My uncle was interested in the naming of horses and would send me often through the post pieces torn from newspapers showing details of cleverly chosen names. The nearest he ever came to telling me a dirty joke was his telling me that he planned to buy one day a filly and a colt, to name the one On Fire and the other Fundament, to mate the two eventually, and to name the first foal Scratch Below.
My uncle often told me that his best friend during his teenage years had been a man he had never seen. Jim Carroll is said to have been the first person in Australia, and probably in the world, to describe the progress of horse-races for the benefit of listeners to radio, or listeners-in, as they were called in Jim Carroll’s time. Nowadays, Jim Carroll would be called a race-caller, but in the mid-1930s there was no name for his occupation, so new was it. Jim was employed by the Australian Broadcasting Commission to comment on Melbourne races for the benefit of listeners in many parts of Victoria. He did not chant or intone as his successors learned to do; Jim talked to his listeners about what he could see and what they could not. He talked as though he was sitting in their lounge-rooms and able to see, far beyond the range of their vision, a field of horses on a far-away racecourse.
During the mid-1930s in Victoria, the price paid to farmers for butterfat fell to sixpence per pound. And yet, my father’s father and his family survived the so-called Great Depression.
In the mid-1940s, when I first visited the stone house near the upwards-sloping cliffs, I saw there things that I had seen in few other houses: a cabinet radio; a gramophone; a tall, glass-fronted bookcase full of books; binoculars for bird-watching; massive cedar wardrobes and bedsteads; a dining-room suite including a large sideboard full of English china and a glass-fronted cabinet full of water-jugs and wine-glasses and glass fruit-bowls; a piano with a cupboard full of sheet-music. The family survived and later prospered largely because my youngest uncle and several of his siblings, during most of the 1930s, milked cows and did farm-work and housework for no wages.
My youngest uncle had left school to become, in effect, an unpaid farm-labourer. He milked cows by hand, morning and evening, on every day of the week and did other farm-work between milkings, except on Sunday. Much of his free time on Sundays, however, was taken up by the long, slow trip to church, the hour and more of the service and the sermon, and the trip home again. Perhaps once each month, he went with his parents on their weekly trip to the nearest city, which trip took all of an hour on roads that were mostly gravel. His older siblings sometimes went to a Saturday-evening dance in the district, but he preferred to stay home and read.
He did extra tasks on weekdays so that he could spend most of each Saturday afternoon by the battery-powered radio, listening to Jim Carroll commenting on races at Flemington, Mentone, Caulfield, Williamstown. The boy listening-in was hardly aware that these places were suburbs of Melbourne, which he had not yet visited; each place-name brought to his mind the same far-reaching racecourse of a vaguely elliptical shape, although the different vowel-sounds in each gave rise to differing sights of level grassy countryside in the background and to differing arrangements of trees and low hills on the horizon. The boy tried to commit to memory choice passages from the racing-commentaries so that he could repeat them aloud during the following week; could shout them in the direction of the ocean or whisper them while he sat among grass or rushes.
“I can tell you now: Peter Pan’ll win it. Peter Pan’ll win it!” So said Jim Carroll during his commentary on a certain Melbourne Cup when the field had only just turned into the straight. And Peter Pan won.
“I told you all. I told you weeks ago he wasn’t a stayer.” So said Jim Carroll to his listeners one afternoon when a field of horses was in the straight and when a race-caller of today would not dare to do other than report the positions of the leading few but when Jim Carroll chose to report that the favourite was dropping back through the field, just as Jim himself had predicted.
Jim Carroll’s best comment so impressed the solitary boy who later became my favourite uncle, and afterwards so impressed the solitary boy who later became his favourite nephew, that he and I would often look for excuses to come out with the comment. On many a Saturday morning in the late 1950s, when I lived with my parents in a suburb of Melbourne, after my uncle had driven during the Friday afternoon from the western district to my parents’ house and had gone out, as the expression was, with his girlfriend on the Friday evening and had arranged with her to go out on the Saturday evening, he and I would set out for the races together, discussing the chances of horse after horse. It had for long been a game with us for one to say that a certain horse should run well, given that it was closely related to some or another outstanding horse. The other would then counter this prediction with the words that my uncle had remembered for nearly thirty years from the afternoon when Jim Carroll, while discussing the entrants in a forthcoming race, had said to his listeners, “We all know this horse is closely related to a champion, but Boy Charlton had a brother who wouldn’t wash himself!”
My youngest uncle throughout his life observed birds. Whenever I remember him nowadays, thirty years after his death, I tend not to see any image of him but to hear his voice in my mind while he tells me about some or another bird, the image of which appears in my mind where the image of my uncle might have been expected to appear. The bird in question is sometimes one or another of the striped quail-chicks that my uncle hunted down one day in a paddock not far inland from the farm where he had spent his earliest years and still in sight of the cliffs that stood above the ocean. We did not see the mother-bird, but she had seen us and had sounded a warning call to her chicks. My uncle had recognised the call. He told me to stand still. He whispered to me that seven or eight quail-chicks were likely to be hiding near us. The grass was only ankle-high, but I could see no birds. After perhaps two minutes the mother-bird, still hidden, sounded a different call. From place after place around my feet a tiny, striped quail-chick began to run towards the place whence the mother-bird had called. I understood that the chicks were running, but seen from above their movement was so fluent that each bird might have been a tiny, striped toy propelled by clockwork.
My uncle surprised me by chasing after the chicks. He caught two by flinging his hat over them. Then he imprisoned the chicks in a billy-can beneath a ball of crumpled newspaper. He told me he would give the chicks to a family he knew in the city further along the coast. The family had aviaries in their backyard. He mentioned a surname. I understood that the wife was a cousin of my uncle, or it may have been a second cousin.