by Shaun Carney
This fight had been going on for an age—probably twenty seconds—and I concluded that something radical was needed to bring it to an end. So I bit Howard. On the leg. Pretty hard. He squealed and released me immediately, clutching the leg. ‘Owwh, he bit me! He bit me!’ he shouted. Now, my key mistake was that I hadn’t taken my surroundings into account. Our tangle had occurred outside the girls’ shelter shed. A strictly enforced regulation covered the shelter sheds. Boys and girls were forbidden from entering each other’s shelter sheds, which were 20 metres apart, with the school incinerator standing in between. In those carefree days, all of the school’s refuse—lunch scraps, used paper, pretty much anything—went into the incinerator and into the planet’s atmosphere. The incinerator was a source of endless fascination. If our fight had happened outside the boys’ shelter shed, I doubt it would have drawn much attention. But by causing another boy to cry via what was unquestionably a dodgy tactic in front of scores of girls, I’d instantly made myself a pariah. At least half a dozen enormous girls—they were probably in Grade Three—gathered around Howard. A couple put their arms around his shoulders and comforted him. Another turned to me, glowering, and said: ‘Ummahh, you’re in trouble’. Then they started to lead Howard away as he sobbed quietly. Yet another girl looked back at me and said: ‘We’re telling!’
Until then, I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong. But now I started to get the idea that this could be bad. Confirmation came minutes later as I joined the line to re-enter the classroom and Miss Claffey approached me, looked at me sternly, and spoke in a monotone: ‘Only dogs bite’. Those girls had told on me. Okay, that was frightening. After taking our places in the classroom, Miss Claffey, from behind her table, locked her eyes on me. ‘Shaun, come up to me.’ I walked to the table. I was calm. She spoke briskly: ‘Okay, tell me what happened’.
‘Well, Howard wanted me to play with him but I didn’t want to. I said I wanted to be on my own and he wouldn’t let me and when I tried to walk away he jumped on me and we started fighting and then he wouldn’t let me go, so I bit him.’ It was, I can see now, my first straight news report, albeit in the first person. She took a second or two to digest this and advised me to go back and sit down before calling up Howard. I couldn’t make out exactly what they said to each other, but the rhythm of it went like this:
Her: -------?
Him: ----------------. Her: -------?
Him: ----------------.
Whereupon she rose a little out of her chair, just enough to be able to reach around and give Howard a solid smack on the back of one leg (the one I’d chomped on?), before telling him to stand in the corner, where he remained, crying again, until the bell rang at 3.30. As he walked past me on his way out of the room to collect his bag from the row of hooks in the corridor, his face was streaked by the combination of tears and dust collected during our scuffle. Poor Howard. All he wanted to do was play with me. I should have been grateful. Perhaps typically of this time in life, the next morning we were friends again and never spoke of the incident. At the end of the following year, Howard transferred to a newly opened school closer to his home on the other side of the railway line. We never saw each other again. Howard had a couple of little brothers, one being a lively, angelic-faced boy called Peter who used to run around at Howard’s birthday parties playing with all the presents. A few months before I joined The Herald in 1978, Peter took up a cadetship in the Melbourne newsroom of Channel Nine and since 2000 has been Channel Seven Melbourne’s weeknight newsreader, the bloke whose face is plastered over the sides of trams and on billboards. He is very good at what he does. But try as I might I have always felt uncomfortable watching the Channel Seven news. Every time I’ve tried, I’ve found myself incapable of looking at Peter without thinking, ‘I bit your brother on the leg and miraculously came out in front’.
There was another fight around this time that couldn’t be set aside the next day. It took me years to make sense of it. The bright spot of Saturday afternoons in the early 1960s for me was the show featuring the clowns Zig and Zag on Channel Seven, designed primarily to advertise Peters ice-cream. The various products they talked about—the Eskimo Pie, the Choc Wedge, the Two-in-One, the Drumstick—seemed highly desirable (less so the Kreem-B-Tween, a small slab of ice-cream between two plain wafers that the consumer was required to assemble) because our local shop was committed to Toppa, whose chief product was a Donald Duck icy pole. So convinced was I of Zig and Zag’s powers that I believed for a long time that they had been responsible for a very real crack in the recently built King Street Bridge on the southern edge of Melbourne’s CBD. The duo filmed an episode in which they tried to break open a coconut on the bridge and banged so hard that they caused a section of it to collapse. In fact, they were spoofing what had really happened, which was that there had been some mistakes in the welding of the girders. But the closure and repair of the bridge was big news, leading to a royal commission. It frustrated me to see news items about this. I couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t know that Zig and Zag had done it. Late on a Saturday afternoon, my mother and I had been visiting neighbours in the next street. My father was doing his usual Saturday shift. As the time for Zig and Zag’s show approached, my mother sent me on home to watch it. It was no big deal for a six-year-old to walk the streets unaccompanied and it wasn’t as if I needed a key; the house was never locked.
As I approached our front yard, I saw my father’s car in the driveway and behind it a little green van owned by one of his workmates, George. And I saw on the rough, barely tended front lawn, right next to that van, my father and George rolling around together. They were grunting and the rolling was at a high speed. One second my father would be on top, the next it would be George. My father was pretty active in those days. He played squash most weeks, swam a lot in summer. I was amused to see him and George mucking around like that, having a play fight. I thought it was great that adults mucked around in the same way as the kids at school. I didn’t know they were such good friends, although why two men in their thirties would engage in a play fight at the end of a hard six-day week was something my Grade One mind couldn’t explain. As I got closer, I heard that between the grunts they were involved in a spirited conversation while carrying on the fight. I could only pick up grabs but the subject seemed to be where my father had been.
‘You were there …’
‘No, I wasn’t.’
‘You know what you were doing …’
‘That’s not right …’
‘They saw you … I checked and you were …’
It was a stream of broken dialogue. It was a fistfight as might have been written by David Mamet. I stood there smiling but when I saw a squirt of blood on the driver’s side door of George’s van, I realised this was not for play, turned heel and ran back to get my mother. By the time we had returned, George and my father were on their feet and had stopped going for each other. They were facing off, panting, possibly because they’d done so much talking. My father had a split lip and some early signs of light bruising next to one eye. George looked at my mother and said: ‘I’m sorry, Ed. You know why I’m here’. I don’t recall my mother saying anything. George staggered two or three steps to his van, got in, backed it out of the driveway and headed off.
Faithful to my father, I started praising his fighting prowess as he headed for the bathroom. My mother followed. He filled the basin with warm water, crouched over it, grabbed a face washer and started wiping off the blood, paying special attention to his ballooning bottom lip. ‘You got him, didn’t you, Dad!’ I said. ‘You really punched him. He had to take off!’ Looking into the basin and dabbing at his eye with the face washer, he said: ‘That’s right, Bud’. That was his name for me. My mother didn’t seem angry. She seemed barely perturbed at all. She watched all this, standing just inside the doorway to the bathroom. She didn’t berate him. She didn’t say anything. But I kept talking. ‘Dad,’ I asked earnestly, ‘Do you think this’ll be on News
beat tomorrow morning?’
6
JUICE!
MOUNTAINS OF MEDIA twaddle have been written about the various ‘generations’ of contemporary society—their social characteristics, their experiences, their cultural proclivities, their biases, their selfishness. Every successive ‘generation’ since the baby boomers has supposedly viewed the previous ‘generation’ as greedy, a massive cohort of thieves burdening their kids with unsustainable debt while they live high on the hog. Come to think of it, the media orthodoxy also has it that each generation can be expected to view subsequent generations as pretty hopeless and self-interested too. The analytical framework in which the population is broken down into arbitrary groups based on date of birth, showing little regard for individual circumstances, is a handy tool for journalists who want to make vast generalisations while trying to look knowledgeable about what’s going on in society. I know because as a journalist I used it regularly. I offer no excuse. Like so many people writing about politics and society and the economy, I was all too often a fashion slave, either going with the dominant thinking or not working hard enough to plant both feet outside of it. That’s a matter for serious regret because I don’t even know, culturally, what a ‘generation’ is. I understand the way demographers, in their day jobs, define and use the term. It is chiefly a statistical device, tracking birthrates and population shifts, and it is highly relevant to infrastructure and business planning, and financial decision-making. But the way the media has taken it up, picking up on the American tendency to apply reductive thinking and typecasting to every phenomenon, real or imagined, amounts to entertainment rather than real observation. I am, statistically, part of the postwar baby boom, which is judged to have begun in 1946 and ended in 1964. This makes me a baby boomer. But am I? Surely only in the technical sense.
The youth revolution and the social ferment caused by the Vietnam War, both of which are generally associated with the baby boomer experience, were not part of my formative years. When The Beatles released their last album I was twelve. The music of my teens wasn’t the first wave of what came to be known as rock, which was driven by the sense that there were no artistic boundaries; it was the diffuse offerings of cynically designed stompers such as Slade and Suzi Quatro, the portentous Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and The Rolling Stones in their millionaire tax exile phase. Listening to the radio in the early seventies was like eating flavoured yoghurt—always sweet but with ever-present, predictable sour undertones informing the taste. When the Whitlam Government abolished conscription, I was fifteen. Appropriately enough, I began my university studies the year after students took over the administration building at Monash University. In my three years at uni, I took part in exactly one demonstration, in August 1976, when Malcolm Fraser visited the campus to open an education centre. This was only nine months after the Dismissal, when the wounds were yet to heal (although not among the clear majority of Australian voters, who had welcomed the opportunity to endorse Sir John Kerr’s decision to appoint Fraser prime minister at the election in December 1975). The demonstration amounted to a large number of students, some of them bussed in from Melbourne’s other universities, crowding around the Rotunda building and blocking the exits. I don’t recall it being particularly boisterous or loud. It was mostly just a lot of milling about. One dopey student found a brick from a nearby building site and threw it through a glass door. That was the extent of the violence. Fraser had to hole up in a toilet for a while before his security people and some police found a window through which he could escape to a waiting unmarked car. Not so wild, really. During my time at Monash the biggest student club was the Water Ski Club.
_______________
If there was one element of Australian life that defined my age cohort, it was the fact that we arrived on the planet only months after the introduction of television. TV was our binding agent. We were the first babies of the television age, the first Australians not to have experienced their country free of the pervasive presence of TV. It’s hard to believe now that so many of us were so captivated by black-and-white pictures on small convex screens, with no choice but to watch whatever the stations—they were not then networks—offered up. Initially, there were only two commercial stations and the ABC; a third commercial station, Reg Ansett’s Channel 0, arrived in Melbourne in 1964.
Once our Astor set arrived, TV was definitely my baby-sitter and best friend. It offered a version of the world, a much bigger and more attractive one, right there in the lounge room. All we had to do was sit there and ingest it. Most of the material was imported. The Adventures of Robin Hood came from England but most shows were American. There was Sea Hunt, starring Lloyd Bridges as the ex-navy diver Mike Nelson. I tried to emulate him diving backwards from a boat by attempting the same action from our couch on to our Tasmanian hardwood floor, got a headache, threw up and had to go to bed early. And Casey Jones, the heroic nineteenth-century railroad man played by Alan Hale Jr, whose next notable role was in Gilligan’s Island, when he chewed up the scenery as The Skipper. I imagined myself as Corky in Circus Boy, as played by a juvenile Micky Dolenz, who would a few years later, as a member of the Monkees, play a further influential role in my cultural development.
The stations did produce local children’s shows each afternoon. Nine ran The Tarax Show, hosted first by Geoff Corke (who, as King Corky, the King of the Kids, presided over proceedings wearing ermine robes and a crown) and then former radio man Norman Swain. Swain’s first show as host began as a farce when he made a grand entrance via a children’s slide, only to break a leg as he landed on the studio floor. Seven had The Happy Show, hosted by Happy Hammond, who spoke in a high register and wore a garish checked jacket and matching hat. The shows had similar formats, with a cast of ‘characters’—often former vaudeville comics such as Joff ‘Joffa Boy’ Ellen on The Tarax Show, who told jokes, and The Happy Show’s Vic ‘Funny Face’ Gordon, who pulled faces—and skits, songs and bits of useful advice about the best way to kick a football or how to look after your teeth. This latter segment was especially problematic, given that one show was sponsored by a local manufacturer of lolly water and the other promoted the ne plus ultra of soft drinks, Coca-Cola.
The ads that supported the show were for food destined to promote tooth decay. The cereals were heavily sugared: Coco Pops, which were cocolossal and tasted just like a chocolate milkshake, only crunchy; Frosties, cornflakes coated with sugar; Guest’s Teddy Bears, which were ‘everybody’s favourite’. There was Weston’s Wagon Wheel, in the ad a gigantic, satisfying disc of chocolate-coated marshmallow placed next to a puny little round biscuit. ‘It’s more than a biscuit, it’s a mighty big snack!’ Using the same two ingredients, Brockhoff offered the Chocolate Royal, the king of biscuits. Brockhoff also created Shapes, which in their first, early sixties iteration were shaped like potato slices so as to take it up to the company’s chief snack food rival in Melbourne, the potato chip maker Colvan. Of course, these were times when it was common practice for adults to have their teeth pulled and replaced with slick, white sets of dentures. My parents did not succumb to this trend but all of the mums and dads in the houses surrounding our place opted for the smooth-choppers look. An ad I enjoyed as a young child, mostly because it featured animation of a woman dancing, was for Kemdex, which, according to the jingle, featured ‘three-way care’ for dentures if they were soaked in the product because it promised to sterilise and deodorise them. The viewer was left to assume that the third of the three ways was brushing. Any animation appealed to me. When Mr Sheen showed up to apply a lustrous mirror shine to make a housewife’s furniture look fine, I was interested. Ditto, Louie the Fly in his death throes thanks to Mortein. I even liked an ad for Maxwell House coffee because after an alarmed husband, having been told by his wife that she’d run out of coffee, exclaimed incredulously ‘We’re out of coffee??!!’, a two-metre jar of the stuff bustled into the kitchen through the back door to save the day. There was not much going on in Boono
ng Avenue.
My favourite of the local shows was The Tarax Show, which seemed more irreverent and challenging than the others. It featured ventriloquist Ron Blaskett and his doll Gerry Gee, who became an important character in the show. Gerry got so popular that the producers brought him to life and created a filmed serial in which a kid in a Gerry Gee outfit, complete with a doll mask, wandered the streets of Melbourne solving mysteries. At five, I found this creepy but compelling, like Mr Barrow’s severed finger. The show, I thought, was also funny. In one skit, a character called Professor Ratbaggy boasted to Joffa Boy that he had invented an orange you could wear on your wrist that was also a transistor. ‘I’ve just been listening to the tennis on it,’ he said.
Joffa Boy: ‘Oh, really? What’s the score?’
‘Juice!’ the professor replied.
For my sixth birthday, my mother took me to Channel Nine’s studios in Richmond to attend a live broadcast of the show. We kids were placed off to the side in a set of bleachers, separated from our mothers—there’s no way any father would have been there. We were told by a floor manager to make as much noise as we could when the overhead ‘applause’ sign was on but to remain quiet for the rest of the time, unless Joffa Boy did something funny, in which case we were advised to laugh as hard as we could. I was especially excited to be there because there were two young women, Patti McGrath and Gael Dixon, both blondes, in The Tarax Show cast. Gael Dixon was, to my eyes, immensely appealing. I didn’t know why but I enjoyed seeing her face on the TV screen. She conformed to my ideal of fresh-faced Australian womanhood. At the end of the show, before being sent back to our mothers, the children in the audience were instructed to line up and file past the cameramen and their equipment on to the studio floor to be given a showbag filled with sponsors’ products, including the obligatory bottle of Tarax. Patti and Gael were handing them out from a table. As I got closer I felt excitement and a strange, rising wave of embarrassment. I was about to be in the direct presence of people on the telly. More specifically, Gael: perfection. From the very core of my being I hoped Gael would give me my bag. I could see that I was going to get my wish. I shuffled forwards and as I reached her, I slowed down. Thoroughly without expression, she handed me my bag. I paused to look at her. Without returning my gaze, with her left hand she picked up the next bag from the table while placing the tips of all four fingers and the thumb of her right hand on my back, and gave me a purposeful shove.