Burnie – OZTHOUGHTS

This morning I had an experience that for me was unique.

I am 74 years old, have lived in about 10 countries, went to some 14 schools, have had a large collection of professions and lived in rather a lot of towns, villages and so forth, and in all of that I have so far never, ever, been back to a place I lived in, a place I have worked in, revisited an old profession or in any manner or way gone back to any earlier experiences.

It has always been my policy that once left, is always left, and so far that policy has worked well for me, even if it has made the business of regularly having to make new friends a bit exhausting.

So what was this revolutionary experience I had this morning? Simple enough. We are currently driving around in Tasmania, a country where I lived for a few years back in the late ´40s of the last century, and one of the places I lived in was a farm about 15 km to the west of Burnie at a place called Doctors Rocks.

The actual Doctors Rocks is a small rocky headland just opposite the entrance to the track up to the farm and the house we used to live in.

So, as we were driving past this place, I had no excuse not to stop and have a walk around and revisit for once part of my earlier life – a part that I have always remembered with affection.

It is a simple enough place, a farm at the end of a track (now sealed, but in my time, simply a dirt track) going off at right angles to the road. Now it seems to consist of several wooden houses and a lot of modern barns set in a rather attractively wooded and up and down bit of countryside.

I am not sure if the houses that are there now were there when I lived there, as they are wooden houses, I suspect that they are not the same ones, but they seem to be in roughly the same positions relative to each other that they were in my time there.

The farm itself was about 2000 acres (some 800 hectares) and stretched in a relatively narrow strip back from the farm and up into the hills behind the farm. Continue reading “I Revisit A Part Of My Childhood”

As a child I was occasionally forced to take part in various forms of sport or gymnastics, something which I found both pointless and painful.

My first encounter with sport took place in Tasmania, where I attended a small school in the town of Burnie, which gloried in the name of Upper Federal Street State School. Actually its name was almost bigger than the school itself, as it consisted of only two classrooms.

AFL….. Refined Street Fighting

Anyhow, the sports of choice there were cricket and a weird game that only Australians could have invented – Australian Rules Football, or AFL. This is a serious contact sport that is a sort of amalgam of football, rugby and American football (without the armour) and street fighting, and in those days seemed to me to be a matter of rendering as many of the opposing team unconscious as possible by whatever means you could think of… So punching, kicking, hair pulling and so on were all standard techniques.

Well I played this abomination once, saw it for what it is, a free card for bullies and not an activity which any sane person would voluntarily take part in, and resolved never to be trapped into playing it ever again.. a vow I stuck to through thick and thin.. Refusing to even go anywhere near the field where this “game” was “played”.

Anyone for cricket??

After this, I was then introduced to the weird game known as cricket. Boredom refined to a high degree, interspersed with moments of real pain. To explain this a bit… Most of the time in cricket (I gathered) one stands at some distance from the three people who are actually playing it, i.e the bowler, and the two batsmen. The former is responsible for throwing the ball at the batsman, and the batsmen are expected to hit that ball far enough away so as to allow them to run madly back and forth between the working position of the bowler and the set of wooden posts known as the wicket, where the guy who hits the ball stands waiting for it to come his way.

Continue reading “Me And Sports – No Way!!”