77. Reflections on the process of Writing

Analogies of the Writing process

Alluvial gold mining

Sighting a terrain that was potentially gold bearing, the miners would ‘test’ their theory; they’d pan for gold in the nearest creek. If there was a sign, they would stake a claim and begin digging a shaft. They often worked in pairs, taking turns; one would dig in the shaft, and fill the bucket with the soil and gravel; the other would operate the windlass, winding up the heavy bucket and tipping the dirt onto a pile. It was hard work, digging deep in the ground, in that claustrophobic space. Once they’d dug a large quantity, they would start sifting through the dirt. They would take the dirt, one pan full at a time, down to the water, and pan for gold.

They was a great deal of dirt that would be useless – especially the dirt that came from above the gold bearing strata; that would be simply left behind, forming a mullock heap. (Mullock is one of my favourite words; why, I don’t know, except that I used to enjoy wandering around mullock heaps in Ballarat when we visited Uncle Gordon. I recall, too, finding an old, abandoned windlass in the scrub near Ballarat, when I went on a Scout camp there in the mid 1950s.)

The analogies with writing are clear enough. The writer mines his mind, digging up the contents of memory and imagination, and then sorting through the pile in search of the gold. Writing, like alluvial gold mining, takes place in two major phases. First, there is the collection of the raw materials, as the writer digs up all she can. This can be demanding work; it can be heavy going at times. But once a sizable mass of material is collected, the second phase can begin: the sorting and refining phase that we call editing. Here, the gold is separated from the mullock.

The Water Bore

The second analogy is the water bore. At Sandy Point, where we owned a holiday shack back in the 1970s, the Hendersons came and “put down a bore”. It took them a day to dig the bore. They had to dig down until they had found the water table: that level where water is readily drawn out of its surrounding shale environment. Once the bore is in place, a relatively small pump will provide sufficient energy to draw up all the water you might need. Once the bore is put down, and a pump is in place, the water flows. Each time the bore is stopped, it needs to be primed; the flow needs to be re-established. If the bore lies idle for a lengthy time, it can become blocked.

Again, the analogies with writing are clear. The underground source of material – memory, imagination, the unconscious – is almost infinite. As Malouf once observed, the first twenty years of our lives provide us with sufficient material to fill three lifetimes of writing. We have lots to write about. Once we get underway, once we tap that huge reservoir, once we have flow, the writing simply emerges. The trick is to establish flow each time we put pen to paper, or set our minds and fingers working on the keyboard of our computers.

The Mullock Heap/ The Storage Tank

The dirt and gravel gets piled up on a mullock heap. The water from the bore can be stored in a tank.

Once you've dug up the gold-bearing ore - once you've got the flow of water established - you have to store the stuff somewhere.

That's where the Writer's Journal comes in.

The idea of the Writing Agenda is to provide us with a storage area for our writing - for our false starts, our snippets of conversation, our plot outlines our outlandish ideas.

It's also a place where we can keep notes about OTHER PLACES where gold might be found.

I keep a WRITING AGENDA, and keep adding to it, as possible topics and projects slip into my mind. My WRITING AGENDA provides an endless supply of things to write about. And each piece we write throws up more items for our Writing Agenda, so that the growth is exponential.

Sample from my Writing Agenda

• The Boy Scout camps I attended: left handed hammers and tartan paint


• The hike to Arthurs Creek with Tom


• The fog in Melbourne – coming home from Scouts


• Moments of embarrassment: somersaults; farting in cubs


• Working at Royal Park


• Geology classes at Taylors, 1959


• Dutch classes at Taylors, 1960


• Uncle Ken’s house


• Aunty Iris’ house


• Aunts, Uncles, Cousins, Neighbours and Friends of the family


• Swimming with the Kippings

Springs and Alluvial Gold

Whichever analogy, whichever metaphor we use to characterise the writing process, the notion is fairly clear: the writer taps the flow of consciousness, dips into the stream of consciousness and works with what emerges. It is not simply a “taking from”; what is drawn out is also changes in the process. Image, snapshot, memory, misty feeling/ thought, vague recollection is reworked. The idea is formed at the point of utterance; that was how John Dixon put it, yet that is not right either. The idea does “exist” in some form; indeed, part of the business of writing is to match the words on the page with the thought in the head, while asking the question: Have I said what I meant? Have I said what I seem to have meant, what I think perhaps I meant?

Our writing emerges out of the swirling currents of thought and feeling and intention, and takes form on the page or screen. This is Klauser’s Ariel in operation. Out of the Right Brain comes a seemingly endless stream of images, ideas, memories, speculations, all feeling-laden and motive driven … once we have tapped the stream and got them down on paper, we can then bring the Left Brain into operation. We bring our critical intelligence to bear. We can “interrogate” our own text: Does this make sense? Is it well ordered? Are our conclusions supported by evidence? Do our characters seem real?

Klauser argues for “writing on both sides of the brain” – for clearly recognising when we are in imaginative mode, and when we are in editing mode. She presents writing as a product of both sides of the brain working in cahoots. First Right, then Left, the Right and so on…

Writers march to a different beat: Left, Right, Left, Right ... and so on until the manuscript is finished and edited and sent off for publication...

76. On Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson is one of my favorite writers.

I found this extract in my journal for 2004. At the time I was reading Bryson's A Short History of Everything. Bryson was relating the story of a fellow called Midgely who was a great inventor who was possibly the most dangerous scientist/technologist of the 20th century. His first achievement was to add lead to petrol. It stopped engines from knocking, but killed hundreds. As Bryson observes, the removal of lead from all petrol was legislated in America in 1986.
Almost immediately lead levels in the blood of Americans fell by 80 per cent. But because lead is forever, Americans today have about 625 times more lead in their blood than people did a century ago.

Midgley’s other great contribution – as Bryson points out, Midgely's “instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny” – was the inventions of chlorofluorocarbons, which have done enormous damage to the ozone layer, thus ushering in an era of global warming that could compromise the planet’s capacity to sustain life.

Bryson on the quantum world is no less fascinating. He has this to say about the size of atoms:
Half a million of them lined up shoulder to shoulder could hide behind a human hair. On such a scale an individual atom is essentially impossible to imagine, but we can try of course.

Start with a millimetres, which is a line this long: -

Now imagine that line divided into a thousand pieces with equal widths. Each of these widths is a micron. This is the scale of micro-organisms. A typical paramecium, for instance – a tiny single-celled, freshwater creature – is about 2 microns wide, .0002 millimetres, which is really very small. If you want to see with your naked eye a paramecium swimming in a drop of water, you would have to enlarge the drop until it was twelve metres across. However, if you wanted to see the atoms in the same drop, you would have to make the drop 24 kilometres across.

… That’s the scale of an atom: one ten-millionth of a millimetre.

Add to that observation the fact that atoms are composed largely of empty space – that the nucleus of an atom is equivalent in size to a pea in a huge cathedral (or, to use the other analogy I picked up somewhere: the size of an orange, suspended in a cube that is 60 kilometres in each dimension). Atoms are, in fact, a whole lot of nothing; they are composed largely of empty space. How do “we” know this? When scientists fired particles at a sheet of foil, most went straight through, but some bounced back.
Bryson also refers to Sagan, another of my favourite science writers:

Carl Sagan in Cosmos raised the possibility that if you travelled downwards into an electron, you might find that it consisted of a universe of its own, recalling those science fiction stories of the 1950s. ‘Within it, organised into the local equivalents of galaxies and smaller structures, which are themselves universes at the next level and so on forever – and infinite downward regression, universes within universes, endlessly. And upward as well.’

For most of us it is a world that surpasses understanding.

And yet? And, so? Where does leave us? What does that mean for meaning? What is the point of our consciousness, of our knowing these things are possible? Would we be better off without our cerebral cortex, living our lives as dogs live theirs, driven solely by various drives – to eat, to procreate, to bury bones to make them more edible…? And if all this is possible – if this world of quarks and such is at least possible, even likely, why not reincarnation, past life regressions, crystals that change the vibes?

The 21st century is the century of doubt, like most of the 20th century.

75. Going to the Saturday Flicks

The Grand, The Plaza and the Progress

During the years of my childhood – from the mid 1940s until the early 1960s - Coburg supported four picture theatres: The Grand, The Plaza, The Tasma and The Progress. The Grand and The Plaza were both in Sydney Road, and less than one hundred metres apart. Of the four, the "Grand" was the most impressive. It offered the choice of "Front Stalls", "Back Stalls", "Dress Stalls" and "Lounge" and a “Mothers’ Room” where mothers could take their crying babies so as not to disturb the enjoyment of other patrons, but still be able to see and hear the movie. Like the city theatres, The Grand had a kiosk. And it had lolly-boys, who took up their positions just before interval. At one stage, it even had an organ playing prior to the film.

The lolly boys were clad in red uniforms and military hats; they carried trays held around their necks by a leather strap on which were displayed a range of ice creams and lollies.
"Ice - dixie ice", they called. Dixies were small cups of vanilla ice-cream with a small wooden spoon, produced by either Peters (“The health food of a nation”) or Sennits, whose trademark was a polar bear.

"Lollies - choc................ lates," they called. There were Jaffas, Violet Crumbles, Cadbury's Dairy Milk, Milk Shakes, and, of course, Fantales. The Plaza, like the Grand, was also of the standard of the city theatres.

Suburban theatres like "The Grand" and "The Plaza" were entertainment centres for families in pre-television days. My parents had a permanent booking at the "Plaza" each Friday night, for quite a while, despite the fact that we were quite poor; this was perhaps the one small luxury of our lives.

Brunswick was served by at least three theatres: "The Padua" - which was a truly grand and impressive theatre, and two lesser theatres, "The Empire" and "The Alhambra". Of Coburg's two other theatres, I never actually went to the "Tasma"; on the other hand, I regularly frequented the "Progress" theatre. The Grand, The Plaza and The Progress were all within ten minutes walk of our house in Reynard Street. Much smaller than the other two, the Progress was also considerably less luxurious, and was given more earthly appelation of either "The Flea House" or "The Bughouse". Whether these names were deserved or not, I don't know, but whilst the Plaza and Grand boasted lush carpet, the Progress had bare boards; whilst the Plaza and Grand could each house over five hundred people, the Progress was bursting at two hundred; there was a small kiosk at the Progress, where you were shoved and jostled in your quest for Fantales, a cup of cordial, and a dixie, as compared to the orderly that which waited patiently for service from the resplendently dressed lolly-boys.

In those days, films took well over a year to reach Australian circuits after their release in Hollywood or in England. Then, they would be shown in one of the major city theatres: the State, the Capitol, the Odeon, the Regent ­ and would then do the rounds of the major suburban theatres, like the Padua, the Grand, and the Plaza. After that they would be shown in the lesser suburban theatres, like the Progress and Tasma - so that the Progress showed only either the fifties equivalent of re-runs of repeats, or very low grade films which none of the more reputable theatres would show.

As I approached adolescence, the pictures were the highlight of the week for me, especially the Saturday afternoon matinee. The queues outside the Grand and the Progress, ­ the two theatres which ran matinees, would begin to form at one o'clock, and by opening time, at two, hundreds of children would be there. If a popular film was on the bill, it was not uncommon for large numbers to be turned away.

I recall the bitter experience of being only three places from the front of the queue for a tremendously popular film­ - I don't now recall what it was - when the "Sorry – Full House" sign went up. At least one hundred kids were turned away that day - such was the popularity of the matinees.

They were good value, too. For your sixpence you got to see a full program. To begin with, there were always the Val Morgan and Sons advertisements, which were flashed onto the screen to the accompaniment of the Wurlitzer organ. Organists were regular featured at all of the larger theatres, and they would play prior to the program, during the ads, and during interval. Then came the cartoons: usually three or four, with Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Goofy, and so on. The full-length supporting film came next, followed by the serial. I think it was the serial, more than anything else, that kept me attending week after week; they were certainly as important as the main features, as far as I was concerned. The formula for each episode was, I now recognise, very simple:

They would begin by repeating the final minute or so of the previous episode, which showed our hero (Superman, or Batman and Robin, or Sir Galahad – whoever …) in an inescapable trap, facing certain death. A car plummeted from a cliff top to the rocks and sea below, and our heroes tied hand and foot inside; or Superman, weakened by kryptonite; or - the great suspence cliche' of those times: ­ Batman and Robin trapped in a room by some mad scientist, and the walls closing in to crush the life from them.)

Their incredible escape, usually not terribly convincing, was then enacted, after which the plot would gradually unfold for ten minutes or so, building up at the very end to a new suspenceful conclusion - invariably facing our hero yet again with certain death!

"Is this the end for Batman? And what of Robin, trapped in the snake pit by the dreaded Black Fang? Don't miss next week's spine-tingling episode "

Then came interval, and after interval, one or two cartoons; and then the full-length main feature. Alan Ladd and Zacchery Scott still ride across the prairies of my childhood reminiscences, for that was the era of the cowboy westerns: Hopalong Cassidy and his aide-kick California; Tom Mix; Gene Autry; Roy Rogers and Trigger; and of course, The Lone Ranger and Tonto - with a hearty "Hi. - Ho Silver". These were the hero figures of my childhood.

In a way, they were all like Superman; they all fought for Truth, Justice, and the American Way; and if they couldn't leap tall buildings at a single bound, or be faster than a speeding bullet or more powerful than a locomotive, they certainly "came to earth with powers far greater than mortal man." For then, there was none of today's moral ambiguities - there was Right, and there was Wrong. Before our eyes, on the magical silver screen, the eternal struggle between Good and Evil was enacted, with Good ever victorious. Apart from the Westerns, comedy films, usually with "dynamic duos" such as Laurel and Hardy, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were great attractions.

Equipment breakdowns were quite common, especially at the Progress, and would be accompanied by a tumultuous stamping of feet, and the rolling of jaffas down the aisles. This, in turn, would prompt the ushers to move around, their flashlights on, looking for the worst offenders. The advent of television all but destroyed the local suburban picture theatres. The Tasma disappeared altogether, as did the Grand –it became an office building. The Grand was transformed into a ten-pin bowling alley, and rode that fad until bowling lost popularity. It then became an Italian Community Social Club.

Only the Progress survives, a tiny suburban theatre which has managed, somehow, to stave off what seemed inevitable. Partly its survival stems from the fact that it is the home of the Coburg Film Society. It didn’t really seem to change much in thirty years. Even now, as I write, in 2004, the Progress is alive and kicking – a relic of the 40s and 50s, a gigantic piece of memorabilia.

74. Autobiography: The Drains 2

I started teaching in 1965. In my second – perhaps third – year of teaching I came across the Stephen Spender poem: My parents kept me from children who were rough. The poem resonated with me; I had that frisson of recognition, that Eureka experience. The boy in the poem was me.

My parents kept me from children who were rough. They rarely allowed me to play in the streets of Coburg. Ours was a rough area. The boys in the streets around our place were tough. I spent my days in our back yard or indoors, playing my solitary games, and envisioning achievements: being the first man to walk on the moon. I built intricate road systems around the tomato and the rhubarb bushes, for my Dinky cars.

I knew from an early age the superiority of the rough boys. Eddie Fennell had done me out of sixpence. The Scarletts had made it through the drain, while I sat by the entrance, paralysed by questions: What if?

What if there were a sudden storm, and a wall of water surged through the drain? What if I caught polio myelitis? I knew that term almost as soon as I could walk: polio myelitism. They were words my parents pronounced very carefully, always according that disease respect, giving it its full title.

“Never play in gutters – you could catch polio myelitis.”

Two diseases held me in awe as a child: polio and whooping cough. My parents dreaded both. There had been a polio epidemic a few years before; it had claimed the lives of many children, and left others – like the writer, Alan Marshall – permanently crippled. My parents had already experienced the pain of child death on two occasions; their fear was powerful, gargantuan.

Polio and whooping cough were high on the list of my childhood fears, up there with the Boogeyman, who lurked behind trees in the dark of night, and Ching-Chong Chinaman, and the old woman who pushed a pram around the streets of Coburg and Moreland, collecting treasures from other people’s garbage bins. All threatened, though in a vague, undefined way. But I was full of fears. I knew nothing of the character of polio myelitis, its cuases, its consequences – I simply knew it was to be feared. The smell of the drain was sufficient to tell me that here lay danger, that this place was alive with disease and with germs.

There were rats there, too – long, sleek, ugly rats that lived on the offal and waste that was carried in the slimy waters.

Another danger lurked in the drain, a threat more potent than the rats, or the smell or the potential disease. The underground portion of the drain ran beneath Pentridge, the high walled prison that housed the worst of Victoria’s criminals. The back portion of the jail contained the farm area and acres or uncultivated land. What if some prisoner were to hide in the paddock? What if there were a manhole or grill into the drain? What if some prisoner had found it, and was hiding there, in the drain, waiting for night?
The walls of Pentridge were a stone’s throw from the low cyclone wire fence that ran along the back of the school playground. During little play and big play small knots of children would stand along the fence line, under spreading peppercorn trees, and gaze across the road at the bluestone walls, wondering what they held.

There were stories, whispered in the shelter sheds and the boys’ dunnies, or out under the peppercorns, that the drain was a secret escape route. To our boyish minds, it seemed very possible that such a thing could happen – indeed, had happened. These imaginings were fuelled by a film of those times: The Third Man, with its haunting theme music, its narrow, ill-lit streets, and its pies carrying out their work beneath the city, in its sewers and drains.

But none of the “What ifs” was the real cause of my lack of adventure. What compelled me to sit outside while others ventured in, and through, was the sure knowledge that my mother would not want me to go there, would not approve of my entering that foul smelling drain.

How many drains did I avoid as a child?

I was wandering home from school one day. My route took me past the Coburg Railway station. Beside the path was a stand of shiny leafed, gnarled and stunted trees. I was later to learn how you could fold the almost round leaves in two, then blow through one end, to produce a high-pitched, buzzing sound. Among the trees I saw someone squatting; a bare bottom was clearly visible. It was a child, someone around my own age I guessed. He – or more intriguingly, she – was squatting to do a poo. (That is what I would have called it then; the word “shit” was not yet part of my vocabulary).

The body moved uneasily at my foot tread, waddling a little deeper into the undergrowth and the dark shade. I was drawn by curiosity, by the faint pull of an undefined sexual inquisitiveness. But the censor in me won out, the mental embodiment of all of the “Do nots” and “Should nots” of my nine or ten years. I did not find out whether it was a boy or girl. I walked on, out of the bushes, embarrassed and a little guilty. I walked down the underpass, along beside the railway line, down Loch Street, and around the corner to my house in Reynard Street, Coburg, there to play with my dinky toys, and dwell in my mind on what I had seen, and wonder about what I had not seen.

73. Autobiography: Down the Drain

The gullet trap at the back of our house smells. It is like the open earth drain that runs down Dorset Street, Pascoe Vale, where my aunt and uncle live. Or like some of the lockers at the Brunswick Baths after someone has left wet bathers or a wet towel for a couple of weeks. The odour is stale, pungent, insidious.

The oval at McDonalds Reserve smells like that too.

(It no longer exists, but it was a huge, open stormwater drain, perhaps ten metres wide and more than a metre deep. The drain ran in a north/south direction, emerging from its subterranean course at Bell Street. It was open for a distance of perhaps two hundred and fifty metres, then disappeared under the walls of Pentridge. There were many such drains around Melbourne in the 1940s and 1950s, but they have gradually been replaced by underground drains. The McDonalds’ Reserve drain usually carried only a trickle of water, except after a heavy downpour. Some twenty metres outside the bluestone wall of Pentridge, the drain went underground. While the exposed section was paved with bluestone, the underground section was concrete – concrete base, concrete walls, concrete roof. The drain swept in a wide arc under the Pentridge “farm”, and eventually emerged – perhaps 500 metres away – and discharged its contents into the Merri Creek.)

How many times have I sat on the rocks beside this drain, too afraid to enter, waiting for my more adventurous friends. Once I ventured into darkness, but only briefly. I preferred to return to the rectangle of light behind me than to go on into the darkness that lay before me.

What is it that enables some kids to explore cliffs and water holes, old houses and drains, while others sit outside, afraid to enter, afraid to climb, afraid to venture in?

Graeme and Peter Scarlett – the twins –and Eric Wardley had not only entered the drain, and stayed inside; they had emerged from the other end. They had travelled its length, in the darkness, without torches, and had emerged, triumphant, from beneath the threateningly high back wall of Pentridge, emerged onto the banks of the foul smelling Merri Creek.

Eddie Fennel, too. I remember Eddie Fennell. Sometimes I wonder what path his life has taken. In Miss Corrie’s class, I always sat in Row 1, with the bright children. Eddie sat at the very back of Row 6. Eddie was probably backward; he was certainly slow at his school work. Our seating in the class was determined on how well we performed on the monthly tests.

For the whole of my grade 6 year, the back row seat was occupied by Marion Davis, and by either Jacqueline Callaghan or a slight girl with whitish hair named Louise. These three invariably topped the tests. We would be tested on spelling, punctuation, dictation, arithmetic, mental arithmetic, composition, reading aloud … For most of the year I sat in Row 1. I spent a month in the first seat of Row 2, sitting next to Coral Williams.

The tests gave Miss Corrie the information she needed. We were seated according to our relative position in the mark hierarchy of the class. It stared with Marion Davis, in the No. 1 seat at the back of Row 1, UP Row 1, down Row 2, up 3, down 4, up 5, down 6 – to Eddie Fennell and Katrina Kurley. Most of the ones who sat in between have been lost to my memory, although a few remain there: Ian Cann, who broke my front tooth when he pushed my head down onto the drinking tap; Eric Wardley; Graeme and Peter Scarlett, who were to remain friends through school and beyond; Graeme Foo, who was “top boy” in our grade 6, and who went on to Coburg High, and from there became a motor mechanic; Laurie Ferguson, who was the son of a bookmaker; Coral Williams, who became a school teacher; Marion Hall, Rosalyn Blencowe, Joan Jenkins…

I wonder what became of the rest of Miss Corrie’s Grade 6 class of 1954. how many are living, dead, happy, mad? How many have had ulcers, cancer, heart attacks? How many beat their wives and children? How many murderers, playrights, plumbers, nuns, accountants, PhDs in Chemistry?

Eric Wardley is dead now, and so is Eddie Fennell. Eddie’s sister told me of his death at the 150th anniversary reunion of Coburg 484, in 2003. The Scarletts are alive. Marion Davis went into teaching, as did Coral Williams.
I recall one day when I had just moved from the Little School, on the south side of Bell Street, to the Big School. I was in Grade 3; Miss Browning was my teacher. I had found thruppence, maybe sixpence, in the sawdust and rubbish swept up outside Moran and Cato’s. I saw it shining there, in the dust, and claimed it as mine.
I found six pence
Jolly, jolly sixpence
I found sixpence
To last me all my life
I’ve got twopence to spend
And twopence to lend
And twopence to take home to my wife…

Foolishly, I told my school friends of my find.
“Whered’ya find it?” asked Eddie Fennell.
“Outside Moran and Cato’s,” I said, too naïve to see what was coming.
“That’s mine,” he told me. “I lost it there last night.”
“True dinks?” I asked. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not.
“Yeah!” he said, firmly. “You’d better give it to me.” His voice was menacing.
I gave Eddie Fennell the coin.

Eddie Fennell had been down that drain. He was afraid. I ventured maybe twenty metres, then turned back.

72. The Joys of Writing: Some Quotes

From: Wim Kayser A Glorious Accident

Sacks – on writing
“… I write by hand. Never computers. I’m computer illiterate. I’m afraid I might erase everything. I do like the mechanical heaviness of this typewriter, but most of all I like to write by hand… I often do little pictures as well, and I write in different colours. Sometimes little diagrams … basically I travel everywhere with pen and paper. All my books were written like this. In my house you’d see a whole roomful. I have my notebook with me now…”

Sacks: “The brain is not a computer, it is an orchestra of a thousand musicians; it is a work of art.”

Haldane: “The universe is not only weirder than we ever imagined it, it is even weirder than we can imagine.”

Dennett: “We are all faced with the baffling phenomenon: how could anything be more familiar and at the same time more weird than the mind? .”

Sacks: “… we are not blanks at birth’ we are really a billion years old.”

Matthew Arnold: “Have something to say and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret to style.”

And a final joyful puzzle for people who like unlikely sentence constructions:

What are you like on stringing prepositions together? Could you manage to write a grammatically correct sentence using nine prepositions consecutively?

“…There was a little boy who, it is said, disliked a book about Australia that his mother was fond of reading to him at bedtime and (who) finally demanded, ‘What have you brought that book I don’t like being read to out of about Down Under up for?’”

71. Autobiography: Long and lanky, skinny and cranky

Long and lanky, skinny and cranky
1
That’s how my mum used to describe me when I was 11 or 12 or so, and shooting up like a beanstalk. You don’t hear the word cranky these days. It was a word of the 1940s and 1950s – a word of a bygone era. You don’t hear lanky much these days either. Or cobber or bonzer.

They’ve gone, or all but gone. Like zac and bob and two bob and florin and quid and twopence and ha’panny and tray and deena – all words that have lost their currency.

Should I add the once obligatory ‘If you’ll pardon the pun’? As if there is something unseemly about puns. Critics of puns would inevitably trot out the old injunction: ‘The pun is the lowest form of wit’. For as long as I can remember, I’ve long loved puns and punning. Where did that come from, I wonder? I recall that it was my father who introduced me to puns. One of his favourite jokes concerned Johnny and the teacher:

Teacher: Johnny, I want you to use these three words in a sentence: delight, depot and defender.
Johnny: Sure, Teacher. De light was out, de pot was full, so I did it in de fender.
Dosh and spondoola have also gone, and no one calls anyone a bot any more. For a time bots and botting were transformed into scabs and scabbing, but they too have disappeared – slid out of the language like a kid slipping out of side gate to wag school for the afternoon. Nowadays, if I want to read Kay Arthur’s story Wagging to a group of kids I have to explain what the term means; they understand the concept, of course; it’s just the term they don’t know. Kids don’t ‘nick off’ or ‘play hookey’ or play truant any more. I never once wagged school – I was never game, never had the guts to wag school.

Wag also had other connotations too that no longer have currency. Once you might say of someone: ‘He’s a bit of a wag’ – meaning that he’s a card, or a trick. A wag was someone who could make you laugh at their antics – a practical joker, a trickster.
Then there was chin wag. – or as my dad called it, jawing. A chin wag was a chat, a talk.
I was born in 1953, and grew up at a time when Australians spoke of Japs and Krauts, when the only kind of spaghetti you could buy in a cafe was Kiaora brand tinned spaghetti’ – spaghetti in a thick tomato sauce, and usually served on toast.

2
I was certainly lanky. At 14 I was already taller than both my father and my mother – the second tallest boy in my class at school. My mother was five foot two ... Being five foot two – petite – was fashionable back then.
Five foot two, eyes of blue
But oh what those five feet can do
Has anybody seen my gal?
Five foot two – I don’t even know what that is in metric.
Dad wasn’t much taller; five foot four.

Linda Robina May Kipping was born in Casterton, and raise in Hamilton, in the Western District of Victoria. She left there in her twenties, and travelled to ‘the city’ as it was then called – or more precisely, The City – Melbourne. She had left school at fifteen, at the end of grade three.
Dad was 14 when he left school. His full name was Herbert Garibaldi Carozzi. When Dad left the Catholic school in Coburg he was in Grade 5. He’d been ‘kept down’ several times, and could neither read nor write when he left.

When I had my growth spurt and ‘shot up’, my mum started saying, ‘We’ll have to put a brick on his head!’ My parents worried about me. They worried a lot, because they were scared that they might ‘lose me’.

They had had a lot of trouble conceiving a child. Over the years I picked up snippets of information. By rights I should have had two siblings - an older brother and a little sister; however, my brother was still born and my sister died within a couple of hours of birth. Mum had also had numerous miscarriages.

Sometimes I think about those little babies, one dead at birth, all blue and limp and lifeless, and what it must have been like for my mother to see such a sight after the nine months of hope and longing and dreaming. And for it to happen a second time.

I witnessed at first hand the births of four of my five children. Back in the 1970s that was a relatively uncommon thing. The stereotypical father paced the waiting room until a nurse emerged to tell him ‘It’s a boy!’ But in the 70s, ‘modern’ men were wanting to be present, and provided you had the doctor’s approval, you could be present – although you were required to be quiet and keep out of the way. You were allowed to hold your wife’s hand and speak quietly to her as she went through the pain of labour and birthing. You weren’t allowed to watch any of the actual birth; you weren’t allowed to see the baby crown, and to watch your child emerged from its mother, all wet and covered in mucous and blood.