04/09/25 Back When The World Was Young

 I spent the day working.  That wasn't particularly noteworthy, so let me tell you a little story that took place in Fremantle in the year 2000, back when the world was young.

Back then a family packed their three small children into a commodore, stuffed a garden trailer full of things of which they only needed half, and left Roma on a kind-of circumnavigation of Australia.  I would show you photos, but they're all stored safely back in a shed in Milang, so you'll have to take my word for everything.

This is Fremantle today.  This picture has very little to do with the story you are about to hear.

The family left Roma and made their way to Alice Springs via Cameron Corner (where SA, Qld, and the NT intersect), the Oodnadatta Track, Coober Pedy, and the Finke River.  They washed their filthy children and clothes in Alice Springs and set out on the Tanami Track, and five days later the husband was observed embracing the bitumen in Halls Creek as he celebrated deliverance from endless corrugations, bulldust, and the marital stress that comes from passenger-seat driving.

The family followed the coast south: they gathered shells on 80-mile beach and watched the blow holes blowing at Quobba.  Eventually they got all the way to Fremantle where the commodore's radiator blew up in front of the Fremantle Gaol at the beginning of a long weekend when the only place to hire a car under their RACQ membership was out at Perth airport.

This is the round house, Fremantle's first gaol.

The husband caught a taxi out to Perth airport with child 1 in tow, and the wife set up camp in Fremantle with the diligent 'help' of children 2 and 3, whose combined ages at that point still didn't amount to more than 5.  While the tent was going up the husband discovered that he had left his drivers licence on the counter at the Geraldton Post Office some weeks ago, and no matter how hard he pleaded no one was going to hire a car to a hobo with a 3-week beard and a dirty child in tow.  He offered to leave the child as security but that didn't go down well at all.

Because the world was still young neither the husband nor the wife had such gadgets as mobile phones, so communication was tenuous and relied on the hire car office allowing use of their land line and the caravan park owner delivering verbal messages which suffered somewhat in the space between receipt and delivery.

The statues are a new thing in Fremantle.  They did not exist here back when the world was young.

As the sun set the wife zipped up the tent, gathered up her licence and the tired and crochety children 2 and 3, and caught a taxi out to Perth Airport where she hired a car under her name and the husband and child 1 had to forgo watching the Olympic Games opening ceremony on the airport TV because everyone was getting tired and crochety.

The hired commodore was clean and shiny and new.  It was a far cry from the broken-down one, the back seat of which had been habitat for three children for the past 4 months and could generously be described as a pigsty.  The family buckled the children into the back seat and, because they were all past crochety and well into hangry, went to McDonalds for dinner.  This was a big treat and the children ate a lot.  As everyone slurped their after-dinner soft serve ice creams (because back when the world was young McFlurries hadn't been invented yet) child 2 stood up on his seat, crossed his eyes, hiccuped once, and vomited his McDonalds dinner all over the table which thankfully was covered with trays that contained much of the toxic spill.

The family retired in some embarrassment, giving thanks that the upchucking had happened in McDonalds and not in the squeaky clean hire commodore.  An unnamed and vastly unappreciated 15 year-old in McDonalds was tapped for the clean-up, and the family went back to the tent and crawled into their sleeping bags without showering or brushing their teeth. The earth spun around and in the morning everyone felt much better and the parents decided to keep the children, once they'd washed them well.  The story of the Lost Licence and the Great Upchuck became a family legend, because while not particularly funny at the time it gained a lot as the years went past, particularly when told by teenagers.

I went to visit the Fremantle Gaol where the story began with the broken-down commodore.  Fremantle Gaol, like Fremantle in general, had gotten quite respctable in the intervening 25 years.  Payment was required for entry, part of the cell block was repurposed as a hostel, and it was most definitely not possible to park close enough to the front door to break down there.  The caravan park, which the family reached by coasting the car down the hill, had long disappeared.  Fremantle boasted a plethora of beautiful open malls lined with lovely buildings and positively bursting with places to eat and drink.

There was a pub in a brewery.  It was a big brewery too.

I didn't go to McDonalds.  Funny as the story of the Great Upchuck may have been, there was definitely some residual trauma that prevented me from walking in those doors.  Instead I wandered around the town and enjoyed all the old buildings and goggled at the size of the Esplanade Hotel which catered for the America's Cup back in the days of Alan Bond, and continues to service the more expensive end of town aka the ones with yachts parked in the marina across the way. 

That's not the half of it.

Thus ended another day in Fremantle.

Bubbles to end the day.