Vulture Street story

It’s fashionable these days to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land. Vulture Street was the home of the Jagera people, of whom my friend Neville Bonner was the senior elder.

Neville’s people lost this land long ago, and its stories have been told since by others. David Malouf internationalised its reputation; Powder Finger’s album Vulture Street, gives it beat. But for our family the person who has best sung this place, our times, and the world in which we exist, was my Dad.

In our family Dad was the story-teller, and he had those two qualities that story-tellers need the most: the knowledge that your imagination can create reality; and the courage to assert that reality against the world.

Dad’s published output is probably no more than a letter to the editor, but there was extensive correspondence between him and Mum, the fairy tales and short stories he wrote for us kids, and the ones he improvised on the front verandah while we snuggled up before bedtime.

The special thing about Dad was not that he told stories, and wrote some of them down. The special thing was that he lived his stories and made them real.

Lionel Edward Cooke Young was born in the front bedroom of 483 Vulture Street, East Brisbane, to Edward and Annie Young (nee Copeland) on the July 6, 1912. Annie and “Cookie” were both in the theatre. Annie’s mother Blanche who made stage costumes, and her second husband Reginald, who painted, also lived with the family.

When Dad was quite young, his father died. Alcohol was implicated, but I suspect tuberculosis was the real cause.

As a result the heroes of his family stories were women - his mother, his grandmother, and further back in the pantheon, his great grandmother Oomie - all of them single mothers.

Dad went to primary school at East Brisbane State and secondary school at the Normal School. His first full-time job was as a copy boy for the Brisbane Courier. Somewhere around 1930, in the middle of the Great Depression, at this time the sole bread-winner for the family and with a wage rise coming, he saw the writing on the wall. He took a cut in pay and forsook a journalistic career to become an apprentice mechanical engineer, still at the paper. As an apprentice he couldn’t easily be sacked.

Things might have been grim, but they couldn’t have been desperate. At some time in the ’20s his grandmother splashed out and bought a house on the beachfront at Currumbin.

As Dad grew older so did his family. His beloved gran died, as did his step-grandfather.

So then it was Dad and his mum, Annie. They seem to have had a great life together in a Dickensian type of relationship rare in the 20th century. She waited on him hand and foot - Mum says that when she met him he didn’t even know how to butter his own toast. He paid the bills, took her for their treasured weekends down to Currumbin, and as far as anyone knows, never looked at another woman.

It must have been devastating for Dad when his mother died when he was 41. That was when he went to sea as a marine engineer. It was also when he decided, on the advice of his mother, to regularly donate some of his generous estate (at this stage they owned five houses, one built by Dad and Gran) to the Blue Nurses, a new service being established at the West End Methodist Mission.

It was as a result of those donations that he came to marry the “little deaconess” Marie Young (nee Millett).

Six weeks after Mum and Dad met they were engaged, and six months later they were married. No wonder that the first time Grandpa Millett met Mum’s sailor suitor he took him to one side and asked him whether his intentions were honourable!

Despite being 46 Dad almost immediately embarked with Mum for Canada where he hoped to gain experience on diesel engines, and a Commonwealth Chief Engineer’s certificate.

He did that, and more. He bought and furnished a house, had three children - myself, Bronwyn and Hélène - and spent a number of seasons working on ships on the British Columbian Coast, and in the Arctic Ocean.

Back in Australia he divided his time between his family, the ships, and his various houses, particularly those at Currumbin. I say divided, but those three things weren’t separate. We all lived and breathed sea, ships, surf, house maintenance and renovations.

He was active in whatever organisations were to hand - church, P&Cs, P&Fs and lodge. He worked mostly on oil tankers. Then, aged 62, he spent the last three years to “retirement” as the leading hand fitter at the Royal Brisbane Hospital, where he was also the union rep.

But retirement didn’t mean anything changed. In 1977 when our rental house at 485 Vulture Street burnt down he used its charred remains to build an extension on 483 Vulture Street. In 1987 we sold his beloved Currumbin property - by now an acre of beachfront land and went into the property development business.

And it was in his retirement that his family grew, with three marriages and 6 grandchildren, something I’m sure the newly married 45-year-old Lionel would not have thought he would live to see.

Even in his last years when the world was closing in on Dad because of deafness and bad eye-sight, he still kept working at something. Three weeks ago he was still cutting his own lawn. Three years ago he climbed Mount Warning including the last 200 metres, which is a rock climb.

When the end came, it came quickly. Monday last week he wanted to go to hospital. It might have been his heart, but it was probably that you can’t run an engine as long and as hard as he had without it just wearing out - particularly if bread and dripping is one of your favourite lubricants.

There are a number of strong themes to Dad’s story.

Man as hero

Dad believed in the individual, in his or her (there was no gender bias in his world) ability to achieve.

It’s a dominant theme for my sister Hélène who remembers being knocked over, spade and bucket in hand, by a freak wave while out for a walk with Dad one night.

She recalls: “The world turned white and very cold as the water surged around me, the bucket and spade were snatched from my grip. Through it all a single strong hand steadied and held me tight. As the water receded Dad simply swung me up onto his shoulders, shook his head and laughed. ‘Buy you another bucket littley. That was a big wave wasn’t it.’ I gazed in awe at the top of his head. Not even the sea was strong enough to shake my Dad.”

Faithfulness

Dad was faithful in his life. There were only two loves - Mum and Gran - and he was faithful to both of them in exactly the right way, and to the utmost of his ability. He was also faithful to his family and would have done anything for us.

Dad was also faithful to his word. Once it was given, that was it.

Openness and acceptance and forgiveness

Everyone felt relaxed with Dad. I never saw him treat another human being with any less dignity than any other. The ships he worked on had large foreign crews, and the crew all loved Dad because he treated them as equals. Taigal on the Guinea Gas called me his brother. Dad did however have limits and wouldn’t agree to Taigal’s request to marry my sister Bronwyn, who was 11 at the time.

His respect for people also extended to the whole living world. He never saw a dog that he didn’t like and respect, and I don’t think the dog ever existed that didn’t like and respect him in return.

Progress

Dad believed in progress - the word itself was for him a rebuttal to caution. He was a bit of a “gadget”. His mother shelled out six guineas - a princely sum at the time - to buy him a crystal set. She bought him an automobile before he could drive (she had to get the licence).

Dad was into poured concrete when everyone else was into wood, and had graduated to structural steel when everyone else was discovering concrete. He claims to have invented the rotary mower, and we have a chassis at home as proof, although Victa has the patent.

It’s typical that at the end of his life he was the major financial supporter of On Line Opinion.

Righteousness

Dad believed that all that is necessary in life is to do the right thing. The only scripture passage I can recall him quoting to me was from St Paul - “Test everything, and hold fast to that which is true”.

Family

Dad believed in the family. It wasn’t an abstract political philosophy but an organic concept where each generation builds on the previous one’s achievements. When he talked about his family history, it wasn’t just about the gossip but about educating us about who we are, what we shouldn’t do, and what we owed those who went before.

Geography

He may have traveled far, but his is a Brisbane story. Vulture Street runs like a thread through his life. He was born on it, went to school on it, went to church on it (both at St Paul’s Anglican and West End Methodist), married on it and died on it. As Dad passes, so passes the shadow geography of Vulture Street that we all knew so well from his stories.

These themes I have sketched out miss so much. Dad was a man of nooks and crannies, of contradictions and convictions, simple as well as complex.

Bronwyn remembers Dad as:

“Unconditional love, unconditional support, warmth, surf and sunshine: the safest haven in the world. He was a: writer, raconteur, stargazer, futurist, inventor and original greenie;a surfer, bee keeper and devoted son, husband, father and grandfather.”

For Hélène:

“He taught me that it was fine to screw up and make mistakes, provided you learnt something from it.

“He taught me that if someone holds out their hand to you in friendship or need, you take their hand and welcome them into your life.

“He taught me that everyone has a story worth hearing if you just make the time to listen.

“He gave me the courage to pursue my dreams and the strength to make them reality.

“He taught me that family and friends enrich our lives in a way that material things never will.”

I had great times with Dad, including time spent carrying his tools, and a couple of fantastic trips on my own with him on ships. For me it’s Dad’s will that finally defines him. As his heart physician said - it was “indomitable”.

As I’ve tried to come to grips with his going, I’ve reached for secular texts. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam - Dad’s favourite - and Tennyson - mine.

For me, the final stanza from Ulysses, a poem about another sailor, of a much less reputable type sums him up:

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal-temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Good-bye Dad. As you would have said, “Cheer-up. Worse things happen at sea!”