Like many men of my age, generation and background I could quite easily count on my available appendages the number of times I have shared poignant or deep moments with my father. In fact even if i was to suffer some form of horrific appendage decrementing industrial accident I could still safely keep a running tally even if forced to rely on the stumps of my hands and feet. The cunning linguists amongst you will have noted that I failed to use the more predictable word “intimate” to describe the sorts of moments I am referring to, but as the intimacy meter betwixt the old man and I has never suffered even the most minor tremble I can safely use the more less eye-opening word “poignant”.

It isn’t impossible to share a poignant moment with any object irrespective of its degree of animation; accountants, travelling sales-persons, tram passengers, puppies or doorknobs are all quite common co-participants in intimate moments. In fact if my Father was an accountant it would help clarify the depth of our understanding. After all comes a time every July when you have to tell your accountant some pretty private stuff; hopes, dreams and off shore tax schemes.Regardless of this lack of saturated father son intimacy during formative years, the old man did occupy the Alpha Male role in the household, albeit by default. Within our family this status was bestowed upon any person who possessed the necessary skills to convincingly prepare a whole lamb for roasting over an open fire. A task which my father took to with some passion and not minor amounts of flair, running his fingers along the sweet smelling lamb carcass, preparing the butter and herbs that would be placed into its cavities, growing, harvesting and preparing the lemon that plugged the beasts rear orifice.

I recall a time when my father dared to move further up (or is it down) the food chain by attempting to hunt the animal that would adorn the Easter spit. If memory serves me correctly this pursuit involved standing around in a cold outer-suburban paddock for many hours spanning the course of an autumn day’s rapid transition from day to night. The long period of patience was ended by a gun shot, solitary and reverberating, its echoes punctuated by the cries of the wounded, followed immediately by an uncannily similar length of time spent in a fluorescent-lit outer-suburban emergency ward. My opportunity to indulge in the cornucopia of Australasian Posts that had been painstakingly amassed by the staff of this hospital was disturbed on the occasional occasion by my father lighting his perpetually ultimate Peter Stuyvesant and mumbling something about how stupid my soon to be right-big-toe-less uncle Tom is and what in the devil’s name had possessed him the day he gave him his consent to marry his sister.

I fell asleep at the nurse’s station and woke up in East Hawthorn in one of those “did I dream all that” moments, Uncle Tom’s limp suggests firmly, no.

Throughout my youth I spent a disproportionate amount of time staring at puzzled expressions on doctor’s faces. They would toss up the pros and cons of various strategic approaches for dealing with my particular condition. They would flash lights in my eyes whilst making me look in all sorts of directions and then act all surprised to discover that yes indeedy albinism does cause severe light sensitivity in the retina, those text books were right all along, who knew, egad!

This suffering wasn’t without its benefits however as it was during these visits that I developed character traits that help define who I am. These regular visits in the 70s gave me access to some of the more beautiful homes of old Melbourne. The now brutally subdivided and apartmentalised homes in East Melbourne and the top end of Collins Street. I got to press pull or yank the door chimes of many of these grand, dimly lit palaces and coming from our little East Hawthorn weatherboard really helped to max out the intimidation factor that something as simple as architecture could convey.  I would walk along corridors wide enough so that even with outstretched arms i couldn’t touch both walls, Grandfather clocks would mark time, creaky floorboards elaborate noted human presence beneath plush hall runners, dark, carved balustrades crawled along the sides of stairways and the walls were adorned paintings that weren’t backed by chipboard.

I had become quite skilled in determining which doorway led to the waiting room, office and reception and would discuss appointment details with the matronly assistants occupying these rooms. The size, layout and impact some of these places had on the landscape really struck a chord with me and continues to do so to this day.

On a more personal level, it was also during these visits that I developed the trademark smirk that tends to crawl across my face whenever I am presented with a theory, statement or council by-law which I feel is firmly grounded in moose kaka. This smirk was born in an East Melbourne ophthalmic surgeon’s office, me seated behind a big desk and he opposite flanked by two students, announcing that the reason I walk with my head bowed is because my nystagmus is less pronounced that way. Genius! I cried, not out loud of course. There I was thinking it had something to do with being able to see where I was going, give this man his own tartan!

Not all the practitioners I encountered during this time were similarly encumbered by cockheadedness. One particular GP approached my parents on the street one day, spoke to them briefly about the rather unorthodox spectacles I was strutting around in. When it became obvious that my parentals weren’t able to communicate effectively in his chosen language he wrote a brief note which was passed on to our family quack. This gentleman offered his services gratis, helped my parents with where to go and get free or government subsidised help and was able to speak to me about what I was, what it meant and what it would one day come to mean. He was an amazingly calming person, he commented and I would listen, he would suggest and I would ponder, he would tell me when it would hurt and it rarely did. He also helped convince my parents that I was in fact quite capable of living a normal life, (although I’m yet to prove this really).

All this background brings us to the morning of the day of one such visit to the government subsidised clinic. It was normal procedure for mum or my sister to accompany me to these visits.  They were normally long, drawn-out affairs involving several brief visits with various staff with different skills or responsibilities. There were numerous tests carried out with the aide of equipment that had to be either state of the art cutting edge technology or archaic museum curios, it’s rather difficult to make that call when you aren’t in the know.

On this particular day however, it was dad and not mum that would accompany me. I woke up at the usual time for a school day was enjoying another episode of the Thunderbirds when I was told that I didn’t have to go to school today because I had to go to the clinic. I sat at the kitchen table with mum, dad and my grandmother, the entire parental arsenal at my beck and call. They all looked unusually serious, but this meant that I was able to eat as many slices of toast as I wished with as many Kraft singles slices as the laws of physics enabled a skilled operator to balance atop them. Dad didn’t even mind when i chucked away the dry first slice, as was the custom during those ground breaking days of pre-sliced but not individually wrapped fake cheese.

I eventually did stop eating breakfast, and back in my bedroom I found a gift, a bright battery-operated red toy fire engine complete with expandable ladder and fireman holding a nozzle, there was no hose. I thought the gift a tad childish and would have preferred a book, but it was a gift from dad not mum and gifts from dad had to be used, pushed, climbed on, jumped on and eventually gifted on to a cousin who enjoyed gifts that required performance of these sorts of acts. The red engine was meticulously maintained for years, it survived for decades until my sister’s son decided to unleash its capabilities and show the world that it was in fact a new member of the “transformer” family.

Big breakfast, gifts, dad home from work, it was obvious that something big was happening our arrival at the offices of subsidised eyeball health in Kooyong didn’t seem out of the ordinary. They didn’t have a bottomless toaster service, we still had to wait well beyond the time we were told to arrive and I still had to go through the same series of tests in the same strange rooms with the same future retro machines. There was still lots of forms that I had to fill in and dad still pronounced the “e” in the word “little”. i considered the possibility, not for the first time, that the word little with the e articulated was in fact some technical medical term and dad had inadvertently given the professionals to which he had entrusted my care and well-being with misleading information. I was appalled by his reckless way of life.

Towards what would normally be the end of the visit I was shepherded into the room where the “and now cover your left eye” tests were normally carried out, where you got to wear the weird spectacles with the removable lenses and try and spot the difference between something incredibly blurry and something incredibly blurry, or have to correctly identify which way a letter “E” was pointing on a chart. I wasn’t put in the barber’s chair where the tests were normally carried out but sat at a desk at the far end of the room in front of a few small boxes. The boxes were opened to reveal a range of binoculars, some pocket sized some grand some military. An open window allowed me to use the binoculars to look around outside and learn how to focus and zoom in and out. The dreaded twisted E chart was flicked on and I was finally able to read the bottom line without having to sneak a look on the way into the room.

What appeared to me a simple event was in fact the culmination of much discussion as to how my education had been progressing and would go. The idea was that as I was moving along in school quite reasonably they had agreed to allow me to stay on at a “normal” state school at least until I finished primary school, with the aide of these binoculars and later are rather more stealthy monocular I was able to take part in class a great deal more than usual and also have to spend less time pestering the poor soul that I sat next to for details on what was being scrawled on blackboards. For years this role was held by my friend Brad Dickson, who upon reflection was doing a pretty sterling job reading out loud whatever the teacher was writing on the board for my benefit.

The shrinks at subsidised government health were concerned that if i continue to learn that way I will not develop certain critical aspects of learning and rely on sound rather than what vision I had, they were right, In meetings, lectures, social events, I normally don’t bother using my eyes to learn what is going on, ears can give you a great deal but my lack of the social protocol of using eyes to immerse yourself into a scenario, situation, conversation has made people feel that I am not interested or bored, when in fact I’m quite often the only person involved who is taking it all in.

I was admiring my new shiny gadgets in the front seat of dad’s Kingswood when he pulled over at Anderson reserve, a large park that runs along side the south eastern freeway at Glenferrie road. We would often head down here on weekends to watch one or two of my older cousins play soccer for Hawthorn Citizens, but pulling over today was odd. Dad came around to my side of the car and opened the door. I stepped out and walked out into the park using my binoculars to check out the details of the high tensile power lines that also make use of the reserve. I heard dad open the back window of the station wagon and walk towards me, i put down my goggles when I felt that he was nearby, turned around and saw him holding a kite. It was your typical V formation, 3 bits of dowel joined at the apex, it was the 70s so it was bright blue and yellow with a long red ribbon for a tail. It was of course home-made, I recognised components that I would see often in dad’s workshop, but it was bigger than me and had a nice big spool of white nylon secured by a big brass ring in front.

I ran around the park for a few minutes trying to get it off the ground, dad wouldn’t normally tolerate this level of non successful endeavour, but today he stood patiently holding the spool of nylon whilst his son who had to use binoculars to read the blackboard ran around in his shorts and dress shoes trying to predict which way the wind was blowing. Even the transition from giving me advice on techniques to employ for achieving lift-off to dad’s taking control of the kite in order to get it in the air was handled gracefully. It was a combination of waiting for mother nature, some minor adjustments to the kite’s aerodynamic qualities, some suggested by me, some suggested by dad, the rest by common sense and obvious measures needed to correct the errors of engineering that came together to help achieve flight. The kite was quite heavy and when the wind gusted i had to dig my heels into the grass to stop myself being dragged forward. Dad took the controls for a while, I stood under it and tried to jump up to touch its crinkly red tail.

The sound of the wind pushing against the kite’s skin and the strange ratting that the tail would emit when it was performing some sort of loop the loop or nose dive seemed to occupy a frequency range above the traffic noise. Dad’s hands would take hold of mine to teach me how to pull on the nylon to make the kite move up or down in the sky, I wondered where he learnt how to do that and why if he knows that why he doesn’t know how to fill in my deposit slip on my Commonwealth Bank passbook account.

Something was achieved that day, a boy and his dad and a kite, nothing new, nothing beyond the ordinary, but there is great pleasure in the mundane when you have been told that even that is out of reach. A man, full of hope thrust into a new world, with his son cast not quite in his image, gathering the pieces of what they can expect, cleaning them up a bit and presenting them to the world in a “we sure showed em today” way.