I'd thought about it pretty consistently since my sons had asked me at Christmas to accompany them on a walking trip in Japan in May. I'd initially said yes, because Ollee my youngest son and I had walked 250km along the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in Spain seven years previously.

Alright, I was older, but the Japanese walk, the Nakasendo trail connecting Tokyo with Kyoto they were proposing, was much shorter. The weather at the same time of the year should be similarly good too, as it was.

But my trip started badly soon after I put on my hiking boots in Benalla to catch the early morning XPT to Melbourne for an early afternoon flight to Japan.

The boots had been perfect in Spain, but were now far too tight. My big toes were telling me that in no uncertain terms. But it was too late to change, and I eventually hobbled into Tullamarine. About lunchtime the next day I hobbled into Ollee and his family's room in central Tokyo with a view of Mt Fuji and removed my boots for the first time.

Fortunately, Ollee had an old pair of runners to spare.  I very gratefully eased my bloody feet into them. My other son Julian was there as well - he and I later took a train to Matsumoto, the starting point for our walk.

Ollee joined us after seeing his wife and boys off on a flight back to Melbourne. But we delayed for a day because of wet weather and spent some time inspecting the 400-year-old Matsumoto castle instead.

From there we walked about 80km over the next week or so to a point near Kyoto where we caught a high-speed train, Shinkansen, back to Tokyo. A train runs every nine minutes and costs $145.

The boys had booked us into traditional ryokan onsen accommodation each night. A ryokan features matting on the floor and futons and doonas as bedding. An onsen is a natural or constructed pool being fed hot, 40 to 43 degree spring water and there are many across the country.

Onsen users must be naked and clean. It can take some effort to appear to be clean enough. Ollee spent a great deal of time one evening using the handheld shower to meet the critical looks of a local onsen user who thought he was not doing enough to clean himself. Eventually he spent time scouring crevices between his toes and fingers before entering the onsen.

We had set meals at most of the onsens we stayed at. Generally, they included fish and sometimes beef and once raw horse meat. Small butane powered stoves allowed us to cook the meat the way we wanted but I ate my horse before I realised what it was. I didn't really get to grips with what we were eating but it was always totally fresh and well presented in small bowls. White rice was always a big part of a meal.

Much of the Nakasendo is through forest and in many places we were warned there were bears lurking. So, we carried small bells on our back packs to scare them off. We didn't see any, although some fellow travellers reckoned they could hear them. Another hazard at one point was over friendly monkeys according to a warning sign.

We saw no signs of farm livestock on our walk, not even poultry or dogs. Julian and I travelled to Kobe to eat their famous Wagyu beef in a restaurant set up presumably to service tourist demand. We also wanted to see Wagyus on a farm, but that didn't seem possible to arrange.

When asked by someone in U3A what Japan was like, I immediately said orderly. But it is more than that. It is meticulously clean as well.

We didn't spend much time with the locals apart from one evening when a mother  and her son fed and watered us in a small restaurant. Turned out they had worked on a cruise boat on Sydney harbour.

The thing I quickly realised on this trip, was that we'd never done anything like it before and on how well we got on together. As well I realised that we'll probably not do it again.


David Palmer
June 2024
.

​This all began in late October, when I started wondering about better ways of soaking up the amazing energy my local four-year old grandson expends every day, at a time when I'd been largely incapable of expending much at all.
 
Anyhow, I decided that what he needed was a trampoline.  I went online searching for new and old ones without much success; the options ranged from free ones in every state except Victoria to some costing a couple of thousand dollars.
 
Then I talked to my youngest son who has a trampoline for his two young boys in Melbourne and he said the key to obtaining a reasonably modern trampoline, was acquiring the services of a trampoline whisperer.
 
Apparently, a trampoline whisperer has well-honed skills, particularly for installing angled fibreglass roads that hold trampolines up and give them some of their spring. They can be dangerous if mishandled I was told.
 
I was also told that, if buying a used trampoline in Melbourne, the trampoline whisperer's dismantling and reassembling skills are often written into the price, as was the case with my Melbourne grandson's bouncer.
 
Coincidentally, my delving into trampoline culture, lined up with my new iPhone and the realisation that I was not taking enough exercise. The new phone registers how much exercise I take in a day, in the form of a partially or completed colored circle, within an app.
 
The idea is to complete the colored circle on the phone, providing an indication that I have made a bit of an effort to keep fit. Surprisingly I find it quite compelling.
 
My new effort at exercising more, is largely limited to walking three or four kilometres a day and this usually around the lake or Benalla's streets.
 
Anyway, one longish walk took me along streets I had not walked before and lo and behold as they say, I stumbled over a small, fully assembled trampoline on a nature strip, with a free sign on it.
 
So later in the day I picked it up with my trailer and a few days later delivered the trampoline to my daughter's small farm near Benalla.
 
Grandson Freddy was delighted and immediately started using it. But then, seeing I was straightening some uprights and tightening now apparent loose screws, he grabbed a screwdriver from my toolbox and helped.
 
So quite successful for me, him and his less stressed mother.
 
 
David Palmer
November 2023

Nearly four years ago my youngest son Ollee and I, at his instigation, walked about 250km of the Camino de Compostela through northern Spain.

There are several well-worn pilgrim routes across Spain and further afield, which bear the Compostela name. But they all terminate at the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela near the north west corner of Spain.

We flew from Melbourne to Madrid in mid April and caught a very fast train to San Sebastian in the far north east of the country, on the coast and near the French border.

From there we started our walk on the route closest to the coast. Mostly country roads and well-worn tracks - pilgrims have been walking towards Santiago for at least 1000 years – we followed ceramic shells or drawings of one, to indicate the route. Fellow pilgrims often carried shells dangling from the backpacks to indicate their involvement in the walk too
​.
To me one of the biggest joys of the Compostela is that there are dedicated hostels scattered roughly a day’s walk apart along the route. And usually there are restaurants nearby, often designed to cater almost exclusively to walkers. So we usually had a very adequate simple three course meal, plus beer or wine, for 10 to 12 Euros each.

On only one occasion on the two week trip, were we not near a coffee shop, so we could have coffee and croissants in the morning. A walk of about 5km to a supermarket more or less solved that omission.

That meant because accommodation and food were provided en route, we did not have to carry much food, or any bedding, apart from sleeping bags.

Our walk was almost entirely through small farms on rolling hills. Many had just made silage so there was that smell in the air.

It was Basque country, the home to intriguingly enterprising people, who are not really Spaniards, although no-one can really tell where they came from. Their language is quite different and unexplainable as well.

One day while having lunch in a square, a dog wandered up to see if we had dropped any food. Ollee tried to engage it in Spanish but it just backed away looking somewhat wary. However he talked to it in the Basque language and it was suddenly quite friendly. Obviously a Basque dog.

Every village and town we went through had a large square with at least a restaurant, a bar and a few shops around it. And in the evenings whole families descended on these squares to eat and drink from from tables and chairs in the streets, and talk to and play with friends at other tables.
​
It is a wonderful feature of European life we have tried to emulate, but just haven’t matched, and there’s hardly a sign of it in this pandemic time.

That magic walk had a special anticipatory feel both to Ollee and to me, because his wife Lauren, was due to give birth to their first child and my first grandchild, in just a few weeks.
In due course Ernie was born without undue trouble and a couple of years later, Lauren gave birth to Wilf, now just one year old.

So if I’m still alive and reasonably fit in 2030, it would be wonderful to traverse the Camino de Compostela, again with Ollee, but with two grandsons as well, absorbing its wonders for the first time.


David Palmer
​February 2021

A week or so ago, I helped farmer friends marshal their cows and heifers into a crush so a veterinarian could pregnancy test them.

I don’t think the cattle I’ve worked with over the years have ever been willing participants in an operation that forces them into a long race and then into the ultimate indignity of a 40cm probe with camera being inserted into their back ends. (For those who once watched All Creatures Great and Small, the probe was always a vet’s long arm).

The heifers on this day were maybe easier to handle because they were smaller and had not suffered such treatment before. But they all emitted voluminous streams of urine and faeces, to indicate their extreme nervousness, as we herded them up to the race. Strangely they seemed more settled once they were in the race and could see their colleagues moving along it and eventually exiting its confines.

Armed with a plastic paddle to prod the girls into place - the paddles are designed to emit much more noise than pain - my job was to extract about 10 cows or heifers from a yard of say 30, into three smaller pens and ideally reduce that number to four, closest to the start of the race. That was a number that gave me room to avoid aforesaid liquid projectiles and the odd kicking hoof. Strangely I nearly avoided all that as we jostled the best part of 200 cows and heifers up the race.

Towards the end of four hours I knew I was getting tired and attempted to be even more careful around vigorous back ends. However, I eventually copped a firmly planted hoof in my left calf and not much later, one cow strongly objected to my urging and simply bowled me over as she charged to the back of the yard.

The kick hardly hurt and being knocked over, thankfully, affected me little, apart from my clothes being considerably messier.

Shortly after the second incident, while questioning me about my health, the herd’s owner asked me if I had noticed that the cow that knocked me over, had also jumped over me.
​
On reflection, 'right here, right now', I'm most grateful for that, because if she hadn’t, it might have been more like a fairly gory moment from the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona.
 
David Palmer
August 2020

I grew up the day I started boarding school in early February 1953. I was 10 and a half years old.

My mother, in her late 90s in 2013, said one of the saddest sights she ever saw, was the reflection of my glum, close to tears face in the rear vision mirror of their rapidly receding Vauxhall car.

I don’t think I cried myself to sleep that first night, or thereafter, but I can’t remember for sure. And I didn’t resent my parents for depositing me there. I just never really liked the school until my final year, year eleven in 1959.

But I did grow to appreciate, through my seven years there, the privileged education I was getting. The school had been established nearly a century earlier, specifically to educate the sons of Western District farmers. I was certainly one of those and it was that free for all farm life, including driving utes and tractors, I missed from day one.

On that day we were issued with a specially made, dark blue Onkaparinga school rug/blanket and I quickly discovered, although it was summer, it was a vital piece of equipment. That was because our big, east facing dormitory windows, just holes in the walls really, were open to the elements; a canvas blind sometimes kept out the coldest winds. We wore shorts all year round for the first three years and just accepted cold showers, so I don’t think I really felt the cold at that age. Still don’t. And I was never cold in bed and had that rug for many years after I left school.

One of the first scholastic things we did was to complete an intelligence test: they were all the go at that time and for years afterwards. On the basis of those tests, we were allocated to class groups, presumably matched to our supposed levels of mental acuity.

My first class was Latin, a day or two after the term started. But presumably there had been a rethink about my intelligence and I was hauled out of that class minutes after it started. I really resented that insensitive act and still do.

My cohort did not come anywhere near learning a language other than English until year 10. At that time a hugely enterprising teacher, much against the wishes of the headmaster, wangled French lessons for us “dullards”. We embraced those lessons and enjoyed them and I’d like to think the headmaster eventually congratulated our teacher on his initiative. 

I grew up from that time too in making friends. Until then nearly all my friends were cousins from nearby farms. Three were at school with me but they were one or two years ahead or behind me and we just didn’t mix because of the age difference. I was desperately shy anyway and it took me another decade before I more or less became a little less introverted.

So it was serendipitous that Donough O’Brien, a boy my age, took me under his wing as it were. He later became a doctor so I suppose there was a caring element in his make up.

He discovered I liked to take photos and he quickly taught me how to take better photos and then develop and print them. I don’t think we had cameras any more exciting than box brownies. But the developing of the films and then printing them was really quite exciting. Twenty odd years later, as a photo journalist, I really enjoyed too, the much more precise challenges of developing and printing colour films.

Donough also taught me how to seriously catch fish. Limeburner’s Bay which was only a 10 minute walk away, seemed under Donough’s tuition, to be chockfull of flathead and small sharks, because I think we always caught one or the other. We pretty much had that part of the bay to ourselves which helped I suppose.

And thanks to the school cooks, we and some of our friends, were able to eat what Donough and I caught. I know at least one of them, as an ex shearers’ cook, would never have cooked fish for shearers. We never had it at home then. Too far from the sea you see!

I know too that we all grew up, puzzled I’d have to say, in our second or third year when a special school assembly was called. There was a message and that was that boys – it was a boys only school - had been seen walking with their arms around the shoulders of their friends and that must cease. No explanation was given and I can’t remember when we discovered, that the inference was that we might have become gay if we persisted. Now like most schools, there are boys, girls, gay kids, transgender kids and everything else at the school. That is fine now but we all needed to really grow up in 1953.
 
​
David Palmer

In a flash I’d exchange my house on Benalla’s south western edge with Dulcie’s home and gorgeous garden on the city’s north eastern fringe.
 
You see Dulcie Sanderson, 90, has for 66 years been treasuring her extensive garden, on land where her father and grandfather once grew wheat, using horse teams to plough and sew the crop.   She has never forgotten her grandfather telling her of the beautiful band of self-mulching clay soil which which extends from the main Melbourne to Sydney railway line right through the 120 acres he bought in the 1920’s, to what was then the Hume Highway.  The Benalla Village Caravan Park is on part of that original block.
 
The good clay loam continues right under her garden and has made it possible for Dulcie to grow practically any plant which takes her eye. That has even included tropical seedlings given to her by local botanist Kay Fairley, who recognised Dulcie’s green fingered ability and willingness to take chances.
 
One of those, a rainforest black bean tree, looks perfectly happy in a sheltered spot not far from the back door.
 
But 67 Sydney Road has never been a peaceful spot.  When it was for many decades the Hume Highway, trucks thundering past, albeit much smaller than today’s B-doubles, clashed with the quiet green bubble of Dulcie and then husband Ron’s glorious half acre garden.  They married in 1952 and Dulcie has lived there ever since.
 
So, traffic is much reduced these days, but is still quite busy during morning and evening peaks, which mainly comprise Schneider employees coming or going to work.
 
Glider tow planes are another noise hazard, as they start their initial climb after take-off to the west, sometimes immediately overhead.  However, Dulcie says some of the two pilots make an obvious attempt to turn slightly right or left to avoid flying directly over her house.
 
One, a 90 hp De Havilland Moth Major two-seater 10 years younger than Dulcie, climbs slowly though, heading directly it seems to her, into the branches of some of her bigger trees.  No pilot is allowed to turn a plane at a height lower than 1000 feet, because of noise implications for Benalla hospital patients.  So, as a pilot who once inadvertently few through tree branches on take-off, I can understand the hazard Dulcie’s very healthy and numerous tall trees pose to Mark, the Benalla owner and pilot.
 
One day recently when I was visiting Dulcie, another high-flying adventurer also seemed to be facing the distinct hazard of falling to earth in a messy way.  A young man, 20m high in the topmost branches of a gum tree, was trimming with a chain saw, branches threatening a major powerline on the old highway.  He was no doubt well roped in but still looked vulnerable. 
 
Dulcie still manages to keep her garden spick and span with a little outside help.  And the lovely clay loam paddock her father once farmed and treasured, now restricted to grazing Hereford cattle, still stretches from her garden fence to the train line.  No doubt pilots too, in the remote possibility that their plane’s engines stop when they are doing their damnedest to gain height quickly and safely, hope that paddock remains free of houses too.
 
All power to you, Dulcie.
 
David Palmer

In retrospect it should have been a rather surprising parental proposition: become a business partner – and by inference a friend – of your sister’s former lover.

But my father had a bee in his favourite floppy cotton hat, about buying what was mostly a bush block on the remote Rose River, one valley to the east of the King.

And both parents reckoned I needed a partner to do it with which was certainly sensible.

At the time I knew Chottie, at her instigation, had broken up with Geoff while they were residents in Deakin Hall at Monash University. At the time I didn’t know that it was quite bitter and in was several decades later that Chottie told me, Geoff had burned all her love letters.

The reason Geoff’s name had come up as a strong possibility to be involved in our pioneering enterprise, was that he yearned at Monash to be a farmer and instead had ended with an economics degree and a teller’s job in NAB’s North Melbourne branch.

I don’t remember first meeting Geoff but we got on well and were both keen to face the challenge of turning useless bush into vibrant farmland. We were quite different though: he all extrovert enthusiasm, me a painfully shy and diffident 23 year old.

In mid-winter 1966, we took over the farm and launched into milking 40 odd cows, inherited from the previous owner. At the same time we prepared to plant potatoes in a new to the farm enterprise on its rich river flats. We were flat out and so it went for the next six and a half years.

I was the one who knew farming and Geoff was the one who knew people and particularly young women who seemed to swarm into the valley. A year or two later, we’d each acquired more knowledge in the other’s specialities and were spending time with two kindergarten teachers based in Everton, who were also good friends. Convenient too because we only had one workable ute.

It was a huge growing up phase for both Geoff and I; to clear trees we bought a large second hand bulldozer and learned to drive it and in Wangaratta, thanks to a grandmother’s inheritance, I learned to fly.

By the early 1970s the farm was going well and we had added cattle and sheep to the enterprise. But a major kerfuffle in my family’s finances meant the farm had to be sold.

After a couple of years Geoff married and became an accountant while I tied the knot too and joined Stock and Land as a journalist. But we drifted apart and didn’t really start being connected again until three or four years ago.

That happened because Deakin Hall celebrated the 50th anniversary of its founding and Chottie and Geoff found they could at long last put their emotional differences behind them and attend. As a result they and their partners have dinner in Melbourne every Grand Final eve and I have been drawn in too, sometimes with a partner, to the same celebration.

So come Friday night, we’ll enjoy a not too boozy restaurant meal and Geoff will again I’m sure, tell me that the Rose River period was the most enjoyable time of his life. Me too - probably.  
​

David Palmer
September  2018

The Sydney Writers' Festival, held in the first week of May, moved to the Seymour Centre, a complex of theatres in the University of Sydney and the Carriage Works, about 9 minutes' walk away between Redfern and Newtown stations. In some ways not as good as the previously used Sydney Theatre Company venue on and near wharves close to the harbour bridge, but being more spacious they tended to work better.

There were not as many free sessions as previous years but most sessions were $20 for concession card holders. If there were unsold tickets at the start of the day on which a session was scheduled, prices were cut to $10 for everyone. Highly recommended. 

Jane Harper talked about her third crime novel, apparently set in western Queensland. She had travelled there for research for the novel and was it seemed inspired. Her presentation was marred somewhat by endless "ums" and "ahs" which made it difficult for an audibly impaired bloke like me to hear.

The interviewer suggested she'd had it somewhat easier than first novelists, in getting into very successful print in just two years, by mining her writing course participants to the nth degree. She didn't deny that they had helped enormously.

To hear Charles Massy talk about the Call of the Reed Warbler, between 70 and 80 people crammed into a small sound studio at the Seymour Centre. One questioner asked if any agricultural college had invited Massy to talk to their students. But he said absolutely none. He added that he had tried three times to start a course with existing educational establishments to expound his ideas, but without success.

I had heard an economist at a previous unrelated session about China, say that tractors had cut employment in Australian agriculture from 30 per cent to about 3 per cent in about 70 to 80 years in the 20th century. Repeating that I asked Charles what he thought and did he not think that combining tractors and computers had made evaluating no till, controlled traffic cropping and refined inputs easier and less impactive on already fragile soils. Charles acknowledged that to produce the quantities of food necessary such combinations were essential but doing it better than it had been done in the past.

​When on November 2, I realised I'd taken a step too far and broken my ankle, it became a right here, right now moment.   Two months ago I was casting around the subject for this month and suddenly it had caught me by the throat as it were.
 
I was chain sawing and removing a heavy limb that had fallen in sheep yards on a Lima South farm. I was aware that there was some Hingejoint fencing lying on the bottom of the yard part hidden in grass and that I might get my feet tangled in it.
 
But I let my guard slip and as I carried a heavy piece of wood out of the yard, my foot caught, I slipped sideways and as I fell I heard a bone crack. My “limb” was too heavy apparently.
 
I am an optimist and my immediate reaction was to sit there and convince myself it was just a sprained ankle. And because I wasn't in a lot of pain, I continued working for the next hour and a half.
 
That evening I continued to convince myself it was just a sprain and applied a washing soda bandage to get the swelling down.
 
But my ex wife in NZ, bless her, convinced me to see a doctor who the next day confirmed I had broken my right ankle.
 
A couple of hours later at the Benalla hospital he set it in plaster and from then on mobility became a major concern.
 
The hospital sold me a smart pair of adjustable crutches for $30 and in short order my sister set me up for meals on wheels every day and a wheelie stroller thing with a seat and a small freight compartment. Do these things have a proper name?
 
Life slowed right down. Now breakfast of toast and coffee consumed in bed, takes about half an hour to prepare and trundle back to the other end of the house. I quickly worked out that I had to put the toast in a container and the coffee in an old jam jar with lid, to prevent spillage.
 
In fact moving anything demands careful planning, particularly when on crutches; a long handled cotton bag I can loop around my neck has proved most useful.
 
While I have no argument with the design of the crutches - they are adjustable for different body types - the wheelie stroller thing has a flat, smooth liftable lid which doubles for a seat. But there is little grip when I sit on it and propel myself along with my good foot. Why does it not have a seat contoured to the average bottom, like those old steel seats that were common on tractors and farm implements years ago?
 
I’ve now discovered a sticker on the stroller which says it should not be propelled while sitting on it, even though it has a 100kg weight limit. Pretty weird really.
 
Well I'm nearly four weeks into a less mobile life and have almost come to grips with it. With any luck the polyester cast will come off on December 8 and I will have a moon boot substituted for another couple of weeks.
 
That will certainly be a right here right now moment too, as will the retirement of the moon boot, early in the new year. I think I'll now be able to deal with very few similar right here right now moments after that, or will it be easier?
 
 
David Palmer
November 2017 

'Vibrational Big City Move'

An OED definition of vibration is to say it is like a pendulum swinging to and fro. To quote, “Vibration – from the Latin vibrare, move rapidly to and fro, brandish, shake, etc. Of a pendulum to swing to and fro, to oscillate 1667. To quiver, shake, tremble, to move or oscillate between two extreme conditions, opinions.
 
In that vein in the early 1990s I was living here in Benalla, but my marriage had broken up and I was looking for a new job in journalism. I was interviewed in Melbourne by a Sydney publisher and in due course he told me I had won the job.
 
Indeed this was a swing of the pendulum and one I enjoyed in various roles for 15 years. The job was at Birkenhead Point in the inner west suburbs on the Harbour. So that was a quite significant swing from landlocked Benalla.
 
But not surprisingly, the lifestyle was quite different. I re-established contact with an old girl friend and thanks to her friends and knowledge of Sydney we were able to enjoy and suffer what the city had to offer on many levels.
 
In terms of suffering and harking back to that pendulum again, Anabel and I had three friends whose sons or brothers suffered so badly from schizophrenia that they committed suicide by jumping from the Gap, just round on the steep rocky seaward side of South Head.
 
That was just so out there for me and I know it was for the surviving relations too of course.
 
On a less sad level, my friend Anabel owned a beautiful small farm on the south coast near Kiama and we often went there at weekends, not least to fight rapidly encroaching lantana.  It is a nice, contained garden flower here, but in that warmer more humid climate, it simply takes off and dominates bush land in many areas on the coast.
 
So we sprayed and slashed and burned, seemingly sometimes to little effect. At the same time I had to deal with sand flies. They are difficult to see but leave wounds that particularly on your legs, seemingly need scratching for a week or more at a time.
Eventually I concocted a brew which when applied to my legs, kept them at bay.
 
On a cultural level too, Anabel took me to plays - Alan Bennet's History Boys and Lady in the Van stand out - and my Canberra based sister took me to operas at the opera house.
Hardly missed an art gallery, museum or any other exhibition either. Living in Paddington - John Olsen's gallery was just round the corner - I didn't miss much in the art world anyway.
 
We also hiked some amazing walks around the harbour and in one case I remember an angry landowner shouting that we were walking across his Harbourside land. We even undertook the old colonial road walk towards Newcastle. Never got that far though.
 
Well the pendulum has swung back to Benalla and while I have some regrets, I love this town and the people and what it has to offer too. Good vibrations on all levels.

​A girl in one port was enough

​To say that for quite some time I felt like a fish out of water where sex was concerned is perhaps a bit confronting.

I was painfully shy well into my 20s, so was not good at even talking to girls, in the quiet corner of Western Victoria where I lived.

Growing up in the 1940s and 1950s my parents never talked to me about sex, even about birds and bees. I suppose they thought that growing up on a farm where there were horses (no stallions though) thousands of sheep, hundreds of cattle and tens of thousands of rabbits – before myxo at least – that I would be observant enough to realise their numbers were not getting bigger by themselves.

But not being that observant anyway, I was blissfully unaware.

My two years younger sister and I spent a lot of time riding horses and I remember once when I was 13 or 14, that we rode past a bull impregnating a cow and I asked her what was going on. I think my sister giggled and tried to explain. But I’m not sure I really got it. Naivety with a capital N.

By then I’d been at a boys’ only boarding school for four years and in reality I think we were all pretty naïve.

At one point when I was about 12, the headmaster spent some time telling us, that it was just not acceptable to walk around with an arm around another boy’s shoulders. I don’t think we knew why, but no doubt looking back, that directive was to ensure that none of us became gay. To this day I don’t know how many of us were, but I’ll ask at a school reunion I’m going to next month.

Much later, in fact in year 11, the headmaster was horrified to find that our year had not received any sex education although it was supposedly on the syllabus.

But I hadn’t advanced much in the sex awareness stakes on my own account either. I was excruciatingly shy which didn’t help and I didn’t start to get over that until I was well into my 20s.

Being a mid WWII kid, I had few contemporaries to socialise with in the quiet heart of the Western District I went home to after school. Then I jackerooed on a fairly remote Riverina sheep property and from there landed a job helping look after Hereford cattle being exported to Chile.

Aged 24, I was still a virgin when we landed in Chile. But the two other Aussie blokes I was with, although not verbalising that a bit of sex was high in their priorities after a month at sea, suggested we go to a brothel in Concepcion, the port where we landed.

One of the other blokes now lives in my street, but I don’t think we compared notes much then and we certainly haven’t since. Perhaps the time has come. To me it was a revelation but what I really remember is being advised to hide my money in my shoes. Good advice, because although the young woman demanded and probably deserved more than I gave her, she didn’t suspect I had more.

But the brothel visit was a oncer, because although the three of us lived together in a flat in Santiago for another three months – we were showing Aussie cattle at Santiago’s annual show – the subject of visiting brothels did not come up again.
​
However it was a turning point for me. No longer did I feel like a fish out of water, where sexual relations were concerned anyway.

Without a thought, any prompting, my younger sister some years ago labelled me a rebel. When I was thinking about writing this and asked her why, she immediately jumped to an incident at the Sydney Olympic Games and not surprisingly, I straight away knew what she was talking about.

A group of us including my sister, were showing our tickets to gain access to the equestrian cross country competition at Horseley Park. But I had recently read something which said that if you retained a pristine Olympic Games ticket, it would be worth quite a lot in the years to come. In retrospect too much reading can be a bad thing.
So I was protesting to the ticket collector, that as he had let me in, I should be able to retain the ticket. He was equally adamant that he needed to have at least the stub to prove how many people were at the event. I suppose that was the logic of it anyway.
We argued for probably a minute and inevitably I suppose, I gave him the ticket stub, thus spoiling my pristine and potentially valuable piece of Olympic memorabilia.
But what really convinced me to give it up, was peer group pressure from my friends, who were getting quite impatient with me for holding them up in their quest for a good observation spot for the upcoming competition. I would have been there for quite a while if I had been on my own though. Probably wouldn’t have kept the ticket however.
Later my sister said to me somewhat crossly, “I think it’s because of your Irish blood”. But I’m not sure that’s true or particularly true, because she has the same Irish blood and it is no nearer than three generations back; lots of dilution with the much less rebellious English, Scots and Welsh since.

More recently I was accosted by an angry police woman in Swanston Street for walking across the intersection when the sign said not to. She was quite agitated because I had not at first heard her shouting at me (no hearing aids in) and then because I indicated that she was making a mountain out of a bit of pigeon poop.
“Didn’t you see there was no little green man?” she said crossly and I thought quite condescendingly. She went on and on to the extent that I eventually told her to "f... off". Not surprisingly that didn’t go down well but she never charged me as she had threatened to.
After writing this I have to admit I am a bit of a rebel; I still cross busy streets against the lights and tram tracks between platform stops for example.

I got booked two weeks ago for parking my car inside a badly marked, by itself parking bay, up against the railings at the Benalla library, because there was nowhere else to park. I emerged from the library just as the parking inspector was writing the ticket. But I think she would have let me off if she hadn’t started writing.
I appealed to the council and thankfully they did let me off the $74 fine. I do at least now park elsewhere if the car spaces outside the library are full. A rebel in partial retreat perhaps.

David Palmer
July 2017

​​'Backpacks and blisters matter'

I suppose it would have been naïve to believe that because his backpack weighed 20 percent more than mine, that my son Ollee’s walking pace along the Camino would be slowed to something akin to mine.

His usually weighed about six kilograms while mine was about five, a vital consideration, along with the dread of blistering our feet, which partly dominated our ambition to cover about 250km of the northern coastal Camino in Spain in 11 days.
​
The reality of the trip was that Ollee walked quite comfortably at the rate of about five kilometres an hour while I was pretty well stuck on four.  But then he is less than half my age and the 40 year difference, kept me pretty comfortable with the fact that I lagged behind most of the time.

The reality was that the only times we walked together was when he purposefully matched my speed although I was grateful that he frequently made that effort.  And I think because we were forewarned about the dangers of getting blisters on our feet and the impact that would have on our ability to walk at all, that we took reasonably elaborate precautions to protect our feet.

In both our cases it meant walking in our hiking boots for some distance several weeks before we started on the Camino and paying attention to the socks we wore. In my case I think I walked only 15km or so before we started and I didn’t even have a backpack on.

But my boots were fine. No pre walk signs of blisters.  As well, retailer Paddy Pallin advised using quite fluffy US made Wigwam socks, at $20 to $25 a pair. I bought two pairs and because I didn’t get blisters I reckon they worked brilliantly.
​
Towards the end of our walk, we met a young Lithuanian woman who had been stuck at an albuerque for three days, because she couldn’t proceed on her pilgrimage due to a number of well developed blisters on her feet.  Fortunately my sister had given me a Scholl product, which apparently is the bees knees for keeping the pain of blisters at bay, while enabling the user to continue walking.  Indeed our Lithuanian friend applied the blister fighters and in fact was able to accompany Ollee and I on most of the next day’s 20 plus kilometre walk.

The disparity between Ollee and my walking speeds, meant we became separated on several occasions and usually took different versions of the Camino or no version at all.

Marking of the Camino was usually pretty good, with yellow arrows and scallop symbols, delineating the way to go at fairly regular intervals. Sometimes they inexplicably ceased although if we were together, Ollee consulted Google Maps on his Spanish SIM card equipped phone and it usually pointed us in the right direction.

Apart from taking photographs, I barely used my phone because of the anticipated expense and because I was not turning off the camera after taking shots, I was running the battery down to nothing by about early afternoon most days.

That led me to acquire from Ollee, the phrase “Puerdo cargar mi telephono por favor?” This enabled me to have my phone charged up at bars and in one case a farmhouse, when we became separated and me lost.

One of those times was when the Camino went off into the hills to the south of Bilbao which was the mid-point of our trip. Ollee and I had walked flat suburban streets of Bilbao together for several kilometres that morning – I could more or less keep up with him on the flat - before the hills intervened. (The flat streets were such unchallenging walking, that Ollee was on his phone, investigating baby alarms on the Choice magazine website in Australia).

Anyway, we separated in the hills and although I met up with a couple of fellow pilgrims in the old part of the city, there was no sign of Ollee. I continued walking until I had gone quite a way from the city centre, a fact I noted from the large number of African refugees living in the area.
So I backtracked, tried to recharge my phone – it stubbornly refused to do so - and then wondered how I was going to find Ollee.

The problem was that we were not that night due to stay at one of the pilgrim albuerques, but at a smart hotel he’d booked in the middle of the city and I didn’t know the name of it.

​Eventually I found a visitor centre and much to my relief, one of the English speaking staff, undertook to ring the city’s hotels to find where Ollee had booked us in.  After ringing 10 she was successful and I made my way to the one that mattered. I booked in and saw that Ollee had already done so but was no longer there.

After a shower I walked to the nearby famous Guggenheim modern art museum and spent a couple of hours looking at the art on display inside.

Afterwards I spent maybe three quarters of an hour listening to variously talented pianists, who emerged from the crowd one after another, to play a grand piano stationed on the forecourt of the museum.

Suddenly Ollee appeared saying “I thought I might find you here.”
​
So in retrospect I hadn’t needed to plague the woman at the visitor’s centre. But it would have been a bit of a drag hauling my five kilogram backpack around for another three hours or so.

In all we walked about 250km from San Sebastian to Santander climbing and descending more than 4000m in 11 days. Santiago de Compostela, the ultimate pilgrimage destination, was still about 500km away close to the north western corner of Spain.
​
Another time maybe.

It was an extraordinary sight: an aeroplane wing spiralling vertically upwards about 50m from behind a clump of trees.
Then it spiralled back behind the trees, like a falling leaf, which it had closely resembled on its upwards trajectory.
I knew then that a super. spreading aeroplane I had seen descend behind the trees moments before, had come to grief. I had followed its progress as it came towards the car I was a passenger in, turned left opposite us then turned left again to descend behind the trees.
I was working for Stock and Land newspaper, had been attending a cattle sale near Ouse, north west of Hobart and was returning to the state capital with two stock and station agents who had given me a lift.
As soon as I saw the freed wing, I said to my companions what I thought had happened and that we must try and render assistance.
I was amazed that initially they just wanted to drive on, but I convinced them we had to do something, although I was anxious about the catastrophe we were about to confront.
So we drove a short distance into the nearby paddock and immediately saw the remains of the aeroplane and despite it being winter and the grass green, it was burning because of the spilled petrol.
Some dozen or so metres from the bulk of the wreckage, the pilot, just alive and badly burned, was still in his seat on the ground.
He died as I stood there wondering what I could do. But my journalist’s instincts came out and I took a couple of pictures of the wreckage, but not of course of the pilot.
The Mercury published my picture and others the following day, with the story that the pilot had been in the magistrate’s court the day of the accident, to answer a charge of buzzing the Bruny Island ferry in an aeroplane. I never discovered if he was found guilty.
Then with what remained of the day he decided to spread super. on a farm he knew.
What had brought him unstuck though, was that a new powerline had been installed, since he had last done a job there.
Many months later, I was called from Melbourne to give evidence to a magistrate’s hearing, I think in Hamilton. There I discovered there had been a second fatality in the accident: the pilot had installed his girl friend in the fertiliser hopper, as was the way in those pre occupational health and safety days. But I had no inkling at the time that she had suffered too. In fact when I think about it, I can’t recall seeing the hopper at all.

David Palmer
​May 2017

Elvis Presley, singing Wooden Heart played loudly at 1am, marked the start in 1961 of my year as a jackeroo on Coonong, a Riverina Merino stud.
   The melancholy song, played at full blast, came at the end of a one day 700 km three leg train journey from Terang to Melbourne, Melbourne to Tocumwal and Tocumwal to Bundure, a request stop on the line to Narrandera.
   Certainly the country side was little different at either end; treeless volcanic plains with 700mm of annual rainfall at Mortlake to a practically flat and treeless but drier and hotter 430mm rainfall spot in the Riverina.
    My last leg was on the Red Rattler, an antiquated but picturesque diesel rail motor, which ran up and down the line every day.
    I and my newly acquired sheep dog who was accompanying me, had been picked up by the station overseer, as it seemed everyone else normally on the property, was playing tennis or just playing up in Urana, the nearest town. It had and I think still does have a legendary tennis club.
   The situation was that I would be paid five pounds a week and live with five or six other jackeroos, around a flywire enclosed verandah, near the homestead.
   A cook came in every day to provide breakfast. Lunch was usually cold mutton for making our own take out lunches. The cook provided dinner at night which was usually based on meat from an old wether grazed on saltbush. A taste memory to savour and never boring.
I had previously worked on my family’s farm during holidays and fulltime for a year after I left school.
   We had Corriedale sheep, Hereford (beef) and Shorthorn (dairy) cattle as well as a bit of cropping.
   But that was on about 750ha and Coonong stretched across more than 17,000ha.
   I could ride most horses, drive tractors, cars and trucks and undertake most maintenance tasks reasonably well.
   But I’d not had a sheep dog before and in my time at Coonong I never really trained my dog to do the things I wanted it to do.
   Interestingly, I discovered two years ago at a Coonong jackeroo reunion, that Ken “Biscuits”Arnott, one of my fellow jackeroos, had nonchalantly without checking, sent his dogs into a shed to flush out 30 or so rams and they had left about a dozen inside. That got everyone in a panic for a while and embarrassed Ken no end.
   Meanwhile I had supposedly mustered a 5ha paddock near the homestead and managed to leave half a dozen sheep behind, which bugged me until 2015 when I heard Ken’s story.
   When I went out on a horse I nearly always carried a transistor radio in my saddle bag so I’m not sure I was all that well fitted to big station life.
   In fact I’d only gone to Coonong because my uncle was a great friend of Coonong’s manager in WWII and my parents thought it would be good for me. But during the year I wouldn’t have spoken more than 100 words to Mr Smith and in retrospect neither I nor the others, ever had a meal in the cavernous homestead.
   As a result of the wartime friendship, two of my cousins had preceded me to Coonong and it is strange now that I didn’t ask them what to expect.
   One cousin Oliver, too young to have a driver’s licence, regularly ferried people and goods 150 km or so to and from Wagga Wagga.  No one had thought to ask him if he had one. So in today’s terms of stringent occupation health and safety regimes, we were pretty laid back.
   Twelve months after arriving in the antique and picturesque Red Rattler, I left Coonong on the same conveyance, but continued on to Narrandera.  From there I had a sleeper on the night mail train to Sydney, where I met up with my family to help look after cattle we had at the Easter Show. In the harbour city I was a ‘new boy in town’ too.

 
David Palmer,
February 2017
 
 650!….

My mother Joanie and her slightly older brother Frank Austin, ran wild on their parent's farm near Narrandera in the Riverina.  They rode ponies all over and helped their father muster and drive mobs of sheep and cattle.  At other times they raced each other, jumped logs, climbed trees to get at interesting bird’s nests and made and sailed rickety rafts on a seasonal lake.
 
Joanie wrote all about that in her more or less last book, Memories of a Riverina Childhood, published by the University of New South Wales Press in 1993. 
 
That lifestyle never left Joanie when she moved in 1941 to the much more sedate western district of Victoria to become a farmer’s wife; she played polocrosse competitively for years and immersed herself in breeding stud Hereford cattle and running a mixed farm with husband Ken.
 
In the 1950s I smuggled an 1886 history of Hereford cattle out of the Victorian State Public Library and Joanie used that as the basis for an updated history of the breed, her first book.  I later smuggled it back.
 
From Plough to Porterhouse was published by Cheshire in 1966.
 
Then Joanie discovered Ken had the handwritten diary of his grandfather, who had arrived in Victoria in 1840 as a baby, and become a pioneer of the western district at Wando Vale near Coleraine in the 1850s.

Initially Joanie thought that it would just be a matter of tidying up grandfather in law’s grammar and adding the odd footnote.
 
But that became endless hours in the State Library and several years of work footnoting Bill Moodie's 124 page handwritten diary into a modern context.  It eventually filled 145 tightly typeset pages as William Moodie – a Pioneer of Western Victoria , published in 1973.
 
In 1975 Rigby published The Great Days of Wool by Joanie with illustrations by a friend of mine, David Symes.  Joanie's family had once controlled the genetics of 85 percent of Australia's Merino wool production and I think this involvement spurred her to write the book.  But what really made it were the illustrations of shearing sheds, sheep and wool people, drawn by David. Son of a clergyman, he too had caught the rural lifestyle recording bug.
 
Joanie's involvement with polocrosse meant she played on the same team as long time Olympic equestrian Bill Roycroft.  He made his debut with a team gold medal in Rome in 1960 on a horse called Our Solo.  On returning from Rome, Bill semi-retired Our Solo and gave him to Joanie to use on our farm.  Our Solo's history and eventual interment near Benalla, became in 1982, another albeit much shorter book called Our Solo.
 
My father Ken bought an old Cessna aeroplane in the early 1970s and because he had a slightly dicky heart, he taught Joanie how to land it in case he had an attack.
 
This led to Joan undertaking Goggles and God Help You, another largely diary-based book about the flying exploits of Frieda Thompson, an early aviation pioneer between the two world wars.  Again, extensive footnotes and additions made the text more readable for a modern audience.
 
Joanie was focussed on her writing all through her life, to the extent that she had a notice pinned to her front door, which said you weren’t welcome unless you had made an appointment. That caused a bit of friction with friends.
 
In the mid 1980s, in her early seventies, Joanie sort of got her head around computers, particularly recognising word processing software as a convenient way of making easy but often almost endless revisions to manuscripts.
 
But she never trusted them and always printed out whatever she had written.
 
Printers too could be contrary in those days and incurred her wrath, much as a particularly difficult typewriter had 20 years before.  She sort of typed the following when trying to get an old Remington stirring its stumps in the 1970s. I read this at her funeral in 2013.

​In between writing books Joanie kept up a constant flow of letters to newspapers, contributed plant and garden stories to gardening magazines and travel stories to the Women's Weekly.
 
Joanie’s output diminished in her 90s but she read The Australian from cover to cover every day and endlessly clipped and pasted items that interested her.  Her Benalla newsagent told her 40 years ago she was the only one in the city to get the Nation Review when it was around and I still get the fortnightly London Review of Books which she subscribed to for ages as well.

"Joanie" - Joan Palmer 1916 -2013

​​


​David Palmer
Benalla 
November 2016

Journalist David titled his entry to the Benalla Festival's 'The Sky's the Limit' writing competion in 2016 -

 ‘World’s best gliders seek soaring supremacy in Benalla’  
  
The exhilaration eagles and dolphins display, while surfing winds and waves for pleasure, have fascinated us for ever.
 
Palaeontologists believe pterodactyls with wingspans up to 7m, probably surfed waves of wind formed against mountain ranges millions of years ago. In comparison, humans have only fine tuned surf boards and gliders to roughly eagle and dolphin standards, in the last 50 or 60 years.
 
But you could say humans and wildlife now equally enjoy both types of waves together.
 
Terry Dillon of Benalla, Victoria, encountered that close connection when he was gliding near Bacchus Marsh, west of Melbourne. Initially he became alarmed when a wedge tailed eagle flew straight at him.
 
But it veered away at the last second and disappeared for a few minutes.
 
Then it reappeared to fly in formation just off his wing tip, clearly surfing the air waves the glider's wing generated, much as dolphins surf bow waves generated by ships.
 
Eagles can be aggressive in spring when young are hatching; just this year a 6kg Western Australian wedge tailed eagle smashed the Perspex of a glider’s cockpit in an attack.  Fortunately the pilot was able to eject it quickly before it injured him and he later landed safely.
 
Dell McCann, also from Benalla, farmed on the Delatite River east of Mansfield until early 2016. A couple of summers ago she was delighted to see eight eagles spiralling upwards in just one thermal.
 
Then the next thermal moved down the valley – they start forming in the Victorian Alps near Mount Buller then move west – and there were four more eagles climbing effortlessly at maybe 300m per minute in that one too.
 
The eagles must have come a long way to enjoy the thermals because she only knew of one pair nesting nearby.
 
In Benalla in January 2017, about 180 pilots from 29 countries will be flying some of the most advanced gliders, worth up to around $500,000, to compete in the world gliding championships held every four years. Quite possibly they will be encountering eagles as well.
 
It is not by chance that Benalla was chosen for the championships because the area has some of the best gliding conditions in the world.
 
Certainly there will be talk of “thermalling gaggles,” as pilots manoeuvre under cloud bases where the best lift is usually found, to avoid fellow competitors and gain the height they need to travel to the next thermal on their cross country races.
 
In the 1930s gliders lost one metre of height for every 15m they moved towards their destination in still air; current gliders have more than tripled that efficiency to achieve a 50 to one glide ratio.
 
Airliners surprisingly achieve 15 to 20 to one glide ratios if engines fail. That means that from a normal 35,000ft (10,700m) cruising level, a powerless airliner could travel up to 182km depending on destination ground level.
 
The glider altitude record was set at 15,445m in Argentina putting it well above airliners.
While gliders have been equipped with compasses, air speed indicators, altimeters and variometers for decades, the latter a device to indicate when air is rising or sinking, now colour LCD displays of varying sizes also provide information about what the air is doing as well as fronting multi channel GPS receivers for precise navigation.
 
An ever present question pilots ask on a cross country race is, am I high enough and particularly, am I high enough to reach the finish point, without chasing more thermals?
But ultimately the best glider pilots feel their aeroplane performs as an extension of their arms and legs; that skill commonly enables them to fly at up to 300km/hr over 1000km or more.
 
Last summer Tim Shirley, who retired to Benalla to pursue gliding to his heart’s content, flew from Benalla to Temora and then Hay in New South Wales, before returning on the final leg of his triangular course to Benalla.
 
That 750 km trip took him about seven hours as he side tracked to take advantage of thermals along the way.
 
But once he reached Yarrawonga on his return trip at 6000ft (1830m), he knew he had enough height to reach Benalla nearly 70km away, without seeking more thermals.
 


​David Palmer
October 2016
 

My mother, forever gardening, riding horses, cooking and helping on the farm, was always advising us to wash our hands. Apart from a bit later in life when she strongly advised me never to pick up a book in daylight hours - "it will suddenly be dark and you will have wasted a day", - gave me no other advice I took to heart anyway. (I still feel guilty picking up a book or even writing this in daytime despite today's dreary weather).
 
But observing current mothers, the wash your hands advice seems to be somewhat overblown, with soap being replaced as inadequate by litres of squirted on disinfectant. I'd love to know if their children are less afflicted with tummy complaints and diarrhoea than my generation was.
 
A friend of mine, who lives just a block away from here, goes on a couple of ocean cruises every year.  Twice in the last three years there have been two major outbreaks of digestive upsets, despite printed and broadcast warnings all over the ships, to carefully “wash your hands Geoffrey”. (Remember the TV ad for Solvol?).
 
So, given that most of the passengers are in their seventies and eighties, maybe my generation needs to lifts its game. I know I have become less attentive to the hands washing task then I once was, quite often not even using soap. But then I work on the theory that a regularly small E. coli infection, is probably useful at keeping a catastrophically large one at bay. Sometimes I have the odd tummy rumble but I haven't had a major attack for years so I have to assume I have it sort of right.
 
But my friend gets consistently upset when I just rinse plates and cutlery in cold water. I can't really blame her when I remember her horrible stories of all the whales - they can’t resist mountains of "free" on board food - beached on their bunks for want of greater adherence to better hand washing hygiene.
 
On another front my friend keeps at me about wearing my hearing aids.
 
I haven't been good at it. At Christmas last year I was in a NZ supermarket and after making a purchase the woman on the cash register said : "have you got a golf cart?" I thought this a rather odd question and told her I played with a buggy.
 
Sometime later my ex wife, with whom I was staying, told me she'd asked if I had a gold card which I think is a standard there for old age pensioners. Monica later still asked the woman, who she knew, if she'd had a dotty person in making funny answers to her gold card questions and filled her in.
 
David Palmer 1 August 2016.

To maintain a licence as a private pilot, it is necessary to undertake with an instructor, a flight review every two years to demonstrate that your flying capabilities haven't evaporated.
 
That normally requires between one and two hour's flying time when you will be required to demonstrate a steep turn, a stall and a recovery from it, a throttle off approach to a forced landing in probably a paddock and a real landing back at the airfield.
 
My last one here at Benalla, also involved a return flight to Albury, to demonstrate navigation ability or lack of it.
 
In the late 1990s I was producing a monthly magazine for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association at Bankstown airport. As a requirement of that role was a current private pilot's licence, I told my general manager that my currency was about to lapse if I did not again undertake a flight review.  As he was a licenced flight instructor, he said he would check me out.
 
In due course we borrowed someone's single engine plane - I do not remember paying for it or the GM's time - and I did the pre flight and radio checks before taxying to the runway.
So after a radioed clearance from the control tower, we took off, but only did one circuit of the airfield before landing and taxying back to the parking lot and shutting down. All of 15 minutes travelling on the ground and in the air.
 
My GM/instructor was just saying that was fine, when I looked down to undo my seatbelt and realised to my horror I hadn't even done it up in the first place. So much for the effectiveness of my preflight checklist, such as it was.
 
I think my boss just smiled and signed my log book to again make me a legal flyer for another two years.
 
Haven’t been able to fake it since though, partly because my original extremely conscientious and still current instructor from nearly 50 years ago, now lives near Benalla and is the most accessible person for doing a flight review of my abilities.
 

​The only time in my 74 years that I have been physically assaulted, was when a big boy of seven or eight and one of my contemporaries at school, had me on my back in a Mortlake street and was sitting on top of me. 
 
He probably pummelled me a bit and told me a thing or two about life - I've always been pretty naive - but I don't remember him hurting me in any way.
 
From that time though we parted ways, because a Catholic school started in town and he was part of its first intake, while I stayed at the state primary school.
 
61 years later I was in Melbourne editing a magazine called Earthmover and Civil Contractor and my editorial and picture in the magazine prompted that boy, Allan Hoy, to send me an email to see if I was indeed the same David Palmer.
 
Shortly afterwards in April 2011, we met for coffee near his office in Collins Street and for starters we naturally reminisced about our early lives in the small Western District town. 
 
Allan said suffering a displaced hip, playing football for Mortlake and subsequently missing months of school, had changed his life. Because he had missed so much school and was then 15, the school principal thought he might be better off in the workplace.
 
Fortuitously a job came up as supernumerary station assistant at the Mortlake railway station - one train a week but more than enough work for two people - and Allan got the job.
 
Nearly 60 years later he is still working in the railways but now in South Africa, Taiwan, South Korea, China and India as well as Australia.
 
Allan says that while he was not a good student at school, once he joined the Victorian Railways, he embraced the system which gave him the education he needed to do his job and live life to the full.  In 1965 he married a Mortlake girl and they had two daughters who each in turn had two children each.  
 
At the peak of his VR career in the 1980s, Allan was appointed to run the Melbourne Met, a job which entailed looking after 600 train drivers, 500 guards and all the Melbourne region's stations and signalling systems. 
 
Allan retired from the Victorian Railways in 1991, on the eve of a massive shake up and has been consulting around the world on railway operations since then.   
The spur railway line from Terang to Mortlake we enjoyed reminiscing about closed in 1978 and was later torn up.
 
Allan and I have stayed in contact since meeting for coffee in Collins Street in 2011.  
 
I did not then and have not since though, reminded him that he once "beat me up".
 

​Years ago my parents made friends with an English Hereford breeder and his wife when he came to judge the breed at the Royal Melbourne show.

A few years later, I was a student at an agricultural college in the west of England less than an hour's drive from their farm.  They very kindly offered me the use of a bedroom accessible from their farmyard so that I could come and go as I pleased, which I often did. 

Mick and his wife Bridget were obviously deeply in love but unfortunately had not been able to have children. Their cattle, a couple of horses and two whippets, were their children.  

I enjoyed walking around the cattle with Mick on their gorgeous farm and also going with them and their cattle to various county and smaller shows.  When I returned to Australia we kept in touch by letter and I even visited and stayed with them again a couple more times, not least because I married Bridget's god daughter.

As they got into their late seventies, Bridget became beset by ill health and in the late 1990s died quite suddenly.  Less than one week later Mick died too.  To me that was real heart break, because while his joints were not great, he was not really unwell.  I can't even come close to matching that heart break, although if one of my kids died it might be a close thing.

But I still get teary, thinking about my son and daughter in law's cat Nigel, dying while in my care a couple of years ago. He'd been off his food for a while and when I took him to the vet, she advised that it would be more humane to have him put down than try and mend him.  I agreed to that and she did the deed there and then.

I dug a hole in the back yard and can see his body now, curled up as if asleep, in the bottom of the hole. I still make my breakfast and take it back to bed to eat and he used to curl up on top of me the same way when I did that.

In fact I cried more when Nigel died than when my 96 year old mother died a year or so before him. But then she had had a full life, and convinced of an afterlife, was happy to face the end.

But six years was before Nigel's time and as they say, it just wasn't fair.