The Little Red Book

It was 1972 when I was 11, just old enough to start understanding the real world, but still too young to understand society in any meaningful way. The Adventures of Barry Mackenzie was on at the drive-in in Dowerin. It was the start of the Gough Whitlam era. Cigarette packets began to include health warnings.

We lived in a tiny country town called Minivale on the railway line in the wheat belt of Western Australia. The population was under 100, it was so small there wasn't even a pub, just one single shop.

There came a day when  I over-heard my parents talking with a visitor about some dangerous book. A red book. Apparently The Red Book of Chairman Mao, (who at that time was leading the Chinese in a cultural revolution that was sweeping away the old, and causing great destruction in China.) They spoke of this book in hushed tones, furtively looking around to see if someone was listening - someone like me that is. Apparently it was full of dangerous knowledge, it was evil and subversive, and it must be carefully restricted - especially kept out of the hands of children in whom it might corrupt and even inspire communism. Reds under the beds was the fear of the time !

Well, I had never heard of this book, and would have never been interested until I overheard that talk about keeping it away from children - but obviously I kept an eye out for it - not that an 11 year old had much resources in a tiny town with no library, and it was long before the internet.

So sure enough - one day I found myself alone in a room with that book for an hour or two. So naturally I immediately read it from cover to cover. Wow - what an eye-opener it was - I was astonished.

Of course - it wasn't Chairman Mao's book at all. It was actually The Little Red Schoolbook written in 1969 by S. Hansen and J. Jensen. It was a highly controversial book, which was even banned in some countries. It was targetted at school children, and was designed to inform openly about subjects such as drugs, sex, advertising, and authority. It was shockingly open and direct in a way that I had never seen before, and not often since.  I learned a great deal about the world from that book - but to this day I have no idea who made the confusion about which Red Book it was.

The full book can be read here :
The Little Red School Book

How I nearly missed the flight, but saved the day

Years ago I worked on computer systems for casinos, our company was in Perth, and we supported casinos here and in Adelaide and elsewhere. As opening day for Adelaide approached, I was more interested in being with my girlfriend in Perth than hanging around for the opening day. So 2 days before Adelaide casino opened, I caught a flight back to Perth - "she'll be right" I thought - what could possibly go wrong with a complex computer system involving hundreds of networked parts in the 80s? Even if I had made a software change to the system 30 minutes before I left!

On my return to Perth my girlfriend met me at the airport - fully dressed up in a beautiful pink dress slit to the thigh, magnificent beehive hairdo with pink feather, shiny leather boots, and even elbow length pink gloves to match. Wow.

We spent the day in various debaucheries and dissoluteness and were at one of my friends place when oddly, a phone call came through - for me. For me? Here? Turns out I had left a bug in the code and they desperately needed me back to fix it, with only 1 day to spare, and my boss had spent the day ringing all over Perth trying to track me down. They had managed to get me a midnight flight to Adelaide connecting through Melbourne which would get there a few hours before opening time.

Naturally, I spent the rest of the day in various excesses - which, as I recall, involved a whole bottle of baby oil and two ruined sheets and a ruined matress. But somehow time seemed to slip away, and later, checking my watch, I found it was 11:30pm! Oh my God! it was 30 minutes to the airport and the flight left in 30 minutes! I have never moved so fast in my life! My heart was thumping 120BPM as I threw everything into my suitcase, ran to the car and drove at break-neck speed, not even stopping for red lights. Fate was with me and I drove into the airport at 11:58 pm.

I ran full pelt into the departure lounge - it was completely empty. Except for one staff member behind the counter - he looked up as I ran pell-mell towards him, and he realised instantly who I was - the missing passenger. As I ran towards the counter, he furiously started writing and stamping on a bit of paper - my boarding pass. When I reached him, I threw my suitcase onto the conveyor and he shoved the pass into my hand and said "gate6 - Go!". I sprinted off towards gate 6, and behind me I heard him call out "your luggage won't make it though."

I ran through gate 6, out onto the tarmac, and saw the boarding ramp vehicle was literally just pulling away from the airplane. I bounded up the ramp 3 steps at a time, and the thumping of my footsteps clued the driver to stop - I arrived at the top to find a gap of 3-4 feet between the ramp and the plane. I swear to God - I jumped full sprint across the gap into the plane, colliding into a very surprised looking stewardess. I had made it!

So I settled into my seat, very relieved indeed, until I recalled that my luggage had the EPROM programmer in it - the device needed to change the bug in my code inside the EPROM computer chips in the Keno terminals. Oh dear.

I arrived in Melbourne just before a threatening storm, but made it onto my flight to Adelaide - the last flight before Melbourne airport was closed. Fate smiled on me again. Finally, I arrived in Adelaide early morning, no luggage, no EPROM programmer.

So I rang around a few tech stores enquiring about an EPROM programmer, and actually found a place which was prepared to loan me one to see if it 'suited our needs'. With 2 hours to spare, I had the programmer in my hands, and the code on my screen, with the obvious bug staring me in the face. I fixed the bug, programmed all the EPROMS and then walked around the madhosue of a casino about to open in one hour and replaced all the EPROMS in all the Keno terminals. (We then sent the EPROM programmer back - "sorry, it wasn't quite what we wanted".)

One hour later, the casino opened and the very first Keno game began (a game which involves drawing a selection of numbered balls from a big spinning cage - not unlike Lotto.) As all the casino big-wigs stood and watched, the announcer started to call out the numbers as they popped out of the machine one by one : "number 15", "number 6", "number 28" ... etc. Suddenly the announcer stopped in confusion, and then said with some embarassment "Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, we have a slight problem, we'll be stopping this game". For one panicky moment I thought I had really ballsed something up, even though ball-drawing was nothing to do with my area.

It turned out that the ball mechanism had a small place where a ball could get stuck inside the machine without being noticed, and a ball number 6 had become caught there from the previous practice run. The announcer was about to call out a SECOND "number 6", but realised he had already just called a number 6 and  so had to stop that very first game. Phew - this one was not my fault after all. Lucky he spotted it, otherwise any bets with number 6 would have won twice the odds till they sorted it out.

Dreaming the Melbourne Cup Winner

It was 1963, the year the British stopped testing nuclear bombs in Australia, the year Whitlam and Calwell were photographed standing cap-in-hand under a street-lamp outside in the street , waiting for the Labor caucus inside (the 36 "faceless men") to decide their future without them.

The Queen visited that year, prompting Prime Minister Menzies to sycophantly proclaim "I did but see her passing by, and yet I love her till I die". The Queen responded with an odd smiling shrug - almost a grimace of embarassment.

My parents had just married, I was about 2 years old, and we had an odd stroke of luck that year - a family story that is oft-remembered, but yet never really understood. My mother does not dream at all, she says; but my Dad does from time to time. He is not at all religious or spiritually minded, being quite down-to-earth and practical. But on this one occasion something rather odd happened.

One day in early November 1963, my Dad dreamed about the Melbourne Cup - indeed he specifically dreamed that it was won by a horse called "Gatum Gatum". Dad laughed it off, but Mum took this very seriously, and insisted they actually bet on the horse. She scraped together all the florins and shillings and pence which could be found, a total of some pounds, and took it to the bookie for a bet on Gatum Gatum to win.

Gatum Gatum was far from the favourite - indeed his odds were 25-to-1 for the win.
But sure enough, exactly as Dad dreamed - he came in to win at 25-to-1.

The story goes that when Mum went to collect, the poor bookie shovelled piles of notes at her - even including a few 'blue notes' (the rare 5-pound note.)

The money went on various bills, but also paid for our first pedigree British Bulldog - "Dallymore Tiger", a pet I remember with much affection who lived with us for ten years to follow.

Now-a-days Dad shrugs it off as a "just a fluke", as just "one of those things" - to which I wonder "one of what things, exactly?"

The Day the Bombs went off in Perth

Perth is generally a peaceful place, essentially no terrorism or serious violence - apart from a few examples like an rogue M113 APC once driven through the city, or a crazy with a rifle in an office block one time.

But there was one occasion when a series of bombs went off in Scarborough, and they never even caught the culprit. The date was 29th August 1985, and it was quite bad day for me.

Firstly I had a car accident - I was driving south at about 50km/h along a minor road in North Perth, when suddenly Bang! I experienced an almighty crash of noise and pain. After a moment I recovered with a painful head and right knee to find myself stationary and facing north! With another damaged car nearby. The driver had gone straight through a stop sign and collided with my right hand side, causing my car to swing around a full 180 degrees and come to a halt. She was not much hurt herself, but distraught and worried - worried, that is, for what her boyfriend would say about her ruining his car! She didn't give a damn about me or my car though, and my un-insured clunker was a write-off.
Anyway - later that night I went to bed nursing a headache and a sore knee - in my flat right opposite the construction site for the new Observation City hotel that Alan Bond was building in Scarborough.

Then about 1:20am in the morning there was an almighty explosion! I've heard explosions before - this was not a truck crash, not a sudden weather event, but a high-pressure explosion nearby. Instantly awake I lay silently in bed thinking "WT? was that!". There was complete and utter, and very pregnant, silence - I could sense the entire neighbourhood was awake and listening and wondering what was happening.

Some unknown few seconds later, another huge explosion shook the building, and I heard my lounge-room window shatter and spray shards of glass all over the room. I was already feeling pretty sore and abused, so I decided this was bad day worth ignoring - and I just put my pillow over my head and went back to a fitful sleep.

It turned out that someone was unhappy with the new high-rise development right on the beach at Scarborough and had attempted to bring down the construction crane with 3 bombs placed against it's legs. Luckily it failed, and the crane remained standing, although the area was evacuated while it was checked out. To this day, no-one knows who did it.

Next morning I got up early to see my main room covered in glass fragments, and a gaping broken window. Just then, there was a knock on the door. I was surprised, not expecting anyone, and I opened my door to see a glazier standing there! He immediately saw the glass and said "Ah - can I fix all that for you sir?". "Um, sure", I replied. So he came in, swept up all the glass, quickly and expertly fixed my window, then left with a cheery "bye now."

I had no idea who sent him - but now I assume it was Bondy and his lawyers being pro-active. Perhaps I should have said "Ow, my head hurts from the explosion" :-)

A little nature friend

Recently I was out in my Mum's Aussie garden, being with nature - feeling and smelling and seeing the plants, enjoying a informal drifting nature meditation, as lately I've been trying to open up more to the various worlds of nature...

And so it was that a little friend joined me - a mid-size tree spider crawled around my tee-shirt and arms. I did my best to grok his spiderness, made myself into a spider friendly tree, sent him spider love, and we made friends easily enough.

Now the sun was just setting over the ocean, it was a lovely moment, so I did a little meditation about energy up the spine and focussing at the crown, like the sap rising up the trunk of my tree. I invited my friend to climb up my back to the crown of my head where I created a sort-of 'spiritual spider-friendly parking zone'.

Sure enough he crawled up my back, right up the back of my neck, running his legs thru the hairs on the back of my neck - quite an interesting feeling. He walked to the top of my head, and stopped right at the tip of my head, in my spider-friendly parking spot, for a little while as we shared a little happy moment together while the sun set into the ocean. Man and beast. Spider en-crowning my Stick of Brahma.

Next thing Mum comes running out with a thong in her hand - "Aargh! look out ! a spider is on you! I'll get it!" Don't get me wrong, my Mum is kind and caring, and she was doing exactly the right normal thing.

But somehow my life is not always about the 'normal thing'.
Perhaps spider-crawl spinal-meditations are not everyone's cup of tea.
:-)

Brass memories of my grand-pa

My maternal grandfather, Stavely Erskine Johns (usually called 'Johno',) died when I was about two years old. I'm told he held me and sang to me as baby, and although I don't remember him personally, I do have a special childhood memory which connected me to him, a memory from when I was maybe three or four years old, a memory which I never understood until nearly fifty years later - a memory of mysterious brass objects - slightly tapered brass cylinders, open at one end, heavily closed at t'other.

Grand-pa served in both world wars - he retired a Major, and I still have his Major's crowns carefully stored to this day. And the mysterious brass objects in question were empty shell casings - of various sizes, arranged neatly in a row on grand-ma's mantel-piece - from big ones inches in diameter, down through some an inch or so, to the smallest .303 shells. Not that I had the faintest idea what these mysterious brass objects were, nor understood the secret symbols and codes imprinted on their base.

Grand-ma lived in Melbourne, and we lived in Perth. I can only vaguely remember her from our occasional visits before she died when I was about four. But what I do remember with great clarity and reverence were those mysterious brass cylinders.

I don't know how or why, but somehow these mysterious brass mementos were important to me, and I was allowed to hold them, not to bang and throw and play with as toys - no no - just the opposite. I would hold these casings lovingly in my arms and clean them and polish them with Brasso till they gleamed like gold.

I had never understood their importance - they were just a strange childhood memory. But now, nearly fifty years later, as I follow that growing urge to connect to my ancestors, I finally understand - I was holding them like a baby in my arms, and caring for them just as he had done for me.

Thank you grand-pa Johno.

The Million Dollar Bra

Around the turn of the millenium I did some tech support work in Adelaide on a cruise ship docked there for some maintenance. I met a young lady on that job - I didn't know her well, or for that long either, but I liked her, and here's an experience I'd like to share.  I feel a certain connection to the Divine Feminine, and I'm also a single man in whose breast hope still springs eternal. So this story is partly about me, partly about average aussies, and partly about a young Aussie woman - and also partly about something rather special.

This young woman was attractive and slim and blond - she looked somewhat like Lisa McCune, and in my mind's eye she has the grace of Gigi Edgly in Last Train to Freo, the loveliness of AnnaSophia Robb in Bridge to Terabithea, and the spunk of Rapunzel in Tangled.

I thought she had a special something, a je ne sais quoi, a smooth and warm quality, a simple and comfortable niceness. To be with her was like having on your favourite comfy shirt that made you feel calm but manly. Her female friends would probably laugh at my fantasy image, but it seems that somehow I saw her best side. I'd like to think her friends had some of these qualities too, without realising it.

She didn't act like she was special or superior at all - just the opposite. She was in many ways a normal young Aussie woman, mostly friendly and nice, positive and often funny. Not perfect, not necessarily good at everything, not always successful. But she had what they call the 'girl-next-door' quality in spades. Remembering her is like those 24 years spent Living Next Door to Alice.

Perhaps her je ne sais quoi lay in what she didn't have. She didn't have arrogance, she didn't have barriers and heavy defences, she didn't slash at any man who might come too close, she didn't play games and faces. I obviously never had a chance with her of course, largely due to the age difference, (and perhaps a little, um, quality differential.) But that of course gave me the pleasing freedom to be openly warm to her - I'm old enough now to realise the magic lies mostly in the giving.

Not once did she choose to push me back, make it clear she wasn't interested - because it didn't have to be said, because we understood, and she wouldn't want to cut me for no reason. That is until the sad day I heard the ship was leaving, and in a strange whirlwind of panic I asked her out. She let me down gently "oh, that's very sweet of you - but no, I'm sorry". A lovely humane capacity for empathy and communication in a slightly awkward moment.

No doubt she would be embarrassed to hear herself described this way, thinking of herself as just a normal girl with her own issues and weaknesses and dramas, mixing it up with her hopes and dreams and assets. Nor would I want to pretend I was close to her or anything - I'm just a friendly old codger she worked with once - and I really like to write about nice experiences (and yes, the bra is coming soon - patience, grasshopper.)

But first - I too, have a dream. I have a dream that indeed this really is a normal young woman. The modern normal young Aussie woman.

Australia has come a long way in recent decades - in the way we have treated our children. A century or so ago - most children were chattel, slaves, treated like animals. Whilst there was much improvement by the 50s or so, a lot of children still suffered hell from an early age (and not just those in those terrible institutions.) Not to mention the smoking and the drinking of that era and earlier. Most children were beaten as normal procedure. Getting through childhood without major damage to the psyche was still a hundred-to-one shot.

But eventually - things changed with the 60s or so, and into the 70s and on. There was a sea change in our society in so many ways - sexual freedom, human freedom, more information, more open-ness, more acceptance of different things and people, and a better understanding of people, of emotions, and of children's needs.

So we stopped beating children, we learned how to damage them less, we moved on from Dr Spock, we had many parents who really tried to learn how to care and bring up good persons - which seems like an obvious norm now. And now we are starting to see children who were brought up by people who were not beaten and damaged as children - the second generation of decent up-bringing - with the third one coming along. I believe modern Australia is paradise, Australia is the New World - many of those tired and poor huddled masses dream of coming to Australia now. There are few places better than here for living and growing. This is where many quality souls are choosing to incarnate now, because this is where quality up-bringings can be found to birth into.

Perhaps that's the quality I saw - the normal Aussie girl, a decent normal soul who grew up what a fairly decent, normal, nice person should be. Not un-flawed, not perfect, but not critically damaged. Not that she's alone either - indeed I see many wonderful young people coming in now. I see children with amazing abilities, I see people who can see deep realities, and many who want to help others and just be a good person. This is truly the Golden Age, my friends.  (OK, OK, the bra!)

So, one day I wander into my friend's office on board ship, and she had on a lovely blue silk dress. Not in-appropriate for the office, not too revealing or provocative, no-no. But figure-hugging and attractive? Oh my Lordy, yes-yes-yes!

As I walked in with my friendly greeting, she responded with a happy 'hello', and she leant back in her chair, arms behind her head, big warm smile, eyes twinkling, hair gently swinging, open and pleasing. Now I don't think it was anything more than genuine friendliness - she was just being nice to a cheerful and non-threatening guy. Perhaps she just felt good about herself that day and just chose to glow, to radiate.

And the bra? Well, I don't really know much about bras - but there are obviously different types and qualities etc. - your basic everyday bra, your quality bra, and the special expensive French bra when you really want to knock-him-dead on Friday night.

And then - there is this bra.

This is the bra that Vulcan magically crafted for his lover Venus on Mt Etna.
The bra that Boticelli snatched away from her just before he snapped her picture on the Half Shell.
The bra that Helen wore which inspired a thousand ships to go get that pair back again.
That Cleopatra wore as she popped out of the rolled-up carpet in Julius Caesar's tent that day.
Wow.

Not that the bra itself was obvious or crass or even revealed. In fact the bra was completely and utterly invisible - I didn't see the bra at all - nor any VPL either. Princess Di herself would have been impressed.

What I did see was this complete lovely young woman, dressed simply yet truly beautifully, arms open, big smile, pouring out warmth, a heavenly figure, and perfect breasts akimbo - in that million dollar bra.

Now, I've had some unusual experiences - I've travelled the planes, I've battled demons, I've stood in the Lightning Flash, and I've heard Mother Mary. And on this day a special little something happened too.

For a tiny flashing instant - the Glory of Venus herself shone down on me. I swooned - I swear to God.

My head filled with a rushing sound, my heart raced, my vision blurred, my knees started to buckle. I was overcome - not with desire or arousal - but with the pure bliss of the Divine Feminine - as the gates of heaven opened just a crack and the shining light of the Goddess burst briefly through.

But the moment did not last long, and as I recovered I was still quite wobbly. It seemed rather uncool to actually faint, so I surreptitiously leaned against the door as if the ship had rolled in a little swell, looked away and bit my lip, until that bittersweet moment of being fully back in the Earthly.

Thank you my Lady - there's a story for my glory book.