Just a Small Town Boy
I grew up in a series of small towns for the first twelve years of my life. I was born in Roma and grew up at Mungallala, where my parents ran a roadside café. I fondly remember days spent napping and playing games at the back of the shop. Because I was small and both Mum and Dad had to work, I was there with them the whole day. They had a computer set up in the back, where I would play Scooby Doo point-and-click games, the kind where you had to solve who the criminal was. Alongside the computer was a Nintendo 64, the first console I ever played, and Legend of Zelda, the first game I ever finished (and by far my favourite series to this day). There was something about a little green kid taking on evil to save his homeland that still resonates with me to this day. After Mungallala we lived out at Dalby Dilla, a property halfway between Mungallala and Morven. In my memory Dalby Dilla was all about playing in the muddy pools of water after it rained and setting up makeshift games of golf around the big empty paddocks with my three older brothers. I was always so proud when they awarded me one of the trophies we had at home, even though now I know it was just for trying.
We moved to Morven for school and for Dad to work at the Roo Works skinning kangaroos. I used to catch the bus to Charleville three days a week for preschool, because they only had year 1-7 support at the State school. I made some good friends in those day that carried over to when I attended Morven State School. As a small town, it had about thirty kids, so you had to be friends or at least tolerant of everyone. Outside of school, we rode our bikes a lot. Cubby houses were a popular past time, built in the bushland around the town, but close to the back roads that littered the area. The tree were always very dry, which made them easy to break and for us to gather up sticks for walls, rough structures and mock weapons. As all kids seem to, we often had play fights and sometimes real ones. Fights over cubbies, the stealing of them and the occasional wanton destruction of them. We treated them like our homes and sought justice for their destruction. Of course there was always the rule that no one was to be injured. We all knew that actually hurting someone was always a lot of trouble. My brothers Tim and Lach helped Dad out on the weekends when he went roo-shooting. It meant they learned to drive and shoot when they were young. I never really took to it for some reason, I think because I didn’t seem to be able to stay up all night. That and I couldn’t stomach the gutting that took place so the roos remained sanitary before they got to the roo works.
After seven years of such a simple existence, and plagued with social ostracisation, we eventually decided to move to Toowoomba. Small towns are nice, but with such a small population, drama and social cliques are an inevitability. When it came to making a choice between who to associate with, Mum chose no one in particular. And so our family ended up pushed to the outskirts of social tolerance. People weren’t unfriendly, but for one reason or another, they never felt comfortable or trusting of us, and didn’t care to invite or include us in the goings on of the town. Coupled with a lack of opportunities for us growing kids and me about to head into high school, moving closer to civilisation was a necessity. I still miss things about Morven. The privacy. The simplicity. The quiet. It’s a different life out there compared to cities. Even small ones like Toowoomba. It makes me grateful for the opportunities and facilities Toowoomba has in comparison. It’s something I feel you have to experience firsthand to understand.
