Ten Pound Pom

by Griffiths, Niall

  But we need to get to Melbourne. Back in the van, back on the never-ending road. We pass through Glenrowan, which barely exists but for its Kelly connections; a bucket-headed statue of him stands as high as a house outside the general store. Plus there’s Ned’s Pizza Parlour, Kelly’s Inn, and so on. Like those towns in mid-Wales which have built themselves around the red kite.

  I need water and razor blades, and walk under the shadow of the giant Ned into the store. They have no blades, and no bottled water. I stay hirsute and thirsty.

  THEN

  The death-masks intrigue and appal the boy. The cold plaster behind glass and the set expressions on the faces, all serene, all peaceful, never, now, to change. He searches them for any sign, any hint, the merest suggestion of what it might be like to die but he sees nothing, just gently closed eyes and calm mouths, belying completely the violence of their going. But this is plaster; maybe if he saw the death-in-flesh… Why worry anyway? Death is something that happens to other, older, people. It’ll never come for him. He’s immortal. But one mask in particular fascinates him and holds him rapt; the facial features are much the same as the others’ but this one, running from nose to nape across the bald skull, has a crimp like that on a Cornish pasty where some awful rupturing has been sealed. The accompanying placard tells the boy that this man, in a last desperate defiance of the authorities, broke free from the guards who were escorting him to the gallows, bent his head and ran full pelt at some cell-bars, splitting his skull open, killing him instantly. The boy thinks about that, cannot help but think about it; is there something noble about that death, in that way? An act of rebellion, the only possible one left. The terminal action of this life, to regain self-expression, to wrest identity back from the vast and faceless machinery that had swallowed it. And to split the skull like that – he must’ve charged the bars as fast as he possibly could. He must’ve been truly determined, with every cell of his body.

  Nothing else in Melbourne Gaol impresses the boy as much as this death-mask does. It doesn’t feel like a place of incarceration to him, with the laughing and running children and the tourists taking photographs and the light slanting in from the windows in the high ceiling and alive with motes. The gallows is on the third floor, and the boy wonders why it has to be so high. Beneath it, a long way beneath it, is a large drain.

  The family stays in Melbourne for one night. They enter the state of South Australia on May 9th, Mother’s Day, and they stop at a garage to fill up on petrol and the boy’s dad buys a bunch of flowers for the mum. On a road entirely free of any signs of civilisation the back tyre bursts; from the back window, the children can see black rags wriggling in the road away from the car to turn and twist like snakes in the dust. The dad fits a new tyre, and buys a replacement at the next garage. ‘Another $36 gone’, the mum writes in her diary.

  NOW

  It’s cold. Didn’t expect it to be this cold. We get rooms at the Maroondah motel in Box Hill. The owner, a chirpy skinny feller who wears a hat like mine (maybe to hide chemo alopecia; he looks like he’s recovering from a bad illness), takes a shine to us and gives us a discount. We ask him how to use the phones, me to call the UK, Tony to call Sydney.

  –Calling the old women, ey? Bet you boys have sheilahs coming out of your ears.

  We laugh. –We’re doing okay.

  In my room, I take a shower, which is like a hit of paradise, lie on the bed and watch Oz Big Brother, which is more or less the same as the British one, including the accents. Same eyes rapacious for fame, even of a brief and tawdry sort. Same attitudes – same eagerness to jettison dignity. Same mix of character types; the snob the sporty the thicko the babe the slightly-unhinged the shit-stirrer. How soul-crushingly fucking dull. I sleep like a log that night and catch a tram into town the next morning, which takes the best part of an hour. News that morning had declared that parts of the city centre around the Flinders Street area have been cordoned off whilst police investigate a fatal shooting; three shot, one dead, one a woman, the dispute probably domestic in origin. The shooter not yet apprehended, so the sky above the city is buzzed by helicopters. (Some days later, they’ll catch the killer; he’d had a row with his girlfriend in a club, followed her outside, attacked her, then shot the man who came to her aid. Shot the girl too, but she survived; the samaritan died. Early 40s, young kids, on his way to work, killed because he couldn’t stand by whilst a woman was assaulted. There’ll be a photo of the killer in the paper; ’roid-swollen arms across his chest, one of them bearing the tattooed word ‘CARNAGE’ in huge Gothic letters. Dead eyes. Utterly dead eyes.) The Immigration Museum, with its advertised exhibition about Ten Pound Poms, shut. I was looking forward to visiting that. Find an internet caff and check emails instead. Drink coffee and eat a muffin. Explore a huge second-hand bookshop, buy the Collected Prose of Robert Creeley, and a Ron Hansen novel. I check the ‘g’s, of course. No Griffiths. Must’ve all been sold. I notice, in Oz, that used books aren’t ‘second-hand’, they’re ‘pre-loved’. That’s sweet.

  A cold wind blows through the city’s gridded streets. I meet a mad Big Issue seller. A really cold wind blows through the city’s gridded streets. I like the mad Big Issue seller. She’s got eyes like fruit-machine reels about to pay out and a laugh like a stack of saucepans falling onto a hard lino floor.

  I remember the prison; I’m surprised, in fact, at how much I remember of it. The reproduction of Kelly’s armour. The high gibbet with the large drain beneath it (for ejected blood and faeces and guts; sometimes the body would be wrenched from the head). The hanging model of the lead weight which basically drops an inch and is hoisted back up again; you press a button to make this happen. Which I do. The death-masks. A few cells have life-sized flat outlines of women-shapes made out of transparent plastic; I don’t know why. But I like their lost and ghostly effects. The death-masks again. One in particular. Can’t find it. I approach a guide and tell him what I’m doing there and what I remember and what I’m looking for.

  Ah, yer after MacNamara. He’s still there, ey. Cell thirty-four. Ya might not know, but after he did that, the governor at the time insisted that all bars be padded to stop it from happening again.

  I go up to cell thirty-four. There he is – MacNamara. In his glass case with his skull still seamed. I’ve thought about you a lot, MacNamara, in the past thirty years. A lot. Wondered if I’d ever see you again, and now look, here I am, here you are, talking together again. You haven’t changed a bit, MacNamara. Your skull’s still split. You still look peaceful. What about me? Do I look now as I did then? Carry on sleeping, Mister MacNamara, carry on sleeping. Not like you didn’t earn a good long rest.

  Souvenir shop; guides to the gaol, some stuff about executions in the state of Victoria, 1894–1967. 1967? Bloody hell. That recent. The sixties swuang in many ways. Kevin Morgan’s booklet carries the warning ‘contains graphic references to execution by hanging’, and the guy in the shop tells me that it’s very gruesome. I take the books, and more coffee and cake, outside to sit in the sun at a table by the gaol’s grand gates. Traffic roars and rattles past. The coffee’s strong, the cake is sweet, the sun is pleasant, the wind has calmed, the sky is very blue. Kevin Morgan begins by debunking the myth of ‘instantaneous’ hanging, rightly pointing out the political imperative behind the perpetuation of that myth: ‘any statement to the contrary would result in an electorate having to search its conscience[,] a discomfiting prospect for any government intent on maintaining office’. He writes that women would often have lead weights attached to their skirts so that they didn’t ride up ‘immodestly’ when they fell. Some hangmen were clearly incompetents with a strong streak of sadism; one, Robert Gibbon, was a ‘mentally deficient child-sex offender’, who took over from a feller called Pauling after he (Pauling, I mean) fled the state to escape from his alcoholism and gambling debts. Gibbon was also installed as Victoria’s chief flagellator, but lost his job in 1909 when ‘his mind broke down altogether. He hallucinated that na
ked girls were taunting him in the streets and, complaining to the police, declared that if nothing was done about the problem, he would begin hanging the girls himself.’ A fine man for the job, then. Morgan outlines several case histories, people who suffered executions just as savage and vile and hideous as the crimes they were convicted of (and often much, much more so). It’s depressing reading, a horrible glimpse into human coldness and numbness: ‘The whole exercise of a hanging was seen as little more than a legally-sanctioned indulgence for one or two inquiring medical men in an experiment with ropes and weights and forces about which no-one seemed to know less than the executor himself.’ I’d recommend this book to anyone who supports the re-instatement of capital punishment, except that I know that not even books like this one will deter them from their foaming need for vengeance. As long as it’s not happening to them, they don’t really care.

  I’m so glad that hanging was outlawed. It has no place in the world. We’ll kill the person who killed the person because there’s nothing worse than killing a person, except when we do it, because we’ve made murder legal, for us (and, often, the death sentence was passed for non-lethal crimes). Disgusting. It must never come back.

  Ah Christ. No-one really notices that the world turns and never stops turning. And that there are little creatures on it that all breathe in the same way the same air. The ‘Melbourne Visitor’s Guide’ tells me that the original Kelly armour is on display at the national library so I ask a gaol guide for directions and he points to a tall tower in the sky and tells me to head for that but that it’s closing very soon so I dash round to that tower and check my bag in at security. It’s in the ‘Changing Faces of Victoria’ exhibition, the armour, on Level 5 of this colossal, cavernous cathedral of a building. Lift. Up. Level 5, big glass case and there it is – Ned’s original armour. The very one he wore, bullet-pocked, heavy-looking. It’s missing the helmet, which is on a national tour, apparently, which is disappointing; there’s always something you can’t see, isn’t there? Always something missing. But there are photographs here, too, taken during the final shoot-out; there’s Ned himself, crouching behind a fallen tree in his steel suit, pistol raised. There’s the post-office in flames. There are the gnarled and blackened corpses of Ned’s gang, dragged from the smoking ruins. It takes a while for what I’m seeing to truly sink in; real photographs of Ned Kelly? Of the final shoot-out? Real photographs, from the time? The most primary of sources? Apparently so, yes. I wasn’t aware such things existed. Why aren’t these more widely known? Why haven’t I seen them before? For three decades I’ve been interested in Ned Kelly, read the books, seen the films, visited the exhibitions, and this is the first time I’ve even been aware of the existence of these photographs. Who’s been hiding them from me?

  That afternoon, I meet with Fiona Gruber, a lovely, sweet woman, originally from Shropshire, who runs Melbourne City Radio. She interviews me in her house for her afternoon programme. I notice a book on her shelves: Diary of a Welsh Swagman. What’s this? Something else I’ve never heard about. By Joseph Jenkins. Collated by William Evans. I make a note of it, and a mental note to search for it in every bookshop I’ll find in Oz from here on in. It’s her husband’s book, Fiona tells me. His surname is Williams. Has an interest in Cymric things. I arrange to meet her later and Tony and I catch a cab to St Kilda. Once Melbourne’s Kings Cross, now gentrified, a bit. I saw a play once, in Aberystwyth, called St Kilda Tales, about transvestism and drug use and madness and abandon and desperate celebration in the area, and I’ve wanted to visit the place ever since. So I drink in the Prince of Wales and the Espy, the Esplanade Hotel, which is brilliant, and allows you to smoke. The sky gets black outside. Stars bounce off the sea. Has this place got anything to do with the British St Kilda, I wonder, the remote and abandoned island off the coast of Scotland? I don’t know. But it’s a great place. Tony likes it, too.

  Fiona comes to pick us up with her husband and they take us out for Chinese food. The next day we get back in the van and head for Adelaide, and our uncle, our mother’s brother. The desert creeps ever closer.

  THEN

  They arrive in Adelaide at 2:30 in the afternoon and book into the Glenelg motel in what appears to be a posh part of the city, coastal resort kind of area. The clocks in South Australia have gone back an hour. Recently, there have been killings in Adelaide which have earned the city the soubriquet of ‘Australia’s Murder Capital’; the Beaumont children of ’63 will never be found, and, some years later, there will be the Snow Town murders – people killed as part of a social security fraud, wrapped in plastic and stored in bank vaults. The killers will earn $800 from this crime. Luckily, the boy is unaware of these details; he’s an imaginative child, given to anxious fretting about and dwelling on the world’s lurking darkness.

  On May 10th, they catch a tram into the city and feed ducks with bread. The boy asks whether they’ll be going to see Uncle Roy. No, says his mother. He’s away.

  On May 11th, they leave Adelaide and head for Kimba, on the edge of the great desert. The pass through a hamlet called Iron Knob.

  –A man built a robot here, the boy says. –A man robot. But it went wrong and there was an explosion and it blew up into hundreds of little bits and all they could find of it was its iron knob.

  His brother and sister laugh. The mum writes in her diary: ‘We have driven through some desolate places today and through miles and miles of nothing.’

  Outside Kimba, they stop at a menagerie. There is an eagle in a cage, which seems to like the boy; it shuffles closer to him along its branch, cocks its huge head, makes clucking noises in its throat. There is a huge red kangaroo, taller than the adults, so tall it blocks out the sun. The chicken-wire of its enclosure bulges where it has leant back on its cable of a tail and kicked out with its hind legs. There is a fox skin drying on a wall, nailed to the wall. It is very hot and flies whine and cicadas provide a constant background shrillness. There is a crocodile too big for its pool. An American tourist wants his picture taken with the giant kangaroo so the zoo’s owner lets him into the pen and the ’roo picks him up and bounces off with him. He’s like a doll, the American, a small and screaming doll.

  NOW

  –So why couldn’t we see Uncle Roy?

  –It was Doreen, his first wife. Remember her? She didn’t want us to visit.

  –Why?

  –Dunno. She was just like that. You remember what she was like.

  I don’t, really, but I remember the disappointment at not going to see Uncle Roy when we were in Adelaide, the mother’s brother who lit out for Oz in 1966, the year I was born. I’d seen him since, in Britain, but we would see him again, in his adopted home city, at the other end of the Great Ocean Road, which is beautiful. We didn’t drive this way as kids but we do now, and see the Twelve Apostles, huge towers of red rock rising up out of the surf far below, and we pass through small and attractive coastal towns, one of which, Kingston, is declared by a sign to be ‘WINNER 2005 BEST MEDIUM-SIZED TOWN’. Bloody hell. That’s scraping the barrel till it bleeds. At Mount Gambier we spot a Hungry Jack’s, the burger joint in which I had my first ever experience of fast food, so we stop and go in. It’s pink and yellow and garishly overlit. The soundtrack to Grease is on the jukebox, too loud. The food is utter shite. Cardboardy-greasy-meaty flat grey thing in a dry bun. Fries like blades of straw. Rubbish. All it does is fill a hole and make me feel slightly queasy. I don’t often eat fast food, but I remember Hungry Jack’s from when I was a kid. Was it this bad then? I remember liking it. Why did I like it? Has it gotten worse since I was a kid?

  We get to Adelaide. The Glenelg motel is still there, same address, looks the same. Rooms for $69 a night. The pool, the low units. Hardly changed in thirty years. In the seventies, we caught the tram here, from Jetty Road, into the city. And we couldn’t see Roy, then. But we do now. I give him a call and he arranges to meet us by a school so we get there and wait for a bit and there he is. Looks the same, too. He’s been i
ll with cancer recently but he’s recovering and for a seventy-five year-old, doesn’t look at all bad. Hasn’t aged much. Seems, sometimes, as if the only thing that’s grown older is me.

  Roy Mostyn, Ten Pound Pom. Was a policeman in Liverpool. He contacted the Oz police force for a transfer but they said he’d have to resign and then re-apply so that’s what he did. He was thirty-two, a bit too old for the State Police, but the Commonwealth Police said yes, provided he went to Darwin. No skills were needed, really, just a medical and an interview; ‘effortless’, he says. He didn’t really want to leave Britain, but followed his first wife to Oz – her siblings had emigrated and were loving their new lives. Roy remembers, though, looking over to Liverpool from New Brighton and seeing the city covered in a cold, grey smog; he was holding his daughter, Dawn, at the time, who was two years old, and it was that view that made up his mind to go. The boat journey took five weeks; ‘best holiday I’ve ever had’. The irreversible fact of his re-location only really hit him when he’d bought a house and car in Oz, which left him with $15 in his bank account. Why Adelaide? Because his wife’s sister was here. When he landed, it was raining, miserable, half ten at night. Arrival formalities at Outer Harbour, then herded onto a bus to the hostel. 1,800 people. The ship was full to capacity. Roy’s first job was selling insurance, then he was a security officer, then he spent twenty years in the catering section of an Oz airline. He split up with his first wife, and married Eileen, a Ten Pound Pom too. He refuses to take out Australian citizenship, or even dual citizenship, because he doesn’t want to completely sever his ties with the UK. Does he feel Australian? ‘No; I feel like a Pom. I’m proud of my heritage.’ Which is of a piece with his innate loner nature. If he hadn’t’ve met Eileen, he’d be in a little remote cottage in Wales, he says. There are greater career opportunities in Oz, it’s got the best health system in the world (and he should know, having recently recovered from two primary cancers), money goes further, Oz war veterans are revered. Is there anything he misses? ‘The friendliness of people’, he says (he’d be shocked and disappointed, I reckon, at how rude Britain has become since he last visited, but I don’t tell him that). Anti-Pom attitudes are very conspicuous in the workforce, he says, and talks about the overt aggression of the average Oz male.