In which Al enters the Picture.

A little while ago I did a post based on my early teen years in Mum’s patch of the country.

I promised I would carry on with more of the story. Well I am starting that story again only… and it is a fairly big only… I am jumping about thirteen or fifteen years further into the past.

The early 1960s a man and a woman meet and fall in love.

He was from India. As an Anglo-Indian in a racist world, living in what was Redneck Australia he was (I think) tormented. She was desperately unhappy in a marriage to a man who would not let her return home to visit her ailing father in England.

They are both married to other people and have children. Yet despite that and despite the standards of the time they leave together. He never looks back, she regrets always leaving her son and daughter with the man she no longer loves.

About two years later I was born…

Meet my father, Rupert Russell. This is what he was like in my earliest memories (and amazingly I do remember these times). He was young and fit and a lover of wild places. But it is almost impossible to find a picture of him in this period. He was a thinker (some might argue a philosopher) and he had some funny thoughts. Like me he was and is a writer (find a small sample here). One of the thoughts he had in this period was that people should not have their photo taken. Hence no photos of him.

And... no photos of me as a baby. Which brings me to this piccie. Mum holds a gate somewhere in western NSW so Dad can drive through. Next to her a two year old Al.This is the oldest picture of me in existence. Don’t I look a serious little fellow?

As I said Dad was a lover of the wilds. He grew up in an India that was still even then largely jungle and learnt a passion for the wild from his father. So one of the things we did when they weren’t moving around looking for work was go out into the bush and camp.

Here is one of the few piccies of my Dad from then. Mum got up and snapped him as he slept. The tousled little head next to his is mine.

A detail I had never noticed before on the car are some packets of dri-tot nappies (diapers). I have always known that the mosquito net in the car window was there to protect my little brother Ian from the flies. He was a tiny newborn at the time of this trip. So he slept in a bassinet in the car.

This little photo of Mum was taken a few days later on the same camping trip.And now a discovery. I have always treasured this photo as one from my early days. I scanned it a few years ago so I could have a copy. But tonight I blew it up so I could look at it for this post and I saw something I had never noticed in the little 2” by 2” print.
Al enters the picture.