Broken Hill

It is my birthday today and on Thursday I am going on a trip to Broken Hill to visit the television set for the remake of Dad's novel Wake in Fright. Both the birthday and the trip are creating a feeling of nostalgia for the past when the future was unknown and exciting. Now a lot of that future has become the past and the unknown turned into fact. 

Recently a woman asked me to describe my childhood. I thought for a while. A childhood is hard to sum up in one word. Eventually I came up with "exciting". And it was in parts. It was also full of travel,responsibility, love,uncertainty and self doubt.

To be travelling to Broken Hill with my brother Paul, sister in law Tina and old friend Peter Dunn is something I'm really looking forward to. The three of us are flying to Dubbo where we'll meet up with Peter and then drive for eight hours to Broken Hill where we'll stay until Tuesday.

The very thought of it rekindles that sense of excitement that I remember from my childhood. As you get older that fizzy sense of excitement that you experience as a child becomes less frequent. 

Dad provided a lot of those fizzy moments. You never really knew what to expect from him. 

Below is a picture taken of him in Broken Hill taken by my Uncle Philip. This was the trip that created the inspiration for the book Wake in Fright. He looks so young and he was. I had just been born and he spent three months in Broken Hill working as a journalist.

I have no memory of this. My first memories of Dad were of a larger than life sort of swashbuckling hero that could fix anything. I remember the motorbike with a sidecar that he would pack his children into. I can remember him packing the four of us into the one bath to save time. I can remember the many road trips around Australia and the two big overseas trips where I was taken out of school for two years. I can remember the many gifts he like to buy his family and the dogs he was always bringing home. I was always in awe of his writing talent.

Paul and I did a mammoth road trip to Adelaide with Dad in 1982 and we visited Broken Hill. This trip I'm about to do brings back memories of that trip. Paul and I were in charge of setting up our various campsites while Dad adjourned to the Pub.

So now thirty five years later Paul and I are revisiting a time and place that will have changed enormously. Out of my close family of six only Paul and I are alive to celebrate and remember times past. 

And we will be watching the shooting of the Tele series that is a remake of the classic Ted Kotcheff film of 1971. So we will be celebrating Dad's talent from a new perspective. A book that was published in 1961 being reimagined in 2017. That's a pretty special legacy Dad left us with.