Whole Wild World

by Tom Dusevic

  The school split into three broad groups, roughly the same size: Anglo-Irish, Southern Europeans (mainly Italians) and Lebanese, with a few from Egypt and Syria falling into this group. There weren’t many Asian kids, one or two scattered in each of the younger years. I felt at ease among all these groups in the playground and classroom. At St John’s, affiliations were fluid with overlays of neighbourhood, sporting teams, graded classes and interests.

  With no other Croatian in my year, I was a freelance wog. There was little movement in or out of the great mass of my year of a hundred or so students; parents rarely separated, families did not move out of the district. It could have been a stagnant pool, but it wasn’t. Lebanese kids brought energy and noise to the school, a lightness and laughter that were infectious. Many of them were related or their parents were from the same villages; they socialised at ‘younger set’ gatherings at weekends. No one was excluded from the caravan of fun. They were especially pleased to teach all comers their swear words and pop songs.

  Ya habibi! Dang, nana nang nang nang nang nang.

  I envied the exuberance, sometimes abandon, they brought to everything. At weekends they occupied a territory of tiered covered seating and standing room behind the goalposts at the southern end of Belmore Sports Ground. It became known as the ‘Wog Stand’. When Canterbury scored the noise in there rattled your ribcage. The view from the Wog Stand was like being a fullback on the field; you saw gaps in defensive patterns, the ball movement across the field, followed the ball tumbling from the sky after a bomb was launched. When a shot for goal was taken from in front, the ball would clear the stand and land in the street or a house behind; sometimes the ball would bobble on the tin roof and roll into the back row of spectators, who’d wrestle for the ball. At the other end of the ground, train drivers slowed to a crawl or stopped to watch the game for a lazy half-minute, part of the service on the Bankstown line.

  The club had just taken on the Bulldog insignia. I felt sure it wouldn’t hold up after being ‘the Berries’ for so long. The Dogs had bite in those years, due to ‘Bullfrog’ Moore’s canny way of recruiting country talent and building a family culture around the Hughes and Mortimer dynasties. With the Dogs on the rise it meant ‘The Moose’ was often at Belmore to call games. Kids hoping to catch a glimpse of him or stir a man famous for temper outbursts would surround his Mazda RX-7 in the carpark.

  ‘Hey, Mr Mossop, what rhymes with Rex?’

  ‘Bex, now get lost!’

  ‘Sex rhymes with Rex!’

  ‘Hey, Mr Mossop, what rhymes with Moose? Goose!’

  ‘Get lost, you idiot.’

  If you played junior league, a pass got you into the ground for free. Non-wogs sat on the hill or in the reserved seats on the western side. But the Wog Stand was the place to be, vibrant and shape-shifting, a roiling mosh of bodies and emotions. Near the end of each game we squeezed in with other kids to be close to the fence so that as soon as the hooter sounded we’d be up and over, running to give the players a pat on the back or to get an autograph.

  There was a fierce struggle for the four cardboard corner posts – striped black and white, trophies for home – on the try lines. The posts would quickly be in pieces, kids left in tears. Within seconds of the end of a game there were hundreds of children on the field. The first time I saw Wests prop John ‘Dallas’ Donnelly up close I was stunned by his physical immensity. In his early twenties, he was coated in cuts and scratches, dirt, white-line powder and sweat, his shorts and jersey torn. There was a dimple on his chin, big as a moon crater. The exposed area between his neck and chest was raw, as if trampled by cattle.

  ‘Onya Dallas,’ I said, patting his soaked number 11 with the faintest of touches. His eyes were groggy, yet fixed forward as if walking the aisle to Communion, inching his way through kids now playing their own games in a festive riot. Footy players didn’t hug opponents then; they loved fans and their mates, and we loved them. Later, if I felt crushed after a game or busted in life, I’d think of the battered Dallas, a colossal warship gliding into port between rowboats, edging forward, unbroken, and say to myself, ‘Just keep moving, son’, one foot in front of the other.

  Kerry Packer tried to buy cricket in 1977 but we broke its spirit in the backyard of the flats. Wally had two younger cousins, Nalitha and Nilunga, still at primary school, but handy cricketers all the same. Skinny Nal’s nickname was Larry, after a slippery and lightning-quick Aboriginal winger who played for Balmain. The flats were the first choice ground, fully concreted, a back fence or wooden fruit box serving as the stumps.

  We batted youngest to oldest, bowled in the opposite order. This structural defect suited Wally, who dominated with bat and ball. Over time we opted for a Sinhalese solution, courtesy of a stepfather who’d hand-carved a bat an inch wider than regulation. For every new innings one of us would write on the concrete a random sequence, say 2–4–5–1–6–3, covering it with the bat. Players would put their finger or foot on a line that was attached to a hidden number; the bat would be removed and players would take their batting slot, with the number wrangler assigned the remaining position. Scoring was designated off walls: two for a straight drive, four if it was on the full, over any fence was six and out. Players kept their own score and there were no LBWs; run outs were always a source of argument if playing ‘tip and run’, as we called it.

  ‘Not taken! Not taken!’ was Larry’s signature defence when clearly out, citing an obscure bylaw or indiscretion on the part of the fielder.

  His brother Nil, younger but heavier, was a flighty left-hander whose natural hook invited a hit off the hip and over the fence almost every time he batted; some days it was enough to win and the fool who bowled leg side to him then copped an earful.

  It was chaotic, but more fun, when we had seven or eight players, enough for a wicket keeper and a slip, and a ring of fielders. Just beyond slips for a right-hander there was an abandoned VW bug, once green, dusty in and out. The car reeked of mildew, oil and decay, not the worst smelling thing in our street. It served as the waiting area for batsmen if the playing conditions required fewer fielders. It was also a cone of silence for Wally and me when the traffic and kid noise was excessive. The car belonged to the boys’ stepfather Don, but he was often away. It had been there so long any concept of ownership had been extinguished; it may as well have been dumped in a canal. The VW was used and abused, equally. As a bowler released the ball, the next man in could pull the car’s squeaky hand brake to distract the batsman.

  ‘Not taken. NOT TAKEN!’

  Perhaps it was boredom or the battles in Packer’s Super Tests between Australia and the West Indies, who can say for sure. One day we decided to play white guys against black guys. Wally, Larry and Nil versus me, Frank and a younger boy called Tim, the only non-wog in our repertory.

  Wally bowled fearsomely. Every dismissal was in dispute. The sledging had a nasty edge. The fun had gone out of the game, replaced by a racial pissing contest. When I was batting Larry got in close, mid-pitch with Wally bowling. Larry spread his legs, stuck his arm under his bony bum, made a fist under his crotch and wiggled his thumb. Wally sent down a Yorker. I was clean bowled.

  ‘Not taken.’ Did I mention I hated getting out?

  ‘Fuck off.’ That I also had a tendency to swear and wave my arms? ‘Larry fucking put me off. Fuck off.’

  The end could not come quickly enough. There were many hours left in the day but everyone retreated, head down, to his own home. The flats’ backyard returned to the usual occupants, little kids on dinkies who did not go to school.

  A few days later I popped my head over the fence at lunch-time, hoping for some cricket. There was preschooler Anesti, a Greek kid, sitting on top of the VW. He could only have been aged three or four and was wearing a white singlet with a dash of embroidery. Anesti was playing not only by – but with – himself. Normally he had a broad smile that lit up the space he was in. Now, his face was intent as he furiously worked at the fleshy s
tump in his right hand. It was hot and he had attracted the attention of a fly. Anesti worked the control stick like a veteran pilot. This ace was hoping to coordinate a near impossible paradox: a take-off (for him) and a landing (for the insect). He rolled his stout rod, dribbled more spit onto it to attract the bug and actually succeeded in getting the fly on deck more than once. Entranced, he was a surgeon looking through a microscope, an artist at the easel. Who knew such delight, and all-round dexterity, were possible?

  ‘Anesti!’ It was his older brother, Arthur, shattering the bliss. ‘Stamatiste tora.’ Stop it now.

  Arthur had been sent to fetch him. He used the words malakas, Mama and Papa in rapid fire. I got the drift. Anesti pulled up his shorts. He climbed down from the car via the hood, sliding over a wheel arch, and skipped away. Like the cricket, play had been abandoned. The music stopped; it would take a few weeks before we found our rhythm again.

  Anesti’s radiant face told me he’d never miss a beat. Anesti means risen in Greek. I looked it up.

  11

  Wombles

  Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768) was too revered for reading in the dunny, too hefty for bed. Britannica held the whole wild world in twenty-four volumes (1: A–Anstey, 23: Vietnam– Zworykin, 24: Index & Atlas). But publishers came up with the perfect one-volume compendium for a nosy, fact-hungry fourteen-year-old: the Book of Lists. The editors of Lists boiled off the nutritional value of knowledge, like Mama did with veggies, and served up the strangeness of the planet as remember-able hors d’oeuvres. The print was smudged, the paper cheap, pictures woefully inadequate. But I spent more time with Lists than I did with the Bible – although that’s not a fair comparator for someone living through a Catholic school in those days. There were sections on movies, literature, history, nature, sex and many more. This was no nerdy compilation of worthy facts but stuff to propel you through life, around a campfire, for instance, or while sitting in the gutter on a Thursday night. Lists marked you as a person of discernment and wit.

  We had trudged through sex education (smuggled in under the personal development banner) during evening sessions at St Therese’s hall in Lakemba. The MoD – easing off on the discipline and emphasising the master part of his title – had incorporated mechanical sex talk into religion. We asked him questions about the rhythm method of contraception and invented complicated ‘what if ’ scenarios to keep him from straying back to God; to my mind he seemed less an expert than my mate David with the pornographic memory in Year Four, and nowhere near as captivating.

  The robust Lists furnished you with essentials that would never be raised at the dinner table at my place, or any place. There was a list about the most common sexual positions, although no diagrams of how to engineer them; a sexual folklore section listed people who had died during intercourse. I’ll never forget artist John Ruskin failing to consummate his marriage, shocked by the sight of his wife’s pubic hair. My own concern was the exact opposite, fearing I would not sprout a reasonable forest in time for my own wedding night. There was no elixir, as far as I knew, for baldness down there.

  But up here, facts simply tumbled into a reservoir without limit. At the start of Year Nine, Mr Fernandes settled the squad for It’s Academic, to give it a lengthy run-up to the competition the following year. I made the cut and we began filling our heads with the material on the cards after school. At night, we were expected to add to the Q&A stockpile by typing up cards or sheets of ten questions. We were free to choose any topic, literally anything; it would all be absorbed. I viewed Britannica’s twenty-four volumes as a world without end and switched to slicing facts from newspapers – full of facts in those days – to give my questions a contemporary flavour.

  We practised most days after school, fitting it around our sport and part-time jobs. The five of us would take turns at being Andrew Harwood, getting quick on the buzzers and zipping through ten questions in a minute. We devised corny routines amid the grind. For instance, the pretend Harwood would ask: what is the simplest living thing?

  Answer: A retarded amoeba. And on it went.

  ‘What is the smallest living bird?

  ‘The hummingbird.’

  ‘More information required.’

  ‘The bee hummingbird.’

  ‘I need a little bit more, please.

  ‘The Cuban bee hummingbird.’

  ‘Can you be more specific?’

  ‘The infant Cuban bee hummingbird.’

  ‘Correct!’

  This was not the traditional approach to attracting girls or avoiding getting rumbled. But we did it to cope with the slog of getting to the finish line. After an hour we’d pack up, then play handball or basketball until dark, getting home around 6 pm. Month after month, never losing pace, implanting those boxed-card facts into our heads.

  Near the end of the year, Mr Fernandes entered us in a local quiz competition against older students. We reached the final, held at the Raindrop Fountain at Roselands. I wasn’t sure why, but Coach Fernandes organised a team of three cheerleaders from MacKillop, popular girls who went out with boys in the Firsts. The girls wore red T-shirts, blue shorts and yellow ribbons in their hair. They had dance steps and performed the St John’s war cry. Zoomba Zoom. It’s possible a worldwide women’s fitness craze was started right here at the Raindrop Fountain. Zoomba Zah.

  At school that year we did careers testing. I already had clear intentions. My first preference was sports reporter (newspaper or TV), followed by ‘sports shop owner’, as I was fond of sportswear, particularly the Adidas line of products, appreciating the way the stripes rolled over your shoulders or kept your tracksuit pants straight and the tactile wonder of the perfect marriage of polyester and cotton in a sky-blue hoodie.

  ‘How much did you pay for that T-shirt?’ asked Tata.

  ‘Twenty bucks.’

  ‘Twenty bucks, my God you could have bought a new one!’

  ‘But it is new and it’s better than the stuff you get at Lowes.’

  Okay, here we go.

  ‘You know,’ he says, shaking his head, as if I were on a crazy binge, ‘you’re just like old Ivanac from the village. One time he had to buy a pig from us. We told him the price: fifteen dinars. He said to your grandfather, “Okay, here take twenty, just so it’s a better one”. That’s you with your clothes.’

  My fallback job was barrister. I knew the first two careers depended on luck or succeeding in sport. Law was a safety option. I wasn’t entirely sure what a barrister did, but I’d read NSW Premier Neville Wran – known as ‘Nifty’, his election victory so emphatic that year it was called a ‘Wranslide’ – had commanded 800 a day in the early 1970s when he appeared in court as a QC, a sort of prince of lawyers. I did the calculation in my head. It was a preposterous sum. Nifty was earning squillions. Even at 100 a day, what he earned as Premier seemed a fortune in 1978. Wran was my man.

  Journalism was coming into clearer focus. Despite the holiday lifestyle I thought our old neighbour Mr Corless enjoyed, I wasn’t interested in the turf. Our year had an excursion to John Fairfax & Sons at Broadway near Central station. As an avid reader of the Sun, Herald, Sun-Herald, even the National Times, a serious and dense weekly, I was going to the chocolate factory. I was well behaved in class, saving my worst impulses for excursions.

  Part of it was boredom. At museums, for instance, I’d visited them all many times with Tata and Sam. There was also an animalistic freedom away from school. In the familiar terrain of the city I could show off my knowledge to boys and teachers who didn’t know their way around. I rushed through the assigned worksheets and spent the rest of the time distracting everyone else or ducking into shops.

  Going to Fairfax, however, was a pilgrimage; I expected others, on such an occasion, to show the same degree of reverence. I walked with the tour guide, a young woman, and unself-consciously bombarded her with questions.

  ‘Tom, please let someone else have a turn,’ said Mrs Haddock, our English teacher.

  I
pulled back but no one stepped into the space. The rest of the boys may have been going through the motions; I had a sense I was touching a possible future.

  We were shown the hot-metal composing area where printing plates were made, the photographic dark rooms, the vast presses and newsprint stores. The first editions of the Sun were being printed; a gnarled printer in inky blue overalls made a hat from a printed ‘spoil’ for Mrs Haddock.

  The highlight for me was the newsroom. Even then I knew some of the bylines. A few journalists had their pictures in the paper. I saw Mr Corless working quickly at a typewriter and recognised the man who did the fruit-and-vegetable specials column, Cliff Ryan, the ‘Housewives’ Friend’. There was an Asian woman in the business section.

  ‘Is that Florence Chong?’ I asked the tour guide.

  ‘Well spotted, young man!’

  The excursion may have been a superficial view of the news game, but I had a connection on the inside. My cousin Zdenka, five years ahead of me at school, was a cadet journalist on the St George & Sutherland Shire Leader. A born storyteller, she glowed with confidence and charm. I’d sit enthralled for hours as Zdenka recounted house fires, car accidents, court cases, hospital visits, council meetings and press conferences at Mascot airport. She told us about the events she attended, such as parties and the theatre. Zdenka knew everything going on in that local community and she had a licence to be impertinent, if that was required. Free stuff and asking rude questions, variety of scene, meeting people, reading the paper, plus being paid, seemed a good fit for me.

  Another cousin Blanka, a decade older, fierce, bossy and bold, was now a lawyer and her work seemed a grind – years of university, long hours in the office, endless paperwork and preparation at home. For all that toil I hoped she was earning squillions like old Nifty or seeing drama up close. If I ever got in trouble I’d face a dilemma: I’d want Blanka defending me but I’d be afraid of the consequences if she knew I’d been mucking up.