Dear Book Club Members,
I am sorry that this has taken so long to get to you. However, there ARE reasons! Obviously, my natural tendencies to procrastination spring to mind.
But, the grieving process for our darling Mumma Dot/Nanna Dot is not a short term matter. And we have spent much of our free time over at Jim and Mumma’s home, sorting through her stuff – photos, stamp collections, food, pot, pans, crockery, linen, clothing, knickknacks, mementoes, etcetera. All of which brought back memories. Which in turn gave us each our individual reflections, sad and happy.
Plus I have been through a bit of a down time.
However, here is Chapter 9.
I have to warn you that, there may be stuff inhere that may not agree with your own values and beliefs. I do not write stuff to offend, but I do believe you have the right to see my life as it actually IS, not some air-brushed, sanitised version.
You have the right to hold your own opinions, but, you signed up for the truth about my life, and I have tried to give you that.
With much love and warmth,
Norm
Regarding Dorothy Margaret Richardson
I loved our little Mumma Dot/Nanna Dot, who died on 11 January 2011. Jim and Margaret asked me to write and read a poem in her memory. I did so, and read it at her funeral service on 14 January 2011.
Farewell Mumma /Nanna Dot
The journey’s over, little Dot, it’s time for us to part;
But our memories ensure that you will live on, in each heart.
You loved your children dearly, as good mothers tend to do,
You loved their children deeply, their children’s children too.
You were fiercely independent, didn’t always like advice;
You liked to smile & laugh at jokes, the naughty & the nice;
You played your weekly lotto games, you loved a little bet,
And you’d mutter, “Gee, I’d murder for a beer or cigarette!”
You loved to do the puzzles in the papers, Woman’s Day;
And you really loved to travel, overseas & far away.
Your cats were all so dear to you, each one a special friend,
And Don Lane, The Lanky Yankee, was for you, the Prince of men!
Mumma Dot, Dear Nanna Dot, it’s time to say goodbye,
There is love for you in every heart, and tears in every eye;
We thank you for the life you led, the love you had to give;
You will never be forgotten, as long as we shall live.
Chapter 9: Finding Friends:
Thank You, Captain Jim, Thank You, Bernard Dunne
Age: 18 – 20
Every job I have held in my life came about by chance or circumstances, never by design or desire. The one ambition I had, from childhood, was to become a radio announcer. I had no idea of how to achieve that goal, and I suffered from a serious lack of initiative. My proactive skills lay dormant and unused, submerged far below my conscious mediocrity. I wanted someone to take my hand, lead me to a radio station, seat me at a turntable, and tell me what to do.
One day in 1963 I saw an advertisement in the Brisbane Courier-Mail for the Brisbane School of Broadcasting, that promised to train suitable candidates in announcing and copywriting, and to help me find work in that field. I wrote for an application form, completed it, sent it off, and was summoned, in due course, to an interview at Radio Station 4BC, on the corner of Adelaide and Wharf Streets.
Captain Jim Iliffe owned the Brisbane School of Broadcasting. He was an ex-World War II fighter pilot turned Children’s Television host, a very popular personality, with a huge handle-bar moustache a friendly smile, with a genuine warmth to him. Ten of us came for the interviews, but he only selected four, including me, as having suitable voices for radio.
The course ran for several months, and was very much based on practical activities and exercises, supported by notes. I kept those notes for years, until about 25 years ago, when I lent them to an interested someone who has yet to return them. (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE!).
We did group activities in the station auditorium, wrote advertising copy for homework, and spent many sessions alone in a vacant studio, cueing up records and ads, playing them, reading copy (sometimes our own), and giving our phantom audience station identification and time checks. I loved it. At the end of the course, we all made audition tapes, supervised by Jim, and he sent them off to various Queensland radio stations when they had vacancies for cadet announcers[1].
Jim had one-to-one chats with each of us both during and after the course. He and I had coffee one afternoon, and he suggested that I join a theatre group, to get more experience in projecting my voice.
Enter Bernard Dunne, a junior clerk with the State Government Insurance Office. He and I had chatted when we swapped files between our sections, and I was intrigued by his natty dress sense and his general flamboyance, which seemed a tad out of place in the grey environment of the public service. One day he had mentioned to me that he was a member of the Brisbane Arts Theatre, which didn’t stir much interest in me at the time.
I asked Bernard about how one joined the theatre the day after my chat with Jim Iliffe. It so happened, said Bernard, that the theatre was holding auditions for a series of one act plays within a couple of weeks. So began my less than illustrious career as an actor.
My first audition was a triumph for my ego. I sat around a wall in the cottage next to the Arts Theatre, with about thirty other hopefuls, and was called upon to read a little speech (in front of the rest – I was SO nervous) for each play. Four one-act plays were cast, and I was given a role in three of them.
After the first rehearsal, I went with my SGIO friend Bernard and a couple of others from the theatre down to the Cubana Coffee Lounge for a late (cheap) dinner. It was exciting, but embarrassing, because the other three were VERY theatrical, with unusual voices and expansive gestures. Bernard wore a hat with a flower in it.
I remember much about those plays for two main reasons. Firstly, because this is the only theatre program I have somehow managed to keep across the years. Secondly, because it was here I first met several of my first true friends.
About the plays. I missed out on ‘Queer Street’ produced by Gerard Kennedy (later to become well known as a nasty criminal in a show called ‘Hunter’, then even more well known as a detective in ‘Division Four’, a long-running crime series)
Catherine Sparkes clearly saw my potential when she cast me as the Town Crier in ‘Three Knaves of Normandy’. I think my total words were along the lines of “Oyez, oyez, oyez, here come de judge!” (probably more like, “make way for the judge”, but the three x Oyez were DEFINITELY part of my big scene.
Donal Saunders (christened Donald, but he thought the shortened version was more theatrical) directed ‘The Bushrangers’ Christmas Eve’, by Kylie Tennant, in which I played a bushranger, Alf, in a rugged band of incredibly evil men which set upon Mrs Caroline Chisholm’s party of young girl immigrants. The play ended with us joining in the singing of Christmas carols with the ladies, and helping them in their chores. I think my part was restricted to a few rough ‘Righto Boss’ type rejoinders, a few group ‘yeah’s’, and, of course, part of the Carol Choir.
My major role, an absolute triumph, was the second lead in ‘Blue Murder’ directed by Rene Vance. It was a sort of spoof on Sherlock Holmes, with John Bowstead playing the Holmes character (named Vague), and I was his support (named Witless, a name that many have used many times since, whilst nodding in my direction).
In those two or three months of rehearsal and performance, I met many wonderful people, three of whom became close friends – Don Saunders, Ron Phillips, and Peter Hitchener. Both Don and Ron have died, but Peter, with his Mother Bunty, his sister Wendy, and his stepfather Fred Parks, are still the closest friends I have, outside my family. More on those friendships later.
One night at rehearsal, Lindsay Clayton, a girl I REALLY fancied, but was too shy to ask out, asked me “Are you one of us or one of them?” I had absolutely NO IDEA what she was on about, so I stuttered (even as I blushed) “Um, what do you mean?”
Lindsay then threw me thoroughly out of my comfort zone by asking, with an in-your-face, direct stare, “Do you prefer going out with boys or girls?”
I was 19 years old, and there was absolutely NO WAY that I was going to tell this gorgeous girl that I had never been out with ANYONE, boy or girl. I simply said, “Why, girls, of course!”
“Well then”, she replied, “you’re one of us, then.” Which puzzled me even more. It would have been wonderful if Lindsay had then asked me out, but, as it happened, she was enquiring on behalf of another girl in the cast who was too shy to find out for herself. [2]
Although Lindsay’s comments amazed and perplexed me, I had no intention of asking her what the heck she meant, because it was obviously something I ought to know.
The next person who tried to extend my life education was a petite and beautiful young woman with dark hair and dark shining eyes. Marguerite and I shared several cups of coffee in a favourite long-gone coffee lounge, and one evening I had dinner with her family at Belmont. (This was when one could STILL take the train to Belmont and back to the city). Marguerite patiently explained to me, several times, using French words that I never fully understood (so much for my Year 10 French studies), about men loving men.
I think my mind was clouded by a tale I had read in school, about the great love between Damon and Pythias, where one offered to be executed in place of the other, whereupon the king let them both go free. That, to me, was about the love of man for his fellow man. Marguerite was on about something a fair bit more carnal.
When I suggested that she was joking, she lost her cool a smidgen (I won’t go so far as to say she stamped her foot – Marguerite was very much a lady); but she did quite testily ask me if I had never noticed how Don and Robbie held hands when they moved between the Cottage to the other rehearsal room a little way along Petrie Terrace.
Just a few days later, and ONLY because I was looking for it, I saw Don and Robbie holding hands as they walked along the street. My mind was totally confused (this is someone who had not yet come to grips with any practical experience of heterosexuality – I had absolutely NO ‘hands on’ experience with any heterosexual people of the opposite gender - so you can imagine the chaotic thoughts that roamed around my mind).
It took Wendy Haupt to lay it on the line for me about Don and Robbie and other theatre friends. Wendy, the daughter of a Magistrate, I think, invited me to be her partner at the Trainee Teachers’ Ball at Cloudland, for which I hired a dinner suit (I still have the photo of us decked out for the ball). Afterwards, I took her home by taxi to her Clayfield flat, and we sat on the back porch until dawn, while she explained in quite graphic detail about homosexuality, and that many of the males in the theatre were actually ‘camp’.[3][4]
It was past daybreak when I left Wendy, and I arrived home at Brother Bert’s place, where I was then boarding, around 7:00 a.m. I had some concern as to what Bert and Carmel might say to me (and, more importantly, what they might report back to Ern), but I was saved by the Beatles.
They had arrived in Brisbane in the early hours of this very morning at the end of June, 1964, and Bert thought that I had gone to the airport to scream and wet myself on their arrival.
For those wondering how these incredible revelations affected my relationships with gay or lesbian people, it possibly made me regard them in an even better light, BECAUSE:[5]
1. Right through my formative years, I was taught to treat ALL other people with respect, which I did, most of the time, with the possible exception of my brother Les, and the definite exception of myself.
2. I was aware that I was a stupid, lazy, uninteresting person, and something of an outsider. My friends in the theatre were also outsiders, and they offered me inclusion without judgment, friendship without conditions.
3. They were fun and interesting to be with, and this possibly made them even more interesting. As soon as the grapevine shared the news that I was square (heterosexual), almost everyone respected that, and didn’t ask me embarrassing or leading questions.
4. Now, I have mentioned in this chapter three particular beautiful women, each of whom spent time with me, and asked me to coffee and balls. Why, then, did I not ask any of them out? The only reason that hits me (with considerable force) is that I saw myself as a boring, ordinary individual, with no idea of what to say to girls (or, in many cases, to boys). I realised it would only be a matter of time before they saw me as the stupid person I was. AND I would be bald in a couple of years!
Let me move on from that pathetic, pity party analysis, to comment on the three particular friends I met in my first month in the theatre.
Donal Saunders worked in the public service, but he LIVED for Brisbane Arts Theatre (BAT)! He was known to most people in BAT as Batsy Saunders. He smoked compulsively, drank hard, had an utterly evil laugh, and didn’t look after his teeth very well. I thought he was a very good comic actor and skilled director, who told the RUDEST jokes, and we got on very well.
One day he asked me if I wanted to move into a flat with him in Llewellyn Street Kangaroo Point. At the time my relations with Bert and Carmel (who I loved and love dearly) were a tad strained, as they sometimes get when a younger brother moves in with a young family for a temporary few weeks, which stretches into longer than three months, and no end in sight.
So, I moved in with Don. The first night after we had moved into the flat, two of his theatre friends arrived with a flat-warming present – a carved marble cherub which they had removed from a grave at the Toowong Cemetery. We made our first unanimous decision in our new home – we made them promise to take it straight back and replace it where they had removed it from. These two men both fell in love with a Peter Sellers film, ‘Dr Strangelove, or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’. They saw it at every suburban theatre where it was shown. Each time they took with them two large Coca Cola bottles filled with claret, to enhance their viewing pleasure.
One of them, now dead, found his fame and fortune in an Australian soap called ‘Sons and Daughters’, I think. The other one dropped out of my world many years ago, but, an army mate told me last year, in a lunch-time conversation, that his ex-wife had a brother who was incredibly gay, and it turned out to be the same man I had known.
Two weeks after we moved into the flat, the landlord told Don he had made a mistake, and we had to move out. (Perhaps the landlord had seen our flat warming gift arrive and leave). Don found another flat, at 28 Chermside Street, Highgate Hill, right beneath Torbreck, which for years was the tallest (and one of the few) block of multi-storey unit buildings in Brisbane. The rent was higher than we could jointly afford, so a third person, Ron Phillips, was invited to share with us. Don’s special friend Robbie also spent most of his time there. Robbie was a young, and truly gifted, pianist.
This began a wonderful stage in my life. I had the theatre, with all of its assembled characters, castings, rehearsals, performances, and parties; and home life was pretty much the same.
I developed a taste for Marsala and coke; for the first time in my life I heard, and liked, classical music (first I fell in love with Tales from the Vienna Woods, by Strauss, then Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony); I developed theatrical affectations in my speech; my conversations outside the theatre revolved around the theatre. In short, I took to wearing a superficial mask that wasn’t really me. I liked this new me, because it was far more interesting than the real me.
At work, I achieved my daily/weekly targets, but the time and effort spent in the Statistical Data section had become a necessary drudgery that provided the income to pay for my dilettante lifestyle.
Ron Phillips spent his whole working life with Queensland Railways, and was a complete gentleman with a gentle sense of humour which led to his being called “Pixie” Phillips by his theatre friends, in a friendly and endearing way. I doubt if Ron ever made an enemy in his life. He had a round head, with extremely receding hair, glasses that glinted in sunlight, and an impish, boyish smile. He was a gifted actor, and particularly so in comedies, farces, pantomimes. I was privileged to know him, and to call him friend.
Flatting with Ron was something of a double-edged sword, however, because, whilst one had his friendship and humour, he had a fetish for neatness and order, and woe betide anyone who did NOT do the Ron-allocated share of the housework. I shared another, larger flat with Ron after I returned from Vietnam, with Graeme Pinniger and Gary Smith, who were then, and are now, wonderful friends of mine and the Love of my life, Margaret.
Don, Graeme, Gary and I were not particularly tidy[6], and we generally fell far short of Ron’s standards in completing our tasks, when we completed them at all. Ron, usually took over if they weren’t done to his timetable (which was usually every Saturday morning), and he would stalk through the flat, mumbling and grumbling about the inconsiderateness of others. Graeme had a car, and usually managed to find important duties in other parts of the world on Saturday mornings, but I had no excuse, and usually helped Ron when the guilts attacked me.
Ron taught me how to eat a boiled egg without having any eggcups, a valuable skill in our New Farm flat, and one which will stand me in good stead should I ever forget where the eggcups are.
By the time I had returned from Vietnam, Don had left the public service, and was working as a barman at the Embassy Hotel in Edward Street. He had left the theatre, and was involved in a relationship with an older man who treated him unkindly. Don smoked too much, drank too much, and became something of a caricature of the man he once had been.
The evil laugh remained; the teeth were fewer in number and more deeply stained; he still told as many jokes, mostly rude, but the eyes seemed almost empty of feeling, as though he had lost something precious.
He didn’t have, or want to do, much with most of his old friends, he worked, he drank, he smoked, and went home to his partner, and none of it seemed to make him happy. Because I spent six years away from Brisbane from the beginning of 1969,
I did not know that he had died until several years after his passing. I would have liked to have attended his funeral, but one cannot arrange events as one might wish. From the little I saw of him after Vietnam, I was left feeling as if a dear friend had died, long before he left us.
Rest in peace, Donal Saunders, you brought joy and friendship into my life for a brief time.
Ron bought a house in Guthrie Street Paddington while I was away in Melbourne and Townsville (from January 1969 to June 1975), and our darling daughter Jane attended her first New Year’s Eve Party there in 1975, at the age of 9 months. Ron brought his aging parents down from Rockhampton to live with him for several years. After their passing, and his retirement from the railways, he moved to the Sunshine Coast, and lived there until his death.
It was a beautiful funeral, and I was able to renew friendship with Graeme Pinniger, Gary Smith, Bill Weir, and other Arts Theatre friends.
Ron Phillips had a profound impact for good in my life, with his gentleness, his non-hurtful humour, and his caring regard for family and friends. We miss you Ronnie, but we hold you in our hearts.
Bill Weir I met early in my theatrical career, and, I believe, he is the longest-serving paid-up member of Brisbane Arts Theatre to this day. He was mostly involved in backstage work in my time there, as Stage Manager and other important roles that never seem to gain the acknowledgement they deserve.
I think from the time I met him, Bill worked in the areas of his personal interests – books, records, film and video (and, nowadays, CDs, DVDs, and other technological marvels that store books, music, films, plays …).
After my triumphal success in the one act plays, I moved on to a major role in a play written by Ernest Emmanuel. Ern and his wife Ellie became lifelong friends of mine and, in time, of Margaret’s. Ern and Margaret had known each slightly, years earlier, when they both worked in the Queensland Housing Commission, on the ground floor of the SGIO building. So, without knowing it, we three who were to become friends all worked in the one building in 1962! Sadly, Ern passed away several years ago, at a good age, but Margaret and I still visit Ellie, and their daughter, Denise, though not as often as we should or would like, at their West End home.
Ern wrote a play, ‘Bush Town Story’, in which I played a pipe-smoking city slicker, Todhunter, visiting his dear friend Muggeridge (played by Peter Hitchener) in a small country town. I accidentally discharge my host’s rifle, and we think that I have killed Horsey, the town drunk, although it transpires that Horsey was just dead drunk. However, Muggeridge and I decide to hide the body while the police come looking around, and this was done on stage by we two sitting under a table with the sides and back blanketed off, me with pipe and rifle, Peter with a concerned stare, and Horsey propped up between us, all facing the audience.
Horsey was played by one Charles Muir, who EVERY night, as we sat silent and serious-faced, tickled both Peter and me in the arm-pit region, while we struggled to keep our faces stern and straight.
Which brings me to the Hitchener family. Peter Hitchener was a trooper in ‘The Bushrangers Christmas Eve’ and I was a bushranger. Despite being on opposite sides, we shared a similar, absurdist sense of humour, and an ambition to be radio announcers.
It didn’t take long for us to become friends and, within a few short weeks of knowing me, Peter asked me home to dinner with his family. He and his widowed mother Bunty (Alison Beauchamp Hitchener), lived in a small flat in Oxford Street Bulimba, just a few blocks from my first home in Brisbane at the Bulimba Hostel. Peter’s sister Wendy lived there when she was on holiday from St Hilda’s School at Southport, where she was a boarder). Peter was working for one of the Big wool companies – Elder Smith Goldsborough Mort, (or the other one whose name I forget for the moment), after finishing his schooling as a boarder at the Southport School.
We met after work on a grey and rainy afternoon, took the Bulimba Ferry tram, then the ferry, and ran up Oxford Street through increasingly heavy rain, and arrived, wet through and laughing, to be met by Bunty at the door.
I had been somewhat nervous at meeting Peter’s mother, because, I had a feeling she wouldn’t like me (which is what I thought about most new people I met).
There is a scene in the film, ‘Sleepless in Seattle’, where Tom Hanks tells a night time talkback host about meeting his late wife for the first time. He says something like: “It was like coming home, but to a home I’d never been to.” That was how it was for me, entering the Hitchener household. I had never felt so welcome, so unconditionally respected, in my life. Since that night, the Hitchener family has become my family, and our friendship continues to this day. When Bunty married Fred Parks in 1971 (I think) and I married my Margaret the same year, the family circle just grew a little wider, but no less loving. Here is an amazing fact – I have never had one argument, angry moment, or less than worthy thought with or about Peter, Bunty, Wendy or Fred in the 46 years we have been friends.
Bunty may be a tad cranky with me for telling what I see as the truth about the Hitchener/Parks family, because she thinks I credit them with too much praise. I can but say Bunty, that there are not words enough to tell you each and all how much you have helped/supported/loved/nurtured me, and the Wotherspoon family.
Bunty and her children lived down near Texas, until her husband Nat died. He and his brothers owned some properties, which were tied up for legal reasons, as I understand it, for some years after Nat’s death. I don’t know a lot about the situation, except that Bunty, ever proactive, moved to Brisbane, and worked with Queensland Newspapers, in the Classified Advertising Department.
I have no idea how I was so simply and completely accepted into this close-knit family, but I was, and we spent many happy evenings and weekends laughing, listening to records (particularly the Tokens – The Lion Sleeps Tonight and Them – with a 17 year old Irish lead singer, Van Morrison, and a hit song, ‘Here Comes the Night’.) We talked, smoked, and, on occasion, drank beer. We invented our own standing/running jokes, that launched us all, Bunty included, into fits of giggles. “M’took, M’took … a herd of stampeding elephants” can even now bring the smiles, though we are possibly too staid and serious to give out the gut-wrenching guffaws. Who am I kidding? I can STILL guffaw with the best of them!
I wrote my second song, late on a Sunday night after a wonderful weekend with all three Hitcheners. Early on the Monday morning, just before leaving, I recorded on a small, very primitive tape recorder.
It was a sad song, because I didn’t want to go back into the ordinary world, away from this family which had adopted me.
Blue Sunset
Blue sunset tonight,
As dusk on the river falls.
Tears hide the light
As my heart hurtly calls
To you, my love,
Come back to me,
Make everything all right.
But she won’t return, though
My heart yearns so much,
In the blue sunset tonight.
Why did she go?
I know, I know;
I treated her so badly.
Now she won’t come home,
I’m all alone;
I know it’s goin’
To be a blue sunset tonight.[7]
As to Bill and Graeme and Gary, we are still friends, and our friendship circle has expanded easily to include the Love of my life. Although we do not see as much of them as we would like, we do manage to catch up more than once a year. It is amazing how friendships can last for nearly fifty years, and be as strong, even stronger, than they were in those early years.
Back to the theatre. I played parts in many plays in those salad days of 1964-65. I was something in an Elizabethan play directed by Gerard Kennedy, which I mainly remember because of a statuesque lady named Judith, who was the star of the play, and of whom I was in awe.
I had a leading role in a Donal Saunders produced play in which I played a Cockney, with the memorable line: ‘A bit o’ butter’s better for the biter’. I didn’t make a very good Cockney.
Ian Austin cast me in three roles in his production of Sean O’Casey’s Irish tragedy, Juno and the Paycock. There were several brilliant leads in this play – Ian Austin was incredibly good as Joxer Daley, Les McWilliam as the Paycock, Gwen Smith as his wife, ‘Juno’, Bill ? as their son Johnny, and I think Patricia Smith as their daughter, who became pregnant to the English lawyer, played by Hugh Buckham. I mention Hugh because, 40 years later, he acted in a play in which our son Timothy played the lead role of the King of France.
I had three roles in the play – a coal block seller (crying ‘Blocks! Coal Blocks!) offstage; an IRA soldier leading Johnny off to his execution; and a concerned neighbour comforting Juno after her world had collapsed.
I was the Wicked Coachman in Joan Whalley’s production of Pinocchio, for the Lord Mayor’s Pantomime in December 1964. I have a magnificent photo of me in that role.
The last role I played was in Paul Sherman’s production of Macbeth, which featured some truly wonderful actors, including Lenore Caton, Carol Burns (later to become a star of Prisoner) as two of the three witches; Paul himself as MacDuff, and Michael Caton (of The Castle, The Sullivans and other shows) as the drunken gatekeeper. One night, the actor playing Macbeth was ill, so Paul played Macbeth and MacDuff, except, of course, in their sword fight scene. Paul is something of a legend in his complete knowledge of most of Shakespeare’s plays, word for word. He has also written several books on aspects of Australian history, and is a fascinating character, someone I have been privileged to know.
I think I had a part in The Mayor of Muckadilla, written and directed by Alan Denby, and possibly a small role in Our Town, a beautiful Thornton Wilder play, with Brian Cannon as the Narrator, Patricia Jones as the lead role, and Ernie Nichols in another major part.
Two other important events stand in my memory from 1964 to the first half of 1965.
At one of our Chermside Street parties, with much alcohol, witty and largely gay conversation, I had my first personal, practical experience of heterosexual connection. A young woman from the theatre, a few years older than me, asked to see the view from the window of my bedroom, the small sunroom at the back of the flat.
We went into the room, she closed the door, grabbed me, and, in the next ten minutes, guided me into the mysteries of man/woman stuff. I do not claim that I was seduced against my will, because I know that I was a willing, if inexpert participant, and found it urgent and in part enjoyable. But, in truth, somewhat disappointing.
Those of you who know me well may have sensed that, beneath this rugged, rough exterior lies a sensitive, romantic soul. Although I knew next to nothing about the intricacies about The Act, it had always been, in my eyes, something which happened after two people built a relationship based on mutual interest, friendship, and then deepened into something more serious.
What happened on that night was not romantic; it was a one-night stand. I found out later that my partner in my loss of innocence was someone who simply enjoyed sex. As it happened, I was the only straight man at the party, and I was chosen because of that. Again, I was a willing, if bemused player in that game.
The other important happening was a young lady named Anne, who had attended All Hallows School, and was a qualified Speech and Drama teacher. Somehow I found the nerve to ask her out for coffee, then to a theatre show. We held hands a lot, and, because Anne was a Catholic, I went with her, several times, to church. She lived with her parents at an Albion address that I still remember.
Because I KNEW that I was nowhere near good enough for Anne, I wrote a poem for her, gave it to her, and, a few weeks later, she told me she had met another. Sigh!
For Anne
This happiness will not last long,
A brief moment of bliss,
A treasured hour or two;
And then it will be gone.
But, while it still remains,
Let us be happy,
For I have never known
A sweeter time than this.
[1] I sent off 4 or 5 audition tapes, and was successful with one, but the news came on the day I was called up for National Service.
[2] Lindsay went on to marry Barry Otto, nowadays a noted actor, and their daughter is Miranda Otto, who is even more famous than her parents.
[3] For my younger readers, ‘camp’ was the old ‘gay’. I’m not sure if it was used for both sexes, so I don’t mean to insult anyone by omission.
[4] After I had worked out who was camp and who was square, I realised that I was the ONLY straight bushranger! (Well, I thought it was amusing).
[5] One of my purposes in writing this … document, is to continue the process of understanding how I came to be who I am today. This particular piece of personal philosophy is something which I worked out some years ago, and have shared with many of my TAFE students.
[6] Graeme and Gary would possibly dispute this, and certainly nowadays they are tidier than ever Ron was.
[7] You guessed it! I can and will sing the song if asked.
