The Hillbillies

2: Christmas and the Cul-De-Sac Kids

• View of Perth City from the Hillbillies town •

I know I introduced myself in the previous chapter as an 8-year-old but the real story starts the year I turned 7.

You see, I wasn't born in Tassie and us Hillbillies had to move to Misty Hill Mountain at some point. So I will start at the very beginning - where I was born, which was in the dry, flat plains of Perth City. Well, I wasn't born in the actual city but in the bush-land to the south in a tiny little house in a tiny little rural town. That's the place where my parents got married, where I was born, and where we children all spent the first several years of our lives.

It was a lot different to Tassie – it was hotter, contained more risks of snake-bites and bee-stings, and had terrain flat enough to skateboard around relatively safely. Not to say we didn't stack it though – we definitely kept Mum busy with our scraped knees and bruised arms.

She always told us not to talk to strangers when we went out - our street seemed to be littered with the back-end dodgy bogans who couldn't afford to live anywhere else. That didn't really stop us though.

We made friends with an old lady who lived across the street from us - we called her The Cat Lady because she let her cat run loose in the streets. Its fur was all matted and one of its ears had a rip in it.

One day, Brodie and I saw her cat climbing out of a drain on the side of the road. We raced away screaming convinced that it was a dead cat come back to life. We stayed away from it after that. You can never be too careful when it comes to the undead.

There was another strange old lady who lived next-door to us. We all thought she was a witch. She would always poke her head over the fence and stare fiercely at us while we played. She didn't seem very friendly until, one day, she beckoned us over. She gave Brodie a toy zebra. He loved zebras. She gave me a porcelain bear figurine that wore a matching pink hat and dress set and held a basket of flowers. One of the bear's arms had come off so it looked a little ugly. I didn't want to be rude so I smiled and said thank you. We never saw her again. To this day, I wonder who she was and what happened to her.

We had a trampoline back then too. Brodie and I would hold competitions to see who could jump the highest – sometimes we jumped so high we would accidentally propel ourselves over the net. Luckily we never broke any bones though, however surprising that may sound.

One of our favourite games to play was called "Little Monsters" although at the time we were both convinced that it was pronounced "Little Munsters," much to the amusement of our parents. We would hold hands and jump as high as we could in 3 seconds before letting go and tumbling back down. "1, 2, 3, little munsters!" we would scream and laugh uncontrollably.

Monsters wasn't the only thing we mispronounced – there was a long list. Oil was eel. Scenery had a very aggressive-sounding 'c.' Larry was Lerry. Million was millin. Vitamins were pitchuals (don't ask me why). And if you were Min, water was 'oopa.' I don't know how she translated that but it was funny and it stuck. Visitors would always look at us strangely when we asked for a glass of oopa but that's what made it so funny. We would giggle and snicker while they looked all the more confused because of it.