​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

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 boyfriend.

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

​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.

​​'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.

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

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.

​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.