by Matt Wright
There are obviously very strict rules about shooting animals. For example, hunting on another person’s property without permission is illegal. That meant we had to stay out of sight.
‘Why don’t we head to that national park?’ I asked.
The Deep Creek Conservation Park is about a 15-minute drive from Cape Jervis. Like all national parks in Australia, people – especially minors – are forbidden from hunting animals in Deep Creek. A ranger might take out a dangerous animal. Otherwise, killing creatures in national parks is off limits, which made it all the more appealing to us.
We left our Toyota in the empty car park and headed off along one of the walking tracks with our bows. There were kangaroos and wallabies everywhere. We took a couple of shots, but couldn’t get a clear path. The animals were lurking behind trees and shrubs, instinctively aware of the danger we presented. Finally, I spotted one in a small clearing off a walking track. I nocked an arrow and took aim, before quickly aborting. A group of bushwalkers had suddenly appeared. We stashed our bows in some scrub behind a tree and pretended we were hiking. An old bloke barrelled up towards us.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he shouted.
‘What are you on about?’ I said.
‘Don’t play stupid, kid,’ he said. ‘We saw you shooting arrows with a bow.’
I continued to play dumb. Things got pretty heated. I nearly punched the old bloke but Jono dragged me away. We waited for them to clear off before returning to the place where we had concealed our bows. But they were gone. While the old bloke had been levelling accusations, one of the other hikers must have snuck out of sight and grabbed our gear. This was not good. Mum’s bow was her absolute pride and joy. There was no way I was going home without it.
Jono and I knocked our heads together and came up with a plan. We figured the old man was going to report us to the police and hand over our bows as proof. If we could get the jump on him and report our gear stolen, then the whole thing would become his word against ours. All I can say is that it seemed like a good idea at the time.
I got on the phone to National Parks and Wildlife and reported that someone had broken into my car and taken a crossbow and a hunting bow. The police were informed and I was brought in. In the end, it didn’t wash with the coppers. This was a small country town. Everybody knew everybody else. The police were always going to take the word of an old man with an impeccable reputation over a wild teenager who was known to the police.
I ended up going to court. I was found guilty and sentenced to 50 hours’ community service. I had to ’fess up to the coppers to get the bow back, but I didn’t care. Coming clean to the police was far less daunting than fronting up to Mum.
Unexpectedly, community service turned out to be great fun. I was ordered to take extra classes after school with one of the few teachers I actually respected, Mr Truman. Mr Truman’s class wasn’t like maths, literature, science or history. In other words, it wasn’t 50 minutes of torture. He taught carpentry and metal work, the only class where I actually scored decent grades. Those 50 hours of community service were a breeze. As an added bonus, Mum never found out. She didn’t even know that the bow was missing in the weeks leading up to the trial. Her mind was on other problems.
5
Pull Your Bloody Head In!
Errol and Mum divorced. Their marriage had been on the skids for a long time, but it still came as a shock when it ended. It got messy. It wasn’t just a case of splitting the house and the assets. They had to work out how to handle the business. Mum’s practice and Errol’s practice were heavily entwined. Not only did they run off the same books, their patient lists overlapped. It was something that the courts would have to sort out.
It was decided that Errol would stay up at Mount Compass while Mum, Holly and I rented a small house in McLaren Vale. Holly went to boarding school, so that left Mum and me. McLaren Vale is a region renowned for producing some of Australia’s finest wine. In this part of the country, the hills are crisscrossed with vineyards as far as the eye can see. There are wineries absolutely everywhere.
It wasn’t an easy time for Mum. Having an out-of-control teenager on her hands was absolutely the last thing she needed. I’m not proud of this period of my life. I was behaving like an absolute prick at a time when she needed my support. The hours wasted in court and performing community service after being busted hunting in a national park might have knocked me into line had Mum found out. But she hadn’t. It was like I’d gotten away with it. Like a lot of kids in their mid- to late teens, I thought I was bulletproof. My behaviour got worse and worse. Until one time, I went too far.
The incident happened at the start of my last year at school, when the temperature in the classroom was at its hottest. It wasn’t even lunchtime, but the day was dragging. So four of us decided to take the afternoon off. A few of the boys had brought their bikes to school. Those of us without bikes were dinked as we went exploring.
I suggested we take a look inside one of the enormous buildings at a local winery. After busting the lock on the door, we all filed in. Inside were these huge metal vats that reached up towards the roof, at least two or three storeys high. At the base of each was a large tap. Crates of empty bottles lined the walls of the storehouse. No second guesses for what happened next.
We had no problems turning the taps on. The challenge was trying to get the wine into the bottle. The mouth of the tap was big enough to fit your fist inside. It was like turning on a fire hydrant. Wine surged out of the tap, ending up all over the floor. For every bottle we filled, probably 200 litres of high-quality wine was wasted. And the four of us went through a lot of bottles.
We sampled the wine from each vat and were all pissed in no time. But it wasn’t until we found the sparkling wine that the situation started to get seriously out of control. It was sweeter and more refreshing in the blistering heat. A couple of the boys were chugging entire bottles of the stuff in one go. I was 15 and had hit the grog a few times before. But this was a whole new level of drunkenness. I was completely blind.
Before we left, we must have filled up about 30 bottles to take home. We corked them up and stashed them in our bags. In a half-hearted show at responsibility, I went round and turned off all the taps. By then, the damage was done. Every square inch of floor was covered in wine.
Getting home was a circus. It was challenging enough for those guys who were riding the bikes. For those of us being dinked it was a bloody nightmare. I lost count of the times I fell on the ground. A ride that normally takes about 10 minutes took five times that. We made it to the outskirts of McLaren Vale and started riding through front lawns, knocking down letterboxes and destroying fences. All the way we were laughing uproariously in between hurling insults at bystanders for no particular reason. It was the most amount of fun I’d had in years.
Once we’d made it to the main street, we got even more raucous. People spilled onto the street from the shops to check out who was responsible for the racket. We finally made it back to my place. Luckily, Mum wasn’t home. Unluckily, my sister was. The moment I staggered into the house she got straight on the phone.
‘Mum,’ she yelled into the receiver. ‘Matt and the boys are pissed.’
Mum came home and found me halfway down the drive. I did my best to play it straight, but I had no hope. I was completely legless. If I was the most pissed of all of us, then my mate Luke was a close second. At the sight of my Mum bounding up the driveway, he panicked.
‘Righto,’ he said, trying to get back on his bike. ‘I’m off home.’
He got up some speed on the bike and rode straight into the side of the house. He stumbled to his feet, picked up the bike and had another go. He only made it a few metres before Mum raced over and pulled him off the bike. She frogmarched him towards the house.
‘All of you!’ she roared. ‘Get inside! Now!’
I went straight to my bedroom and started throwing my guts up while Mum called the parents of the other boys.
I could hear everyone else spewing up in the front yard while they waited to be collected. Mum brought me a jug of water. It was one of the few things I remember about the night, other than Holly coming into my bedroom and pinching one of the bottles of wine in my bag. That didn’t impress me one bit, particularly seeing as she had ratted on me. But I was too hammered to do anything about it.
The following morning, nursing the first serious hangover of my life, Mum took me down to the cop shop. She had been on the phone to the police the previous day. The local copper was a good guy. He knew I’d been in trouble with the law. He also knew that putting me through the courts was not what I needed. The cop rang up the winery and somehow smoothed things over with them. No charges were going to be laid.
Not that I knew any of this at the time. Mum, who was white hot with rage, left me in the waiting room on my own. I was sat in the same room as hardened criminals and rough-looking characters. After about 30 minutes, the sergeant called me in. He sat me down in the interrogation room and told me what was going to happen. His words were that much more powerful because he was measured when he said them. I was no longer a kid copping a lecture from a parent or a teacher. I was being spoken to like an adult. The implication was clear – I couldn’t hide behind being a child anymore.
He pulled out a file of information on me and listed all the things that I’d been convicted of doing in the past. He also mentioned the stuff that I was suspected of doing – shit I thought nobody knew about. Then he said that if the winery pressed charges, I’d probably have a record. That would be a permanent stain on my life that would make finding work after school very hard. If I was convicted of another crime, I faced juvenile detention. If I continued breaking the law, I’d most likely end up in jail.
The sergeant talked about what going to jail actually meant – the violence, the rape, all of it. Then he stood up, told me he’d be in touch. There was none of the usual, ‘Don’t do it again,’ or, ‘Think harder next time.’ I was beyond all of that. I walked out of the police station shaking.
Worse was yet to come. Mum was onto me the moment I set foot through the door, telling me to pack my bags and get out. I told her to calm down. That really set her off. We got into a slanging match, yelling and swearing at each other. She wasn’t going to back down and I didn’t have a leg to stand on. I got my stuff together and took off. I figured that she needed a day or two to cool down. I’d call her up and apologise and the whole thing would blow over. It didn’t happen like that.
It would be a long time before I was welcome inside Mum’s house again.
Some people might think that kicking me out was way too harsh or that it was a risky move. Without parental supervision, I might have ended up going completely off the rails. I don’t see it that way. In fact, I have nothing but respect for Mum’s decision. It wouldn’t have been easy looking your son in the eye and telling him that he is no longer welcome in your home, particularly before he has finished school. The fact that she did it is an indication of how bad things were going for me.
Mum didn’t kick me out simply because I was making her life hell or it was convenient. She did it for my benefit. It was the last card in the deck that she could play. She wanted me to grow up, to take responsibility for my actions. Sure, it was a gamble. And although I didn’t see it at the time, it was the best thing she could have done.
I’m not saying that I completely cleaned up my act. Subsequent years proved I still had a knack for finding trouble. There will probably always be a bit of that streak in me but I started to think hard about the consequences of my actions. I also started to realise that my future was in my own hands. It was high time I made decisions and choices for myself. In other words, it was high time I pulled my bloody head in.
My first decision was to continue on at school. I would’ve preferred to quit and get a job. The only thing stopping me was a promise I made to Mum years earlier. I vowed to finish school. There were hundreds of times I nearly reneged on the promise. I guess it had become a point of pride – proof that I could finish anything, no matter how much I despised doing it. After getting myself kicked out of home, I had just made the job of finishing school that much harder.
I spent the next seven months crashing on mates’ couches and sleeping on floors, living off other people’s generosity. I’d do odd jobs for a bit of cash and had more free feeds than I can remember. In the holidays, I managed to snag a proper paying job.
School was still a drag and I didn’t exactly knuckle down. I did, however, stop ditching classes all the time. Instead, I only skipped the ones I really hated. My results were terrible. But somehow I scraped through with my leaving certificate.
By the time the results came out I’d already managed to snag a job. It was the worst fucking job I would ever have in my life. My mate Luke Crocker – the one who’d ridden into my house drunk after the winery incident – rang up his grandfather and got me a job gyprocking. He suggested I give it a crack.
Gyprock is a type of plasterboard that is used for walls and ceilings in modern homes. Gyprocking refers to the removal, construction or replacement of this material. I obviously didn’t have the qualifications to put the stuff up. So my job was to remove the old stuff. It was horrendous. I’d get sent up into the ceiling on a stinking hot day. Usually I’d be working in a space so cramped I could barely crawl. I’d have to cut away the old gyprock and then feed it down through the ceiling hole. Sometimes the gyprock hadn’t been replaced in decades. It would be caked with dust, possum shit, bat shit, spider webs and mould. It was pretty common for entire plasterboards to collapse on top of me, leaving me coated in dust and crap and gasping for air.
I didn’t get paid much for that job. But gyprocking taught me a valuable lesson that would come to shape my life: the things you earn through hard work are much more valuable than anything you are given. The money that came from gyprocking wasn’t much at all. But they were hard-earned dollars and I didn’t spend them easily. I started saving up, rustling up enough cash to get out of South Australia for a fresh start.
My first stop was the Victorian snowfields. Vicki and Dave Dickson, the parents of my mate Phil, made a few phone calls and got me and my other mate Dhani a job at one of the ski lodges at Falls Creek. We worked as house cleaners and did the laundry. I’d be grafting away for hours – tidying up bedrooms, cleaning toilets, changing sheets during the day and doing laundry at night – barely having a moment to see the slopes. But I was enjoying myself. I discovered a work ethic I barely knew existed. I took pleasure in fulfilling a set of daily tasks and getting a financial reward for it.
Making a bit of money was great. But being cooped up indoors all day was wearing thin. I belonged outside. More worrying was the fact the ski season was coming to an end. I needed a job fast.
Without question, Mum has been the most influential figure in my life. There is nobody I admire more.
6
Kings Canyon
I wanted to become a diesel fitter or a boilermaker, someone who manufactured equipment for heavy industry. I’d done well in metal work and woodwork at school. So I asked around. Apprenticeships were hard to come by and it seemed nobody was taking anyone on. There just wasn’t enough work.
I got in touch with Lenny Halfpenny, an old family friend who owned a cattle station in Klondyke in northern NSW, and he found me a job on the station. Growing up, Lenny used to have Jono and me up to the station pretty much every summer, and we’d run amok with his kids Darrell and Wayne. Darrell and I became great mates and Lenny was like a second father, teaching me the lay of the land on a cattle station.
I hadn’t been to the station for a little while but was planning a visit when I got the devastating news that Darrell had died. Returning home from his pipeline job, his car had rolled on a dirt road about 100 kilometres from the station. Darrell was thrown out the passenger window, crushing his head, and killed instantly. At the time I struggled to understand why such an energetic keen young fella
could be killed. He’d had his head screwed on straight and a great career ahead of him. It certainly cemented in my head that life is short.
I loved working at the station and seeing Lenny, but it always saddened me that Darrell wasn’t around. Lenny had taken me on as a ringer – a roustabout on a cattle station who does all the jobs nobody else wants to do. I was thrilled. More and more, it felt like a path was opening up before me. It was not, though, as yet completely clear. But one thing I knew for certain: I was not cut out for a desk job. I belonged in the great outdoors. Working on a cattle station seemed like a good fit for me.
I reckon Lenny was pretty surprised to see the transformation that had come over me since I’d left school. There was a fire in my belly, an absolute determination to succeed. I’d push myself harder than anyone, keen to learn as much as possible and build up some experience. When Lenny taught me how to put up fence railing with a chainsaw, shovel and a crowbar, I’d do my utmost to exceed his expectations. When he’d send me out to muster sheep and cattle on the back of a motorbike, I’d drive that bike harder and faster than anyone.
Lenny was a great mentor to me. He taught me farming techniques that I still apply to this day. But it was the practical stuff he passed on that I valued so much, and still do. He also handed down some great life lessons, like the importance of making mistakes. He taught me this lesson the day I ripped up a whole lot of piping with a backhoe while trying to clear off some old fences. Water started bubbling up to the ground. I raced off to the house to turn off the water main before fronting up to Lenny. I was filthy with myself for not having checked that there wasn’t any piping under ground. I was half expecting Lenny to fire me.
‘Matty,’ he said, ‘if you aren’t making mistakes, you aren’t trying.’
For a bloke like me who had developed a fear of failure, it was exactly what I needed to hear. I went back out to help fix the damage to the pipes, wondering why none of my teachers ever taught me that lesson at school.