Paula & Me

By John Jeffery

JJ was a typical Aussie larrikin. Football, friendships and fun were the most important things in his life. Until he met Paula – beautiful and brave enough to stick with him wherever he went.

Together, he – a banker – and she – a hairdresser – set out on the suburban path as a normal Australian family. But something was missing. They wanted adventure... and a three-year bank posting to Papua New Guinea would be the catalyst for an exciting, unexpected but welcome future.

The ‘Jeffery Gypsy’ gene and a career change to hospitality saw them travelling and working in some of the most remote and challenging places in outback Australia... and loving it! Through it all, Paula was a devoted partner whose dedicated support allowed JJ to follow his dreams. And when she fell seriously ill with motor neurone disease (MND), he was determined to return the favour.

This is a story of lust for life, luck and, above all, love set against a backdrop of harsh conditions, personal challenges, confrontation with a monster and the comfort of true friends.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Jeffery
• Release date: Dec 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9780995415225

John Jeffery

Even though they say that everyone has a story worthy of a book in them, I never thought mine would ever exist anywhere outside of me. I didn’t think I had the patience or ability to remember all that information and devote myself to such a time-consuming project. And I’m not a writer. Or at least I wasn’t. I was a larrikin, a suburban and well-travelled country footballer, a banker, a husband, a father, a grandfather, a somewhat crazy thrill seeker always up for a practical joke and a good time. Anyone who has ever known me or seen me waterskiing naked knows that. (Yes, there is pictorial evidence of this in the book as well as many other tales that will surely give you a laugh or two.) I was having too much fun to grow up.But when Paula, my wife of over forty years, fell ill – first with breast cancer while we were working in Kakadu and then more seriously with the incurable and emotionally cruel motor neurone disease (MND) – writing our story was a way of keeping me occupied and from going crazy, a way of making some sense of it all, if that was possible.Apart from now being a writer, I’m also a business owner on the Sunshine Coast in Australia. I spend plenty of time in Cairns and Hobart where our two sons and their families live as well as everywhere in between and I still love to travel, although a recent knee replacement has slowed me down a little.I hope you enjoy sharing our journey through life and getting to know Paula the way I knew her.Thanks for reading!

Book preview

For Paula, the love of my life

Paula, I wasn’t the only one in your life. You will be forever in the hearts of everyone who had the honour of knowing and loving you. You will never be forgotten.

This book is dedicated to you.

Table of contents

Dedication

Introduction

Part one: A larrikin from day one

Chapter 1: Humble beginnings

Chapter 2: Our own Underbelly experience

Chapter 3: Party’s over

Chapter 4: School’s out – let’s go

Chapter 5: Falling in love – who, me?

Chapter 6: The footy club – no better place or people

Chapter 7: The footy club – home and away

Chapter 8: Time to settle down – yeah, sure!

Part two: Married life, my love for always

Chapter 9: The big day – a storm develops

Chapter 10: The honeymoon goes on and on

Chapter 11: A world away in PNG

Chapter 12: Home from the wild – now what?

Chapter 13: Bendigo, a place for growing teens

Chapter 14: From banker to dreamer

Part three: Dare to dream

Chapter 15: Ellenbrae Station – our first role

Chapter 16: Faraway Bay – you bet it was

Chapter 17: Mount Isa – town of shame

Chapter 18: Mackerel Islands – no better fishing

Chapter 19: Katherine – tough times brewing

Chapter 20: Kakadu dreaming – or was it a nightmare?

Chapter 21: Civilisation at last in Cairns

Chapter 22: Home at long last – seven years later

Chapter 23: Some holiday

Part four: Living with a monster

Chapter 24: Life-changing news

Chapter 25: Where to from here?

Chapter 26: Life with a monster

Chapter 27: The frustrations of Lyme disease

Chapter 28: Introducing Stella

Chapter 29: Bored but ready – it must be close

Chapter 30: Putting it in writing

Chapter 31: Filling in time

Chapter 32: Why Paula?

Chapter 33: Christmas 2015 fast approaching

Chapter 34: My saddest moment

Chapter 35: Saying goodbye while surrounded by friends

Acknowledgements

Family

Friends

Special thanks

Chronology of moves since marriage

How you can help beat MND and breast cancer

Introduction

It’s been said that everybody has a book in them and it’s just a matter of sitting down and writing in order to get it out. For me, there was a crucial moment between living the life you’re going to read about in the following pages and writing this book. That moment was an old work colleague and friend suggesting that the action-packed life I had led would be an interesting read for my grandkids.

There was just one problem. I’d never written anything before and I didn’t know if I could write. But there was only one way to find out. I had to give it a go. So in typical JJ style, I started making notes at three o’clock one morning as I lay in bed unable to sleep. Six hours later, I was still typing away on my laptop. Maybe that old work colleague and friend knew what he was talking about, after all.

As more and more family, friends and acquaintances found out I was writing my autobiography, it seemed like everyone wanted to read it. All the people I had met along the way – the ones who were still talking to me, anyway, which was most of them – were curious about the places I’d been and the things I’d done. I reckon a lot of them were also wondering whether they’d be in the book. A few of them are. More than a few.

But, of course, the story of my life is – for the most part – the story of my life with Paula. We were married for forty-two years and together for more than forty-five, since I was nineteen years old. I hope this book will instil in every reader’s mind what a remarkable wife, mother, grandmother, sister, aunty, cousin and friend Paula was. I dragged her from Melbourne to Papua New Guinea and back to Melbourne and then on an endless journey around country Victoria, regional Queensland, remote Western Australia and outback Northern Territory. Most women would have waved a white flag and said, ‘Enough is enough! Take me home!’ But she never did.

We were rarely separated during our adventurous, nomadic and fun-filled lifestyle… until we were rocked by the news of her diagnosis with motor neurone disease. Paula had previously battled and beaten breast cancer but this was something different. This was a disease without treatment options, without a cure, without hope. This was a death sentence.

We experienced the peaks of unbelievably happy moments and the troughs of emotionally tough times throughout our journey. And despite the inevitability of a tragic ending, our love for and devotion to each other remained as deep at the end of our life together as it was at the beginning.

This book is the most honest account I can give of how we lived our dreams working and travelling throughout some of the wildest parts of the outback and the Top End of Australia, even while Paula’s health was slowly deteriorating unbeknown to us. My choice of language may seem a bit crude at times but what else would you expect from a bloke who was rude, obnoxious and full of bad manners until his wife inspired him to become a loving, caring, generous husband and father?

It is also a tribute to our family and the lifelong friends we made along the way. During the times that it seemed like doom and gloom might set in, when we briefly considered simply lying down and surrendering, it was family and friends that gave us the support and strength to keep going longer than any of the medical experts ever envisaged.

Enjoy the story and prepare for the tales that only I could tell.

Part one: A larrikin from day one

Chapter 1: Humble beginnings

Acknowledged by many, and even by my own admission, I was born a larrikin. The tag hung over me for the better part of my life, something I couldn’t shake off, not that I ever wanted to. It seemed like something to be proud of.

Born on 11 September 1950 and saintly christened John Francis Jeffery by my very proud parents, Aussie and Dot, they hoped I would carry on the Catholic image the family was so proud of. My only aunt was a Catholic nun and my mother always wanted me to be a priest. In my early years, when asked by her work friends, I would give the stock standard reply of wanting the same vocation. But by the time I was able to think for myself (about the time I started at Aquinas College in Ringwood) and with many years of being a larrikin both behind and ahead of me, she gave up on me achieving that dream. In fact, the direction my life later took could not have been further from the Catholic path both my parents had dearly hoped for.

Growing up in the rapidly developing eastern suburbs of Melbourne in the fifties, I had a list of escapades and resulting injuries before I even reached the middle years of high school that a professional stuntman would have been proud of. My earliest recollections are vague but at the age of five, a badly broken leg set the scene for the accident-prone life I would go on to lead. I was a roly-poly little bloke and by then had earned the appropriate nickname of ‘Fat’, the saintly names not having stuck. The ‘JJ’ nickname would come later.

So how does a fat five-year-old break his little leg? Trying to pinch delicious fruit from a nearby neighbour’s pride and joy passionfruit vine, of course. It hung precariously from a fair height and out of the reach of everybody except those who dared to make the risky climb. I’d done the deed successfully on numerous previous occasions. But this time I pushed my luck a little too far and failure saw me pay the ultimate penalty (in my view anyway), which was being trundled off to school by my mother in an old wire-spoked, rubber-wheeled pusher that other mothers used for their infant children. It proved to be one of life’s more embarrassing moments for me.

That broken leg paved the way to a further five fractured bones, multiple accidents, stitches to the head and limbs, boiling water scalds to both feet and scarlet fever thrown in for good measure. From a very early age, I seemed destined for a life of excitement, stupidity and outright danger that would continually worry my parents.

The saintly names of John Francis didn’t last long, replaced by ‘Fat’. You can see why.

They were working class and my older sister by three years, Christine, and I shared a simple lifestyle with them. Dad was a bus driver and Mum was a receptionist at the local steel foundry, nestled amongst the newly developing house lots of the outer eastern edge of Melbourne’s urban sprawl in Owen Street, Mitcham. But we were part of an extremely loving and hardworking family network. Far from wealthy, the family was, however, rich in the friendships our ‘open door’ home brought. Priests, neighbours, pub and work mates, fishing mates and anyone who cared to stop in for a cool drink and BBQ were always welcome. Aussie and Dot were also well known to many of my school and footballing friends and those same mates and their families often shared the generous hospitality of Sunday BBQs and camping trips to the Murray River or Eildon Weir. They were always welcome to holiday with us, a trend that continued for many, many years. So from that very early age I gained an appreciation for friendship, a philosophy I carried throughout life and proudly instilled in my own family as well.

Friendship and larrikinism often went hand in hand. And different times of year brought different forms of entertainment. The cold and chilly Melbourne winters saw the arrival of the somewhat risky fireworks season that often resulted in damage to the property of unpopular neighbours. Having carefully devised, tied and lit multiple fireworks and then placed them into flimsy letterboxes, we would run like hell before the deafening explosion scattered wood and sent splinters flying through the air. From a distance, we looked back on our achievements with pride, although this was usually followed by having to face the consequences of disciplinary action from parents and complaining neighbours.

Every bit of burnable rubbish was collected to create the biggest bonfire in the street.

We would also build huge bonfires on Guy Fawkes Night, which meant collecting every piece of timber, bush and burnable rubbish possible in order to achieve the biggest and best fire in the street. It was a real treat to see the fire, once lit, grow so large it was licking the trees five yards above and creating small grass fires as embers fell to the ground. We delighted in the raging red-orange flames and cracking sounds while sky rockets jettisoned above into an explosive display of light and sparkles, a mass of colour against the backdrop of the darkened sky. The disappearance of rockets into the night left us wondering if they had mysteriously landed on the ground below or nearby roofs of not-so-excited neighbours. The next day, the remaining ashes smouldered beneath the singed brown tree line above while we frantically searched for unexploded crackers and sky rockets that could be drained of gunpowder and result in more fun. Destroying bull ant mounds with monster fireworks and lit piles of gunpowder provided further thrills, except when the angry little suckers landed on us, piercing our bodies with multiple bites and leaving us rolling on the ground writhing in excruciating pain. Those same monster crackers, called ‘threepenny bungers’, were later banned for obvious reasons but, boy, did they pack a punch and make a mess of letterboxes! If you tempted fate by hanging on too long, you would suffer at your own peril, usually ending with a visit to the doctor or local hospital.

Our spring time adrenalin rush was raiding magpie nests, disposing of baby birds and unhatched eggs in an attempt to rid our favourite tree-lined football park of the breeding and pestering dive bombers. Nest raids eventually discouraged their presence and freed us from their swooping antics and we soon became engaged in playing footy matches without the problem of the pesky feathered pests. Cliffy Fowler, a little red-headed, freckle-faced bastard up the street, was always being attacked by swooping magpies. Your typical Ginger Meggs, he dismounted trees with a shirt stuffed with baby magpies and broken eggs, quite often with bleeding puncture marks to his fiery red scalp from the rampaging angry birds protesting at his nest invasion.

The trouble tag that hung over me from an early stage and haunted my parents was no more apparent than the time a friend and I were exploring private property in the local Board of Works reservoir not far from home. Using the ‘No Entry’ sign as a means of scaling the heavily barbed wire fence, we were seeking adventure in the dense scrub when we stumbled across a neatly wrapped brown paper bundle carefully stashed under a bush. We approached the package with curiosity and excitement and when we unwrapped it, to our surprise and delight, we came across a sparkling and obviously brand new double-barrelled shotgun. Complete with a box of cartridges, it was clearly straight out of the shop. The thought of how it got there and who owned it never entered our minds as we started to show off by waving the gun around, pretending to be some sort of macho-like Chuck Connors from the TV show Rifleman.

Not content with an empty gun, we carefully loaded cartridges into the breech. I had learnt the art of handling guns from an early age, having seen it all on the newly introduced luxury at the time called television. After much showing off while pointing the gun at each other’s scones, the gun went off with an explosive bang, giving my unprepared young shoulder an almighty jolt and forcing me onto my backside as the gun flew over my shoulder and into the air. I was totally shocked and completely unaware of the near miss to my friend until much later (the spray of lead pellets had narrowly missed his usually laughing face and it was replaced by a petrified look as he took off running). After quickly realising what had happened, I too shot off faster than the gun itself in hot pursuit of my fleeing friend. We scaled that barbed wire fence without so much as contact. The next day, we sheepishly returned to the scene of the crime only to find the gun was gone. We never found out who owned the gun nor did we tell anyone of our near miss experience.

Regardless of the season, in those days, time was often spent playing my favourite of all sports, football. We would set up makeshift playing arenas on the planted out nature strips and bituminised local streets where more often than not our wayward kicks knocked out power to neighbouring houses. There were blinding flashes of electricity as the ball made contact with the wires above. We took it as a challenge to perfect our accuracy of kicking the ball in order to deliberately cause a flash or smash the light globes. Unsurprisingly, it usually resulted in our banishment from the street. Playing all sports in the quiet streets free from traffic was common in the fifties and you could look along the newly planted tree-lined street to see the different groups playing a game of kick-to-kick till all hours of the night.

The local park, at the end of a laneway and nestled amongst trees behind our house, was the meeting place for many after school. Good friends Choco Supple, Tant Howard, Graeme Phillips, Cliffy Fowler, Terry Lambden, Robbie Helmore and others often gathered there to imitate their favourite VFL footy idols. The confines of the tree-lined and bare dirt park created a football oval with designated house paling fences as boundaries and trees as goal posts. It was about 800 square yards and trees also acted as strategically-placed football opponents that enabled us to hone our game skills. The mix of trees and mates as playing opponents meant we would smash into each other, blind turn or baulk around a tree as if playing a real live footy match.

Over the summer months, the park was converted into a BMX bike track, a cricket pitch or soccer ground and the same friends gathered together for more fun. Trees in that park also provided a place for tree houses made from old pieces of building materials, packing cases and any material we could muster from under our parents’ houses. The soundly-built structures provided shelter from the weather while we sucked on fags and flipped through the old man’s girly magazines like Man and the Truth newspaper, items we were barred from seeing at home but never seemed to have any trouble finding.

It was during those hot summers in the park when again I found myself in deep trouble. Snakes were often out and on one particular occasion I errantly ran over a metre-long tiger snake on my trusty bike. Head raised in a striking motion as I rode across its back with my wheel, it attempted to bite me, forcing me to crash close to where the angry serpent was slithering. After a few whacks to the head with a nearby tree sapling, it was no longer a threat to my wellbeing. Proud of my achievements, I took it home and carefully laid it on the front doorstep for Mum to observe. But it was the deafening scream of my sister upon her arrival home from school that could be heard for miles. I flew down the driveway and fled the crime scene in pursuit of safety somewhere else.

It may have seemed neglectful of our parents because we had a fairly free rein on where and what we were doing but that was the way it was back then. Society was generally a safe place to leave kids to their own devices, regardless of the time of day. We would frequent the local haunted houses, usually old abandoned farmhouses on expansive apple orchards located within riding distance of home. The orchards were lined with carefully planted trees, near to perfection for what seemed like miles across the green, grassy hills. All the trees were brimming with juicy, red and shiny apples, providing not only a constant supply of food to satisfy our hunger pangs, but also ammunition for the battles that took place amongst friends. What a waste. Those same properties are now under multi-storey shopping centres, hotels, office complexes and real estate forming the concrete jungle of modern day Melbourne suburbia.

On our way home from a day’s adventure of warfare, we liked to experiment with a fag or two, usually a full pack of Turf 10s cigarettes bought from the weekly pocket money allowance of about two bob. A few smokes whilst showing off to your mates by doing the drawback usually resulted in a grey colouration to the face, followed by a squirmy sickness in the stomach; it was a dead-set easy detection signal for Mum and Dad of what we had been up to by the time we got home.

In those same early days, you could buy a big bag of broken biscuits for a penny and get threepence deposit on soft drink bottles, enabling you to buy numerous lollies or icy poles. When in season, you could buy as many fireworks as you needed or a family brick of ice cream for two bob and gorge it all yourself while riding no hands on your push bike, a sure way of showing younger kids in the district that you were pretty cool. Our antics of pinching empty bottles from behind the old milk bar and taking them to the shopfront for a refund was about as close as we got to big time theft at that stage. It proved quite a lucrative little business where we befriended the shop watchdog, trading access to the yard with broken biscuits purchased earlier. The poor bloke who owned the shop never did realise what we were up to.

Cashing in bottles enabled you to get the little luxuries for yourself when your weekly allowance was never enough to last through the weekend. Money wasn’t freely available in a struggling house like ours and I can clearly recall my hardworking mum fossicking down the back of the old vinyl-covered and wooden-legged couch, very fashionable in the fifties, looking for a threepence or penny that may have somehow extracted itself from some visitors’ pockets, thus enabling her to buy bread and milk. That typified the financial struggle our parents experienced in those days. Once, Mum asked me to ride a short distance to buy a crusty loaf of bread for tea from the old corner store. By the time I got home, the bread was just a loaf of crust without the middle. I had devoured the warm, moist contents on my own, totally oblivious at the time of the financial struggle my parents were experiencing. Otherwise, I might have had some guilt at my little bit of greediness.

Paula as a four-year-old growing up in Warburton.

Chapter 2: Our own Underbelly experience

The primary school years flew by quickly and the fifties turned into the sixties. My parents had attempted to well and truly brainwash me with the Catholic religion but instead I was on the verge of my rebellion.

Monthly visits to Aunty Lorna felt like I was visiting Alcatraz. Even at this young age, I would rather have been at home playing footy with my mates. From left to right, my mother, Dot, me, my Aunty Lorna, my sister, Christine, and my father, Aussie.

Because my only aunty was a Catholic nun – meaning I never had any cousins to grow up with, something I often look back on regretfully – most school holidays in my early teens were spent with my maternal grandmother, Kath Waters. I was born at her place in South Melbourne and it was a totally different environment to Mitcham. At the time, South and the surrounding areas of Port Melbourne, St Kilda and Richmond were, unbeknown to me, the location of a gangland war between unionists, non-unionists, wharfies, prostitutes, pimps and layabout drug dealers. Whenever I visited South with my friends, we were totally unaware of the criminal goings on around us. We were happy in our own world, moving amongst groups of newly arrived and seasoned immigrants from England, Italy and Greece, commonly referred to back then as poms and dagoes, and getting into mischief of a non-criminal description.

I also often visited my grandmother’s purse in search of much needed pocket money. While I was rattling through her purse in the early hours one morning, looking for some loose change, she caught me red-handed. She asked me what I was doing and in a flash I replied, ‘I thought I heard a noise in there and I was just checking to see what it was.’ She was a truly wonderful lady who simply smiled and handed me two bob, the same amount she often gave me. She knew what I was up to and told me to enjoy the fireworks that I intended to buy from the proceeds of my crime.

I didn’t really need to pinch money as she always gave me some regardless. My grandma on my mum’s side was a truly remarkable woman – gentle, generous and full of love and pride in my sister and me. That same love and generosity was given to us by our mother, Dot, who showed those same qualities to all of her grandchildren before we lost her at such an early age, only in her late sixties.

My dad’s parents were equally as loving, but more stiff-necked types, due mainly to my grandfather’s overseas war involvement. As kids, we didn’t see them as regularly. Dad’s father was a decorated officer of World War I, promoted from Corporal after leaving Australia and achieving numerous rank upgrades to Second Lieutenant in the space of four years in Africa, France and England. It was only after pursuing his war records much later that we found he had been promoted to fill the gaps left by fallen comrades in different battles. We also discovered he had been gassed twice and wounded by shrapnel in the many battles he’d participated in. He was a remarkable fellow who, like many, never spoke of those horrible experiences of war. When we were kids, we were told to hush whenever the subject of war was raised. He was a hero to us but, unfortunately, we never really got to know him that well. He took his secrets and his heroics to the grave.

During visits to my grandmother’s place in South Melbourne, my friend Lance McKimmie from Mitcham, his cousin Gary Croft, who lived around the corner from Grandma’s place in the close density housing of South, and I spent the days from sun-up to sun-down riding our bikes anywhere and everywhere. In the city, we took in picture shows, lunch at Coles in Elizabeth Street, Luna Park and St Moritz ice skating in St Kilda. The worst thing we got up to was pinching Juicy Fruit chewy from shop counters, which was all in a typical day out for us.

Lance McKimmie and primary school friend Val Bacon, who would go on to marry State Bank footballer Leigh Dent and is still a friend today.

Bike riding also took us to the Richmond baths where a ten-metre diving tower awaited us. We would show off, performing belly