By PHIL JARRATT
Grandparents Day
AS MUCH as the very idea of it scared the hell out of me a decade or so ago, being a grandparent has its upsides, I have to admit. I remember as clear as yesterday (no, clearer) the moment the prospect of grandfatherhood first loomed. The great Queensland surfer Gary “Kong” Elkerton and I were on the Stansted Express, on our way home to France with a group of rowdy French grommets we had taken to compete in a pro junior in Cornwall. I took a phone call and rang off looking dismayed.“What’s wrong?” Kong asked. “My daughter’s getting married, and you know what’ll be next!” Kong moved into the seat next to me on the train and put his big arm around me. We sat in silence while the French groms – some one else’s grandkids – ran amok around us.
But the reality is grandkids are cool. You can give them back, for one thing, and they can make you happy, and often proud, as two of ours did last week when they showed us around their new school as part of St Thomas More’s “Grandparents’ Day” celebrations. I’d never been celebrated as a grandparent before, let alone prayed for, so that was nice. After the liturgy, our two elder grandsons showed us around their classrooms and demonstrated their new-fangled gadgets, like iPads, for God’s sake. (Sorry Father). Bring back the abacus, I say. On a wall outside the classroom, the kids had written bio notes on their grandparents. Mine read: “My Poppy is a longboarder. He hurt his leg and had a heart attack but he’s okay.” Pithy, direct, straight to the point. Maybe a journalist in the making, but we’ll do our best to dissuade him.
Elsewhere that same day grandson number three was receiving an award at his school, an event we missed but liked on Facebook soon after. So well done all round, grandies.
RIP MP MKII
It seems impossible that more than three years have passed since the great Michael Peterson passed away. The memories of that extraordinary day are very clear – the packed funeral parlour at Tweed Heads, brother Tommy’s hilariously moving eulogy, many drinks at the Snapper Surf Club, talking story and watching the “MP Swell” roar down the Superbank.
A week later, I was at Bells with Tommy Peterson, raising our glasses to MP again, and Tommy said: “You know, I hope one day we can stop treating him like a god and just remember him as Mick.”
I wrote Tommy’s line down on the back of a coaster and later transferred it to a notepad I still have. It must have been a thought he had frequently, because I’ve just discovered it in slightly different form on the back cover of Sean Doherty’s fine new remembrance of Mick, MP Untold: “Everyone treated him like a god, but he just wanted to be treated like a normal bloke.”
Far from being another crude cash-in on the legend of MP, Australia’s greatest surfer of the 1970s and one of our culture’s great tragedies, Seano, author of MP back in 2004, has compiled a loving tribute to the man behind the myth, trawling through the memories of family and friends to find that “normal bloke” that Tommy remembers. By his own admission, Seano never knew MP the surf star, nor Mick the sly toker with the wry grin, only Michael the overweight invalid who lived with his mother. In this book, he sets out to find the hidden persona from those who understood it best.
Seano is a fine writer, but, as author Malcolm Knox notes in his foreword to MP Untold, he has left his ego at the door here, letting the friends and eye-witnesses tell their own stories without intrusion, until his astute summary at the end. It’s a good approach, and even though I knew the surf star as well as anyone in the media at the time, I found many new stories to chuckle at, and even shed the odd tear over, well told by old mates and fellow reprobates, and, of course, by brother Tom and mother Joan. Both Tommy and Joan present as rough diamonds, but it doesn’t take too much scratching to realise that the cogs are always turning on the inside. Joan is the master of the 30 second sound bite; Tommy can tell you what Mick was doing every year of his life, recall every surf and drug binge they shared. And his dates always check out. Together, they are the flesh and blood of this story, but Seano has found many more morsels to enjoy.
I’ll be talking to Sean Doherty about the “lost stories of a surfing legend” at one of Annie Grossman’s fabulous book celebrations on Tuesday, 4 August, from 6.30pm at Zachary’s Gourmet Pizza Bar, Peregian Beach Village. Tickets are $18 a head (which includes a lot of pizza!) and there’ll be a cash bar. This one will be a sell-out so bookings are essential. Phone 5448 2053 or email anniesbooks@bigpond.com.
