Confessions of a Babyboomer

CONFESSIONS OF A BABYBOOMER

By Geoffrey Gibson

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Published by:

Geoffrey Gibson at Smashwords

Copyright (c) 2014 by Geoffrey Gibson

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TO THE KIDS OF GLEN IRIS STATE SCHOOL.

I

Of course I cannot tell you about my conception, but I have learnt something about my birth. According to the Birth Certificate - is it merely hearsay? - I was born at Bethlehem Hospital. A lot of Melbourne's babyboomers were born there. The birth certificate describes my father, always known as Mac Gibson, as the informant. He was said to be a Judge's Associate, 30 years of age, from Brunswick. My mother, Norma Gibson, was 26 years of age from Fairfield. Although both were born north of the river, I have lived my life south of it. Opinions vary whether this meant I was going up or going down.

The idea of the father as the informant was, I suppose, an outmoded inheritance from the English. It is surely not a good start in life for your father to be characterised as an informant - it suggests that one way or another, he may not have not long to live. But it was certainly consistent with Australian attitudes at the time that the form of birth certificate called on the father to be given an occupation, although this was not necessary, or apparently desirable, for the mother. Childbearing and rearing were enough for her sex. Instead, she had to give her maiden name. It would be hard to give a better example of what Sir Henry Maine had described as the movement of ancient law - the evolution from status to contract. We had not moved. Women were stuck with status. The men could contract out.

Dr Rennick is recorded as having effected the delivery. Dr Wilson was there too. Sister Justinian was in attendance. The birth was effected with the use of forceps. Remarks of friends, comments in the outer, and the difficulty in being fitted with a hat all suggest to me that the size of my head was the cause of the problem. Some say it has led to other problems.

I was proud to have been born at a place called Bethlehem. It seemed to me to be in good standing as a birthplace. In the simple logic of a child, when I decided I should adopt a football team, it seemed right it should be Melbourne. It was the capital city. This seemed to be the patriotic thing to do. As an investment in emotional capital, that decision later got so draining as to threaten to become terminal. I had to recalibrate it permanently after the umpires robbed Melbourne in 1987 when an Irishman was said to have gone too far after the siren. The mate who was with me, who was shortly to take silk, said he was prepared to do time for it. While the Hawthorn people slinked out of the carpark without making eye contact, one Melbourne supporter told me he was going home to teach his children how to lose. I said I was going home to teach mine the meaning of revenge.

The war in Europe finished in April 1945. The second atomic bomb fell on Japan on 9 August 1945. The Liberal Party of Australia got under way in Sydney on 26 August 1945. Laval and Quisling were executed in October in the countries they had betrayed. On 6 November 1945 a crowd of 92,776 people at Flemington saw Rainbird win the Melbourne Cup. The press carried ads for Bile Beans as the medically approved laxative to bring a big smile. The year might therefore be said to have been one of ups and downs. VJ Day was 2 September and I was born on 31 October 1945. The babyboomers were on the march.

According to the Birth Certificate, my first home was flat 7, 33 Orange Grove, Balaclava. They are not recollections, but the earliest images I can summon up - perhaps what Lincoln called mystic chords - are of clinker bricks, wrought iron gates, and hundreds and thousands. That should give the shrinks something to go on with. What could Ignatius Loyola or Sigmund Freud have made with those mouldings? The bricks were fired in a fiery furnace; could the temptations of the shotgunned but lubricious confectionery prevail against the gates of hell?

In those days hundreds and thousands were all over the place at birthdays. I do not now recall ever having a birthday party as a kid. I can recall being taken about twelve years later for a birthday with a mate called Herman Hill to see The Battle of the River Plate. Afterwards we went for a Chinese meal. That was a bit of a novelty then. Whether it was the excitement or not, I threw it all up when we got home. That took the gloss off the outing. My older daughter Kate had a number of parties in honour of her birthday. We came to accept that when we - or at least everyone else but Kate and me - came to sing Happy Birthday, she would break down in tears. Perhaps she inherited from me the same estimate of the power of nemesis on these occasions.

I was born under the sign of Scorpio. The scorpion stings. According to the OED the intense pain caused by the sting of the scorpion (situated at the point of the tail) is proverbial. A scorpion can kill you. For that matter, they do not do much for each other. During mating they perform some sort of courting dance, but after copulation the female often devours the male. The motto of the Clan MacPherson, my middle name, is Touch not the Cat Bot (without) a Glove. If you took any notice of all of this stuff - and I do not - you could make others edgy, or get edgy yourself - a born killer that can snuff it after a session on the nest.

The name MacPherson used to embarrass the hell out of me through all of my childhood. I still sign documents omitting the name altogether, by habit. It derived from the mother of my father, Marion Gibson, whose maiden name was MacPherson. Her father was born in Perth in Scotland. The father of my father was Bill Gibson. The Gibsons are said to have been a sept of the Clan Buchanan. But the middle name of Bill was Campbell. When I reached adulthood, I met people of highland descent who would cross the street to avoid running into a Campbell, the hated clan who had sided with the redcoats.

Although I take little notice of our Scottish ancestry, Glencoe is one of those places - like the Grampians (our version), St James Park, Central Park, even the Acropolis - that resonate with me when I get there. I was gratified on going into the boozer at Glencoe for the first time to see a sign on the door No hawkers or Campbells. A photo of that sign, and Glencoe, hangs above my desk as enduring testimony to the dangers of clannishness.

Such residual interest as I may have had in my Scottish ancestry was nearly snuffed out the first time Christine (my wife) and I went to Scotland. She had embarked on a quest to find her ancestors. They were thought to be from Ireland. I thought that the exercise might be dangerous as you would never know what you may find. With the help of a very nice man in central Ireland who had gone over from Cornwall, she ascertained that her family, the Clarkes, were part of a clan of a clerical nature which had originally come from Scotland. She also had connections with the MacIntoshes.

When we got to Newtonmore, in the highlands, and the heart of the territory the Clan MacPherson, we went to the MacPherson museum. I told the keeper, graciously I thought, that I may enrol for the price requested, an amount measured in English pounds. He then proceeded to test my credentials, coming only through the female line as they did. He appeared to have some doubts, which struck me as being extraordinary since I had intimated that I was prepared to pay the subscription. He then discussed the position of Christine. MacPherson originally meant son of the parson. The clerical content of Clarke was thought to give Christine better rights of entry.

This was an insult. I had been trumped by the Irish. I must have been right after all in trying to hide the name MacPherson. The best thing I can say for them is that they had the sense to be too late for Culloden - on the other hand the MacIntoshes were there from the beginning. The exercise finally demonstrated to me that our Celtic ancestry - Scottish, British, European, or what you like - was moonshine.

The flats at Orange Grove are still there. They are in good order - at least they appeared so from the outside when I went the other day. This block is less than 100 metres north of Carlisle Street, which becomes Balaclava Road. It is smack in the middle of the Jewish quarter. It is the kind of two-storey place with the dark burnt bricks that used to have a mock Tudor front, as does now the corner building, which is tenanted by professional investment advisers. Number 33 has mock Georgian column facades with close-kept pines. Flat 7 is at the rear. It is quiet, and it must have been dark. There is almost no light coming in. Just round the corner there is a gymnasium with four Swedish saunas, a Cardiac Gym, Hi-Tech Pathology, and two of the ugliest churches, now in awful disuse, you could ever see.

I have no recall of life at Orange Grove apart from the vague images I have mentioned, and being sat on the back of a bike when my parents went out to play tennis. Around the corner there was my Aunty Rene, Norma's sister. Their house was opposite Rippon Lea - we used to call it the Nathans, as we trespassed on it in a state of terror through what appeared to us to be a vast jungle. Aunty Rene's house was on the railway line side of Williams Road, the last one before the bridge. It looked like a sardine can and, for some reason, smelt worse. Their phone number comes back to me: LF5280. Uncle Sam was blunt. He liked boxing - he taught my cousins, John and Roger. I can still recall the impact of a straight right one of them gave me - more or less in play.

Sam died young. I was mortified for my cousins, but they survived. Later Liza, Norma's mother, lived in the adjoining maisonette.