by Matt Wright
Daryl pulled out the camera and told mum to crouch alongside the fallen animal – the hunter and the hunted.
Mum posing with the monster boar she took down on Kangaroo Island. Her quarry dwarfed the wild pig I took down years later.
4
Raising Hell
Mum’s parenting style was unconventional. She was big into personal responsibility and put a lot of faith in Holly and me to perform tasks that I’m sure some parents would deem unsuitable for children. From a young age we learnt how to shoot a rifle, skin animals, cook meals and drive a car. If we were out camping, Mum made us responsible for everything. We packed the car, set up camp, cut the wood, made the bed, lit the fire and scrubbed the toilets.
Mum taught us every single practical life skill you can think of. I cannot imagine a better role model growing up. The way she approached life and the lessons she taught us still ring in my ears today: feed the dog first, tell the truth, never kill animals without a reason, give to people in need and do your chores before you have fun.
She had no concerns about leaving me to my own devices on the weekends, giving me the time and space to become my own person. I would explore the valleys around home and try out the things she’d taught me. She was committed to raising independent children who would be capable and self-sufficient adults. She gave me the drive, discipline, determination, strong work ethic and ability to survive in this sometimes hard and overbearing world. If you can’t tell from what I have just shared, I love her dearly. She has made me who I am today.
But that doesn’t mean we didn’t have our rocky moments. Raising me was no easy task. I was a bloody nightmare. I got a lot of smacks growing up and deserved every one of them. It was hard to drill a message into me. Looking back, I realise the amazing job Mum did. She was capable of being gentle and encouraging one minute and harsh the next. But she was always fair. She was the mother, the father, the disciplinarian and the friend all rolled into one. The person I have become boils down to the lessons she taught me growing up.
If I did something to piss Mum off – which was often – she wouldn’t simply berate me or give me a hiding, she would teach me a lesson in an unforgettable way. There are countless examples to draw on, but none more memorable than when she made me skin a fully grown kangaroo with a pocketknife. I was 11 years old. It was extreme tough love. Not that I’m complaining. It was exactly the punishment I deserved.
It happened a couple of hours before Mum had promised to take me rabbiting. I was playing up. I can’t really remember why. I guess I was keen to get started. Mum told me to wait while she fed the farm animals. I’ll admit it, I was an impatient little shit. If things weren’t happening the way I wanted, I’d lose my cool completely.
‘C’mon,’ I moaned. ‘Let’s go! You’re dragging arse!’
‘Watch your mouth!’ she shouted. ‘If you keep that up, we won’t go at all.’
Most kids would have done as they were told. Besides, it wasn’t as if there was nothing else to keep me occupied. But I wasn’t like most kids. I took a rifle and headed out on my own.
Mum had taught Holly and me from an early age how to handle firearms. She often took us out hunting. And I couldn’t have asked for a better teacher – she was passionate about the sport. Not that she was bloodthirsty or anything. In fact, Mum has more respect for animals than anyone I know, even feral pests. She despises cruelty towards animals and drilled into us the importance of giving an animal a clean, instant death.
I shot a couple of rabbits before coming across a big grey kangaroo. Mum was always big on never killing a native animal whose meat or skin you aren’t going to use. Her mantra was simple: never take more than you need. She also insisted that you kill an animal as quickly as possible.
I crouched into a shooting position and waited. The kangaroo was grazing. With his head down, my chances of a kill shot were not good. I had to wait. I edged forward and a twig snapped under my foot. The kangaroo lifted his head and stood up to his full size. He was a big animal, at least six feet tall. With his head up I had an easy shot. I aimed and then fired. The roo was dead before he hit the ground. I was pretty proud of myself. There was no pain or suffering. I’d given him a quick death, just as Mum had always taught me.
I took hold of the kangaroo’s leg and started dragging him back home. I could hardly wait to show Mum what I had bagged. But he was far heavier than I’d expected, and I was about five kilometres from home. There was no way I would be able to get him back on my own. I dragged him to the bottom of our paddock and left him there. I was thinking either Mum or Errol could come down in the ute and pick him up. I stepped up my pace. I was chomping at the bit to tell everyone about the big animal I’d just shot.
It was well after dark by the time I got home. Mum came thundering out of the house to meet me. I can’t remember seeing her so livid. She took me by the arm and gave me a flogging. When I told her that I needed the car to go pick up a big kangaroo I’d shot, she gave me another few wallops.
‘I told you to leave the kangaroos alone,’ she said
That was one lesson I don’t remember her teaching me. Whether she had warned us off the kangaroos before doesn’t really matter. Her 11-year-old son had just gone hunting without her permission. She had every reason to be angry.
I was sent to bed without dinner. I thought the punishment was over. I couldn’t have been more mistaken.
Around midnight, Mum burst into my bedroom and flicked on the lights. She was still on the warpath.
‘Wake up!’ she shouted.
‘What’s going on?’
‘Get out of bed!’
‘No,’ I said, burying my head under the pillow.
She was obviously ready for this reaction. She pulled the pillow away, ripped off my blanket and then hauled me out of bed. When I tried to resist she gave me a few smacks and shoved a backpack into my arms.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
She told me to open the backpack. It was stuffed with plastic bags. In the front pocket there was a pocketknife.
‘You’re going to head back out and skin that kangaroo,’ she said. ‘When you’re finished, you’re gonna bag up all the meat in those plastic bags and bring it back here.’
I started howling. But Mum wasn’t going to fall for that old trick. She led me outside and told me she’d be checking the carcass in the morning to make sure I’d done a proper job.
It was a long night. I walked back over the hills, through the scrub, down into valleys and then over to the bottom of the paddock where I’d left the old roo, with nothing but a torch to guide me. I found him about two hours later. Now the real work was about to begin.
The only way to properly skin and bone out an animal is with a large, sharply pointed knife. Not only will you do a better job, you’ll also do it quickly. A pocketknife is not nearly the right tool for the task. Obviously I could only move the knife one way or else the blade would fold back on itself. I knew that if I did a substandard job, Mum would dream up some other punishment. So I got stuck in.
Cutting the hide was tough enough. It must have taken me over an hour to remove it all. But trying to cut through tendons and bone with a pocketknife was horrific. Rigor mortis had set in, which made it a little easier, but I still only had a bloody pocketknife. It took me a couple of hours before I started bagging up the meat.
Dawn was a few hours away and the temperature was dropping. I began to lose feeling in my fingers. I was also absolutely exhausted and feeling pretty sorry for myself. The prospect of a five-kilometre walk lugging bags of meat filled me with dread. So I decided on having a sleep. I lay down on the frozen ground next to the carcass and shut my eyes. The problem was the cold. I needed a blanket, but the only thing on hand was the remains of the roo. I wrapped myself in its hide. It smelt a bit but was warm. Within seconds, I was asleep.
I woke up just after dawn, the whole world covered in frost. I finished up bagging the meat and took everything home. I walk
ed in the back door to Mum who had calmed down by that stage. Nevertheless, she still looked at me sternly.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘hopefully you’ll learn from this one.’
As each year passed, her hopes were dashed. I became increasingly wilder. Incidents like shooting the kangaroo proved to be pretty mild compared to the hijinks I got up to in the years to come. It all started to lift off around the time I became a teenager. That was when my attitude collided with puberty and things started to get very interesting.
* * *
I never cared much for school. In fact, I hated just about everything about the place. The schoolyard was divided into two groups – the goths and the jocks. I definitely wasn’t the type to get dressed up in black clothing and cover my face in make up. Nor was I the type to go and chase balls around all day.
I was bored out of my mind. School down here was completely different to what I had experienced in Cairns. Up there, it felt like the teachers made an effort to engage the students, encouraging kids to pursue the things that they were passionate about. In this place, I was forced to sit through classes that had absolutely no meaning to me. English, maths, music, history and geography all put me to sleep. My mates and I would wag in the afternoon and head to the local pub for beers. Once we were boozed we’d walk down to the golf club and play a few holes to entertain ourselves. We decided this was better than school any day and it became the norm.
The older I got, the worse things became. At first, the discipline issues were fairly minor – falling asleep on my desk, talking back to the teacher, throwing paper planes and blowing spitballs at other kids. Before long, that stuff began to bore me. I set my sights on stirring up the teachers. Getting kicked out of class was my goal.
My standard move was kicking kids’ chairs out from under them. If that didn’t do the trick I’d start knocking over tables and throwing chairs around the classroom.
‘Get out!’ the teacher would roar. ‘Go see the headmaster!’
Smiling ear to ear, I’d gather up my things and leave. Sometimes I would flip the bird at the teacher for good measure. Job done. In the end, I was spending more time outside the headmaster’s office than in the classroom.
One day I’d really had enough of one of my classes. After answering back a few too many times, I got sent outside. There I set my sights on a fire extinguisher. I unhitched it from the wall and walked back inside the classroom. With one squeeze of the trigger the powder shot out like an erupting volcano. The teacher was covered in white and the room began to fill up with powder. The teacher and the whole class were forced outside because it was so thick you could barely breathe. Knowing that this time I would be in serious shit, I took off running.
A lot of the time, I’d ditch school entirely for the day. Sometimes Jono would wag too, or I’d meet up with him after final bell. We’d look for any way to entertain ourselves. One particular favourite was ripping out ‘For Sale’ signs staked out the front of properties and using them as sleds. Those shiny metal signs used to skim beautifully down a slope.
Once, while wandering through the hills from Second Valley to Rapid Bay, we came across a discarded car bonnet. With its distinctively curved shape, the bonnet looked to have belonged to a Volkswagen Beetle. Christ knows what it was doing up there. We didn’t really care. All we were thinking about was using it as a sled.
We flipped the bonnet on its top, lined it up for the bottom and jumped inside. There was no need to push off with our hands. The hill was covered in pebbles and rocks. With the sharp curve of the bonnet preventing us from digging into the ground, we absolutely flew down that hill. We got airborne a few times, sailing over small ledges and bouncing over boulders. I remember seeing the tops of trees whistling past. There was no way of getting off. We were going too fast. When we finally came to a stop at the bottom, both of us were covered in grazes. Jono had taken most of the skin off his palms in a hopeless attempt to slow our descent with his hands. Sure, it was dangerous. But like all the stunts we used to pull in those days, nobody got hurt – at least not seriously. The real problem was my habit of getting into fights.
It wasn’t that I was a bully. In fact, I tended to pick fights with blokes older and bigger than myself. I was just an absolute hothead. If someone so much as looked at me the wrong way, it would be on. Teacher feedback was that I had an attitude problem. My school reports at the end of each term didn’t make for great reading, but it was the references to getting into fights in the schoolyard that had my mum most concerned. She was already getting worried when I started coming home with a bloody nose or missing buttons from my shirt.
Truth was, I wasn’t only getting into fights on school grounds. Around Second Valley I acted in a very territorial manner. The way I saw it, Jono and I owned Second Valley. If someone stepped onto our turf, we would let them know all about it. Talking back to teenagers older than us often landed us in trouble, like the time we got into a dust up down near the old yabby hole.
The yabby hole was located under a bridge over an inlet at Second Valley. It was one of our favourite spots. Beautiful big yabbies used to burrow into the soft mud under the bridge. The sewage from the local caravan park would run under the bridge, which kept them fat and healthy. We used to fish them out and take them home and cook them up for dinner. I’m not sure our folks would have eaten them if they’d known what they were chewing on.
We were fiercely protective of the yabby hole. It was our place. If we came onto other kids fishing the yabby hole, there would be trouble. There was one occasion when Jono and I nearly bit off more than we could chew. We came across a group of three boys probably about 16 years old fishing the hole. We were outnumbered and these guys were four years older than us. That’s quite a large gap at that age. It didn’t matter. Jono and I saw red.
We got over the bridge and started mouthing off. They told us to piss off, so we started hocking up phlegm and sent down a few gobs. That got their attention. They climbed up to the bridge, ready to fight. Jono was a skinny little bloke and I wasn’t much bigger – and these guys were twice the size of us. But what we lacked in size we made up for in speed. Just before the fists started flying, I leapt in fast at one bloke and pushed him over the railing. He cartwheeled over the side and landed in the river below.
‘Run!’ I shouted at Jono.
We sprinted across the bridge and headed into the hills. Those blokes were breathing fire. They helped their mate out of the river and then came after us. We had the home ground advantage and knew every square inch of that terrain. We ran them around our patch, hiding in crevices and leading them along false paths. We crested a hill and turned around to check their progress. They’d fallen well behind. They were still keyed up and determined to knock the shit out of us, though. So, of course, we started hurling rocks and pushing little boulders down on them.
‘See you later, suckers!’ we shouted down at them, as they scampered clear.
Jono and I laughed all the way home with another great story to tell. We were always getting into scraps like that one. But after a while, roaming the hills of Second Valley became boring. By the time I’d become a teenager, I’d graduated to a whole new level of troublemaker. I was chock full of hormones and energy and I had no place to burn it off. School was no longer just tedious. It had become unbearable. I went looking for new ways to alleviate the dreariness of life in the Valley and found a group of like-minded troublemakers along the way.
At a time when the other kids were thinking about getting into university or TAFE or heading straight into the workforce, we were thinking up ways of getting up to no good. We ran amok purely for the thrill of it. If we weren’t trespassing, we’d be hot-wiring cars and going for joy rides. It was reckless, dangerous and unbelievably stupid. I knew exactly what I was doing, but my adolescent mind concluded that if I got busted I would be judged as a minor. It was my way of rationalising my atrocious behavior; a way of convincing myself that I wasn’t completely giving up on my future.<
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Parents of badly behaved kids will often justify their child’s waywardness by saying that they fell into a bad crowd. That wasn’t the case with me – I was the bad crowd. Whether I simply drew like-minded kids into my orbit is hard to say. Some parents certainly saw me as a ringleader and a negative influence and told their kids not to hang out with me. In the end, Jono’s parents forbade him from seeing me. After the shit we’d pulled over the years, I was surprised it hadn’t happened sooner. The tipping point was a weekend holiday where Jono and I raided the minibar in the room we were staying. We got completely shitfaced and then trashed the room. Naturally, our parents were livid.
It would be easy for me to hide behind excuses. My relationship with my old man was non-existent and I had no respect for Errol. So you could say I lacked a positive male role model. There were also more fault lines appearing in Mum and Errol’s marriage. Big blow-ups and shouting matches were a daily occurrence. The truth is, none of those things bothered me. Besides, at some point all kids have to take responsibility for their actions. The way I look at it now, I was a teenager completely bored out of my brains. Breaking laws was my way of feeling alive. But it was always going to end badly.
* * *
By now, I was 16 and old enough to drive a car – legally. Jono and I were still catching up despite being warned not to do so. We arranged to drive down to Cape Jervis for a spot of fishing. It wasn’t a very well-thought-out trip. We didn’t bring along any food or bait. Our plan hinged on shooting a kangaroo. The best part of the roo would be our lunch and uneaten scraps would serve as bait. Jono had packed his crossbow and I had Mum’s.
