The Shark Net

by Robert Drewe

  Every Christmas morning my heart sank when I saw the parcel and uncovered the familiar yellow and black box. When I opened the box and caught that first sharp rubbery whiff, unwrapped the tissue paper and spied the new Bumpers huddled heel-to-toe inside, I could have cried. But I went through the Christmas motions. ‘Oh, good!’ I lied. ‘New Bumpers. Just what I wanted.’

  Bumpers were clumpy-looking ‘leisure shoes’. They came in two styles, each with the same thick, creamy yellow rubber soles. These soles were the ‘bumpers’, the buffers to the shoe. If you counted the in-soles, the soles were two inches thick. For uppers, you had the choice of a navy blue canvas-like material or chocolate-brown artificial suede. Over various Christmases I was given Bumpers in both colours, but I usually received the chocolate fake-suede ones. The navy blue Bumpers had a more daytime, middle-aged, yachting and golfing look whereas the chocolate ones were day-and-evening-wear Bumpers. This was supposed to make me feel better.

  It was impossible to convince my parents that in the place, climate, fashion niche, age group and time in which I lived the preferred casual footwear was the desert boot. I even tried the physical-terrain angle. ‘We live in the sand, after all,’ I said plaintively.

  ‘Bumpers are good in the sand,’ my father said. ‘Look at those soles, like camels’ feet.’

  Every Christmas I put in an optimistic request for desert boots. My requests were foolhardy and increasingly provocative. My mother associated desert boots with the vandalism, vulgarity, music and greasy haircuts of ‘juvenile delinquents’. My father simply declared, with growing impatience and unarguable logic, ‘Dunlop doesn’t make desert boots.’ Desert boots were made by Clark Rubber. Dunlop made Bumpers. Desert boots were the competition. Desert boots were the enemy.

  After five years, aged forty, my father had at last been promoted to State manager. I wouldn’t have thought it possible but the promotion had made him even more of a company man, and he and the company sincerely believed that Bumpers were superior to desert boots. When I approached my problem in a roundabout way by suggesting that Dunlop take the plunge and start making desert boots like Clark’s, my father shook his head. I was hopelessly misguided. The world of business was not for me.

  ‘Bumpers don’t have the bad image of desert boots,’ he said reassuringly. He was right.

  For some reason he and the Dunlop marketing people thought a wholesome buffoonish image was the smart way of pitching to the adolescent market. Their plan was that Bumpers would bite deeply into the teenage desert-boot market while still satisfying the middle-aged yachting- and golf-shoe market. My father and Dunlop couldn’t grasp the essential flaw in their belief that teenage boys aspired to the shoes of their fathers. Maybe even to the slippers of their grandfathers.

  I could have warned them this would be the downfall of Bumpers. I could’ve said I’d never seen another boy wearing Bumpers. I could have challenged my father, mother and the Dunlop board of directors to ask any teenager, especially those who sniggered at my Bumpers at North Cottesloe Beach or at the Claremont, Windsor or Dalkeith picture theatres, whether Bumpers seriously rivalled desert boots. But I didn’t. It would have disparaged all those Christmas presents. It would have hurt their feelings. And it would have made my father angry because he made them and sold them.

  I couldn’t say that unless you thought it suave to have limitless bounce in your step and a safety buffer around each foot, Bumpers had no panache. Or that Bumpers focused undue attention on the feet and dominated the rest of your clothing. Bumpers resembled Mickey Mouse’s shoes. They looked as if you’d inserted your feet in a pair of fairground bumper cars. If I hadn’t been wearing them myself I would’ve teased someone wearing Bumpers.

  The only apt thing about them was their name. The tragedy was that with soles that thick they were indestructible. There was no escape. You could never move on to a new, Bumper-free life. The only way you could discard a pair of Bumpers was by moving up to another, bigger, pair.

  There was another important reason they failed as Christmas gifts. I knew they were just a tick on a docket somewhere. No one had actually shopped for them, nor had full price been paid. A secretary could fetch a box of Bumpers from the storeroom in five minutes.

  To be fair, there was one thing in their favour. They made you two inches taller. For that reason I liked the album photographs of our family taken during a Christmas holiday at Shoalwater Bay. I was about to turn thirteen. I had two favourite before and after shots. In the first, we were all ready for the beach, lined up self-consciously in our beachwear. I was barefoot and my father, who was wearing a pair of strappy leather sandals that embarrassed me, was taller. In the second snap I was dressed up to the nines in that Christmas’s pair of Bumpers, my first sports jacket and matching pants. I was smiling down managerially on my father’s head.

  One Saturday I was caddying for my father at the Cottesloe Golf Club, hauling the Dunlop bag with his Dunlop clubs, Dunlop waterproof windjacket, Dunlop-65 balls and Dunlop golf umbrella. I was wearing my current Bumpers, my sixth or seventh pair, because they would be gentle on the greens. As the afternoon drew slowly on and my interest in the game waned to zero, I was astonished to see two other pairs of Bumpers on the golf course, one on the twelfth fairway, the other on the fifteenth tee, both being worn, apparently willingly, by non-Dunlop personnel or family.

  I watched them carefully for as long as I could. Both pairs were the navy blue variety and fitted with golf cleats. I noticed that their owners were well into their forties or fifties: guffawing, big-bottomed business types. My father was also wearing his navy blue Bumpers, so there were four pairs of Bumpers on the course at the same time! I felt like phoning the newspapers.

  Mine, however, were the only representatives of the chocolate ersatz-suede, day-and-evening-wear variety. The day was cool and the dew on the fairway soon turned the nap on my Bumpers sleek and black and glistening with what looked like snail mucus.

  While I waited in the car for my father and his golfing partners to wind down at the nineteenth hole, I had plenty of time to ponder the effect of dew on artificial suede, and related matters. My Bumpers stayed like that, like wet otter skin, even when they should have dried out. When they were still slimy a week later – as if they had spent much of that time under the house in a bucket of water – I was allowed to throw them away. They were my last pair.

  The Bumper Leisure Shoe was just one of the many rubber products that exerted their personality on our family. We wore, played with, slept on, walked on, sat on, floated on, swam in, sheltered under, showered behind, warmed our feet on, and kept our bathwater from going down the plughole with Dunlop products. Naturally, we were conveyed by – in any vehicle you could name – more Dunlop products. I supposed millions of other families were, too, but for them it wasn’t compulsory. And I presumed they were blissfully unaware of the fact.

  We were a one-hundred-percent Dunlop family. Apart from my Bumper problem I went along with the company all the way. We were mightily impressed by the rubber industry and its offshoots. We were led to believe that everyone else was, too.

  As my father liked to declare at drinks parties, when he’d married my mother he’d said to her, ‘You know you’re marrying Dunlop as well as me.’ He’d glance around the group and add self-righteously, ‘I said to her, “You know Dunlop will always come first.” ’ The males present, if they were Dunlop employees, nodded sagely over their beers. The women said nothing. My mother gave a faint sociable smile. It was at this time that she taught Junior, our budgerigar, to say, ‘Today You’ll Use a Dunlop Product.’

  We knew that to have Clark desert boots or a Goodyear tyre or a Spalding tennis ball in your possession, even in your general vicinity, was to commit a crime somewhere between treason and sacrilege. We understood it was disloyal. It breached the faith of my father. We honoured the giant D of the advertisements and the Dunlop colours of yellow and black, selected by Dunlop scientists – my father pointed out – as the m
ost arresting to the human eye.

  One day I professed wonder at the huge number of things Dunlop made. ‘Gosh, everywhere you look there are rubber goods,’ I said.

  I thought I was paying my father a compliment. I was surprised at his stern reaction.

  ‘At Dunlop we say “rubber products” not “rubber goods”,’ he said.

  Even things in our house which weren’t Dunlop products purposely reminded you of them, especially items to do with drinking and smoking. I thought they were sophisticated and witty. What rakish characters thought up these things? I wondered. What would they think of next?

  We had bottle openers, ashtrays, cigarette lighters and drinks trays shaped like miniature tyres, giant golf balls, tiny tennis racquets, little gumboots and tennis shoes and hot-water bottles. We had decks of cards with pictures of Dunlop’s Peter Thomson winning the British Open, and Dunlop’s stable of tennis players winning Wimbledon and the Davis Cup, and Dunlop’s Hubert Opperman winning bicycle races, and Dunlop’s Jack Brabham winning the Grand Prix, and other decks of cards, vaguely saucy (and so kept away from children’s random glances in a sideboard drawer), of vivacious young women keeping dry in shiny Dunlop rainware.

  We had cocktail swizzle sticks designed like little golf clubs (separate woods, irons and a putter), and toothpicks like golf tees, all slotting into a little Dunlop golf bag which was really a martini jug. We had a rubber ice-tray, resembling some sort of invalid’s appliance, which froze water into little dimpled golf balls. We had drink coasters like flattened tennis balls, golf balls and the bowls used on bowling greens, and other coasters like bicycle, motorcycle, car, truck, tractor and aircraft tyres. We had a big Dunlop-65 golf ball, hinged in the middle, that opened to display a collection of twelve miniature spirit and liqueur bottles. We had pewter tankards engraved with the names of all the major Dunlop sporting events. And above all these clever party souvenirs the dour, bearded likeness of old John Boyd Dunlop, who invented the pneumatic tyre, grimaced down on us from a shelf collection of beer mugs.

  In our house’s celebration of rubber and the business world only the small lounge-room bookcase showed evidence of my parents’ lives before Dunlop. The top shelf displayed my parents’ old school awards: his gold-embossed, leatherbound book prizes from Carey Baptist Grammar School and her plain blue clothbound ones from Frankston High.

  My father’s prizes, signed by the headmaster, H. G. Steele, MA, had the school badge on the cover, an athlete carrying a torch above the motto Animo et Fide. He’d been dux of his class most years from Form IV in 1925, aged eleven (the Oxford edition of John Falifax, Gentleman by Dinah Maria Craik), to his final year. In 1927 he’d picked up The Three Midshipmen by W. H. G. Kingston. For being dux in 1929, the year the stock-markets crashed, he won The Romance of Scientific Discovery by Charles R. Gibson and Tales of Washington Irving.

  My mother’s book prizes, embossed with the Frankston High School badge of a bubble-blowing fish flicking its tail in the air above the motto Optima Semper, were The Plays of J. M. Barrie and The Plays of John Galsworthy. W. J. Bishop, headmaster, said inside the cover that Dorothy Watson had been awarded the Citizenship Prize (Gift of The Welfare League) for being school captain.

  The top shelf also contained three Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and the six hardback novels my parents owned (they preferred to borrow best-sellers from the library): Grand Hotel, The Egg and I, Doctor in the House, Doctor At Large, They’re a Weird Mob, and another Australian novel called Andy, which I’d carefully chosen and saved up to buy for my father the Christmas I was eleven because it was about an Australian pilot in the war. I was crushed to overhear him loudly dismiss it as ‘just an Australian book – I couldn’t get into it’.

  Not counting the six volumes of World War II in Pictures, the remaining two shelves were all either about Dunlop, sales and marketing techniques, accounting or business management.

  The walls told a similar story. Apart from an oil portrait each of my brother and sister (thin, pimply and self-conscious, I’d refused to be painted), the lounge room, dining room, front hall and kitchen all displayed watercolour scenes of the rubber industry.

  The framed watercolour prints were my parents’ favourite selections from Dunlop calendars over the years. The calendars displayed the works of Australian painters who’d been finalists in the lucrative annual Dunlop art contest. Every year a lot of noted artists delighted the judges by choosing Dunlop’s smoky rubber factories at Montague, in Melbourne, and Drummoyne, in Sydney, as their favourite landscapes in the whole continent. This always came as a pleasant surprise to my father. It confirmed his view that ‘modern art’ couldn’t hold a candle to Australian realists.

  My parents had both put in time at grimy Montague and come home with black tyre dust on their clothes and, in my mother’s case, in her hair. Freshly showered after a Sunday morning’s lawn-mowing, beer glass in hand, Carousel spinning on the radiogram, my father liked to relax before the roast dinner by humming ‘Soliloquy’ (‘My boy Bill is as tall and as strong as a tree …’) while admiring Bill’s and Jan’s painted likenesses. Then, stepping back and frowning like a connoisseur at a gallery, he’d contemplate the framed factory chimneys belching into the sky on every wall and say, admiringly, ‘You can almost smell the smoke.’

  On weekends we were often taken to ‘see over the factory’ ourselves. This was Dunlop’s new West Australian rubber plant, built by my father in the new industrial estate of O’Connor. I found it interesting on the first, and even the second, visit. Quite soon, however, the process from the coagulated milky latex of gutta-percha to rubber sheeting was firmly impressed on our minds.

  I liked the sweet smell of gutta-percha. Its sticky sponginess tempted you to chew it or roll it in a ball and throw it around the factory. You could stretch it into strips like elastic and twang it at each other. But in the end it wasn’t edible, and you could only sting each other’s legs so many times before someone cried. The latex smell became cloying. It filled your nostrils and then your whole head and you had to run outside into the fresh air.

  The Dunlop office was more sedate than the factory. There was nothing to do there but eat biscuits and play with new tennis balls, their yellow nap surprisingly thick and fluffy, provided by Miss Edna Kirwan. She was my father’s crisp but kindly secretary, a sturdy, aunt-like figure, fifteen or twenty years older than my father, who wore her hair in a French roll. Miss Kirwan was unlikely to cause a managerial black eye or a heart attack. It was Miss Kirwan, we discovered, who always remembered and bought my mother’s birthday, wedding anniversary and Christmas presents.

  Unfortunately Miss Kirwan was in hospital for my mother’s fortieth birthday so my father forgot it. I remembered her birthday, however, with a tin of MacRobertson’s ‘Clematis’ chocolates with painted purple flowers on the lid. My mother let him suffer for several days while she made a fuss of me. But remembering her birthday did me more harm than good. It sealed my dubious reputation as her gallant young knight.

  Dunlop children led busy social lives. At weekends we went on Dunlop picnics and barbecues in the Darling Ranges or we watched Dunlop teams of Alf, Les, Syd, Nev, Stan, Wal, Alan, Len, Ken and Clarrie playing other firms in sporting events, using Dunlop sports equipment. In one social cricket match, against the Ford Motor Company, Dunlop’s spin bowler, my father, injured his knee. He had to have a cartilage operation at St John of God’s, arranging with the nuns to keep a supply of cold beer for visitors. The operation wasn’t a total success. Thereafter, wounded in Dunlop’s service, he walked with a pronounced limp.

  The main social occasion was the company’s children’s Christmas party. Despite the summer heat, it always took place indoors, in the main city showroom at 424 Murray Street. There was no air-conditioning. Rubber fumes rose in waves from the showroom floor and hung over the festivities. To demonstrate the merits of rubber flooring it had been made several times thicker than normal commercial flooring. While it cushioned any pressure,
and muffled and absorbed voices and normal office sounds, its sticky surface squelched and peeped at the slightest foot movement. No one could sneak up on you at Dunlop. The showroom floor was like a shifting, rubbery swamp that squeaked a warning before it sucked you under.

  This bouncy backdrop compelled us to leap about like spacemen until Santa Claus, played by Dunlop’s most rotund executive, Jim Chute, finally arrived, ho-ho-ing in his Dunlop industrial workboots. He gave you a present every year until you were twelve. They were proper presents, not rubber products. By the end of the gift-giving all the Dunlop children would be tired of rubber – all of us spread out, red-faced and gasping for air, on the Dunlopillo settees in the reception area – so we appreciated this.

  In our own house, of course, Dunlop was ever present. Even when we urinated. Males stood and aimed from two rubber footprints wittily set into the Dunlop bathroom flooring at the approximate average adult firing range. If you were still a child, of course, more often than not you missed and pissed on Dunlop.

  Because of their Dunlop connection, and the shortage of social attractions in Perth, famous sportsmen regularly came to our house to eat or, more often, to drink. In a way, Dunlop was like a country. They represented this country in their sport, and my father, as the country’s local consul, entertained them at his consulate.

  Those tennis players, golfers and racing-car and rally drivers on the payroll, visiting the West to perform with and promote tennis racquets or tyres or automotive products or tennis shoes or golf balls, would sprawl in our lounge room drinking beer in pewter tankards and throwing peanuts into their mouths.

  The older ones, especially the golfers and racing-car drivers, would try to flirt with my mother and, in the case of ‘Gelignite Jack’ Murray, the champion rally driver, simultaneously flirt and explode fireworks in our kitchen. Gelignite Jack had made his name by cheekily lobbing explosives around the countryside during the Redex Round-Australia car reliability trials, and he had a reputation to live up to. Even when he didn’t win these rallies he got so much publicity that everyone thought he had. As Gelignite Jack sold many Dunlop tyres, fan belts and batteries in the process, my father chuckled tensely at the flirting and the exploding bungers on the veranda and the catherine-wheel burning the paint off the kitchen door and topped up everyone’s drinks.