First Impressions

It was very hot in Adelaide on the day of our arrival exactly four weeks after our departure. We arrived in the morning of the 26th February 1963 and the heat of the day was beginning to make itself felt. How could people live in this place? It was the heat of a desert. What kind of hell had we come to? We’d travelled through the equator and the heat didn’t seem this bad. In time you get used to it, or get used to tolerating it. I still hate the hot weather. I hate it when people say, “Isn’t it warm.” No, it’s not warm; it’s fucking hot! Why aren’t people more honest? You dress for the weather, and wash more often.

Joe knew how to dress for the hot weather. He had been living in Adelaide for two years before we had arrived. On those hot summer days living in Rostrevor I would often see him gardening or cutting the grass with an old Pope lawn mower. It’s not that he was a keen gardener. He said he just wanted to keep the place tidy. You would often see him in the summer months wearing khaki shorts with the legs rolled up, no shirt, and a pair of thongs on his feet. He was probably trying to get a tan. This was in the days when people gave little regard to skin cancer. I’d see him marching up and down behind the mower. Every now and again he would draw up from the back of his throat something that probably looked as disgusting as it sounded, and without breaking stride he’d lean over and spit a gob into the garden. He also had a unique style of nose blowing. With just a slight lean to the side lest there be an accident, a finger on one side of the nose shutting off a nostril, a good quick blow, and out it would all come onto the ground. He could also do this without breaking his stride. Actually, now that I think upon it, he always did this on the same patch of the garden. I wonder who did the weeding there.

Our welcoming party at the dockside in Adelaide’s Outer Harbour comprised Joe, Alf, Cathy and Eddy Paterson and their two sons. We were escorted to Cathy and Eddy’s house in suburban Lockleys, for drinks and munchies. Cathy is Australian; Eddie was born in Scotland but met and married Cathy in Australia. They married and their two sons Robert and Brian were born in Australia. The house at Lockleys was kept very dark. All the blinds and curtains were shut tight, and this was the middle of the day. We thought this to very odd behaviour, not understanding the reasoning behind it. This, of course, was simply an attempt to keep the heat of the day out, but at the time we thought it bizarre. Here was the first gathering of the clan, as it were, and this group of people is trying to converse, and they could hardly see one another in the gloom. Someone later made the comment that they wondered if they were in mourning. Of course, this is one of the techniques used to keep the place cool, and it works quite well. There was a lot to learn in this new land.

There was an unusual occurrence very early in our time in Australia. Of course, as a twelve year old at the time, I may not have been aware of all the circumstances. However, let me relate the experience, and you can form your own impression. We must have been in Australia for no more than a few months, and Cathy had invited my mother to lunch, which is a rather nice thing to do. I tagged along with her because I had nothing to do. It was a bit of an effort getting to her house in Lockleys, having to take two buses followed by a longish walk from the bus stop to her house. The weather was still very hot, and it was a relief to get to her house. We were invited into the kitchen for lunch. There was just the three of us. Cathy served the food almost immediately from the stove, and placed it before us. She had prepared a Mornay of some kind. It was like a kind of meaty dhal, and it was very tasty. We sat and ate the food while Cathy stood nearby and watched. My mother asked why she didn’t join us, but she said she had already eaten. I expect there must have been some conversation between my mother and her, but I don’t actually recall. So, there we were, two people invited for lunch, eating the meal that was prepared, and our host standing to the side watching us. And how long does it take to eat a meal? Possibly, about ten minutes; perhaps fifteen minutes if you taking your time and there was a bit of preparation and serving time involved. Then when we were finished she dropped the heaviest hint possible for us to leave by announcing she had work to go to. So we left within half an hour of our arrival. We walked to the bus stop puzzled by the experience, wondering what had just happened.

Cathy and Eddy had a modest house and pleasant furnishings if not a bit conservative. Everything was neat. The house was neat. The garden was neat. There were hens out the back too in a well-kept and tidy coop. I had never seen a hen this close before, and I was fascinated. It was like having your own zoo at home. I had no idea chooks never died of old age. There was a small patch of lawn in the back yard, and that’s where I had my first and last game of cricket.

The square of grass growing in the back yard was framed neatly within a concrete footpath, as if in a huge picture frame. It was set lower than the footpath. This had apparently made the grass difficult to cut close to the raised footpath, because the wheels of the lawn mower would get in the way. Alf took pride in telling us he had concreted the edging. He had solved the problem by cementing a strip, lower than the footpath, but at the same level as the grass. The mower’s wheel could run along this strip. The strip was painted green to match the colour of the grass. I wonder why they didn’t just dump a couple of tons of soil on the top of the existing grass, and let it grass grow through. After all, Eddy was proud of the fact he had never planted a lawn, but just kept mowing the weeds. Alf stayed with Cathy and Eddy when he arrived in Australia with Joe. Joe had to find his own digs. Maybe Alf’s effort in laying the cement edging was in payment for his keep. Alf was one of the more stingy relatives.

My mother used to laugh at the number of times Alf would come visiting us, in Newton, just before lunch or dinner was due to be served. I don’t think she minded too much, but the favour was never reciprocated. He didn’t call often, but when he did, he would arrive on the doorstep, almost like clockwork, about a half hour before lunch.

Alf was always interested in ‘the lassies’ and that would be the conversation a lot of the time. I went with him to a pub-dance once. It was essentially a pick-up joint, and it was the most horrible and boring thing I have ever been to. Not my cup of tea. You had to almost fight to get to the bar, pay too much for a drink that you couldn’t drink in comfort because of the squeeze of the crowd, and you could barely hear yourself speak above the loud music. It was a dead loss, no one was interested in us, and I think I would only be half interested in anyone who would go to a place like that in the first place.

I became interested in the Folk scene in Adelaide and would sometimes see him at the occasional folk festival or folk club. I wouldn’t doubt he was less interested in the folk music and dancing than he was in meeting someone. That’s not an unusual situation; I was interested too. I must admit to loving the dancing, and didn’t really mind so very much about not having a date, just so long as the person I was dancing with could actually dance. I think Alf had an opposing perspective. I suspect all his exploits failed, and he used an introduction agent to meet someone, and married a Malaysian woman; a mail order bride.

Anyway, just to get back to what I was talking about. It was our first day in Adelaide, and we had been invited to Lockleys for munchies. Robert and Brian were probably as bored as I was, and invited me to play with them in the back yard. They were actually quite good company. They had some cricket stumps set up on the square of lawn out the back, and they invited me to play. I didn’t know what cricket was. I knew it was something the English engaged in, but that was about it.

I never really liked sport when I was in Scotland, and the only game I’d actually had anything to do with, which I hated when forced to play at school, was football (soccer). I did everything I could to avoid it, and could not understand the interest people had in running after balls of varying shapes and sizes. Though, in later years I had rather poor luck at hitting golf balls, but a lot of fun trying. I later discovered squash and enjoyed it immensely, and squash was indirectly responsible for my meeting Stephanie. My lack of interest in football may well have disappointed by father, but he never said anything. He was an avid fan of the game, and spent many hours in front of a blaring TV or standing in the cold at the match. I was vaguely aware of rugby but had no idea of what it was, and even less interest in finding out. My brother was introduced to rugby in Scotland, and loved it. It was not a sport with much of a following in Scotland as I recall, and possibly that was why it was being promoted. It may have been introduced to broaden students’ appreciation of different sports. John took to it from the beginning. Unlike soccer, which requires a great deal of skill and dexterity to get the ball past an opponent, and is for the main part a non-contact sport, much of rugby requires a player to hold the ball and physically ram through the opposing team, and is in fact a very different sport requiring a very different approach to the game. It was an approach that John took to immediately, and the sports teacher at the time commented on when watching him play. When John had the ball and was running with it, the opposing side they provided no real opposition to him. They were probably looking for an opportunity to tackle him as they might have been done in a football game, but John clung to the ball and ran at them, and ran through them, and the sports teacher was encouraging him calling out, “That’s right. That’s the way. Keep going.” He continued his interest in Adelaide and joined a rugby club as a young man after leaving school.

For me, back then, the word ‘cricket’ was a new term entirely. I was put on to bat, probably because I was a guest at their house. Why this could be considered a favoured role, I had no idea. Robert was bowling. Brian was fielding. Trying hard to remember how to hold the bat, I watched the (tennis) ball come flying towards me. I gave the bat a good old swing, it made contact in what would seem, by chance the most perfect hit I could have hoped for, and off it soared over their heads and over the back fence. Brian yelled, “Six,” and took off after it. Six what? I only hit it once. There was a gate in the back fence, and he raced out and was gone for about five minutes. He eventually returned without the ball. So that was the end of the game. My fabulous innings may have left an impression, and we got on famously thereafter. The curious thing I noticed from that brief meeting with Robert and Brian was that they seemed to enjoy each other’s company. I observed them later when they visited us at Rostrevor, and wondered how it was that they played together without fighting. Sure they would have their tiffs, but it never lasted. This of course, contrasted markedly between my brother and me.

Shortly after our initial welcome at Lockleys, we bundled our things together and left for suburban Rostrevor to where Joe had his house. One of the first priorities of the day was to organise the sleeping arrangements, and to accommodate this, a quick visit to the city to buy some beds, mattresses and so forth was required.

Joe had a three bed-roomed house. My grandparents were allocated the main bedroom, and two single beds were put in there. I’m almost positive they had a double bed in Scotland. Maybe someone snored. June got her own bedroom, because, well, she was June, and couldn’t possibly share. Vic and my brother shared the third bedroom. The lounge was used as a fourth bedroom for my mother and me. There was a large steel garage on the property that was used as accommodation. A dividing wall had been erected inside to shut off the workshop, to form a makeshift bedroom, which became temporary accommodation for my father and Joe. The garage was extremely hot inside in the summer months. The sun beating down on the metal structure left it feeling like a furnace inside. Fortunately, it cooled as quickly in the evening as it heated during the day. In time, some insulated panelling was fitted to the walls and ceiling, but it remained a hothouse.

It was truly charitable of Joe to live in the shed during this time. I can understand my father having to do this, but it was Joe’s house after all, and here he was roughing it. I wonder why Vic didn’t go out there. Was this an obligation of some kind? These arrangements remained for the two years we stayed there. Though, there was still really no room for Joe inside the house when we moved out. Our departure created a lounge room in the house, and with John’s absence allowed Vic more space. Joe didn’t get a room in his own house until June left when she married Leo.

I was slotted into a class at the local primary school. John wanted to go to a technical school rather than a high school, and ended up having to peddle miles on his bike to get to Norwood Boys Technical High School. My father’s first job in Adelaide was labouring for a construction company. A temporary bridge was being built linking a small island to the mainland near Adelaide’s main port area. Torrens Island was the site for a new electric power station, and the temporary bridge was to provide access over a swampy, mosquito-ridden, tidal estuary. He spent a lot of his time wading in the swampy water whilst timber posts were driven into the riverbed. My father assisted the pile-driver operator. I gather he was invited to stay on with the company, but their next project was in the bush in some remote country region, and he would have had to live away from home for several months until the project was finished. My father was a strong man, and had the ideal physique for this type of work. I’d watch him working in the garden. He just kept going and going with a pick or shovel. He never seemed to tire.

Labourers could make a killing by working in the bush. He should have stayed with that company he worked for at Torrens Island, and gone with them to work in the country. The conditions would have been terrible with heat, dust, flies, and long hours, but the money to be made in these places is astonishing. Could the conditions have been any worse than he experienced as a coal miner? That was a dirty job. It was unhealthy, dangerous, and there were cave-ins, and major disasters in the mines. In fact, Valleyfield was one of the pits he worked. The pit was close to the Firth of Forth, and I think some of seams ran under the water, and as a consequence the mine continually leaked seawater. This pit suffered a major diaster years before, possibly due to the water seepage, but fortunately for him he just had near miss experiences and minor injuries. Working in the bush would have been a breeze for him, and after a couple of years he could have come back with a very healthy bank balance. I gather my mother didn’t like the idea of his working in the bush. He eventually got a job at the car manufacturer, General Motors (Holden). He was a storeman, and later drove a forklift with this company. He stayed there until he retired.

My father was a surprisingly versatile individual in some ways, but in other ways, he just didn’t seem to have a clue. There were occasions when he demonstrated skills it seemed as though he may have missed his calling, and perhaps he could have done better than labouring throughout his working life. On a number of occasions, GMH was shut down because of strike action, during his time there. One strike lasted for about five or six weeks. That’s a long time to do without an income. He put some stepladders on the car roof rack, and took off with buckets and cleaning materials. He parked the car in some wealthy suburb, knocked on the doors, and offered his services as a window cleaner and odd job man for anything that needed doing. The cash in hand helped get them through. After a while he won some regular window-cleaning customers that continued long after the strike finished. He also bumped into the odd commercial window-cleaning contractor that no doubt resulted in a few heated exchanges. During this period, one of the odd jobs was digging a hole for a swimming pool. It seemed that his rates were cheaper than the cost of bringing in a contractor with a mechanical digger. He also had some relevant experience as a swimming pool excavator.

There wasn’t a much of garden to speak of at Joe’s Rostrevor house, in those early months in Australia. My father would willingly lend a hand when required. He knew how to swing a pick, and was capable of do this kind of work for hours on end. For as long as I knew him, he had calluses on his hands. I’d watch him working. See him rest every now and again, stretching his back, spitting on his hands and slapping them together, before continuing. “It helps protect the skin,” he said. I doubt if gloves were ever considered.

The hot Australian summer seemed particularly intense that first year. It just never seemed to go away. Inevitably, conversation shifted to the appeal of a swimming pool in the back yard. Everyone thought it would be a great idea, and without too much discussion my father was in the back yard with the pick and shovel digging a huge hole in the ground. It was all talk, and whilst a pool in Adelaide is a very sensible idea, there was no real commitment. He spent weeks digging it, no one else helped, and after a while, he was asked to stop. The five foot deep hole in the ground eventually became a sunken garden. Years later it was filled in.

There wasn’t a lot of respect for my father amongst my mother’s family. Despite the camaraderie Vic and my father seemed to enjoy on board the ship during the voyage to Australia, and also during the first few years living in close quarters at Rostrevor, it turns out that Vic didn’t have much regard for my father. In a heart-to-heart between my mother and me, she told me how Vic thought she could have done better than marrying him. I suspect that’s probably correct, but rude scarcely describes the comment. I could never understand why she married him. Though, as I think about it, perhaps he could have done better too. They didn’t seem to have much in common. They were often getting into arguments, and at times yelling matches would ensue. He would also fall out of favour with Vic or Joe on various occasions. Vic would go into a huff. Joe would snap at him, “Get your facts right.” It’s true; he sometimes did push the realms of probability a little too far. My mother said he was responsible for loosing her friends. She told me that not long after they were married they would be invited out by her friends, and he inevitably got into arguments with them. She said he embarrassed her and the arguments resulted in a loss of friendships. The relationship between my brother and father was always fragile. There was an occasion when he and John got into an argument when we were all living at Newton. I have no idea what it was about. I wasn’t interested. I just remember a yelling match going on in the lounge room, and went in there to see what was happening. I got there just in time to see John taking a lunge at his father. It didn’t actually get to the stage of blows being exchanged because my mother who was also present quickly pushed herself between them, but there was certainly a lot of heavy pushing and shoving going on. And yet, there were times when he saved the day. For example, June was very upset with her approaching wedding to Leo, complaining it was going to be a failure. June made a life long practice of being dour; a bit of a whinger. In the end, my parents organised her wedding, and my father volunteered to be the MC at her reception. He did a fine job, and I gather the event was very successful. There are not too many people who are confident in centre stage behind a microphone in front of dozens of people, but he carried it off.

He was a freemason and an active member of his lodge, the Torrens Valley lodge, and eventually held the position of Master, which by all accounts is no mean feat. There was a time when I was trying my hand as a contractor offering welding services. I had also advertised for sale a range of wall and floor safes I had been making. This was me hoping to strike it rich. They were of reasonable quality if I do say so myself, and well priced too. I copied and improved the design of the commercially available safes that were available at the time. I made them for a city locksmith and security business in Adelaide, and they put them on display in their shop window, but they weren’t exactly selling like hot cakes. I subsequently realised that there was a very limited market for such things. They just weren’t selling as quickly as I would have liked. So, I arranged to take some samples to a nearby market, and asked my father to come along and help out. I had no experience with this sort of thing, and was willing to stand by and wait for people to approach and perhaps make a sale. However, I planned an inducement to get the punters interested. I had made a sign to put on top of one of the safes that was fitted with a combination lock. The sign was painted up with large lettering having words to the effect that if anyone could open it they could have it as their prize. I also had some leaflets to give away. The trouble with the market crowd was that most of the people who approached our stand wanted something for nothing, and had little interest in what I was selling. Though, it was funny watching people trying to unlock it. They had no idea of what they were doing. They were turning the dial one way, then the other, putting their ears to the door to listen for clicks or whatever. No clicks, nothing to hear. In fact, combination locks are really rather tedious to open and you have to make an annoyingly lot of complete turns of the dial in the process of unlocking them and if you loose count, your done for. In fact, if you rotate the dial a degree too far, you’ve done your dash and you have to start again. It’s nothing like you see people doing in the movies with a few quick spins this way, then other way, and back again and its open all within a few seconds. My father took a different approach. He barked in a loud voice the various wares that were for sale like a seasoned stall owner at a fish market. He could make his voice boom when he wanted to, and used it to call out what was for sale, how much and how good the quality was, and any punters who approached got the full treatment from him. He would soften his voice as they approached, and espouse the various attributes of the safes. It was a sight to behold. I didn’t make any sales that day, but a few people who took pamphlets got back to me for special jobs they wanted. So, it wasn’t a complete loss. Maybe my father should have been in sales. But for all that, there were some things he just couldn’t do.

He tried woodwork with only limited success. My mother had encouraged him to learn woodworking, and got her father to teach him a few things. My grandfather was a retired tradesman. This was shortly after we arrived in Australia, and though this plan seemed reasonable enough if only because we lived in the same house, it wasn’t a good idea because of the personality clash. I suspect this was an attempt to get out of the rut of labouring for a living. Though, you can’t really learn a trade within a few weeks. Her father was a cabinet maker and he had made many pieces of furniture for the home. I wonder if my mother was jealous of her mother. My father did eventually make a few pieces of furniture mostly through attending enrichment classes at the local technical college, and although some pieces would have been described as serviceable, most had flaws. They would either be out of square or the veneers he used would lift at the corners, or the pieces would wobble on the floor.

I did an apprenticeship as a motor mechanic in my youth. What a mistake. I suspect my father assumed this meant I would be his personal mechanic who would fix his various car problems. This is a somewhat reasonable expectation, but hell, not all the time. My solution was to coach him in the ways of basic automotive repair. I would do the work, and he would watch what I did. I got him to take notes, and the plan was that on the next occasion we would share the task, and there after, for routine things, he would be able to do the work himself from his experience and notes. Anyway, that was the plan. I wanted some time for my own interests. Was I selfish in not doing everything for him – maybe, maybe not? Anyway, he could never seem to retain a memory of what to do next. Maybe he was faking and just wanted me to do it.

Here’s another example. My father was in the masons, as I’d mentioned. I never joined. I think he was disappointed in that. He knew John was never going to join because that would be too much like sharing an ideology with his father; something to be avoided at all costs. He didn’t want to have anything in common with his father. In fact, it distressed him as a child to have the identical name to his father. I could never understand why parents inflict this ‘honour’ of naming their children after someone else in the family. There was also the problem as a consequence of both father and son sharing the same name, whenever one of them was called, there were inevitably two heads popping up to see who was calling. The solution which developed was to refer to them as Big John and Wee John. This, possibly belittling label was subsequently changed. There used to be television program we watched as children in Scotland, and one of the presenters name was named Jonathan. To ease his distress, my mother suggested John be called Jonathan. He liked the name and it stuck. Of course, nothing could be done about his surname until he was an adult, but as soon as he could, he changed the spelling of his name from Crichton to Crighton. Anyway, to continue, I could never see the point of freemasonry. You often hear people talking about the masons giving their secret handshake and so winning a job or getting a promotion over some non-mason. There’s no denying this; it happened. I knew people who joined, not because of their personal beliefs of such things, but simply to get introductions to give them a leg up the career ladder. This was distasteful to me. I had no interest in the religious element of freemasonry, and was less than impressed by the discrimination it practiced. There is an annual cycle associated with the lodge, from their monthly meetings to the installation of a new Master. It was the latter which had the greatest ceremony. It’s a big event for those concerned, particularly for the incoming master. One of the curious customs they had in Adelaide was the provision of a souvenir of the event. I’m not quite sure what else to call it. The name of this custom is probably one of their secrets. Freemasonry is steeped in secrecy. I don’t know if the custom of providing these masonic keepsakes was supported in other lodges, but it was certainly an item in my father’s lodge. I think all the masons going through the process in the years he was involved all wanted to outdo each other. Of course, this memento of the event had to be made and paid for. There was no funding for this. If you wanted to be master, then you put up the brass and paid for these things yourself. He ended up settling for the ‘square and compass’ that is one of the symbols of freemasonry. His idea was to glue two wooden ice-cream sticks together at right angles after they had been suitably shaped to look like a try square, and do the same thing with another pair of ice-cream sticks which had also been shaped into points to look like a compass. These two pieces were then glued onto a tiny cube of wood that became the base so that the thing would stand upright, displaying the square and compass masonic icon. It was varnished, and a tiny piece of typed paper with my father’s name, the lodge name and date of installation, and maybe a few other details was glued onto the base. It was little more than a trinket that was destined to be a dust catcher. When you have about a hundred and fifty or so members coming to your installation, as he did, that’s a lot of keepsakes to be provided, and the making of them could be expensive in time if not money. Anyway, my father was talking to Peter about the idea he had for these things. He had gone through all the various ideas and options with him, and asked him, “Do you think you could make something like that?” “Of course, it would be easy,” was Peter’s reply. It would just need this and that and whatever else. That was all the invitation he needed, and quickly followed it with, “Oh, good. I’ll need a hundred and fifty of them, please.” Peter’s jaw fell open. I must say, there is a certain skill in this kind of interaction, or is it just a method of loosing friends. I can’t quite decide. Perhaps gall is another description.

It didn’t take long to notice differences in cultures. Possibly the most noticeable was the Australian accent. It was such a hoot relaying the day’s experiences of being misunderstood and how the Australian accent sounded. Typical of this was the joke about the hungry bloke, a non-Australian individual, that is, who goes into a snack bar for something to satisfy his appetite. Looking around the shop he picks up a few chocolate bars from the racks, but wants something more substantial, and thinks to himself he’d like a pie, and asks the shopkeeper, “Do you have a pie?” “Of course you have to bloody pay,” demands the shopkeeper (‘pay’ pronounced as pie). Australians often seem to pronounce pie and pay in the same way. I thought the bus conductor was deliberately humiliating me on one occasion. The fare to the city was 1/9d. when we arrived in Adelaide. I asked for my fare, and thought I said, “One and nine pence, please.” (I probably really said something like, “wannninems.”) The conductor looked blank and said, “I beg your pardon?” and the conversation went on:
“Wannninems.”
“Pardon?”
“Wannninems.”
“Pardon?”
“Wan-n-nine-ms.”
“Pardon?”
“Wan an nine ems.”
My accent must have been thick, and the lilt I would have had in my speech, as a Fifer, would have made it worse. Of course, by this time other people on the bus were beginning to turn and take interest in the exchange. I think the conductor finally worked it out by guessing where I wanted to go. It was all rather embarrassing and confusing; didn’t these people understand English!

My grandmother kept the company of a Scottish woman she met while on board the Stratheden. They were both about the same age, and I recall often seeing them sitting together in one of the lounges. They were often engaged in conversation, or so it seemed. My grandmother was from Glasgow with her own distinctive accent. Her friend was from some other part of Scotland with her own particular accent. It turned out that neither one of them knew exactly what the other was saying half the time. Just a nod here and there and the occasional “uh huh” between them was all that was required to keep them happy. This was my grandmother’s own story. I’m not just being patronising. Although, following our arrival it was surprising the number of people who seemed incapable of understanding what we said, some of whom suggested we were speaking a foreign language, and they had the cheek to ask if we could understand English, “I-can’t-un-der-stand-what-you-are-say-ing.” they would say, pronouncing each syllable separately and speaking slightly louder as though we were deaf, “Can-you-speak-Eng-lish?” What stupid bastards.