpet, a yellow toy, the Cat in the Hat poster by my bed, the scratches and 2B pencil scrawls underneath the kitchen table, Patsy from the TV show Skippy, sunshine through a teddy-beared curtain, an animated owl teaching road rules before the 7 o’clock news on ABC television.
Eventually the final image flickers and the tape turns to electronic hash and I realise I’m in the zone before my brain even had the capacity to perform long-term recording… either that, or I’ve subsequently killed off that part of my memory with too many good dinner parties.
Everyone has a “first moment” where their personal video-tape begins. Some people claim they have vague memories of warm fluid, weightlessness and a resounding heartbeat. Some just keep on rewinding until they’re Cleopatra or the Captain of the Titanic.
When it comes to first memories, there was a lot for me to choose from. China had a cultural revolution. Walt Disney died. The Beatles released Sgt Peppers. Amongst a storm of protest, Ronald Ryan became the last man to be hanged in Australia. The Seekers sang Georgy Girl and Gough Whitlam became the new head of the Labor Party. Australian aboriginals were counted in the census for the first time. Israel had a six day war with the Arabs. Dr Christiaan Barnard performed the first successful heart transplant. The world’s first supersonic airliner, the prototype Concorde 001, made its debut in France. Martin Luther King was executed. Robert Kennedy was gunned down. Richard Nixon became US President. Mexico City hosted an Olympics. The cast members of Hair introduced the era of nudity on stage.
What a wonderful smorgasbord from which to have a first memory.
Of course, 1969 is famous for one particular, earth-shattering, history-defining event. After millennia of people looking up to the heavens and wondering if the moon was cheese or a rock thirty metres deep in dust, the science-fiction fantasy of HG Wells took that one small step across to the realm of historical reality. Mankind finally broke the bounds of the earth and reached for the stars. It was the dawn of a new era.
After a fiercely contested and much publicised space race between the Soviets and the Americans, the entire world stopped and held its breath as at 12.56pm Eastern Standard Time on July 21, 1969, a man called Neil Armstrong stepped out of his small craft, Eagle, and took mankind’s first step on the surface of the moon.
It was without doubt one of the most important moments in the history of mankind. TCN-9 ran Australia’s longest non-stop live coverage of the event, an amazing 86 hours. Across the world, billions of faces were fixed to small fuzzy black and white screens, watching those now-so-familiar images beamed across several thousand kilometres of inky vacuum.
And to think, of all the times to be alive, I was there!
Unfortunately, I don’t remember a single moment of the moon landing.
Not a one.
I’ve tried and tried, but the video is blank. Static. Zippo. My parents assure me that I was parked in front of our tiny AWA television set with its bakerlite sides, enormous clunky knobs and massive valves at the exact and critical moment when Neil said those words. But obviously my five year old brain did not grasp the sense of import.
My generation never knew life without space travel, moon landings, astronauts and shuttles. And so they are taken for granted and considered as much a part of every day life as the automobile or electricity. Being a kid and wanting to be an astronaut was as ordinary and probable, therefore, as wanting to be a postman or baker.
To the billions of older people on the planet, however, who knew life before the space age, the moon landing must have seemed like a dream.
Yes, 1969 was the year of my first memory, but it was not of the moon landing.
My first memory was instead of the tragic episode of Steven Taylor attempting to set a new tricycle land-speed record down the ramp to the preschool toilets.
There was a long and gentle slope on the concrete path between the preschool hall and the outdoor toilet block. Nobody walked there. The girls rode fat white wheeled scooters and the boys rode one of the preschool’s fleet of Dinky trikes.
By using your sandalled feet as brakes, you could control your descent and safely lean in to the quick left hander, then to shoot out along the grass of the lower play area. It was extremely popular with all the boys and any moment would see a variety of trikes, scooters and pedal cars zooming down like a miniature grand-prix.
I don’t know if Steven simply lost control, misjudged the turn or whether in a misguided attempt to push the adventure threshold to the limit he decided to see what would happen if he kept on straight and true. Such conjectures are now academic.
The critical factors in the subsequent tragedy was that he didn’t slow himself down and he didn’t turn the handlebar. The pedals which a dizzying blur which cut the air and hummed like a turbine. Rocketing down the path, the bike looked like the Starship Enterprise achieving Warp 5. As little kids dived for safety, the big front wheel smacked into the toilet block step. The trike folded in on itself like a black hole, instantly launching its rider into space. Steven remained airborne across the entire distance of the tiled floor of the toilet block.
The sound his head made when it slammed into the urinal on the far wall was like the gong at the start of the old Rank-Arena movies when it was clobbered by the Herculean bloke with the elephantisus donger.
The teachers came from all directions to find him lying prostrate in the trough amongst the stinky pine-fragrance tablets. He would eventually recover and the ostrich egg on his forehead would eventually go away.
But the urinal was never the same again. For the remainder of the year, it sported a cranium size indentation that the flush could never reach, instead water-falling over the top like an entrance to a secret cave.
There are other memories of preschool: Milk in plastic cups. Afternoon sleeps on fold-up cots. A pale blue blanket which I rubbed against my top lip to go to sleep. Egg cartons with different coloured paints in each compartment. Singing to an out-of-tune piano with chipped yellow keys. Making Jamie Nunn cry by throwing sand on the plastic slide. At the end of the year I dressed up as a Prince and walked in a big circle with the other kids in their favourite dress-ups while the parents clapped.
They are happy and warm memories. And while I regret that I don’t recall Neil Armstrong’s historic step, I still get a smile out of remembering the noise Steven Taylor made – a curious cry of triumph and horror – as he flew towards his destiny in the urinal of the preschool toilets.