FAMILY MATTERS!

Even though they’ve used my one-eyed dinkus for this piece, it’s not really a rant …. just a quick tribute to my older brother William George Gordon-Brown who turns 80 today.

Bill (above) looks a helluva lot like King Charles 3 of Great Britain, so much so that at a family function a few years back he greeted the amazing clan he and Sharon have amassed, dressed up as Jug Ears (left, above).

Our mother had quite a difficult birth with Bill which means I’m quite some years younger but he still influenced me greatly at Aspley State School despite that very large gap.

“Are you really Billy Brown’s brother?” teachers at cricket training training would ask when I tried to hit a ball and who then would shake their heads ruefully when I proudly said yes.

He was never embarrassed to have me around, although whenever we went down to the tram terminus at Chermside on our way to the Centenary Pool, he made me walk on the other side of Hamilton Road. I think he thought it was safer there.

In 1963, I think it was, he bought me a ticket to go see The Beatles at Festival Hall. And before that, he never once questioned my sexuality even though my bedroom walls were covered with pictures of John, Paul, George and Ringo, some of them naked.

Speaking of such things, I ended up with his green Volkswagen beetle, the mighty PEW, whose nightly travels around the environs of Gatton College in the late 1960s and early 70s and outside the nurses quarters at Toowoomba General Hospital were the stuff of legends.

I said goodbye to him once on the back steps of our humble little college in Western Avenue when he went off to fight as a regular in the Vietnam war. I never once thought of the chance he might not return, even though I might have asked him if I could have his bedroom just in case he didn’t.

Whenever we get together, we reminisce about our days as children and just the other day, he made me laugh when I recounted the story of coming home furious that the teacher had decided my answer that “defrost” was the opposite of “normal” was wrong, even though our fridge had always shown us it was. Cute, hey? But Bill gently reminded me that story was about him, not me. No sarcasm, no putdown. Just a brotherly correction.

Look, I’m getting a bit choked up now so I could recount much, much, more about our lives together and apart.
In a short while, Carol and I are going to grab a 50c train fare to Nambour to help him celebrate if they’ve found a venue large enough to hold the entire G-B clan.

And I’ll text right now to make sure he’s still with us this morning and to say happy birthday if he is!

Don Gordon-Brown

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