Ten Doors Down Page 2

Dad decided to build a large, 12.5-metre fibreglass swimming pool at his Forster factory, which was then installed in our backyard, much to my mother’s consternation. It was a massive intrusion into the garden she loved so much and had built up over the years. The local swim squad took up what seemed like permanent residence in our backyard heated pool during the winter months, and it was also a year-long attraction for the local kids, including my friends. Despite her initial misgivings, Mum enjoyed looking out her kitchen window directly onto dozens of kids in the pool, and my dad pacing up and down the side with his stopwatch. I was especially happy to have such a honey pot of attraction for my mates in our backyard.

  As a young boy, I was adventurous. I got up to things that would never be allowed these days, including designing and digging a vast underground tunnelling project in the backyard. My engineering feats would extend for three or four metres under the sand, which in hindsight I can allow was probably particularly dangerous. Mum and Dad warned me about this, but I persisted until they finally banned the practice. I also became obsessed with devising ways to bring down massive branches of the huge gum trees in our backyard, using ropes and the brute strength of my gang of nature-marauding mates. Today, I am horrified by my mindless path of destruction, which was briefly added to when I was given an air rifle when I was about ten. I managed to shoot a small bird with the rifle, but then instantly became so mortified and ashamed of my actions that I never used the gun again.

  Tim, my dog, was my constant companion and friend and followed me everywhere. He was part kelpie, and a more devoted and loving pal I couldn’t have wished to have. With no brothers and sisters of my own, perhaps, for me, he filled that void. He was a huge part of my life until my seventeenth year, when he finally had to be put down due to injuries and very old age. We buried him in the backyard; I remember that burial spot to this day.

  Our small family of three was harmonious, and our household was free of conflict for all my childhood years. Even though there was no one to compete with me for my parents’ time and affection, this doesn’t mean that I was spoilt or showered with material possessions. On the contrary, because my parents were much older than those of most of my friends, they were rather conservative in their parenting. In my teenage years, I often found myself more confined in what I could do than my contemporaries — and because we lived in a small town where everyone knew everyone else, I didn’t have the cover of a big city to get up to mischief.

  Growing up without brothers and sisters in a very peaceful home environment arguably had its downside, too, as I later realised. Living a very protected life in lots of ways meant I didn’t learn how to deal with conflict until much later in life. Even now, I don’t do conflict well, which is perhaps a strange admission from someone who spent 18 years as an elected representative! I was close friends with Terry Sanders, the daughter of our local doctor, Gordon Sanders, and, in contrast to my own home life, whenever I visited her house, I was astounded by her and her brothers’ robust and voluble relationship. The shouting and banter of her two brothers, Don and Peter, provided a background noise I wasn’t used to, and I was often intimidated by the chaos of their house.

  Occasionally as a child, I thought about what I would do if I didn’t have my mum and dad to look after me. Although I was very close to all my aunties and uncles, they were mostly older than my parents and living far away from Forster — my beloved hometown, which I never wanted to leave. Doctor Sanders had been our long-term family physician, and I decided that if anything happened to my parents, the Sanders family would take me in, even though I didn’t have any real basis for this conclusion.

  Of course, this question of what would happen to me was probably in the back of Mum and Dad’s minds as well. My bond with them was all-embracing, and they must have been conscious of how very dependent I was on them. There was no one in the wider family who could easily look after me if anything happened to them.

  2

  Father Bert and Mother Gwen

  At every level, my mother and father were a well-suited couple. They fitted together and complemented each other in so many ways. By any measure, they were a handsome couple, but, much more importantly, they were outstanding people with an obvious integrity about them.

  Born in 1910 in the tiny town of Tallong, near Goulburn, New South Wales, where his family ran an orchard, my father, Bert, was a strong, lean man due to a lifetime of hard work and active participation in sport. His family were very strong cricketers in the region, and I have a photograph of the Tickner family cricket team, which played the Goulburn team in a match in 1919 and won. The tiny stone house where Bert and his siblings grew up is still standing, but the orchard has long gone. Mum and Dad named me Robert Edward Tickner after my father’s father, who passed away before I was born. As a small boy, I saw a photograph of his headstone and was unnerved to see my own name on a grave.

  The Tickner family left the Goulburn region and moved to western Sydney, and, having left school at the age of 13, my father went to work. Six years later, when the Depression hit and he lost his job, he went door-to-door selling. Even in those dark years, he displayed the entrepreneurial and resilient spirit that would hugely shape my own life.

  My father rarely wore a suit except for major public occasions. He wore long pants and long-sleeved shirts almost all the time, usually supplemented with a hat in the summer. My own conservative fashion sense is cast in his image — I continue to dress this way to this day, unless I’m compelled to dress up. When my father did wear a suit, he wore it well, and, when sometimes I tagged along on trips to Sydney, I could see he was quite at home in that milieu, negotiating challenging business deals.

  My father spoke well, with an appealing voice honed through a lifetime of entrepreneurial business activities. He could tell a good story, but he wasn’t a showy person; if anything, he was a little shy. He could hold his own with anyone in a one-on-one conversation or in a small group, but he absolutely loathed public speaking and would go out of his way to avoid it. I saw him as ruggedly handsome, in his own way, and he was always tanned from all the time he spent in the sun. He was also a reasonably tall man, being just over six feet.

  On weekends, my father played golf on Saturdays, and he and Mum would usually play together each Sunday, with me tagging along. I learnt to play myself and joined them on the course as soon as I was old enough. Early on in my parents’ time in Forster, my father played the leading role in building the Forster-Tuncurry golf course at One Mile Beach. He worked with key supporters to secure the land from the state government, then he got on a tractor and, with a handful of locals, physically built the first nine holes of the course, which still stand today. Both he and Mum were later honoured with life membership of the Forster Tuncurry Golf Club.

  My father was from a very different generation of Australians, and one consequence of that was that he didn’t easily or demonstrably show his feelings to either my mother or me, especially once I grew into an adolescent. Nevertheless, he was deeply devoted to Mum and respected her with almost a reverence — something he also instilled in me. They rarely argued, and life at home was very peaceful. I remember a loving childhood with him, and vividly recall sitting on his knee on one of our old plush lounge-room chairs, plucking his whiskers. Throughout most of my childhood, my father worked very long hours and was running two substantial businesses, one in Forster and the other in the town of Taree, 40 kilometres away. Even so, besides taking on the role of local swimming coach most mornings and afternoons throughout the year, in summer he and Mum would drive me to swimming carnivals up and down the New South Wales mid-north coast.

  Dad and I also spent a lot of time together through his driving me to school. Despite this, I don’t recall him ever talking to me about my adoption. The very few conversations I had about it were initiated by my mother.

  I do, however, recall my father as being the parent who administered the discipline. I was most
ly a well-behaved child, but there were times when I no doubt deserved the ‘switch’ — a relatively spindly piece of the New Zealand Christmas bush that grew at the front of our house. When I was about six or seven, on one of those rare occasions when he came after me with the switch, he chased me around the house to hit me with it, only to realise, as he chased me around their bed, that I was now outpacing him. Laughter broke through his stern veneer, the punishment dissolved into a joke, and the chase was abandoned.

  From a young age, I liked to play practical jokes on my father. When I was about six years old, one of these jokes backfired and ended in disaster and destruction. Our toilet was located well down the backyard, with a key to lock the door. As an inquisitive small child, I’d discovered that the key could be used on the outside of the door to lock in any unsuspecting adult, condemning them to a period of captivity in the company of the stinking pan toilet. One morning, just before going off to school, I snuck up on my dad and silently turned the key, which I had earlier shifted to the outside of the door. Unfortunately, after I’d tiptoed back to the house I got distracted and forgot that I’d locked him in there. I skipped off to school, saying goodbye to my mother, who was working in the garden at the front of the house. Only some considerable time later did she hear a faint noise in the distance, which sounded suspiciously like someone was trying to demolish part of our house. Indeed, my father, having failed for half an hour to attract my mother’s attention with his yelling, had kicked his way out of the toilet, demolishing the door in the process.

  I came home from school in the afternoon while he was still at work and was bewildered to find the toilet door smashed to bits. My father never mentioned the incident to me, and it was left to my mother to explain what had happened. I sheepishly said, ‘Sorry about the door, Dad,’ but received only a perfunctory grunt in reply. But my father’s wry smile whenever the topic was raised in later years by friends or family suggested that he came to see the humour in it down the track.

  By the time I was in primary school, my father’s businesses were going gangbusters. In 1957, he had launched Mid North Coast Moulded Products, a fibreglass-manufacturing business in Forster that manufactured the Sunliner caravans. My mother worked in the office in the early days. Dad carried on this business for eight years until the costs of manufacturing in country New South Wales finally got the better of him. There were over 500 vans produced, most of which are still on the road, and they have become an Australian icon. Ultimately, Dad lost a lot of money in the venture, but gave it all he had to make it a success. His work in building up the factory showed what an entrepreneur he was, which was all the more extraordinary as he had had little formal education.

  Almost to prove our family commitment to caravanning, we undertook marathon treks, including all the way to Cairns twice, on very narrow and dusty roads. Of course, it may also have been partly to do with my father’s fear of flying. It was torturous long-distance confinement to me as a boy, but nowadays I get a kick out of seeing these Sunliner caravans on the road, 60 years after they were first built in Forster by my dad and his dedicated workforce. I often go out of my way to talk to the owners, who are all Sunliner devotees and thrilled to learn something of the history of their van. In September 2018, I was honoured to be invited back to Forster-Tuncurry, not in my own right, but as ‘Bert Tickner’s son’ for a sixtieth-birthday celebration of Sunliner caravans. I could not believe the respect, and even reverence, in which my father was held by the large number of devoted Sunliner caravan owners gathered in Tuncurry for this event. My father’s signature, so familiar to me, was proudly displayed on the windows of numerous vans, alongside the history of the caravan factory in Forster. As a humble person, he would have been deeply touched to be so remembered.

  My father’s second business was a major car dealership in the nearby town of Taree called Mid North Coast Motors. He sold Volkswagens in their 1950s and 1960s heyday, as well as Land Rovers and Rovers to the farmers and graziers of the region. I remember him telling me that the Hollywood actor Anne Baxter (granddaughter of the famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright) once purchased a Land Rover from him.

  Being the son of a car dealer had its upsides: we always had interesting cars in the driveway. I learnt to drive in about 15 different cars, as they were recycled from the car lot to our home and then back to the business. I quite liked the fact that Dad sometimes drove high-performance or exotic cars, and one I especially liked at the time was the Fiat 124 Sports Coupé. In Year 11 at high school, before I got my licence, Dad would drive me in one of these vehicles from Forster to Taree and drop me off. Although I was getting dropped off in a flash-looking car, I would invariably be late for my maths class — although that was due to me being slow to get ready and certainly nothing to do with Dad’s driving, which sometimes pushed the boundaries before speed cameras and common sense prevailed.

  In addition to running his two businesses full-time, my father also invented things in a backyard shed that was more like a small factory. Here, various innovative water pumps were developed, along with contraptions to better manage drainage and water circulation around the house, and refinements to improve the performance of his motor cars. It all left me in complete awe. I remember watching his weird, electrically powered pool-cleaning contraption, made from old washing-machine parts, cleaning the walls of the pool while at the same time slowly propelling itself on wheels along the edge of the pool. Phenomenal. I had some self-interest in this particular invention because, if successful, it would relieve me of my pool-cleaning duties. Alas, ultimately that wasn’t the case, as some technical problems could not be overcome.

  Sadly, in spite of all of my father’s early encouragement to do with practical skills, I’ve never had a shed in my life, and my workshop skills are an absolute disgrace. If there was one thing that was guaranteed to make my father very angry, it was when I thoughtlessly ‘borrowed’ one of his tools, like a hammer or precious drill, and left it outside in the weather for days.

  Our relationship changed a little in my later teenage years, as I think it does in most homes. I was never particularly rebellious, but, like all teenagers, I needed to find my own place in the world. We clashed during those few years when I was staking out my increasing independence, mainly because he wanted me to work more around the house and yard, and I wanted to go surfing.

  From the age of 14, I was became a very committed surfer, and this represented another world to my father — one he wasn’t comfortable with. Even before I took up surfing, I was aware that it was competition for the swimming club, and that my father didn’t think highly of surfers. But the lure of the ocean was hard to resist: often there would be fantastic surf only a couple of hundred metres away, over the back wall of the ocean baths. Swimming training never stood a chance faced with competition like that.

  I became fanatically devoted to surfing and a love of the ocean, and even studied for my school and later my university law exams on Pebbly Beach. I knew this stony beach like the back of my hand, and I surfed as radically as I could, as a local kid with inside knowledge of its hard break right onto the oyster-encrusted rocks. Often, my mates and I ended up with deep oyster cuts on our backs when we fell off our boards, and, in hindsight, it’s a wonder that we didn’t suffer serious spinal damage. I was never around to perform the chores Dad wanted; I’m sure he thought, during that period, that I was destined to be a beach bum.

  Whatever stresses my father and I imposed on each other during my adolescence, I never had any trouble showing affection to my mother, and it is my relationship with her that most affected my later thinking about the relative influence of nature and nurture in shaping my identity.

  My mother was born Gwendoline Daisy Osborn. She both came into the world and grew up in the house at 18 Lansdowne Street, Merrylands, where I was taken to meet my grandmother immediately after my adoption. The house was likely constructed in the late 1800s, and still stands, although it was su
bstantially altered in about 2005 and looks quite different now from my childhood memory of it. Mum’s father, David Osborn, worked at the Clyde Engineering Works and passed away before I was born. Her mother, Minnie Osborn, and the Lansdowne Street house were both to play a large part in my life. My Grandma Osborn was a direct descendant of Andrew Fishburn, a carpenter on the First Fleet. Andrew Fishburn travelled for part of the journey on the flagship Sirius, where he undertook repairs, but he arrived in Sydney in 1788 on the Alexander. He came from Whitby in North Yorkshire, where the ship that would later be called the Endeavour and be captained by James Cook, had been built by the Fishburn family shipbuilders. Research continues on Andrew’s relationship to that English Fishburn family.

  There were five daughters growing up in the Lansdowne Street house: Elsa, Alma, Gladys, Daphne, and my mother, Gwen, the youngest. Another sister, Marjorie, had passed away as a child. Gladys died before I was born, but the surviving sisters were an impressive quartet of strong and competent women, who kept a strong family bond throughout their lives. They all had warm and engaging personalities, and I became very close to each of them.

  My mother was a slim and attractive woman, five foot three inches tall, with a broad and welcoming smile. Her skin was forever bronzed by the Forster sun, and provided a warm contrast to her hair, which turned white quite early in her life. She was a very fit woman and, after her years as a champion tennis player in western Sydney, on moving to Forster, she became a successful golfer. My mother spoke in gentle tones and had an easy self-confidence that allowed her to mix well with people from all walks of life. She was an extremely down-to-earth woman and very strong and self-reliant in so many ways. She dressed stylishly, buying some of her clothes by catalogue order from David Jones, and her hair was always fashionably groomed.

  My mother was central to my life. Although she supported my father in the family businesses, she was very much focused on being my mum, and we spent a huge amount of time together when I was a small child, and later, when I took up competitive swimming. Mum would do anything for me and my mates as we were growing up, from piling our surfboards on top of her car and driving along some near inaccessible sandy track to reach the beach, to collecting us all after we missed the bus as 17-year-olds on our first day at Taree High School. Much to my embarrassment on that occasion, Mum chased the bus in her car, eventually caught it halfway, and we had to troop on board.