1985 Part III

Part of my induction into Australian "Culcha" was to very quickly shed my "Queens English" Zimbabwean accent. This became a necessity after the first few days at school when it became clear that multiculturalism was not exactly high on the agenda for the rednecks in the red T-shirts at Kirwan High. At first their ignorance meant that I constantly had to prove I could speak English - Zimbabwe being some unheard of place in deepest darkest Africa. It became easier to just say I was from South Africa, because at least this had some passing infamy thanks to apartheid. However, this lead to all manner of preconceptions until the cruel day when some of the more hilarious wags set up the white-bread "South African" to go and give the "niggers" a bit of the treatment associated with apartheid. A swift lesson in what happens when one gets on the wrong side of the school's aboriginal gang ensued. Ironically since arrival we'd already been told many jokes about the "boongs", "coons" and "abos" that would never have been given breath in a racially divided South Africa. In short, shedding that accent became an urgent necessity and the task was set upon with gusto and basically completed within six months. In retrospect it was a simple matter of understanding the differences in two vital vowel sounds. The first one was fairly obvious given my surname. Andrew Gr aunt immediately became Andrew Gr ant. R ar nch became r a nch etc. And the longer "are" sound in words like "car" became nasal cawing sounds "caaaaaaaar". The penny dropped on the other major vowel difference after a few months. The Zimbabwean "i" was pronounced as a soft "u" (not as guttural as the kiwis) whereas the Aussies use it in the phonetically correct form - a higher pitched sound closer to an "ee". So Birn became b i n and so on. The assimilation must have been going reasonably well because somehow I attracted some female attention - again a somewhat perturbing experience for the boy from all-boys Falcon. The attention came from a girl called Paula, from memory a tallish brunette who was an occasional attender at JYP. I was completely oblivious to the fact until we went to a JYP camp towards the end of the year. This camp was at a scouts camping site at Rollingstone, around 40km north of Townsville. The place had very little to endear it to us - a dry dust bowl next to a stagnant, largely dry creek bed. We played the obligatory games and a wide game or two but my memory of the greatest amusement came when a mysterious pair of underwear were run up the flagpole one night and no one would admit to owning them, or flying them high. I was sharing a tent with Jonathan but was alone in the tent on the first afternoon when a "messenger" arrived in the form of Paula's best friend to inform me that "Paula liked me". This was absolutely staggering information and caught me completely off guard, so all I could manage was a stuttered "oh bull shit!". Given Paula was in the adjoining tent with a coterie of her friends this was probably a worst-case scenario - a gruff (and might I add unintended) rebuff replete with colourful language heard loud and clear in evangelical circles.

I can remember quite a few stony stares over the next twenty-four hours and very little conversation until mercifully the camp was over and I could retreat to the relative security of Lodge life. I did plan to try and make amends at the next JYP night but Paula and her best friend never showed their face at TDBC again as far as I can remember.

If she had returned her ardour would most likely have cooled significantly when the annual JYP concert rolled around. Dress-ups has never been my strong point and camp concerts are a dull and excruciating experience of banality. Perhaps this aversion springs from the brilliant idea Jonathan and I hatched for our performance at the concert in 1985. Mad Max III had just come out and with it the main song from the sound-track, Tina Turner's "We don't need another hero". Jonathan and I slightly doctored the words and changed the title to "We don't need another youth group", some strange homage to JYP that I think was supposed to be flattering. Our nerves were not assisted by the ridiculous get-up we chose for ourselves. Jonathan borrowed a dress from Carlie while I dragged a kimono I'd been given when flying Cathay Pacific out of the closet and matched it with the iconic green and white hoop socks of the Zimbabwean Rugby team. To top it off I took out a permanent felt-pen and wrote all over my precious "fellis", comfortable bush shoes that had been a part of the Falcon day uniform. Play was pressed on the tape player and we proceeded to sing the first few lines of the song over the top of Tina Turner, at which point Jonathan completely lost composure and launched into maniacal laughter. I attempted to labour on with the song but probably would have been better joining in with Jonathan (and by now the rest of the youth group) in derisory laughter at the ridiculousness of the performance. I think it would be fair to say that both Jonathan and I remember this night as one of the most humiliating in our teenage lives.

Towards the end of that year tragedy would strike our youth group when the elder brother of the Chester twins, Shane, would pass away in a car accident. Shane had just finished year 10 and was intending to leave school to take up an apprenticeship.

He and another older guy in the church, John, decided to take a trip to Sydney. With John the only one that could drive they set out from Townsville, made it to Brisbane and decided to keep going. In the dead of the night is seems John fell asleep at the wheel and the car veered into the other lane on a notoriously bad stretch of the Pacific Highway near Tarree. They collided with a semi-trailer and both were killed instantly.

The accident happened in the early hours of a Sunday morning just before Christmas and the pastoral staff were quickly alerted to the news ahead of the morning’s church service. Senior Pastor Stan Solomon was flown to Tarree to identify the bodies whilst the rest of the pastoral team picked up the pieces with a shattered congregation.

It was a very sad start to the summer holidays and cast a pall over several subsequent Christmases.

All of the other Lodgies vacated for the Christmas holidays and we returned to our nuclear family which sweated out our first tropical coastal summer. While Bulawayo was in the tropics it was also 1300 metres above sea level and had low humidity, it's temperate climate regarded as one of the most pleasant in the world. The Townsville summer descended like a sticky wet blanket from which there was no respite.

We had no air-conditioning so all we could do was open our louvres and rely on ceiling fans that were on constant rotation, beating the turgid air around with little effect.

With the heat and humidity came the lethal box jellyfish so even a dip in the soup-like ocean had to be conducted within the confines of a huge cage covered in chicken-wire. It was hardly worth the effort.

In the lead-up to Christmas there were a huge amount of advertising brochures to be distributed, Jonathan's place on the team taken up by a school friend, Dominic Andrew. To escape the blazing heat we would meet up at 5am and try to have the whole delivery round finished off by 9am, whereupon we'd retreat to the only air-conditioned place we could find that summer - the shiny new Willows Shoppingtown.

We'd withdraw our hard-earned money at the Westpac ATM on the way in and then spend several hours languidly buying ourselves treats (coke and ice-cream mainly). One day Dominic shook his 2 litre Coke up a little too hard and it shot the cap off the bottle and Coke spewed out in a great big puddle on the immaculate tiles. We took one look at the carnage and bolted for the bike racks, my legs pumping the little BMX as fast as was humanely possible.

Dominic joined us when we took a day-trip on Reef Link for our first proper look at the Great Barrier Reef. It was a two hour trip to the Perc Tucker Reef which housed the "yellow submarine" with a glass floor and was also preparing to receive the "8th wonder of the world - it's first floating hotel". It was a cloudy, blowy day (hot and sticky of course) and Mum and Dad joined half of the boat's patrons in being violently sick.

Dominic and I sat on the back deck for the trip and showed no ill effects and enjoyed a very long day of snorkeling and eating the buffet lunch that was touched by very few. Mum and Dad managed a fleeting look at the coral through the yellow submarine but spent most of the day inspecting the back of the toilet bowl or marveling at the patterns the contents of their stomach could make in the water when lurched over the boat's rail.

The Floating Hotel didn't last very long at the Perc Tucker Reef. It opened with much fanfare but was buffeted by Cyclone Winifred the following year and lost patronage. Within a year or so of opening the Hotel was cut loose from its anchors and towed up the coast en-route to Ho Chi Minh city which was just opening its doors to the world and had no accommodation!

As we cruised back into Townsville harbour late in the afternoon we passed another hotel that was a few weeks short of opening - the Sheraton Breakwater Casino which at the time was a stark monolith rising up from the dry and dusty Townsville marina carpark. Our first Australian Christmas was a sweltering day (even more so than usual) and we made the short trip over to Magnetic Island to spend the day with the Ansells, their Zimbabwean connection making them our longest-term friends in the country. We did the whole Christmas Roast thing and then went for a desultory walk along Nelly Bay to let the food settle. It was an absolutely stifling day, a couple of degrees higher than normal and tremendous humidity and with no stinger nets in operation a quick dip in the tempting-looking water was not an option. A few months later an Australian one-hit wonder band called Gangajang would release a song called "Sounds of Then". I distinctly remember the first time I heard the song on the radio, distorted by the crackle and static caused by lightning strikes as an early evening thunderstorm pierced the heavens and great gusts of rain were dumped from the darkened bellies of massive cumulonimbus clouds. And the refrain was repeated over and over again: To lie in sweat, on familiar sheets, In brick veneer on financed beds. In a room of silent hardiflex That certain texture, that certain smell, Brings forth the heavy days, Brings forth the night time sweat Out on the patio we’d sit, And the humidity we’d breathe, We’d watch the lightning crack over canefields Laugh and think, this is Australia. Indeed!

1985 Soundtrack:

Apparently this is not a common trait, but I seem to have a back catalogue of songs in my head that are strongly associated with the memories, feelings and even smells of particular points in time - generally when the songs were on heavy rotation on the radio.

Kate Bush - Running up that Hill: This haunting song beautifully conjures up that sense of "WTF have I come to" that was relocation to Australia at the back-end of 1985.

Say if I only could, I'd make a deal with God, And I'd get him to swap our places, Be running up that road, Be running up that hill, With no problems...

I am certain this song became hard-wired because the first eighteen months in Australia was a long-running debate with God along the lines of "what have you done with me? Do you know how hard this is?"

Prince - Rasberry Beret: I'd fallen in love with Prince's music the year before. The risque funk rock of his Purple Rain album starting a life-long addiction. Rabserry Beret was pretty much the follow-up single, a light and breezy number that plumbed the depths of a teenager just starting to wake up to the romantic possibilities of the opposite sex. Clumsily taped off the radio this song was on very heavy rotation as I read through Wilbur Smith's Eagle in the Sky.

Dream Academy - Life in a Northern Town:

(Chant) Ah hey ma ma ma Life in a northern town. Ah hey ma ma ma All the work shut down.

It was certainly obligatory that this song would be adopted by the proud North Queensland locals, even with its reference to "winter 1963, it felt like the world would freeze." The song entered folklore the following year when local disc jockey Steve Price offered to swim in the fountain near the Long Tan pool in mid-winter (oo-er). It did and he did.