5 photos in 50

I turn 50 tomorrow. I thought I might share five photos from the last fifty years, one per decade.

Mercy Hospital, East Melbourne, 1972

1972, My birthday, Mercy Hospital

This moment was so special for Dad that he now lives in an apartment built on the site. He’s never told me that’s the reason he chose there but I suspect it is. Margaret and Ray have four children, Samantha, Tony, Ned and Pippa. Dad named the first two (seventies names, dated), Mum named the last two (cool names, still fashionable). Mum says that the Mercy cooked excellent chops, and you could have as many as you liked as a nursing mum. I suspect this is the reason she had so many kids. And yes, she is unbelievably beautiful, which is why it’s great we all look like dad. Mum won Miss Footy, 1969 which I wrote about in another post.

World of Sport on both sides of my bloodlines

1989, Lord Somers Camp, Somers Beach

Blah blah blah. Could tell you stuff about leadership and how we were challenged and how one night at three in the morning somebody cut through our boarded up hut door with a chainsaw, but we all know why I have chosen this photo.

Abs.

1998, La Paz, Bolivia, Race Around the World

Probably the most exciting, perhaps the most scary day of my life. Earlier that morning I’d flown into La Paz to begin the adventure that was Race Around the World. It was a doco-making travel show where the job was to travel to ten countries in one-hundred days, completely alone, and the four minute stories were shown on the ABC. That morning I’d arrived at La Paz at dawn, experienced the eerie, other-worldy moonscape that is a city situated above the tree line, and spent the day wondering what the fuck I was going to make a story about. It ended up being about kids in San Pedro prison, because of the lack of state housing and orphanages, ‘The Child Inside’. I was meant to be making the funny ones!

2008, Wedding day, Red Hill

Okay I admit, I dyed my eyelashes for my wedding. Anything to impress the beautiful Tamsin, and it worked! And just to show how deep our love is, she is unperturbed that I never dyed them again over the next fourteen years. Our bridal photo is a bittersweet image. Two of the six suffered death by suicide, best man Chris Daffey (third from left) and Tam’s cousin Patricia Hay (second from left). Both charismatic beacons. Daff’s loss is constantly with me, and Tam is similarly broken about Trish.

I made an episode of Speakola podcast about Daff’s eulogy.

2017, Westgarth Idol, Piggy Pop

Since 2014, I’ve been the MC of the local primary school ‘talent’ night, Westgarth Idol. We actually get to murder a song in the presence of a pretty kick arse band — I think this was the year Ben Ely from Regurgitator was on bass! There’s some sad truths in this photo. Whatever I was in 1989, by 2017 Tam was forced to find a YouTube video on ‘how to draw fake abs’.

Aging hey.

Fifty hey!

Happy birthday to me!