A Country Town ( Goulburn)

Most local people would know Goulburn as the town that holds a high security prison. The notorious mass killer Ivan Milat is serving his sentence there together with other high profile miscreants.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backpacker_murders

Please try and read the above link. It is almost as good as a Wallander Mankell thriller.

In its heyday Goulburn was the hub of Australia’s wool industry. Australia from the early eighteen nineties till the nineteen seventies was ‘riding on the sheep’s back.’ One of its main export income was wool. With cheaper cotton and synthetics entering the market, wool became much less competitive and growing wool now is a minor part of agriculture. A reminder of this wool Empire of Goulburn is a very large concrete sheep near the Sydney-Melbourne highway turnoff to Goulburn. Inside this large sheep one can buy Chinese made wool trinkets, whistles, scarfs, and Australian made socks as well as aboriginal artefacts.

Goulburn as a result of the collapse of wool became a town looking for its former but lost glory. We bought a farm in 1996 not far from this town, about 20 kms away. At that time one could have bought a 4 bedroom freestanding house for about $350,000.- and today the same house is still selling for $350,000.- It’s a beautiful but a stagnant rural town. I am sure it would provide an amazing opportunity for Sydney siders to cash up on their $2 million house and whoop it up in Goulburn. It houses an excellent library and an even better Art Gallery. In winter it can be a bit cold and bracing, but with central heating and a roof full of solar panelling it would be a most pleasant town to live in. It also has a very nice ‘Workers Club and RSL.’ ( Returned Soldiers Club)

A few days ago we went to re-visit our former country town. We usually like to go back to past lives. Reminiscing about places and lives of the past is the prerogative of growing old, especially while it is still possible. One never knows when the time will arrive the mobility scooter or ‘Eventide Care-Home’ beckons!

After arrival, and being hungry we popped into the Workers Club. I ordered curried sausages with peas and mashed potatoes. Helvi ordered roast chicken with vegetables. Both were terrible. I never thought that mash and sausages could be so failing. Helvi’s chicken was some kind of muscled thigh that belonged to a very scrawny old chook looking for a long gone rooster. My curried sausages were chopped up bits of something drowning in what I assumed was a curried flavoured sludge sobbing to be rescued. The peas were absent or fled somewhere else. The mash was lumpy.

In Australia we are the world champions in gambling. All clubs provide subsidised cheap meals paid for by the poker machine addicts. You can see them on the way to the toilets. Elderly or not so elderly people, transfixed by the ghoulish lights of the poker machines. Sometimes plastic shopping bags next to the players on the floor. A sad sight, if ever there was. After a couple of beers drowning the half-eaten lunches, we left for a solid walk around Goulburn.

On the walk back to the car we came across a man sprawled out on the pavement. We had walked past him previously and noticed his dishevelled appearance, but he was seated on one of those updated modern square public seating arrangements surrounded by pretty greenery between the pavement and the road. He must have slumped off his seat. People walked past this man. We stopped and thought of finding out what might be the matter. He looked to be in his mid thirties and appeared motionless. I asked if he was alright but no response. I then decided to phone triple zero for emergency. By that time a few passers-by had stopped too.

As I was giving information to the emergency number, the man moved his hand and showed therefore to be alive. He picked himself up and mumbled a few words. The emergency phone lady decided to cancel the ambulance. The man went back to his previous seat and grabbed his tobacco that had spilled on the pavement. He mumbled something that he was alright and no help was needed. We felt sorry. How does it get to that state? He would have been a healthy young man once. Did he take some tablets or did he have a health problem?

We hope to have a better visit next time. Perhaps we will give clubs a miss seeing that gambling gives us cheap meals. A bit like being hypocritical of an industry that causes so much harm.

Autumn is getting serious

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The autumn leaves are in a serious downturn. Going past the hospital grounds I was wading knee-deep in them. I love walking through them listening to their particular sound. The crunching of leaves underfoot cannot be imitated easily. It is a sound of my childhood when I used to play with my friends no matter what weather. It would be the leaves in autumn and the swishing of snow in winter.

In winter, and if there was a good pack of snow, we would take matches and some lint with us and try and find snow bubbles above the frozen canals of The Hague were we were living after the war. The gases that were free to rise when the water wasn’t frozen would get trapped under ice or snow and form gas bubbles which we would explore and set alight with our matches and burning lint. The aim and hope was always to get a big bubble with a huge explosion. We never found the really big one..

Is it true that boys are more drawn to fire and explosions and does that explain the inclination to wars and bloody mayhem? I watched a mob of primary school kids running into a park. Within minutes the boys separated and went running after each other rumbling and play fighting, rolling over the ground. The girls in the meantime, few rumbled or threw each other to the ground. Most were happy to sit in the shade of a tree and talking. Is it nature or nurture?

Another favorite trick of mine was to put petrol on water in our kitchen sink and light it. How I was fascinated by something burning that was floating on top of water. I suppose it was a lesson in science. I always did this when my mum was having a nap in the living room which was on the other side of a long wall-papered corridor. The bottle of petrol was kept in a green cupboard underneath the sink and was used by my father to fill his cigarette lighter. In those days it was the height of sophistication to light a cigarette by petrol filled lighter. Men walked around not just smelling of tobacco but also of petrol seeping out of there lighters.

The contraption used a small rotating disc against a flint stone that would ignite the petrol infused cotton wool wick that was kept inside the housing of the lighter and which would protrude through a small hole at the top of the lighter. Even the modern lighter uses some inflammable liquid or gas to light the cigarette. Of course the delights of smoking have long gone since, together with so many other enjoyable cultural habits. We now ingest more tablets than ever before but they are just not as satisfying as the pipe, cigar or cigarette.

Let’s also not forget that instead of smoking we now suck on sugar, salt and fats as never before.  Even so, we live longer or at least stay alive longer but is it still hotly debated if it is ‘living’ when the number of Alzheimer and dementia suffering people are skyrocketing and queuing up by the millions at the gates of places with names such as Eventide, Golf-shore Delight,  or Heritage Thistle.

I don’t want to grow old and in my demented state start grabbing nurses by the bum or mumble obscenities in church and suck up farts in a bicycle pump and then stalk my best and equally old and fading friend and give him the full benefit of a recently digested Brussel sprout blast.

It would be nice to grow old and still be writing my little nonsensical pieces within some reasonable word order.  I have some doubts though. Lately I wake up having to piss almost every couple of hours during the night. I thought of rigging myself up with a handy rubber harness above the bowl where I can hoist myself up with pulleys and ropes and sleep there instead of in bed.  I have to check the Senior Magazines for any aids. I am sure to find some. I bet many might well end up chucking a mattress on the bathroom floor.

In the meantime, my life of decades ago  playing with exploding gas bubbles under the frozen and snowed canals of my youth and now mulling over the possibility of hanging from a suspended harness above the loo is still proof of a busy and interesting time ahead.