Boyhood adventures…

There is something to be said for growing up in the bush as you tended to have a lot of boyhood adventures!

Sport is something of a national obsession in Australia particularly when I was growing up. From an early age I was always outside kicking a football.  We lived on a one-acre block, and although much of it was covered in fruit trees of every persuasion there was some room beyond our front fence that enable us to kick without hitting trees.

It didn’t really matter what the weather was doing, even in the winter it was fun to get outside and play in the mud, often times my brother James and I would come in after playing football for a couple of hours, sweating, filthy dirty and soaked to the skin all in one gloriously smelly bundle…

Yes, we learned how to do a load of washing at a very early age – no seriously!

I can still hear mum yelling at us for the state we were in, of course we’d be famished and as such would attack the bread, jam and on a rare occurrence even the vegemite if truly desperate. Invariably there’d often be a trail of mud and water which we’d slop into the house, which made mum yell even louder and with more gusto.

It’s hard to believe, but like most mums she had a variety of levels to her yelling.  Fortunately, we all learned at an early age when you were getting too close to her breaking point. Heaven help you if you crossed the line!

Another favorite pastime growing up was making billycarts. For many of you this may be a completely foreign concept, but basically you construct a cart with wheels and some form of steering and get someone to push you down a steep hill.  Yes, this was our adrenaline rush as kids.

Most of our billycarts were made up of an old wooden ironing board as our chassis that dad had collected at one time or another (his collecting habits are a story unto themselves) and had stashed in the woodshed in the back yard.

We were always raiding it to repair a damaged billycart.

My older brother Laurie had built the original billycart using bits and pieces that he had reclaimed from the depths of our spider infested and dingy woodshed.  He had bolted two lengths of wood – front and back, which would hold the axles, the front one secured with a bolt in the center of the board so it would turn, he added another smaller cross piece of wood for our feet to rest closer to the front axle but far enough away so that it didn’t interfere with our ability to turn.

Our steering mechanism was a length of rope that he had ingeniously fastened via two holes drilled into the front board.  The 20-centimetre (8-inch) metal wheels had been salvaged from an old pram (stroller in today’s lingo) and again had been secured to each end of the front and back boards by screws.

All I can say is that it was a sweet ride, albeit without any form of suspension as we bucked and jumped whenever we hit a pothole, crevice or wash away in the dirt road that we used.

Strangely as a kid the dirt road to the side of our house was a virtual cliff and scary as hell as you sat on the billycart facing downhill with someone giving you a running push start down the hill.  Our brakes were the heels of our shoes, which strangely were always worn out – go figure?

The other tricky part was at the bottom of the hill as the road ended in a T-junction where it connected to the main road which was reasonably busy.  This was one of the main roads in and out of town so you had to be careful and make sure you hit the brakes (your heels) early enough, so you didn’t overshoot the junction and be hit by oncoming traffic on the main road.

James and I would take turns speeding down the hill, then braking furiously just in time not to hit the junction.  The best rides were the ones where you tried fishtailing the billycart on the gravel road and leave skid marks (no snickering now), the bigger the skid mark the better the driver, by the way James was much more of a daredevil than me and hence a better driver.

On occasion we’d have to swerve off the road entirely to avoid a car or truck that turned off the main road onto our road while we were mid ride, which wasn’t pretty because if you had to take this route the embankment was even steeper, and was festooned with box thorn bushes and rocks, all equally unpleasant.  However, if you survived the thorns, and rocks you’d end up in a large slimy gutter which flowed adjacent to the road.  Clearly you avoided swerving off the road at all costs cos’ if you did there was no time to think nor consider the consequences you just held on for dear life.

All I can say is that over our formative years there was a lot of knees and bums taken out of our pants, heels worn off our shoes and bottles of disinfectant used on our cuts and abrasions.  You could often tell that we’d been on the billycart by the amount of Mercurochrome that would be visible on our hands, arms and legs, veritable red devils!

The travesty of this story is that we’d never let our kids do any of this today, as I read it I even shake my head to the fact that we weren’t seriously injured.

With Dad was always working and mum focusing on the house, we were left pretty much to our own devices, this coupled with living in the bush (country) there was a lot of freedom to do as we pleased.

This freedom enabled us to use our imaginations and natural design skills to build stuff, we innovated as we went, rolled up our sleeves and built through trial and error but with amazing experiences to show for it.

Until next week

Ciao!