I lost my dad not so very long ago. It’s okay, he was very old, and physically ailing for a long time, so his passing was gentle. The funeral was heart-warming and uplifting. My eulogy full of laughter and happy memories, raised a good few chuckles among the crowd of saddened mourners.

There are many ways of remembering the departed. Most of my memories of dad are happy ones. This is just one of them.

It concerns my dad and his collection of pornographic magazines. I had a symbiotic relationship with my father’s porn mags from about the age of twelve onwards. As soon as I could sustain an erection, I was keen on sniffing out porn.

Now, when I say porn, let me make it clear. This is going back to the 1970s, before the age of the Internet and the porn auteur, before the most degrading hard core porn became easily accessible to children. This was paper based porn, and soft core at that. There were no videos, nor DVDs. The only porn on film around then was restricted to 8mm film, something out of reach for me in suburban Perth.

No, this was a simpler time, when girlie mags were restricted, and most of us pathetic schoolboys could only hope for an older male sibling to hand down a dog-eared copy of a nudie mag, or gaze longingly at them through plastic covers on the upper shelves of the newsagent.

I don’t remember how I first realised that dad had porn mags. It was just something mysterious and innate. As the hormones started to kick in, you sort of develop a sixth sense for all things sexual. Being a loser and a loner, I didn’t have any curious girls around to experiment with, so paper copies were my only hope and the next best thing.

So about this time, when the folks are out of the house, you start to lurk around their bedroom, cos you know there are secret adult sexy things in there. I’m dredging my memory banks here, but I think I first found them in the bottom of their bedroom cupboard, under a pile of shoes. Or maybe they were in dad’s unlocked briefcase with his mysterious Buffaloes lodge paraphernalia.

There they were anyway, a hidden treasure, all shiny and glossy and colourful, a collection of very soft core girlie magazines. No sexual penetration, in fact, no male bodies at all. That would have been gross. Just ladies, without any clothes. On a rare occasion they might have their legs spread to show you their most intimate parts, but that was rare. Mostly it was boobs and bums and hairy bushes. No shaved quims in those days, and no tattoos either. Tattoos, as dad used to say, were restricted to sailors and prostitutes. Dad had an anchor inked on his arm… he was a sailor.

I can still recall some of the titles – Penthouse, Playboy, Swank (which had the titillating and apt word ‘wank’ in the title) Hustler – with I recall a rather tasteless and offensive cartoon called ‘Chester the Molester’ within. The ongoing saga of a middle aged father and his unnatural relationship with his pre-pubescent daughter. It was funny in the 1970s I guess. What else? Parade, Mayfair, Escort. So many titles. Too many to remember.

The pile expanded as my teenage years progressed, only diminished on the odd occasion when mum and dad arrived home unexpectedly and I didn’t have enough time to pull up my pants and sprint to their bedroom to replace the object. Oh and that one time I didn’t realise that…. No it’s too disgusting, but let’s just say several of the pages got stuck together and ruined the magazine.

The really memorable part of this for me was that I never really knew if dad knew I was accessing his material. I was mostly meticulous in putting everything back in the pile in the exact order I had found it. Over the years for some reason dad would move the pile of porn from place to place, but like a rampant bloodhound, I would always sniff it out, no matter where he hid it. Perhaps he was moving it to try and keep it away from the prying eyes of my mother. She never mentioned the collection regardless.

One time it was slipped between a tear in the base of our lounge room sofa. God knows how I knew, but I found it. I like to think dad knew all along, and he was just messing with me, playing a game of smutty hide and seek between father and son.

This went on for a few years until I turned sixteen and one day, probing the cracks and recesses of the parental bedroom, I found the soft core mags gone and replaced with hard core porno mags, showing actual sexual penetration. I was both shocked and excited of course, but somehow, the innocence of it evaporated. In retrospect, the loss of innocence was just another step on my path to manhood. I would soon discover real flesh and blood girls, and while my interest and love of porn would never really go away, I always missed those days of smiling naked two-dimensional paper women, showing me only just enough forbidden flesh to peak my interest.

That was just one small snippet of the relationship I had with my father. We shared an interest in pornography, sex, and mild sexual deviance. He had a quick wit and a knowing smile, and a twinkle in his deep brown eyes.