WHOLE NEW BALL GAME

Holidays: orange-cordial iceblocks, bunk beds and communal toilet blocks. It’s all fun and games until someone drops the ball

“FOR WE KIDS, EVERY HOLIDAY WAS DOMINATED BY TWO FACTORS: BALLS AND MORE BALLS. NOTHING WAS MORE CRUCIAL.”

Informer is in holiday mode. Another week of toil and I begin three weeks of free weeks. My favourite holiday when I was a kid was at Port Sorell, a seaside town in Tasmania’s north-west.

When I say favourite holiday, it was my family’s only holiday and it occurred between Boxing Day and Australia Day every summer of my childhood from age four to 14.

Upon arrival at the Port Sorell Caravan Park and Camping Village, we would unpack the EK Holden – the mighty Buffalo – and squeeze inside a fibro shack considerably smaller than our already tiny house back in Launceston.

For the next month this was home, albeit one fewer rooms.

What we did have was sand in the food, bull ants in the sand and bunk beds for the kids.

Being the eldest brother, Informer was afforded the top bunk, not that such privilege prevented me from falling out of it several times each holiday.

We had orange-cordial iceblocks, sunburn and three toilets, which was two more than at home.

However, these toilets were in a communal block shared by several hundred fellow holidaymakers among whom were always a few who couldn’t aim straight in a firing squad. Dad said they were from Hobart.

For we kids, every holiday was dominated by two factors: balls and more balls. Nothing was more crucial. We needed balls for the Test cricket we played every day, balls for tennis, balls for handball, balls for footy, balls for chucking at other kids when they weren’t looking.

There were so many balls and yet we lost every one, meaning that at least once a day we divided into scouting parties, dispersed to various parts of the Port Sorell Caravan Park and Camping Village and knocked on every caravan, shack and tent to ask the annoyed occupants: “Got any balls?”

After about 30 minutes we would reconvene at the swings, count the balls we’d managed to muster, and begin a new game.

Each day’s play began straight after breakfast and continued until it was either too dark or our mums called us for tea.

Gawd knows how many balls we went through.

Gawd knows where they all went. For that matter, gawd knows what happened to the Port Sorell Caravan Park and Camping Village.

I’m heading to Tassie for my holiday and I suppose I could make the trip from Launceston to find out.

Still, I probably won’t, because I prefer the way Port Sorell exists in my memory.

I suppose it went the way of caravan parks and camping villages all over Australia, bulldozed and replaced by resorts possessing all mod cons, not a skerrick of charm and no room for Test matches.

If so, I like to think there might have been a day during the digging of the foundations when the bloke on the excavator summoned the foreman, the project manager, the architect and, scratching his head, said: “You have to see this.”

And there, filling a hole where a hundred bland units would soon stand, were thousands of balls, the once lost and now found remnants of square cuts and hook shots, wild serves and errant smashes, missed goals and wide aims.

You know, the only ton Informer ever scored was while we were on holiday at the Port Sorell Caravan Park and Camping Village. I topedged a Slazenger over third slip to go from 98 to 100.

We lost the ball. I hope it’s still there, happily hidden in the holidays of my past, and unfound in the foundations of my childhood.