Short Memory: the story of the Oils' Peter Garrett, his great grandfather the Test player, and a curious find in a Sydney op shop

TW Garrett played the first Test, his grandson played the circuit

Pete Garett Midnight Oil and his great grandfather TW Garrett

On the corner of my street, down from my house, is a quirky business called Reverse Garbage. It’s one of the many enterprises that have adapted to the spaces left since the automotive industry up and left Sydney’s Inner West, and when I need to stretch my legs, I will wander down and poke around among the odd things they recycle.

Lately, I’ve been distracted by the collection of trashy sporting trophies celebrating events and pursuits past. At one point, there was a wheelie bin or two filled with the gaudy celebrations of minor achievements. Today, you could pick up Jo-Ann Cahill’s 1996 trophy for participating in the St Joan of Arc netball team (below), but if you were hoping for a representation of Joan in armour or in flames, you’d be disappointed.

I don’t invest all that regularly, but I recently bought a red velvet cocktail bar (pictured below) and donated it to old mate at Willie the Boatman. Another time I got a really good jar of nails, a hand-operated vintage drill that didn’t work and a coat rack that I pulled apart and never put back together.

Last week, I resisted the temptation to buy a slot car set, but it was a hard one to leave behind.

For god’s sake, when is the real cricket going to start again?

Anyways, the music section has generally been bereft of anything of interest. There’s a lot of that shit you find clogging op shops that nobody wants and everybody wonders why anyone had it in the first place; Harry Secombe, Val Doonican, RSL crooners covering the Beatles, some dickhead with a Hammond L-100 playing music for a Fondue-party and plenty of shellac 78rpm cracklefests.

(I just wandered down while on the phone doing a debrief of the annual dinner, and am happy to report that a brilliant box of mixed cassettes awaits a new home. The person who made them had some good taste, and now I’m annoyed that I had to leave my last tape deck on a footpath in St Kilda because I couldn’t fit another piece of stereo equipment in my luggage for the plane ride home.)

Reverse Garbage interiors, including the cool bar I picked up there a few months ago which is now a DJ desk at Willie the Boatman

Last September, I found Great Moments in Australian Sport, a double LP narrated by Norman May and “incorporating the sports trivia quiz game”. Horseracing, cricket, the Olympics and the Commonwealth games were all given a side each, with the remaining tracks dedicated to “general sport”. My eyes were immediately drawn to the banger first track on Side 2: The First Test Match – 1877, The Voice of TW Garrett.

I recognised that name. TW, or Tom, is the great grandfather of Midnight Oil frontman Peter Garrett. It’s not much of an interview, just a grab about the east-west orientation of the wickets and the effect the light had on the players at either end of the day, but it’s something.