My Dad Frank

Living in Middlesex, England, Issac Douse my great (X7) grandfather was walking home from a night out on the drink. The fact that it was a long way home didn’t bother him, as he noticed a very convenient ride waiting for him in the shape of a grey mare in the paddock next to him.

Grabbing the mane he drunkenly swung his legs up and clung on for dear life as the little mare clip clopped her way down the cobblestone road. After a few hours he came across an alehouse, the warm glow from inside looked too inviting to resist. “I’ll only stop for a couple” he told himself as he clambered off his stolen horse and staggered into the pub.

“A pint of your finest, please” He told the barman.
”Ere you go sir, that’ll be 3 shillings” Said the barman as he wiped the old oak bar with a grubby rag.
”Tell you what” Said Isaac with a rascals glint in his eye. “You give me three more of these pints and I’ll give you my horse. Sounds like a fair deal if you ask me!”
“OK” Said that barman. “I guess I can take a look at it”

Issac Douse didn’t realize that the barman knew the owner of the grey mare he had stolen that night. And he didn’t realize that he would be clamped in irons and sent to London to be charged with horse theft, leading to a charge of death, later changed to the worst sentence of all. Shipment to Botany Bay, Australia. He traveled for eight months on the HMAS Glatton and arrived in Botany Bay in 1802. He was on the seventh fleet of convicts to reach Australia.

This is how our family came to be in Australia.

My dad and I have a great relationship, now. When I was growing up, we didn’t really get along much. Mum and Dad were going through a very messy patch in their relationship, which led to them divorcing when I about 15.

It wasn’t until I was about 19-20 and had been through a few relationships of my own that I started to realize that maybe this divorce thing wasn’t all dads fault as I had once thought. I realized the fact that my dad was creeping up to 60 meant that he probably wasn’t going to be around for much longer. This made me think “If my dad passed away tomorrow, would I be happy with things the way they are” My answer was “no”, so I made a very conscious effort to get to know my dad a little better.

Growing up on a farm in the tropical regions of northern Queensland he owned his first gun at 10. He was a crack shot and had a disciplinarian father that taught him the ways of the farm and the bush. Not doing well in school, he worked on the family farm until his early 20’s. Soon he found himself in the Lands Department as a Land Valuer. This lead to him being away in the bush for sometimes weeks on end, tracking large parcels of land to find out their worth.

This had to have been hard on my Mother. Having three children to look after and being moved around the state every couple of years took its toll. Having had enough, my Mother demanded a stable home, leading to my father taking an office job in Brisbane to quell the unrest in his young family.

We lived in the country, about an hour and a half from the city and made our home on a piece of land my father bought from his sister who owned the dairy farm on a few thousand acres next door.

When I was younger, aged 5-10, I felt my father wasn’t around much. He went to cricket games with my brother and seemed to be helping my older sister through high school and University, but wasn’t really there for me. I probably grew up without him noticing.

When I was twelve he took me to my first concert, one of the few things we did as a father and son when I was young. (The other being climbing Mt Bartle Freer, the highest mountain in Queensland) I don’t know why I didn’t get to know my dad as a kid, it just happened that way.

A couple of months ago dad gave me an autobiography. Nothing fancy, a hand written 15 page brain dump of his memoirs. He told me that he didn’t really know his father when he was growing up and he didn’t want to go to the grave without his kids know what he did as a young man. This is his way of saying "now you can learn about me in a way I feel comfortable giving"

I think the fact that I felt that my father wasn’t there for me as a kid has led me to being the type of father who is involved, nurturing and always there for his kids.

Posted by Peter