Well all children have a Nana nothing special about this statement you may say. But see, I have never met anyone else who had a Gonga. I remember clearly the perplexed and quizzical look on my school friend’s face when I said that I was going over to Nana and Gongas place for the weekend. I really thought that everyone knew what a Gonga was apparently not! As I understand it, the first grandchild Margaret, used her editor’s license to pronounce Granddad as Gonga and it stuck! Her initial lead was taken up by all members of my generation until my Granddad came to be known affectionately as Gonga. Now Nana kept a very neat and orderly house and managed to maintain that status under this simple principal – quiet, gentle, doll playing sisters were welcome inside whilst rough-house rowdy boys must find their entertainment where they belong – in the backyard. Well Gongas yard contained one item of huge magnetic attraction for us boys the macadamia nut tree. It was always our first comfort stop, after being refused entry into the well preserved antique and historically appointed house. We boys would excitedly rummage through those nuts lying on the ground to find a prized specimen with the greatest possibility of providing a culinary delight. The first inspection of any nut was to check if a little borer worm had not already beaten you to those inner delicacies. Another method to increase the odds of a good find, was to wait for David to shake the tree and then beat your brothers in the race to the newly fallen tasty morsels. Having collected a folded back shirts full of eating possibilities, we then proceeded to break into Gonga’s sacred site his tool shop. It was located under his high-set timber house at Wavell Heights. Now, Pip and Tom were expected to squeeze through the ornate 6 inch wide fibro slats in order to open the laundry door to let the bigger brothers inside. Once free to explore that normally locked and forbidden underground zone, there was usually a rush for only one item Gonga’s bench vice. Now by holding the hard shelled casing of the nut in the vice and winding the straight bar handle vigorously, one would hopefully gain access to the taste of one of God’s specially created delicacies. Now I say hopefully, because it was not as easy as it seems. Firstly, one must remember to remove one’s fingers from the advancing jaws else the resulting pain from the trapped pincers tendered to negated the pleasure obtained from that tasty entree. Secondly, quite often the exploding crack in the hardened casing simply provided a quick escape for the now rather distresses worm who would wriggle off along the vice leaving you to try and enjoy what remained of his tasty meal. Thirdly, there was no guarantee that the extracted nut was going to be a pleasurable delight or an offensive let down. Our eye was not so specialist trained as to visually identify the divergent palate difference between the first or second experience, but our humour was unmistakably fully developed as we derived much enjoyment from our brother’s spiting cursing reaction to the rotten bitter Russian-roulette gamble of the second. Now, the real art to nut cracking, was to be able to break the outer shell but still leave the soft nut on the inside completely in tact. This precise procedure sometimes meant that the tension in the shell was not completely released and so it would spring closed on your keen-to-remove fingers as the pressure was taken off the crushing vice. The yelping sounds of another pinched finger convinced David to take a slightly different approach to nut cracking. He found some wire in the metal waste bin and proceeded to pick Gonga’s locks that were securely fixed to his tool cupboard. Minutes later David was into the tool cabinet removing a huge hammer with which to smash those nuts to smithereens so as to pick out his food. There was just no finesse to David’s nut cracking style, but he did display a certain flair and obvious profitable talent for the art of lock picking. I am convinced that the profits from his lock picking talents would have secured enough funds by now to purchase his own nut factory, rather than simply being the headmaster of one.
