by Robert Drewe
I was torn. I loved to see these famous adults at close quarters, like newspaper photographs come to life. They were different to the other adults I knew, yet, regardless of their individual sports, very like each other.
I wondered what made them different. I could see that the famous golfers’ fingers curled around their drinks were uniformly stubby and thicker than most normal fingers, as if they were all the meaty digits of the same person. And when I passed a plate of bacon crackles to Rod Laver I noticed that while his gingery right wrist was not much thicker than mine, his left was twice as thick. Lew Hoad, meanwhile, had forearms and wrists the size of Popeye’s.
They either seemed to be straining on invisible leashes or so relaxed they were almost asleep. I loved to soak up this sporting atmosphere but I hated seeing sportsmen winking and grinning and cracking their knuckles around my mother. I didn’t mind them finding her attractive but I disliked them being suggestive. I didn’t like their jokes hanging in the air. I wanted them to be polite and chivalrous heroes. I wanted them to look up to her. And I didn’t want my father to look bad.
But I took my cue from him, and the high-jinks seemed tolerable to him. It wasn’t as if the flirting sportsman in question was the still lithe and suave Adrian Quist. Within the company their paths crossed constantly but on his many visits to Perth, during which he effortlessly picked up several State singles and doubles titles, Quist was never invited to our house. To the company’s delight and my father’s annoyance, he’d recently won the Wimbledon doubles again, aged thirty-seven, fifteen years after winning it the first time.
Would he never stop being a hero? My father was still peeved that my mother had kept a racquet that ‘Adrian’ had personally signed for her, indeed the racquet that had helped Australia win the Davis Cup in 1939. This racquet had trounced the reigning Wimbledon singles champion, Bobby Riggs. My father was happy for me to bash around with it on the street.
When the racquet got chipped on the bitumen and warped from playing French cricket on wet grass, he was good about it. Perhaps surprisingly, so was my mother. She didn’t seem to mind at all. So when she mentioned ‘Adrian’s’ latest success in a neutral sort of way, it seemed unnecessary for my father to mutter, ‘Little siss!’ and to mimic someone prissily combing his hair. It was a bitter gesture which I put down to the sensitive matter of his having no hair himself, except around the edges.
Depending on the specialties of the visiting sportsman, I’d nonchalantly walk into the room swinging a tennis racquet or whatever. I was always optimistic that one of these heroic figures, Lew Hoad, say, or Peter Thomson, would be struck by the coincidence of our shared sporting interest, impressed by the signs of my early promise and praise me generously. This hero was already a guest in our house; there was a good chance we would become friends, I reasoned, and with his encouragement I would rise to the same dizzy sporting heights.
So my fantasy went. But beyond an initial wink, most of them took no notice of me. When we were introduced they shook hands, cracked incomprehensible jokes and turned away. I got their autographs, though. I got the autographs of all the tennis stars, even the non-Dunlop Americans, Pancho Gonzales, Vic Seixas and Tony Trabert. I was a relentless autograph hunter and I followed their careers with keen interest. I was even training my hair into a Kramer cut, the popular hairstyle named after that of the former American tennis champion, Jack Kramer – short on top and swept back at the sides.
One exciting day during the Davis Cup interzone finals my father gave me and Nick Howell tickets to the Players’ Lunch at the Adelphi Hotel. We ate in the terse but awe-inspiring company of Rod Laver, Lew Hoad, Ken Rosewall and Roy Emerson. Ted Schroeder, the US team manager and former American player, sat next to me. Businessmen and tennis officials were tucking into jewfish, prawns, crayfish platters and schooners of beer. But none of the players at the Players’ Lunch was lunching. They sat around, tense and decorative, sipping orange juice. I was dumbstruck but thrilled. Sitting by himself in the corner of the Adelphi dining room, eating a steak and salad and drinking a big glass of Coke (the first male adult I’d ever seen drinking it), was Jack Kramer.
My eyes settled on this lone figure. Because he was trying to persuade the tennis players to turn professional, none of them could be seen sitting with him. As he was the originator of the Kramer cut, the founder of my very own haircut, I naturally gave his hairstyle the once-over. It was short and brushed neatly forward. It didn’t stick up in a rigid flat-top, it lay down. The sides weren’t longer and swept briskly back. It was nothing like a Kramer cut! Jack Kramer didn’t have a Kramer cut! What was wrong with the world?
But the great Lew Hoad spoke to me this day. Well, not to me. Of me. After the lunch there were four company cars waiting outside the hotel to ferry the Australian players and sports executives to Royal King Park where they were playing the interzone finals. I had a Dunlop ticket. I was wearing my Bumpers. My father asked Hoad which car he wanted to ride in to the courts.
Lew shrugged. More than ever he looked like Robert Mitchum’s sleepier brother. Then he lazily tilted his head in my direction. He said, ‘I’ll go with Shoes.’
STRANGERS
A stranger showed up in our back yard one day with a shotgun. Another time one had a tank of poison. It wasn’t unusual for a stranger to suddenly appear unannounced. My mother called this ‘lurking’. Not surprisingly, she found it threatening. Her ‘lurkers’ – axe- knife- saw- and scissor-sharpeners, window-cleaners, gardeners, odd-job men, Italian fishermen, Yugoslav vegetable and mushroom growers, manure-men: moody, whiskery, stained and smelly men lumping sacks of sheep shit and dripping poultry droppings across the path – often loomed around the corner of the house, touting custom and catching her unawares.
Any man carrying a sack, bin, bucket, spirit-level or toolbox; any man confidently wearing a hat, overalls or a leather apron, could open the back gate, march up the back steps with an air of authority and, in passing, laconically correct the way you were managing your life. By the way, did we realise we’d planted the wrong sort of grass for this soil and climate? What with all the problems his brother-in-law said Ford were having down at the Leighton assembly plant, he’d be buggered if he would’ve bought a Customline himself.
The sound of a man clearing his throat woke me one winter morning. I heard him spit, then the scrape of his boots and a hissing noise. A high, sweet smell came into the bedroom. I peered out and saw a man crouched in the yard below the window. He looked like a lurker to me. He had a tank strapped to his back and a woollen cap in East Perth football colours pulled down over his ears. He was spraying our back path and stairs with liquid. It was barely dawn and steam was rising from the cold cement where the liquid hit it, and the liquid was running down the stairs and fizzing into the lawn. A vapour mist clung around the man’s legs and waist. He frowned up at me and turned back to his spraying.
It was six-thirty. My parents were still asleep. I went outside in my pyjamas and stood there in his vapour. I didn’t ask what he was doing but by standing there I was obviously wondering.
After a while he looked up from the mist and said, ‘Poisoning Argentine ants, aren’t I?’
‘Have we got Argentine ants?’
He was spraying so vigorously the poison was splashing as it hit the cement. It was running down the path and pooling under the clothesline and trickling down the stairs into the Doghouse. It smelled like fly spray but sweeter, like DDT mixed with honey. ‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘But I’m spraying for them anyway.’
‘What’s wrong with Argentine ants?’
‘They’re against the law. Can’t stop to chat. We’ve got to do every bloody house in town.’
I’d trod on a few ants in my time. I’d even burnt the occasional ant with a magnifying glass out of curiosity. I remembered the little spiral of smoke rising from the squirming body. But I had nothing against ants. I asked him, ‘How do you tell an Argentine ant from an ordinary ant?’
He stopped sq
uirting poison for a moment, looked at me and sighed, as if his line of work called for great patience. ‘You know when you squash an ant in your fingers it smells like varnish?’ He mimed someone doing this.
I nodded.
‘Well, an Argentine ant doesn’t smell like varnish. It doesn’t smell like anything. That’s how you tell.’
‘Do the ants in our place smell like varnish?’ Suddenly I felt quite possessive of our ants. ‘I think all of them do smell like varnish.’
‘Bugger off, sport,’ he said. ‘I haven’t got time to squash ants.’
The man who burst into our yard with a shotgun was hunting sparrows. This was during the Great Sparrow Panic. There’d been a sparrow sighting reported in our neighbourhood and you couldn’t be too careful. He was a Sparrow Ranger from the Agriculture Protection Board and the double-barrelled shotgun made him look very serious.
Sparrow Rangers were allowed to come onto your property and blast away. All they had to do was show their ID and say, ‘Official business. I’m hunting sparrows,’ and you were supposed to gratefully step aside. That’s what he said to my mother while she was hanging up the washing. She laughed at him, then she said, ‘I don’t want a gun here, thank you.’ Anyway, the only bird in our place was Junior the budgerigar so he left.
The State Government, the newspapers, everyone but our family, it seemed, thought this was vital work. The Government declared that Western Australia was the last place on earth apart from the North and South Poles where the sparrow hadn’t gained a foothold. Its fear of sparrows was even greater than its fear of Argentine ants. (I never found out why the ants were supposed to be so evil. In any case, despite the ant poison saturating the suburbs, they continued to thrive and the Government eventually gave up the fight.)
Both fears were to do with our isolation. The ants and sparrows were like fruit flies, Ceylon crows and ‘conmen’ from the ‘Eastern States’ – that catch-all description for anywhere outside the State border, but especially Sydney or Melbourne. (A car with a distinctive yellow Sydney licence-plate was suspicious enough to be noted by police.) All of them had the potential to make our lives that little bit less harmonious.
West Australians were accustomed to the Nullarbor Plain and the Indian Ocean keeping unpleasantness at bay. Thanks to the desert between us and the rest of the country, and the ocean between us and the rest of the world, there had never been a sparrow in Western Australia. Still, sparrows were at the top of the Agriculture Protection Board’s Vermin List. They were an official menace to agriculture, and a potential nuisance to city dwellers because they built their nests in gutters and eaves. They had to be shot on sight.
For once my parents disagreed with the Government. This was remarkable in itself. In our obedient neighbourhood it was almost treachery. My parents reverted to being Victorians. They recalled sparrows hopping around their old streets and parks without their bringing either the city of Melbourne or the State of Victoria’s agriculture to its knees.
Over his beer on the evening following the gunman’s visit, my father suddenly became quite sentimental about sparrows. ‘Cheeky little fellows,’ he said. I wondered whether he missed Melbourne. But if nostalgia was driving him, so was territorial instinct. He decided to make a protest to the Government.
First, he tried to drum up a joint complaint with the neighbours. They weren’t enthusiastic. ‘A bloody nuisance, I agree,’ said Bill Stockwell, the dentist, next door. ‘But better safe than sorry, eh Roy?’
‘By the same token,’ said my father, ‘what’s worse, a sparrow or a public servant with a shotgun?’
Once the Press became stirred up over the ‘outbreak’, sightings flooded in from all over the State. The ‘outbreak’ became an ‘invasion’. My father began cutting out the newspaper reports and filing them in a manila folder for his protest presentation to the Government. With growing scorn, he read out the latest developments each morning. ‘Stop the presses!’ he’d say. ‘A Fremantle steelworker saw a hen-sparrow eating sandwich crumbs outside his factory canteen. We’ll all be ruined!’ Next he’d yell, ‘Hold the front page! Our steelworker friend has spied a cock-sparrow outside his canteen, pecking at a piece of fruit cake.’
How had the sparrow spotter known their sex? ‘ “I’ve seen sparrows before, in England,” he reported. “And I know my sparrows.” ’ Reading this out, my father affected a lugubrious northern English accent and a dark look of suspicion. Armed rangers had hurried to the premises, but although they’d seen many birds in the factory grounds, shot several and scared all the rest away, none was a sparrow. ‘Bah goom, fancy that,’ my father said.
The Government was offering rewards for people killing sparrows and Sparrow Rangers were engaged around the clock investigating reports. So far none of the birds had proved to be sparrows. We were delighted. We’d turned into a one-hundred-percent pro-sparrow family. Of an evening we’d spread out the sparrow protest file on the kitchen table and all gather around with newspapers and scissors, laughing at the Government and urging the sparrows on. For once we had something in common: sparrows – or, rather, the complete absence of sparrows.
Although the sparrow file grew thick with news cuttings, the invasion was proving difficult to illustrate. The West Australian ran two news photographs of a Mr Healy of East Fremantle. In the first photograph he was pointing at an empty tree where he thought he’d seen a sparrow the day before. He said he’d observed the sparrow in the tree for seven minutes ‘before it flew off in a southerly direction’. In the second photograph Mr Healy was pictured pointing in a southerly direction.
My father cut out and filed the photographs of Mr Healy sternly pointing at an empty tree and then at the air. Underneath them he wrote, ‘I Rest My Case!’
The Sparrow Panic turned him into a bird lover. He shook his head at the tragedy of all the dead birds piling up in the offices of the Agriculture Protection Board. Shot birds were arriving curled up in shoeboxes and preserve jars. There were heaps of grey whistlers, silvereyes, cuckoo-shrikes, thrushes, finches, flycatchers, shrike-tits, wrens, robins, mudlarks, willy-wagtails, swifts, fantails and honeyeaters. But no sparrows.
A lesser body would have called it quits. The Agriculture Protection Board, however, saw the continued absence of sparrows as proof of the birds’ shiftiness as well as their danger to agriculture and domestic guttering. Vigilance must be increased.
The Board decided on a two-pronged attack. Sparrow Ranger Squad Number One was despatched to conduct close surveillance of all suspected sparrow habitats – warehouses, grain stores, railway yards. Squad Number Two was ordered to inspect all ships entering Fremantle harbour from ‘sparrow infested areas’. This meant inspecting ships from every port on the planet.
‘That’ll keep them busy,’ said my father.
The Sparrow Panic lasted six months. One dead sparrow was found sealed in a car packing-case which had arrived from England. The Sparrow Rangers never saw one live sparrow.
Everyone but the Agriculture Protection Board soon forgot about the invasion. Even my father’s indignation faded. The sparrow protest file lay forgotten in a sideboard drawer until I found it a year later and used it in a geography project. Mr Drake, the geography teacher, failed me. He favoured the Government line on sparrows.
The front door was for adult friends of the family, official business or female callers. The back door was for tradesmen and children. From the confident way they acted, it could have been the tradesmen themselves who made the rule. All of them except the butcher, the Watkins man and the Dutch lady baker came to people’s back doors.
It would never have occurred to the butcher not to come to the front door: he was a businessman, with two butcher shops. The Watkins man came to the front door because he was middle-aged, wore a tie and was a respectable anachronism, selling from his sedate green van things which people didn’t need and which lasted forever: padded coat-hangers and tea-cosies and bottles of vanilla essence.
In hushed tones
he spoke the mysterious language of mothers and their products. He was like a mobile church fete. All the women, including my mother, always bought something from the Watkins man, even if it was only a packet of jelly crystals or safety pins.
I was mystified and impressed by the long and serious performances the Watkins man and his customers would act out. ‘Anything you need today, madam?’ he’d ask. ‘Bobby-pins? Hat elastic? Nutmeg?’
The women would rack their brains and finally say, ‘Oh, I could do with some cochineal.’ And he’d say, ‘Blow it! I just sold the last bottle three doors down. Would you like to put in an order?’ And they’d say earnestly, ‘Yes, I’d better,’ and he’d take out his order book from his briefcase and arrange his carbon papers and fasten them securely with a bulldog clip and painstakingly write down their details: Mrs So-and-so, No. 45, Cochineal. And everyone could relax. The cochineal problem was covered.
But it wasn’t really. The Watkins man wouldn’t be back our way for two or three months. There was no fixed delivery time. If someone needed cochineal at all, they needed it to make pink food in the near future. Anyway, if buying cochineal – or safety pins, or jelly crystals, or a thimble – was a matter of urgency, the shopping centre was only a couple of hundred yards away.
I wondered why the women conspired with the Watkins man’s pathetic salesmanship. They had to be humouring him. Perhaps they were pretending they were lonely nineteenth-century farmers’ wives living hundreds of miles out in the bush, and the intrepid Watkins man was fording the floodwaters and crossing the desert and climbing the ranges to bring them vital cochineal supplies. Maybe the hopelessness of his endeavours just touched their hearts. Anyway, his business was so eccentric it did quite well.