If you met me today, you mightn’t automatically assume that you are looking at someone who’s been  going to gyms for many years. I’ve lifted weights, pumped iron, hoisted metal all over the country. I can remember when gyms were called health clubs and fitness centres and health studios. I go back so far I can recall when gyms were called gyms the first time around.

I remember when gyms didn’t have wall-to-wall carpets and women weren’t allowed. I remember when they were smelly places where surly heterosexual sportsmen went to get fit off-season or sweat out hangovers. There were no models, lawyers, airline stewards, hotel receptionists, accountants. Definitely no journalists.

The drill was that you joined up for six months, or 12 months, or – what a bargain – life, and when the proprietor went bankrupt two months later you were left with a minimally muscled body and a long membership of a large empty space over a hamburger shop.

I’ve momentarily changed shape several times at gyms, sometimes for the better. I saw my most memorable gym, on Sydney’s sedate North Shore, turn gradually into a massage parlour. For weeks I was mystified by all the Crows Nest businessmen coming up the stairs with nary a bench press to follow. I finally became suspicious when a woman in a green negligee began sauntering into the showers for hot water for her mug of soup. Suspicions were confirmed when various King’s Cross personnel began calling in for “management consultations”.

‘When you arrived in his gym, Omar would always grunt, “You need sun-tan. Have sun-tan now. Ten dollars more. Pay me.” If you were someone, unlike me, who did want a sun-tan, you had to settle just for a tanned upper right thigh.’

The proprietor, a 160 cm, 130kg Turk named Omar, was arrested on the premises twice in one week for diverse offences, the gentlest of which was tax evasion. Omar was a very savage health entrepreneur. He used to handle his business affairs by throwing his bills, Tax Office correspondence and summonses into the steam-room boiler, when it was working, or tearing them up and throwing the confetti out into the shopping centre.

His bulk made Omar look even shorter than he was. He was the shape of a refrigerator, and had to edge through doors sideways. As is common among gym instructors, muscles were a height substitute. From the waist up he was bigger than Arnold Schwarzenegger, from the waist down he looked like a fat jockey. When he walked he more than rolled from side to side; he rotated.

The first time the police came for him, on behalf of the taxman, he went quietly. Just a bit of arm-waving, swearing and shouting. The second time it took eight rapidly bruised cops to get him down the stairs, even with the handcuffs, and they confiscated our personal membership cards “for the department”.

Omar epitomised the breed. Not only did he refuse to pay creditors, but he physically threatened them. Omar’s whole muscular life was a threat to everyone and everything he encountered. He threatened us to lift heavier and heavier weights. He threatened us to leave two hours before closing time because he was tired. He threatened the barbells themselves into weightlessness. He put up threatening signs all over the gym. “Put Weights Back or Many Hurt” and “Not My Folt (sic) You Injure” and “Who Made Lat. Machine Unfix Monday Night? Omar Punish.”

The lat. machine was always “unfix”. So was any gym equipment the least complicated. Omar didn’t pay for maintenance. He soon presided over a steam-less steam room and some stationary bicycles that were absolutely stationary. I can’t imagine Omar having the yoga, Pilates and yogalates rooms of today. I cherish the impossible vision of Omar leading aerobics instruction and Zumba dance-fitness classes. Omar never talked of having a conscious tie with his physical body or asked members what star sign they were.

When you arrived in his gym, Omar would always grunt, “You need sun-tan. Have sun-tan now. Ten dollars more. Pay me.” If you were someone, unlike me, who did want a sun-tan, you had to settle just for a tanned upper right thigh: five of the six ultra-violet globes were “unfix”. Sometimes the green-lingeried woman would be sitting in the sun-room drinking a mug of soup.

These days I exercise — sort of — in a terrific gym attached to the Lennox Aquatic Centre. It’s a calm, uni-sex place. Occasionally, between extremely moderate bench presses, I recall Omar and his fellows. Between them, they owe me five life memberships. That’s a lot of muscle.

Robert Drewe’s most recent books The Local Wildlife and Swimming to the Moon are on sale here: penguin.com.au.local-wildlife

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Digby Hildreth reviews Robert Drewe’s latest book, Swimming to the Moon, a collection of Drewe’s newspaper columns and finds them wry, entertaining and insightful.

Prolific Northern Rivers-based novelist Robert Drewe long ago mastered the short-form newspaper column, telling stories, exploring the goldmine of memory and providing insightful educational précis in about 700 finely crafted words.

Among the 50 vignettes offered here, there’s much that provokes loud laughter, such as the piece Sitting Backwards on Chairs, which turns a sceptical eye on the movie cliché used to signify male earnestness. “The hero (a cop, a reporter, a private eye) can only nut out the problem in hand by spinning a chair around and sitting on it backwards,” he notes, although the serious professional men in films, doctors, judges and so forth, “always sit on chairs the right way round”. Just as, he wryly observes, “…in my experience, do all men discussing problems in real life”.

Swimming to the Moon examines such conundrums of popular culture (including popular names for children and their increasingly outlandish spelling variations), makes small histories out of the everyday (such as the loss of his grandmother’s generation’s seemingly endless talent for baking cakes, biscuits and puddings, each lovingly recalled, their sweet delights still fresh in the memory).

There’s more: stirring recollections of an early childhood in Melbourne, followed by a coming of age in WA, with all its golden glow of nostalgia and wince-making efforts to woo his town’s brown-limbed girls.

His “West Australianness, for want of a better description, is more accepting than it was back then. Though more sharply tuned by experience, it’s also more romantic and sentimental”.

Romantic perhaps, but Drewe never lapses into sentimentality. He has too sharp a sense of irony, of the absurd; he’s too curious about today to be mooning about the yesteryears.

And some things are always with us: mention of WA’s doublegee prickle segues into a mini essay on the bindii, which has recently unsheathed itself once again for the summer season, to punish any barefoot chancers. “Prickles” is devoted to the horrible, painful phenomenon but, characteristically, Drewe doesn’t dwell on his personal encounters with the spiky weed, to bleat about the discomfort induced by “the devil’s claw”, but looks more deeply into his subject to reveal, wonderfully, that one type of bindii (Tribulus terrestris) is used by men (and gym junkies) to boost muscle growth and sexual performance. However, he warns (always going that further step into discovery), a study of sheep that ate the plant showed they developed the staggers “and couldn’t mount”.

He gets out and about, revelling in the desert, the shores of the Southern Ocean, and country pubs and fairs, whose activities offer so much to the writer’s eye. “You couldn’t make this stuff up,” he says of the elaborate, often sadistic, shenanigans of the local agricultural show. He doesn’t have to invent material but, as they say, it’s the way he tells ‘em.

Whether drilling down into the details of everyday life, finding the extraordinary in the mundane, navigating his past and current connection with landscape and family, or mocking the vanities of the present age, Drewe maintains his quiet, amused tone: his writing is droll, vivid, clear-sighted, nuanced. He is, above all, witty and entertaining, a restless, inquiring mind shaped by an enviable sense of wonder and expressed through a gift for the exact word.

Swimming to the Moon is, as he remarks about plunging into the ocean after a scorching day, “as good as it gets”.

Swimming to the Moon by Robert Drewe.

Fremantle Press, rrp $29.99 pp224

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