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Pointless Stories: Memoirs of an Albany Boy
By Graham LeesDedication:For Steve
Foreword
Before you start reading these stories, it might be a good idea if I tell you that this is a work of fiction. Most of the things that are recorded here are very loosely based on events that really didhappen, but not necessarily in the way I have depicted or to the characters involved, except me.Before you get hot under the collar and accuse me of telling spare ribs, remember this! After all,Napoleon Bonaparte is credited with saying “What is history but a fable agreed upon?”You will note that I seldom come out of it smelling of anything less than roses! Naturally thiswasn’t really the case but when I did something stupid or made an arse of myself, I haveattributed it to one of the other characters. Let’s face it, I am hardly likely to go out of my way tomake myself look silly, am I?Some of the characters are completely figments of my imagination. Some have been givendifferent names. I do have a brother and a sister who are very unlike me in nearly every way anddid not necessarily behave in the way I have depicted. Sometimes they did, though!One or two of the events are completely made up and I don’t know that they ever happened toanyone, anywhere, ever.Albany, however, does exist, so do all the geographical features mentioned.And I really did have a Ford Anglia . . .
Albany
First, let’s get one thing straight! The town’s name is Albany!Not Orlbany like the Poms say, or Arlbany, as North Americans call it. In fact, if you were trying topass yourself off as a local, you would pronounce it Owl-bany. But even a trained actor have to doa lot of homework to succeed!Albany is in Western Australia, right down the bottom on that little rounded bit that other Sandgropers call “The Buttock of Australia”. Yeah, that bit!The town nestles between two small hills, grandly called Mount Clarence and Mount Melville.They’re not really mountains at all, though. Albany is too insignificant to have real mountains so itgot Clarence and Melville instead. These are often referred to as the “Pimples on the Buttock of Australia”.Immediately to the south is what looks at first like a big lake until you see that it has a wharf withocean-going vessels tied up to it. Then you realise there is a passage at the eastern end thatleads out into King George Sound.This large inlet is called Princess Royal Harbour and its main use, other than to house the wharf,is that it is the finish line for the Perth to Albany Yacht Race, which is where yachts race fromPerth to Albany. Albany people don’t suffer bullshit very easily and call a spade a spade and theycall the Perth to Albany yacht race the Perth to Albany Yacht Race!It is also the start line for the Albany to Perth Yacht Race for reasons similar to the above!
 
In years gone by, Albany was also home to a small fleet of whaling boats that tied up at theAlbany Town Jetty, a jetty that was at the foot of the main street of the town. Creativenomenclature decreed that this would be known as the Albany Town Jetty, and despite a lot of initial confusion, the name stuck.Anyway, in the late nineteen seventies it was becoming increasingly difficult to get crews for theseboats as Norwegians became a bit thin on the ground and the Japanese had still not beencompletely forgiven for the War in the Pacific. Nobody else was interested in a career in whaling.For years the industry had stubbornly resisted protests that it was cruel, barbaric and inhuman.Enormous pressure was being brought to bear to close down the practice and this was the deathknell for whaling in Albany.The boats were converted into floating restaurants and the whaling station was converted intoAlbany Whale World, a museum and funfair where all the rides are built to look like whales. Thename of this institution was agonised over by the people of Albany, unsure of whether visitorswould see the name and connect it with a history involved in whaling. Nobody ever visited themuseum, but the funfair attracted large crowds during the summer fortnight.Although it was the first British Settlement in the state, Albany always seems to be the end of something. Not content with just being on the Buttock of Australia, it has always served as theterminal station for one thing or another, such as the aforementioned Perth to Albany Yacht Race.In 1826, Major Edmund Lockyer colonised a hamlet on King George Sound and named itFrederickstown after some mate of his in the British Royal family. The idea was to plant a flag onthe western half of the country before the French could claim it. As a honour to the founder, theynamed a slum after him and to this day, when people think of the dashing major, they think of thescruffy asbestos and iron shacks which house the lower socio-economic demographic of thenorthern suburb.The explorer John Eyre, who crossed the Nullarbor westwards from Adelaide some time later,finished his journey in Fredrickstown and sat down and wrote a long dissertation on why theyshould name everything along the southern coast of Australia after him.Then, when the first telegraph lines where strung across the Nullarbor, they finished inFrederickstown. It was of little or no consequence that nearly all the people these telegrams wereaddressed to lived in Perth or Kalgoorlie, hundreds of miles away. Frederickstown was a goodplace to finish things, so the telegraph finished in Frederickstown. Messages that had been wiredfrom Sydney, San Francisco and Shanghai in the twinkling of an eye were put into an envelopeand carried by horse and buggy to Perth, a trip that took two weeks on a good day and up to amonth when the pubs were open.Or they went by steamer, which took slightly longer and only stopped at the pubs in Augusta,Bunbury and Mandurah.So Frederickstown became the cutting edge of communications technology.But in those days, handwriting was large and flowery and the word Frederickstown was too big tofit onto the small envelopes of the paper-scarce colony. Especially the swashy way they wrotetheir “F”s. So they changed the town’s name to Albany and pronounced it that way just toconfound the Poms and Yanks. There are hundreds of Albanys scattered throughout the Englishspeaking world but these Western Australian people had the good sense to distinguish theirs fromthe rest!The Bibbulmun Track is an overgrown pathway through the coalmines and burnt out remains of logging camps that make up the landmass known as the Great Southern Region. It was namedafter a tribe of indigenous people known as aborigines who lived in the region and who,anthropologists tell us, never lived anywhere near Albany. If they had, these anthropologists say,they would not have called themselves Bibbulmun, preferring a more obscure name such as theAlbany Tribe. Anyway, these Bibbulmun people used to love to go for a good hike with their little
 
woolly hats, their anoraks and their butane stoves, so they made the Bibbulmun Track to walkalong, singing tramping songs and stopping occasionally to brew up a cup of tea.Anyway, this track was the main pedestrian route between Kalamunda in the Darling Ranges andNorthcliffe in the Karri forest near Pemberton. This is where it finished.But the people of Albany got really jealous when it was discovered that something finishedsomewhere other than in Albany. They demanded that it be extended a hundred miles to the eastin their own town, right near the railway station, which is, co-incidentally, the final stop on thePerth to Albany line.I lived in Albany until 1971 but my heart will forever remain there. It is undoubtedly the mostpicturesque place in the world.Put it another way, it can be quite pleasant on a sunny day!In Albany it rains for an average of eighteen hours every day, three hundred and sixty five days of the year. For the rest of the time the weather is perfect with only a bit of constant drizzle. Thisgives the place the beautiful green vegetation that captured the attention of the early pioneerswho noticed the similarity to their native England, with its rainswept beauty and its torrentialgrandeur.This is why everyone who visits Albany is held captive. They cannot leave their hotel roomsbecause it is too miserable to venture out!On a beautiful, warm, sunny day the people of Albany walk around looking all confused,wondering what has gone wrong with their weather.Townsfolk call themselves Albanians, after the inhabitants of the poorest, harshest, mostuninteresting and politically unstable bit of Europe. For some reason they believe this identifiesthem as coming from Albany, as opposed to Albania.But not all Albanians were born in the town. In fact, probably a larger proportion of migrants livehere than anywhere outside Melbourne and Darwin. The original pioneers were free settlers fromEngland and Scotland along with Irish and Welsh convicts. Oh, and Scandinavians who were onlyafter the whales.After World War Two, a lot of Dutch, Poles and Italian people came here to live. More recently atiny trickle of people from the Middle East moved in although they remain unobtrusive and almostno-one knows they are there. Or if they do, they never mention it. Okay, no more sarcasm!In the nineteen fifties when we first moved in, there were very few folk who were not immigrants.On the day I started school at Albany Junior Primary School, a boy from the Nyoonga Tribestarted as well. The Nyoonga Tribe was the name given to the aboriginal people of the areabefore the Europeans came. Nyoonga means Albany in Nyoonga, so Nyoonga Tribe literallymeans Albany Tribe.Anyway, the other kids in my class asked us where we were from. I replied in my charming littleCockney lilt that I was from England, and no-one seemed particularly interested. They knewhundreds of people from England and that was quite frankly, old hat. Then they asked BillyColbung where he was from.“Mt Barker!” he replied.“No!” the other kids chorused. “What country are you from?”“Australia!” declared Billy.“Don’t be a dumbarse. This IS Australia!”“That’s where I’m from!” said Billy, shaking his head in perplexity.“Piss orf!” the other kids said.
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