A Fraternal Reunion in the Antipodes

The brothers Goodden en route to Tasmania

LONDON, ONTARIO – Quite early in my life I recognized that summer is the season I find most oppressive. Not wanting to be a year-round whiner, I made a sort of pact with the world that I’d restrict my meteorological grumbling to June through August and this hasn’t been a hard bargain to keep. Not being a driver I’ve been able to maintain a child’s love of snow – the heavier the better, say I – up to the present day. No matter how inconvenient snow might be or how boring it is to shovel the stuff multiple times during the same day, I can never go out into a freshly polarized landscape without thinking to myself, “This really is one of the most beautiful things that our world gets up to.”

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So I’ve never wanted to flee a Canadian winter but ten years ago this month, I was firming up plans to do just that when the opportunity arose to be with all three of my brothers in Australia. It was going to be the first time we’d all been together since burying our father ten years before. And owing to the fact that The London Yodeller had just started up in November of 2013, I was actually earning some decent coin for the first time in my so-called professional life and was able to make the trip.

It was my oldest brother Dave who first threw a spanner into easy Goodden-reunion planning in 1969 by chasing his wife-to-be Liz down to her home town of Melbourne after meeting her in Canada on the last leg of her own globe-trotting trek. With or without Liz and/or daughter Kate in tow, Dave managed to make it up to Canada every three or four years and would unfailingly extend his invitation to each of us to come on down to the other side of the world. Our parents had made the grueling, international dateline-crossing trek in 1980 to see their only (as yet; this would soon change) grandchild in her natural habitat. From their trip I learned about a certain Twilight Zone aspect that attends such Canada/Australia treks. According to one’s airline itinerary, it takes two days to fly from Toronto to Melbourne and no days at all to fly back home.

My other two older brothers and I were able to resist Australia’s call so long as the three of us resided in London and Dave was prepared to schlep his way up to us every few years. But then Ted, the second-born, started messing with that arrangement by routinely summering out on B.C.’s Hornby Island and then moving there altogether in 2012. While it’s always great to get together with any of the brothers, all four of us were starting to miss that special frisson – a sort of snapping into place of all the necessary elements to empower a full electrical circuitry of unadulterated Goodden-ness – that only occurs when the full quartet re-constellates in the same physical space.

Accompanying us was Dave Dell, aka the Dell Dog. He was first an early childhood friend of third-born Bob, but because the older three were born within 17 and then 14 months of one another, he was soon taken up as a good friend by all of them. (In an act of regenerative mercy that our mother greatly appreciated, I debuted three and a half years after Bob.)  The Dell Dog’s always been a sort of avuncular figure to me; one of the few of my brothers’ friends who never gave me a hard time and would even put up with me if I wanted to sit in with them. Being practical and technically competent in ways that Gooddens, sadly, are not, Swamper Dan (he also has more nicknames than should be allowable; I’m sparing you at least two others) was indispensable to our entire Australian mission – helping to book our flights, ensuring that we met them, presenting us with agendas each morning for the day ahead and photographically chronicling the entire adventure.

At first blush everything seems quite different on the underside of the globe. You’ve got your koalas, Tasmanian devils, platypuses and ‘roos, a total absence of snow, a plenitude of large, noisy birds squawking away in exotic palm and gum trees, and a distinctive architecture that is largely defined by measures taken so as to mitigate the blistering glare of the sun. Sitting around an up-island Tasmanian airport on yet another scorchingly brilliant day, the sound system started to play George Harrison’s Here Comes the Sun, and I announced to the brethren, “Now there’s a song that no Australian would ever have thought to write.” At nighttime, they don’t even have the same sky as a completely different canopy of stars twinkles overhead. And while it might be the same sun which occasionally emerges on some afternoons up here, it doesn’t come at you full-on like theirs does for 364 days of the year.

And yet having said all that, I was struck again and again by how very much Australia shares with Canada . . . well, at least, Canada outside of Quebec. They have the same ubiquitous British Empire influence owing to its almost simultaneous founding. Australian place names feature that same weird mix of imperial and aboriginal nomenclature. Even though they don’t have our excuse of living in such geographic proximity, they too struggle to keep American cultural hegemony at bay. I sighed while moving through the Sydney airport when the first thing I spotted on Australian TV was the bloody Ellen Degeneres show. And in both of these very large countries the preponderance of settlement takes place on the fringes – along the American border up here, around the outer rim down there.

Newly arrived in Melbourne, the brothers Goodden confer with a local tour guide

From shopkeepers to temporary companions on tram cars or at shows and church services, I remember the Australians I encountered as refreshingly friendly and forthright. None more so than the guide who showed us around the extensive grounds and buildings of the penal station at Port Arthur which operated from 1830 until 1877. For the first 23 years of its existence, this station was the main dumping ground for the thousands upon thousands of convicts – more than 150,000 of them in total – who were forcibly evicted from Great Britain and dispatched to the other side of the globe to serve out their sentences. It was cheaper than housing the criminals in British jails, it was easier on the conscience then putting them to death and the evictees were put to work (unpaid, naturally) in the forests and mines of Australia, sending needed resources back to Britain and helping to establish infrastructure in the new colony.

It was brutally hard work but those who co-operated with the system were also given vocational training as blacksmiths, shipbuilders, carpenters, shoemakers, etc., so they’d have something honorable to turn their hands to when they got sprung. Once their sentences had been served out, these convicts-turned-freemen could return to Britain if they wanted to and could raise the scratch for the voyage but the vast majority of them stayed put. If the climate agreed with you, life was a lot freer and more inexpensive in Australia and so it was that up until the 1850s when mass immigration got underway on a huge scale, rehabilitated convicts comprised a substantial fraction of the pioneering population.

For the first hundred years of its national existence, Australians were a little embarrassed about the role deported criminals played in their development and downplayed that chapter of their story. In the 1960’s that attitude started to swing over to its opposite extreme and today it can even be a source of defiant pride. Our guide told us about descendants of those convicts who tell him their great, great grandfathers were deported to Australia under absurdly trumped-up charges and decry the utter corruption of that old system. One woman apoplectically told him her forbear was sent to Port Arthur for nothing more than stealing a measly section of rope. He took down the esteemed gent’s name, checked it out against the records (and the one thing you’ve got to hand the British colonizers of that time, they kept great records) and learned that that particular section of rope had actually been attached to another man’s horse and that particular theft was his 13th conviction.

“Of course, people want to think well of their families,” he said. “But human beings – some a lot more than others – are perverse and ornery creatures. Was Port Arthur successful as a prison system? I don’t answer that question except to pose another: Our prison system today – how successful would you say that is?”

Thanks to the global interconnectivity of the interwebs, I was able to edit two issues of The Yodeller while I was down under. This meant that I wasn’t around to hold the publisher’s hand when our original layout person went insane and completely sabotaged the first of those issues. For a couple of days it appeared likely that my new job was about to evaporate. But after a few frantic phone calls from home, Kirtley offered to revive the same husband/editor and wife/layout wizard arrangement that had worked so well for us at SCENE twenty years before and – without missing a beat and greatly improving the look of the Yodeller in the process – saved the day.

With a magazine to edit and a crisis to, however remotely, massage, I had to miss out on a couple of side-trips that my brothers and the Dell Dog undertook. But I did have my first real swim in the ocean on a beautiful red-sanded beach not far from Melbourne on our first Wednesday and it was a revelation. Ted successfully got me to float for five minutes at a stretch; something I’d never been able to do in fresh water. It’s the salt in the water that does the trick, and boy, can you ever taste it. I think it was my first acquisition of a major life skill since Kirtley taught me how to blow bubble gum bubbles on our third or fourth date in 1970.

And I did take part in the biggest of our excursions; a four-day tour of the south-eastern island-state of Tasmania; the most wooded and mountainous and temperate (its closer proximity to Antarctica shaves a few degrees off the broiling daily highs) of all eight Australian states and territories. On our second night we lucked into a beautiful inn on a steep hillside in Bicheno with a heart-stopping view of the ocean and nocturnal visits from a herd of kangaroos.

The next morning I dropped into the manager’s office to pick up some email with his wi-fi and walking me back down to our van, he said he’d never hosted an expedition quite like ours before. “I think a lot of people would like the idea of doing what you’re doing but then they’d have to ask themselves, ‘Could I really stick it with my family for three or four weeks?’ You fellas actually seem to get along. You’re lucky that way.”

Indeed we are. And negotiations are underway as we speak for our next fraternal confab; this time in B.C.