What's in a name? Big Hoss or Big Steve....

 

If I said that I never really cared about my name, which I doubt I have, that would be because of two things. The first is that when I grew up most people had close approximations to the Bible for names such as Phillip, John, James, Luke, David and Roger and so although I was down the pecking order Stephen was ok. The second was that I rarely heard it. I heard “Shorty”, from my Dad, “Idiot” and “Stink” from my brothers and sister, and either “Longy” or my favorite, “Longschlong” at school, so it didn’t matter.  Mum called me Steven, or Kay, or Wayne, or Robbie, depending on what she was doing. Add to this I am a tall blue eyed blonde male that took German in Grade 8, I was comfortable telling everyone my heritage was German and without invoking the Aaryan call  (which I didn’t learn about what that even meant until the second year of training at the police academy) I felt superior enough that it could end there. That’s what Toowoomba can do for you.

Again, two things happened and I understand there is a pattern to this blog with the number two.  The first is that at the police academy, Stephen was pronounced Stefan – so Steve it became. Except for my Mother, and people who read out forms that I have to fill out legally. The second was early in my fairly poor win-on career as a Cadet at the Police Academy - a status that many of my peers seemed to leverage to the point that movies should have been made about their conquests. I managed to garner the fluctuating interest of a delightfully endowed, auburn headed lass, who in what I can now only see as a last ditch attempt to justify further engagement, asked , “you are so blonde where are your family from?” Before I could kill the deal with….”Toowoomba.” she said “Ireland? Longford?” In the hopes of a run at the money of course I tilted and nodded and the anticipation I was feeling was enormous. I come from somewhere she knows about!  At this point you should know she had a strong Irish accent and with the tone that screamed, that was your last chance, she said, “They have a shite football club”, and walked away. Always an upside, so now I am Irish!

Fast forward a fair bit and now with my wife, who has such a strong, proud and even a bit scary heritage that led her parents to Australia, I am on my way to Longford, a town just 30 minutes outside Launceston that will finally connect me to my roots. Like a convict it will help me understand what the agony and suffering that living in Toowoomba represented as part of my heritage. Now that I am finally here, I feel remarkably like the time I saw my Toowoomba next door neighbour on TV, years after I left home, arrested for stealing hundreds of exotic plants from the Botanic Gardens, people’s houses and Queens Park. It is pretty obvious now. There were hundreds of big, unusual plants you can’t buy at the Nursery in his garden, and he had them all.  And so, arriving in Longford it makes sense, now.

Most people I know have never heard of my surname let alone that there are towns (yes plural but with limited emphasis on the gas disaster Longford in Victoria) I am named after. And that’s fair enough, but I’ve heard of people with surnames Jones, Smith and Riley and even Fox, Whittaker and McKenna, but I can’t find any towns in this country with those names. I realise I have a genuine claim to Australian heritage that others have implied, or imbibed, on the basis of majority or popularity.  If you ever get to visit Longford, you will see for yourself what it takes to be authentic in terms of origins and claims, you great bunch of frauds.

Starting from the start, Longford is Longford.  The town is not diluted by suburbs or villages and so everything is pretty much named after the town. I went to the Longford Guardian Pharmacy and the Longford Family Pharmacy, Longford Chainsaw and Mower Shop and Longford Garden Centre have the same stuff, and the Longford Riverside Caravan Park does differ slightly from the Longford Caravan Park. You can treat Longford as a prefix in this instance and insert pretty much any place you want after it and you will find it there.  It’s the Jim’s of Tasmania. So as the name suggests, what you see is what you get, and any attempts to add or subtract from it, fail.

Longford was built to last and to do it in a style that transcends the flips and flops of emerging and transient fads and gimmicks of other places. The buildings, from the smallest cottage to the grandest homesteads are so authentic and strong, and by their structure and materials defy degradation or replacement. You can walk for kilometres and with each different building, find some new and interesting thing that you hadn’t seen before. Sure, there are new bits and pieces here, but they have been added to the foundations that were laid over 200 years ago, and only if they add some value.  Longford is not stuck in the past, it just draws from it as a basis to test all the new ideas and things that bombard it and sort the shit from the clay.  I’m learning more about me every minute I spend here.

I also now realise how and why my appetite for both telling stories and watching them, mainly on TV, is so ingrained. Longford is effectively the epicenter of the real-life version of every decent  TV show we relied on America to make, and send to us to watch. The Woolmer Estate, just outside Longford, is the Australian pre-cursor to Dallas, albeit with sheep instead of oil, and the tour you take of what is now a perfectly preserved homestead, lays it all out.  Six generations of the Archers, all for some reason called “Thomas” 1 through 6, (when you are farming sheep who has time for the top 100 baby names guide) who progressively built their fortune from nothing, exploit it and then piss it up against the wall, along with a stunning array of beautiful women who support, cajole, seduce and debilitate the men, makes for a great 90 minutes. The yachts are gone, but the grand cars are still in the shed. Right across the valley you have Brickenden, also a magnificent World Heritage site, the obvious inspiration for Bonanza with their honest, hard-working 6th generation family who to this day still work the property. They were considered the kindest masters of their convicts, and solved many a problem in town with their strong sense of duty and great horse riding skills coming into play almost weekly. A week is not enough time to explore the original storyboards for the Fast and the Furious franchise, as they are laid out in the Country Hotel, also known as the pub on the corner of “Pub Corner” as it was called when the Australian Grand Prix was run there in the streets in the 50’s and 60’s. A quick visit to the Courthouse/History Room reveals pretty much the plot lines of the first three series of Starsky and Hutch and you won’t need to watch any of West Wing of you visit the Historic Council Chambers. Just a short drive out of Longford towards the Pangyean Dairy Experience (where it is impossible not to ship hundreds of dollars’ worth of cheese back home free of charge because the sign in the toilet prompts you to ask) the real Waltons are living their wholesome life without much at all except each other and love, and the sawmill of course.

So clearly, as I become more and more immersed in my origins, my understanding of who I am, I can see how others, without such a rich and legitimate identity, would feel the need to pursue money, status, power, popularity, or even drugs. And being humbled by the whole experience, it might go some way to helping me be more tolerant of you, but let’s see how that plays out.