GHOSTS OF HOLIDAYS PAST
7 October 2026
As
kids, Susan and I spent many of our school holidays in 1960s and early 1970s in
the Porongorups (as we were taught to spell it). For those of you who haven’t
been down to this part of the South West of WA, it’s a billion-year-old
mountain range that sits between Mt Barker and Albany. The hills arent’t very tall
(670m at the highest point) but they are made up of an extraordinary collection
of granite boulders. In those days we’d go climbing Nancy’s Peak and Devil’s
Slide and explore the tree-in-the rock and the Karri and Marri forests
surrounding the 
Tree in the Rock 
Mr Brown, Pete, HH, Susan, GR, Dot - late 1960s
When
we stayed with Auntie Dot and Uncle Pete we were allowed to do many things that
weren’t part of our usual home life including:
- Drinking soft drinks and spiders (although they were
never brand drinks because Dot & Pete were pensioners on limited
budgets)
- Eating chocolate - peanut rough for me and rocky road
for Susan
- Watching commercial television (although this meant
that we only caught a couple of episodes of a series at a time and could
never follow the story lines)
- Playing board and card games such as Snakes and
Ladders. Chinese Checkers, and Rummy
And
then there were comics. One series that I remember we had access to was also
available to read in the surgery of Mr Henderson, the orthodontist: The
Phantom, or the Ghost Who Walks. So when I saw copies of the Phantom for sale
in the Porongurup Inn, Shop and Tearooms, I just had to buy a copy. The main
story was the Phantom rescuing a French journalist (along with a range of
enslaved women) who had been following a story about protected teak timber
plantations being cut down and turned into charcoal to be sold into the
European BBQ market. I remember that the Phantom was always fighting the
baddies but who would have thought he’d turned into an environmental warrior 90
years after his creation?
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