“I was born December 22 1952 on the very outskirts of Houston, Texas. My parents had lived in this tiny town called El Campo and my Mum had a Dr who did virtual home births in his surgery so I was born naturally in his clinic which was an old house in this small town. My birth certificate says El Campo which really is a dinky little nowhere town.
We lived on the outskirts of Houston until I was 11. My Dad was a Geo Physicist and he got work in Hawaii which didn’t eventuate. He was meant to be the head Geophysicist on the Mohole project which was a project to try and drill through the earths crust and the thinnest part of the crust was 200 miles off Maui so we moved to Maui in 1964 and lived there for 4 years. That was a very informative part of my life, 11 to 15, getting into everything in the multicultural melting pot of Maui.
We then ended up in LA and we lived in Hollywood so I went to Hollywood High School from ’68 to ’70 which was a full blown life explosion. The Vietnam War was happening, John Kennedy was shot up the road, there were riots and the whole acid revolution was in full force and then Dad got work in Phuket, Thailand.
We lived in Thailand from ’70 to ’72 and it was so beautiful. There was no tourism there at all then. I really absorbed the Thai culture and learnt to speak Thai fluently. I was young and absorbed it all.
My brother and I came to Australia because we were draft age. I’d turned 18 and I didn’t want to go home and get sent to war. We basically came here to work, get a job, put our noses down and save money. I was planning a world tour in my mind and then I got busted for pot in Albany. I’d worked really hard on building sites for 9 months and saved every penny. I had $1200 in the bank which was a lot then and they took $1000 off me in fines.
That all happened when the Aquarius Festival was on so I hitched all the way from in from Albany WA to Nimbin. That was when Gough Whitlam got in and the first day in office he ended the Vietnam war to Australia and he gave amnesty to all draft dodgers which technically I was. I wasn’t going to fight there, especially after living in South East Asia and getting to know what it was about up close.
I’ve been around these Northern Rivers parts now for the last 50 years. I was one of the first 10 people to move onto Tuntable after the festival. I didn’t stay there long back then. We used to call it the open air asylum. It was pretty crazy. I lived around that area for 12 years but after I married and had kids life was tough on the land.
I married a girl from Long Reef, Sydney. Her name was Denise but she was always known as Neecy. We had been friends through the whole hippy thing. She had a child, not to me and when that Liam was a year old, we got together. We were together for a wonderful 40 years. Before she died she worked in the Funeral industry here in Lismore for 25 years. She was one of the Celebrants who did all the oddball funerals. She changed the whole funeral attitude around here. She went that extra mile to make sure people and their families designed their own funerals exactly how they wanted. Neecy passed away 5 years ago in 2017 from cancer. She was only 67 and it was very sad. It knocked me about more than anything else in my life for a few years.
We had another 2 children together, a boy and a girl. Birralee is in Ocean Shores and Loui and Liam are in Brisbane. All of them were home births, Liam was born in Sydney and then Loui in a little flat in Lennox and Birralee in Nimbin with a wonderful midwife Gillian Delaney.
I moved to the North Coast in 1989. Neecy had got a small inheritance from her grandmother and found a bush block of 27 acres in Nimbin for $25k. We struggled for a few years, there was no real work and you couldn’t work from home back then so you were stuck between a rock and a hard place. We sold it for $50k four years later in 1989. This house came up on an acre in North Lismore for $45k and it was 100 years old back then. It was coming to pieces so over the last 34 years I have totally renovated the entire place. It was half this high so when I renovated I had the floods in mind because the ’74 flood had gone up to the eyeballs. I renovated in all hard wood and slabs. It’s all now designed for flood.
As luck would have we got that first grant when they raised all the houses and paid for it. About 36 of the lowest houses in North and South got raised. The State and the Federal Government at the time put in $2 each for every $1 the local council put in so it was 4 to 1. Our house was 2 metres off the ground and now it’s 4.5 metres and the last flood still came in way over my head upstairs.
I spent the flood night in my boat tied to my house and then to a tree watching the house go under. It was a slow flood to the floor and then once it started coming in, that huge downpour from out Nimbin way, it just rushed, really, really fast.
My neighbours have 2 little kids so they came over here the night before because my house is higher. We thought we’d all be safe. It was coming so fast up our legs. We thought about the attic but there’s nothing up there, just beams, spiders and filth and we had the 2 little kids with us. So my little trailer sailor boat had all 5 of us stuck in the cabin in the pouring rain. A boat came later and took them to the uni but I stayed. I knew I wouldn’t sleep up there and I wanted to be here watching my house.
As the water receded I spent 3 nights sleeping on my verandah. As luck would have it a camp mattress in the house had 2 doonas and 2 pillows and sheets on it. It floated so I ended up with a dry bed. I had a mozzie net in the boat and a little camping kit stove so I set that up on the verandah. I also keep a hose there so I was able to start hosing out the first 2 rooms in the house. The mud comes off easily if you can start straight away. No-one could reach me for 4 days but all these little miracles happened. My neighbours had emptied their fridge and when they left the food was left with me. There was tons of meat and a giant block of cheese, which I don’t eat too much of usually and I ended up giving it to boaties looking after people. My neighbour and I had tried to save my fridge by pulling everything out. I’d filled it the day before in readiness for flood. We put the fridge up on the table but it fell off and drowned but the full vegie drawer floated and never got a drop of mud in it. Most of my bulk food also survived in waterproof jars. I could have stayed here for a month.
Before the morning I got out of my boat and into my little kayak because I wanted to check my house out from all angles. I paddled around the back and the first thing I find floating is a 4 litre, unopened, new container. I picked it up and it says, ‘Industrial strength gurney cleaner’ I screamed out loud because…What!!! Another miracle gift. I paddled around to the front and the flood has left an umbrella I had neatly hooked on the verandah rail. It was like the flood said, you are going to need these 2 things. So many things happened like that.”
