It was getting around to that time of the year again, the annual "GOOD BASTARDS DAY". A day of celebration for all the Good Bastards who could be mustered. It focused around the Melbourne Cup each year and was achieving a bigger turnout as each year revealed an even more fantastic day than the year before. They all came, from near and far, to Hokitika's leading hotel, the Southland. Hyndsie travelled down from Auckland, Kerbs left his nest on the shores of Lake Taupo to make the yearly sojourn. There were folk from Christchurch, Nelson and a contingent that came up from South Westland. The locals made up the main numbers, from the young through to the two oldest living Good Bastards, Bill Condon, and Phil Duffy, both well into their eighties. Mary Teen, previously publican of this grand establishment and now in her eighties, still graciously attended each year, and we all loved to see this endearing old lady who had, to a certain extent, shared the history of the Good Bastards.

Gary Hutchison, Hutch, had been on my case to get the invitations done. "Where's those bloody invitations? I've got people lined up from all around the country to come to this thing and I need the invitations, you useless bastard." Such are the terms of affection among affable West Coasters.

"I can’t find the photo that I want to use on them," I told him.

"Doesn’t matter, just get the bastards will you."

It wasn’t that you needed an invitation to be there, in actual fact they weren’t actually invitations. They comprised small colourful tongue in cheek flyers that were aimed at promoting the event.

I had an appropriate photo of a good bastard from last year that was ideal, but somehow it had slipped into the Sweeney Triangle, something akin to the Bermuda Triangle which claims everything from single socks to addresses and important bits of paper.

Good Bastard Success Tip: Acknowledge there is a Sweeney type Bermuda Triangle in all of our lives and don’t get stressed about it. Cop it sweet and live without the bloody thing that disappears into it until it turns up, which it may never do. Most stress is a matter of choice when you get down to it. It kills, makes you crook and your life forlorn with worry. Stuff it, don’t get bogged down with that sort of thing. All that happens is that you become a miserable bastard. Look for the alternative. It’s always there.

I finally had to settle on a photo of my old mate Paul Teen with his butt hanging over the bow of his yacht having his morning constitutional. Gawd would he go crook when he saw it. Paul was sailing his way to Dubai on the Nora J to meet up with his lovely wife Jane, who has a teaching post there. The bastard was probably lying back enjoying life, listening to Pat Boone singing Moon River as he dodged the turds floating around in the Strait of Malacca.

This was pay back, I rationalised, for the many things he’d done to me over the years. Like the day he, and others, stripped me naked in the lounge bar of their family’s hotel about 25 years ago when the footy club had the contract to paint the Wiataha School about 50 kilometres south. We’d finished the job and had a celebration at the half dozen or so pubs between there and Hokitika. It was a gloriously hot day and we were all in shorts and at that stage, pissed as chooks.

Paul decided to embarrass me on our return to the Southland Hotel, by ripping my daks off in front of everyone. His mother, Mary Teen, was behind the bar and she went right off. Especially when I got up off the floor, calmly sauntered up to the bar and picked up my beer. When she realised I wasn’t putting the daks back on she turned her attention to Paul. A fearless man in all other circumstances except when confronted with the full wrath of either of two people, his wife or his mother, normally very placid people, but Paul could test them.

Paul, now under heavy artillery fire from Mary, started to try and get me to put my strides back on, but at this stage they were hanging off the rafters. "Go and get stuffed", I told him, starting to enjoy what had previously been an embarrassing moment but now in some strange way I was gaining the upper hand. Mary’s then back on my case as well as Paul’s. "Pat Sweeney, put those bloody pants back on!" she demanded, a look of sheer frustration starting to come to her eyes. She didn’t know the shorts were hanging off the rafters.

"I never took them off Mary, blame Paul."

Mary was back on Paul’s case. Meanwhile the bar was half-full of drunken footy-playing painters and a few guests trying to enjoy a quiet Saturday evening drink. Hughie Little was there, he must have been pissed because he had the giggles. Roo and Dave Curtain and Paul Lucas arrived covered in paint, I think they had a paint fight with Bill Morris, (Big Louie,) who didn’t look much better. There were Davidsons by the dozen. A car pulled up on the footpath and out rolled Murray Ellis, Peter Higginbottom, John Davie, Bill Cropper, Malc Paterson and Kevin Ford, all pissed to beat the band and roaring. Peter Teen had been responsible for heaving my shorts onto the rafters and seemed quite proud of the fact. All were there, with more of the team arriving all the time. Honk Freitas, the world’s greatest coach, having coached the Saint Mary’s juniors through to over a hundred straight wins, somewhere along the way had come across these bloody great white shoes that were about six sizes too big for him. He looked a real wag as he clopped all over the place.

One of the older ladies who worked at the hotel came around the bar to have a look at my old boy. It had been a while since she’d seen one she said. Paul’s on his knees at this stage, I’m not sure if he was hiding from Mary or begging me. I’ll take the latter. Finally I consented to put on a pair of Paul’s shorts which Mary had located hurriedly.

She’d spotted the rafter decorations and realised that there was no show of me getting dressed as long as there were no shorts to get dressed into. The shorts stayed up in the rafters for several months.

Good Bastard Success tip: When mates de-dak you in the pub in front of every bastard, take photos of them crapping over the bow of their yacht and publish them, so that the rest of the world can see them in their most ars-tistic position.

About two years later when I was selling farms in Canterbury I turned up to list a property and the owner, Trevor Wilson, thought he knew me but couldn’t remember where from. Then he suddenly remembers. "You were the bloke that cavorted naked in front of me and my wife at the Southland Hotel a couple of years ago." I wanted to disappear into the ground. That bloody Paul, he’s living over in Australia , but he’s here haunting me, the bastard, he is having the last laugh on this one, I thought at the time. The vendor saw how embarrassed I was and let me squirm for a while before having a laugh and saying, "Just sell the bloody farm and I’II forget I even saw you."

The invitations Hutch wanted were finally sent out with a new improved program for the current year’s event. We had included the "Good Bastards Golf Classic", an Ambrose tournament that cost twenty bucks per head with the pool being split into three cash prizes which must be wagered on the Melbourne Cup. It was to be played over thirteen holes on the morning of the Good Bastards Day.

I’d contacted Leo McIntyre to organise it and he’d done nothing. Grumpy bastard Leo at times, a trait that endeared many people to him once you learned how to deal with it. So I gave the job to Hutch to do, Hutch passed the ball to Ian McMillan, Noot. Noot did most of the work organising prizes and stuff, then passed the ball to Leo who still did stuff all.

It didn’t matter, we still wanted him along to tone down all the happiness, sort of balance things out a bit.

You talk to Leo and you would swear you were talking to Joe Cocker. Great voice. Can’t sing, well, that depends on how pissed he is.

Good Bastard Success Tip: Don’t rely on bloody Leo. He might well be the best chemist in the world, but don’t give him other stuff to do. Well, having said that, you can rely on him for one thing, you can rely on him giving you a bloody good argument on any matter whatsoever, whether either of you know anything about it or not. You will enjoy the debate, which you will probably lose. You will also enjoy Leo, because as well as being a useless bastard he is also a helluva likable bastard.

Hutch came up with the idea that we should also have a Green Jacket for the winner, and Noot had one in his closet. They had it embroidered with "Good Bastards Golf Classic 2000"

The event also comprised a few other activities which had eventually seen us turn it into a week-long happening. This included a stint of whitebaiting along with some other adventurous pastimes.

It sort of grew its own path since 1996 when Hyndsie, Kerbs and I lined up to go whitebaiting down the Whataroa River with another Good Bastard, Pat Condon. Pat and I had gone to primary school together. He went away to Saint Bede’s when he was twelve or thirteen and I went to work in the Waiho sawmill. Not quite straight to the mill but near enough.

I was supposed to go to Saint Bede’s as well, but my dad had died in the November of my last year in primary school. Luckily, I was able to convince my mother to not go down the boarding school track and to enroll me with the Correspondence School Clifton Terrace Wellington. The first plan was for me to go to the Grey Tech in Greymouth. They had a co-ed hostel for country students to board in. That was the initial plan, then it came out that there was a fair bit of hanky panky going on between the boys’ and girls’ dormitories and it reached the papers. "Bloody good stuff," I thought. "No bloody way!" Mum said, which I didn’t think was very sporting of her. Sex in those days was something your parents did under the blankets with their clothes on. That’s what Pat Condon reckoned anyway.

Boarding with priests held no appeal for me largely due to a bad experience I had had with an old, alleged paedophile of a priest called Doc. He’d bailed me up one day and tried to have his way with me when I was staying in Hokitika at my Grandfather’s home as a youth. He lured me into his lounge room at the back of the presbytery as I was walking past one day. Somehow I got out of his iron-like clutches and his rubbing up against me. I kneed him in the nuts and broke away from his heavy breathing, and bolted out the door like a possum that had just escaped from a sack.

I was too embarrassed to mention the degradation of the experience to anyone for years. Now over a beer telling the story, many of the Catholic boys of that era had a similar story to tell about him. He was higher than a priest having a Doctorate in Divinity or some such thing. This only served to make his actions even more disgraceful and disgusting given his position in the community and what he represented. The church makes this big stand about gays and how ungodly homosexuality is, yet evidence keeps emerging that paedophiles and homosexuals have been rife in the church for years. Procedures have had to be developed to hide the guilty parties and protect them from their own parishioners. So much for honesty. What’s the difference between aiding and abetting a paedophile and being one? Until the church comes out in the open and admits there is a problem, its bound to continue; that’s a universal law, and there’s not much we can do about it.

Maybe the old Doc fooled his parishioners and his church right through his lifetime, but the youth he coerced knew different, albeit they were too frightened and embarrassed to say anything about this so-called reverent man.

The correspondence thing was anything but a joyful experience for me. This wasn’t helped by the fact that our neighbour’s daughter was also on correspondence, having started at the same time. She was getting all these good reports, and if you listened to her mother she was the star of the show. I was lucky to get in the arena at all, just having the equivalent job of tidying up after the elephants in the ring after they dropped their do do’s. Janice Warburton was a good friend but her diligence was doing my case no good at all.

My folks, now just my Mum, had the tearooms and store; a restaurant and general store in today’s terms. It was situated at Franz Josef Glacier, a burgeoning tourist resort on the west coast of the South Island. Mum was busy running the business from about 8 in the morning until 9 at night, 7 days a week. This was great for a young larrikin like me as it gave an immense amount of freedom to roam the hills and rivers and create all sorts of adventurous pastimes, some real, most imagined in my young highly creative mind.

When Mum wanted a break, even if it was to go away for a week, she would shut up shop and put the key under the mat at the front door, and any of the locals who wanted anything went in and helped themselves and put the money in the till. Can’t imagine that happening today.

Good Bastards Success Tip: Don’t leave the key under the mat these days, as the days of peaceful dignity and honesty have long since passed and been replaced by a breed of bastard that often defies description, one who would flog the key hole out of the door if they had half a chance.

With Mum being so busy with the shop it didn’t take me long to work out a system that would combat the diligence of Janice Warburton.

Actually Janice unwittingly put me on to the plan. She told me what a great library the Correspondence School Clifton Terrace Wellington had. (The correspondence school had a radio program every morning at 9.30 and every time they said Correspondence School it was followed by Clifton Terrace, Wellington. That full address, maybe because of the catholic guilt, was indelibly imprinted into my brain as the name of the school). She told me also about the various clubs within its system. I promptly sought out what was available and joined the photo club as I had a Kodak Box Brownie Series II, a birthday gift from my parents. I also had all the gear to do my own developing and printing of the films. This had been purchased from money earned trapping possums. I needed something to relieve the boredom as I was bogged to well above the axles on the bloody correspondence school work. The library was excellent, with a great array of adventure stories and books on exotic places. The library started getting a constant flow of requests for great books. I had a fascination for books, something that is becoming a major part of my life in more ways than one, as life steadily progresses in its relentless countdown to wherever the Dickens it is that I am heading.

I needed something to alleviate the boredom as I sure wasn’t doing the schoolwork. The lessons came in green canvas, envelope-type bags and so did the books from the library and the photo club. I use to call these "Those bloody green bags."

One of my daily chores was to collect the mail from the Post Office about a hundred yards down the road. This chore was to prove a vital factor in my ability to get through the next two years without having to do very much of the school work from the Correspondence School Clifton Terrace Wellington.

Mum knew that all the lessons came in these bloody green bags, so for the duration I was probably the number one patron of the library and a diligent member of the Photo Club. I even had a photo published in the annual magazine of the school. It was awarded third place. I never even realised the competition existed until Janice came running over to our place with her copy of the publication at the end of the first year, excited that I had gained this recognition. My copy had also arrived the day before, and had been jettisoned down the long drop dunny, as did all things which looked remotely like official mail from the Correspondence School Clifton Terrace Wellington. More on that shortly.

The problem was it wasn’t my photo. Janice’s father Ralph Warburton was a photographer; he used to take photos of the tourists who climbed the Franz Glacier and

sell the finished product to them on their return. He also had postcards of scenes around the area.

I thought that if I took the same photos from the same locations with my Box Brownie they would come out the same. Alas they didn’t. Nothing like it in fact. The Box Brownie may have been an icon of a camera in its day, but it was no match for the flash gear of Ralph Warburton.

So when the club wanted a photo of a bridge, seeing that mine were no good I sent one of Ralph’s. The bloody thing got third in the ‘Best Overall Photo for the Year’.

Of course I never told Ralph, I thought he would be highly pissed off at being beaten by the two kids who had got first and second.

Good Bastards Success Tip: Don’t trust any other bastard with your Photos.

After a while letters started arriving from the teachers in charge of my lessons. The silly buggers put Correspondence School Clifton Terrace Wellington on all of the letters, and of course it was my chore to collect the mail.

Weeeeeeell, Mum never got to see them, did she?

In fact the first shitty letter that came, I opened, and froze at the implications contained therein. These people had the audacity to tell Mum off for my not doing the lessons. "How bright are they?" I thought, first they don’t try and disguise the letters to get past me, and second they are blaming Mum for the fact that I haven’t done the lessons. It had nothing to do with her. As far as I was concerned this was my domain and if I wasn’t doing the lessons it definitely wasn’t her fault. I was working hard on NOT doing them. "Geez, they are dumb bastards and I’m supposed to learn from them."

I couldn’t show her this letter so off to the lavatory went letter and I. Only one of us came out.

In those days we had no flush toilets, just a deep hole with an outhouse built over the top - thus the name, long drop.

The letter was destined to be filed forever more in the long-drop. Only I wasn’t content with just screwing it up and throwing it down the hole. I was going to make doubly sure it was never read by setting fire to it and sending it to its shitty grave.

Good Bastards Success Tip: Don’t let any other bastard collect your mail.

Unbeknownst to me, these long-drop toilets harbour a lot of gases from the fermentation of their payload. So when I lit the offending letter and dropped it down the hole…………

Whoooooooooorrrrrrrrrrrrooooooommmmmmpth. The gas exploded, flames were shooting out the sitting hole and the toilet paper was catching fire. It was actually a lesson in chemistry, one that Correspondence School Clifton Terrace Wellington had not written into their curriculum.

As bad luck would have it, Mum was outside putting out some washing, and she spotted the smoke and heard the noise. She came charging down to the dunny to see what the problem was, only to be met by me with a red face and singed hair and no eyebrows. "What on earth are you doing Pat?" she demanded. "I was just seeing what would happen if I threw a match down the hole Mum," I explained sheepishly. I immediately had this image of the dreaded letter having been blown out of the hole and landing partly burned at our very feet and still readable. Fortunately the fire subsided as quickly as it began

with no damage other than my singed hair, red face and guilty conscience. She immediately chastised me for my stupidity which I took meekly as my just punishment, keeping a sharp eye out for the charred letter falling from the sky. Thankfully it never eventuated.

Good Bastards Success tip: If evidence is going to get you in the shit, don’t light it and put it down the toilet, instead, put it down there by eating it first. Make sure it is absolutely destroyed by using your own personal digestive shredder. Not recommended for big documents and books.

The toilet and I had a bit of history. Dad had given me the job of digging the hole a year or so earlier. He had had an operation on his arm for bone cancer and the doctor thought that they would have to amputate his arm. The doctor was Mr Black at the Westland Hospital, a brilliant orthopaedic surgeon. He managed to save Dad’s arm although he had to remove about four inches of bone. This left dad with very little practical use from it, although he made a lot of progress and eventually was able to use it for simple things like holding eating utensils and later was also able to do some shovelling when he went black sanding.

It was this incapacitation that led him to make the proposition to me about digging the hole. He was going to Christchurch to get some radium treatment or something similar and wanted me to carry out the job while he was away.

The deal was that he would pay me two shillings and sixpence for the first foot, then five shillings for the second one, ten shillings for the third, doubling the payment at each foot.

Off he went to Christchurch for the treatment over some reasonable period of time and into the task of the big dig I launched myself. It wasn’t that easy; after about the first foot I hit a big rock and the job nearly conked out there. I did the sums on the task and figured there was the greater part of a new bike in this deal. So I set about belting this rock with a sledgehammer and bit by bit I broke it down. It was a schist rock and not nearly as hard as granite. It took a while but slowly and surely I removed the bloody rock.

Each day after school I would be out there digging. Mum thought it was great as I was not getting into mischief or terrorizing the village. Soon I was down two feet, seven shillings and sixpence in the kick, then three feet and it was seventeen shillings and sixpence.

Once I was through to four feet I had one pound seventeen and six and while the task was getting harder the money was getting much better. I had to barrow the pile of dirt away to make room for the next lot of dirt. This bit of it was a pain in the arse.

Then at five feet I had notched up three pound seventeen and six. I needed a ladder to get in and out of the hole as it was crumbling in otherwise. I had to also make a sort of jib arrangement with a pulley and a rope to bucket the dirt out. It was quite an ingenious arrangement that took me about three variations to get right. The first couple were too slow and I had to get out each time and empty the bucket.

I used to love making things and the more imagination necessary, the better it was. I had heaps of pulleys and rope as I was always making flying foxes and winches and the like in the bush behind our home. The finished apparatus was styled on a loading spar that the

Giles brothers had set up at McDonald’s Creek where they loaded logs they had pulled from some bush that we owned.

I would pull the bucket up to above ground level then there was another rope that pulled the bucket to one side, then a heavy string was attached to the bottom then threaded through a pulley on the handle so that I could empty the bucket.

Emmett Clark came over and told me how impressed he was with the whole apparatus. Man that made me feel good. Mum was telling me how great I was to do the job so well. She said Dad would be very pleased.

Once I hit six feet I had made four pounds or eighty shillings for digging just one particular foot. My total booty was seven pounds seventeen and six. I sure was getting rich at this digging business. Originally I had the goal of being a carpenter like Jesus Christ who seemed to be on a good thing, but maybe this was a better caper. There must be heaps of people who would want a dunny hole dug.

I finally hit the seven foot mark after having to build another ladder as the first one was now too short. Dad turned up home from Christchurch in a new car. Well it wasn’t a new car, just new for us. It was a 1948 Austin Eight, a beautiful little car and by far the best that our family had ever owned. I copped a bit of crap at school about it; to the other kids it was an old bomb, as their folks had new cars, but it didn’t worry me two hoots. We had a car with wind up windows and a starter. It even had a key. The Model A had none of those. I used to sit in it for hours and get so hoarse from mimicking the motor I could hardly speak, and I’d imagine I was driving it everywhere. Dad was a gold miner and had a heap of gold to sell and had bought presents for us all. Gold in those days was only worth twelve pound ten an ounce and was very static in its price.

Dad received the biggest surprise when I took him out and showed him the seven foot deep dunny hole. He nearly fell in it. The seventh foot was worth eight pounds to me, or a hundred and sixty shillings. He owed me fifteen pounds seventeen and six. He told me he thought it was deep enough. I was a bit disappointed with this, as with the money I was on I was prepared to dig right through to China. He paid me the money and I was soon riding around on a new bike.

Good Bastards Success Tip: Incentive contracts, the greatest things for the worker to have in the free enterprise system. Sadly the unions don’t think so. That’s why unions are slowly disappearing and people negotiate their own destinies.

With the flow of bags coming and going, Mum was happy to think that the school work was getting done. An opportunity arose where I had to convince her that I could do both the school work and hold down a job three days a week.

Peter King, our next door neighbour was the National Park ranger. A fine man who had a big bum. I knew that, as he was a keen gardener and I would climb a tree to my secret lookout in the bush behind his garden. He would often be stooped over weeding his plants with this big bum sticking up in the air. I was about nine or ten at the time.

My brother John, who was at Saint Bede’s College in those days getting taught by the priests, had a Model One Daisy air rifle. Peter King’s big bum bending over was too good a target not to take a shot at. Down the tree I went to pinch John’s gun from where he had it hidden up behind the hot water cylinder. I had my own supply of slugs which I’d bought from Jack Pegly’s Westland Sports Depot in Hokitika ninety miles away, with my possum token money. Thankfully it was a Model One air rifle so it wasn’t very loud or powerful.

I took careful aim at Peter King’s big bum and bingo hit it right on target. He abruptly stood up, looked around and brushed his backside and then returned to the business of weeding. Over the years I must have taken about a half a dozen pot shots at Peter’s backside and fortunately never got caught, caused him any harm nor did he ever figure out what was going on. I knew the slugs wouldn’t hurt as I couldn’t even kill a blackbird at close range with the darned thing. Don’t get me wrong here, Peter King was a real Good Bastard and a asset to the district.

Good Bastards Success tip: Don’t point your bum at the bush when you’re weeding the garden.

So when Peter offered me the job three days a week on the National Park as his assistant it was initially with a large degree of hidden guilt and remorse that I accepted and with Mum’s eventual blessing. She probably figured I was better off out of the house and shop and not pinching ice creams and sweets all day long. When I served in the shop I had this little thing I used to say. We sold ice creams in the cone that cost either fourpence or sevenpence. When someone asked for a fourpenny one I would say. "I make a great sevenpenny one, would you like one of those?" Invariably they would say yes, a bit like the attendant at MacDonald’s asking. "Do you want any drinks with that?" I think they call it up-selling. My motives weren’t to up-sell, I figured if I could sell more sevenpenny ones it would compensate for those I was flogging. The Catholic guilt showing through once again.

The National Park paid me twenty three shillings a day, which I spent on comics, extra bits for my bike and a .22 rifle. I couldn’t even think about taking pot shots at Peter’s bum with the latter, without my vivid imagination running riot and the bullet going in through his bum and up to heart and killing him. I would be charged with murder and would rot in jail for the rest of my natural life. Boy, was I lucky that brother John only had a Model One daisy air rifle.

Good Bastards Success tip: Don’t hide your air rifle because your little brother will find it before the bus to Saint Bede’s is out of sight.

Two doors up from our shop was the mill house. It was where the single men from the local sawmill lived. They were all my heroes, Leo and John Mumford, Licka Leech, Lou Gromulski, Tim Wallace, Adrian Wallace, Charley Mc Ilwain and Wally Bachelor.

Of those my greatest hero was Wally Bachelor, a tougher man had seldom come out of the area. One day he cut off a finger or two in a chain saw accident and whoever it was that was taking him through to the Greymouth Hospital 115 miles north of Franz wasn’t driving fast enough, so Wally ordered them out from behind the wheel and took over the driving himself, bleeding hand, loose fingers and all.

The story goes that Wally was felling trees up the first of the Fox Hills and the chain broke and wrapped around his hand. They took him down to the first farm which was owned by the Miltons. They were fantastic people, Pat and Gary and their four children. Pat Milton used to be a Sister at the hospital and was the local port of call for many a wounded soldier. She was looking at Wally’s hand with a finger hanging by a thin piece of skin, and remarked it was likely beyond saving. Wally promptly wrenched it off and threw to a nearby dog to eat.

Wally and his brother Fred had the contract to supply the mill with logs, normally a five man crew would be required to do the work; a winch driver, a faller, a wedger, a snigger, and a whistle boy. The two Bachelor brothers did it all by themselves. Not only that, they would flood the mill with logs and then take a week off while we caught up. They made massive money for their endeavours.

On these occasions Wally would head to town on a drinking binge. Cashed up he would buy a suit and get a rental car. The brothers would turn up when we were down to our last log and piss us all off as we had all worked our arses off to get through the logs and have a day or two doing nothing waiting for them to return.

Wally would come to work in the suit, he wouldn’t take it off since he bought it and it would be his work clothes until it was completely knackered and then some.

Wally looked quite unusual in the pub with the tattered and torn suit, a grubby white shirt and no tie. He even wore the flash square-toed shoes to work. Everyone used to have a laugh about this behind Wally’s back. I saw it differently; I always felt good when I was dressed up and so I figured Wally did also. With mill and bush work being basically boring, he at least had found some way of lightening up his day.

Good Bastards Success Tip: Work your arse off, earn heaps and spend your money the way you want and stuff what every other bastard thinks. If they want to make rules, let them make them for themselves, the Good Bastards make their own.

Some of the men were critical of Wally earning all this money and squandering it. Jealous I guess. Wally always treated me as a man, which put him on the highest pedestal. I was envious and had the greatest admiration for the two brothers’ ability to earn. What they did with it, once they received it, was the whole reason why they worked so hard in the first place. I voiced this opinion in the smoko room at the mill and promptly was told to shut up, an order which I ignored. I faced a massive task of debate. A thirteen year old up against six men of the world. This debate went on for a few days at smoko and lunchtime, and if nothing else, it sure sharpened my swearing and cussing skills which were undergoing a fast-track process in any event. What was happening, which I couldn’t see, was that the men were baiting me and using my innocent reactions for sport. They told me I was gullible and I believed them. At some point they tired of it but I would have none of that and kept up the defence case for Wally. All that did was earn me a "Greasing of my Gonads". Now there is a humbling experience if ever there was one. I took the medicine as best I could, fighting back the tears, determined not to break down and quietly resolving that I would get my own back. The chief perpetrator of the incident was Leo Mumford, one of the boss’s sons. He and I had a long running battle of playing tricks on one another.

In one example of this Leo asked me to go down to the mill workshop and ask Lou the mechanic for a long wait. The inference was on the word wait to be interpreted as weight. The idea was that Lou would leave me waiting around for a while and in so doing humiliate me a bit more. I figured out what they were up to, and went down behind the truck shed, lay down in the sun and had a sleep for about two hours. Meanwhile without me there to carry out my duties as a docker, cutting the rough ends off the timber and classing it, the mill clogged up. Leo was looking everywhere for me, and finally had to the docking himself to clear the backlog and get the mill producing again. He thought I had gone home.

I came out of hibernation at lunch time and Leo blasted hell out of me for disappearing. "I only did what you asked," I replied. The rest of the men laughed and supported me. I felt good over my little win and Leo chose future tricks with a little more care. I learnt much later that Herb Findlay gave him a word of warning to stay off my case. Herb was a big gentle giant. Someone you could liken to "Big John" from the song by Johnny Cash of the same name. Someone told me that Leo went on to be a cop, an appropriate sort of a job for his personality.

Good Bastards Success tip: When the boss’s son instigates the greasing of your balls, something good will come out of it. At the end of it all he is still only the boss’s son.

Lou had a little speedboat and in the summer, after work, they would all head out to Lake Mapourika to go water skiing with me tagging along. Wally was the champ, he was the only one who had mastered the single ski.

Then one day out at the lake a big boat turned up from Christchurch, it was a gigantic skiff and had a massive Mercury Outboard motor. They had a bloke who could water ski bare foot. It was no match for Lou’s boat, which had a Ford ten side valve engine and would only do about thirty miles an hour on a good day down hill and three blokes pushing. Wally wasn’t about to be beaten by this Canterbury bastard with the bare feet. He promptly tied the ski rope around his neck lit up a smoke and skied around the other boat with his arms folded. If he’d fallen off he probably would have broken his neck or ripped his head off. We were all on the shore chanting "Beat that you bastards, beat that you bastards." They couldn’t.

Good Bastards Success Tip: Just because you have a bigger, faster boat and know all the tricks don’t underestimate the country boy’s ability to come out and top you.

A few years later Wally was involved in making a bit of South Island history. Along with Ted Gibb they hoisted Frank Smith on their shoulders and executed the first recorded pyramid on water skis in the South Island. Well, anyway, that’s what Pat Condon reckons, so I suppose its true.

Good Bastards Success Tip: If Pat Condon reckons it true, then it probably is.

Stan Mumford was the boss of these great men and I held Stan in awe as he used to treat me as though I was one of the men. My opinion went up from that when he originally offered me a job at the mill stacking timber. It was twenty-five shillings a day and he wanted me to work six days one week and four the next. The men all came from Hokitika and Greymouth and had a long weekend every second weekend. The extra two bob a day was not the main attraction, working with my heroes was. I couldn’t have been happier.

The bloody green bags to the library and the photo club were flowing, so it wasn’t difficult to convince Mum that I could do the lessons after work and on weekends, and work full time at the mill. With her being understaffed and busy serving in the shop and cooking meals, I made sure the bloody green bags were highly visible. It was all going along quite smoothly, until one day a particularly difficult letter arrived that had my blood running cold. An inspector was coming to visit and discuss with Mum her son’s lack of performance.

Holy Toledo, this definitely was a serious problem by any assessment. The only good thing about it was that it was a month away.

For sometime I had been playing with the idea of running away from home if I was ever sprung and had to go to boarding school. The plan was to stock up my pack with food, a sleeping bag and tent, and ride my bike up to the Whataroa River Bridge about 25 miles away. I reasoned that I would do this at night to avoid detection. I’d then hide the bike in the bush and set off walking up the side of the Whataroa River.

Peter McCormick was the local guide on the Glacier and someone who had been a great inspiration to me as I had grown up. One day when I was in the equipment room, which was the mountain guides’ base (where they kept all the boots and ice axes and other equipment for climbing on the Glacier). I had watched and listened as Peter had explained to a couple of mountaineers how you could go up the Whataroa, then up another tributary, up the Scone Glacier and cross over the Sealy Pass and come down into the Godly River. He explained in detail how they would need ice axes and crampons and that it was a relatively straightforward climb. I had my own ice axe and crampons and had some minor climbing experience from climbing around the Franz Glacier. I could instantly see myself making the climb and romanced in my mind the adventure of it all. Ed Hillary had had meals in our tearooms from time to time after climbing across Graham Saddle and scaling various peaks. He then went on to become the first person to reach the top of Mount Everest and return alive. Mount Everest! Where might this little adventure take me?

One day he came in, he and his climbing partners had returned from climbing Mount Cook, New Zealand’s highest mountain, which was, then, 12349 feet high (a piece fell off the top a few years later and shortened the mountain by a few metres). They had a huge celebration, including a bottle of what I think was wine and as I had never seen anyone drinking alcohol in our tearooms that event was a memorable one.

Peter had used a map on the wall in the equipment room to explain the path they would need to follow. I took it down a few days later when the guides were all out climbing and traced it onto greaseproof paper. It was all part of my plan to walk in the boot prints of Sir Edmond Hillary, and more importantly, escape the plague of education.

I studied the map and noticed that there was a dot that said Sheep Station Homestead in the area. So my escape plan was to cross over the Sealy Pass, then lob up at the door of the Sheep Station and get a job. I planned on leaving a note for Mum telling her I had shot through to Auckland to get work. This was still on my agenda if I didn’t manage to score a job at the Godly Sheep Station. We didn’t know anyone in Auckland and it was the biggest city, so I figured that I could blend into obscurity without much difficulty and never be found.

Up the Whataroa River there was a hut in which I planned to stay for a couple of weeks until the heat went off before crossing over to the Godly. It was a perfectly plausible plan and one that would eliminate those bloody green bags from my life forever.

While it all seemed straight forward enough, I still a bit apprehensive about it all and devised an alternative plan to deal with the dreaded inspector. If the alternative plan didn’t work then it was up the river and over the Pass for me.

The alternative plan was also a tough one, it involved getting Mum to shut the shop for three days either side of the inspector’s visit and go to Hokitika ninety miles away to visit her father.

My reasoning was that if both of us were ninety miles away from the officious inspector on the appointed day then I would have escaped detection. Franz Josef in those days was an out of the way place as the road ended about fifty miles further south and Christchurch was about an eight hour drive away, mainly on gravel roads. So the chances of him popping up again unexpectedly seemed reasonably remote.

Luck went my way; as soon as I mentioned the trip to Mum she said she had been thinking of doing just that as she hadn’t seen her dad for a while. To confirm the deal, I promptly wrote a letter to my Grandfather, Pop Heveldt (we had no phones), and told him when we would be arriving and when we were leaving. This letter served to lock in the dates and thereby ensure the plan smooth passage. Stan Mumford granted me the time off work and all looked sweet.

Good Bastard Success Tip: When confronted with the encroaching enemy who has more fire power than you, the best plan is to get the hell out of the way and thereby remove yourself as the target.

About one week out from the trip it all nearly fell to bits. Janice Warburton’s mother Joyce came into the shop one day to buy something and Mum told her of the pending trip. She immediately said "That’s when the inspector is coming." Holy bloody Toledo, I thought I liked Joyce Warburton.

Mum confronted me with this when I came home from the sawmill that night, I nearly kaked in my daks.

I replied as calmly as I could, "That’s the inspector for girls; my one’s coming about a month after that." The letter I received was from a Miss Brown. I remember thinking a better name would have been Miss Patrick. If she missed me I would be eternally grateful, although it was a man who was the actual person that was going to front at my court martial, if indeed I was around.

Mum knew that I had a different curriculum to Janice (she didn’t know just how different), so she accepted the answer and remarked how typical it was of the Government to double up on the spending of taxpayers’ money. I wholeheartedly and enthusiastically agreed with her. Bloody Government, bastards!

The trip to Hokitika went according to plan and everything was fine until about an hour after we got off the bus on our return. Joyce Warburton bowled into the shop and started to give my mother the roll call and it was all bad, bloody bad in fact.

The inspector had arrived and yes he had wanted to see me as there was no other inspector coming. Then Joyce came in with the heavy mortar fire as she relayed the news that I had not completed even one of the fortnightly assignments for the Correspondence School Clifton Terrace Wellington. She might as well have stripped me naked and riddled my body with bullets I felt so exposed.

Good Bastards Success Tip: When an ally dobs you in, revert to the contingency plan.

Suddenly the trip up the Whataroa and over the Pass looked mighty inviting. In fact I was ready to leave that very instant just to get away from the white hot heat of the moment.

Joyce was glaring at me and Mum was chastising me. I sat there like a stunned mullet, supposedly taking it like a man but in reality, running the escape scenarios through my mind as to how I would execute the escape plan. My heart was pumping cold blood the weight of lead and was in danger of seizing up unless I exited the hell out of there or injected some anti-freeze into my veins.

Good Bastards Success Tip: The theatre of the mind is where all great plans must first have their premiere.

Up until this point I thought Joyce Warburton was a great person. She had always been very kind and considerate to me as I grew up.

"What about the coming and going of all the green bags?" Mum asked. They must be empty, Joyce volunteered. I wasn’t about to let them in on that one. I’d been nailed fair and square and there was nowhere to run for cover. There was no way I was going to let them know how I had been able to get away with it for so long.

Mum told me I had to quit the job at the mill and she would be supervising all my work.

My world as I knew it, it seemed, had come to end.

Then I found an unusual ally in Stan Mumford the mill manager. I went and told Stan that I had to quit the job. In retrospect Stan had filled in as a bit of a father figure since my Dad had died. I found him easy to talk to, and after swearing him to secrecy, told him the whole story and how I had managed to avoid detection. I even told him about the Whataroa River and the Sealy Pass escape plan. I trusted him more than anyone else in the world. He was highly amused at how I’d gone about escaping detection.

However when I told him about the running away bit he sat bolt upright and said,"Jjjjjjjesus Pat dddon’t do that, you will kill your bbbloody self". Stan had a bit of a stutter which only enhanced his personality as far as I was concerned. He also had a bit of a limp. I had perfected both of these for demonstration to Pat Condon in the coming school holidays.

Stan consoled me in my grief and could obviously see that I did not have the slightest inclination or intention of doing any learning whatsoever. He also told me that I could probably teach the people at the Correspondence School Clifton Terrace Wellington a thing or two. This cheered me up somewhat.

Stan told me that he would go down to our shop that evening and buy some tobacco and have a yarn to Mum about it all.

I didn’t think this would do much good and initially I was quite apprehensive that it might do more damage. He assured me it wouldn’t and once again I swore him to secrecy about my escape plan. At this point I’d started to plan the finer points on how I would abscond and was intent on leaving in the next few days. I had ordered a new tent and was awaiting its arrival in the mail. I abhorred studying, the whole business of having to go through the process of learning all this useless stuff was motivating me to get the hell away from the area altogether. I had some cash saved in the Post Office Savings Bank and that would fund the Auckland part of the plan if the Godly Station didn’t come good with a job. The anticipated adventure had gained much momentum.

What Stan Mumford told my mother that night I have no way of knowing. I think he may have talked about the futility of trying to teach me anything and how good a worker I was in the sawmill. My Dad had instilled a very strong work ethic and I followed that with gusto. Do more than the other fellow, don’t lag behind, volunteer for the hard jobs, stay the distance, work long hours, don’t take days off, and a whole bunch of similar stuff.

He told me to have a go at the impossible sometimes, even if you miss you will be that much further ahead of those who never attempt anything.

Perhaps Stan did tell her that I was planning on running away and how dangerous that was. The upshot of it all was that I stayed at the mill and I did try to do some of the lessons with Mum’s supervision.

Good Bastard Success Tip: When in deep shit, don’t under-estimate the power of your mates to get you out.

What went in my favour was the algebra. Mum didn’t have a clue what it was and to this day neither do I. Maybe the teachers at Correspondence School Clifton Terrace Wellington didn’t know either as I showed the lessons they sent to anyone who would look, and I couldn’t find any bastard who could understand it either. We both got bogged down on it along with the chemistry. Although I must admit I had a lot of fun doing my own experiments and subsequently nearly gassed myself just mixing stuff up at random. (I poured all sorts of concoctions down the long drop thinking I might find a new invention that would disintegrate the payload and I would make us all filthy rich. I never succeeded).

Why I had to learn French was another mystery to me, and Mum agreed she couldn’t see the sense in it either. We didn’t know anyone who had even been to France and had no intention of going there ourselves. While I had every reason to defend my stand of not wanting to do this stuff, I couldn’t see the sense in the crock-of-crap curriculum and its relevance to negotiating one’s way through life. I hold even stronger views today on how the education system fails to prepare students for understanding and dealing with enterprise, the very thing that drives every economy, from the roles we play in the most mundane jobs through to building successful businesses. Commerce, as it is taught in schools today, and how it applies to the entrepreneurial spirit, is about as relevant to the real world as starting a duck farm in Antarctica. It is obsolete long before it is taught. Why they don’t run actual enterprises as part of the curriculum, beats me. I think I’ll write a book and call it "A Hundred And One Ways Kids Can Make Money".

Some lessons did get sent to the Correspondence School Clifton Terrace Wellington. The boys from the mill took up my case with Mum as well. They all had their meals at our place and they all agreed what rotten bastards they were at the Correspondence School Clifton Terrace Wellington trying to teach me stuff against my will that had no relevance to the business of working in a sawmill or any other bloody thing that I may encounter. I asked them for help with the Algebra, Chemistry and French and none of them knew anything about it either. As far as I was concerned this gave my case immense weight.

Good Bastards Success tip: There is great joy when your antagonists collaborate with your problem. But don’t skite about it, keep it under your hat. These sort of wins are best savoured in silence.

It wasn’t long before attention to the lessons dropped off completely and I settled down to a working life from the age of 13 to 15. The inspector never returned, probably partly due to the letters that I sent to him subtly conveying just how bloody dumb I really was. The silly bastard would reply with advice which gave me the perfect resource to reply to. I would spend my thinking time coming up with ambiguous questions that were hard for the poor bastard to answer. Such as, "How come we didn’t have to learn to speak Algerian if we had to learn Algebra, and who was the silly bastard that taught the French to speak French in the first place and why don’t the English speak proper English?" One real juicy one was, "If a car was travelling through the air at the speed of light, what would happen if you switched the headlights on?" He used to write back giving long convoluted answers to my stupid questions. I reckoned he was a couple of chooks short in his back yard. It was good sport nonetheless

These letters went back and forth for a while and Mum was pleased to see that at least I was doing something constructive. I showed her the replies from the inspector. The whole purpose of my letters was to confuse the inspector and have him contradict himself. This I finally managed to get him to do. It was to be ammunition in the event of a confrontation.

It became apparent over time that the inspector was giving up on my case. I never tried to be a smart arse in these letters, just a dumb bastard, which wasn’t hard because outside the men at the mill and Pat Condon, everyone told me I was. This was aided somewhat by the fact I couldn’t spell to save myself. Still can’t. There is no greater fan of spell cheque on the computer than me. A great and reliable innovation.

Good Bastards Success Tip: Always be a jump ahead of your adversaries. A paper trail can be great evidence providing you don’t hang yourself in the process. Think out every eventuality and have a contingency plan for each one.

Not long after my fifteenth birthday I received a letter in the mail from the Correspondence School Clifton Terrace Wellington. In it was a certificate to say I had completed two years of secondary education with them, along with a letter congratulating me on my success and wishing me well for the future. What were they trying to do, get in my good books now that I didn’t have to do send those bloody green bags any more?

Good Bastards Success Tip: Hang on in there REGARDLESS, success will eventually come. Persistence is the most powerful word there is. It eventually conquers everything.

Good Bastards Success Tip: If that piece of paper spells success, some bastard has it all wrong.

Pat Condon meanwhile, dutifully completed his stint at Saint Bede’s and was always envious of my freedom when he came home for holidays. I too was envious of the stories he would tell me about the outside world. I couldn’t get enough of them and I cherished the school holidays when he came home and we’d share all the adventures that we each had. It used to amaze him how I could go into any of the hotels around South Westland and get served a beer. The general consensus was that if you could hold down a man’s job you could drink in the pub. By the time I was fourteen I was earning a full man’s wage and had experienced life that put me far ahead of fourteen years. By the time I was fifteen I’d bought a near new 650 cc Gold Flash Motor Bike and put big cow horn handle bars on it. I grew into manhood much faster than most and became very street wise despite living in a country area.

Good Bastards Success Tip: Don’t underestimate the elation of meeting up with other Good Bastards from the past. It truly is one of life’s great joys.

We had many great and fun times in our young days, some of which will be recounted elsewhere in this book. To round off this First Bastard I need to complete the lead up to the sad events prior to the Good Bastards Day 2000…….

In 1994 I rang Pat up from Australia, where I had been living with my family since 1981, and he told me about a hut he had built down at the mouth of the Whataroa River some considerable distance from the Sealy Pass, which was upstream about fifty or sixty miles. Pat and his son-in-law Mike Alford from Whataroa were in partnership in a whitebaiting venture for about three months of the year. (You might catch Mike in the Whataroa pub if you are passing through that way). Pat told me that I had to come over and go down the river with them for a few days the following season. This was an offer too good to be true. Having been in Australia for thirteen years at that point, and away from the West Coast for a further six, I longed to get back and get my arse up against a bungy and have a good old bush shit.

I took him up on it eagerly in 1995 and have been going back each year. I asked if I could bring a couple of mates from Auckland the following year. He said as long as they were Good Bastards that would be fine. So it was that Hyndsie and Kerbs joined the mission. These two certainly qualified as Good Bastards.

The trip coincided with the Melbourne Cup and I only had limited time to catch up with all my mates from the football club and previous involvement in the district.

It was a matter of getting a few Good Bastards with whom I had knocked around in my earlier life on the West Coast along to the Southland Hotel and having a few beers and talking about old times. That was the beginning of the Good Bastards Day and every year it has grown bigger and better with up to 300 people turning up at the Southland Hotel in Hokitika in 2000. Not bad for a week day in a town of around 3000 people.

Gary and Bev Hutchison were my main contact people over there. A finer couple you would never find anywhere. Top line, really Good Bastards.

Gary had a panel beating business and suggested that Hyndsie and Kerbs might like to stay with him and Bev while in Hokitika. This turned out to be great idea and Gary and Bev are now firm friends with the two North Islanders. If you ever want to be treated like royalty, don’t turn down an invitation to stay with them. That’s if you are lucky enough to get one.

Each year, as part of our Good Bastards activity, Gary organised different things for us to do. We had been up in Micro-light aircraft, up rivers in jet boats, over gold dredges, through the milk powder factory and all sorts of other interesting pursuits.

Good Bastards Success Tip: Have at least one mate that is as good as Gary and Bev Hutchison and you can count yourself as an extremely lucky bastard.