Category Archives: Blog

Writing obituaries is often an exercise in “meeting” after the event. Such contact, over conversation, over coffee, over both, can lead to something like friendship. The question from a wife or family member, about any possible meeting, is a source of comfort. The implication is that my work has done justice to a life well lived.

Likewise, a reader may call to make the point: “I’d like to have met the doctor you wrote about in last week’s paper.” So would I, is often my reply.

Many obituaries in my recent anthology, Encore, included the results of such conversations. Families and friends enjoyed the chance to reflect on my knowledge of the person whose life and achievements have been summarised.

On the fringe of Snowdonia, it was grey hair and grins. We had all been in grey shorts and long socks on starting at Brighton, Hove and Sussex Grammar School in the summer of 1959. That first day was extremely warm for September, one of us recalls.

Fifty-six years on it was not exactly sweltering in the last days of September 2015. It was balmy, sort of. Sunny, definitely. Stroll-friendly. Months before this muster I had been warned that the west coast of Wales could be wet and windy. As someone who has lived in Wales, I know all about that.

A howling gale and rain during our stay would have been less romantic.

So I’ve been busy recording the moods, dangers and changing faces of the sea, as author of the centenary history of the City of Bunbury Surf Lifesaving Club.

I have listened to dozens of current and former members recount their challenges, triumphs and wrestles with an ocean that can be observed, assessed, entered and harnessed. But never tamed. Even by the strongest members of this or any other surf lifesaving club, never tamed.

Watching swimming events, even during the Olympics, has never appealed to me. The pool is just a two-dimensional platform for athletes to put their strokes on display. The sea, however, is another whole dimension. One morning, calm, choppy by tea time. Rips that we may call treacherous but are in fact just the sea demonstrating its power. It is up to the person acting as sweep, for example, to adjust to wave conditions and get his or her boat crew home safely. First to the line, perhaps, but mainly it’s about safety.

He ran, chased, and leapt in unconfined joy, unless he was sitting quietly while the rest of us lunched or sunned ourselves through a spring afternoon.

Gypsy was great at communing with humans, even by canine standards of companionability. He walked, ran and climbed and, as a Golden Retriever, would fetch a ball if he felt like it. Which he usually did.

I first saw “the Gyps” more than 12 years ago, when he arrived – a gorgeous pup – to live with our friends who live in a rural district an hour’s drive inland from Perth. This sort of debut is rather like the arrival of baby, except it’s more “outdoorsy” and the likely school fees are less frightening.

Gypsy was indeed fortunate to have a hectare of bush to run around in safely. Even if he had ever got over the fence he would have been a long way from traffic. However, as I say, a wanderer he was not. He was also lucky in having kind and attentive owners.

It is only one year since an enjoyable reunion of classmates at the Good Companions pub, a hundred metres or so south of the school, Brighton, Hove and Sussex Grammar, whose uniform we once wore.

In September 2014 there were stirrings of emotion, recognition and, yes, please, I think I will have another pint. “Can’t be sure when we’ll meet again…..” We were a cadet corps of balding, greying, face-lined men who decided that we were not so short of Sundays that we would resist devoting one to rollcall.

“You must be, yes, Bauer. Pete. Was ‘Pete’ rather than ‘Peter’, was it not? Football, if I remember correctly, was not your thing, mmm? Pity.”

As promoter and “mustermeister” it had been my job to get this show on the road and at three tables near the bar. We mingled, mangled and sat still for a group photo. A few wives braved the high tide of nostalgia, enjoying their own conversations that possibly roamed far from the punishments for excessive chat delivered in the era when John, Paul, George and Ringo ruled the airwaves.

Birds singing, paddocks bursting with grain, scenic hills, maybe a valley or two . . .

Many people who do live “in the bush” do enjoy it. The ease of car travel, for example, means that they can easily get up to metro shopping malls or high streets dripping with cappuccino cafes.

There is stress, however, beyond the suburban boundaries. On a recent visit to the Western Australian Wheatbelt I heard a farmer’s candid lament on how profits had not kept pace with profits. “We get the same price for what we produce, same as a decade ago, but today we have to pay much more for power, fertiliser and fuel.”

Last month the red-tiled main stand of Perry Lakes Stadium was demolished, much later than the rest of the venue because of an asbestos-related problem. The building is now a pile and will be carted away in trucks so that the rest of the swish housing development, between Floreat Park and Bold Park, can proceed.

My moves do not involve gliding around on the floor of practice space. My moves are more prosaic. I help shift tables, as a break from tapping away at a computer keyboard to write letters and material for the company’s website.

While waiting for a reply, maybe, I have time to wrestle with questions.

Why did I never, as a child, develop an interest in dance, apart from me bopping, jigging and jiving to the Beach Boys and Abba?

Why do I, generally speaking, need a verbal component to appreciate the arts, such as drama and opera offer?

And, er, what is art?

I am not going to live long enough for a definitive answer on this third one.

Well, good for about 2.7 per cent of the people, I suppose. You know, the ones who wear suits and ties and travel business class and wheel their bags into five-star. . . You get the picture.

As for the rest of the population, who cares? Their lives have nothing to do with missiles. The countless millions with jobs or family businesses, cooking food for train passengers, or cleaning offices by night. And finally, the poor, for whom no international conferences or bankers’ dinners can bring an end to hunger and exhaustion.

But let me ask: Are we perhaps in need of reminding of the joys of simple one-on-one contact?

If so, I suggest one-on-dog commitment. Stay on this leash for a couple of hundred words.

Bold in a cheeky sort of way in since primary school, I am the sort to initiate chatting with most people I meet either on a street or in a park. “That university sweater you’re wearing . . . I have not only been there but was booked for speeding as I approached the entrance . . . ” Such opening gambits are my stock in trade.

For nearly a year I have often had a four-legged aide to the business of meeting and exchanging a few minutes of conversation. Especially with dog owners. Our young friend Tillie is forthright, to put it mildly, in approaching creatures of either two or four legs.