written by Gerry Clarke

The adventure of Pocket Books takes me into discussing business sectors and community concepts over a very wide range. Pocket Book itself contains every type of business classification covering all of a community's wealth generating firms, as well as geography and town settlement through maps, and hobbies, pursuits, sports through club listings and government listings and even theology through churches.

With Pocket Books we reach the whole conundrum of society! So there is a lot to draw upon for these articles. Over twenty-six years, I have written over 160 front cover stories, as well as thousands of advertisements; and, drawn nearly all the maps.

While I have had numerous friends and contacts in all political parties, I have been a member of the Liberal Party since I could first join as an 18 year old young liberal in 1969. My father, Calvert, a staff sergeant in the AIF, with his friend photographer Damien Parer, had seen the young wartime prime minister, Robert Menzies, on his tour of the Middle East in 1941. By the mid 1960's he was on Bob's Liberal Party electorate committee, and, at one stage, chairman. So most of my family, with ten brothers, followed Menzies' "small-l" Scottish version of liberalism. One gets to know a lot of people, and from time to time some of the ideas get accepted.

My brother Adrian (1947-2015) who never joined a party, probably had more important ideas accepted than me. In about 1968 he had been 'harassed', once again, by local constabulary because he was 'showing off' by having and wearing a seat belt. (He had seen several friends badly injured, and realised a seat belt saved lives and injuries in car crashes.) This particular time, he arrived home, finding Rupert (Dick) Hamer visiting dad. Dick was not yet premier, but a minister in the Victorian Liberal Government. Adrian's concepts about seat belts were taken up by Mr Hamer, and by the police minister who was the member for the neighbouring electorate of Hawthorn, leading to, to my knowledge, the first compulsory seat belt legislation anywhere in the world.

Later Adrian, working with my twin brother Anthony, took motions right through the then liberal government with the support of Premier Jeff Kennett, for the establishment of industrial hemp as a farming industry in Victoria. Adrian had developed a revolutionary decorticating machine, which allowed hemp to be separated, while being harvested, into seeds, fibre and hurd. Adrian told me that this hemp had a little side benefit: when grown within a few kilometres of an illegal marijuana hothouse, the hemp pollen would seek out the illegal stressed female plants and completely destroy the illegal THC drug!

One of my own main successes was to get the LNP State Convention to pass a motion in 2008 saying that we should be able to have upto a 2kw electric motor on push bikes. We still have not yet had the LNP shadow cabinet, not the LNP real cabinet when in office, to agree; but we are still working on this.

I did have one interesting success. My wife and I had bought a 'rural' zoned 28 acre property instead of a 'rural-residential' two acre property because a local Caloundra council official had said 'you are not permitted to sell even one dollar of produce off a rural-residential block'. Some ten years later I mentioned this in some general discussions with our local member Andrew Powell, who was then a Minister for the Environment. I said Doug Anthony, federal leader of the National Party in the 1970's, had always supported rural-residential because these residents sometimes go on to become real farmers. A few months later, mid 2014, Andrew stated in his electorate newsletter that he did get Queensland legislation changed to allow farm and garden produce from home blocks to be sold or bartered; regardless of what any local councillor or technocrat might decree!

Anyway, this Gerry's Corner, won't be spending all its energy on politics. There are many more interesting topics.

I was born on 15th June 1951, about forty minutes after my twin brother. My parents already had four sons - Clement, David, Adrian, Calvert - so mother, Nancy, was praying to St Gerard, the patron saint of mothers, for a daughter. As mother says "he laughed as he gave two more sons". So I was named Gerard after St Gerard, and my twin was named Anthony, I think after St Anthony of Padua. I have visited one of his saint shrines in Slovenia. In the ensuring years, St Gerard laughed a bit more, giving mum four more sons - Lowen, Paul, Philip and James. Being right in the middle of the family, I have good connections, which do come from reasonably close age similarities, with all my brothers. In the 1950's, we were the largest all-boy family in Australia, from one marriage. For babies 8, 9 and 10 we appeared on the front page of the Melbourne Herald newspaper. St Gerard was well known for his ability to levitate - a theme to which I will return in later writings.

My twin brother, Tony, is a migration agent. In his 32 years of this vocation, he has assisted over three thousand families to come to Australia. One of his Indian clients once joked to him: that date, 15th June 1951 is very important. Add up the digits of 15.06.51, and you have 666. Well, I don't think this is any sign of the devil, especially when this is just one way of adding up the digits. However, on our 64th birthday in 2015, that date of 15th June was certainly important. It was the 800th anniversary of the first signing of the Magna Carta at Runnymead in England by King Richard iii. Eight hundred years is 8 centuries, and 8 squared is 64.

As more brothers arrived in the family, I think my mother decided in 1952 that the family should move from Glen Iris, where dad, as a boy, had been to Caulfield Grammar, to Kew where all the boys could attend the Jesuit Catholic Xavier College. During the war, father had had his own epiphany walking in the steps of Jesus carrying the cross around Jerusalem, converting there from Anglican to Catholic. Dad, who had been a builder, decided to change to the profession of Real Estate Agent; he was quite well known in Kew. I worked with him for about ten years.

In 1967, our religious knowledge teacher in Year 10, told how Joseph of Arimathea, the wealthy uncle of Jesus, had taken the close family of Jesus to Marseilles in the South of France. He even mentioned, yes in 1967, Mary Magdalene, with daughter, Sarah, being on this boat. Thirty years later, I read more detailed information about this journey with the suggestion that Mary Magdalene was the wife of Jesus, and Sarah, their daughter. I knew this story pretty well, long before the novel, Da Vinci Code, was ever written. Sir Joe Bljeke-Petersen might have even known more. His farm property, near Kingaroy, was called Bethany. Bethany was the legendary name of the group of people, which claimed to include Jesus himself surviving the crucifixion, settling in York in northern England. (Joe's old family probably knew a lot about names and history. Even Kingaroy has a double royal meaning, as "roy" is also King, being the Latin.)

In 1969, I was appointed captain of the Xavier College Cross Country Team by our coach, Pat Clohessy. We won the Victorian schoolboy championships for the first time. A young member of the under 16 team helped ensure that Xavier won for many years - Robert deCastella. A big feature of the 1969 year was that a good friend of Pat Clohessy, Ron Clarke, attended the team's awards night. Ron held 18 world records; much later he became mayor of the Gold Coast.

In 2015, I still run about 5 km about three times a week. In 1969, I also formed a social work group at Xavier, and was President of the Xavier Chess Club, and vice-president of the Victorian Junior Chess League. Years later, chess sort of re-entered my life.

In 1990, I married Nevenka Golc, who had been the chess champion of Slovenia! We have one son Gerard who is now 23 and studying his masters in psychology in Edinburgh, after attending University of Queensland, a French university and Ljubljana University in Slovenia. At 13, in Canberra, playing trumpet he won the brass section of the Australian National Eisteddfod against university competition.

The mentioning of this teacher from 1967 did have an ulterior purpose. This showed that the Jesuits were often teaching "more" than other religious orders within the Catholic Church. They also had missionaries in India. So they were interested in some of the extraordinary things being done there. St Gerard levitated; the Jesuits could see in India the levels of consciousness that Gerard would have attained to do this levitation. So seeking this, and doing it (if only in part) in the 1980's was well within the scope of knowledge and seeking still in harmony with the Jesuit thought of Catholic religion.

While I worked in the real estate profession in Melbourne, I wrote most of the advertising copy for properties, and started to sell businesses. This lead to independent firms of advertising. I started a small firm of placing advertisements around the edge of a Safety Calendar - this was four hundred safety hints to do with resuscitating people to recognizing drug addictions. In 1980, there were nine of these, with two thousand to four thousand copies each, in places like: Taralgon, Morwell, Bairnsdale, and a few towns in Qld, including Gladstone. In Gladstone, one lady client said how she also needed to spend on phone book, and that was essential.

Years later I remembered those words as I sold and wrote advertising for Yellow Pages for a period in the 1980's. In the 1980's advertising with them was really essential for business; so long as your business was located in the right town. I later realised that in country phone zones, businesses in the second sized city could never really justify spending five or six thousand dollars on a single advertisement to be near the front of the classification, while similar firms in that phone zone's primary city spend the same dollars but had four times the potential client base.

In 1990, after selling businesses in real estate for some years, my wife, who was an IT expert, and I, designed the Pocket Book concept, for second sized cities in regional phone zones. This allowed local firms to have the prime position within their classification without being unfairly outbid by firms in the major city of the zone.

These days we expanded the directory services to online media of which I will write more in another article.