Fish Out Of Water

By Peter Miles

In this work of humorous adolescent fiction and adult nostalgia, set in the later 1980s, a 15-year-old surfer from the Gold Coast of Queensland, Australia, is uprooted by his parents and moved to an Outback country town and school. Phillip “Fish” Fisher must learn to manage his family, make new friends, navigate the idiosyncrasies of Australian rural living, deal with the academic and sporting demands of high schooling, and plot his romantic future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Miles
• Release date: May 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463793855

Peter Miles

Peter Miles lives in Rainbow Beach, Queensland, Australia. He is a father of 3, an English and Physical Education teacher, a Special Educator, a classroom Behaviour Management specialist, a surfer, a runner and a paraglider. His priorities in life are Family, Fitness and Career, in that order. After 32 years of teaching, he is also a RAT - Retirement Aspirant Teacher.Peter published the classroom behaviour management textbook "Don't Just Stand There, Yell Something?" in 2003 through McGraw-Hill Publishing and wrote a follow-up ebook "If You Can't Beat Them, Teach Them" in 2006. He also compiled the educational package "The Better Behaviour, Better Learning Professional Development Suite" for Education Queensland and a protective behaviours anti-bullying program called "Take Control" for his education district.

Book preview

FISH OUT OF WATER

By Peter Miles

Copyright 2020 Peter Miles

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyright property of

the author, but may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes,

provided the book remains in its complete original form

Other works by this author:

A CONTEMPORARY CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT MANUAL

A ROLINGTON RATS TALE

MARY HAD A TRENDY LAMB

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE A NEW BEGINNING   THE END OF THE WORLD

CHAPTER TWO A TOWN WITH NO SURF

CHAPTER THREE HOME IS WHERE THE CARAVAN'S PARKED

CHAPTER FOUR SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES

CHAPTER FIVE DRESSED IN GREY, FEELING BLUE

CHAPTER SIX THE DAZE IN THE OLD SCHOOL YARD

CHAPTER SEVEN GETTING TO KNOW YOU…

CHAPTER EIGHT LOVE WILL WOUND ALL HEELS

CHAPTER NINE THE SHOW MUST GO ON

CHAPTER TEN THE RISE AND FALL OF SPORTING LEGENDS

CHAPTER ELEVEN THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME

CHAPTER TWELVE GETTING AHEAD IN LEAPS AND BOUNDS

CHAPTER THIRTEEN ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE

CHAPTER FOURTEEN YOUR FUTURE LIES BEHIND YOU

CHAPTER FIFTEEN AND NOW, THE END IS NEAR…… I THINK

EPILOGUE

AUTHOR’S NOTE

PROLOGUE

My name is Phillip John Fisher. My friends call me Fish, my mother PJ, my father Phil my boy and my enemies call me a whole mixture of obscenities. This book traces significant events in one year of my life, back in the 1980s, a year that seemed to have a major impact on me, and on the course of my future. At the time I was young, inexperienced and a little self-centred, but mostly, I was young. I can't vouch for the complete accuracy of the events I've recounted, because time and a teenage imagination may well have altered a few of the facts, but I've done my best to record things as I saw them when they happened. Cross my heart!

CHAPTER ONE

A NEW BEGINNING   THE END OF THE WORLD

One thousand and fifty six, one thousand and fifty-seven, one thousand–and fifty  eight. I was sitting glumly in the back seat of our yellow 1976 Toyota Corolla, counting the telephone poles as they raced past the car, each one another nail being driven into my coffin. Each passing pole symbolised a further 50 metres between me and the ocean, and 50 metres less between me and a drab future in the bush. Beside me, Sarah The Brain, my 10 year old blonde haired, chubby cheeked sister, was busy reading a copy of Man on the Land, a rural affairs magazine, hoping to pick up a few vital tips on how best to relate to the native species of humankind we were about to encounter at our new home.

Home. The mere mention of the word brought tears to my eyes. Home had been the sunny Gold Coast, with beaches, surf, surfshops, video game parlours and plenty of well tanned bikini girls   everything that a growing 14-year-old boy needs for his physical and mental development. I was happy there and had already planned for a very successful career as a professional surfer and Beauty Contest judge. My hair was just getting that tousled, bleached look that the girls loved, my skin was looking tanned, and I was on the verge of being accepted at school as a true surfer-of-note. Then the worst happened. My father decided to take an interest in my future.

My father was an English and Geography teacher who had taught at the same Gold Coast school for the past eight years. He was a dark-haired, basically ordinary looking middle-aged man, of average height and fair complexion. He did, however, have one unusual feature – some of the students in his classes had nicknamed him Mullet Head. He had this strange open-mouthed look he adopted when silently reading or watching his students work. I suppose, as his son, I should have defended him, but I kept my mouth shut. Don't get me wrong, I loved my dad   I just didn't like him very much at times. His favourite hobby at home, apart from matchstick architecture, was to correct my grammar at every possible opportunity. It was an irritating habit that tended to destroy the atmosphere a little whenever I tried to have any deep and meaningful Father and Son talks with him. In the end I'd given up trying, and turned to my friends for more worldly, if grammatically-incorrect, advice instead.

My feelings towards my father turned to genuine dislike the day he came home to announce that he had applied for a transfer to a country school. He had decided that Sarah and I needed to experience more of life, needed to develop emotionally, spiritually and culturally, and that the Great Australian Outback was the place to go in search of this development. He wanted to help us make our mark in life, to go where no one had gone before. I felt that the only mark we’d make in the country, away from the sand and surf and everything I loved, was a skid mark. I even started to hum the Star Trek theme, but Dad wasn't impressed, telling me I needed a more sensible approach to life. I was going to point out that seeking culture and life's adventures in some tinpot country dusthole didn't sound too sensible in my book, but I changed my mind. 14-year-old boys who want to see 15 know how far to push their fathers, and I felt that mine was already well advanced around the bend.

I'll say one thing positive about my dad, and it's that he's a man of action, on those rare occasions when he actually decides to do something. Once he had determined that the country was the place for the Fishers, the wheels of change began to move incredibly quickly. Our beautiful brick, ocean front home, with easy access to the best waves on the Coast, went on the market. Shelves of books disappeared into large cardboard boxes, and matchstick Eiffel Towers and Sydney Harbour Bridges were swallowed up in tissue paper mounds. Dad gave up whistling bars of old Beach Boys songs and instead began to hum Slim Dusty tunes about long country roads and hotels without beer.

During these days of upheaval, I tried my best to demonstrate my disapproval, but everybody was too busy packing to notice. All I could do was sit on my bed in my room, mournfully gazing at the myriad of surf posters on the walls, and at my soon to be useless surfboard standing in the corner. I felt the victim of some hideous crime, and in more desperate moments I contemplated running away. I quickly realized, however, that there was no sense in such an action. For the first time in my life, I began to regret the careless way I had squandered my $5.00 weekly allowance on surfboard wax, surf magazines and the occasional chocolate bar. I had no funds, I had nowhere to hole up when they sent the tracker dogs after me, and I couldn't fit a surfboard, skateboard, cassette player, surf magazine collection, 12 pairs of board shorts, 15 T shirts, 3 pairs of sandshoes and my pillow all on the handlebars of my BMX. I decided that if I couldn't take the essentials with me when I ran, it just wasn't worth going at all.

So, there I was, sitting in the car on the way to oblivion. In front, Mullet Head was mumbling away about pubs with no beer again, for the millionth time in the last two months. Beside him sat The Ice Queen, serenely reading her Mills and Boon. For the uninitiated, The Ice Queen was my mother, a lady not unlike many other mothers apart from one or two peculiarities. She looked like most mothers, just over 160cm tall, a little bit plump, with blow waved sandy hair and a wrinkle or two that make up couldn't hide. Despite her nickname, she wasn’t a cold and hard woman – in fact, she was actually quite gentle. She did, however, have the unusual habit of freezing everything, be it food, drink or even the odd piece of clothing which drifted too close to the freezer door. She had picked up the idea from an article in some women's magazine, and then blown it out of all proportion, like mothers often seem to do. The meals we ate today were prepared long ago, stored and frozen in plastic bags and containers, and simply defrosted after months in suspended animation. My school lunches were usually blocks of frozen bread and vegemite, a frozen juice, and a frozen apple or banana, all of which generally thawed out by lunchtime, except on cold days. I never had the heart to tell Mum that most fruit didn't survive the freezing and thawing process well, being content to make my daily donation of mushy fruit puree to the school bins.

Mum had taken the news of the country move very well. She had made enough tangles of string in her Macramé classes to satisfy her needs for the moment. The house had a lifetime supply of shapeless, unrecognisable ashtrays from her weekly Pottery classes, and our cupboards and freezers were full of Tupperware from her frequent visits to parties. She'd already given up her mid week Ladies' Squash after downing all challengers (literally, with blows to the head or body) and had been warned away from Aerobics classes after injuring classmates whilst performing star-jumps, leg kicks and other vigorous exercises. In short, she had achieved all the reasonable aims of the average fulltime housewife, and was ready for a change of horizon. The good wife, she was willing to place her future in her husband's hands. My constant urgings that macramé hadn't been discovered out west couldn't shake her faith, though I did raise a brief look of shock when I mentioned that New Idea magazine might not be available. But in the end, my efforts were in vain. She was going to the country with Dad, and they were dragging me with them.

CHAPTER TWO

A TOWN WITH NO SURF

Most of the journey west was relatively uneventful. I mean, how much trouble can you get into when your father never drives faster than 60 kilometres an hour, even in a 100 zone? After the first 50 or so kilometres I grew tired of mouthing apologies out the rear window to the luckless drivers who formed a convoy behind our car. They didn't seem to like me staring at them, and from the unusual and rather obscene responses I got back, I think many didn't know how to lip read anyway.

Perhaps the highlight of the trip was our crawl up the Toowoomba Range, part of the Great Dividing Range beyond which the inland plains stretched to infinity. We attacked it at 60, and quickly slowed to a steady 40, being passed by everything and everyone, including a cyclist on a racing bike. I ducked down in my seat so no one would recognise my embarrassed face.

As we climbed the steep ascent, Mum passed The Brain'' and I a Mintie each to chew on, explaining that an article in Woman's Day said it would stop our ears from blocking. Sarah pointed out that the pressure differential could be countered by simply blocking one's nose and puffing one's cheeks". Being a little scientific myself, I grabbed her Mintie and proceeded to push a lolly up each of my nostrils. She wasn't impressed at all and burst into tears, demanding a fresh Mintie and a sound thrashing for me. Mum wasn't impressed either, despite my explanation that all I was doing was combining her theory and Sarah's in a controlled experiment. Dad pitched in with another comment about my lack of sense, so I shut up and went back to counting telephone poles for the rest of the journey. Inside, however, I felt I had won a major victory. I had two Minties, and Sarah had only one.

The sun was low on the horizon when we finally reached the end of our epic journey. After seven hours and five toilet stops, we had arrived as weary travellers in our new home   Wingindi, Queensland. Back on the Gold Coast, there had been considerable family argument over the correct pronunciation of the town name. Dad insisted it was Win Jin Dee, Mum and Sarah thought it was Win Gin Dye and I said it had to be Whinge and Die. I certainly felt that way when I thought of moving to the country town. In the end, however, Dad, forever the English teacher, was right.

Our initial introduction to the town was an old sign about a kilometre out, which looked to have been painted and erected in the 1960's and boldly stated in faded lettering:

"Welcome to Wingindi. Pop. 790. Elev. 200 ft.

Home of Red King. Tidy Towns Runner up 1974.

Enjoy Your Stay"

Isn't that nice, dear, wishing us an enjoyable stay. I think I'm going to like living here, gushed Mum, who was very big on first impressions since reading an article in The Australian Woman's Weekly which said that first impressions were the best guide, especially in choosing a marriage partner. My first impression was that the entire population of the town was less than the student population at my last high school, and therefore I'd be having a hard time trying to find new friends or available females. It therefore was a poor impression indeed.

What or who is this Red King? continued Mum, vocal cords beginning to warm up after several hours of silence following the Mintie incident.

I'm not really sure, my love, replied Dad in word-perfect English, with emphasis on the pauses, and speech marks almost audible. What do you think, Phil my boy?

Before I could bless them with my infinite wisdom, The Brain came to my rescue.

I think I can answer that, Dad. From my reading of numerous rural publications, I've discovered that many cattle stud farms give their top stud bulls official registered names. Red King may be one such bull. I could see her little head beginning to swell with her own importance, so I sought something to deflate her ego and thus