My Mate John: a very Australian story

John is an ordinary man of small importance in the affairs of men, except that he has a natural and wholly unaffected charm.  Adults and children alike take to him with an unpracticed ease that transcends age, culture, education, rank or class.

Over the last fifty-one years, I have known him as both.  I was ten and three quarters when I first met a thirty-one year old John on the migrant ship that took us from Southhampton to Melbourne in August of 1958.

My parents met him and his wife Rosily while queuing for deckchairs early in the trip.  We were all ten pound migrants, so the fact that my father was public school educated and lately a middle rank army officer with a business partnership and newly built house waiting for him at journey’s end, and John was an agricultural laborer with virtually nothing, made no difference.

Besides, despite his humble occupation, he was a well spoken man and his wife was even more obviously so.  His father had been a ‘turf accountant’ and despite wildly varying fortunes, had been able to send his not very scholarly son to good schools, for some periods of his education.  This had the effect of further suspending the usual social assumptions that English people of the time used on first acquaintance
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For me as a child, his easy manner, indefatigable good humor and way of speaking to me, intimated genuine interest and the constant possibility of playful mischief.  I always knew I was welcome in his company and we would happily chat about this and that, passing together the tedium of our long journey.

After we disembarked, it was several months before I saw him again, until he turned up as our gardener.  He had tried several jobs in factories, but decided that the land was where his heart was.  My father was one of his first customers.

Not long after he started with us, we moved to a place upstream on the river that meanders through Melbourne.  There were ten acres of land to manage and much landscaping around the house to do, which meant that John often came on Saturdays, as well as his regular time on Friday.

I always looked forward to his arrival during holidays.  Saturdays with Dad in the party were OK, but Fridays were Just-John days.  We would go out like a couple of adventurers into the day’s labors, starting with burning incinerator rubbish and hopefully at least one aerosol can.  It would explode most satisfactorily to loud cheers.

Cleaning the grease trap was a regular and always revolting job.  I would light the cigarette that he needed to mask the smell.  While he carefully ladled the putrid contents out, he would regale me with stories of farming pigs and gardening for the air force base he worked on in Egypt.  The officers’ and sergeants’ messes relied on the meat and vegetables John and his crew produced, as did the base brass, for the free family quarters gardening service he provided from time to time.

The appreciation of these rigid hierarchs was an informal, benign and indulgent latitude.
 
His stories were all about reading emotional and social subtext, and how to get on with people.
 
I learned from him a lot about farmers and rural life in the west country of England during and after the war; of horses and plows, sheep and cows, pubs and villages, hedges and styles, long cycle rides and getting lost through the lane ways of Somersetshire in the long twilight of a warm midsummer’s eve.

He and I fenced, mowed, landscaped, cleaned, cleared, sprayed, weeded, painted, cut wood and built sheds together all through my youth.  Our shared days were always too short.  At their end, we would sit together under the leafy veranda adjacent to our kitchen with a beer (a small one for me) and we would share our adventures with Mum, and Dad too, if he got home from the office early enough.

John and Rosily bought a five acre piece of rural land beyond the suburbs, with an unlined tin shed, a tank, bush shower and toilet on it.  John kept improving and serendipitously extending this structure until it was the sweetest, prettiest and most comfortable set of joined sheds and verandas in the neighbourhood.

Rosily’s cooking was simple, but it and her wines were delicious.  Their hospitality piled good will, generosity of spirit, pleasant conversation, laughter, food and drink in equally generous measure.  I would always lose John’s eating ‘challenge’ and go home feeling blissfully happy, if somewhat over-full.

Study and going to university took me away and I saw much less of John as I grew up.

In the mid nineteen seventies, my parents moved north to a beautiful seaside resort on the south coast of New South Wales.  John and Rosily visited them and liked the place so much, they settled there too.  John continued gardening for them and being a close family friend. I would see him and Rosily whenever I was up there.  But we were not to work together again in the garden.

In the later eighties my parents moved on to other places and John and Rosily fell out of our lives, until early in the new century, when she died.  I went to the funeral and resolved to regularly visit him at least twice a year.  He still tells the same stories I heard as a child.  I must have listened to them a hundred times, yet I never tire of them.

To celebrate our fiftieth anniversary of coming to Australia, I cycled the six hundred kilometres from where I live to his beautiful mud brick pole house overlooking the Pacific.  It was a measure of my love for him and the country that has done us so proud.

John is now eighty-three and the next time I visit, I hope he will let me help him in the garden.

It would be fitting.