Ian Wilson and his family travelling in their car when he was a little fella.
Poet Ian Bland on Radio 3RRR’s JVG Radio Method recently described the imminent migration of Melburnians to the country post-lockdown, as not unlike a plague of field mice heading out of the city. So true.
Sadly, not all family holidays reach expectations. Despite my parents’ best intentions to provide that ‘Brady Bunch’ moment in 1973, our first family holiday became our last.
In 1995 I had an opportunity to take a position as state account manager in Perth after 15 years of living on the east coast. After a couple of weeks, my boss came to me and said, “You know that national consumer competition we ran in Coles where the winner gets a car?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Well, the winner comes from Albany. You know where that is don’t you?”
“Yep.”
“Well, I need you to fly down there and do the presentation.” Pregnant pause. He continued: “What’s wrong? Is it the flying?”
“No … it’s Albany.”
In the summer of 1973, my parents decided to do a cliched family road trip to Albany, about five hours south of our hometown of Medina. Our parents only ever spoke to argue, and me, 10 at the time, and my younger brother Glen, seven, were constantly at each other’s throats, so this trip was never going to end well.
Glen and I fought all the way and I distinctly remember the tipping point being as we approached the outskirts of Albany. Mum, forever the disciplinarian, had been yelling and reaching around from the front seat punching any part of us she could and had clearly had enough.
Dad pulled the Mazda station wagon, with the protective plastic still on the seats, over to the side of the road, turned to us two now strangling each other, and said quite calmly, “When we get to the next stop, I’m going to give you both the thrashing of your lives.”
From that point to when we stopped at the toilet block on Albany Esplanade, Glen and I were in serious damage control and distraction was urgently needed.
“Gee Dad look at that island out there.”
“Wow, those waves are pretty big hey?”
No response from the old man, just grimly focused on the driving and what he was intending to inflict on us.
We pulled up at the toilet block and Mum got out. Dad slowly got out of the driver’s seat, opened the back door on my side and I was frozen as if my last act of defiance was, “What can you do to me anyway?” Beat the crap out of me was the answer to that! Our Dad was a British Commando Sergeant Major in WW2, so a skinny 10-year-old in black footy shorts wasn’t going to pose much resistance!
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Glen had decided that jumping from the back seat into the car’s wagon area would save him but it was futile as Dad grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, pulled him back to position “A” and proceeded to thump his legs and backside amidst the cacophony of screams being omitted by both of us.
I’m sure the belting wasn’t that bad, more so it was the serial killer-like approach he executed that traumatised us. It was the only time he ever hit us, because every time we played up from thereon, he would simply yell out, “Shut up or I’ll come in there and give you an Albany.” Case closed. It was also the first and only family holiday we had.
Two years later in our final year of Medina Primary School, we had an end-of-year school trip. No exotic locations like kids have these days such as Costa Rica or Mongolia. No, let’s throw 40 kids in a bus with no air conditioning in the middle of summer and take them on a 1000km road trip starting at Kalgoorlie, a town where only miners and prostitutes could exist!
From the Goldfields we went to stunning Esperance and up to that point, the trip was fantastic. Next stop Albany. We were taken to Albany’s main tourist spot, the whaling station, at that time still the only active commercial whaling station in Australia. After browsing the gift shop for a while, we got the call that a dead whale had been pulled up the jetty.
Suddenly we stepped from the relative comfort of cheesy souvenirs into a backdrop of blood, blubber, guts and an overwhelming stench that bypassed your nostrils and penetrated your brain! I distinctly remember two men guiding intestines into a huge hole in the jetty.
Whale intestines are the diameter of a telegraph pole and probably kilometres in length although I didn’t hang around long enough to measure it. Despite the events of that day, no one complained and we simply pushed that trauma down into the dark recesses of our minds to deal with 40 years later!
Back to 1995, and after finishing the presentation and spending some time with customers and colleagues I had an hour to kill before the flight home. I walked to where the events of 22 years earlier had occurred and reflected on my and my brother’s behaviour. Up to that day, Mum had always been the disciplinarian to all nine kids and I think her exiting the car that day was her way of handing a bit of the baton over to the old man.
His method may not have been in the ‘parenting 101’ book these days but it had the desired effect. To anyone who hasn’t been to Albany before, have no fear! There is no whaling station anymore and along with the other towns in the south-west like Denmark, Yallingup and Margaret River, are all beautiful and great to visit.
One of my favourite sketches from Bill Hicks relates to his family trips as a kid growing up in a Christian family in Texas (language warning).
*You can read more of Ian Wilson’s work at WWW.ISOWILSON.COM
