“I was a creative storyteller, which the teachers saw through pretty quickly, but in the book, I did endeavour to be factual. I have a lot of postscripts of a news item or photos or something to show that there was some truth to what I was saying.”
Mr Dean said he decided to write down some of his stories about a decade ago, about the time of his 60th birthday.
“I started writing individual stories, vignettes, like a little window. Each one’s a separate, self-contained story,” he said.
“So, it didn’t have to flow. It flows chronologically, but doesn’t flow story-wise. It’s just little insights, which lasted a few minutes in life, but to me, that’s worth a page or two. And so, I found it was my style.
“You can read one in isolation. But if you read a lot of them, then you get to know the same characters – my siblings, my old man, mum, the neighbours, and workmates I had.”
Stories of cleaning Treasury Place, rite-of-passage sibling torment, and a police chase are among Mr Dean’s punchy, moment-in-time vignettes.
“I’ve got some tough stuff in there, and I’m not always a hero,” he said.
“I told my little sister she was adopted – she didn’t know who I was because I’d been away for two years in the mines and there was such a big age difference.
“At the end of the chapter, I had to write, ‘Sorry, Poison’, which was her nickname.”
Mr Dean’s brother Joe also features for a stunt he pulled at the Grand Canyon in the United States.
“One of my sisters had warned me not to take him to the US, that he’d be trouble, but I said he would be right. We – Joe, myself and a friend Brad – were walking along on a Sunday morning in front of the Grand Canyon, and I eventually left them behind,” he said.
“I heard screaming and about a minute later, Brad ran to me and told me that Joe had told him to stand still, and as an elderly American couple walked towards them, Joe dropped off the edge.
“The woman screamed, and she and her husband went to get the ranger before Joe popped his head up from the ledge he’d dropped onto.”
Mr Dean said although he was a ‘shocking’ student, he was intelligent and was inspired by his teachers at Dimboola Memorial High School.
“Brian Frecker was my English teacher, he definitely told us lots of stories and he had a massive impact on me,” he said.
“He had something special about him. Then there was a guy called Jack McMillan who taught typing – ‘a skill for the future’, although mum was upset because it seemed to be ‘secretary’s work’.
“Years later we got a word processor, and I could touch-type – I reckon it’s saved me half a lifetime – and I quietly said, ‘thanks Jack, I owe you’.”
Mr Dean has worked in the army and on navy warships, writes about model engineering for a UK magazine, and wrote a book, Der Tiger, about designing, building and running a 1/5 scale Tiger tank.
He said a sequel to ‘Wayback’ might be worth writing.
“I’d like to write another,” he said.
The book is available on Amazon, and at book retailers across the Wimmera.
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