RON GORDON – Eulogy

Ron Gordon was a simple man. A simple man and a truly good man. He was not perfect man, although he’d sometimes argue that point, but even with his flaws, he was to our family the perfect example of a loving husband and father. He was an incredibly honest, hard working, and loyal man whose integrity we will always look to as a benchmark.

Dad hardly ever spoke of love, but he showed it every day in his selflessness and devotion to family. For him, love was shown in actions, and not in words. And there was no force of nature that could stop him when his family was in trouble.

When Penny was born and needed to be rushed to a Sydney hospital and no ambulance was available, Dad drove her under police escort all the way. He pushed the car so hard, one police car broke down trying to keep up and another had to meet up with him along the way as he sped to Sydney.

Or when the fires were surrounding Canberra and were only blocks from Penny’s house, officials weren’t allowing anyone in to the affected area but nothing was going to stop Dad from getting through to his little girl to keep her safe. Nothing did stop him, he got through. Similarly, many are the times he came to my rescue.

Dad showed love and sacrifice in lots of little ways. When we lived in the little two bedroom place in Mundy Street, where Penny and I shared a room and miraculously didn’t kill each other, money was scarce. Dad and Mum always made sure they missed out so that we wouldn’t have to. It probably never occurred to Penny and I when we were very young how poor we were. To make ends meet, Dad took on many extra jobs – delivering breads and soft drinks, working at Gulson’s brick works, driving taxis and working at Uncle Tom’s service station.

Perhaps his noblest deed though was working the farm. I see it now as noble because it was a small farm that would have been almost impossible for anyone to make a success of, but it was rever in Dad to give up. Instead, he threw extra hours into it – working six or seven days a week – and drawing a very low wage. Like many small farmers, I’m sure he felt like he carried the weight of the world, with debts he couldn’t meet, looking after a business that couldn’t succeed. But he never said anything at all like that to us kids. He just kept trying harder. When the farm was finally sold, he felt a poignant sense of loss and we were all concerned what would become of a fifty something labourer with only labouring skills behind him,

But, in a stroke of great fortune, he got a job at Linfox, where he started as a packer, then a gardener, then a forklift driver. This was the beginning of a brilliant new period of his life, Despite the acute disappointment of losing the farm, he found himself in a job where he could make friends, joke around, work hard and at the end of the day not have to woffy. There he got heavily involved in the work health and safety committee. That was also typical of Dad. He would always put his hand up for extra responsibilities like he had done as a bushfire vice captain or when neighbouring farmers needed a hand.

Once he started at Linfox, Dad was like a new person. I’ve often said that’s when some alien took over Dad’s body because he suddenly developed interests he’d shown no signs of before. He quit voting National Party and switched to Labor. He fell in love with country music, bought a bus he hardly used, a tent he never used, and got involved in woodwork and it turned out he was very talented at making bowls and pens and clocks.

But while I saw those as new things for Dad, the truth is that he had been fun and lighthearted throughout his younger years and had only stepped up to the plate and taken on the serious duties of looking after his family when it was needed. On a real wage at last, and with nowhere near the stress he’d had at Chatsbury, the fun loving Ron Gordon that people up and down the Taralga Road new as a kid was back. Don’t get me wrong, he always had a great sense of humour and had fun even in the tough times, but a weight was lifted and he seemed to be enjoying life more.

One of Dad’s favourite enjoyments was to be involved in pranks and practical jokes. An early example was, after Dad’s sister Robyn had planted confetti all through his travel bag at his wedding, Dad and his brother Bede tried to return the favour on Robyn’s wedding night but were blocked by their brother Vince.

At the farm he used to find clever ways to get me to grab the electric fence: often using brilliantly cunning tactics like saying: “hey, touch the electric fence, I think it’s off.” I would, and it wasn’t. Once when I wouldn’t grab the fence, he decided he knew just enough about physics to know a charge would pass through him to me. Sadly he didn’t know enough about physics to know that if I was leaning on the gate at the time we wouldn’t get the usual small zap but the massive wallop of its full voltage. Seconds later we were lying on the Taralga Road with Dad yelling “My Heart, My Heart” and me yelling “My arm, My arm”. When we could stand up, we thought it was hilarious, and it was – until I later told mum about this funny thing that happened at the farm and then Dad got an even bigger electric jolt.

Once when a computer wasn’t working at home, he asked to be told when it was fixed and then took credit for it, saying he had unfrozen the defibrillator. Mum appeared to buy that explanation for a few minutes but when you consider that Dad used to call the monitor the “tv bit” and the keyboard ‘the typewriter bit” it proved too ambitious a prank for even him to pull off.

But the cunning old bugger saved his best prank to last. Mum and Dad would argue over who ate the most pink “Clinkers” from a packet. About a month before Dad went into hospital, mum had bought a packet and it sat on the bench of the kitchen with both determined not to open it. Each kept saying they could outlast the other and neither would budge. We thought. On Thursday morning, when mum got home from Canberra she lifted up the packet and found Dad had made a hole in the underside and had eaten some. He probably had a few in his belly while he was saying he would outlast mum.

It may sound like I’m painting Dad as a saint, and he wasn’t. Dad was a typical Gordon, which most of us Gordons accept to mean loyal but also stubborn. He was certainly both. As a typical Gordon, Dad could also hold a grudge. Mind you, most of his grudges were against famous people he would never meet who had done nothing against him personally. There was a bunch of people he would frequently tell you the faults of, which Mum, Penny and I called his “hate list”. On it were names like John Howard, Shane Warne and Lleyton Hewitt, and those names are fair enough, but even “Mr Nice Guy” Pat Rafter was on it. And if you asked Dad why, he’d just say: “He isn’t as nice as everyone thinks. And he only won one grand slam”. I think he won two and I’m not sure what information Dad had on him that we didn’t, but he was on the list and that’s that. Each year he’d watch people get kicked off Australian Idol or Dancing with the Stars, and go on for hours about how “it’s rigged” or “it stinks”, declaring he’d never watch it again. Mind you, he would never vote in any of those shows, but he was just amazed that people couldn’t see obvious talent like he could.

Dad was also a man with no sense of scale. Things were either really great or terribly bad. If he dropped his teaspoon on the floor in the morning, which seemed to happen every other morning, he’d make the same sort of racket as if he’d broken a leg. He was also a man of strong principles, who would stand by his convictions no matter what, but even that could be without scale. All principles were equal, regardless of whether something was a big deal or not. Many were the stands he made on seemingly small issues, and I think both my sister and I have inherited that trait.

Dad’s last stand however was his most heroic. Despite being given the last rites on a Saturday afternoon and not being expected to last more than a few hours, Dad hung in there, I don’t know if it was consciously or just a matter of will, but in a body that was used up and unable to continue, he still managed to fight on for five more days – as usual – trying to please us and be there for us. Like I said, it wasn’t in him to give up. But in the end, the choice was taken away from him and there wasn’t enough left of Dad to fight on, and our hero had to leave us.

On an occasion like today, and for a long time to come, some of us will be tempted to think about the “what ifs”, and wish Dad was still around for this and that. But we need to remember that Dad was a very contented man. And the secret to his happiness, like the way he lived his life, was very simple. He had an amazingly small want list. He wanted very few things in life: A close family and the woman he’d always loved by his side, just a few close friends, a TV with lots of volume that could pick up the footy, some lollies and biscuits in the cupboard and some ice cream and lemonade in the fridge.

And lastly, he wanted a bench to sit on so he could watch his own little piece of the world pass him by. Dad never felt the need to see the world. For him, the world was whatever passed by 106 Mary Street on a given day. Long hours he sat there, often chatting with his friend and neighbour Sarah Tabner. God only knows what he thought of while he sat there, watching the weather patterns, the aeroplane flight paths and neighbours cars going by. But we don’t need to know. It made him happy.

I sometimes think Dad might have thought he wasn’t terribly significant. Recognition and acknowledgement often passed him by. But it seems pretty plain today that his life mattered quite a lot. He affected many people’s lives, not through loud emphatic demonstrations, but by his simple, humble goodness. Many have known him as the bloke up Mary Street that waves as they drive by. Some knew him as the bloke with the great Christmas decorations. Some knew him as a neighbour, workmate, brother, brother in law, cousin, uncle, tennis player, footy player or a friend.

My mother, sister and I were the lucky ones. We knew him as a father and husband. We knew him as a protector and an example to emulate. We miss you terribly Dad, but we trust that the pain is over now and that you are happy, and we’ll try to pick up where you left off.