The barren backyard

I am standing on the Newtown & Chilwell football ground, looking across the grass to my distant past.

I started playing here 40 years ago – not for the red-and-black Eagles, just for fun. A kick of the footy after school at the Elderslie Terrace end of the ground with my neighbour John. Two kids, not yet in their teens, mucking around. Day after day, year after year.

We both lived in Minerva Road, a few hundred metres from the oval. I vaguely remember that Bobby Davis lived around the corner, somewhere in Read Street. I don’t remember seeing him but I only had eyes for the red-and-the-black of the 1970s Bombers on the black-and-white television. Barry Davis, not Bobby Davis.

My sister says that Bobby Davis lived right behind us, that we shared a back fence, and that he had a flutter or two in Mum and Dad’s Geelong West TAB.

From centre-half-forward of the Newtown & Chilwell ground I look for the cyprus that dominated the front garden at 165 Minerva Road. I know it’s not there anymore but I still want to look for it, to see it popping out above the houses, looking down Sydenham Avenue to the city.

Instead I catch a glimpse of a large white cement-mixing pump arcing into a driveway or a backyard. It might even be pouring cement into my own past, I wonder, as I head down Read Street. My younger brother had told me a year or so ago that the house was being sold again, with a subdivision listed to tempt prospective buyers.

Cement dust used to crust flower petals in the gardens of Newtown and Geelong West. It used to turn black roads grey. It used to turn firm surfaces slippery. (Dad once came a cropper on his motor scooter when he took a turn too casually up near the footy ground.) The cement silos of Australian Portland Cement stood at the top of Autumn Street like sentinels. The towers are still there, though the cement works closed years back.

The arcing cement pump is pouring concrete into a driveway in Read Street, a few doors up from Bobby Davis’ old place. The new driveway is for a three or four apartment development.

I turn the corner into Minerva Road, where I lived from 1970 to 1980, from the last year of primary school to the first year of leaving home. The house is still there, as is my neighbour John’s. As is the house on the other side, which had peacocks and galahs in the backyard and maybe – in cages – snakes.

I walk up my old driveway, where Dad parked the Kingswood (and, briefly, the second-hand Mercedes), where my older brother parked his first motor bike, a Hodaka, where my older sister parked her first car, a Hillman.

There is a sign in the corner of my old backyard, my old field of dreams, my old Test ground. There is a sign in my MCG, my Windy Hill. A sign on Bobby Davis’ old fence.

A new paling fence runs the length of the driveway and then cuts right, across the back of the house so that the view is not that of a yard to play in, of a yard to muck around in, but of, well, a new paling fence.

I am disappointed but not devastated. Change is inevitable.

The backyard is bare but I can still see the table-tennis stadium (the garage), the cordon of slips fielders (the shed), the wicketkeeper (the pigeon coop), and the leg slip (the rhubarb patch).

I can still see mid-on (the apricot tree) and short cover (the Hills Hoist clothesline) and mid-off (the Clark swimming pool).

I can still see that imperious cover drive that would have been a boundary (the side fence near the peacock and snake house) if the cricket ball hadn’t hit our pet Pomeranian, Chang, right on the base of the spine.

I thought I’d killed Chang and was ready to start digging a hole at leg slip. Dad came home from the TAB that night and nursed Chang back to health, via an eye-dropper full of whiskey.

Thereafter all cricket matches between John and I, especially the newfandangled World Series Cricket matches, were preceded by us placing Chang safely inside for the duration of play.

Standing in the old backyard I can still see the agapanthus bushes that caught everything at silly mid-off. How many hours did John and I spend looking for cricket balls amongst the snails and the spiders and the slime of the broken green leaves?

Those bushes were also where I took mark-after-spectacular-mark while playing mind games of Essendon victories as darkness descended on Saturday afternoons. Those bushes were hapless defenders and I was Ken Fraser or Ted Fordham or Alan Noonan or Geoff Blethyn.

I used the roof at Minerva Road to practise anticipation, marking and ruckwork. I’d throw the ball up there, out of view, and then guess where it would roll down. Above the back door? Above the toilet door? The kitchen window? Now, there’s a paling fence in the way, a fence dividing the past from the present, and the present from the future.

The current state of the old backyard does bear some resemblance to the time my older brother turned the yard into a trail-bike track. With the house and the yard to himself for a weekend he decided to give his Hodaka trail bike a good work-out. The tyres carved out a muddy track around the perimeter of the Hills Hoist, along the cricket pitch, down past the shed and around to the agapanthus bushes. It was a daft thing to do but impressive too.

In a way, the old backyard where my neighbour John and I spent so many hours is empty. In another way, of course, it’s full.

I won’t be surprised if next time I’m passing through there’s a white cement-mixing pump arcing into the old backyard, concreting the past but not entirely burying it.