Sometimes, on a dreary winter’s day or a baking hot summer’s day, you would take your bike and head into the local bush with  a sketch pad and a  book. It wasn’t  the glamorous bush, the one tinged with green and bathed in soft light of Fred McCubbin or  Arthur Streeton scenes,  those from the Heidelberg painting  school who gave the nation the imagery for its national consciousness – but rather the dull, dreary grey brown bush splashed between bare, over cleared paddocks.
It was the drabness which made it attractive.  You could hide there, with the calls from the crows as company,  and teach yourself basic sketching techniques and,  when that became boring, read chapters of books which flew you to imaginary lands.  Art and literature fed the imagination – opened doors to new worlds unrelated to daily life; made daily life more interesting, gave you the hiding place, physically, emotionally.  Later, I managed to land a gig providing cartoons for our bi weekly newspaper – not especially good cartoons – but the constant buzz  from being published closed down alternate career avenues. Briefly, I entertained ambitions of working as a cartoonist, then as an art teacher. But like many dreams, they were tossed as I recognised  both required more talent than I possessed.

Art and literature were not pursuits for the working class.  If nothing else, they defined the distance between the classes. Art and literature were the pursuits of the educated affluent. Decades later, standing in front of Michelangelo’s David, and visiting the Louvre, examining the works of the great masters,  I wondered what the old man would have said.

But art classes played a significant educational  role  in a small town. Not only by introducing you to the world  outside of the wheat, sheep and dust of the Wimmera Mallee, but also providing  invaluable life experiences. Art seems to have that impact. There were art camps at the Grampians with students from other schools; the awkward  mutual groping  with some unfortunate girl and, a life art class complete with living, breathing, nude model.  As she dropped her dressing gown I  saw, for the first time,  all the girl’s bits and pubic hair. I played football that afternoon with astounding energy levels.

Saturday nights were filled by the radio,  when you could sit outside in the summer evenings as the day’s heat leaked from the ground, listening to the local station’s top 40 count down. Music  was the part of your entertainment – not The Entertainment. London might have been swinging; there might have been social and musical revolution gathering pace,  but not in the Wimmera Mallee. Long hair was rare. Revolution was still only a Beatle’s song. Kennedy had been assassinated,  Martin Luther King had delivered the famous, “ I have a Dream” speech and was yet to meet the assassin’s bullet;  and  man had yet to land on the moon ( something we watched at school in grainy, flickering, black and white vision ).

Life in rural, working class Victoria was isolated – sleepily immune to the changes.  In the pubs, men drank beer in the front bar, women drank shandies in the ladies lounge,  toffs drank spirits, and urbane wannabees drank wine, although  it was a brave man indeed who stood at the bar and ordered a glass of Ben Ean, Kaiser Stuhl, or the wildly exotic, Liebfrauwine.  The wheels of social change might have been  rumbling, but at Beazley’s Bridge, Sunday nights were dominated by   the  ABC’s radio plays opening the world of  breathless drama.    Sometimes, afterwards, on a Sunday night,  there would be card games. For a fair slab of time, I read. Books were the key to other worlds, where you didn’t fall over  and where only good things happened, where fire-breathing dragons, Henry Lawson, Shakespeare and King Arthur all met, where there was tranquillity in the night