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DOWN
UNDER 1 On to the  next page! |
 In 1961 when I was nine years old
and my brother nearly four, we moved from Sweden to West Australia
travelling with our
parents on a small Danish cargo ship which went all the way from
Rotterdam in
the Netherlands to the West Australian port of Fremantle. It´s
hard to
realize just how much has changed over the years with the globalization
and
modernization constantly going on, but when my brother
returned there in 1994
he discovered that not much of the old OZ we once knew remained. In
those years,
Perth along with Fremantle was populated with less than four
hundred thousand inhabitants, there
wasn´t much pollution around and life was nice and slow the way
it was
back then in
most parts of the world. We were amazed at this fantastic new country
having come all the way from the other side of the earth. Everything
was so different, the plants and flowers, the wildlife, even the ocean
which rumbled in with breakers that caused the ground to tremble way
inland. |
 There
were lots of beaches to choose among all the way from Leighton up to
Scarborough but we mostly stuck to the sands of northern Cottesloe
until
after a year or so when we moved away to a rural town called
Katanning which is situated right in the middle of the barley and
wheat district. It was a nice and
wild
place to live in, at least for us. The aborigines, however, were
confined to a shanty town in the bush just outside of the community
border. My mother worked there for a year or so and she was
shocked at the appalling conditions which these people had to live
under. |
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 Each
summer and often during weekends and
holidays we
escaped the furnace heat of the inland to Kwinana which is situated
south of Fremantle, just
north of the sea side resort of Rockingham. This meant we
regularly had to
travel 176 miles to get to our beloved Indian ocean and then back
again. But we could also turn south and pass the Stirling range until
we reached Albany and Denmark where it was a lot cooler and where one
could sometimes spot dolphins in the clear blue water below the
cliffs. Further to the
west near Pemberton we sometimes made it by car to the tingle trees and
the Karrie forests, which second to the Californian Sequoia are said to
reach higher into the sky than any other trees in the world. Other
remarkable plants of the Aussie verdure are black boys which look like
they´ve been
taken right out of "Jurassic park" and also the national flower
Kangaroo
paw which
doesn´t look like anything I´ve seen apart from its
cousin the Cat paw.
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 Eventually
the family once again ended up on the west coast, this time in the
lovely sea side resort of Mandurah where there was good surfing and a
relaxed atmosphere. It was
a daily half an hour drive by car to
high school in neighbouring Pinjarra, which lies further inland. My
father was a teacher at the same school so we usually made that trip
together. It did happen though that I had to go by school bus like
everyone else and at one of these occasions there was a huge triangular
spider which came tripping along ever so happily upside down in the
ceiling above
the seats until it suddenly swung right down in front of me, which
naturally
gave me the shock of my life! Australia is infested with spiders of
every kind, some of them very poisonous and some not. And at that
moment I wasn´t exactly competing to find out the toxic status of
this
particular specimen! It was huge and hairy and it seemed as if it
belonged to the bus far more than we did. Which I figure the bus driver
reckoned the way he was sitting clutching at the steering wheel and
laughing out loud. Well, if I ever see him again he´d better
watch it
or I´ll feed him to my pet huntsmen, the eight legged
monsters which used to dash around the walls of our Kwinana cottage! Or
make him some new friends with those transparent little devils that
trail the north Australian waters and which they call stingers... |
  By
1966, Australia had itself all tied up in the Vietnam war.
So
to avoid having me drafted for when I got older, my parents decided it
was best to call it quits and hastily get ourselves back to the old
country. But we were also
suf- fering from an invasion of microscopic spiders (oh no, not now
again!)
called mites which
multiplied in billions and eventually mobilized themselves in big,
mushy clusters
which appeared to be everywhere in the house, especially in the
kitchen. So you could say that
because of little spiders and a stupid war,
I´m
where I am today and not Down Under! Here are some of my
class
mates from 1F at High school in 1965 with me second from the right on
the bottom row, as with the rest of my fellow pupils wearing that
maroon coloured jumper with a gray shirt which made up the
Pinjarra High School uniform at the time. This photo is featured
here
by kind permission from my beloved school teacher Jeff Carroll
and by my former class mate Gordon Stuart. |
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Pics as shown from top to bottom:
1: Walking the dogs in Peppermintgrove, Perth, 1962 with me to the right and bro in the middle 2 & 3: Cottesloe and down town Perth 4: Bluff knoll in Stirling range, West Australia |
5:
Kids of
Cottesloe in 1961 with me to the far left and my brother in the middle
6 & 7: North Cottesloe beach in Perth 8: My fellow class mates in High shool, Pinjarra in 1965, with no "sheilas" on this one! |
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