Cheroots, spittoons and tickling the old ivories

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Not too many places are around these days for quaffing from brandy snifters, chomping on cheroots and expectorating into spittoons. It’s comforting, however, to find such luxuries do still exist, and in some of our finest establishments.

Better still, if you’ve an eye for despatching the ivory orbs over wide expanses of green baize, you can do so while despatching canapes and hazelnut and carrot soup as well. Maybe with a lusty durif or a crisp pinot gris, if you prefer. Rack up a sizeable break and you might mark the occasion with an antediluvian Scotch or cognac.

All of this beneath a soaring, clerestory-lit, timber-braced ceiling not unlike a clever cricket pavilion or a brass-band rotunda. That’s not to mention leather benches, moulded timber chairs, marbled fireplace, heraldry, ensigns, flags, polished timber honour boards, hat stand, trophies, score rollers, cues racked in leather, metal and canvas prophylactics — and, of course, two handsome sprawling 12-foot tables that also create the ambience of this club annex.

“Good God, man, that’s awfully civilised,” I can hear you gasp. And short of a small phalanx of heavily-whiskered gentlemen, ice clinking in their whiskey glasses, cigar smoke permeating the air, you’d be right. Right in the 19th century, that is, in the sprawling billiard room of The Geelong Club behind its pretty, and exclusive, Queen Anne facade on Brougham Street.

Long an enclave of Geelong’s wealthy and privileged, The Geelong Club has a history dating to 1859 when it was populated by pastoralists, lawyers and merchants. The roaring days of the Gold Rush had Geelong fairly buzzing as a port city, and demand for fine dining, claret and champagne, mahogany and cedar, billiards, cards and other diversions — along the British club model — led to the club’s inception.

The first lodgings were in Yarra Street, north of Ryrie, before the club moved to Mack’s Hotel on Brougham and, in 1889, built next door at its present site. Names tied closely to the club’s beginnings fill Geelong’s history books: Strachan, Armytage, Austin, Russell, Bell, Calvert, Murray, Fairbairn, Hope, Whyte, Russell.

Other familiar names also adorn the boards and cue racks of the billiard room: Fidge, Heath, Douglass, Annois, Vickers-Willis, Roydhouse, McKellar, Chomley, Inglis. If the hallows of Geelong’s early movers and shakers are to be found anywhere it seems the billiard room is a fair place to bring in the ghost busters.

Funny game, though, the old billiards. Likewise snooker, or pool, or Indian pool, pin pool, risk snooker, pyramid, black pyramid, carambole or whatever species of the game you might prefer. Long been associated with ne’er-do-wells and a misspent youth. Gamblers, hustlers, hoods who’d break your thumbs if you got too clever — think Fast Eddie Felsen — and even authorities who changed the rules to beat champions like Walter Lindrum.

Not really what the club’s fathers would have had in mind. But it’s funny, too, how things change. For instance, Lindrum’s Melbourne billiards hall, once a venue of certain angst for this scribbler as a curious young teen, is now a genteel boutique pub on Flinders Street. A classy 12-foot show table has survived but it stands alongside tables laden with Spanish almond cakes and pork cheek croquettes. A couple of boutique beers, too, fortunately but it’s a fair bet the ivory orbs are now phenolic resin.

Geelong’s baize pedigree lies across the city’s pubs, clubs, pool halls such as the Golden Cue, once resident next to the former Regent Theatre on Little Malop and for the past half century with Geelong Snooker ands Billiards Association. Also with figures such as Percy Shand who ran a Malop St saloon the better part of a century ago. Together with TV’s Pot Black they made for a breeding ground for a raft of Eddie Charlton and Hurricane Higgins hopefuls.   

The good folks at The Geelong Club tell me they’re dabbling with the idea of opening their inner sanctum to men’s events (cough) with a leaning to cigars, brandies and snooker/billiards/pool contests. Yeah, nothing it seems is as predictable as change but, hey, I’m in! Might I suggest a few celebrity exhibition matches, too, as Lindrum and his brother Fred did here back in the day at Percy’s.

Just one thing, please don’t change The Geelong Club’s exquisitely-tiled gents’ ablutions block and its XXL WC cubicles. They knew how to build thrones back in 1889. That was a Mr O.D. Figgis, by the way. Made them big enough to open and read a broadsheet newspaper. I can hear you again: “Good God, man, that’s awfully civilised.”

Yep, awfully.

This article first appeared in The Weekly Review, 26 May 2016

Aqueducts and a little concrete advice …

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Breakwater’s historic aqueduct is about to fall on people’s heads, again, making it time to revisit concerns from a few years back …

The giant honeycombed concrete edifice on Ryrie St looks like a bomb blast aftermath just now. The Barwon Water HQ makeover is interesting on a couple of fronts, not just for its tilt to brutalist architecture, a trait shared by the Irish pyramid also boldly evident at its rear.

Concrete is a tough building material and it can look, well, less than warm and friendly. And it can deteriorate into a rather dangerous proposition as age and a peculiar condition loosely termed concrete cancer develops.

Similar thing, efflorescence, can happen with sandstone, which you’ll find in buildings such as Christ Church at Moorabool Street’s top of the town. Pored over that as a student, way back when. Remember a mate skittling a kid on his bike while we there; kid wound up under the gearbox with about an inch clearance from his head. No helmets, he was lucky to walk away.

Was reminded of this out on Marshall’s Tanner Street the other day, eyeballing Barwon Water’s old sewer bridge, a remarkable cancer-riddled concrete aqueduct. Heritage listed to its own eyeballs, the century-old, 750-metre, 14-span structure supports a sewer pipe — ovoid in shape for max hydraulic efficiency, in case you’re interested — and looks like some strangely crocheted school project.

It’s like a concrete-stringed concertina drawn out full length with a rod through its guts. Peculiar and oddly beautiful. Been some politics attached to its survival, too, ever since engineers 20 years ago suggested it could collapse at any moment. It’s still there, though.

Can’t say the same for its engineering sister, the Geelong CBD’s old Bow Truss woolstore, which experts also said was set to fall on people’s heads any second. It’s gone. Interestingly though, when the demolition lads moved in, they couldn’t knock it down with a wrecking ball. Really had to put their shoulders into it to eventually get rid of it; the TAC building came up in its place.

I can’t say if the aqueduct would offer the same resistance, or redevelopment options; the river precinct underneath looks more flood-prone than Warralily. Some people are talking up walking tracks and interpretative signs. Best put a few warnings up for tiger snakes if that gets up.

Noted recently that Cave Clan tunnel tourists are back playing teenage mutant ninja turtles in Barwon Water’s pipes beneath Geelong. If they want something really smelly, maybe they should try the sewer pipe within the McIntyre Bridge over the Barwon at Belmont. More brutalism there, by the way, seems it’s just the way with concrete.

That pipeline’s been going since about 1967, 50 odd years now, which is getting close to the 56 years the aqueduct operated from 1916 before being decommissioned in 1972. Barwon rowers might be forgiven for looking upwards every so, given what some engineers seem to think of concrete.

Yeah, I know, shouldn’t joke about things like that. Mind you, it does strike me as a little odd that the most significant landmark near Kardinia House, the residence of Geelong first’s mayor, Alexander Thomson, might be a sewer pipe. Then again, the way Geelong treats some of its mayors, but that’s another story …

Thing I do find amusing about our water utility’s matrix of sewer pipes is the need to flush them every so often with gusts of high-pressure air. I seem to recall notices to householders cautioning them not to be alarmed if any toilets seats bang open unexpectedly.

Puts a new take on the term thunderboxes, I suppose. Maybe that’s what they should call the new bomb-blasted HQ — Thunderbox House. That would be a bit brutal.

This article appeared in The Weekly Review, 13 May 2016

As Your Worship Pleases …

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Dispensing justice in a place like 1970s Rhodesia requires a mix of talent and accoutrement.

First thing you need is a gun. More than a few unsavoury characters about, and some menacing political rebels too.

A cool disposition toward stifling heat and professional scrutiny is handy. A cast-iron stomach, and a liking for the odd whisky or vodka, as well. No matter it might be illegal.

With a cast of witch-doctors, terrorists, fortune-tellers and crims to deal with, not to mention mandatory canings and clueless sentencing, your constitution better be pretty damn robust.

Magistrate Michael Neal does his level best to steady the reins across his bailiwick while fencing deftly with reckless and nasty colleagues, a haughty overseer and sensitive but ambitious juniors.

Author Terence FitzSimons is in his own briar patch, regaling the reader with horror stories of standover cops intimidating families with the severed limbs of their children. With moonshine drinking sessions over-proofed with the crushed and distilled mash of an aborted human foetus. With skin-crawling accounts of brutal canings and crooks with fevered dreams of setting him to rights.

Think women speaking in tongues, con artists, porn exhibitions, bloody knifings, prisoner dagga plant deals, assaults with bricks, boozy prayer meetings, gut-churning autopsies, illegal game hunters, naked door-knockers, klepto teachers …

It takes all types to keep a court running in the Rhodesian Midlands town of Gwelo but Michael Neal’s your man.

FitzSimons, with a clutch of historic tomes under his belt – and his clever Anglican priest Fr Michael Gale’s foray into war-torn Rhodesia in Nkosi as well – keeps a steady hand on the tiller throughout this entertaining judicial romp.

 As Your Worship Pleases: Tales from a Magistrates’ Court in Africa. By Terence FitzSimons, Mirador.

Limbo: Jungle bars, volcanic interruptions

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Above: OzPost’s Mt Elephant volcano stamp issue

Volcano watch wasn’t exactly what I’d planned. Things were meant to be more of an exploration mission. A search for faces, places, swimming pools, sort of stuff you do in the Bali tropics.

Ideally, it was going to be a search for jungle bars.

Something in the treetops, or nestled into a river gorge cliff face, maybe on the edge of python-riddled rice terrace. Bit of lazy exploring. There was a hippy Geelong expat I hoped to track down in one.

Things went sideways, predictably enough. The expat had gone to God, hanged himself in bankruptcy, I sadly learned. One bar I tracked down was riddled with sculptures of 200 rampant monkeys, and I mean rampant. Some artisan presumably had an awkward time explaining to the missus what he’s been doing at work. “Making LGBTI anthropoids for the tourists, darling.” Hmmm.

pH levels in the first swimming pool bar left me tingling at antihistamine level. Eyes red and skin itching for days. First mates I made in a bar, sideways on margeritas — and I’m guessing lithium, too — were great fun but also looking for a political argument, no matter how many times I agreed with them. Others were paranoid.

And then volcano ash grounded all the planes in and out of Bali.

Struck me the book I was reading, a biog of explorer Hamilton Hume, who ventured into Geelong back in 1825, with his arch-nemesis William Hovell, was a good pairing. Things didn’t go quite as planned for them, either.

Thought they were at Westernport Bay. Hovell wasn’t the greatest navigator, of course; sunk one ship and ran another aground while working as a sea captain. How he got the exploring gig’s a good question.

Not that this intrepid pairing made it to the extensive volcanic areas immediately west of Geelong.

It was up to subsequent pioneers to discover the dormant volcanoes Mount Duneed, Mount Moriac and Mount Pollock right next door. Over time, the count expanded to some 400 volcanoes on an explosive arsenal across western Victoria.

About a dozen have blown their stack in the last 20,000 years or so, a minor blip in geological terms. Thing is, according to experts like Melbourne Uni’s professor Bernie Joyce, a fresh volcanic blast could erupt any time. In blip terms, we’re overdue for one.

Bernie nominates Anakie as a likely site. Yikes. Moreover, he says disaster services aren’t prepared for it – nor, I suspect, are tourism operators who might find visitors to the Great Ocean Road kept at bay by volcanic ash.

Volcano limbo is a curious thing, you know. Distracted as I was from my boozy-exploring terms of reference, I found myself tripping over all sorts of unexpected things.

People mainly. Frenzied taxidrivers, Hindu temple pilgrims, a sitar-playing prog-rocker, a failed businessman hiding out, kids in rockstar apartments, parachutists and BASE jumpers, lonely Eat Pray Love devotees, mad Aussie footy fans.

Not a one of them cared a bugger-me for the volcanic ash flight crisis. Stay there, go home, all the same to them. Nothing they could do.

Go figure. Looking for a rainforest bar and you find some nonchalant breed of couldn’t-care-less fatalism instead. Worry you die, don’t worry you still die.

Sounds like the law of the jungle. Instructional maybe. You could get eaten tomorrow. If you don’t get atomised when some mountain god cracks the sads, of course.

Murphy’s Volunteers, a song for the ages

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It’s hard to silence a Werribee rustic sometimes but an Aussie-Irishman named Martin Hanley had the ability to send this scribbling gob-shite into gob-smacked by the surreptitious means of deed, sentiment and music.

He comes to mind as the Port Fairy Folk Music Festival ramps up acts for its latest bash because he drove me, at white-knuckle speed, from Melbourne to my first festival there. Long ago now, back in the early 1980s.

He was there playing accordion, whistle and the beautiful wooden flute, the type with which the Irish whisper heaven into your brain. He had just picked up the Australian Irish Musician of the Year title at Kapunda in South Australia.

I thought his driving would kill us both, award or not. He’d had 20-odd bingles in his 19 or so years, including two in one day.

Of course, a man of all his music had a special talent equivalent to his driving.

He could play the pennywhistle stuck up his nose – a Gaelic Tokyo shock boy of note, you might say. Good thing he left his saxophone at home.

Reels and gigs, easy. Slow airs, they might test his olfactory mettle, I thought but, nope. All the time signatures were the same to him. Piece of cake.

He played along with songs too; sometimes even extracting the whistle to sing himself. He taught me one song, which I’ll get to directly because it’s important to understand why the song was important to him.

Some close friends of his family ran a septic tank business. They didn’t install them, they pumped them out. They were a tough breed. Capable of eating lunch on the job.

You’ve got to respect people like that. You also have to avoid them.

Martin didn’t. He embraced them. He was immensely proud of these superhumans.

And he found a song he thought captured them perfectly. One that a sewerage-city Werribee-born lad like me could appreciate, especially as his name featured in the title – Murphy’s Volunteers.

Fancy that, your name in lights. Now sing along:

Ah, Murphy, you’re the Devil, you’re leading me astray,

Down the sewers of London town for 15 bob a day,

Ah, me poor ol’ heart it’s breaking, I’m crying bitter tears,

I tell you, Pat, it’s a hard old craic, with Murphy’s Volunteers.

Ah, that’s real Paddy music for you. I’d like to see Mary Black sing it.

 

A Nod’s as good as a wink to a blind horse ….

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The swaggie was out of sorts, no doubt about it. Just released from Geelong Goal, the old bluestone

gaol, where he’d been sequestered for a few days over unpaid fines, he came bellowing into the

office demanding a reporter. And roundly cursing the long arm of the law.

The plods had rejected his offer to have them drive him home to his bush hideaway in the Great

Otways National Park behind Apollo Bay. Told him to catch a bus.

“You’d think I was a criminal or something,” he groused. “You can’t just throw someone out of jail

on to the streets.”

But that wasn’t Noddy Hill’s only gripe. He was filthy on the food he’d been fed while behind

bars. Pure stodge, terrible for the bowels, and he was in pain as a result of the injustice, he moaned.

“It’s the constipation. You put that in your paper! The prison system is constipating innocent people.

It’s not right. It’s just not right!” he railed.

And, yes, there should be a law against it. And the cops should give you a lift home, in case you

didn’t get that the first time. And what’s the world coming to? Just not good enough …

You get the drift.

Old Noddy was about 45 back then, three decades ago. Looked for all the world like a latter-day

swaggy. Wild hair, wild eyes, wild demeanour. In fact, he was a hermit who lived deep in the forest

with a wild independence that rejected society and civilisation, and a head full of ideas that

reflected a powerful but eccentric intellect. An alternative lifestyle, if you like. Undiagnosed, by

other assessments. 

The Otways harbour all manner of unusual tales. Noddy’s hardly on his own. Panthers, carnivorous

snails, Tasmanian tigers, UFOs, German wartime submarines, shipwrecks, dinosaurs, quolls, giant

ferns and yowies are just scratching the surface.

Cut across the southwest hinterland and you’ll trip over rain-gauge crater lakes, megafauna trails,

volcanoes, large open maar craters, caves, scoria cones,  mystery ships, bunyip bones, early

Australian discoveries by Portugal and China, floating islands, exquisite waterfalls — all manner of

weird and wonderful, of believe it or not. Fascinating place. National Geographic would go silly for

it.

But for all the area’s extraordinary otherness — and the fact a few of these have problems of their

own, too — Noddy’s tough to eclipse.

For years a local identity quietly celebrated for his differentness, he was considered a harmless,

amusing and, generally speaking, acceptable outsider. A hermit. A swaggie. An oddity, a bit out

there but okay.

However, beneath the innocuous eccentricity, a darker side to Noddy Hill was brooding. Scheming

and plotting nefarious plans no-one thought him capable of hatching. And his plans were rather

nasty.    

No one doubts his lot wasn’t helped by drugs — hallucinogens like LSD, mescaline and magic

mushrooms. Mix them with an evangelistic obsession, multiple internments in mental institutions —

and gaol — and an autodidact’s love for biochemistry, microbiology, endocrinology and toxicology

and, well, you’re on the road to somewhere.

But that road struck out into no-man’s land when Noddy decided to posted an image of a bomb on

the internet — what he called ‘bushfire bomb mark 3. Police were staggered by the detail he knows

of explosive devices and feared his mental health status might lead to terrorist attacks and

holocaust-type bushfires through the Otways.

Coming on top of emails comparing himself with mass murderers Julian Knight and Martin Bryant,

and with Jesus Christ, on top of suicide threats and references to Bali bombing, World War III,

holocausts, doomsday and nirvana, it’s fair to say they were a bit concerned. The swaggy seemed

pretty deranged.

Noddy had managed to email stalk some 600 people or agencies, including Premier Daniel

Andrews, in his mission and police saw his so-called ‘Placebo Park’ hideout with its dozen huts

and satellite dish as more terrorist bunker than bush retreat.

Eventually, after seven months in jail and a court case, and in a frail state of health, he was

transferred to a nursing home where the judge was happy to see him stay. 

So in the end, with his menace muted, his mental status noted, Noddy Hill found the care and

warmth he’d been missing since the 1970s when he went off the rails after two deckhands on his

abalone boat died near Portland.

Better late than never, I suppose. It’s funny but it makes me think of the old story of the

unexpected warmth nature has provided in another of the great southwest’s many anomalies, Mount

Leura near Camperdown.

Odd thing is that a holocaust might well have been in the wind there, too. For all we know, it could

still be so today. Vulcan mischief is commonplace across the southwest, as recent as maybe 4500

years ago. Hence the  Dead Sea-like salty crater lakes — great for a lazy Saturday afternoon’s beer-

drinking — the spooky Stony Rises, igneous outcrops, strange subterranean gurglings and more

you’ll find there.

Indigenous folk have it invested in their oral tradition. When volcanic bombs from the scoria of

Mount Leura’s cone were shown to one Aboriginal bloke, he said they were like stones his

forefathers claimed were thrown from the hill by the action of fire.

Back up a little to 1911 and you might get my Noddy-nature-nurture drift. That’s when

Geelong’s News of the Week paper reported “a strange occurrence’’ at the Curdies River:

“All the water became quite white, with froth upon it, which afterwards turned to green slime,’’ it

said. “Large numbers of fish in the stream died. The water gave out a peculiar odour and cattle

refused to drink it.’’

It wasn’t the first time the locals had witnessed such peculiarities. Same thing happened 20 years

earlier; all supposedly the result of a volcanic disturbance in Lake Purrumbete, not far from  Mount

Leura.

“It is said that divers were sent down into the lake on the previous occasion to investigate, but the

water was so hot that they could not stay in it,’’ the News of the Week reported.

 

The paper also reports that blokes humping their waggas through the district took advantage of the

heat around Mount Leura, reporting: “Swagmen frequently camped in such places to obtain

warmth.”

No doubt our Noddy, with his liking for self-sufficiency, would appreciate the fact. But a bloke like

him would also appreciate the many other mysteries and curiosities of the Otways and the

southwest.

In the early days of white invasion, it seemed a wild place. It landscape was bizarre, queer, crawling

with the unknown and the dangerous, with Aborigines and with unfamiliar wildlife. It drew only the

toughest of pioneers and even they battled to stave off the superstitions of bunyips and pookahs in

the region’s splendid isolation.

Yet artists such as Nicholas Chevalier were alert to that splendour early in the piece, capturing the

likes of Red Rock’s crater lakes in the 1860s with a dreamy pale green and blue vista. Similarly,

photographer Fred Kruger preserved Mount Leura to an 1880s moment in history with its lightly

timbered slopes high over the wide verandas of Camperdown. Artist Eugene von Guerard exercised

his draughting excellence to capture the flora and fauna of Koroit’s Tower Hill, outside

Warrnambool, presumably dodging its curious resident emus in the process.

A powerful sense of place and wonder lives on in the works of Otways laureate Gregory Day,

whose exquisite studies of life, love and environment along the Great Ocean Road are some of the

best documents we have.

Some time ago, Geelong Art Gallery exhibited the powerful work of several artists in a charming

essay on Lake Gnotuk.

Drawing on history, geology and indigenous stories, their combined opus was as exhilarating and

captivating as it was outworldly: bottles plugged with cork, stones, sand and water from the lake;

photos of tiny ostrocods; draughtsmen images from the 1850s; russet rock, soil, stone and granule

textures; sepia takes of the crater welded to ochre impressions; prehistoric fish bones; fossilised

shell necklaces, magnetic swirlings of rock and soil reflecting the lava tubs and underground

vortexes of the antediluvian landscapes.

Science meets art, environment meets art, palaeontology meets art; I don’t think it would have been

lost on someone like Noddy. I’m sure he’d wonder at the idea of clear hyper-saline water covering

the stumps of 2000-year-old trees. Maybe he’d think, too, that such volcanic dreaming of the

southwest is just an opening foray into a broader church of natural science, history, mystery and

folklore.

Maybe, just maybe, had his mental health issues been identified and acted on earlier — had he been

closer to the society he shunned — he’d have contributed differently to that oeuvre than becoming

the rather sad piece of folklore he is now.

Pity, really, that we’re all still a bit constipated that way towards such people.

Link: https://regionalnews.smedia.com.au/geelongadvertiser/TranslateArticle.aspx?doc=NCGA%2F2019%2F10%2F22&entity=ar01703

Three decades of innovative, creative design

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Now here’s an interesting project: 70-plus stories on what it takes to build some pretty special new towns, suburbs and communities.

Think planners, designers, engineers, artists, landowners, bankers, investors, clubs and community groups, sales crews, marketers, maintenance crews, apiarists, traditional owners, mums, dads, kids …

Think also creativity, innovation, experience and a good bit of commonsense nous. Villawood Properties has the lot in spades.

This book, 30: Fun, Happy, Communities, marks three decades since Villawood’s beginnings in Bendigo. Over those years, it’s expanded across Victoria, Melbourne, NSW and Queensland.

All up, it’s 164 pages showing a vibrant developer who’s about creating lifestyle and community, not just blocks and houses. A few features:

. A block donated to the national forest system for every block they sell;

. A huge amount of support to community groups, including a house-and-land every year to the Good Friday Appeal;

. Getting people together through activities, facilities and under-the-bonnet design detail;

. Folko Kooper’s extraordinary artwork;

. Getting kids outside for healthy, adventurous childhoods in great parks and playgrounds;

. Sustainability with 70% water and 60% non-renewables cuts.

LINK: https://villawoodproperties.com.au/

 

Parsons, strathspeys and rough justice

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Well strike me pink, I’d sooner drink
With a cove sent up for arson,
Than a rain-beseechin’, preachin’, teachin’
Cranky bloody parson.

The old rhyme’s banging through my head like a tattoo as I try to concentrate on the tune at hand, an elegant strathspey the parson beside me is pumping out on his squeezebox as we labour away musically at Sovereign Hill.

Not that he’s a cranky bloody parson; a while back, in fact, he delivered last rites to an unfortunate infarction victim whose ticker didn’t quite carry him fully up the hill. Very white of him.

The poor deceased was in troublesome health and he’d been well warned about our goldfields precinct but, committed patron he was, he thought what the devil, you only live once.

Regrettably, you only die once too. Unless you’re one of the worthies from the Sub Continent who arrive with their orange beards, pink turbans, lurid purple and lime shirts and retina-burning white trousers. They come back all the time.

It’s an old hack’s maxim, too, that musicians don’t fear death because they do it so many times when performing. Yes, very droll but most neo-colonial fiddlers’ spiritual leanings don’t extend naturally to reincarnation and deathbed sacraments. They’re more, umm, secular.

That strathspey’s bouncing along with a sweet jaunt as one of the corpulent worthies feigns to park his carcass on top of mine to have his daguerreotype taken with a lumpy i-tablet camera. Or maybe it’s a phablet, I don’t know. All I know is he’s stopping me from playing and couldn’t give a tinker’s cuss about it — not that I really care, that’s what we’re there for, our good looks.

They’re only human, of course. Who wouldn’t want their photo taken with a clutch of craggy, weather-worn, ruggedly handsome goldfield musicians? Pity they’ve landed us slack-jawed, rheumy-eyed, bewhiskered darlings.

I glance at my parson confrere, who’s seems inured to the intrusion. He’s had his day putting worthies and their likes in their place. Such as the magnificently named James Bond Moussaka — maybe it was Mousenka or somesuch epithet but I prefer the Hellenic tag.

The hapless, recidivist crook with the 007 title came up against the parson when the latter parked his carcass behind the bench as a magistrate in a Zimbabwe jurisdiction. James, in desperation, had robbed a postman on his bike. Together with his priors, it earned him a sentence at the governor’s pleasure, with a minimum of seven years.

He didn’t take kindly and bellowed his approbation from his cell beneath the court: “There’s no fecking justice!”
To my parson’s credit, he didn’t send James off to be flogged, they still did so in those days, but off to the high court.

Curiously enough, James had literary ambitions but probably cruelled his chances with a short story he penned about the jurist banging away on the accordion beside me; a pithy little fiction about torturing and ultimately despatching him. Seems he had a thing about cranky bloody parsons.

None of this, of course, is insinuating its way into the grey matter of the worthy spreading his plump, powdered anatomy across me. I smile diligently, with a thumbs up for good measure, but demur as he tries to snatch my fiddle for his amusement. Nothing doing sport, I smile. Insurance.

His grin assumes a rictus normally associated with too strong a curry and he finally separates himself, making way for a dozen more who take his lead.

We bound into a tune called The March of the King of Laois; seems kind of fitting but it’s awkward with your elbows cramped by visitors. The parson stares into the distance, another dimension perhaps.

Fair bet it’s not The Raj. Wherever it is, it triggers a story about another African encounter, one in which he imbibes a confiscated witchdoctor’s brew made from various well-fermented ingredients, including an unborn human foetus.

“A little like the Irish poteen,” he recalls, citing the illicit potato drop of preference in God’s green land.

“Fortunately, it tasted better.”

New home, new life, new hope

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It was once the cradle of civilisation. These days, there’s little that’s very civilised about the country that hounded Milad Butrus and his family from their home.

Bakhdida, in northern Iraq, became simply too dangerous for this Christian family, a Catholic family, and they fled to Jordan in 2014.

It was a harrowing flight to safety marked by hellish traffic jams in a baking desert, feverish passport negotiations with Baghdad bureaucrats, three businesses and a handsome double-story home left behind, friends, family too …

The alternative presented by Islamic State forces, who had been rocketing Milad’s Bakhdida home town for days, with shells landing as close as 500 metres away, was impossible.

“It was just like Baghdad, where most Christians left — some were killed, some were kidnapped, other had their properties stolen,” Milad says.

“I heard the same story over and over. They came in Hummer cars, they’d say ‘You’re Christian, sign these papers signing over your home or we’ll kill your son’.

“It happened with so many families, and it wasn’t only Islamic State, it was people from the government, the Iraqi army.”

Milad reveals two photographs on his phone that point all too vividly to the fear, anguish and horror of living in the shadow of IS.

The first is of a priest, dressed in brightly coloured robes, in his coffin. It’s Milad’s cousin. He was shot by IS while at Mass, trying to close the church doors against the terrorist intruders.

“They killed between 45 and 50 people in the church that day, some of them as young as two years old,” Milad says, raising his phone to show the second photo, of the church’s appallingly bloodstained and shattered interior.

Milad’s wife, Maherah, nods in agreement as he describes the anxiety of fleeing Iraq, hunkering down in Jordan for close to two years while seeking refugee status to just about anywhere that would take them.

They had their lives, their young children Neamah and Karam, now 11 and six, and they had prayers and hopes.

They’d left behind an IT services and internet provider business, a travel agency and a new furniture store. Their home was shelled but not obliterated. Milad’s father’s home was obliterated. Milad ponders whether he might be sell what’s left of his but he’s not sure if he can.

Fast forward five years and the Butrus family is resident in Geelong, infinitely safer than where they once called home. Geelong was their first stop after arriving at Melbourne Airport. They’re still pinching themselves about living in Australia.

Milad is working in IT at GHD, Maherah is studying English at The Gordon, the kids are lapping up school at Bell Park’s Holy Family Primary.

And they’ve just bought up at Villawood Properties’ new Wandana community between Highton and Ceres, where they’re planning to build soon and consolidate their new life in Australia.

Milad and Maherah grin shyly as they admit they’re even contemplating more kids.

Talk about turning your lives about.

Rattling good yarns on the track to ’Rat

/in /by

TRIPPED over an old map recently, showing Newtown’s Skene St as the road to Ballarat. You headed out Skene to Shannon, north to Autumn and up to what is now Hyland St, then down to Fyansford and onwards to the wild west goldfields.

Loads of yarns are attached to the old Fyansford, first watering hole on the road to the old Ballaarat — seabed fossils, sharks’ teeth, cement works, trains, Monash’s bridge, pubs, a re-routed river, Russell Rushton’s frenzied stabbing murder in the 1960s …

Geelong West pedalling oracle Rod Charles will tell you of cyclists coming off second best to bullocks driven up Hyland in days gone by.

All changing now, of course. New houses, estates, roads, drains. An arts and plonk precinct. The old Swan pub’s burned down. Even the Kombi graveyard has lost a lot of its tenants.

Co-travellers to the ’Rat bemoan the goat track highway, even with its recent upgrades. They fiddle with my radio, hook up their iTunes, pore over their phones … anything to avoid looking out the window at the landscape. Well, up to Meredith, anyways. After there, a bit of geographical mercy seems to ease their discomfort.

I get it. But at the same time, I don’t. To me, there’s a world of stories in each swale and saddle, each ridge and rise along that bone-rattling goat track.

There is the skillet-pan pub murder at Stonehaven, the Aboriginal massacre at Dog Rocks, the topless nymphs hanging out of cars on Black Saturday, Johnny Cash at Batesford’s Derwent pub, drag races along Friend-in-Hand Rd, the upside-down model TAA plane that had passers-by worried about a plane crash.

Keep moving west and you’ll be greeted by tiger snakes at farmhouse doors, by a sad memorial to the young actor Melanie Jewson killed in an awful head-on, by the rain shadow of the You Yangs, by rough dry stone fences.

There’s Anakie’s Three Sisters, willows weeping into farm dams, giant irrigation sprinklers, pretty bluestone cottages and abandoned concrete houses.

Stories resonate down the years. Victoria’s last Gallipoli veteran was Bannockburn’s Roy Longmore, a sapper drawing on intel the likes of which Monash learned building his reo-steel bridges to attack enemy positions. Still have a sprig of rosemary from his funeral. Keeps the witches away.

At the one-time Meredith Parachute Club, “kick the can” campfire hijinks were played with beer cans of burning avgas. All very funny until the flames started licking the knees of your jeans. I’m not sure if it’s where One-Legged Dave broke his good peg on a bad landing but wouldn’t be surprised.

Lethbridge Airport hosts a giant yellow Russian Antonov AN-2 biplane, the largest in the world and capable of flying backwards — if you consider it can fly as slow as 80km/h but remain aloft into a 120km/h headwind.

An infamous murder at the one-time Green Tent pub next door, once upon a time, saw walleyed Owen McQueeny hanged at Geelong’s Gallows Flat for killing pretty mother-of-two Elizabeth Lowe.

Across the road, World War I returned servicemen struggled to eke an existence from the Murrungurk soldier settler lots. These days, they’re weekend getaways.

Conman Harold Lasseter, of the Lasseter’s gold reef, gave up his first bleats as a baby at Bamganie, near Lethbridge. Ran away from home at eight, after his mother died. Coerced a government and the unions into funding his smoke-job. Died in the desert for his efforts, mind you.

Turf-smoking premier Henry Bolte was photographed beside his old refrigerator letterbox at Meredith. Cartoon in a Melbourne paper suggested readers look in the fridge, presumably to find the blood sample allegedly switched after a drink-driving incident where a woman sustained permanent brain damage.

Then there was the self-appointed Catholic bishop who powdered his bare buttocks on his porch, to the annoyance of neighbours. Someone spray-painted his sheep pink. Lucky that’s all that happened, I’d suggest.

It’s an odd neck of the woods. Rough as guts in parts but handsome in a scratchy, rocky, wiry way too.

Drop in at Russell’s Bridge and you’ll find alpacas splashing in the Moorabool — and one of the thickest thickets of peppercorns in Christendom.

The Coopers Bridge fishing hole on Sutherlands Creek is gorgeous. The Steiglitz Cemetery is bizarre.

Vignerons drawn to the Moorabool Valley’s dry, stony terroir have transformed the place with their cellar door diversions. Sharing panoramas like the one from Maude’s Bunjil’s Lookout, it’s no surprise. Fact you can see Bunjil and his six lieutenants on a clear night sky is pure magyk.

You want a real treat, though? I’d suggest the burgers at the Meredith Road House. On the right day, the girls will give you a dancing rendition of A-ha’s Take On Me. You might also trip over bikers chugging on lattes, a Good Friday highway re-enactment of the stations of the cross or a ragged crowd of music festival hangovers.

They’ll all have a yarn for you too.

TUNNEL VISION

GOOD to see Geelong’s tunnel addicts are as rusted-on as ever. A recent flurry of Facebook activity shows that belief in the purported female convict tunnel between the old Terminus Hotel and Cunningham Pier hasn’t waned despite nothing resembling evidence. Same goes for the supposed subterranean passage between the old Golden Age pub cellar on Gheringhap and the pier.

And if they’re not still there, well they must have been filled in, yeah? Hmmm … Sly grog, prostitutes, convicts, gold, contraband, guns, illegal immigrants … the tunnels were used for almost everything. Makes you wonder sometimes who was using the roads.

Peculiar thing about them, however, is they hark back to the dark days before streetlights. Given how black the nights were, except once a month at full moon, and with normal citizens holed up in their houses, you have to wonder why you’d need to hide from anyone in the first place.

NED’S GEELONG

Ned Kelly

LOVE the Sidney Nolan Ned Kelly series on at the Geelong Gallery right now. Been a day or two since old Ned’s been in Geelong. Actually, he wasn’t very old at all, only 15, but he was well on the way to infamy, “apprenticed” to gentleman bushranger “Harry Power” at the time.

Ned and Harry stayed at the Rising Sun Hotel on Ryrie St, after Power earlier ventured into the Easter Volunteer Encampment at Little River. Power’s real name was Henry Johnstone and he escaped from Pentridge in 1869. He met Ned through a Kelly relative he met in jail.

Ned and Harry embarked on a wild 20-month expedition across Victoria. In April 1870, Power made his way to Little River and on to Geelong. “Harry’s mother had lived in Geelong,” says Gary Dean, co-author of the book Harry Power: Tutor of Ned Kelly with Kevin Passey.

“I don’t know if she was still alive, but he had a sister who also lived in Geelong and she was still living there in late 1880s. Harry was obviously visiting his sister, her name was Margaret Melanophy.”

SLEEK CAT SIGHTING

GOOD to hear, too, that our big cat sightings continue — well, so long as you’re not part of their food chain. Freshwater Creek cockie Harry Cook says the area has hosted big cats, on and off, for years. His last sighting was a couple of weeks back, in the Dickens Rd area.

Harry says the animal was as sleek as all get out, well-muscled and a shiny jet black. Sizewise, it was somewhere between a domestic cat and some larger unknown cats he’s seen in the past. “Every year about this time he seems to show up,” Harry says.

“As far as I can tell, he’s visiting his girlfriend or something. I think he’s in a nearby dam full of reeds and stuff, but I’m not game enough to go have another look. He’s after fast food and I’m slow food!”