The Smoking Gun-Final Chapter

Final Chapter

High up in the tree Gary and I sat. Looking down through it's canopy of green leaves in the shifting dappled light. Being really, really quiet.

The look on my face said it all. Like finding a squashed frog in your pocket.         

It wasn't that the workshop was right beneath us or that my dad was in it. It wasn't the constant sound of his sudden gasping or all the head holding, it wasn't even our slim hopes he might have forgotten what we'd done to his mower, had flown out the window joined up with a flying flock of other great hopes and was now heading for another planet. 

No,  I was quiet because I learnt something about my father that I'd never dreamt possible.

Dad had found religion.

He was so religious in fact, he'd invited God and his whole family over for a visit.

I'd never seen him go to church. But then, he did spend a lot of time looking up at the sky and asking for strength, especially when I was in trouble. Maybe today God had decided to help dad in person.

It must have been pretty crowded in there with all of them and someone must have been really hard at hearing because dad's voice was raised up the whole time. He was still angry that was for sure. He kept saying things like "God Almighty, will you look at this?" "Holy Mother of God how will I fix that" and "Jesus , Mary and Joseph when I get my hands on those two kids..."   

Because dad was walking back and forth and around and round our view of him through the window was intermittent. Suddenly though, dad stopped his mower circling and bent over to pick something up off the workshop floor. I wondered what it was, and then realised it was a little brown plastic soldier that I had placed on the ground next to all the tangled engine parts, to keep guard.

I looked over at Gary whose stomach by now was growling like a pack of hungry lions and when I turned back dad was sitting on the cold greasy cement rolling the little toy over and over in his fingers and just looking at it. He sat there staring for a long time.

It must be pretty funny when God tells a joke because dad started to laugh and laugh. The kind of laugh you make just as the roller coaster you're on starts to go, there's no getting off the ride now you might as well enjoy it.  He was laughing and talking to himself at the same time and with a sigh of relief and with grins that could split dark clouds on a rainy day, Gary and I knew then it was going to be alright. Of course we faced all kinds of music from our parents,  but for the life of me I cant remember what it was.

No doubt Gary relied on his three tried and true methods of getting out of trouble...a sudden attack of permanent amnesia, a few moments of quiet sobbing with some well timed tears thrown in and if all else failed, the main trusted weapon. His little freckled face which was as cute and bright as a button.    

All our stories are really pathways, they connect past to present, and the present is really the future creating itself. It's only the characters that come and go. We live, we grow old and we pass away, yet the story itself never ends because new characters are born every day and they add to the everlasting-ness to the journey we call life,  colouring the tapestry of what it is to be a human.

Many years later the two little boys in this story grew to became young men. One day, just before he died, Gary and I found ourselves with dad in that same workshop watching him tighten some bolts on another engine. Using all his force he tightened the last one. My cousin Gary said ''Do you think that needs tightening a bit more uncle Chas?'' My dad turned to him and said "Have a go"

During the time we knew him, my dad's strength was our high mark. Always a level beyond. Something Gary and I always aspired to have ourselves, but uncertain to ever be reached.

Gary took the spanner and moved the bolt, not much, but just a tiny bit more. I looked up at him and he looked at me and in our eyes we knew it was our time now and sadly nothing would be the same.

My memories are like gentle echoes they remind me of where I've been, they teach me by looking through the actions and through the eyes of others. They warm my heart and they keep the ones that mean the most to me...alive.

And like a bright happy face the sun moved its way across a cloudless sky.

The Smoking Gun-PART 4

PART 4

There was rumbling and a gurgling.

It was so loud that at first I thought it was a truck going past the end of the street. Then I realised it was Gary's stomach.

We were rapidly reaching the point when the need for food would overwhelm our fears of personal Armageddon. Being on the run was one thing being on the run without any lunch was quite another.

Unfortunately though we were still terrified, and being holed up together in the dirt beside a smelly furnace was rapidly losing its appeal. Gary and I were just discussing the possibility that maybe dad had already forgotten the whole mower incident, not to mention who's bright idea it was in the first place, a fact in dispute because I could clearly remember was Gary's,  when a sudden unidentified scurrying in the dead leaves next to us nearly stopped both our little hearts and had us screaming back to our mums. We couldn't see it, we didn't know what it was, but it was moving near us and it was time to go.

my loyal dog Kelly and the famous back fence 

....Deciding to split up, I'd go sideways across our two backyards while Gary would make a death defying sprint down the side of his place, along our footpaths and up the side of my house and rendezvous on the big branch up the old nut tree. Depending of course if during his death defying Gary didn't change his mind and sprint up his own back steps instead.....

We went.

Gary disappeared in a red blur while I went over the back fence. Which to be honest was more like a jump, hang, scramble and up and over followed by a messy crash landing on the other side. 

By using the extensive military techniques gained by years of watching war movies on TV, I proceeded in a near stealthy fashion along the back fences, totally oblivious to the fact that my blue and white shirt stood out like missing keys on a piano until at last I found myself unscathed and climbing up our favourite refuse to find Gary, perched like a blue faced monkey waiting for my arrival and it was only about five minutes later that I learnt something that would change the way I thought about my father and the world for many years to come...


The Final Chapter (PART 5) in this backyard adventure "The Smoking Gun' will be posted in the next few days

The Smoking Gun-PART 3

PART 3

All went quiet on the suburban front.

Which strangely seemed even more scary than the prospect of a wild foot race involving us, dad and what was left of his mower being swung overhead like a caveman. At first we could hear a lot of clanging from the workshop, like tools being thrown around and the loud, slightly hysterical sound of dad's ranting rising and falling like big surf on rocks. We couldn't make out any words though, which was just as well, but I was fairly certain they weren't discussing my Christmas presents.

We had no idea where Kelly was.

Hopefully she had decided, although un-heroically, to wisely go to ground and was happily curled up in her basket under our back steps. No doubt remembering all the other fun filled but ill considered associations with us and the many times we had gotten her into trouble.

More likely though, she was at this very moment searching everywhere for us with all those painful memories completely forgotten. And one thing was for certain, all her noisy barking  and slobbering would give our hiding place away, no doubt bringing  sadness and pain to our tender little backsides.

As children we vaguely suspect but cant quite grasp the subtleties of the psychological warfare parents assert on us kids during moments of, well, child caused calamity. The torment of not coming after us when they should be, instilling even the smallest doubt in our minds that everything was OK, maybe we imagined the whole thing, like we really didn't burn down the fence or pull dads mower to bits after all.  Lulling us into a false sense of security, tempting us to come home for a sandwich and then...

KA-BAM!!!

We find ourselves in a desert somewhere with the French Foreign Legion or even worse. I didn't really know what the French Foreign Legion was except that it wasn't good, there was a lot of sand involved and absolutely no Christmas presents whatsoever, ever.

We had to go somewhere. Except for our failed attempt to build a secret underground headquarters beneath Gary's house. I was fairly certain there were no subterranean caves close by to hide in. The next best thing would be to ascend vertically up the big Queensland nut tree overlooking dad's workshop in the far back corner of my backyard...

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The Smoking Gun-PART 2

Part Two    

I'm not exactly sure how we survived those first few moments, when dad drove up our driveway to find the three of us sitting there happily in our now greasy little flannelette shirts amid the tangled wreckage of his beloved and only recently working mower. 

But I do remember the strangled sob and his bulging bloodshot eyes glaring in total disbelief from behind the windshield of his white Ford Cortina. Signalling to all concerned that explanations would have to wait, because right then was the perfect time to drop tools and get the heck out of there. Which we did in three different directions and at high speed with the sound of my mum trying to offer some quick positive reasoning to my near psychotic father, which knowing him as I did was like trying to talk a hand grenade from exploding after pulling the pin.

I didn't hear the whole conversation going on between them, given the fact that at the time I was fairly absorbed with running around in noisy confused circles. I do however remember hearing dad say he was going to do something  that involved his bare hands at the exact moment that I reached our side fence.

Like an Olympic athlete and with my little legs blurring beneath me, I hurdled it in one terrified bound, hitting the ground on the other side on the run and with all the speed I could muster, headed diagonally up Gary's backyard and dived headfirst into the space between my uncle Alec's furnace and their back neighbours fence. Which I instantly discovered was crowded with another small petrified child in the shape of my cousin Gary looking owl eyed and disheveled and after yelling out together in shock and disentangling our arms and legs, we stretched out as flat as we could and like two panting little lizards squinted through some blades of grass expecting at any moment to see the Frankenstein like figure of my father coming to get us... 


Part Three coming soon
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The Smoking Gun-PART 1

Part 1

I had a wonderful childhood.

Being under 10 in the late 1960’s was a joy beyond description. It was such a happy and uncomplicated time. To my young eyes the sky was tall and blue and the air seemed clean and fresh and smelled like cut grass. Magpies called and cackled to each other in the green trees and everywhere the sun shone down and kept us warm.

You could dress up like a cowboy and blaze away at people with your little silver six shooter with no frowning faces or offers of a good therapist.

The journey toward working with my hands began early, mainly because I couldn't keep them still. As a little kid I loved building plastic model aircraft, mainly to blow up in fiery air-crashes that occurred tragically and very frequently in our backyard. I was always fascinated with how things work and was constantly getting into varying degrees of trouble for pulling those same things apart.

Sadly, I wasnt really mechanically-minded though, except for the time when I was 9 when me, my cousin Gary and our little fox terrier called "Kelly" found ourselves all alone with my dad's shiny new Suffolk Punch Self Propelled Lawn Mower one cool Autumn morning when we pulled the head and any removable parts off it when he and my mother were out doing the grocery shopping.

That day our memories were a little hazy and we couldnt quite recall the fact that screws come off with a thing called a screwdriver and not pliers.  Also, that the removal of a carberetta and its housing  won’t go well for anyone using a hammer. Strangely though, it didn’t seem to matter much at the time seeing as how Gary and I were getting busy launching our engineering careers.


..... watch this space for Part 2


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Alchemy

Many times over the years, when I've been asked what I do for a living and I reply ..."I'm a  jeweller". Most people have no idea how to become one or what's involved in being one and are generally surprised when I tell them. 

For starters, the age old perception that jewellers work in dungeony places like alchemists couldn't be any further from the truth. My workshop is a sunlit studio with a view of beautiful Burleigh Beach, it's a wonderful creative space.

Personally, I'm a classically trained craftsman who entered the jewellery industry at a time when everything was totally handmade and nothing was mass produced. I was very fortunate to be indentured to a High-End Jeweller in Brisbane City. For three years I went 

to the Kangaroo Point Technical College where I studied history, theory, designing and was tutored in technical skill. My apprenticeship lasted a total of four years.

Because of my many years as a Master Jeweller I fully understand that at its heart, originality, line, balance and attention to detail are the most important aspects for the creation of all beautiful jewellery.

I feel honoured to be commissioned to create pieces for my clients that are destined to be their family heirlooms. My jewellery is given as important symbols of love and commitment that will last for generations. 

My next blog post will be a fun look at being a weird little kid, blowing things up, making new friends and how they all got me into jewellery.   

Creativity

                                 


In the dictionary creativity is defined as:    "The use of the imagination, especially in the production of an artistic work

"I don't think anyone realises their full potential as a creative artist until we have the realisation that the true source of originality lies within and not without.


As creatives, we are constantly being influenced by images of artistic expression. The flotsam and jetsam of ideas, of concepts and imagination. Constantly we encounter breathtaking examples of the human spirit being manifested in the most amazing of forms.


I believe our originality is like a precious gem, one that we were born with, one that we hold in the palm of our hand. In the beginning of our journey as we immerse ourselves in our chosen art we seek inspiration by digesting the works of our contemporaries.
As time goes by, little by little our beautiful gem is covered with layers and layers of images and ideas weighing us down, confusing our own work with the flavours and experiences of others.


The hardest thing to do is to close our eyes to most of that which influences us and to open ourselves up to all that lies inside, waiting for us to discover.
It can be an interesting place to be in at first, like being in a picture theatre with a blank screen and not knowing what's coming next. But one day we awake to find our gem, a shining diamond, reminding us that the greatest artist is and always will be inside us. 
Do you use your imagination for artistic expression - Do you see yourself as a 'creative' ? 

Line & Balance

Like many industries worldwide today, jewellery design and manufacture is going through fundamental change. For the contemporary artisan, time honored hand skills are being replaced by technology and mass production. Like the surfer watching a big wave building in the distance, classically trained jewellers like myself view this shift in skill and attitude, while slightly terrifying, as also an opportunity for the ride of our lives.

So then, what makes for a good classically conceived and manufactured jewellery design?

What propels a random concept of thought, within the mind of the designer, to become a reality of beauty and individual expression fashioned of Gold and Gem?

Good jewellery design in all its infinite forms must have at its most basic foundation, two key elements...... "Line and Balance". Without this, your precious investment will always and only be, a structure to hold shiny expensive things and not an amazing form of beauty that represents your individual style.

My journey as a classically trained jeweller began a year before I left school in 1973. Since then I've worked some 110,000 hours on the jewellery bench perfecting my skills. As I look back on my career, I realize the journey from jewellery maker to jewellery designer manifested itself, strangely, separately and yet one could not exist or be nurtured without the other.