The Metricup Party House: A Mid-70’s Story By Gary Gibbon

I’m not even sure if the old farmhouse, the subject of the title, still exists. It used to be accessed by a short dirt road off Bussell Highway, Metricup. (Metricup is located in the South West region of WA near the town of Cowaramup on the Bussell Highway). The road itself is no more. It has been replanted over with bushes and trees. There is not much left of the old farmhouse now and it is nearly invisible from Bussell Highway. Today the surrounding area is covered with sprawling vineyards, but back in the 1970’s dairy farming prevailed.

I ended up there due to a combination of several occurrences.

Firstly, I (and a rotating collection of friends) had to leave my preferred location in a cabin in the Greenacres Caravan Park in Dunsborough, because the May school holidays were about to happen.

Back in those days, there were only three lots of holidays in the WA school system: May, August and the longer summer break over Christmas/New Year. And come those school holidays, those of us, enjoying living on the water in Dunsborough for what was then, quite a modest rent, had to vacate the cabins, to make way for the holiday hordes who paid premium rates for the privilege.

Secondly, the 1962 VW bug that I was driving at the time, had come to the end of its effective life and

Thirdly I needed to be able to get to Busselton, where I’d just scored a well-paying job working as a brickies’ labourer for Best Constructions. They were a Bunbury outfit who’d won a couple of substantial building contracts in Busselton; the larger involving the construction of the (then) ‘new’ Busselton Hospital in West Busselton. I didn’t have the capital at that stage to buy a replacement vehicle, so I had to look for other options.

The one staring me directly in the face came from three of my friends who were also working on site as a sub-contracting bricklaying team. I had known Kirk Ball (RIP), Graham (Guru or just Goo) Leslie (RIP) and Kim Hunter (RIP) previously more as surfing acquaintances.

But on the worksite, we became closer after Stan Best, as he periodically did, “loaned” me out to them, especially if he wanted a particular piece of work finished quickly. On hearing of my conundrum, Kim Hunter, who was the de-facto leader of the team and had negotiated the contracts with Best’s, immediately invited me to stay with the boys at Metricup and also get lifts to and from work with them. Well of course given my situation, it was hardly an offer I could refuse, even though I knew the guys had a fair reputation for ‘raging’, whereas I was just naturally somewhat more circumspect in my social habits.

Interesting little sidebar! The guy on the left in both worksite photos was/is a Victorian bricklayer named Warren “Something” but preferred to be called “Wog”. The two dogs were his. He’d brought them across with him! I think I met him in the Yallingup car park. We became quite friendly and I suggested he approach Stan Best for a job, which he did and he got. He worked for wages on the site, so I was labouring for him (and others). I remember being the one to introduce him to Kim Hunter and I believe they later became rather close friends. I also remember he ended up living for a long time in a farmhouse up towards Bunker Bay and becoming quite a fixture in the Dunsborough/Yallingup community. I’m sure he was still up there when I returned in 1979, but not sure what became of him after that.

At any rate that’s how I ended up in the Metricup house with the above – mentioned guys, along with Micko Hamilton, who wasn’t a bricklayer (Indeed I believe he was a talented horse – trainer, who did most of his work at the time in the Busselton – Capel area.) and Brian (Brains) Sherrington (RIP), who also wasn’t brick-laying, but had talents in all sorts of other areas. I became a fairly popular addition to the household, when it became obvious that I had some marginal abilities to cook. So I was encouraged to run amok in the kitchen at night, “creating” for the five other guys and whoever happened to be dropping in, or staying over for the night. A definite open-door policy prevailed.

However, I will add that the non-stop traffic through the place, also prompted me to ensure my stay at Metricup was relatively brief. But whilst I was there, I became a willing participant and very interested observer in a series of what you might call notably heroic, social failures.

The abalone barbecue! One Saturday up Bears way after a solid surf session, Micko Hamilton and myself somehow managed to fossick and collect an enormous amount of abalone. Forget bag limits of the time! Our catch pretty much filled a surf-board bag/cover. Anyway, we got them home and immediately started peeling them out of their shells and attempting tenderisation of the horde by thumping them with hammers and assorted other tools. Realising we had too many for us to eat ourselves, we put the word out that we’d have a Saturday night abalone barbecue. The good weather meant that quite a crowd rocked up, but unfortunately, we didn’t pound the abalone enough. I have memories of assorted people chewing, chewing, indeed masticating endlessly, these tough as boots abalone. Not only that, but we also didn’t get rid of the shells soon enough and within a day or two, a pungent, putrid atmosphere lingered over and around our rustic, rural abode.

The Hangi! (NZ method of cooking food on hot stones). Not to be deterred from catering for the masses, I’m pretty sure it was Kim and Kirk came up with the bright idea of hosting a hangi on another Saturday afternoon/evening. Now this time I’m pretty sure I quizzed them on whether they actually had much of a grasp of the traditional Maori method of cooking especially suited to preparing food for large numbers of people. I admitted I didn’t, but they said they didn’t feel there was much to it and it was simply a matter of getting enough hot coals happening in the ground. Anyway, the guys got a lamb/sheep from somewhere, buried it in the ground with some coals, stuck some vegetables in there as well and again advertised an open house.

Folks, to label it a culinary disaster is a massive understatement. It was dire. The lamb/sheep got dug up and it essentially had a burnt outer skin with an entirely red, raw undercoat. The vegetables were all torched too. The funny thing about the evening is that no one really seemed to care too much about going hungry. Perhaps fortunate or otherwise, the ones who really came out of the whole experience on top, were the many dogs that came along accompanying their owners to the hangi. They were the ones who ended up demolishing much of the sheep, which certainly wasn’t fit for human consumption. The canines all greedily gorged on what should have been their humans’ tucker. At the end of the night I distinctly remember an extensive sea of dripping meat oils, sloshing around the linoleum floor of the kitchen.

Guru wants a German Shepherd. Guru had his heart set on getting a German Shepherd dog. Now bear in mind, that back in the seventies WA had rather strict regulations on the owning and breeding of German Shepherd and Alsation dogs. You could only have them if they’d been desexed. It was all pretty complex. I know that for me coming from Queensland, where it was much less regulated, I found, as a life-time dog lover, the whole thing pretty overbearing. Anyway, somehow Goo, reckoned he’d made contact with some breeder north of Sydney who he was tapping into, to bring this pedigreed dog back to WA. So he took a longish weekend off and flew east to pick up the hound.

Let’s just pause again here whilst I indulge in a brief history lesson. These were the days of Australia’s official and strict two airline policy, where it was quite remarkably expensive to return fly across the continent. Proportionally, much more expensive than it is today. Added to his airfares and living expenses, Goo also had to pay for both his new dog (From memory, $1500 and this was back in 1976.) and the transportation of said canine back to WA. But he along with Kim and Kirk, was earning quite big money on their hospital job and he was determined to shell out the bucks and become a dog owner. And thus a few days later he returned home to Metricup with Tex, happy as the proverbial pig in a poke.

Now I would never have presumed to tell Goo how to lay bricks. But I did know something about dogs even back then. And I had to engage in a series of verbal gymnastics to compliment Graham on his latest acquisition, whilst wrestling with the conundrum of diplomatically informing him, that he’d been majorly had. Within a pretty short time of him being back home, he realised that whilst not having a pedigreed German Shepherd on his hands, he did have a very nice, sociable, neutered mongrel, which did have a likely trace of Alsatian ancestry. As far as I know, they did have a long-lasting relationship. And by the way, Tex did appear to get on with the house cat, whose name I simply don’t remember!

Brains’s water bed! Have I mentioned that I travelled pretty lightly in those days? At any rate, whilst having a sleeping bag, I didn’t own a bed. No worries the boys said. “Brains is happy for you to borrow his waterbed.” I thought this was exceedingly generous of Brian. He stayed in another room, whilst lending me his waterbed, the likes of which were quite the trendy boudoir items of the time. I don’t mind saying I was quite excited about anticipating my first sleep on it, which did end up being remarkably anti-climactic.

Naive as I was, I didn’t realise water beds needed a certain number of accessories to make them viable. Things like a firm frame, water-proof under covers and even perhaps a heater. This one had nothing. It was just a big, black, rubbery bag on the ground full of what felt like ice cold water, that also likely leaked. It slopped around so much at night with me on it, the potential for inducing sea-sickness in a bed room was a distinct possibility. Then there was the condensation factor. Every morning when I got up, out of my nocturnally damp, sleeping bag, I had to negotiate a myriad of pools and puddles of water on and around the bed. Truly, it was hard to tell at times whether I’d been accidentally installed in the bathroom, rather than a bedroom. And, within a night or three, it was easy to see why Brains had been so ready to hand over his waterbed.

Please don’t think it was all domestic calamities and misadventures. It was fun (for a time). And I do recall, scoring some nice afternoons of offshore, uncrowded, late-autumn sessions at Margaret River, heading down there in Kim Hunter’s big red sedan (Can’t remember the brand), after wrangling some early work knock offs. Surfers Point was Kim’s preferred surfing destination and who was I to argue? I was just happy to be able to go along for the ride and grab a surf, I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to enjoy, not having any wheels. I should also add that he was the first person to really encourage me to start surfing the right-hander off the peak, where previously I’d tended just to surf the left. And when I look back at these photos, it does appear almost common sense doesn’t it?

But after around a month, I’d saved enough to purchase another (cheap) car. The opportunity also arose to return to Greenacres for a moderately quieter lifestyle with similarly inclined old pal Steve Carroll, as a housemate. So after thanking the guys for putting me up and politely declining their offer of a “going away party,” I bid them all adieu.

Trivia Bonus: On the turntable frequently and turned up loud:

1 Lots of various Little Feat LP’s

2 Early AC/DC

3 Born to Run – Bruce Springsteen

4 Pavlov’s Dog

5 Supertramp

6 Barclay James Harvest

On the black and white TV, bearing in mind there were only two stations from which to choose, GWN and ABC.

We didn’t really watch a lot, but Countdown on Sunday late afternoons and the (great) ABC mid-week program called Rush (set in the Victorian gold fields of the mid – nineteenth century) were somewhat surprisingly, never missed.

Footnote More than anyone else mentioned above, I did see and keep in contact with Brian Sherrington over the years. So much so that around a decade later he became a co-tenant for a couple of years along with Lawrie ‘Pup’ Nesbitt, of the Yallingup property, my wife and I owned. The guys were kind of fifoing up north, well before the minerals boom and the term came into common usage. Long story short, somewhere along the timeline the boys became uncontactable for a significant number of months (no mobile phones back then) and got way behind in the rent. We didn’t over stress on it and eventually they appeared again and everything financial was sorted out. But Brian felt a little self-conscious about the whole thing and ended up hand-making and gifting us a jarrah bench table that we still have almost 40 years later. That was the kind of unobtrusively nice guy he was. Rosa and I were both very sad to hear of his very premature passing some years back.

Thanks Gary, for sharing your SW surf memories & pics.

—————————-