Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are largely occasions created for commercial reasons to make us feel compelled to buy presents and increase retail sales. They are cynical manipulations of our inherent feelings (normally) of affection for our parents.

I must confess that I was blessed with the parents I had. I loved and admired them both.

But with the recent celebration of Father’s Day I will seek your indulgence to reminisce about my father.

He was born of immigrant Scottish parents, and although he never made much of it publicly, he was quietly proud of his Scottish heritage. Probably the only public manifestation of his Scottish heritage was the fact that New Year’s Eve (Hogmanay to the Scots) was always the biggest celebration on our calendar!

My mother had a large extended family and though they had little Scottish heritage, all joined in for the New Year’s celebration. When midnight arrived it was compulsory to take a wee dram of whiskey and sing Auld Lang Syne.

My mother, who had learnt a little piano in her youth, but had the capacity to play almost anything by ear, would sit at the piano and play many of the popular songs of the era as twenty or thirty of us sang along.

And of course because of some Highland tradition we had to ensure that the first person who stepped over the threshold after midnight was a tall, dark, handsome man!

As was the norm in those days my father left school at age fourteen or so and made a modest living from manual labour. But without much formal education he had amazing skills.

People would bring him their clocks to repair.

He used to make gun stocks. His favoured timber for gun stocks was Burdekin Plum tree. He would find a mature tree down on the Burdekin River, cut it down and bring the trunk home and let it mature for some years before using it.

He completely renovated our family home which was a modest,two bedroom house with a generous sized living room and a spacious verandah around two sides. He installed a new kitchen with (what was fashionable then) Formica topped cupboards. He replaced our old conventional wood burning stove with a slow combustion stove and inserted an array of copper piping into it that enabled us to have continuous hot water. The stove burned twenty four hours a day with a coffee percolator sitting on a hot plate!

When later on in life I bought a motorcycle to get around with, he was the one that effected repairs.

When I was very young he loved getting out into the bush or going to the Burdekin river to fish and swim. He loved to swim and had once saved a young woman from drowning when she got sucked into an undertow beneath the weir on the Burdekin which provided the water supply for Charters Towers.

He taught me how to swim sufficiently well to be safe around water when I was about four or five. (I did the same for my children following his example!).

A typical Sunday afternoon in my childhood was spent on the Burdekin swimming and with a little fishing.

On the way down to the river, when they were in season, he would stop at one of the local farms and buy a watermelon. He was very particular in his choice of watermelons and would only buy the biggest! When we got to the river he would put the melon in a sugarbag and dunk it in the water until it was thoroughly wet then tie it to a branch of a tea-tree to let it cool in the breeze. Then when we had done swimming we would sit and enjoy some naturally cooled watermelon, which was a wonderful treat on a hot summer’s afternoon!

But in his middle age he became a chronic asthmatic  which severely curtailed his outdoor pursuits.

He was a fabulous gardener. He liked to grow roses and vegetables. (My mother, who was an exceptional gardener as well, grew her own flowers.)

Charters Towers, where we lived, could hardly be called a hospitable climate for roses. Yet I can recall at the peak of his gardening efforts, there were some two hundred rose trees in our garden.

He also loved his vegetable garden. Although he grew quite an array of vegetables, he was most proud of his tomatoes. I can’t remember now where they came from, but at some stage someone gave him some tomato seeds from a Spanish variety that grew huge fruit. The fruit were often six inches across or bigger. If you wanted a tomato sandwich, you only required one slice to cover your piece of bread!

He was however very generous with his produce and gave much of it away. In those days when there were no florists in town he often donated the blooms of his prized roses for wedding bouquets and such.

In the evenings mum and dad would often play cribbage. Early in primary school he also taught me how to play. Now I know it was not just his intent to teach me to play cards, it was a painless, entertaining way to teach me to add up.

I have an autistic son who has some intellectual difficulties. When he was young, I used to come home from work of an evening and play a couple of games of crib with him. Unsurprisingly, despite other issues his number skills are quite good.

Once, when quite young, I had a serious foot injury. Dad made me a pair of crutches to get around with until it healed. But when my foot was better he made me a pair of stilts which I mastered easily enough.

When my father went for walks in the bush he always looked to find bee-hives (not native bee hives but feral European bee-hives).Then he and a friend that kept bees would come and cut down the tree and harvest the honey-comb. This was often a courageous endeavour because the bees naturally rose up against the attackers and vigorously defended the hive.

I well remember my oldest brother, Bob, helping out once to cut down a tree with a bee-hive and having to run helter-skelter with a swarm of bees in pursuit when the tree came down.

The honey comb would be duly extracted and hung in a muslin bag in our laundry whilst the honey drained out into a large container to be later shared between the fearless hive robbers!

Now I was a schoolboy athlete and had won interschool championships in the 220 yards, 440 yards 880 yards events. But I desperately wanted to win the mile event.  In the interschool competition I had first tried to compete in the mile when I was a couple of years younger than my competitors. (The mile was an open event and not competed on an age basis.) I was well-beaten but still in the top four. I desperately wanted to win a mile race.

In those days when our top athletes were just starting to run sub-four minute miles, schoolboy athletes were striving to run sub-five minute miles. My father encouraged my athletic endeavours. Sometimes when he and I went out together into the countryside, I would ask him to stop the car. I would ask him to do his best to drive the car at a speed of 12 miles per hour (which equated to five minute miles) and I would run behind trying to keep up as best I could. I soon found it was hard to drive so slowly over any distance and beside the speedometer wasn’t very accurate and after a mile or two I was exhausted and had to give up the pursuit!

The next opportunity I had to run a mile race was at our school athletics carnival. My fiercest competitor was my good friend Henry Handley. As the starting time for the race drew near, my father came down to me with a thermos flask and said, “Have a swig of this.” Not wanting to disobey, I duly did so. I was surprised by what he had offered me – it was sherry!

The contestants gathered around the starting line. I was talking to an older friend on the sideline when I was surprised to hear the starting gun fired.  I missed the start and to my chagrin saw Henry streak away into the lead.

I worked hard to capture him and finally in the last lap I came up to him and settled in three of four yards behind. Naturally the finish line was in front of the grand stand and the crowd in grand stand were cheering wildly. (Henry told me later that he was unaware of my presence and thought the crowd was cheering him on.)

But about fifty yards out from the finish line, I pounced. I mustered all my strength and sprinted as fast as I could past him and before he could meaningfully respond I threw myself over the finish line. I don’t think a mouthful of sherry from my father helped a lot to defeat my friend and archrival but I am glad there was no drug testing done in school sports in those days.

I don’t think that I was a very great miler, but I do have the satisfaction of still holding the mile record for the Charters Towers State High School. History was kind to me. You see just a few years after my efforts to run a mile, Australia adopted metric measures and the mile was superseded and they now only run fifteen hundred metres. It is possible as a result my meagre efforts might be cemented into perpetuity!

My father loved Australian poetry, particularly Banjo Paterson and C J Dennis. But another great favourite of his was “Rum and Water” by Thomas Edward Spencer. (If you haven’t read it and you want a good laugh I can recommend it!) I am sorry Dad is not still alive. I would have liked to have introduced him to the fine bush poetry of my friend Keith “Cobber” Lethbridge!

Dad was an ardent trade unionist and a staunch Labor supporter. He was elected for some years as a Labor member of the Charters Towers City Council. He was committed to his role and I can remember him buying a text book on hydraulics so he could argue the point with the Council’s Engineer on aspects of the water supply!

He was a huge fan of Bob Hawke but was disdainful of Paul Keating. When Keating moved to make superannuation compulsory, Dad was afraid this was a ploy to deprive working people of their aged pensions.

We used also to argue over macro-economics. He couldn’t accept that it was almost impossible to have low unemployment and low inflation rates at the same time. I guess he might have supported Anthony Albanese who seems to share the same belief. But I doubt it because his focus was always on improving the lot of the working class and I am sure he would have abhorred Labor’s tendency to take up “woke” causes.

He was a man with a strong social conscience who wanted to support the poor, the weak and the underprivileged.

I have had few role models that shaped my life, but my father, to my eternal gratitude was one of the best of them!

But let me close with a humorous little story my mother would sometimes tell (only in family circles).

My parents had five children. The eldest, my sister Mary, was the only girl. She got married when I was quite young. Dad was quite emotional at the prospect of his only daughter getting married and leaving home. Dad was only an occasional and moderate drinker. I can honestly say I never saw him under the influence of alcohol. But apparently on this occasion he over imbibed! In the wee hours of the morning, after we had left the wedding reception, he awakened and felt he might need to be sick. He pulled on his shorts, removed his dentures and put them in his back pocket and went outside thinking he would vomit. A little later he came back inside and forgetting his dentures in his back pocket sat down on a chair. In doing so his dentures fastened on to his buttocks causing him to yelp in pain and leaving a large red welt.

Mum was vastly amused by this. She would say, “I feel so special to be married to the only man on earth that bit his own backside!”

Nevertheless we all admired my father. He was a good husband and father. He was so capable in many ways. And in his own manner he tried to make the world a better place. I remember him with great fondness! I know you can’t pick your parents, but I was most fortunate for those who were allotted to me.