Kissed by a Croc

PART I

1940s–1970s

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

Early Influences

Life for me started in the Melbourne Town Hall during the Second World War. My grandfather was the curator at the Town Hall and all my family lived there while Father was away fighting in Borneo. My older sisters, Anne and Jean, used to call me ‘Sun, Moon and Stars’, teasing that they shone out of my bum – in Mother’s eyes at least. Mother had lost a son, Jimmy, at eighteen months, and I was the replacement child, the golden-haired boy. Mum went into labour with me on the night of the Lord Mayor’s Concert in 1942 and had to leave for the hospital in haste; no trouble for her, as she was used to getting things done despite adversity.

My mother had been born in the Gorbals, the tenement buildings in the slum area of Glasgow; you don’t get much lower than that. She was the eldest of a large family and came to Australia with her parents in the 1930s. My father arrived with his parents from Coventry, England, in the same decade.

My mother and father met at a dance in Melbourne after a soccer match. Mother was initially besotted with Father; he was a champion athlete and a wonderful sportsman and at age nineteen was the youngest soccer captain in the Victorian League. He also won race after race: swimming, running, you name it. Father was a man’s man. Mum and my sisters said that he never should have married, and I’ve grown to acknowledge that. He just wanted to go fishing, shooting and drinking beer – that was his life.

When Dad was a boy he had a stepfather and their relationship wasn’t a good one. His mother and stepfather bought a restaurant up in Mount Macedon, just north of Melbourne. Father worked for them as a cook because they wanted ‘family’ to do it. The arrangement was a huge source of conflict because there were plenty of sports promoters chasing my father’s athletic prowess. But his stepfather said no, he couldn’t go because he had to work in the kitchen and earn some money for the family. So he stayed back and cooked instead of becoming a professional sportsman. For him it was a great opportunity lost.

Dad had a very straight eye and later became a sergeant in the army simply because he was such a crack shot. Maybe that was passed on to me because I’m credited with being a good shot. He was a champion at billiards and snooker, and he liked to down a beer every night. He hardly ever had to buy one because everyone would challenge him to a game at the pub and he always won the beer.

Dad had a rule, typical of men in his day: any money he earned was his, but he gave Mum two-thirds of it to keep the house, clothe the kids, buy food, pay rent on the house and for the hire-purchase on the car. He kept a third for himself, and he felt that was generous, because it was his money.

You could say Dad was selfish; everything he did was for himself rather than the family. He didn’t see that as being wrong. His holidays were due, so they were his, and he went fishing with his mates. The family never went along, although I did go once, to Marlo at the mouth of the Snowy River to catch salmon. He took me because my mother was quite insistent that Dad should spend some more time with me. During those two days he taught me a lot about fishing, and how to tie hooks on a line, and set up a paternoster rig, and all the things that every kid should know how to do.

My father was a very good craftsman, and he did teach me how to use a saw and to make tenon joints. I used to keep budgerigars, which prompted Dad to decide that he’d like to go into breeding finches. He never did anything half-heartedly. He built a big walk-in aviary and he’d sit there in a deckchair, with a beer in one hand and a smoke in the other, and put birdseed on his shoulder so the birds would come down to him. He enjoyed that, and I guess I discovered a love of birdlife through my father, and my grandfather. Learning how to rear all these animals turned out to be pretty important for my future. As well as the finches, my father bred canaries, and my interest in budgerigars extended to breeding and training them to sell to old people as pets.

My grandfather taught an African grey parrot to talk – they are the best talkers in the world. Because of his army background, Grandpa would walk around all day saying the same phrase: ‘Wake up, Gunner, daylight’s come, set the fuse and fire the gun. Bang.’ The family was sick to death of it, and when he finally stopped saying it – because the bird had learned to say it – things only got worse. As soon as anyone made eye contact with the bird, he’d squawk, ‘Wake up, Gunner, daylight’s come …’

Mum had a very good business mind and, back when Dad was away at the war, she decided to invest in land and houses, because the population in Melbourne was growing, and when the war finished she was sure there would be more people coming out from England. She bought a shop opposite the Caulfield Racecourse: a milk bar with a residence behind it. The milk bar did very well, particularly with the Crystal Palace Picture Theatre just across the road; everybody used to walk over at interval to get their drinks. When Dad came home from the war, Mum discovered how handy he was behind a counter: he was fast, and good with money and adding up in his head; and when he saw the people walking over at interval, he’d mix up ten lime spiders at once.

But he was a gambler and then he became an SP bookie, which was illegal. There was a hotel right next to the shop and the gambling was all done at the hotel. He lost a lot of money. All the efforts that had gone into getting a business going, and making it work, and saving money to invest in houses, and all my mother’s big plans were lost because Dad squandered the money and we had to sell the shop.

Still, in the 1950s we were one of the very few families in our neighbourhood to have a car. Everyone used public transport and went by bus or train or, if you were close to the city, by tram. Mum, being a good manager, said the family should have a car. Dad maintained that working people didn’t have cars; they were for rich people and he never aspired to become a rich person. He believed he was nothing more than a working man. Mum, however, went ahead and got the money and dragged Dad along to look at cars and we finally bought a brand new Wolseley 4/44. We did a lot of touring in that car. We were dead keen to get out and have a look at the countryside in rural Victoria. These were fond times and I’ll never forget them; we had a little kettle we used to plug into some apparatus in the car to make a cup of tea as we went along.

Mum was a homemaker – until we needed things, and then she’d go and find a job. In 1951 she worked in an engineering factory operating a machine that punched out washers. It was a repetitious job and my mother’s intellect was far beyond that, but she did it because she decided that the following year we were going to England. My father said that working people didn’t go overseas – it was beyond their call. Regardless, Mum saved up extra money by taking in boarders; as a kid growing up, there was always a boarder in my room.

Not many people went from Australia to England in those days; it was the other way round. All the migrants were coming out from England with their ten-pound tickets. Up until the week before we left, my father maintained he wasn’t going. Mum went out and organised his passport, arranged his clothes and packed his bags.

In the end Dad enjoyed it more than anyone. We went by boat, and he was the only one who didn’t get seasick. Mum was flat on her back for a whole month because she was a terrible traveller, and I got seasick too. Dad sat in the bar and played chess and draughts with the boys, smoked and drank and had a great time. In England we visited all the relatives on both sides of my parents’ families.

On our return, Mum felt the best idea was to move as far out of Melbourne as we could. Here, she could buy cheap land that she thought would appreciate. We went to Blackburn, only twenty kilometres east of Melbourne. In those days the district was apple and cherry orchards and dairy farms, with a house here and there. She bought a block of land and we had a house built. I was eight and I’d disappear yabbying. I’d go into the orchards, unbeknown to the owners, and pick the fruit, seeing a multitude of rabbits every time. I thought it was marvellous.

The circus came to town, setting up next to the Blackburn Hotel, near the Maroondah Highway. I’d go and, with my love for animals, I’d lose all track of time. Once my mother came looking for me at eleven o’clock at night. I was still at the circus helping them to clean up because I just wanted to be around the animals.

I’d wag school and the circus people would have a bit of fun, sending me down to the hardware store for things like a left-handed chisel and a tin of striped paint. I’d gullibly ask the hardware owner for them and he’d say, ‘No, but try the butcher, he might have some left over,’ and the butcher would say, ‘No, but ask the greengrocer’. I don’t know what psychologists would say about that today. I loved the circus and I was certain I’d run away one day and become a trapeze artist or a lion tamer.

My sisters were six and eight years older than I was and very social animals. Anne was often going out and Jean was the life of the party. She was very pretty with an hourglass figure. They both loved dancing and they used to practise with me. As a very young man I knew all the dance steps, which gave me great social confidence. People were amazed that someone at the age of twelve could do the Charmaine or the Tangoette. Apart from my father teaching me how to fish and shoot, it was the girls in my family who taught me the things that mattered.

I became a deft hand at sewing on buttons. I’d been through the Scout movement and I had a seamstress as a mother, who showed me very quickly how to use a needle and thread. She also taught me how to knit. It was just part of our family upbringing. Dad was away at the pub and I had two older sisters, so I joined in with the knitting and crocheting.

I remember once as a kid, I was having dinner with my family and my mother was obviously annoyed that my father had come home drunk. Sadly, he threw up all over himself, and then he lost his teeth down the toilet. He came through the kitchen to get to the bedroom and he was stripped down to his singlet. That night Mum packed our bags and we left home.

We walked quite some way from our house in Blackburn down to the railway station, carrying our suitcases. I kept saying, ‘Mum, my throat’s really sore.’ I couldn’t explain it. I didn’t know that my sense of sadness had manifested as a lump in my throat. When we arrived at my granny’s place, there was Dad, waiting in the car to take us home.

The relationship between my parents was no longer one of love. But Mum stayed with Dad – because of us kids. Her children were going to have two parents.

The Female Factor

My mother had a big influence on my life, as did Mum’s mother and my great-aunt Jemimah. They used to spoil me. Granny and Aunty Jem would dress me up and take me for paddleboat rides on the Yarra River. ‘We’re so proud of you, wee Johnny. Never disappoint us.’ These influences have always been with me – and they’ve come from the women’s side.

My mother’s philosophy was to help others less fortunate. All kids love their mothers and I started to appreciate the qualities my mum had when I was ten or eleven. If I saw an act of bullying going on in the schoolyard I’d step in and help the underdog.

When I was growing up in Melbourne, our house was often full of orphans because, come Christmas time, the orphanage would close its doors for two or three weeks and these kids had nowhere to go. My mum, being who she was, would arrange for them to come home to us. Quite often we had four or five kids, and we’d share the food and the love around. I grew up sharing beds with kids I didn’t know, and I felt very sad for any child who didn’t have a parent. As I grew up this whole theme of helping others continued.

When I was twelve my mother booked me into the Presbyterian summer camp, where I chanced to meet the Reverend Poon. He was a Chinese missionary who showed us slides on an old projector and told us about his work with the people of the New Hebrides. It was this that sowed the seed in me to work in the Third World.

‘Mum,’ I said, when I arrived home, ‘I want to be a missionary.’ I didn’t want to spread the word of God, that wasn’t it. I simply wanted to do some good.

‘Johnny, why not wait a little longer, until you get a bit older, and then make your decision.’

When I was thirteen my mother became ill with asthma and was bed-ridden from time to time over the next five years. I used to get myself off to school and I can remember sometimes putting on a dirty-collared shirt because my mum wasn’t always able to wash it. I was supposed to do it but sometimes I didn’t. My good friend Tony Mugg had clothes that were always crisply ironed but I’d turn up in a crinkled shirt. If anything dampened my confidence a little bit it was that. I felt I just wasn’t measuring up in terms of my clothes and how I looked. I got ticked off for not wearing my cap all the time: I’d turn up to school and be brought out in front of the whole assembly for not wearing it, again.

My first friend was Ken Secretan. He is a fantastic person; we’ve never argued. I remember one night Ken, Tony and I were lying on the front lawn talking about the stars and heaven. We saw this travelling light – the first satellite, Russia’s Sputnik – and marvelled at man’s achievement. Somehow, witnessing this bonded the three of us forever.

As I grew up, I learned to play the bagpipes and became a member of the local pipe band, playing the side drum. The family kilt, which had belonged to my grandfather, was handed down to me. He had run away from Glasgow and joined the Scottish Black Watch stationed in India, and later fought in the Boer War in South Africa. Boy, to get dressed up in the whole rigmarole – the kilt, the sporran, the waistcoat and beret with the feather in it – made me so proud to have Scottish blood. I never mastered the bagpipes but I used to practise ad nauseam and drive everyone mad.

During my high-school years I discovered girls. Having been brought up in a household of girls, I always felt I understood them. I was full of confidence and bravado. I dated a girl named Sue. Well, in those days it was wheeling her bike home. I was enamoured of Sue, but the headmaster used to tell me off because I was seen walking with a girl. Then I fell in love with Diana, which wasn’t hard to do: she was absolutely delightful. For many, many years after, I kept in touch with her and once hitchhiked up to Sydney to see her, to confirm my feelings for her, only to find she was much more worldly than I and was dating other guys. The journey was a waste of time, energy and emotion; heartbroken I was, but not for long.

I was halfway through high school when my sister Anne married a wheat and sheep farmer in the Mallee, a wheat belt north-west of Melbourne. I was in love with my sister and had told her not to marry that bloke but instead to wait until I grew up and could marry her. It was in the Mallee that I experienced what country living was all about. I used to go up there with my parents at weekends. I learned to drive a tractor, plough paddocks, operate vehicles and shoot rabbits. Being out in the bush was heaven to me.

My ambition had been to be a draftsman but after returning from the country one weekend I went to see my teachers. ‘I’ve changed my mind, I want to be a farmer.’ They told me the subjects I’d chosen and my results wouldn’t get me into agricultural college – so I determined that I was going to make them good enough. I worked darn hard without any supervision because Mum was sick and Dad didn’t care much. It paid off, though, because I went on to get the high grades needed to get into Dookie Agricultural College, in north-eastern Victoria, and completed a three-year diploma there.

Because of my mother’s asthma the doctor told her she needed to get out of the city, away from all the fumes. Bendigo had a good, dry climate and he suggested she consider going there. Dad, in the meantime, was getting worse and worse with his pub mates and the drink, and being the manager and planner she was, Mum felt that if she moved him away from all these bad influences and found him a good activity like looking after chooks, he might just get better.

The place we bought was fifty-six hectares at Lockwood South – a horrible block, full of rabbits and foxes, but I thought it was terrific. Because we couldn’t afford meat, we lived off rabbits, chooks, eggs, milk and cream. Dad became heavily involved in building chook pens; he started a chook farm and we sold eggs to the Victorian Egg Board.

Even from her sick bed my mother was trying to influence my purpose in life, giving me a poem by English poet William Ernest Henley as a mandate for self-determination. It provided a sense of clarity: I was in charge of my destiny and shouldn’t entertain self-pity:

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of Circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of Chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gait,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

(First published in 1875, the title is Latin for the word ‘unconquered’.)

The Male Factor

John Grylls was a neighbour of ours at Lockwood South. When I came home from Dookie I would work on his property when he needed extra help. A forward-thinking wheat and sheep farmer, he was three times winner of the Hanslow Cup, a Victorian soil-conservation award. He had been the first in the district to develop broad-based earth contours to avoid soil erosion and conserve water in the light granite soils. As a returned serviceman he had been given a soldier settlement block and one of the first things he was required to do was clear the land of rabbits. They were in their hundreds of thousands, ruining temperate Australia during the 1940s and 1950s. They’d been introduced by the first settlers as a source of food, followed by foxes to keep the rabbits under control, which was just as big a mistake.

Farmers set about poisoning and shooting the rabbits, until bullets became too expensive. Then they’d have rabbit drives where thirty or forty men would get out in the paddocks and put up netting fences in a V shape, with gates they could close behind them. They’d frighten the rabbits with horns and by beating tin cans with sticks. The rabbits were piled up against the fences: four and five on top of each other. Then the men would bludgeon them to death and bury them in the gullies that had been eroded by the creatures. The farmers would put soil on top and then plant trees. This was before my time, but I did help John with rabbit-control practices – trapping, dogging and poisoning – and he succeeded with these strategies better than most.

John was always frugal, which fitted in with my way of thinking, because that was what my mum had taught me. He introduced me to the philosophy that if you are going to kill an animal, why waste anything; respect the animal by utilising each part of the beast. He was an advocate of young people taking up agriculture and he encouraged me to go on and do better things with my life. John was my first mentor and an inspiration, and gave me the opportunity to consolidate my practical experience after I had obtained my diploma at Dookie. He was also a surrogate father, filling in those gaps where my father didn’t provide for me.

Soon after returning from Dookie I decided I wanted to have a dairy. The plant, equipment and cows down the road were for sale, and at the age of nineteen I went to the bank and tried to borrow a 1000 pounds to start my own business. But even with my parents signing a letter of guarantee, the bank said I was too young. I went around to the stock and station agent and they agreed to lend me 500 pounds. I took that down to the dairy farmers, arranging to pay them half my cream cheque every month until it was paid off.

One morning, not long after, I milked the fourteen cows down the road and put them out to pasture. I cut off all the bails in the dairy with the oxy, raced home with them to where the holes were already dug and set the bails in concrete. Then I set up the milking machine and plant, and raced back that afternoon to muster the cows the eight kilometres in order to milk them that night. By 10 p.m. they were bursting, with milk going everywhere. I was three hours late for milking but by the end of the day I had a functioning dairy.

Our property was on the corner of a main road that branched off to Maldon and Castlemaine. I was watching the traffic go by one day and I thought I could start a little tourist venture, with morning and afternoon teas. We could show all the things we loved, like the finches, whistling canaries and parrots that we bred. That was my very first plan for going into tourism. Then I rolled my father’s car and that put a spanner in the works.

My friend and I had a bit of a race. I lost control and swerved out onto the bitumen, over-corrected and hit a tree. At that stage, with the dairy and my dad’s poultry farm, we were living from week to week. About a month earlier, my parents had decided not to insure the car, simply because the insurance cost was beyond them. Wolseleys are very tough, and I got out of that car with just a thick ear – which I deserved. My mother said she was disappointed