by Shaun Carney
The work my father did, doing structural and decorative metalwork, could be heavy, often hot, and carried a hint of danger, being a combination of welding and the cutting and shaving of metal. His hands consistently bore little scabs from burns and cuts. A couple of times each year, little bits of metal would get lodged in his eyes. His abilities as a tradesman were considerable, as a businessman less so. He was a last-minute guy. He detested paperwork and was the King of Putting-Off. He had no coherent filing system and hated paying bills before the due date. He did not like tidying or packing up a site at the end of the day. He would leave his tools on the job in the expectation that he would pick them up when work resumed the next day. As a result, the beautiful set of tools he was given as a gift when he completed his apprenticeship gradually diminished as each of its constituent elements were stolen or left behind. This did not appear to have ever upset or disappointed him. He also at this time formed a fully requited and enduring relationship with his one true love: beer.
The man was my idol when I was a child, the model of what I wanted and for a long time—too long, on reflection—wanted to be. He was smarter and funnier than the other men in our gradually expanding immediate community. He was the one who said things that made all the other men laugh and once he had them going, he would join in the mirth, tilting his head back and cackling hard at the ceiling. His look of satisfaction—of completion—at these moments was unmistakeable. His posture would be relaxed, like a driver who felt as one with his vehicle, capable of taking it anywhere. Before the beer thickened him, he resembled a mid-career Frank Sinatra, having started out, like Frankie, as a skinny, handsome, pencil-necked hustler with a big appetite for females. My father’s father had imparted to him an indelible aphorism: if someone was good enough to invite you to their home for a party, you were obliged to contribute to the entertainment. I suspect that my father needed to be told this only once, if at all; it was equivalent to advising a newly hatched turtle to make for the shoreline and swim.
When I accompanied my parents to parties there was invariably a moment when they would be exhorted by other partygoers to do a little ballroom dancing exhibition in the lounge room to a record by Victor Silvester or Joe Loss or one of the big swing bands of the 1940s. Or my father would be urged to ‘Give us a song, Jim’, and he would oblige with a red-faced, emotive a cappella rendition of Billy Eckstine’s ‘That Old Black Magic’. Theirs was the last age cohort that clung on to the pre-electronic practice of performance—jokes, stories, poems, tricks—as the natural and predominant form of social intercourse. They were raised in the wake of either the Great Depression or World War II, a world of wind-up gramophones, crystal sets and occasional meals of bread and dripping when the groceries ran out, with cars and phones being neighbourhood rarities.
By contrast, I grew up with television and a family car, household features that kept a larger world if not available, then at least in view. At first we could not afford a television and I do remember life before TV. It was not unenjoyable. It involved a lot of running around in the long grass in the backyard and my mother calling out from the back porch to look out for snakes. I never encountered one in the wild, although once our black cat Midnight presented a baby snake, half-chewed, on our step. Then a TV arrived in early 1961, a few months before my fourth birthday, connected to an antenna by a man from Hills, the clothing hoist company that had recently expanded into technology. The television set was locally made by Astor. It was a lightly lacquered Danish-style beauty featuring a buttery-coloured timber veneer cabinet with tapered wooden legs set at a jaunty angle, each leg capped at the feet with a brass band. The lid of the unit lifted up to reveal a turntable—or, as we always called it, a phonogram—on which we played our only two records: a single, ‘Yes Sir, That’s My Baby’ by Col Joye and the Joy Boys; and an LP (never an album), Sammy Davis Jr Live at Town Hall. Within a year, the turntable broke down, never to be repaired. I mentioned earlier that my father didn’t like paying anyone to carry out any sort of service. I should also say he disliked buying new appliances; the TV was second-hand. He had bought it from a bloke he had met at a pub. It would be seven years before we got another record player.
That was of no concern to me. I found popular music baffling. I would hear it on the kitchen radio. Why were there ghostly sounding men and women singing behind Nat King Cole on ‘Ramblin’ Rose’ and Ray Charles on ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’? And the rough-sounding group of men who chanted ‘Free, free, free, free, free!’ as they ushered in the key change in Toni Fisher’s lament of the heartbreak caused by the Berlin Wall, ‘West of the Wall’? Why was the guttural-voiced ‘trucker’ Dave Dudley in ‘Six Days on the Road’ willing to break the law by taking amphetamines, overloading his truck and keeping a dodgy logbook? What was waiting for him at home and why was he so anxious to get there?
I asked my mother. She gave me many gifts and perhaps the greatest was that she never failed to answer one of my questions, no matter how ridiculous and regardless of what she was doing. ‘Maybe he just wants to get home,’ she said. That wasn’t enough of an answer for me. ‘Yes, but why? Is it because of love? All the songs seem to be about love. Why are they all about the one thing?’ She took a pause and looked me gently in the eyes: ‘Maybe they can’t think of anything else to write about’. While I was at it, I wanted to know why men called women ‘baby’, prompted by Bobby Vee’s ‘Take Good Care of My Baby’, in which Vee advised the listener not to make his baby ‘blue’. What is it with blue? I wanted to know. Do you go blue if you go out?
She responded, ‘Blue means unhappy. I don’t know why. And some men call women “baby” but I don’t like that.’
‘Is that why you let Dad call you “Sort”?’ I asked.
Another pause. ‘Yes, that’s why.’
Probably a year or so after that, he didn’t seem to call her ‘Sort’ any more.
There was also a range of songs that frightened me. Vee’s follow-up hit ‘The Night Has a Thousand Eyes’, a warning to a possibly unfaithful girlfriend that she would eventually be found out, was one. I already didn’t like the dark. Now there were eyes out there too? The song that I found profoundly disturbing was Peter, Paul and Mary’s ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’, in which Puff befriends Little Jackie Paper and the duo have all sorts of sea-borne adventures until Jackie appears to die, whereupon Puff retreats to a cave, heartbroken. That’s how it sounded to my five-year-old ears, anyway. What really happens is that Jackie outgrows Puff, finding ‘other toys’. It would seem that the magic dragon was thrown over by Jackie for chicks. Even though I know all these years later that Jackie didn’t expire, I continue to find the memory of the song disturbing.
What interested me was TV and thank God our Astor worked most of the time. Head and shoulders above all other shows was Adventures of Superman, screened by Channel Nine on weekday afternoons. I am not an imaginative person. I saw what happened in a newspaper office and it looked irresistible. That seemed like a good life. Reporters dressed neatly and got to go places. They snooped around and asked what was going on and often—always, in the case of the staff of the Daily Planet—found themselves in danger. In the show, they didn’t seem to really need to type up their stories; the articles just appeared in print later, always on the front page with the headlines in war type. And the janitor’s closet was invariably empty, giving Clark Kent somewhere to change into and out of his Superman outfit. What a great place to work! The show was as slow as a wet week and was mostly about petty-to-moderate crime, not super-villains. All Superman seemed to do after catching up with crooks was to grab their pistols and crush them in his hand like they were made of licorice, which they probably were. I can see all that now. And George Reeves did spend at least 80 per cent of his screen time not being Superman, either overcooking his serious look or smirking at the cluelessness of Noel Neill and Jack Larson, playing Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen. The show could more accurately have been called the Adventures of Clark Kent. But it was captiva
ting, exciting, enthralling. I didn’t care what happened throughout the rest of the day as long as I could watch the show and imagine myself being part of the Daily Planet’s world.
Because of television, I taught myself to read. On Sunday nights at 6.30, Channel Seven screened Walt Disney’s Disneyland and every few weeks there would be a ‘Fantasyland’ episode featuring animation, with Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse. I couldn’t get enough of that show either. The Shop was a sub-newsagency, stocking a considerable array of comics. The Disney comics, in full colour, cost one shilling. The Superman comics, bumper editions in black and white, cost two shillings. I badgered my mother to buy me whatever was available and I would take it home, straight to my bedroom, and pore over every panel, every word balloon. I would note all the unfamiliar words and once I got to about a dozen, I’d take the comic out to the kitchen and ask my mother to give me the pronunciation and meaning of each word. Then I’d return to my room. I had just turned four. I have not yet stated baldly that I was a weird kid. I did not think it necessary to point out the obvious.
In my defence, while we lived in suburbia, it was in the farthest reaches. Few neighbours and with no real community to speak of, certainly at the start. And in our house I was on my own. I didn’t know what other children did. In my first week at school, the teacher sat us at tables, placed crayons and paper in front of us, and asked us to draw anything we liked. The other kids set about drawing cars and dresses and beach scenes. I had no clue. I picked up a green crayon and then an orange one and drew dozens of undisciplined, overlapping circles, picking up speed as I ran the crayons around and around. The result was rubbish, not even a doodle. I’d never drawn before. There were no coloured pencils or crayons in my house.
One of the reasons for this—although I would learn later it was explained by other things as well—was a lack of funds at home. The 1961 credit squeeze that almost killed the Menzies Government in that year’s federal election did play a hand in killing my father’s one and only attempt at running a business. When he was declared bankrupt, he entered a scheme of arrangement in which he was to repay his debts in the next fifteen years. He managed to hold on to our house. That was the official story, the key elements of which grew with every telling in subsequent decades. When it happened, my father was thirty-five. By the time he’d reached his seventies, by his telling the credit squeeze had become an economic depression and Robert Menzies was akin to a war criminal. He would refer to this crisis in his life four or five times each year, with or without the assistance of alcohol, and in all manner of company: family, new acquaintances, former workmates. It was something he needed to hear himself recounting, his voice rising and his face tightening—a form of explanation for what he had done with himself, and to others, since that moment.
5
NEWS OF THE WEEK
THE LOSS OF the business was a humiliation for my father and it burdened him with debts but it did not mean that he would be out of work. Although the credit squeeze had caused unemployment to jump from 1.4 per cent in 1960 to 3.1 per cent in 1961, he had a trade, which ensured him of continuous employment. Australia’s manufacturing industries were heavily protected. We weren’t going to have to live with our fox terrier, imaginatively named Puppy, in Dad’s Chevrolet ute. Within a few weeks of his fall, he took a job as a manager of Jeem Engineering, a small one-factory business in the recently reclaimed market garden outer suburb of Braeside. Really, he was the leading hand, doing most of the oxy and arc welding, and overseeing the firm’s construction work.
Australian life was heavily regulated and so much more parochial in the 1960s. The world outside Australia looked so big and distant, while Australia internally was a collection of small worlds. Each state had distinct consumer markets. In Victoria, beer was supplied by one brewer, Carlton & United Breweries, whose sole market was the state. Bakers were not allowed to bake bread for sale on Sundays. One of the traditions in our home was to listen to a program on 3UZ on Sunday mornings called Newsbeat, which would begin with an announcer declaring with the common (for then) Australian broadcast voice that sounded like a jockey imitating a BBC newsreader: ‘Newwwsssbeat!’ The delivery was breathless and highly dramatised. The announcer would never refer to the show simply as ‘Newsbeat’. The thirty-minute show featured a reporter covering Saturday night road accidents, fires and any other disturbance around suburban Melbourne that required the emergency services. Official police reports would be read verbatim. If they related to a road fatality, the reports would conclude with a terse ‘Life was pronounced extinct by Dr Campbell’. Victoria’s roads amounted to one large charnel house in the 1960s, with drink driving rampant and no seatbelt laws. There was never any shortage of serious accidents to cover and then, as when I was a police reporter in the late 1970s, reporters followed few protocols; the ‘Newsbeat’ man would walk right up to the scene and start describing what he saw. One morning, he walked up too close to a car wreck in which someone had died. He broke from his description and said, ‘Excuse me for a moment’, some faint visceral sounds followed and then he resumed his narration. ‘What happened?’ I asked my father. ‘I think he had to go off and have a chuck,’ he replied.
One of the disturbances deemed important enough for Newsbeat to cover was a Saturday police raid on the bakery that operated next door to Jeem Engineering. The baker, a European refugee known to all the mechanics and welders along that little industrial strip simply as Joe, couldn’t understand why there was a law that prohibited him from supplying fresh bread to people on a Sunday as he used to be able to do in Europe. So he regularly defied the law and the local police regularly raided his bakery on a Saturday night. The sergeant who oversaw the raid reported by Newsbeat sounded very unhappy with Joe’s wilful defiance of the established order during his interview. I liked Joe. Whenever I went to the factory with my father on a Saturday and ran around picking up all the bits of punched and discarded metal while he welded away, Joe would come in and hand me a loaf of warm bread wrapped in waxed paper. Warm bread was not something a suburbanite in Melbourne in those times encountered unless the baking was done at home. The big industrial bakeries—Tip Top, Home Pride, Gawith’s—dominated the market and grew large by sticking to the rules and producing and distributing highly uninteresting bread for the masses. In the 1970s, ‘hot bread kitchens’ started to appear in the suburbs and disrupted that leaden orthodoxy but it was a tad too late for Joe and his business, having been elbowed out years earlier by the big bakeries.
The rigidities of life seemed to be everywhere. A sharp division ran through the vast ad hoc network of milk bars, precursors to today’s convenience stores, across suburban Melbourne. Each milk bar had to make a choice: was it a Toppa shop or a Peters shop? No milk bar could be both; exclusivity was mandatory. Each shop displayed its allegiance above its front door, either through a light in the shape of an ice-cream cone for Peters or a white icy pole for Toppa. Milk bars sold many things—cigarettes, newspapers, lollies, pies, packaged groceries, sandwiches. And milk. In bottles. The milk was processed and distributed by local dairies, wherever you were. There was only one type of milk: plain, full cream. Order, orderliness and predictability were regarded as the society’s great virtues.
Despite my socially isolated early upbringing, I did find that I fitted in at school. I discovered the satisfaction that came from entertaining the other kids, putting on voices, imitating them to themselves. And I liked taking charge. Whenever we put all our chairs in a line, one in front of the other, so that we could pretend we were on a bus, I was always the driver. My first friend was a boy called Howard Mitchell. He had curly hair, blue eyes and a big smile. We laughed a lot and did a lot of running around the schoolground together—I don’t think there was any purpose to it—and got on famously, except for one afternoon, when my solitary instincts kicked in. It was the afternoon break, from 2.15 to 2.30, and as we walked out of the classroom, through the breezeway and into the grounds, Howard suggested we do something toge
ther. I said I didn’t feel like it and that I just wanted to be on my own. I didn’t actually have anything planned. I probably would have ended up atop some hardened mounds of dirt pretending to be the Cisco Kid riding his horse over a mountain range. Howard insisted that I play with him. I said I didn’t want to, forcefully—‘Look, just leave me alone!’—and started walking off. He tackled me from behind, bringing me to the ground, and we struggled in the fine gravel for a while. It was an even contest and we ended up on our sides, locked in a complex wrestling hold. As we tried to outmanoeuvre each other, I found myself with my face pushed up against one of his bare legs.