It's 1953 and Barry has been sent to stay with Nan and Pop during the school holidays while his mum waits for the new baby. Barry is six-and-three-quarters and 22 Miller Street - the last house Pop built on the West Preston street - proves full of novel experiences: there's going shopping across the Hump at dawn with Nan Dickens ('good isn't it, height,' she says, advising him 'you can look at the stars for nothing'); keeping Pop company in the shed (where he goes for his smoko 'a yellow packet of Havelock was sticking out of his back pocket'); sharing a bed with great aunt Bess (whose Anzacs are 'an indestructible mixture of oats, molassess, wheatgerm and pure will'). Oh, and finding his way to Fairyland. 'It's time you got to know each other.' Nan reached up and took an old golf ball out of a baked-bean can nailed to the doorframe above the gully trap. 'All right,' she said, 'Now, West Preston fairies are nothing like the English ones. When you find them, do as they tell you. They'll never do you harm. And don't shout - they don't like that. They'll close up their ears if they hear a loud noise. Now, let's see where the ball lands. Ready, set, go!' But then Pop dies, and Barry and his Dad can't find the deed to the house. Developers Snaithe and Sharky are circling and Bracky Boy the Bodgie is threatening the whole neighbourhood.
Lessons in Humility is the bizarre story of Barry Dickins' life as a teacher. He gained his Diploma Of Education at The Melbourne State College forty years ago although he failed Classroom Management. He has taught Drama and Creative Literature to cherubs at a primary school and prayer-composition at a secondary college. The recollection unfolds at the point of doom but cheerfully expands when the author experiences enlightenment when he is put in with Grade Ones forever. Barry Dickins' writing has been called 'The defeat of the desperate by the bizarre' which means of course that his stage characters are inevitably overcome by not themselves but their surroundings. Join the catastrophic but noble hunt for meaning as our indefatigable community-loving teacher collides with life head-on. Nietzsche once wrote that 'only with laughter do we slay' and never was that epithet truer for a willing servant of education who not only clashes with bureaucracies but can't comprehend society either. What he is brilliant at is never teaching but the forgotten art of listening. Children adore to be carefully heard and practising that fact is what gets him through Hell in one piece. The fantastic and fatal daily hurts and contradictions are faithfully recorded here by a writer who loves poor people so well he knows what lollies they've knocked off. Many essays have been composed and published upon teaching in the 200 years of the strap. Many are marvellous but this is true. You too will feel as you have held class at The Boil Street Special School in Sickening Road. The author learns the timely lesson in modesty at the rickety helm of teaching chaos. It's not that his kids are stupid but that he is arrogant. He teaches poorly because he listens worse. It is only when he surrenders his portrait of himself as an artist to the wheelie bin of life that he finally learns that teaching is to do with others and not vanity. Vanity is interesting but it will never get the soul a Roadworthy Certificate.
In early 2008, Barry Dickins suffered from insomnia. He went to the doctor, who cited anxiety as the cause and, then, depression. Clinical and severe. He checked in to the Albert Road Clinic, where he was told that he would be there until the joy returned to him. But where was it? The joy eluded Barry for months, so he stayed in the clinic, alongside patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorders and other traumas, but depression was overriding. Depression that could fell you with a single blow. He took his medication and succumbed to the electroconvulsive therapy, which left him unable to grip a pen and riddled his memory with holes. The experience marked him for good, and is one that more people share than we might like to consider. Written with Barry's inimitable wit, humour and lyricism - and his ability to find the ridiculous and the jubilant amid the pain - Unparalleled Sorrow charts Barry's journey from the lows of the clinic to the small joys of a game of tennis with his young son. It follows the path to depression - via his salad days in St Kilda and the murder of his housemate - and the road out of it.
A collection of irreverent football stories, first published in the TMelbourne Times', about the performance of the TRoyboys' (Fitzroy) Australian rules team. Apart from his newspaper column, the author writes plays, radio and television scripts, and short stories. He is also a fervent Fitzroy supporter.
Collection of writings by a novelist and playwright, first published in the 'Age'. Covers a variety of topics, including being a victim of police violence, walking his baby, writing and street children. Author writes for the 'Age', 'Herald Sun' and 'Melbourne Times'. His previous books include 'Ordinary Heroes' and 'Heart and Soul'.
An Australian story of innocence, friendship, faith, tragedy and growing up ... 'Even a toilet is the House of the Lord,' he once said to me. 'You can pray in there. Christ doesn't mind where you contact him. I will save sinners in shithouses. Convert them in there. You just watch me. I'm not afraid.' This is a story of two young men going out on their own and doing it their own way. Bertie Warble is a Melbourne suburban boy railing against his too true-blue family and their beliefs but not sure what to replace them with. Johnny Rigos is the beloved first son of a Greek-Australian family who, reeling from the sexual abuse he suffered at Catholic school, escapes into an obsession with God and a plan to save the world with the power of love. Thrown together in the counter-culture world of Melbourne in the 1970s they form an intense friendship and, brimming with ideals of freedom, faith and discovery, this wonderfully original odd couple take off on a half-baked mission to Central Australia. Out in the desert, Bertie realises what he's looking for: the security of family, the girlfriend he'd left in Melbourne, finishing his apprenticeship as a panelbeater, toothpaste. A future that doesn't include Johnny and his crazy ideas. But not long after these friends part company, Johnny, still preaching his own brand of faith and fearlessness, is brutally killed in a public toilet block. He makes the ultimate discovery that there is, after all, no room for dreamers in the House of the Lord. And Bertie, safely back in the burbs with a beautiful wife and brand new baby boy, grieves, not just for his friend, but for the ideals we sacrifice on our way to becoming grown-ups. Told with great love in the bitter-sweet larrikin voice of Barry Dickins, The House of the Lord is a coming of age story with a difference. It's a poignant, very special book about not fitting in; about the search for faith and ideals, about the love shared between mates; the grief of losing a friend; and saying good-bye to the idealism and invincibility of youth. It's a beautifully balanced tragicomedy that truly is as funny as it is sad. Barry Dickins has a terrific ear for how Australians speak and magical insights into relationships, families and the hopeless dag within us all. Meet Bertie's father, Len... We are all tucked up and snug as a bug in a rug, and Dad's black whiskers on his chin make us chuckle, and he reads us The Coral Island, doing all the pirate voices. He's a bit of an ad-libber, Dad, it's the actor in him: 'It was just under Rathcown Rock that Peterkin slew the wicked gipsy Gerard, using a length of industrial curtain track on him. There was nothing left of poor old Gerard, who worked as a linotype operator in his spare time after working as a pirate. The tropical birds resembled cockies up Canberra-way, the way the things dived at anything resembling spouting, and ate their way straight through a man's hard-saved-for particleboard. But Peterkin fought savagely on, ever on he did, and it wasn't long before he sat his sister Robbyn on the dog's back, similar to what they done in Peter Pan, and it wasn't long before calm was restored to Rathcown Rock, that three-pointed isle bigger than the Melbourne Cricket Ground, plum-centre in the South Pacific Ocean.' And he falls asleep on the pillow next to me. Boy does he snore. The joys of public school education... It was all rather unintellectual, the old shy state school: more the pursuit of chuckles than capitalism. I sailed through Bubs at the age of none. The infantiale sun sung us to blond sleep. Miss Dusting hit the chalk out of her duster with a daggy ply wooden ruler; and I saw dust motes get between her eyes, which were crossed. She was a bit of a turn-on. 'Now class,' she says sweetly. 'It's time now of course for your favourite topic: Sleep. Let's do Morning Sleep together.' Obedient as Vita Brits under fresh cold milk, we
Insouciance is a family saga about the love that binds a maniacal mother, her anxiety-ridden husband and their long-suffering son. This is a play, both comedic and compassionate, written in Dickins' distinctive style. The Prodigal Son is about the homecoming of an adult son, and the affections that survive the more difficult family histories.
Ordinary Heroes is the result of a year on the road in a battered Kingswood, searching for memories of war. It records Barry Dickins's remarkably frank interviews with ordinary Australians who found themselves caught up in some of the most nightmarish events of the twentieth century. With them we go back to the trenches at Gallipoli, revisit the Burma–Thailand railway and experience the terror of being stranded in the jungles of Vietnam. These are tender stories from rather reluctant heroes who saw what they did as nothing more than duty.
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