Author: dean

The news that specially designed magnets are being used to stop people’s dentures slipping, is the kind of story into which one can get one’s teeth.

You have seen mine grinning at you from time to time. Some people have seen them in person but more often in rolls, pavlova or whatever’s offering.

Certainly my teeth and I have been going around in the same old set for years, false prophets all.

So naturally I’m interested in magnetised teeth although there is no truth in the assertion that people will spin around and face the north.

Certainly my dentures have played fast and loose at times and have a tendency to be aloof and even clicky.

People are shocked to learn my own teeth were lost in the ’20s but as everyone knows I have always been one for the lolly.

Similarly the cry “This won’t hurt a bit” has haunted me for years as the extractions go on undiminished, mostly from my bank account and all without an anaesthetic.

These days my teeth and I sleep in different rooms and they’re not the kind of things, yellowed and snarling, that you want to encounter in the bathroom. The last guest who did was later reported near Burra and still in her nightdress.

My dentist, who never comes within gumshot these days, once looked into my mouth and said: “The things that go on under that roof.”

Admittedly there have been times of tension, times when we have all been on edge. One morning after a severe sneeze my wife observed my bare gums and cried: “For Heaven’s sake where are your teeth?”

I replied casually “Oh, they’ve just pop ped out for a minute.”

But I must say that dentures in our house hold have been engaged in a meaningful and energetic lifestyle, constantly involved in mouth-to-mouth recitation.

Recently when I received new dentures, my wife’s face softened, her lips quivered, her arms crept around my neck and she whispered passionately: “Hullo, Jaws.”

Of course the discovery of teeth has often given palaeontologists and anthropologists a guide to creatures of the past.

The finding of my dentures in future will probably excite the scientific world.

“This creature was large, both carnivorous and vegetarian, walked mostly on its hind legs and possibly had an ill- filling outer skin. It is believed to have been fleshy and while not belligerent had a strong territorial instinct where its food was concerned. The teeth show signs of great wear.”

So keep your scene clean, and your fangs firm. Magnetised teeth are coming but mean-while you molars, it’s back to the daily grind.

 

Max Fatchen

There’s been some discussion about better seating in the Adelaide Town Hall and if it has done nothing else it has focused attention on an undeniable human phenomenon—we all need seats sooner or later.

The world is full of seats, and I’m glad!

There are the Victoria Square park benches flecked with sunlight through prim, urban trees, benches Inhabited by quick-sandwich office workers, girls lettuce-leafing through their calorie lunch and sad, drifting people for whom the seat is a solace and also a grandstand from which they must needs view that world that seems to have ill-used them.

But seating preoccupies us. Seats are for sitting, but also for interrogation and being restless in when the bank manager (or the tax consultant or the boss) cries “Take a seat.”

Take a seat! I would take one to some wild headland and sit there enthroned in breezy majesty, in draughty state like some modern Canute crying out at the inflation rate and saluted by gulls and shouting waves.

And little people would ask: “Is that a lighthouse on the headland, mummy?” “No child. It’s just a big man with a red nose.”

Take a seat. I would take one to the river where the weir spills like a liquid cafeteria and the pelicans walt with serviettes of feathers.

Take a seat. I’m not a man of standing, so why not?

Seating always bothers me on aircraft.

“No Sir,” says the booking clerk, “you cannot sit with your back to the engines.”

On planes I so often sit between two people who haven’t seen each other for years. I call them seat socialisers. I find myself on a busy intersection of words, craning necks and destination discussions.

The layback railway seat on a long-distance train has its perversities but also its poetry with the staring eyes of farmhouses at night, Tailem Bend, romantic under the Mallee moon, the dreaming Wimmera below the Victorian stars and the old vacuum flask yielding one more cuppa in the long watches of the Overland night.

Yet, seat me in a crowded bus and my personality changes. When those standing look at me for succour, my fleshly lips curl in disdain, my eyes narrow into a rush-hour squint, my hands grip my newspaper like claws and I give some over-laden shopper the kind of glance which Genghis Khan must have bestowed on the latest pyramid of his victims’ skulls.

Sometimes chairs strike back. I once found a particularly vicious folding seat in a local hall. One moment I was sitting there tranquilly and the next the seat tried to foreclose on me.

My legs came up around my neck and for a moment I felt like a victim in “Jaws They finally dragged me free from that aluminium and plastic rat trap. It was still snapping at me as they dragged it away for disciplinary action.

Certainly one keeps one’s favourite chairs and an old armchair Immediately springs to mind. In fact its springs are on my mind most of the time I’m sitting in it.

Yes, they subside and oh the buttocked rapture of one’s favourite armchair. My chair is so old you can even find concealed in s cracks money pre-dating decimal currency.

There are pieces of petrified food (and so would you be petrified if I sat on you for 20 years); there are tiny toys long before Star Wars and men on the moon.

When my armchair finally expires I am thinking of having an autopsy on it and presenting the relics to the nation.

It also has stains which would baffle all but the most skilful analysts; compounded of old tea, rare cordials and generations of fragmented chocolate. They are blended with heaven knows what strange fluids and solids but they make a heady mosaic which could be worth an interior decorator’s studying.

Of course nobler chairs are called thrones, although the statement that a person is on the throne doesn’t necessarily mean he is a regal person.

But there remains for us this precious anticipation that while the baleful world rattles on the window, or glares from the telly, or shrieks on the telephone, we can still have this most primitive of pleasures—we can be seated.

“Sit” people cry at dogs and men.

Gladly. Bottoms down and feet up. I’m a chairperson, man

 

Max Fatchen

The Australian bush is at risk of vanishing these days, of becoming a mortuary of up-rooted tree trunks, a pyre of blazing branches; a place of residents summarily ejected, birds given notice, shade expelled, lizards evicted.

Attila the Hun can be an avenging tractor, razing the cover to the ground.

Farms, they say, must breathe. Fire hazards must be eliminated, land made productive.

Yet there are compromises. My country cousins like to sow and reap but they like a balance too. So their bit of bush is part of their pattern of things. They firebreak it and fence it but, inside, it is their wilderness,

They played in it as children and now their children play there. They call it simply The Scrub.

It is a pavilion for parrots, choir stalls for magpies and crawling space for sleepy lizards.

It even provides a breathing space for slow, heavy visitors from the city.

Some people may not see much to it. The trees are untidy and twisted, mostly low but with one ancient isolated gum that broods in a corner like the oldest inhabitant in a pub, waiting for someone to come and yarn and to pay for the drinks.

Yet the scrub is full of windsong. Its trees anchor the slope which is inclined to erode and their leaves are green sails, their branches spars and their trunks masts and they bend to the breeze and make their music.

My country cousins have never thought of clearing the scrub because it’s too much a part of them

It has its moods. On a hot day it can be perfectly motionless, a frieze of foliage on the ridge.

One can sit on a log in the scrub’s shade and watch the heat haze distort farms and fields, sheds and implements until the plains seem in habited by quivering dinosaurs and strange reservoirs of mirage.

I enjoy the scrub. I have never been very primitive except with a hamburger.

Yet, having failed at agriculture, I make honest attempts to understand conservation, wind erosion, contour ploughing and all the other niceties which my country cousins explain to me over black tea and white scones.

Picnics in the scrub are not as fashionable as they once were, but the bull ants are only too happy to share their formic acid with visitors and the bush flies are always abuzz for company.

The children who often escort me say there’s a brown snake in residence. This snake, a defender of the environment, can smell a townie a kilometre away (the children say) and starts recharging its venom glands at the drop of a Coke can.

It’s a very efficient biter, gets the fangs in deep and lets you have the lot.

You’d be stiffer than frozen yoghurt within the hour.

So the children tell me.

Once the sly movement of a stick in the grass sent me leaping into the fork of the nearest tree which is now called Fatchen’s Leap and shown to visitors.

I like being in the scrub on a moonlit evening On my own; when the country children are at their homework; the snake resting somewhere recharging its venom glands, the ants topping up their formic acid for tomorrow.

The scrub in the moon light is beyond the heat of day and much into mystery.

It murmurs of old times far back and old things forgotten.

The moon swings itself from branch to branch and one should be whispering to one’s girl, although I know she’s down there in the farmhouse and telling bedtime stories about me.

The plain stretches below and the farmhouse lights are portholes the night and the eyes of the cars shine on distant roads and their sounds are faint disturbances of gasoline.

The air is warm in the scrub and pungent with eucalyptus for I have crushed leaves in my hand and, somehow, inhaling then brings old pictures…paintings by Tom Roberts and drovers with dogs and flocks, and stooked hay and selectors huts.

The scent of eucalyptus.

“Hey, you up there in the scrub. Supper time.”

Voices and laughter from the farmhouse.

“So you like the old scrub,” say my country cousins, pleased as we sip tea and eat macaroon squares.

“He likes macaroon squares better,” says my wife.

But when I go to bed and the moonlit trees stand tranquil on their ridge, I can’t help thinking that in these hectic times, we all need our bit of scrub somewhere.

 

Max Fatchen

You may think I have a chip on the shoulder when consider you my fish cooking practices.

Cooking fish requires a nice touch with the pan. Or you may finish floundering and getting into deep water.

Some people prefer flathead. If your fish hasn’t a flat head, sit on it for half an hour and then scale.

Scale anything you like—the sideboard, the sink, but you’ll find that cooking fish will send you up the wall anyway. It does me.

I have enormous trouble with batter. Recently one of my friends made a beautiful crisp batter. We all stood around admiring it as it came out of the pan. Then he began this dreadful weeping. He’d forgotten to put the fish in. Batter can become an obsession until people go crazy and are had up for salt and battery,

Filleting fish also needs care. Recently one of my friends filleted too enthusiastically and things rather got out of hand. Well it certainly gave a new twist to fish fingers.

Some people are keen about cooking tommy ruffs and rolling them in flour. You can roll in it yourself if you become excited. Whether you fry or bake your floury fish as the poet says, full many a flour is born to blush unsteamed.

How about cooking carp? Too many cooks keep putting the carp before the course.

You would be better with salmon trout which is a petite, fish, going around in schools: and when the schools are on vacation, they go it alone.

Some cooks sneer at salmon trout and shift their cookery books to the other side of the room. They want to play around with a baked snapper with lemons in its mouth.

But I know, confidentially, that snappers hate lemons and hate even more being a table centre-piece.

Snappers belong to the deep reaches of the sea, exerting their tremendous muscles against the tide, sliding down the liquid banisters of Backstairs Passage and all that.

Remember that, next time you have baked snapper. How would you like to lie around with a lemon in your mouth?

The butcher has offered me a job doing it in his window on Saturday mornings with the notice “Country Pork.” But of course this is getting away from fish.

Fish patties are pleasant. It’s their very anonymity that I find beguiling. Are they salmon, are they tuna or a bit of sunken schooner?

Of course you must have a sauce with some fish. Have your fish swimming in sauce. I like nothing better than paddling up a fish mornay and exploring its sauce.

Well, I’m a mad romantic that’s all.

We haven’t looked at whiting and why should we? Our fish merchant charges me entertainment tax just to peer at them in the shop window.

Some people like squid and it is very nicely done, Continental style. Squid pro quo, of course.

Sardines rate a mention. It’s usually what I finish up having.

As the saying goes, in fish cuisine be sure your tins will find you out!

The Australian Broadcasting Tribunal has invited the Australian public to stand up and be counted on its television preferences.

Questionnaires will seek views on violence, sport, sanitary napkin advertisements and many other matters. The letters are already starting to flow!

Dear Tribunal: It’s not so much standing up and saying what’s on television but what’s standing in front of the set. We have this big hefty slob in our family and he’d make even the Incredible Hulk incredulous.

He is always sneering at me: “Do you want to watch Prisoner? We might soo some of your relatives.” And I told him: “Sit down you great oaf, you’re more restless than “The Restless Years”

I tell you I’d like to have him up in front of a tribunal that would give him plenty.

By the way, I’ve watched “Wonder Woman” and she’d die of fright at what I have to do in a day and I don’t whirl in a circle and come up wearing a fancy costume and showing my legs. I just wear the same old house frock and if Wonder Woman could get any more heat out of our stove or could persuade the butcher what a tender joint is or lug around what I have to get at the supermarket and then come home and persuade the great slob in front of the TV that, after all, you have to pay money to get goods, then I’d say Wonder Woman was a wonder and the wonder of it all is that I’m still sane. Yours faithfully….

Dear Tribunal: “I am writing as a young teenager and certainly I’m not all that crazy about babies’ bottoms or sanitary towels, but I’d like to draw attention to the dressing of some people watching TV, that would make any bare-bottomed baby scream with disgust.

I’m referring to what I describe loosely as the Thing from the Upper Bedroom and the slip-shod shortie pyjamas he wears

Inadequately shielded by an egg- stained dressing gown. Yuk and double yuk!

When he sprawls, his mouth full of crisps and his torn singlet obscenely winking from his talced chest I can’t persuade my boy-friends to stay. After all they were brought up on the genteel TV attitude of violence, bashing, frisking for gun, the late horror show and chasing chicks, and they get distracted looking at him and doubling up with laughter or, at other times, staring in sheer youthful disgust as he mugs a sandwich over his TV tray.

I think standards should be set for parents watching TV so that visiting teenagers can enjoy soccer violence, war films, car crashes and clothes-ripping without being distracted by corny remarks by a parent whose clothing wouldn’t even get a Mature rating if only you could see It. Yours faithfully…

Dear Tribunal: Bewdy. Have you clapped your eyes on that Lady Fogarty in “Onedin Line”? She shivers me timbers every time she comes cleaving through the plot. What a bow and stern? Away all boarders. And then there are those police sheilahs. I feel a right Charlie before those Angels. And I like that Denise who reads the ABC news. She can make even an ayatollah sound nice.

What are my complaints? Well they’re sitting all around me complaining like hell. Hang on, I have to stop writing now. One of the liberated women in my family has just, changed the channels and when I put down me glass and me crisps I’m going to show them who’s master in this TV room… See you, Denise Yours faithfully…

 

Max Fatchen

It was a question I had been expecting for some time from my nearest and dearest. (The nearer they get, the dearer they get.)

Why they said, didn’t I have bottom of the harbour scheme yielding something little more profitable than tommy ruffs?

It brought to a fish-head what has been smouldering in my mind for weeks and has irritated the faithful who fish the Bay of Magpies beyond Birkenhead Bridge and the gentle world of gents and cockles behind Torrens Island.

The bottom of our harbor has been littered with similes and metaphors, analogies and accusations. Cartoonists who have barely put a line in the water have had a field day. Tax dodgers have rocked the boat, investigators have shrieked about submerged funds.

Laundering

People have been doing their monetary laundering at the water’s edge.

There something rotten in the Bay of Denmark and it’s not just the friendly smell of decaying seaweed.

It is the destruction of the verbal environment, the rape of marine terminology.

As the next fisherman on the wharf said, it has made our breed ashamed that the rapacity of the human race should be linked with the dour monosyllabic rivalry of the gar gatherer and the whiting whacker; that the shady legal and political phraseology should invade the privacy of the bait box.

Bottom of the harbor indeed. It’s more than horseflesh and burley can stand.

It had worse effect for me. My family decided to come fishing with.

When my head and reel had stopped spinning my wife explained jauntily “We want to see if there IS anything at the bottom of the harbour.”

“You can dredge me a tenner, Daddy Person,” said my daughter, shouldering my fishing basket with the winning smile of a young white pointer.

My companions of the wharf were visibly sha ken to see my family group One or two hats were half-raised but whether in deference or defence I’ll never know.

“Have you caught any schemes?” my wife asked an old fisherman, his face scaled by three-score and 10 summers “that’s where you catch them Charlie, on the bottom of the harbour.”

Guardedly

I felt so ashamed with all these good men who would normally be chatting guardedly about the tide (is it on the turn?), the wind (was it beginning to rise?), the forecast (wrong again), aniseed (the tiddlers aphrodisiac) and all the reputable matters of the sea.

I could hear my wife’s jolly voice and see her pointing finger, “Yes I landed him 40 years ago and still haven’t thrown him back. I must admit he has some commercial viability.”

“Bring us up something, Big fisherman,” said my daughter, relaxing in my folding chair, “preferably a double-header of debentures, or some nice gilt-edged stock. I began thinking seriously about the bottom of the harbour. How nice both of them would look down there. But then one had to think of the fish. That’s the way with me—outwardly calm, but with so much going on under the surface

My wife was still haranguing the old fisherman. “Mind you, he’s not very venturesome. I go for high-interest tum over on the money market, but he’s still with his school bank book syndrome. But at least the Dow Jones averages show signs of recovering but wouldn’t be that keen about oils.”

Other fishermen were packing their baskets in panic. It is the first time I had seen any of them run to the bus stop.

My only catch for the day was an old boot with a bit of river bed adhering to it. So I smeared it on my offspring.

And why not. Mud is thicker than daughter.

We didn’t stay after that. There was nothing on the bottom of the harbour. But all the same, they gutted my wallet and quite enjoyed my going off the deep end.

So I am ringing my friend Dudley Burton, about English usage.

Bottom of the harbour indeed. It’s time we got our terms straight

 

Max Fatchen

A Government department in Canberra can’t trust its staff to water the office plants so it pays thousands of dollars for their hire and maintenance.

We’ve had some incidents with our office plants. Once the secretaries gave me a nasty-looking tropical exotic.

It was when it began swallowing flies and snatching at my sandwiches that I became uneasy.

I heard two office girls talking about it. One said: “What’s eating him now?”

The other said: “Nothing, but give it time.”

The next plant had big fronds and the girls lavished such attention on it. I decided this was time-consuming so I bade it a frond farewell.

Yet I suppose it was nice to have a bit of greenery which would cushion me against the ravages of the day. But they wouldn’t let me have any Angels Wings. They know how I like a flutter.

But they tried to find something to suit me.

“How do you think an aspidistra would go in Fatchen’s office?” the secretary asked the boss.

“Why not,” he said? “He has a lovely big pot.”

He, of course, has a rubber plant so that he can bounce the staff

But it was the cactus plant that caused a pecul far change in me.

“Mornin’ gal,” I drawled to the typist, “I just been ridin’ the range and headin for the last round- up. It’s high noon, honey, and raindrops keep fallin’ on my haid. Kiss me, Mary Lou, and I’ll stampede for the saloon and a shake and burger.”

A little later, I had my shirt off and my face streaked with Biro and I danced around the cactus, going, “Hai, hai, hai.”

Then a squaw appeared.

She said, “When you can tear yourself away, Geronimo, the chief’s on the warpath.”

So they tried me with one of those miniature Japanese trees, the sort that makes you leap on your desk, shrieking “Bonsai”

But, crush my kimono, the tree actually soothed me.

Then the tea lady arrived and performed her centuries-old ceremony, dipping the ancient tea bag for the traditional half-second in the lukewarm water.

The final, beautiful touch of delicately slopping the coffee biscuit had all the old-world fragility of colourful Nippon about it.

And yet the office pot plants are a mere scattering compared with the massed greenery of my wife’s collection. There is her pot-plant stadium alongside which Football Park looks like a children’s playground. One can stand in it during the heat of day and hear the chattering of strange birds. Well, she’s always showing off to her friends.

However when she goes away for a weekend and says: “Now water the pot plants” It’s enough to pale the nail of any non-green-finger.

One drips and splashes from room to room while the aspidistras gulp and the potted pigface slurps and dribbles.

Then the phone rings and I feel for it through the trailing tentacles of some indoor creeper. No wonder I get my vines crossed:

“Are you watering the pot plants?”

How that sentence must have rattled around the world, chilling countless men in soggy slippers, patrolling through the sleepless, saturated nights, doing a watering can-can through the shadehouse and the fernery, tying ribbons in the maidenhair.

Do you know why the Murray has a sandbar gag across its mouth? Because all the water has gone to pot.

Oh, and Mr. Tonkin, do bring foreign investors to our place. We have more plant than GMH.

 

Max Fatchen

Maybe it’s just a touch of the sun and we’ve had so much to touch us lately.

But have you noticed how life turns full circle?

When I was young I splashed in the shallows, a fair headed child with an abdominal overhang. Then I began to swim and disport myself beyond the breakers, a daring young Adonis clutching my wooden surfboard catching the curling lip of the sea, and scattering the girls like beautiful flying fish.

Then my hair grew sparser and my swimming stamina dwindled.

Now, bald-headed and scarcely able to raise a ripple of interest in even a passing bikini, I am back In the shallows again, floating like an old liferaft from some wreck. And still with an abdominal overhang.

It was all brought home to me at a blistering beach on the holiday coast where I’d sought to float limp, massive and impassive a few centimetres about the shelly seabed. I have always been a floater rather than a propeller and this was one of my floating days

I was suddenly aware of five shadows—not sharks, silly, but something more menacing—children.

Aggressive, curious children. Intrigued but belligerent.

“You go back to the sea, big barrel” said the spokesperson, a mermaid in floral bathers and with a perpetually running nose. The shallows are for children.

“ Go, go, go,” they began shouting in that terribly frightening rhythm of childish gangs.

“Has come from the sea” asked a small boy,” or has it come from the land?”

“Never mind where it comes from” said Floral Pants, “it’s where we’re going to send it.”

“It could be a whale. We must be kind to whales and help them back to in deep water,” said a small environmentalist, heavily freckled but with a kindly appearance. “Look whale I’ll lead you back.”

“Anyway it’s not a whale, said Floral Pants. “Its tail is the wrong shape. If it was a whale we could melt it down and make oil for Eskimo lamps.”

She gave me a loose toothed leer that would have repelled a white pointer.

They began beating the water again. But I was too big for them

“Shall I tell you a story?” I said.

The monster is talking. Yes monster, tell your story.

“Once,” I said dreamily, “I was young with air golden hair and a bucket and spade and played happy in the shallows.”

“But as I got older people poured the bucket over me and drove me out of my depth. Somehow I couldn’t keep my head above water. Next moment I was on the rocks, the sea was full of sharks and even my family said I was as spineless as a jelly-fish.”

“I knew I wasn’t in the- swim so I came ashore to be left high and dry. Sometimes I feel like I am stranded partways, twixt the Devil and the deep blue sea.”

The applause could only be described as scattered.

“You’re nothing but a big, fat, wet old cry baby, said Floral Pants

Then the contemptuous quintet departed, perhaps to trample at couple of aunts or maybe to sack the kiosk.

Suddenly I saw a stem and waving figure on shore, a figure waving an authoritative beach towel and I knew that she wasn’t from Greenpeace.

“Are you staying in the water all day making an exhibition of yourself?” she asked. So I rose obediently. Even a sea monster knows when he’s licked.

But I thought about that bossy kid in the for al bathing suit and I told myself that one day she’d be a grandma with knitted knees and worrying sons-in-law, and she’d be in the shallows somewhere and youth would come to stare and question and get in her old, grey, wet hair.

Anyway, for a big, fat, wet old cry baby with an abdominal overhang, it was a comforting thought.

 

Max Fatchen