Whole Wild World

by Tom Dusevic

  On his days off, usually Sunday or after a half-day Saturday- morning shift when they cleaned the Kellogg’s plant in Botany, Tata would walk us the few blocks to Belmore Park. On the way we’d walk through a tunnel that was beneath the railway line. If he spotted an oncoming train, Tata would urge me and Sam to stand in the tunnel. The sound as the train passed overhead was astonishingly loud. Even when you blocked your ears, the noise was primal, a drumbeat in your chest, shaking the ground beneath you. It felt at any moment the train could come off the rails or the tunnel collapse upon us. I wanted to run away but the extraordinary feeling of danger and exhilaration kept me there. We’d be screaming rude words like dick and bum and we couldn’t be heard. Then, as the last carriage cleared the tunnel, there was stillness, the train’s noise a faint echo across the park. Nearby was a stormwater drain and a little further away, tucked in the grass, a concrete pipe. Tata whispered in one end and, like a magic telephone, you could hear what he said come out of a manhole a short distance away; the sound had made a ninety- degree left turn. I made goofy wolf noises and once or twice, in my softest voice, whispered ‘I love Ti-to’ just to make sure Tata was on his game.

  The park had two main attractions for us, a merry-go-round and monkey bars, where we’d contort our bodies, imagining we were Indians working on a New York skyscraper, like we’d seen on TV. As soon as there were spots available, Sam and I would dash onto the merry-go-round. If there were no little kids onboard, we’d ride it like a scooter to get the speed up, feeling a rise or fall in force as we changed position; we’d crouch, surfing-style as well, the air on our cheeks. You were more stable in the middle (the trick to being the last person on the spinning disc at Coney Island in Luna Park). We would lock ourselves in tight and ask Tata to whip up the speed to NASA astronaut-testing levels. One of the wooden planks in the floor had a large hole in it. When you put your face through it, the grass and dirt underneath would tickle your nose as you spun around. Before the merry-go-round stopped spinning, I’d start a countdown from ten then launch myself like a rocket, rolling to a dizzy stop on the grass. Standing up, you’d be dazed, swaying legs and arms like Rudy.

  I wasn’t fussed that Tata didn’t play ball games with us because he worked so hard. My father would sit on the grass and watch us play. He’d collect odd things from the ground, stuff only he could see, and fashion fun shapes from found wire, metal, wood and plants. He’d pick out the dandelion, chew on the stem, play a kazoo tune from a stalk as he watched us, until we were tuckered out.

  Tata was content to just watch the sky. I’d lie next to him or rest my head on his tummy, see the clouds moving or changing shape. That was the best way to see everything because on your feet they didn’t seem to move as fast. We described the different shapes – ‘that’s the head of a monster’, I said to most of them – and talked about things we usually never spoke about at home. It was a good chance to ask my dad questions about his life.

  ‘What was your favourite game when you were a boy?’

  ‘How many brothers and sisters do you have?’

  ‘What job did your father do?’

  ‘Where did you meet Mama?’

  ‘Did you fight in the war?

  ‘Were you scared?’

  ‘Did you ever kill anyone?’

  ‘Have you ever seen a dead body?’

  ‘How did you escape from Tito?’

  ‘Where did you learn to drive a car?’

  When we were lost in talk like this I felt I could ask him any question that came into my head. And I did. Tata was careful to answer me properly. Nothing I asked ever made him angry and we kept talking until I ran out of questions or there was a burst of sound.

  The park was outside Belmore Sports Ground, home of the Berries. The crowd noise would surge unexpectedly, giving you a sense of how Canterbury–Bankstown was going. I could hear the collective euphoria from our house as well. Tata preferred soccer, but took us into the ground for a squiz after half-time, when entry was free. Squeezed between groups of men standing on the old grandstand side of the ground I was too small to see the action. Like others, Tata would find four empty beer cans, two for each foot, to stand on like stilts. I’d get cans but even the beer boost was pointless. Tata once put me on his shoulders but we fell off the cans and I wasn’t game for a repeat spill, given how much it annoyed the men near us watching the match. Instead of following the action, a lot of kids slid down an embankment on cardboard boxes or played in the abandoned grandstand, old paint cracking in Berries’ blue and white, which was behind new seating benches. On the scoreboard side was a bigger hill, with food trucks and ice-cream vans, and kids sliding down an even steeper slope, in turns, until a siren sounded.

  We spent winter Sundays following the South Sydney Croatia soccer team in the NSW First Division. The club’s home ground was the E.S. Marks Field in Moore Park, which is also an athletics venue. First-grade kicks off at 3 pm, which means we can go to Mass, watch the wrestling on TV, have lunch and drive to wherever the team is playing in Sydney. Soccer was a migrants’ code then and most of the top clubs had strong ties to ethnic and religious groups. St George Budapest was the Hungarian- backed team. Italians followed either APIA Leichhardt or Marconi Fairfield. The Jewish community supported Hakoah Eastern Suburbs, the best team of the era. Greek, Czech and Maltese clubs also had teams in the top division. For Croatians, soccer was more than a game. It was an expression of patriotism and pride, given nationalism was suppressed in Yugoslavia, and a chance to flaunt red, white and blue colours and the checkerboard emblem on the flag.

  There are always more men and boys than women and girls at the soccer. But on this occasion Mama has come to watch the first game of the 1970 season against our arch rivals Yugal-Ryde; in my conception, given how my father spoke about them, this team was effectively Tito’s local squad. Their supporters were ‘Yugos’, people either sympathetic to Tito’s regime or descendants of Dalmatians who had migrated to Australia long before World War II. We normally sit close to halfway but this time there are few seats at all. Before the match starts there is commotion near the dressing rooms, on the other side of the field. As we are in a high position, I can see men with flags being chased by other men on the running track next to the field. A fight breaks out among those men. People around us begin to boo.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I ask, but my parents ignore me, both now standing and in intense conversations with other fans.

  ‘They’ve taken our flag,’ Tata says to Mama, outraged by what he sees as a desecration.

  Croatian men, dressed like Tata in a suit, angry and spoiling for a fight, are jumping the fence and running across the field to where the trouble is. Police can’t stop them. There are so many people on the field it’s impossible to see what’s happening in the middle of a moving mob. PA announcements are jeered. Hands are thrown in the air. The match has been abandoned.

  ‘We’re leaving,’ Tata says, turning from us, hurriedly following others down the stairs of the uncovered stands towards the exits. Croatian fans are shouting ‘Money back, money back’. Then ‘Cro-ahh-zziah, Cro-ahh-zziah’ starts up, the chant when we score or are behind late in the game.

  I’d never seen Tata, always composed in public, so agitated. It scares me. I don’t know where this is going. Mama tries to calm him, even calling him ‘Joso’, but her pleas just make him angrier.

  ‘Money back, money back,’ he shouts with the mob, but even I can tell this has nothing to do with a refund.

  There is a messy multitude of humiliated Josos, wanting to stand up and strike back. Croatian men are complaining to police officers ‘Not fair, Mister’, as if they are referees, except with guns. The police, all of them tall, look scared, which shocks me because I expect them to be in control with their handcuffs and sticks and for people to obey them. I enjoy the energy of matches, being part of the Croatian supporters’ army, but it feels like we are doing the wrong thing.

  Mama has a look that bubbles up when bad
things are afoot. I can’t see Tata from my low vantage but my mother is pleading.

  ‘Dušević! Dušević! You’ll be arrested by the police.’

  The idea of my dad going to jail hits me in the chest. What will happen to him? How will we get home? The wounded collective stomps in the direction of the gates. The kids I can see look confused and helpless, dragged along by sheer emotion. Little girls, still dressed in the fine clothes they wore to Mass, are crying. There’s pushing and shoving; the unruly crowd is bigger than the exit. I am losing grip of my mother’s hand, fearing a beast-like stampede, but she grabs me. I can’t see Tata or Šime, but Mama and I find our way back to the car parked on the road outside the golf course. Tata is seething, not talking. No one says anything on the drive home because speaking would only make things worse.

  After the riot, both clubs would be stripped of their ‘ethnic’ names for several seasons.

  I started playing rugby league in second class. I was the tallest boy and played in the forwards as a prop or in the second row. We wore a black jersey with a white V, similar to Western Suburbs, the worst team in the comp. I wore unlucky number 13, a bad boy. Our coach Mrs Ward was tougher than any teacher we had at school. She was the mother of the halfback, owner of the prized number 7 jersey who took the first pass from dummy half and usually ran with the ball, often backwards to evade tacklers.

  We played on Saturday mornings in the Canterbury– Bankstown area. At training Mrs Ward divided us into two teams: the best and the rest. The three fastest and most experienced players, including her son, would play against the ten, eleven or twelve others who had turned up to training. I don’t think our side ever scored. The three stars wore proper footy jerseys, which were expensive and scarce at that time, while the rest of us wore the black T-shirts and white shorts we had worn at sport.

  My dad was working so I walked to school on the morning of my first match to get a lift to the game. Tata had taken me to the chemist to buy a mouthguard that we custom-fitted with scissors and boiling water. I could still taste the steam in it. Mama wasn’t keen on me playing, though not because of any perceived danger.

  ‘Don’t get dirty,’ she said, eyeing the crisp white shorts. ‘My hands, nobody thinks about my poor hands.’

  Footy clothes were an added burden to her compulsive washing ritual. As a first draft, so to speak, Mama hand-scrubbed every item. She then placed them in the washing machine, mulling over its inadequacies. Once that cycle was complete, she got down to the nitty-gritty of washing by hand, copyediting if you like, to achieve a standard that time-saving technology could never match.

  I didn’t have footy boots but the coach said she’d fix me up. Mrs Ward had a bag of second-hand boots. The only ones that fitted were vintage plastic boots that came up to the ankle, not easy to put on or run in, but the loss of pace would make little difference. To pep us for big games, Mrs Ward would declare them a ‘Sunny Boy match’. If we won, every boy would get a triangular pyramid orange ice-block, encased in tetrapak, at the school tuckshop or – surprise! – straight after the game itself. The offer extended to the whole family of icy treats – Razz, Zap, Pow or Glug – wonderful names that seemed to come from the action scenes of Batman. Just asking for them at the tuckshop was its own fun: ‘Can I have a Razz please?’

  The best player in any game was guaranteed a prize, which rarely went outside the power trio. I never got hurt but, much as I tried, it was impossible not to get dirty on the grassless paddocks, once garbage tips, that we played on.

  Half-time oranges remain the sweetest fruit I’ve ever tasted, their magical qualities impossible to replicate at home. Being on the field was the best place to see live footy. The action was faster than on TV, especially when we had the ball. It was easy to forget to back up or chase, lost in that most splendid moment, watching a zippy kid weaving through a whole team to score a try.

  4

  Hit and run

  At the beginning of second class, my third year of school, we began preparing for our first Holy Communion. The initial step was a first confession. To get to heaven – or at least, purgatory – you had to wipe the slate clean. Confess your sins, do penance, then return to go. I figured there might be a statute of limitations on my misdemeanours. Perhaps, like in maths, you could group like with like and confess to a general principle.

  ‘Not being kind to my brother’ covered the dinky business. ‘Telling lies’ was my omnibus in case something I needed to confess had gone missing or I had made a mistake in the telling. I was doomed. Here, I am thinking like a lawyer while my soul is crying out for salvation. You could go all out, fall on your knees, confess to absolutely everything and your soul would be as pure as Adam and Eve’s before the Fall. Or like it was after being baptised as a baby. These were the calculations I was making before I went into the confessional to see Father Slattery, an old-school priest, serious and remote to a seven-year-old.

  ‘Bless me Father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession, these are my sins.’

  It went smoothly. Enough sins to be a decent catalogue of a life’s work, not so many that Father would think I was a bad egg. The penance was five ‘Hail Mary’s and five ‘Our Father’s, which I thought was on the high side when I compared notes with others.

  We went to 9 am Mass as a class once a week at St Joseph’s, where we charmed pensioners with our hymn-singing. We also prayed for an end to the war in Vietnam, which I knew from newspapers and TV had been going for a long time and was about the spread of communism. My mother and aunt called the country ‘Vit-man’. The previous year, Denise, the smartest kid in our grade, had been called out of class. A little later I looked out and she was in the playground, crying uncontrollably, in the arms of two adults. Denise was inconsolable, fighting an invisible force, as if a furious demon had entered her body. Denise wasn’t at school for days and we were asked to pray for her family – her brother had been killed in Vietnam.

  The image of Denise in distress and the news of her brother’s death were chilling as they triggered my deepest fear at age six: going to war. In my mind, some time after you left St Joseph’s at the end of Year Four, you’d be off to Vietnam. From the news – violent street protests and men objecting to being put into the army by lottery – I knew you could be ordered to fight, even if you didn’t want to. I didn’t like my chances in a lottery, so I prayed to God to slow down the days, to lengthen the period before my time would come. Maybe the war would be over before I was called, but I didn’t put a high probability on it.

  My numbers were out by a long, long way but I felt the deadline pressing in. Running away was no good. I willed time to stand still and for my place in the universe to be the same. In my mind, the big boys in fourth class, ten years old at most, would leave at the end of the year for another stage of life. I wasn’t sure where they went, but I knew it was another stop on the line of the cruel train that took you to war. To die. At St Joseph’s, the big boys looked so strong and sure, in charge of the bottle drums and bins, that they could actually fight if required; they carried the morning milk crates and loaded the garbage incinerator while it was burning. I believed I was a good boy at Mass, praying for Denise and her family. But God, who knew everything, knew I was praying for myself.

  If I thought God or Sam had let me off scot-free for the unfortunate incident of the dinky and light tube, I was mistaken. After school Sam and I would get out of our uniforms straight away and put on our play clothes, then we’d eat whatever snack Tata had bought us, usually a packet of chips each. There was always Vienna bread to eat with cold, hard, scraped-on butter. We fought over the crunchy corner of the loaf if Tata or Mama had not eaten it at lunch. Then we’d settle in front of the telly, a square old Kreisler, to watch Cartoon Corner, hosted by Skeeter the Paperboy.

  One afternoon, Sam and I slipped into a silly game where we were whacking each other with our school shirts. It wasn’t something we often did, cotton not generally regarded as weapons- grade material
in our stoushes. But here we were, using shirts like whips. Take that! Zap! Pow! Moving into full-scale wrestling – escalation being in our DNA and, like Mario Milano and Killer Karl Kox, we are in our underpants – I put him into a full nelson. With my arms looped under his armpits, interlocking my fingers behind his neck, I feel a sense of triumph. Yet Sam shakes me loose, grabs his school shorts off the bed. He twirls them over his head, as if he is David and I am Goliath, except he’s bigger than I am.

  I move in to tackle him onto the bed. Bam! He’s hit me. Hard. What? Are you kidding? I hit the floor, knocked out cold. Like a villain on World Championship Wrestling, Sam had two chunky D-sized batteries hidden in the pocket of his shorts. I actually saw stars, like in the cartoons. It was wonderful. If I milked this egg-lump on my head, said my vision was off, maybe I’d square the ledger on my crimes, at least with Sam and my parents.

  One Saturday evening in winter we had cousins over: non-stop action, ball games, chasings, hide-and-seek. Empty Swing soft-drink bottles outnumbered the unopened ones in the crate; our boy noise was louder than the table talk of the adults, which was always raucous. A non-Croatian could walk in and think the gathering was on the verge of a gunfight but it was actually a sign of what a wonderful time everybody was having and how close we were. My dad loved nothing more than a house filled with the laughter of guests and a passionate political free-for-all.

  ‘Have you lost your mind? Tito is playing them for fools, all of them, the Soviets, China, America.’

  ‘Bullshit. Tito’s not that smart, he’s being used by everyone, especially the Serbs.’