For Ray Wilson's 71st and 1/12: 'My father does love to organise a function', by Tony Wilson - 2016

24 February 2016, MCG Committee Room, East Melbourne, Australia

Hello ladies and ... scrap that , I’ll start that again, hello gentlemen and gentlemen and welcome to the 71st and one twefth birthdayof my father, Raymond Ian Wilson. As dad said in his email, 71st and one twelfth birthdays don’t traditionally beget presents, and as he said in his first email, they don’t traditionally beget speeches either.

But dad, as you all know, does like to organise a function, or more particularly does like to organise a function timetable, and so when the innocents at the MCC handed him a page that had a gaping blank between 7.30 and 11, with nothing but good times and great company and lovely food and fine wine, he went into a panic, and so now we have nine speeches, all about him, and if I check this running sheet ...  Delta Goodrem is on just after 9.30 singing Happy Birthday Mr former Hawthorn District Junior Football League President.

Most of you know I’m tony wilson, I’m Margaret and Ray’s second born, I do have an older sister,  although I have to admit that this all male affair has given me the first glimmer of hope that dad’s gone all Downton Abbey on us in his old age and is going to leave the whole lot to me. Sometimes you can’t fight these things ... Ned’s here too ... he’s the dutiful second son ... off to a life in the military ... I promise I’ll still let you use red hill, especially in those less popular winter months.

My father does love to organise a function. The one he’s had a crack at recently had both Ned and I very worried. It arrived by email with an innocent little bing into the inbox, but then we looked at the subject and it just said, ‘my funeral’. I felt that sinking stomach feeling ... holy shit, dad’s turning 71 and a 12th soon, he’s not getting any younger, this could be bad news, and so I desperately started scanning the page

 ―who’s to be invited ... Don, Ern ... oh that’s nice, mum and sam and pippa are on the guest list for this one,... anyway it’s all here, by all means come up over the course of the night and I’ll tell you whether you got the nod,

-Who should speak ... look at that. It says that he’ll see how I go tonight before he makes a final decision

- what music should be played; Nick Cave seems a bit cool for dad, Annie Lennox . Mozart Piano Concerto No .21 K 467 "Elvira Madigan" Andante
  fuck, you really can take the boy out of Preston can’t you ...

-I’m still scanning desperately

-what he wants to wear to his cremation ... dad loves beautiful shirts, loves them, makes ned and I come over when he’s wearing a favourite and feel the quality of the cloth, and he’ll usually say, ‘can you feel the quality of that cloth’, I’d let you have this you know, if you promised to look after it, ifI came around and found it on the ground, I’d take it back, but you could have it, in fact I’d like you to have it, and then he might get you to try it on, which rarely works because I’m six foot three going four and he’s five ten going on nine, but we go through it because dad loves and appreciates high quality cloth and loves sharing them with people who don’t love or appreciate high quality cloth really at all – so anyway it’s no surprise that dad didn’t want to wreck one of his good shirts in the cremation. Instead he’s chosen this – a simple white T-shirt emblazoned with the image of him running through big Carl ...

So I’m scanning, scanning ... one of the things I’m really keen to find out is when he’s going to die, especially if he knows ... but no details on that ... just endless details on everything ... else

For the wake, sandwiches can be wholemeal bread... egg is okay, but I particularly like chicken and mayonnaise with celery and some sort of herb infusion, I think it might be dill, ask your mother about that ...

Brochure photos ... yep he’s chosen his funeral pamphlet photo ...

Music to accompany the slideshow ... holy shit, what’s this list of jpegs, he hasn’t chosen his own slide show has he?

Scanning, scanning ... come on dad, really hoping you’re not sick ...

Get to the end of the email ... “Love Dad”

Ned is actually the one who replies first,

“Um dad, is there anything you want to tell us’

Dad replies straight away ...

Oh no, everything’s fine. I probably should have put that up the front of the email. I’m feeling quite well.

So that’s great. Dad is not sick, and two pages of funeral plans plus a 71st and a 12th birthday are just, well, dad being dad.

Our theory is that he wants to have the best birthday. He is a very competitive person, and it’s served him well in life.

Not every father tells you constantly where you rank against your siblings.

Not every grandfather tells their three year old grandchild where she ranks against the other grandchildren.

Dad likes winning parking ... he send photos of his great parks to my older sister sam.

He likes winningraffles, and he wins them extraordinarily often.

He likes winning football teams, and is absolutely insufferable when he gets a Collingwood fan in his gunsights and can unleash on sentences like ‘2 premierships in half a century’.

He’s so competitive that when he retired from football, he went down to the local lawn bowls club with a view to taking up lawn bowling. Dad’s theory was that nobody takes up lawn bowling young, and if he did it seriously in his thirties, he’d be a certainty to make the Commonwealth Games team.

He joined a club, had a few bowls, and only stopped because mum sat him down and said what has become a famous sentence in our family ... ‘I’m not ready to be married to a lawn bowler yet.’

I repeated the story to mum yesterday and she said to me, ‘He still thinks that I cost him ... he actually still regrets it!’

Not only is he not sick, but mum says that his latest competitive endeavour is trying to win ‘living the longest’ ...

He’s on a diet,

He’s stretching every morning

He doesn’t drink during the week

He told mum to give away all his Brioni suits because he’s never going to be that size again ...

So he’s set his sights on living forever, and jesus christ, I’ve seen how he tackles a task, he’s not out of it.

Dad, in our eyes is the ultimate achiever ...

Hard working, dedicated, dreams big ... whether it’s getting the Blacks to A Grade or teaching rotten Ronnie Andrews to the best of his ability, or starting a business or caring for kids or playing league footy, or marketing my novel or setting up a roster for his disabled grandson. He’s just amazing.

He believes he can do anything... he believes in his own luck, whether it be the great raffles of life, like marriage and health and career and friends, and also in actual fucking raffles, which he always wins, racking up two business class flights to Dubai in 12 months one year. He believes in his talent. He believes in a meritocracy, and why the fuck wouldn’t you if you won all the time.

Happy bithday dad. You might have won a few raffles in your time, but none is better than winning the one to be your son. Have a wonderful night, and see you all again for the 73rd and three fifths.

For Ray & Margaret's 50th: 'Fifty is old, very old, and it will remain so until we ourselves are fifty', by Sam and Tony Wilson - 1995

26th January 1995, Kew, Melbourne, Australia

By our reckoning, giving a speech is much like turning fifty - you know that sooner or later you're going to start making a fool of yourself. Take it from us - fifty is old, very old, and it will remain so until we ourselves are fifty. Both Mum and Dad have expressed grave concerns about this speech. Dad isworried that it will be too long. Mum is worried that it will be too "interesting".

But as the straight and narow offspring of two straight and narrow baby boomers, we can guarantee you all right now that we do not possess either the material or the capacity for a long speech, let alone a long, interesting speech.

 My mother and father met at university, and the fact that Margaret  eventually agreed to marry Ray bears testament to the persistence of a balding man who knew he was running out of time. Oh yes, the wonderful Spring of 1966, a year in which the youth of Australia sought to redefine traditional social norms.

As confident as we are in declaring the sixties a time of sex, drugs and rock n roll, we are all the more confident in saying that our parents definitely, completely, without a shadow of a doubt indulged in none of the three.

Sex? Well okay, maybe four times. Drugs? Somewhat unlikely. Bill Clinton says he didn't inhale. Mum and Dad would not have known that you had to. Indeed, with some degree of hostility, Dad quite regularly informs us that Mum once smoked. Mum's version is that she smoked once, and Dad that caught her - half a cigarette at a university party just over a quarter of a century ago. Rock n Roll? Well we have it on good authority from Mum that she did not indulge in rock and roll citing the fact that "rock and roll was for the bad kids — I jived." Such was the crazy, free, liberating spirit that was sweeping North Balwyn Methodist Church in the 1960s.

One story we were particularly keen to relay to you this afternoon relates to Mum and her uncanny ability to lose the unlosable, a characteristic which I have sadly inherited. The year was l979, the month November. Pippa had been born just one week previous - a beautiful seven pound, blonde, blind bombshell. We were living ln Donvale at the time, and Mum had driven us up to the local shopping district to purchase some groceries. Groceries were duly bought, monies duly paid, and Mum was just loading us into the car, when Mr Migliori came racing out of the fruit shop:

"Mrs Wilson, Mrs Wilson - you've left something behind"

"Oh my god, my purse!"

"No Mrs Wilson, it's your baby!"

And sure enough, Mum had left tiny Pippa in the fruit shop. Her explanation at the time: "I'm just not used to having four".

In 1993, my father and his business partner Vernon wood were driving on a particular interstate highway in the Lake Tahoe region. All was proceeding normally. But then, after ten or so minutes of saying not much., Vern turned to my father and said,

"Shit Ray, do you reckon that river over there is running uphill?

Now science is one of the few realms in which my father does not profess expertise, so he pulled over in the emergency stopping lane, his rationale being that if the water was running uphill, then this was indeed an emergency. Finally Dad spoke:

"Gee Vern, I think you may be right."

They got out of the car, and on a coolish March evening on a Californian interstate, passing motorists got to witness the sight of two grown men, pacing out a river bank, trying to determine its gradient, and whether the river, as they suspected, was running uphill.

Take a suburb like Suney Hills. Or take Ashburton. Or even Merricks. I think we'd all agree that if we had to drive to these places they're all sort of that way ... or right. I have therefore spent much of my adolescence and early adulthood, driving to these places with Mum and wondering how she manages to go right without ever actually making a right hand turn. She has somehow managed to redefine geography, spatial relativism and quite possibly human sensibility by mastering a system of going right ... by turning left. As is the case with most significant breakthroughs, the whole thing occurred through a process of evolution. Out of sheer fear Mum refuses to make most right hand turns, and so to compensate she has developed an extraordinary capacity to turn left. And it says something for the ingenuity of my mother, that we can say with complete confidence that should she take to driving overseas, she will evolve further and devise a system of going left by turning right.

And just to demonstrate that Mum is willing to share the nervousness, it sometimes disturbs us that a necessary part of any road crossing with Mum, even today in our late teens and early twenties, is to accept the hand that is invariably offered. Old habits die hard - or so it would seem.

Moving now to infallibility. The Catholic Church currently subscribes to the Infallability of the Pope doctrine, and it was arguably the existence of this doctrine that led Pope John Paul II, upon falling down the stairs and breaking his leg, to look around sheepishly and say,

"I meant that"

Whilst Dad does not yet think he's infallible, we are predicting that he might arrive at that conclusion within the next five or so years. Take the question of eye-sight. The more observant ones amongst you may have noticed that 20-20 vision isn't a huge player with the four Wilson kids. Sarn is verging on blind, and it basically deteriorates from there. It has always amazed us,that despite the fact that Dad cannot read, write, drive, watch TV, play sport or even use his beloved dictaphone without his glasses on, he still manages to somehow blame his wife, who has stoically performed the role of seeing eye Mum for twenty-three years now, for the genetic stuff-up that blurred our vision. For conveniently enough, Lesley, Mum's sister, has a turned eye - not a badly turned eye, more like a slight sprain, yet enough of a defect to encourage Dad to shift the entire responsibility for our poor-sight away from his side of the family.

The more sportingly minded may have noticed that Chris Matthews, the Tasmanina and West Australian paceman, has decided to retire from first class cricket. Some of you would also be aware that Chris Matthews bowled arguably the worst three over spell in the history of test cricket - it included five wides, and three no-balls. He could fairly be described as struggling with both line and length. Let me draw some sort of analogy there to my mother's golf.

To our wonderful parents, I'd like to say Happy Birthday. Sam stayed at home until she was twenty-three, and the rest of us are securely entrenched here in Fort Wilson for the time being. There are basically two reasons why we see ourselves living here for a disturbingly long time. Firstly, there's no denying that it's not that easy to find yourself an exit in this place. But secondly, living with Mum and Dad is fantastic — because we get to see them every day. They're fun to spend time with, and they pursue every facet of their lives with such energy and gusto, that it encourages us to do the same.

So, as they raise their bats this afternoon to celebrate their respective half centuries, we're pleased to note that Dad has grown into his baldness, and Mum out of the terrible health hurdles she's had to overcome over the last few years. Both look fit and well, and ready for the next fifty. But make sure you treat us well, dear Mum and Dad, for the decline will inevitably start, and for the four of us, it has been a lifelong ambition to get our own back at Mum, and to one day clean her face with a saliva saturated tissue.

Happy Birthday again. Thank you.

Ray Wilson's 70th: 'The eightieth is always something very special, isn’t it?' by John Clanchy - 2015

21 January 2015, Melbourne, Australia

Note: Ray is 70

Maaaaaaaaa-te!

21st  January 1935 – 21st  January 2015. What a journey!

The eightieth is always something very special, isn’t it? And not just for you and your family but for all your friends too as we look on and wonder whether we’ll ever get there ourselves (let alone get there in your condition).  So celebrate!  Eight decades is not to be sneezed at.

Ray, I was thinking of you today, and so many great memories popped up. I’ll spare you the full-length movie for now and just re-run a few shorts – the first one personal, the other two sporting:

1.      As your Uni mates, we always looked up to you – and only partly because you were half a generation older than us. But even we were surprised when you carried off one of the most gorgeous belles of the University in your final year. I remember Roger Gay and myself shaking our heads when you declared you were going to court Margaret. Jeez, we thought, the guy’s got guts, but the idea of a Northern-Westie Newman boy heading out into the Protestant-infested waters of the abstinent EASTERN suburbs in search of love naturally filled us with dread. We knew this couldn’t work.

‘She’s already said No to him twice,’ I told Gay.

‘Well, he’s heading out there for another try,’ Gay said.

‘What’s the bait this time?’

 ‘He’s gonna tell her that you and I are mates of his.’

‘You reckon that’ll work...?’

It did of course, but Gay and I continued to shake our heads. She’s a Science student, we kept telling each other; she must know that if he’s a decade older than her now, then she’ll never make up the difference. The day he turns eighty, she’ll still only be seventy. ‘Ray’s an Arts graduate,’ I told Gay, ‘he’s full of it; he’ll find a way to fudge it.’ ‘Even when he’s eighty?’ Gay frowned. ‘He’s very fit, I reminded him.’‘True,’ said Gay.

2.      Sports: You were always a superb footballer, Ray – you left the rest of us for dead in skills and attitude. And probably did the same in every field of ball sports - with one exception. No doubt you’ll remember as vividly as I do our first ever game of golf. I was drunk and played superbly. You were sober and totally naff. You sliced the trees to ribbons on one side of the fairway, and you hooked baby starlings out of their nests on the other. You chopped when you should have chipped, and the sight of a sand-trap or a green gave you attacks of the yips. It was the first time on a golf course for both of us, and afterwards (mostly out of feeling for the starlings) I took you under my wing and promised to show you everything I knew about the game. It’s a great memory for me. Especially now that people tell me you’ve become a fabulous golfer in the six decades since, and I take profound comfort from knowing that if you’ve ever had a bad day on the golf course from that day to this (whether it’s the youthful octogenarian yips or the ‘Lazy-Susan’ return of the slice) then it’s got fucking nothing to do with me!

3.      Footy: It’s Grand Final Day, Newman vs Ormond (1960-something). It’s  late 3rd quarter and we’re in deep do-do’s. Ormond has just kicked a goal and taken the lead. The ball comes back to the centre, the umpire (a hired idiot called Minson) is about to bounce it and our leader – Captain Wilson – pushes his opposing captain into Minson’s back, and spoils the bounce. The Ormond captain whirls on Wilson and cries, ‘You prick!’ Wilson’s face turns white with shock. He glares at the Ormond captain and shouts, ‘Who just called the umpire a prick?’. Minson blows his whistle and tosses a free to Wilson. The Ormond captain looks at Wilson and again he shouts, ‘You prick!’ Minson blows his whistle and give the Ormond captain a 50-metre penalty for verbal abuse. From 30 metres out, Wilson slots the goal, and Newman is never headed again.

Brilliant!

Those were the days!

Happy Birthday, Ray.  And may the second eighty be just as memorable as the first!

Bones.