Memories – Page 3

I Dream of Nikki

Dreams are weird.

Back in primary school, in year seven, I sat next to a girl named Nicole Mooney. I couldn’t say that we were actually friends, but, as I recall it, we got on fairly well – or at least as well as a 12 year old boy and girl actually can. We had a little routine we’d engage in, in which she’d claim that I’d drive a Saint to sin, and I’d claim that she’d drive a man to drink. We’d sit there muttering “Saint to sin!”, “Man to drink!” back and forth to each other until the teacher yelled at us to shut up.

At the end of the year we left primary school and moved on to the different high schools. I’ve haven’t seen her, or even heard tell of her since.

But here’s the weird thing – I often dream about her.

Not, I hasten to add, in any creepy kind of way – she just has a habit of turning up as a bit player in whatever nonsensical carryings on are going on in my sleeping brain. Often she’ll be accompanied by a mixed cast of people I knew in high school, but she’s the only person there from primary school. Weird.

I have no idea what, if anything, this means. Logic tells me dream-version-Nicole is nothing but a glitching neuron buried deep in my cerebral cortex. But every time I wake up with her in my head I can’t help but wonder what she’s doing these days, and if she ever dreams about me.

I was an 11 Year Old Idiot

Hundreds of people were killed and many more are dying of cancer.

Insightful analysis of the Cherbonal Disaster...

Back in 1986 it was my primary school’s 50th anniversary. To celebrate this event, all the students wrote an essay to be placed in a time capsule to be opened on the 75th anniversary.

Which was last Sunday.

So, I got to read a letter from my 11 year old self – turns out, I was an idiot! ;D

TIME CAPSULE 1986

Hi, my name is [REDACTED]. Im 11 years old and I have blond hair lots of frecles big feet. Im the 3rd smallest in the class (Belinda [unreadable] the smallest) and I collect stamps, soft toys, chip bukets, rocks and budgie feathers I have 4 pets two fish one bird and a dog.

This year is the Internationale Year of Peace (1 singn for the international year of peace) And Pope John Paul the second is coming to Pperth. Hes having a big mass on the thirtyieth of november, Im going.

Earlier this year we could see Hallys comet and at 1oclock in the morning we got up to see it (0100 Hours on the 24 hour clock) it looks like picture two.

This year the space shuttle columbia blew up (3) and so did the cherbonal nuclear reactor (4). Hundreds of people were killed and many more are dying of cancer.

I think In 2011 ~~I think~~ (in School) everyone will have a computer and the teachers will be humanoids. You do all your work on your a computer and it gets printed out on the printer. For sport you turn your computer to remot control and move the ball by it. Everyone has a chemistry set and constant chemical supplies and you can learn how to make a micro chip.

flife would be fun.

What’d I tell you? An idiot. Although at least I was correct about the teachers being humanoids 😀

The various numbers were supposed to reference a sheet full of hand drawn pictures, but I ruined my first try and didn’t get a new one done in time. That’s always kind of weighed on my mind – perhaps I should draw one now and take it up to the school as a replacement…

Ghosts and Grunts

Extraorrrrrrrdinary tales of the undead

Many years ago, when I was in primary school, there was a book in the school library that caused a bit of a stir. It was a collection of (allegedly) true Australian ghost stories.

I can’t recall much about the contents. It probably included all the usual suspects such as Frederici at the Princess Theatre and Fisher’s ghost. But there was one chapter that started up a whole load of trouble – one about a bunch of quite terrifying events alleged to have occurred to a bunch of kids on a school camp at the Old York Hospital.

This caused quite a ruckuss. It was all anyone would talk about. In creative writing class, all anyone would write were stories about ghosts and (for some reason) ninjas and kung-fu on school camping trips to the Old York Hospital. The situation got so bad that the year seven school camp was cancelled out of fear that the students would run off to go ghost hunting (or possibly ninja hunting). The fact that it was a fairly conservative Catholic primary school with a dim view of all things “occult” probably didn’t help matters either – I think the book eventually vanished from the shelves never to be seen again before the whole thing eventually died down.

It did however leave me with a lifelong curiosity about the old hospital, and when a photographer on Flickr got in touch with me this week about the old Castle Fun Park in Mandurah, and I noticed some photos of the hospital in her photostream, I decided to do some research about the story I remembered as a kid. And I found the motherload!

First up I located a lengthy article about the events at the old hospital by one Miriam Howard-Wright. The article was published in a magazine, but I strongly suspect that the book that caused such a stir so many years ago was written by her, with the article reworked into the notorious York chapter.

I also found a fantastic old documentary about Australian hauntings up on YouTube. Broadcast in the 1980s it very likely sparked the Old-York-Hospital mania I remember so well. The video transfer is a bit off, and it’s heavily infused with a rather 1970s “the paranormal is now a serious subject of scientific enquiry” vibe, but it’s still a damn good watch. One of the most entertaining aspects of it is actually the accents – the narrator appears to be English (presumably on the basis that no one could possibly take a documentary narrated by an Australian seriously) and there are a couple of examples of the old “refined” Australian accent which is now nearing extinction (such as the woman at the info centre in the Rocks). The sheer preponderance of cigarettes also shows how much the country’s changed in the last 30 years.

Finally I stumbled over another documentary, this one from 2001, about Australia’s “Most Haunted Town” (apparently Kapunda). It’s hosted by Warrick Moss, who made his mark in the field by hosting 90s paranormal infotainment classic The Extraorrrrdinary (you have to say it like that – it’s the way he did it). It’s nothing particularly ground-breaking, but gets my vote for the second half, which consists almost wholly of shaky-cam, infra-red footage of Moss stumbling around in the dark, grunting (and swearing). Now that’s entertainment!

One of these days I’ll make it to York…

Dolphins? Pah!

Dolphins are seriously overrated.

Just what is the big deal with dolphins?

Everywhere I turn, everyone seems to love dolphins. See the dolphins! tourism ads proclaim. Meet the dolphins! Swim with the dolphins! Swim with the WILD dolphins! Everyone seems to go completely gaga over the damn things.

Well, here’s the thing. Dolphins are seriously overrated.

I’ve met the dolphins. I’ve met the wild dolphins. And they completely failed to impress me in any way.

For many years Australia’s premiere site for communing with wild dolphins was Monkey Mia right here in WA. There are plenty of other places to see dolphins these days, but that was the first place where wild dolphins started coming into the beach and begging for food. It’s still a major tourist draw, despite being in the middle of nowhere, and we stopped off there to meet the dolphins on a family trip back when I was in high school.

And we did meet the dolphins. Or at least the dolphin, as only one turned up. In the midst of a big crowd of tourists we waded waist deep into the ocean and saw the dolphin. We saw the dolphin, we touched the dolphin, we listened to a lecture about the dolphin courtesy of the ranger minding the dolphin, a few randomly selected folk fed fish to the dolphin, the dolphin bit my brother, then got bored and swam away, and we waded out of the ocean.

That was it. No great revelation. No amazing sense of joy, wonder and communication with another intelligent being – just standing around in cold, salty water prodding at something that could have been a wetsuit full of custard for all the profundity it provided.

We returned to Monkey Mia a few years later with my Aunt who was out from the UK and wanted to meet the dolphins. We sat around on the beach until the dolphins arrived and everyone stampeded down to the water – everyone except me that was, as I was reading a rather good book and couldn’t see the point in putting it down to go and stand in the water, gawking at something rather dull that I’d had my fill of the last time.

Everyone was wildly concerned. Didn’t I want to see the dolphins they asked? Was I alright? Was I feeling ill? Was I – my Aunt asked quietly to spare me any embarrassment – scared of the dolphins? No, I explained. I was fine, I’d just seen the dolphins before and didn’t feel that I needed to see them again.

They all looked at me as if I was dangerously insane, but then the lure of the dolphins proved too much and they scurried down to the water, leaving me to my book, which was far more interesting than any cetacean could ever be.

Now, pinnidpeds – particularly the otariidae – I have time for. They’re smart, playful and entertaining, and you can interact with them without getting wet (well, too wet). They have personalities. But dolphins… dolphins are just dull, and fail to excite me.

Read into that what you will – if that is, you have any time for reading while there are dolphins around.

Old East Perth

Old photos

I’ve started work on a major cleaning project – basically going through everything I possess and deciding what I can either throw away, give away or sell. It’s long term, but so far I’ve spent some time doing it every day since Wednesday, so maybe I’ll be able to keep at it long enough to have a unit that I won’t be ashamed to show to guests.

Some good has come of the project already however, in that I’ve found a long lost set of photos (yes, actual physical photos!) recording the state of East Perth Power Station and surrounds back in the mid 90s – right at the start of the the Graham Farmer Freeway and East Perth Redevelopment schemes. I knew that I had them – it could be argued that they record my first attempt at urban exploration – but I had no idea where they were, so it was fantastic to stumble over them.

I’ve spent the afternoon scanning the most interesting 17 in and posting them to my Flickr stream, so head over and take a look.

It may have been called “Adam 1985” or something…

Televisual Memories

Yes, yes, happy new arbitrary point in the earth’s orbit and all that. I have more important things to talk about. Like TV.

(If I were running things then the year would start/end at a solstice or equinox or something. You know, a date that means something. Hrumph.)

Anyway, I remembered a TV show the other day that I haven’t thought of for years. The trouble is I don’t know the name of it, and can only remember a few fragments of plot. This is driving me nuts so I thought I’d start off the new year by putting all the details I can remember about it up online, thus making it someone else’s problem.

It was a live action show. I have a vague suspicion that it was made somewhere in Europe, and dubbed into English – or at least it was filmed in English but in association with a French or Belgian or Dutch (or maybe German) TV network. The plot (insofar as I remember it) was that at some point in the future the world is threatened. You see, in the future everyone wanders around in white robes in a big white building, listening to a super intelligent computer – which appears to be nothing more than a large perspex cube. This computer predicts that some kind of cataclysm is going to occur – a comet, or a planet or an asteroid is going to collide with the earth. Oy gevalt!

Now, the super civilisation of the future is based around the discoveries of a brilliant scientist who was born in the 20th century. In his memoirs he mentioned that he once developed a formula that could be used to move a planet – exactly what the future people need to do to save the earth. But, the formula doesn’t appear anywhere in his papers. So the future people decide they need to travel back in time to the 1980s (when the scientist – about 12 years old at the time – says that he developed the formula) and get it off him – without disturbing the time line by walking up to him and saying “Hey! We’re from the future!”.

So a small team travels back to the 1980s and spends most of their time stumbling around, not actually achieving anything.

They do however (somehow) become involved with a local tramp, who wanders around whitling things. Right at the end of the series they rescue the tramp from being hit by a car (and for some reason) immediately need to return to the future without the formula. Because the tramp is supposed to be dead, they take him with them. Once back in the future they get all mournful about how the mission failed and they’re all going to die.

Meanwhile the tramp notices that the perspex cube supercomputer isn’t level, and quickly whittles a wedge to correct the situation. The computer then announces “Hey, guess what! I wasn’t on a level surface so my calculations were off, the comet/asteroid/planet is going to miss us, hooray!” and everyone lives happily ever after.

The series ends with the boy genius and his girlfriend sitting on a pier back in the 1980s. She asks him what he’s carving into the wood, and he tells her it’s a formula to move planets. THE END.

It was a very weird show – everything was very grey and grim. Lots of melancholy shots of salt marsh and things. I remember a couple of other scenes, one of the future people ransacking the kid’s house (which in the future is a scheduled monument of some kind), and a couple of the time travellers sitting around at a party noting that all of the songs the locals are singing are about love. But that’s it.

So, what the hell was I watching? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Happy new year y’all! 😀

Blast from the Past

Like sands through the hourglass…

Dingalings do stupid things, they don’t think of others at all,
They’re dopes and bullies, see the trouble they bring? That’s what we call dingalings!

If you’re now wondering about my sanity then you obviously didn’t grow up in Perth in the 80’s…

Dingalings
Vitamins
Nutrition
Dirt and Germs

I stumbled across a Livejournal page linking to these while searching for info on the old Ascot Water Playground. This was a favourite summer destination when I was a kid and I only just discovered that it’s all shut down and derelict. I cycled over today and scouted it out for Abandoned in Perth. I’ll probably get a proper expedition together later on.

It was a great place Ascot Water Playground. You had a big pool at the bottom, a sort of concrete bunker halfway up with fountains and slippery metal ladders (which were a death trap waiting to happen frankly) and two smaller pools at the top linked with locks. Locks! Like on a canal! A paddling stream ran from the top pools all the way down the hill to the bottom pool and one year (oh the excitement!) they opened a new pool with water slides. And admission was whatever you decided to put into the tins at the gates!

One of the defining moments of my childhood was at Ascot, the day when I finally summoned the courage to climb the deathtrap ladders all the way to the top. All the other kids (including my younger brother) who’d been clambering up and down them with abandon for years kept mocking me mercilessly about my cowardice, and on this particular day I decided I was going to conquer them even if it meant I fell to my death on the concrete below. I waited until there was no one in the bunker (both so the other kids wouldn’t figure out how badly their mockery hurt me, and so that if I chickened out at the last minute there’d be no one to see) and hauled myself up the slippery bars and over the top onto the roof. Then I clambered back down and wandered off, quite happy with myself.

(I only ever climbed the ladders once again – the next time the other kids started mocking me. I climbed up and down once to shut them up, and then never risked it again. Honestly, I’m amazed no one was ever killed on those things.)

But – back to the modern day – run off from the park into the river was apparently getting out of control (the site is right on the riverfront) and there were all kinds of liability issues (those ladders I bet), so the playground had to shut down about five or six years back. Another irreplaceable childhood memory gone – although at least it’s gone in a way that provides me with something to clamber around and take eerie photos of.

The Livejournal page I stumbled across has a bunch of other musings about Perth in the 80s, including a reminder of the plastic tugboats and space shuttles you used to get Red Rooster in. How could I forget those!? They were made of extremely thin and brittle plastic (that crumbled after only a few hours exposure to Perth’s harsh summer sunshine) and you got a sheet of stickers to personalise them with. Great days!

I’ll have to write about my memories of Atlantis Marine Park and Dizzy Lamb sometime I suppose…

Rex Mortuus Est

The end of an era…

Many years ago – back in the 50s in fact – a promoter by the name of Lee Gordon arranged an Australian tour for Little Richard and a bunch of other American rock’n’rollers. He booked the artists, booked the venues, did the publicity and then had a ridiculously tough time selling the tickets.

Why? Because no one in Australia could believe that the people they listened to on their records could exist, in the flesh, on an Australian stage. They lived in the far off, almost other-planar land of America. The idea that they’d visit Australia was as ridiculous as saying that you’d booked Santa Claus or Superman to appear. It had to be either a bunch of impersonators or some kind of scam – so no one was willing to pay to be ripped off.

Back in the early nineties, when the Big Day Out festival was just getting started, the big guest was Marilyn Manson. This was at the height of his “Antichrist Superstar” period, when he was the biggest, larger than life, most controversial, most frightening personality in music. And he was going to appear at Bassendean Oval, the run of the mill, slightly run down football field that I went past every day on the way to and from school.

As I remarked to my friend Mike this was as if Batman or Spiderman was going to appear – Manson seemed just as much a fictional character as anything from the world of comic books. And yet he was going to strut his stuff in our very backyards. It was downright surreal.

The reason I mention this is the sudden death this morning of Michael Jackson.

Jackson has been around my entire life, always there in the pop cultural milieu. In the 80s he was huge – people laugh these days when he’s called “the king of pop”, but back then he truly was. He was a brilliant song-writer and composer with string after string of hits, most of which still stand up today.

Then he started to go weird. He descended into increasing bizarreness and his music became increasingly unlistenable. He became “Whacko Jacko” – at best a complete weirdo, at worst a dangerous pedophile. His latest excesses and eccentricities were a staple of the tabloids. And as a result – without my realising it – he migrated from the part of my brain that catalogues real people into the part that catalogues fictional people.

So to hear that he’s dead gives me the same sense of surreality that Marilyn Manson’s visitation did, and that those 1950s Sydneysiders had when they were offered tickets to see Little Richard. It doesn’t make sense. How can someone who was never really real die?

So let’s all raise our glasses of Jesus juice to a unique individual. Thanks for Billie Jean at least dude.

The Laughter of Mr Rose

A tale from my disreputable past

I was thinking the other day of an incident that happened to me in high school. Not a hugely important or earth-shattering incident, just one that sort of illustrates a point about how you can sometimes be too intelligent for your own good.

The incident occurred in year eight maths. My teacher was Mr Rose (not his real name by the way), a youngish and slightly arrogant fellow with the looks of someone who’d much rather be strutting up and down the beach in a speedo than stuck inside forcing mathematics down the throats of a bunch of unwilling thirteen year olds. This particular day, towards the end of the school year he posed us a problem to do with a clock face.

He gave us an angle, and claimed that at only one time of the day did the hour and minute hands of the clock form said angle. Our job was to determine what time of day that was.

A simple question you might think. But for the life of me I couldn’t figure it out! I did all the maths I could, and even resorted to rigging up a crude clock face with a protractor and a couple of pencils, but I couldn’t for the life of me find the answer. What was particularly disturbing was that all around me my classmates – even the particularly thick ones – were apparently figuring it out and going up to Mr Rose to be marked. The best I could do was a rough estimate (around 5:42 I seem to recall) which Mr Rose totally rejected. How were they doing it!?

The class finished without my finding an answer, and I got 0 marks on that particular exercise.

It was some years later – after I’d left high school – that I figured out what I’d been doing wrong.

You see, there was an unspoken assumption about the exercise. The hands were assumed to instantaneously jump between set points on the clock face without crossing the space in between. Much like electrons jumping between valence shells within an atom, they just plain didn’t exist between these points. This meant that the minute hand could only occupy 60 positions on the clock face, and the hour hand only 720 – a fairly manageable number of angles to account for with a well structured mathematical relationship between them.

I on the other hand was assuming an analogue clock face where every division of every angle counted and hence – although I didn’t realise it at the time – the positions and angles of the hands were infinite. The problem as I understood it was unsolvable without inventing differential calculus, which was a bit beyond me at the time as I was only thirteen years old and wasn’t Sir Isaac Newton.

So yeah, that’s the story. If I’d been a bit dumber I would have assumed that the hands could only point to round minutes from the start and would have solved the problem in no time. As it was I outwitted myself by thinking the problem was about a real clock face, and not the numbers represented by one.

Mr Rose is probably still laughing at me.

Jack Sprat and the Doom of Dogs

Better than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull!

Many years ago, when my brother and I were young kids our parents would occasionally leave us in the care of our aunts overnight. They lived in a small, yet somehow rambling house in North Perth with our two cousins – both boys about eight years older than us. It can’t have been much fun for them as teenagers babysitting two little kids, but they did a good job and I can’t remember a single incident of teasing or cruelty towards us on their part.

One thing they did do however was teach us two very important and little known facts, which I shall now reveal to the world at large.

The first concerns the gap down the back of an armchair, between the cushions on your couch, or even between a bed and the wall. You may think this is nothing but a depository for loose change, but in fact it is a dimensional portal that opens solely for members of the canine clan. It is The Doom of Dogs!

I have to admit I was a bit shaky on exactly what happens to any pooch that falls into the Doom of Dogs – the cousins seemed a bit shaky on that themselves – but whatever it is it must be fairly terrible because their aged terrier Suzie (her full name was actually Suzie Wong, but that’s a story for another day) would run for the hills whenever we placed her on the couch and started pulling the cushions apart.

(Of course we would never have let her actually fall into the Doom, we were merely using her to demonstrate the concept. Repeatedly. Every time we went over there in fact.)

The second important thing they taught us was the real words to the nursery rhyme Jack Sprat. You are no doubt familiar with the traditional version, learnt from books and at nursery school…

Jack Sprat could eat no fat,
His wife could eat no lean,
And so betwixt them both, you see,
They licked the platter clean,

Well the real version, passed down through our cousins’ family line for generations (or at least since they made it up the previous week) is…

Jack Sprat forgot his back,
His dog was green with envy,
So together they sat, on Old Shag’s back,
And told stupid stories,

Now the meaning of this rhyme (not that it rhymes very much, if at all) is naturally an ancient and terrible secret. I could of course tell you, but then I’d have to condemn you to the Doom of Dogs, and no one wants that…