AN EARLY BOOMER
David Murray has lived a far-from-ordinary life. His autobiography spans the ‘Baby Boomer’ years from 1946 to the present day. Born ‘pre-Boomer’ in 1945, he relates a life in Australian history that saw some of the greatest social changes, when teenagers experienced a freedom that will never come again. A time when growing up meant climbing trees, letting off fire crackers and accepting punishment for wrongful actions. When young men were forced to fight in the Vietnam War and return home to find no emotional support for the horrors they had witnessed.  With his ability to capture the people and the era with honest simplicity, the author encourages the reader to keep turning the pages. This is a book that today’s youth, in their world of advanced technology and rigid regulations, will find interesting as they discover the simple things that children and young adults got up to not so very long ago. And of course the Baby Boomers themselves, a ‘rather self-indulgent lot’, will enjoy reminiscing on their lives as they enter retirement.	In Store Price: $AU23.95  Online Price:   $AU18.95 ISBN: 978-1-921406-13-3   Format: Paperback Number of pages:161 Genre: Non Fiction Autobiography Buy as an Ebook version - $AUD9.00 pdf upload.     Cover: Clive Dalkins
Author: David Murray Publisher: Zeus Publications Date Published: 2008 Language: English

About the Author 

The author was born on 9^th August, 1945, the day the Americans dropped a second atom bomb on Japan. Unlike the generations immediately before him, he most definitely works to live. He travels at every opportunity and places considerable store on the richness of his life experiences. 

A few years after leaving school, he found himself drafted into the army and soon after, fighting in the jungles of Vietnam. 

Following his war experiences, his restlessness led him to try a variety of employment options. He gained formal qualifications in special and regular education and worked as a teacher in both fields. In the early 1990s, he spent time as a licensed real estate and strata managing agent after winning the 1989 NSW TAFE Medal as top student in that year’s Advanced Certificate Real Estate Course. 

In 1981, he gained the highest possible pass in the Level 2 swimming coaching course conducted at the Canberra College of Advanced Education and for many years was a professional swimming coach. Throughout his life, he has maintained an almost fanatical adherence to sporting pursuits for health reasons. 

This is the author’s first book.

Introduction   

This book is an attempt to record the life, times and thoughts of an early baby boomer who is neither a celebrity, famous sportsman or a politician. It is in fact a book about ‘A Man In The Street’. You may have passed him in an aisle of your local supermarket on Monday afternoon, or in the surf as you caught a wave last Sunday. He may have been playing golf in the group in front of you Wednesday morning or been that bloke with the bag full of fish you saw walking up the beach yesterday afternoon. You see, he’s an ordinary person just like everybody else. In fact, he probably sees the world in a similar light to you, which, if the truth be known, is not that much different from how Mr or Mrs Celebrity actually think.

So why pay a fortune for a book written by the ghost writer of A. Celebrity, when you can pay a little less for one written by the person sitting in the seat opposite, as you travel home from work by bus or train? After all, he may in his distant past have experienced a tumultuous childhood, gone off to fight a war he didn’t believe in, suffered the anguish of a major cancer scare, or more recently, be recovering from the death of his parents, a near fatal bicycle, surfing or rock-fishing accident, or he may be on his way home from the hospital where he has spent several days undergoing tests for a suspected minor stroke which turned out to be a false alarm. Or, like the author, he may have experienced all of the above.

Next time you pass ‘a man in the street’ have a close look at him and consider what his story might be. Who knows, after reading this book you may see your fellow citizens in a different light.

The author was born in 1945, the year the Second World War came to an end, hence he precedes the true baby boomer by perhaps a year or two and should therefore be called an early boomer. Early and genuine baby boomers are a very significant force within Australian society. They are the group that tended to break with the conservative ideas of their parents and grandparents. Job security, saving for a rainy day and living frugally are not ideals readily associated with the Baby Boomers. From their ranks sprang the hippies and flower power generation who tended to embrace the smoking of marijuana as readily as their fathers had alcohol. Living in the lucky country, where anyone who wanted to work, could with little effort find a job, they enjoyed a lifestyle that by historical standards was very comfortable.

The old adage that children should be seen and not heard went by the wayside as boomer families made their offspring the centre of their universe. These children, now in their late twenties and early thirties, have a tendency to party later, remain in their parents’ home longer and marry at significantly older ages than the generations before them.

Whereas the baby boomers will largely benefit from the frugality of their parents, in that many of them will, on their parents’ death, inherit at least a share in some form of real estate, the children of the baby boomers may not be so lucky. Most baby boomers have failed to provide adequately for their retirement and are about to discover that the age pension on its own will at best only provide a very meagre lifestyle. I think it is fair to say that if in retirement a couple is free from debt, their annual income would need to be in excess of $35,000 if they are to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle during their post-work years.

Furthermore, unless their income is indexed, inflation will progressively reduce their standard of living as each year passes. They will then either have to remain in work longer or tap into the equity in their homes via reverse mortgages or similar products. My bet is that the great majority will choose this latter strategy, which of course involves ‘spending the kids’ inheritance’. I must admit to thinking this may be the making of the boomers’ children, as it is easy to become lazy and complacent if you know that sometime in the future you will acquire significant assets without having to earn them.

The baby boomers’ children will need to provide for their retirement through the superannuation vehicles which are now being made available as a result of the Commonwealth Government’s recent push to encourage this form of wealth creation. They may even free themselves from the questionable Australian tradition of home ownership, which burdens most young couples with huge debt for most of their working lives, and instead, choose to rent the place they live in. If they are able to do this they may end up changing the face of our society even more than their boomer parents.

Since the birth of the first baby boomers, our society, as would be expected during a fifty- to sixty-year period, has indeed undergone a significant number of social changes. Unfortunately, not all these changes have been for the better. The most regrettable of these has been the shift from a society where we had a huge middle class with very few genuine poor and a small wealthy group of individuals, to one which today boasts many very wealthy citizens, a shrinking middle class and a rather large group of the very poor. This change in the topography of our society must surely be at least partly attributable to those that stood watch during that period, i.e. the Baby Boomers. The problem with such a change is that as the numbers of the genuinely poor increase so to does the risk of significant social unrest. Maybe the boomers’ children will recognise this and work towards rectifying the situation. One can only live in hope.

Finally, the views, thoughts, philosophies, whatever you like to call them, expressed in this book are entirely my own and are presented here simply as one man’s commentary on the society in which he lives. I don’t claim that they are right or wrong; they are merely the result of the way my brain has processed the information it has been presented with and as none of us share the exact same ‘grey matter’ or for that matter the same ‘life experiences’ it is unlikely that anyone will wholly agree with many of them.

 Hopefully, however, they will move some of my fellow ‘men and women in the street’ to at least examine their own thoughts on the issues raised. After all, the only way to maintain our vibrant society is surely to have as many people as possible debating the important issues of our time. History clearly indicates that effecting social change is a numbers game. So readers, develop opinions, debate with your friends, lobby politicians to your cause and please don’t be a fence sitter … have an opinion and voice it.

PART ONE: (part sample)

A NOT SO ORDINARY LIFE 

An Eventful Childhood 

As the Second World War drew to a close towards the end of 1945, thousands of young soldiers returned to Australian cities and towns. One of the first things most of them did was to find a female partner and get married. (It was relatively rare at that time for a couple to set up house together without officially tying the knot.) The following decade saw a baby boom that was unprecedented in our history. Today those children are referred to as ‘the baby boomers’.

 I was born on 9th August 1945, the day the Americans dropped the second of two atom bombs on Japan. Hence I was actually an early boomer. My father had married my mother in the early days of the war and had returned from fighting the Japanese in New Guinea early in 1944. I was obviously the product of one of Dad’s leave passes!

 Up until I was aged six we lived in a fibro house in the Sydney suburb of Punchbowl. Back then, Punchbowl was only lightly developed. All the houses had a familiar look: they were mainly constructed of sheet fibro, had a front porch, an adequate backyard and smaller front patch of land that often comprised a modest garden and path that led to the front porch. Our house looked out over open fields onto market gardens. Though many of the housing blocks in our street were vacant we had neighbours on both sides of us. To our right lived two girls probably aged around five and eight, and to our left lived two boys, one my age and the other a couple of years older. I cannot remember the girls’ names and am only really aware of their existence because of an incident that established the older girl as my first mortal enemy.

I had been halfway through peeing against the fence that separated my house from that of the girls when the older girl spotted me, yelled out and ran at speed in my direction. I immediately took off but was no match for my pursuer, who in no time at all had me pinned by the shoulders against the side of my house. What followed was a verbal tirade telling me what a dirty little fellow I was. I must have been about four at the time yet the embarrassment stayed with me for the remainder of my life at Punchbowl and led to my avoiding interaction with the two girls from that point on.

The two boy neighbours on the other hand were mates, particularly the younger one, Kenny. His brother, Raymond, was quite a cult hero amongst the children in our area due to his habit of lying in the middle of the road, below a small rise, and allowing cars to run over him. Just how many times he performed this amazing act I’m not privy to, but I witnessed it on several occasions. How he survived – and survive he did, without a single scratch – defies belief. I think complaints to his parents by irate, shocked motorists put an early end to Raymond’s bizarre behaviour and thus enabled him to eventually attain adulthood.

The Whittle boys, as Mum called them, spent a lot of time at my place. They would often appear around mealtimes, which meant Mum usually gave them some of what we were eating. The feeling in our household was that their parents spent most of their money on furniture and the like, leaving little for food for the boys. Whether this was true or not is a matter for conjecture but I do remember that there was never a scrap left on the plates Mum gave them.

My early memories of life at Carlton Parade, Punchbowl, are very sketchy. Apart from what I’ve already mentioned there are only a few incidents that readily come to mind when I reflect back on those early years. A rather spectacular happening occurred one Saturday or Sunday afternoon in the vacant paddock across the road. Kenny and I were lighting matches and throwing them into the tufts of long grass that littered the acre or so that separated two recently built houses. Suddenly, to our amazement, the whole field was ablaze, several fire engines appeared out of nowhere and people were coming from all directions. Somehow Kenny and I managed to escape the crime scene without being noticed. We later joined the rather large crowd that had gathered to watch the spectacle and heard a fireman, or some adult of importance, theorise that the blaze was probably the result of the sun shining on an empty bottle, the subsequent heat causing the grass to smoulder and hey presto, Kenny and I were off the hook.

On another occasion, that same stretch of land had been hosting an informal football game between some of the local older youth of the area, when a tackled player let out an almighty yell of pain and clutched his leg in agony. I remember running over to see what was causing the trouble and saw that the injured player’s upper thigh had come in contact with a broken beer bottle, which had left a very deep long gash in his leg. The fact that the thigh belonged to a very large fellow enabled the broken bottle to do a really spectacular job. A large chunk of bloodied flesh seemed to literally hang out of the gaping wound.

Punchbowl was where I experienced my first dangerous encounter and it nearly cost me an eye. A van or truck had parked outside our house; the driver had left the vehicle with the passenger side window open. Looking out of this window was a large dog with a particularly friendly expression on his face. To me this was an invitation to swing up onto the side of the vehicle and give him a pat. I don’t remember the sequence of events other than one minute I was climbing up to the window and the next I was screaming in agony, my face covered with blood, Dad was on the scene and we were off to the doctor’s where I was stitched up and told how close I had come to losing an eye. Strangely, this incident had no effect on my attitude towards the canine species, for whom I have always had a strong affection.

In the 1940s and 50s most houses had their toilets situated outside in the backyard; perhaps due to the fact that at that time all toilet waste was deposited into a ‘night pan’ or large drum that was collected weekly, just as our garbage is today. Each week a truck would call by and a man would remove the full drum from each toilet and replace it with an empty. There were always terrible stories circulating about full drums with rusty bottoms falling apart when being lifted and empting their foul contents on the poor fellow carrying out the exchange.

Mostly, the toilet was located in a little shed that more often than not was dark and of very basic design. This led to them being a haven for spiders, and it was therefore not uncommon for people to be bitten on their bottoms as they delivered their daily load. Red-back spiders were of particular concern, as a bite from one could apparently cause an adult to become quite ill and perhaps even kill a young child. So every time any of us went to the ‘dunny’ in the dingy little shed in the backyard, we would always, with great trepidation, lift the toilet seat and look for the dreaded red-back. The discovery of the deadly foe, besides provoking a minor drama at the time, only served to reinforce our resolve to always look before we sat. Looking back it’s a wonder we all didn’t grow up with arachnophobia. To be honest, I even occasionally did the toilet-seat check well into my teenage years, long after the night pans were a distant memory and toilets had largely moved indoors.

The above memories are all that remain of my first six years, except for the one that would change my life forever and resulted in our moving to the northern Sydney suburb of Mosman. One evening my father sat me down and announced that he was leaving and wouldn’t be coming home again. He told me that Mum would be looking after my sister Annabel (aged two) and me, and that I would be able to visit him on some weekends when I was a little older. I remember crying and pleading with him not to go. On reflection I do remember lying in bed on many a night prior to Dad’s departure and wishing that my parents wouldn’t argue so loudly. My father unfortunately was a ‘ladies’ man’ and obviously married too young. I remember him having many temporary relationships with young women over the sixteen years between the time he left us and when he finally settled down and married a girl not much older than me.

Soon after Dad’s departure, Mum, Annabel and I moved into my grandfather’s house at 27 Myahgah Road, Mosman. It was a typical old federation ‘Mosman’ house, in a great location on a rather large block of land, which in later years we were able to subdivide and sell off. Mosman oval was directly across the road and Balmoral Beach with its parklands, rocky outcrops and great swimming areas was only ten minutes by foot. Mosman Bay and The Spit, both great waterways, were also only a fifteen-minute or so walk. Spit Junction and the Mosman shops were a mere two or three hundred metres up and down the street respectively, and public transport to the area was excellent, even back in the early 1950s. Ready access to these facilities was very important to us as our fatherless family never owned a car. For that matter neither my mother or my grandfather ever possessed a motor vehicle licence. We simply walked or caught public transport everywhere. I can hardly recall any of my friends’ parents owning cars, until at least the early 1960s. In those days everyone walked a lot. All my friends walked to school, the beach, the Saturday movies, even the shopping was done on foot and the food carried home by hand.

Before I go any further I’ll get the divorce of my parents out of the way. In Australia today where close to fifty percent of marriages end in divorce it may seem that in this story I’m dwelling a little too long on the failure of my parents’ marriage. However, in the 1950s, divorce was far less frequent and involved a rather complex legal process. Fault/cause had to be established and a time period of some five years had to elapse before the legal process was complete. As a result, couples were more likely to stay married even if they weren’t entirely satisfied with their lot. Of course there were many other reasons. Women were far less independent. They tended to run the home, take care of the kids and left the career development to their husbands. The men were the ‘breadwinners’ in most families. There were no large supermarkets so shopping tended to be done more frequently and tasks like cooking, washing and general house cleaning took far longer than they do today, whilst childcare centres were nonexistent. The 1950s and 60s were the days when bread, milk and ice were delivered daily to most people’s houses. The ice, by the way, was used to keep food cool in ice chests; fridges were luxury items that many homes in the early 50s did without.

Whatever the reason, the divorce rate at the time of my family’s break up was very low. To emphasise just how low, I had only one friend in the whole of my teenage years whose parents were divorced. If I remember correctly, Bob Manning and I were the only kids in our year at Mosman Primary School who ‘came from broken homes’. It may sound incredible, but one bad memory I have of my schooldays is of a group of kids forming a circle around me in the primary school playground and chanting something like ‘David Murray’s parents are divorced’. I was about eight at the time, was new to the school and remember walking up to the nearest boy and punching him in the face. That act of course brought the wrath of the deputy principal down on me and I received four cuts of the cane. In spite of this incident, I enjoyed most of my schooldays, but more on that later.

Fitting into the local community was quite difficult for my mother. Many of the women were afraid she’d do a line for their husbands and as such tended to steer away from her. She, on the other hand, had far more pressing things on her mind. My grandfather fortunately provided a roof over our heads in the form of the house, but Mum needed to find work in order to put food on the table and provide the other essentials that make life bearable for a young family. In this regard she had a number of problems. With two young children to care for, the hours she could work were limited. To her great credit, she had a belief that she needed to be home of an afternoon in order to prevent my sister and I being unsupervised and thus ‘getting into trouble’ upon our return from school.

With no formal career training she decided that the only work which she was experienced at and which would provide her with a reasonable income, whilst at the same time enabling her to be around when my sister and I weren’t at school, was to clean, housekeep and cook for the richer element that lived in Mosman and adjoining suburbs. She was obviously good at what she did, as I can never remember her being without work. As time went by she concentrated more on cooking for and looking after the children of wealthier professional people, who were attracted to the Mosman area due to its proximity to the city. My father was supposed to pay maintenance and though he didn’t entirely neglect that responsibility, he tended to miss as many payments as he made.  

Soon after taking up residence in Myahgah Road, I enrolled at the local Marist Brothers Catholic school. Though my mother’s family were nominally members of the Church of England my father’s side were Roman Catholic and as I’d hitherto been attending a Catholic school, mum thought it best to continue in that vein.

In those days the Christian churches had quite a strong influence on the day-to-day lives of the general public. There was much animosity between the Catholics and the Protestants. Marriages between the two were often frowned upon and many romances were cut short because one of the parties was unwilling to convert to the other’s faith. The term ‘mixed marriages’ in those days applied to marriage between people of different religious faiths rather than to people of varying colour or race. After all, those were the days of the famous ‘White Australia Policy’. (A policy incidentally introduced and championed by the Australian Labor Party, the same party that would, at a much later time, introduce us to the concept of ‘multiculturalism’.) Various workplaces were said to favour employing workers of one faith over those of another. If I remember correctly the Forestry Commission had few if any Protestants working for them in the early 1960s.

As a student at a Catholic school, I and/or my parents were supposed to attend church regularly. When this didn’t happen, and in reality was never going to happen once the family break-up occurred, my teachers constantly put pressure on me to make the Sunday pilgrimage. So much so that I began having dreams which involved my spending time in Purgatory, a place they told me I’d have trouble avoiding if I continued missing Sunday Mass. When these dreams turned to nightmares, Mum pulled the plug so to speak and I enrolled in the local State-run primary school.

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