Steve Dillon, from Thirroul, tells Janice Creenaune how the inspiration of others has set him on a career in the environment and nurtured an interest in history.
Steve has always felt fortunate to have grown up in the ancient and awesome Hawkesbury district, the land of the Dharug and Kuringgai. From a very early age, inspiring parents broadened his horizons, yet taught him to focus on the detail surrounding him. Bushwalks were an adventure and an education.
“One of my earliest memories on one of these treks into the forested valleys below was being shown a native bee, exhausted, and dying, curled up in the seemingly protective petals of a wax flower.”
That his parents could use this experience to talk of the role of the bee in its short, busy life no doubt was a formative lesson on nature and perhaps also engendered admiration and empathy for all living things and the part they play in the environment.
With subtle parental guidance, a desire for an aviary was transformed into the creation of a garden of wildflowers encircling the property, attracting all manner of birdlife, free to come and go.
Across the landscape was evidence of the culture of the first peoples of the Hawkesbury, Deerubbun.
“The fish engravings on a riverside boulder, hand stencils under a wave-like sandstone overhang, generational accumulations of middens combined with my parents’ influence, I developed a great respect for traditions and cultural diversity.”
Steve’s memories of long-abandoned cottages and the remains of convict-made roads also sparked a fascination for history.
“We discovered old cemeteries hidden in the bush. The moss and lichen decorated inscriptions on the headstones, telling of lives and families from a century before.”
Steve’s parents were instrumental in him meeting people with connections to history. Once he met a bloke who rode for Cobb and Co.
“I chatted with a ‘bullocky’ from the Border Ranges, walked with a gentleman who took a flight with [Sir Charles] Kingsford-Smith. I became best mates with Arthur, a veteran of the Gallipoli Landing, Lone Pine and the memorable evacuation. The recollections told were priceless.”
Steve believes the retelling of these tales – some about mundane trench routine, others about the horror of action – emphasise that it is life not myth that is essential to remember.
“Arthur shed tears, 75 years on, [remembering] the foe falling thickly before their lines. And quietly spoken Bill, a Light Horseman who rode in the charge of Beersheba.
“Legends and myths arise, but it is important for me to believe that the place of the real person and empathy for their experience is what history is all about. This was particularly so when my parents arranged a picnic with Nancy Wake, ‘The White Mouse’, a woman of exceptional valour who witnessed the greatest and the worst in humanity.”
Steve has carried on this tradition of connecting to history and of celebrating nature.
His own children have also met remarkable people: treasured Holocaust survivors, Eddy and Olga, with philosophical advice; an unassuming Bomber Command hero; a spitfire pilot; a member of the Polish Resistance; a Royal Navy officer:
a friend of Prince Philip and an acquaintance of Winston Churchill; endearing veterans of Tobruk, El-Alamein, Sanananda and Kokoda.
Steve believes the wisdom of prior generations, enriched by one’s own experiences, come with a cross-generational obligation to pass on that knowledge.
Writer Janice Creenaune is a volunteer for the PKD (Polycystic Kidney Disease) Foundation. For more info, contact janicecreenaune@gmail.com
