The Big Bang Theory

Charles Wooley, 60 Mins

Something had triggered my seasonal alarm clock. The night was still, but intensely cold and dark and it brought vividly to mind one of childhood’s greatest delights. From the far reaches of lost innocence there was a distict whiff of kerosene in the air and I was back in time, half a century ago, in suburban Launceston, around the shortest day of the year.

Suddenly, it was once again the season of Tom Thumbs and Double Bungers, of Jack-jumpers, Sparklers, Roman candles, Catherine wheels, Fountains, Flowerpots and Star-bursts. And of course the glorious backyard centrepiece of this night of nights was the blazing bonfire. We mispronounced it ‘bomb-fire’ and then contracted it to ‘bombie’.

Nominally, the occasion was a celebration of our British connections and was called ‘Empire Day’. As England declined and the Empire became less imperial, it became ‘Commonwealth Day’. Back in the early sixties, we didn’t give a hoot what they called it. For us tiny pyromaniacs it was always ‘CRACKERNIGHT’.

Oh what a wonderful word and what a wonderful world!

The sun sank early, though for us it could never be early enough on that short but seemingly longest day. The Big Bang was nigh. It seemed as if the very air was explosive. The town held its collective breath, waiting for a spark to set the whole universe magnificently ablaze. As I raced back home from Jack Kellaway’s shop, clutching a bottle of fire lighting kerosene, ‘kero’, the first aromas of fire and gunpowder were already gathering in the darkness. In the distance early sporadic explosions were splitting the night. In retrospect my hometown had some of the sound and smell of a war zone, except that nobody got killed. Well not very often.

Like every kid I was desperate to open my bottle of ‘kero’ and light my ‘bombie’. My mates and I had spent every day of the last month building that magnificent towering pyramid. We dragged into the back garden, fallen branches, discarded Christmas trees, cardboard boxes, linoleum, carpets, old weatherboards and even some new ones scavenged from building sites. It was the great age of suburban nation building and so anything not nailed down went up in a crescendo of sparks into the night sky.

Since the end of the recent Chocolate Fest which Sunday School teachers obscurely called ‘Easter’ our whole lives had been a preparation for this wonderful moment. The old car tyres, donated by Bill at the Neptune service station, lay at the heart of the ‘bombie’. Which had grown so dramatically that even our wonderfully insouciant parents were starting to worry that it might now be too big. But not so very worried, because this was a glorious age, before seat belts and bike helmets, when kids were considered to be indestructible.

Step back a little to avoid being sucked into the explosion …

Pour the kerosene into the heart of the unlit bonfire. Step back a little to avoid being sucked into the explosion (we learned from experience rather than from our parents) and toss in a lighted Redhead (that’s a matchstick and not ‘Bluey’ from next door).

Whoosh! Within minutes our ‘bombie’ was a fabulous towering inferno with the tyres from the Neptune servo belching acrid black smoke from the heart of the incandescent blaze. The heat was so intense we couldn’t approach it. Red faced we cavorted at a distance. Multiply this scene by hundreds across my suburb and city, hundreds of thousands across the nation, and you will realize that I’m really talking about another planet where there once existed a wonderful and carefree world of incendiary paganism. In my heart I still miss it. And so will my kids when they read about it.

Then there was the extraordinary explosive power of those fireworks, which we had been amassing for months. We worshipped and fondled them, over and over until the gunpowder was leaking. I kept mine in a shoebox and would count them out in front of the open fire in the lounge room. One spark in that parallel universe would’ve changed everything. The bungers, small red sticks of dynamite with white flammable wicks came in strings of about twenty and in different sizes. Tiny Tom Thumbs that you could, if you were brave enough, explode between the tips of your fingers, through to massive ‘penny bungers’ which would take your hand off if you tried that same trick. Yes, to some extent, even I am now thinking “Where were their parents?” By today’s standards I guess we were lovingly neglected but we had much more fun.

The temptations were too great, not to let off a few explosives before the big night. Letterboxes were a favourite testing ground. Every house had one, but it was neighbourly to go to another street. They were all the same, square tin boxes with a narrow mouth, usually painted white and perched neatly on the fence by the front gate. The postman came twice a day, morning and afternoon, so we struck at night. A large penny bunger took little more than seven seconds to explode but by the time we heard the deep muffled ‘crrump’ our small heels had already vanished round the corner, leaving behind, we thought, a hilariously bloated, swollen smoking mailbox, its mouth agape as if in shock.

Skyrockets were launched from an empty milk bottle. Sometimes the impromptu Cape Canaveral fell over decanting the rocket at high speed in our direction. None of us were ever struck. ‘Light blue torch paper and retreat to safe distance’ was a packaging warning we sometimes ignored. If a wick failed a match was bravely applied to the top of the cracker. The explosion was often instantaneous. I remember deafness, temporary blindness and deadened hands, but nothing more serious than a few second degree burns. And we never told our parents.

Over the years, though, there must have been some casualties on the night because the Fun Police who stopped us riding in the back of the Holden ute and made us wear seat belts were presumably the very same authorities who also made us wear bike helmets, who took away our air guns and worst of all denied us our incendiary pleasures.

By today’s standards we enjoyed an apparently dangerously neglected childhood. Still I grew up to be a rational, if slightly cranky adult.

But the kid in me will never forgive those killjoys who silenced ‘Crackernight’ and extinguished the ‘bombie’.

First published in Mercury’s Tasweekend