Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.
If you were to chuck me in a time machine and send me to my happy place of choice, 70s Australia is it.
There was a naïveté and innocence then that I really miss, life was simple, free and happy.
My parents worked extremely hard. There was only ever enough money to make ends meet. Dad drove earth moving equipment in the beating sun and howling rain. Mum worked as whatever she could, at one point in a wool factory, scouring filthy bales of wool and sorting them to be cleaned.
Looking back I feel bad for the moments where we didn’t appreciate this as kids. I’d beg to be taken out to the movies or the drive in, or to the beach on a hot day and couldn’t understand why one or both would scream in exasperation to “go and jump over the fucking sprinkler to cool down”. We would and we enjoyed it because there was nothing else to do.
Summers in Perth are stinking and maddeningly hot. We didn’t have an air conditioner in our car so trips to the beach after school or on the weekends usually meant a burning bottom on the vinyl backseat of the Kingswood , with the windows down and the hot air searing our skin like a hairdryer. We would song along to Kenny Rogers, Bob Marley or the eurythmics on the tape deck and were occasionally allowed to have a Giant Sandwich ice cream as a special treat. It would be a race to cram as much in to our mouths whilst cold without freezing our brains, and licking the sticky melting rivers that ran down our salty hands. The measure of a good day at the beach would be the size of the pile of sand that fell out of our bather bottoms as we stripped off in the bathroom. Mum would have to sweep up half of Coogee Beach by the time we finished showering.
We didn’t have enough money to have family holidays, so days out were activities like fishing. I couldn’t stand it, I was happier inside reading or riding my bike til the sunset. We would go to South Mole or Robs Jetty, neither of which turned me on. The smell of Robs Jetty was unmistakeable on the approach. Meaty, rancid and metallic. The jetty was next to an abattoir , which made it a great fishing spot. The fish were attracted to the blood that tinted the Indian Ocean red until the tide went out, and the odour hung in the in air and stuck in my throat. Little wonder I chose to be a vegetarian for nearly 30 years.
Our house didn’t have an air conditioner either and there was a daily dance of courting and spurning the breeze. Closing the curtains and windows in the late morning to keep the hot easterly desert breeze out, and opening everything up in the late afternoon to let the Fremantle Doctor in, the sea breeze that brought relief from the heat.
During a heatwave my brother and I would have to sleep on towels on the floor of my parents bedroom under the single lazy and squeaky ceiling fan for relief. He had ADHD so it was never very relaxing being in such close proximity.
There was always a love of music in our house and I didn’t appreciate how cool my parents were until my 30s. They had me very young, at 19, and we cut our teeth on bowie, the stones, bobs Dylan and Marley, Fleetwood Mac and AC/dc. I was an awkward and shy kid, and would die inside when I brought friends home after school if I could hear the music pounding out of the house when we were at the end of the driveway. The windows would practically bow from the volume and the bass.
My friends would exclaim they wished their mums were as cool as mine. She would dance, head bang, air guitar and crank the volume up another notch whilst yelling “this is good shit man”.
It was impossible to take yourself too seriously in our house. Any loving of oneself sick would invariably lead to a taking down of a peg or two. My choice to become vegetarian was seen as imperiousness , and ridiculous. To prove this, one evening I was served one of my mums incredible soups. She’s famous for them in our family. After I polished off my bowl and sat there full and happy with my rotund belly she took great delight in telling me I had enjoyed it because she had puréed the meat. To this day her outrageous and shifty audacity, as wrong as it was, fills me with admiration. I shouldn’t admit it but I aspire to her levels of great, cunning shiftiness.
My most treasured memories are those from simple, suburban Australia. It kills me that I’ll never have to work hard to replay a song I love again, rewinding the tape deck, doing the frustrating stop, start, false start, rewind some more. Or siting with my cassette player, waiting for songs I loved to come on the radio so I could record them. That I’ll never again have the vinyl backseat dance, moving from (bum) cheek to cheek to alleviate the burning and that it’s unlikely that I’ll ever cool down by spending hours hopping back and forth over the sprinkler in the front yard. I know that technically I could, but it would be a community service not to.
To me there is nothing lovelier and more endearing than daggy suburban Australia.