Press Escape

by Shaun Carney

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  Fear is a great motivator, which was a good thing for me. I was frightened of being left out, so I joined in all the games with the other boys. I had no natural sporting talent. A video of me trying to get a badminton racquet to make contact with a shuttlecock—a Christmas gift that was played with just the once—around this time would have made for an hilariously pathetic YouTube sensation nowadays. Fortunately, the only camera we had in the house was a Kodak Box Brownie and film was expensive, so there is no visual record of it. But my devotion to football was so evident to the other boys that I became a captain of one of the two pick-up sides that fought it out on the oval each lunchtime. The other captain was Russell Greene, whose talent was stratospheric compared with the rest of us. Russell went on to play his first game with St Kilda at sixteen. He was later traded to Hawthorn, where he capped off his 304-game career by playing in three premiership sides. Other thoroughly committed players running around during those lunchtimes included my friends Paul Goldman—who became a film-maker and the director of the feature film The Night We Called It a Day about Frank Sinatra’s controversial Australian tour of 1975, and a film about growing up in an isolated part of modern Australia, Australian Rules—and Peter Botsman, an activist academic who at different times in his career ran the Evatt Foundation, the Brisbane Institute and the Whitlam Institute. And John Middleton, whom my mother had tried to draw to my attention on my first day at school.

  I was also frightened of stepping out of line. When I was seven my parents decided I should get religion—utterly superfluous, given that every Wednesday morning a well-meaning, heavy-set middle-aged woman without a hint of make-up would give my school class an hour of religious instruction. I was sent along to Sunday school at the nearest church to our home, a congregation of Anglicans that worshipped in a large backyard garage of an old house fifteen minutes walk away. The children would sit with the adults for thirty minutes singing hymns, and were then sent off to sit together on the house’s verandah to hear the same Bible stories that were the stuff of the Wednesday morning religious instruction class, heavy on Moses with the bulrushes and the burning bush and so on. Eventually, the worshippers came up with sufficient funds to build a church a few doors away, a squarish grey brick construction that looked from the outside more like a scout hall than a church (this came in handy a few decades later when the adult congregation had died off and the church hierarchy sold the building). It was a thoroughly modern congregation—very 1960s in a beige skivvy and tailored trousers sort of way—overseen by a young fellow called Greg who conducted the services dressed in street clothes and wielding a nylon-stringed guitar on which he put pieces of scripture to folk music arrangements. My favourite was his reworking of ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’ as a lilting, understated Peter, Paul and Mary–style ballad that began ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd, I shall not want / He makes meeee down to lie / In pastures green He leadeth me, to the quiet, yes, the quiet, waters byyyyy’. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, my parents never attended any of these services. They’d been raised as churchgoers, had done their time with no overt signs of damage or benefit, and now it was my turn. I’d not been christened. They rejected the idea of original sin and wanted me to choose my own religion, but I had to learn the basics. By rights, I should have been disengaged from and possibly even resentful of the whole experience, given that they set no example at all. Upon my return from Sunday school they never even asked me what happened there. But no, because I was so frightened of getting into trouble, I used to read the Bible, memorised the catechism, and did every piece of Sunday school homework I was given. Consequently, in the six years I was forced to attend, I won first prize every year because I was the only kid who did the homework.

  It was a similar story at school. I was attentive to the point of being a suckhole. If the teacher told another kid in front of the class that their work was untidy, I would be terrified that mine wasn’t neat enough. When she looked disappointed at some other student’s inability to spell a word or work out a sum, I’d think, ‘Oh, my God, memorise every word you see. Do your times tables!’ I was fixated on approval and conforming. It did pay off in an immediate sense. Each year, I won the class spelling bee. Sometimes a teacher would spring for an actual prize. The best was a set of twenty-four Cumberland pencils, very highly ranked among the student body, arranged in a fold-out green vinyl wallet. These were only one step below what some of the better-off girls would occasionally bring to school—a full set of Derwent pencils, contained in a wooden box. If a special art project was to be completed the following day, I would hear these girls promising a deskmate, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll make it look really good. I’ll bring my Derwents’.

  Writing and making one’s mark was the subject of an enormous amount of industry by my teachers in primary school. Learning how to write—in both senses—took up several hours of each school day. Morning after morning, day after day, month after month, once we had chanted our times tables together we would construct and deconstruct sentences. Eventually, most of us worked out how to distinguish between the subject, the object and the predicate within a sentence, along with verbs and nouns and adjectives. We came to understand how important it was to maintain a single tense inside a piece of writing. And why it was essential that confluent sentences should vary in length in order to keep the reader engaged. And that a sentence should not begin with a conjunction such as ‘and’ because it suggested untidiness. And, yes, I realise I am in the process of breaking that rule three times in a row. The emphasis on penmanship—an antiquated and possibly offensive term so many years later—was even stronger than the weight applied to composing clear sentences and being able to comprehend the words served up by others. The progression began with a lead pencil. Once you could demonstrate that you had the basics of cursive script down and embraced the purpose of a line—that it was an unyielding and impermeable resting place for letters and words—you were granted the right to use ink. This was the equivalent of moving from basic training to becoming an army private—at last you were regarded as some sort of soldier, able to wield a nib. And that is what you got to use: a nib attached to a thin, pencil-shaped plastic shaft that was dipped into an inkwell placed in an aperture on your desk. This necessitated the purchase of bottles of ink from a stationer’s in Frankston, along with a pad of blotting paper. Children were not trusted with the task of filling the inkwells; that way lay an indigo-hued catastrophe, so the teacher or a poor student teacher doing his or her three-week secondment would get that job. However, an ink monitor was appointed to clean out the inkwells in a trough near the breezeway at the end of the daily writing sessions. Neatness was all. A blob of ink or furry lines because too much ink had been drawn by the nib would be marked down. Blotting paper, which was a sort of tea towel for the operation, mopping up and forestalling mistakes on the page, played an important role. We were instructed in the technique of placing a sheet of it under our writing hand in case of spillage and so that it would be less than an inch away from a fat, blobby letter that needed to be drained before the ink ran. But press too hard or move too fast with the blotting paper and you could make it worse by creating a smear. There was no coming back from that. Even our leaves of blotting paper were subject to regular inspection: messy blotting paper, with torn or frayed edges, was the pathway to messy work. And shame.

  Very little of this educational experience was designed to encourage students to express themselves or to explore their feelings. There were no theatrical productions, no concerts, no speech nights, and no musical instruments housed at the school, save for some triangles and maracas. We were at school to accumulate facts and develop practical skills, not to find ourselves or to develop our personalities. No-one came from a broken home. Every kid’s father had a job. Hardly any of our mothers worked. In my seven years of primary school, I shared a classroom with one girl whose parents were Greek and about a dozen kids whose parents came from England. Everybody else was Anglo-Celtic Austral
ian, except for one boy who had emigrated with his family from Belfast. During our lunchtime football matches, he had no choice but to run around with the rest of us. When he found himself at the front of the pack chasing after the ball, he would just kick it along soccer-style. He didn’t develop the ability to pick up the ball or to mark it or do anything else with it and no-one tried to teach him how. The games cannot have been enjoyable for him. He was neither embraced nor ostracised by the group. But he wasn’t anyone’s friend.

  8

  BEYOND THE KEN OF THE HUMAN MIND

  AMONG THE THINGS you learn as you settle into adulthood is how easy it is to make a mistake. Then to make another one. Adults have agency to make errors and to notch up great successes. They also have agency to cover up or deflect responsibility for their mistakes—certainly much greater power than children to do that. Adults can talk themselves up and con people into believing them. They can play upon the insecurities or fears or isolation of others to get what and where they want. In doing this, they can influence people into silence and acceptance. Having been posted to the Canberra press gallery two days after my twenty-second birthday and, almost forty years later, finding myself writing a weekly political column for the same paper, I have seen this happen in public life up close pretty much on a daily basis in the political world. But politics is really only basic human interactions played out on a larger stage, with various institutions and organisations as the backdrop. It is only because people in households and workplaces and families do exactly these things, often without being conscious of it, that politicians can so frequently get away with it. Are they in fact even guilty of getting away with anything? The term ‘getting away with it’ suggests that they are putting one over on the public. In many cases, it is not like that. I believe that as long as there are no obvious, bleeding victims—or perhaps not that many—of political con jobs, most people are willing to just let it go, even if they know that they are not inhabiting a fully truthful environment. People just want to get through each day. They don’t want confrontation. They don’t want crisis. They don’t welcome risk. They want to survive.

  Surviving was the goal in our home in Boonong Avenue as the scrub and dirt roads yielded to modernity and the bitumen arrived, and brick veneer and weatherboard houses and blocks of flats populated the neighbourhood through the 1960s. It was not like living in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night—most of the time. Whenever I asked my father to cross the road to the schoolground to have a kick of the footy, which I did a lot, he always agreed. My mother enjoyed being a mother. I think it was the only thing she really enjoyed, apart from following Carlton in the winter and the Australian test side and Australian tennis players in the summer. And, in later years, the dominant source of information and entertainment for stay-at-home mums, The Mike Walsh Show. She showed me a lot of attention. She had no friends and no family in Melbourne. The idea of women having any degree of social independence or an emotional life outside the home was a long way off in the working class sections of Frankston and Seaford. We did not have a phone—that would not come until I was attending university and had a car and a driver’s licence and it was decided that I should be required to tell my parents where I was—so she wrote letters home, to her two sisters, at least once a week. But the letters weren’t enough. It was expected by her and by her extended family 1000-plus kilometres away that we would spend large parts of each year’s summer holidays in the Hunter Valley. It wasn’t as though there was a lot to appreciate at home. Our house was something between a shack and a standard suburban dwelling. For our first thirteen years there we not only made do with the backyard privy, we also had no heating or cooling, except for a small, portable and incredibly dangerous kerosene heater around which we would have to sit in the winter. It also took thirteen years for the house to be fitted with internal doors. In the kitchen, the cooking was done on a slow combustion stove fuelled by briquettes and pieces of kindling. The stove was also deployed to provide the house with hot water via an elaborate plumbing arrangement. This meant that there was barely any hot water in the mornings because the fire in the stove was reduced to little more than embers by breakfast, having burned through its fuel overnight. Even in the evenings, hot water had to be rationed because a slow combustion stove could not be relied upon to heat a lot of water. It was my job to empty the ashes from the stove each day after school. This was a messy job that entailed pulling a tray laden with warm, fine, ochre-coloured dust—the remnants of the briquettes—from the bottom of the stove. Holding the tray with my left hand, I would then place a sheet of newspaper over the top with my right hand and head for the back door, hoping like hell that I wouldn’t stumble or be hit by a gust of wind as I carried my cargo down to the compost heap near the back fence. If conditions were swirly, I could count on returning to the house bearing an ochre patina that only a good going-over with a bar of gritty, grey Solvol soap and some warm water would remove. Ours was a form of frontier living. My mother sought temporary escape from this existence each year.

  In January, as Melbourne’s summer oven moved towards what in the days of Fahrenheit was known as the century mark, and our placement by a pretty beach on the cooling waters of Port Phillip Bay came into its own, the three of us would head inland on the Hume Highway, bound for Sydney’s outskirts and then on to Maitland—a long way from a beach—where we would stay with my mother’s widowed sister, Flo, in a home that was overlaid with a deep sadness. In the early 1960s, Flo had lost her youngest son, aged nineteen, in a car smash and her husband Roy to a heart attack. She lived alone. But Flo got a lift from having her youngest sister there, and my mother became a different person back in her family environment. For her, these visits meant much raucous laughter, and the opportunity to revisit three decades of shared memories and anecdotes that were irrelevant and unstated in her regular life with me back in Victoria. And there were people, so many people—dozens of family members and friends from her youth. As a child and a teenager, they meant very little to me, although I regard them dearly now. Because my mother married late and had me even later, I had cousins who had children who were older than me. There was not much for me to do during these journeys, just sitting in the back seat of our car thumbing through comics and books, looking out at the parched countryside, my back stuck to the vinyl upholstery. And when we arrived, I would spend weeks watching adults talking. I came to dread the summer holidays.

  But we spent one summer at home, when I was ten. My mother’s mother, Clara, had died in the middle of the year. Stan the patriarch had died four years earlier. With them gone, it was deemed that there was no need for the annual pilgrimage to the Hunter region, this time around at least. For the first time in my life I had more than a month in which I could please myself. And now that I was about to go into Grade Six and could at last boast some seniority, I was allowed to walk into Frankston. This was the prepubescent equivalent of getting a car; I could get away from the house whenever I liked. I would wander around the shopping centre, past the newly established outposts of retailers now long gone—Wardrop’s menswear, the Ball & Welch department store on the spot where Frankston’s cinema had once been, Melbourne Sports Depot, Brashs record and music store—and always end up at the Frankston Book Exchange, a little room at the end of an arcade that led to the Safeway supermarket, which was that chain’s very first store. (As Melbourne’s leading postwar satellite suburb, Frankston did a fine line in national supermarket leadership.) A thin, forty-ish lady, superbly made up, with her frosted grey hair pulled up in an immaculate 1960s bun, would spend each day seated on a vinyl kitchen chair reading magazines in a corner of the bookstore next to a tiny counter while men perused the second-hand paperbacks lining shelves on the walls and boys picked through the comics on tables in the middle. I didn’t really know what I was looking for, just something that would entertain and enliven my mind. My father had given me modern editions of the books that he had loved as a boy—Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Treas
ure Island are two that I recall—but they seemed leaden, verbose and took too long to get to the point. Television had already done its work on me. Television and newspapers, really. Here is the part where I would really like to say that I turned my back on the comics table and found a profound piece of fiction on the shelves—something by Dickens, say. Or perhaps a book of ideas or a biography. I really would. But I didn’t. I stayed glued to the comics table. And it is probably just as well. A few months earlier, for my birthday, my Aunty Molly had given me a book right from the bottom end of the children’s literary spectrum, The Wham! Annual 1966. It was a hardcover compendium of strips from a British comic, Wham!, published by Odhams Press, a subsidiary of the company that owned the Fleet Street title the Daily Mirror. The comic was in the style of the more celebrated Beano, full of English boys in short pants exclaiming ‘Cor!’ and ‘Not ‘alf!’ and getting into trouble for not washing behind their ears. The strips were funny and often bordered on the bizarre. One strip, Georgie’s Germs, recorded the exploits of the germs that lived on and in the body of a boy called Georgie. It anticipated by several years the idea behind the segment in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask in which the internal mechanics of a man’s body during a seduction were explored, culminating in the individual sperm lining up and comparing notes as they prepared for launch. On one of my trips to the book exchange, I found a used copy of Wham! selling for half price at five cents. Inside it was an extract from an American comic strip I’d never heard of called Fantastic Four, which carried bold artwork and what seemed to me to be adult-level dialogue. I learned that Wham! was part of the Power Comics imprint, whose five titles published reprints of Marvel superhero comics from America, to which Fantastic Four belonged. Now I knew that I had to find the other Power titles: Smash!, Pow!, Fantastic and Terrific. There was something compelling about the Marvel writing and the breadth of imagination applied to its adventures. I’d loved Superman and Batman since I was what—four? But they seemed infantile by comparison. And so it was that I would haunt that second-hand bookstore two or three times a week in the early part of summer looking for these comics. I could not afford to buy them new; I was getting only twenty cents a week pocket money for taking out the briquette ash. On a bright Saturday morning, I found my first copy of Fantastic on the comics table. The cover showed Iron Man using the repulsor ray in his glove against the evil, oriental Mandarin. Inside, a team of teenage mutants, the X-Men (although one of them was a girl), faced for the first time an army of anti-mutant robots known as the Sentinels. But the first story was of the Nordic god of thunder, Thor, who had long blond tresses—I had to imagine this because the comic was printed in black and white—and wielded Mjolnir, an enchanted hammer. The thirteen-page story, ‘When Giants Walk the Earth!’, was self-contained and not serialised. I read it as soon as I got home. Then I read it again. And again. In it, Loki, the god of mischief, persuades Odin, the omnipotent ruler of all gods, to visit Earth to upbraid his son Thor for falling in love with a mortal (in the comic, a mortal was a ‘mere’ mortal). While substituting for Odin as the ruler of Asgard, Loki sends Skagg the Storm Giant and Surtur the Fire Demon to Earth with the intention of destroying the planet—and Thor and Odin along with it. Thor learns of Loki’s plan and when Odin turns up at the Manhattan office of Thor’s alter ego Dr Donald Blake, he advises Odin of the plot, beginning this way: ‘NOBLEST OF LORDS, FORGIVE ME FOR SPEAKING FIRST, BUT GRAVE DANGER BECKONS!’ Apprised of the terrible threat, Odin advises Thor: ‘THE HUMAN RACE MUST NOT WITNESS WHAT IS ABOUT TO OCCUR!! STAND BACK, MY SON! I HAVE AN AWESOME FEAT TO PERFORM!’