Woolen Trousers, Levis and Bum Cracks

Must admit that my favourite jeans are Levi 101's.  Pulling on a pair with button up fly is like meeting an old friend.  Of course these days the waist has gotten somewhat bigger than that of my first pair circa 1974.

It was a long time before Mum agreed to let me wear denim.  She'd send me to the snow in shorts in winter and off to school in grey woollen sorts all year round but there wasn't a pair of long legged trousers to be seen anywhere in my single wardrobe at Box Hill South.  Until Form 1 that is.

That year, 1969, we had an excursion at the end of the year to the gold mining town of Maldon and I was the somewhat embarrassed wearer of the only pair of long pants I owned - brown checked woollen trousers.  At least I was warm but when everyone else is wearing jeans it was a bit hard to take.

Mum eventually realised that maybe denim wasn't so bad after all and I got a pair of Stirling jeans - the ones with the checkered flag logo and a really cool pocket on the side of the leg where you could fit a comb.  Not that I needed one because they were the years when Dad would take me up to the barbers on the corner of Middleborough and Eley Roads for a college cut.   These days it would be called a number one.

After the Stirling jeans came my first really expensive pair - Amco Heavyweights with a suede patch on the back.  Not quite Levis but I was getting there.  Of course as I got older and graduated to Lee Jeans which were bought at a mens wear store in Flinders street in the City next to Lindrums Pool Hall.  If you read this Andrew help me out here.

And as we got older the jeans were pulled down a little further exposing both the few pubic hairs we had at the front and the bum crack at the back - unless Mum was around of course.

Mid to late 70's the fashion changes again.  The legs got wider and Juz Jeans and Staggers were the brand of choice.  I bought a pair of Staggers that were so tight I could barely move.  The sales girl told me they would stretch but after a couple of wears I gave them to my sister Karen because my voice kept getting higher.

Another thing I remember about the jeans of Burwood High days were that for a while there is was really cool to wear them as low down as possible, showing a few pubic hairs if you had them or exposing the bum crack if you didn't.  Of course we had graduated from y fronts to jockettes in those days which were pretty brief and not big enough to show above the waist of the jeans anyway.

Jeans are still my trouser of choice these days and over the years I've gone through the plain navy denim, light blue denim, brown denim and white denim.  The there were the acid wash and stone washed versions in black or navy mostly with legs that varied from stove pipe to wide flares.  But through all that the 501's have remained the favourite.

Meat and Three Veg

I'm writing this post on Sunday night with the smell of a beef casserole simmering on the stove in the background and remembering that as I was growing up the food we ate was very much a part of the daily and weekly ritual.

I wrote in the post Of Chow Food and Other Things about our regular Friday night feeds of Fish and Chips but there was a fairly standard menu served in hour house when I was growing up.  One night would be chops, sausages, mashed potatoes and peas, another sausages eggs and chips, yet another spaghetti bolognese,  and of course the Sunday lunch time roast when we weren't out visiting relatives or having barbecues.

Karen and I had to either set and clear the table each night or dry the dishes. For some reason we used to fight over the former, mainly because it meant we could sit down earlier in front of the TV and watch the Flintstones or Gilligans Island.

Most nights, Dad wasn't home.   Most nights he wouldn't get home before we went to bed but would come in some time later, under the weather and smelling of the front bar and any of several pubs he frequented over those years.   But this is a post about the food we ate, not the bad times, I'll leave that for another time.

Sunday nights we usually had something light, usually toasted sandwiches in front of the telly.    A night without having to set the table was bliss.   I know there are families who share meals around the table and Raels and I try to do that now.   Maybe it was the fact that eating at the table reminded me too much that Dad was absent that it wasn't a tradition I had with my own kids as they were growing up, but is something I enjoy now when they do come around for meals with us.   But I digress again.

Mum was a good cook, but not an adventurous one and that may have been because we had fairly spartan tastes and any time she did stray from the meat and three veg, like the time she tried to serve us sheep brains and I came very close to vomiting, or when she regularly tried to serve up Brussels sprouts.  To this day I don't like them.

But the roast potatoes, ahhhhhh, I still haven't tasted better, even after all these years.   And Dad's barbecues were as good as anyone could ever cook, charcoaled chops and snags, and best of all, flat round chips fried in dripping over a wood BBQ in the back yard.

Another memory from the kitchen table is of my sister Deb, sitting in her high chair breaking up bread crusts and stirring them into a bowl of ice cream.    She still makes her cakes the same way even today.  Just kidding.

Rabbitting, Fishing, Yabbying and Mushrooming

Not all food was found in supermarkets when I was growing up in fact a few times a year we'd have family expeditions somewhere up the Hume Highway on hunts for food and I'm guessing this was a family legacy born out of the necessities of the Depression.

Mum used to tell me about how her uncles used to visit the Vic Market and bring home vegetables and fruit that were beginning to turn.  We didn't need to do that but old habits die hard and we'd often meet at Nana and Grandad's in Brunswick and head off up the highway looking for suitable paddocks we could wander through looking for mushrooms or finding dams where we could through a piece of meat tied to a string and pull out yabbies.

Both Grandad and Uncle Phil kept ferrets so some of those trips involved finding rabbit warrens, putting nets over the outlets and waiting for the ferrets to chase the rabbits out of the holes.   I still love to eat roast rabbit and usually after we got home and the rabbits were scunned I'd be given a rabbits foot for luck and I have to say it was much luckier for me than it was for the rabbit.  I'd carry it around in my pocket for a few days until I suspect it got a bit woofy and Mum made me throw it out.  My sisters would get a rabbits tail.

There were times when we'd spend school holidays away camping. I remember one time Uncle Phil took me with him, my cousin Phillip and a couple of others to the Barmah State Forest near Koondrook for a week.  And that was real camping, fishing every day, a bush dunny consisting of a 9 gallon drum with a canvas screen pulled around three trees to give an illusion of privacy.

Those Christmases spent camping on the Murray River at Corowa, long hot days and early morning treks down to the riverbank before dawn are great memories for me.   Later as I had kids of my own and tried to re-create those times I found that my sons never really got into fishing and I think that was because I wasn't all that good at it.    When I took them out as kids and never caught anything they just got bored with it until there was actually no point asking if they wanted to go because I knew the answer would be no.  Diffierent times, different places.

...comes great responsibility

Something very special happened yesterday, I became a grandfather for the first time.  I didn't really expect the depth of emotion that came with knowing that the baton passes again and that new life carries on the unbroken chain that reached back to that man who stood on the shores of Lake Tanganyika 60,000 years ago.   He whose descendants spread around the world with the sons of his sons passing on that YDNA right down to young Parker Alexander Joyce yesterday.

I was unprepared for the overwhelming feeling of love as I held my Grandson for the first time and realised that for me another entirely new chapter in life is beginning.  

Welcome young man.  You don't know it yet but you have many people who love you and will look after you.  Your journey through life will be full of ups and downs but we'll do our best to make sure the ups are great and the downs don't last too long.   I don't pretend to be wise but my knowledge is yours to ask for.    I look forward to reading to you, to telling bad jokes, to the laughter and the tears.  I will be there for your first basketball game and football match, should you choose to play, I'll give whatever support a grandfather can in whatever way I can.

I joked yesterday with your Dad about your name and the connection to Peter Parker who was burdened with the wisdom from his uncle that "with great power comes great responsibility" but I realise now that it is my great responsibility to love and support you.    Not alone, but with all of those other people who will share your life and watch as you grow.

I hope I am around one day when you too become a father just like I was for your Dad.

What were they thinking???

I wrote in an earlier post about my first real bush walk but what I didn't write at that time was why I didn't think that I would enjoy it.

I was a cub and then a scout; a member of 9th Box Hill Troop. I'm not sure why, but the troop I belonged to was full of kids I didn't know and I guess like my Sunday School experience, I didn't really enjoy it. In fact I really went under sufferance and in many ways because I was forced to go.

I enjoyed some of the suff we did - chalk chases and some of the other games - I never really saw a lot of point in learning how to tie knots or do some of the other stuff that earnt competency badges and I put a lo of that down to an incident that happened fairly early on in my scouting career.

One weekend the troop headed off to Mt Ritchie for a camping adventure. Most kids had packs and sleeping bags, but not me, I carried a suitcase, complete with blankets and pillows. Anyone who has experienced the badge of outcast will know how stupid I felt having to lug a suitcase up a mountain track for a few miles until we got to the campsite. I have no idea what Mum and Dad were thinking sending me off like that. I'm certain they didn't mean to humilaite me or to isolate me, and I know that we didn't have access to things like proper hiking gear. No matter the reason it put me off wanting to hike for a long time.

A suitcase for crying out loud! What were they thinking?

Happy Holidays

Dad would always sing Happy Holidays in his best Bing Crosby voice as we’d pull out of the driveway on Boxing Day morning on the way to Corowa situated on the New South Wales side of the border on the Murray River. This was my life at Christmas time as a kid.

We started holidaying at Corowa sometime around 1969 after we had visited there one Easter when we had camped at Myrtleford. We camped at Ball Park, right on the bridge over the river and pitched our tent on sloping ground for the most part.

For us kids, it was a great place, we fished and swam the river, there was an Olympic sized pool adjacent to the camping ground and the golf course was about a 10 minute drive down the river. In most years, at least early on, the Brown’s came away as well. Dad and Uncle Arthur had grown up together and we regarded each other as family, spending a lot of time together, not just on holiday’s but on weekend barbecues and drives through the bush.

Uncle Arthur used to enjoy grabbing me by the big toe and dragging me out of bed in the morning so we could head off along the riverbank fishing. In the early years we caught a lot of redfin and there was nothing better than coming back to camp and cooking them up for breakfast. But later on the European carp began to take over the river and the edible fish were few and far between. Of course that may also have been a reflection of my skill as an angler.

I was lucky enough not to have to sleep in the tent because I had the luxury of Dad’s old Ford Thames Van, complete with a three inch foam mattress and terylene curtains to keep the mozzies out.

There was no possibility of speeding in the old thing because loaded up with everything we took away it was lucky to get over 45 mile an hour. When the Brown’s stopped coming away with us and I can’t remember why they did, I was able to bring along one of my cousins or a mate and they’d sit in the back of the van on a deck chair with the camping gear piled high around them.

The van went to God not long after this picture was taken but Dad then bought a Datsun Homer which was a distinct upgrade to the old Thames.

I’m not really sure why Mum and Dad chose Corowa, except that they spent a lot of time playing the poker machines which at that time were illegal in Victoria. Dad would get drunk and Mum would sometimes go over to the Bowling Club, create a scene and virtually drag Dad back to camp. We kids of course weren’t allowed anywhere near the clubs except probably once a holiday when we’d go over for a meal.

A lot of time was spent at the pool and we’d sometimes have a competition to see if we could swim the entire 50 yard length under water. Bombs and horsies were allowed, at least I think they were, I have no memories of any life guards wandering around telling us not to do those things. I do remember that one end was 12’6” deep and we’d play another game where we’d drop a rock on the bottom and have to duck dive down to grab it.

These were days before we knew about holes in the ozone layer and we tanned by lying on our towels on the concrete paths smothered in coconut oil.

When Karen got older and started to bring friends along and their interest in boys was developing, Mum used to lace up their side room on the tent to stop them going out. But tents didn have built in floors and it was easy for them to creep out underneath and go visiting other friends. I haven’t asked but I’m not sure Mum knew they were sneaking out or maybe she just turned a blind eye.

I think my aversions to New Years Eve began on those holidays because Dad would invite whatever stranger wanted to around for a beer, which usually became a dozen and often the night would end with blokes getting pissed on our campsite, in our space, with nowhere for me to hide. I expect that I spent a lot of time lying in the van on those nights reading by torchlight. For all that, they were fun times and I will treasure those memories of camping.

The Power of Music

Having been scanning photos for the past week has lead to a trigger of memories where you can recall the actual time, place and circumstances surrounding the capturing of that particular moment in time and it got me thinking about other things that trigger memory such as smell and music. So I thought I’d write a little about some of the music that means something to me.

Elvis Presley – I remember arguing with some other kids at Primary School about who was better Elvis or The Beatles and I argued strongly for the former. I grew up watching Elvis movies and the first records I ever bought were his – Edge of Reality, Suspicious Minds, In the Ghetto and Don’t Cry Daddy. I knew them word for word and some might say that the famous Joyce snarl that appears occasionally on my face may have had it’s genesis some time during those Saturday afternoon matinees at the Padua Theatre in Brunswick.

The Eagles – around Form 2 we had an American exchange teacher at Burwood High School and he brought with him The Eagles album Desperado. We must have had a rainy day one day and stayed in the class room over lunch time listening to the sublime harmonies and ballads of these blokes on a concept album of all things. Something at that time that I’d never heard of before. I have remained a fan ever since. I remember when the album “One of These Nights” was released that there was a special on the radio which I taped. At that time my mate Fog and I were working over Christmas at a wire factory and we played it over and over again.

James Taylor – Fire and Rain, Carolina on my mind, Sweet Baby James and others were favourites. I had a group of friends and we called ourselves The Diggers. We were mainly mates from High School plus a few who we met through our university studies. Not a lot in the way of disposable income so we spent a lot of time sitting around houses playing guitars and harmonicas singing lots of James Taylor and Bob Dylan songs.

Little River Band – Harmonies every bit as good as those of the Eagles and for a while The Diggers mucked around with a band playing LRB songs. We called ourselves The Sentimental Blokes and were legends in our own loungerooms. We never had any intention of performing anywhere it was just a way of having fun and a lot of laughs.

At least three of those guys have passed away now but whenever I hear those songs I’m transported back to a simpler time and place and the boisterousness of youth, with the voices of mates still ringing loudly in my ears.