Don Davey: my life

Don Davey My life … in response to Comment 7

Well V.W. not knowing whether you are young! old! are married! have children! work! or are on the dole! have a car, ride a bike! use public transport! and much more! to determine as to whether your statement is of consequence!

In my almost 70 years i find it at times hard to believe the changes that have taken place, from outside toilets that were emptied by what we called the “night men”, families huddled round an old bakelite radio listening to the serials of an evening as our entertainment and if we were lucky we got to sit up till 8.30 to hear the end of “courtship and marriage” or “Dossier on Demetrius”, then up at 6 to do my paper delivery, and no running hot water! the weekly bath taken in the same 6 or 7 inches of water that the rest of the family used with my young brother saying ha,ha, I just pissed in that !

My dad had an apple orchard in the Huon valley and after school each day ,until dark i had to hoe the weeds away from the trunks of the trees, then at spraying time I would come home often saturated with d.d.t, dieldren, (probably spelt wrong) but in the 60s it was called agent orange and it burnt like buggery.

The school was like a f——g concentration camp with male teachers who loved wielding a metre and a half long cane! and delighted in using same on our hands on cold frosty mornings and six of the best meant you could not write for several days.

Crossing the road ! everytime i saw a f——-g priest because they scared me shitless! after an episode on a school camp trip when he attempted to interfere with my mate “Tassie” and me, and i stabbed him in the hand with my kitchen knife then ran off only to be soundly beaten by my grandfather the next day for telling such lies about a “man of the cloth “whatever the f—k that was supposed to mean.

I could go on forever but i am so tired of those who say “remember the good old days of the fifties and sixties” perhaps if your family were rich it may have been!

However the young of today can thank those of my generation, because in the late fifties we said “ENOUGH” is bloody enough! and i believe we changed society by rebelling against such treatment! But then late 60s we had conscription into a most awful war, which in itself was horrific but no more so than the treatment that was handed down to returning soldiers “often” by the very ones he or she grew up with and who had been lucky enough to escape the lottery type organized conscription.

But I digress ! Of course we have too much! but why complain about it, the only ones that do so ,are those that can’t afford it ! and given the money “we all” would have it all.

Color tele, laptops, ipods, mobile phones, cars that damn near drive themselves! fly to melboune for 20—30 dollars or so. Christ ! a trip from Hobart to Launceston took a week to organise back then.

I reckon my generation have seen more changes than any gone before, because we are living longer, and i say, “Bring it on”