My parents were the first people to buy a block of land in the area. Dad bought a small corrugated iron garden shed that he erected and this served as my parents’ bedroom, our dining area, and washing and laundry area. A deep, double concrete laundry trough was where my mother did our washing and washed the dishes after meals.
We had no running water or electricity. Our fresh water came from Dick and Jean’s house. Just about every day we filled a couple of buckets of fresh water and carried them back to the shed.
My parents rented a caravan, which became the bedroom Elly and I shared. That’s how we lived for a year until my parents had saved enough money to start building our house.
My father negotiated with a builder: Dad would do all of the woodwork and the builder would take care of the rest. It was very exciting seeing our house being built from the ground up. Every day when Elly and I came home from school, either something was still in progress or something had been completed. When the foundation was set, we walked across the top of it with my parents pointing out where the various rooms were going to be.
The first night we slept there was on Christmas Eve 1960. There was no carpet, just bare floors but we didn’t care. It was the best Christmas present ever to be living in a real house again.
At night, we always ate together as a family. When Mum was close to serving dinner, Elly and I were ordered to turn off the television and take our place at the table. We had family conversations around the dinner table and Elly and I took turns with helping do the dishes after dinner. Mum always washed while we dried. Sometimes Mum sang popular songs of the day and I would add a harmony part. The first time I ever sang harmonies was with my mother, standing at the kitchen sink.
Elly and I earned ten shillings pocket money a week that we could either spend or save in our school bank accounts on Wednesdays. To earn this, we had to make the beds, do the breakfast dishes and sweep the kitchen floor before heading out the door for school. We alternated these duties every day of the week as my parents left the house before us to go to work.
NETLEY PRIMARY SCHOOL
Elly and I started school at the newly built Netley Primary School in February 1960. I was held back a year because of the language barrier and my lack of knowledge of Australian subjects. In Holland, I had been taught European and world geography but I knew nothing about Australia, aside from the fact that Dutch explorers discovered it.
I was in grade five and Mrs Brown was my teacher. I will never forget Mrs Brown as long as I live because one day she called me up to her desk and took a twelve-inch ruler to the back of my lower leg, smacking me until my leg was red raw. I was flabbergasted and didn’t have a clue as to what I had done wrong. She pointed out that I had misspelled ‘Sydney’, using an ‘i’ instead of a ‘y’. Mrs Brown must have had a lot on her plate because her son, Kelvin, a student in our class, was the most unruly of all the kids. She smacked him more than anyone else! Looking back, I’m convinced that the Sydney incident made me determined to become a really good English student. Ever since, I have been a stickler for spelling and grammar.
I made many friends at Netley and got involved in playing all kinds of sports. I took up baseball and cricket. I hung out with friends like Bruce and Kelvin Minerds, who were Australians, and Ilgvar Daga, a Latvian immigrant. Ilgvar loved basketball and sometimes I accompanied him to games.
My memories of the three years I spent at Netley Primary are sketchy at best. By the end of my first year I could speak English fluently. Elly and I spoke Dutch at home, and outside the home we spoke English. To this day I can still carry on a conversation in Dutch. I was young enough, however, that I completely lost my Dutch accent.
I completed grades five, six and seven with flying colours. Even though I was held back to start with, I had an advantage with a couple of subjects like mathematics and geography. I was taught these in earlier grades in Holland and that came in very useful by the time I entered grades six and seven.
Girls flirted with boys and led them around like sheep. Blair was a really good-looking girl but she lost interest very quickly and went from one boy to the next. It was all so innocent back then: getting friends to pass notes to girls you liked. Giggling girls flirting with boys behind the shelter sheds, and boys following girls home to see where they lived.
I liked a pretty girl called Linda, who was so sweet and innocent in primary school. A few years later, she became a rocker and a biker chick, complete with black eyeliner, mascara and black leather clothes. She grew up way quicker than I did! I was innocent and naïve to the extent that I didn’t experience sex for the first time until I was twenty and living in Melbourne.
Another girl I really liked was Wendy Newman, who had a brother, Robert. I was friends with him and I used to go over to their house after school. Wendy and I loosely became boyfriend and girlfriend and I made the mistake of bringing her home to meet my mother.
Life lesson number two — don’t bring someone from the opposite sex home to meet your mother, no matter what age you are!
The minute Wendy was out the door, my mother picked her to pieces, pointing out she had a crooked nose and was poorly dressed.
I learned that lesson very quickly. I think I brought maybe two other girls home after that. It didn’t matter who the girl was, my mother was always extremely critical. No one was ever good enough for me, or for Elly, for that matter.
If my mother only knew that what she was doing at the time was pushing me away from home. After the incident with Wendy I decided that everything I did would take place outside of our family home. Don’t get me wrong, when it came to Elly and me, my mother was very loving and generous. I’ve lost count of the times that we went to the pictures together. We would catch the bus to the city and walk to The Majestic Theatre in King William Street. We saw every Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin comedy and every Elvis Presley movie together. When the new technology of curved Panavision movie screens was introduced in Adelaide we went to see South Pacific. I loved doing that with Mum. While Mum did lots of things with me, Dad never did. I’ve heard other baby boomers say the same thing about their parents, that they weren’t involved in their lives and not very demonstrative with their emotions.
I hugged my father one time and told him that I loved him and I felt him straighten up like a piece of wood. I could tell it made him feel very uncomfortable, so I never did it again. Maybe because his own father had never shown him any love he didn’t know how to handle it. He hardly ever talked to me about his childhood.
My mother was more demonstrative with her love. She would run her fingers through my hair and talk to me about what was going on in my life. After all, I was her firstborn and we had that mother-and-son bond, but that was only when I was young.
The last time my mother came to visit my wife Donna and me in Nashville she showed us some photos of my dad. They were from shortly before he died. She admitted that my father’s only downfall was that he never did anything with me when I was growing up.
Dad died on May 4, 2000 from Alzheimer’s disease. I chose not to go back to Australia to see him because I didn’t want to remember him that way. At that time, Donna and I and our two daughters had been living in the US for ten years and I hadn’t been back to Australia during that time. It greatly disappointed my mother and sister that I didn’t fly back for his funeral. For some reason I had developed an attitude about Dad never doing anything with me and it made me angry. I thought: Why should I fly back for his funeral when he never did anything with me? Now that I’m older I understand that my parents were a product of their generation. Even though Dad may not have remembered who I was, I should have flown back not only for his sake, but mine as well. I now know from having attended my mother’s funeral that it brings closure.
Along with the British music invasion came the fashions of the day. The Beatles had long hair and wore Cuban-heeled boots. We all wanted to look and dress like The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. I wasn’t allowed to grow my hair long or own a pair of Beatle boots. And I was especially not allowed to wear skintight jeans!
I defied my parents about this. Sitting in my bedroom, with the door closed, I spent hours hand-stitching