Author Archives: gerard oosterman

Blue Dolphins, golden dolphins and get stuffed here.

04 Saturday Jun 2011

Posted by in Gerard Oosterman

≈ 32 Comments

The delights of Nelson Bay here in NSW are enjoyed by hundreds of thousands who will end up renting holiday accommodation available but always in short supply. Signs galore everywhere and the closer to water’s edge the more prolific the signage.

Nelson Bay I remember driving to some years ago. We were invited by our neighbour opposite us when still living in Balmain. It is just a bit North from Newcastle, she advised us. It was a considerable ‘bit more’ and as always the last bit takes the mostest. I remember it was a lovely if not a somewhat boozy week-end with many partying the week-end away.

This time around the accommodation was pre-booked on-line and pre-paid without any trouble. One gets many photos and previous quests comments all on-line giving the distance from beach -water, how many bedrooms, all the technical gizmos including size of TV screen, dishwasher cycles, micro-wave, reverse cycle air-con.  The wonders of the internet have many advantages.

Driving there also a cinch complements of GPS stuck especially for the occasion on the front screen. ‘You are over the speed limit’ from a pleasant English voice warning us every now and then.  It even warns you to ‘stay left’ 3 kilometres before the actual left turning event. It remains a puzzle how I ever found Nelson’s Bay all those many years ago.

About twenty kilometres before arrival one knows that Nelson Bay is getting close. There are now a profusion of hoardings with water sports and dolphins sprouting up wherever there is a bit of vacant bush still available. We passed a house which had a giant golden dolphin fastened on a trailer. Where this dolphin would be hauled to and what it would end up advertising would be anyone’s guess.

 It seems that most go there to either race around on jet skis, watch cavorting dolphins or eat ‘to get stuffed’. It defies how anyone could be enticed to eat at a place advertising ‘A Hog’s Breath’, showing a pig’s snout, but at Nelson’s Bay anything goes.  I suppose all those water activities makes for such a dire and urgent hunger that an advertisement to eat at ‘Ernie’s dung pile’ would be chockers with starving hordes.

We all had a fantastic lunch at a place that I often wished there were more off. It was at the Northern end of Nelson’s Bay in a pub overhanging the water. Perhaps it was called the Blue Dolphin. It did have dolphins featured in the design of the carpet. Anyway, nice tables with white linen and a superb dish of flat-head crumbed and cooked to perfection with a salad and crunchie chips. Below us, there were activities of boats getting ready with hoisting giant lobster pots and fixing long-lines. Those long lines are fitted with GPS’ as well; I was told by my brother, who does a lot of volunteering watching and reporting on whales. All those boats fishing with long lines have those lines fitted with GPS’ which then sends continuous rapports out to Canberra of their positions.  

I hope the fish caught by that method appreciate the technology! At one stage a group of school kids arrived with their teachers. I suppose it was a private school with the girls in those long Jane Austen skirts and the boys in long beige coloured pants and fancy jackets. They were taught to put bait on and throw the line in. All those activities were below our window while we tucked into our flatheads.

No-one there that ordered lunch was drinking beer. Beer drinking in pubs is dying. The latest figures out show a disastrous decline in beer consumption which is balanced by the increase in wine quaffing.

  It is a sign of the times.

Vale Bob Gould

23 Monday May 2011

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 8 Comments

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/05/23/3223935.htm?site=sydney

 

Anyone who has ever been to second hand book shops in a serious way would know Bob Gould. A figure of some girth with a long beard. He shop was generally chaotic but he would always point you in a direction if you knew the genre you might be interested in. The Newtown shop was gigantic, covered with books from floor to ceiling. (Talk about book shelves.)

He was a character and will be missed by many.

From ‘Le Salon des ABC refuses’ (death of suburbia)

22 Sunday May 2011

Posted by in Gerard Oosterman

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

, ,

Death of Suburbia?

   Who can’t fondly look back on the days when our suburbs were havens for the warm smells cosily wafting over the hardwood paling fence with Donna, Ernie’s wife from next door, passing some freshly baked scones? Soon after, Ernie would start the Victa and the rattle of many mowers would join all over the place in a peaceful chorus. This idyllic suburban symphony would be repeated in all our suburbs and in all our cities and at every week-end. We knew who we were and where we were. 

All this is now coming to an end. Mowers and their associated gadgetry,  motorized leaf blowers, leaf suckers, edgers, whipper snippers, hedge trimmers; all being pushed to city’s  outer limits miles away. Those still hanging onto their dreams are doing so with grim determination bordering on the heroic, but being pushed to the edge of tolerance.  How long will suburbia with its endless rolling out of subdivisions into the distant sunrise continue to last? Is suburbia’s sun sinking below the horizon? In its last death row, gone forever?

More and more, the rise of medium density with apartments and town house/villas are being rolled out at an ever increasing pace. The closer to the city the more unlikely any of us can afford to live in the separate free standing house with garden and trampoline for the kids. There would hardly be a free-standing house under the one million dollar mark within 5 kilometres of our main cities. 

The push away from a free standing 3 bedroom house with enclosed louvre glassed veranda and big garden is on in earnest. The change of demographics and peoples living choices are inexorably moving towards a more maintenance free mode of housing and towards overcoming the tyranny of having to drive to overcome distance. No matter how we increased the size and bulk of our cars, we seem to have become thoroughly fed up with the endless driving to and fro work, child-care, our al fresco dining experience and entertainment. We are voting with our feet and the weekly footage on TV with queues at the Real Estate Auction for inner city living, proof of seeking a new way of city living. 

Free standing houses that still survived the roving eyes of the spec. builder keen to convert a single block into a dozen townhouses are fetching millions, becoming totally out of reach of the average battler. Not to worry though. Most of those seeking to buy into a closer more intimate inclusive, dare I say it, ‘life-style’ are happily snapping up the town/house/villa or apartment with courtyard or balcony, but within the inner city. They do so because they want to be able to stroll to all the amenities that through the last few decades involved the owning of the cars and subsequent driving…It just became intolerable. Many, especially for those arriving at our shores from other countries, expect to see people on city streets with coffee lounges and cafes, theatres and shops. They reject the idea of mowing or crouching on grass, prising out unwanted bits of other grasses or weeds. 

Some might feel nostalgia over the demise of suburban housings but those have still the choice of going where suburbia still flourishes, and ‘choice’ is now more available than ever before.

The European migrant in the fifties and sixties could only buy or rent into suburbs. The block of land and own house was portrayed, and sold, as being so desirable that rejection was sometimes seen as heresy. Own block, own house, was proclaimed Australia-wide as having reached the very pinnacle of an achievement and dream bordering on a Nirvana.  Without most Australians ever having seen much else in the form of city housing elsewhere; they would often state that our suburbs were the envy of the whole world. Indeed, the ‘best of the Southern Hemisphere,’ the more geographically enlightened, would proclaim with Anzac pride.

There has been some solid arguing with both the defenders of free standing housing and their opponents. http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/sydney-lets-stop-the-rot/2005/09/16/1126750124219.html Both sides seemingly as eloquent in portraying survival of endless suburbia with free standing housing, with those that predict that more people will choose to live closer to work and other amenities including closer to other people. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/life-in-suburbs-drives-up-emissions/story-e6frg6no-1111117525526 

Some defenders of suburbs and free standing housing are even suggesting Australia should consider de-populating ourselves. Well, I’ll be lining up with great curiosity to see how that could happen.

It will be safe betting that our choices will be widened as ever before, but that most of us will move towards a form of housing less reliant on driving. 

The choice is ours and isn’t that what it should be all about?

Because (Nr7 the end)

21 Saturday May 2011

Posted by in Gerard Oosterman

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

Still another five months to go now meant one more time going around cutting the entire Goulburn jail population. Every lice infested head meant getting closer to my Kelly, brother and sisters and mum and dad. Those last few months were spent on ‘the farm’ as ‘trusted’ planting thousands of pine trees near Young. The freedom to see greenery and flight of birds became a warm-up for a return to my home of Muswellbrook and its wooden bridge.

‘Brother is getting worse,’ mum wrote. ‘He can’t ride the quad-bike but is as cheerful as a button, never complains, always tells us he loves us.’ Dad now has to bath and toilet him, sleeps with him, and turns him over when needed, massage him to keep him as good as possible. ‘He asks after you, Frankie’. ‘You better come here soon son!’

I had vowed, the first thing I would do, when at home again, to swear on the bible I would never do crime again, take up being a barber instead, marry Kelly, have a family just like ours.

I caught the train back to Muswellbrook with my belongings, including bible and well fingered book of psalms inside my small suitcase that I carried when entering Long Bay a very long eighteen months ago.

Hi mum, dad, dear brother and sisters. I never lost or did not love you all, ever. Forgive me, please. Brother died two days later in bed next to dad…His big heart failed him.

I am 59 now, with my Kelly and children of my own. I am good with words but never learnt spelling….Because.

Il m’a attaqué comme un chimpanzé orniérage

17 Tuesday May 2011

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 38 Comments

Geez,

The alleged impropriety of Monsieur IMF has been fuelled by yet another allegation of conduct unbecoming of the president of the IMF.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/05/17/3218630.htm?section=justin

Can you believe it? This time the woman alleges he ‘attacked me like a rutting chimp’. She certainly has a way with words. She is an ‘auteur’.

Imagine him coming out of the shower, no doubt having scrubbed himself up vigourishly, et voila, the maid was there and sans un moment to lose, he chucks out all caution to the wind, hurls himself onto the maid. Afterwards, hurries to catch the plane but with ten minutes to go he is led away by the police. His wife stands by her man.  Hundreds of Billions are wiped off  share markets world wide. How stupid.

Still, ‘ he attacked me like a rutting chimp’ really was a good description.

.

Because (Nr6)

17 Tuesday May 2011

Posted by in Gerard Oosterman

≈ 30 Comments

Tags

,

 ‘I miss you so, Frankie’ were the sweetest words I ever heard. I miss you ‘SO’’ I scratched the SO into the wall next to my bed with the end of my toothbrush  and whitened it with the paste, adding a small s, just in case the screws thought I was up to something. Previous decades of inmates had scribed endless salubrious messages of dripping carnal lusts, drawings of big cocks and fannies, the main extend of their incarcerated years and artistic oeuvre. Kelly’s letters I carried permanently on me. A balm soothing the pain I felt for all, mum, dad, brother and lovely Kelly.

Was it having perfected my sweeping-up skills that satisfied the authorities, or, more likely, the overcrowding, but I was suddenly ushered into a van with some others? ‘You’re going to Goulburn, matey’. All of us shackled to the inside rail of the van. It took almost half a day, after which I was ushered into a cell not dissimilar to the one I had left, except, this time shared with another grim looking character. Some years back dad made me learn to cut his and my own hair. He was never shy to save a quid on the household and I did the same to my brother which earned me half the cost of a haircut on the list of ‘shave and cut’ at Tony’s Barber-shop. When I told them of my hair-cutting skills I promptly elevated to becoming the hair cutter of Goulburn Jail.

“Dear mum, dear dad” I wrote. It would take me hours to write the letters. The combination of both my bible and psalm book offering me the words to copy, letter by letter. The word ‘because’ easily found but not so ‘wasting’ and muscles’. Brother had not improved and dad massaged him daily now, sleeping with him, turning him around and doing the tasks that required strength that mum just didn’t have. On one visit mum was happy. The family had got together and bought him a motor quad bike with automatic gears. He was full of beans when going around the paddocks belonging to someone they knew that had level areas for him to race around on, chasing sheep with Kelpie. He still had control over his body in the use of throttle and steering but needed his feet strapped to the footrests. He couldn’t attend school anymore, she said. “Some boys with dystrophy can still survive and last for many more years”, she added hopefully.

 Mum was always as cheerful as a freshly baked coconut slice, sunny and exuding a crunchy kind of cosy warmth, never given much to the luxury of introspection. She had a gift for the wisecrack but not at the expense of anyone. “Drink the milk before it goes off” she sagely used to advice to anyone about life’s possibilities or foibles. Even so, her shoulders stooped and her sigh was clear. “See you in a few weeks time my son.” Perhaps the milk was starting to sour, with one son in jail and the other with a bad illness inherited from her side of the family. ‘Incurable’ the doctor told her. His need would be endless massaging and getting him to remain upright and move about as much as possible. Granddad reckoned there were a few in his background up north that had died young. “They couldn’t walk about”, “just died in the dust”, he added. “No doctor about either”.

‘Dear mum, dear dad’ I wrote again. Some words now gleaned from a real book taken from goal’s library, a medicine book with ‘dystrophy’ in it together with ‘muscular’. M U S C U L A R, I copied with a cramped hand from effort. So S O R R Y.  This copied easily from the book of psalms. Lots of ‘sorry’ in that book. ‘How is brother going?’ ‘Won’t do crime ever, never no more.’ ‘Say sorry to dad, I love all.’ Your son Frankie. Goulburn.NSW.

Dear Kelly: ‘All colours are grey here.’ ‘The walls grey, the floor grey and peoples, all look grey,’ ‘even food is grey with the green for peas giving some relief.’ ‘Thinking of you gives my life colour, colour like yellow and happy orange.’ ‘I miss you and smiling, your hands I miss too.’ ‘I love you.’ ‘I want to go for the marry you’, ‘when I come again back to Muswellbrook and you.’

Because (Nr5)

15 Sunday May 2011

Posted by in Gerard Oosterman

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

, ,

The screws at Long Bay weren’t at all like the friendly folks in Muswellbrook. The cell measured mere two by three and half meters. I was considered low risk and given the job as sweeper. It wasn’t easy and the nights were long and boring. I swore never to do anything like crime again. Un-expectedly, a  screw called ‘Punchy’  cracked me one below the belt which made me double over, racked with a busted bladder for which they gave me a couple of aspirins. A doctor was only called two days after when I was sick with fever… The fever became so bad I was put in hospital but that screw stayed on smirking as ever. It was a hostile place. The radio was centrally controlled and blaring out loud all day with ads waxing on about Cadbury chocolate bars together with 43 beans in Nescafe… The food was terrible and the mutton routinely wriggled with pale looking maggots that one just learnt to brush off. What have you done Frankie? How did you come to this? Bloody Ernie. He never told me he had a pistol.

Kelly and bra straps

Kelly’s lovely kiss and her bra straps kept me going as much as ‘going’ was possible. Geez, how the time crawled. My only relief was writing letters to mum, dad, and Kelly. My dear mum had tucked the bible and book of psalms inside my little suitcase, no doubt worried sick of whom else I would get mixed up with inside those forbidden brick walls. Her visits were sporadic. It’s not so easy to travel up and down from Muswellbrook. ‘Your dad is too busy with your brother’s health, has to keep massaging him to keep his muscles going”, she said each time. My brother was eleven now and his bones growing bigger but his muscles were not corresponding, keeping up. Tests were being done in Sydney but she had forgotten the complicated name. Something to do with wasting muscles,  dystrophy or something like that, she added crying, her tears soaked up by  her Aunt Bellum’s embroidered hanky on the little table behind the screen that separated us…’”He sometimes has trouble walking up to his bedroom”’. “‘He keeps buckling over”’ and Aunt Bellum reckons that in her family some boys had had the same disease, eventually dying from it. “Women can’t get it, only boys, but we carry it over”, she was sobbing now. I was starting to see the reason why Aunty Bellum never got married and her always worrying about me. I remembered her saying about girls, ’be careful not to get taken’. Was she considering that I could succumb to the same disease that my brother had inherited?

Kelly’s letters became a life-line that kept me from losing the will to keep going. The Long Bay ambience was getting to me. ‘Punchie’ was still creeping around with his fondness for unexpectedly knocking blokes out in the one expert punch, when no-one was looking.  I stayed away as much as possible, with my broom at the ready, just in case! (to be continued)

Oranges and Sunshine

14 Saturday May 2011

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 7 Comments

Has anyone seen this movie?

Oranges and Sunshine tells the story of Margaret Humphreys, a social worker from Nottingham, who uncovered one of the most significant social scandals in recent times: the forced migration of children from the United Kingdom. Almost singlehandedly, against overwhelming odds and with little regard for her own well-being, Margaret reunited thousands of families, brought authorities to account and worldwide attention to an extraordinary miscarriage of justice. She discovered a secret that the British government had kept hidden for years: one hundred and thirty thousand children in care had been sent abroad to commonwealth countries, mainly Australia. Children as young as four had been told that their parents were dead, and been sent to children’s homes on the other side of the world. Many were subjected to appalling abuse. They were promised oranges and sunshine, they got hard labour and life in institutions.
(Synopsis gleaned from ‘Google’.)

Because (Nr4)

13 Friday May 2011

Posted by in Gerard Oosterman

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

, ,

The job of getting money together was more driven by Ernie to buy his ‘romance’ rather than my own lack of money. For me it was more of a dare and show of bravado and wanted to somehow make up for my well- known lack of spelling in swaggering around town with money in my pocket.   Kelly would be impressed! Being young and having experienced the hot wiring of cars it wasn’t such a big career deal to step up to a next level. I should have stayed at school but they were confusing times and my younger brother had also been troubled by suddenly buckling while climbing the stairs to our bedroom. My parents seemed worried.

 We took to climbing a fence of the factory where we knew electric fans were being made. Sauntering nonchalantly past the factory earlier, we had seen the truck being full of the fans. The padlocked gate was easily prised with the jemmy bar. What wasn’t so easy to prise open were the jaws of the Rottweiler which, soon after, clamped itself on Ernie’s jacket, determined not to let go till the guard arrived with gun drawn. This snarling monster-dog was trained to remain out of sight till a penetration was made inside its perimeter.  I reckoned the Rottweiler took a fancy to Ernie, possibly could smell the Bull Terrier on him. How fortuitous for me! We were opening the latch of the truck and admiring the boxes of fans when the snarling dog came upon us. The temerity of the guard to lock us then up inside the truck with fans was an insult not lost to me while pondering the time inside.

Still, I did not lie in Court, confessed all and was duly sentenced. Mum crying on Aunt Bellum’s shoulder. Dad hugged me and said, “don’t add anymore to our worries, you brother is getting a wasting sickness…” “Do your best in jail and write to us”. “At least you told the truth, didn’t fib like Ernie”. Ernie’s plight did not bring him any ‘romance. Instead he got 3 years, no parole. He had pinched the pistol from his dad’s shooting club. Dad and Ernie used to go pig shooting at the back of Macquarie Marshes with the help of a totally disinterested and untrained bull terrier. Ernie used to run with the dog in his arms while dad trained his rifle on the wild pig. The bull terrier just refused to engage in pigs, preferred to get stuck into the German Sheppard across the road instead.

(to be continued.)

Because (Nr3)

11 Wednesday May 2011

Posted by in Gerard Oosterman

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

,

 

Before the episode in the clink between leaving school able to read but not spell but having some money, Ernie, I and some others managed to learn to crack a few cars, doing a bit of hot wiring and joy riding but always returning the cars. Getting a license was easy in those days. I wrote and filled in all forms with the help of Aunt Bellum who kept saying, “I worry about you”. How come you can read but not spell?

One day while trying to get the attention of a girl who kept kind of standing near the window while I chucked the Herald in the garden I had the gall to ask her for a date. She was in the garden and I asked her name, “‘Kelly” she said. What’s yours? Frankie, I answered. Want to see a movie, I dared the second time when I managed to chuck the paper at her feet? She stood outside again.  Its”Clockwork Orange.” Kelly was nice, had cheeks like Jonathans and wore a nicely filled bra of which I could see the straps showing through her blouse. The experience I had with girls was limited to looking at pictures in Pix and Post while dangling with mates from the Muswellbrook Bridge. As I grew so grew my eagerness to explore the opposite of myself. Aunt Bellum always said, “Girls are nice but don’t get taken”. What did she mean by that, I wondered? I wanted to be taken, would dearly like a girl, and this might even be better than pinching cars or nicking the milkman’s money.

‘Frankie’ was getting ready for a ‘first time’ and it could not come soon enough, especially as Ernie had already experienced it twice. The first time wasn’t much chop, he explained. The girl wanted some ‘romance’ first and he didn’t really know where you could get this or where you could learn romance. I explained that my dad sometimes came home with a special wrapped gift which mum liked. He even bought her once a nice meal at a Greek Cafe in town. As far as I could fathom, mum was always very happy when dad showed he loved and cared. I think that might be ‘romance’, Ernie, I said. Well, I can’t give presents and I can’t take her out to a cafe. I don’t have money. But I shouted her to a strawberry milkshake with extra malt before last time, Ernie stated solemnly. How was the second time, I asked? She cried and did not think the milkshake was ‘romantic’ enough, Ernie said. I told her I loved her with much ‘romance’ and she said, “If that is so you would not want me to take my bra off.”   “I don’t take that sheila out anymore”, Ernie said gruffly.

He remained troubled by romance and the apparent link to the cost of it. “We need to get some money together”, he told me, while flicking his butt away

 After the movie I had finally experienced a first time with Kelly leaning against me with her well filled bra and giving me a first but lingering kiss on the cheek.  I was overwhelmed with it all. She hurried through the gate afterwards and waved to me with a smile that stood me in good stead throughout Long Bay and Goulburn afterwards…The bone cold in winter with those grey weeping concrete walls condensing into tears that none of us dared to show.

( to be continued.)