Crossing Over

CROSSING

OVER

Daryl Joyce

Copyright © 2015 Daryl Joyce.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Balboa Press

A Division of Hay House

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.balboapress.com

1 (877) 407-4847

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Photo credit for Marlene Dietrich on Limo to read — AP via AAP

ISBN: 978-1-4525-2844-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-2845-8 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date: 04/28/2015

CONTENTS

1 SYDNEY, NEW SOUTH WALES

2 POTTS POINT LUNCH, SYDNEY

3 SORRENTO, VICTORIA

4 MORNINGTON PENINSULA, VICTORIA

5 KOOWEERUP, VICTORIA

6 RAY

7 DOUG

8 LANG LANG, VICTORIA

9 FIRST DAY AT PRIMARY SCHOOL

10 DOUG’S ELECTION

11 FIRST DAY AT HIGH SCHOOL

12 OLD FARM AT LANG LANG

13 THE ROAD TO THE BEACH

14 FIRST PARTY, LANG LANG

15 TOMMY

16 REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE

17 CRUISING

18 COUNTRY DANCE

19 SABBATH DAY

20 EAST COAST HOLIDAY

21 THE SWIM

22 GIRLS ON THE ESPLANADE

23 MOLESWORTH, VICTORIA

24 MY EDUCATION

25 THE INTERVIEW

26 A MOVE TO THE CITY

27 EASTER BASH AT ‘BALHAM HILL’

28 THE SILVER FOX

29 END OF THE ROAD

30 THE HARVEST

31 THE PORT MELBOURNE FAREWELL

32 THE MAE WEST PARTY

33 BRIAN

34 MARLENE DIETRICH

35 BAD TASTE

36 ARTS BALL

37 OPERA HOUSE COMPETITION

38 THE MELBOURNE CUP

39 TEACHING

40 ST KILDA TO PORT MELBOURNE

41 BACK IN SYDNEY

42 THE FAREWELL

43 THE VOYAGE BEGINS

44 A DAY IN SYDNEY

45 PHILIPPA’S SYDNEY FAREWELL

46 LOST AT SEA

47 JEALOUSY

48 FANCY DRESS

49 ON DECK

50 TAHITI

51 HEIVA

52 THE TALK

53 PHILIPPA IN OZ

54 PANAMA CANAL AND FINAL PORTS OF CALL

55 THE TELEX

56 SOUTHAMPTON, ENGLAND

57 THE KINGS ROAD

58 AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS

59 MUNICH, GERMANY

60 SALZBURG, AUSTRIA

61 ROME, ITALY

62 A LETTER FROM ATHENS

63 BRISTOL, ENGLAND

64 CHRISTMAS DINNER 1968

65 WESTMINSTER, LONDON ENGLAND

66 LONDON CLUBBING

67 PLAYBOY CLUB

68 HAMPSTEAD, LONDON

69 EAST END LONDON

70 ROUND HOUSE

71 PHILIPPA’S DILEMMA

72 DARYL’S DILEMMA

73 NUPTIALS

74 HONEYMOON FROM HELL

75 THE BUMP

76 BRIGHTON, ENGLAND

77 ST MARY’S HOSPITAL, HAMPSTEAD

78 SWINGING LONDON

79 ARRIVAL IN SYDNEY

80 THE CONVERSATION

81 THE CARAVAN TRIP

82 DARWIN, NORTHERN TERRITORY

83 POTTS POINT, SYDNEY

84 HERVEY BAY, QUEENSLAND

85 THE FUNERAL, HERVEY BAY

86 AIRPORT, HERVEY BAY

87 POTTS POINT, SYDNEY

88 BONDI BEACH

This memoir is dedicated to my parents Jack and Mary Joyce, true pioneers.

We shall not cease from exploration.

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

— T. S. Eliot

1

SYDNEY, NEW SOUTH WALES

T here was a family of brothers, the youngest of whom wandered off to far off lands leaving his older brothers to care for his parents. On his return, this son was welcomed by his father, who offered him the best robe, a fattened calf and a feast, all to the chagrin of his brothers.

This is a biblical story but it could be my own.

I’m The Prodigal Son, the youngest of three brothers who has been lost to the family for two decades, but who has now been found. My story is not about merit or reward — instead it’s about departure, adventure and homecoming.

Returning to Australia in the mid-80s after being abroad for two decades, I was surprised to find in the interim that my homeland had grown up. Instead of the parochial bastion of English colonialism that I’d known in the 50s and 60s, it had matured into a sophisticated go to destination. The Lucky Country with its enviable sunny climate had caught up at last; its plethora of fresh produce spurning an exciting local cuisine and its denizens happily enjoying a standard of living the envy of other nations!

Unlike the Australia I’d known in the 50s and early 60s, it had begun to openly accept other cultures and traditions and was even beginning to recognise its own indigenous ones. Like a debutante at her coming out ball, Australia appeared fresh and stunningly attractive, brimming with energy and promise, offering not only a healthy out door lifestyle, but promising work prospects too.

With our teenage son in tow, Philippa and I were seeking an international city with a beach holiday feeling and Sydney, although a long way from Europe and America, fitted the bill.

By making our home in the harbour city, I would be closer to my family once again, but although this proximity was initially appealing, it would demand from me a commensurate increase in responsibility.

2

POTTS POINT LUNCH, SYDNEY

Y ou wouldn’t be dead for quids! my father would pronounce when things were going really well — today they are, for us.

It’s Melbourne Cup Day and my wife, Philippa, and I have planned to meet our son and his wife, Caroline, at The Apollo, a trendy restaurant just a few blocks from where we live. The horse race that stops a nation is always contested on the first Tuesday in November and we’ve come to celebrate it in style each year.

In a mid-length black dress, Philippa has made an interesting choice of shoes; the light grey Armani pair has a high heel and we have to walk a couple of blocks on uneven pavement. As I look at her well-turned ankle, I’m thinking that at the end of a boozy lunch she may be regretting her choice. She’ll be requiring a steady arm to lean on and I’ll no doubt, be the rock on which she depends.

We’ve made an effort to dress up and as we stroll along Macleay Street, a few of our neighbours whistle at us. Are we being mocked or appreciated, I wonder? In my black linen jacket and bone-coloured pointy-toed shoes, I greet Caroline at the restaurant’s front door and as we are led to our table in the corner, eyes turn to check out her watermelon coloured shift and strappy tangerine shoes. By the time our son, Kristian, disembarks from a taxi we’ve already downed our complementary champagne. He tips the driver and breezes into the noisy scene, looking extremely handsome, his premature grey hair matching his grey business suit and silk tie.

The restaurant is already abuzz with loud music and chat, with anticipation high for the screening of The Cup on a sidewall behind the bar. A gentleman at the next table offers us some of his Chablis which he produces, contraband-like, from under the table; we soon realise he’s one of the restaurant’s owners and we’re the fortunate recipients of his secret stash.

Every eye in the restaurant turns, as a trio of women of a certain age enters. The waiters, themselves smartly attired, raise their eyebrows when they appear, as like the three witches from Macbeth, they command everyone’s attention. The first struts in wearing a boldly patterned dress, sensible shoes and a canary fascinator. The second, stomps towards us in a dress decorated with pearl and turquoise sequins — on closer inspection the sequins are in the shape of two swans whose heads hover over her voluminous breasts. The third enters with her right hand holding on to her picture hat, the weight of which is threatening to displace her wig. Her left hand meanwhile, is working hard to readjust her dangerously short skirt!

Before arriving at the restaurant, Philippa and I have placed a few bets at the local TAB on a horse owned by Gai Waterhouse, a well-known racing identity. When her horse bolts for home in the big race, we all scream with excitement and once more we are showered with wine from our neighbours. You wouldn’t be dead for quids, would you? I remark to Kristian, as we view our winning tickets.

Towards the end of the lunch, realising how much Philippa and I enjoy living in this neighbourhood of Potts Point, Kristian is prompted to ask me a pertinent question. When I was a baby and you were leaving England at the end of the Swinging Sixties, why didn’t you come back to Sydney then? Why did you go on to Canada?

His question brings into focus the far-reaching choice we had to make at the time. As new parents and expatriates, we’d begrudgingly come to realise that we could no longer indulge ourselves in London’s trendy singles scene. With the new responsibilities associated with caring for a baby, we’d have to change our lifestyle drastically, but our dilemma was that we were still on our journey, and were not yet ready to return to Australia!

I think about Kristian’s question for a while and respond to him in racing terminology. Like the young horses that start in the Melbourne Cup, Kristian, I espouse, we were primed for a long race and were on the track to run the full course. By the end of the 60s, we still had a fair way to run, but when you arrived on the scene, we hadn’t reached the finishing post yet, so we made the bold move to cross the Atlantic. We raced into a new adventure in North America, with you in our arms!

* * *

The Melbourne Cup celebrations over for another year, I find myself in a reflective mood as I sit on our apartment balcony gazing out over Sydney Harbour. My thoughts return to the announcement of another family celebration, a wedding we attended in Sorrento a couple of years previously. My brother Ray’s daughter Kristie had called to announce that her wedding invitation would be coming to us via snail mail.

Where and when? I ask her eagerly.

Sorrento at Easter, she replies.

Perfect, I answer, it’ll be the gathering of our clan in one of my favourite seaside getaways!

I remember being excited at the prospect of a wedding venue close to where I was born. Having not returned there since my childhood, it could be an ideal time to retrace my steps after reuniting with the family at the wedding.

The wedding on Victoria’s wonderful Mornington Peninsular, turned out to be a delightful affair and by the time the celebrations were over, I had convinced my brothers to join me on a journey to revisit our childhood haunts.

The journey would prompt us to recall events that had been buried deep in our subconscious for decades but in the revisiting, these original incidents would become infused with an adult’s understanding. Second time around, we would recognise the significance of many of the pivotal events in our young lives and imbue them with insight, thereby enriching the memory — a palimpsest!

During my formative years, I’d been influenced almost entirely by my family, but these close ties had been severed when I departed by ship at the age of 25. By leaving Australia, I’d broken the chain, but I hoped that this proposed road trip with my brothers would strengthen the connections that we once had.

* * *

As I wait for Philippa to return from her dash across the road to collect two flat whites from La Buvette, I peer down to Elizabeth Bay and Beare Park from our balcony. From here I can survey the locals as they roll out their beach towels in a sunny spot to top up their tans by the harbour’s edge. Recently we’d been delighted when a kiosk had opened up on the jetty there, offering us coffee and pastries under shade umbrellas.

When Philippa returns, we have time for a brief sojourn together before she leaves for her studio and as we sit sipping on our coffees enjoying the scene in silence, a newborn baby’s cry breaks the serenity, his loud wail announcing his arrival in a neighbouring apartment.

Starting life in a fashionable inner Sydney location, how fortunate! I’m thinking. After reflecting on his arrival for a moment, I cannot help but compare it with my own, a much less auspicious event that took place six-and-a-half decades ago during the bleak years of the Second World War! It was in a remote rural village in Victoria that I was born to a farmer and his wife, but I’d arrived instead of the hoped for daughter, thus causing a major disappointment for them!

Take care, Philippa calls as she departs, leaving me to continue my reverie about my inauspicious arrival, alone.

I drew my first breath in a flat market town located in Gippsland Victoria, a town that retained its original Aboriginal name of Kooweerup: the name described a vast swamp that was subsequently drained. The rarified existence I now lead in Potts Point, the most densely populated suburb in Australia, seems a million miles from this little town, where I grew up.

Eking out a frugal existence on a farm, my parents were pioneers who struggled to make ends meet. My father was on a mission to clear the trees from his land to create pasture for dairy cattle. The straightest of the trees were used to build the house that we lived in. As a child I felt isolated on this farm however and it was only as I matured that I began to imagine that there could possibly be more out there somewhere for me.

This thought gave my mundane existence a small degree of excitement, relieving my day-to-day tedium, but as we lived so far from any discernable cultural mecca, it became more and more obvious with each passing day, that I’d have to explore wider horizons. I’d have to break out of Kooweerup!

3

SORRENTO, VICTORIA

S orrento, one of the loveliest seaside towns in Victoria, is near Portsea, where our former Prime Minister Harold Holt disappeared in the surf in the 1960s. Kristie tells me excitedly that she’ll marry her fiancé, Ross, in the garden of his parents’ summerhouse.

Having spent some of my childhood in this part of Victoria, I’ve always wanted to bring Philippa here, it being one of my favourite seaside escapes. Surprisingly, the site for the first European settlement in Victoria was at Sorrento, which was built even before Melbourne. It has many grand homes and distinctive buildings gracing its streets, the best of them constructed back in the 1800s with the local limestone.

The scenic towns of Sorrento and Portsea at the tip of the Mornington Peninsula are sited between the calm azure bay beaches on the one side and the tumultuous surf beaches on the other and for as long as I can remember these towns have been the preferred summer destinations for Australia’s rich and famous with the original stone buildings and palatial homes tucked into the terrain remaining bastions of privacy and privilege.

To accommodate the family, Kristie and I find a historic Portsea mansion called The Grange to rent. With expansive gardens, an infinity pool and a tennis court, the neo Gothic home is handy to the famous last port of call, the Portsea Hotel. While celebrating, the wedding guests will be able to see out across Port Phillip Bay from the hotel’s dramatic upstairs reception room.

On Good Friday, my brother Doug arrives from Perth with his new partner Jennie, having separated from Annette, the mother of his three children. He’s joined by two of his children: his beautiful daughter Prideaux who is the bridesmaid and his youngest son Gratton, who has come from the Margaret River area where he’s studying winemaking. Hudson, his oldest son, arrives separately with the love of his life, his future wife, Ivana.

My brother Ray arrives from Sydney with a lady friend who sings with him in Sing Australia, a popular choir. Having acrimoniously split from two previous wives, he’ll walk Kristie down the garden aisle as father of the bride, alone. His son Hayden, who lives close by in Melbourne, travels down by car for his sister’s wedding with his loudmouthed grandmother.

I fly in from Sydney with Philippa and we drive down the Mornington Peninsula with our son Kristian, his wife Caroline and their son Jack, a two-year-old at the time, who ends up playing croquet on the vast lawn as if he is to the manor born. The family fills every conceivable space in The Grange and it’s here that we welcome friends and extended family.

At the dinner table, my brothers and I are constantly asked by the younger generation to relate our childhood stories and although they’re often exaggerated, they’re eagerly received, with the young listeners convulsing in gales of laughter soaking up our tales like sponges, eager to hear the family folklore.

After hearing the oohs and aahs in response to some of the most outrageous events of our past, my brothers and I have an overwhelming urge to retrace our steps together. As the Mornington Peninsula is so temptingly close to the places where we grew up, it seems the perfect time for the three of us to revisit where we lived as kids.

4

MORNINGTON PENINSULA, VICTORIA

D oug and Ray jump at the idea of the road trip to the South East Gippsland towns of Kooweerup and Lang Lang and Doug insists on calling into the Frankston Children’s Hospital en route, an institution where he spent almost three years of his childhood strapped in irons, suffering from the effects of polio.

Soon we’re bidding farewell to our families in Portsea and we set off like old times, in a rented Jeep. We find ourselves speeding past some of the Mornington Peninsula’s celebrated vineyards and glimpsing the familiar seaside towns of Rye, Rosebud, Dromana, Mount Martha, Mornington and Mount Eliza, on our way to Frankston.

Doug drives out onto Jackson Road to revisit the hospital, his home for so many years as a young boy. Eager to stroll in the grounds, he parks the car in the lot and we stride across the lawns towards the hospital buildings. When Doug sees the old physiotherapy pool, he exclaims,

I remember the dunkings! I was strapped into a contraption that they lowered into the icy water! He shudders at the memory. ‘I also remember looking out of the ward windows to these grounds every single day, longing to escape, but the days and nights just stretched on and on, until I lost hope!

The big boys on my ward would wage war at night you know — I had to form a gang of young patients, so we could support each other when we were attacked, he confides.

They were horrific attacks but we were never able to report them.

Why not? I ask.

For fear of reprisal! he quickly rejoins.

Some of the young nurses were sweet and gentle to me though, he recalls with a creeping smile.

They’d bring me lollies and soft drinks on occasions. Recalling them, Doug’s grin widens. Ray and I watch Doug’s face eagerly as he relates his hospital experiences, but we notice his expressions change when darker memories creep in.

The younger nurses weren’t safe from the older boys at night, he recounts. They were sometimes ambushed by them for sex! He shakes his head deeply disturbed by the recollection.

"Some of the older nurses were so brutal