by Shaun Carney
7
THE EARLY DAYS OF INK
IN THE FIRST two months of 1964, our household went from blue to white collar. Still working class with a big debt that would take fifteen years to wipe out, but white collar all the same because my father folded up his overalls, stashed them in the bottom of his wardrobe, sold his ute and went into sales. Having reached thirty-seven and taken to drinking a lot of beer to go with his thirty-a-day cigarette habit, he was finding the welding work too heavy. At the factory, sales reps who came through would regularly get into long, humorous conversations with him as he followed his natural impulse to outdo all comers when it came to storytelling. It could have been an old joke or a new one, or an anecdote about some shenanigans in the factory—an inopportune fart or a deliberate lunch order mixup. The subject didn’t matter. His ability to focus on his interlocutor and to revel in the experience of being the centre of that individual’s attention was the remarkable thing. Taken with his jokes and patter, and used to most blokes in overalls that they encountered being monosyllabic, the reps had frequently told him that he was well suited to their line of work. So he bought a grey suit, some business shirts and a blue nylon tie, purchased a yellow-and-cream Ford Cortina on a monthly payment scheme, and got a weekday job with a company that required him to travel to Victoria’s convents and monasteries selling clerical clothing to Catholic orders. He also secured a weekend/weeknight job in which he tried without much success to sell icing moulds for festive cakes to suburban bakeries.
Within a year he had moved on, joining a firm that sold shelving for factories, warehouses and retail outlets. Twelve months on from that, he signed on to his final employer, the giant US corporation 3M, for which he sold industrial abrasives, chiefly sandpaper and larger, tougher versions of the company’s kitchen scouring pad, Scotch-Brite, to the metal and automotive sectors. He remained there for almost a quarter of a century until he retired early, on his sixty-third birthday. The 3M job included a company car, so rather than sell the Cortina, he just stopped driving it, let the payments lapse and left it sitting in our driveway. It remained there for months until one day when I was home from school sick with a heavy cold and laid out on the living room couch, I watched through the big side windows as a tow truck reversed up the driveway. The driver, without bothering to knock on the door to tell my mother what he was doing, hooked up the Cortina and took it away.
None of this bothered my father, who in his new guise as a salesman was a man unleashed, utterly in his element. He was on the road all day, every day, following leads and calling in to regular clients as needed. Sometimes those calls to established clients would be to check to see how his products were working out. On other occasions it would chiefly be to tell the managers a new joke. These same jokes would also be retold to his fellow sales representatives, who gathered several times a week after work at a pub near their office. It was with these workmates, desperate to reach sales targets and make the most they could out of their expenses, that my father was accorded the nickname ‘Kooka’ because of his habit of tilting his head back and laughing without restraint, much like a kookaburra. His intake of beer was truly outstanding, not only in these gatherings, but in the social group that formed as the bush blocks made way for brick veneer and weatherboard homes in our neighbourhood. Weekends rarely passed without some sort of neighbourhood get-together—a backyard barbecue on a Sunday during summer or, in winter, drinks in someone’s lounge room while in the corner Channel Seven’s World of Sport thoroughly examined the previous day’s football matches—whose main purpose would be to enable extensive drinking. Weeknights, it soon became pointless to assume that my father would be home at the conventional 5.30–6 o’clock end of the working day. Sometimes he was. Friday nights he definitely would not be, arriving well after I’d gone to bed.
The fights between my parents on Friday nights or in the early hours of Saturday would often be loud enough to wake me. The house was poorly insulated, and the sound bounced off the hard surfaces of the kitchen, which was always the venue. The arguments were never physically violent to my knowledge—just shouted assertions and denials culminating in deep, pained, disappointed sobbing sounds from my mother—although on a couple of nights I heard the sound of cutlery jiggling as they struggled over the drawer that held the big knives, scissors and the other heavy kitchen tools. I assumed my mother was trying to open it, my father trying to keep it closed. My heart thumped so hard those nights that my hearing would fade briefly; I could only hear the blood coursing inside my head.
I never spoke to my parents about these altercations. I assumed it was what happened between man and wife from time to time. I’d spent my whole life on edge and occasionally frightened by my surroundings, so why should I be especially concerned by these incidents? And my father’s explanation the first couple of times I asked him why he’d been so late, which was that he’d been out ‘drinking with the fellas, Bud’, was good enough for me. I would have liked him to be around more but didn’t feel all that bothered. I had other things on my mind.
By the time I made it to Grade Two, I’d adopted Australian Rules football as my obsession. All I wanted to do was play it, at every break during the school day and then in my backyard after school, using a couple of scrawny gum trees near the back fence as goalposts, with added commentary from me. As far as choosing who to follow in the nation’s premier competition, the Victorian Football League, I did not even give it a thought: I selected Carlton, the Blues. I took up Carlton’s cause because my father did. My mother, who knew nothing about Australian Rules football on her arrival in Melbourne, was a passionate convert to the game and was thoroughly devoted to Carlton, too. On the face of it, my father’s adherence to the Blues made no sense. Indeed, it was a sacrilegious act. Clifton Hill, where he had been raised, was in the City of Collingwood, home to the state’s most successful club; if you grew up in Collingwood or Clifton Hill or Abbotsford, you followed Collingwood. Worse in terms of his choice, Carlton and Collingwood are traditionally the mortal enemies among Victorian teams. Like most feuds, no-one can say for certain why the antipathy has run so deep and for so long, but that didn’t matter. So why Carlton?
Once I’d entered the world of footy, adding it to my enthusiasm for Disney and Superman comics, and the English puppet shows on TV—Supercar, Fireball XL5 and Stingray—the rhythms of the week became predictable and intense. As the end of the week loomed, all thoughts were directed at Saturday around 2 p.m., when the teams would run out and do their warm-ups before the first bounce. Friday mornings centred on reading the team selections in The Sun. The evenings meant taking in chief football writer Alf Brown’s voluminous previews of the games in The Herald—the main match of the round would take up most of a broadsheet page—before watching the Kevin Dennis Football Show on Channel Seven for more previews. Saturday afternoon was spent listening to the call of the match on the radio. This would be torture if the Carlton game was being called by one of the racing stations, 3DB or 3UZ, because they regularly broke into the commentary whenever there was a race, which meant that minutes would go by when you had no idea what was going on and instead found yourself listening to Bill Collins or Bert Bryant calling out horse’s names. Then there would be the cut-in announcements—‘Correct weight at Randwick. Correct weight’—to disrupt the call as well. Saturday night involved watching the replay and the show that reviewed the games, Pelaco Inquest, on the telly while eating dinner and then running up to The Shop before it closed around 8 o’clock to get The Sporting Globe, the Herald & Weekly Times’ pink sporting newspaper, to read the hastily written and typeset match reports. Sunday afternoon was World of Sport and getting ready to wait for the following Friday.
On Monday, there was extensive semi-informed discussion in the schoolground about the weekend’s results. At playtimes, we formed pick-up sides for games on the oval that gradually wrecked our Clarks and Corvin school shoes. The longer the season went on, the deeper became my involvement. I talked my
mother into knitting me a navy blue Carlton guernsey from a pattern I spotted in one of her copies of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Now that my father was on the road each day, I asked him to buy his petrol from Mobil service stations so that he could collect the new line of football cards that were given away with each purchase, and he cheerfully obliged. I convinced my parents to give me my first leather football for my seventh birthday to replace the plastic one from Coles that I’d been booting between the trees in the backyard. And I badgered them into taking me to a real game. In beautiful August sunshine, one of the last games of the home-and-away season, we travelled to Carlton’s home ground, Princes Park, to see the Blues take on Collingwood. Awaiting the game in our seats in the Robert Heatley Stand, I worked methodically through the Football Record, with its ad for Rothmans cigarettes on the back, which had been sold to us by a boy in a dustcoat outside the ground for sixpence. As I ran my eye across the page containing Carlton’s team list—at this point it was a thrill just to see the name of my favourite player, John Nicholls, who wore the number 2 on his back, in print—I saw the name of the coach at the top: Ken Hands. The line beneath it read: Reserves Coach—Jack Carney.
‘Look at that, Dad,’ I said, ‘there’s a man named Carney who’s a coach for us. I’ve never seen anyone else called Carney. Wouldn’t it be funny if he was related to us?’
He gulped slightly and gave my mother a sideways glance. ‘Actually, Bud,’ he said, ‘he is related to us. He’s my brother.’
This did not compute. He had a sister, Molly, my Aunty Molly, who still lived in Clifton Hill, a few doors away from her childhood home, with her husband and son and daughter. We’d stopped off there in the morning before we drove over to Princes Park. I’d never heard of this Jack Carney before. ‘Why don’t I know about him?’ I asked.
‘He and I don’t really talk and that’s why I’ve never mentioned him,’ he said. His discomfort carried a hint of sadness. I asked if I’d be able to meet this uncle of mine one day. I saw this as an opportunity to get into the clubrooms. ‘We’ll see,’ he said. ‘We’ll see’ was his ‘no’.
Carlton and Collingwood played a drawn game that day. The experience of watching it, with the sound of the capacity crowd that caused the stand to resonate and send vibrations up through my feet that settled in my rib cage, Carlton’s red-headed centre halfback Gordon Collis putting in a best-on-ground performance that would clinch that year’s Brownlow Medal for the league’s best player, and the sight of the vast, perfect green of the playing surface, was too much. On the way home, we stopped off again at Aunty Molly’s, this time for dinner. After all the excitement, I couldn’t keep it down and vomited into the grease trap just by her back door. I’d had the best day of my short life.
And it wasn’t a bad life. I was comfortable with my obsessions, my mother was always there and I’d made a couple of new friends at school who wanted to come home with me a few afternoons a week to play with my considerable collection of Matchbox cars, English-made reproductions of contemporary trucks, vans, sedans, station wagons and farm machinery, fashioned out of die-cast metal. The cars got their name from the fact that they were about the size of a matchbox.
At Grade Two, the school merged the previous year’s two Grade One classes into a single class that went close to spilling out through the classroom door into the corridor. Looking at the class photo now, I’m reminded of how static postwar Australian society had been all the way into the mid-1960s. Our haircuts and clothes could have come from the 1940s. We dressed in greys and browns. Our chief source of entertainment and information was delivered in black and white—on paper and on the screen. The cultural explosion of The Beatles happened in 1964. Being, at that stage, still a society that looked to Britain for guidance, we felt the explosion too: the energy of the music and the haircuts were disruptive, challenging. Even as a six-year-old I could see it. But Australia was not going to change for a while. Our national government was in its fifteenth year, led by a man who had first assumed the prime ministership twenty-five years earlier, and it would not fall for another eight years. In Victoria, there was an even deeper constancy; Henry Bolte’s government was nine years old and would last until 1982, enjoying twenty-seven years of unbroken incumbency under three leaders. Melbourne in the 1960s was led by sturdy men in their sixth decade and beyond. Many of them belonged to the Coles and Myer families and the boards of the Herald & Weekly Times, BHP, and Carlton & United Breweries—men with short-back-and-sides haircuts and horn-rim glasses. Pretty much to a man, their allegiances were to the Liberal Party. Most of them stayed out of public view. Their headshots might appear from time to time in the business page of The Herald. Occasionally, they would be more visible. Reg Ansett, later Sir Reginald, owner of Channel 0 and the private half of the domestic airline duopoly Ansett ANA, lived in Mount Eliza and would, rather flamboyantly, take a helicopter from his property to his city office each weekday morning and back again each afternoon. He followed strict banker’s hours. I know because his chopper flew over our house each day, following the shoreline of Port Phillip Bay. On Wednesday nights, Channel Seven screened the quiz show Coles £3000 Question hosted by the fruity-voiced, grey-haired Roland Strong. The show’s theme had nothing to do with the contestants and everything to do with the sponsor—‘From the north to the south, from the east to the west, you’ll find every Coles store the cheapest and the behhhhhhst!’—and the advertising was exclusively about Coles products, including its line of cosmetics (‘She’s a Starlet girl, a beautiful Starlet girrrrl’). On the rare occasions that a contestant would secure the top prize of £3000 by answering questions on their chosen subject such as the music of Gilbert and Sullivan or countries of Africa, the company’s managing director Sir Edgar Coles would appear in the studio to hand over the cheque. The whole thing was as Melbourne as the football-obsessed World of Sport or The Sun News-Pictorial. I had a particular interest in Coles not because of its merchandise but because the company had in 1962 chosen Frankston as the home for its first New World supermarket. Above the main entrance, it constructed a 3-metre red-and-white rocket, pointing skywards at a 45-degree angle. There was a lot of fuss around the opening—pictures in the papers, items on the television news. I thought it was about the rocket. This was a time when there was great interest in NASA’s Mercury rockets and JFK’s pledge to send a man to the moon. I kept waiting for the New World rocket to be launched. It took me a couple of years to realise it was just a model—a dispiriting conclusion.
Notwithstanding the emergence of youth culture and the space age preoccupations, this was a vastly more formal and strictly organised Australia than the one that would develop by the time I reached adulthood. When I started school in 1962, children were still being raised to become adults within only ten years of their entry into the education system. The vast bulk of children were expected to end their schooling at fifteen and to enter the workforce, where they would be required to behave like adults—to dress and speak like adults—and do adult work. They would not be able to reach full adulthood until they turned twenty-one, when they would be allowed to vote. But they would be able to drive, and to drink alcohol, at eighteen. In Victoria, the hotels closed at 6 p.m.; Victorians were expected to spend their evenings at home. Students in the state school system were assigned to specific local schools; there was no automatic choice and an appeal process had to be followed if parents wanted to send a child to a school outside their allotted zone. Teachers in the state system were still accorded their honorifics without question and at secondary level uniforms were compulsory. There was little personal familiarity between teachers and students. Male teachers wore ties and either a V-neck jumper or a suit coat. Female teachers wore skirts, not trousers. The process of regimentation began in the first moments of school. Marching music would play over the school PA and teachers stood next to the lines to ensure that the children walked in lockstep into the classrooms. Once seated, students were required to clasp their hands on the table or d
esk in front of them and to sit up, with backs straightened. Only on a command from the teacher was this pose allowed to be abandoned. On Monday mornings, before the marching, a flag monitor—always a boy at my primary school, perhaps based on an assumption that jingoistic duties could not be entrusted to muddle-headed girls—would raise the Australian flag. The assembled school body would turn to face it and sing ‘God Save the Queen’ before reciting: ‘I love God and my country, I will honour the flag, I will serve the Queen, and cheerfully obey my parents, teachers and the laws’.
There was an extensive system of monitors—bell monitor, blackboard monitor, yard-duty monitor (the one few wanted to be; only budding maniacs who enjoyed ordering other children to pick up rubbish gravitated towards that). Milk monitors had the daily task of leaving their classrooms shortly before the bell rang for morning play in order towards fetch a crate containing small bottles of milk delivered by the local dairy. Under the watchful gaze of teachers, each child was expected to drink the milk, which was provided under a scheme funded first by the state government and then the Commonwealth, going back to the 1940s. The scheme met two goals: to ensure that children consumed more calcium because they might not be getting enough of it at home and to prop up dairy producers. It was not until the first year of the Whitlam Government in 1973, when it seemed it was time at last to leave it up to mothers to ensure their kids were getting enough dairy, that the scheme was discontinued. By then, other rigid and seemingly immutable traditions were starting to fade. Throughout my primary school years there were two cracker nights each year: on Empire Day, 24 May, which celebrated the existence of the British Commonwealth, and 5 November to mark the thwarting of a 1605 plot to blow up the House of Lords. A bonfire would be set on the nature strip. This was part of a ritual established three and a half centuries earlier in England in which an effigy of Guy Fawkes, who was caught guarding thirty-six barrels of gunpowder beneath the parliament, was traditionally cast on to the flames, simultaneously upholding the supremacy of Westminster and burning a Catholic. We never went to the trouble of symbolic incineration in Seaford. The very fact that here, on the other side of the world, in a country with its own parliament that had never been threatened by anything more serious than a boring garden party, we were marking this piece of another country’s history was exotic and ritualistic enough. We were happy just to send the neighbourhood dogs and cats into a frenzy. Skyrockets would be launched from an empty milk bottle. A Catherine wheel would be nailed loosely to a gum tree. It would spin awkwardly and rarely fail to disappoint. In the morning, the detritus of burned-out Roman candles and exploded penny bungers would be gathered up, the little scraps of Chinese newspaper that had been wrapped so tightly around the slivers of gunpowder to render the crackers combustible blown along the street by the breeze. For reasons of safety—kids were blowing out eyes, losing fingers—and lack of interest, cracker nights fell away pretty quickly after the 1960s.