AS you know, the old Whacker had his old man out of the homestead, and off the farm, as fast as he possibly could. For his own wellbeing, mind you.
Had nothing to do with the fact that I clearly knew more about running the place than he ever did. I might not have got away with it either, were it not for the fact the old girl (who had a lot of city in her blood somewhere) was more than happy to up stumps and move on.
This was all a good 30, in fact just shy of 40, years ago and just lately the old man has not been in the best of shape.
A diagnosis of this and that has sort of knocked him around a bit and we all got a shock just before his 80th birthday when he announced he had prostate cancer.
And no, like all good Aussie men of the war vintage, he hadn’t been in any rush to get to some whippersnapper doctor half his age – “and so many of them women these days, you know boy” – for an annual check-up.
So by the time he (or most likely she, the old girl loving nothing more than someone sick, giving her new gossip to spread about) decided to do something about it, it was all too late.
At 79 the experts gave him two years, definitely not five. Sadly we buried the old man this week. In his usual stubborn fashion he wasn’t going anywhere he didn’t want to go. “Stupid doctors can stick their two years,” he told all and sundry.
If the stubborn old bugger had let the doctors stick him somewhere else we might not all have been gathering for the funeral.
So anyhow, he stuck it out 10 years, not two, until finally even he was beaten.
I saw him the day before he died and the first thing he said when I walked into the hospital room was: “I’m buggered”.
“You don’t look too flash either,” I added. And he didn’t, he was a husk of the great man he had once been. Not tall like me, more wiry than muscled, but he seemed tireless.
There are a lot of things about him not a lot of people knew, because, like the rest of the family, me included, he was not one to blow his own bags.
Well, there is one. One of me brothers decided he’d had enough of farming and decided to become an agent, specialising in real estate.
You’re already with me as far as a big mouth and matching opinion go, right? But apart from him the Whackers are notoriously low profile.
None as much as the old man. He wasn’t just smart, he was bordering on genius.
I remember him helping out a nephew who was trying for this fancy engineering job. So the old man went a little overboard and put a whole package together for this boofhead, who duly sent it in with his application.
Next thing you know boofhead gets a request to complete this rather messy-looking exam, and he had to do it against the clock.
So you guessed it, the old man got the summons. Two weeks later boofhead got a call from someone at Mensa Australia. At which point the old man told boofhead he was on his own.
My old man was a man, like so many others, but better than most. He was also my hero. Growing up there seemed nothing he could not do, from tapping his pencil at the kitchen table with remarkably-restrained frustration as one after the other his children failed to grasp the most basic mathematics (that, with his love of anything engineering, was so near and dear to his heart) to disappearing into his shed and making absolutely anything you needed, from any material required.
Whether it was family advice, career advice, homework or even dealing with teachers wanting my head on a plate, he was there for me. He never failed to front them, and after we got home never failed to give me a hiding because regardless of what he told the teachers, he knew I was guilty.
My old man was my hero because he was an ordinary man who in my eyes did extraordinary things and who, even until his last day alive, still had that wicked sense of humour he could use with such dry and damaging precision.
When my first child was born 41 years ago I often thought, and said, if I could be half the father my old man was I wouldn’t be going too badly.
I don’t think I have come close to even that lowly benchmark.
