Night Fishing

by Vicki Hastrich

  Pa was a male Cinderella. But there was no fairy godmother. He had to rescue himself.

  After six months of saving money from his small wage, Pa had enough to decamp again, this time to Rotterdam, where the mistimed stowaway incident took place. Two years of working as a sailor followed, aboard tramp ships, oil tankers and even a three-masted sailing ship. He was trying to gain the experience necessary to become a ship’s officer and possibly a captain; but his service on the sailing ship nearly did him in.

  •

  When I was ten or eleven I had a craze for reading sea stories: Billy Budd, Two Years Before the Mast, that sort of thing. I don’t think it was because of Pa. I don’t remember knowing much about his sea years when I was a kid, and anyway, I couldn’t connect him, a real person I knew, to such a last-century form of transport. But those novels stayed with me, and I have a pretty good picture now of the conditions he must have endured. In his birthday speech, Pa gives a matter-of-fact account of the incident which almost cost him his life. During a blow at night he was assigned the main mast. Sent up to reef in the topsail, he stood on a swinging rope attached to the yardarm. The mast, 50 metres high, pitched in a wide arc while he tried to gather in sail with one hand and hang on with the other. Lightning strikes helped him to see what he was doing. A rope he was pulling on unexpectedly slackened and he was thrown off balance. For a moment he felt himself weightless, without a chance in the world of saving himself from falling to the deck below, but just at that instant the ship dived forward into a trough and he was reunited with the yardarm.

  A change of career was necessary. At an English dock he found working passage on a migrant ship headed for Australia. Disembarking in Sydney, he was at last in charge of himself.

  The year was 1912. He was nineteen years old.

  •

  Despite his early hardships, Ferdinand Hastrich (aka Pa) retained his sunny manner. In short time he found the local German community and got himself a job with a German wire-maker. A year later he was married. The following year he was naturalised as an Australian citizen.

  With no English and no experience, his first job was to build a tennis court fence. Someone showed him how to cut and thread a pipe and left him to it. The fence stood for more than twenty years. As the wire business grew, Pa started making wire-working machines to improve processes for his employer. A job at a lift factory followed, then a job with a panel beater. The panel beater won a contract to make car bodies to fit imported Buick chassis, buying one of the new oxy welding plants to get the job done. It was the latest technology—so new, nobody knew how to use it, including the bloke sent to train them. Pa taught himself, welding the pieces of the 50 cars together with the care of a tailor. His skill became known to a large architectural metalworking company and he was poached to set up their welding section. There he remained until 1920. Then, as a 28 year old, he went out on his own.

  •

  The day Pa opened the Oxweld Co. on Parramatta Road was a dream come true. Two weeks later he blew the place up. He used an oxy cutter on an old drum he did not know had once stored petrol: the resultant explosion threw him on his back, and his dropped oxy torch set fire to what remained of the workshop. People came running out of the bank and the post office across the road.

  Ever the optimist, he was not defeated. With the financial help of his brother-in-law he built a new workshop next door. From his drapery days, he fancied himself as a ticket- and sign-writer. But something of the heavy Gothic script he grew up with entered his written English, and his lettering always looked overworked and clumsy. He didn’t notice. He was proud of his signs. On the big double doors facing Parramatta Road he set to work, painting a big red heart, split by a jagged crack running through it, and the slogan: We Weld Anything but a Broken Heart. Thereafter the business was locally known as the Broken Heart Welding Shop: it was a landmark.

  A golden period followed for Pa. People took him at his word and brought him impossible jobs, the ones no one else would touch. A surgeon came with an instrument used for removing adenoids. The damaged part was finer than any welding wire Pa had to fix it, but the repair was done.

  Pa loved tricks and puns so always enjoyed telling the story of fixing the statue of King Edward VII. The monarch, mounted on a horse, was prominently situated outside the Conservatorium of Music. (He has since been moved to a nearby traffic island.) The statue was not long installed when an embarrassing defect became apparent. The statue leaked. Every time it rained, water entered the statue via a crack in the base of the king’s head, which was not welded but only screwed to the body. The belly of the horse filled with water. While it rained nobody noticed anything amiss. But when the rain stopped, the water inside continued to come out a drain hole located in just the right place for the king’s horse to look like it was merrily pissing. The wee was rust-coloured, thus further drawing attention to the spectacle. For the boys and girls from the Conservatorium it was a great joke.

  Pa told the government architect it would be impossible to weld the 4-hundredweight head in the cold air, but called for a long ladder to inspect the problem close up.

  An agreement was reached. If the architect would erect a scaffold and wrap it in canvas to keep the cold out and the warmth in, Pa would take on the work. When the head was removed as a necessary part of the job, Pa took out the rusty iron bars he found inside the horse, and in their stead left his business card. Presumably it remains there: Ferd Hastrich, Welder. He could have added a new qualification: Equine Urologist.

  In another ‘art job’, as he termed them, Pa was approached by a sculptor commissioned to make a bronze statue for the Leichhardt Council’s war memorial. The artist had designed a 2-metre-high classical figure of a woman holding aloft the wreath of peace, but no foundry in Australia could cast it whole. The artist, seeing Pa’s Broken Heart sign, wondered if Pa could make good on his boast. Suppose the statue was moulded in pieces, could Pa put them together?

  Thirty-six separate parts of the woman—Peace—were duly cast, but as they cooled they shrank at different rates according to their various shapes. The artist was devastated. Pa’s job was now inordinately harder, but he called for an extra hundredweight of bronze rods and proceeded, filling here and cutting there. It was painstaking work to make the woman whole and the joins undetectable.

  I have a copy of the page which documents the job in his scrapbook. There’s a photo of the pieces as they were first given to him, arranged approximately but placed apart against a dark cloth background. The photo is, of course, black and white, but it is also much worn: scuffed and creased as if folded in a wallet for many years. This textures and flecks the monochrome, contributing a ghostly aura. The dismembered body, some parts whole, some parts halved, is spellbinding. The two profiles of the head face each other. A severed hand floats in the air. A bent arm, minus shoulder and wrist, emerges from the cloth. Breasts and bodice are split. The skirt of the gown is in shards. At the bottom, two feet point unnaturally down, as if with tendons cut.

  The relationships between the parts are still there—the black cloth areas between them somehow hold them together, even while highlighting what’s missing. Integration and disintegration are in tension. The off-centre fold mark in the photo performs an extra dissection to the already dismembered body, isolating the slices of head in one panel.

  I stare and stare. The photo is a simpler, haunting precursor of Picasso’s Guernica, perhaps the most famous anti-war painting in the world.

  Honour to the dead, says the inscription on the plinth under the finished statue, shown in another picture. The completed woman looks uninvolved. As if she is doing her public duty but has to shut out her own wearying problems going on at home. Her raised forearm looks too thick. Whether that’s Pa’s fault or the sculptor’s is unknown. Its chunkiness makes the wreath of peace that she holds look disproportionately small and almost toy-like, as if no one is expected to believe it.

  On the same scrapbook page there’s a phot
o of Pa, looking somewhat deranged. He’s in his workshop, though most of it is in shadow. He’s dressed in a white shirt and dark tie, and a black waistcoat with a fob chain. He’s young and slim, has deep-set eyes and a smooth continental complexion. Perched high on his forehead is a pair of welding goggles; their round glass lenses catch the light. He’s standing behind a waist-high collection of ironmongery: a metal frame, an engine block, bits of pipe and other miscellany. Low down, the face of a goggled co-worker pokes out of the junk. He must be lying on the floor or crouched low, because the position of his head is comically surprising, like the final reveal of a magic trick. Presumably all the gathered items are things they have cleverly fixed. Between them, Pa holds up a hastily handwritten sign bearing the Broken Heart Welding Shop symbol and slogan.

  The photo is amusing—they have had fun in its impromptu staging—but in its scrapbook proximity to the unassembled woman it’s disconcerting. The photos talk to each other, making Pa look like a criminally casual Dr Frankenstein.

  It took Pa a long time to weld Peace together. It was slow and difficult, and because it had to be fitted in around his regular work, it could only be done at night. After expressing concern about delays, the mayor was invited by the artist to inspect progress.

  ‘What countryman is the welder?’ asked the mayor as they were leaving.

  ‘French,’ said the artist.

  ‘Yes,’ said the mayor. ‘The French are clever people.’

  It would not have done to reveal the welder’s origins.

  •

  Recently, I went to visit Peace for the first time. She stands on a high granite plinth in a park which was formerly a cemetery. The plinth is inscribed with over 540 names. Of that number, 350 belong to the Leichhardt men who served in World War I, the war the memorial was built for.

  In the sun, perched on a kerb, I sat with Peace for a while, thinking of Pa, alone in the dark workshop, carefully putting her together. Did he grow fond of her during the many nights he spent with her? Honour to the dead, indeed. By then, 1922, he must have known one of his brothers had been killed in the war, that another had been injured and yet another interned as a prisoner of war. He must also have realised that if he’d been allowed to follow his vocation in Germany, he would surely have ended up working in one of the massively expanding industries supporting the German war effort. I picture the white-blue of his oxy torch in the dark and, coming from it, showers of sparks.

  Peace has a narrow, mannish face. A circlet of laurel leaves flattens her 1920s bob. She no longer holds the wreath of peace aloft; it’s gone missing. But she looks more resolute without it—her stout arm not dangling a prize, but raised in protest.

  In Australia it’s hard to be martial for long. Our country resists it. That day, while I was sitting there in the sun, a fat magpie flew down out of a royal blue sky to make a graceless landing on the top of Peace’s head. The bird had a worm in its beak. Up there, with its feet on her bronze hair, it tilted and bowed into the wind. It was in no hurry to fly off.

  •

  Now Pa finally had his own business he was able to realise some of his own ideas—of which he had plenty. He had invented tools and improved processes for previous employers, but now he was a young family man his attention turned to the home front. He invented a flushing toilet cistern that was superior to and cheaper than any on the market (Silent, Sanitary, Sure was the advertising tagline), later patenting a dual-flush system decades ahead of its time. A poor licensing decision led to the first model flopping, and the second was a flush too far for the public. A cradle-pram was next, then a picnic tent which could be assembled in various configurations and neatly packed into a suitcase.

  A new age of family leisure was dawning and it was one Pa embraced. The annual Hastrich holiday, taken down on the south coast with a gang of relatives and friends, was one of simple hedonism, with days spent swimming and fishing. There was only one thing missing—a boat.

  Naturally, if you are Pa, you make one—one that is versatile enough to answer to every possible requirement and desire, albeit on a small scale. And just as naturally, if you are Pa, you make your boat out of metal. Hence the Collapsible Boat and Trailer, patented 1932.

  Made of sheet metal, the 10-foot-long double-ended dinghy was constructed in two halves which could be ‘folded’, one on top of the other, for transport. In this mode it looked like half a peapod. To transport it, the pod was placed in a trailable cradle, whose metal struts doubled as oars when the thing operated as a boat. Fishing gear and holiday luggage could be stored inside the pod during transit.

  In a blurred newspaper photograph of an early prototype hitched to a car, the thing looks like a futuristic coffin. Suitable for the interment of contaminated bodies. Perhaps Pa missed an opportunity to patent for this further use.

  Once at the holiday destination, the wheelbarrow-like trailer could be unbolted from the car and pushed to the water’s edge. Locked open, the little boat accommodated five people. Airtight compartments made it unsinkable. A motor could be fitted to the stern or it could be rowed, but it could also be sailed. The canvas cover of the trailer converted to a sail when rigged to a mast erected from one of the oars. The second oar could be employed as a rudder. An ingenious improvement in a later drawing shows a solid trailer-wheel doubling to fulfil this role when attached into a special bracket. This attachment does rather undermine the beauty and credibility of the vessel, however. Wheels and boats do not generally look well together, unless in a paddle steamer. But on the still waters of the lagoon behind the surf beach, the boat looks boatish enough to be serviceable, and in the few tiny box Brownie photos I have, the occupants look as pleased as Punch.

  In one picture three little boys are in the boat with Pa. The singleted one with the stickie-outie ears nearest him might be my dad. Of the other two, one might be my dad’s younger brother; the other is probably a cousin. Neither of them could be Pa’s oldest son, who by this time has been in an asylum for several years.

  In these tiny photos everyone looks so happy; but the freest, most creative phase of Pa’s life was rapidly coming to an end. The Great Depression tightened its grip and the Broken Heart Welding Shop closed. For the next twenty years Pa worked as the manager of a fertiliser factory in Glebe.

  It was, quite literally, a shit job.

  •

  In the 1950s, after another war, the amateur engineer in Pa could be suppressed no more and he opened a workshop in the backyard of his Croydon home, manufacturing his own inventions. Hastrich & Co., read the letterhead, Manufacturers of Technical Novelties. He made garden hose holders for watering the lawn; special coathangers for drip-dry garments; and windshields which fitted to the driver’s-side window of cars. The shields stopped air from blasting into moving vehicles when the window was open, thereby saving the hairdos of passengers. Pa also made metal trays which sat stably on a person’s lap for that newest of phenomena—the TV dinner. Another version, the Kartray, was designed to hold snacks at the drive-in. The Barbecue Mate, also known as Spike-M, was a skewering system whereby multiple meats could be turned at once—so labour-saving. I get the impression Pa couldn’t bear standing around for too long, either to hold a hose or turn a chop.

  All around the house there were other inventions not viable on a commercial scale—the automatic cat-feeding device, for example, which ensured his beloved animal would be fed on time whenever he was out playing cards. I remember a sliding door which mysteriously closed all by itself, thanks to a strung-up counterweight. And then, of course, there was his toilet cistern, which had been in operation for years. This was attached high up on the wall. A straggle of levers poked out the top, making childhood visits to the loo an unsettling experience. I always half suspected the toilet was an ejector seat, which might at any moment blast off.

  We kids never snooped around or pried into cupboards, but would have loved to. After all, this was the home of a guy who once turned up at a fancy dress party in a dinner suit and bo
wler hat—quite a conservative outfit … until he pressed a button in his pocket and a cuckoo bird popped out of a door in his hat.

  In the garden there were other idiosyncrasies I saw in no one else’s yard: little wire cages around the carnations to make them grow straight; a set of swinging bar doors on the fenced-off vegetable garden; lines of beer bottles pushed into the ground to serve as edges of flower beds; metal pipes everywhere, bent and joined as trellises.

  The backyard factory was in truth a couple of mismatched sheds with the walls between them knocked out to join them together in higgledy-piggledy fashion. Inside, the atmosphere was cave-like. Narrow walkways of slatted wooden flooring threaded between benches and shelves. Everywhere, absolutely everywhere, there were tools, many of Pa’s own design. Pa had one or two employees, and family members sometimes worked for him too, but in the jumble of stuff it was impossible to know what anyone did. I remember the surprise I got when I once saw one of Pa’s hose holders for sale at a Woolworths variety store. So it was true: Pa really did make things that ended up in real shops; they weren’t just bits of bent wire covered in plastic that we had lying around the house. I felt proud. They were bits of bent wire in Woolies.

  Some of Pa’s inventions had serious industrial applications: a rotary metal hole punch; a self-levelling mechanism for extension ladders; improvements to the design of concrete reinforcing; a sheet-metal bending machine. This last, patented just before he died aged 81, was to have been the biggie. A tool for the world.

  •

  While I’m partial to trying Heath Robinson fixes around the house and show a certain nascent aptitude for innovation in the manual arts, it’s really not my strong suit. What I share with Pa is his spirit. It’s the blind adventurousness of the amateur that allowed me to dare to write. Like him I have learnt my skills by trial and error; like him I have limited materials to hand; like him I counter deficits with what are sometimes ingenious, sometimes inelegant, workarounds. Under these circumstances I realise my overoptimistic visions with varying degrees of success. There is a certain naivety to that optimism which is a weakness and also a strength. It’s an optimism that’s aligned with zealotry and utopianism: it lights up us amateurs and gets us cracking, but it also means disappointments are felt extremely.