Passing Clouds

by Graeme Leith

  The weather seemed fine to me, but the skipper and his mate were apparently enjoying a few days on land after their last trip, which had apparently been rough. The idea seemed to be that you stayed in the pub until you tired of it and then set off no matter what the weather. So I had to hang around the pub for a couple of days until the skipper was ready to leave; my shack was only 10 miles away so it wasn’t hard for me to stay in touch.

  One morning the skipper decided he’d had enough and we set off into a howling gale, the weather so bad that the other inexperienced man succumbed to seasickness of such virulence that we put him off at an island with a sleeping bag, some water and food, promising to pick him up after the trip, and we bashed through the waves to the fishing grounds.

  The weather subsided enough to bait up the longlines and we were ready to fish. The job of baiting up hundreds of hooks with smelly salmon on a heaving boat, with a hangover and the smell of diesel in my nostrils, trying to fight off seasickness, was not pleasant. We fed out the longlines from the baskets in which they were coiled and sailed back to the beginning of the drop and, as on the cray boat, we cleaned the decks, had something to eat and a lie-down, then began retrieving the lines and their catch of sharks with the aid of a rotating winch. This was quite a tricky job, avoiding the bare hooks, then bleeding and gutting the sharks and flinging them into the freezer.

  I was glad when, after two days and nights, it was over and we could sail back to retrieve our little seasick Robinson Crusoe from his island. He was still green around the gills when we collected him and not happy to be boarding the boat, but his alternatives were limited. Worse was to come for him, however, for the wind blew up again and we had to seek refuge in a cove on the mainland. It was a troubled night, but in the morning the wind subsided and we cleaned up the boat, throwing the offal and unused bait over the side, preparatory to departure. A weak sun began to shine and I decided to have a quick swim, but just as I was about to launch myself into the water, I saw, lying under the boat, the unmistakeable shape of a gigantic shark. That was the end of swimming for the day—I was to remain filthy.

  We headed back to Stanley and the skipper decided that I should drive the boat while he and the first mate got out some large bottles of beer and started drinking them. I had noticed that the skipper had a very long belt around his waist and I was now about to find out its purpose: with one end embracing his waist, and the other wrapped around the large metal stanchion in the wheelhouse, he was able to urge me to put on more speed. The two big Perkins diesel engines responded to the throttles and the big steel-hulled boat crashed through the waves and swamped the decks and the windscreen, while I clutched the wheel for dear life and the skipper drank more beer and urged me on. It was an exciting ride, but I was very glad to see the huge shape of The Nut at Stanley loom up through the spray and rain, and could back off the throttles.

  Bloody workplace

  In many ways reluctantly, for there were several loves to leave in Tasmania, I moved on to my next job at Longford, near Sale in eastern Victoria, to work on the installation of a new section of the Esso gas plant. I was still supporting the family, so I needed the extra money construction work gave me, for my lifestyle wasn’t cheap. There were not many wine and food adventures there, but I did have the opportunity to buy the entire stock of a pub cellar that had been flooded. There were hundreds of bottles, from chiantis to Hunter Valley semillons to South Australian reds, and I got them for a song as most had lost their labels (although it was not difficult to identify the chiantis after experiencing them on the Castel Felice).

  Vosje was then, in 1969, living with her new partner, Rod Parker, and our children, Ondine and Sebastian, at 453 Canning Street in North Carlton. Rod was in the process of purchasing the house from the Richardson family, a large and lively clutch of music- and food-loving vegetarians who always had pots of delicious things simmering on their slow combustion stove to the accompaniment of taped classical music.

  The Richardsons had a young friend named Vicki Barclay, who then became a friend of Rod and Vosje. She was a gregarious and fun-loving girl who would sometimes babysit Ondine and Sebastian. I came to know her quite well—so well that I fell in love with her and, despite the difference of ten years in our ages, we got on like a house on fire. Over the following years we had good times and holidays. Once she came on a fly-fishing hike over Wild Dog Tier in Tasmania, where we were trapped by a blizzard for some days as we were about to break camp, our supplies being almost exhausted. Four of us males and Vicki had to hike out of that unforgiving country for many hours, with empty bellies, in the snow and rain. Not surprisingly, Vicki succumbed to hypothermia, and the rest of us were very close to doing the same. We had a hire-car parked on the bleak shore of Lake Augusta, and had it not been there the outcome would have been fatal for some of us.

  There were warmer times, too, of course, and every weekend I would return from Longford to Drummond Street in Carlton, and we’d eat at home at Vicki’s flat, or we’d go to Jimmy Watson’s in Lygon Street, or Dennis Conroy’s Borbles restaurant in Elgin Street; veal zingara smothered with roasted capsicums was a favourite.

  I was pleased when my mate from the Tasmanian days, Rod Williams, arrived in Sale with his wife Cheryl so that he could join the team at Longford, for we needed a skilled electronics technician. But in August 1970 at Longford things were about to change catastrophically. Tragedy struck in the form of a gas explosion.

  I saw it happen. Rod was shutting down a valve that had become live due to a failure in the safety system during maintenance shutdown. Heroically, he stayed to shut it down manually when he could have run. But a huge area was flooded with gas, which exploded.

  At the time I was in the control room, and all of us there, hearing the huge hissing roar of escaping gas and knowing the possible result, were transfixed with fear. We could see the distant figures of the men below us, and we actually watched Rod turning the metal wheel to close the valve until it became silent, after which he, too, began to run. There were several men running on that concrete plain when some spark ignited the gas and acres of concrete became a giant fireball, obliterating the fleeing overalled figures. The large metal pipes in their racks beside the control room crashed and banged, bouncing around like boiling spaghetti in a pot. Then we, too, were rushing through the smoke to our wounded workmates. As the smoke cleared we found their blackened forms, some writhing in pain.

  I travelled with Rod in the ambulance to Sale Hospital. His face and hands were burnt black and his overalls were burnt through to the skin in places, but he insisted on riding in the front of the ambulance between the driver and me. He was in frightful pain but kept talking—I think to keep our spirits up as much as his own. I stayed at the hospital until after his treatment, spoke to him in his state of morphine-induced lucidity, and even spoke to the doctor in charge of his treatment, congratulating him on Rod having pulled through. I was devastated when the doctor said: ‘We haven’t really saved him, Graeme. We’ll probably lose him tonight.’ And we did.

  Rod had survived the Vietnam War but in the end a bloody workplace got him. He was a wild but compassionate man who told me that during Vietnam he and his mates in the helicopter gunship were not happy with what they were instructed to do. They suspected that the people they were supposed to be shooting were guilty of nothing except having been born there. So they would take the chopper into the jungle, shoot some bullets into the trees below and hover about for a while—some would smoke a joint—then they’d go back to base and write false reports on their number of ‘kills’.

  It was I who had recommended Rod for the job in the first place, knowing his work from Tasmania. So I had to live with the fact that I had inadvertently caused his death. I was left grieving—and angry and dismayed by the subsequent legal proceedings and findings. What’s worse, the disaster was to be replicated many years later, in September 1998, when there was another explosion. Two people were killed and eight injured.

&nbs
p; Carlton Dark and meeting Sue Mackinnon

  I chose to leave Longford in any case, and ended up establishing an electrical contracting business. This became known as the infamous Carlton Lighting—or ‘Carlton Dark’ as David Brown used to call it, for we were often working in just that.

  I set up the business largely because I wanted to be with Vicki, and also closer to my children, who had settled with Vosje and Rod in Steiglitz, a small town in the Brisbane Ranges, about 90 kilometres west of Melbourne. Rod ran the Moreland High School education and holiday camp there. Strangely, perhaps, now that they were living in the country an hour from Melbourne, it seemed possible to see them with less heartache than before. When they’d lived just a couple of blocks from me, I’d been frustrated almost to the point of madness that I could be so near literally, and yet so far from them. It was somehow easier with them being geographically further away—although I was still anguished that I couldn’t be with them. I loved them so much and missed them every day, and was taunted by the irony that Vosje’s partner, Rod Parker, would probably have been delighted at times if Graeme Leith had taken his bloody kids away and, a little later, his bloody wife, too!

  Vosje had introduced me to John Timlin, who was converting an old Carlton factory into a theatre, The Pram Factory, and needed some serious wiring done. It was to be a base for the grandly titled Australian Performing Group—basically a fairly scruffy troupe of unemployed actors with big heads. I’m still friendly with a couple of them today. John was organising the conversion from factory to theatre, dealing with building inspectors, tradesmen, bureaucrats, scriptwriters, producers and actors, and generally keeping the whole show on the rails. With a bit of creative thinking and a studied analysis of the relevant regulations, we were able to set up the electrics for a fraction of the original prohibitively expensive quote they’d received. I’d applied for an electrical contractor’s licence, bought an old van and some tools and equipment, was granted the licence, and Carlton Lighting was up and running.

  One night I was finishing off a dimmer board for The Pram Factory in the dining room of Vicki’s flat, just as the audience was filing into the theatre over the road. By the time we carried it over to the theatre, five minutes before the play was due to start, The Pram’s lighting man, Ian Mackenzie, had torn out a generous crop of his hair.

  A lot of house renovation was being done in Carlton then: the suburb was becoming gentrified, as I had earlier predicted. The price of houses had risen dramatically so I now worked on them as a tradesman contractor, rather than owning two or three of them as an entrepreneur—my marital separation had taken care of that, one way or another. I’d assembled a little crew of employees and the business ran successfully, so a few years of happy contracting followed.

  After several years Vicki and I went our separate ways, although we were still friends—in fact, over the years, as our birthdays were one day and ten years apart, we’d send birthday telegrams and cards to each other. (She and her husband Graeme are devotees of Passing Clouds wine.) I then happily shared my life with Gail Morton for a couple of years, living at 453 Canning Street for some time. (I had come to an arrangement with Rod Parker, and was now the occupant of the ex-Richardson house.) But when she headed off adventuring overseas, I was on the loose again.

  I met Sue Mackinnon at a mutual friend’s place, and after a couple of false starts on my part, Sue and I took up life together. I loved her intelligence, her wit, her love of literature and her general lack of reverence for things normally revered, which we shared. We seemed to have read and admired much of the same literature, so were always making literary allusions. It was a lot of fun for us both, although often a mystery to my children. Later, when my daughter Ondine started reading Shakespeare at school, or other books from our shelves at home, she began to understand, to her surprise and delight, the code we used, and she joined in. From The Bard to Oscar Wilde, from James Thurber to Donleavy, it was all grist to our mill.

  We had fun with words and, sometimes, other people. Once we had a pretentious visitor who loved to use big words, and I put him down by referring to Sue’s ‘infracaninophilic tendencies’, using the word as if it was completely familiar to us. We had in fact only recently and joyfully discovered it a few weeks prior, in the introduction to a book on Conan-Doyle. In this case it worked a treat at quieting the pretentious sod; we enjoyed the thought of him scrambling for his dictionary when he got home.

  Sue had a deteriorating muscular disease that plagued her throughout her late teens and adult life. There was no knowing when the deterioration would plateau or whether it would continue and Sue had to live with that uncertainty, which she did with extraordinary courage.

  The electrical contracting was beginning to bore me so I began acting at nights at Carlton’s iconic La Mama theatre under Betty Burstall, who seemed annoyed that I could act all right without having had any formal training. I performed in four plays there over a couple of years. La Mama was an exciting place to be and the playwrights, actors and other people who made that sweet unique little theatre work became my friends.

  Sue was then working for The Melbourne Times newspaper, which had morphed from The Carlton News, so we were able to get the play reviews prior to printing. They were not always good, as some of the plays were distinguished more by their controversial elements than their quality. The reviewer, John Smythe, was fond of a joke, so a review of Roger Pulver’s play Ice was headlined as ‘Pulverised Ice’, and Barry Dickins’s Ghost in the Alley was hailed as ‘What the Dickins?’. And they were only two of the plays I was in.

  When we were doing Ice, Sue asked her sister Jill, who was visiting Melbourne, if she’d like to go to the theatre and see me in a play. Jill’s first sighting of her sister’s boyfriend was naked in front of about fifty people, which was usually about La Mama’s capacity, depending on how much space the play occupied.

  Barry Dickins often acted in his own plays and, as the writer, he felt at liberty to alter the script at any time he chose; he would sometimes launch into a stream-of-consciousness monologue only vaguely related to the script the other actors had industriously memorised, so when delivered the learned lines often seemed strangely irrelevant. But perhaps it didn’t matter at La Mama—certainly from the standpoint of eternity, not at all. The last and probably the best play I acted in was Louis Nowra’s first play, I think, Kiss the One-Eyed Priest. It seemed outrageous at the time, dealing as it did with exploitation of an individual for the sake of television sensationalism, of necrophilia and police dishonesty, but twenty years later seemed quite prescient.

  I would have liked to have done more acting but the opportunity wasn’t there. I had burned my bridges (again) by leaving Melbourne and since then my acting career has been restricted to some melodramas in various country towns, and campfire or after-dinner recitations of The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God, Albert and the Lion, The Shooting of Dan McGrew, Gunga Din, and so on. About twelve years ago an actress had to pull out of a melodrama, The Drunkard’s Dilemma or Her Honour for Sixpence, at a church concert at Daylesford. My youngest son Jesse was the only person I could think of who could learn the words in time, so he was roped in, reluctantly, to play the heroine, with me as the drunken uncle. He did it brilliantly—it was a hilarious performance.

  5

  The vision splendid

  ‘Coming out’ in ’73

  The spirit is restless. Some men have always wanted to plant vineyards; fewer women, as they are usually more conservative and sensible. But since Old Testament times and before, men have wanted to plant vineyards and my appetite was becoming whetted.

  My friends Roger Milner, David Brown, David Reimers and Robert Roles had all worked at Reynella in the Southern Vales, near Adelaide, for varying lengths of time. They were oenophiles all, lived communally at a house over there known as ‘Four Winds’, and didn’t mind spending money on good bottles of wine. They drove old Peugeots and Renaults, loved their food, wine and good fun. (Incidental
ly, the old Peugeots and Renaults always carried the best wine buyers to the cellar door in those days.) Over time they introduced me to grape varieties and styles that I never knew existed—their gods were winemakers and their holy grail was great wine. I really don’t recall how we all came to be friends; I certainly wasn’t the glue that held them together. Maybe I was more like a strip of sticky flypaper that trapped a few of them when they were trying to fly past.

  Sue Mackinnon and I shared many good meals with David and Ann Brown at their place, or at mine at 453 Canning Street, almost over the road from Ferranato’s where we bought most of our Italian smallgoods and wine. Sometimes we’d go to Osicka’s Vineyard near Graytown, an old goldmining ghost town north of Melbourne, and buy some bottles of wine and a 20-litre container of bulk red to take back to Carlton for bottling, marvelling at the sheer power and colour of the wine and always wondering where the strong eucalypt character came from. This flavour would diminish with time in the bottles. There was a rumour that during the war a man had been selling wine barrels made from mountain ash eucalypt, but whether that was the origin of the eucalypt flavour, or whether it was due to the proximity of the eucalypt forest to the vineyard, I still don’t know. I have had my own experiences with eucalypt flavour in wine at Passing Clouds over the years, but more of that later.

  We would sometimes eat at Jimmy Watson’s Wine Bar, where you bought your steak and bottle of wine and then went out to the back courtyard and cooked your own meat on their barbecue. David Brown and I worked together for a time and would have a counter lunch at the Lincoln Hotel or the Evelyn Hotel sometimes—in fact, most times during the week, because, well, you did have to eat, didn’t you? For our Friday lunches we’d go to the Railway Hotel in Nicholson Street in North Fitzroy where the best value for quality traditional Italian pub food was served, and probably still is. And then there were lunches or dinners at the Clare Castle Hotel in Carlton. Fulvio was the maître d’ there and I have never before or since seen a man who performed that role with more skill; his ability to sense the needs of a customer were intuitive and profound. Much later I observed those same qualities in Simon at the All Nations in Richmond. To my delight, many years later Simon turned up at Daylesford where he and his wife Vanessa bought and ran the Farmers Arms.