Uncle Chris

Uncle Chris is my dad's older brother - a fraternal twin to my uncle Jeff. When Chris was a toddler my grandmother accidentally left a pot boiling within reach of him and he pulled the pot down upon himself and was so badly scalded that he had a really bad scar down the right side of his face including an eyebrow that was raised taut from the scar. This scar affected his confidence throughout school and for a lot of his life he has been rather reclusive.

Chris never married. He lived with my grandfather at Greenlaw, the former home of Lord and Lady Knox, in Ferntree Gully, and cared for him right up until my grandfather died at home. After Grandad died, Chris' siblings decided to sell the property. It was worth a fortune to developers and after the usual amount of . He did not cope with the idea of leaving Greenlaw. He flitted between his sister and his brother's homes for a little bit until it was made patently clear that he needed to find a place of his own.

Interestingly enough, he didn't end up being on his own. He bumped into a family friend at a gathering and apparently she said something to the effect of, "Oh, is that Chris? He's gorgeous" and the next thing my uncle is living with her in her house in San Remo.

Their relationship has always been ambiguous. When you visit them she will talk non stop about her family and make constant references to her late husband and his collection of antiques and you will not see any public displays of affection. Then one time Chris came to visit us here in Horsham with his lady friend. They were to sleep in the bungalow up the back. There was a really comfortable timber queen size bed and then one of those awful sofa beds where the mattress is thin enough to feel the bar under the middle of one's back. Chris asked for a separate set of sheets for the sofa bed. It did not go un-noticed that the sheets remained folded and unused for the entire stay.

Chris had a few bumps in his road. Early on in the piece, and this is just folklore passed on from other family members, Chris went to see Billy Graham, the evangelist, when he came to Melbourne and the story goes that he locked himself in his room for a year afterwards in a deep depression. What's interesting is that he emerged an atheist. This became very obvious in the weeks leading up to the weekend my sisters and I were due to be christened in the Anglican church. Mum had waited until my baby sister was born to do this and Chris was supposed to be our godfather. He declined and he also declined to come to the ceremony. Uncle Jeff ended up with the job instead.

Later on, Chris had a job with the Agriculture department writing AgNotes, helpful, collectible leaflets made for all types of farmers, that went into a binder. At the same time he invested all of his hard-earned savings into Christopher Skase's get rich quick pyramid scheme and of course, us Victorians know, it completely collapsed and Skase took off to Mallorca in Spain and the money was never recovered.