ALBERT 'Paddy' Fuller was a dear old man but he was as blind as a bat and his brother Old Claude was as deaf as a post. In their later years, Claude lived with Paddy in his house near Tilly Willy Creek at Macksville.
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The love of fishing has always run strong in the Fuller family. Now Old Paddy's house backed onto the creek. It was about 15 steps from Tilly Willy Creek to the foot of Paddy's bed!
Unlike most people preparing to retire for the night, Paddy would bring out the fishing gear. A handline, hooks, sinkers, a strip of mullet for bait, a blunt fishing knife and a pretty rough old rattan fishing basket.
As you can imagine in a household with basically a blind man and a deaf man sharing the floor space it was to say the least in modern parlance, a bit dysfunctional.
The brothers shared a love for cricket and when black and white television arrived in Kings Point, the tv set was on whenever the cricket was being televised.
Although Old Paddy had a pair of horn rimmed glasses to correct his failing vision - whenever he put them down he could never find them.
What made this worse was that whenever he asked for help, Old Claude couldn't hear him!
Now likewise, Claude had a set of hearing aids and whenever they were misplaced Paddy was absolutely no help in looking for them.
This caused a bit of frustration in the Kings Point household. It got to a stage where they had to resort to military like precision in clearly defining what belonged to Paddy and where Claude stored his belongings.
Right down to the food they ate. In the fridge, Paddy's essentials were on one side and Claude had his perishables on the other. It was almost like the Mason Dixon Line down the centre of the fridge.
In the middle of summer when the cricket was on the tv it was easy to locate old Paddy's residence. When you came over the Macksville Traffic Bridge you could hear the dulcet tones of Alan McGilvray's cricket commentary coming loud and clear from over at Kings Point.
And you knew that sitting six inches from the tv screen would be Old Paddy peering at the elegant stroke play of Greg Chappell while Claude was relaxing back on the settee with the volume adjusted to its maximum level of decibels.
Now these two old codgers weren't always so. In his younger days Paddy was a fine horse trainer. Unlike the satellite stables of James Cummings and Godolphin with their millions of dollars and horses, Paddy had only one horse under his tutelage.
It was a fine thoroughbred named Dinki Di. Now I am not sure whether it was a colt, a stallion, a gelding, a filly or a mare. What history does record is that it really was Dinki Di. In other words, it tried its guts out around the local tracks at Bowraville and Newville.
Newville? Yes, this was a rather notorious track just west of Nambucca Heads. In the middle of the track there was a wet schlerophyl rainforest. This feature of the track often led to an unusually large number of stewards inquiries!
Newville was notorious for the number of coat-tuggers congregating around the rails bookmaking enclosure. Why? It was well known that when the horses disappeared behind the gum trees all sorts of shenanigans would take place.
Jockeys changing horses, horses being replaced by ring-ins, jockeys dropping and adding weights, horse shoes mysteriously falling off, you name it, it apparently occurred when those horses went missing behind the rainforest for about five minutes during a mile race!
One of the problems for stewards and ambulance back in those days was that Dinki Di could gallop faster than a car.
So that ruled out stewards following the race in the back of a T model Ford, looking for foul play. They just couldn't keep up!
But back to Old Paddy. Each night, with his fishing gear assembled, he would ready himself for a good night's sleep.
And he had the most unusual 'alarming' alarm clock.
After he had thrown his fishing line into Tilly Willy Creek loaded with a big juicy mullet bait, he retraced the 15 steps to his bedroom with fishing line in hand.
He would strategically place himself on the mattress so he could wrap the line around his big toe.
His alarm clock was now set.
And boy did he dream, not only of the prospect of being woken up with a 3lb bream on the end of his big toe, but also of days gone by when he had aspirations for his racehorse.
What better tribute to Australian racing could there be than Dinki Di wins the Melbourne Cup!
