I have two daughters. One is thirty and the other twenty seven. They’re great kids and like many of their generation they have an aversion to stories from me referencing ‘the olden days’.

Even if I do start with a life lesson, they will quickly remind me that it sounds like a monologue from Monty Python’s ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch.

Given this level of contempt, I’ve found solace reading The Footy Almanac.com where contributors from around the country often share stories of sport and life from a bygone era.

With that in mind I received a photo the other day from a half-brother in WA. It looks like 1971/1972 at our house at 23 Crabtree Way, Medina, WA 6167.

I have no memory of it being taken or who took it, but the image perfectly captures what I remember of my childhood growing up in Kwinana, WA for the first seventeen years of my life.

Kwinana in those days consisted of four small boroughs. Medina where we lived was the first built, Calista the second, Orelia the third and finally Parmelia.

The town was populated by ‘ten pound Poms’ our Dad being one, lots of other European migrants as well as a strong First Nations contingent.

The bulk of the town worked at the enormous refineries like BP and Alcoa as well as CSBP fertilisers and CBH wheat exporters. All sit on our childhood playground Cockburn Sound, with their respective giant jetties to accommodate the international tankers.

Medina was almost entirely made from asbestos and timber homes that were based on a couple of designs and managed by the State Housing Commission.

Although we were materially poor, we lived a rich childhood. We rarely visited anywhere north of the Swan River to witness how the ‘other half’ lived and therefore remained oblivious to the outside world.

Our focus was footy, cricket and friends. This photo depicts two of my closest friends, our next door neighbours Luka and Joe Petrovich and my younger brother Glen.

Here’s why I love this so much.

  • Luka’s tank top, very popular amongst WA kids in those days.
  • Bare feet, a staple in those days although we did wear thongs to school. We weren’t animals!
  • Joe with cricket ball. Not sure why because the tennis ball was the standard backyard choice. Perhaps we had just returned from the nets at Medina Oval.
  • The brick house belonged to the Bird family and was the only one in the street. The Petrovich’s lived on the other side.
  • Black footy shorts were our ‘go to’ almost all year round.
  • Luka, Joe and I looking at the camera like primitive tribesmen seeing a white man for the first time whilst my brother performs an interpretive dance.
  • When I was younger I went to retrieve a ball in the Bird’s backyard and had to climb the picket fence. I slipped and a picket went up the inside of my leg and inside my footy shorts leaving me dangling helplessly. An older brother eventually lifted me off.
  • The picket fences were fashioned into all manner of things, swords, guns, firewood and even a hockey/golf stick. One innovation we had was our version of a golf game. Every house had a septic tank in the backyard that contained a vent covered in concrete that could house a tennis ball exactly. The game was to hit the ball with the improvised hockey/golf stick the least amount of shots from one backyard septic tank to another. Down driveways, around hedges and over fences, it was a skillful challenge that would take up a few hours of fun.

Luka and Joe’s parents were from Croatia and spoke little English. Along with their sister Nellie who was a year younger than me, Joe and Luka spent significant time in an orphanage located in York, about 100km east of Perth due to their Mum having mental health issues.

Nellie and I had our first kisses under my house before my Mum put the hose on us when I was about seven. It was never spoken of again and Nellie went on to be a career schoolteacher.

Joe completed a never used psychology degree then made a small fortune as a landscape gardener. He is also the president of the WA Free Diving Association and has survived two well publicised confrontations with White Pointers.

Luka joined the Army a few months after me, completed three years and is now a Church Minister in WA after many years working with street kids and homeless.

My brother Glen was a star junior footballer and if the recruiting of today was in place back then, would have played AFL. He moved to the country at sixteen and worked some tough jobs such as in a wood mill and a boner in an abattoir before a 25+ year career as a fitter at Alcoa in WA’s south west.

He had a fantastic career in footy and cricket and is happily married with two boys similar in age to my girls. Forever the clown, he has always had the ability to make me gut laugh.

We may have looked like waifs in a Steinbeck novel, but kids in my community were raised with an inherit level of resilience and creativity.

The photo captures a moment in time so typical in how we lived back then. We fished, slept on the beach, mastered hand tennis, hitchhiked, walked everywhere, kicked, marked and handballed thousands of footys and spent entire days playing cricket in the nets in searing heat on a melting malthoid pitch!

I can hear my girls now…”You were lucky. I dreamed to play on a melting malthoid pitch. Would’ve been like the MCG for us.”