Dad was a beekeeper and as such was denied the opportunity to join Australia’s armed forces when World War II broke out.
Enlistment was out of bounds for Dad, as he was told the beeswax he produced was critical for the country’s war effort.
Dad was a fellow who rarely looked back or talked much about his past, and why would you, as his father died when Dad was just four and his education ended when he left primary school. With just a mother and two younger sisters, life was tough, impoverished, and so not a time of life you would happily and willingly revisit.
He said he never had to concern himself about which boots he wore to school as didn’t have any and so he went barefooted.
His personal mission though, seemed to be about trying to make tomorrow better than today.
He did talk a little about privations individuals and the wider community endured during the war and I’m sure that experience added to the life of poverty he, his sisters and mother endured when he was young, and coloured my life as a kid.
Toothbrushes and toothpaste were considered something of an eccentricity when I was a kid and that is something for which I’m now paying the price, worsened by the fact that I was raised in pre-fluoride days.
The caveat is, of course, that I had a fantastic childhood. As with most kids from that era, we were ‘free range’, meaning we went pretty much where we liked, when we liked and only come home when Mum rang the dinner bell, a strange big hollow metal tube-like thing she whacked with a metal drumstick-like gadget.
I can remember playing ‘tally ai-oh’ with the neighbourhood kids, mostly in the evenings, when we would be hurtling up and down the street, leaping our neighbours’ fences to hide in their gardens.
Dad still had to work his bees during the war — that’s the reason he wasn’t allowed to enlist — but getting his hives to a productive site required fuel for his truck, and that was in desperately short supply, as were many other things he and others needed.
However, he had a solution — he fitted his truck with a charcoal burner that produced a gas on which the truck ran, although not very well.
Dad was almost the only able-bodied man left in our street throughout the war and so it fell to him to ensure the nearby homes were supplied with wood and maintained.
Although he never complained about those responsibilities, he was somewhat bemused, not bitter, that a brother-in-law who served in New Guinea as an officer’s batman and never saw a shot fired in anger was greeted upon return with a full war pension, while his tireless work in helping keep the neighbourhood intact did not attract a public word of thanks.
But Christmas, that annual moment in the year we have just passed, was something Dad always enjoyed.
I can remember that in the week leading up to big event, all us kids would pile on the back of Dad’s three ton (yes, it was ‘ton’) truck and head out to the bush, a place he knew well, to find a ‘Christmas tree’ big enough to be the central point around which several extended families could gather to hand out gifts and, for a moment, forget the stresses of the post-war years and revel in each other’s company.