I was a sixteen-year-old Gympie boy, with undiagnosed Dyslexia, studying in what they termed “sub-senior”- the year prior to matriculation. I had scrapped through my Junior with 2As, 2Bs and 4 Cs. My parents valued education highly. My mother had come from a reasonably well to do orchardist family and had been taught at All Hallows a Catholic boarding school for country kids in the heart of the Valley in Brisbane before going on to train as a music teacher. My father, the son of a Church of England minister had been educated in a number of places the last of which was the Church of England private school at Southport, on the Gold Coast. At Southport, he had been head boy in one of the colleges and excelled at Sport. At the University of Queensland, he enrolled in a BA and gained blues for cricket and football. After teaching in the private school system including Southport he joined the state system at Gympie High where he taught languages, Latin, French, Greek and German.
Our family life was reasonably harmonious. Mother and father were fond of each other but not publically demonstrative about their affection. One even in my Junior year father called me into the lounge where he would sit every evening in a comfortable chair marking class assignments. He asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I told him I wanted to be a writer. Mother had been hovering in the hall way. Father got up from his chair grabbed mother in a bear hug and swung her around losing his balance. From the floor, roaring laughing, he blurted “Before you can be a writer you have to learn to spell and punctuate.” I did not tell him I was half way through writing a novel.
One of the subjects I had enrolled in for Matriculation was Maths II with Algebra, Trigonometry, and what all. My Dyslexia meant that learning these mathematical languages was beyond my capacity. I could never get the “correct” answer. Within a few weeks, whenever presented with a question in the text book I assumed there must have been a printing error and would proceed to answer the question which I thought should have been asked. As you might guess this didn’t go down a treat with my Maths II teacher.
About 5 weeks into semester, I had determined to leave and went around and said goodbye to all my teachers apart from my father and went home and told Mother who suggested I make myself scarce until she had had the opportunity speak to Dad.
When I returned and told Dad I was intending to go and dig peanuts at Kingaroy because the Commonwealth Employment had told me there was plenty of work there. My original desire to work on a prawn trawler at Tin Can Bay had some weeks before been ruled out as unacceptable. Mum and dad sat me down and produced a letter from the Department of Agriculture and Stock in Brisbane offering me a job as a clerk on the strength of my Junior results. The letter had arrived some weeks earlier and they had determined I had no need to know about the offer.
Copyright © 2026 John Tomlinson