camp near Castlemaine during the green Victorian winter was excruciating. I called home every day from the nearest pay phone asking my parents – ‘No, we haven’t heard anything.’
On my return from the camp, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I telephoned Lieutenant Commander Henry, who said: ‘I’ve got bad news, I’m afraid, Mark. Your application has been unsuccessful – I was about to ring you. The board indicated that you are a little immature, so I would suggest that you stay at school, get your HSC, and you can try again next year. I’m sorry.’
I was devastated.
On reflection, this was indicative of the navy always having been a ‘people’ service. A ship runs twenty-four hours a day: its captain, officers and petty officers (who are equivalent to sergeants in the army and air force), apart from their required technical abilities, need to know how to handle people well in a floating community. A naval vessel is cramped, noisy, pitching and rolling, its crew far from family and potentially at war. The Board’s response was typical of the calibre of many in the navy, not just a flat ‘you have missed out’, but one that was also accompanied with advice and encouragement for the future.
Time is a healer – particularly to an adolescent – and the navy dream faded a little. There was always the air force or civilian flying, and I was interested in the workings of the human body, with an ulterior motive of becoming a ‘rich doctor’ in order to own my own aircraft. With the Higher School Certificate looming at the end of the year, schoolwork was intensifying, and there were conflicts with my mother about late nights out with the band, so that income was petering out, and the Moorooduc flying became even less regular. It did not help when old BYJ was grounded for refurbishment and the other aircraft were too expensive to hire. Not particularly happy at home, I wanted out, and as the academic year drew towards its climax, I decided that I had better knuckle down and apart from occasional work at the racecourse, I needed to concentrate on my schoolwork.
I have always believed in preparation, removing as much of an unknown as possible before a test, and, as with the IQ test books I worked through for the navy, I started working through past paper after past paper of the Victorian HSC examinations. The real thing would, therefore, not be an unknown. Most of Mornington High’s Sixth Form teachers were helpful to those who put the work in, so this, the past papers and, at last, some increasing maturity, provided a basis for tackling the HSC.
It can be funny how things work out sometimes. My parents had decided to heavily renovate our house by adding an upstairs room, during the time of my exam preparation. The place was a shambles; hammering and sawing reverberated through it, so the only alternative for daytime study was in the cubicles of the newly-constructed library building at school. In the library, free of the distractions of home (with or without renovations), I was motivated to work hard. In the meantime, university courses were on ‘offer’, so, with little thought about how I or my parents would pay for them, I submitted preferences to the various universities for Medicine and Meteorology. However, although I was now hard at work with an eye on the future, I was still thoughtless and impetuous at times. One day the librarian overheard me outside the library ‘sounding off’ to friends about her, calling her names, regarding some rule she had introduced. She promptly banned me from the library.
After I spent the following day at home with the renovations then the next lying in the sand at Mills Beach trying to study, the penny dropped: I had been dreadfully rude, and under stress. The next morning, I apologised to her. She told me, ‘Thank you, it took a man to do that.’ Lesson learned. Welcomed back to the peace of the library, once again I was able to work at past paper after past paper.
I remember well the examination days of late ’75. A girl was sobbing after she opened the first paper while I began mine, plodding through the questions. Most seemed straightforward after all the preparation, and I made sure to read the questions carefully and to doublecheck the answers. The final exam, English, ended with a ‘free essay’ requirement. Figuring that not many HSC candidates would be in a position to write a description of their first solo aeroplane flight, I did just that using appropriate amounts of flowery adolescent prose. After handing in the paper, my school days were over.
After that came the long hiatus of the Australian summer. Even on the temperate Mornington Peninsula there were days of relentless blue skies, the turquoise sea, brown fields under waves of heat, with the she oaks and ti trees being the only green in sight. It was an agonising wait for the HSC results: they would determine the offers of placement at the universities.
I now laboured full-time at the racecourse. I could not afford to undergo a structured course toward a Private Pilot’s Licence and beyond to Commercial level, so there was little else to do but wait for my results and socialise. One muggy, windless afternoon under grey sky I was shifting hoses at the racecourse when my father’s car appeared on the road outside. It stopped, and Dad poked an envelope through the fence. I tore it open to reveal my HSC results, and I had done well. My avid reading through the years had even contributed to a Distinction in English.
Coincidentally, a thunderstorm broke. I stopped work and was driven home. With the storm’s passing, the telephone rang with excited calls from friends. My friend Tony would soon pick me up and we would drive to another mate’s house towards the other side of the Mornington Peninsula to see how he had fared; Rod lived in humble circumstances and did not have a telephone. Tony and his girlfriend arrived in their old grey Toyota.
I remember a screech of tyres and me calling ‘Hang on!’ After that, stillness and blackness. I could not see or move, but I could hear. I was aware of a girl moaning and reassuring words from strangers. No visual picture remains in my conscious memory, but I can still recall the sounds. Later came a slow drive in another vehicle (am I in an ambulance?), with continued groans from the girl. The black became grey, and I did not feel much pain. Eventually, I realised that I was in a bed somewhere and I could hear my parents’ voices. Still unable able to see, I asked, ‘What happened?’
‘You’ve been in a car accident,’ my mother replied.
Later I could see again, and I was aware of nurses and a hospital room. I could put my tongue into a hole under my lower lip. Now my shoulder hurt, and one of my arms was in a sling. I was still in the clothes I was wearing at the racecourse, and, because of a medical reason, my body had not been washed.
Distracted by his girlfriend, Tony had been late braking at an intersection and the old car skidded on the asphalt, still slick from the thunderstorm. We hit a vehicle that was travelling along the intersecting road. A family group at a nearby sports oval had rushed over to the scene; theirs had been the comforting voices. Tony was unhurt but his girlfriend’s body had not been treated well by the seatbelt she was wearing and the deceleration severely injured her back, hence the slow ambulance trip to minimise her distress. I had been in the little car’s back seat, but wore no seat belt, because they were not fitted to the rear seats of many vehicles then. I never saw the wreck of the car, but Rod later described the ‘V’ that my body had made in the front bench seat of the old grey Toyota, which at least had absorbed my momentum and prevented me from being hurled through the windscreen. The occupants of the other vehicle were uninjured, although my mother later said that the other vehicle’s driver had been found over the legal blood alcohol limit.
All that work … good exam results … then a thunderstorm to clear the air … but after that, a car crash and injuries … could I become a pilot now?
4
FLY NAVY!
1976
University College, in Melbourne’s leafy residential college area, provided accommodation for students, some tutoring and two meals each day. Its inmates
