The story of Dog Lately

Dear Dorit V.C.

Thank you for your letter and photo. Is your lovely little dog Bandit a Tibetan terrier? I had one just like it but sadly he died at the remarkable old age of eighteen years four years ago, his name was Dog Lately. Like have you seen the dog lately? He was a wild dog in many ways and somewhat savage towards other dogs. He never discriminated size-wise. Any dog would do. With half a chance he’d just tear into them, be they Alsatians or Pomeranians. More than once we had to take him to the vet and get him stitched up.           

His original owner was a local millionaire of some note in the white goods business. He bought the dog as a pup from a dog breeder in Melbourne for a very high price. The pup was a Tibetan Terrier, the breed that in ancient times were used to guard the temples. That little pup more pedigree than the Queen and I suspect that Mrs Millionaire wanted to show him at the Hobart and Launceston Shows and lift her profile in the doggy world.            

Unfortunately his original owner wasn’t observant enough to note that dear little Dog Lately only had one testicle and a slightly overshot jaw. He was definitely not a show prospect. The millionaire who bought him, it seems, had been gazumped by a canine breeder and it was suggested through the local gossip that he was somewhat pissed off with the deal and took out his spite on the growing pup by not giving him a lot of love and affection. And Dog Lately who, like most dogs, had an insatiable desire for the same ran away from his new home and spent the next eighteen months living off the land. He became expert at hunting down and catching the local and plentiful Tasmanian native hens.

He also learnt the art of grafting in between times. He turned up in the yard of a friend of mine one rainy winter’s morning and sat beneath a camellia bush looking somewhat wet and miserable and fixed his doggy eyes on my friend the moment he stepped out his door. Well, you know what doggy eyes can do in the pleading game? Within the hour the dog through the largesse of my friend’s wife had a quantity of breakfast left overs, including some first class home-cured bacon rinds and crusty bread to fatten him up. Naturally enough, being a dog of some wisdom, he found that grafting was a good deal less strenuous than chasing wild birds so he turned up the following morning and got more of the same.

And so it went on for several weeks and Dog Lately was putting on weight. He looked like he was settling in. He began to stay around longer and longer. Sometimes, right through until almost dark, when he would mysteriously disappear. By that time my friends had found out the hard cold facts about Dog Lately’s recent  history. They reasonable assumed that having satisfied his doggy needs for the day he had either returned to his original owners or to some secret doggy den somewhere.

Both assumptions that were proved wrong when my friend met one of his neighbours some time later and the neighbour told him how this stray muddy dog turned up on his doorstep just before dark each night and cadged the family’s evening meal leftovers. He told how the dog would gulp down his meal, slurp up some water and collapse on to their verandah to sleep. In the morning there was no sign of him.            When I finally met the wayward dog I was also smitten by those eyes of his. I offered to take him home with me and make such a fuss of him that he would never stray again. Everybody agreed that it was a great idea, including, it seemed the dog who had already decided the carpet in the back of my Kombi was a good place to snatch a bit of shut-eye after a hard day’s grafting.

So off I went with him in the back of my van - an excitement for both of us. Me, with plans of walking the dog on the beach, playing ball with him in the parks and having high expectations of having a  dog to guard our temple when we were away. The dog’s excitement was more direct. The moment I started the van he suddenly changed from a happy soft-eyed, tail-wagging doggy into a monster. Every car we passed got his message with his snarling and barking that he wasn’t a dog to be fooled with. And I’ll swear to this day, that when we so coincidently passed a carry van with the name of his late master emblazoned on its side, the dog’s barking rose to a crescendo that would have put the hounds of Baskerville to shame. He literally hurled himself at the windows of my van. Leaving, I might add, smears and scratches that I could never quite rub off.

Unfortunately, my envisaged doggy games with him never eventuated. Dog Lately never brought back a ball I threw. He preferred rather to eat them. Neither did he ever stay home and house watch. He insisted on going everywhere we went, whether it was to a party, a funeral or a wedding. He sat in the driver’s seat with eyes half closed looking like a bored taxi driver waiting for us to return. That Kombi belonged to him and woe to any stranger trying to touch it. Our warm house was of very little interest him. He preferred to sleep outside in his kennel or in the Kombi. He was an outside dog. Indoors was alien to him.

That showed on the first night I brought him home. I had to pick him up and carry his struggling body inside where hopefully he would get to know his new home. He spent most of that night trying to eat his way through the back door. Too scared to let him out we fed him up in the closed porch until he was busting and only let him out on a lead to recycle his meaty-bites in the garden. I had to practically drag him back into the porch when he was finished where he howled and yapped half the night and spent the other half working on the door.           

Two days later when he’d quietened down somewhat we decided give him a run. We walked him up the road towards the farmlands and that was when he showed us some of his acquired show-dog characteristics, he was out in front, pulling at his lead like a sled dog, his plumed tail up and wagging, fit for any show. When we were in the open paddocks we let him off his lead and held our breaths. He was Ok for two minutes sniffing around, but then when he hit the trail of native hen he was off with a speed that would have shamed a racing greyhound.

For hours we trekked around the paddocks and the nearby dams, calling and whistling, but there was neither sight nor sound of Dog Lately. We imagined him racing the forty kilometres back to our friend’s place on the outskirts of the city to get his leftovers. Or worse, getting himself squashed on the roads in the attempt.

We decided we’d better go home and ring around. But that dog continued to surprise. When he got back home in the early afternoon there he was sitting up expectantly on our doorstep, with the kind of eloquent, tongue-hanging expression that seemed to enquire where had we been all day. We were further surprised to see that lying between his paws was a somewhat mangled and very dead, native hen.  We presumed the bird he was offering was not so much of a gift as it was his token of his acceptance of us as his new slaves…

           

             

The day I nearly met Patrick White

When I read Patrick White’s book The Tree of Man I was fascinated by his style of writing and his storytelling ability. He became my favourite Australian author. When I published my first book, Strangers Country in 1977, I readily admit, that, in parts, its style and phraseology owed something to Patrick White.

 After its publication my friend, the late James McQueen, suggested I send Patrick White a copy of my book. There was some discussion about how many other aspiring writers would do the same, and how Patrick White might think that it was a sneaky way of using any comment he might make as promotion material. I didn’t want him to think that, so I expressly wrote inside the cover that my book was just a small gesture in appreciation for all his writing and that I wasn’t seeking a response.

On the strength of my book having positive reviews in The Age Newspaper, The Australian and the ABC book program, I was invited to attend the Adelaide Writers Festival where I mixed with many literary luminaries such as Elizabeth Jolly, Ann Summers and Thea Astley.

 On the third day after I had read (rather nervously) one of my stories, a man I’d never seen before emerged from the crowd, sat down beside me and introduced himself. I was somewhat surprised by the event and I regret that I didn’t get his name. I think he said he was a publisher.

 He told me that he had a message from Patrick. He told me that Patrick said thanks for the gift of my book and that he’d read it and enjoyed it, that I had an individualistic style and that I should never be persuaded to sway from it. I thought it a rather cryptic message at the time, but who cared, the man at the very top of my literary tree liked my stories! I was, to say the least, elated.

 In 1982 I was accepted to attend the Film School in Sydney to learn film script writing. I rented a room from a friend of mine in Randwick and drove to the school in North Ryde each weekday. At the weekends I used to walk for miles in all directions, exploring the Eastern Suburbs and working potential scripts over in my mind.

 During one of my walks around Centennial Park, quite by accident, I suddenly realized that I was in the street where Patrick White lived. Martin Road, Centennial Park. Number 20. I remembered it well.  It was the address to which I’d posted my book.

 Would I walk right in and knock on his door? Hello Mr White, I’d say, my name is Geoffrey Dean… remember my book? Would he invite me in? Would he offer me a cup of tea or coffee? And why did I want to say hello? Perhaps I needed the story of my visit to carry around me in my name-dropping bag to impress my friends at the dinner table? I had no real idea what my motive really was.

 And just say that he had invited me in - what then? I wasn’t really a literary person at all. I’d never so much got a sniff at getting a degree in literature. I disliked disseminating writing for its own sake. I was a storywriter. I wrote stories intuitively by watching and seeing and listening; teasing stories out from the remembered past and the present ethos; waiting for them to emerge and reveal their shape and purpose. How could I have talked about that with a great writer who had won the Nobel Prize?

 But then Hell, I could talk about something else, couldn’t I? Like, where I lived under the mountain in Hobart and how my day job was painting other people’s houses - or about farming - just general repartee - the kind of conversation I was reasonably good at.

 So, drawing in my breath and imagining that my backbone was lashed to a shining steel rod, I opened the gate and let myself into his garden. A garden, I thought, that owed as much to Southern Europe as it did to Australia.

 I either rang or banged at the door. (A detail that escapes my memory.) Silence from within - the kind of dull silence that belonged to a house bereft of any living being. There was hardly any need for the neighbour’s voice calling to me from over the fence that Patrick and Manoly were away.

 I never did try again during that year I was living in Sydney. I had stumbled on his street by accident, knocked at his door and he wasn’t home. I put the event down to Fate giving me a message. At that age and experience draining my feeble literary courage once, was enough…

 Some years later I met Vivian Smith the expatriate Tasmanian poet at Salamanca Market who now lived in Sydney. I knew Vivian when he lived in Hobart and I had heard through the literary grapevine that he was Patrick White’s friend. I told him about my foray into Patrick White’s territory. Ah, yes, he said, I actually had a conversation about you with Patrick when I saw your book in his bookcase.

 And, I asked? Well nothing much really he said. He asked me how old you were and when I told him you were about my age he seemed rather surprised. Was it because he thought my writing had the promise of the young, I asked?  No, nothing to do with that, Vivian said. It was more to do with whether your stories would be acceptable in Australia because of their...

 That’s when the phone rang Vivian told me and Patrick went off to answer it. When he came back, Vivian said he was fuming about something that had gone wrong with the publishing of his next book. Unfortunately we never got back to you, Vivian said rather regretfully. I wonder what it was he was going to say?

 Yeah, and me too. A pity he wasn’t home that day I called.

 

 

A goldfish called Serberton

         

My neighbour Alice has this pet goldfish that is breaking all records for longevity in the fish world - or so she thinks. But there are certain things Alice doesn’t know, and it’s better for both of us she remain ignorant.

It all began last month with Alice and me sitting in her kitchen drinking tea and watching her goldfish swimming in its miniature aquarium on the top of her walnut veneer sideboard. Well, the fish is not exactly swimming; it's more of a kind of languishing. It floats in a patch of lettuce-green waterweed. The only sign that it is alive is the occasional rippling of its diaphanous dorsal fin and a bubble or two that escapes from its mouth.         

 I didn’t know you had a goldfish Alice, I tell her. Ah yes, she says, my little Cerberton. She explains to me that she bought the goldfish to keep her company years ago when her husband was on the road selling vacuum cleaners. She and her husband Herb had lived in a small flat where no pets were permitted. She hadn't been sure whether the landlord's edict had also run to goldfish, so just to be sure she'd sneaked the fish in one day when the landlord wasn't looking.

 I called him Cerberton, Alice tells me. You know, like the suburb in London where I was born. That little fish has been great company to me, especially these last few years since poor Herb passed on. We never had any children you know.

 She sighs a regretful sigh and pours me a second cup of tea as she continues to fill in the picture. Of course Cerberton was only a bit of a tiddler then. Thirty-five years ago last month, it was.

I have no reason to mistrust Alice’s veracity but I am amazed that a goldfish could live so long. I know cockatoos can live to a ripe old age and turtles too, but such longevity in a goldfish stretches my credulity to its limit. Perhaps Alice is mistaken? She is at the age when many begin to become somewhat vague.

We finish our cups of tea and I go back to shoring up the posts and hammering another generation of galvanized nails into the palings of our territorial fence. That fence has blown down in the wind for the third time in as many years. I have suggested to Alice several times that we renew it but she resists and every time we have a really nasty gale I am back to shoring it up again.

But it's not the cost of her half share to build a new fence that worries Alice; it’s the notion of change. I've got so used to that old fence, she tells me, I'd be unhappy if it were gone. It's such a lovely smoky grey, isn’t it? And then there’s the lichen - it’s taken years to grow that. It was like she was pleading for a favored work of art or an artifact of some significant and I, like always, give in.

Later that month Alice is in a bit of a quandary. She tells me over the fence that her sister who lives in Launceston is sick. She laments that she can't go to stay with her for a few days because there's nobody to look after her Cerberton.

I know what she’s getting at, so to save time I tell that it would be an honor for me to look after the little feller. Surely, I tell her, all he needs is a bit of grub each day? I could put his glass tank on my kitchen bench where I could keep a close eye on him.

 Alice is ever so grateful for my offer but not entirely convinced that it is as simple as I make out. But he'll be lonely without me, she says. He’ll miss me. I talk to him all the time. Well, I’ll talk to him, I assure her. I'll go in and talk to him every time I make myself a cup of coffee and I drink lots of coffee. She still looks a little doubtful, but with a few more words of assurance I manage to convince her that I am an experienced goldfish-sitter who will treat her goldfish as though he were my very own.

 Ah, if only life could be so simple! Three days after Alice's departure I come home and find Cerberton acting like a miniature shipwreck. He is floating upside down on the surface of his glass tank and no matter how many times I right him with my finger he rolls right back over. I decide eventually that there is no getting away from it, Cerberton is no more, he has, as the Goon said, shuffled off this mortal coil.

 My God! What have I done wrong?  What am I to do now? Here is a fish that has survived thirty-five years in my neighbour's loving care and I have killed it in the course of three days. In my mind I go over all the things that I have done or not done, to try and find a reason for Cerberton's demise. But there seems to be no reason. Have I been so unlucky to be his keeper on the very day that he has been designated by fate to depart to that big fish-tank in the sky?

 Surely not, I tell myself. The chance of that happening is about the same odds as me winning the lottery. So, perhaps it is something not quite so coincidental? Perhaps I hadn't been talking to the little feller enough? Perhaps my casual good mornings and how are you today chats, weren't enough to sustain his tenuous grip on life?

 Although, I did remember one quite long conversation I'd had with him on the second morning about the consequence of my literary dry up. And I'll swear that morning he'd responded to my words with an extra bubble or two. Was he upset by my confession? Did it affect him? I have no idea. The only thing I do know is something has to be done about it. I don't think I'm up to facing Alice’s tears on her return.

It is the man in the pet shop who eventually solves the dilemma for me. When I show him poor Cerberton's body, he immediately identifies it as a carpis manifico. Quite a common species, he assures me, replacement will not be too difficult. Do I go along with the minor conspiracy? Or do I subject myself to self condemnation and Alice to sorrow and tears? I toss it up in my mind. Conspiracy wins hands down.

 The shop owner and I wander from glass tank to glass tank in his pet shop, peering amongst the weeds and exotic paraphernalia that litter the bottoms of the tanks for a replacement of the extinct and rapidly decomposing Cerberton. And he is right, they are many variations on a theme and it isn't too long before we find the absolute replica of the late Cerberton hiding in the fluorescent hull of a miniature Titanic.  That's him, I tell the pet shop owner. That’s the one I want. This carpis manifico looks as old and languid as Cerberton ever looked.

Back home I very carefully follow the pet shop owner's instructions on feeding little Cerberton 2 a tiny pinch of the flaky fish food, any more and it will be too much. Which, considering the spoonfuls I fed his predecessor, at least solves the mystery of his untimely death. Though, as I watch the little fish rise slowly in a very Cerberton-like manner to take the food, I wonder about the other unsolved mystery of his predecessor’s unlikely age. The pet shop owner has assured me that goldfish rarely live beyond fifteen years - eighteen at the most.

I lean closer to the tank and eyeball the tiny fish through the watery glass and ask the question. What do you think Cerberton 2? Do you reckon there was another goldfish-sitter all those years ago that pulled the same scam on the original model? You might be the third in line? The fishy stare and string of bubbles I get in reply tells me nothing.

 When Alice gets back at the end of the week she is delighted when she sees the goldfish languishing peacefully in his glass tank. She leans forward and warbles her greetings to him. Cerberton 2 rises to the surface like he always does around feeding time. See, Alice cries, he knows my voice. Sure I tell her, why not. There are times when the truth is not the best policy.   

 

Cradle Mountain

Dear S.K. There’s a picture of Cradle Mountain on the television. Cradle makes me feel a bit sentimental. You are right; Cradle Mountain does call you back. Remember how I had commented how different it was when I walked around Dove Lake and climbed the Cradle forty years before with my family and friends. We only met about half a dozen people that day and this time there was almost a constant line of walkers from one end to the other. Ah, me, progress!          

But back at Waldheim I remember when I stood on the verge of the tree line looking out across the valley, waiting for you to finish your shower, just how isolated it could be. The tourists had all gone back to their comfy hotels and motels - the Overland Track hikers all gone - heading south towards Lake St Claire. It seemed like we were the only ones left in the world. Certainly, we were the only ones left in Waldheim.          

Remember how there had been a brief storm before you went off to those so inadequate shower rooms. The storm left a kind of rosy light behind. It infused everything, the huts and the trees behind me; the valley in front, it all glowed as if lit by unseen lanterns. It looked like it was millions of years old. I could have imagined giant marsupials down there in that valley, reining supreme. Sure, the single weather-greyed wooden walkway was there, but so integral was it with its surrounds it was - or could have just been, part of the general configuration. 

Then there was a movement in front and I saw this fat old orange-tinged wombat coming out of the ferns to grab a quick snack before dark. I walked right up to it and it just lifted its head, blinked and went back to chewing. Okay, I said, don’t talk, you’re a midget compared with what I have just imagined. You wouldn’t think that a fat old wombat could be so stuck up, would you? The wombat still ignored me and went on chomping. 

It was then I saw on the side of the distant mountain, a slow moving patch of red in the losing light coming down the slope. Curiously enough such a sight didn’t impose on the vast emptiness all around. It was like the present also needed to be recognised and in its own strange way it added, rather than subtracted, from the emptiness. And curiously enough in retrospect, that touch of alien colour reminded me of some of those white figure drawings you do on a black background. The ones where you had given a touch of alien colour to the faces of the otherwise blank fingers. There was a similarity. Something to do with minimalism, I suspect.          

And by the way, I ran into Bob Brown at his photo exhibition in the Salamanca Gallery some time back and commented to him that one of the photos he took must have been taken at almost the same spot that I just described. I told him how I felt about that lone returning hiker. How alien in such emptiness. He told me that he remembered taking the photo well, because just after he‘d taken the shot he heard in the distance the sound of a dog baying in hunting mode.How strange! Who what or how? 

I looked back at his photo and it suddenly seemed a little flatter than it had been a few seconds before. I sometimes think in my more fanciful moments that photos need more than just an unmoving description of the past, they are too flat; they need audio or movement to bring them to full life. But then, they wouldn’t be photos would they. They’d be something else. They’d be being there! 

The washing machine story

I met Bill in the local grocery store. He had a heap of groceries in his basket and I was only buying a loaf of bread and a carton of milk. I stepped aside to let him go in before me. There were still three people in front and it was one of those times when each one of them paid by bankcard. By the time they had slipped their cards through the machine, being accepted and signed the slip, it took quite a while.

The man who I had let in before me half turned around and winked at me. Weren’t cards meant to make shopping quicker and simpler?

Yeah, I said, for the bank and the store but not for us.

We who only stand and wait, he said. He changed his full basket from one hand to the other and groaned. Thanks for letting me in front.

When I reached the counter I paid by cash, the same way as he did and I was out of there in no time. I caught up to him in the car park where his vehicle was parked next to mine. It was a yellow campervan. He was stuffing his groceries through the middle door into a kind of large wicker basket.

It looks like you might be going away, I said.

He closed the door and shook his head rather sadly. The wife and I were going. You know, retired now, kids all grown up. Spending our inheritance we joked, but unfortunately my wife got sick. You know how it goes; life chucks you a bit of a wobbly now and again. I’ve had to go back to work for a while to pay off the medical bills.

I told him how sorry I was and asked him what kind of work he did?

White goods mechanic, he said.

Bad luck for him and his wife, good luck for me. Like maybe you fix washing machines? I asked.

I explained to him that my washing machine had broken down a couple of weeks ago and I had been using my daughter’s machine until I could get someone to take it in for repairs.

Sure, he said, I’ll fix it. Half the price of the downtown guys too.

I gave him my address and he turned up the following day and within an hour the machine was going like a new top. An hour’s work, fifty bucks, good all round.

It was a nice sunny day that day and neither of us had much to do so I offered him a cup of coffee and we sat on my bench in the sun and talked.

I asked him how his wife was. He shook his head sadly. She used to be great - a naturally happy person, looking forward to our trip away and all that, then suddenly, without any warning, Bonbon died.

Bonbon? Somebody close was it?

Not somebody exactly, something. My wife’s Pomeranian. Well ours actually, but mostly my wife’s. She took him everywhere. Poor little Bonbon, she found him in his basket one morning just before last Xmas. All cold and stiff. She’s never got over it. I took her to the doctor but that didn’t do much good, he just gave her drugs and it made her more depressed. A psychologist tried to talk her around and that didn’t do any good either. She finished up in a clinic and that cost a heap. He smiled then, wistfully. Nothing seemed to help. Goodbye trip I say.

Look, perhaps it takes more time, I told him at my gate. I thought of my own situation in the past. Sometimes time is the only healer?

I hope so, he said, without a great deal of conviction. I’ve been thinking lately that I might put the van on the market and pay off the debt.

Give it time, I shouted after him as he drove off.

For weeks after, every time I saw a campervan passing in the street I checked it out. But no, I didn’t see Bill or his wife that I never met riding by. I could only hope that it did come out well for both of them.

Some time later I was sitting down reading the ads in the paper. I was looking for someone selling sheep manure for the garden and as my eye slid down the columns, another ad under livestock caught my eye. Someone was advertising for a home for a half grown Pomeranian puppy. A sweet little companion for a lady the ad said. I went to my kitchen drawer to get the scissors and cut the ad out. I picked up Bill’s address from the phone book and sent the ad to him. I signed it from a Well-wisher.

Would my little hint work? As it turned out I didn’t have all that long to wonder what happened to Bill and his wife. Early in autumn I saw a woman sitting in a loaded up yellow campervan outside the same grocer shop where I’d first met Bill. She was sitting up, smiling happily. There was a little, flat-nosed, golden-haired dog with a red ribbon round its neck standing on her lap, yapping out at the world in general. I never did particularly like Pomeranians much but this one seemed to be a little beauty.

I was in a hurry that day and I didn’t stop to verify my assumption that it was Bill’s missus. I reckon it was a pretty sure bet that it was, though.

Welcome to Geoff's blog!

These are random posts about various phases of my life, in no particular order, just as they come to mind.

Most will be uplifting some with a touch of humour and some with a touch of sadness - like life really.

I hope you will enjoy them.

Let me know!