we stayed in a galvanised iron hut and lived on strawberries and ice cream. Aboriginal people roamed through the houses, begging tobacco, tea and sugar. They had fallen for the white man's curses but they were beautifully wild and frightening. There were goats roaming the streets; it was hot and dry. Half the time we spent in Kalgoorlie we were quartered in the local racecourse grandstand, along with a lot of other Salvationists from the train.
Eventually the train was off to Perth and I was off to school, where on the first day, I fell in love with the infants' mistress. The old James Street Infants' School was next door to the gaol and the boys used to poke fun at the Aborigines staring out at us from behind its bars. Perth was exciting. One could get home late after roaming through nearby city shops or playing on the horseshoe bridge or the railway station. This was after my belting with the pram tyre and we'd gone to live in another house behind the People's Palace, which was later pulled down to make way for the new Perth Fortress. This was an exciting place, right in the heart of the city and near the practice room for the famous Fortress Band - a band that has had a succession of Palmers as bandmasters for eighty years. I don't know what will happen when the supply runs out.
Everybody in the Perth Fortress Brass Band was a fine musician as well as a holy man. They were all brave celebrities who went off to wars. At the time there was probably no more efficient musical entity in Perth than the Fortress brass band. No symphony orchestra nearly matched the prowess of the Palmers and their friends. There was no jealousy or sin or dross in any one of them.
I was surprised to find, later in my life, that in other places Salvoes were ordinary people in fancy dress. On average they seemed to be on the godly, temperate and sober side of life. I was somewhat astounded therefore to find that a sergeant-major in one corps was shot when climbing through the bedroom window of someone else's wife. I stayed with the Army as long as I could, pretending not to be there when any of my friends passed by while we were marching or playing in the street. Finally I thought it best to be honest and burn the red guernsey.
By the time this happened I was, thanks to my father and the Army, a fairly competent musician. I think my discovery of Mozart's quartets helped me to stray. Perhaps I should later have taken the invitation to re-enter and become bandmaster but it was just as well I refrained. It would have done little for me, I was past redemption. I'm pretty sure it would not have done much for the Army either.
After Perth we moved to Malvern, Victoria, where Commandant and Mrs Penberthy were Corps Officers. On the first day at school I asked who was the best fighter. "Baines," a girl told me. He hit me once and bloodied my nose. Baines is the only thing I can remember about that school, except buying marbles at Miss Tindale's shop. Malvern was auspicious for the birth of my beautiful younger sister, Mary.
Inevitably I now go into a diversion about sex and creation. It should now be obvious that this would crop up from time to time. Let's get it over and done with for a while. When I was twelve and living in Bendigo, my friend, Ocky Nelson, who used to kill dozens of southern yellow robins and little lorikeets with his shanghai, strolled up to the gutter outside our house and we started kicking stones and generally mucking about. After a while Ocky came out with a most important piece of local news. "Smithy fucks his sister," he said. I knew already that this sort of thing might happen among the big kids but not little kids with their own sister.
"Jeez, who'd want to do anything with his old sister?"
"'Strue," he said, "Smithy told me."
I didn't doubt him because I recalled how one day May Whitehead of the 5th Grade was sitting on a fence on my way home from school. As I trudged along the footpath and under her perch, she called quite plainly: "Will you fuck me?" Before I could answer the red-headed witch had jumped down from the fence on the other side and run like a rabbit, bare feet flying over the grass. I knew these things were physically possible. After all, I'd made my first forays into what fits into what at the age of four and, to the age of six, had rubbed bellies once or twice. I knew that girls knew about it. That was valuable information. Nevertheless, Ocky now shocked me as never before or since.
"Your mother and father do it," he said.
I flew at him. "You rotten bastard! It's a wicked thing to do and my mother and father would never do such a thing."
Ocky had a piece of bread and jam in his hand. He took a bite or two and considered this.
"That's how babies are made," he pronounced.
"If that was true," I answered, "Wessy, Florence, Mary and me wouldn't be here."
To this day I am not altogether convinced that I was wrong. I can't quite equate beastly sex with the birth of Salvation Army children. We'd had never heard a word about procreation from either parent as long as they lived. There was no talk about it - no physical sign of an amorous nature in my parents' behaviour. I never heard the bed squeak. I would never have imagined the possibility. They never even went to bed at the same time. My father would go into the bedroom every night, kneel beside the bed and study or pray; my mother would work and sew and put us to bed. They spoke beautifully to each other with deep love and obvious adoration, but it seemed holy love and there is no way I can picture "sin" tainting it in any way. As I have grown older, I have never quite allowed my mind encompass this awful thing that Ocky Nelson suggested.
This brings the story back to my sister Mary - a really beautiful girl who became a top professional model, the mother of two beautiful daughters and eventually a fine sculptor. Mary was barely fifty when she died. No one knew that she'd been abysmally unhappy and depressed. She'd hidden her sadness. The medical evidence is that Mary died of lung cancer after having been subjected to passive smoking for most of her married life. Near the end she told me: "I think I was an accident. I don't think I was wanted. You all thought that I was contented and placid as I sat by myself as a child but I thought you were all wanted except me." I wished she had mentioned this to the rest of us much sooner.
Despite my feelings about the purity of my parents, I'd heard a rather beautiful story from a woman, a friend of my mother, a "backslider" from the Army. This lady had been talking to me about her own busy sex life with her second husband. I told her about my feelings on the apparently sexless life of my parents and the four virgin births. She told me this story: "One Sunday morning, when someone other than your father was preaching the sermon at the Citadel, your father and mother decided to have a beautiful daughter. At precisely eleven o'clock, with the sun shining full on the bed, Mary was conceived." The last time I saw my sister before she died, I told her this story. "I wish I'd known," she said and wept. And so did I. In due course, after comparing notes with Wes and Florence, I came to the conclusion that I was the only uneducated member of the family.
Music Beckons
Having been conceived, born and influenced under the blood and fire flag of the Salvation Army, it is now time to see what impression secular education made upon me. I am often asked how I learned music and with whom I studied. The first question is easy to answer. I learned music because it was all around me. I was in an environment in which music was almost as important as breathing and certainly it was as natural. My father played, composed, thought and lived music. He made it seem so easy, satisfyingly brilliant and beautiful that I became part of it and it also became as natural to me as breathing. I listened to it day after day from infancy right through my childhood. I learned music as the butcherbird learns music. I was never sent to the nuns to learn to play the piano, so never worshipped and feared the piano. In our house we had every kind of instrument except a piano. My father made wonderful music. He was no pedagogue, he didn't try to teach me, he just enveloped me in it.
When I was six he bought me a piccolo for seven shillings and sixpence. It was old-fashioned and had a crack on the middle joint, which he filled with plasticine. "Play it," he told me and, being a good little butcherbird, I did and very soon I was
