Fossickers

By Neville Cole

My mother always had a rare sense of timing. She passed away last year on my birthday. Instead of celebrating another year around the sun with my friends, I travelled back to Melbourne to organize her funeral and take care of her affairs. It was all fairly straight-forward until it came time to go through her stuff. The house where she passed was filled to overflowing with the assorted flotsam and jetsam of a long and disorganized life.

Sadly, most everything I came across was destined for a quick trip to the local tip. I was beginning to think that I should save myself a considerable effort and toss it all, until deep down in a box pile of ancient papers, I started to discover bits and pieces of a jumbled handwritten manuscript entitled Victor Australis that appeared to have been written by a long-lost Great Uncle named Aussie Moore.

I knew my Great Uncle Clarry well. He was a legendary figure around Kilmore, the town my mother grew up in. One of many famous Clarry Moore tales was that on his 82^nd birthday the family purchased him a table saw so that he could put a new roof on his barn. He completed the task by himself in less than a week. I knew all about Clarry and Grandpa Dot; but until I came across Victor Australis, I had never heard of Aussie Moore. It was if he had been banished from the Moore family records.

Victor Australis is a rambling and outrageous account of a very strange life. Many events are described in exhausting detail then whole decades disappear without a trace. Much of he describes is too coincidental to be true, while other parts of his life story are clearly historical fact. In his own words, Aussie Moore was one of the “first true Australians” as he was born during the early hours of January 1^st, 1901: the day Australia became an independent federation.

Ever since I picked up Victor Australis I have haven’t been able to set it back down for long; which is why I have decided to write out Aussie’s tales out in some kind of a logical order and bring them to the world. Ladies and Gentlemen I give you the late, great Aussie Moore!

NOTE: The section of italic text that follows I believe to be the opening paragraph of Aussie’s autobiography. I have tried to capture his idiosyncratic phrasing exactly as he laid them to paper; but, truth be told, some of these pages have been pretty severely damaged by the ravages of time and in places I was forced to make my own best guess as to what had been once been intended.

I was born into trouble and it has followed close at me heels throughout my entire life. I have done too many things to remember them all, seen much more than even that, and just to have survived this long I consider myself a fortunate fellow indeed. I was born in an Englishman’s house high on a hill overlooking the rich goldfields of Ballarat. The morning of my birth was the first morning of the new Australian federation, which makes me one of the first true Australians, the first of the Aussies. I don’t count in this group any of the many indigenous peoples who have inhabited the great southern land as they all predate terra australis by centuries at least. I don’t remember any of the particulars of my birth. Which isn’t unusual, I suppose. In fact, any man who says he does remember that time of his life is a damned liar at best and at worst a devil in the flesh.

I was, quite naturally, told stories of that morning by others from time to time. However, never by my own father, Duncan Robert Moore, for reasons I will reveal at a later time.

Ballarat – the town where Aussie was born

At the dawn of 1901, Ballarat was a town still thriving from sale of gold. It was a town with a thick rough edge and a tough, unforgiving, and almost unimaginably wealthy center. It was a town still driven by the Eureka spirit. My father was far more proud of Australia’s hard fought federation than my arrival. In fact, on more than one occasion he informed me that it was always his intention that I would be a daughter – a gift from him to my mother for her hard toil over the years. My name had already been chosen. I was to be Victoria Australis Moore. When it was clear that a nob and two bollocks hung between my thighs, my parents removed the last two letters of my first given name and I became Victor Australis Moore – forever after known simply as Aussie. But getting my name changed is the least memorable part of this story.

You see, as was customary on the last night of each year, my father spent a good part of New Years Eve, 1900 drinking heavily with good friends and neighbours and, only after midnight passed and it became obvious that I would wait no longer, did he send his guests home and my brother Clarry to fetch the local mid-wife. She arrived none too soon and immediately saw my mother was in grave danger as I was well on my way to coming out breach. There was no time now to fetch the doctor so, as the mid-wife did what she could to make my mother comfortable, my father staggered to his horse and galloped off to fetch Mr. Webb, a local horse breeder who had experience with various animal surgeries. Mr. Webb by all accounts had also been partaking in a long evening of revels and, perhaps because of this, made the immediate decision that I must be delivered in the manner of the great Caesar himself. He administered a gulping gut full of rum down my mother’s gullet then proceeded to quickly and skillfully slit her belly and tear me screaming from her womb.

My oldest brother, Clarry watched the whole ordeal in utter fascination, and later would recount the horrible episode to me late at night causing me to suffer from a lifetime of sleep shattering nightmares. Clarry never failed to mention that Mr. Webb sowed my mother’s belly back together “like a seamstress at her loom using naught but dried sheep intestines that had been soaked in spirits”. Such was my coming in and such has been my path ever since.

 —ooo—