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Iain MacDonald Eulogy

Iain MacDonald - a dynamic past President of Sydney Univerity Boat Club (196's and 70's_ died on 29th of September.

At Iain's funeral about 15 SUBC Alumni came dressed in the Blues Blazers in honour of Iain's Blue which rested on his casket.

Iain's son Hamish MacDonald gave the Eulogy which we reprint here. Thank you Hamish.



Iain Macdonald 1960's - a fierce competitor in a rowing boat


Eulogy :

Iain Macdonald was not short of opinions. So it came as no great surprise to any of his children last week when we learned he’d left specific instructions about any funeral notice in the paper: it should be, he said, “succinct, basic and free from any subjective statements”.

 

While these would be reasonable and prudent instructions for a journalist in most contexts, today is not most contexts. I will, however, do my best to answer ‘succinctly and basically’ the who, the what, the where, when, why and the how of Iain Macdonald. Its possible I might stray from the parameters of Dad’s directive so clearly articulated.

 

And as for subjectivity, it was a big life, but it was also a well-documented life. He leaves behind a universe of primary source material; photographs, letters, emails and newspaper clippings. In fact, Dad wrote me a letter every week I was at boarding school from the age of 11. It was always typed, always on Iain A Macdonald Jindabyne Pharmacy letterhead, always signed at the bottom “Love Dad, Iain A Macdonald” and always stamped with the Pharmacy seal.

 

Emails started coming in the early 2000’s and then really stepped up a gear when he first got the internet installed at East Jindabyne back in April of 2010. And for any of you who have ever been in correspondence with Dad, you’ll be familiar with his distinctive writing style. It often seemed to combine a stream of consciousness essay, with brief interludes of Haiku poetry, punctuated by Morse Code.

 

The ‘who’ is fairly straightforward: Iain Alisdair Macdonald was born on 29th August 1939, to Gertrude Croxon and Allan 'Ferg' Macdonald. It was a Tuesday, he was born on the floor of the living room at the house in Blacktown. A local midwife performed the delivery. The house was built by his Grandfather, Eric Croxon. Ferg was a senior rates clerk at Blacktown Shire Council. Gert, had a number of clerical jobs and was a fine musician.

 

2 years later, his much admired sister Heather was born. Dad described Heath as “a loyal, loving and compassionate sister” when he spoke at her funeral 12 years ago, proudly noting that they “never uttered terse or angry words to each other in adult life”.

 

When I asked Dad to paint me a picture of that time growing up, Dad described Ferg and Gert, who had a considerable age difference, as probably having met in a soup kitchen during The Depression. Ferg had emigrated shortly after WW1, on a ship repossessed from the Germans. 

 

It seems the frugal values of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland had travelled with Ferg from Oban and the Isle of Mull because there was no talk allowed at the meal table and Sunday was off limits for play. “So, what about happy memories from childhood?”, I asked Dad. In typically dour fashion he replied, “it was survival at home as a child, rather than happy memories.”

 

In truth, there was a bit more to it. Dad talked of a childhood wrapped up in nature. Walks through the bush and picnics and visits to farms. There was a chook shed behind the house next door, Heather and Iain would make their way around back to play. 

Ferg made a point of taking them to Watsons Bay on weekends which is where they learned to swim. Dad kept memories to the very end from down in the park where the sailing club is, Ferg and Gert with a thermos of tea, while Iain and Heather played in the water.

 

Here’s the ‘What’: Iain was a schoolboy at The Scots College, he was a pharmacist, a cross country skier and of course, a rower.

 

He’d gone off to Scots at the age of 11 in 1951, catching the train each day from Blacktown. He took up rowing in year 7, after seeing the ‘Head of the River’ and wanting to be part of the excitement.

 

It may seem unbelievable from his size and stature in adult life, but a description Iain would often hear as a child was that "he didn't cast much of a shadow". This initially meant he was put in the coxswain seat of the tub four in Double Bay and he recalled being paddled out towards Clark Island in the middle of the harbour, totally terrified because he still wasn’t much of a swimmer. He transitioned from Coxswain to Oarsman at 17, developing fairly late into a tall, lanky but strong rower. 

 

Rowing was of course Dad’s great love. Iain had many successes and many different roles. Eventually, he was recognised for ‘Lifetime Services to Rowing’. Kari found a letter this week from Gerard McInerny who Dad knew through the Pharmacy Board of Australia. Gerard congratulated Dad, saying “ultimately very few put back into their chosen sport or profession as much as they got out of it. You are one of that exceptional select band”. 

 

You see, Iain had failed the school leaving certificate which actually saw him work outside the pharmacy initially, rather than inside it, as a window cleaner at Soul Pattinsons in the city. He re-sat the exams at Sydney Tech and ultimately got into Sydney Uni for a diploma in ‘materia medica’.

 

When I asked Dad in the last couple of years what it was about rowing that so captivated him. He recalled a trip to Perth, in 1960 with the Sydney Uni 8. On the Swan River the coach, Dr Eric Longley, had said "Look Macdonald, if you can do that in a boat, you can do that in exams at the end of the year." This gave Dad the notion he had more to give and more to do. And as Dad said, “it was true”.

 

At uni Iain met Joan Louise, they married in 1963. Rory was born 1969 and then Kari two years later.

He went on to marry Carol and together they brought myself and Catie into the world. He was also a grandfather to Harry, Camilla, Finn, Louis, Hugo, Ben and Florence. He was so proud of them all and genuinely delighted in seeing each of them take on the world in their own ways.

 

Now to the ‘Where’: Jindabyne and the mountains were Dad’s place. Iain moved there in 1976 with Cas and they opened Jindabyne Pharmacy, then Perisher Pharmacy. Standing in the kitchen in East Jindy, or on the back deck looking across the lake at the weather coming in from Kosciuszko is where Dad liked to be most.

 

And over the years he developed an array of truly fascinating methods for forecasting that weather.

Sheep clustering on a particular hillside on the way into town indicated imminent snowfall.

There were almost constant references to what the Barometer was doing, even many years after it had stopped working. I think by then Dad was just feeling it in his bones.

And most precisely, 15 degrees and raining in Adelaide meant snow in Perisher within 48 hours.

 

The mountains were a place of many connections for Dad. Solving the world’s problems down at the newsagency with Bruce Rossel and Warwick McCabe, countless shopping trips to Aldi in Cooma with Simon Blazey (how can we ever thank you enough, Simon!?), Sunday Roasts with Vicki, Al and the girls next door, and begrudgingly fishing $2 coins out of the pharmacy till to give to Cate to go and buy more hot chips from the Kebab shop. 

 

There were visits too from Rory and Kari during school holidays. These were loud and fun and occasionally dangerous, like the time Rory’s driving lessons somehow became an all-in family activity. We piled on to the bench seats at the back of the Land Rover (if memory serves, without seatbelts) and headed for the dirt road to the tip and what was unquestionably a near death experience for all of us. Kari reminded me this week we were there for her early driving lessons too, also without seat belts. I can only conclude that either Kari’s driving was not as terrifying as Rory’s, or that some of that childhood trauma has now been successfully blocked out.

 

The mountains were also where Dad pioneered his trademark brand of pharmacy practice. This usually involved some unsuspecting customer walking in off the ski fields with either a sore throat, a runny nose, or both. Inevitably, they’d say “Have you got anything for a cold?”, to which Dad would stare down his spectacles from behind the dispensary and bellow “Have you been wearing a beanie?”, followed by a brief but well rehearsed lecture about how humans lose most body heat through the head. 

 

Dad did have lots of repeat customers though. He believed passionately in the right of people in regional Australia to receive top level health care, and if I can humbly offer, together I think Mum and Dad really did deliver this. By the end of his time working in the mountains Dad’s services extended well beyond standard pharmacy practice. He was a Justice of the Peace and even got his licence to marry people, no doubt with an eye to increasing nappy sales down the track!  

 

Dad also had some more, shall we say, ‘bespoke’ treatments. Macdonald’s Guthega Rub and Macdonald’s Black Cough Mixture. The common feature of these was that they were both brewed in tubs and vats at the back of the pharmacy and both stunk to high heaven. God only knows what was in them, but people did swear by them.

 

And while the mountains were his place, Iain was also a man of the world. Rowing had taken him far and wide. He worked for MSF in East Timor after independence. He’d led the Pharmacy Guild. He’d run the New York Marathon. Travelled to Rhodesia with Cas. And with Joan Louis, attempted to drive home to Australia from London in a Land Rover. 

 

Dad found people and made friends everywhere. Iain loved telling the story about heading East towards Mr Ararat in modern-day Turkey, pitching tents beside the vehicles to camp. Just on sunset one night they saw another car coming towards them with bright yellow kangaroos painted on it. Inside was Mason Thomas, who became a lifelong friend after that. 

 

The ‘When’: here’s the thing, Dad had a thing about being on time, or more precisely, being early. At least 30 minutes early to everything. And if there was an airport, or a bus terminal, or a train station involved, nothing less than two hours would do. And good luck to anyone who tried to get in his way, least of all Cas doing some last minute work with a hair dryer. 

 

Which brings me to the ‘Why’. With Dad, the ‘why’ often defied explanation..

 

I thought perhaps there’d be some answers in his letters and emails. Patterns, themes that emerge which explain him. I’ve spent time over the past week or so reading some of them. The letters started 32 years ago, in 1992. The emails start around 2004.

 

What stands out at foremost is that Dad was running a pretty strange sort of Alpine news service. Lots of weather reports. Rowing results. Climate change theories. Media analysis. And oddly enough, spot price checks;

 

  • National park toll gate entry is now $27.00 a day!?

  • Airfares are cheap to Maroochydore $79 each way.

  • Had a cheap motel at Gold Coast $60 a night.

 

Sometimes his different themes of reporting succinctly coalesced into one single story: “excellent Chris Masters report on ABC 4 corners last night on Ningaloo station remote camps…now the greens want to move them all out. Send them to eco resorts with wind-powered eco toilets...at $400 per night.”

 

Or this one, “i had a birthday dinner for you last night at the Lake Jindabyne Hotel... schnitzel and salad deal for $8.50.....quite good. who was the lady in doha on this mornings inside story programme..8.00 a.m. e.s.t.has dark hair.....she sure has a grating voice...?”

 

And sometimes it was difficult to tell where one thought stopped and another began: “dear hamish;hope your trip to the demilitarised zone is going smoothly, no pot shots from North Korea i can get some tickets to Dame Edna in Melbourne on Friday 19th Jan”

 

And a recurring theme through all of the years of correspondence is Dad’s lifelong battle with technology. I don’t want to be unfair to Dad, because he’s not the first person to struggle with tech. Its just that sometimes the drama with which he described it left you with the impression he thought he was trapped in a Matrix movie.

 

16th may 2010 “computer continues to be a source of anguish..but eventually i got  into the  system.” 

 

29th May “the lap top is still here,it really broke down yesterday i could not get it to start......some funny messages came up and i  think it had been hacked into....soon after i received a phone call from india offering on line repairs to my computer...i dont know how they knew unless they were hackers.....i was on my guard immediately and just said i am deaf and cant hear you.”

 

As I said, the why was often almost impossible to land on. But put together the emails do tell me something; 

 

Iain was a man with a deep desire for connection, even if the approach was sometimes unusual. 

He was a man engaged with the world, grappling always with the parts he wanted to understand.

He was a man who felt that the best gift he could give his children was to let them go out and embrace life, as long as you maintained a constant awareness of what the weather was doing back home.

He had a genuine interest in our lives. And you probably know he had a genuine interest in yours too.

I could almost guarantee that for each of you here today who knew Dad to any extent, there’d be an email or a letter one of us has received, telling a story about something you’d done or achieved. Or something your children did. Or something your Mum once did. Or your best friend did at school. 

You see, he loved stitching together those stories and tales over decades, countries, continents and life times. It was an enormous, intricate patchwork that existed mostly in his mind, but also manifested in that giant annual Christmas card mailing list that went out no later than October. He loved nothing more than pulling out some random fact from five decades ago about a person he once knew who turned out to be the uncle of the person you just met on a hillside on the other side of the planet. That was Iain Macdonald.

 

For all his strong and sometimes unconventional opinions, I’ve enjoyed thinking these past weeks about HOW Dad lived his life. When it came to his kids, he really wasn’t judgemental at all.  As a parent, he had a sort of ‘non-interference policy’. At times you might mistake it for distance, but I think in truth it was a deeply respectful form of love. He didn’t need to utter what he might call ‘subjective statements’, or tell you he accepted you, he just did.

 

He had clear principles. He was fiercely independent, sometimes defiant. And he was proud. 

 

But he was also ultimately open to change, he offered all of us a lesson in growth and evolution. As he aged, he mellowed. A bit. And softened. A bit. He listened and accepted and decided to live with things as they were, not as he wished them to be.

 

I don’t know if Dad ever imagined himself going to a gay wedding. But by the time Jacob and I got married, there was very little that was going to stand in his way of getting there. When I told him I was thinking of wearing a kilt in the family tartan, he immediately asked if he could buy it for me. And I laughed at the irony of Dad, who was deeply conservative, and had sent me countless emails about the threat to society that was Bob Brown, wanting to buy me a wedding dress.

 

Its become clear to my siblings and me in the past couple of weeks that Dad touched so many people’s lives. And in so many different ways. I think he’d probably like you to know that he told me in those final months “I’m not afraid of what’s to come”. As he kept telling his incredible carers, the wonderful Doctor Cathy and probably even Dr Steve well before that, “I’ve reached my use by date”.  

 

I think he’d like you to think of him occasionally if you spot some rowers out on the water, or when you’re eating fish & chips, if you’re down by Lake Jindy, or if you’re up in the mountains.  

 

To the end, his connection to the mountains remained powerful. It is where his mind still took him often, and it was where he belonged. In his final hour I read Dad some Banjo Patterson, ‘At the Melting Of The Snow’;

 

There's a sunny Southern land,

 And it's there that I would be

Where the big hills stand,

 In the South Countrie!

When the wattles bloom again,

 Then it's time for us to go

To the old Monaro country

 At the melting of the snow.

 

To the East or to the West,

 Or wherever you may be,

You will find no place

 Like the South Countrie.

For the skies are blue above,

 And the grass is green below,

In the old Monaro country

 At the melting of the snow.

 

Now the team is in the plough,

 And the thrushes start to sing,

And the pigeons on the bough

 Sit a-welcoming the Spring.

So come my comrades all,

 Let us saddle up and go

To the old Monaro country

 At the melting of the snow.


Iain MacDonald Funeral Notice

Iain Sculling on Lake Jindabyne

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