Mum Knows Best

Growing up as one of nine children in Kwinana WA in the 60’s and 70’s, I was used to my Mum delivering pearls of wisdom to me and my siblings.

“Always look after those worse off than yourself” was a classic, to which my younger brother Glen would retort, “there is no one worse off than us!”, from inside our State Housing Commission asbestos home.

She was always trying to inspire us with real life stories of people who had overcome adversity. It was as though she was preparing us for a world that was never going to provide the privileges of those with more prosperous upbringings.

When I joined the army as a seventeen year old and was shipped off to Wagga Wagga in 1980, she would write to me weekly and the envelopes would arrive the size of a giant blowfish, stuffed with a couple of handwritten A4 pages and a heap of clippings from the West Australian and the local Sound Advertiser.

The envelope would be wrapped in sticky tape in order to survive the 3000km journey and it contained sporting updates, local tit bits and the feats of those pushing through boundaries to achieve their personal best.

This mindset that Mum had, came from a very tough life. She had four children to a man who was a drunk and wife beater then took on my Dad, a ‘ten pound widower Pom’ with three kids under ten, then she had me and Glen. After we left home, she then fostered two local homeless juveniles and gave them a start in life.

My Mum loved athletics and sport in general. In the late 30’s and 40’s she dominated the 880 yards distance for women in Australia along with her friend and great rival Betty Judge. Betty was married to Kim Beazley Snr and Mum to the former Labor leader of course.

Incredibly 880 yards was the furthest a woman was allowed to run in those days so Mum would always marvel at the evolution of women’s sport and the distances they competed in throughout the years.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The war and pregnancies prevented both women from reaching the Olympics but Mum did get to see her nephew Christopher win a gold medal in the 4 x 400m relay at the 2006 Commonwealth Games.

All us kids played sport to high levels because she taught us the importance of fair play and to love it or leave it. We were part of that generation that came home from school, grabbed a snack and wouldn’t be home till dark, kicking the footy or playing cricket with the neighbours.

Mum despised laziness. Her methods to get us moving were at best unorthodox and at worst challenging the Geneva Convention!

In the mornings she would be up at 5am, have the house cleaned and would start the washing machine up at 6-6.30am. It was one of the old ones that had a spin drum attached to it that sounded like a Chinook Helicopter taking off!

If that didn’t wake you, she would order our two kelpie mongrels, Toby and Red onto the bed and follow up with the vacuum cleaner in a full body assault. You couldn’t keep resting so you’d rip off the sheets and make a fruitless attempt to grab the assailant but she was too quick, the back of her grey head running out the door laughing hysterically.

When Glen and I would arrive home from a stinking hot day of Little Athletics, grumpy and ready for a fight, Mum would be waiting around the back of the house, hose in hand and as soon as we got close she would blast us like a water cannon.

We would then chase her around the backyard, hold her down and drench her amidst a cacophony of laughter. Whatever grievances Glen and I had simply disappeared in that moment.

She would use similar modus operandi when we had a particularly sketchy breakfast argument between us brothers. Glen would conceal himself at one end of the table behind cereal packets and I would fire verbal cheap shots over his cardboard bow.

Mum would give us a couple of warnings then the spot fire would inevitably become an inferno. Mum would quickly grab one or both of us by the collar and stick our heads under a cold shower. Again we would wrestle Mum under and all violent thoughts dissipated. A quick change of clothes and we were ready for school!

Humour was the key to her discipline. “Have a laugh” was her edict and solution to any anxiety or personal issues we had. It’s etched on her grave plaque next to the names of her children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and foster children.

Humility and selflessness were two of her key values. Even though she wasn’t religious, she love the ‘Todays Text’ in The West Australian. She would mail them to me in the giant blowfishes and would underline the important messages, another of her constant behaviours which I’ve inherited with my own kids.

When I left home in 1980 she gave me two ‘Todays Texts’ joined with a gold safety pin belonging to my Nanna who lived to one hundred. I have carried those flimsy texts with the underlined words such as “work hard and do not be lazy” in a plastic pocket, in my many wallets for forty three years.

I have always loved getting home to WA on holidays and especially for the beaches. The only thing I’m not keen on is seaweed. I’m happy to swim over it when it’s deep enough but not to walk on.

Another of Mum’s classic folkloric assertions was that running through the WA seaweed was good for your ankles. When I was home and taking the folks to the beach she would typically accuse me of being soft for not jogging through the seaweed in the shallows of Cockburn Sound.

During one trip home in the mid-eighties, I was throwing the tennis ball with an older brother on a beach near Rockingham. We were skimming the ball off the water thus providing slips-like catches.

One of my brother’s throws went over my head so I turned to chase it, only to discover the ball had landed on top of a sizable clump of seaweed.

I immediately felt the heckle come from my Mum perched comfortably on the sand, “Come on soldier…big tough footy player! Get your feet in there and harden those ankles up!”

I had had enough, so I took a deep breath and stomped into the greasy, leathery abyss only to scream in agony. I’d trodden on a catfish or as they are known in WA, a cobbler.

These slimy but tasty buggers have a poisonous spike on their head that isn’t designed to accommodate a human foot. The pain was excruciating and my brother had to take me to a doctor for a tetanus shot, much to the amusement of my mother who was trying to keep a straight face whilst consoling me.

Mum would have been a hundred right now. She nearly made it to ninety two and left a legacy of kindness that was felt wherever she was. Her methods were somewhat Machiavellian because she had little time for conflict resolution.

For all the wonderful self-improvement philosophies she shared with us, one will always remain an undisputed myth, ‘running through WA seaweed makes your ankles stronger.’

What a load of old Cobblers. 🙂