What is the 'it'?

The dust has settled on the “trial of the century”. The jurors have gone back to their previous lives (and possibly wishing/pretending that none of this had ever happened). The “sleepy hollows” of Morwell and Leongatha are returning to their former state of general somnambulism. This means that the time has come for me to tell my own Leongatha mushroom story.

In 1988, I was a junior lawyer working at the Leongatha office of Birch, Ross & Barlow, reporting directly to the senior partner, John Barlow – a very experienced solicitor and highly respected member of the community. (Birch, Ross & Barlow has been around a long time. My mum worked as a secretary for Mr Ross in the Korumburra office before she married my dad.)

Because the late 1980s were a time when an articled clerk could afford to buy a house (even with interest rates at 13.5 per cent), I was living on my own in an old weatherboard house on the main street of Leongatha.

The farm at Fish Creek where I grew up was 20 miles down the road. I often went back there on weekends, to visit my parents.

And so it was that on one particular Sunday we took our old Ferguson tractor into the paddocks to look for mushrooms. We picked the perfect day for it: there were so many that I took a box of them back with me to Leongatha that evening.

I knew I would never get through them all on my own, so I divided them in half, and the next morning I presented Mr Barlow with a plastic bag full of mushrooms. Why I did this I cannot now recall; my guess is that at some point we had had a conversation from which I took the notion that he liked mushrooms on toast. (Well, who doesn’t?) Anyway, he seemed grateful, if a little bit surprised.

That night, I cooked up my own share of the harvest and had a very decent feed. Half an hour later, I was vomiting my little heart out. Never in my life, before or since, have I been subjected to such violent torment. I was convinced that I was going to die. Somehow, between spasms I managed to telephone my parents, who were so concerned for my welfare that they sent the local ambulance crew around to check on me.

Eventually the heaving subsided, and I tried to sleep. It was a rough night – not because I was sick, but because my head was full of thoughts along the lines of, oh no, I have killed my boss; I will never be able to show my face in this town again; there goes a promising career. (Not that promising, as it turned out, but of course I didn’t know that then.)

The next morning I struggled out of bed and managed to drag myself to work. To my great relief, when I arrived Mr Barlow was sitting behind his desk, showing no outward signs of either death or discomfort. He saw me looking in at him. “What’s up?”, he asked. I explained to him what had befallen me the night before. “Ah”, he said, with a glint in his eye. “So you gave me the wrong half.”

And with that, another day’s work began.