THE GOLDEN YEARS.

In the summertime when the weather is fine,
You can reach right up and you can touch the sky.....

Oh for those wonderful days of early childhood.  Where it always seemed hot and sunny, when a day seemed like a week, a week seemed like a month and the whole world was yours for the taking.


Our new house was in one of Sydney's most northerly suburbs.  Surrounded by bush and set amid the steep sandstone hills and valleys which surround much of Sydney.  Our days were filled with excitement and adventure.  We had bushland all around us, tracks to make, creeks to play and swim in, rocks to climb and caves to explore.  We made the bush our own, each year adventuring further and further.

Our house was in a short but steeply curving dead end street and set at the highest point.  My parents were sensible enough to have it built on pylons which meant that we had bushland views that stretched forever and total privacy.  Over the years my parents literally carved out a wonderful terraced garden with rockeries, fishponds, sandstone steps and wooden bridges which all led up to more bush which formed the back of our property.

Here I learned to love nature and privacy. It was also here that I formulated my contempt for hypocrisy and violence.

We were the TV generation (black and white in those days) and grew up with the Brady Bunch, Lost in Space, The Courtship of Eddies Father, Little House on the Prairie....shows where everyone was happy, parents were fair and generous and every day had a happy ending.  My parents, though always working hard to 'give us what they never had' were constantly arguing.  My father couldn't go more than two days without belting one of us, usually me, and my mother was always telling us that we were better than the rest of the families in the neighbourhood.

This was because they were either too uncouth, being Australian, or too common, coming from the wrong part of England.  My mother the house cleaner and social snob!  It was no wonder that after a few short months we as children found ourselves unwelcome in our friends houses.

But we had our garden, our pets and most of all the fabulous bush to play in.  Whether secretly meeting friends there or just spending the day alone and totally enjoying the solitude.  Swimming in the creek, playing on the Tarzan rope which was in the middle of the bush and swung out dangerously over large rocks and fallen trees, finding tadpoles, frogs and tortoises, making 'cubby houses' in the caves and at a very early age discovering our body parts.....