LIVING IN THE PASSED

In my brief time at the ad agency, I enjoyed swotting up on famous campaign slogans. The most impressive went, ‘At sixty miles an hour, the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.’ Being at the wheel of your twenties could also be like hearing a clock ticking, a persistent drone from your future saying it’s on its way to meet you on a corner. You can try to justify ignoring it by insisting that the young have a birthright to live like there’s no tomorrow, but the clock keeps going, and the preordained corner floats up from your imagined future to cloud your forward vision. You’ve lived long enough to notice that measurable outcomes proceed by tiny increments — particularly for sportspeople — and that if you miss too many, they can’t be redeemed. And then you will have been left behind.

I didn’t finish the art course. It was enjoyable, but I was there for more than that. Its teaching seemed at the forefront of recent fashions favouring creativity over rigour. Our classes encouraged composition, not representation; spitting non-toxic pigments onto the canvas, not brushing or scraping; enculturation, not concentration; car-pooling up to Sydney for brunch with our teachers’ artist friends, not rote drawing — and so on. I left because I’d enrolled to paint well, not apprehend well. I might have needed a Ming to stand over me for hours on end to make me sketch the perfect still life, but nobody at the TAFE worked that way.

I returned to Brisbane, where my younger brother and I rented half a sturdy old Queenslander owned by Alf, an ageing but spritely former England first-division soccer player. He and his wife lived in the other half. My brother and I used that long, enclosed verandah for handball matches while drinking with friends on Sunday afternoons. When I asked Alf if our games were too noisy, he said he and his wife liked having ‘young bucks’ next door occasionally to deter potential intruders, but I would ask this same question almost every time I saw him. ‘We just pretend it’s distant afternoon thunder,’ he chuckled across the non-existent time that made one of us old and the other young under the clothesline one morning, and I knew he was being too kind. Maybe I’ll end up like Alf too, I thought: an ex–sporting champion and his wife making believe the occasional racket next door was a benign protection racket.

The following year, at twenty-five, I completed my high-school matriculation year at a Gold Coast TAFE college. A month or so later, I began a cadetship with the Tweed Daily News, wondering if there was something portentous in my first day also being the first day of the 1980s. My first hour of my first day was spent accompanying a photographer and a curmudgeonly journo just a few years my senior in search of post–New Year’s Eve celebration ‘yarns’ amid the rough sleepers and litter. As the journo kicked out in disgust at the contents of an upturned refuse bin outside his favourite cafe, I wondered if reporters should be so partial.

I stayed at the paper for three years, graduating as a fully graded journalist and working from my own Gold Coast branch office. Brian Styman was the editor, and the chance he took helped restore the traction I’d lost since Munich. I couldn’t have known when I left the News to run my first public pool that this would be my vocation for the next three-and-a-half decades. Until that point, even with the journalism behind me, I’d sensed my opportunities slipping. I remembered my old primary-school teacher Mr Grange knocking repeatedly on the blackboard while exulting that opportunity only knocked once; and Mrs Talbot reminding me of ‘the incredible opportunity’ I’d been given with my swimming after I’d publicly blabbed how hard it was for swimmers to cope — and how I’d resented her for that. Yet I suspected soon after I began running pools that this was the very corner on which my ticking future had been waiting. It had to be. I was twenty-eight, and within five years I would be married with children. I’d left Bobo back in his home town, but within three years he’d be up in my part of the world and running pools too. This had been his father’s vocation, and he helped set up Bobo with his first.

Life’s early achievers are easily accused of resting on their laurels or living in the past, especially when the years typically bring no further honours. I would wonder if my Bobo-inspired enjoyment of a return to daily training in my mid-thirties was a nostalgic regression to my Ming days, or at least a satisfying purging. Even if those new solo laps were a form of living in the past, I assured myself, they were done not twice daily but just once, and were merely the bare bones of a session: Bobo’s enigmatic ten fours on five. Neither did I obsess over performance milestones, my one goal to climb out with the glow of having completed my daily ‘constitutional’. And its fifty-minute staple was pretty much what prudent health authorities advocated for people of my age anyway.

A decade after that regime had worked its way through my system — I now enjoyed pushing weights and walking the dogs — I was taken aback when a patron at my own swim centre abruptly quipped that I now lived in the past because I no longer trained. Since she was a paying customer whose penchant for wry taunts I accepted as my mercantile lot, I resisted telling her how perverse this one had sounded. Being used to robust barbs from other passionate sports-lovers, I easily deciphered her logic. Its premise was that former champions should maintain their profile with such public commemorations as leading their local fitness group, and that this was not living in the past but an extended conversation. It then stood to reason (at least for some) that if you rejected this organic link, you were probably living in the past. Who was I to argue?

Other patrons over the years had judged more than my personal temporal alignment: the father of a boy I briefly trained even felt he’d identified a dynastic failing. He’d been dragging his son from coach to coach and found them all wanting because the boy had not yet met his expectations. (There had been a much older son — now estranged from both parents — who’d ultimately retired without ever measuring up; so here were parents desperate not to repeat the mistake.) The day they moved on, the father quipped that I couldn’t have been much of a coach because I’d been unable to turn my own girls into champions.

There were too many silly assumptions in this to bother replying; among them that my own success had been a fait accompli of genetics and that my ‘progeny’ needed merely a top-up of tutorial stardust. It was at this point that I wondered if he himself was consumed by a kind of dynastic curse — reflexive disappointment; and this could seem an inherent family hazard in sport. It occurred, I felt, because it was far too easy to imagine that you or your offspring could invest a unique energy in the skills and fitness required for success. And this belief was in a sense justified, but only within the absolute limits of personal excellence — because where was the proof that you were the most gifted of your peers, or that you weren’t fooling yourself with your self-assessments? Otherwise sensible parents, gripped by the promise of a child’s early triumphs, risked forgetting the sheer number of bidders their children would face in just one age group within a chosen sport, let alone those many age groups above and below them, each with its own champions, all eventually spewing out onto the Serengeti of open competition. Similarly, it could sometimes be taken for granted that the enormous effort their child put into daily training wouldn’t run out, that the child trained purely from an ethos of daily satisfaction. Yet it often did run out. On the upside, however, there were always those whose only ambition was to be the best they could, to bask in the attainment of great competence, and to make new friends, and whose families sport would keep rewarding. I have heard Cate Campbell patiently explain to reporters that she and her siblings attended childhood swimming carnivals not in a chase for precocious glory, but ‘mostly for Mum to get us out of the house’ — showing that great outcomes can have unremarkable beginnings.

It didn’t concern me in the slightest if my accuser, or anyone else, disparaged my coaching: I had no greater anticipation of becoming national coach than of being prime minister. Both might have involved a skill set or aptitude I lacked, and coaching was just one of the things I did to make my swim centre viable. In fact, I’d long ago been cautioned never to coach, because the expectations were exponentially higher for those assumed to have ‘cracked the winning formula’. When well-meaning parents asked me if there were any secrets I could tell their kids to help them achieve what I did, I told them this was like asking a winning lotto ball how it had managed to bounce out first. Advice could certainly work, but it would never control the fates of the other lotto balls.

Yet there have been coaching successes along the way. Olympic relay gold medallists Mark Kerry and Chris Fydler had their first significant successes under me as teenagers. Multiple Olympian Adam Pine and Commonwealth Games backstroker Leigh McBean also swam in my lanes on different occasions. (When I had to shoot an email off to Swimming Australia a few years ago, the surprising reply began, ‘Hi Coach.’ This was from Adam Pine, in one of the positions he has held there.) In each case, I moved on to another pool before these impressive young individuals fully matured, always chasing a more lucrative contract rather than staying put in the hope of taking a champion to the top. (I was still ‘once bitten, twice shy’ about the costs of chasing glory in my own career, let alone hitching my star to the contingencies of another. By the time a pool lease came up for renewal, I’d already lined up another, ready to move on if my price was rejected.)

My twelve years leasing council pools were an excellent primer for my own centre, though that entire period could seem a blur of unbroken summer grind with only Christmas Days off, my daily obsession to never have a drowning; industry stalwarts had forewarned me that such blighted managers were sometimes ‘never the same again’. Then there were those patrons who hadn’t minded at all if they expired under my care, like the veteran lapper who refused to leave the water in a thunderstorm, insisting he’d swum through far worse under four prior managers happy for him to plod at his peril. I humoured him by suggesting his welfare was the least of my concerns; it was the hours of forms and interviews I’d later be subjected to that I dreaded.

For a time, I fancied I might even become a pool-management magnate, during a fluky phase of acquisitions that briefly saw my name on three contracts. But I quickly realised that the more pools that came under my control, the less I could exercise control … over public risk, staff behaviour, and revenue. The pools were spread across 1200 kilometres of eastern Australia. No sooner would I be notified that a casual lifeguard at one centre was making a community pest of himself by chatting up young mums at the toddlers’ pool, than another centre would have problems balancing the books. Then there was the coach who threatened to quit on his first day after being confronted by a poolside delegation of aggrieved mothers demanding to know how he intended keeping their children on the ever-upward path the previous coach had touted. In short time, I succeeded in letting one pool revert to council management, and fully sub-contracting another.

Among the remarkable things I witnessed while running country pools was something that happened in 1987 in my then Northern Rivers centre, with a regional school championship underway. Three teenagers I coached were returning from their freestyle final clutching slips of paper. I knew these mementos had little to do with success because the boys’ training habits were not up to this level of competition. The trio ambled across with wry smiles to show me their certificates, awarded to all their fellow finalists in recognition of the winner having broken a regional record. Emblazoned in lush cursive above the centre line was, surely enough, ‘Share-a-Record Certificate’. The boys then shared a cackle before sharing their certificates with the contents of the nearest bin, and I suddenly wondered why educators had so little faith in students as to presume them incapable of allowing hardworking victors their moment in the sun.

And it also happened that neither was I too concerned what sort of swimmers my own girls became, since they were also involved in tennis, equestrian, and surf-lifesaving activities — each requiring its own practice time. There was never any question they would do sport; I’d heard of parents intent on averting future Christmas-dinner rancour by raising ‘free range’ children, only for those supposed free spirits to ultimately round on them with the interrogation, ‘Why didn’t you ever push me?’ In other words, it seemed parents couldn’t win. Sport was the community I’d grown up in — and trusted. I wouldn’t have minded my girls swimming more, had they wanted to, but I also loved seeing them rise early on weekends to eagerly materialise in mustard jumper, tie, and jodhpurs for pony club — and hoped they would always cherish the memory of this ritual.

Horseriding didn’t appeal to me — it was one of my wife’s family traditions. I saw horses as not much more than unshackled trees with enhanced volition and nice but duplicitous eyes, though I occasionally sought ways to be involved. One free Sunday when my older daughter, then twelve, practised slaloms in our paddock, I strolled over to watch. Soon I had stopwatch in hand, timing her through swerve after powerful swerve when the horse stumbled, and in a flash of eternal regret I foresaw a mass of buckled horse and daughter on the ground, before the steed just as unexpectedly regained its footing. The stopwatch went away forever then: ‘This is not swimming,’ I chastened myself.

I was thrilled my daughters played tennis too. We had a big smooth wall in my swim-centre car park where they practised — and I practised — for twenty minutes, several mornings a week. We would stand some fifteen metres from the wall and whack hard and accurately enough at an imagined net height for the ball to keep returning with pace. And once a week we went to the local courts for a longer hit-up, with the girls in regional fixtures (we still play occasionally as a family). Then at thirteen, my older daughter began ballet classes at the invitation of one of our hard-working swim-club mothers, and six years later was performing with the Bayerisches Staatsballett, coincidentally based in Munich. She later returned to Australia to complete a podiatry degree. My younger daughter also danced, and now, like her paternal grandmother, models full-time, proudly booking all her own assignments.

There were other swim-centre clients over the years who asked if I kept up with old swimming friends, when the answer was no. Though not by design, I always hastened to add. It was just that ‘keeping up’ was something my Facebook-less generation of swimmers tended not to do, though if you bumped into any one of them it was surprising how much information there was to exchange. One former teammate, for instance, might have been thriving with five children and happily married to a tradie in a country town; another had gone to finishing school in Switzerland; yet another was now a professional tennis coach, of all things; and a few had teamed with well-situated siblings or parents to make millions. Or you’d be driving to work when the ABC news told you that NSW Fisheries scientist Marcus Lincoln Smith (an old Sydney age-group tormentor) had published his findings into mercury levels in fish caught off North Head.

But one day several years ago, my childhood swim-club mate (and Munich teammate) Jim Findlay wandered into my Gold Coast swim centre. Jim had married one of Talbot’s daughters, the one he was keen on at Auburn pool when Talbot threatened to break both his legs if he found him near his home. Jim was easy to recognise when he came in: his hairline, which had begun receding aggressively in his teens, was not much further along. Except that now he limped in, not from injuries inflicted by Ming, but from a bad motorcycle accident in his thirties. When I introduced Jim to the passing mother of a promising young swimmer as my former Olympic teammate, she paused, offered a brief, courteous smile, and kept going. Because this was a woman who seemed keen for her daughter to succeed, I felt slightly offended on Jim’s behalf by her coolness. But then I guessed my mildly ravaged middle-aged friend may not have been the cliche of spectacular success conjured by rose-tinted parent-glasses. Apart from raising a family, Jim had immersed himself in the sport of taekwondo over the years, despite the limitations of his injuries, and had become a prominent figure in a Korea–Australia friendship organisation. Sadly, Jim died unexpectedly of a heart attack not long before this memoir was completed. Jim’s younger brother Ian was one of our clients at this time, his son a regular in toddlers’ classes. (A very successful coach himself, Ian had taken a starring role in the annals of swimming notoriety when he and Talbot scuffled at a major championship to end up grappling in the pool lanes. The incident made headlines at the time because Talbot was still national coach. When Talbot filed for assault, the ironic guffaws must have been heard from Perth to Brisbane, and the magistrate sensibly threw the case out.)

Also around the time of Jim’s visit, on separate occasions, Talbot’s children Trevor and Lee popped in unannounced, though I was away both times and enormously disappointed to have missed them.

When that legend of every 1960s Australian swimming childhood Graham Windeatt walked into a public pool I managed at age forty, I was so excited I called to my wife in the kiosk to come over, because she’d so often had to listen to me talk about him. I hadn’t seen Graham enter; he’d just materialised beside me in his togs with towel on shoulder while I was taking a chlorine test at the side of the pool. He seemed to have aged taller than me; we’d always been the same height back in the day, though if my torso had been put on his legs, one of us would have been much taller, the other possibly too short to aim high. As always in the past, I was struck by his mildly patrician bearing; other people stood, but Graham anchored. He’d done a business major at the University of Tennessee in his final years of swimming, and before me at that moment might have stood the president of some transnational conglomerate. At forty you don’t want to say things like, ‘I spent my childhood in awe of you,’ or, ‘I don’t know how you survived all that childhood fame when it was the instant kiss of death for other careers,’ but these — and a regard for his general decency — are my enduring sentiments about Graham.

Writing a memoir is obviously another cohabitation with the past. I was never one for keeping a diary — couldn’t see the point of recording a life spent recording a life, even if that daily eclipse was modest. And with this book, there has also been a sense of temporarily damming a river. Even my dreams have had their haunts gatecrashed by long-absent acquaintances; most in these pages have signed that visitor book. I had a recent dream, for instance, starring Don Talbot. I was swimming in an adult squad somewhere, and a little miffed that my training mates were not former greats but recreational lappers. Talbot then appeared before a large iron poolside shed from which flares also randomly spewed. He was in a boiler suit and seemingly disdainful of his swimmers as he scanned the horizon distractedly. When I briefly caught his attention to ask, ‘Am I trying hard enough?’ he didn’t answer but hurried along the pool to a more pressing issue.

I’m not a believer in dreams as portents, though they can evidently revive latent emotions. Talbot’s uncharacteristic distraction in his dream role left me pondering my obtuseness to his inner life in the days when he was trying to turn brats into champions in spite of themselves. My first inkling of him being anything but a reflexive tyrant came when I lived with Bobo in my early post-career years and began hearing about a special friend Talbot had often visited in that very town. She was reportedly quite an elderly woman, a close family friend, and I was gobsmacked to learn that Talbot sometimes ‘poured his heart out’ to this unlikely agony aunt. Poured his heart was surely an oxymoron: it didn’t square with the Ming I’d known. I even found the news mildly cringe-worthy. I was further surprised when Bobo, never a respecter of authority — he had no qualms addressing his father as ‘you silly old goat’ — also held back. I’d expected at least one of his lacerating cackles, but the Talbot expose was clearly emotional kryptonite for him too.

So when Talbot published his memoir many years later, I was almost relieved when a reviewer opined, ‘reads more like a catalogue of triumphs, and rarely anything from the inner man’. Needless to say, there was no mention of his matriarch mentor.

The book was a birthday gift from one of my swimmers who’d been flabbergasted to read within its pages a revelation about his own coach — that the crusty cynic who stood at the end of his every lap was ‘the most talented swimmer’ Talbot ever coached. I was happy for a prominent figure to briefly boost my stocks in the eyes of one of my charges, but my candid impression was that Talbot had leaped far beyond his usual public punditry into omniscience. It seemed silly to rate my abilities above those of John Konrads, for instance, who set twenty-six world records to my two. Silly — because sportspeople competed to end debate, not invite it. You could have favourites, but once you ranked athletes on inferred ability, the speculation was endless. I wondered if Talbot had mistaken my daily struggle with training consistency for a stubborn latent giftedness, when it was simply an athletic deficiency. This was a classic case of ‘drowning, not waving’. I lacked the impressive energy of my peers, and tried to make up for it by being observant.

When my wife and I noticed Talbot on a TV panel show at this time, he again nominated me his most gifted swimmer, adding I’d also been ‘one of the toughest’. Then he quipped I’d been ‘a total nightmare to train’. ‘Is he allowed to say that?’ my wife asked with a start. I laughed and said I was in excellent company: Talbot’s book was a litany of the sport’s greatest names variously condemned as ‘fragile’, ‘angry’, ‘their own worst enemy’, ‘lacking confidence’, and ‘never coming near their potential’. ‘To be coached by Talbot,’ I told her, ‘was to be judged against the straw men of your teenage inadequacy and his infallibility.’ And if you weren’t inadequate, you might be ‘cocky’, as he labelled the Laurie Lawrence–trained Stephen Holland, who rewrote the distance record books in the mid-1970s. (As captain of a team Holland toured with, I found him not cocky, but upbeat, comedically self-effacing, and an inspiration to teammates.)

Yet beyond all this, I could now appreciate Talbot’s frustration at having his injunctions for resolute training undermined by a swimmer who appeared to daily prove him wrong.

These and other Talbot pronouncements through his later tenures made me suspect he was currying controversy arbitrarily: in one five-year period his position on doping, for instance, swung 180 degrees from a laissez-faire ‘Let Them All Dope’ (Brisbane Times) to a blanket ban of all pharmacology in sport (Sydney Morning Herald). (My position has consistently been the latter.) Such opinions seemed to thunder even more loudly after 2001 when he gave up the Australian national coaching job to finally share the fate of swimmers — to suffer the adjective ‘former’ before his laurels. From here on, he would work as a consultant.

And soon came the mother of all Talbot public sprays, when he took up a consultancy with Swimming New Zealand and promptly told a major newspaper (Otago Daily Times), ‘New Zealanders don’t believe in themselves.’ This almost biblical ‘belief only through me’ franchise of psychological hegemony had always worked on teenagers, but an entire nation? In my scan of his 2003 book, I couldn’t help noticing how many times variants of his core mantra, ‘records will always be broken’, came up, always preceded by ‘I’m a great believer that …’ as if he might soon patent his hunch that the sun would keep rising.

Yet this humbug had always served him perfectly in the masculine world of coaching, where chest-to-chest bluster counted for far more than flawed platitudes. Talbot exuded so much of this corticosteroid bluff that it was as if his entire endocrine system had migrated outwards into a tough exoskeleton. When you saw him playing hardball with people and reputations, you could almost see protein receptors bouncing and binding across that armour plate.

It was a measure of the hormonal maelstrom that could seem to pass for communication in the Talbot national coaching hierarchy of the ’90s (Grant Hackett’s coach Denis Cotterell confided in me, ‘If he comes on like that again, I won’t mind blueing with him’) that few bothered to challenge his more outlandish statements. As I continued to read his memoir (in case I was quizzed by my swimmer), I came across the most brazenly false proposition I’d heard a coach make. Talbot, as ever, playing the goading iconoclast, had tried to make a case that swimming still had much to learn from athletics on the basis of an unfavourable contrast in performance fall-off between swimming and running events. But the events he chose to compare were not remotely of the same duration. Had he chosen races of similar duration, he would have found that both running and swimming suffer exactly the same performance fall-off — in this case, by the margin of 4.6 seconds (between the swimming events of 50-metre and 100-metre freestyle, and the running events of 200-metre and 400-metre, as indicated by their then respective world records).

That Talbot put such jabberwocky into print within two years of having been Australia’s head coach showed a chutzpah beyond belief by normal sporting standards, but not by his. It was also an example of the deferential effect he had on colleagues, since neither of his two reputable co-authors evidently bothered to scrutinise this blatant howler. Either that, or they hadn’t the temerity to raise it with him.

But Talbot succeeded spectacularly in his long career not on the basis of egregiously flawed technical speculations; he was simply from the start outrageously smitten with swimming. Whether in the competitive or skill sense, swimming seemed a mythological presence in his imagination. After a stint as a reputedly impatient school teacher in his early twenties, the serendipitous appearance in his life of two of the most talented siblings ever to don a pair of cossies — the Konrads kids John and Ilsa — sparked the lifelong passion he appeared to place before all else. Whenever I walked onto a pool deck that Talbot strutted in my youth, I had no doubt that few coaches on earth at that moment held such command over a team of athletes.

Elite swimmers sometimes consider themselves ‘truer’ personifications or exemplars of their sport’s history than coaches, but it is hard to argue that Talbot’s almost six decades of continuous elite coaching and administration doesn’t confer similar status. Talbot gave his entire life to the sport in a way that few swimmers are required to.

By his own admission (and regret), he did not become rich, despite his pre-eminence. Perhaps with this in mind, he controversially chastened those swimmers who found wealth through success yet refused to share it with their coaches — to which swimmers would sensibly reply that they had already financially advantaged their coaches by burnishing their reputation in continuing to train with them. Talbot struggled to see why modern swimmers would readily give a percentage cut of their incomes to a manager, yet not to a coach. Perhaps he saw managers as usurpers to the control coaches traditionally exercised over swimmers. But when double Olympic gold medallist Susie O’Neill went public with her sense of outrage after Talbot’s poolside castigation of her own coach, I’m sure she knew the value of her manager. (Swimming Australia now has a ‘member welfare’ policy in place to deter such poolside confrontations.)

Other casualties associated with such a proud determination are not hard to find in the Talbot experience. While acknowledging this, he also claimed to have been baffled by a perceived reluctance of luminaries like Susie O’Neill, Hayley Lewis, and Lisa Curry to fully resolve past grievances with him.

I know few contemporaries entirely free of a conflicted view of Talbot, though many, like me — on balance — consider him a vanishingly unique individual.

Those without reservations are usually from his earliest coaching days. John Konrads, for instance, told me that he had warmly regarded Talbot as ‘a kind of big brother’. Less than a decade separated the pair. Talbot had then yet to face the full stresses of raising a family and finding a way to support his poorly paying passion.

In another recent dream about Talbot, I was back with my old Ming squad mates at a carnival where I’d been placed in charge of supplying towels. This ridiculous dream and my ridiculous task also had me carting around some medieval wooden trolley, its cargo of towels folded and compressed into the smallest possible bricks, like fluffy licorice allsorts. But I’d apparently packed many times the required number, because when Talbot noticed this mistake he spent the rest of the carnival gratuitously haranguing me.

It was this exact same haranguing note that had filtered through Gold Coast supermarket shelves one day in my forties when I overheard from the next aisle, ‘Why would we even buy that curry? You wouldn’t know how to cook it.’ I immediately quipped to my wife in a shelf-traversing pitch, ‘That man sounds just like my old swimming coach, and he’s still telling people they’re not good enough.’ When the adjacent aisle fell silent, I took my wife around and introduced her to Ming and his third wife, and if he was embarrassed he didn’t show it, though the pair seemed keen to get on with not buying stuff. More-generous souls would have left the couple to their unremarkable shopping tiff. I thought I was being droll, but probably went too far. And I didn’t enjoy it. I relished it. At the 1974 Commonwealth Games in Christchurch, two years after Talbot last coached me, we passed much closer to each other than in those supermarket aisles — I almost physically bumped into him on climbing from the pool elated after my 200-metre backstroke gold. He didn’t offer a congratulations or even a simple hello, but couldn’t resist accusing, ‘You should be four seconds better by now.’ In that instant, I saw how puny an amateur sportsperson’s place was. We generated fortunes for media magnates, kept their journalists in work, and sustained careers like Talbot’s — all for fleeting praise or gratuitous poolside slights. (An image of Emil Zatopek collecting Prague’s garbage popped into my head.) I couldn’t wait to quit. Our supermarket encounter didn’t make up for that disappointment, but I had a ‘personal best time’ of it, if a guilty one.

My father died in 1996. Regrettably perhaps, it was a month before I opened my new swim centre, though this prospect held no great atavistic pomp. Yet he did manage to visit the site near its completion, and promptly stumbled on a patch of loam to go headlong towards a pool still full of air. I caught his arm in time to prevent that dive. After a decent innings like his, bereavement can be processed soon enough, but in that same year another of my Munich teammates died unexpectedly, aged forty-two. In her 200-metre Olympic breaststroke win, Bev Whitfield became one of Australia’s two Munich ‘bolters’, along with Gail Neall. Both had found the perfect opening at the perfect moment of their careers, showing a special genius most sportspeople only dream of. Bev died in bed during what might have been expected to be an innocuous and brief — for someone so physically powerful — dose of the flu. Ever cheerful in company, Bev hailed from Bobo’s part of the world, the Illawarra, and epitomised the best in its hearty populace.

The deceased appear in my dreams more than the living lately, though I wouldn’t use the word frequent. Unlike Bobo’s dramatic end, my father died in his sleep in the retirement village where he’d rested his head the previous five years. On his bedside table was a bottle of pills, half full or half empty, depending on whether I worried he’d ended his own life, or accepted that pills were inseparable bedfellows with the elderly. But he was nearly ninety, and old enough to decide when, and how, to go. My older brother and I were the ones called to view the body and make arrangements.

My father’s tired euphemism for death was the big swim. He exercised it so much that I half-suspected he was conditioning me for eventual news reports requesting public help to identify an elderly man last seen stroking in the general direction of New Zealand. He didn’t die a lonely old man, the fate my mother had often shrieked for him. His last five years had in fact been full of retirement-village activities, and he retained his car until the end. Which was all a bit odd because for the almost twenty years after I left him he stuck doggedly to a solitary version of the roving life we’d had together, clocking an average six months per dwelling. Mostly he stayed in bedsits or caravans, though occasionally ‘shacking up’ with rich widows in their waterfront mansions. I visited him through all of those moves, his one constant the wall of photos of famous actors: his glorious past. I was gazing at Elizabeth Taylor’s eyelashes one day as he leaned forwards to change TV stations with a golf club, when he quipped out of the blue, ‘They were hard times after the divorce, weren’t they.’ I answered, ‘Yep,’ and ribbed him about his nine-iron remote.

He loved talking about his neighbours, often fellow itinerants, and always made their life stories interesting except for that of the old amnesiac next door at one location, for obvious reasons. Once when he abruptly ended a relationship with one of his rich widow suitors, she rang me with a distressed request for clarification of his goodbye note: specifically, the counsel, ‘Don’t take any wooden nickels.’ I thought she was either really dumb or, more likely, simply wanted me to stew in my father’s juices. The only blemish on Ashley’s otherwise charmed last years at the village was his feud with a pesky fellow alpha male, a stiff-backed sergeant-major type, who’d begun to steal his thunder and dance partners. ‘Do you think I should just deck him, Brad?’ he asked once. I wasn’t sure how to answer, but joked he’d probably knock his nemesis’ head clean off and go to jail and only get paroled in a box. One day I caught sight of a nasty surgery scar zipping that old pest’s neck vertebrae from his hairline into his collar and knew I’d cautioned Ashley wisely.

I often wondered how much — if any — money Ashley had squirrelled away in those frugal peripatetic years, and when the will came out it was a modest sum that bypassed his own offspring for the pockets of his eight grandchildren, with my girls able to buy half of their first second-hand car with their share.

Ashley’s appearances in my dreams are quite banal. The most interesting was where we were chatting in the manner of our many ‘interview’-style later meetings, though this time he was sitting not on a lounge cushion but atop the backrest. This was so uncharacteristic of him — of almost anyone — that I laughed heartily, even reciting a mock advertising slogan for the brand: ‘Our lounges are so comfortable that people sit on the backrest,’ which was so you-had-to-be-there hilarious that I laughed my way out of the dream and marvelled at how revitalised I’d woken.

Bobo knows this memoir’s pretty much done and dusted, because he doesn’t drop in anymore — to my dreams. When he did, we’d mostly chat about the weather. His only visit to seem in any way complex or poignant concerned his son, who was also a father of young children when he too died in a single-occupant car crash. This particular dream had Bobo and me chatting easily, though I was also distracted by overhearing his son’s voice and being unable to source it. Then I suddenly noticed Bobo concealing something behind his back, an iPhone on which I glimpsed his son’s Skype image calling for him. I left them alone to talk.

A year or so before Bobo’s son died, I was driving to work when a familiar voice phoned into a local talkback show; listeners had been asked to call with examples of parental sage advice. I was surprised Bobo’s son identified himself with his real Christian name — it was exotically rare. And when he was asked where he was from, I knew the coy lilt that announced his suburb. I was so touched by his impulse to casually memorialise his father that I hardly noticed the nature of that sage advice, though it was along the lines of, ‘When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade.’

The one dream presence that puzzles me is actually an absence — of my Brisbane coach Gordon Petersen. Puzzling because training under Gordon was totally uncomplicated: no constant threat of physical abuse, no crushing fatigue to make you think about quitting every other month. And I was living at home, as basic as it might sometimes have been with my father. Ashley seemed to think Gordon lacked charm, but perhaps Gordon knew how to switch it off to such parents who were likely never satisfied with his results anyway. In fact, Gordon was one of the most humorous and entertaining of coaches, if a little dry and curt at times. And maybe it’s because of this fully resolved sense of training with him that I don’t need him in my dreams.

I don’t recall any recent dreams about my mother either, let alone advice — considered advice, anyway. But when she took the trouble to provide a eulogy for her own funeral in 2014, I wondered for a brief moment if this wasn’t a dream. I was unaware she’d penned a piece addressing her three sons until the funeral director asked me to decipher portions of her handwriting, moments before I took the stage. Now suddenly the deceased’s fellow eulogist, I had no time to speculate on her motive for this eccentricity. When her piece aired, there were no surprises: just her usual recollection of concern for my idle early twenties, praise for my younger brother’s qualities of loyalty and friendship, and, finally, her dogged insistence that my older brother’s arrival in her own young adult body had been ‘a complete mystery’, a reference to his birth exactly eight months after her marriage. Was this Catholic guilt carried past the grave? I wondered. I also wondered why she’d felt the need for this kind of post-mortem showboating. If she’d been proud of her sons, surely the fact that we were all self-employed and had in fact been net employers for much of our working lives should have been sufficient.

At one point on her deathbed, my mother’s legs kept kicking fiercely under the sheet, as if scrambling for a foothold, and I pondered that life’s most challenging moment was so often kept for those least able to apprehend it. Or were they? But then, I guessed, we’re all equally diminished in those very last moments. Earlier, according to my brothers, who’d spent the morning with her, a priest had chanced in presuming to perform last rites, when our mother had the presence of mind to see him off with a few petulant air chops. This was in her second visit to palliative care; her first had lasted just a day or so before she returned to her flat beneath my older brother’s home. In those forty-eight hours before returning to hospital, dressed to the casual nines, she hosted several final visits from friends and family — dips and drinks supplied. Looking at her, you wouldn’t have been surprised to learn you’d been summoned to hear she’d mistakenly received someone else’s diagnosis. It was gallows theatre.

While chatting with her that evening I boldly decided to steer the conversation to her early days with Ashley. I wanted to know more about his supposed conjugal declaration that the baby being created on the cruise ship (me) would ‘be something special’. (Yes, my mother was dying, I conceded, but I felt I deserved an explanation after all the social capital she’d made of this bizarre claim over the years.) This was a kind of journalism, and not the most comfortable one. When I worked as a graded journalist for those three years in my mid-twenties, I’d often dreaded asking the tough questions, but this was worse.

‘Are you sure it wasn’t a misunderstanding?’ I finally asked. ‘I mean, he might have muttered some terrible bedroom cliche like, “making this baby will be special,” and maybe you misheard him or were unfamiliar with the line.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘I know what I heard.’ And that was that.

So, yes, your father was a total lunatic, she might have added.

Still, I wondered.