Tim Ross built up an enormous fan base through sell-out stand-up performances across Australia and has become a regular on Australian television. He is the author of Merrick and Rosso.

Mum had a Kingswood

Tales from the Life and Mind of Rosso

By Tim Ross

Allen & Unwin

Copyright © 2010 Tim Ross
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74237-507-6

Contents

The bit at the beginning,
Part 1,
1. Mum’s old green Kingswood,
2. Our house: A story of survival,
3. Mixed lollies,
Stuff:,
Rosso vs technology,
Nigerian loan scam,
Part 2,
4. Rock with Jesus, the one that pleases,
5. The electrifying ’80s,
6. The power of apricot jam,
Stuff:,
Relationships,
Party games,
Part 3,
7. I lied about being the outdoors type,
8. Do you reckon we’ll get our bond back?,
9. Everybody should play in a rock band at least once,
Stuff:,
Breaking up,
1001 musicians who should die before you (abridged version),
Part 4,
10. What’s an Arts degree got to do with it?,
11. The dynamic duo,
Stuff:,
Kids,
Almost Twilight,
Part 5,
12. ABC isn’t always as easy as 123,
13. Oops, I did it again … and again,
Stuff:,
Reality shows,
Movie sequels,
Whacky radio ideas that never made it,
Part 6,
14. Here’s a celebrity I prepared earlier,
15. The meet and greet,
Stuff:,
How to bring a bit of celebrity into your own life,
The complaints file,
Understanding Gen Y,
Part 7,
16. Hey Dad,
17. Centre link,
The end bit,
Acknowledgements,

CHAPTER 1

Mum’s old green Kingswood

I have a soft spot for Australia’s car culture, especially for cars made here in the 1970s.

Last year I was walking down Church Street in Parramatta, and I stopped at a JB HiFi store where they had a TV in the window playing the 1977 Bathurst 1000 on DVD. I was riveted and so were others as a crowd gathered like it was 1956 and we were watching the Olympics in a shopfront window because we didn’t have a TV at home. When the Ford team of Allan Moffatt and Colin Bond went over the line in their famous 1, 2 finish, the vision cut to the view from Channel 7’s overhead chopper of these two hulking Ford XCs crossing the line. A wave of nostalgia-tinged excitement gripped the half a dozen strangers who had been drawn to watch this classic race. We smiled at each other, exchanged a few ‘How good was that?’-type comments, and then went on with our business, our lives just a little brighter all because of some old footage of a car race more than thirty years ago.

When Mum bought her Kingswood in 1975, there was pandemonium in our household. My brothers and I were out of minds with excitement. We climbed all over that six-cylinder, big four-door sedan, checking out the glove box, sliding across the bench seat and admiring the shape of this car that just seemed so modern. Mum had pretty much always had Holdens, but it wasn’t due to any loyalty in a Holden vs Ford rivalry kind of way; this latest car turned up in the driveway because a family friend worked at Holden and Mum got a great deal. I think she got it for a steal because it was a ghastly shade of lime green with a cream vinyl interior.

Not long after its arrival at Wooralla Drive, Mount Eliza, Mum and Dad took us to Adelaide for a holiday. With three boys piled in the back, we took off across the country. As the temperature hit the mid thirties, Mum turned round and yelled at us to put our seatbelts on. Dehydrated (this was the ’70s, remember; no-one drank water then) we explained to Mum that the polymers in our polyester velour jumpers had moulded with the vinyl seat in the car and so we didn’t need seatbelts because we weren’t going anywhere.

Despite our love of Mum’s new Kingswood, we were too young at the time to realise some of the deficiencies of Holden engineering. The HJ Kingswood didn’t exactly handle like a dream; in fact they were never used as police cars for this very reason. In the early ’90s I went along to show some support for my old mate Bulldog, who had a small driving misdemeanour matter being decided at the local magistrates court. Before his case, a bloke had been charged with reckless and unlicensed driving of a Holden Kingswood while he was twice the legal limit. When the magistrate asked the police prosecutor whether the defendant had made any excuse for his behaviour on being arrested, the officer read from his notebook in a classically deadpan manner, ‘He said. “You try driving this piece of shit when you’re pissed, officer!”‘

One of the stranger design features of the Kingswood was that the fuel cap was placed behind the rear numberplate. To access the tank you had to pull the hinged numberplate down to reveal the cap. In those days, most petrol stations had full driveway service so as we pulled up halfway to Adelaide, my brothers and I giggled at the comic possibilities of the guy at the servo walking around the car, scratching his head, damned if he could work out where to put the petrol. As we stopped at the bowser, the three of us waited in anticipation as the crusty old attendant came over and Dad wound down the window and said, ‘Fill her up with super, please’. Without missing a beat the bloke walked round the back of the car, lifted up the numberplate and dutifully filled the tank up with super. We were amazed; I’m not sure that three boys under ten could understand that the Kingswood was actually the most popular car in the country at the time.

It seemed like we spent half our lives in that car. Mum, a doctor, used to pick us up from school, and then pop into the hospital to check on some patients on our way home. To keep ourselves occupied we would dare each other to take the car out of park, release the handbrake, and see how far we were prepared to let the car roll before chickening out and quickly hitting the brakes to avoid rolling into a surgeon’s Mercedes. Only marginally less dangerous than that was when we got a box of Kleenex out of the glove box and set fire to individual tissues with the cigarette lighter.

When I was seven, we went and stayed at a family friend’s beach house. Mum and I went a night earlier than Dad and my brothers, and when we arrived at the old fibro shack Mum turned into the driveway and hit a rock sticking out of the lawn with one of the tyres. It caused the Kingswood to launch into the air and land, wedging the garden tap underneath the front bumper bar. This was quite a concern because we were trapped; any attempt to move the car would mean snapping the water pipe. What was more troubling was that Mum had promised me a Chiko Roll and that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon if we couldn’t drive to the shops. Somehow I came up with a brilliant solution. I got the jack out of the boot of the car, jacked up the front of the car until the car was clear of the tap and pipe and then got Mum to start the ignition, slam the vehicle in reverse and drive off the jack — and the tap. Despite Mum’s scepticism of my ingenious plan, it worked: the car slid off the jack, missed the tap, completely fucked the lawn, and I got a deep-fried snack.

In the early 1980s, Mum upgraded to a green Holden Commodore with a green vinyl interior, and Dad started driving the Kingswood. Dad was now not only driving Mum’s car but he had taken to wearing an old pair of her sunglasses too. Dad has what is best described as a light afro, so it wasn’t a surprise that on the day he picked us up after seeing Ghostbusters my mates jumped into the back of the car and said, ‘Hi, Mrs Ross!’

In the hands of the old man the beast had some trying times. Because Dad was an antiques dealer, he added some roof racks and channelled a Balinese family on a motorbike with the amount of stuff he could tie on the roof. One of the best things I ever saw was him coming up the driveway, forgetting he had a nineteenth-century wardrobe on top of the car, and barrelling straight into the carport. I watched the car go in, but the wardrobe didn’t make the clearance. It hit the front board and took the roof racks clean off the car, and then landed directly behind the car like something out of a Road Runner cartoon.

His best modification to the Kingswood was when the lock to the boot seized. This sent Dad into a panic because the boot was filled to the brim with an assortment of shit that he’d just bought at auction. Rather than take it somewhere to be fixed, he just got Gary from next door to come over with his angle grinder. With some help from my oldest brother Steve, they took the back seat out of the car, Gary fired up the angle grinder and, under Dad’s instruction, cut a square hole 2 feet by 2 feet through the body of the car so we could dive in and remove his precious cargo. Now you don’t have to be an automotive engineer to work out that removing such a large piece of the car was going to affect its structural integrity, and Dad soon found that the back doors would fly open when he went round a roundabout at any speed over 20 kilometres an hour.

Unfortunately the old girl didn’t have much time left on the clock, and a week after Steve drove us down the road to the Dromana Drive-In and we sat on her bonnet to watch local legends Australian Crawl do their very last gig, her head gasket blew and she was off to the wreckers for 150 bucks.

CHAPTER 2

Our house: A story of survival

The way my brothers and I treated it, the house we grew up in could have withstood Hurricane Katrina. In the late ’70s Mum and Dad renovated it to give us all a room for ourselves. What this did in the process was extend the hallway and give us some extra room for corridor cricket. Although this sport was banned, it didn’t stop us from us spending hours on school holidays battering a tennis ball and the walls in equal measure. When we heard Mum or Dad come up the driveway we’d have to quickly hide the bat and ball in Stephen’s room and pretend we’d been doing homework, watching TV or reading.

One afternoon we had the stereo on extra loud and hadn’t heard Mum come home from work early. It wasn’t until the last moment, when the front door closed, that we had to scatter. Stephen took the bat into his room, I ducked into the bathroom with the tennis ball and Campbell dived onto the couch picking up what he thought was his Robert Ludlum novel. It wasn’t until Mum asked him if he was enjoying his book that he realised he’d picked up Mum’s copy of Everywoman by mistake. It would have been even funnier if Mum offered him a mirror to examine himself.

Obviously indoor sports were forbidden because of the damage they did to the house but some impromptu sports were impossible to ban. When Wiltshire introduced the nifty StaySharp knife in the 1970s they were pretty damn fancy. Their ability to stay sharp had an unexpected use when I chucked one in a fit of rage at my brother, who thankfully ducked, and it wedged half way in the pine-clad wall. It took us ten minutes to remove and left a hole in the wall that we never managed to explain.

There was far worse to come when Steve started mucking around with the ignition of Dad’s little Suzuki soft-top 4WD and managed to drive the car straight into the side of the house. Mum, who was upstairs making dinner at the time, thought we’d suffered an almighty earthquake. Despite a little bit of damage to the front side panel of the car and the bull bar, the little jeep was actually okay. The house had moved several centimetres permanently and the bricks were cracked. My brother, despite being only thirteen, was saddled with the shame of being a ‘fucked driver’.

I decided to go one better when I was thirteen (a very unlucky number for our household). Mum had a very strict rationing of Prima Orange Juice drinks (the ones that most people call ‘poppers’ these days) and I decided I’d tuck into one without permission. Rather than dispose of the evidence in the bin, I took the opportunity to go downstairs into Dad’s workshop, which was inside, directly below Campbell’s room. There I created a diorama/installation featuring the crushed container and a few small plastic army men on Dad’s workbench. Once they were looking decidedly arty/Guns of Navarone-ish I poured a bit of paint stripper over them and lit the diorama with a match. With a small flame going I ramped up the Napalm stakes and poured more of the paint stripper straight from the tin directly onto the flame. I don’t think I need Dr Julius Sumner Miller to return from the grave to tell you what happened next.

The moment the liquid hit the flames, they flew skyward and set the wall and the roof on fire. Petrified, I stood there screaming as the flames licked the walls.

Luckily Campbell took my screams as a sign to take a break from watching Wide World of Sports and come down, find a hose from outside and put out the fire before it took the whole house down.

Not only had I destroyed Dad’s workshop, there was water everywhere. This was going to be a hard one to blame on the dog when the folks got home.

The other near scrape for the house was when a tree fell on the roof in a storm. Luckily it only caused a small hole the size of a 50-cent piece and Dad had me up there scraping the asbestos roof with a wire brush to prepare the surface so I could fill it with a plastic filler.

Mucking around with asbestos, now those were the days.

CHAPTER 3

Mixed lollies

When I was a kid I used to ride my bike everywhere — and almost killed myself in the process on numerous occasions. One of the coolest things I loved to do on my Malvern Star racer was cycle with my hands off the handlebars. I used to watch all the older boys do it, so once I perfected it I was pretty damn pleased with myself.

One day I went down to the shops to buy some mixed lollies and some Whizz Fizz. With my lollies in my duffle coat pocket, I was very smoothly dipping the small plastic spoon into the fizz while riding my bike along. It was fine until I looked down at the bag for just too long and barrelled into a woman walking along with her shopping. I’d actually managed to steer the bike between her legs, and when I felt the bike wobble I looked up to find her holding on to the handlebars. I dropped the Whizz Fizz instinctively and steadied the bike. For five metres or so I carried the woman along until I hit the kerb and we both fell sideways. A bit shaken, I quickly apologised and helped her pick up her groceries and, despite me almost killing her, she felt sorry for me. So this woman of forty-two asked me back to her house for a cup of tea and a piece of cake, and then she promptly seduced me and made me a man … Yeah right, what actually happened was she went off her nut, calling me irresponsible and a reckless idiot, and wanted me to pay for her damaged groceries. Given I had five cents on me at the time that wasn’t going to wash, so I got back on my bike and headed off to avoid any further tirade.

On school holidays my brothers and I would cycle round the neighbourhood knocking on people’s doors to see whether they had any odd jobs that needed doing for a bit of spare cash. We’d rake up leaves or wash cars for an hour, and end up with 50 cents each. Afterwards we’d head straight down to the milk bar and stock up.

When we knocked on one door, the woman put us to work raking up all the leaves in her rather large backyard as well as cutting a large stack of wood with a small bandsaw. It looked like it would be a good half day’s work. After we’d been toiling away for an hour, the woman came out the back and told us she was out for the rest of the day and gave us 20 cents to finish the job … between us! We were pretty incensed by the tight-arsed nature of the offering but decided to do the right thing and finish off the job anyway.

As soon as she’d backed her Datsun out of the driveway my brother called us round to the side of the house. While he’d been stacking the wood he’d noticed a crate of empty 1-litre soft drink bottles. At the time these bottles were recycled — not in a crush and melt them down again kind of way, but washed and reused by the manufacturers. As a result when you returned them to the milk bar you’d get 20 cents per bottle. Ever the mathematician, my brother did the sums and before you knew it we’d downed tools, the crate was on the front of his bike, and we were headed down the shops with $2.40 worth of bottles. That got us bags of mixed lollies, Freddo Frogs, White Knights, Choo Choo Bars, a mountain of hot chips and a can of creaming soda each.

It was at this visit to the milk bar that we worked out that after we gave the owner the returnable bottles, he took them out the back of his shop and left them by his backdoor. After we’d finished what we could eat of our feast, my brothers hoisted me over the fence and I stealthily passed our recently returned bottles — plus a few more — over the fence to my brothers’ eagerly waiting hands. Then we hid them in the bushes for a couple of days before taking them back to the milk bar to collect our bounty again. The owner was none the wiser. It was the perfect crime.

The word got out about this opportunity and it seemed that everyone we knew was in on the scam. Today in my memory I can see us all jumping over the fence in our Golden Breed windcheaters and Amco Rider jeans like an old silent movie with ‘The Entertainer’ from The Sting being played underneath it.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Mum had a Kingswood by Tim Ross. Copyright © 2010 Tim Ross. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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