In 1945, the year after my father died, I came down with a serious ailment that was to leave its mark on me for life. It was an acute abscess in a frontal sinus—that is, the sinus in the bone above the eye. In my case, it was the left frontal sinus. The first symptom I had was a bad headache. My mother took me to a GP in Hamilton, who could find nothing wrong with me. In fact, he warned my mother against pandering to me because I no longer had a father. I was then ten years old. A day or two later I collapsed and was taken to the local hospital, where the cause of the problem was identified, probably by an X-ray. My condition must have been considered serious, because a Melbourne surgeon named Scantlebury was flown to Hamilton specially to treat me. What he did was to cut through the bone above my eye to drain the abscess. My mother told me long afterwards that during the operation Dr Scantlebury emerged from the operating theatre to ask her whether she wanted him to continue. He was warning her, in effect, that I might not survive the operation, and he wanted her approval to keep going. She told him to press on, which, fortunately, he did, for the operation proved successful.
I was in hospital—the old McKellar Hospital in Hamilton, which is now part of the Hamilton Hospital complex—for a long time afterwards. There was an RAAF airman in the same ward, a young man from a grazing family in the district, who had been wounded in the war. He taught me to play euchre. He had a pack of cards, and I would sit on his bed and play euchre with him for hours. I did not realise it at the time, but the airman was dying from his injury. I heard later that he died not long after I left hospital and went home. I have thought about him many times since. I like to imagine I may have been some comfort to him—a kid sitting on his bed playing cards. He certainly helped my own recovery. Eventually, I did recover completely, although the operation left a deep scar above the eye which I bear to this day.
In the late 1940s I began spending a few days at a time with Aunty Jean at Bassett. Sometimes I brought along a school mate of mine, Roger Harrison. We went rabbiting with Alf Turner’s son, who transported us about in a horse and cart. We also sailed about the property’s deepest dam on a raft made from oil drums. We did it without life jackets, of course. I was only twelve or thirteen then, yet Aunty Jean used to say to me, ‘You know, dear, that you’re going to have to run your farm when you grow up.’ The idea did not appeal. I knew nothing about farming and, in any case, I was happy living in a comfortable house in Hamilton. Those visits to Bassett were, however, my first real experience of farming life.
In 1949 my mother sent me off to board at my father’s old school, Geelong College. Before that, I had gone to school at Hamilton College, which was convenient for me, because we lived close to its front gate. In fact, no student at Hamilton College lived closer to the school than I did. At Geelong College, I proved to be an undistinguished student, as my 1949 school report illustrates. I came thirty-first in a class of 35 and was close to last in most subjects. The school principal wrote of me in the report: ‘A reliable, trustworthy boy but slow academically.’ A few ‘special comments’ were added about my poor marks. One of them, in reference to English, said, ‘Grammar weak.’ Another, in reference to Latin, said, ‘Subject seems beyond him.’ The final summary, presumably by my teacher, was: ‘Does some good work sometimes, but is very unstable. Not sufficiently interested in accurate thinking.’ Things did not improve in the next few years, either. I failed Year 10 and had to repeat it, after which I left school for good. That was in 1952.
During my time at Geelong College—in the summer of 1950–51, to be precise—the school had the fairly rare distinction of having two old boys in the Australian cricket team at one time. One was Lindsay Hassett, the Australian captain, and the other a spin bowler with a unique ‘flicking’ method of spinning the ball, Jack Iverson, who was not quite two years younger than Hassett. I have read that Iverson once bowled Hassett in an inter-house match at the school, which was no doubt a sign of things to come. In 1952 Hassett returned to the school to play for an old boys’ team against our first XI. I was the official scorer that day, which was probably the high point of my cricket career: cricket was not my game. I really enjoyed playing footy, by which I mean Australian football, but the sport I did best at—and enjoyed most—was athletics, for I could run fast enough to make the relay team.
Geelong College had a large boarding house in my day, which was occupied mainly by the sons of sheep graziers from various parts of Victoria, especially the Western District, and from the Riverina. Many of these boys intended going on the land, and for some of them it was almost an automatic thing to go from school to an agricultural college. This is exactly what I did. The decision was not mine, however. It was made by my mother on the advice of Dick Hughes, the manager of the Union Fidelity Trustees Company, who had been a close friend of my father’s. Dick Hughes was a fine, upstanding character who gave my mother a lot of support while we were growing up, although, as I later discovered, he did not have much practical knowledge of farming. He was probably right, though, to suggest that an agricultural college would be good for me.
I enrolled in Longerenong Agricultural College, which is just north of the Grampians, quite close to Horsham. Because I had passed only the intermediate exam at school I went into first year at the college. Boys who had matriculated went into second year. This put me at a social disadvantage, since I was seventeen going on eighteen and sharing the classroom with boys of sixteen. But I made some good friends there and occupied my spare time happily by playing footy and other sports.
Longerenong was a great training ground: we acquired practical skills there as well as theoretical knowledge. We might spend one week in a dairy, the next in a poultry shed, the next in a woolshed or abattoir or even a bakery. I hated the abattoir work. First-year students like me had the job of slitting the sheep’s throats, but I freaked out whenever it came my turn to do it. (I did get over the revulsion eventually and for a long time I killed our own meat at Lanark. But about twenty years ago the old aversion to slaughtering animals suddenly returned and I was never able to kill our own meat again. Today, I would find it hard to kill a fly.)
The one thing that was lacking in Longerenong’s syllabus was some reference to the importance of planting trees on farms. In all the classes I attended there, as best as I can recall, the subject was not mentioned once.
I enjoyed Longerenong and learned quite a lot, but unfortunately my time at the college was cut short. Here is what happened. Someone who had been in our football team the year before, but who had since left the college, decided to revisit his old team-mates. On his way to the college he called at a local pub and bought a few long-neck bottles of beer, which he shared with us when he got to the college. It was both a generous and unwise thing to do, for at that time Longerenong had a total ban on alcohol: anyone caught drinking was liable to be expelled. Since our old team-mate had been kind enough to bring the beer, however, we felt obliged to drink it. I had one glass. Others may have had two glasses, but that was all. When we went into the dining room for dinner that evening, we were stopped at the door by the head prefect of the college, who apparently could smell the beer on our breath. We were apprehended and made to sit at a separate table in the dining room. There was much worse to come next day. Our house master ordered us to pack our things and leave Longerenong immediately, which we did. We were taken to the railway station at Horsham in the back of the college’s farm truck.
Six of us, all members of the football team, were later formally expelled. Some of the parents reacted with outrage and complained so loudly that the story of our expulsion eventually made page one of the Melbourne Sun. It was all acutely embarrassing for the college, which then sought to defuse the situation by inviting the six of us to return. The house master who booted us out was reportedly made to resign. I felt sorry for him even then. He was close to retiring age and had obviously felt he was just enforcing the college rules. The catch was that we could not come back that year: we had to wait until the following year and then start the academic year again. I was already nineteen by this stage, and I decided I was too old to start second year at the college again.
I decided to go jackarooing.