Bayside

I don’t mind water but I don’t do water. It’s been years since I had a swim anywhere and I can’t see that status changing before the coil is sprung.

However when I was a kiddo, the role of water was a little bit different. The Regan ranch was located in Abbotsford and that was a suburb which was bordered by water on three sides; to the west was Hen and Chicken Bay, the north featured the Parramatta River while the east (give or take a few blocks) collided with Fig Tree Bay which then morphed into Five Dock Bay as you snaked around Chiswick.

It wasn’t so much the water that was important but more the shoreline. In the ten years when I was growing up between 1960 and 1970, the bay and river borders were the sites for much of the stuff that sprogs engage in before growing hair in ungodly places. Those two year markers correspond to yours truly motoring from five to fifteen years of age.

A disclosure here is necessary. I have a fucked memory of most things that have happened in my life. I remember stupid things rather than significant events and the ‘content sample’ which follows reflects that. A comforting nostalgia doesn’t even make the bench simply because I’m just not sure about the precise details of anything in this recount.

• One of my first recollections is noise. In the late 50s and early 60s, Hen and Chicken Bay was the venue for weekend powerboat racing. These craft would tear around a circular ‘track’ on the water for hours each Saturday and Sunday. Even as a tacker, I’d be fascinated by the way the rockets would manoeuvre through bends going sideways and leaving a trail of displaced water and sometimes smoke before they steadied for the two straights on the course. I can’t tag it as loud but it was drone-like and signalled the weekend more than anything else I can recall.

 

• There were bay and river swimming pools during part of this period. The three I remember included a ramshackle affair on Hen and Chicken Bay just south of Henry Lawson Park, a much better maintained structure on the Parramatta River which formed part of Battersea Park and an almost harbour-like pool at the end of Blackwall Point Road in Chiswick. I swam in all of them and the two describing words that fit were ‘salty’ and ‘cold’. All three would soon disappear as the mercury levels in the river rose or, perhaps more precisely, were measured in the first place. I once saw a shark gliding close to the shore at Henry Lawson Park and it must have been in very shallow water because I could only make out the dorsal fin. The shark probably met the same fate as the pools.

 

• My gaze was fixed on three figures as they slowly walked, rode or were pushed down Halley Street. I watched their every move until they were very small and disappeared around the corner onto Great North Road. From the gate where I was loitering, Hen and Chicken Bay could be viewed in full landscape mode with a few resistant mangroves jutting up around the borders. It was 1960 and later on that day I ate a jam sandwich.

 

• We finally arrived at the park with the chips and scallops that had been bought up at the Abbotsford Point shops. There was a slight complication. Marge had forgotten to bring a bottle opener so we used the footboards on the pump-ups to lever the tops off the soft drinks.

 

• I can’t actually remember ever building one but bonfire heaps were de rigueur around the bays and river come June each year. I do recall a bunger war at a familiar stomping ground in the build-up to cracker night in, I’m guessing, 1965. There must have been about fifty kiddos at Henry Lawson Park hastily wrangled into two tribes with penny grenades being hurled between the warring parties coupled with skirmishes involving the launching of hand-held sky rockets. It was bloody great. A pipe mortar we fashioned one year on Walton Crescent overlooking the Maggi factory in the Nestle’s compound didn’t end nearly so well. Primed with a couple of penny propellants and stoked with four or five bonkers, we were lucky to escape in one piece.

 

• My allegiance with golf started at a very young age. I watched Big Three Golf on the Pye avidly and allowing for the fact that I had just graduated from shitting in my pants (mostly), I held strong aspirations for securing a place on the American tour alongside Julius Boros, Tony Lema and Billy Casper…….. even though I was only seven or eight years of age. When Barnwell Park Golf Course opened on the southern side of the bay in early 1965, my future was assured. My first visit to a golf course occurred there and the thing that impressed me was the pungent smell of the grass on the greens. One of my greatest achievements in life was when I finally cleared the stormwater canal from the tee-box on Hole 2 using a kiddo-sized 2 wood. Wal was there to bask in the reflected glory.

Circumstances, age and increasing ‘push’ factors soon meant that the bays, parks and river became less important in my march towards the abyss. I’ve visited these places only a couple of times over the last twenty years and, incredibly, they don’t seem to have changed that much. I wish that the same could be said of me.