My Dad 1934 - 2014

Eulogy

Donald Stratford was born in 1934, as the youngest of 6. He didn’t have a middle name because, according to Dad, his Mum had run out of ideas by the time she got to him.

When baby Donny came along his dad, Albert, had been suffering many years from his war injuries and his mum, Lydia, had been keeping things together on the home front. Dad’s brother Albert was already 14, Tom was 12, Alf was 8, Pat was 6 and Lyd was 4.

The family lived in Essendon and then moved to Mentone. Dad’s school reports show he wasn’t a perfect student but could pull his socks up and get good marks if he made an effort. (Sounds just like his sons and grandsons if you ask me!)

One teacher wrote about Dad: “He is a boy of very good character, trustworthy and above average intelligence”.

Mind you, an earlier report card had said “This student must do better. If his too frequent lateness is an indication of a careless attitude it had better be improved at once”!

Dad left school after fourth form and worked as a delivery boy in the city, running advertising slides between cinemas for Val Morgan Advertising. 60 years later I remember driving through the city with Dad who was recognising the Forum Theatre and other old buildings from way back then.

I think that was the last time you could have called Dad a city boy. When he was about 18 the Stratfords moved to Drouin. That was when Dad’s lifetime career as a mechanic began.

Dad did his apprenticeship, got good marks and even came second in the state wide Victorian Automobile Chamber of Commerce Technical School Awards as a third year apprentice motor mechanic. He lived the life of a young man in the 50s in a country town. Mum remembers his car – a 1934 Riley – that he had rescued from someone’s back yard and fixed up. I looked up what that looked like – it made me think of the cars you see in gangster movies.  Dad had rigged the wiring to a light globe that sat on the top of the aerial. You knew it was Don coming along the road because of the little glowing light bobbing along on top.

Dad once told a story about playing April Fools jokes around town with his mates. One night they lifted several metal front gates off their hinges, swapped them around amongst the neighbourhood  and snuck off. In the morning the neighbours came out to find unfamiliar front gates in their driveways and their own gates further down the road.

Dad, like most young blokes of the 50s, spent Saturday nights at the local dance, hoping to meet a pretty girl to marry. He met Noela Davey and they married in ’59. Starting their new lives in Paynesville and then Bairnsdale, Dad continued to work as a mechanic, supporting Noela as the kids started to arrive. In Bairnsdale Terry was born, then Steven. I was born while they were living in Warragul and then they moved back to Bairnsdale where Brian was born. Transferring with the CRB (Country Roads Board) in 1969, the Stratfords moved to Bendigo where baby David was born.

Although we five kids were, (of course!) the best thing to ever happen to Dad, it was a life filled with ups and downs and not much money. We would travel down to Drouin to visit grandparents at times in various cars that Dad had improved and modified. Sometimes it was to squeeze all of us into the back seat, or to tow the caravan or sometimes I think dad was just reengineering cars to make them run better. The most memorable were the old 50s Chevrolets, the Kombi Van, the blue Hi Ace and the old black P76.

Every year we had a holiday. Towing an old 4 berth caravan and annex behind whichever was the car of the time, We would all pile in and head off to interesting places. Adelaide, Victor Harbour, Queensland, Tathra, Broken Hill, Inverloch. Our cousin Neale can probably remember the Inverloch holiday by the beach. Another old friend of mine remembers a holiday with the Strattys as the best childhood holiday she had ever had.

We didn’t always go on fancy trips to faraway places. One year when there wasn’t much money around we went to Heathcote caravan park– 20 minutes down the road! We still had a fun time camping and playing and exploring.

 

Dad encouraged us to be independent, questioning, practical kids. He taught us all how to shoot and fish. Steve tells a story of shooting his first feral fox. Dad spotted a fox on the side of the road, pulled over and trained the headlights on the poor animal. He slowly got the rifle out of the back of the car and showed Steve how to rest it against the car and line the fox up in his sights. Poor Steve was shaking and nervous and over excited but he pulled that trigger and shot it! Dad said later he wasn’t sure if the fox had actually been hit by Steve’s bullet or had just died laughing.

Dad spent a lifetime inventing, making, modifying, repairing, fixing and building things. Not surprisingly, he taught all of his kids to invent, make, modify, repair, fix and build things too. He taught us to have a crack – don’t be afraid to try.

In Dooley street, we milked goats and cows, kept chooks, ducks and geese. We always had a dog or two, even cats sometimes. We had a sheep once. We learnt that chooks can still run around without heads. We grew chrysanthemums and vegies and sweet corn and more silver beet that any kid would ever want.  Luckily it was Mum who cooked all this because Dad’s cabbage stew was legendarily bad.

Sometimes Dad would do surprising things. David once discovered that Dad would sometimes go down to the beach at Warrnambool, sit on the sand dunes to watch him surf. Other times Dad would make something or give something or say something that surprised us that he had known what was going on even though we hadn’t said a word.

The family moved to Warrnambool in 1982 and from there, once Mum and Dad had split, Dad’s life took a different path. After an awfully sad time, Dad retired early, pressed the reset button on his life’s priorities, got a caravan and a dog and set off to see the country. He hit the highways and dirt tracks, scratched around on the goldfields, went down opal mines, saw Queensland beaches, drove to Darwin, stopped for a few months sometimes, got bitten by a redback once, saw whales and dolphins. I was there once when he was asked to leave a pub because he wasn’t wearing shoes. (I think he went months without shoes in those days!) He visited Brian in Perth, went to Fraser Island with me on a ferry and kept in touch with all of us by writing letters.

During these years three beautiful women entered Dad’s life. Julie, Kerry and Christine were welcomed like new daughters, not just daughters-in-law. They quickly became important members of Dad’s family.

Dad wrote a lot. Letters to his kids, stories, poems, prose, letters to the newspaper, he even had a publisher interested in a science fiction story he was writing for a while there.  He had an old clackety-clack typewriter for a while but more recently he just wrote in his usual messy scrawl.

It was while he was still roaming around like a nomad that he met Melissa in Swan Hill. Eventually Dad stopped travelling and settled in Bendigo again. He lived for some time in his caravan and then shared several houses with Melissa. Their friendship, their dogs, their gardens and their simple lifestyles gave him much joy, purpose and love. Evenings with a home brew around a fire in Dad’s back yard were some special times for all of us, especially Steven who spent many evenings sitting, sipping, talking, listening.

It was with his grandkids that Dad truly shone. Dad was brilliant with kids and kids loved him. You will see in some of the photos we have collected the joy on his face when he was with his grandkids.

First came Steve’s kids, Kyle and Shaylee, then Brian’s boys Joel and Lachie. Then down near Warrnambool, David’s kids arrived - Finn, then Thomas and Alanah.

These seven children brought so much love and joy to Dad during the past 23 and half years.  I am not sure if they will ever know how much. He loved joking around with kids, feeding them sugary foods they weren’t allowed to have at home, letting them poke the fire with a stick or even use a pocket knife. And they all loved him. Shaylee will speak later but I’m sure there will be some fun Grandad memories to share and laugh about for many years to come.

Dad died quietly, surrounded by loved ones. He was gently talking about being ready to die and joking about who would get the old red car and not to fuss too much over the funeral.  He smiled when he opened his eyes, he was ready. So were we. This was how he wanted to go.

Don/Dad was smart, funny, cynical, curious, sceptical, questioning, creative, proud, stubborn, practical, analytical, forgiving, sometimes hard, difficult, demanding, determined; sometimes a total softie, gentle, caring, loving.well loved. This would be a better place with more dads like mine in the world. My brothers and I, the in-laws, exes, kids... the whole of our family... loved him wholeheartedly. Still do, still will

Dad was the master of the “Dad Joke”. In fact I think the term “Dad Joke” was named after our Dad. He played jokes on us and on the grandkids, he always got us on April Fool’s Day. He was a very funny man, although sometimes we heard the same jokes over and over and over again. I think he enjoyed our groans as much as our laughs.

Dad made choices in life that we didn’t all agree with (that moustache for example!). We, his kids, also made choices he wasn’t so keen on. But he was proud of us and loved us all unconditionally. He supported us in what made us happy. He didn’t always know what to say when things got awkward but he certainly knew how to love us.

We learnt from Dad, Don, to value family and friends before material wealth, to treat each other kindly, to turn the other cheek, to do it our way, to laugh, to be independent in our lives and our thinking and to see through bullshit. In Dad’s own words in a piece of prose we found this week amongst his books… “We learned to look around us. And to wonder. To question. To try this and that.”

We are now left with a big Dad-shaped hole in our hearts, many memories and some really bad jokes, Some of us have his blue eyes. Most of us – family AND friends – have picked up or just learnt to appreciate his dry wit, black humour and ability to laugh at the irony of life.

I’ll finish with a few words from dad’s own hand:

Nothing comes from nothing….

…. It is said.

This world – this universe – is something. Really something.

How can it be said, the amazing astounding beyond comprehension out of this world stupendous SOMETHING that this place where we live really is?

Man, it is something.

Big? Yeah! Old? Well, there’s a date or two bandied around, fifteen billion – that’s fifteen thousand million! – years. Earth-round-the-sun years, that is. The Earth itself is just a whippersnapper, only - only - four billion years. Huh. Hardly out of nappies.

Yet…

There’s been some progress to date. There’s us, for instance. Us. Humanity. Yeah, I know, bit of a question as to the worth of the product but in the absence of a superior judge we have pride of place in the living-things category.

Every chance our bungling will blow it all away before many more millennia, or we’ll sink into a great stagnant sea of sloth with barely enough room to scratch ourselves. There’s a word out that just 700 years will see us with about a square metre each to stand on, given the current rate of population growth.

But enough of the down-side.

Look, we – humanity at large (I personally take no credit for any part of the upside) we have been movers and shakers from way back. Granted that each step or shuffle forward was for the sole purpose of betterment for ourselves, we have lived.

To start we were at the level of a rat, more or less. Scrabbling for a morsel, dodging rat eaters, existing. Slowly, slowly, thousands of years, we were climbing-beasts. Fruit-eaters. Leaf-eaters. Grub- egg- worm- beetle-  name-it-we-ate-it beasts.

Then we chipped a bit of stone to use as a tool. For a few million years we grew and chipped stones and scavenged and scrounged and grew and grew and grew – not bigger, much; not stronger, much; but smarter. Yeah! Much!

We learned to look around us. And to wonder. To question. To try this and that. To do all those things that have been so well chronicled by writers with experience and knowledge and an ability to describe.