A Man's Got to Have a Hobby

by William McInnes

Genres: Family Life; Humor & Satire; Sports

Synopsis

William McInnes' bestselling memoir, A Man's Got To Have A Hobby, takes us back to the long summer holidays of the 1960s and 70s, and the last of the baby-boomer childhoods. William writes with humour and affection about his family, and especially his mum and dad, who talked to the TV set and enjoyed life in their house near the bay. William McInnes is a talented writer and a natural storyteller. A tail-end baby boomer, he recalls summer holidays that seemed to go on forever, when he and his mates would walk down to fish in the bay; a time when the Aussie battler stood as the local Labor candidate and looked out for his mates; and a time when the whole family would rush into the lounge room to watch a new commercial on TV. He writes about his father - a strong character who talks to the furniture, dances with William's mother in the kitchen, and spends his free time fixing up the house and doing the best for his family. In William's writing you can hear his father speaking and listen to his mother singing. This is a book about people who aren't famous but should be. It's about cane toads and families, love and hope and fear, laughter, death and life. Most of all, it is a realistic, down-to-earth book by a man who had a great time growing up. His warmth and humour come through on every page. This Australian memoir tells of a time that will be familiar to many readers and a delight for all. 'McInnes applies a deft touch to a swag of recollections, shaping a yarn that should be listed with the national treasures' - The Courier Mail 'This will make you laugh till you cry' - The Age 'A perfect balance between humour, humility, seriousness and light, laughter and tears' - Sunday Telegraph

Release date: July 1, 2010

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 288

Sample

I am sitting in the study of my mum’s house in Redcliffe. I’m trying to use the phone. To be precise I’m actually trying to
find a telephone number so I can use the phone. Trying to find the number and then trying to find the phone could be a protracted
exercise – the study in the house I grew up in can derail the most determined efforts at efficient purpose. For as long as
I can remember the phone has been here in the study, although finding the thing was never easy, even when it was that great,
heavy-set, black blob of Bakelite with an arm-breaking handpiece. Nowadays, the thin white plastic number could be anywhere.


A certain state of flux exists in this house, and the study is a case in point. The study wasn’t always the study; it was
once called ‘the Den’. It was my father’s den. What my father did in his den I was never quite sure. He would come home and
throw things in through the internal door of his den and

then prowl off. ‘Don’t touch anything in the den,’ we’d be warned. Later, when my old man started his mostly handmade hire business, the ‘Den’ became the ‘Office’.
By this stage the office had two doors into it, the internal door and another rather grand door that faced out onto the front
lawn. This door had a sign on it. A sign that said ‘Office’ on a door that never opened. People would come around to hire
something and, quite naturally, they would walk to the door marked ‘Office’. They had no idea it didn’t open.


My father did. He could never understand why others wouldn’t know this fact, so every time it happened he’d become more and
more exasperated and cranky. He’d rush from the front door of the house, which did open, yelling, ‘No, no, no, for Christ’s sake. The bloody door doesn’t open.’


Those who knew Dad well sometimes tried to open the office door for a laugh. But a lot of the newer customers were quite shocked.
One day an old painter in his overalls shrieked as he fell back over a lump of concrete in the vague shape of a garden gnome.
We thought he’d had a heart attack.


It was odd because it was Cliffy Jenkins. He was one of Dad’s regulars and was having his little joke. But, unknown to Cliffy,
Dad had decided to add yet another door so that he could come around behind the office.


Dad bent over his elderly friend. ‘Cliffy, Cliffy?’ he said. My sister Corby suggested he resuscitate him. Dad had been having
breakfast – his morning fry-up of immense proportions – and his lips were slathered in oil and sauce. Cliffy’s eyes opened
and saw my father looming and puckering above him. He shrieked again. He was helped up, moaning. ‘You and your bloody house, you’ve changed it again!’


My father looked down at his friend and patted him on his shoulder. ‘Well, Cliffy,’ he said. ‘A Man’s Got to have a hobby.’

•

That was the thing about this house; like life it was always changing. Walls would disappear overnight to reappear somewhere
else the next day. A door that led into a pantry in the morning would open up onto a courtyard in the afternoon.


Anyway, I’m sitting in this study trying to use the phone, trying to find a phone number. I reach for a small box of telephone
cards. The box was a present Mum received a couple of years ago. I open it and go to the list of cards in alphabetical order.
Where the card marked ‘L to P’ should be is a card of similar size. It’s not a telephone card. It is in fact a card from a
Nabisco breakfast cereal called Granox. It is a collector’s card – ‘Our Modern Australia’. It has an illustration of a man
in a slouch hat, walking at the head of a column of ‘fuzzy wuzzies’. The card is entitled ‘Walkabout in Our Savage Colony
New Guinea’. It’s forty years old, almost as old as me, and it’s in a telephone box that’s only two Christmases old.


I don’t know how it got there, but it doesn’t surprise me. This house has a mind of its own. In fact, it has so embedded itself
in my heart and mind that I barely think of it as a house. My children refer to it simply as Nanna Mac’s. They speak of it as you
would a living thing. That is the key, my children see this house by a fire station as a living thing. Over the years it’s
soaked up the sounds and life around it like a sponge soaks up the water in a bucket. But instead of squeezing the sponge dry and letting the water fall and trickle away, the house
has retained it all. It holds on to memories that were thought long forgotten.


Perhaps that is why it looks bigger than it is. It’s a two-storey rambling weatherboard with wraparound verandahs and a cluttered
green yard. It’s set back from a main road, down a quiet lane. It rests on a battleaxe block. Behind the fire station and
the car park of a Senior Citizens’ Hall. Before the Senior Cits’ Hall was built there was a small, two-bedroom house on a
large, deep allotment. That’s where Mr Tibby lived.


Mr Tibby always looked to me like the man in the big Pilsener billboard by the trotting track. Bald-headed, pale-eyed and
pink-faced, asking all that looked up, ‘Won’t you join me in a Pilsener?’ The man in the billboard offered a foamy substance
in a glass.


Mr Tibby was a widower. A big bull of a man, he walked with a thick stick, propping himself on it from time to time to heave
at his wide belt and pull his trousers up over his huge stomach. He was a Jehovah’s Witness. Once a week he’d come to the
front door as we ate dinner. He’d lean on his stick and read us passages from the Bible. You could always tell he was coming
by the thudding of his cane. He’d ask my mother how the children would get to heaven. ‘Wrap them up in sacks would be best,’
he’d say. He was constantly throwing sacks over the fence.


‘Thank you very much,’ my mother would say. ‘Very kind. What a handy sack.’ Then she’d look back and shake her head.

Whenever there was a full moon, Mr Tibby would walk up and down his deep block of land in his baggy underwear roaring quotes
from the Bible. We children always felt safe in the house, even when Dad had to go to hospital with a bad foot. But Mum wasn’t
so soothed. She slept with a great wood axe under her pillow. When I’d go into my parents’ room for an extra cuddle, I’d feel
the blade. ‘Just in case of Mr Tibby and his sacks,’ Mum would say. I’d go back to my bed and the creaking timbers would reassure
me. The breathing house made me safe.


Mr Tibby would sometimes ask us if we wanted to pick strawberries in his paddock. He would point them out with his great stick.
I thought this big rumbling man would break my fingers as he thrust his heavy lump of wood here and there at the strawberries,
smashing them even when it was clear our young eyes couldn’t see them. ‘Are ya blind? Are ya blind?’ he’d cry.


Often he’d wait outside his house, dressed in his best, waiting for other Jehovah’s Witnesses to come and take him to church.
But they never did. One day he wasn’t there any more. Dad said they’d put him away. His house stood empty. When, some time
later, Mum told me he’d died I didn’t feel anything much. I just thought of him smashing the strawberries into a bloody pulp.


His children sold his house and one afternoon when I came home from school, it was gone. Razed to the ground.

•

At eight o’clock every morning the fire signal would ring. This was the fire drill at the station. It was a sound that didn’t
startle as it began as a slow humming and would build to a soaring roar, not unlike a huge early-morning yawn. The firemen
would saunter about laughing and singing; all men, away from their wives and families, carrying on like real lads. Flirting
with Mum and my sisters. Harmless stuff. Jonsey with his battered face and smiling eyes, offering Mum freshly caught crabs
and whiting from Woody Point Pier. Cherokee, who was from New Zealand, was given the moniker because he’d whoop like an Indian
from a Western movie when he jumped aboard the fire engine. He’d sing songs that would echo off the big incinerator at the
bottom of the station while Mum would be chopping wood in our backyard. I’d sit by the chopping block and hear him. ‘Cheryl
Moana Marie’, he’d croon. It was an old John Rawls lounge number about a lonely man pining for his Maori princess.


One morning I heard a sharp, harsh breathing sound coming from the backyard. There was a knock at the door and there was Jonsey
wearing his breathing apparatus and holding a bucket of sand crabs. Through his mask I could see his laughing eyes. He’d whistle
while he walked around the grounds. High and clear. He would wear his cap at an angle and would never have a cigarette too
far from his mouth. Sometimes he’d call me over to see if I could kick or pass a footy into a big white bucket he’d be holding.


‘Come on, young Mac, come on over. Give it a drill and see how you go!’ When the ball landed in the bucket he’d whistle his high sweet whistle. ‘Never seen a ball fly like that, young Mac. Never.’ And then he’d smile.

One Saturday night we heard the siren wail and the firemen shouting and the fire engines roaring to life. We all went and
stood on the front verandah and could see a fire in a house down towards the beach. The first fire truck roared off with Cherokee
howling; moments later the second engine began growling from the station. As it picked up speed and began to rocket down the
road, a uniformed figure with blond hair sprinted after it holding his helmet in one hand.


‘Hey, look at him go!’ my brother yelled.

‘He won’t make it!’ said one of my sisters.

But then just as the truck seemed to draw away, the uniformed figure flung himself at full stretch through the air and grabbed
onto the rails on the back. The truck fishtailed and tyre smoke billowed as it braked sharply.


‘He’s the flying Dutchman,’ said Mum.

‘He’s the flying Dutchman, all right,’ said Dad.

From then on the young, raw-boned blond man with the Dutch name became the Flying Dutchman.

One of the brigade officers, Mr Easton, would sometimes walk his trotter around the station’s back paddock. Jonsey would whistle
a starting tune and do a phantom racecall. Mr Easton’s horse always looked a certain winner and sure enough he’d never fail
to lose. Both of them would laugh and I would join in.


Mr Easton had a son who was allowed to keep pigeons up the back of the station. In those days he was called spastic – now you’d say he had cerebral palsy. It was hard to understand him when he spoke and when he’d try to speak louder, he would
often spit and dribble. This he usually did at his swine of a dog, Karl. Karl was a psychotic German shepherd that we’d race
through the station, if we felt brave or bored enough.


‘Goin’ out to race Karl,’ one of us kids would say for no particular reason. And then it was on.

‘Betcha you don’t make it to the bomb shelter.’

‘Betcha I can.’

‘Betcha you can’t.’

‘Betcha a packet of Beachies I can.’

‘No short cuts!’

I was the youngest by six years and was easy prey for Karl. I seldom made it past the ‘bomb shelter’, a round brick building
built in the 1950s. So I’d invariably lose lots of Beachies, a type of pelleted chewing gum we’d buy from the service station
up on the corner.


Sometimes I wouldn’t even make it to the bomb shelter – I’d only get as far as the tennis courts. One morning I screamed and
leapt up at the sharp wire netting that bound the courts. The metal stuck into my fingers and toes, while below me Karl leapt
and snarled, and Mr Easton’s son bellowed and dribbled. On the court a doubles game was in full swing.


‘I just don’t like a man who marries a woman who is sooo much younger than he is,’ said a big woman in a small hat and a ballooning tennis skirt. ‘But I could never vote for that
Whitlam fellow …’ She finished off her thought as I clung onto the wire, ‘He may not be a communist but I’m sure he’s a socialist.’ She stopped and turned to look at me. She was wearing green-black clip-on shades attached to the top of her
glasses and I could see the whole scene reflected in her specs – me and Karl and Mr Easton’s son, who had a hold of the dog’s
collar and was being shaken like a go-go dancer.


And way behind us I could see our house. I hung there in her sunglasses for what seemed like ages. Karl was eventually dragged
off by the gurgling Easton boy and I jumped down and ran off along the fence. I heard the big woman as I ran. ‘A socialist,’ she snapped, and then she hit the tennis ball.


Occasionally we’d play on the courts with old wooden racquets named after Aussie champions who were on the pension even then.
Men like Frank Sedgman and Fred Stolle. I was given a Pancho Gonzales Special. What was so special about the racquet was lost
on me, although it did have a pleasant image of Pancho smiling rakishly from the neck of the racquet and the head was bent
at what could only be called an alarming angle.


The tennis courts were made of light crushed rock and sand so if you played barefoot, pebbles and bits and pieces would stick
into your feet. You could slide, though, and it wasn’t long before gouging big skids into the sand became the object of the
whole exercise.


During one game I moaned incessantly in my youngest-child whine. ‘I can’t play because my Pancho Gonzales is bent!’

‘A bad tradesman always blames his tools,’ my mother said.

‘It’s bent, it’s bent, Mum!’

‘If you don’t want to play, you don’t have to play.’

‘It’s bent, it’s bent, it’s no good!’

‘What’s he whingeing about now?’ My father sauntered over. He never played tennis and he never came near the court, so it
was a bit of a surprise to see him. He’d been working, making deliveries or pulling down walls, or whatever and he was dressed
as if he’d been up to something. He loved hats, ‘dynamic’ hats, he’d call them, which really meant ‘work’ hats. He preferred
peaked caps, especially Makita caps, which were the red and orange ones supplied by the Japanese power tool company. But today
he had on what he called his ‘Robin Hood number’ – a strange, chequered, bucket-shaped thing that he’d mangled into something
vaguely resembling the hat worn by one of Robin Hood’s merry men from the television show. He was also wearing his brown Stubbies
work shorts, a white T-shirt, footy socks and work boots.


He ambled through the gates of the court.

‘Pancho bloody Gonzales was a legend, son, he’d eat people alive,’ he said.

‘But the racquet’s bent, it’s no good.’


‘If Pancho put his name to it then it’s all right. Just play the game.’

‘It’s not his racquet, Dad, it came from a jumble sale.’

My father looked at me. ‘Oh, all right,’ he said, nodding his head, ‘not good enough for you, eh?’

‘Oh, Colin,’ my mother sighed.

‘No, it’s all right, love. Give me that thing, you.’ He grabbed Pancho’s racquet and told my sister to give me hers – a Phil
Dent Special that had been bought from Woolies down the road for her birthday. It was a prehistoric aluminium number but back
then I guess it was pretty space-age.


My sisters started to giggle.

My mother looked at my father, wide-eyed. ‘You’re not going to play, are you?’

‘It’s all right, I know what I’m about. Come on, you goose, me and Pancho’ll knock you into next week.’ Dad flipped the racquet
and looked at it for the first time. He ran his fingers around its bent head. ‘Christ,’ he mumbled.


I lobbed the ball to him and the show began. He swung the racquet like he was felling a tree, and the ball shot off at crazy
angles again and again. He waved his arms about so much that his dynamic Robin Hood hat flopped in front of his eyes and his
big chook legs skated and skidded across the court, his feet scrabbling in his work boots.


‘This bloody game’s for penguins. Bloody Pancho Gonzales.’ He held the racquet aloft. ‘It’s as bent as an S-bend. You could
scratch someone’s arse around the corner.’


‘Colin!’ my mother said.

‘Well!’ he answered with a laugh.

We heard more laughter and turned to see that Jonsey and the Flying Dutchman had wandered over and were standing there shaking
their heads.


‘How’d you be, brother?’ Dad said to Jonsey.

Jonsey looked back at my father. ‘I didn’t know you played tennis.’

My father stared a minute and then casually flipped his bent Pancho Gonzales Special, caught it and pushed back his Robin
Hood number. ‘Well, Jonsey,’ he said. ‘A Man’s Got to have a hobby.’


Our house on the battleaxe block was bounded by trees, and birds would gather in the branches as the fruit ripened, clattering
and eating, carrying on and dropping berries onto the tin roof. This particular sound – a kind of music really – would mix
with the other peculiar sounds of my family. Mum and Dad singing and yelling. Mum calling for the dog. Dad banging away on
the next renovation. My sisters shrieking with laughter in the backyard as they gave each other different hairstyles and colour
jobs. My brother hacking away on the piano that has never been in tune, in all the time it has been sitting downstairs against
the wall.


Music filled the house, and surrounded it. From over the backyard fence would come the noise of our neighbours, the Worths,
and their record player. Reg and Warren, sons of Snow and Pat Worth, loved Johnny Cash and Johnny O’Keefe. And Engelbert Humperdinck.
And they especially loved the races. So the music was often accompanied by a jaunty racing trumpet and the flat nasal excitement of the caller.


Every now and then lyrics of the songs would float across those yards, adding a backdrop to the domestic action of the day.
It was a cacophony of life. Of living.


I remember sitting drinking sarsaparilla in the backyard while watching my mother chop wood to the tune of ‘Spanish Flea’,
an insane Tijuana trumpet song. Then later watching Dad stretched out on a trestle table having a midday ‘kip’ while Mario
Lanza wailed from the hi-fi next door. Just as Mario reached his high-pitched crescendo he paused to gather breath but before
he could assault our ears again my dozing father let rip an almighty fart. ‘Merry Christmas to you too, you fat bastard,’
he muttered, spreadeagled on his trestle table.


One beautiful, still summer’s day only one song played. It was late summer for the mangoes had started to ripen and fall.
In those last moments of the afternoon, when the heat was at its strongest and the humidity had started to close in, before
the thunderstorm rolled across the bay, I lay on the deep green couch grass and stared up at the sky. Our dog Sam was next
to me panting, and from downstairs came the sound of my sister Laurie playing ‘Claire De Lune’ on the old piano. She played
that piece over and over again. I lay there until the rain and the darkness came. I thought I had never heard anything as
beautiful.


The backyard at the battleaxe block was a place where you could dream. It seemed huge when I was a boy and yet now when I
stand there I see how close to the fence line the houses next door have crept and how many trees have been chopped down. But it doesn’t take long before the big trees grow again,
and the houses disappear, waiting for the memories to put everything into perspective. Life goes by so fast that sometimes
it is good to wait and let the memories catch up. And there is no better place to do that than the backyard where you grew
up.


We kept chooks that lived in the corner by the woodpile, and every morning while Mum wa. . .