MEMOIRS:
CHAPTER 5 THE EARLY YEARS
My life in a convalescent hospital in Goulburn evolved slowly out of a grey mist of the pre-sentient nothingness called early childhood.
Unlike the apocalypse-inducing computer featured in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s great yarn Terminator which gained self awareness at a specific moment on a specific day, I simply emerged gradually into a timeless existence of scooter riding, daytime television, fluffy slippers and Dr Suess books, as if I had been doing this since time began.
Life back in those years was simple.
A five year old is like a gold-fish which, according to reliable anecdotes, has no sense of time apart from the immediate moment. This is how, it is hypothesized, they can swim around a tiny bowl and still think that their life is fulfilling and rather complex and therefore don’t simply leap out to their doom on the laminex bench-top.
Similarly, each day for a child is a series of all-absorbing moments that continue until an adult comes along and tells them it’s time for dinner.
When not at preschool, my life was composed primarily of days of sleeping in, afternoon naps and early bed-times, interspersed mostly with television and lots of running around pretending to be a spaceship re-entering the atmosphere and coming in for a crash landing.
Like other kids my age, a great deal of time was spent on the floor.
Adults exist in a world five or six feet away from the carpet, up amongst the pictures, chairs, desks, high cupboards and expensive stereo equipment. The floor is a long way down and is only good for walking on. The only time you ever visit down there is when you have to tie your shoes.
But the five year old lives down there…. And everything is enormous.
I spent a lot of time on the floor. A slight tilt of the head and a sideways-step was all it took for me to be under the dining room table where I perceived I was invisible to my parents. Under my bed was a roomy cavern of books and toys. A quick shove of a pile of blankets and I could burrow into the linen cupboard, where my greatest thrill was to take off all my clothes and hide there naked scratching my bum.
Cuisenaire Rods occupied a lot of my time.
They were originally designed as a mathematical teaching tool. There were 10 groups of rods in a set, starting with the cubic centimetre white and then increasing by a centimetre respectively through red (2cm), light green (3cm), purple, yellow, dark green, black, brown, blue and finishing with the 10cm orange.
To the uninitiated, these were just little colourful wooden beams, which supposedly increased the user’s understanding of addition, subtraction and even division. Even though I failed almost every maths exam in the subsequent years, I still know to this day that purple, light green, red and white together equal orange... a combination that caused indescribable arguments many years later with my visual arts teacher when she explain to the class how to create a colour wheel.
At the time, I wasn’t particularly interested in their mathematical possibilities; to me they were just colourful blocks.
I laid out the rods end to end to form complex fencing structures or vast roadways across the lounge-room. They could be organised to form short words and secret and profound messages like “E am in cat”. By balancing a blue on a purple-red stack-axis, I could make a see-saw or even a poorly functioning catapault.
The piece-de-resistance, however, in the hierarchy of Cuisenaire architecture, was the tower.
Starting with a square of orange blocks and then working up through the smaller colours - each level smaller than the one below until you crowned it with a single white cube - the Cuisenaire tower was a finely balanced pygmy ziggurat. Even the heavy footsteps of a passing adult could turn a poorly constructed minaret into a jumbled pile like a beaver’s log-jam.
I spent hours in the space behind the piano in the corner of the lounge-room building complex arrays of Cuisenaire towers linked by suspended beams. And when my mother, resplendent in floral apron, would appear to announce the washing-up-for-dinner-routine, I would painstakingly nudge one of the base beams out with an almost alarmingly pre-orgasmic sense of its imminent destruction.
There is something about the fact that at the core of human nature, the ying of creation is balanced by the indefinably disturbing pleasure of the yang, namely, watching it all fall down.
·
My parents had a radio.
The word “radio” now brings to mind a tiny sleek black component system the size of a novel and with the punch of a symphony orchestra.
My parents’ radio was not like this.
Occupying a significant proportion of the lounge-room and the size of a volkswagen, it looked like a drinks cabinet. When you pushed back the mahogany-veneered lid, it folded out to reveal a clunky metallic turntable and a series of knobs reminiscent of the control panel of an Apollo spacecraft.
They had a collection of “long-play recording albums” of the variety, it was carefully explained on the sleeve, to be played at 33 and 1/3 revolutions per minute.
Today, music is ambient noise. It’s on when we’re in the car or out jogging, like a soundtrack to our daily existence.
Back then, it was an event. Mum or Dad would put on an “L.P.” and we would gather around the altar of the record player to listen to its magic.
While the sun swept down over the bleached plains of the Southern Tablelands, Mum would sit at the kitchen table and either shell peas or crochet a new pant-suit while Dad perched on a stool in his any one of his massive selection of fawn cardigans sketching a plan for a new back deck and I sat on the carpet in front of the musical drinks cabinet.
My parents had a diverse collection of records. There was a big selection of obtuse classical ones, always somebody’s fifth movement of their third opus played by the Sangranistian Philarmonia with Ophelia Longbottom as guest on the harp, that sort of thing.
My mum also had a penchant for Robert Goulet who we had to listen to ad infinitum, crooning away with his big moustache on the sleeve as he walked in soft focus through fields of golden wheat singing songs with titles like “I never knew how much I loved you until I saw you walking out the door”.
There was a significant collection of English comedian records like Harry Secombe and Morcambe & Wise. Their jokes seemed to always revolve around misunderstandings in fish’n’chip shops. My dad would howl in laughter. I never got the jokes.
My favourite was the cast recording of Camelot. It was a white record with glossy photographs of Julie Andrews and Richard Burton on the back. I would sit there for hours listening to the perky songs and laboriously kissing the photo of Julie Andrews. It would be years before I would have either the knowledge or the physical capacity to be serious about the opposite sex. But even at that age, that photo was stirring in an inexplicable way.
·
Then, of course, there was television.
None of the fancy flat screen digital stuff that is around nowadays, mind you. I’m talking the televisual equivalent of a crystal radio set. Small, black and white, and fuzzy. Some shows looked like cloud patterns.
TV was still in its relatively early years. There was no transmission at night so the evening’s pickings would come to an end with a brass band playing the national anthem or an Elvis looking guy in big sunglasses gesturing grandly on a Manly ferry while singing “My city of Sydney…”.
There were gaps between shows, and for a large part of the day the ABC transmitted a colourfully striped test pattern or a clock ticking down to the next hour.
TV programs were divided into two distinct categories; kids programs and adults programs. There were only a few adult programs I got to see, usually in that brief tele-visual window before my bed-time.
There was a 5 minute before-the-news rock program called GTK which featured bands like Zoot, The Master’s Apprentices and Daddy Cool.
A wiry, crazy little man with a lab coat called Professor Julius Sumner Miller (the man, not the coat) taught the nation science tricks with water, rubber bands, milk bottles, bunsen burners and bicarbonate of soda. His voice was like fingernails on a chalkboard, his constant cry to the bewildered student audience as he posed his quirky scientific quandries, “Why is it so?”
A twice weekly favourite was the aptly named Origami – the ancient Chinese art of paper folding - hosted by Robert Harbin who appeared sombrely in a Mao Se Tung outfit, perhaps to reflect the Asian nature of his medium. On “origami-night” my parents and I gathered eagerly in front of the tele with our brightly coloured squares, there to mimic Harbin’s step-by-step instructions. The man was a genius, able to majestically conjure a flapping swan, jumping frog, praying mantis, small electrical appliance or operational rotary engine with just a few quick folds to a sheet of paper. My parents could often manage something half-decent, but my creations invariably looked like Frog After Falling into Barrel of Acid or Giraffe Hit By Steamroller. Most of my attempts ended as one of my own creations - Flying Snowball - which I created by scrunching the poorly proportioned water-bomb cum lantern into a ball and hurling it in frustration at the bin.
My parents indulged in a nightly ritual in front of Bellbird, one of the first popular Aussie soaps. It had your typical cast of odd-ball Aussie rural townsfolk up to all kinds of low jinks and mundane activity. I recall a lot of time was set in a pub.
I was more partial to kids programs.
I liked Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men. This was puppeteering at its crudest. Bill and Ben were two disjointed little blokes with inverted pie-tin hats who jerked and spasmed about the tiny cardboard set under intricate webs of exceedingly visible fishing line.
Every episode was the same. They came out, dancing and twitching in random directions, making little squeaking noises and pronouncing the only word in their vocabulary, “weed”, (which coincidentally is what the producers of the show must have been consuming in vast quantities) before they were joined by a friendly flower which rose up out of a nearby pot like a charmed snake. Then footsteps would approach and they’d all scurry back to their various flowerpots, grumbling about the gardener or watering-can or whatever.
Another great show of the day was the Magic Roundabout. This was also a pioneering program which used stop motion photography to manoeuvre an assortment of little creatures around a glaringly white linoleum set.
It came on for five minutes before my parents sat down to watch the bespectacled James Dibble on the ABC nightly news.
There was Dugald, a shaggy dog with a sugar habit, an eccentric rabbit by the name of Dylan as well as a snail and a pink cow who I think might even have had wings. Zebedee was a head on springs who bounded into shot with a jarring “boing-boing” sound. At the end of each episode, he announced that it was “time for bed” before boinging off on another adventure.
Many critics since have suggested that the Magic Roundabout was an analogy for drug use with hidden torrents of double-entendre and that basically the whole show was one big drug trip.
There is something curiously appealing about the idea that millions of kids could watch a TV show totally oblivious to the depraved private joke of the producers.
Similar rumours have emerged about Captain Pugwash, also an early pioneer of TV production. The animation was elementary to say the least, often involving a still frame with an occasionally moving body part which spasmed back and forth at moments generally unrelated to the narrative or dialogue.
Pugwash was the rather large Captain of the Black Pig which sailed the jolly seas with his crew Tom the cabin boy, Willy and Master Mate. Each episode, they were chased and plotted against by Cut-Throat Jake and his nasty crew from the Flying Dustbin.
“Jumping Jellyfish” he would yell, his body frozen for five seconds despite the obvious panic in his voice, “there’s Jake off the starboard bow”. Then his left leg would flick up at exactly the same moment as he lowered his spyglass from his face, where he would freeze for another few seconds.
The existence of the naughty characters Roger the cabin boy, Master Bates, Seamen Staines and Big Fat Willy is alas an urban myth. Which is a pity, because if that were the case, it would have been quite funny.
Mr Squiggle, The Man from the Moon, was also a favourite.
The amiable Squiggle, with his pointy head and amazingly proportioned phallic pencil-nose, is Australia’s longest running television show.
In each episode he arrived from the moon “with lots of fun for everyone” in a spaceship that wrapped around him, leaving a hole for his nose to stick out. The overall effect was like a drunk man stumbling out from a toilet with his flag still to the wind, if you get my drift.
Squiggle was a frail and bumbling puppet, like a clown with Parkinsons. He had big blinking eyes and a quirky sycophantic voice.
There was a blackboard, a cranky steam-shovel called Bill and an assistant who bantered with Squiggle as he did the drawing thing with his face. Back then it was Miss Pat, who along with Julie Andrews shared the dubious honour of being another object of my affection. Kissing the TV screen was easier because it was bigger, but it hurt my eyes a lot more and often left sloppy marks on the glass that my mother was less than pleased with.
Squiggle’s main trick was to draw. Viewers sent in pieces of paper with a meaningless assortment of squiggles, shapes and lines. These were put up on Blackboard and Mr Squiggle would miraculously add to them to create clever drawings.
I would sit in front of the TV with a little table and a piece of paper and quickly try to reproduce Squiggle’s squiggle. But my efforts invariably looked like scribble.
My favourite show of the time, however, was Adventure Island.
Set in the magical kingdom of Diddley-Dum-Diddley, the show followed the adventures of Percy Panda and two bizarre characters by the names of Clown and Flower Potts. It was hosted by Miss Sue, who dressed like Alice in Wonderland and soon became yet another object of my affection.
The pantomime style of the show appealed to my young sensibilities. As I recall, each episode involved the music-hall caricatures of Fester Fumble and Miser Meanie getting up to their no-good tricks, like trying to steal pies and other such high level crimes. It was all done with loads of over-acting and exaggerated facial expressions.
I loved it and soon developed elaborate fantasies about growing up and going to Adventure Island. I would tie up Fester and Miser and push them off in a boat and then marry Miss Sue.
Unfortunately, a few years later the show was axed to make way for some American nonsense starring a Big Bird and a whole bunch of puppets who lived on a sunny street somewhere.
Unlike the apocalypse-inducing computer featured in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s great yarn Terminator which gained self awareness at a specific moment on a specific day, I simply emerged gradually into a timeless existence of scooter riding, daytime television, fluffy slippers and Dr Suess books, as if I had been doing this since time began.
Life back in those years was simple.
A five year old is like a gold-fish which, according to reliable anecdotes, has no sense of time apart from the immediate moment. This is how, it is hypothesized, they can swim around a tiny bowl and still think that their life is fulfilling and rather complex and therefore don’t simply leap out to their doom on the laminex bench-top.
Similarly, each day for a child is a series of all-absorbing moments that continue until an adult comes along and tells them it’s time for dinner.
When not at preschool, my life was composed primarily of days of sleeping in, afternoon naps and early bed-times, interspersed mostly with television and lots of running around pretending to be a spaceship re-entering the atmosphere and coming in for a crash landing.
Like other kids my age, a great deal of time was spent on the floor.
Adults exist in a world five or six feet away from the carpet, up amongst the pictures, chairs, desks, high cupboards and expensive stereo equipment. The floor is a long way down and is only good for walking on. The only time you ever visit down there is when you have to tie your shoes.
But the five year old lives down there…. And everything is enormous.
I spent a lot of time on the floor. A slight tilt of the head and a sideways-step was all it took for me to be under the dining room table where I perceived I was invisible to my parents. Under my bed was a roomy cavern of books and toys. A quick shove of a pile of blankets and I could burrow into the linen cupboard, where my greatest thrill was to take off all my clothes and hide there naked scratching my bum.
Cuisenaire Rods occupied a lot of my time.
They were originally designed as a mathematical teaching tool. There were 10 groups of rods in a set, starting with the cubic centimetre white and then increasing by a centimetre respectively through red (2cm), light green (3cm), purple, yellow, dark green, black, brown, blue and finishing with the 10cm orange.
To the uninitiated, these were just little colourful wooden beams, which supposedly increased the user’s understanding of addition, subtraction and even division. Even though I failed almost every maths exam in the subsequent years, I still know to this day that purple, light green, red and white together equal orange... a combination that caused indescribable arguments many years later with my visual arts teacher when she explain to the class how to create a colour wheel.
At the time, I wasn’t particularly interested in their mathematical possibilities; to me they were just colourful blocks.
I laid out the rods end to end to form complex fencing structures or vast roadways across the lounge-room. They could be organised to form short words and secret and profound messages like “E am in cat”. By balancing a blue on a purple-red stack-axis, I could make a see-saw or even a poorly functioning catapault.
The piece-de-resistance, however, in the hierarchy of Cuisenaire architecture, was the tower.
Starting with a square of orange blocks and then working up through the smaller colours - each level smaller than the one below until you crowned it with a single white cube - the Cuisenaire tower was a finely balanced pygmy ziggurat. Even the heavy footsteps of a passing adult could turn a poorly constructed minaret into a jumbled pile like a beaver’s log-jam.
I spent hours in the space behind the piano in the corner of the lounge-room building complex arrays of Cuisenaire towers linked by suspended beams. And when my mother, resplendent in floral apron, would appear to announce the washing-up-for-dinner-routine, I would painstakingly nudge one of the base beams out with an almost alarmingly pre-orgasmic sense of its imminent destruction.
There is something about the fact that at the core of human nature, the ying of creation is balanced by the indefinably disturbing pleasure of the yang, namely, watching it all fall down.
·
My parents had a radio.
The word “radio” now brings to mind a tiny sleek black component system the size of a novel and with the punch of a symphony orchestra.
My parents’ radio was not like this.
Occupying a significant proportion of the lounge-room and the size of a volkswagen, it looked like a drinks cabinet. When you pushed back the mahogany-veneered lid, it folded out to reveal a clunky metallic turntable and a series of knobs reminiscent of the control panel of an Apollo spacecraft.
They had a collection of “long-play recording albums” of the variety, it was carefully explained on the sleeve, to be played at 33 and 1/3 revolutions per minute.
Today, music is ambient noise. It’s on when we’re in the car or out jogging, like a soundtrack to our daily existence.
Back then, it was an event. Mum or Dad would put on an “L.P.” and we would gather around the altar of the record player to listen to its magic.
While the sun swept down over the bleached plains of the Southern Tablelands, Mum would sit at the kitchen table and either shell peas or crochet a new pant-suit while Dad perched on a stool in his any one of his massive selection of fawn cardigans sketching a plan for a new back deck and I sat on the carpet in front of the musical drinks cabinet.
My parents had a diverse collection of records. There was a big selection of obtuse classical ones, always somebody’s fifth movement of their third opus played by the Sangranistian Philarmonia with Ophelia Longbottom as guest on the harp, that sort of thing.
My mum also had a penchant for Robert Goulet who we had to listen to ad infinitum, crooning away with his big moustache on the sleeve as he walked in soft focus through fields of golden wheat singing songs with titles like “I never knew how much I loved you until I saw you walking out the door”.
There was a significant collection of English comedian records like Harry Secombe and Morcambe & Wise. Their jokes seemed to always revolve around misunderstandings in fish’n’chip shops. My dad would howl in laughter. I never got the jokes.
My favourite was the cast recording of Camelot. It was a white record with glossy photographs of Julie Andrews and Richard Burton on the back. I would sit there for hours listening to the perky songs and laboriously kissing the photo of Julie Andrews. It would be years before I would have either the knowledge or the physical capacity to be serious about the opposite sex. But even at that age, that photo was stirring in an inexplicable way.
·
Then, of course, there was television.
None of the fancy flat screen digital stuff that is around nowadays, mind you. I’m talking the televisual equivalent of a crystal radio set. Small, black and white, and fuzzy. Some shows looked like cloud patterns.
TV was still in its relatively early years. There was no transmission at night so the evening’s pickings would come to an end with a brass band playing the national anthem or an Elvis looking guy in big sunglasses gesturing grandly on a Manly ferry while singing “My city of Sydney…”.
There were gaps between shows, and for a large part of the day the ABC transmitted a colourfully striped test pattern or a clock ticking down to the next hour.
TV programs were divided into two distinct categories; kids programs and adults programs. There were only a few adult programs I got to see, usually in that brief tele-visual window before my bed-time.
There was a 5 minute before-the-news rock program called GTK which featured bands like Zoot, The Master’s Apprentices and Daddy Cool.
A wiry, crazy little man with a lab coat called Professor Julius Sumner Miller (the man, not the coat) taught the nation science tricks with water, rubber bands, milk bottles, bunsen burners and bicarbonate of soda. His voice was like fingernails on a chalkboard, his constant cry to the bewildered student audience as he posed his quirky scientific quandries, “Why is it so?”
A twice weekly favourite was the aptly named Origami – the ancient Chinese art of paper folding - hosted by Robert Harbin who appeared sombrely in a Mao Se Tung outfit, perhaps to reflect the Asian nature of his medium. On “origami-night” my parents and I gathered eagerly in front of the tele with our brightly coloured squares, there to mimic Harbin’s step-by-step instructions. The man was a genius, able to majestically conjure a flapping swan, jumping frog, praying mantis, small electrical appliance or operational rotary engine with just a few quick folds to a sheet of paper. My parents could often manage something half-decent, but my creations invariably looked like Frog After Falling into Barrel of Acid or Giraffe Hit By Steamroller. Most of my attempts ended as one of my own creations - Flying Snowball - which I created by scrunching the poorly proportioned water-bomb cum lantern into a ball and hurling it in frustration at the bin.
My parents indulged in a nightly ritual in front of Bellbird, one of the first popular Aussie soaps. It had your typical cast of odd-ball Aussie rural townsfolk up to all kinds of low jinks and mundane activity. I recall a lot of time was set in a pub.
I was more partial to kids programs.
I liked Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men. This was puppeteering at its crudest. Bill and Ben were two disjointed little blokes with inverted pie-tin hats who jerked and spasmed about the tiny cardboard set under intricate webs of exceedingly visible fishing line.
Every episode was the same. They came out, dancing and twitching in random directions, making little squeaking noises and pronouncing the only word in their vocabulary, “weed”, (which coincidentally is what the producers of the show must have been consuming in vast quantities) before they were joined by a friendly flower which rose up out of a nearby pot like a charmed snake. Then footsteps would approach and they’d all scurry back to their various flowerpots, grumbling about the gardener or watering-can or whatever.
Another great show of the day was the Magic Roundabout. This was also a pioneering program which used stop motion photography to manoeuvre an assortment of little creatures around a glaringly white linoleum set.
It came on for five minutes before my parents sat down to watch the bespectacled James Dibble on the ABC nightly news.
There was Dugald, a shaggy dog with a sugar habit, an eccentric rabbit by the name of Dylan as well as a snail and a pink cow who I think might even have had wings. Zebedee was a head on springs who bounded into shot with a jarring “boing-boing” sound. At the end of each episode, he announced that it was “time for bed” before boinging off on another adventure.
Many critics since have suggested that the Magic Roundabout was an analogy for drug use with hidden torrents of double-entendre and that basically the whole show was one big drug trip.
There is something curiously appealing about the idea that millions of kids could watch a TV show totally oblivious to the depraved private joke of the producers.
Similar rumours have emerged about Captain Pugwash, also an early pioneer of TV production. The animation was elementary to say the least, often involving a still frame with an occasionally moving body part which spasmed back and forth at moments generally unrelated to the narrative or dialogue.
Pugwash was the rather large Captain of the Black Pig which sailed the jolly seas with his crew Tom the cabin boy, Willy and Master Mate. Each episode, they were chased and plotted against by Cut-Throat Jake and his nasty crew from the Flying Dustbin.
“Jumping Jellyfish” he would yell, his body frozen for five seconds despite the obvious panic in his voice, “there’s Jake off the starboard bow”. Then his left leg would flick up at exactly the same moment as he lowered his spyglass from his face, where he would freeze for another few seconds.
The existence of the naughty characters Roger the cabin boy, Master Bates, Seamen Staines and Big Fat Willy is alas an urban myth. Which is a pity, because if that were the case, it would have been quite funny.
Mr Squiggle, The Man from the Moon, was also a favourite.
The amiable Squiggle, with his pointy head and amazingly proportioned phallic pencil-nose, is Australia’s longest running television show.
In each episode he arrived from the moon “with lots of fun for everyone” in a spaceship that wrapped around him, leaving a hole for his nose to stick out. The overall effect was like a drunk man stumbling out from a toilet with his flag still to the wind, if you get my drift.
Squiggle was a frail and bumbling puppet, like a clown with Parkinsons. He had big blinking eyes and a quirky sycophantic voice.
There was a blackboard, a cranky steam-shovel called Bill and an assistant who bantered with Squiggle as he did the drawing thing with his face. Back then it was Miss Pat, who along with Julie Andrews shared the dubious honour of being another object of my affection. Kissing the TV screen was easier because it was bigger, but it hurt my eyes a lot more and often left sloppy marks on the glass that my mother was less than pleased with.
Squiggle’s main trick was to draw. Viewers sent in pieces of paper with a meaningless assortment of squiggles, shapes and lines. These were put up on Blackboard and Mr Squiggle would miraculously add to them to create clever drawings.
I would sit in front of the TV with a little table and a piece of paper and quickly try to reproduce Squiggle’s squiggle. But my efforts invariably looked like scribble.
My favourite show of the time, however, was Adventure Island.
Set in the magical kingdom of Diddley-Dum-Diddley, the show followed the adventures of Percy Panda and two bizarre characters by the names of Clown and Flower Potts. It was hosted by Miss Sue, who dressed like Alice in Wonderland and soon became yet another object of my affection.
The pantomime style of the show appealed to my young sensibilities. As I recall, each episode involved the music-hall caricatures of Fester Fumble and Miser Meanie getting up to their no-good tricks, like trying to steal pies and other such high level crimes. It was all done with loads of over-acting and exaggerated facial expressions.
I loved it and soon developed elaborate fantasies about growing up and going to Adventure Island. I would tie up Fester and Miser and push them off in a boat and then marry Miss Sue.
Unfortunately, a few years later the show was axed to make way for some American nonsense starring a Big Bird and a whole bunch of puppets who lived on a sunny street somewhere.