In a quiet Australian town, long ago, stood a modest weatherboard house. It had three ordinary steps at the front, but the four wooden backsteps leading down from the kitchen verandah opened onto a boy’s entire universe.
Fifteen paces ahead - thirty with seven-year-old legs - stood the dunny, its tippy tin tucked beneath a leafy vine. Once a week came the Night Soil Man, brave, dependable, and somehow larger than life. He would swap the full tin for a clean one without fuss, as if performing a sacred duty for civilisation itself.
Beyond the gate sat a green Morris Minor sleeping in a garage crowded with ladders, tools, bits of timber, old paint tins, and mysteries only fathers understood. In the far corner of the yard, chooks scratched and clucked around the veggie patch, occasionally escaping into forbidden territory whenever the gate was left swinging open.
Those backsteps were this boy’s favourite place in the world.
Beside them stood the rainwater tank stand like a faithful sentry, while a narrow timber deck stretched toward the laundry. During the day I would sit happily on the steps “watering” the blue hydrangeas in my own special way, always leaving the dunny door wide open because, in my young mind, spiders preferred privacy.
At night, things became more serious.
Armed with a candle in a tin holder, I would make the careful journey down the yard, checking every corner for redbacks before daring to sit down. Inside the dunny hung a mail-order catalogue and last year’s phonebook on rusty nails - the only available reading material for moments requiring patience and courage.
Life revolved around chores, as it did for most children then.
My older brother pushed the heavy mower across the yard, the blades whirring loudly as he negotiated payment.
“For two bob I’ll do it!” he’d declare dramatically.
Otherwise there would be no sweets for anybody.
My duties involved weeding and feeding the chooks. Each afternoon I collected still-warm eggs from the nesting boxes and spoke quietly to the hens in the private language understood only by seven-year-olds and chickens. The hens, for their part, seemed perfectly content with the arrangement.
And then came one crisp evening in November, 1957.
After a proper dinner of meat and three vegetables, I sat on the backstep beside Nancy, my loyal golden spaniel, leaning into her warm fur as the evening settled around us.
My father came outside and sat beside us. The timber creaked softly beneath our weight. Together we looked up into the enormous Southern sky.
“What’s the biggest number?” my father asked with a smile.
I thought hard but had no answer.
What followed was a lesson no school could ever properly teach.
My father spoke of endless beaches and grains of sand beyond counting. Then he explained that even numbers larger than all the sand on Earth still could not reach infinity. Above them, the Milky Way stretched silently across the heavens, filled with stars, planets, and suns beyond imagination.
“Now imagine,” Dad said, “that every star you can see is only a tiny beginning.”
I stared upward, trying desperately to grasp the impossible size of it all.
Then suddenly a bright light moved across the darkness overhead.
“There!” my father said excitedly. “That’s Sputnik. The Russians have sent a spaceship into the sky. One day men might even travel beyond Earth itself.”
My eyes widened as round as the fresh eggs I had collected that afternoon.
My imagination exploded.
The old books my father kept suddenly became more than stories. The stars no longer seemed distant pinpricks of light, but places. Possibilities. The universe itself had somehow drifted down and landed right there above the family backsteps.
Nancy simply wagged her tail and leaned against my leg, content to share the moment.
Years later, much of that little world would disappear. The old dunny would vanish. The Night Soil Man would become history. The chook yard, the Morris Minor, the rainwater tank and the weatherboard house itself would slowly fade into memory like so many things from old Australia.
But some things remain forever.
The creak of timber beneath father and son.
The smell of evening air after dinner.
The warmth of a loyal dog.
And a November night in 1957 when a small Australian boy first discovered infinity from four humble wooden backsteps.
No screens. No noise. No endless distractions.
Just family, wonder, and the first whispers of the Space Age drifting across the Southern sky.
Little Frankie
