Cracker night might be gone but at least the hoons still have their guns

While nascent lawlessness provokes a swift and unequivocal response (often in the form of a dressing-down from a grizzled elder) we'll tolerate things many places wouldnt.

We'll cop the low-level violence, the ultra-high beams; the maddening yap of cattle dogs from every second yard, the marathon mowing, the industrial-grade chipping and chopping and sawing. We don't mind (we even respect) a little DIY backburning and hugger-mugger construction.

Man caves here aren't architectural sanctuaries to be fawned over in French by Kevin McCloud or nestled down the garden path and inhabited by humble war hero novelists; they're noisy hangars equipped with hoists and home brew, engines and outboards, welding gear and grinders; everything perched on slabs with sufficient concrete to smother Chernobyl twice over and still dregs enough to knock up a handy pad for the wheelie bins.

Nights out and get-togethers are messy collisions of hard-working folk determined to let the good times roll before, like Cinderella cursed with a perpetual 5am mobile phone alarm, they're shaken back into domestic reality. Turps-tinctured turpitude is barely registered in the flesh and certainly forgiven come the pragmatics of morning and the long, endless road ahead.

Simply, one town's opprobrium is just another's Wednesday night.

But we're hardly unique in the fact that, if any cohort is to test our limits of what we'll put up with, it's young men; those magnificent vessels of stunning self-sabotage and cocksuredness.

Like shorn sheep, they bounce about the place literally bumping into things (road signs) and leaving their scent (diesel) and their mark (scorched rubber) before they eventually settle down to raise their own unsinkable lambs or leave the district for a few years via their hotted-up utes or, more permanently, via the trees around which said utes are prone to become wrapped.

If they do manage to survive, our fallback suspicion regarding these hoons can, given time, blossom into genuine affection.

While quite prepared to murder them as they tear past our bedrooms 2am Saturday, we're equally prepared to nominate them for some kind of citizenship award 8am Tuesday, when they felicitously pull up next to our becalmed vehicles offering good advice and tangles of jumper cables and snatch straps.

As Tim Ferguson explained to fellow retired Dadaist Richard Fidler a few years ago while promoting his B&S ball film Spin Out ....

"If you break down in your car in the middle of the Nullarbor, would you like ...

(a) A hipster barista?

(b) A screenwriter?

(c) An arts student?

Or ...

(d) A bogan who can fix your car?

Get to know these wildlings as they whip you at squash or shout you a beer and they'll often reveal themselves to be more sensitive and rounded than their driving and general odour would suggest and while you pray to God they never darken the front gate asking after your daughter, they do find a place in your heart and, once this is established, the equipoise of the generations can continue to underwrite the community as it always has and hopefully always will.

These country kids also tend to grow up with guns and when the shooting begins, nonchalant locals turn in their beds or shrug a (hopefully stray-bullet-free) shoulder, quite comfortable in the knowledge some lads are out killing things tonight (often with the help of massive dogs, which seem to share their young masters' Jekyll and Hyde complexity).

Our ballistics bubble only expands come the Queen's Birthday long weekend because, around here, unregistered fireworks rival registered firearms for old-fashioned, anti-authoritarian fun and no one's complaining when surprise skeins of coruscating colour vault the gums to cheer the harsh hiemal firmament.

Valiantly, like a last-gasp militia, our pyromaniacs have been eking out the ammo ever since they took our crackers away but more than a decade on since those days of bountiful border raids it has to be said our once spectacular pirated displays are sputtering into something resembling a 67th birthday "do".

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And as the spectre of increasingly flammable summers (and springs and autumns) haunts us all, we already sense the loss of communal appetite for those bonny bonfires of June; the drowning sensation of another tradition slipping from our grasp, to be extinguished with all those crazy bungers.

It's a pity, certainly, but I've never been able to share most people's fond childhood memories of cracker night because, as a nine-year-old, I (along with all the other kids) was throwing sparklers at a Queen's Birthday town gathering when one of my shooting stars singed the thick Mediterranean locks of the local doctor's wife.

Luckily, she was uninjured but she grabbed me by the neck and shook me like a rag doll and I ran off to hide in the Kingswood.

A few months later, while on one of my very first solo supermarket errands, I was determined to fetch mum a jar of "whole cloves" (whatever they were) when I slipped on an Exxon Valdez-sized slick of olive oil in an aisle and was left flailing on the floor in my shorts like a greased pig.

With cheeks aflame and exotic spices in hand (and ignored by smirking onlookers), I made it to the checkout only to realise I'd forgotten to bring any money.

The doctor's wife from cracker night happened upon me, paid for my cloves and drove me home (without even asking where I lived) but not before politely suggesting her oleaginous passenger sit on a ream of brown paper shopping bags so not to soil the Volvo's fine leather seats.

Later that week, my mother, desperate to thank the doctor's wife, bought her a huge bouquet of flowers and made me deliver them, alone, to her door.

The doctor's family lived in a nice house near my school (I didn't need to ask where they lived, either) and I was to walk all the way in what passed as morning peak hour, right along the bus route.

Resembling a child labourer for Interflora, before I could make it safely up the driveway and offload my unwieldy and reputationally risky cargo, the inevitable happened; three buses (including our lurching green and brown double-decker) drove by.

Hey, Doherty! Got some flowers for ya girlfriend, have ya?!

Bloody yobs.