Some chronology for John Joseph Ray


The beach at Etty Bay outside Innisfail where I experienced many school and church picnics during my childfhood



1950

At school

Let me start by saying that I am no good at most things. I am hopeless at all sports -- even chess! And I cannot even open a can of something without cutting myself around 50% of the time. And, any time I pick up tools to do something in the carpentry line or the like, I always hurt myself.

But, as is common, I do have one thing that I am good at: Academic tasks in my case. The first intimation of that was in my Innisfail Primary school, where I was known as the "walking dictionary". I ALWAYS got 10 out of 10 on spelling tests and always knew the meaning of any new word that came up in our reading.

But I was born and bred in a small Australian country town where the entire social life revolved around sport. So I was as complete an outsider as I could possibly be there. I was on a few occasions abused over it and called a poofter [homosexual] etc. The fact that I have now been married four times probably gives the lie to that last accusation.

But it was all water off a duck's back to me. I read books, initially kids books of English origin. So mentally, I lived a lot of the time as a prewar English schoolboy. It was vastly different from the world about me but that just made it more interesting. The English schoolboy had few fears about nature, nettles mainly. Whereas in my tropical environment I had to know about crocodiles and sharks that might eat you, pretty fruit which could send you blind if you ate it, jellyfish that could sting you to death and a great range of highly poisonous snakes and spiders. You could die within half an hour of being bitten by some of them. So, odd as it might seem, I had a happy childhood and never got bitten by anything other than mosquitoes. I lived in the world of the mind.

I didn't actually learn to read until I was 7. Kindergarten and pre-school were rarities in that time and place -- and childminding was generally informal. My parents were also great readers but saw no need to prepare me in any way for school. They had no ambitions for me where school might be important. So I was fascinated when I got my first ABC book at age 6 and remember it vividly to this day.

But I caught on rapidly and was reading well from our reading book by the end of the year. One tale I have told before, but which still amuses me, was when the class was doing chain reading. One kid would read one sentence, the next kid would read the next sentence and so on. We got pretty good at it. So eventually the teacher asked us to close our books and read the same sentences again. Everyone could. I was the only one who could not. I was the only kid who had been reading. The other kids just memorized it. Young memories are very good. I initially got a few scornful looks from the other kids but that turned to amazement when the teacher praised me.

I think it was from that point on that my exclusion started. The other kids could see that I was different from them and mostly avoided me from then on. And the blue boy story reinforced that. But there were a couple of kids who did talk to me.

I grew up on English books. I was born in the 1940s and just about the only children's books available in Australia at that time were imported from England. Additionally, the writers seemed mostly to be from the higher social strata of English society so the boys' books that I read were mostly about life in English Public Schools (now usually called "independent" schools to allay confusions among Americans). So there I was in small-town tropical Australia among crocodiles, sharks, deadly snakes and insects reading about crocuses and nightingales. And schoolboy cries of "cave" and "pax" had to be understood too. Fortunately Latin was still taught in my local High School at that time so I eventually understood where those cries came from.

And while I always felt that "bounders" and "cads" were excellent terms of disapprobation, it was the man "who goes too far" who best summed up Englishness for me. It was a not uncommon term of disapprobation in my boys' books and was a particularly final dismissal of anyone. To this day I still think it embodies a central English value and one that I still heartily agree with -- although I suspect that I myself may "go too far" on occasions. The concept is of course that there is a broad range of behaviour that can be tolerated but that there are nonetheless important limits that must not be transgressed. It is both a celebration of tolerance and a condemnation of "anything goes". It means that there ARE important standards that are needed for civility and that some things CANNOT wisely be tolerated.

One rather important thing that I had in common with the English boys that I read about was an Eton education. I did not in fact attend that illustrious institution in Berkshire but I had much the same curriculum at my school. Politicians of the day wanted "the best" for their children and English Public Schools were indisputably the best at that time. So little working class kids in country towns had to learn their Latin declensions and read poems about daffodils, skylarks, nightingales etc. And I did. Though in my environment, instead of the "blithe spirit" of the skylark, we had the "demonic laugh" of the Kookaburra. I was even introduced to Chaucer and Homer, which pleases me to this day.

I grew up in the age of Dr Spock, a widely respected American pediatrician who preached permissive parenting. He saw permissivenessas being as much a moral issue as a practical one. His influence was particularly strong in the '60s, which was a time to question all values, so the Biblical advice -- "He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes" (Proverbs 13:24) -- was regarded widely as impossibly obsolete.

And for Spock and other reasons I was a beneficiary of permissive thinking. I have no recollection of my parents ever saying No to me in fact. Dr Spock later changed his mind and decided that some parental guidelines were needed but it was all too late for generations of kids. But permissiveness suited me. I had a very untroubled childhood.

I was sent to Presbyterian Sunday school from about age 7 -- which I greatly enjoyed -- so I accepted the rather Puritanical wisdom that was preached to me there. And those were pretty safe guidelines. I am pretty sure I am a born Puritan, in fact. I was teetotal until I was about 28. But I like my gin these days. I was 17 in 1960 but the unhealthy substances that people poured into themselves in that era had no appeal for me. I have never even smoked tobacco, in fact.



Dr Cotter, the local doctor during my childhood in Innisfail

Probably the greatest misfortune of my life occurred at a time when I was totally unaware of it.

I have frequently-occurring skin cancers, far more frequent than anything my parents ever had. White people growing up in the tropics do tend to suffer a lot from skin cancer -- mostly BCCs and SCCs -- as fair skin of Northern European origin (particularly Irish skin) is not at all suited to the direct sunlight of the tropics. The grey skies of England, Scotland and Ireland are its natural habitat.

But my frequency of BCCs and SCCs is extreme. I have at least half a dozen procedures a year to zap the worst of them.

So how come? How come I get them so badly? The answer is rather clear. In about the first two thirds of the 20th century lots of kids were given low doses of arsenic for various reasons. One such preparation was "Bell's compound" cough syrup. It appears to have originated in the USA but was very popular for a while in Queensland. And its legacy years later, for those who had a lot of it, is arsenic-weakened skin that frequently degenerates into cancer.

And I had a lot of upper respiratory ailments as a kid, largely due, I think, to the fact that I have a deflected septum. I was not in fact given Bell's compound but rather Dr Cotter's own "pink mixture" which would appear to have reflected the popular wisdom of the day about the utility of arsenic in combating coughs and colds. So the fact that I had a LOT of it has come back to haunt me. The toxicity of everything is in the dose so for most people the arsenic probably did no harm. It's only when arsenic builds up that the harm occurs.

So Doctor Cotter unwittingly harmed me. He died in 1972 so it is too late to remonstrate with him now and he was in fact a distinguished medical scientist in his day. He was in fact responsible for eliminating Weil's disease from the sugarcane industry. Seeing my father was a canecutter for a while Dr Cotter may well have also done me a great favour. The biography of Timothy John Patrick Cotter is here.

He was of Irish Catholic origins and an opponent of government-run healthcare. As the bio notes, he was an early adopter of sulfonamides and I do remember his prescription of "M&Bs"



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E.&O.E.

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