Whole Wild World

by Tom Dusevic

  He offered to teach me to drive but I wasn’t ready to engage with the VW’s stick shift. Tata had taught Sam, so my first lesson was with him in the Kingswood station wagon with its three-speed manual column shift. The session soon became a scream opera, a rolling catastrophe of stalls, jump-starts and near misses.

  ‘I’m not teaching you anymore, you don’t listen.’

  ‘I’m never going with you again, you’re a hopeless teacher.’

  This Balkan stalemate needed a peacemaker.

  ‘You have to take your brother,’ Tata said to Sam, ‘because we can’t afford to pay for lessons, okay?’

  Sam drove me to an industrial estate near Kingsgrove.

  Signal. Accelerator, ease off the clutch. Handbrake down, rolling. Hop, hop, stall. This went the way of the first lesson until we agreed not to say anything.

  Silence. Calm, off we go. For an hour, I drove laps of the circuit (it really was called that), finding rhythm through the gears, listening to the engine, getting a feel for the release point of the clutch. We did this for weeks and I extended my range.

  As I was gaining confidence I tore the ligaments in my ankle at basketball and was on crutches for a month. It was a naggingly slow healing process, partly due to the severity of the injury. Not aiding recovery was my mother’s insistence that the best treatment – to reduce swelling, speed tissue repair – was a home remedy of a cloth (had to be pink or red) soaked in water and vinegar. The method had worked wonders for Mama on Tito’s Brotherhood and Unity highway project. It was also effective on ailing livestock, Teta added. Supercoach thought it was hilarious, poultices last used on athletes and damsels during the Middle Ages.

  My seventeenth birthday passed, so I booked a driver’s test. As the family car was needed elsewhere, it was decided I should use a vehicle from a driving school. Column-shift manuals were impossible to come by so rather than stumble with a four on the floor I thought it best to do the test in an automatic, even though I’d never driven an auto.

  ‘I only need one lesson,’ I explained to the instructor, an Indian with a moustache like cricketer Kapil Dev, the all-round star of the summer. ‘I’ll take the car for an hour before the test to get used to it.’

  ‘Okay, put it in D for drive, blinker, check your mirrors, hand-brake off, now show me your stuff.’

  The instructor directed me around the streets of Beverley Hills and Narwee, near the motor registry. He taught me a handy way to reverse-park this Datsun Bluebird, guided by plastic studs fixed to the rear shelf. It never failed. I did an hour with him on the morning of the test as well. I made polite conversation with the examiner, impassive, who provided a series of clear instructions and nothing more. A dream run. He didn’t utter a word after the test until we were in the registry.

  ‘Wait here,’ he said, pointing to a chair near the eyesight test. He went over to the driving school instructor, who’d been chatting to the women working at the counter. They had a short, intense exchange.

  ‘He said you hit the kerb when you did your three-point turn,’ my instructor said. ‘He’s not going to pass you.’

  ‘What? He didn’t say anything at all during the test about that. I didn’t even come close to the gutter when I did the three-pointer because the street was so wide.’

  ‘You’ll have to sign up for a few more lessons to brush up on your driving skills.’

  I sensed a shakedown. In the postmortem, Wally concurred. So, too, did Tata.

  Scam.

  ‘Next time, you use my car,’ Tata said. ‘I’m not paying a guy for lessons you don’t need.’

  The test queue, however, was so long it would be a month before the next opportunity. Sam drove and parked the car across the street from the registry. Taking no chances, we were early. A better parking spot came up and I urged him to grab it. But he couldn’t move forward; the Kingswood in gear, engine revving, but the car was sliding backwards.

  ‘What are you doing? Take the spot.’

  ‘It won’t move.’

  Broken axle. No test. Fail.

  A month later. Sam parked in the same spot. I started the car.

  ‘You’ve just failed,’ says a new examiner. ‘You rolled back and hit the car behind you. Do you want to get in some driving and I’ll tell you what you need to work on?’

  Sam had left the handbrake off, as he usually did, except on steep hills. I’d got into the habit of putting the clutch down, changing into first and then starting the engine. A car had parked inches behind us, illegally, in the red No Standing zone. I wasn’t aware of the rollback or contact.

  I’m too cranky with Sam, no practice run. Fail.

  A month later, ultra-confident, I’m an L-plate professor, aware of just how good I am. Check that cockiness. Take it easy, now off we go. This time, I’ve been too tentative. Too slow! Fail. This saga is grabbing attention at school: world’s slowest learner.

  A month later – good God, this started in January, and we’ve slipped past Easter – I’m going for an unofficial school record. I’ve presumably racked up a thousand column-shift hours, driven from Sydney to London. I’m driving to school each morning while Tata reads the paper in the passenger seat. Not too slow, not too fast either, I say to myself before the test. Be serious, no smile, humble, polite enough.

  On my fifth attempt, I pass. Jubilant, it was never in doubt! For the next year, while driving, I’ll display a ‘P’: for plodder and perseverance.

  My father had done his sums, over and over, studied every angle, anticipated problems; so calm and moderate, even in his fancy. A hot Sydney property market was doing its best to take us to the next level of comfort and security. Joso’s rule of thumb had been to sell two of the townhouses, covering the land, materials and builder’s fees, and keep two. One would be held for rent, the other sold to free up capital for his next project: the house of my parents’ dreams.

  Years earlier they had become partners with relatives (on my mother’s side) in a dilapidated house on Taylor Street in Condell Park, just below Black Charlie’s Hill, one of the highest points in Sydney. The house sat on a huge block of land; the idea was to build home units or townhouses. The plans fell through, so the block was subdivided to build two big new houses; we got the street frontage, our cousins got the battle-axe block. We’d sunk years of maintenance on the ruined weatherboard house – mowing the grass, clearing junk and overgrowth – for virtually no return. The stench alone left you high, in a sick way.

  If I could slip out of the overlord’s sight, I liked sorting through the debris of tenants past: tools, car parts, magazines (not the ones I’d usually see: tattoos, tits, motorbikes) and vintage clothes. No single family would have such a span of stuff, from broken high chairs for infants to medications for ailments I imagined were for people close to death.

  I’d heard bikies once lived here. There was a huge pantry, a great hiding spot for kids or a place bad dudes stashed cash and drugs. My imagination ran free with tales of police being called after parties got out of hand, Harleys in the hallway and a head smashed through a wall; an old person who’d been forgotten, dead, their bones found in bed. To me these were semi-real tabloid stories finding their way back to terra firma, not just wild flights of fantasy. Is this ‘news sense’?

  At the end of Taylor Street was a nine-acre block, beneath which was the Bankstown Bunker, a secret two-storey building that served the Royal Australian Air Force during World War II. Fearing attack from the Japanese, the military monitored sightings of all aircraft in the eastern area of the Southwest Pacific from this command post, issued air-raid warnings and controlled searchlights.

  In the mid-1970s, as we tried to control the trees and weeds on our forlorn patch, a mini housing estate for defence workers was built over this shrine of surveillance and intelligence, integral to the defence of the realm. The editor of the Bankstown Torch had rediscovered the bunker a few years earlier, reporting its exact location; soon after, vandals destroyed any chance of us exploring it. T
he past and that distant war were buried right here.

  Work excursions to Taylor Street soaked up school holidays; stuck out in the sticks for a day, a picnic lunch among the ruins. I moaned about the make-work. I’d toil for cash any day, but this seemed a futile quest. To me, it encapsulated my father’s dedication to the Croatian cause: fundraising, committee meetings and protests, but for what? Nothing would ever change in the old country. I was convinced nothing was ever going to happen here, on this sinkhole for council rates and scarce leisure time, a shallow burial ground for evidence on crims and vagrants.

  Then one day, it did.

  Tata built a four-bedroom, full-brick, double-garage mansion: rock-solid, concrete slabs on both storeys, it could stand a hundred years. Welcome to bunker country. Most of our cousins were leaving older homes in the inner-west and St George district to build new houses nearby or in the expanding suburbs of the southwest around Bankstown and Fairfield. Whenever we visited relatives, the adults spoke constantly about home prices, construction techniques, the cost per thousand of laying bricks, the quality of tradesmen, and most important, the ideal placement of a konoba (a wine/moonshine cellar and meat-drying bunker). Having sampled a dozen new houses, Tata declared my cousin Bepo had arrived at the winning spatial formula. With only slight modifications to that design, and again buying Croatian, the new house was now underway.

  The fresh foundations also put paid to one of my concealed fears. When I was starting high school Tata said in a matter of fact way if Croatia became independent we would be moving back there: leaving this life behind and starting over. No question. Quietly, I wished freedom would be a train delayed. How could I begin over there when I hadn’t had time to finish whatever it was I was doing here? So this house was a threshold moment; there was no going back from a home on this scale. We were digging in.

  I was looking forward to having, for the first time, my own bedroom. A bonus would be moving closer to school and my best mates. Wally and Harpo were in Georges Hall, an adjoining suburb of new houses, Pip was in Yagoona near the Hume Highway. Joso would come to regret the house-wide rear balcony that blighted the entrance to the cellar, meaning everyone bar Teta had to duck their heads to enter; the downstairs shower was never used, but cleaned every week, and Mama believed the placement of the wall phone in the kitchen was, in hindsight, a mistake.

  But the finish – woodwork, tiling, brickwork, guttering, driveway, paths, fencing – was flawless. Every shade of cream and brown were represented. New trees and a vegetable garden were planted, as well as a Hills Hoist. All who came to visit Joso and Milenka’s new home said it was superb.

  Tata made it happen. He bought a lawnmower, wheelbarrow, ladders and winemaking paraphernalia to keep us busy. A lifetime of collecting Croatian folk artefacts and Teta’s ancient glory box would still not yield the supply of doilies that would adequately protect the sheen on this palace.

  ‘Bože moj! My God. Just cleaning this house is going to be the death of me,’ Mama will say to Tata even before we moved in.

  ‘Boys, no shoes on the carpet!’ is the sum of his help.

  ‘Ajme meni. Oh me, Oh my!’ she’ll say. ‘As soon as I finish cleaning, I’ll have to start again. Dušević, you’re going to have to help me. It was you, not me, who wanted such a big house to show off.’

  ‘I will help you darling,’ he’ll reply. ‘I’ll sleep a bit extra for you in the afternoons.’

  My father often changed his address but never his lines.

  15

  Freestyle

  Like a proto screensaver, a world map is laminated into my bedroom desk. I count time zones, left to right. Jaundiced and obese, the ailing USSR is etherised upon a table, its chilly eastern extremity a baby step from Alaska and the might of Reagan’s USA. I’m visualising geopolitics, channelling T.S. Eliot, getting ready to do maths, first subject among equals.

  It’s 1981, my final year of school and I’ve abandoned studying in front of the TV, given I can get it all done before the 6 pm news. That’s the beauty of Benilde’s restricted trading hours and sawn-off extracurricula. To loosen a tight jaw, some Bazooka gum. Debbie Harry caresses me through calculus with the soft reggae of the ‘Tide is High’ and, to enhance focus, I raise the pulse with her motor-mouthed montage in ‘Rapture’. High-fidelity homework.

  I’m tracking well in English, maths and economics, but there’s a trail of debris behind me. In a cavalier move, I’d ditched modern history at the first sign of footnotes in Year Eleven. Towards the end of the year, dropping chemistry was cold-blooded. (Report card: ‘Tom did not attend the final examination’.) I was losing momentum in physics and came to a stop at the end of first term.

  In English we were studying texts by long-dead writers or about distant places. Sons and Lovers was melodramatic and obtuse. Hormones ablaze, we were hungry for action and the direct route to the prize. Paul Morel and his mum! Patrick White’s Tree of Man, about a dreary, mythic Australia, was out of reach as well. Eliot’s poetry, so beautifully crafted, was itself a mindscape of misery: blokes who were past it and impotent in smelly London. The confessional American poet Robert Lowell, mercifully more recent, may have been depressing but his imagery was immediate and haunting: Murder Inc. killers, mental illness, making out in cars, resilient skunks.

  I’d latched on to economics because it was dominating the news. The budget, an inquiry into financial deregulation, a wages explosion and the mining boom were the essence of our studies and the main battles in politics. The theory explained the cost of life’s necessities, why taxes or interest rates were being raised and why jobs were scarce. In essays we offered advice to treasurer John Howard and the Reserve Bank. Why did we bother? Why did they bother? Imperious Malcolm Fraser had won his third election but wasn’t a man of action, unlike our economics teacher Mr Ireland, a black belt in martial arts, or union boss Bob Hawke, who’d just entered federal politics.

  Perhaps because it was loosely defined, I was especially keen on general studies, a subject about society and culture. Mrs Young once asked us to think about which class we belonged to.

  ‘Raise your hand if you are working class.’

  Hands went up, emphatically, bar two. The great split: the ALP herd and a couple of stray, mongrel Croatians, probably DLP groupers.

  ‘Middle class?’

  Željko raised his hand. Like most Croatians we knew, his parents voted Liberal. But I’m not putting up my hand.

  ‘Tom?’

  ‘My dad’s retired, so technically not working, but he’s busy building a house. Is there anything other than middle?’

  ‘Upper?’

  ‘More like uppayaself, Luigi!’ said one of the delegates from the Bankstown Right.

  Drawing on fact memory, personal beliefs and what was reported in the newspapers you could simply improvise the entire time in general studies.

  ‘What larks, Pip!’ as Joe Gargery put it in Great Expectations, a novel we studied the previous year.

  If only there were a career in such a lark. Advanced maths had become esoteric, remote even from the verities of physics, equations floating off the page, numbers and letters bursting into particles. My Easter report was solid, except for maths, where I’d blown the exam by getting bogged down in a difficult equation – pure pride – and not leaving myself time for easier ones. Numbers wizard Lehane, son of a professor, said the difference between boys and girls in maths is that faced with a vexing question, boys will say the question is too hard, girls will think they are not smart enough. I didn’t fit in either camp.

  Doing Croatian on Saturdays meant I was down to a light burden at school, a case of Mediterranean backsliding. I had more free periods than anyone else; when the timetable moved into certain, fortuitous phases I wouldn’t be required at school until morning tea or I’d be finished an hour before lunch. I’d do essays last-minute, no panic, giving every deadline an even chance. In the library I spent my ‘frees’ in the study cubicles distracting Nazareth girls and
absorbing the National Times, the Bulletin, the Australian Financial Review and the Australian, figuring this was building my storehouse of facts, learning ‘news sense’.

  I was noticing bylines, developing a taste for writers who showed flair in features and opinion-writing. I felt they were reaching out, writing for me. In the National Times, I’d search out Elisabeth Wynhausen’s zesty dispatches from America, still the Promised Land, that vibrant place vast and menacing, encompassing all creation. Although I didn’t appreciate all the nuances in Craig McGregor’s profiles, I understood he was trying to inhabit his subjects and play with the form itself. In the Herald, which I bought every morning, I was on the hunt for human-interest stories by Lenore Nicklin and Tony Stephens, and the crabby cricket analysis of Bill O’Reilly, who scorned Kerry Packer’s pantomimes in pyjamas.

  Journalism seemed limitless. I was sure there would be space for me in this club. Yet beyond a starter job called a cadetship, and my cousin Zdenka’s blossoming career, I was clueless. How you progressed to write longer pieces or even found stories were mysteries. Yet instead of working to an orderly plan, I simply craved to be swept up by journalism and taken away.

  I was going at things freestyle, an erratic, alternative existence of leisure, cutting corners at school and squeezing all study into a few hours at home. At first it did not feel like a high-risk approach, rather it seemed a logical, if not reasonable, extension of the school’s ethos of freedom and individual responsibility. The cadetships in journalism would be determined long before the HSC results came in. Why bust myself?

  Hanging out in the mornings at Wally’s pool or in the Kombi, staying up late and sleeping in were the rewards of an easing in my academic policy. Every night I did something social or sporty – I’d been chosen in the NSW Catholic Opens basketball team – anything ‘un-school’.