Dennis appeared before us like a vision. With his unkempt hair, stubbly beard, Dennis Lillee moustache, lingering smell of tobacco, and shabby clothes, Dennis was taken on as sharefarmer by my father against all the odds. Against all common sense, really. Perhaps dad perceived in him some admirable quality arising out of the fact that he was getting out there and looking for work. That he could hit a cricket ball would have worked in his favour. That he was a drug-addicted boozehound was not then known. He had never worked on a farm, had quite possibly never stepped outside of the city. How on earth did he even find us?
Dennis brought with him his lady friend, Christine, their daughter, Sheree, who was four or five years old, a little yappy dog whose name I don’t recall, a stack of pornographic magazines, and, what was of most interest to me, his record collection. I had this idea that Dennis was into the kind of music I was into, although, looking back, all I can remember him owning was “Pablo Cruise” by Pablo Cruise, and the first Dire Straits album (which was then pretty new and, perhaps, exciting: at school we all thought, when we first heard “Sultans of Swing” on the radio, that it was something new by Bob Dylan - I think I had some idea that I could pick out Joe Strummer in there, too - of course, now it just sounds like a poor man’s “Marquee Moon”). They moved into the old rundown weatherboard cottage that was used as the sharefarmer’s “residence”. That house, which was built by a farmer during the depression from any materials he could lay his hand on, and had been moved twice, was at one point used as a shearing shed, and despite one of the side walls bowing inwards rather dramatically, it steadfastly refused to fall down.
Of necessity, dad adopted a more hands-on approach with Dennis than he had done with other sharefarmers, helping out in the shed at milking times and doing many of the other jobs around the place that needed to be done. Whether this was out of a sense of having to show Dennis the ropes, or because of a perceived inability on Dennis’s part to do anything by himself, is not known. I was also made use of on a more regular basis. On weekends and school holidays Dennis and I milked the cows together. I rigged up a transistor radio at the cowshed which enabled us to tune in to 2JJ during milking times, and, later, the “new thing” in radio, FM Stereo, in the guise of EON-FM, from Melbourne, which was actually a godsend for its first few months of existence, with its Lee Simon-programmed “album oriented” playlist, showcasing perfectly acceptable listening fare like the Reels, the Models, and Matt Finish, even if it did run too hard with “Stairway to Heaven”. (And Pablo Cruise.) (This Golden Age continued until it dawned on the men in suits that nobody was actually listening aside from a couple of guys 100 miles away who were up to their knees in milk and cow manure, whereupon an inevitable dumbing-down process commenced, which continued until we ended up with the appalling behemoth that we know as Triple M.)
Dennis joined my cricket team and in his first game showed himself to have a Botham-like ability to turn a match with his own bat (although this ability revealed itself frustratingly sparingly).
He had a very mild and pleasant nature (although he would occasionally explode with profanities of a type that the farm had never known, if a cow didn’t do what was expected of it).
It could all perhaps have worked reasonably well. Except that, in the end, it didn’t.
It seemed that Dennis or Christine - or maybe both of them - had trouble with headaches. Dennis would often get my father to run an errand for him: to go to a chemist (a different one each time: with dad travelling far and wide in the ongoing search for a miracle cure for his bad back, this actually wasn’t all that difficult for Dennis to engineer) and get a prescription for some kind of strong painkiller. These painkillers all had two things in common: they didn’t seem to last very long, and they all contained codeine. While it is understandable that a man who had known only clean living and moderate, lawful behaviour (no, I am not talking about Dennis here) would not have put two and two together, it was not until one morning when dad stumbled upon the makeshift chemistry lab operating in Dennis’s kitchen that the awful truth was uncovered: the painkillers were being melted down and somehow converted to pure codeine, which was then being used in ways other than as recommended on the packet. “I think Dennis is using drugs.” There were no more trips to the chemist.
Some mornings Dennis would fail to turn up for milkings, and dad and I would have to do it ourselves. Sometimes I would be late for school. Homework was sometimes missed. But the most serious consequence - it ended in tears - was when he failed to appear on the morning of the Saturday when I had been picked, for the first and only time, in the starting 18 for the Fish Creek thirds football team, in an away game at Devon, about an hour’s drive from our place. The cows were milked very quickly that morning, but we still failed to get to the ground on time, and that was the end of my football career, before it had even started.
Possibly the last thing we needed at the farm was a pet goat. But that is what Dennis brought home for us, one day, perhaps as an apology for his erratic behaviour. The little guy was even pre-named (by Sheree): “Pablo”. Pablo was an angora cross; he produced quite nice long, curly hair that, each year, was ignominiously hacked off as Pablo lay upturned in a wheelbarrow. As Pablo grew older, he took an unjustified dislike to my mother, who would be attacked by him if she ever ventured out into his territory, the holding paddock that ran around the outside of our house yard. Nevertheless, he ended up becoming another member of the family, and we all cried the day that Pablo, stricken by a mysterious illness that caused him to froth at the mouth and twist his neck around at an improbable angle, was finally put to rest.
When Pablo was still tiny, we once left him with Dennis overnight while we went on one of our infrequent visits to Melbourne. (Perhaps the cows were milked while we were away; perhaps they weren’t.) When we returned home, just before nightfall the next day, Pablo was returned to us, lying prone in his cardboard box, and struggling to breathe. Sheree had apparently been playing with him quite a lot during the time we were away, but beyond that Dennis wasn’t giving anything away. It looked bad. A vigil was maintained. In a fit of inspiration such as only he was capable of, dad said “Pablo looks a bit like a cow with milk fever.” So he raced off to the dairy to pick up a packet of the medicine we kept on hand for cows suffering from milk fever; did a quick mental calculation in the nature of the relative weights of (a) a large dairy cow and (b) a tiny baby goat dying from something like dehydration or exhaustion; fashioned an extremely small dosage in an extremely small syringe; and did the deed. We kept up the vigil until we all had other things to do. After a while we heard, like a voice from the heavens, a happy little “maa-aa, maa-aa”. By the morning, Pablo was as good as gold.
One morning we received a visit from the local constable, Mr Duffus, letting us know (although I’m not sure why, unless it was a pointed message to us that we had brought an unsavoury character into the area) that Dennis’s car had been found some way down a disused dirt road, wherein Dennis was “stuffing” someone else’s wife.
Somewhere around this point Christine and Sheree moved back to Melburne, leaving Dennis and his dog to fend for themselves. Dennis got to know a few of the locals around the pool table in the public bar of the Promontory Gate Hotel, in Fish Creek. On another occasion when Dennis had been a non-starter we received another visit from Mr Duffus, who pointed out that Dennis wasn’t milking the cows that morning because he had been found, sound asleep, at the wheel of his car, halfway between the pub and our place, having driven the car off the road and wedged it between two large gum trees in such a way that he could not open any of the doors, and therefore could not get out of the car. Not that he would probably have been sober enough to walk any distance from there anyway, the most likely outcome would have been for him to have been run over after falling asleep on the road, so he was probably safest trapped inside the vehicle.
It was clear that Dennis had to go, but dad hated having that conversation and kept putting it off. Then one day, Dennis packed up all of his gear and left. Where to, nobody knew. All that he left behind was his dog. Dad fed the dog for a few days, hoping to hear from Dennis so that arrangements could be made. But there was nothing. Eventually a decision had to be made. The dog was of no use to us. One of our neighbours, Joe, was called upon to put the necessary bullet into the poor dog’s brain. As if on cue, almost before the echo from the gunshot had faded, a cloud of dust appeared over the hill. It was Dennis, coming to retrieve his faithful hound. Joe ducked around the corner out of sight, dragging the bloodied corpse with him. Dad at least had the tact not to give any hint to Dennis that five minutes might have made all the difference.
And that, as far as we were concerned, was that. Once, several months later, after a game of cricket, I saw a severely inebriated Dennis struggling with a pool cue at the Meeniyan Hotel. I said hello to him, and perhaps sensed some slight flicker of recognition in response. But more than likely Dennis had moved back to Melbourne, where he disappeared into the populace, and that was the last anyone ever saw or heard of him.
However, the ghost of Dennis may not have left us quite so quickly, or so conclusively. Some time after his departure, Uncle Charlie, whose job it was to secure the perimeter of the property, so as to keep out unwanted ragwort and other noxious weeds, made a surprise discovery: someone had established a crop of marijuana (Uncle Charlie chose to pronounce the “j”) in a piece of bushland along one of the less accessible boundaries. And so we were visited yet again by Mr Duffus (these are the only three times I can remember us ever having had anything to do with the police), who removed the offending items and lay in wait for their owners; who never returned.
