What the banana Paddle Pop episode taught me about my father Bryce Courtenay

The Advertiser

2 days ago

In his new memoir on life in the family orbit of one of Australia's best known authors, ADAM COURTENAY goes in search of his father, the real Bryce Courtenay. This is an extract from My Father Bryce.
Nestled on a green hill with a view out to the Pacific Ocean was the little kindergarten I attended in Watsons Bay, Sydney, in the late 1960s.
There was a kid at the kindy whom I'll call Robert. He walked with a list to the left. His hand was permanently bent inwards. His communication consisted of hollers and groans, interspersed with the occasional loud, incomprehensible yell. Robert had come to the school, I think, to give him an opportunity to experience a normal part of childhood, but the plan hadn't taken into account the unreconstructed world of a late 1960s classroom.
All the kids, some as young as three and as old as six, tended to snicker at 'poor Robert', although there was never any genuine meanness targeted directly at him. We just couldn't work out what to do with him. We couldn't talk to him and we didn't know how to play with him, so we left him alone, unaware of how inadvertently cruel that was.
He lived close by and I remember watching him walking unsteadily out of his house one day with his mother behind him. She looked tired and broken, as if she had been given a burden too hard to bear.
----
One brilliant summer's day in 1969, my father took my elder brother, Brett, and me to our favourite local beach. The sand was hot, and the blue water of the harbour was gleaming in the sunlight. Robert was there too.
Gibsons Beach is only about 70 metres in length, so is one of the smaller beaches compared to the main beach at Watsons Bay, but it was perfectly perched on the harbour to see the passing traffic: all the yachts, speedboats and bottle-green ferries that plied their way across the sparkling blue water from Circular Quay to Manly.
Every week that summer, my brother and I had ventured into the milk bar run by Nick and Con to ask if the new banana-flavoured Paddle Pop ice creams had arrived yet. Chocolate and vanilla Paddle Pops had been around forever, but the idea of a new flavour as exotic as banana drove us into a frenzy of excited anticipation. And every week, the two bemused Greek men, sick of our persistent enquiries, simply frowned and shook their heads.
When Dad decided that day to head to the milk bar a few minutes walk away, he asked our neighbours, who were also there, to keep an eye on us. Our relentless chorus started again.
'Dad, can you check please? We know they're coming. They have to come sometime!'
Dad nodded and I noticed a slight smirk. Did he know something we didn't?
'I'll bet they're not coming till 1970. I can't wait that long,' I told Brett.
On the beach, every adult seemed to have a transistor radio tuned in to the same station - 2SM. The music back then was marvellous. It filled the air with passion, pathos and power while my brother and I messed about in the sand and the rock pools, and checked for crabs. There was also always the chance we could strike it rich. We were confident that beneath the sand lay gold, silver and buried treasure. When it got a little too hot, we swam out to the pilot boat moored about 20 metres from the shore. It seemed so far away back then.
As we played and swam I caught glimpses of Robert sitting quietly with his mother in the sun. He seemed happy, even if he wasn't able to join in any of our beach games.
Fifteen minutes later, Dad returned with a large box and started handing out chocolate Paddle Pops to every child on the beach. Clearly he had done his sums, because nobody under ten went without.
One child squealed with delight when Streets' finest ice-cream product was placed in his hands. The parents - a young couple who spoke no English - looked dumbstruck and a little embarrassed, as if nobody had ever given them anything for nothing.
Finally, my father came to Robert and his mother, and out came Watsons Bay's first ever banana Paddle Pop. Robert would be its inaugural recipient. We'd been waiting for it all summer, but here was Dad giving it to another kid first. And not just another kid. Robert! For a moment, it felt as if 2SM had ceased transmitting. All time stopped. This Paddle Pop was ... yellow.
Brett and I jumped up in disbelief. This was a shock. How could our father have given the only banana Paddle Pop on the beach to a virtual stranger ... and one who couldn't even talk or do anything? I was so envious ... and yet we both watched on in total disbelief.
Robert's mum had to hold the ice cream for him as it melted in the boiling sun all over his face and down his body. What a waste, I thought. But then we could see something different in Robert. My dad had sparked a clear response that no teacher had been able to do. He had given Robert the top prize. Did Robert know? Did he understand the significance of the banana-flavoured ice cream? I think he did.
What happened next seemed even more unbelievable. Dad bent down and hauled up a gurgling, messy, sticky Robert to his shoulders and bounced him up and down. You could see the surprise and delight across Robert's face, and hear it in every happy gasp and groan. Hadn't Dad done enough already? No! Robert needed an adventure.
Now a tanned, fit Dad ran at half pace down the beach and then back up it again, Robert perched precariously on his shoulders. Yellow ice cream was still streaming down his body, but Dad didn't care. After a few laps of the beach he gently placed him in the shallows and proceeded to clean up the mess. Then cradling Robert in his arms, he returned him gently to his mother. Robert's mum had her face in her hands. She was weeping. Men, women and children all looked on in silence. The entire beach was dumbstruck. I immediately felt this huge sense of shame. I should have looked after Robert. We all should have.
Brett and I looked at each other. Our dad was different. Our dad did things no other dad did. Dad was a walking, talking story. By Monday, the kindergarten would be abuzz with it.
For days afterwards I kept thinking back to Robert. I basked in the glory of having the kindest, most generous and thoughtful dad in the world. Brett and I felt special by proxy. We didn't need to ask Dad why he had done what he did. Whatever envy we might have at first felt dissolved into a sense of awe.
I didn't know it then, but this was the way of Bryce Courtenay. With the poor, the meek and the unlucky - indeed anyone who had personal difficulties or simply came from the wrong side of the tracks - he would continue to hand out proverbial Paddle Pops for the next 40-plus years of his life.
----
In 1969 the world was an incredible place in which to live. Not only had science put men on the Moon, it was busy making outrageous new toys. It was impossible to keep up with the pace of change. But Brett and I had a secret weapon. Our dad was in the world of advertising and he was involved in all kinds of new and exciting stuff. He knew what was coming and when, and that converted into big bragging rights at school. We had the future, you didn't. It was, when I think back about it now, the ultimate in kid cred. Through Dad we would know when a new flexible skateboard was about to land. There were yoyos too - plastic ones with Coke and Fanta logos. Mini-bikes and battery-powered cars. Toy trains with sleek green bodies. CB radios. Remote-controlled helicopters that could actually fly. Television in colour had arrived in America! They were all coming, and Dad was the forecaster (perhaps harbinger?) of it all.
Even a six-year-old could feel the buzz of living in the Age of Aquarius. Some outrageous people were even wearing purple clothes (I was told by a very cool older girl that the colour was actually mauve)! All over the world, hair was growing. On heads and faces and other places too. You knew exactly who believed in freedom just from the state of their hair. Cool was hairy. Cool was hirsute. Cool was tangled, messy and free.
The cars in the street had been stripped of their 1950s atonal straitjackets and re-clothed in new and exciting hippy colours. We thought the bright-red car at the top end of our street was 'gas' (almost our highest form of praise back then), but it wasn't red - it was crimson! Aquamarine was very groovy too - the colour of meditation and reflection; while strange tie-dyed concoctions of red, yellow and orange spoke of revolution and danger. Progress was multicoloured.
'There's only thirty-one years until the year 2000,' I remember Brett telling me. Brett was a couple of years better informed than me (and far more numerate), and was also a science-fiction nut. I was always interested in progress, but Brett lived for the future. The year 2000 was an important inflection point for kids in 1969. The future would arrive in all its glory on 1 January 2000. It just seemed like such a long time to wait.
'Dad, will cars be flying by the year 2000?'
Dad was the sage of everything, so if anyone knew, he would. He took up an intelligent-looking pose, which I'd seen him do with newspaper reporters, and looked at us each in turn with his burning blue eyes, the repository of all wisdom. I quite liked his considered hesitancy because I knew that what was about to come out of his mouth was very important, so we were both expected to listen carefully. He sat for a few moments in deep reflection, looking into the distance. Then, all of a sudden, he turned back to us.
'Yes, darling, they will be,' he pronounced. 'Men will fly with jet packs on their backs and there will be highways in the skies.'
This was exactly what we wanted to hear. He went on to describe the coming pandemonium. The human race would slowly but surely have to adjust to life in the air. There would be mistakes. People would die. Birds and insects had taken millions of years to get airborne so we - as a species - would also need time to adjust. Cars and people would crash as people learned the hard way how to overcome the Earth's gravitational pull. But it would be worth it. The world would be floating on nothing. How gas would that be?
Dad made his declaration and then sighed, as if to say, well you forced me to say it. The lesson ended. He bundled us back to our little house in Jesmond Avenue, a virtually hidden cul-de-sac only five minutes walk from Gibsons Beach. It was the kind of tiny, weatherboard, two-bedroom house that can still be seen in outlying areas of Sydney, but which no longer exists in wealthy areas. Vaucluse, where we lived, is now among the wealthiest suburbs in Australia and small houses are no longer tolerated. But it seemed big enough for us, and we loved living in a quiet, almost forgotten street barely noticed by the outside world.
It seemed like a typical summer Saturday went like this: Dad allotted the morning to my brother and me but by early afternoon we knew that our Dad time had ended. While nobody stated it, it was Damon time.
Only three years old, our baby brother, Damon, could not come along on Watsons Bay adventures under any circumstances. He was a delicate child who could not be bumped or physically cajoled. You weren't allowed to get him in a headlock or punch him in the arm - physical encounters which my elder brother and I delivered to each other with monotonous regularity.
Damon stayed with my mother, who was always concerned that he might make a wrong move - step and fall - and start what we all dreaded and feared: a bleed. He was a haemophiliac and all I understood was that bumps made him bleed. Did he ever show resentment? Never. He had my father's creative mind. He was a self-starter. I would often stand just outside his bedroom door and listen as he moved a few Matchbox cars around, spoke to the toy soldiers and good-guy teddy bear, and scolded the naughty monkey. He seemed to have deep and meaningful conversations with all of them. He had his own world, one he created and curated, and he was happy in it.
My mother listened in too, sometimes leaving as I approached, her face showing a mix of love and pain. At that age I didn't understand why, but in the years to come it became clear. She had passed on the gene to him that had miraculously bypassed me and Brett. Her guilt was unreasonable, but it was there all the same. Damon's affliction was all her fault.
But Dad knew what he had to do. When he walked into Damon's room to join in the conversations with the monkey and the teddy we knew we weren't invited. Somehow we knew instinctively that this 'Dad time' fitted in with the Robert scenario. It was when he chose to look after the unlucky ones, to give them his time and space.
Dad had invented a couple of characters, whom he called Mr Wooden Spoon and Mr Puppet, who went on adventures to strange lands. One story was about Mr Wooden Spoon and Mr Puppet in Blood and Guts Land, another they found themselves in was Wee-Wee and Poo-Poo Land. Sometimes he even drew the stories for us so we could see what it was like when these heroes entered these amazing worlds.
Damon loved both characters more than we did, and Dad and he would act them out. Dad as the more sensible Mr Wooden Spoon; Damon the more adventurous Mr Puppet. Dad helped Damon to set up the plots and characters he was creating in real time. They had some hidden understanding. Dad and Damon seemed to live for the moment, and made it into something special. They spent a long time creating situations and momentous events in a tiny bedroom full of furry and plastic characters. What secrets were discussed? What plans were made? Who came out on top? What had happened to Mr Wooden Spoon and Mr Puppet today? Only they would know. But in a world where anything went, it didn't matter.
Brett was preoccupied with the future, and I with the past. I cared less about what was going to happen, more about what had actually happened. But in Damon, Dad saw the potential of a wide-ranging mind that didn't have to ask questions; because in Damon's world, he could answer them himself.
Back then, I think I was slightly peeved that I couldn't be part of the story unravelling behind closed doors. But it was more curiosity than envy. Dad made these times special for Damon, and neither Brett nor I resented it. Damon was getting his valuable Dad time, and if that was how they did it, I wouldn't intervene. I realise now that perhaps it was a form of relief for Dad. He was far better - and far more comfortable - working with make-believe worlds than he was at explaining real ones. His youngest son understood that intuitively. He always would. His middle son would need another 40 years to work that out.
In his new memoir on life in the family orbit of one of Australia's best known authors, ADAM COURTENAY goes in search of his father, the real Bryce Courtenay. This is an extract from My Father Bryce.
Nestled on a green hill with a view out to the Pacific Ocean was the little kindergarten I attended in Watsons Bay, Sydney, in the late 1960s.
There was a kid at the kindy whom I'll call Robert. He walked with a list to the left. His hand was permanently bent inwards. His communication consisted of hollers and groans, interspersed with the occasional loud, incomprehensible yell. Robert had come to the school, I think, to give him an opportunity to experience a normal part of childhood, but the plan hadn't taken into account the unreconstructed world of a late 1960s classroom.
All the kids, some as young as three and as old as six, tended to snicker at 'poor Robert', although there was never any genuine meanness targeted directly at him. We just couldn't work out what to do with him. We couldn't talk to him and we didn't know how to play with him, so we left him alone, unaware of how inadvertently cruel that was.
He lived close by and I remember watching him walking unsteadily out of his house one day with his mother behind him. She looked tired and broken, as if she had been given a burden too hard to bear.
----
One brilliant summer's day in 1969, my father took my elder brother, Brett, and me to our favourite local beach. The sand was hot, and the blue water of the harbour was gleaming in the sunlight. Robert was there too.
Gibsons Beach is only about 70 metres in length, so is one of the smaller beaches compared to the main beach at Watsons Bay, but it was perfectly perched on the harbour to see the passing traffic: all the yachts, speedboats and bottle-green ferries that plied their way across the sparkling blue water from Circular Quay to Manly.
Every week that summer, my brother and I had ventured into the milk bar run by Nick and Con to ask if the new banana-flavoured Paddle Pop ice creams had arrived yet. Chocolate and vanilla Paddle Pops had been around forever, but the idea of a new flavour as exotic as banana drove us into a frenzy of excited anticipation. And every week, the two bemused Greek men, sick of our persistent enquiries, simply frowned and shook their heads.
When Dad decided that day to head to the milk bar a few minutes walk away, he asked our neighbours, who were also there, to keep an eye on us. Our relentless chorus started again.
'Dad, can you check please? We know they're coming. They have to come sometime!'
Dad nodded and I noticed a slight smirk. Did he know something we didn't?
'I'll bet they're not coming till 1970. I can't wait that long,' I told Brett.
On the beach, every adult seemed to have a transistor radio tuned in to the same station - 2SM. The music back then was marvellous. It filled the air with passion, pathos and power while my brother and I messed about in the sand and the rock pools, and checked for crabs. There was also always the chance we could strike it rich. We were confident that beneath the sand lay gold, silver and buried treasure. When it got a little too hot, we swam out to the pilot boat moored about 20 metres from the shore. It seemed so far away back then.
As we played and swam I caught glimpses of Robert sitting quietly with his mother in the sun. He seemed happy, even if he wasn't able to join in any of our beach games.
Fifteen minutes later, Dad returned with a large box and started handing out chocolate Paddle Pops to every child on the beach. Clearly he had done his sums, because nobody under ten went without.
One child squealed with delight when Streets' finest ice-cream product was placed in his hands. The parents - a young couple who spoke no English - looked dumbstruck and a little embarrassed, as if nobody had ever given them anything for nothing.
Finally, my father came to Robert and his mother, and out came Watsons Bay's first ever banana Paddle Pop. Robert would be its inaugural recipient. We'd been waiting for it all summer, but here was Dad giving it to another kid first. And not just another kid. Robert! For a moment, it felt as if 2SM had ceased transmitting. All time stopped. This Paddle Pop was ... yellow.
Brett and I jumped up in disbelief. This was a shock. How could our father have given the only banana Paddle Pop on the beach to a virtual stranger ... and one who couldn't even talk or do anything? I was so envious ... and yet we both watched on in total disbelief.
Robert's mum had to hold the ice cream for him as it melted in the boiling sun all over his face and down his body. What a waste, I thought. But then we could see something different in Robert. My dad had sparked a clear response that no teacher had been able to do. He had given Robert the top prize. Did Robert know? Did he understand the significance of the banana-flavoured ice cream? I think he did.
What happened next seemed even more unbelievable. Dad bent down and hauled up a gurgling, messy, sticky Robert to his shoulders and bounced him up and down. You could see the surprise and delight across Robert's face, and hear it in every happy gasp and groan. Hadn't Dad done enough already? No! Robert needed an adventure.
Now a tanned, fit Dad ran at half pace down the beach and then back up it again, Robert perched precariously on his shoulders. Yellow ice cream was still streaming down his body, but Dad didn't care. After a few laps of the beach he gently placed him in the shallows and proceeded to clean up the mess. Then cradling Robert in his arms, he returned him gently to his mother. Robert's mum had her face in her hands. She was weeping. Men, women and children all looked on in silence. The entire beach was dumbstruck. I immediately felt this huge sense of shame. I should have looked after Robert. We all should have.
Brett and I looked at each other. Our dad was different. Our dad did things no other dad did. Dad was a walking, talking story. By Monday, the kindergarten would be abuzz with it.
For days afterwards I kept thinking back to Robert. I basked in the glory of having the kindest, most generous and thoughtful dad in the world. Brett and I felt special by proxy. We didn't need to ask Dad why he had done what he did. Whatever envy we might have at first felt dissolved into a sense of awe.
I didn't know it then, but this was the way of Bryce Courtenay. With the poor, the meek and the unlucky - indeed anyone who had personal difficulties or simply came from the wrong side of the tracks - he would continue to hand out proverbial Paddle Pops for the next 40-plus years of his life.
----
In 1969 the world was an incredible place in which to live. Not only had science put men on the Moon, it was busy making outrageous new toys. It was impossible to keep up with the pace of change. But Brett and I had a secret weapon. Our dad was in the world of advertising and he was involved in all kinds of new and exciting stuff. He knew what was coming and when, and that converted into big bragging rights at school. We had the future, you didn't. It was, when I think back about it now, the ultimate in kid cred. Through Dad we would know when a new flexible skateboard was about to land. There were yoyos too - plastic ones with Coke and Fanta logos. Mini-bikes and battery-powered cars. Toy trains with sleek green bodies. CB radios. Remote-controlled helicopters that could actually fly. Television in colour had arrived in America! They were all coming, and Dad was the forecaster (perhaps harbinger?) of it all.
Even a six-year-old could feel the buzz of living in the Age of Aquarius. Some outrageous people were even wearing purple clothes (I was told by a very cool older girl that the colour was actually mauve)! All over the world, hair was growing. On heads and faces and other places too. You knew exactly who believed in freedom just from the state of their hair. Cool was hairy. Cool was hirsute. Cool was tangled, messy and free.
The cars in the street had been stripped of their 1950s atonal straitjackets and re-clothed in new and exciting hippy colours. We thought the bright-red car at the top end of our street was 'gas' (almost our highest form of praise back then), but it wasn't red - it was crimson! Aquamarine was very groovy too - the colour of meditation and reflection; while strange tie-dyed concoctions of red, yellow and orange spoke of revolution and danger. Progress was multicoloured.
'There's only thirty-one years until the year 2000,' I remember Brett telling me. Brett was a couple of years better informed than me (and far more numerate), and was also a science-fiction nut. I was always interested in progress, but Brett lived for the future. The year 2000 was an important inflection point for kids in 1969. The future would arrive in all its glory on 1 January 2000. It just seemed like such a long time to wait.
'Dad, will cars be flying by the year 2000?'
Dad was the sage of everything, so if anyone knew, he would. He took up an intelligent-looking pose, which I'd seen him do with newspaper reporters, and looked at us each in turn with his burning blue eyes, the repository of all wisdom. I quite liked his considered hesitancy because I knew that what was about to come out of his mouth was very important, so we were both expected to listen carefully. He sat for a few moments in deep reflection, looking into the distance. Then, all of a sudden, he turned back to us.
'Yes, darling, they will be,' he pronounced. 'Men will fly with jet packs on their backs and there will be highways in the skies.'
This was exactly what we wanted to hear. He went on to describe the coming pandemonium. The human race would slowly but surely have to adjust to life in the air. There would be mistakes. People would die. Birds and insects had taken millions of years to get airborne so we - as a species - would also need time to adjust. Cars and people would crash as people learned the hard way how to overcome the Earth's gravitational pull. But it would be worth it. The world would be floating on nothing. How gas would that be?
Dad made his declaration and then sighed, as if to say, well you forced me to say it. The lesson ended. He bundled us back to our little house in Jesmond Avenue, a virtually hidden cul-de-sac only five minutes walk from Gibsons Beach. It was the kind of tiny, weatherboard, two-bedroom house that can still be seen in outlying areas of Sydney, but which no longer exists in wealthy areas. Vaucluse, where we lived, is now among the wealthiest suburbs in Australia and small houses are no longer tolerated. But it seemed big enough for us, and we loved living in a quiet, almost forgotten street barely noticed by the outside world.
It seemed like a typical summer Saturday went like this: Dad allotted the morning to my brother and me but by early afternoon we knew that our Dad time had ended. While nobody stated it, it was Damon time.
Only three years old, our baby brother, Damon, could not come along on Watsons Bay adventures under any circumstances. He was a delicate child who could not be bumped or physically cajoled. You weren't allowed to get him in a headlock or punch him in the arm - physical encounters which my elder brother and I delivered to each other with monotonous regularity.
Damon stayed with my mother, who was always concerned that he might make a wrong move - step and fall - and start what we all dreaded and feared: a bleed. He was a haemophiliac and all I understood was that bumps made him bleed. Did he ever show resentment? Never. He had my father's creative mind. He was a self-starter. I would often stand just outside his bedroom door and listen as he moved a few Matchbox cars around, spoke to the toy soldiers and good-guy teddy bear, and scolded the naughty monkey. He seemed to have deep and meaningful conversations with all of them. He had his own world, one he created and curated, and he was happy in it.
My mother listened in too, sometimes leaving as I approached, her face showing a mix of love and pain. At that age I didn't understand why, but in the years to come it became clear. She had passed on the gene to him that had miraculously bypassed me and Brett. Her guilt was unreasonable, but it was there all the same. Damon's affliction was all her fault.
But Dad knew what he had to do. When he walked into Damon's room to join in the conversations with the monkey and the teddy we knew we weren't invited. Somehow we knew instinctively that this 'Dad time' fitted in with the Robert scenario. It was when he chose to look after the unlucky ones, to give them his time and space.
Dad had invented a couple of characters, whom he called Mr Wooden Spoon and Mr Puppet, who went on adventures to strange lands. One story was about Mr Wooden Spoon and Mr Puppet in Blood and Guts Land, another they found themselves in was Wee-Wee and Poo-Poo Land. Sometimes he even drew the stories for us so we could see what it was like when these heroes entered these amazing worlds.
Damon loved both characters more than we did, and Dad and he would act them out. Dad as the more sensible Mr Wooden Spoon; Damon the more adventurous Mr Puppet. Dad helped Damon to set up the plots and characters he was creating in real time. They had some hidden understanding. Dad and Damon seemed to live for the moment, and made it into something special. They spent a long time creating situations and momentous events in a tiny bedroom full of furry and plastic characters. What secrets were discussed? What plans were made? Who came out on top? What had happened to Mr Wooden Spoon and Mr Puppet today? Only they would know. But in a world where anything went, it didn't matter.
Brett was preoccupied with the future, and I with the past. I cared less about what was going to happen, more about what had actually happened. But in Damon, Dad saw the potential of a wide-ranging mind that didn't have to ask questions; because in Damon's world, he could answer them himself.
Back then, I think I was slightly peeved that I couldn't be part of the story unravelling behind closed doors. But it was more curiosity than envy. Dad made these times special for Damon, and neither Brett nor I resented it. Damon was getting his valuable Dad time, and if that was how they did it, I wouldn't intervene. I realise now that perhaps it was a form of relief for Dad. He was far better - and far more comfortable - working with make-believe worlds than he was at explaining real ones. His youngest son understood that intuitively. He always would. His middle son would need another 40 years to work that out.
In his new memoir on life in the family orbit of one of Australia's best known authors, ADAM COURTENAY goes in search of his father, the real Bryce Courtenay. This is an extract from My Father Bryce.
Nestled on a green hill with a view out to the Pacific Ocean was the little kindergarten I attended in Watsons Bay, Sydney, in the late 1960s.
There was a kid at the kindy whom I'll call Robert. He walked with a list to the left. His hand was permanently bent inwards. His communication consisted of hollers and groans, interspersed with the occasional loud, incomprehensible yell. Robert had come to the school, I think, to give him an opportunity to experience a normal part of childhood, but the plan hadn't taken into account the unreconstructed world of a late 1960s classroom.
All the kids, some as young as three and as old as six, tended to snicker at 'poor Robert', although there was never any genuine meanness targeted directly at him. We just couldn't work out what to do with him. We couldn't talk to him and we didn't know how to play with him, so we left him alone, unaware of how inadvertently cruel that was.
He lived close by and I remember watching him walking unsteadily out of his house one day with his mother behind him. She looked tired and broken, as if she had been given a burden too hard to bear.
----
One brilliant summer's day in 1969, my father took my elder brother, Brett, and me to our favourite local beach. The sand was hot, and the blue water of the harbour was gleaming in the sunlight. Robert was there too.
Gibsons Beach is only about 70 metres in length, so is one of the smaller beaches compared to the main beach at Watsons Bay, but it was perfectly perched on the harbour to see the passing traffic: all the yachts, speedboats and bottle-green ferries that plied their way across the sparkling blue water from Circular Quay to Manly.
Every week that summer, my brother and I had ventured into the milk bar run by Nick and Con to ask if the new banana-flavoured Paddle Pop ice creams had arrived yet. Chocolate and vanilla Paddle Pops had been around forever, but the idea of a new flavour as exotic as banana drove us into a frenzy of excited anticipation. And every week, the two bemused Greek men, sick of our persistent enquiries, simply frowned and shook their heads.
When Dad decided that day to head to the milk bar a few minutes walk away, he asked our neighbours, who were also there, to keep an eye on us. Our relentless chorus started again.
'Dad, can you check please? We know they're coming. They have to come sometime!'
Dad nodded and I noticed a slight smirk. Did he know something we didn't?
'I'll bet they're not coming till 1970. I can't wait that long,' I told Brett.
On the beach, every adult seemed to have a transistor radio tuned in to the same station - 2SM. The music back then was marvellous. It filled the air with passion, pathos and power while my brother and I messed about in the sand and the rock pools, and checked for crabs. There was also always the chance we could strike it rich. We were confident that beneath the sand lay gold, silver and buried treasure. When it got a little too hot, we swam out to the pilot boat moored about 20 metres from the shore. It seemed so far away back then.
As we played and swam I caught glimpses of Robert sitting quietly with his mother in the sun. He seemed happy, even if he wasn't able to join in any of our beach games.
Fifteen minutes later, Dad returned with a large box and started handing out chocolate Paddle Pops to every child on the beach. Clearly he had done his sums, because nobody under ten went without.
One child squealed with delight when Streets' finest ice-cream product was placed in his hands. The parents - a young couple who spoke no English - looked dumbstruck and a little embarrassed, as if nobody had ever given them anything for nothing.
Finally, my father came to Robert and his mother, and out came Watsons Bay's first ever banana Paddle Pop. Robert would be its inaugural recipient. We'd been waiting for it all summer, but here was Dad giving it to another kid first. And not just another kid. Robert! For a moment, it felt as if 2SM had ceased transmitting. All time stopped. This Paddle Pop was ... yellow.
Brett and I jumped up in disbelief. This was a shock. How could our father have given the only banana Paddle Pop on the beach to a virtual stranger ... and one who couldn't even talk or do anything? I was so envious ... and yet we both watched on in total disbelief.
Robert's mum had to hold the ice cream for him as it melted in the boiling sun all over his face and down his body. What a waste, I thought. But then we could see something different in Robert. My dad had sparked a clear response that no teacher had been able to do. He had given Robert the top prize. Did Robert know? Did he understand the significance of the banana-flavoured ice cream? I think he did.
What happened next seemed even more unbelievable. Dad bent down and hauled up a gurgling, messy, sticky Robert to his shoulders and bounced him up and down. You could see the surprise and delight across Robert's face, and hear it in every happy gasp and groan. Hadn't Dad done enough already? No! Robert needed an adventure.
Now a tanned, fit Dad ran at half pace down the beach and then back up it again, Robert perched precariously on his shoulders. Yellow ice cream was still streaming down his body, but Dad didn't care. After a few laps of the beach he gently placed him in the shallows and proceeded to clean up the mess. Then cradling Robert in his arms, he returned him gently to his mother. Robert's mum had her face in her hands. She was weeping. Men, women and children all looked on in silence. The entire beach was dumbstruck. I immediately felt this huge sense of shame. I should have looked after Robert. We all should have.
Brett and I looked at each other. Our dad was different. Our dad did things no other dad did. Dad was a walking, talking story. By Monday, the kindergarten would be abuzz with it.
For days afterwards I kept thinking back to Robert. I basked in the glory of having the kindest, most generous and thoughtful dad in the world. Brett and I felt special by proxy. We didn't need to ask Dad why he had done what he did. Whatever envy we might have at first felt dissolved into a sense of awe.
I didn't know it then, but this was the way of Bryce Courtenay. With the poor, the meek and the unlucky - indeed anyone who had personal difficulties or simply came from the wrong side of the tracks - he would continue to hand out proverbial Paddle Pops for the next 40-plus years of his life.
----
In 1969 the world was an incredible place in which to live. Not only had science put men on the Moon, it was busy making outrageous new toys. It was impossible to keep up with the pace of change. But Brett and I had a secret weapon. Our dad was in the world of advertising and he was involved in all kinds of new and exciting stuff. He knew what was coming and when, and that converted into big bragging rights at school. We had the future, you didn't. It was, when I think back about it now, the ultimate in kid cred. Through Dad we would know when a new flexible skateboard was about to land. There were yoyos too - plastic ones with Coke and Fanta logos. Mini-bikes and battery-powered cars. Toy trains with sleek green bodies. CB radios. Remote-controlled helicopters that could actually fly. Television in colour had arrived in America! They were all coming, and Dad was the forecaster (perhaps harbinger?) of it all.
Even a six-year-old could feel the buzz of living in the Age of Aquarius. Some outrageous people were even wearing purple clothes (I was told by a very cool older girl that the colour was actually mauve)! All over the world, hair was growing. On heads and faces and other places too. You knew exactly who believed in freedom just from the state of their hair. Cool was hairy. Cool was hirsute. Cool was tangled, messy and free.
The cars in the street had been stripped of their 1950s atonal straitjackets and re-clothed in new and exciting hippy colours. We thought the bright-red car at the top end of our street was 'gas' (almost our highest form of praise back then), but it wasn't red - it was crimson! Aquamarine was very groovy too - the colour of meditation and reflection; while strange tie-dyed concoctions of red, yellow and orange spoke of revolution and danger. Progress was multicoloured.
'There's only thirty-one years until the year 2000,' I remember Brett telling me. Brett was a couple of years better informed than me (and far more numerate), and was also a science-fiction nut. I was always interested in progress, but Brett lived for the future. The year 2000 was an important inflection point for kids in 1969. The future would arrive in all its glory on 1 January 2000. It just seemed like such a long time to wait.
'Dad, will cars be flying by the year 2000?'
Dad was the sage of everything, so if anyone knew, he would. He took up an intelligent-looking pose, which I'd seen him do with newspaper reporters, and looked at us each in turn with his burning blue eyes, the repository of all wisdom. I quite liked his considered hesitancy because I knew that what was about to come out of his mouth was very important, so we were both expected to listen carefully. He sat for a few moments in deep reflection, looking into the distance. Then, all of a sudden, he turned back to us.
'Yes, darling, they will be,' he pronounced. 'Men will fly with jet packs on their backs and there will be highways in the skies.'
This was exactly what we wanted to hear. He went on to describe the coming pandemonium. The human race would slowly but surely have to adjust to life in the air. There would be mistakes. People would die. Birds and insects had taken millions of years to get airborne so we - as a species - would also need time to adjust. Cars and people would crash as people learned the hard way how to overcome the Earth's gravitational pull. But it would be worth it. The world would be floating on nothing. How gas would that be?
Dad made his declaration and then sighed, as if to say, well you forced me to say it. The lesson ended. He bundled us back to our little house in Jesmond Avenue, a virtually hidden cul-de-sac only five minutes walk from Gibsons Beach. It was the kind of tiny, weatherboard, two-bedroom house that can still be seen in outlying areas of Sydney, but which no longer exists in wealthy areas. Vaucluse, where we lived, is now among the wealthiest suburbs in Australia and small houses are no longer tolerated. But it seemed big enough for us, and we loved living in a quiet, almost forgotten street barely noticed by the outside world.
It seemed like a typical summer Saturday went like this: Dad allotted the morning to my brother and me but by early afternoon we knew that our Dad time had ended. While nobody stated it, it was Damon time.
Only three years old, our baby brother, Damon, could not come along on Watsons Bay adventures under any circumstances. He was a delicate child who could not be bumped or physically cajoled. You weren't allowed to get him in a headlock or punch him in the arm - physical encounters which my elder brother and I delivered to each other with monotonous regularity.
Damon stayed with my mother, who was always concerned that he might make a wrong move - step and fall - and start what we all dreaded and feared: a bleed. He was a haemophiliac and all I understood was that bumps made him bleed. Did he ever show resentment? Never. He had my father's creative mind. He was a self-starter. I would often stand just outside his bedroom door and listen as he moved a few Matchbox cars around, spoke to the toy soldiers and good-guy teddy bear, and scolded the naughty monkey. He seemed to have deep and meaningful conversations with all of them. He had his own world, one he created and curated, and he was happy in it.
My mother listened in too, sometimes leaving as I approached, her face showing a mix of love and pain. At that age I didn't understand why, but in the years to come it became clear. She had passed on the gene to him that had miraculously bypassed me and Brett. Her guilt was unreasonable, but it was there all the same. Damon's affliction was all her fault.
But Dad knew what he had to do. When he walked into Damon's room to join in the conversations with the monkey and the teddy we knew we weren't invited. Somehow we knew instinctively that this 'Dad time' fitted in with the Robert scenario. It was when he chose to look after the unlucky ones, to give them his time and space.
Dad had invented a couple of characters, whom he called Mr Wooden Spoon and Mr Puppet, who went on adventures to strange lands. One story was about Mr Wooden Spoon and Mr Puppet in Blood and Guts Land, another they found themselves in was Wee-Wee and Poo-Poo Land. Sometimes he even drew the stories for us so we could see what it was like when these heroes entered these amazing worlds.
Damon loved both characters more than we did, and Dad and he would act them out. Dad as the more sensible Mr Wooden Spoon; Damon the more adventurous Mr Puppet. Dad helped Damon to set up the plots and characters he was creating in real time. They had some hidden understanding. Dad and Damon seemed to live for the moment, and made it into something special. They spent a long time creating situations and momentous events in a tiny bedroom full of furry and plastic characters. What secrets were discussed? What plans were made? Who came out on top? What had happened to Mr Wooden Spoon and Mr Puppet today? Only they would know. But in a world where anything went, it didn't matter.
Brett was preoccupied with the future, and I with the past. I cared less about what was going to happen, more about what had actually happened. But in Damon, Dad saw the potential of a wide-ranging mind that didn't have to ask questions; because in Damon's world, he could answer them himself.
Back then, I think I was slightly peeved that I couldn't be part of the story unravelling behind closed doors. But it was more curiosity than envy. Dad made these times special for Damon, and neither Brett nor I resented it. Damon was getting his valuable Dad time, and if that was how they did it, I wouldn't intervene. I realise now that perhaps it was a form of relief for Dad. He was far better - and far more comfortable - working with make-believe worlds than he was at explaining real ones. His youngest son understood that intuitively. He always would. His middle son would need another 40 years to work that out.
In his new memoir on life in the family orbit of one of Australia's best known authors, ADAM COURTENAY goes in search of his father, the real Bryce Courtenay. This is an extract from My Father Bryce.
Nestled on a green hill with a view out to the Pacific Ocean was the little kindergarten I attended in Watsons Bay, Sydney, in the late 1960s.
There was a kid at the kindy whom I'll call Robert. He walked with a list to the left. His hand was permanently bent inwards. His communication consisted of hollers and groans, interspersed with the occasional loud, incomprehensible yell. Robert had come to the school, I think, to give him an opportunity to experience a normal part of childhood, but the plan hadn't taken into account the unreconstructed world of a late 1960s classroom.
All the kids, some as young as three and as old as six, tended to snicker at 'poor Robert', although there was never any genuine meanness targeted directly at him. We just couldn't work out what to do with him. We couldn't talk to him and we didn't know how to play with him, so we left him alone, unaware of how inadvertently cruel that was.
He lived close by and I remember watching him walking unsteadily out of his house one day with his mother behind him. She looked tired and broken, as if she had been given a burden too hard to bear.
----
One brilliant summer's day in 1969, my father took my elder brother, Brett, and me to our favourite local beach. The sand was hot, and the blue water of the harbour was gleaming in the sunlight. Robert was there too.
Gibsons Beach is only about 70 metres in length, so is one of the smaller beaches compared to the main beach at Watsons Bay, but it was perfectly perched on the harbour to see the passing traffic: all the yachts, speedboats and bottle-green ferries that plied their way across the sparkling blue water from Circular Quay to Manly.
Every week that summer, my brother and I had ventured into the milk bar run by Nick and Con to ask if the new banana-flavoured Paddle Pop ice creams had arrived yet. Chocolate and vanilla Paddle Pops had been around forever, but the idea of a new flavour as exotic as banana drove us into a frenzy of excited anticipation. And every week, the two bemused Greek men, sick of our persistent enquiries, simply frowned and shook their heads.
When Dad decided that day to head to the milk bar a few minutes walk away, he asked our neighbours, who were also there, to keep an eye on us. Our relentless chorus started again.
'Dad, can you check please? We know they're coming. They have to come sometime!'
Dad nodded and I noticed a slight smirk. Did he know something we didn't?
'I'll bet they're not coming till 1970. I can't wait that long,' I told Brett.
On the beach, every adult seemed to have a transistor radio tuned in to the same station - 2SM. The music back then was marvellous. It filled the air with passion, pathos and power while my brother and I messed about in the sand and the rock pools, and checked for crabs. There was also always the chance we could strike it rich. We were confident that beneath the sand lay gold, silver and buried treasure. When it got a little too hot, we swam out to the pilot boat moored about 20 metres from the shore. It seemed so far away back then.
As we played and swam I caught glimpses of Robert sitting quietly with his mother in the sun. He seemed happy, even if he wasn't able to join in any of our beach games.
Fifteen minutes later, Dad returned with a large box and started handing out chocolate Paddle Pops to every child on the beach. Clearly he had done his sums, because nobody under ten went without.
One child squealed with delight when Streets' finest ice-cream product was placed in his hands. The parents - a young couple who spoke no English - looked dumbstruck and a little embarrassed, as if nobody had ever given them anything for nothing.
Finally, my father came to Robert and his mother, and out came Watsons Bay's first ever banana Paddle Pop. Robert would be its inaugural recipient. We'd been waiting for it all summer, but here was Dad giving it to another kid first. And not just another kid. Robert! For a moment, it felt as if 2SM had ceased transmitting. All time stopped. This Paddle Pop was ... yellow.
Brett and I jumped up in disbelief. This was a shock. How could our father have given the only banana Paddle Pop on the beach to a virtual stranger ... and one who couldn't even talk or do anything? I was so envious ... and yet we both watched on in total disbelief.
Robert's mum had to hold the ice cream for him as it melted in the boiling sun all over his face and down his body. What a waste, I thought. But then we could see something different in Robert. My dad had sparked a clear response that no teacher had been able to do. He had given Robert the top prize. Did Robert know? Did he understand the significance of the banana-flavoured ice cream? I think he did.
What happened next seemed even more unbelievable. Dad bent down and hauled up a gurgling, messy, sticky Robert to his shoulders and bounced him up and down. You could see the surprise and delight across Robert's face, and hear it in every happy gasp and groan. Hadn't Dad done enough already? No! Robert needed an adventure.
Now a tanned, fit Dad ran at half pace down the beach and then back up it again, Robert perched precariously on his shoulders. Yellow ice cream was still streaming down his body, but Dad didn't care. After a few laps of the beach he gently placed him in the shallows and proceeded to clean up the mess. Then cradling Robert in his arms, he returned him gently to his mother. Robert's mum had her face in her hands. She was weeping. Men, women and children all looked on in silence. The entire beach was dumbstruck. I immediately felt this huge sense of shame. I should have looked after Robert. We all should have.
Brett and I looked at each other. Our dad was different. Our dad did things no other dad did. Dad was a walking, talking story. By Monday, the kindergarten would be abuzz with it.
For days afterwards I kept thinking back to Robert. I basked in the glory of having the kindest, most generous and thoughtful dad in the world. Brett and I felt special by proxy. We didn't need to ask Dad why he had done what he did. Whatever envy we might have at first felt dissolved into a sense of awe.
I didn't know it then, but this was the way of Bryce Courtenay. With the poor, the meek and the unlucky - indeed anyone who had personal difficulties or simply came from the wrong side of the tracks - he would continue to hand out proverbial Paddle Pops for the next 40-plus years of his life.
----
In 1969 the world was an incredible place in which to live. Not only had science put men on the Moon, it was busy making outrageous new toys. It was impossible to keep up with the pace of change. But Brett and I had a secret weapon. Our dad was in the world of advertising and he was involved in all kinds of new and exciting stuff. He knew what was coming and when, and that converted into big bragging rights at school. We had the future, you didn't. It was, when I think back about it now, the ultimate in kid cred. Through Dad we would know when a new flexible skateboard was about to land. There were yoyos too - plastic ones with Coke and Fanta logos. Mini-bikes and battery-powered cars. Toy trains with sleek green bodies. CB radios. Remote-controlled helicopters that could actually fly. Television in colour had arrived in America! They were all coming, and Dad was the forecaster (perhaps harbinger?) of it all.
Even a six-year-old could feel the buzz of living in the Age of Aquarius. Some outrageous people were even wearing purple clothes (I was told by a very cool older girl that the colour was actually mauve)! All over the world, hair was growing. On heads and faces and other places too. You knew exactly who believed in freedom just from the state of their hair. Cool was hairy. Cool was hirsute. Cool was tangled, messy and free.
The cars in the street had been stripped of their 1950s atonal straitjackets and re-clothed in new and exciting hippy colours. We thought the bright-red car at the top end of our street was 'gas' (almost our highest form of praise back then), but it wasn't red - it was crimson! Aquamarine was very groovy too - the colour of meditation and reflection; while strange tie-dyed concoctions of red, yellow and orange spoke of revolution and danger. Progress was multicoloured.
'There's only thirty-one years until the year 2000,' I remember Brett telling me. Brett was a couple of years better informed than me (and far more numerate), and was also a science-fiction nut. I was always interested in progress, but Brett lived for the future. The year 2000 was an important inflection point for kids in 1969. The future would arrive in all its glory on 1 January 2000. It just seemed like such a long time to wait.
'Dad, will cars be flying by the year 2000?'
Dad was the sage of everything, so if anyone knew, he would. He took up an intelligent-looking pose, which I'd seen him do with newspaper reporters, and looked at us each in turn with his burning blue eyes, the repository of all wisdom. I quite liked his considered hesitancy because I knew that what was about to come out of his mouth was very important, so we were both expected to listen carefully. He sat for a few moments in deep reflection, looking into the distance. Then, all of a sudden, he turned back to us.
'Yes, darling, they will be,' he pronounced. 'Men will fly with jet packs on their backs and there will be highways in the skies.'
This was exactly what we wanted to hear. He went on to describe the coming pandemonium. The human race would slowly but surely have to adjust to life in the air. There would be mistakes. People would die. Birds and insects had taken millions of years to get airborne so we - as a species - would also need time to adjust. Cars and people would crash as people learned the hard way how to overcome the Earth's gravitational pull. But it would be worth it. The world would be floating on nothing. How gas would that be?
Dad made his declaration and then sighed, as if to say, well you forced me to say it. The lesson ended. He bundled us back to our little house in Jesmond Avenue, a virtually hidden cul-de-sac only five minutes walk from Gibsons Beach. It was the kind of tiny, weatherboard, two-bedroom house that can still be seen in outlying areas of Sydney, but which no longer exists in wealthy areas. Vaucluse, where we lived, is now among the wealthiest suburbs in Australia and small houses are no longer tolerated. But it seemed big enough for us, and we loved living in a quiet, almost forgotten street barely noticed by the outside world.
It seemed like a typical summer Saturday went like this: Dad allotted the morning to my brother and me but by early afternoon we knew that our Dad time had ended. While nobody stated it, it was Damon time.
Only three years old, our baby brother, Damon, could not come along on Watsons Bay adventures under any circumstances. He was a delicate child who could not be bumped or physically cajoled. You weren't allowed to get him in a headlock or punch him in the arm - physical encounters which my elder brother and I delivered to each other with monotonous regularity.
Damon stayed with my mother, who was always concerned that he might make a wrong move - step and fall - and start what we all dreaded and feared: a bleed. He was a haemophiliac and all I understood was that bumps made him bleed. Did he ever show resentment? Never. He had my father's creative mind. He was a self-starter. I would often stand just outside his bedroom door and listen as he moved a few Matchbox cars around, spoke to the toy soldiers and good-guy teddy bear, and scolded the naughty monkey. He seemed to have deep and meaningful conversations with all of them. He had his own world, one he created and curated, and he was happy in it.
My mother listened in too, sometimes leaving as I approached, her face showing a mix of love and pain. At that age I didn't understand why, but in the years to come it became clear. She had passed on the gene to him that had miraculously bypassed me and Brett. Her guilt was unreasonable, but it was there all the same. Damon's affliction was all her fault.
But Dad knew what he had to do. When he walked into Damon's room to join in the conversations with the monkey and the teddy we knew we weren't invited. Somehow we knew instinctively that this 'Dad time' fitted in with the Robert scenario. It was when he chose to look after the unlucky ones, to give them his time and space.
Dad had invented a couple of characters, whom he called Mr Wooden Spoon and Mr Puppet, who went on adventures to strange lands. One story was about Mr Wooden Spoon and Mr Puppet in Blood and Guts Land, another they found themselves in was Wee-Wee and Poo-Poo Land. Sometimes he even drew the stories for us so we could see what it was like when these heroes entered these amazing worlds.
Damon loved both characters more than we did, and Dad and he would act them out. Dad as the more sensible Mr Wooden Spoon; Damon the more adventurous Mr Puppet. Dad helped Damon to set up the plots and characters he was creating in real time. They had some hidden understanding. Dad and Damon seemed to live for the moment, and made it into something special. They spent a long time creating situations and momentous events in a tiny bedroom full of furry and plastic characters. What secrets were discussed? What plans were made? Who came out on top? What had happened to Mr Wooden Spoon and Mr Puppet today? Only they would know. But in a world where anything went, it didn't matter.
Brett was preoccupied with the future, and I with the past. I cared less about what was going to happen, more about what had actually happened. But in Damon, Dad saw the potential of a wide-ranging mind that didn't have to ask questions; because in Damon's world, he could answer them himself.
Back then, I think I was slightly peeved that I couldn't be part of the story unravelling behind closed doors. But it was more curiosity than envy. Dad made these times special for Damon, and neither Brett nor I resented it. Damon was getting his valuable Dad time, and if that was how they did it, I wouldn't intervene. I realise now that perhaps it was a form of relief for Dad. He was far better - and far more comfortable - working with make-believe worlds than he was at explaining real ones. His youngest son understood that intuitively. He always would. His middle son would need another 40 years to work that out.