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!