Whole Wild World

by Tom Dusevic

  ‘What do you need to get a job?’

  ‘You’ve got to do really well in English, have good general knowledge and have “news sense”, which you either have or don’t. My cousin told me when I go for interviews never to say, “I want to write” or “I’m going to save the world” because the old bastards who run papers will cross your name off just like that.’

  ‘So what are you going to say?’

  ‘Not sure yet. I’ll probably tell them I like talking to all sorts of people and finding out what’s really going on. But my dad says it won’t be easy to get a job with a Croatian surname.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t you watch the news? Croatians are all terrorists.’

  ‘Man, it would be a lot harder if you were black.’

  I’d been ‘going around’ with Wally so long I’d become colour-blind, not in a good way. Empathy dissolved. My senses had stopped registering the discrimination he constantly encountered. I was vigilantly noticing tiny details, hearing the ambient noise of life, but I wasn’t looking out for and listening to my best mate. The first time I saw him bleed after falling off a bike I was startled by the vermilion red gash on his black-brown forearm. What did I expect, another blood colour? I’d have to learn from others close to him about the anguish he’d experienced from the many cuts, deep into raw flesh.

  14

  Slow learner

  Benilde High School was a two-year flight academy, designed to take only boys with the right stuff, launching them into tertiary education and the world beyond. It was minimalist and laidback, stripping out traditional extracurricular activities that bind a school, such as dancing, gambling and bare-knuckle fighting.

  Pleasingly, there was no Master of Discipline. The rulebook was bare, except for two broad-ranging principles that purportedly governed our journey through this universe: honesty and respect. That covered a lot of ground; just ask Azzopardi, who was pinged for astral-travelling during religion. Not buying your round at the Three Swallows Hotel (thereby breaching both codes) was a near-mortal sin, likely to result in an intervention by Cardinal Jimmy Freeman or a letter from Rome, signed by JPII, the big fella himself. You get the spirit of the place?

  We were – legend had it – the only school in Australia where students were permitted to smoke. A packet of Winfield or B&H in a Benilde white shirt pocket was as common as the top buttons undone on a blue Nazareth uniform. You were meant to have a note from parents to smoke, but the rule was never enforced. Smoking was banned in the main school building, a two-storey block set around a pebble and plant courtyard. In summer, we wore navy blue King Gee shorts with long walk socks, presumably to fit in with the geezers at the RSL or bowlo. As soon as we got to school we were obliged to take off our ties and black shoes; for most of the year we wore thongs, runners in the colder months.

  The autonomy on such things did wonders; the rebellious aspect of smoking or disrespecting the uniform was removed. There was no peer pressure to smoke, just normal nicotine addiction and the might of Big Tobacco and its hired urgers in the advertising industry.

  Anti-authoritarianism shifted from the concrete to the meta- physical. The dark sarcasm in the classroom came from us, not teachers. Given there were many in a small space, with two hundred boys in Year Eleven alone, opening a locker in the confined halls was like being in a ship’s cabin with the Marx brothers. Lockers were relatively spacious – if you were a textbook; a few of the boys once stuffed weedy Lehane into his, just to see if they could.

  ‘Are you Sam’s brother or George’s brother?’ asked Brother Cletus, the urbane, dry-witted deputy principal behind the hillbilly name.

  It’s no slight on my muso cousin to say Cletus was relieved.

  At this transit lounge to manhood, thank you for smoking, the guys who’d been in the year ahead of us at St John’s had changed markedly: facial hair, a proprietary air around the courtyard, and a sense of urgency about Higher School Certificate exams. There were so many new faces to take in, but you could tell which guys were in Year Eleven by the colour intensity of their King Gees and the thrill of teen freedom behind cloudy puffs of smoke.

  Benilde relied on five DLS feeder schools. Only thirty-five boys from Lakemba had been accepted, with the majority of students coming from Anglocentric Revesby and Bankstown. But throw in Kingsgrove and Marrickville, as well as girls from a different pool of source schools, and Benilde and Nazareth had a cosmopolitan flavour. Our school had more quirky kids per square cubicle than anywhere west of Leichhardt: obsessives about primitive computers, Greek girls, Arabic disco, opera, the Oils, Toranas, aviation, surfing, liberation theology and hash.

  There were even other Croatians. Željko and Nick were as different as two Dalmatians could be, black spots versus white spots. Nazareth had two Irenes and a Mira; the following year my twin cousins Anna and Maria would be part of the ‘Crovasion’, as one of the mums put it, without quite meaning to put it so well. On occasion, we’d fall back on the mother tongue to blaspheme and bamboozle the stranci, our word for ‘foreigners’.

  After eleven years, my days of walking all the way to school were over. At Belmore station, I’d meet Jane, the sprint queen from St Joseph’s no one could catch. I’d started going out with her sister Melissa, who was still at MacKillop. Jane tolerated – just – our goofy handholding and goodbye kisses over the two minutes it took by train to Lakemba. Arriving at Bankstown, Jane and I would dash through the shopping centre, up the hill – past apprentice leerers and jeerers at Bankstown Tech – part of an intent, if rowdy, swarm trying to get to an 8.30 kick-off. Our lessons were called ‘serials’, not periods, as if the learning never stopped, an ongoing soap opera of formulae and iambic. The bell rang precisely like the first three notes of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s ‘( Just Like) Starting Over’. Breaks were far too brief, more like smoko, and each day we were finished by 2.45.

  ‘You guys get out even before kindergarten,’ principal Brother Leo said.

  Still, many opted out completely. The attrition rate was high, as boys took jobs in banks or the trades. Some just needed to earn or got jack of Keats’s drowsy numbness, Avogadro’s number and calculus. My bright It’s Academic teammates took the early-bird eject option, Tony finding work in a factory, Dave starting a cleaning business.

  I’d taken on a long load of subjects, three more than I’d need to matriculate, with the idea of discarding cabooses at the end of the year, depending on interest and performance.

  ‘All the smart kids do physics and chemistry and they scale up your marks because those subjects are hard,’ said Sam, who had done scarily well in the HSC and was about to start a science degree at Sydney University. ‘I’ll be able to help you with them if you get stuck.’

  I had to work at science, if only to behave properly in lab-based classes. Yet the prospect of getting Sam’s notes was irresistible.

  One discipline I was indentured to was Croatian. The leaders of the Croatian community had lobbied the NSW Board of Studies for years to have the language as an official subject. I was in the first small group to do Croatian for the HSC. Over the curriculum border, there was another cohort of students: a crack, paramilitary unit of Serbian linguists who, word had it, had been training for years in secret bush camps.

  We had to put on a good show to maintain Croatian pride, Tata said. The next generation were depending on Vesna, Astrid, Irena, Katica, Ivica and, God help them, Tomislav.

  Croatian was non-negotiable. In my father’s reckoning, I could fail everything, as long as I kept at Croatian.

  ‘Anyway, the more languages you have, the more valuable you’ll be to an employer,’ he said.

  ‘So how come St John’s and Benilde don’t teach any languages?’

  ‘Rubbish schools,’ Teta Danica interjected. ‘A man is measured by how many languages he has. Your grandfather could speak Chinese.’

  How could anyone tell?

  ‘You’ll be able to work as an interpreter here or overseas,’
my dad said, with more hope than experience. ‘It will help you in journalism – when you’re selling newspapers, paper boy.’

  He could have added another insult. Charlemagne reputedly said ‘to speak another language is to possess another soul’. Duša translates to ‘soul’ in English; Duševićs were of the soul, rhythm, blues and gospel-backed folks singing to your soul. We had the groove, despite a hereditary aversion to the dance floor among our male kin. But my Croatian soul was stuck at age nine: immature, whiney, confused and erratic, not yet belligerent. I only ever spoke to my parents in Croatian; it stunted my ability to argue with them – not counting angry gesticulations – or embarrass us all by telling them about the things going on in my head. An uneasy peace hung over flashpoint Belmore, a battle over my very soul. It was concord by default.

  In any case, as I’ve already declared, the Croatian I spoke was a creole, the Dalmatian dialect we used at home. Yet within it we entertained the island-speak of the Lukins of Kali, with its odd contusions on the language, random syllabic stresses and mimetically bizarre intonations. Next, we blended in the lingo of the Duševićs of mainland Ljubač, sprinkling in the patois of sheep-herders between the mountains and sea. Mama and Teta Danica had also kept up the bastardised tongue that took hold during the Italian occupation of Zadar decades earlier. What they were able to do to two decent languages within earshot of minors deserved a harsh sentence. Plus Tata had been educated in the official Zagreb-style Croatian and read widely. There was a swirl of house styles, a cacophony of usages.

  ‘You sound like a Hungarian,’ I’d been told by more than one relative and a few barmen, masters of being cruel because they could. There is no greater insult to a Magyar, short of being told you speak Hungarian like a Scotsman.

  Initially, Sam and I went through community-run Croatian schools at the club. Later, on weeknights, a serene, patient priest, Father Gracijan, taught us at the church. But it was hard going. I could not easily discern the difference between the hard and soft ‘ch’, even though Dušević uses the latter. You have to lightly press the tip of your tongue against the soft palate in your mouth, and make a sound between the ‘ch’ of chalk and the ‘tu’ of tune. Already there’s too much to think about, before overcoming a lisp I have when tired or lazy.

  Then there is the hellhole of grammar, my declension deficit disorder. Nouns in Croatian have seven cases in both singular and plural. Seven is supposed to be lucky. But in the masculine there are hard or soft forms, depending on the last consonant of the stem; then you have animate and inanimate designations. By the time you get to feminine nouns, you’re buggered, well and truly. Although in this part of the word world, nouns tend to end in ‘a’, so that takes a lot of side bets out of the equation. There are no hard and soft delineations, for instance, no cage fights between animate and inanimate.

  Our teacher Teresa, a family friend, loses me fifteen minutes after Dobro jutro. By noon I am neutered and infinitively confused. In all my endeavours, although it was a stretch to call turning up an effort, neither I nor the language would stick. On this score, the sort of ‘ic’ I’d become was dyslexic. It was as if I had developed an internal stutter – second-guessing myself, over-stressing, too many ways to get it wrong – and I was hobbled. I tried to mask my poor grasp. Teresa encouraged me to read and work on my grammar but my heart was dissident and my mind followed its orders.

  The nasty sting in all this was Croatian was taught on Saturday mornings at Ashfield High School, a block from the Croatian church. That extra half-day of school when other fun such as rep basketball or part-time work beckoned seemed unfair. The good part was getting to know Croatian kids my own age, esp- ecially the girls, who were studious without being annoying about it. The boys I sat with kept up a constant low-hum commentary of one-liners, soccer talk, expletives and erotic tales. Not all were doing Croatian for the HSC; some were too young or too old, others were exiles from school sport, to my mind the ultimate blasphemy in any creed or code.

  At morning tea break, the playground was like the second division of migrant languages. The premier league of French, German, Italian, Spanish and Indonesian were done in luxurious home grounds, part of the regular school timetable. The faces in the crowd at Ashfield told you Modern Greek, Arabic and Cantonese were the top teams, with a long tail of Turkish, Korean, Dutch and Polish pupils, ahead of newly promoted Serbian and Croatian contingents.

  I’d had no experience of Serbs but it was quietly suggested that we keep our distance from them. It was an article of faith among us that Serbs were the ones keeping Croatians down in the home country; Belgrade controlled Yugoslavia, milking industrial Croatia and Slovenia, sending its military brass on a pension to the Dalmatian coast as soon as they’d completed their service. The Serbs I saw on Saturdays appeared to be just like us, so I worked hard to spot the differences. The boys seemed older, dressed in faded denim and were on the verge of thin, shifty moustaches; the girls were louder than the boys, dyed blondes and wore jangly jewellery and bright nail polish. Serbs here had a lower profile than Croatians, given they sat under the Yugoslav banner; for devout Croats, the term Serbo-Croat, red star on the flag and appeals to bratstvo i jedinstvo, brotherhood and unity, were a sure way to raise the blood pressure.

  ‘What do you say when someone asks where you’re from?’

  ‘Croatia!’

  ‘What will you say when they respond, but that’s part of Yugoslavia, Croatia doesn’t exist?’

  ‘I’ll say Croatia’s been around a lot longer than Yugoslavia.’

  We’d all endured such lectures from parents. But no one outside the conflict wanted to engage on such remote issues, unless they were trying to stir you up or grab your vote. My knowledge of Balkan history was sketchy; unlike all the other facts I’d stored, my curiosity about Croatia was limited because there seemed little point digging deeper. Like my Catholicism, I was operating on pure faith, and happy doing so. The questions I was actually interested in were about our family in Croatia, where all our closest relatives, except for Teta, still lived.

  How did they pay for things? What did they think of the regime? Why were they still living in Yugoslavia? Are they free to leave or visit us? Are they really happy, slim Commies living Tito’s dream of socialism with a suntan and smile? I’d assumed Tito was a Serb. Josip Broz, now dead, had been born in the north of Croatia.

  Due to time and geography, it was not easy to reconcile the past or understand the present; both were pushing against each other. As a boy, I’d read about the Ustaše during the war, described as a brutal, fascist outfit that had slaughtered Jews and gypsies. Hrvatska was supposedly a Nazi ‘puppet state’. My father believed this to be a vile lie, an utter misrepresentation; the alliance had been one of convenience, not a joint project. Terrible things happened during the war, my son, best a boy not know everything. The victors, he said, write the history.

  What about the losers?

  By 1980, Croatians were notorious for soccer riots, rowdy demonstrations and terrorist attacks. In primary school I’d been shocked when a Croatian group hijacked a plane in America. When the Sydney Hilton was bombed in 1978 I was relieved Croatians weren’t responsible. Then, a year later, six men were arrested over a complex plot to blow up Sydney’s Elizabethan Theatre during a Yugoslav cultural event, to bomb a number of city businesses, to cut Sydney’s water supply. The so-called ‘Croatian Six’ were convicted and sentenced to fifteen years’ jail. I was miserable and ashamed. Boys at school badgered me with questions about terrorism.

  ‘Why do you bring your troubles here?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Why do Croatians want to hurt innocent people?’

  ‘We don’t.’

  ‘Then why blow things up? What have Australians got to do with your fight against Serbs in Yugoslavia?’

  I couldn’t get my head around it either: killing people here, causing mayhem, to change an entrenched political order on the other side of the world?

&
nbsp; ‘How can it possibly help Croatians anywhere to let off bombs in Sydney?’ I asked Tata in exasperation. ‘What happens next?’

  ‘Bullshit. It’s all bull-a-shit,’ Tata said, more emphatically than usual. ‘UDBA (the Yugoslav secret police) are behind it. These young men have been tricked into a stupid plot by Yugoslav agents.’

  I wanted to believe in agent provocateurs, but wasn’t convinced. I’d heard the claim many times from people I respected: Yugoslav spies had infiltrated Croatian groups to discredit them in the eyes of the Australian government and people. I thought Tata naïve; this time his dedication to Croatian independence had stopped him from seeing what politicians and others had been claiming for years. He cried conspiracy, but I needed facts, to see the evidence. Just one case would do it for me. I’d have the tools, then, to explain the truth to anyone who said Croatians were ‘bomb chuckers’ and terrorists. The men lost their final appeals. Guilty – and so were we.

  After each had served up to a decade in prison, evidence emerged the Croatian Six had been set up by the UDBA. An operative ‘Vico Virkez’ had infiltrated the Croatian community; plotter, police informer and Crown star witness, he was flown back to Yugoslavia after testifying in the men’s first trial. In 1991, ABC Four Corners reporter Chris Masters tracked down ‘Virkez’, who was actually a Serb. Vitomir Misimovic admitted being a spy and setting up the innocent men. Later, author Hamish McDonald in Framed revealed Canberra officials withheld intelligence material from the courts that would have led to ‘not guilty’ verdicts. He detailed how Yugoslav spies used Australian police and security services to discredit Croatian nationalists. Maddeningly slow, the truth arrived, as did Croatia’s independence.

  Wally’s mother had remarried. He and his sisters were now living in a two-storey home in Georges Hall, near Bankstown airport, with a garden, pool and rock-solid stepfather. Wally was on his third car, the tantrum-throwing Bambino ditched for a VW Fastback, which blossomed into a full-scale Kombi. Wally’s campervan was a fixture in the Benilde car park. By the end of Year Eleven Wally was off his ‘P’ licence and I was just old enough to get my learner’s permit.