As a meat inspector, Dad was known as a stickler for standards, even to his own detriment. When he found out that some inspectors were turning a blind eye to contaminated carcasses, he blew the whistle. He also stepped in when some meatworkers were killing sick goats to harvest their gallstones, which could be sold to traditional Chinese medicine practitioners. Being such a strict by-the-book operator didn’t win the old man any friends at work, and there were times when he felt quite isolated.
He didn’t bring those dramas home, but a couple of times he took Brent and me to the abattoir. I was really excited to see it all happen. He showed us the process – ‘This is where the cows, sheep and goats come, this is where they’re killed’ – and seemed happy to get us involved. He was allowed to bring home a couple of live lambs from the abattoir and fatten them in our paddock. We were counting the days to the weekend when he’d kill them and cut them up for the freezer so we’d have lamb for the next six months.
When the day came, I was adamant about helping him. Brent was not so keen; I think he may have been away playing rugby. I had to hold the lamb’s neck back while Dad cut its throat.
‘You sure you want to see this? There’ll be a lot of blood.’
‘Yeah, I want to see how it’s done.’
It trembled in my arms as it bled out. I helped him carry it over to the shed. He had a chain strung up from the roof with an S-hook, on which he hung it up and skinned it.
‘Now stand under it,’ he said, ‘and put your arms out.’
I didn’t know what was going on. Earlier in the day he’d got me to dig a hole near the shed. I’d asked what the hole was for. ‘You’ll find out later,’ he said.
Now he was working inside the sheep up to his elbows while I had my arms around it.
‘Are you ready?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, not having any idea what I was ready for.
‘Righto, catch this.’
All the guts came out – the stomach, the intestines, the liver, the bladder. The smell hit me in a wave. I was gagging, just thinking, Don’t vomit, don’t vomit.
He pointed to a bulging sac of grey gizzards and said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t pop that.’ It was the bile duct, which, if it broke, could poison everything around it.
Dry-retching, I dragged this heavy mass of stinking internal organs towards the hole, telling myself, Don’t vomit, don’t vomit, you have to show him you can do this without messing it up.
I got it there and kept myself in one piece. When I came back to him he said, ‘Righto, let’s do the other one.’
I enjoyed the next one more, I’ll admit, and fresh lamb was the best meat you could have. Looking back on it, even though it was gross and confronting, it was one of my treasured moments with Dad, and set me up well for some of the stomach-turning things I’ve had to do in my professional life. He and I bonded over blood and guts. I remember one week in later years, when I was fourteen, when Mum and Brent were away somewhere and Dad and I had to look after ourselves. He’d leave for work early and I had free rein in the kitchen, making myself Milo sandwiches to take to school. One night, the old man announced that he was cooking.
‘What are we having?’
‘You’ll find out. Don’t ask, just eat it, see how you go, and we’ll talk about it after.’
He fried some kind of meat in the pan and put it down in front of me. I thought, What the fuck is this? I sat and ate it with him. Then I asked what it was.
He pointed to each bit. ‘That was heart, that was kidney, that was lungs.’
I thought he could have told me beforehand, but it was good. And it was good to be doing something like this with him, just the two of us.
It’s only when I sit down and think back over these events that I understand how they were more than just isolated moments in a fairly typical country childhood. At the time, they were little spikes of love and enjoyment in what was often a pretty fiery relationship with the old man. Later, when I lost him, I would treasure these memories all the more for the fact that we could never do such things together again. But even later still, having seen what I’ve seen in Afghanistan, I wonder if all the elements of these episodes – the confrontation with bleeding flesh, the need to overcome my revulsion, the motivation to win Dad’s approval and be a man in front of him – were part of a pattern, all leading to the particular kind of person and soldier I am now. It’s impossible to say how important childhood experiences are in determining your future, but that association of pleasure and achievement with acts when I had to fight my disgust and fear must have helped me do some of the things I’ve had to do in war.
As kids, there was one big, communally approved outlet for our warlike instincts, and Brent and I were both into our sport: basketball, cricket, rugby league and union, swimming, soccer, whatever was going. It was always Mum, not Dad, who got up at the crack of dawn for long drives to other North Coast towns to soccer or rugby. She was happy to drive us, cheer for us, provide the half-time oranges or take home all the jerseys to wash for next week’s game. They’re things you take for granted as a kid, and I’m conscious now of the need to remind my kids of how much their mum does for them. There’s never a bad time to say thanks to your mum.
Brent was much more talented than me, as well as being older, but I was a determined bugger and was desperate to match him. He’d get me to come out into the yard to play cricket, where he’d bat as Steve Waugh and I’d be the cannon fodder bowling at him all day as he smashed me around. All I did was chase the ball and get angrier. Eventually I’d crack the shits and chuck the ball at him and we’d have a fight. Brent soon realised that if he wanted to keep me playing, he’d have to let me get him out. It didn’t matter; the games usually ended up in a fight anyway.
We had a basketball ring the old man built, which we used a lot, but Brent was taller and better at that too. We also played one-on-one rugby, which I’d play grudgingly again because he’d smash me.
I looked up to Brent more than anyone else, as little brothers do. He was happy to play together at home, but in public he didn’t want his little brother in his team, and eventually, instead of trying to mimic and compete with him in everything, I decided I wanted to be my own person. He was such a good rugby league player, I got into soccer to be different. But although I was so competitive with him, he was my hero and role model. I was always fighting kids at school in what I thought was a noble defence of Brent’s reputation. Generally the conflict went along the lines of, ‘My big brother’s better than your big brother!’ and it’d be on. One day I was fighting with an older kid about who was a better rugby five-eighth, him or my brother. Brent got up me for causing him dramas.
I said, ‘But you’re heaps better.’
He said, ‘It doesn’t matter. The guys are coming up to me at lunchtime and having a go at me about my hothead little brother.’
*
Holidays involved long car trips, and Dad’s determination and hunger for adventure had to be balanced by Mum’s calming hand. On the first day of a holiday, he was up at four in the morning, packing the car, hustling everyone along. We’d be still rubbing the sleep out of our eyes when he’d say, ‘Have your toilet stop now, that’s it, no stopping on the road.’ He didn’t even want to eat, he was in such a hurry to go, but Mum managed to stall him for a few minutes so we could have some breakfast.
When we got going, he was a competitive driver, always having to be first in the overtaking lane. He liked to drive fast, never letting anyone pass him, desperate to get in front of a truck before the road narrowed to one lane. In the back, Brent and I would soon be fighting over the imaginary line demarcating our space.
‘You put your hand over it!’
‘No I didn’t, you did!’
Dad reached back to smack us, before Mum told him, ‘Come on, concentrate on the driving.’
Three hours into the drive, after we’d
had our poppers and some apples and sandwiches, the cry would go out.
‘I need to go to the toilet!’
After all the work he’d done overtaking cars, having to stop for a toilet break drove Dad insane. He’d ignore us or urge us to hold it in, until Mum persuaded him that he had to be humane or risk an accident on the back seat.
Any chance I got to prove myself to him, even on holidays, I took it. We did a big drive to Victoria once and went hiking up Mount Buffalo. Brent and Mum ran out of gas some way from the peak, but Dad said, ‘I’ve come this far, I want to see what it’s like at the top.’ I followed him, and we left the others behind. One holiday I remember was particularly special, because it was just Dad and me for two weeks, during the school term. I was about nine or ten and he had to drive to South Australia to see an old friend of his from the Newcastle butchery. We went fishing in Adelaide, and Dad’s mate showed us where the Indy cars went and drove us on the track. I loved my cars, saved my coin to buy Wheels magazine and pinned posters of V8s and super cars on my wall, but even better than indulging this love was spending all that time alone with Dad. He let me get away with things I couldn’t do at home, like taking our seatbelts off. Crossing the desert in New South Wales, I read a book and lay across the back seat. At a servo, I could get an ice-cream or a treat. Normally it was ‘No, nothing, you can never get anything from a servo.’ On this trip, everything was allowed.
He was terse and stern so often, the exceptions are what stick in the mind. At one Christmas party, at a friend’s place on a lake, Dad went waterskiing, and we watched him zip around on the two skis. Then he dropped one off and started single-skiing. Then he dropped that one too and went barefoot. It was amazing to see the old man showing the talent he had. When he came back in, he was so happy and joyful with his friends, and Mum was having a laugh too. There are photos of us all clowning around and Dad’s poking his tongue out while Brent’s sticking his middle finger up. It was one of the rare times we saw Dad really let go. Now that I’m a father, I can understand how stressful it can be, but as a parent I think Mum’s influence on me has come out more. I don’t get worked up over little things like Dad did. He was such a clean freak, he’d go nuts if we smudged a window he’d cleaned or a floor he’d polished. I’m much more easygoing. And as a soldier, I don’t get wound up over small matters like obsessively keeping every piece of equipment sparkling and well organised. I think I take after Mum in being a bit more pragmatic.
But Mum did like keeping things tidy, sometimes to a comical degree. On our Easter holiday camping trips, it was Mum who made sure the eating, cooking and sleeping areas were always in order. Dad, Brent and I would go off fishing for hours and when we came back to the campsite it would be immaculate. One time we came back to find the tent all zipped up and Mum sitting on a fold-out camp chair under the tarp with a big stick, looking intently towards a large gum tree. She told us she’d been taking a nap in the tent, only to wake and see a large goanna next to her. She’d jumped up and ran out of the tent, knocking the camp table and food all over the place, and charged around whacking the reptile with this stick until it had scuttled up the gum tree. It was funny enough hearing that she’d scared the goanna up a tree; hilarious that while warding it off she’d still re-ordered the camp to the way it was when we’d left.
Where we really saw Mum and Dad at their most relaxed was on family holidays visiting Uncle Ross and Auntie Val at Lake Macquarie or Sydney, or Auntie Margaret and Uncle Ken at their holiday house at Tanilba Bay. Those holidays were the highlight of the year. When we arrived, we’d go bananas. Was Uncle Ken’s boat there? If the trailer was standing empty next to the shed, the boat was already out. The first thing was to run through the Nancarrows’ yard – they had a couple of kids our age – to the access road to see the bay. Angie would follow us. We tiptoed through the bindies to get to the buffalo grass, racing each other. We got to the water and threw jellyfish at each other, feeling our feet in the sand. It was awesome, that anticipation of hitting the salt water and seeing our cousins. Kay and Tony would be windsurfing, and Christine, who was much closer in age to us, would already have rounded up some friends to play with. Being the youngest, I was as usual running myself ragged trying to keep up with everyone. My cousins teased me a bit about my red hair. The family was full of redheads, but in that generation I was the only one. They said it gave me a temper, which only made me angrier. Actually, it was my tough wavy curls that bugged me more than the colour. I spent a lot of time trying to straighten it, even running my head along the hallway carpet, which gave Auntie Margaret no end of amusement.
When I joined the SAS, we could choose between three modes of insertion: by water, air or land. I think I owe the origins of my choice to be a ‘watery’ to those days at Tanilba. Every day was an adventure. We’d crowd around Dad and Uncle Ken: ‘Where are we going today?’ It would be swimming in the rivers and estuaries, or up to the oyster leases at Karuah. Uncle Ken had a four- or five-metre runabout, and fishing with him was so relaxed compared with Dad. When it was just us and him, he’d have to set up our lines and cut us free from snags or untangle our messes, and never get to relax and fish himself. At Tanilba, Dad was so much calmer, even Mum came. When the fishing got slow, we had competitions to hold our breath and dive under the boat, which was also powerful enough to take us waterskiing.
Our aunts, uncles and cousins had such close relationships because Mum and Dad were partly estranged from their surviving parents. As kids, this only dawned on us gradually. We didn’t notice anything unusual in the fact that we hardly ever saw our Grandma Prue, even though she lived only a short distance away at Nambucca. Dad had never fully got over his father’s death, and never patched things up with Grandma Prue. She had a lot of gentleman friends after she became a widow, and Dad reckoned she’d chased him out of the house when they were there. Either because he didn’t trust her or he wanted to pay her back, he wouldn’t let us stay overnight at her house.
To compensate, Dad would go out of his way to make sure we saw our maternal grandfather, Fred. He was old and bald and lots of fun when he could be alone with us. The train ran by his house in the semi-industrial part of Mayfield, and we loved going there. We’d be shy at first, then treat it as our own house. We knew where the lollies were. We’d go into the shed with him and he’d show us how to use the tools. He had some old scooters in the shed and we’d tear off on them. But this relationship was problematic too. Eventually, if we were having too much fun, it would be brought to an end when Joan came out to send him off on an errand or to take us shopping. She wasn’t mean, she just didn’t want us getting too close to him.
It was only when we were teenagers that Mum explained how Joan wasn’t her mother. She didn’t let on how cruel Joan had been to her, but in her subtle way she was letting us know that if we weren’t getting to know our grandfather as well as other kids knew theirs, there was a reason.
*
It won’t have gone unnoticed that I haven’t talked much about school. No prizes for guessing why. I was by no means the worst student in Dorrigo, but nor was I straighty-one-eighty. At some point, I think I was kicked out of just about every class for being a smart-arsed little turd. It wasn’t anything serious in those late primary, early high school years. In science I’d fill kids’ pencil cases with gas and light them, or get as many Bunsen burners going as possible. We had frogs to dissect, and as the teacher was old and didn’t know how to handle us, we ran around the classroom with frogs in our mouths. It was more skylarking than serious misbehaviour, in the early days at least.
It wasn’t that I hated being at school or was hyperactive. I did have periods when I was quite settled and studious. Ever since I’d been little, I’d enjoyed reading books and making models. I could sit for hours building with Lego or model aeroplanes, and if I got into a book I’d read it in a day or two: Roald Dahl’s Matilda, Fantastic Mr Fox, that sort of thing. The old man also used to read
to us before bedtime, The Hobbit and then The Lord of the Rings, a couple of pages a night. I don’t know if he got through the whole cycle. But it was hard for me to carry that interest through to school, because the main excitement there was how much you could get past the teacher.
I was pretty cheeky, and around the age of twelve or thirteen I started getting into more serious trouble. One of our teachers was the rugby coach, and everyone knew another teacher was having an affair with his wife. One day when this other man walked past our room, one of the kids said, ‘That guy’s a wanker.’ The rugby coach said, ‘Oi, don’t say that, he’s a good bloke.’ I quickly and, I thought, wittily snapped back, ‘If he’s such a good bloke, why’d he steal your wife?’
I got sent to the headmaster, not for the first or last time. I was going through a transitional period when Mum and Dad must have felt they were just hanging on to me. I’d play soccer on Saturdays and then go fishing with Dad, or hang around the house where he had jobs for me. He got me to help build our home septic tank, which was really tough work, but I would eventually get in trouble, such as when I drove the ride-on mower over our driveway of blue-metal rocks just after Dad had spent all morning sharpening the blades. He came charging at me with a shovel before I knew what I’d done wrong. What made it worse was that he’d been yelling at me to get off but I was wearing my Walkman, listening to my favourite heavy-metal music, and hadn’t heard him. In his eyes I was turning into your typical deadbeat teenager. He came after me and caught me across the bum with a full-blooded swing. I didn’t cry because I didn’t want him to see how much it had hurt, but I still moved far enough away so he couldn’t reach me with his second swing.
The Crossroad Page 4