Hunger Town

by Wendy Scarfe

  Jock raised his eyebrows in disbelief. ‘Och, laddie,’ he responded, his Scots burr rich and cynical, ‘is that your plan and all? And what do you think will happen afterwards? Yer daft. They’ll slaughter us and Nathan, you bloody dolt, I canna swim.’

  Nathan was not put off. ‘It takes time and sacrifice to educate people.’

  ‘They don’t want us!’ Jock was short. ‘Didn’t you understand what they said? They don’t want a Central Committee ordering them about.’

  Nathan persisted doggedly, ‘Another meeting might persuade them. Maybe they didn’t understand the first time.’

  ‘Did ya hear that, Andy?’ Jock was scornful.

  Andy smiled quietly and went on drinking his tea. Bernie whittled away at his piece of wood and the sun danced along the blade. As always he whistled ‘Avanti popolo’ but when he looked up at Jock his eyes were understanding. I wondered if, of all of us, only Bernie had experienced the complexities and pain of sacrifice. Certainly Nathan hadn’t. He burbled on about the necessity of doing the job we had come to do, that the Party expected us to form a branch in Mildura, that’s why they had financed our trip.

  Now, incensed, Jock snarled, ‘Well you can tell the fuckin’ Party we’re not going to be martyrs. I’m not putting myself out in front at some street meeting so that Harry and Judith here can drag my body out of the river. I wouldn’t expect you to be around when there’s real trouble. You need guns to fight fascist bastards. Right, Bernie?’

  Bernie smiled secretly and his knife flashed as he continued to whittle.

  ‘He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day,’ I murmured sententiously.

  Nathan looked daggers at me. Offended and defeated he sulked. Finally he said, ‘Will you all compromise with another house meeting tonight? There may be a few brave lads there who are willing to carry on when we leave.’

  Jock snorted. ‘OK. If that’s all you have in mind.’

  Andy had heard us out. ‘I’ll look after your wife,’ he said quietly to Harry. ‘She can stay here with me.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m going.’

  But Harry was adamant and belligerent. ‘I’m staying here with you.’

  That night after dark the three left in Pat’s car. We heard them jolting down the track and then the quietness of the bush fell around us. Occasionally a restless bird settling for the night reawakened and cried out. There were gentle rustles. Now I was certain I could hear the river pushing and pulsing towards the sea. The day had begun with an early greyness and although I had bathed, the water, with no sun to penetrate it, had looked and smelt dank and threatening. Its appearance had compounded my mood of dark unhappy thoughts.

  Now that Jock had also defied Nathan I felt happier. Harry had his support and the weight of opposition to Nathan didn’t rest solely on my shoulders.

  After Nathan, Jock and Bernie had left we sat on in the firelight. Andy brought out his guitar and strummed happily. He and Harry talked about music. Harry tried to play Andy’s guitar and laughed at his own ineptness on a new instrument. At about ten o’clock we decided to turn in but it was hard to sleep. We both wondered and worried about what was happening at the meeting in town.

  It was close to midnight when we heard Pat’s car tearing along the track. It slewed to a stop, skidding on the grass between the shacks. Nathan, Jock and Bernie piled out.

  ‘They’re coming,’ they panted. ‘Pursued us out of town. Quick, into the huts.’

  Awakened by their shouting, Andy loped out, rubbing his eyes sleepily. He looked back along the track, saw the advancing headlights, retreated into his shack, and re-appeared with a rifle. ‘Get inside,’ he ordered sharply. ‘I’ll deal with this lot.’

  We hesitated to leave him alone.

  ‘Do as I say.’

  We ran back to our huts. Harry put the bolt across the door and would have closed the shutters but I stopped him. ‘I can’t. It’d be like a cage. I must see.’

  Of course I could see very little through the small space but there was plenty to hear. Half a dozen trucks screamed into our camp, hurtling at breakneck speed in a circle around the fire. Grass and dirt spattered from beneath their wheels and I smelt the scorch of hot rubber tyres as they braked then accelerated. They carried an army of men, all bellowing abuse and threats.

  As they charged past the ground shook and the walls of our tin shack trembled. Once again I felt the sick terror of being trapped. Far better to be on the street or on an open wharf if I was going to be murdered.

  Finally they scudded to a stop. Their leader appeared, a burly ugly bloke.

  ‘Come out, you rotten commie bastards. We’re waiting for you. Or are you going to die like rats in a hole?’

  He jumped down from his truck and lit a brand from the fire. It flared.

  ‘Christ,’ Harry gasped.

  Andy, who none of them had noticed, walked casually into the middle of the ring of vehicles. He pointed his .303 rifle straight at the leader with his burning brand.

  ‘Drop it!’ we heard him say. ‘Tell your fascist mates to get back into their trucks and piss off. You stay here. If you move an inch or they make a wrong move I’ll shoot your balls off. And it’ll be self-defence. Make no mistake. We still have a few law courts in this country.’

  The gang leader dropped his brand, which sputtered and then went out. He turned as if to join his mates but Andy’s cold voice stopped him. ‘I told you to wait. And just so you know I mean it …’ He aimed a single shot on the ground in front of him. Grass, twigs and dirt sprang up and there was a sharp smell. Quick as a flash he reloaded.

  Trucks revved violently, horns tooted, and six tried all at once to get out of the clearing. At last they sorted themselves out and sped back down the track. Their gang leader roared after them uselessly, ‘Don’t leave me, you bloody cowards!’

  He stood cravenly in front of Andy. There was complete silence, the trucks could no longer be heard, but still Andy waited. ‘Just in case,’ he said, ‘any of those bastards decide to sneak back.’

  An hour later he released his prisoner and ordered him to walk back to town.

  ‘It’s ten miles,’ the fellow whined.

  ‘Yes.’ Andy was amused. ‘Good exercise for you. And don’t come here again. Next time there’ll be more than me with guns.’

  We joined Andy outside. I gave him a big hug. Our thanks embarrassed him.

  ‘That’s it,’ Jock said. ‘I draw the line at being burned alive.’

  Nathan was silent. Jock poked him in the ribs. ‘Feel like being a bit of cinder for the Party?’

  But Harry took pity on Nathan’s discomfort. ‘Dry up, Jock. He’s only trying to make things better for working people. Don’t jibe at him.’

  Jock raised his eyebrows. ‘Support comes from unusual quarters.’

  Harry flushed.

  ‘And what about my little ‘fascist’ mate Bernie-Benito? What’ll happen to him now?’

  Bernie patted his arm and flicked his knife across his throat.

  ‘They’ll kill you, Bernie.’ Jock was distressed.

  ‘No,’ Bernie said, ‘not me. Mussolini couldn’t even kill me.’

  Not convinced, Jock glared at Nathan.

  Nathan capitulated, ‘We’ll go home in the morning. We can’t always win, it seems.’

  Jock snorted. ‘And we’ll take Bernie?’ Nathan said nothing to this. After all, it was only recently that they’d got Bernie out of Adelaide.

  However next morning Bernie was gone. Andy didn’t know where and we had to pack up and leave without him.

  Our return trip was a quiet one, everyone absorbed in their own thoughts. Harry, who never brooded over perceived injuries, tried a few cheerful comments but neither Nathan nor Jock responded. We were relieved to get out of the car and be home.

  ‘Phew,’ Harry said, ‘I never expected to see a parting of the ways between Jock and Nathan. I suppose they’ll get over it in time.’

  We lit the bathroom chip hea
ter and shared a delicious hot bath.

  ‘It’s a lot better than the Murray.’ Harry sighed with contentment and luxuriously rubbed his soapy hands into my back and shoulders and gently around my breasts.

  ‘Mm,’ I said. ‘Intimacy is delicious and our own bed heavenly. Never, never again will I sleep on a camp stretcher.’ And bending to kiss the tips of his fingers I added, ‘It’s far too narrow.’

  We arrived home at the end of November and Christmas was approaching rapidly. Until our trip to Mildura Colonel Campbell and his New Guard of right wing warriors had meant nothing to me. Now I recognised their menace.

  Harry was quite certain that the hoons who had threatened us were part of his army. ‘They were too organised, too confident, to have just been a loose rabble. The Party has been warning about them for some time and even the Laborites are concerned—and they’re conservative enough.’

  I had thought a cartoon about the events would be futile because it wouldn’t resonate with readers but now I changed my mind. On the banks of the Murray I had recalled Banjo Paterson’s ‘Clancy of the Overflow’, that romantic nostalgic hymn to the beauties of freedom and the bush. Perhaps I could turn it on its head and use it in a cartoon.

  So I drew a drover being kicked into the river by a gang of hoodlums and headlined it, The New Guard. They were shouting, Sink you red ragger! Beneath the picture my caption read: In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy gone a-drowning down the Cooper where the western drovers go. Appreciating the cartoon depended on knowing the poem but I hoped that most Australians would.

  The Sun News Pictorial rejected it but the Workers’ Weekly gobbled it up and I felt better for having targeted the New Guard.

  Harry and I were to have Christmas dinner with my parents. Harry’s mother and Winnie would join us for tea on Christmas night. I invited Miss Marie, but she was making her once-a-year visit home to see her parents and brother and sister.

  ‘The gathering of the clan, Judith,’ she joked. ‘And all political discussion is banned. Such a pity because it so enlivens a boring family reunion.’

  My mother always insisted on attending the Christmas Eve service at the Anglican church. Neither Harry nor I found comfort in religion but my mother hovered on the edge of belief and Christmas, with its cordiality and community feeling, engulfed and soothed her. Briefly she escaped into a benign world where, as the songs of the day told us, love ruled supreme.

  My father, whose ‘mean old bastard’ of a father had cured him early of any belief in religion, never argued with her about the Christmas service. He always put on his best suit and meekly accompanied her.

  Harry loved the music and joyfully joined in all the carols: ‘Hark the herald angels sing’, ‘The first Noel’, ‘We three Kings’, and his lovely tenor voice soared above those around us.

  ‘Sing up, darling,’ he nudged me, but I was always too shy.

  We heard the oft-repeated story of the birth of Christ and the arrival of the shepherds and the wise men and I wondered, as I had often done at past Christmases, what three wealthy, sophisticated, and, presumably, learned kings of the Orient made of a baby in a stable. Were they really impressed or were they bitterly disappointed and regarded the whole affair as a complete fizzer? And to make matters worse, they probably didn’t live long enough to see what came of it all. I didn’t know why talks of birth inevitably led me to conjectures about time and mortality.

  At the close of the service the organist played ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring’. The congregation filed out but Harry sat transfixed, his eyes rapt, as the full-throated notes of the organ resonated and rolled around the church. I waited quietly beside him until he was ready to leave.

  ‘Oh, Jude,’ he marvelled, ‘have you ever heard such miraculous fabulous sound? One day I’ll learn the organ and play Bach. The piano merely tinkles beside those great chords. Isn’t it awe-inspiring? The sound of the organ beggars description.’

  We had a happy Christmas and later, as we kissed and sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ to welcome the New Year, we briefly hoped that 1933 would be better.

  But it wasn’t. Better years were not our lot. Perhaps if we had been happy to close our doors on events outside the Port the year might have seemed more hopeful. As early as January the axe fell. Adolph Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Immediately he rounded up all opposition to his power. He would ‘smash Bolshevism’ he trumpeted, and communists, socialists, Jews and Gypsies were incarcerated in concentration camps. It didn’t require a lot of imagination for me to envisage Germany in terms of the hoons of our New Guard let loose on a community to terrorise and kill. Joe Pulham’s predictions of ‘that nasty bloke Hitler’ had become frighteningly real.

  ‘Even the conservative forces in Australia are alarmed, Judith,’ Harry said, throwing a copy of the Melbourne Argus on our kitchen table. ‘We’ve been warning for years that Hitler threatens the peace of the world and that the League of Nations is a paper tiger. Anyone who reads Mein Kampf knows his plans for a Greater Germany. It’s a choice now between fascism or communism.’

  Harry was always tired now. He was constantly absorbed into urgent Communist Party meetings and hardly ever at home. They were working frantically, he said, to formulate their policies.

  I had lunch with Miss Marie in Adelaide. She greeted me soberly. ‘This is terrible, Judith. I have many friends in France and they are very afraid. They write that the Versailles Agreement is now no more than a bit of useless paper. This monster will trample Europe. The barbarians are at their gates.

  ‘How lucky we are to live in Australia with the beautiful sea for a boundary. So many of my friends have experienced armies marching across their frontiers. It’s so easy there if anyone has a mind to do it. And this Hitler person certainly has a mind to. We’ll see his marching hordes within a few years.’

  She was despondent. ‘Mind you, if we hadn’t brought Germany to its knees after the last war maybe … Well, it’s all too late now.’

  She drank her coffee and was silent for a few minutes. At last she sighed. ‘You’d better get busy on those sharp cartoons of yours, Judith. Your specialty is biting satire. Thank heavens. I get so sick of puerile jokes, masquerading as cartoons, that feed on stereotypes about women being gold-diggers and the working class being drunken slobs who keep coal in their baths. You’ll always be a lone voice, perhaps, but you’ll make people think.’

  So I went home and drew the cartoon that had been shaping in my mind for several days. I drew a monstrous dog with Hitler’s head. Two portly gentlemen struggle to hold him on a straining leash. In front of the dog is a bowl of food and the meal a collection of small human figures labelled Socialist, Communist and Jews. One of the portly gentlemen speaks to the other: Do you think we’ll be able to hold him after he’s eaten his breakfast? For good measure I decorated the clothes of the two gentlemen with some British, French and American symbols. And to be really provocative I added a small kangaroo.

  Looking exhausted, Harry came in late from the night’s meeting. He slumped into a chair and watched me pen the finishing touches. ‘That about sums it up, Jude. The communists are as busy as bees. There’s a whole lot of buzzing to and fro, much talk and a lot of opinion. I’m afraid that amongst ourselves we believe our own bombast and our own propaganda. I don’t really know whether the workers of the world will unite against this monster. He has power, Jude, a power we can only dream about and such is the miserable plight of the German people that many see him not as a barbarian but as a messiah.’

  He picked up my cartoon, studied it and smiled bitterly. ‘You’ve hit the nail on the head as always. He’ll gobble up his opposition and the rest of the world will sit around hoping it won’t turn out too badly.’

  He laid it down. ‘You should send this to the Argus. Try again to break in on the main press.’

  ‘They won’t take it, Harry.’

  ‘I don’t know about that. A lot of people are very worried.’

  ‘That�
�s what Miss Marie says but she’s talking about her friends in France.’

  ‘Nevertheless, Jude, I’d give it a try if I were you. You deserve a wider audience than the Workers’ Weekly. After all, there you only preach to the converted.’

  So without much hope, for it was a very conservative newspaper, I sent my cartoon to the Argus. They responded within the week and surprisingly were enthusiastic but cautious. Could I, they suggested, delete the communists from the food bowl and just have Hitler devouring the socialists, Jews and Gypsies.

  My experience of the New Guard in Mildura had toughened my stance against bullying. I was short in my reply. Either they took it as it was or I withdrew it. They capitulated and featured it as a large item on page two above an article warning of Hitler’s threats to extend the borders of Germany. They paid me more than the Workers’ Weekly and Spearhead combined paid me for a single cartoon. Apparently it delighted their readers and there was such an overwhelming response to it that they requested more work.

  On the same theme I produced a cartoon of Cerberus guarding the door to the Underworld. I depicted each of his three heads as the slavering face of Hitler. He crouches at the door to Hell and the caption reads: Don’t be mistaken. I’m only Cerberus in disguise. All living beings, especially communists, socialists, Jews and Gypsies are welcome here.

  There was no argument about the communists this time and presumably readers of the Argus recognised how I had turned the Cerberus myth on its head. I was commissioned to produce a weekly cartoon on the same theme. Readers were buying the paper for my cartoons. It was hard work coming up with a fresh idea each week and often I lay awake at night pummelling my poor head but usually I managed something. And, at Harry’s further urging, I sent one of my Hitler cartoons to the Daily Herald in London.