Straya 1985 - Part II

One morning at breakfast it was announced that we were about to be joined by another boarder, a girl our age called Carlie Gray.

Leanne burst out, "I know her, she has a twin sister Leah and they're known as the Dolly Birds" (Dolly Parton having quite famous mammary "assets" at the time). This was probably an incredibly ill-advised comment to make in the presence of two fourteen year old males.

Jonathan and I eagerly awaited the arrival of Carlie as the story was filled in. Her parents were sugar cane farmers in Gordonvale but low commodity prices were seeing them relocate to an exotic fruit orchard at Cape Tribulation and the twins needed somewhere to stay.

As they were identical twins who apparently didn't see eye to eye the parents wanted them to have the personal space afforded by attending separate schools. Carlie would live with us at the Lodge and go to Kirwan while Leah was boarding at the private Cathedral School.

Well they say girls mature faster than boys and Carlie arrived as a confident young fashion sophisticate. She also latched quickly onto my mother as her proxy mum which was quite something for a “lonely only” who had never had to compete for attention or affection. This blew into quite a fracas when Carlie went to hug mother good night one evening only to find me standing in her way snarling "she's MY Mum!"

Carlie soon branded Jonathan and me with the moniker "immature young rabbits" which inspired us to new levels of name calling that we won't go into. Eventually things would settle down but it must have been a frightening introduction to Lodge life for Carlie. Jonathan, Carlie and I would be at the Lodge together until the end of Year 12 – the three hardcore "originals".

The September school holidays rolled around and Carlie went home to Cape Tribulation. Jonathan would only go to PNG twice a year so he and I found ourselves at something of a loose end so we decided we'd commandeer all the building rubble left from the Lodge's construction and make a BMX track.

This saw us gainfully employed for a fortnight using shovels and picks to smooth the humps and create a wild path that swept around the jumps in a tight circle.

We hatched grand plans of how this facility would make us our first fortune, so we went up to Willows Shoppingtown to avail ourselves of the free advertising cards that are still found on notice boards at most Woolworths outlets!

We promoted a Townsville-leading BMX facility available on a pay-for-use basis and set a date for a grand opening and waited for the town population to flock to our wondrous creation.As it turns out the opening day was politely attended by Leanne, Mum and Dad and the Bullpits.

Jonathan and I dressed up, said our speeches and asked Leanne to cut the ribbon and take the first ride. After that I think Jonathan and I were the only ones to use that track.

Ours was not the only construction going on the property. The next stage of the church’s expansion plan was a large Hall that would also double as the premises for a planned Bible College. Thus a large barn duplicate of the main church building was slowly rising in the west.

The building was being project managed by Kim Grossman, a member of the Willows Lodge Board who had also taken responsibility for the building of the Lodge itself.

Kim’s work crew were an eclectic bunch of characters who, I understand, were participating in the building project as a training exercise (think work for the dole) to enable them to gain experience in the building industry.

This crew proclaimed themselves the “B Troop” and cheerfully went about the task of erecting the massive edifice which we’d wander about at the end of each day to see progress.

There were grand plans for this Hall. It was to have a large central room that was bordered by several other rooms of varying sizes and a commercial kitchen. Not only would it host the North Queensland College of Ministries, it would also be the venue for church functions, youth group events and by day was to be hired as a gymnastics training facility.

In 1985 this was all in the future and so our youth group events were held in the back end of the main church building and for Sunday School we would use the classrooms in the Canterbury School demountable.

That first year of Sunday School was little short of a circus. Some quirk of nature meant that all but one of the church youth born in 1971 were male with 1972 being the reverse. The 1971 exception, Carlie, was allowed to go up one year to join the Sunday School group that met in the Bullpitt’s lounge room, leaving a wild group of boys who didn’t really want to be there in the first place.

The lawlessness of our Sunday School group that year was a stark contrast to what I knew from Falcon, where the failure to raise one’s hat and politely chirp “Good morning Sir/Maam” to a teacher was a caning offence.

We would go to Sunday School after enduring a long church service that generally went for 1 and ½ to two hours. The order of service was pretty much the same each week, several choruses sung twice, selected from a stable of no more than twenty tunes so we’d rehash the same dirge every 2-3 weeks. The choruses would be interspersed with a hymn or two, all accompanied by the dreadful screeching of a pipe organ that set one’s nerves on edge.

Church notices would take twice as long as they should and the whole shebang would be topped off by a sermon that would never be shorter than 30 minutes but would generally run to 45. The choice of seating was either sticky plastic chairs that drew the sweat from your pores or the cooler hardwood benches that were constructed at the perfect angle to make comfort an impossible dream.

The saving grace of the wooden pews was that they had a rail at their back which was designed to hold hymn books, bibles and communion glasses. This meant it was possible to lean forward on the rail, rest one’s head on an arm and, if possible, snooze through the sonorous exhortations to greater tithing and volunteering for the various church rosters (Dad and Stan Solomon excluded).

Every fortnight we would have a communion service and little silver trays would be passed around containing minute cubes of white bread that had been shaved of their crust. Someone had mastered the art of the cut that made them the ideal size to stick in one’s throat and their minute size was the complete antithesis of the bountiful grace that they were supposed to represent.

But the stinginess didn’t stop there. Choking on the bread was alleviated by the “wine” that was brought around in thimble size glass cups. In actual fact this was cheap grape juice (alcohol being something close to anti-Christ in Baptist circles) that was liberally watered down to make it go further.

It is here that I confess that my perverse sense of humour used to be thoroughly piqued by sneaking into the church kitchens through the week and taking out the half used bottle of grape juice and taking great big slugs directly out of the bottle. Eventually someone must have had their suspicions because they started to freeze the bottles!

The main service was followed by a quick cuppa and biscuit before all the adults settled into discussion groups while us kids were shuffled off to our Sunday School, by which time us young males were somewhat stir-crazy and agitated.

We would congregate in the school playground that consisted of some very basic swings and a jungle-jim. Generally we’d perch on the jungle-jim, throwing twigs and rocks at the younger kids passing by and trying to pull the hair out of each other’s legs that were little past threadbare anyway.

The first several times our teacher summoned us to class would generally be ignored until eventually we’d reluctantly troop in to see whether our books contained a story on Joseph or Moses for that day. The commencement of teaching did not coincide with a conclusion to the mayhem.

It was not unusual that one of the Chester twins would stand up and wander over to the TV and flick it on to watch the beginning of the Wide World of Sports program. Naturally this would draw the attention of all of us and the teacher would spend the rest of the time vainly trying to regain it while we caught up on the day’s sporting action.

One infamous Sunday we noticed the mice that were in several cages about the classroom. We’d wait until the mice were in their wheels, making steady momentum before prodding our hands into the cage and flicking the wheel backwards and laughing uproariously as they clung on for dear life or were thrown out of the wheel and across the cage.

It is little wonder that news of our reputation spread and there was a concerted move to thwart the progression to the Bullpitt’s Sunday School Group for Year 10-12 in 1986!

Straya 1985 - Part One

Preamble: My intention has been to work through the years, covering each one in order. However, there's a bit of current demand need to cover some of the early years of Willows Lodge. Based in Townsville, the Lodge was originally a hostel for kids of missionaries overseas whose children would remain in Australia for a local education. My parents were the first house parents. In order to provide a little bit of context, I was born and raised as a virtual only child (my next sibling is fifteen years older) in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and grew up in the midst of a bitter civil war and the "independence" that bought the despot Mugabe to power in 1980. The majority of the Caucasian population quickly started to scatter from Zimbabwe, hurried by a brutal genocide that broke out in the city we were living in. We joined the exodus when our immigration to Australia was sponsored by the Townsville District Baptist Church (TDBC) at the urging of friends of ours, the Ansells, who had immigrated two year's previously. Prior to our immigration I'd been a boarder at Falcon College, an academically brilliant, all-boys, all-boarding private school. The school's excellence grew from an extremely strict regimen that was supported by a culture of schoolboy bastardry whose hammer blow fell hardest on those in the lower grades, of which I was one. We flew out of Zimbabwe on 1 July 1985 and had a few days in Sydney before flying up to Townsville, which is where the story picks up. Townsville 1985: Our departure from Sydney was delayed by several days because the country was crippled by an airport firefighters strike that grounded all jet aircraft. Eventually we were shuffled onto a low-flying Fokker aircraft that snaked its way up the coast to Brisbane where we spent a few hours of numbing tedium at the run-down Archerfield airport that had banners proclaiming the Bicentenary and Expo 88. We then boarded our plane to Townsville and the great unknown. On touchdown we walked down the steps onto the tarmac on a typically temperate Townsville winter evening. We were confronted with a terminal that amounted to little more than a tin shed and a sea of grinning faces as the church folk had all come out to have a look at their new African acquisitions. There was no luggage conveyor. Our baggage was hauled into the carpark on a trailer pulled by a dilapidated tractor and we helped ourselves. Our suitcases represented the sum total of our worldly possessions until a container-load of the furniture we were allowed to take arrived some six months later. Foreign exchange controls meant we had left Zimbabwe with $1000, though we had smuggled a few hundred extra in American dollars sewn into the front of my underpants to get past the body search in Harare. We jumped into the Ansell's car, wrestled with the unfamiliar concept of seat belts in the back seat and were driven to the Ansell's modest three bedroom house in Heatley. That first night at the Ansells Warren took me into the park opposite the house and pointed out the Townsville landmarks. "Immediately to our north the flashing lights represented Mount Louisa, further to the east the lights were atop the iconic Castle Hill and behind us in the south the tallest lights of the bunch were Mount Stuart. The following morning we eagerly awoke to discover this tropical paradise we'd come to. In Townsville winter is the dry season, and we were shockingly confronted with a dry dust bowl landmarked with a few bedraggled eucalyptus trees. The deep emerald greens we were used to in Africa replaced by the pale, washed-out khaki of the sunburned country. We were unexpectedly staying at the Ansell’s house because, unbeknown to us until we arrived, the Council construction certificates for the Lodge had not been issued because the fire department were not happy with the double fire doors at each end of the building and would not allow us to move in until they were replaced with a single door. These were gigantic openings and as it turned out the large single doors proved to be too heavy for the jamb and were impossible to open. They ended up being a far greater hazard to our safety than the double doors ever could have been. Welcome to bureaucratic and union madness – Australian style! I do however have a distinct memory of wandering into the vacant Lodge after our first morning church service at TDBC the weekend before we moved in, flicking on the antiquated television and seeing footage of the Live Aid concert that was being simulcast out of London and Philadelphia. Madonna was singing “Get into the Groove” a song that caused my mother much consternation later in the year when its clip was played on Airwaves during a Saturday lunchtime and the double entendre became apparent to her. As the Queensland school holidays had just concluded and I was coming off a long term at Falcon it was decided I could wait a week before starting school at Kirwan High, a large co-ed government school of 1600 students. The culture shock of school can be covered at another time, but it is worth noting that on my first or second day I was introduced to two boys my age. The taller one with the flat top introduced himself as Andrew and said "this is my cousin Jonathan who will be living with you at the Lodge." I'd met my first fellow inmate. His parents were missionaries in Tari, Papua New Guinea. My first experience of the church youth group, the imaginatively titled Junior Young People (JYP) happened to coincide with my birthday. That night we played the normal round of lame games like duster hockey in the back of the church building before being called into the kitchen. To my horror I realised the well intentioned folk had prepared a birthday cake for me. To this day I get very uncomfortable when any fuss is made of my birthday and I'm not partial to surprises. Suddenly becoming the centre of attention for this shy African fellow with a ridiculous haircut and strange accent was completely overwhelming. I bolted from the room and ran down to the demountable building that served as the classrooms for the fledgling Canterbury School (it would become Annandale Christian School). The rest of the evening a nonplussed youth group wandered around looking for this strange African fellow who in fact was cowering underneath the demountable building, brushing away cobwebs and praying he wouldn't be found. Eventually everyone gave up and went in for the cake and I only emerged when I saw my ride appear. The next day we finally moved into the Lodge. It was a long, narrow building that at that point contained 13 rooms for residents. It sat atop a dusty plain that was bordered by a long line of power lines and petered away to brown bushland pocked with more eucalyptus trees. The car park was shared with the manse which was inhabited by the Bullpitt family. The original plan was for the Lodge to be lots of single rooms but this was changed when it was pointed out that it would be peopled by masses of hormone addled teenagers who would surely get up to nocturnal hijinks in the privacy of their own rooms. Thus the design was changed at the last minute and most of the rooms were doubles, one door leading into two rooms that shared a common lobby area but beyond that had a dividing wall. Each room had two cheap pine built-in cupboards, a pine slat bed with a very narrow foam mattress, a curved desk that ran the length of the dividing wall and an overhead fan that would prove inadequately essential in summer. The building was constructed to promote through-breezes, large windows placed on top of louvres that gathered dust but allowed the sea breeze to pass through if the doors into the long centre passage were left open. One of these double room arrangements had been slightly altered by placing the dividing wall askance, creating a larger double bedroom for Mum and Dad leaving a remaining narrow sliver that was supposed to be their lounge room and office. Their bedroom had a door that led into one of the bathroom areas that was also split in two by a wall and door in case my parents wanted to retain a modicum of privacy. The building was bordered by large concrete awnings except for the front area that was slightly expanded to accommodate a large living and dining area adjoining a kitchen that was equipped with normal family household equipment and crockery – for a facility that would soon be catering to 15 people on a daily basis. Jonathan moved in over that first weekend and it represented the first time in my 14 years that I'd had to share house and parents with another human my age. It would be something I would have to get quickly used to, not that I took it graciously. Jonathan was placed in the single room that was next to my parent's office and I was in the next room down, another single room at the end of the building offering an entire face of uninsulated besser brick to the fierce afternoon sun. Jonathan and I perched at the end of this vast uninhabited building that still reeked of fresh paint and carpet like timid sparrows. Each day we'd hop on our bikes and ride the three kilometre trip to the Kirwan High jungle. My bike was a yellow BMX number that had been kindly rescued from the rubbish tip by the Chester family and moderately restored. Jonathan's pride and joy was a Malvern Star racer and I'd have to pump my legs twice as fast as him just to keep up. The Bullpitt children were slightly younger than us and we'd sometimes share the trip with them. Early in the Lodge's existence we also hosted the daughter of the Chairman of the Willows Lodge Board, Kirsty James. I suspect she must have introduced the Grant family to the alien scrabble of Australian Rules Football because I became a Carlton supporter – her club of choice. After about a month it was time to take in some more inmates. The first to arrive was Leanne, a tall, willowy brunette attending university at James Cook. She didn't fit the demographic the Lodge was then there to serve but I'd imagine there was quite a need to take in boarders to pay the bills. Leanne had a boyfriend , a car and a university social life and didn't spend too much time hanging out at the lodge fraternising with two young lads in Grade 9! The next inmate was a fellow called Eddie who was working locally, I think as an electrician. All brooding eyes, stocky body topped by a bull-neck and few social graces, Jonathan and I immediately decided that we were sharing a house with a serial killer and we avoided him like the plague. My abiding memory of him is of bad jokes and a day where he watched the Grand Final of a strange code of rugby I'd not heard of before touching down. Eddie was a mad keen Dragons supporter and they had made the Grand Final but obviously weren't doing very well as Eddie kept punching the ground and muttering under his breath while I pondered how anyone could take such a strange game so seriously. One of Eddie's jokes particularly stands out in memory. That year Townsville was granted an extraordinary public holiday, from memory to celebrate the inaugural Pacific Festival. In the afternoon we'd played a game called Hooky with Leanne and her boyfriend where we threw rubber rings at hooks on a plaque to score points. Eddie wondered by and muttered to us that "if anyone at school asks you about what you were doing today you can say you played hooky". In fact earlier that morning Jonathan and I had managed to get up to far more mischief than wagging school. We'd scraped together enough money to buy us a packet of Peter Jackson 15s – a controversial cigarette that was being specifically marketed to the teenage demographic because it was cheap to buy and easily hidden. To cover our tracks we cycled all the way up to the shops adjoining the Kirwan Tavern where we must have thought our surreptitious purchase would be unobserved. In a blue funk I stormed into the shop and breathlessly demanded from a knowing owner a "packet of Peter Jackson 15s for my brother please sir" (the sir bit being a default to Falcon parlance that was at that time a characteristic of mine when under pressure). With contraband safely stowed we cycled our way to the end of Canterbury Road that meandered onto a dirt track in the bushland between our church and the recently opened Paceway (now Stockland Stadium, home ground of the NRL Cowboys). The Paceway had only just been opened amid a broadcast flurry from then Gaming and Racing Minister, the rotund and corrupt Russ Hinze. His expletive-ridden tirade reached us at the Lodge and included the gem "people who say this facility is a white elephant, well they can all go and bloody get stuffed!" The Paceway closed operations within five years but for the time I was at the Lodge it lit up the intervening bush with a pale ghostly light and interspersed the night air with commentary that made sleep impossible every Saturday. That bushland included a large gully which stretched away north from the Paceway for well over a kilometre like a long finger. It was riven with gullies and Jonathan and I rode our bikes to one of them and with trembling fingers lit our first cigarette. We took great pains to strip off our shirts so they didn't absorb smoke which was a dubious practise seeing as the gully was a frequent haunt of older trail bike riders who would surely have had a bit to say about two semi-naked teens cowering in a gully. A few roared past but thankfully we smoked out three "durries" each unnoticed. I remember holding my cigarette between index and middle finger like an urbane James Bond whilst Jonathan held his in thumb and index finger and goaded me that this was the Australian way of smoking things. Light-headed after our first smoking experience we buried the remainder of the pack and scrubbed away at our teeth with Jonathan's Ipana toothpaste – the only one he'd use because it still came in a metallic tube. This was of course to cover the smell of smoke on our breath. When we arrived home we had both raced to the showers and given our teeth another good brushing. We'd gotten away with it. Eventually we became far more brazen, aided by the fact we were sharing a leaflet delivery run for pocket money. Our first area was in the backblocks, the very southern end of Kelso in the Upper Ross. Kelso was still being built and much of the run was long roads with houses far apart. It was a tough gig. Part of the run included a house owned by a church family, the Wards, and we'd sometimes stop there for water on a hot day. It was probably only a month (but it seemed like years) before we were offered the delivery run of houses surrounding the newly opened Willows Shoppingtown. This area began at our end of Canterbury Road and covered the swathe of houses between us and Kirwan High – some 450 mailboxes. We would pick up piles of brochures and bring them home and sit in one of our rooms, folding them with a table knife and stuffing them into our school bags (our ports). This exercise would take well over an hour and we'd listen to the dulcet tones of legendary DJ Steve Price on 4AY that morphed into 4RR while Steve Price was poached by the market leading 4TO. We'd split the houses up between us and would deliver the pamphlets after school and on weekends. It would take around two hours to knock over our area, all for the princely sum of $15 per brochure set delivered, that we'd then share between us. As there were quite a number of houses that didn't accept "junk mail" we'd end up with piles of excess brochures that we'd take out the back and burn in the evenings. While we sat around poking smouldering paper we'd smoke our Peter Jacksons with the fire providing the perfect cover for our activities. To be continued .........