August 2nd, 2025Kyle’s Rant
David Hastings is a journalist, writer and English teacher based in Auckland, New Zealand. He has worked in London, Melbourne and Auckland in newspapers and in broadcasting. He was TV news editor at the ABC in Melbourne from 1983 to 1987.
In his latest book he writes: “In the spring of 2022, an email with the subject line, ‘book thought’, dropped into my inbox. It was from Kevin Childs, an old friend and veteran journalist, who at the age when most old journos have long since hung up their quills, was still plying his trade on The Local, a lively news magazine that covers the Central Highlands of Victoria.”
This refers to a meeting between Kevin and my father Cliff Barnes, a man of many words and a frequent visitor to our piece of paradise. Who on this auspicious Sunday afternoon I was not terribly happy with. No big deal, just a father and son spat. So I got on with drinking and telling raucous jokes in the corner of the bar, like most Sundays after deadline, and left him to his own devices. He and Kevin started chatting…and this meet-cute was the catalyst to David writing a book about the adventurous old bugger. A New Zealand-based, risk-taking, commercial fisherman who sunk his boats on more than one occasion, used up all nine lives, and then some.
His story, through David’s amazing words, is now available from Daylesford’s Paradise Bookshop and you can feel the danger of the man through the pages. I am risk averse, quite the opposite to Cliff, perhaps from growing up around the man.
One of my first memories, around five, involved him asking me if I could swim. I said I had been learning to float at the Ngunguru Primary School, where a creek to the beach doubled as our pool. And like that he flung me over the side into the brine to see if I could or was embellishing my abilities. Unfortunately the latter was true.
Another time, eight now, he wanted to check if there was any voltage coming from the end of a spark plug, so asked me to hang on to it. As he kicked the engine over I gave out a yelp and he quickly returned to looking for the fault. Clearly no voltage issue. A spark plug produces 12,000 to 45,000 volts.
More sparks when I was 18 and he taught me how to test a battery by simply arcing a screwdriver from one terminal to the other, If the spark is white, it’s dead and if it’s blue, it’s okay. I took this knowledge to my marine engineer’s class and was told to get out – something about sparks not being desirable on boats. Thanks, Dad.
As his deckhand he usually was inside the wheelhouse with my step-brother and myself working out the back. I once found myself on fire as he had lit the stove in the wheelhouse with a paper towel and tossed out the burning remnant onto the back of my jumper where it quickly took hold.
Another time we were pulling up snapper in the freezing winter and I had a wrestle with a particularly big unit which smacked me in the nuts with its tail. At the same time the boat violently pitched and rolled which ended with me being washed around the deck, cuddling the snapper, covered in hooks. Dad (aka Slipper Skipper as he was eventually known) was standing at the door of the warm wheelhouse with Milo in hand yelling “get up there’s no sleeping on the job”.
For my part in the book there were plenty of fun adventures and hard knocks and reading it gives me a better sense of what made the man and how he came to be the briney battler that he once was and still is to a lesser degree. It also pointed out a few amazing parallels that I have had in my life at the same age as Dad – a cleaning business and skipper for Hikurangi Fisheries among many.
For your chance to win a copy of Hook, Line and Misadventures, let me know in 25 words or less why you want to read about an old man’s memories of nearly killing himself at sea a few times. Who knew he had a book in him, rant over.
