The follow up to the First Summer School was our attendance at Winter Training on Mt Banks, in the Blue Mountains, NSW. A small group of us Tony, Keith, Bruce Hatfield and me took the overnight train from Melbourne to Sydney on Friday evening. In those days, before Standard Gauge was introduced, you had to change trains at Albury, sometime in the early hours of the morning. There had been an accident on the line at Goulburn so we were considerably delayed. Eventually, we got to Central Station, Sydney, and took a taxi to the Sugano home in Baulkham Hills where we picked up a car which had been left for us. Finally, we got to Mt Banks late on Saturday afternoon. I remember our arrival in the old Holden, so pleased to have just got there. Tony was driving and when we spotted white keikogis, he started sounding the horn and we cheered. Unfortunately, Sensei and the Sydney students, who had just returned from practice and were preparing for misogi supper and meditation, didn’t appreciate our “enthusiasm”. Despite our rude arrival, we were warmly welcomed and quickly initiated into the ways of the “dojo”.
To say the least, we were unprepared. All we had brought along were keikogis and sleeping bags. I can still feel the freezing cold of that night, trying to snuggle up in a thin sleeping bag on the hard ground: Perhaps I got some sleep.
But there were the inevitable funny moments. Again, Keith: He awoke and got up out of his damp sleeping bag next morning asking, “did it rain during the night?”. We all said, “No”. Then there followed a guilty silence as, collectively, we realised that probably one of us had relieved himself in the bushes around Keith’s bivouac. I guess that was Keith and why we loved him so much. He loved The Goons and, like them, he had unlimited capacity to attract disorder. He was fun (and a little dangerous) to be around.
It was still dark as we followed sensei up to the top of the mountain where, tops off, we did funekogi with enormous vigour to ward off the cold. Then we sat on the rocks to watch the sun rise. I still remember those moments, staring into the gradually rising sun, feeling its incremental warmth. For me, it was as close as I could get to the moment of Creation. It’s personal; and my most treasured Aikido momento is the copy of the then popular Desiderata, signed by sensei, which he gave to each of us when we came down from the mountain top.
We then watched as the Sydney guys opened their car boots and started bring out food for breakfast. It simply hadn’t occurred to any of us that we would need to eat. The old hands made sure we didn’t go hungry.
I was promoted to shodan by sensei at Monash in 1974. David Brown (then shodan) who had moved to Sydney from Tasmania to study under Sugano sensei moved to Melbourne about this time. The two of us enjoyed vigorous one-to-one practise on Sunday mornings at Caulfield. He was keen to delve deeper into what he had learned from Sugano sensei in Sydney. I was, at least, as keen to learn, so keen that I moved to Sydney myself a few months later to join Sugano sensei’s dojo. And that seems to be an appropriate point to end my tale. I will be only too pleased if others want to continue the story.
Written by Bob Hill Sensei, published April 2025