Trevor John Castles

Eulogy for Trevor John Castles Trevor John Castles was born on the last day of 1934, and sadly passed away Thursday last, aged 82 years. That’s the bare bones of it, but it doesn’t tell us much. Dad said we throwback to our ancestors, sometimes by physical bearings but moreso through our character and mental attributes. He felt that all people are born equal - one as good as another - but that it is the influences as we develop from childhood to men and women that determine our differences from one and another. He felt we should always show charity to others and try to see the good in all people. Perhaps I can tell you something of the good in Trevor, and how his life shaped the man that he became. Dad was complex, as are we all; the man you know is different to the father that I know. And yet, as his son, I feel that after all these years I still don’t know him well enough. He was shy and reserved but for many he was cheeky, even a tormenter. He was intelligent but he was modest and not inclined to display it. He was loving but often awkward in showing his affection. I don’t really know what his early aspirations were, how he saw himself making a mark in the world. There was in him some melancholy sense, of being lost perhaps, but for all I have learnt, he found what he wanted in the love of my mother and in the family he had around him. He was proud of his heritage and of those forbears who came to the colony within fifty years of its founding, and to the generations that followed who helped, perhaps in small but no less real ways, to create the Australia that he loved. Dad’s father, Theo, was the eldest of ten children. Dad was proud of his father – even if, as he said, the old man was a bugger. I am likewise intensely proud of my own father – for all his strengths and weaknesses. Dad’s mother, Clarice, was the second child of twelve. Dad remembers the Coves family at Rose Hill, Gurrundah with special fondness and he had enormous respect for Father (Selby Coves). He felt especially lucky with his Coves cousins; there were, including his two deceased brothers, 38 cousins, and all liked. Dad was the eldest, and had such wonderful memories of his visits to Rose Hill - not so much the place, but the people who lived and visited there. Dad was born in Goulburn in 1934. For the first few years, along with his brother, Terry, life was pretty good. Dad was born in the depression years, and life was hard for his parents, but they lived well enough. His father was always employed, and supplemented the family table with the milk from a couple of cows agisted around the streets of Garfield, fowls, a few rabbits he shot or trapped, and sometimes even eels. His mother’s father, a potato farmer, kept them in spuds the year round. Dad and Terry had to make their own entertainment in those days and they spent many happy hours playing in their house in Francis St, or in the big woodshed. It was also a good hiding place to deploy their daisy-air guns, which were used with good effect on their next door neighbour, and they loved ‘rocking’ the tin roofs of Goulburn. It was this cheekiness, despite his reserved nature, that never left Dad. They played a lot of the games that kids still play to-day, a favourite being Cowboys and Indians with heroes like Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers. The wireless was a source of amusement he was young. ‘Yes, what?’ was his favourite program. Seventy-odd years on ‘Yes, What?’ was still being played somewhere in Australia or overseas. Dad and Terry spent a lot of their time exploring the Wollondilly River and surrounding bush, making pocket money collecting ‘dead wool’, sheep and cattle bones, golf balls, leeches and recycling medicine bottles to chemists. They became competent with the rifle, went shooting or ferreting for rabbits, and even shot at Tiger Moths flying overhead from Goulburn airport on occasion, though thankfully with no success. Dad said he would have been mortified if his sons did what he and Terry had done, and more so if his grandsons were as wild and woolly as they. Dad recollected throwing stones and rocks at munition trains, great long things that snaked along and took ages to pass through the cutting. Most of the carriages carried defused bombs; they clearly never thought that if the bombs did blow, they would blow with them. Or of laying logs on the Hume Highway waiting for cars to come along, sometimes for up to half an hour. Dad remembered watching the platypus at play in the Shoalhaven River at Balalaba, near Braidwood when he was aged 11. Theo had taken long service leave from the PMG to trap rabbits for six months and they lived in no more than a shack for that time. It must have been profitable, for Theo purchased his first car and a house in Garfield Ave not long after returning to Goulburn. In Dad’s last years at school he was addicted to snooker, often sneaking out of home to play the game. Some games involved sizeable bets, but he did not have enough money to play very often. Still, when he did play, he said he picked his mark and collected some nice money. Dad also took up boxing to prove he could excel at the sport, mainly because of the chest cancer that he developed a couple of years earlier. He won most of his fights in the ring (under pseudonyms so his father would not be aware). He didn’t say much but his Mum and Dad had some terrible arguments and there was much hurt during those early years. Dad’s brother, Terry, died in a car accident in 1954. They had been inseparable growing up. And then his other brother, Robert (ten years younger), died tragically in 1971. I know these things hurt Dad grievously and he missed his brothers always. Dad gained, and lost, Commonwealth and Teacher College scholarships because he would not sing God Save the Queen. So, he started his working life as a cadet at the Office of the Registrar General in Sydney on four pounds per week. He was conscripted for national service in 1954, serving 5½ months at RAAF Rathmines on Lake Macquarie. Dad was selected for training as a pilot, but being under 21 years of age, needed his father’s permission, and that was not given. He returned to Goulburn after Terry’s death to help his father out in the scrap metal and rag business and worked throughout the south of the state. He also helped Theo in later years with some SP bookmaking. Well after this time, we kids traversed much of the same southern NSW and Victoria squeezed into the trusty Merc with Dad. I don’t think Dad ever looked after any of his cars but that is one that kept going and covered many a mile. There are so many places we have been to and so many things we have seen together. Dad met our Mum, Patricia, at a dance at the Liedertafel Hall a couple of years later. It wasn’t the first time that he had seen her but it was the first that he spoke to her. They had a couple of dances together and he walked her home. Dad moved to Sydney to procure a decent job for his bride-to-be, and they married on Valentines’ Day, 1959. Dad was promoted with the CSIRO from Sydney to Canberra, where he lived the remainder of his life; in O’Connor, Downer and Kaleen. Dad joined the Accounts branch at the ANU, where he worked for 27 years until 1988. During some of that time, he worked a second job as a milko. After that, he drove taxis for 17 years. He also volunteered to support Central Hockey Club. He met many people through those years, and though he wasn’t so good at keeping in contact with many of them, he remembers very many of them with fondness. He finished work at age 70, after suffering a heart attack on Brad’s birthday in 2005. He found loneliness to be a terrible thing, even though living by himself had its compensations and he had his family. It saddened him that his brothers and wife died the way they did and when they did. It was good that in his last few years Fraser was to live with and care for him. Dad had a triple heart bypass in 2014, and never regained his health after that operation. In the end, sadly, he knew it was time to go and was accepting. Not only have we lost a loved father and grandfather, relative and friend, but in a real sense we have lost our link to a different land, the past that Dad lived through, experienced and was nurtured by. Dad was a living connection to the extended Castles and Coves families and to the earlier days of a vastly different Australia to the one in which we now live. Dad captured some of that in his family story, and we are lucky that he had that sense of enquiry, of genealogy and history, and the words in which to write in an eloquent and personal way. I am hoping to edit that history and make it available. He felt we should all strive to better ourselves; to what effect we improve our lot in life depends on our diverse, complex personalities, and on how we learn from our mistakes. Dad always felt that it is not important what we felt of our ancestors but what they would have thought of us. I hope that going forward we can honour him in that way. I have wondered what I should say on behalf of my brothers and sister, our partners and our children, all different yet clearly from the same root, and all his relatives and friends gathered here. Maybe it is simply enough to use Dad’s own words, written nearly ten years ago: My parents, Clarice and Theo, died within almost three months of each other in 1995. My grandparents, too, are long dead, and so too are my uncles and aunts. It seems like yesterday that Des and I were together at St. Patrick’s College in Goulburn, and we played tennis together on the school courts at Gurrundah with the Heaton and Heffernan families. I can still see my uncles - Coves and Castles - playing football. I remember playing cricket in the back streets at Enmore in Sydney with my uncle Lloyd. Time doesn’t stand still! I remember skipping from iced puddle to iced puddle on my way to school in the fierce cold of Goulburn’s winter. I remember looking up to Mum when I was a small boy, as we took a short cut through paddocks to Goulburn’s main street, and earnestly telling her, in my first pair of long trousers, that I would never call her woman, only a lady because she was one. I recall my first pair of real shoes. We ran barefoot until we went to school. I remember the beautiful, warm and soft feeling I had after I walked my lovely Patricia home from the dance. I remember the birth of our first child, and making it to the maternity ward at Canberra Hospital with half an hour to spare because Pat put the cramps down to the green plums eaten earlier that the day. I remember waiting in the cold when David was born, and holding him before they had time to wash him. I remember the births of our other children (Bradley, Meredith and Fraser), and the panic we felt as we rushed back from the coast with our daughter so seriously ill with an ear infection - we thought that she had meningitis - and the subsequent worries we had. As I approach the last days of my life I remember all those things. That is all life is - the past is gone and won’t come back, the future is always indeterminable, and becomes a memory as soon as we reach it. Only the memories of our life stay with us. Good memories make for a good life, and a life worth living. But most memories are very private, and a person’s life can be summed up in a few words. I wish I had the words to show my feelings. As always, Dad undersold himself. His words speak to me, to us. And we have those cherished memories to hold dear.