Have you ever heard a song that can take you right back to a memorable moment in your life? I can think of three.

Song and Moments #1 – Gloria Gaynor and a King Hit.

As a teenager I had the emotional intelligence of a house brick.

I loved girls but had no idea how to communicate with them in order to pursue a potential romance. Football, music, the beach and my mates took precedent over everything in the 70’s.

The local girls at Kwinana High School in WA were generally gregarious, funny and authentic. They left you in no doubt at as to whether they liked or disliked you.

And they were tough. I once took home one of the toughest, Deb, from a party and escorted her home through our local bush tracks because that was the gentleman I was. 🙂

I offered my thongs to her in case we came across the notorious ‘double gee’ prickle. She rejected my offer, chose to go barefoot and gave me a nice ‘pash’ when we arrived at her house. Who said chivalry was dead? 🙂

Meeting girls for many of us shy types was managed by the girls themselves. It may well be the same today, but they had this irrefutable match making system going on behind our backs that we knew little about.

Someone would just come up to you and say that “Hey, Tracey likes you and she will be at location X on Friday night if you want to hook up.” Hopefully Tracey was someone you also liked and then you would meet her at said location full of optimism.

In July of 1979 at the age of sixteen this happened to me. Word arrived that Wendy liked me and that she would be at a party at Bradley Read’s house on Calista Ave, Calista, the second oldest suburb in the Shire of Kwinana.

Brad’s wonderful parents Cliff and Shirley would occasionally go out on a Saturday night so approximately a dozen or more of us reprobates would gather there to drink and party.

Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive must have been top of the charts at the time because the girls at the party had it on high repeat along with dancing and screaming the chorus. The irony of that song and what happened to me next is too much of a coincidence.

At the party was Eugene Wilson (no relation) who was a couple of years older than me. I’d known Eugene over the previous year as he tended to drift into our friendship circle. A really nice guy as was his younger sister Belinda who was my age.

The party was about six months after the heinous murder of Eugene and Belinda’s big sister Felicia, which occurred in broad daylight not far from her work in Kwinana. It rocked our community and to this day still no one has been charged, an indictment on the ineptitude of the WA police force at the time.

So to add to the scenario, I had no idea that a now drunk, upset and irrational Eugene had previously dated Wendy. This would now enable the perfect emotional storm in Eugene.

I had little to drink because of footy the next day, and I was chatting to a friend out the front of the house when I decided to head inside, presumably to chat to my newly allocated girlfriend Wendy.

I naively walked up the few concrete steps onto the front porch with my usual head down when without warning, Eugene knocked me unconscious with a roundhouse left.

I dropped like an ironing board into Mrs Read’s rose bushes and woke up being dragged out by my good mate Alan who escorted me on the 2km walk home to Medina, the oldest suburb in the Shire of Kwinana.

I still have the scar tissue in my lip today and to compound that, I never got to ‘pash’ Wendy! In fact I can’t remember even having a conversation with her!

Two years later and I returned to Perth as a soldier on my first leave break. I was at a party somewhere and Eugene was there. He walked briskly toward me and apologised wholeheartedly. He was genuinely remorseful and he looked and sounded like the old Eugene I remembered.

He understood the seriousness of what he did and the possible consequences. I was no angel but there was no justification for his actions. He was lucky it was only a split lip and concussion.

I’m glad I chose to be the bigger man that night because if I’m honest, the thought of recrimination had crossed my mind many times since the incident a couple of years earlier, but I was always taught to put myself in the shoes of others.

I could never begin to imagine the pain Eugene, Belinda and the Wilson family have experienced, especially now I have two daughters of my own.

After Felicia’s passing the family decided to move back to the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria where they had come from originally. Felicia’s grave is located there.

If I never hear I Will Survive again, it’ll be too soon. Ahh, what the hey…..

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