A Candle to Myself

By Roditch

Before I die, I want my children to know about my life before they were born and my dreams and thoughts after they arrived on my loungeroom floor. This is book helps do that.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roditch
• Release date: Jan 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005221027

Roditch

I am a retired Photography Teacher, Refugee Settlement Manager, and Builder. For the past 10 years, I have been teaching part-time, writing books, taking photos and doing lots of research.All the books I write come from experience and research. Yes, in my life so far I have worked with refugees, taught art, built houses, studied herbs, and health. I have also studied astrology spirituality including meditation, animal welfare, and poetry.I sincerely hope that you can gain valuable information from my books (usually short and sweet introductions) to different facets of life I have visited.

Book preview

A Candle to Myself

Published by Roditch

At Smashwords

Roditch

Dedicated to Art Thida

She has taught me the last words

in the love story

Copyright Roditch © 2022

Smashwords Edition

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Childhood

Chapter 2: A Teenager

Chapter 3: Perth

Chapter 4: Tasmania

Chapter 5: Castlemaine

Chapter 6: Back to Warrnambool

Chapter 7: God

Chapter 8: Rushworth

Chapter 9: Thailand

About Me

Chapter One: CHILDHOOD

Warrnambool

Warrnambool is a popular summer holiday town, three hours' drive west, following the coast, from Melbourne. It has moderate hills overlooking the sea, and many streets are imperialistically lined with large Norfolk pine trees framing beautiful sandstone mansions behind them. On the side streets, salt-sprayed cars' tires rot. Windy Warrnambool, an infamous title for visitors and locals alike. The incessant quick wardrobe changes, if seen from Mars, would look like a day at Faulty Towers. The wind rips at your skin with cold, pummeling lashes. Every day before you go anywhere, you need to step out your front door and be a weatherman, choose your clothes wisely, and hope that wherever you want to go, you stay in the same weather vane. In the wind, it felt like the Scottish moors, and out of it, a day at a golf course in Florida. You may cry from the extreme temperature changes: you step into the sun dressed as a bison and then into the gales of the Southern Ocean dressed as a bikini. For all the locals who lived through the dark winters, the summer holidays rocked.

The population of 18,000 consisted of Irish, Scottish, and English interlopers and Australian Aboriginals, plus one Italian, two Greeks, and three Dutchmen. They all worked hard during the week and at the weekend went fishing, one hand on the rod and the other on a bottle of Foster's beer. People like Mario, the Italian tailor, were exceptions to the beer scenario. Every Saturday night, he dressed up in his finest handmade suits and romanced the ladies at the Palais de Dance, then afterwards sipped fashionable cappuccinos at the Moomba Cafe.

Even though I lived in Warrnambool up until the Vietnam War days, I didn’t know it very well. Children back in the 1960s were not seen or heard, and the tall, evil-looking spire of the Catholic Church menaced my development. A daily ritual of Dr. Who and curried sausages dimmed most horizons. Looking out the kitchen window provided the only opportunity for adventure. This routine changed forever after I found my love for swimming and surfing in the ocean. The aboriginal act of enjoying emergence and friendship with nature would change my life and religion completely.

A tour through town would take you past many beautiful sandstone homes, up and down hills, along the beach, past the Warrnambool Woolen Mills factory, and people water skiing on the lake, only minutes from the beach. Up again to Lava Street Hill, past the YMCA with its underground basketball court. Down the other side to the Warrnambool Football Club, the spiritual home of brother Bill, otherwise known as ‘Dodger McConnell’. Turn left a few times, and you are playing 18 holes of golf with Father Dave and Mother Doris. Looking from the 7th hole, you can see waves crashing into Penguin Island and the famous breakwater, home to fishing boats and bottles of rum. If you had a pair of binoculars, you could see the Hedditch brothers burning their buttocks, rowing a surf boat way out to sea and on the way back into shore, catching a giant wave, and the boat tipping over into a cacophony of boys and men struggling for air and life. The drive to the beach from the golf course twists and turns beside the Merri River, then turns into a beach car park. Just in time to witness the same men from the boat in blue bather's sand jogging as fast as they could to the breakwater and back to the clubhouse. At night the tour takes you down the main street, past the widgies, bodgies, sharpies and rockers lined up in their Brylcream and their little dab’ill do yah’s. To the Palais De Dance and Bill’s famous pie cart, upstairs to a large dance hall of sweaty swinging skirts and contortion shoes. If you were too young for so much rocking, then you would pass the stairs and wander past the Warrnambool Hotel to the roller-skating rink. With four wooden wheels, tight jeans, and some cool moves, hanging out at the skating rink took some beating. The last cool stop on the hot tour is the Warrnambool Olympic Swimming Pool. Jumping off the high board into the diving pool, diving down into the blue peace and then darting back up to life. Then into the pool next door, full of luscious, warm pee and kablonkers. There are lots of other things to see in Warrnambool, like the hot rods and street parades and the Florado Festival. The annual show with the best cake and the tennis courts. The Catholic Church soaring because they are always drunk, and Cannon Hill is still stopping the Japs.

Warrnambool comes alive during the summer holidays. Families arrive in droves in their large caravans from thirsty farms and Melbourne's melted footpaths. Around the age of 14, I discovered the beach. I would walk by myself down Liebig Street, past all the shops, turn left at the masturbating angel, then right through the sandstone cutting. Then the final five minutes' walk down the hill, across the railroad bridge, and down to the beach, always hoping to hop through the hot sand over the hill and see perfect surf. Only to meet gales of air booming off the ocean, knocking me off balance. the stuff of jetliners and wind tunnels. Sometimes I carried a long and heavy board with me. One you kneeled on to get out the back, and, when you caught some slop, you walked up and down for some exercise. Other days I fought the wind to the shoreline, ran as fast as I could into the melted ice, and duck-dived through the white bullies on my way out the back. No matter how bad the surf, I could always seal myself away for three hours and then walk home, crawl home, and sleep peacefully as a happy pickle.

I did most things by myself, a loner, then and now. All my life, I have been too scared to belong. I don't feel comfortable with friends. It could be because my brother wants to ditch me all the time.

As a child growing up, I had a few options of things to do at the weekend: play football or tennis; go to church; fly down hills in a homemade billy cart; go to the local swimming pool; or go surfing. I went surfing because I loved the ocean, the salty water, the freedom, the wind in my hair, and the danger of dying from falling down some cresting, foaming, stallion wave into the waiting razor-sharp teeth of a White Pointer (it's a very big shark) at the bottom.

I felt deeply connected to the dangerous and mysterious ocean. The sounds and sensation of crashing waves soothed my soul. The ocean, a powerful force of nature in a treeless landscape, was the only thing in my environment that I connected with.

On reflection, I didn’t do anything resembling normal in my adolescent days. Football went in circles aimlessly; there were too many TVs at home; and school lacked poetry and creativity. That left the ocean. I would have been spiritually homeless like my aboriginal friends without it. The wonder of creation can be found anywhere, and it will always be the first and best marvel—one we all need to be part of.

Church

Sometimes we went to church and Sunday school: twice I think it was? No one could explain where the bearded guy with the long hair was, because he was nowhere to be found in the big, cold, ambient father church next door either. I am still looking everywhere for him; alas, no luck. The 'guy' in Sunday school said, listen to everything he says, and follow him every day of your life. And I thought, when I find him, maybe I will.

These two visits with my parents to church were a failed experiment in meaning. Both sides of my family (uncles, cousins, aunties, grandparents) were serious Christians—my father and mother were not. Their personal beliefs never saw the light of day in my life. I consider myself extremely fortunate, as I consider religion to be a construct for bad monkeys. I don't know what drove them to visit the church a few times when I was around six years old. None of us saw the light, and it interfered with their real religion: a Sunday roast dinner and Sunday golf. So, we stopped going as quickly as we came, hoping no one ever saw us, especially God. When Dave was in his 70s, he would talk about the Bible in a good way. His new girlfriend, Aunty Valamai, liked layering her evil with goodness. He had to go along with it to keep her happy. Brought up outside the church, it is impossible to embrace something that is not ingrained at birth. In his 80s, his recommendations from the black book smacked of fear. I respected his ideas a lot, but I had come to realize, when I was 30, that God never wrote such a confusing lot of monkey business—she wrote the universe.

Buddhism, on the other hand, is quite simple to grasp, and while Buddha, like Jesus, never put pen to paper, his teachings that were passed down focused entirely on personal development: controlling your mind in a positive way so that your life is happy and peaceful. Whereas Christians and Jews think commandments and parables should control your life, Religions are deeply confusing and need powerful and rich people to interpret their endless (unfathomable) meanings for money. This is not the Buddhist way.

Back to free will and God's will, and never the twain shall meet. I believe that men created religions to give them power over women, children, nature, and each other, and this is the world's greatest problem. Women and children are souls the same as men, and men with muscles, the destroyers, fear women and children, the creators. We all could live a wonderful life, beyond religion, by doing one thing: fulfilling our purpose and supporting others to do the same.

Words fall freely into the fires of doom every time someone questions the presence of God. The churches in Warrnambool, like the school, drove me insane with their energy attacking me, an innocent soul who could have done well on his own without all the psychological abuse.

All sentient beings are connected via morphic resonance. By tuning in to these connections, it is possible to experience what people call God as the relationship we have with each other. Those special moments when we feel the other, see the other, and love the other This action and this moment are God. No number of written words can change that. For example, thousands of family relationships have been destroyed because mom and dad went to the church to worship a carpenter from Nazareth instead of staying home and worshiping a child from Kentucky.

The Hedditch Family

I don't know much about my family's history. My father is a fourth- or fifth-generation Australian Hedditch. They were originally farmers from Gillingham, Dorset, England. My father's mother came from Scotland, and my mother, an Owen, came from Sussex in England. It is harder to follow family trees on the female side. I recall visiting my grandparents and feeling as if I had traveled to another country due to their English accents and the odor of once-loved and now-eaten pork pies, which was even more extreme because of the infrequency of the visits. Somehow my parents had jumped a few generations. My father is a creative genius, and my mother is a pianist with a hole in her heart. We kept jumping after them. One day, my father showed me the way with a rueful smile. Sometimes they jumped right over us, forcing independence and self-reliability.

The Hedditch's were one of the first pioneering families to arrive at the small beach port of Portland, in Western Victoria, after the Henty's. Two brothers had sailing and cargo ships. One of them is based in Davenport, Tasmania, and the other is in Portland, Victoria. The Victorian side of the Hedditch family eventually settled on a sheep farm at Cape Bridgewater, 30 minutes from Portland. They built a nice home on a few hundred acres overlooking the expansive ocean at Discovery Bay.

One beautiful, sunny, blue-sky day, while surfing at White's Beach, only two kilometers away, I tore my wet suit and repaired it with special rubber glue, some of which dribbled off the rubber onto a black volcanic rock below. I instinctively went to clean the glue off the rock and saw some writing carved into it. It said it was in memory of Waldy Hedditch, who died trying to rescue people from The Jane, a schooner shipwrecked on rocks nearby in Discovery Bay (one of 638 ships wrecked on the Australian South Coast). I thought I had ruined this monument to one of Hedditch's finest and tried desperately to get all the glue off the rough blue-stone surface. A poignant moment; my mind drifted through the Hedditch family tree, which, ashamedly, I had never climbed.

The Hedditch family spread from Portland to Coleraine, where Dave came from. He eventually settled in Warrnambool, where he met my mother, Doris McConnell. Oh! I hardly know anything about my family history, and my children have adopted their mother's Italian name and culture.

Richard Charlton Hedditch of Lal Wald, Bridgewater

The Hedditch family came from Dorset, England. Richard Charlton Hedditch was born on July 3, 1808, in Gillingham, Dorset, the son of Samuel Hedditch and his wife Sarah, nee Charlton, who had been married on April 16, 1807. Sarah Charlton came from the nearby village of Mere, in Wiltshire.

At the time of his marriage on June 28, 1837, Richard Charlton Hedditch was a farmer living in the parish of Bathwick, near Bath, Somerset. His wife, Rachel Forward Read, was also a resident of Bathwick parish. About six months after their wedding, they took the stagecoach to London to embark on the 522-ton barque Eden, which was preparing to sail for Australia. However, their sailing was delayed for a month as the Eden was frozen in the Thames, but it finally departed in mid-February 1838 and, after putting in at St. Jago en route, arrived in Adelaide, South Australia, on June 24, 1838.

Richard and Rachel Hedditch stayed in Adelaide for about two years before moving on to Van Diemen's Land. Their first child, a son named Charlton Waldy Hedditch, was born in George Town, V.D.L., on July 20, 1840. After hearing favorable reports about the Henty’s' settlement on the mainland, Richard sailed for Portland in the Port Phillip District on June 10, 1841, on the 189-ton brig Patriot. Before long, they were settled in Portland, teaching at the Church of England school.

About 1845, in partnership with the Kennedy family, they moved to Cape Bridgewater on the coast just west of Portland and took up a pastoral lease on land formerly held as an out-station by the Henty brothers.

This partnership lasted until about 1853. Conditions there were described in a letter Mrs. Hedditch wrote to her parents in England on Christmas Day, 1848.

This, as you will see, is Christmas Day. We are quite alone, and I trust we shall have a quiet Christmas, as I do not care for company, but I expect my old friend, Mrs. Wilkinson, for a few days shortly. There seems to be a revival among the churchgoers here. Some very excellent and pious men, both bishops and clergy, have lately been sent out. The bishop of this diocese has lately visited Portland. The severe weather prevented him from visiting us, but he sent some good books and tracts and a book of sermons. But although we are not doing better in the country, we have better health, and I think the children are better off being away from others. Children out here are generally brought up badly. I had a bad account of our affairs to give you the last time I wrote, and I have not much better now. The times are indeed very bad. Almost the whole dependence of this district is on wool-growing and tallow, and on account of the disturbed state of Europe, the wool at home has fallen in value by more than half. Tallow is low also, and it has caused such a depression in business here that it is almost impossible to dispose of anything; or if a sale is made, it is difficult to get the cash. I believe I told you something about our new land regulations in my last letter. We received this months’ notice from the government (not only ourselves but all the settlers) that they offer us the purchase of 30 acres of land at £1 per acre and with it a right to 160 acres of common land, and if we fail to purchase, we risk being turned off without being able to claim any compensation for the improvements we have made. The land here is very poor indeed, scarcely worth cultivating without being greatly manured, but it is excellent pasturing for cattle. Our fences were all burnt, but we have a garden that is fenced and a half-acre paddock. We have also a comfortable three-roomed cottage and a kitchen and dairy, besides a fowl house and yard, and it would be a pity to risk losing it for the sake of £30, although in these times we shall find it difficult to raise even that small sum. We have both fat cattle and milking cows for sale, but nobody is inclined to purchase them. Butchers will not give more than eight shillings a hundred for fat beef, and a fine cow with a calf at the side will not fetch more than £3. There were good milking cows and their calves sold by auction last week at about 30/- per head. Butter is now down to 1/- per pound. If things don't get better, I don't know what will become of us all. Our prospects are not worse than those of many others. Indeed, I believe we spend less money than most families here. We have no one with us now, but one of the native blacks will shepherd the cattle by day. I wish we could get a good, steady, single farmer from home—one who would work without being watched. We would gladly give such a man £25 a year, with board and lodging. The men in this country will not work without a master with them, and Charlton is too easy to be a master. I suppose you could not persuade such a man to come out to us. A man who could be relied on to handle anything that needed to be done."

On one occasion, Richard Hedditch was required to go to Melbourne as a witness in a Crown law case. Afterwards, he walked back to Portland, taking about three weeks to complete the journey. The Hedditch family also took over the local post office, and successive generations continued to run it for many decades.

Freehold land was acquired, and in 1855, a family home named Lal Lal was built. Located in the parish of Tarragal, county of Normanby, the surrounding farm is comprised of 372 acres. This residence remained in the Hedditch family for several generations.

Tragedy struck on June 6, 1863, when their eldest son, Charlton Waldy Hedditch, died. He was attempting to save passengers from a sinking schooner, the Jane, in Discovery Bay, and had swum out to the ship three times before he drowned.

At some point, probably in the 1850s, Richard's father, Samuel Hedditch, arrived and resided with the family until his death in 1869. Little is known about Samuel's life, but he may have been the Samuel Hedditch who was transported to Van Diemen's Land on the Hibernia in 1818. Richard had siblings who settled in V.D.L., and some of their descendants later settled in New Zealand.

Richard Charlton Hedditch died in Bridgewater on November 23, 1893, and his wife Rachel died on January 15, 1904, after giving birth to three sons and four daughters. Of their younger children:

Mary Thirza Hedditch was born on August 27, 1844, in Portland. She married James Malseed of Drik Drik in 1864 and had three sons and four daughters.

Emily Hedditch was born on September 17, 1846, in Portland and died on June 8, 1854, at Breakwater.

John Read Hedditch was born on October 11, 1849, at Lower Cape Bridgewater and followed pastoral pursuits during his lifetime. He married Mary Jane Holmes in 1873 and died on August 12, 1927, leaving a large family.

Catherine Sarah Charlton Hedditch was born on September 2, 1854, at Lower Cape Bridgewater. She married John Henry Broughton and had one son, Charlton William Broughton.

William Forward Hedditch was born on March 12, 1857, at Lower Cape Bridgewater. He lived continuously at Lal Lal for seventy years and carried on farming there until his retirement in 1926. He married Marion Nunn Jones in 1890 and had two sons, Norman Samuel Howard Hedditch and Harold Read Hedditch.

Martha Annie Hedditch was born on March 13, 1859, at Lower Cape Bridgewater. She married James Dominic (k) McKenna in 1890 and had two daughters, Mary McKenna, and Rachel McKenna.

Dave and Doris

My mother’s first husband died of a broken heart after he accidentally drove over and killed a boy one night on the dark and desolate Lava Street Hill—Billy Cart Hill to us kids. From Aunty Darky’s house, near where the accident happened, you could sit on the veranda and see two or three boys speeding side by side in old wooden fruit boxes with golf buggy wheels, down the hill, past her front gate. We loved the thrills and spills of flying down the hill. Every year, we got together and officially raced each other, two at a time. The first cart to survive the trip and bump into the hay bales at the bottom got to race again until we had a proud and happy winner.

After the fun of racing with friends, it took us only 10 minutes to walk straight down the hill, across Fairy Street, following, zombie-like, the lusty aroma of Kermond's juicy, onion-filled hamburgers, then feasting on the most perfect food on God’s rock.

After Mum’s husband died, she had to work to take care of her two children, Bill, and Vanessa. My father found her, after the war, working as a waitress at the Warrnambool Hotel. His short, heroic stint, in the Australian Air Force as a radio operator, directing aeroplanes to bomb the shit out of the Japanese in the South Pacific Islands. Sometimes they would retaliate, kamikaze Japs, sending him racing for cover under stretcher beds for protection from the bombs.

He liked her, but he never told me why. An enigma, 12 years his senior, with two young children, Bill, and Vanessa.

This made my father amazing for his time. He took on an older woman, her two children, and two more, me and my brother Graham, and taught himself refrigeration—this teach yourself theme is strong in my life—while working for Ross Motors in Fairy Street, a five-minute stroll down the hill from Johnny the Greek's fish and chip shop. After a few years at Ross Motors, he started an incredibly successful business in commercial refrigeration. Life got better and better for all of us thanks to his ingenuity. He built the largest refrigeration business outside of Melbourne in a matter of years.

They both played golf with style. His and her golf trophies were strewn about the house. And before that, at the other house on Lava Street, Bill's trophies for tennis, squash, and football inspired us all. Eventually, I added to the pile a couple for surfing.

I never knew for a long time that he also taught himself alternative health from the many health books filling his bookshelves back in the '50s and '60s—long before YouTube and Facebook. Dave downed Gotu Kola to make him smart, and that worked. Later, I would find the same Gotu Kola growing wild everywhere around my house. I marveled at how he drank Dr. Wayne Dwyer's carrot juice to prevent cancer and how he loved to eat large crayfish to make himself happy and content.

Many Westerners live by something that God supposedly said: God helps those that help themselves because every person you ask for help with money, labor, or emotional support will duck, run, and hide—my father was the exception. He helped many people with their overdue bills by giving them time—years—to pay them. His drawer was full of unpaid bills when he died. He also lent heaps of money to people in trouble and often helped family members, including me. Thanks Dad.

One loan was to an alcoholic fisherman (his staples were port, rum, and pasties: boxes of pasties) who taught me how to pilot his boat at three a.m. on a cold and frosty morning. I arrived without sleeping a wink—scared of drowning and hard work. When I got on board and saw his half-empty bottle of port, he said, Grab the wheel and head out to sea, son; take her out to deep water, pointing to the port bottle, which was still in its crinkly brown bag. He slept while I chugged out, way out there, and on the long chug, I lugged my way back. The two bottles of port and pasties floating around like a boat in his bloated stomach were a drug, a sleeping pill. No amount of sinking, storming, or wailing would wake him up. Eventually, a few years later, it got the better of him. He could not take the boat or himself out to sea anymore. So, he scuttled it like Fletcher Christian at Pitcairn Island, collected the insurance, and became a landlubber, drinking flubber with all the other bad boy bubbers at the seafaring hotel.

Dear Dad, it's never too late to say thank you. We live in an energetic universe where words, feelings, and thoughts wing like arrows to the one you are thinking of, dreaming about, missing, and loving, dead or alive, because energy never dies. When you get to hear these humble, grateful words, I want you to know I am eternally grateful for your love and support. You were/are the steam in my stinions, the bunk in my trunk, the brain in my refrain, and the heart in my driver. I have so many of your pioneering ideas inside me that cross the divide between man and the universe.

Dear Mom, your heart-warming messages telling everybody to smile and be happy are stuck on the inside of all the cupboard doors in the kitchen and bathroom and, once opened, spread joy and amazement. They did enlighten us, surprisingly, with their simple truths about what matters: happiness. Like Dave and his healthy ways, which gave me herbs, you were a cupboard poet and gave me words. I am sorry about the night (around 7 p.m.) I came home to get my car keys after seeing God making waves. It was near the end of a rare acid trip, thanks to Peter's letter from England. I remember opening it at Manifold Street, and it was empty. If Peter hadn't noted something on the envelope about having fun, I would have thought it was a joke and stopped there. I peered deeper into the pale-yellow envelope, and there was still nothing. I started looking on the floor, crawling and sweeping it with my hands until I eventually found a tiny piece of paper no bigger than the nail on my little finger. Three of us (two friends) headed off to the beach and had a beautiful trip, looking, feeling, and touching what we saw. When we came back to the house, I had to get my keys and car from the kitchen, where Dave and Dorie spent their last hours and minutes of a busy day.

The world was still spinning webs of a golden hue right there in the kitchen. Seeing you in your purple brunch coat and purple globe-like earrings, I asked (with a huge grin and sunset eyes) if you were going dancing when, in fact, you were going to bed. You thought I was making fun of you. But I couldn’t make this honest question live in the real world.

I couldn’t hit a golf ball like them. It would never go as far as the club. always trying to hit the ball out of the park, then missing it completely. Often the club slipped from my grip and sailed like a dead sparrow through the air before hitting a tree. One day, the unforgiving ball was near a tree stump. I hit the stump. The club snapped in half, and the part meant to hit the ball flew over a clump of trees onto the fairway; this was the best shot I've ever made in my disgraceful golfing career.

Maybe this is a lesson I should have learned because I will never have the quiet, soft, and gentle poise of my mother's swing or the determined backswing of my father. Instead, I hacked the ball from one side of the fairway to the other, eventually getting there, but with spades of frustration and anxiety. In sports, golf gave me the most points, by far.

I have tried cooking crayfish with Keen's curry and strawberry jam like my father, but I could never afford the crayfish. Dave got his for cheap or free after fixing the fridges on the local fishing boats. Our house was infested with crayfish, large ones that lived in our bathtub for a few days before flapping their lives in murderous boiling water. The curry was everywhere in the house and often sat beside the rollmops and black pudding sausages in the fridge.

Primary School

Jamieson Street Primary School had desks, playgrounds, marching bands, and teachers, but no soul—the 1960s were still a decade away. There was no way out; I had to march into mediocrity for six years, surrounded by large red brick walls, bell towers, and cottage windows. I had no respect for where I was: all the teachers' certificates proudly hung on the wall, way too high for me to see.