My Dad called me 'kid' and he was my king

My Dad loved Humphrey Bogart movies, so he always called me “kid”. Sometimes, I suspect it was a “one-size-fits-all” solution to the problem of forgetting our names – there were three of us children. He certainly never had a clue as to when our birthdays were or even how old we were. That was Mum’s domain. He was a man of few words such that when he did speak at length about anything, I listened. Words weren’t wasted and there was always a point to the story, a teaching of some kind. There were no-go topics of course. I knew he’d been stationed in Hiroshima as a young Australian soldier to help in the aftermath of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Japan. I can’t even imagine the horrors he must have seen, and the takeaway was a lifelong respect and admiration for the resilience of the Japanese people and severe tuberculosis (TB as it was known) which landed him in an infirmary for two years on his return. Unlike the rest of his family who refused to forgive the Japanese army after the cruel bayonetting death of an uncle, my Dad had a tolerance and open-mindedness for people which I inherited from him “doing” and “being” not just “saying”.

The legacy of his battle with TB was a rather grand wicker picnic basket that sat atop a cupboard in the last family home. When I had asked about its origins, I was told he’d made it while he was laid up with TB. Another legacy was an expression and mindset I still use today – “Kill or cure!” As he told it, when he was finally discharged from the TB infirmary, he was still very weak and used to sleep on an enclosed veranda of his parents’ house in Adelaide. One morning he announced said phrase and set about digging out a stubborn tree stump and roots in their front garden. It took him days, but he did it. It was breakthrough for him mentally and physically such that after the extraction, he began slowly but surely putting back together the frayed jigsaw puzzle pieces of his life, driving a taxi at night and by day, studying towards and eventually getting his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Adelaide. He was able to study for free as a returned serviceman. He was resilient and determined and that’s another thing I learned from him and have passed on to my own, now grown-up children.

My Dad was a gentle, introverted, slightly eccentric soul who loved animals and was a keen birdwatcher. We would feed kookaburras together at our first house in Sydney when I was about five. We would roll up little bits of minced meat and feed the gaggle that assembled on the balcony rail every morning. When my mother expressed concern about how much mince was literally going to the birds, he famously said: “Buy more!” He told me that when he was just back from Japan in the 1950s, he’d gone into a pet store and been distressed to see a full-grown eagle cooped up in a tiny cage. The poor thing was so confined, it couldn’t move. My Dad bought the eagle and set it free. The downside of his love for birds was that he brought injured ones home when he had accidentally hit them with his work truck. He gave them to me to try to nurse back to life but I was a child, seven or eight years old. I didn’t know how to care for these beautiful, broken creatures so, one by one, they all inevitably died. It was a sobering lesson as to how fleeting and fragile life is. Maybe that was what he was trying to teach me. He fostered in me a love of Nature and being outdoors. He taught me to swim in a sea pool down the hill from our first house in Sydney. I had to star-float face-down for a while to get used to the feeling of the salty brine over my head. In the rough surf, he always told me to “never turn your back on the sea.” I love the water and thanks to my Dad, I have swum in oceans, rivers, creeks and lakes and I still swim every chance I get. We always had a pool either in-situ or temporary, above-ground ones my Dad assembled.

He was strict and old-fashioned having been born in the mid-1920s. He was an “old dad” for those days. I was the eldest child and he had been nearly 40 when I was born. We had to sit at the dining room table for dinner and TV was restricted. We had chores and there were expectations that we would do well in school. He put great store in knowledge and education, and we had lots of books. I was studious which pleased him, and he always took an interest in what I was learning at school and would value-add to it if he could. I remember once crying on the floor because I had to put together an insect collection for a science project and couldn’t bear to kill any insects for it. Other kids were quite sophisticated and indifferent to the task and were using bell jars and the like to kill their specimens. I couldn’t stand the thought of that. Together, we came up with a plan to only use insects which had already drowned in the backyard pool. Dad would fish them out with the pool scoop and I would dry them then pin-mount them in an old shirt box with a clear-plastic top. They all looked a bit waterlogged and droopy, but I still got an “A” and slept easier knowing I hadn’t killed anything in the name of science.

My parents were always in the garden – our last family home sat on half-an-acre of grounds with fruit trees and vegetable and herb gardens. My Dad also brewed his own beer and enjoyed handyman tinkering and other jobs. He was a restless spirit. I never really saw him sitting down much. He was mostly away in the bush with his job as a gold exploration geologist. Sun protection wasn’t a thing, so he almost seemed to become the colour of the red-brown desert dirt he was prospecting in. For weeks on end, the only contact we had with him was a daily check-in on a CB radio in the lounge room which was never turned off so would squeak and crackle in the corner all day long. Mum had to learn the CB radio lingo to talk to him. We lived in the Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory for a year or so then Darwin when the devastating Cyclone Tracey hit in 1974. I really saw the true person my Dad was that night. He tucked us away under the dining room table while he walked around opening windows to stop a pressure build-up. Seeing the calm and resolute expression on his brown, lined face by the light of a hurricane lamp made us all feel safe. During the eye of the cyclone, when everything suddenly went eerily quiet, he went outside to check on our neighbours. After the cyclone, we had 11 people sheltering at our house which was the only one left standing. Dad and Mum took it all in their stride. A vivid memory is seeing my Dad working his way through a mountain of seafood with a broad grin on his face. An upmarket Darwin restaurant was going door-to-door giving away prawns, lobster and crayfish before it went bad as all electrical infrastructure and therefore refrigeration had been destroyed by the cyclone. Not at our place. Dad, being a geologist, cranked up a work generator in the shed so we had electricity and refrigeration and were able to stay on. Dad helped the police and army with recovery operations including collecting and identifying the dead.

My parents had a very happy marriage and carried on like lovestruck teenagers right up until he died from cancer when he was 88. It was the second marriage for both, and they were determined to make it work. My mother, a former fashion model, uprooted our comfortable lives in Sydney to follow Dad to live in the wilds of the Northern Territory. She adapted to every situation and hosted people from all walks of life. They enjoyed just being together and a simple life of fresh food, home-cooked meals, camping holidays and a laugh over a TV sitcom or two. Their projects were fixing up the house and creating a beautiful garden.

Despite marrying a model, my Dad was definitely not a fashionista. He was never happier than when he was pottering around the house and garden, dressed in his favourite khaki boilersuit. In the bush, he wore khaki too in the form of short-sleeved shirts, and denim shots with steel-capped work boots. One of the few times he ever made a fuss about clothes was when he refused to wear a suit to walk me down the aisle on my wedding day in 1996. He came ‘round eventually and fronted in a nice, grey two-piecer but I could tell he was uncomfortable.

His barbecuing efforts left a lot to be desired. For some reason, for him, meat wasn’t cooked unless it was almost black and burnt. I am amazed my Dad lived as long as he did eating so many carbonized steaks and sausages but also because he was a smoker for most of his life. Not “tailor-mades” as he sneeringly referred to store-bought cigarettes but “rollies”. He’d patiently sit and shape a pinch of tobacco in a small, white rectangle of paper then lick and seal the side up before lighting and inhaling those first satisfied puffs.

He lost an eye to melanoma midway through his life but was still able to drive and do everything else he had always done. I remember sending him a card after the operation to remove his eye. The card contained a quote I’d found from a medieval Dutch philosopher Erasmus which said, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”. For most of my childhood, my Dad was a king – knowledgeable, courageous, unflappable, a little elusive. It’s really difficult to put my finger on what was the greatest lesson my Dad taught me but I believe it was courage to keep on going despite whatever this strange but beautiful life throws in your path.