Stories of a Simpler Australian Childhood

By Op-Ed Frank is Back

Every now and then, a reader sends in a memory that instantly transports us to a gentler time -  when kids roamed freely on red Cyclops trikes, mulberry bushes grew tall on the hill, and the best birthday gifts came with four legs and a wagging tail.

Tomatoes grew abundantly and his father fed the leftovers to the chooks after the Fowlers vacola outfit had run out of jars. Yes, we grew up in a time of abundance. Abundant food, abundant joy, abundant freedom and abundant hope and optimism for an exciting future. 

Welcome to From Trike to Tail-Wags: Frankie’s World -  part 2 in a gentle collection of tales from young Frankie’s boyhood in Australia. These are stories of freedom, family, backyard adventures, sparkler-lit birthdays, and the kind of lifelong friendships that often begin with a yip and a lick.

I hope you enjoy. 

From Ned Kelly to Dezi Freeman: When Outlaws Change, but the Questions Don’t

Today, news broke that Dezi Freeman has been shot dead in Victoria’s High Country, bringing an end to a long and deeply unsettling manhunt.

For weeks, his name sat heavily in the public mind -  somewhere between fear, anger, and, in some corners, a strange and uneasy fascination. A sense of bewilderment. 

And almost immediately, the comparisons began.

Because Australia has seen something like this before.

In the late 1800s, Ned Kelly was also hunted through rugged country not all that different from where Freeman met his end. Armed, defiant, and on the run, Kelly became something more than a criminal in the eyes of many. He became a symbol.

She left no photograph, few words, and little behind but whispers -  yet the life of Hannah Glennon still rides the long roads of the outback.

People who live beyond the ordinary risk becoming legends. In time, their lives are pieced together from fragments -  records, recollections, and chance encounters -  often revealing more than they ever intended to share.

All of us leave traces. Births, deaths, marriages, fleeting mentions in newspapers or diaries -  small markers that may one day be gathered into a story. We rarely imagine that possibility. Yet long after we are gone, those fragments remain, waiting for someone to follow the trail.

For Hannah Glennon -  known across the western tracks as Red Jack — that trail is scattered and incomplete. She sought no fame, and would likely have been bemused, even dismayed, by the attention her life now attracts. The private struggles, the hardships, the moments preserved in official records -  even the years she spent as a laundress -  have all become part of the telling.

Such, perhaps, is the quiet price of becoming a legend.

The Sale I Didn’t Make

Harping back to apprentices, this series started, oddly enough, with a science fiction novel. In Peter F. Hamilton’s Void Trilogy, a young man learns his craft the old-fashioned way -  inside a world that quietly mirrors the medieval guild system. He begins as an apprentice. He shows up every day. He learns from a master who has already mastered the trade. He makes mistakes, gets corrected, and slowly gets better.

No lectures. No shortcuts. No pieces of paper that say he’s qualified. Just hands-on work, real accountability, and proving himself through results.

That story took me straight back to my real estate days.

Yes, I had the licence. That got me in the door. But what actually taught me the job was learning from a master -  watching how he listened, how he read people, how he put the client’s real needs ahead of the quick commission.

I was, like the hero in the book, learning my craft. 

Special Propulsion Emergency Edition - “We Point So You Don’t Have To”
Filed from beneath the warped floorboards of the Wombat Burrow laboratory (an outpost of the Hangar) by Roderick “Whiskers” McNibble, Senior Correspondent, Rodent Division & Chief Whisker Engineer

Yes dear residents of Dusty Gulch, pointing is forbidden these days but fortunately in the Wombat Burrow, I can point all I like.

G’day, magnificent follicle-folk of the outback and beyond! While the nation waddles in panic at the pumps -  diesel past $3 a litre, reserves scraping along at around 30 days, and Canberra twiddling its thumbs -  your faithful rodent correspondent has been busy in the Wombat Burrow laboratory.

Hundreds of servos are dry across NSW, Victoria, Queensland, and beyond thanks to the Middle East mess choking the Strait of Hormuz. Energy Minister Chris Lowone lowers standards and releases reserves, but the feather-brained mob still can’t see the obvious: Australia needs home-grown thrust, not imported drama and net-zero duckification.

If we are not allowed to " Drill Baby Drill "  there is only one alternative......