by Tom Dusevic
To my mind, Sister Margaret devotes an inordinate amount of time to our school’s two highest artforms, aside from singing hymns at Mass: running writing and reciting poetry at eisteddfods. We get fountain pens (with cartridges) that are like paint guns in skirmish. It’s impossible not to give someone you don’t like – or do like a lot – a spray with the flick of a wrist. Learning cursive writing is akin to kindy drills: letters from first principles. But the real grind comes in our class recitation of poems for local eisteddfods. There’s a poem that every group does and one chosen by the teacher. This is the realm of Australian bush poetry – such as ‘Mulga Bill’s Bicycle’ by Banjo Paterson – and, for younger students, the many wondrous rhymes of Walter de la Mare and A.A. Milne. Eisteddfods were big occasions and I recall our class, with twice as many girls as boys (it was the opposite in the other class), did really well in competitions. For the boys, the temptation to throw a spanner into the works to annoy the girls was suppressed by the prospect of a celebratory party for winning first prize, which we managed to do on several occasions.
Sister tells terrific modern-day parables, mixing her personal experiences, nuns’ gossip and tales from the catechism. Reading is done from The School Magazine, which comes monthly and has one-off stories and serials. Comprehension, my favourite activity, is done via the SRA reading kit, a big box of colour-coded cards from America with a story and questions on each. The higher your reading age, the more difficult it is, but the stories get much more interesting.
Sam and I have also started going to the library on our own, taking extra care across zebra markings. He’s reading Alfred Hitchcock mysteries and will soon be borrowing exclusively from the adult side of the library. The children’s library is fine for me. I am drawn to the magazines that come in cardboard binders, particularly an American one called Boy’s Life. There are stories about explorers, natural disasters, farm accidents, stolen dogs that find their way home and profiles of famous sport stars. I’m captivated by ads for things you could never get here, such as certain magic tricks, novelties and replica Gridiron helmets for 99 cents. Can you imagine? Sam and I watched the Super Bowl on TV and tried to play it in the backyard. We knew the names of teams and some players, but it’s a niche interest and difficult to properly throw the ball.
I’m in between kids’ picture books and fat novels, so I opt for fact books. There’s a twenty-volume encyclopaedia for young people that I borrow at random, whatever’s available. There are cut-away diagrams of machines, entries for each country, a section on flags of the world and the population of cities. The Pear’s Cyclopaedia has all manner of cool lists, such as the order of Kings and Queens. I’m not fussy and read them all, cover to cover. The facts stick. There’s joy in searching out the ‘whole wild world’, which is my mispronunciation of ‘whole wide world’. Aged eight, I know the saying is actually wide. It makes sense. But because of speech laziness and the aural pleasure it brings, I prefer to keep the lovely L-sounds rolling through.
The reference books on the adult side of the library are more daunting and specific, with fewer illustrations. I imagine one day I’ll be using 50 Great Australian Lives as a source for projects. One of the best days of my life is when our family gets the 24-volume set of Encyclopaedia Britannica, plus atlas, and joins the club to get the yearbook. I thought we had the entire world on a bookshelf, the sum of all things. If it wasn’t in the Britannica, it was neither real nor important. The parents of some local kids had opted for the cheaper World Book, with its glossy pages and picture-heavy approach, a blunder in the long-term, according to the perky Britannica sales rep.
‘Your sons will use these books all through high school and, after that, at university,’ he told Tata and Mama.
I knew ‘universe’ from space and sci-fi shows, and ‘city’, so I assumed he meant Sam and I would still be relying on these great books in the distant future, when we were all driving flying cars in the year 2000.
The neighbourhood was saturated with kids who went to St Joseph’s, which is only a five-minute walk from our place; a two-minute run when I got absorbed in cartoons on morning TV. There were several kids in my class or grade living in our street. Franco was right across the road. He will emerge as Frank in later years but his doting mother calls him Gianfranco. Frank is Sofia’s little prince, often sitting down to a sumptuous feast at lunchtime. She always has a hot pot on the stove and the pungent aromas of Salerno pervade the kitchen, kept dark like a cavern; in the garage they have a vault of tomato sauce in beer bottles that will last until the end of the century. The only time Frank got in trouble at school was for throwing – more than once – his wrapped salami sandwich over the fence to the nuns’ house. The Brown Joeys called a surprise search. Show us your lunch. That masterstroke took our napkin-matching ninja nuns right to the door of Sofia’s pantry.
Carlo lived five houses away from us, while a few doors further down was Carl, who lived next door to Margaret, his cousin. That was just third grade. All those kids had brothers and sisters and they, in turn, had classmates living in houses or flats in Chalmers Street. Let’s not pretend otherwise: this was one of the toughest niche markets in Sydney in which to sell school raffle tickets. If you can make it here …
Like Frank’s, Carlo’s parents are from southern Italy. Both fathers drive Fiats, a rare marque in those days. I often went to Carlo’s place after school. He had a huge bedroom all to himself, which was taking on the feel of an Egyptian tomb: dark and elaborately decorated. His parents were much stricter than mine except in one important respect: Carlo was allowed to draw on the walls. While I was honing my ball skills and roaming at will, Carlo was being Leonardo. Like the story of the pharaohs or the Palaeolithic caves at Lascaux, you could follow the arc of this artist’s life by decoding his bedroom masterwork. There are stick figures from preschool, with early attempts at letters and numbers. Over near the window, you’ll find some wonderful examples of Carlo’s depictions of natural history, with the longest brontosaurus outside a museum. Observe the details of the beast’s skin and large teeth, the tail that extends all the way to the skirting boards. But please, don’t touch the artworks, especially as the early works are in pencil and beginning to fade.
In his Bruce Lee phase, a few years from now, after he acquires a muscle-building Bullworker, this artist – nasally, bronchial, pale of skin – will lose his infant, light-handed flourishes. Carlo’s work then becomes more intense, mixing biro and texta, featuring depictions of violence and conflict, reflecting, for instance, the turmoil of our involvement in Vietnam, his penchant for homemade numchucks and experimentation with a range of martial- arts identities.
In adolescence, there will be a flowering of sexual interest as Carlo pays homage to the planet’s cornucopia of bush, breasts and phalluses. Carlo’s studio is as intense as that of Jackson Pollock. Our crazy new government is about to spend 1.3 million on his Blue Poles painting. I don’t pay any attention to art, but I know what I like. I like the cartoonist in the Sun and the quirky, minimalist Molnar in the Sydney Morning Herald on Saturdays. Carlo draws better than all of them.
Gino, Carlo’s father, is a gruff giant and works at the Water Board. Every afternoon, as soon as Papa comes through the door, Carlo and his sister must drop whatever they are doing – painting, batting in cricket, a science experiment – and race up to kiss him. We don’t kiss my dad. Although if I were still up at 11.30 when Tata got home from work, he would not be in a kissing mood. When Carlo’s dad arrives, between 4.30 and 5 pm, playtime is over because dinner will be served pronto and I’ll be asked to go home.
Carlo is creative and inquisitive in a nerdy way. If you wanted to make a device to observe the lunar eclipse, Carlo is your man. Catch a spider or see a dozen variations of snot in handkerchief? Ditto. Their backyard has a long concrete path, under a canopy of grape vines; the supporting structure, a little over-engineered to my Adriatic sensibility, is expertly constructed from metallic pipes.
One day
when Carlo’s mum was not around we got into his parents’ bedroom. Carlo dug into the wardrobe and pulled out a shotgun. Whoa! I’d never seen a gun. I could barely lift the long and heavy shining menace.
‘My dad goes rabbit hunting,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you the cartridges.’
They’re fat tubes, like cheap, Chinese firecrackers. I’m old enough to know we shouldn’t be mucking around with guns, but Carlo had a double-barrelled deranged look in his eyes. I didn’t want to be busted by Gino in his bedroom so I made up an excuse and left.
A few days later Sam and I were driving around in a ute. Okay, it wasn’t moving, but we were changing gears, turning the steering wheel, tooting the horn and using the blinkers on a work truck belonging to a relative. We’d often sit in Tata’s EH Holden station wagon, pretending to be driving in the Hardie-Ferodo 500, the big race at Bathurst. Frank’s dad, a concreter, had a bulldozer-yellow ute. Some days he’d pick up his kids from school and all us boys would pile into the back, like blue-heelers in school uniforms. Sitting between the tools and smoothing machines, we skylarked, called out silly things to pedestrians, felt the wind on our faces. We looked out for Valiant Chargers, the hot car of the time, and shouted ‘Hey Charger!’ just like in the TV ads, making the V-sign with our fingers.
On the floor of the present ute, and scattered on the bench seats, were dozens of golden rifle slugs, a bit longer than the tip of a kid’s finger. Naturally, still smarting from Ajme Ante’s larceny, I pocketed a dozen of those golden babies and carried them around in my school shorts and at home. I showed the slugs to Steve, a Croatian kid from down the street.
‘I can make them go off,’ Steve said. ‘Let’s go to my place and we’ll get a hammer.’
Steve also had a big backyard, where chickens roamed free. His family had a fishing boat and he’d made a sturdy cubby house that could double as a nuclear fallout shelter. Just in case détente didn’t work. Steve’s billycarts were Bathurst-ready. He sourced his ball-bearing wheels from the Holden dealer on Canterbury Road. Steve’s cart had pram wheels at the rear, while the front axle had thick carpet on top, meaning you didn’t require shoes to steer. A big rubber thong nailed to the axle was the brake. His seat was padded. No billycart could beat Steve’s in a race.
After several hits with a claw hammer, then a brick, the slugs were bent out of shape. Duds, not even fizzers.
‘Carlo’s dad has two huge sledgehammers,’ I said. ‘Let’s borrow one.’
I knew Carlo’s love of art, science and ballistics would trump his caution. Carlo’s mum is busy and we stay just out of sight. We find an anvil in the shed and place a slug on top. Only Steve is strong enough to lift the smaller sledgehammer over his shoulder. Carlo and I take cover because – well, we’re not stupid. We can still see and presumably we’ll be close enough to feel the explosion.
Steve raises the sledgehammer. As he brings it down his legs give way and his body is contorted in mid-air. Carlo’s dad has come from behind and grabbed the hammer. We scatter. Carlo knows he’s in big trouble, possibly for not greeting his dad with a kiss, most likely because of the danse macabre playing out in the backyard.
‘What are you doing?’ Like thunder, his voice makes the ground rumble. Grapes slither off the vine. ‘Are you crazy? What did you think would happen?’
‘We just wanted to make the bullets go off,’ says Carlo.
‘Do you have more of these? Give them all to me.’
There goes my golden stash. What a waste. Ajme Ante!
‘You want to see what happens? Stand over there.’
He lines up a slug then brings the hammer down.
Peooooowww! Gino reloads. Peooooowww. Peooooowww. Peooooowww.
‘Go home,’ he roars, removing his belt. Carlo takes the steps two at time into the house. Steve and I don’t dare to leave via the house, so we climb over the fence to the flats next door.
In bed that night, just before I fell asleep, I swear I heard several Peooooowwws going off, amid the distant clatter of a train.
6
Tug of war
It didn’t come with the oomph of a religious revelation or the swish force of a lightsabre when I realised national service did not loom for me. Gough Whitlam had won the election at the end of 1972. At St Joseph’s kids had worn Labor party badges on their uniforms. Our neighbours the Stewarts, whose father Kevin was the state MP, had an ‘It’s Time’ Whitlam sign in their frontyard; their uncle Frank, who lived a street away, next to the home of the parish priest, was the federal member and Whitlam’s sports minister.
My parents, Liberal party supporters and staunch anti- communists, were despondent. Gough hated Croatians, Tata explained, thought of us as pests. We returned the sentiment with extra venom. Tata had a soft spot for the Democratic Labor Party, formed by anti-communist Catholics after the Labor split in 1954, the year he arrived in Australia. Mama and Tata could not vote because they weren’t citizens. Purist Joso was in a void of his own stubbornness. To become an Australian citizen meant official forms would record him as being born in Yugoslavia. Croatia was then a socialist republic within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. On principle, Tata flatly refused to buy in. Mama followed his lead.
So, where did my parents fit in? I feared if they got into strife, or other Croatians made trouble, Mama and Tata would be booted out of Australia, my home, where I so desperately wanted to belong. What did their stand mean for me? I wasn’t sure. But I wanted them to hurry up and become Australians.
Going on what I’d read in the Sun and saw on TV, Croatians were serious criminals around the world: bomb throwers, terrorists and plane hijackers. There’d been an upsurge in violence here, far worse than anything that had happened at the soccer between Croatia and Yugal fans. I had little knowledge of the build-up, but before he became Prime Minister, Whitlam had zeroed in on the cosy relationship between his conservative opponents and Croatian nationalists.
Croatian groups were the main suspects in a score of bomb attacks over two decades. In September, on the eve of the election campaign, a bomb exploded outside the Yugoslav General Trade and Tourist Agency in George Street in Sydney’s Haymarket, injuring sixteen people. Our family friend Fabijan Lovoković, editor of Spremnost, the weekly Croatian newspaper, was one of the community spokesmen who appeared on TV, condemning the bomb attacks. He spoke English well and, like my father, was a moderate and erudite. Although the man was in constant motion, he radiated dignity. In those days rational patriots had to compete to be heard over the many zealots, fools and hotheads involved in Croatian political groups.
Just after I was born in 1964, Tomislav Lesić lost both legs and an eye when a suitcase he was carrying in inner-west Petersham exploded. He maintained the package, which exploded in his arms, was given to him by a Yugoslav secret agent. Security agencies concluded at the time that Lesić had been carrying the explosives to be used by the Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood, a militant organisation that was behind incursions into Yugoslavia. Even after being maimed, Lesić was either incredibly game or amazingly unlucky. On the day of the George Street bomb attack in September 1972 he was inside the Adria Travel Agency, 200 metres away, when an explosive device was detonated there. No people were injured in that blast.
For me, Lesić was a terrifying sight at soccer games and rallies, crouching arse-out on crutches, voluble and crotchety. He often collected money for Croatian causes at the church. There was an air of menace about him, and many people, including my father, kept their distance. I tried not to stare at him or, more importantly, not get caught while at it. Only years later did I come to know the circumstances around his injuries. What brought it closer to home was that Lesić had married Mama’s best friend, Rajka, the woman she had escaped with. I had no idea Rajka, a warm-hearted stoic, and Milenka had been so close. The push of politics and my father’s wariness meant the old friends and oil smugglers were rarely together, except by happenstance in public places or other homes.
Why w
ould Croatian nationalists want to blow things up in Sydney when their beef was with the Belgrade regime? I knew the bombings had turned Australians against us. There was public outrage directed at migrants who brought their troubles here, endangering the lives of others. The crazy actions of a few had tarnished our whole community. My father explained to me that Tito’s secret agents were working in Australia to make Croatians look bad; in fact, the Yugoslavs were responsible for the bombings. He said Labor MPs were too stupid to realise what was going on or were themselves communist sympathisers.
The only politician more reviled than Whitlam by Tata was Lionel Murphy, the Attorney-General. Tata said Murphy’s raid in March 1973 on the spy agency ASIO headquarters was a way of coming after Croatians and the Liberals. In the lead-up to a visit here by the Yugoslav Prime Minister, Murphy had suspected ASIO of holding back information on illegal Croatian activities from the Whitlam government. As a nine-year-old I couldn’t possibly understand the intricacies of one arm of government fighting with another or the damage Murphy’s raid would inflict on the Whitlam government and beyond.
Some of the older boys at Saturday-afternoon Croatian- language school had been called terrorists at their normal schools. I dreaded the day when someone confronted me about what was in the newspapers because I didn’t have all the arguments worked out to defend the cause. All I had was my father’s word and I never doubted him. My mates at school didn’t pay specific heed to where your parents were from. Sure, they could sketch a pencil line between wogs and non-wogs and tell the difference, for instance, between the Italians and Lebanese. But a small, obscure place such as Croatia wasn’t on their radar and I wasn’t going to draw attention to complicated issues they’d never be able to understand, because I couldn’t figure it out either. It was possible to slip into a general European-ness, especially as there were no other Croatians at school. Some kids may have thought I was Australian. Fancy that.