To be precise, it was a year of ‘passing’ away. I’ve never known a year like it. But I have to steel myself for more, not less of the same, as all of our ages, and those of our idols, advance in unison.
Mitchell Seaton Faircloth, one-time comedic and musical theatre Royalty of Melbourne, was the first of ‘my people’ to pass away in April. I never knew he was on television and in the pubs and theatres in the seventies and eighties and nineties as Slim Whittle of the Slim Whittle Family. I just knew him as the bloke who welcomed a hesitant newcomer through the gates of Oakleigh Bowling Club.
Juzzy went. I’ll do another story for him, as he’s certainly worth a yarn of his own.
There were others accorded a solemn attendee at graveside or at church during the year. But none eclipsed the passing away of my own Dad, aged 98, in his nursing home while I was on a driving holiday across The Nullarbor in his and Mum’s honour. Guiding lights, they were.
The death of a parent, I wrote very publicly at the time, makes you feel peculiar, as though naked. It lessens in time, but older friends have advised me it never totally leaves you. There’s no amount of tapping away on the keyboard here that will ever be amply devotional. So I won’t. It was honour enough, for me, to write and deliver Dad’s eulogy at the church he and Mum took us to from our infancy until our late-teens breakaway:
“Our Dad Peter was, above anything and all else, a kind, fair, quietly good-humoured man. These were his innate qualities, not taught or given. A good man. He had a steely sense of social justice, always defending the plights of the less fortunate people in our society and the injustices inflicted upon them.
We were fortunate, as a family, because of these qualities. Our family unit was a little bit like a business, managed and discussed at the kitchen table every night after dinner. But the business of being the Casserly family in Melville was also a very loving one. We were dressed impeccably, lovingly provided for, morally supported in abundance, and taught to look after our things. Don’t slam the doors on the Belmont!
Dad was a child in the Great Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s. Making do, making and mending, and spending wisely, were to become the hallmarks of a generation. He made many household pieces at his garage bench, and taught us how to maintain our bicycles, tennis gear, and our cars.
Young people in Dad’s era didn’t go out and get their P Plates. They’d meet their friends and romantic interests at the station or under the clock, or they’d walk around to friends’ houses. They walked huge distances, or rode bicycles, buses or the network of a young city’s trains, trams and trolley buses to get places.
Almost nobody in Perth and Fremantle could get around by bicycle quite as efficiently as Dad and his younger brother Eddie. They were both champion cyclists, but cycling was something they had to come back to. Events in Europe eventually plunged the entire world into war. Dad was one of many soldiers maintaining supply bases deep into Perth’s hills and wheatbelt, between Northam and Nungarin. In the war’s later years, he was sent to Queensland for jungle training. He never put his new skills to use, as the war ended then and there. But his military service wasn’t quite over. He became an orderly at a US Navy hospital in Sydney, caring for recovering American Prisoners of War. When the Americans left, they left in what they themselves would have described as a ‘Goddam Hurry’. Suddenly, the place was empty. And that’s how Dad got his treasured US Navy wall clock.
Returning to Perth, he and brother Eddie were on the bikes again, with Dad winning the professional annual Swansea Perth to Fremantle race in 1946.
Still only a young man of 22, he started some very hot work in the Metters foundries in Guildford and Subiaco. The Government of the day knew Australia had to skill up. Many hundreds and thousands of young people who’d returned from war were given the opportunity to take up a trade. Dad found himself in Hobart doing a plumbing apprenticeship, and that’s where he met Mum.
In his single days in Hobart, he enjoyed the freedom of travel, the gift of the open air, Australian nature, and the roar of English motor bikes, and these loves never left him.
In his mature years, Dad was an 80 year old man looking after his own mother and father. It wasn’t long after their passing, when our own Mum started showing signs of dementia, and the care, the kindness and the nurture started all over again. It was innate.
He wasn’t an extroverted man. He preferred quiet, deep, meaningful connections with his cousins and a small number of outsiders. That’s because family was everything. A job well done was the only one worth doing. His whole life was one uninterrupted mission of nurture and compassion. A job very…very well done.”