Eulogy
Read by Dad’s eldest son, Michael
A few months ago, when out of nowhere my son Clark told me he loved his Grandpa, I asked him what it was he loved most about him. He told me it was his stories—“Grandpa tells the best stories”. They say young children are very perceptive, because if there was one thing Dad loved above all else, it was telling a good story. Dad didn’t tell tall-stories or fables, Dad told interesting stories because he led an interesting life.
And Dad didn’t just tell interesting stories, he told them in an interesting way. Listening to a “Dad story” was like going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. He’d start with one subject, an idea would spark in his head on something related, and then he’d get about ten subjects deep before wrapping it all back up into the main storyline. Dad had an incredible memory, with an ability to recall distantly related events or back stories that explained the motivations for each person in his story. This ability lasted well into the last days of his life, where despite failing health he could still recount in fine detail exactly what he’d done on a project he’d worked on over 40 years ago, and each person who worked with him, adding his own colourful interpretation of them, both their failings and what he liked about them.
So to properly do Dad justice, we will attempt to tell a story of his life in the manner he would tell it. It will be a potted history, interspersed with vignettes that he had either told to us or we were fortunate to be part of.
Anthony and Dad’s brother Shane have already addressed Dad’s early life, but in the weeks before he died, Dad filled in some detail of his early adulthood, which I will recount here.
Dad matriculated from St Bernards College in 1969 with excellent marks, and was somewhat naive about the world, thinking he’d simply enter the workforce thereafter. Only after being told to attend an open day at the University of Melbourne did Dad realise he could do a bit more study, and it was a chance happening upon a lecturer who asked him two questions. Do you have good marks in physics and maths, and do you like the outdoors? Answering yes to both, Dad was then set on a career of being a geophysicist. Perhaps a different set of questions at a different stall at the open day might have changed his life completely, we’ll never know.
Dad did well at the University of Melbourne, so well in fact he received an offer of two postgraduate scholarships: one at the Imperial College London, and another the University of Hawaii. Dad chose the latter. It may be a bit puzzling why Dad chose against the more prestigious and well-known university, in one of the major cities of the world, but self-advancement was never something that attracted the interest of Dad, and the prestige of the London scholarship would not have mattered to him. As Dad told it, it was highly theoretical, involved a lot of writing of papers behind a desk, and therefore a bit boring. For Hawaii, they had a good geophysics school, and the study would be what he found interesting and very practical. These two things would define Dad’s career and his life, what was interesting and what was practical.
Dad’s decision to study at the University of Hawaii yielded a story almost immediately, when Dad was sent to complete a marine survey in the Pacific Ocean on the research vessel Kana Keoki. To start this survey required travelling from Honolulu, via Los Angeles, then Mexico City, then Peru, then Santiago in Chile, each small hops by plane, and finally Valparaiso by train where he boarded the boat. This was no ordinary trip. For one reason or another, he’d been given a suitcase packed with magazines, of the Penthouse and Playboy variety. Through each of these airports he lugged this contraband for the eventual delivery to the ship’s crew in Chile.
On the leg from LA to Mexico, at about the halfway point while in the sky, the cabin crew started speaking Spanish. Dad, not knowing a word of Spanish, and immediately realising every country from then on spoke Spanish, thought to himself “I haven’t factored this in”. In Mexico, for some reason, he bought a sombrero. On eventual arrival to Santiago, after some haggling and confusion with a taxi driver at the airport, he was on his way to the train station. The cab driver told him to “not look over there” in broken English, at which Dad promptly looked and saw some bloke dead: he’d been shot. The coup in Chile against Salvador Allende having only happened the year earlier.
Dad made it to the train station, and again after some back and forth, he managed to get a ticket and board the train. Now you have to remember that in his youth Dad was a bit over six foot, lean and gangly, a head full of bright red hair, and on this occasion, wearing a sombrero. Dad told me that while sitting there on the train with two suitcases, one with his contraband magazines, looking as he did, he heard whispers about the carriage, “Mexico, Mexico, Mexico”. Who knows what the poor Chileans thought about this odd looking man, but Dad quickly realised he was out of place, and possibly being confused for a Mexican.
As the train left Santiago, it started to ascend, which caused Dad to panic—he was meant to heading for the ocean! Thinking for some reason the train was climbing up into the Andes on its way to Argentina, Dad asked his fellow passengers as best he could, “are we going to Argentina?” Taking issue with this strange looking Mexican who couldn’t really speak Spanish, they argued back, “no, Puerto! Puerto” and Dad, thinking it this was somewhere different from Valparaiso, decided to stop asking questions and just wait and see what happened. Here’s this 22 year old Aussie, who can’t speak Spanish, wearing a sombrero, offending the locals in a military dictatorship.
Eventually the train descended and the last stop was in fact the port of Valparaiso, and Dad disembarked to walk along the dock, looking for the Kana Keoki. As he looked for his ship, he first noticed a large one, thinking “that must be my ship”, but as he got closer he saw it had Chinese writing and was being filled with wheat. Not his ship. So too the next ship along the dock, this time with Japanese writing and was also a bulk carrier being filled with wheat. At a loss, he could see there were no more suitable ships, except for a very small one at the far end, not much bigger than a small yacht, that no one serious would take out to the open ocean, He thought he’d literally missed the boat. But wandering over to have a look he realised this was the Kana Keoki. As he approached, the Americans on the boat laughed at him they had bets on whether he’d make it, and most had bet against it. But he did it, sombrero and all.
Dad never finished his masters at Hawaii, but this sense of adventure defined Dad’s career. He spent much of it in far-off places, like Macquarie Island, Mawson base on Antarctica or the seas around North Korea. These remote places included regions around Australia many Australians never get to, like outback Queensland or salt lakes of Central Australia or the Great Sandy Desert. In each of these he had a story or two, such as swapping a cheap plastic sheriff’s badge in Antarctica with a Russian who gave him the Lenin Order of Merit in exchange. Or bulldozing a ford over a lake in the Northern Territory to help out a pastoralist, which you can still see today on Google Maps. Or swapping bottles of liquor with North Koreans—they ended up with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label, he brought home some kind of rocket fuel.
While packing all this into his early career, he met Mum in 1977, married in 1982, and had four children, me, Chris, Anthony and Olivia, all born between 1982 and 1989. In 1983, him and mum were also owner-builders of the house they still live in down in Chisholm. Many of those years he was off on survey, and now that I have kids of my own, I don’t know how Mum did it at times, although Dad was always an equal contributor for the housework. Possibly because of this, in 1988 three of us kids and Mum joined Dad on survey around Fitzroy Crossing, where he was the party leader, while we were based in Derby. But Dad was not only a man who pursued a varied and interesting career in geophysics, he was also an extremely busy man outside of work.
The thing that left us as kids in wonder about Dad was his ability to try his hand at anything. In fact, Chris had recently asked him why he chose to do things other people might normally get a tradesman to do. His answer was, I like to have a go.
These things he had a go at included furniture upholstery, draftsmanship, being a car mechanic, carpentry, bricklaying, panel beating, sewing, concreting, programming, photography, and solder electronics—all either self taught or learned at night school. One thing Dad never liked to be was idle. As an example, in 2004 when we went on holiday to Perth to visit Mum’s relatives, Dad decided to spend a day or two paving under my aunt’s Hills Hoist, of entirely his own volition, just as something to do while on holiday. As previously said, his main project was the building of the family home in 1983, which he designed and drafted, and was with Mum an owner builder. Looking back, it was a great house to grow up in. I’d go to friend’s houses who had tiny bedrooms compared to our spacious ones, even though in many ways it wasn’t complete, such as not having carpet until we were teenagers.
After Dad’s retirement in 2014, Chris said he’d like to move to Melbourne, with Dad owning a property there in Flemington that was effectively going unused. At the time, this house looked like something you’d call in the bulldozers for, but after nearly two years of careful renovation, Chris and Dad restored the home to something that is both comfortable and high quality. I think both Chris and Dad can be proud of what they did with that house, and Dad lamented that complications from his myeloma meant he could no longer contribute to renovation of the house. Again, Dad really didn’t like being idle.
So if the 80s were a busy decade of starting a family and forging a career, with weekends spent doing home maintenance or fixing cars, in the 90s as we kids grew older, sport became the fixture of our weekend lives and this first made an impact on Dad’s life through footy. Dad must have been celebrating the Bombers premiership in 1993 a bit too much at work, because he was told by a colleague that if he loved Aussie Rules and had three boys he’d ether join a club or his colleague would sign us up with Ainslie. So in 1994 Dad decided to sign us up with the Tuggeranong Bulldogs, me, Chris and Anthony in 1994, with Olivia playing in 1995. This started a lifelong association with junior sport, and earned Dad life membership with the Tuggeranong club. The best memory for me was when Dad and I were coaches of Anthony’s under 11s and under 12s team between 1999 and 2000. Not only was it a joy to spend every weekend with Dad while watching Anthony play, who was an excellent junior sportsman, but I like to think we were coaching innovators. We came up with interchange rotations before anyone else, making sure every kid got equal time on the field, even the best ones, and came up with a midfield tactic that was later used by Port Adelaide in a finals match.
Anthony’s excellence as a sportsman was also evident in athletics. Dad had a lot of good memories with Anthony doing athletics, a particular highlight was Anthony running in the 100m sprint at the Pacific School Games at the Sydney Olympic Stadium in 2000. Dad kept Anthony’s running bib in a box with other treasured items. This led Dad to being involved with the South Canberra Tuggeranong Athletics Club, an involvement that lasted well after Anthony gave up running in preference to football, and he maintained his involvement even after he was diagnosed with myeloma. In fact the only year he didn’t attend a Fadden Pines Cross Country was this one, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Dad’s worsening illness.
One time, Mum wanted to go watch the footy in Sydney, so Dad agreed on the condition that someone in the family covered for him at Fadden Pines. I volunteered and the forecast was for buckets of rain. Dad said to me “you must be there even if only one kid turns up, because you aren’t, you’ve lost that kid forever”. It rained, and I was miserable, and only two kids showed up, which is twice as good as one. This was Dad’s dedication, he never wanted to let anyone down, and if he made a commitment to do something, he did it. Because of his commitment he was again rewarded with life membership with the athletics club, with an award also being instituted in his name at the end of last year.
All us boys left home sometime between 2005–2008, and after doing so would only see Dad on fewer occasions, rarely being part of his adventures. Olivia stayed at home a little longer, and got to experience more of Dad’s life than us, and she has some of those to share.
Dad was always so busy with new projects, but often left completing them until later. It would sometimes annoy as kids that Dad had all these half finished projects going at the same time, but he was always busy, and there was always a sense he would finish them, given enough time. Dad dying at 68 is deeply saddening to us, because his life was a great project, and for both him and us it is unfinished. Dad and Mum loved each other, 38 years together, and they were entitled to many more. Dad loved us kids and we loved him. Dad also loved his grandkids, Clark, James, George, Thomas and Riley, and for the older ones, they thought their Grandpa was amazing. Sadly the younger ones will never get to truly know him. Dad, we’ll miss you, we’ll miss talking to you, we’ll miss your ideas, your jokes, your trolling of us all online, but most of all we’ll miss how you taught us all so much, and still had so much to teach. We love you Dad. Rest in peace.
Dad and eldest grandchild, Clark