The Fence-Painting Fortnight of Destiny: A memoir

by Meshel Laurie

  Choosing the best bits of our parents to take into our own lives should be so much simpler. After all, our faults are so easily and often unfairly blamed on them.

  MAY I INTRODUCE YOU

  TO SHIT BOX?

  My earliest years are a mystery to me, of course. All I have to go on are some faded photos and the memories they spark for my parents, so I thought I might put together a little imaginary ‘slide show’ for you.

  First, we are together in a photo that Mum’s written ‘Shelly 6 months’ on the back of.

  They look like two young people pretty impressed with themselves for creating a human. I love the way they’ve staged the shot in front of the car too. ‘That’s right,’ it seems to say, ‘we’ve got a baby and a car!’

  My first memory is of being aboard an aeroplane, with my parents either side of me. I was fascinated by the clouds, or rather by the fact that we were among them. I seem to recall saying the word ‘clouds’ over and over for the duration of the flight, which must have been a joy for the other passengers. If I know Mum, she would’ve been thrilled at my comprehension of where we were, but desperately wishing I’d be quieter about it. My mother does not enjoy standing out from the crowd, and certainly not due to noisy children.

  I was almost three years old and we were travelling back to Toowoomba from ‘up north’ where we’d spent the previous two years. My parents had struck out on their own shortly after I was born, probably to get away from my father’s parents as much as anything else.

  You might recall they’d threatened to disown my father if he married my mother. Well, they ended up attending the wedding after a lot of drama, although my grandfather refused to appear in the photos, which is probably why my grandmother is looking so nervous in their wedding photo. She’s also standing outside a Catholic church, so she’s probably hoping to Hell no one she knows drives past and sees her. Next to Mum is her Grandmother Gag (name to be explained later), and her stepfather Tom.

  I dare say this was the first and last time Tub’s family and Tom ever attended the same event. Tom passed away not long after the wedding, and Mary and Tubby were for all intents and purposes estranged from his parents until two years later, when I was born. From the moment the first grandchild entered the equation, Tubby’s parents wouldn’t leave the newlyweds alone. I wouldn’t say they accepted the marriage, but the new baby convinced them to find a way to live with it.

  My parents were both 24 when they decided to put some excitement in their lives and some distance between them and the oldies by moving away. My father landed a job at the Amity Hotel in Gracemere, outside Rockhampton. From there, he progressed to the role of assistant manager of the Crown Hotel in Townsville. These years will be forever known in our family as the years we were ‘up north, in the pubs’.

  My father’s boss up north in the pubs was a character by the name of Billy Palmer. Billy is only a couple of years older than Tubby, but had gained some amount of life experience by then and taught Tubby a thing or two. Billy prepared my father for his first plane ride by instructing him to wait at the top of the steps for the hostess to give him his parachute. Of course the hostess impatiently asked him what the hold-up was—then gently assured him that someone was pulling his leg, and there were no parachutes on board.

  The barmaids learnt to dread Billy’s trips away, because he left my father in charge and there was every chance he’d sack a couple of them. What they didn’t know was that Billy hired every girl with big boobs who walked into the joint, and inevitably ended up overstaffed. On his way out the door, Billy pointed out the girls who had to go and left Tubby to deliver the bad news.

  Tubby remains in awe of Billy’s father, Teddy Palmer, and my mother remains unable to understand why. For my entire life, Tubby has described Teddy Palmer lovingly thus: he had glasses as thick as the bottom of Coke bottles, so filthy it was a wonder he could see at all, and he ate onions like apples, plucking them out of a big bag behind the seat of his ute while driving around his home town of Charleville in dusty central Queensland.

  No one really knows what Tubby finds so admirable about Teddy Palmer. I think the secret lies somewhere in Teddy’s relationship with his son Bill. Teddy passed away a couple of years ago, but whenever my father is asked where he’s going, he still answers the way he always has. ‘I’m going to Charleville to see Ted.’

  There are many great yarns associated with the pubs, like the one about Mum dropping a hundred-dollar bottle of scotch on the floor of the bottle shop as she watched a big brown snake make its way through. Or the time they offended the local Aboriginal people and watched as a ceremony was conducted across the street, directed very pointedly at them and their future prosperity.

  It was also in the pubs that my dad’s poor parenting skills became his favourite source of comedy. He once tied me to a fridge with a piece of rope when he was supposed to be looking after me: he had deliveries to supervise, he says. He hosed me in the garden when I’d suffered a particularly explosive incident in my nappy and Mum was at the shops. Those nifty ideas encapsulate my dad’s approach to life, really. He’s the kind of guy who owns one tool, and it’s a hammer. I think his philosophy was born up north in the pubs—that’s where he really climbed out from under his parents, and became the person he was actually meant to be. His own father was a very different sort of bloke. He had a massive, well-stocked tool shed for one thing, and that really demonstrates the difference in their personalities.

  My father’s evolution in the tropics is well documented in photographs. Those taken right up to my birth show a sweet boy, with an awkward smile, hair brushed quite neatly to one side, tentative sideburns neatly manicured over his chubby cheeks.

  The photos from the pubs capture the wild man from Borneo.

  This is the Tubby Laurie I know and love. This guy is out there. He is running his own race, throwing plenty of shit at the wall and waiting to see what sticks. He’s street smart, down to earth and up for just about anything. I don’t think there’s anything in the world that scares this fella, and there isn’t a problem he can’t fix or talk his way out of. He’s taking life as it comes with his lovely bride and his baby girl by his side, and they’re all having a bloody good time while they’re at it.

  For her part, Mum was cutting loose with the local gals, hanging out at the beach in bikinis with her bikini baby in tow, working the bottle shop and digging her man.

  There was one bum note in the epic ’70s soundtrack of their lives. Far from escaping my grandparents, Mary and Tubby had to endure monthly visits, during which their guests would bunk down with them in their tiny one-bedroom flat. I’m sure that any grown human with parents-in-law—or even just parents for that matter—will be chilled to know that every visit lasted for two whole weeks. That’s right guys, we’re talking a two-week on, two-week off rotation of the disapproving, conservative, non-drinking, religiously intolerant parents-in-law from hell, cohabitating with their pub landlord son and his Mick princess. I genuinely cannot understand how they let it happen. Why didn’t they tell them to stop coming, or at least do what I do when I’m too gutless to say something like that: lie? Mum says it was ‘a different time back then, and you just didn’t do things like that’. Maybe it was another example of Mum taking a ton of shit and somehow thinking she deserves it.

  During the two weeks on, my grandparents would manoeuvre themselves into the two single beds that were squeezed into the bedroom with my cot, and Mum and Dad would sleep in their normal spot, which was the double bed in the lounge room. (Mum says she used to put cushions on it during the daytime, but you could still tell it was a bed.)

  I can only imagine what the oldies thought every time they encountered Tubby, whose hair would be slightly longer, whose friends would be more colourful, and whose mouth would contain less teeth than the last time they saw him. From what I can gather though, they said nothing. Such is the power of the Grandchild.

  On a couple of occasions, the oldies even had the nuts
to bring friends with them. In those instances they would somehow fit three women into the bedroom with me, while the three men slept in the lounge. I’m sure anyone who is, or remembers being, newlywed will sympathise with the agony of those visits in particular. Perhaps the cold-room at the pub got a workout. I’m not about to ask them, although it does make me wonder where my sister Sherri might’ve been conceived, but conceived she was—and it was decided, with heavy hearts I’m sure, that two kids in a pub up north was pushing the boundaries of achievability. I suppose my parents probably thought they should give the extended family thing a go too, given the warming of relations between them and my grandparents. So the three of us boarded that flight home from Townsville, and a couple of months later my sister Sherri was born.

  We’re starting to get to the bits I remember now. My memories from the period when my sister Sherri and then brother Pete were little are mainly drawn from backyard barbecues, football games and pubs, where our family spent most of our weekends.

  My father has never had any trouble making friends. Upon his return to Toowoomba he joined a local football club, which formed the basis of his social circle for the next thirty-odd years, long after he lost interest in relaxation of any kind. He never played football, mind you—in fact none of his mates from the club did. They were the kind of members who raised money by making hamburgers at the games and holding ‘Prawn and Porn Nights’ to pay for the end-of-season trip.

  If any of my old man’s football club mates had normal names, I never knew them. I only knew people with names like Spider, Flung, Mad Dog, Bubbles, Podge and Sponge (they were a couple), Spick and Span (he was one person), and my favourite, Shit Box.

  I used to love asking Mum what time Shit Box was expected over because it sent her into an absolute conniption. ‘Well that’s his name Mum, how am I supposed to talk about Shit Box if I can’t say Shit Box?’

  ‘That’s not a very nice thing for a little girl to say,’ she’d complain, raising her eyebrows in my father’s direction.

  ‘He’ll be over this arvo mate,’ Tubby would say in an attempt to end the conversation and placate us both.

  Every guy I’ve ever told about Shit Box has been completely smitten with the concept of the man, and I’ve often spoken about him on radio, even though I haven’t laid eyes on him in decades. I was thrilled to receive an email from one of his grown children not long ago, with a recent photo of him and my Dad at a funeral. I know it sounds terrible, but I’ve never seen two happier-looking blokes in my life! I guess they were pretty thrilled to see each other, and I’m sure they paid suitable respects to the guest of honour before the photo was taken. I remember Shit Box as being a lovely, quietly spoken man, which is hardly surprising given his own dad went by the name ‘Whisper’.

  The oddly named cast of characters had a tribe of about a dozen kids between them. There were some floaters we’d see occasionally, but the dozen of us at the centre of the group got to hang out almost every weekend at one of our houses. Mum took great care to dress my sister Sherri and I in nice matching dresses. She’d tie our hair back neatly and clean our ears, but within an hour of arrival we’d be hooning around knocking skin off our knees and licking with crazed eyes at orange Fanta rings around our mouths. After a couple of hours the adults would be drunk enough to loose track of us a bit. We’d be completely wired on soft drink and Twisties and off exploring the neighbourhood with filthy bare feet and toddlers in tow. We crawled around building sites, lobbed in at neighbour’s houses and just made a general nuisance of ourselves while our parents blew off steam together.

  Eventually the mums would realise we were too quiet, and took turns hunting us down and dragging us back. The dads liked to forget we existed. They hated it when we hung around the main barbecuing and beer-drinking area because they got in trouble for their language and ‘adult themes’ from their wives. It was a pantomime that played out hundreds of times over the years, and plays on still all over the country I’m sure.

  Many times we’d fall asleep somewhere around the house, and one by one our parents would carry us out to the car and drive us home. Yes, after drinking all day. The legal blood alcohol limit in those days was 0.08, but drink-driving just wasn’t as big a deal back then—nothing was.

  Our car didn’t have seatbelts in the back until the late ’70s. There were no such things as baby seats: someone held the baby, or else put them in a bassinet on the back seat. It was nothing for Mum and a girlfriend to throw half a dozen kids in the back of the Falcon, wind up all the windows and smoke while driving us around town. In the ’70s, everyone parented like Britney Spears.

  We didn’t have bicycle helmets but we all had bikes, and we rode them for miles, only coming home when we were hungry. My little brother Pete pushed it too far one Sunday. Having set off on his bike at about 8 a.m., he hadn’t been seen for hours, and Mum finally called the cops at about 5 p.m. They were sitting at our kitchen table, and had just asked Mum to dig out a recent photo, when Pete strolled in, thrilled by the sight of the police car in the driveway. He was all of about seven at the time, and had no idea of the ruckus he’d caused—but then he’d had a pretty hectic day himself.

  He and his mates had ridden up to the Toowoomba sale-yards, which would’ve been a solid 45-minute ride from our place. The pens were always full of animals on a Sunday, ready for the auctions on Monday, so they weren’t lacking in things to see and do once they got there. Well, you know how these things go: one thing led to another . . . and before you could say ‘holy cattle-rustling kids’ they’d let a pig out of its pen. According to Pete, it took the boys hours to get the pig back in. The poor thing had ‘white stuff around its mouth’ by the end, he reckoned. Mum was convinced it had rabies, but I thought it was more likely terribly dehydrated. Either way, we were all very proud of him for chasing the thing down rather than just running away. The incident did, however, usher in a new set of rules pertaining to number of hours without checking in with Mum to let her know we were still alive. The other thing we didn’t have, of course, was mobile phones. We had to actually run up the steps so Mum could see our faces several times a day.

  I’m going to try really hard to let my kids have some of that autonomy we had. It won’t only be up to me, because unlike my Mum who was judge, jury and executioner over our childhoods, I am but one-half of a committee of child-rearers. She was forever trying to get my father more involved in the day-to-day minutiae of our lives, but the truth is, he wasn’t interested. He didn’t care if we had a biscuit before bed, or how many hours of television we watched a day. Couldn’t have been less interested.

  Oh how I long for the kind of power my mother had. I have one of the husbands she asked my dad to be more like. My husband has an opinion on everything, and it takes every bit of diplomacy I can muster not to let issues like how many are too many strawberries for morning tea turn into full-scale battles. Is it me, or has parenting become much more competitive within couples? Honestly, I think we both secretly love it when we spring the other parenting badly. My husband found a five-cent piece in my son’s mouth the other day and couldn’t contain his glee while showing it to me. I’d been in charge, you see.

  That was one big, undeniable point to Dad, and one more giant step away from a romantic relationship between us. Am I yearning for old-fashioned gender roles? Why yes, I believe I probably am. I’m certainly jealous of the kind of intimate relationship my parents appeared to have when they had small kids.

  Every night while we were in the bath, Mum would be in front of the bathroom mirror applying a full face of make-up and doing her hair. She’d be wearing a beautiful dress and shoes, watching the clock and working towards her schedule of having us bathed and fed and ready for bed by the time her husband came home. Half an hour after he did, we were packed off, and the rest of the night was theirs.

  It’s hard to make that kind of effort for someone who’s gloating about a choking hazard.

  I think my husband and I want to be al
l things to our children, whereas when I was a little kid, my father seemed content just to be himself, while we orbited around him, taking or leaving it.

  Whenever I conjure up mental images from the late ’70s and early ’80s of my father around the house, he’s generally doing one of three things, the first two being crumbing fish or peeling prawns. Eating prawns is his idea of the ultimate in conspicuous decadence. As for oysters, well, excuse me, Mr Packer! Later on, when he arrived home with fresh seafood, it was because he was sick of working hard and getting nowhere, the expensive grub symbolising the lifestyle he believed he should have been living. It was not a good omen for the evening, and I don’t think it even tasted good because he was walking around with such a sour taste in his mouth. Back in the day though, it was all about the fun.

  (Controversially, my father does not devein prawns before eating them. He eats the poop shoot. I try not to eat them at all, but because I am the world’s worst vegetarian, a prawn occasionally finds itself in my mouth. If the shelling of the prawn has been up to me, it will not have been deveined. It’s just a sentimental nod to the many hours spent with my dad patiently teaching me how to do it and watching me eat at least three for every one he managed to cadge for himself.)

  The third thing I picture him doing is lying on his stomach on the lounge-room floor, leaning up on his elbows reading the paper. As he did this every Sunday morning, my sister Sherri and I (usually wearing satin shorts), would clamour aboard and scream and giggle, and Mum would take photos.

  Of course that was in the ’70s, so not only did she have to wait weeks to see if her photos had ‘worked’, but there was no internet upon which to post them for the world to enjoy. She had to slide them neatly into photo albums, for no one to look at, ever. Ideally, everyone born before 2000 will write a book one day so that all those lost childhood photos will live again, if for no other reason than to prove that our mums loved taking pictures of our every facile moment too.