RIGHT FROM THE START

On October 23, 1970, at about five o'clock in the afternoon, it happened. It was the first thing I ever got wrong. I wasn't born a girl.

My sister already had two brothers, making a three-to-one majority to the males. I was meant to balance this. I was nameless for about a fortnight, and my next eldest brother, who was three at the time, thought a good name might be Fluff. That was the name of a cat in his favourite storybook. Things were looking up.

I was born in the impending heat of a western Queensland summer, and in the first two years of my life, I suffered from convulsions and a hernia. Plenty of mothers have coped with this for sure, and many with much worse, but for the average parent, an infant in the forty-five-degree heat is enough. I, obviously, have no recollection of this all being a drama, but I am fairly sure my mother remembers it well. My point is that if I had had this happen at, say, fourteen years of age, there is a good chance the drama of it all would have left me a memory of grief. Ever heard a saying about what you don't know not hurting you? There are many examples in people's lives where this philosophy can ring true. Sometimes, awareness can be a downside, and it takes strength and character to manage the effect.

Clearly, as with everything, there's a reasoning for this. We don't need to go into it. All we need to accept is that for every action of nature or the universe, there is a reason. It may not be visible, but bet your arse there is a reason. It may be something simple and hard to notice, or it may be something much clearer and harder to resolve. This situation early in my life may just have been one of my first lessons in developing resilience, or it may have even been the universe using me, the baby, as a tool to teach my mother something. It's hard to know, but there was some sort of lesson for one or both of us. I can almost hear the chorus of opinions saying that a thought or belief like this one is just bullshit. And maybe for the person with that opinion, it is. But I could almost guarantee that these same opinions create a reality of their own, which is usually blamed as being bad luck or someone else's doing that affected me.

I can think back to many times in my childhood of examples of this lesson when oblivion overrode the reaction of panic, such as when danger was imposing on my situation. There was a flowing water bore that came out of the ground about seventy metres from the house, and it naturally flowed more than a megalitre of water a day that measured two degrees less than the boiling point. It came through a drain not twenty or thirty metres from our house on two sides. The steam off this drain on a cold winter's morning could sometimes be seen pluming up like bushfire smoke by our neighbour to the east, who lived about seventeen miles away as the crow flies, so this was a hot bastard of a drain. Sometimes, the shearers who came to shear our flock of sheep would find a spot about one kilometre downstream and bathe after a day of sweating profusely. Another favourite practise of the shearers was to catch crayfish farther down the drain in the cool water and bring them back to the bore head where the water was at its hottest. It was deciphered that in about the time it took to drink two tins of beer, the crayfish were cooked just right — and these guys drank beer fast, so that indicates how hot that water was. There were any number of deadly ground dwellers, such as snakes, centipedes, and redback spiders, to name but a few. None of these things worried me until I knew how dangerous they were. As soon as I was old enough to know the danger, I was old enough to remove myself from the situation. Prior to this knowing, my infant subconscious allowed me to not panic, therefore not sending vibes of fright to scare the predator (except the bore drain).

As a society, we seem to judge cleverness by how many years you have spent being taught by people with opinions who have been educated by people with other opinions, resulting in your forming your own opinion to head into life with. Sometimes, potentially clever people can overlook the simple things or the inescapable things, such as the sun burning our skin or bad diet contributing to poor health.

Another version of clever is the person who remains in touch with those natural tendencies of his or her early life and keeps it simple. The people who find it easier to be nice than nasty are the winners here. If there could be only one human trait to pick, would that not be it? Some people can just roll in life, and this doesn't refer to bludging. This refers to being able to roll with whatever is directed your way today. The really smart people in life are not necessarily the highest paid dudes, but the ol' mates who are doing what they really like doing and are gaining in their own ways from doing it.

Back to the outback. These years from birth to high school are favoured memories, what there are of them. Traits you need, if you to want to live out there, are all related to endurance, love of isolation, pride in effort displayed, and a liking of harsh conditions. There are good returns from production when things are good, but just have a peek at how things aren't good a bigger percentage of the time. Summers are hugely hot and either dry and dying or bogged to the guts and stuck behind floodwater. Winter is a bit cool from time to time but not really at frost level. During this time of my life, I believe I developed an understanding of subconscious conditioning and dealing with whatever the situation at hand may be.

Quite likely, the best memory of all was the effort my mother put in to keeping all her children and anyone else's children out of the previously mentioned bore drain. To paint a picture, our house was passed by a drain some twenty-five metres away on the northern side, the top side, by a reasonable volume of water that belched out of the ground forty metres farther away on the eastern side, at 210 degrees, just two degrees off boiling. The volume I speak of through these drains was about four hundred thousand gallons in twenty-four hours. This temperature factor was only part of the dilemma Mum had. Across the northern drain was a roadway that led to the machinery shed. This was an eight-hundred-millimetre concrete pipe about thirty centimetres wider than a motorcar each side. Under the roadway flowed a stream of steaming water about forty centimetres deep and eighty centimetres wide.

Everything was on the other side of that drain. The shed was where it all started from — the day's work, that is: the engine room and the workers' cottage. The only other buildings were both over that side too, as was all material stored to do the work on the property. This meant a fair few drain crossings per day by a lot of little humans who would today be considered too young to be exposed to such potential danger.

I have a quick story about the drain in this particular spot, and it doesn't have a happy ending, so if you can't handle unhappy endings, jump ahead a bit.

I was at home this day, being homeschooled by my sister, who was having a gap year after leaving school herself. Around midmorning, in the distance, we heard the neighbour from the north go past en route to town. It might have been an hour later when we had the blissful silence of our well-lit little classroom busted by a blood-curdling yodel of a dog. This surprised us, mostly because we didn't have a dog. Well, we did. He was a little burr collector that lived in the yard, and this was clearly the noise of a big dog. You can paint your own picture of the following hour or two. After getting a sheepish response to our frantic calling of his name, we knew Inky was okay, so we were very much left going, "WTF?" (Not that we would have said that, being kids in the 1970s.)

I happened to need to cross the aforementioned pipe bridge later in the day, only to give myself a big enough fright to nearly fall in the water myself. On the right side of the bridge was a dog in the water, and it was lying on its side, motionless. The fact that we didn't own a dog and the thought of how the fuck it had gotten there had me momentarily stuck. I remember being frozen for movement by the surprise.

Pieces put together, the dog had followed the neighbour's car over thirteen miles and trotted up to our house, thinking we were conveniently offering a cool-down pond for travelling canines. Poor bastard ... all I can say is that I know that dog was dead in no more than five seconds because we heard it for about three seconds. Once it hit that water, it didn't move. I saw it right at the bottom in the middle. Like I said, it was not a happy ending.

This is why I can marvel at my mother's effort to keep her own four kids and countless workers' kids out of the drain from opposing sides. There were no pool-fencing regulations in these areas in those days, so the only way of ensuring safety was to educate. Whenever we got a new family pet, we would take it to the edge of the drain and let it feel the heat, putting it uncomfortably close to the heat and relying on the uncomfortable factor to create the imprint. There was always something dead in that drain, from a centipede to a baby snake, but never did we have a drama with one of the animals that we had taught drain safety to. Mum relied on the same theory to ensure that she was never presented with the need to deal with a scalding burn on a human — only lambs, calves, or once a foal. She didn't take us to the edge of the drain and let us feel the heat, but she had zero tolerance of lacking awareness relating to crossing the drain. She taught the older ones strongly and used their assistance to imprint the younger ones. From the early 1960s to the late 1970s, I think that neighbour's dog was the only fatality. Then, of course, we fenced it out to the point where it ran cool. When the majority of the danger has passed, let's create a defence.

There are many places where this rule occurs — driving a car; walking near the edge; and anything to do with fire, guns, or poison.

I feel without doubt that the reason my memory of the bore drain being a no-go zone is so strong is because, yeah, there was a danger factor attached. More the point for me, though, is the realization of what can result from this form of educating. It was on a need-to-learn basis. Just like keeping your head down if there's gunfire, there was absolutely no allocation for getting it wrong. It wasn't hard to get right; all it took was a brief but high level of awareness. This could be my first and best lesson learned. There are times when a required level of awareness must be maintained. This can be life-threatening situations like staying on the left side when you drive (in our country, anyway) or ease-of-management–orientated situations like getting ready for school so you do not miss the bus. There are countless examples, but I hope you get what I mean. To help ourselves best as humans rolling along in life, we must be able to apply the required level of awareness to a given situation. It may be the case that you don't have the ability or the awareness required. Simply recognize this, retreat to base, and find information that will get you there.

I have found many times in the last few years that I have been guilty of exactly this. My wife and I invested in an area that looked reasonably lucrative, but it was an area we didn't know a lot about — retail small business. We found ourselves relying on incorrect information from misinformed sources, and consequently, we were led down the garden path, so to speak. Each time we realized this, we had to retreat back to base, analyse the situation by finding out what we needed to know, and proceed with an open-minded, wide-eyed, lateral view. Because what we were doing was not sailing uncharted water, we had plenty of information sources, but most importantly, I felt as though we put ourselves in our customers' shoes. We quickly realized the simple things, such as making people feel as though they were parting with their money to pleasant shop owners was our best advantage. In short, what I am saying is that we were written off by locals who said we'd be broke in a year. Via three managers in three years, we nearly achieved that, but through a high level of awareness and retreating to wherever we needed to so we could analyse the situation, we took a bleeding business to a very profitable one in a poor economic climate almost wholly and solely on the back of our awareness.

The life lesson I am referring to in this chapter is about awareness and how it is required on a daily basis for simple survival, right up to high personal achievements. This is one of those things that you don't really have to prove is right. We simply need to observe anybody who doesn't use it to know the limitations that come from not being aware to some extent of your surrounds. I think the fact may have been evidenced in some shape or form that there is a connection between success of any type and individual personal awareness, and I believe it would be very hard to find success that wasn't accompanied by this one human trait. I refer to awareness as being an all-encompassing thing from our furthest visions to our tiniest feelings deep in our cores.

PRODUCTION IS PARAMOUNT

Like a lot of kids in those days, I saw a lot more of my mother than I did my father. This was common because Dad would head off to do whatever the day had planned for him while Mum was back on camp, keeping an eye on kids near bore drains. It was right from these early days that I recall Dad emphasizing the importance of being productive in some shape or form with your life, as if to repay the universe for your existence in some way. I am sure that in Dad's eyes, it was simply scratching an itch. My father has an insatiable urge to be productive each day. This stems, I believe, from the belief Dad had, that one, meaning anyone, must produce individual sustainability and a bit more to ensure continuation of the same or better. You with me? (These are my words, not his.) It's the same in most worlds, I would think. In the animal world, for example, the production would relate to catching a daily feed. It's the same result — if you don't produce, you go hungry. There are so many ways to achieve this productivity on a daily basis. One would likely be better off not getting too hung up on how it was achieved. This is one of those situations where it must be just relied on to happen. There is no possible way to measure this without humans getting upset with other humans, so you can't go there. It just has to happen, but productivity or production are self-explanatory.

You get to choose. That's the best part of the deal. Anyone can be anything, pretty much, so you choose your form of daily production. Every job fits, even the free ones done in every shape and form. From the time I was big enough to be useful, I was imprinted with the understanding that a good vibe came with feeling tin-fruited at the end of the day. In Dad's mind, there was (or certainly should have been) no such thing as a free ride. If somebody was employing you, therefore paying for your time, then it was only reasonable that you offered your best effort at whatever they were paying you to do. If the person paying for your time was unreasonable with their expectations, the choice was there for you to move on from that employer and find another job where your efforts were valued higher. Within this train of thought develops a grey area, and it generally relates to effort and thought process. I was witness to many different kinds of workers when I was young. Some were good, and some were ... well, not so good. Some were examples of what to do, and some were examples of what not to do. This is a poem I wrote some time ago about a few of these men.