Vale Brian Whykes

At the start of all this madness I promised a Tasmanian Times that was about Tasmania more than anything else, and unashamedly biased to the people and geography of the island.

I humbly beg your forgiveness today as I break these rules to recount the wonderfulness of my late uncle, Brian Whykes.

Imagine the kind of person who was the jester of a medieval castle, one of the worlds loudest men, a swaggering goldfields entrepreneur, a doting grandfather, a town crier, and the quintessential eccentric uncle you can only dream about.

I don’t have to imagine too hard, for he was my uncle. Vale Brian Whykes, so larger than life that I’m going to spend a pointless hour or so trying to capture the essence of the great man. His giant lungs would probably find that funny.

You can probably try to zero in on any family member by going back to your earliest memory of them. In our case it would have been one of the immense family gatherings held by Nanna Whykes when she was still alive.

An ambitious cook and a big-hearted matriarch with a giant house to boot, she hosted Christmases and anniversaries and other special occasions that spilled out of the house at Tennis Street in Ballarat with an overflow of laughter, canapes and pavlova, seventies fads like fondue pots and vibrating belt machines, and of course myriad grandchildren weaving between the roadside poplars or filching soft drinks from Pa’s stash in the shed or bouncing on the trampoline – provided just for them – out back.

At one of these gatherings, in my stiff shorts and 1970s small boy haircut, I became aware of Brian. The big uncle who pretended he was the youngest. The bearded one. The one watching you out of the corner of his eye as he held court, saving up some observations to use later on. The uncle who’d grab you and reel you in and torture you with his beard just fun. And who all the same would pluck you from under some overbearing cousin when you’d had enough of being chased to death and provide sanctuary in those uncompromising arms. You could look up and his giant face would just be there, like a friendly gargoyle painted on your eyelids.

Brian’s place was a McMansion before they were even really cool, complete with The Castle poolroom and bar decades ahead of time. An overbuilt brick place out on the edge of town – that’s where Australians go to do these things – it in turn was the scene of a large family gathering where in nineteen-eighty-something I last saw my cousin Dean.

Many waters have flown since then, as rivers of tears now remind. Brian’s wife, my Auntie Pat, died while I was living in Italy in the early 2000s. His daughter Robin passed of leukemia a few years ago, shortly after appearing at my parents’ 80^th birthday celebration. The aforementioned Dean, Brian’s nephew and indeed the cousin I knew the least and perhaps am most curious about, died last year in Papua New Guinea, possibly of COVID-19. The cold certainty of death brings its own strange uncertainty.

Always I was somewhere else. Forget Sunday, modern life always finds you too far away. And again, predictably, this time COVID restrictions alone will dictate the numbers at the funeral. Even if I could travel. Even if I could then return to this island state with its borders that crash down like a curtain of iron rain midway over Bass Strait.

But why think of the man in death rather than in life?

Forward a few years from the family mayhem,and my sister Carolyn and I are donning ‘historical’ clothes to romp around Sovereign Hill historical park in Ballarat. Sure, I never found much actual gold in that little panning trap they had set up but gold for young boys is a stage in which to play and roam! Up the mullock heap! In and out of the Confectioners to steal a cherry humbug! And thank you sir, as if I were a calico tent Oliver Twist deserving of the charity, or at least a cameo in Ye Olde Photo Studio looking suitably lost and poor and miserable, the way only pretend 1850s kids could.

Sovereign Hill had a certain kind of playfulness that was pure Brian. It also had integrity, and still does, based on its layout around a former working mine and indeed the slab hut architectural premises of goldfields Ballarat. And why? Because my Uncle Brian, historian and then Managing Director, had made it so.

Not everyone gets to gestate the birth of landmark theme parks. Move over Walt Disney, you just press them out of a cookie cutter. But my uncle took mad ideas from the wrong end of the pub and turned them into realities. Thus his next project, an absolute haymaker from nowhere: Keith Ryall wanted to build Australia’s first real castle.

You can read about young Keith’s fascination with things medieval that led him to build a castle. He didn’t need builders, or even someone to show him how to fabricate artisan swords for mock battle on the plains of Buninyong. What he needed was a crafty showman for the whole, as the castle became a showpiece for all the revived artisanry to be stuffed into the site and spiced up with reckless young men keen to prove their mettle at real jousting.

Brian was that man, as I found out on an upper primary (Healesville) school camp to Ballarat in my Year 6. “We’re going to Ballarat?” I said to my teachers as the news hit of that year’s camp destination. “Let me get in touch with my uncle, he’ll set up some stuff for us.”

And so I wrote, and so he did, and thus it was that on one bleakish day this side of the B-‘rat that there I was, with a giant wooden paddle in hand, obliged to perform the ceremony of beating the bejaysus out of some poor(ly paid actor) sod, ostensibly for some offence against King Keith.

Brian appeared suddenly out of nowhere, dressed in a flouncy tunic thingy we might these days describe as K-Mart Blackadder, and demanded I serve justice.

“So we apply the whack-er to the whack-ee,” roared Brian to an appreciative crowd of Healesville schoolkids, as I went through the motions, “and wackoooo!” Applause.

But the wretch was not suitably punished and I was thereupon called to hang him.

It was cold. I was 10 or so, just me and my brown parka against the world. You can do this. It wasn’t that many 10-year-olds get called upon to pull the lever that hangs from the gallows the delinquents, the trashpeeps, the misfits and crooks and petty crims, even in the freewheelin’ seventies.

Well I pulled the crashbangwallop and the patsy was hanged, cut down, dumped in a barrow and wheeled away. Mysteriously, he was reincarned as a gate attendant about 15 minutes. Ah, but by then I was a hero with my mates, hang ’em high Al.

Fair to say that my encounters with Brian were mostly like this: weird, fleeting, and not easily describable.

Not that long after Nanna Whykes died, of cancer, after a period of illness. I remember the brothers there at the funeral, and her husband my wonderful Granpa Ernie, all pall-bearers at the points of the coffin and all wearing different versions of the same Whykes face.

I remember visiting Ballarat with my then wife Umi en route to The Grampians, and having dinner in a suburban motel where Brian grilled me on my prior work in a casino, lest his grand theory of How To Win At Blackjack might actually work. I don’t think it ever did, though he wore getting-banned-for-trying as a badge of banner.

He slipped in and out of robes and roles effortlessly. There was that time a sudden and nasty hailstorm hit Ballarat, and some journalist from Melbourne got in touch with Brian, a go-to town celebrity after all, wanting to know if he had any photographs of the deluge. Brian thought fast on his feet. “No, but I put some in the freezer. Send a photographer up and they can do a photo of me holding them.” By time the photographer arrived he’d taken some ice blocks, rolled them in milk and frost and re-frozen them, and was ready to pose with ‘golf-ball sized hailstones such as you’ve never seen before’.

I recall a time when I expressed interest in his role as town crier, and he came all the way to Healesville on a blistering summer’s day to participate in some sultry street event. Me, sweaty and exhausted after a day at B-grade cricket. Brian expiring from thirst. He showed me how to properly ring the hand-bell and howl ‘O ye, o ye!’ to stir the very dead.

‘O ye! O ye!’ Where are you now Brian, my imperfect uncle of lumps and bumps and jokes and funny looks and why did it end this way?

There was that time my parents celebrated their 50^th wedding anniversary. Schmick! The crusty relatives and the young ones there, in a venue conjured by cousin Sue in downtown Melbourne.

My sister Carolyn was going on in schoolteacherese about what model parents mum (Wilma) and dad (Ion) had been, both for example being lifelong teetotallers.

“Excuse me,” interjected Brian from the back of the room. “I’m sure Ion once ate a port-wine jelly after dinner.”

The observation squirrelled away for years, the showman ready for its delivery when called for.

Brian’s peak had been a few years earlier, when he travelled to England for the World’s Loudest Man competition. By his own reports, he finished third. Not bad, but I find it difficult to believe that he was not the loudest in the world if not the known universe and that the assessment was somehow faulty.

Behind the glamour of the loud Town Crier was the mundane reality, this:

The Golden Plains Miner 21st February, 2013 page 11 had a smiling photograph, taken outside the Buninyong Post Office, of Roland Rocchiccioli, Chief Selector of the XI’s, Mark Yates, a local resident formerly from Cumbria and local Ballarat town crier Brian Whykes with the box of marmalade ready to be posted to Cumbria. The box sported a metre high boxing kangaroo with joey, both wrapped up with a fine wool scarf to keep off the winter chill in England. It is stated that the Australian XI will be met at the Cumbrian Post Office by Paddington Bear. Proceeds from the entry fees have been donated to Ballarat Home Hospice Care. – Buninyong and District Comnmunity News, 2013.

Uncle Brian was a living definition of generosity. When his son Peter wanted to buy a motorbike as his first vehicle, Brian offered to stump up extra money so he could afford a car which would be safer for an inexperienced driver. Peter said no anyway, being obsessed with motorbikes, but it was the thought that counted.

So vale Brian, purveyor of marmalade(s), servant of your town and city and district, ambassador of your history, pillar of your family and your big extended family who are now staring absently into this Ballarat-shaped hole in our hearts.

For you the freedom of no more dialysis – your own decision, and we respect – and perhaps a dizzying ascent to the realms in which your many achievements will long be trumpeted by angels, or at least the poor sods in the right kinds of costumes.

I loved you so much. All I have now is words. And all I want to do now is bury my face into that beard again, and see a friendly gargoyle on my eyelids. Tonight I dream to make it happen.

Alan

Alan Whykes is Chief Editor of Tasmanian Times, and proud to be a nephew of Brian Whykes.

Many thanks to my wife Monica for her support. Deepest condolences to surviving children Peter, Mandy and all Brian’s in-laws, grandchildren and relatives.