This one was painful, but needs to go up, too
Peter Keith Nicolas
20 June 1964 to 4 September 2012
“9 triple-0 9 2”. The Nicolas home phone number. Everyone knew the number “9 000 92”. I normally used it to call Pete when I was in High school and in the many years after we left. The Nicolas family arrived in Budgewoi, just slightly too late for a 909- number. My own family’s number wasn’t too much before them at 909-623 – we went for years without a phone, in fact. Anyway, in late 1977 they ran out of 909 numbers and started giving out 900 numbers, and the Nicolases got the 92nd one.
Hands up if you know the number 900092?
Writing this eulogy has been hard. When I started writing these notes on Sunday, I’d think of an event we shared, write it down on a little square of paper, and then shed many a tear over that incident. It was a week since he went to hospital – five days after he died - and it was still so difficult to look back. It’s so sad to think there won’t be any more capers we can get up to together now, or any projects we can share.
I first got to know Peter when he enrolled at Gorokan High, starting in Year 8, 1978. Pete was the new kid, starting in year 8, rather than year 7 when all the rest of us started at Gorokan. Yep, Pete spent his first High School year at Bankstown Boys’ High – a bit of a different picture to Budgewoi in 1978, but he soon made up for his missed first year.
We had a lot in common – he was good at his schoolwork (always in the top class, of course). He was a musician – he learnt the violin and piano accordion in Primary School. He liked to read and was into technology. But I wasn’t blessed with Pete’s other talents. His sporting prowess was impressive and extensive. He played Rugby League and Hockey for Gorokan High School, plus represented them at athletics, in the 400m, 200m, long jump and triple jump.
I remember one day, waiting after a PE class. We had changed back into our school uniforms and Pete saw Mrs Cynthia Moore, PE Mistress to get a letter introducing him to the local hockey club and to testify as to his hockey prowess. She said something like “tell them who signed the letter was Cynthia Moore, who represented the state in Women’s hockey for many years, so I know what I’m talking about, etc, etc.”. Pete went on to become a formidable goalkeeper at local club level for the Northlakes Hockey Club at Norah Head.
One year Pete went to qualify for the long jump and triple jump. One of his jumps was enormous, but he was not so straight, and landed right on the edge of the sand pit, hitting the hard surface to the side of it with his leg. Pete went on to compete in other events later that day - I think he ran some races or similar. It was a few days later when returned to school having seen a doctor who told him he had broken his leg – it had to have been from the from the long jump pit! It turned out that Pete had completed that day of athletics on a broken leg.
Pete’s music skills were always put to good use. Early in Pete’s High School career, at one school assembly, Pete played “Zorba the Greek” on his piano accordion in the school hall, much to the amazement of the staff and students alike. The accordion resonated through the hall and had a grandiose effect. Apparently he had a few mechanical problems with the instrument, but otherwise everything went well and we were impressed by his talents. I don’t think he did anything like it again – his public performance skills were transferred to the keyboards instead of the piano accordion.
I remember my early days with Pete when I used to live at Budgewoi, too. We started a rock band in High School named “Full Stop” – someone said we should have made it “Full Stop and the punctuation marks”. Pete played keyboards, Clive Proud played rhythm guitar, and Chris Coble played bass. I can remember carting my drum kit from my house in Budgewoi, through a public laneway and over to Pete’s house. At Pete’s house there was an organ which was FAR too heavy to carry over to my place, or anyone else’s for that matter. But carrying a drum kit about a kilometre wasn’t too big a problem. What this meant was coming over to the Nicolases’ house which was large, had lots of facilities and might even lead to breakfast the next morning.
And Pete’s house had not just Weet-bix and Cornflakes, no. They had Coco Pops, and Nutri-Grain as well! You know, Nutri-Grain, the ones that look like cricket bats with holes in them. I’m sure when Mrs Nicolas did her weekly shopping trip she would have been amazed to learn how much cereal her boys; Paul and Peter seemed to get through in a week. But breakfasts were provided for quite a large number of people over the years, all at Pete’s place.
At school, Pete was always a leader. He was six months older than most of us, for a start. Owing to a mix-up in enrolling, Pete ended up serving eighteen months in kindergarten, so he always seemed to have this extra experience lacking in his mates. He was often one to go first at things. And we all looked up to him as a result.
With his Greek Adonis looks, Pete was certainly the subject of a few girls’ crushes at Gorokan High. Certainly a lot more than one Gorokan High old girl has mentioned this to me; and I’m sure a lot more besides exist who haven’t mentioned this to me as well.
There are plenty of good memories from school I can look back on. I remember when we reached year 11, Sport wasn’t compulsory any more. Pete and I used to go up with Mark Williams, to his place in Westbrook Avenue and play Canasta with Val Pickett; Mark’s Mum. We sometimes used to do this during lunch, and miss the period either side of it to do it (as long as it wasn’t Maths with Mr Britten). Pete had learnt many card and board games at home from his family. As you can see, these social skills were put to good use later, cutting lessons and skiving off from sport.
Pete was the guy in our school group who also got his Driver’s Licence first and that first car. How many of us can remember the number plate of Pete’s first Dato – the Datsun 1200 station waggon – the numbers were 623 and the letters were “G” “A” “Y”. That car had an amazing history, and it used to transport half a dozen students who lived in Budgewoi home every afternoon from Gorokan High to the sounds of Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. Pete’s stereo was the loudest part of the car – if he had a hole in his exhaust it wouldn’t have mattered – you wouldn’t have heard it over the heavy metal playing anyway.
That car had an amazing history; it was just as familiar making night-time trips up to the Watagans, as it was in Sylvester’s carpark at Charmhaven. When GHS did the Dracula Spectacula in 1981, I can remember loading up the Yamaha organ from my home and taking it into school to use in the musical. It slid into the back of the 1200 no worries at all. Yep, despite being a small car, it was quite roomy inside.
Once went I went bush-bashing at Buff Point I did a clutch plate in my HG Holden Station Waggon. I knew if I left the car there overnight it would have been set on by youngsters with nothing to do and it would be a little less driveable the next day. We already lost an unregistered Datsun 1000 there a few weeks before after we had to leave it overnight when it broke down. Next morning when we went back it had been destroyed – every window smashed, all the panels kicked in, all the spark plugs broken off in the block, and as a final insult, the bonnet had been ripped back, the air cleaner removed, and a huge lump of mud thrown down the throat of the carbie. I could see this happening to my car, so I got Pete to tow me back to his place. The poor little Dato was just able to do it, towing a car twice its weight. But it paid the price as due to all the clutch-riding Pete had to do, we had to replace the clutch in the 1200 a few days later. But at that point we were getting good at it, with all the practice!
One of the biggest duties the little Dato fulfilled became known as the “Newspaper Incident”. Not many people have heard the full story of this, but here we go. The Year 12 in front of us had a muck-up day in 1981. They didn’t really do much, but one of the results was a few pieces of newspaper (pieces, NOT pages) scattered around the schoolyard. We thought it was a pretty piss-poor effort for a muck-up day and us Year 11s would show them how to do it properly. Pete, myself and a few others who shall remain nameless, had seen that the lock on a window in the three adjoining social science rooms at the end of the block had been damaged, and if you climbed up a she-oak outside the window you could gain access to these rooms. (I’ve been back recently and that she-oak and a few others like it have all been removed, strangely enough).
So in the early hours of a Sunday morning we set out in Toukley, gathered up bundles of Sunday Papers from the various newsagents, and made it to the school. We gained entry to the classrooms and started to work scrunching up the paper and filling the rooms with a sea of newspapers. We got a bit concerned at one point with the fire risk, so we brought out the fire extinguishers in each room and made sure they worked.
It took us hours. We were there for so long, but after a while we had all three classrooms filled to desk-height with scrunched up newspaper. I can remember Pete “swimming” through it toward the end as a sort of victory lap. I would have loved to have seen the look on the face of the cleaner who opened that room on the Monday morning! It would have been amazing. We brought the newspapers in in a little Dato 1200, but the school had to call for a light truck to cart them back out.
And all hell broke loose, as the Tuesday was to be the first H.S.C. English
Examination. In fact the first HSC exam the school had ever held, and it was to be in these three rooms! Terry Franklin, the acting Principal (Miss Foley was on Long Service Leave) was furious that someone would do this in order to sabotage the examinations. We really had no idea about the dates of the exams (ignorant year 11s didn’t care when the year above them had their HSC). It was just a fluke. And the fact that the exams didn’t start till Tuesday sort of saved us – although that was a total fluke as well.
Anyway, we proved beyond a doubt that if there was a paperchase involved, we were more than up to the task with our little sea of newsprint filling rooms up to nearly waist-height. If we had more guys rolling up newspaper pages, we could have filled the room head-height, no worries. Sunday papers DO go that far in those days, but while it started off with five guys doing the job, we lost a couple after an hour or so, and I’m pretty sure it was just three of us doing the newspaper rolling for about four hours until the sun came up.
It’s probably true to admit, that although High School was just six years of our lives (just five, with me and Pete), we crammed more shenanigans into that time than any other period since.
In the early 80s, Pete started to do a science degree at Newcastle Uni, the first year we started, 1983, was an adventurous year, with the trip TO the uni probably more important to us than what we did in the uni. We failed horribly in first year, so we struck up again to do it in 1984 – Pete, myself and Ian Johnson moved into a house in Mayfield West at that time, and so started the Newcastle segment.
A few years later, Johnno and I went on to our Kempsey days, and Pete followed along, this time in his Nissan Sunny – 1400cc station waggon again. Come 1987 we were back home again, and after a round of minor computers (the Vic-20 and Commodore 64 type) Pete got an amazing device called an Amiga computer. Again, Pete was the first to buy one of these machines, and we played many a day on “Alternate Reality” where Pete had the map of an entire medium-sized medieval village mapped out on A4 sheets taped together and entirely covering one part of his bedroom wall. Other uses for the machines became apparent – I got an Amiga for Christmas 1987 (an early gift, it was, too) and started to play around as well.
By 1990 Pete and I were both running Bulletin Board Systems – Inquestor BBS in Newcastle was mine, and running the same software – OzMetro, TrapDoor, TrapToss and Plutonic on a little A500, was Pete’s Budgie BBS. We processed a LOT of mail messages through those systems. Pete went all political and became Zone Mail Co-Ordinator for the GlobalNet message distribution network, and we distributed mail in mail networks Fidonet, Coastlink, AmigaNet and GlobalNet just to name a few. Pete used to carry a few more networks than me, in fact.
In 1996, Pete surprised us all by offering to take on the role of Josef Hulz in a play I was directing at the time, called “Other Times”. This play was the middle play in the “Summer of the Seventeenth Doll” series. I was living at Toukley at the time and Pete was visiting. Pete had been helping me out a bit with the administration of the play, and we had just addressed envelopes for, stuffed and mailed off the publicity mailout for Wyong Drama Group’s next show, “Other Times”. I mentioned to Pete that we were having problems finding someone to play the role of the spurned male friend of Nancy, who gets rejected in favour of the main character Barney. He was Austrian, and because he was resident in Australia during the war, he gets sent to an internment camp for many years. He tries to renew his friendship with Nancy, and we see that there was a lot of genuineness there, but Nancy goes off with Barney instead.
Pete played the role with such skill and attention to detail. He had learnt all his lines miles before anyone else in the play had, and was often able to help with prompting. I wasn’t expecting to be in the play (just directing), but as things panned out, I had to step in and play the role of Barney with just two weeks notice. It was an absolute joy to work with Pete in the play – his dedication was fantastic and he shocked us all with his many talents. I can remember his Mum Sylvia coming forth and saying we never knew how you got Peter to do the acting role, but well done for getting him to step out of his shell and play a character on stage.
If anyone’s interested, there is a DVD available with the Wyong Drama Group Production of “Other Times” showing Pete in his role as Josef Hulz. I should be able to get you a copy if you give me your mailing address and are patient.
Pete later stepped out of his shell by playing keyboards for Blue Max, and other groups (Need more here).
I’m not sure how to end this piece, but maybe if I let you know how the end was for me, then this will let the story come to an end naturally. About 8 weeks ago now I phoned Pete up, out of the blue, to see how he was going. I hadn’t made contact for a few months previous. He answered the phone in a pained voice, and he couldn’t keep the conversation up. He was so exhausted, and tired that he couldn’t string an entire sentence together. I didn’t think too much of it and didn’t phone back for probably a month, and when I did, I was in hospital, just killing time while on the ward. He sounded worse and was totally zapped of energy. I rang Paul with my concerns, but he assured me that Pete did NOT want to go to hospital, despite the offer being on the table at any time.
Pete steadfastly avoided going to hospital, as you may well know, he absolutely hated them, and anything else to do with the modern Western Medical System.. Fortunately after three weeks they let me out, and a few days later (Thursday 30 August) I went up to see Pete. He was stuck in his chair, very weak and had to get my help to move himself back up in the chair after he had slipped down. I came back on the Saturday night (1 September) and he seemed a bit better. He was able to talk for longer periods, but he was still dreadfully weak – he said to me that he’d just run out of energy.
On Sunday morning Paul phoned me to say Pete had called him up and said he had to go to hospital. They phoned an ambulance and Pete walked into the back of the vehicle which took him to Wyong Hospital. After a lot of tests, scans and interviews Pete went into the High Dependency Unit (a little like Intensive Care only each patient is one-on-one to a nurse in the ICU, whereas in the HDU it can be two-on-one).
I came in to see him on Sunday afternoon, but was told he was still sleeping and too tired to see anyone else (other than his brother Paul). On the Monday I phoned, and they said he had just been put on a ventilator, and he wouldn’t be able to talk to me anyway.
On Tuesday I just went up, and at 3pm they said they’d like to take Pete off the ventilator and se if he could still breathe. He may not, or he may go on for weeks. There was a 4-inch mass on his lungs, and a litre of fluid around his heart, so it was pretty bad – we should get all the family members together for the extubation.
By 6 O’clock everyone had arrived – Paul, Megan, Talia, Sara, Korrine, Lauren and myself and he was taken off the ventilator. He kept breathing by himself, but never did resume consciousness. As the hours went by, Megan and the girls went to get food, leaving me and Paul there. I waited a while longer and ended up going home at about 9 O’clock.
After I’d gotten home and settled in a bit, my mobile phone rang. It was Paul, and I knew what it was before hitting the answer button. Alas he had gone, about half an hour after I left, at 9:30. He just ended up breathing more and more slowly, and finally stopped. It was really peaceful. Pete had finally completely run out of energy, and started a big long Astral Travel.
We’ll all miss you so much, Peter Nicolas.
I think we should all give him a final applause, not just for his role as Josef Hulz back in 1996, but for his entire life. Indeed let’s make it a standing ovation.
Peter Keith Nicolas (1964-2012)
