The Romance of The Bush (part one)

When I was a little tacker I was an obnoxious little prick. That isn't germane to this post so I'll gloss over it for the moment. As well as being obnoxious I was fascinated by The Bush. I always thought of it that way - as a proper noun with a preposition*. Until I was nine years old I had very little first hand experience of The Bush. A week long holiday every year in a little town in northern Victoria called Wandiligong and that was about it. It was an old gold mining town and my brother and I would go exploring The Bush every day and pretend that we were gold miners/ bushrangers/ other exotic bush types. I remember being faintly disappointed that people didn't actually call each other 'cobber'.
The last time that we went to Wandiligong we extended the holiday by camping on the banks of the Tambo River in eastern Victoria for the week prior to Wandiligong. Camping in the same area was a bloke with his family. The bloke was either a) Peter Brock's mechanic, or b) John Harvey. (Older bogans will know who John Harvey is.) Either way, my brother and I were suitably impressed.
It was during our time on the Tambo that my dear old Daddy formed the idea of moving out of the 'burbs and going bush because "People still wave to you out here." Coincidentally, the local fuel outlet/ convenience store/ mini market thingy in Ensay was for sale. Dad looked into it, but a few weeks later he decided against it. However, it did put the idea into his head that he should buy a business rather than look for another job. So every weekend for the next couple of months we would be traipsing around rural Victoria looking at different small businesses.
My personal favourite was the Snake Gully store. Not only was it a big old bluestone building (with really bad stumps - when I stood next to the end of the counter, the top was at shoulder height. In the middle it was level with the top of my head.), not only did it have stables (stables mean horses), but it was Snake Gully!!
How fucking (The) Bush can you get?
My brother and I were walking around saying things like "Crikey bloke, come 'n' 'ave a squiz at this!" (Translation: I say, this is an interesting object I find within my field of vision.)
Actually, whilst I was saying things like that, my brother was saying things like "Piss off, you annoying little turd." Didn't matter, we didn't buy it. I was upset. We ended buying a servo in a little (less than [Bloody blogger keeps reading the 'less than' sign as the opening of an HTML tag and fucking up the post]100 people) town in Gippsland.

I thought that it was The Bush for about six months, then I realised that it was a little town two hours out of Melbourne. The Bush had drovers, shearers and swaggies, we had dairy farmers, SEC employees and spud pickers.At the time there were dairy farms between Dandenong and Noble Park. I don't think that I appreciated the freedom that living in this town gave me. I would ride my bike for miles to visit friends, go for tractor rides, go crayfishing, shoot rabbits, go fishing in another spot on the creek away from where y9ou went crayfishing 'cause every bloody nose that you don't get fish where the crayfish live. If you hadn't caught at least one copperhead by the time that you left primary school then you were obviously a poofter and therefore unfit for human society.

Everybody else knew what they were going to do when ther grew up. Take over Dad's farm, buy a trauck, become an astronaut, whatever. They knew. There was never any doubt. I had so many ideas going through my head that effectively I had no idea. I still don't. For a few months I wanted to be a tin scratcher in the Gulf country. I wanted to be a crocodile shooter a la Tom Cole. I wanted to be an opal miner (Done that one. It's fun if you don't mind going broke.) The only sensible idea that I had was that I wanted to be an aircraft mechanic. I even wrote a letter to the Government Aircraft Factory in Port Melbourne asking about apprenticeships. By the time that they wrote back I'd forgotten all about it.
Eventually I did an apprenticeship as a motor mechanic with Dad, only because he asked me if I wanted to. I only agreed because I didn't want to hurt his feelings. Looking back, it was a dumb decision, but whaddyagunnado?
This was s'posed to be a brief preamble without reference to mateship about a whole 'nother post, not my fucking life story. I'm tired; the rest will have to wait.
*I mean 'The'. I think that's a preposition. I'm fairly thick.

*Update: Diligent readers may notice that a large portion of this post has been subtly altered. This is because Blogger ate it. I suspect it is another attempt by Osama's boys, but have no proof to support this. Neither can I remember the original post so I made up stuff that fit into gap.