by Tom Dusevic
‘Next time just call to let us know you’ll be late,’ our father said, half-heartedly, knowing the likelihood of us forfeiting money on a payphone when we were maximising our spending money, or even thinking about home while we were on a mission to see every display at the Showground, was extremely low. I think he was just relieved to have missed out on twelve hours of Show time.
Joza and Zorica were our last tenants. We had the house to ourselves. The extra bedroom became an office for Tata to do subscriptions and advertising invoices for the Croatian newspaper. Teta annexed the second kitchen as a sunny sewing room at the back of the house. She’d hurt her back and neck at the White Wings factory, and doctors and therapists only seemed to make her condition worse. For a time, the fire went out of Teta; she was a wraith in white socks and slippers around the house, shuffling out of her bedroom at odd times, wearing a purple dressing gown over a long white flannelette night dress, and layers of cardigans and jumpers, forever complaining about feeling frozen in the house.
Before she got sick, Teta would commandeer the house on a Saturday. The sisters would do two days of chores because Sunday was the Lord’s day of rest, a quaint practice they had grown up with in the village and which they adhered to, religiously. If we were having a special Sunday meal or expecting visitors, Saturday afternoon was their time for baking cakes, colouring hair and making complicated recipes. My favourite foods were sarma, several varieties of spiced mincemeat in cabbage leaves, and paprika, same deal, except the meat was stuffed in a hollowed out, plump capsicum. These dishes required laborious preparation, using a pantry’s worth of ingredients. Industrial-grade tools for mincing meat by hand would be brought out of storage and reassembled. The Lukin sisters never worked in a hurry, filling out the available time, like batsmen playing out the overs for a draw before bad light stopped play.
Teta made marvellous cakes, but her expertise extended to anything sweet from an old recipe book she’d kept from the domestic school she’d attended in Croatia. Everything was made from scratch, probably because Teta worked in a factory that made cake mixes. The bonus for us from her time at White Wings was offcuts of Space Food Sticks, a delicacy of the Apollo era, with clay-like consistency in caramel and chocolate. We had cake, doughy frittoli or sugar-dusted krostoli every weekend.
The other Lukin ritual was doing each other’s hair. Mama was in her fifties, Teta in her sixties. They set up brushes, dyes, the rollers, smocks and dryer in the sun room and went at each other in a sullen way, the world’s least cheery hairdressers. Either Danica was better at this than Milenka, or Teta complained more than Mama. To my eyes, they emerged from that fog of ammonia exactly alike: same colour, same style. I’d never seen the entire production but having been present at different stages of the hair cycle, I came to know the burden of keeping the grey at bay.
Saturday was our day for jobs with Tata. Washing the car was mandatory ahead of a wedding or a family gathering. If there were a problem with one of the flats my parents owned at Adelaide Street, Sam and I would be there, miserable, in dirty work clothes. Tata insisted on us helping out, except when painting, possibly because it looked like fun. We had to watch Tata work and learn. It was unbearable when these working bees happened during the school holidays.
I enjoyed seeing Tata do complicated tasks like carpentry or plumbing, his mind ticking to sort out a problem, asking him questions about why he was doing something in a particular way. As a child he’d been curious to know how things worked and he’d figure out how to fix things by trial and error with whatever was at hand on the farm. The other bonus was going to the timber yard or hardware store, where order seemed paramount: everything in its right place. I admired the precision of the tools, liked handling them. There was something for every job and I pondered the biggest question of all: what came first, the task or the tool?
I’d taken Tata’s methods into my own experiments in the shed, making toys and elaborate pieces of furniture for the cubby houses we constructed. We had a South Pacific islands themed house, with long palm branches providing shade and allowing airflow, ensuring a lovely, light structure. There was the shearer’s shed aesthetic, using old corrugated iron to make a bunker-strength hideout. When we had tried every variation, including carpets of the Middle East and Native American Indian teepees, we took things into the Space Age. After a new washing machine and another appliance were delivered, we used the cardboard packaging to make a Skylab space station, which we plonked on the nature strip in front of the house. It was your basic, prefab, three-pod arrangement in a line, including two separate air vaults, with interconnecting rubber laundry tubes for communications. We bored out peepholes to watch the action on the street and made noises when people went past, giggling at their reactions as if they’d been caught on Candid Camera.
One of the regular jobs was mowing the lawn, but we didn’t own a lawnmower; they were expensive, a few rungs below the cost of a motorbike. Our next-door neighbour Jack owned a powerful Victa and Tata paid him, in cash and beer, to do all our mowing. He was hard drinking, single, a garbage man and it was impossible to understand him. Jack spoke as if he had once swallowed a nasty insect, near fatally, and would never again take the risk of opening his mouth. Naturally I added him to my mimicking repertoire. I could get in all the swear words I knew under the pretence of being Jack.
‘HowthefuckareyayoungTommmmmmy!’
Jack didn’t say fuck to me, he was mindful of his Fs and Cs that way. But I did when I was being Jack.
‘Chrisssssalmighteee! Imdyinoffarkenthirsteeersonneeee.’
It was difficult to know if he was talking to himself or asking you to do something. He often stuttered.
‘Yeahyeahyeah! Comeyeeerranemtythebluddeeething.’
I eventually learnt to follow dipsomaniac Jack’s jerky body rhythms, count his sorties over the grass, nod and smile.
When we needed to get to Adelaide Street, Tata would put the back seat flat in the Holden wagon. Sam and I would squeeze in on either side of the mower in the back. Our task was to empty the grass catcher into the compost or a designated spot in the veggie garden the tenants kept. Sam and I did only ten minutes’ work but it was spread over two hours as the house had two yards and was on a corner with wraparound nature strips. Freckled and fair with a potbelly, fading blue-ink tattoos on his forearms, Jack worked like a demon. He wore fitted shorts with a belt and long socks. In those days men didn’t dress like teenagers or fat versions of little boys. Jack would begin the day in a short-sleeved shirt but the big Victa was demanding, summoning a striptease down to a meshed white singlet, chest hairs popping through the fabric after the second load. He’d sweat profusely and mumble as he heaved the Victa, his workhorse; both laboured bloody hard and required ample lubrication and fuel.
‘Comeorn. Getgoin. Mmooooveit. Yeahyeahyeah,’ Jack said as he tried to start the Victa for the first time.
‘Goorn, getoutofit,’ he’d say when he got stuck on an uneven ridge.
Still, Jack looked content in his reverie, happiest as soon as his cracked lips touched the icy Reschs Dinner Ale my dad provided. He’d put the Victa on idle, take off the top of the DA with a pocketknife, steady himself. He’d make eye contact before the first swig.
‘CheeerzyoungTommmyyyy!’ All was right with the world. He’d finish half a long neck in a few gulps.
Jack lived in a house of unmarried siblings, aged in their forties and fifties. I think they were originally from the North Coast of NSW, around Kempsey. They had loud dogs and, for a short time, a pet kangaroo, kept on a chain. When we returned to Chalmers Street in 1971, a big grey bull peered over the fence at me, roo and fences the same colour. Surely it was standing on a box?
There was shouting at night from Jack’s place, adults on the drink having family arguments. Jeanie, one of Jack’s sisters, was kind to us, buying raffle tickets and fetching the ball when it was hit square over the fence – six and out. But she was harder to understand than Jack. There was old Bob, wh
o got off the bus at the same time each night, twenty minutes after closing time. He wore a shabby suit jacket and grotty pants, tied with rope. Drunk, he shuffled as slowly as possible, wobbled without falling, the way a bike gets tippy when it hasn’t got any speed at all. Bob’s specialty, and Frank did a marvellous mimic, was grunt-swearing at the world whenever he passed us.
Sam hated mowing almost as much as he hated getting a haircut. The Italian barber Tony always asked him first up, ‘How’s your girlfriend?’
I didn’t have a girlfriend but was studying Australasian Post and Pix to find my ideal one while waiting for my turn. Sam was of the ‘let’s quickly get this over with’ school of chores, most likely thinking about what he was missing on TV. Waiting around infuriated him. Instead of both of us doing the work of one, Sam put forward a log of claims to our father about taking turns.
But Tata was adamant. There was a bigger picture. Jack served as exemplar of what not to be for our parents.
‘Work hard at school or you’ll end up a garbage man, like Jack,’ Tata often said, half-joking, half-serious, judging and not judging.
Our parents had a troubled relationship with Australians. These ‘kangaroos’ were drunks and no-hopers, people who had to rent because they didn’t have the discipline to save, bludgers lacking the will to work. Or they were snobs: Queen-loving, wog-hating Poms, or the uppity Irish who had lived in the same street for years but cut you short at the shops and at St Joseph’s, or the foremen at work who knew less about the job but told you what to do. My experiences were entirely different; the teachers and parents I knew from school were nothing like that and neither were the kids.
‘I’m Australian,’ I’d say, the one-time preschooler’s defiance.
‘No, you’re not a kangaroo,’ Tata said. ‘You’re a Hrvat. You’re always what your parents are. You’ll never be seen by Australians as one of them, no matter how nice they seem to be.’
I’d never been to Croatia. I was hopeless at the language. I loved footy and cricket. Even though I was a wog, I pretty much looked like all the other kids. Would my parents have to die before I could claim to be Australian? Maybe when I had kids they would be Australian; I could fall in behind them. I was born here, not trapped in Tito’s broken, mixed up, crazy country.
So where did I belong?
In his final year at St John’s Sam became school captain. It took me a little by surprise. Not that Sam wasn’t the complete leadership package – 16A basketball, eisteddfod finalist, prize-winning scholar, member of the choir and astronomy club, solid school citizen – but because I was caught up in my own campaign to be king. I’d lived in Sam’s silhouette and strived to find areas of renown whenever a chance presented itself at school or in the neighbourhood. Sam was too old for the dramas and other kids in Chalmers Street.
At school the expectations on me from teachers were high as he’d been a fine student. But the constant comparison got under my skin. When I’d just started high school, the trim deputy principal, Mick Keeble, Sam’s basketball coach, called me out as I was exiting the school gate.
‘Hey, sunshine, fix that tie,’ he said, while typically engaged in a conversation with a group of MacKillop girls. ‘You’re Sam Dusevic’s brother, right?’
‘No, Sir, Sam Dusevic is my brother,’ I replied far too confidently. I wasn’t completely sure whether I’d made my point or if it were in dispute at all. But I wanted to make my own mark.
Back in the kingdom of Year Eight, we were studying medieval history. A young teacher and footy coach who’d come to the school a year earlier thought the best way to learn was by doing. We would stage a medieval pageant with the whole year playing roles: nobles, knights, squires, clergy, minstrels, jesters, farmers and peasants. It was to be a multidisciplinary approach in technics (a design and technology course), art, music and history. We made wooden shields and swords, as well as other military paraphernalia, with boys modifying homemade numchucks into dangerous weapons of medieval battle.
At a meeting we were assigned roles to get started on our costumes. Competition was fierce for the part of knight; at the other end of the scale were female roles and peasants, bottom of the social order. I’d figured the way to preselection for King was to volunteer to be a noble and then build a support base. Or be the tallest noble.
It worked. The King would make a speech during the evening and the teachers decided I would make a good fist of it.
St John’s had acquired the services of an opera-loving music teacher to run the choir. Mr Connell was determined for singing to be the centrepiece of the pageant, a concert in fact, with medieval bits as ornamentation. His standards were as impossible to reach as we were to corral. In class, Mr Connell would play scratchy records of Enrico Caruso as Canio in Pagliacci. He’d close his eyes and let the music take him to a better place than this school of oafs in Lakemba.
In the extravaganza Mr Connell would play a priest. At one point Fraser Paul, a peasant, would say: ‘Hey father, sing us a song. You used to sing in the opera.’
After some theatrical reluctance, the music teacher launched into song.
Non nobis Domine, non nobis.
Sed nomini tuo da gloriam.
The fact opera started well after the Middle Ages was neither here nor there in 1977 Lakemba. During the feast there was jousting, sword fights, juggling and dancing. We ate roast chicken and potatoes from Henny Penny with our hands and drank cordial as if it were wine, mead and ale. Some boys slipped in harder stuff from hip flasks, such was their Method acting and dedication to detail in revelry. The noble women, including the Queen (a short Egyptian boy) danced around the maypole, before a show-stopping number we all sang to celebrate the harvest.
Summer is a-coming in, all now sing cuckoo,
Groweth seed and bloweth mead and spring the woods anew,
Cuckoo, cuckoo, now all let’s sing cuckoo.
After the pageant, the merriment didn’t last long. The King was dead, a series of rebellions involving female teachers followed.
‘You’re the worst class in the school,’ our home room and technics teacher said during one detention.
He was right, although thirteen-year-old boys had stirrer in their hormones. We called our teacher Tex, who was calm on the surface but fearsome when cornered, and took advantage of his nature – we were attracted to the good and bad versions of him! Tex lacked finesse with the strap, so you were extremely unfortunate to be pinged by him. He couldn’t land the blow and would hack the wrist, an extremely painful spot with no padding. It was only natural for kids to pull away as the leather was coming down; some teachers, perhaps taking this as an insult or unable to cope with fluctuating conditions like the wind and fear, overshot the strike zone. The ensuing bruising a few days later was nothing short of stunning, as long as it wasn’t on you. Parents, who were generally supportive of corporal punishment – some, like my parents, had paid for it and demanded it – were aghast.
We learned about irony in English but here it was before our eyes: Tex was a technics wiz, a master of woodwork and leatherwork, yet he had poor technique with the strap. Faced with a flogging most of us busily rubbed our hands on the way to the executioner, to take the sting out of the blow, especially during winter. But with Slasher Tex, one boy, no doubt hamming it up and still in character as a jester in the coming pageant, made a show of rubbing his wrists together. The six-stroke payback for his defiant mocking of Tex was savage.
Strapping technique was a mode of personal expression, a window into the soul. Picking your punisher was vital. There was a South African commerce teacher whose downward stroke was astonishingly quick. Art master Mr Oon, who called us ‘donkeys’, was not to be messed with; he flogged hard in the privacy of the art materials room. The science teachers were big, no-nonsense blokes; wiser to do your homework and not muck up in the labs. DLS Brothers evidently majored in punishment at the novitiate. Other than old Brother Basil, a sweet-hearted maths teacher who was forgetful and mumbled, the
ir hand techniques were sound.
The Master of Discipline was a boy-thrashing machine. He stood 6 foot 4 inches, a pitiless mountain of a man, wispy hair at altitude covering a lunar-like summit. Just staring up at him was enough to set me right and make my neck sore. The MoD coached the First XIII league team and had the endurance to get through twice that number of reprobates at the end of a Monday assembly. Not only strap-fit, he had the complete game, varying his stroke for the size of the kid and the offence. He taught religion, without the mystery or majesty we had come to expect given our patent maturity in faith and other matters. Homework was routine, a chapter from the Cathechism, in which the format was fixed: we did a heading, drawing, summary, reflection, and answered questions. There was also a formula for the way it was assigned.
‘Chapter 15, in the usual way, 8 Gold,’ he’d say at the end of a lesson. ‘Get it?’
‘Got it!’
‘Good.’
Mr Castagnet had demystified the strap for me in Year Five. I did my best to avoid it, going clean for a few years. Strapping was arbitrary and pervasive, built into the culture of the place, but it did not define St John’s for me; it was only one element. Given the belt was the law at home, I opted for rewards at school. That underlying brutality did keep order in the place. In a multiracial, disadvantaged school with over six-hundred boys, fights were extremely rare.
Yet those punishments would leave scars on some. As the decades rolled on, boys would become fathers, even teachers. Another MoD, a man who once played in Sam’s basketball team, would carry out the mission of his predecessors in probably the only way he knew. Out of the mists of the future, a damaged St John’s old boy would emerge to successfully sue the Catholic school system for 2.5 million for permanent damage and emotional trauma seventeen years after a day when he was strapped eight times, thrice in the morning and five in the afternoon.