KerrieJean.com

You know the place, you love the place……..

And then, some smart talkin’ guy in a fancy automobile suddenly turns up to do a travel piece for a big city newspaper……..

And then…

Without shame, without any feelins’ for the good folk livin’, lovin’ and learnin’ in my irrigated hometown, Leeton, New South Wales, declares:

‘A personal favourite is the automated carwash on Kurrajong Avenue, a must visit for anyone wishing to remove the coating of red mud/dust that clings to every vehicle that spends a day or two around Leeton. An extended wash and brush up costs $12, including the psychedelic lashings of green, white and purple foam. Red mist might impress the four wheel drivers of Mosman but, as the exit signs says, ‘a clean car is a happy car’.

[Sydney Morning Herald, Traveller: http://www.smh.com.au/travel/activity/great-outdoors/soaking-in-the-wetlands-20111019-1m7i5.html

[Mister Huxley on assignment: Cr: State Library, Archives Florida: flickr]

Well, well, well Mister John Huxley………

No wonder there’re 450 inquiries into the Australian media simultaneously underway with operators like you on the loose……

Descending on law abidin’  towns with big expense accounts, struttin’ down main streets swingin’ big notebooks and pointy biros…..

….Demanding, with menaces, to be taken right now to local attractions.

You only had to ask nicely Mister Huxley……..

I note you went to our World Heritage/UN Swamp Mission listed swamps and popped into the ‘modest’ SunRice Visitors’ Centre.

But Mister Huxley, you gotta understand that highly significant swamps and free sample bags of  ‘Two Second Rice With Three Second Prunes’ do not a town make.

Nor – for that matter – does the zaniest car wash on the Pacific Rim.

Come again to Leeton at Christmas Mr Huxley.

Walk the mysterious laneways at the back of the shops on Pine Avenue.

There you’ll see the most magnificent examples of historic rusted corrugated iron fences outside of India……

…..Tap on the steamed up windows of young lovers parking on irrigation channel banks under the most stunning moonlit skies outside of Uzbekistan……

……..Go crazy during a night of bacchanalian alcopop driven dancing and loose talk in the auditorium of the Leeton Soldiers’ Club ['anyone for the Kokoda Trail?']

And Mister Huxley, we won’t be going anywhere near a car wash.

To leave Leeton with an automobile covered with mud just like a choc top icecream is a long held and very important traditon……

You only had to ask.

* A bonus audio extravaganza: Kerrie Jean visits one of Leeton’s World Heritage/UN Swamp Mission listed swamps: 

Episode 3: A Lovely Day At The Swamp

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Gee, can’t journalists be insensitive?

I ask you: have you ever been to a place only to discover that your trip to the carwash was the highlight? I doubt it, I really do.

What can we do to clean up journalism?

If a journalist was visiting your town, what would you really demand he/she report back on? [and please don't, don't tell me your town has the most exciting car wash anywhere]

I await your news. Report in by:

Just clicking on the ‘comment’ thingo and following the simple instructions. The place to write your gems is at the bottom of the last published comment. *A little bit of counsel for people new to this caper. Your email (just called ‘mail’ in this case) address does NOT come up on site. And just ignore the URL thingo.

Children want to fit in…..

But sometimes it’s not possible.

I’ve just discovered that a lobby group called Rainbow Schoolies will be agitating to make sure students of gay parents don’t feel strange when they make two Mothers Day cards -  or their Fathers Day cards feature sperm banks.

[http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/life/happy-fathers-day-mum--gender-restriction-a-challenge-for-gay-families-20111016-1lrfi.html]

Call me old fashioned…..but kids have always coped well  – on their own terms  – with parents of  ‘difference’.

Life goes on. No one gets too upset. No one goes beserk.

My father, Hec, was born in 1914.

It’s, of course, now common for fellas to hold off having children at least until they get their vasectomies reversed – whether that be in their forties, fifties or nineties.

But in the small irrigated township of 1950s Leeton, NSW,  Hec was launching his Fecundity Festival at the same time his peers were frantically arranging shotgun marriages or Papal annulments for their grown up children.

When I was born Hec was 45.

['In my dreams..' cr: Keene & Cheshire County photos: flickr]

In what was a stellar late breaking reproductive career,  he produced five lovely girls in a little more than six years.

Then – like so many brilliant late developing actors, singers or AFL footballers - he retired.

It was my difficult entry into the Catholic education system that confirmed My Dad was a freak.

As was family tradition, Hec delivered me into the clutches of angry, sweaty women in heavy black dresses and creepy long veils.

Tonnes of religious bling hanging from their thick leather belts clinked and clanked in the traditional Riverina  ’start of school year’  heatwave.

Was I having a nightmare in which magpies had grown to one hundred times their size?

No.

Looking around, I saw huge magpies hovering over many other kids.

But there was something else.

The fathers.

They were different to mine.

And it wasn’t just the missing teeth…….

They were jaunty with slicked back mullets, tight pants and - my goodness - some were even sidling  into the magpies…….

And the magpies liked it!

The harsh reality?

Me - five, Hec - 50, other dads 23-27, the magpies, indeterminate.

I did for many, many years want A Dad like all The Other Dads.

So much so that when the local Coles store ran a ‘Draw Your Dad’  Fathers Day competition my entry was of a young man with a mullet and missing teeth.

It won.

My interpretation of  Hec Ross writ normal was in the Coles window for two weeks.

Gwennie said the judges obviously had NO idea about anything.

I won a selection of ‘Old Spice’ products.

Hec didn’t want them.

He said no man worth his salt would walk around town smelling.

Even though he was very old, I thought he had a point.

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We all want to fit in, don’t we?

I still do but one thing’s for sure, my new mullet isn’t working very well towards this aim….not at all, not at all……..

Did you have parents that weren’t quite ‘right’ when conformity was the rule?

Isn’t it awful to think how embarrassed they made us?

Still…….fathering a child at age 45 in a country town in the fifties…..well I never!!!!!!

Feel free to report in on these issues – and anything else that takes your fancy. Do it by:

Just clicking on the ‘comment’ thingo and following the simple instructions. The place to write your gems is at the bottom of the last published comment. *A little bit of counsel for people new to this caper. Your email (just called ‘mail’ in this case) address does NOT come up on site. And just ignore the URL thingo.

*For those who’ve never mooned or met a mooner, it’s an act of provocation whereby a non-thinking person bends over pointing their buttocks in the direction of another person or persons.  Read on…..

And so it was that a family was partaking of what had quickly become - in contemporary times - a traditional Christmas luncheon…

…….Compliments of  Delicious.

…..Prawns in prawn jus, goat’s cheese flan with elderflower garnish, lobster kebabs with wasabi crust, rocket with rocket and kumquats with kumquat inspired kumquat sorbet.

This was an extended Australian family which loved each other despite terrible underlying tensions and gross intolerances.

…..Two nihilstic nephews, three swearing sisters, four Catholic jihadists, five antsy atheists, six Labor loonies, seven National nutbags – and not a peacenik in sight.

The conversation was driven by passion and hard liquor. 

The same unbridegable differences in political orientations, opinions about appropriate hem lengths and same sex/different postcode marriages, remained. 

A teenager at the table could take no more.

[Whose side are you on? Cr: National Archives, Netherlands:flickr]

Excusing herself from the kumquat with kumquat inspired kumquat sorbet she – as if on automatic pilot - got up from the table and – as if in a dream - sashayed outside.

Soon after, our warring Yuletiders fell silent.

Their eyes – as if one big eye - bulged.

Their fists – as if one big fist -thumped the air.

Collective shouts went up:

No, no NO!

Yes, yes YES!

There it was in sharp relief.

The teenager had reappeared, pushed against the sliding doors backgrounding our Christmas luncheon.

Mooning……

The Yuletide Mooning Incident saw the family split even more [if that was possible]

The Free Expressionists went head to head against the Moral Anti-Mooning Majority.

There were no winners.

As for The Mooner, she was frozen out of all family talk and activities for what became known as her Decade In The Mooning Wilderness.

I know she learned a lot there.

For The Mooner was me.

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To tell you the truth, I still feel bad about what I did that Christmas.

But watching ‘The Slap’ has eased the pain.

‘I just couldn’t help it’ was my defence back then – and it remains so now.

But, whose side are you on?

Was The Mooner justified?

Can Mooning ever be justified?

One thing’s for sure, every Australian family has a ‘The Slap’ like incident in its history.

And it’s about time you came clean about yours.Be brave.
Do it now by:

Just clicking on the ‘comment’ thingo and following the simple instructions. The place to write your gems is at the bottom of the last published comment. *A little bit of counsel for people new to this caper. Your email (just called ‘mail’ in this case) address does NOT come up on site. And just ignore the URL thingo.

The Leeton Redlegs Australian Rules Club’s glory period co-incided with my less than glorious adolescence….

I was soooo pathologically nervy, soooooo godamm ‘kookified’ it’s a wonder I’m not writing as the Pacific Rim’s only known survivor of early seventies spontaneous self-combustion.

But……I’m not here [thankfully in one piece] to boast about how a very tortured teenager conquered her fears, eventually exploding onto the highly competitive Riverina dating scene as an audacious, even gleefully obnoxious participant.

No.

I want to speak candidly about a highly charged sports fitness/public/private life debate which always erupted in my hometown whenever a football team of any code resurrected traditional and potent images of masculinity……and made The Finals.

The question?

In the pursuit of maximum testosterone payloads, vital on-field aggression and team coherence should players refrain from conjugal activities the night before The Big Match?

[Coach and team: Pre-grand final training session. Cr: National Library Ireland: flickr]

Everyone had an opinion. Everyone was right. Everyone got cranky.

And, as the big day loomed closer, things got downright ugly.  

The Pre Big Match Abstainer Bloc was made up of sports loving spinsters, clergy, lawn bowlers and 50 percent of club officials. 

They were persistent, mad – and bad.

They even spoke of  kidnapping finals footballers’ wives.

For twenty four hours before The Big Game, they’d be held in camouflaged [dirt covered] caravans in the local Dusty Retreat Van Park and Dirt Slide. 

Their only comforts?

Nine dozen Cadbury Milk Trays and 10 dozen bottles of vintage Porphyry Pearl.

The Pre Big Match match Pro Conjugal Lobby was an unlikely coalition of potential players, players, former players, human rights activists and 50 percent of club officials.

They [many for the first time] spoke of sacred and mysterious relations between man and wife.

And they invoked a breathtaking range of anthropological, literary and scientific sources in support of their argument. 

Those sacred and mysterious relations had served as powerful nerve settlers for sportsmen throughout history -  chariot drivers and gladiators in particular. 

Furthermore, how could you ask brave men to do something which had never – and would NEVER - be asked of young and fit members of a champion netball team?

And so it was that The Big Game would be played – and won or lost.

And I’ll tell you this………

Post The Big Match,  no one ever dared to re-ignite the Coital Conversation whatever the result.   

*About 10 years ago, I was recording a story about the Australian Rules Football Club in the Tasmanian mining town of Queenstown.

It’s a famous club and so it should be.

Games in Queenstown are played on Australia’s only gravel oval. [Mine site 'leftovers']

Anyway, I finally had the chance to ask  a coach of the ‘modern game’ era his view on the ’sacred relations before finals footy’ imbroglio.

He thought, he thought again……he leaned into the mike……..

“There’s tremendous pressure on the blokes in the lead up to Big Games. Tremendous pressure….. 

“My recommendation? ’Don’t change ya routine no matter what it is.’”

…………………………………………………………….

So, is it okay that sports administrators think they have the God given right to go into bedrooms of young Australian sportsmen?

….Or is it just another sign of the ‘win at any cost’ mentality that has taken over our fine sporting traditions?

While I’ve got your attention, many commentators are saying it was very, very disrespectful for the ABC to portray Mr Mathieson and Ms Gillard in an intimate moment under the Southern Cross.

My response?

I think it’s time we got a new flag.

Anything else going on in your life….terrible or terrific?

Do report in…… 

By:

Just clicking on the ‘comment’ thingo and following the simple instructions. The place to write your gems is at the bottom of the last published comment. *A little bit of counsel for people new to this caper. Your email (just called ‘mail’ in this case) address does NOT come up on site. And just ignore the URL thingo.

Forgive me Bindi Boo…..

I thought we’d been landed with the most unrepentant foul-tempered family pet on the Pacific Rim.

I now know it wasn’t your fault:

You were depressed.

['I know how Bindi Boo felt': cr: Smithsonian: flickr]

*Ed’s note: I am on the email media release list for Dogs NSW. Spokesman Dr Peter Higgins recently warned that depression in dogs was a real problem but with proper treatment, outcomes were good. St Johns Wart can be helpful.  Signs of dog depression include changes in temperament, loss of appetite and over sleeping.

Like most things arriving in Hec Ross’s fibro palace – new fangled electric foot ticklers, cherry ripe ’seconds’ where the cherry ended up on the outside of the chocolate, bottles of beer which exploded on human contact -  Bindi Boo fell off the back of a truck.

Not a good start for any Australian Silky Terrier.

But Hec wanted his five lovely girls to love something other than Ray Brown And The Whispers, bad local boys and dirty books like ‘Papillon’ [ya know where he put those drugs, ya know where he put those drugs!]

If Dr Higgins had been active in dog mental health when Bindi Boo came to us all those years ago he wouldn’t have mucked around.

He would have told Hec to get Bindi Boo onto a depression fighting regime pronto.

‘Fifteen parts St Johns Wart, one part Pal twice a day Hec.’

Instead, Bindi Boo’s mood swings had a devastating effect on everyone.

One minute he was happily baring his little razor sharp teeth while trying to stick his head through the bars of poor old Cocky Ross’s cage.

Cocky Ross had enjoyed for many years a  quiet - though useless life - in his simple digs near the back door.

If anyone didn’t deserve this sort of unprovoked upset, it was Cocky Ross.

Then without warning, Bindo Boo would turn his crazed emotions on anyone brave enough to be in the backyard.

A mere ‘Hello Bindi Boo’ would see him spring into the air while letting out blood curdling staccato growls.

There followed precision ankle biting landings.

Everybody in my family had bandaged ankles  – and unseemly track marks on their arms from too many Bindi Boo generated tetanus shots. 

Dr Higgins warns that dog depression is also manifest in loss of appetite.

That was NOT our experience with Bindo Boo.

I think his untreated depression had quite the opposite effect.

Bindi Boo demanded – under threat of violence - more and more Pal. 

Fearing greatle what he might do if the answer was ‘no’, we all became Pal pushers.

Bindo Boo got fatter and fatter.

He let himself go which, looking back, would have only increased his anger and anxiety.

Knowing what I know now, I feel sorry that we misdiagnosed Bindi Boo as a ‘bloody awful dog’.

He was really a ‘nice dog’ trapped in a ‘bloody awful dog’s mind’.

I cannot save Bindi Boo.

But it’s up to all of us to closely monitor the mental health of our – and our neighbours’ – current pets.

Before things really get Well Beyond Bluey.

For new visitors, if you liked/hated this story – you probably will like/hate this one. The natural world – and all of its wonders – is a very big part of our ‘Living, Loving, Learning’ theme.

http://www.kerriejean.com.au/2009/03/what-bird-did-that/

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Everybody says the Dog On The Tuckerbox stayed there because he was loyal – but perhaps he was depressed……….isn’t that an awful thought?

Is your pet depressed?

Why not?

If your dog was depressed would you opt for St Johns Wart or go all out with traditional anti-depressants?

Would you be brave enough to ask your pet this straightforward question: Are you depressed?

Perhaps you don’t believe dogs get depressed. Why on earth not?

Write to me…….it’s free and it’s easy. Do it:

Just clicking on the ‘comment’ thingo and following the simple instructions. The place to write your gems is at the bottom of the last published comment. *A little bit of counsel for people new to this caper. Your email (just called ‘mail’ in this case) address does NOT come up on site. And just ignore the URL thingo.

If this wasn’t the worst way to end my week……

…….Which, quite frankly, already hadn’t been what you’d describe as  ’stellar’……..

The email from kerriejean.com field correspondent, Roma Street, was tagged ‘urgent’ -  its brevity only adding to the drama:

KJ – I read in *’The Irrigator’ that Leeton has just become the proud possessor of its first set of traffic lights.

What do you make of this development?

[*Award-winning bi weekly newspaper of my hometown in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, Murray-Darling Salinity Basin, NSW]
http://www.irrigator.com.au/news/local/news/general/towns-first-traffic-lights-are-installed/2212227.aspx

For all on the Pacific Rim and in the Free World this is what I make of it, this is what I make of it…………..
I am sad, angry, confused, fearful, perplexed, nervy, twitchy, itchy, hollow, all-at-sea and feeling in need of a facelift before my time………….

[Is there no amber in life? cr: US National Archives: flickr]

WHAT NEXT?

A Dan Murphy’s emporium on the site of the historic Temperance Union Hall……..?

…A  soccer ball the size of the Hindenberg flat bang in the middle of the historic Leeton Redlegs Australian Rules Football Club rooms?

……An Aldis superstore on the site of my historic adolescent groping site, the Roxy Theatre….? 

God help me.

God help my hometown.

*And thank you Chadwick for this missive……if there’s one time I need some philosophical ponderings it is now……….

‘The emergence of traffic lights in Leeton is a national disgrace.

Before, we had a fair rule for all: give way to the right or die….

Give way to the right was obeyed, drunk or sober.

Now wankers will say: I was just crossing on the amber.

Amber?

There is no amber  in life.’

*********************************

Oh dear, dearie me………

A terrible start to the weekend………

Please tell me: do you feel old too? 

Is there really no amber in life?

Tell me……..do it by…….

Just clicking on the ‘comment’ thingo and following the simple instructions. The place to write your gems is at the bottom of the last published comment. *A little bit of counsel for people new to this caper. Your email (just called ‘mail’ in this case) address does NOT come up on site. And just ignore the URL thingo.