Dennis Won’t Slow Down
An essay about Dennis based on my interview with him
There are people who drift through life quietly, leaving behind a faint ripple. And then there are people like Dennis, who barrel through it like a souped-up scooter at sixty kilometres an hour, wild white hair in the wind, leaving everyone else laughing, shaking their heads, and wondering how on earth one human being can pack so much life into such a small frame.
Dennis is nearly eighty. And if you ask him to slow down, he’ll probably laugh at you.
He was born with polio, which left him with a weakened leg from childhood. For most people that would have been a life-defining limitation. For Dennis it was more like an inconvenient detail — something to work around while getting on with the real business of living. From the very beginning he seemed to have an instinctive understanding that obstacles are simply puzzles waiting to be solved.
His childhood belonged to a world that feels almost mythical now: rural Australia, railway lines cutting through wheat country, horses tied to fences outside tiny country schools. Kids rode in from farms in every direction. If there were sixty students in the school, there were probably sixty horses outside. And Dennis, with his irrepressible grin, was often in the middle of the action. Sometimes he rode horses. Sometimes he powered down the railway line on a hand-pumped jigger, friends clinging on for the ride as if they were on the world’s most improbable rollercoaster.
Adventure came early.
At seventeen or eighteen, while many teenagers today are worrying about exams or what to watch on Netflix, Dennis was sent to the Northern Territory to work as a boundary rider on a cattle station that stretched across an almost unimaginable 2.5 million acres. His job was to patrol and repair the fences that held that vast land together.
He did it largely alone.
Two horses. One dog. Endless sky.
Every fifteen kilometres there was a rough shelter — four posts, a sheet of corrugated iron, a drum of water. Once a week a truck would arrive with supplies: bread, tins of food, sometimes a packet of tobacco, sometimes a couple of beer bottles dangling in the water tank to keep them cool. If supplies ran out, you shot a kangaroo or a cow and made do.
Days could hit forty-five degrees. Nights could drop close to freezing. Storms rolled across the desert with little warning. But Dennis, a bush kid at heart, simply figured it out.
That phrase — figured it out — might be the secret of his life.
Then came Vietnam.
Dennis served three tours there as a tank commander, responsible for six tanks rumbling through jungle and delta country in the middle of a war that was as chaotic as it was brutal. Inside a tank, he once said, the sound of bullets hitting the armour was like standing under a metal bucket while people hurled rocks at it. The noise was constant. The tension never switched off.
Yet he survived.
When the war ended in chaos, Dennis was among those evacuated by helicopter and packed onto an aircraft carrier overflowing with thousands of soldiers and refugees. Helicopters were pushed off the deck to make room for more people. Planes were dumped into the sea. The only priority was getting everyone out alive.
Returning home, however, proved almost as hard as the war itself. Vietnam veterans were not welcomed back with celebration. Many were told not to even wear their uniforms when they landed in Australia. Recognition took years, and for some of Dennis’s fellow soldiers it came too late.
Dennis did what he has always done.
He got on with life.
He moved into the printing industry, starting at the ground floor and eventually rising to become the general manager of a large printing network with more than a hundred shops. He retired at fifty — which for most people might signal a long, slow drift into comfortable inactivity.
But Dennis is not “most people.”
Retirement lasted about as long as it takes a stubborn man to get bored.
He went to the Philippines to run a massive printing company. The job involved sorting out corruption, firing dozens of staff, receiving death threats, travelling with armed security, and surviving a heart attack along the way. Somewhere in the middle of all that he also met the woman who would become his wife, Joy, and together they raised their daughter Louise.
Eventually Dennis brought his family to Australia after a long and complicated visa process that required persistence, ingenuity, and probably a fair bit of the stubborn determination he has always had in abundance.
Then, nine years ago, life threw him another challenge.
Because of the long-term effects of polio, Dennis lost his leg.
Many people might have taken that as a signal to slow down.
Dennis took it as a signal to upgrade his scooter.
Today he zips around on a souped-up mobility scooter capable of reaching speeds that would make most mobility scooters blush. He repairs machines, restores mopeds, fixes cars, and generally behaves like a one-man mechanical workshop that refuses to accept the concept of retirement.
He also has a Jack Russell named Buddy — a tiny dog with the temperament of a heavily armed border guard. Buddy is fiercely protective of Dennis and treats strangers with the suspicion normally reserved for international spies.
And then there is the story that perfectly captures Dennis in a single moment.
When he lost his leg, he was recovering in hospital just before Christmas. The hospital, in its infinite wisdom, discharged him with almost no support equipment. But Dennis had a more immediate concern.
He wanted a cigarette.
So he summoned his friend Chris and instructed him to bring his mobility scooter to the hospital. Chris arrived, somewhat uncertain about how to drive the thing, but just in time to witness Dennis leap onto it like a cavalry officer mounting a horse.
The scooter roared down the corridor. A nurse narrowly avoided becoming roadkill. Dennis shot into the lift, out onto the street, and across the Pacific Highway — wearing nothing but a hospital dressing gown, which apparently left certain aspects of his anatomy enthusiastically exposed to the general public.
Minutes later he returned victorious, cigarettes in hand, calmly smoking his second one before Chris had even finished processing what had just happened.
If you want to understand Dennis, that story probably tells you everything.
He is stubborn. He is fearless. He is inventive. He is sometimes outrageous. But above all he is alive in a way that many people forget to be.
Dennis himself once explained his philosophy with the kind of blunt wisdom that only comes from long experience.
If the mind stops working, the body stops working too.
So he keeps both working.
And that, in the end, may be the real lesson of Dennis.
Life will knock you down. Sometimes it will take a leg. Sometimes it will throw war, illness, bureaucracy, or bad luck in your path.
Dennis looks at those things the way a mechanic looks at a broken engine.
Roll up the sleeves.
Figure it out.
And keep moving.
Preferably at sixty kilometres an hour.
