I just wasn't made for these times

Were you born in the wrong decade?

I think I might have been. I've long held suspicions that I was, anyway. My CD collection says I was. The CD in my car As We Speak is a self-slapped-together compilation called 70>80, made up of of tracks from between 1970 and 1980 (AC/DC, Sabbath, Purple, Zeppelin, Sex Pistols, Stooges, MC5, Zappa, Radio Birdman, Motorhead etc). The magazine I most avidly read these days is Australian Muscle Car, a periodical for grumpy old men with petrol (Super, of course) in their veins who think the Torana A9X and Falcon Cobra were as modern as performance cars should have ever been allowed to get. I love it because I love all that old muscle car stuff, from here and the States. I love the stories of Bathurst in the late 60s and 70s - Brock winning in '72 in the XU1 Torana slaying the Falcon GTHO hordes single-handedly in the wet, Bob Morris in tears in the pitlane in '76 as his Brit codriver nursed his dying L34 home for a heroic against-the-odds win. My favourite Matchbox car growing up was 'Ruff Trek', the jacked-up off road HX Kingswood ute. Would I trade my safe, secure, ABS and airbagged modern family chariot for a snarling Monaro GTS or even a Hemi six-pack Charger? If we're trading the heavily policed dual carriageways of modern times for the unrestricted two-lane blacktop of pre-1971 'Straya... hell yeah. Just as I'd trade the South Sydney side of 2009 - annihilation of the hated Broncos aside - for the Souths side of 1971, cos they actually WON SHIT.

But dammit, who wouldn't? Who wouldn't trade Ricky Ponting for Ian Chappell, Mitchell Johnson for Dennis Lillee or Michael Clarke for Dougie Walters? Who wouldn't trade Lara Bingle for Brigitte Bardot? The Kings of Leon for Led Zeppelin? Kevin Rudd for Gough Whitlam? Pure Blonde for Something Actually Fucking Drinkable?

Yeah, yeah. Rose coloured glasses and all that. Back then, large tracts of Australia were stagnant, white-bread, backward Anglo shitholes. Your chances of getting a decent coffee were akin to those of getting a decent kebab. TV was still in black and white and so was racial politics. Twuntering, iPhones and the internerd were twenty years away, meaning that pr0n was unavailable in the quantity, quality and variety that it is today - a dog-eared copy of Mayfair passed on by an older brother/cousin or mates with same, if you were lucky. Still, their were unexpected educational benefits, particularly in geography. Maps of Tasmania bigger than the Collins Junior Atlas of Australia. Topographically accurate in many cases.

And I'd have needed a different career. There's no fucking chance a good-but-not-brillo high school student like m'self would have had the opportunity to go to uni, discover life-affirming shit about biology and genetics - much of which was still to be discovered in the early '70s - and veer off in the direction currently occupied by Your Correspondent. Not until Whitlam made uni available to everyone, not just those who scored scholarships and those whose parents could shell out for it.

Nope I'd have probably done what the old man did - went to teachers' college. Newcastle Teachers' College to be precise. Pub crawls up Hunter St - win. Holiday job in the steelworks - less so. And while he had some crap cars in his time - anything prior to the V8 muscle car explosion of the late 60s was inevitably British, anaemic and embarrassing - were some weapons too. In my childhood there was a 253ci V8 HT Kingswood ute, followed later by a '71 Fairlane 351ci V8 auto in heroically early-Seventies rust brown, the ultimate Antipodean land barge. 'Course any and all of them would be dusted by the base model Falcon he has now, but that's not the point. He had mates with V8 Falcons and GTS Monaros (though the latter was *cough* the 186ci six with Traumatic transmission), all of which appeared in the peeling photos and faded slides from the era - as did the shots of the old man and his mate Norm jumping the sand dunes around home on the old man's Suzuki TS185. Unsurprisingly this led to photos of rider, bike and sand dune arguing with each other, then photos of each going their separate ways.

Norm's in a lot of stories about my old man. They met at teachers' college, the old man being from Sydney, Norm from the North Coast. It was Norm who introduced the old man to the area, and the tiny little beach village where I was brought up. Norm had the Falcon GT - he was from a family of Ford-heads - but went against his own programming to get a V8 Calais, and before that - world of weird - a Lada Niva 1600 4WD to tow his fishing boat with. Fucking appalling idea. Gearboxes made from old tins of borscht, wouldn't pull a sailor off your sister, fell to bits faster than Humpty Dumpty. He'd packed in teaching early, medically retired on stress, so for most of my childhood he just kicked back and looked after himself and his family, fishing, running the caravan park, the local volunteer bush fire brigade, that sort of stuff. Five or six years ago he traded in the Calais for his true love, a V8 Falcon - an Arctic White XR8, in fact. Made about as much sense as buying a Lada and parking it at the beach.


There's a theory - it may be just the old man's - that suggests that typically people only last twenty years or so after they pack-in full time work - perhaps the brain just atrophies with not enough to keep it vibrant and functional. Maybe it was true in Norm's case. He passed away yesterday morning. He'd been ill for a long time, with a variety of medical issues - physiological, structural, neurodegenerative - so it wasn't unexpected, but still a sharp, stark punch in the guts. He was a genuinely good bloke and didn't deserve to go out the way he had to. Sadly, you don't often get to choose.



This, according to the old man, was the song playing on the stereo in the shop where he bought the tie he married my mum in - Cream's Tales of Brave Ulysses. Norm was one of the old man's wedding posse - probably groomsman, I dare say his brother was best man - and is in all the appropriately dodgy photos complete with genuine 1971 beard, which both he and the old man maintained until they both turned grey.

That's all I got. Not particularly funny, but you get that on the big jobs, to borrow a line from a good mate of mine. I'm off to raise a glass to a good mate of the old man's, someone who played a large part in my upbringing. It might only be Double Brown in a can, because like the old man I'm fucking cheap when it comes to beer, but the sentiment will remain.

The Doctor is OUT.