SKELETONS IN THE FAMILY CLOSET

Like a rhinestone cowboy
Riding out on a horse in a star spangled rodeo
Like a rhinestone cowboy
Getting cards and letters from people I don’t even know
And offers coming over the phone

Glen Campbell was a fine musician but his biggest hit in Australia, Rhinestone Cowboy in 1975 wasn’t remembered fondly by us teenagers in WA at the time.

Countdown’s Molly Meldrum and radio stations flogged it to the point of annoying saturation, whilst we were listening to bands like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.

We were waifs living in the most isolated community in the world with two seasons, footy and cricket. “Rhinestones?…cowboys?, what the hell is he singing about?”

The reason I mention this, is as a set up to a punch line at the end of this story if you choose to stay with it.

So, around 1990, I was back in WA on holiday when our Dad announced something that was quite cathartic.

To put this into some perspective, you have to understand that our family never had any formalities or big statements, ever.

No organised family get togethers, birthdays, Christmas, anything really, pretty much everything was made up as we went along and dysfunctional at the best of times.

I usually spent most of my break at my younger brother’s house in Waroona, about two hours south of our home town Medina, the oldest suburb in the Shire of Kwinana.

We were both summoned by our Mum to come up on a Saturday out of the blue for some unknown reason, not that we needed any reason to see our folks.

Dad was in the kitchen of the old asbestos commission home which had become smaller and smaller to us in size as we grew older.

Mum was outside the kitchen door in the hallway and mysteriously ushered me to enter the kitchen and told my brother to wait.

We were both massively confused at this stage but dutifully followed these never before seen procedures.

I entered and our seventy five year old Dad told me that he had discovered he was the illegitimate son of his mother, Mrs Wilson and a Glaswegian named Archie Campbell who was married to Mrs Wilson’s sister!

Apparently they had a one night stand that produced our said father, then Mrs Wilson’s sister (Dad’s aunty) and Archie went on to have a further eight children.

Dad always thought the eight children were cousins when all along they were his half-sisters and brothers. One of his so-called cousins had written him a letter from the UK and revealed all, hence the need for this first time conclave in Medina.

After the chat, Dad gave me the option to change my name. He was going to do it for himself, so he suggested I talk to my younger brother and come to a decision.

I left the kitchen and walked down the hall to my ever impatient brother who was already agitated. He approached Mum, still by the kitchen door and lividly said something to the tune of, “what is this rubbish? For crying out loud what’s going on!”

Five minutes later he exited the kitchen looking like a bewildered Daffy Duck.

We did what only two brothers could do in that situation, go to the pub. It wasn’t a long trip but all we could talk about was how sorry we were for Dad, for the first time really.

He was a hard, complex man who had got through WW2 as a Commando Sergeant Major then after returning home to Liverpool and fathering three children under ten, his wife died from Leukemia.

There was no psychological support for veterans in those days, so along with millions of others they ‘got on with it’ and suffered in silence.

Dad had two half sisters who had migrated to Perth and one who was in the UK. They all kept the secret from him for seventy five years and his desire to change his name was to spite them.

So my brother headed to the bar and I went to the dunny for a pee. At this point we had only remarked on how shit our Dad’s life had been and how cruel his sisters were.

It was then at the urinal that I thought about our possible name changes. “Ian Campbell…Ian Campbell. Not bad. Glen Campbell…Glen Campbell!”

As I rushed out of the bathroom, I immediately was confronted by my brother who had clearly been thinking the same thing.

He stood in a rather aggressive but controlled stance, pointing at me and yelled, “no fucken way!”

Glen worked at the time as a boner in Waroona, a very physical job in a highly testosterone filled environment.

When he walked into the abattoir on Monday morning, his work colleagues, having heard the news, began singing Rhinestone Cowboy in a Scottish dialect!

And that is why we never changed our name to Campbell.

The original Mr Wilson had died after fathering Dad’s three sisters. Mrs Wilson gave birth to the ‘illegitimate Dad’ and along with everyone associated with the family in Liverpool, told Dad that his father had died when he was a toddler. Secrets and lies.

Dad said that he did spend an inordinate amount of time with Uncle Archie when he was young and loved him.

Uncle Archie, mine and Glen’s grandad, had red hair. My dad had red hair and Glen had red hair. Who woulda thunk it?

We do have a photo of Archie and he is the image of Glen.

Finally during a trip to Scotland in 2011 I mentioned in passing to a couple of locals that I was in fact a Campbell.

As they recoiled back, they explained that The Campbell Clan are one of the most untrustworthy, treacherous, brutal clans in Scotland, notorious for extreme violence.

And I only asked for a piece of fish and a minimum chips.