Press Escape

by Shaun Carney

  These changes were not unique to my school; they were part of wider social and political changes across Australian society, which ushered in the Great Informality throughout the country. It’s been observed by others that the 1960s did not really happen in Australia until the 1970s, when permissiveness—a widely used word at the time—became evident in our locally produced entertainment via such TV shows as Number 96 and more flamboyant, colourful and revealing clothing. Australian voters even managed to surprise themselves in the early 1970s by electing a Labor government, rudely ending twenty-three years of continuous Liberal–Country Party rule and reminding the nation that it was supposed to be a dynamic democracy.

  Change came relatively swiftly at my high school. When I was in Form Two, being regarded as well behaved, I was taken out of my class one afternoon by a senior teacher to undertake a very important task: the repair of several cracked concrete drain covers at various points of B wing with a trowel and a bucket of slurry. Appearances meant a lot to the school at that early point in its life. Four years later, boys would line up at the entrance to the school and take it in turns to throw a tennis ball at the large white metal letters attached to the brick wall that spelled out the school’s name. They went for the Os first, so that after a week or so of the onslaught it read M NTEREY HIGH SCH L. No-one in authority seemed too bothered. At the other end of B wing, a similar missile-throwing competition had left the boys’ toilets with only two out of eight skylight windows intact. By then, the school had worked out what its future was likely to be. My Sixth Form class was the school’s fourth. Only thirty students remained of the 120 who had enrolled in Form One. Twenty-three of us passed our Higher School Certificate—a stellar performance compared with the three previous years but hardly encouraging, given that my group was regarded by the teaching staff as an outlier in the school community. In 1993, the high school was merged with the nearby Monterey Technical School to form Monterey Secondary College, basing itself in the tech school’s buildings. The high school’s buildings—the classrooms, the library, the science rooms, the home economics kitchens, the woodwork rooms and the gymnasium that we had been required to respect and had in some cases raised money to build through fetes and paper drives and cake stalls—did not last thirty years. They were bulldozed by the Kennett Coalition Government, which sold the land to a private developer. Eventually, the Bracks Labor Government compulsorily acquired the site. It is now a community park.

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  My early years at high school were bleak. Not only did I feel that I’d been transported to an alien wasteland between 8.50 a.m. and 3.30 p.m. Monday to Friday, my home was saturated with a cold war sensibility. My father and mother coexisted. A visit to Melbourne by my mother’s sister Olive, who was appalled at the condition of our house and of my mother’s emotional circumstances and told her so, intensified the grim feeling that never seemed to abate. At the dinner table, my mother would snipe at my father who would respond by being blithe and making jokes. Never once did he break and address directly what she was saying. I sat there watching all of this, wondering why my mother was being like this. My father was a good guy. These accusations were unfounded, as far as I could see. Sure, he was out a lot but he loved company and he loved drinking and all of the blokes he worked with were the same. But then, one Saturday, we were sitting at the table having lunch—do families eat lunch together on Saturdays now?—when through a side window I saw a woman in her late thirties walk up to our letterbox, deposit an envelope and then walk off. ‘A lady just put something in the letterbox,’ I said. ‘Did she?’ my father said airily. My mother put down her knife and fork. I said I’d go out and see what it was, pushed my chair back and ran out to collect it. The envelope was not sealed but the back flap had been folded in to secure its contents. The front, in a woman’s handwriting, bore the word ‘Jim’, with a little swooping line underneath. I took it in, rejoined my parents at the table, and handed the envelope to my father. My mother watched. She could clearly see the handwriting. My father acted surprised. He opened it and took out a two dollar note and then a one dollar note. ‘Well, what do you know about that?’ he said. My mother had seen enough.

  ‘So it’s not enough that the bitch has you all of Friday night, now she has to come here as well,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, you don’t know what you’re talking about,’ my father said.

  Then, with a satisfied look on his face, he folded the notes together and pushed them into his shirt pocket, as if to bring the encounter to a close. My mother got up and walked away. I don’t know where she went although in that little house there weren’t many options. I looked at my plate, with its slice of corned beef, two pieces of steamed potato, half a steamed carrot and a square of over-soft steamed pumpkin from which I’d already cut a chunk. The fork and the knife were in the correct position for an interrupted meal—the 4.40 position, just as I’d been taught. Until I was about eight I was expected to ask ‘Please may I leave the table?’ at the conclusion of every meal. Any sense of hunger had left me. I said to the table or myself as much as to my father: ‘I don’t want to eat any more’, stood up, and retreated to my room, leaving my father sitting there with a look that suggested he didn’t understand what was going on. Unfortunately, he did, and now, for the first time, so did I.

  From this point, given that we had all participated in a single quasi-revelatory event, the warfare became more intense and overt, and my father became more brazen. I was told by a boy I sat next to at school that he’d seen my father in a fish and chip shop in Frankston on a Friday night, wearing maroon slacks and a white belt. I found this hard to believe because my father did not like going into Frankston’s shops, had never been to a local fish and chip shop—he always insisted on a home-cooked meal—and he did not have clothing fitting that description. It sounded too groovy. I concluded it was him, but I had to deny that to this boy, my first lie on my father’s behalf. There would be so many in the years to come as my mates would come over at night to discuss such great matters of moment as whether wages chased prices or vice versa, whether the second season of Aunty Jack was as good as the first, and the qualities of various girls in our class, who would forever remain out of reach. Where’s your dad, they would ask once it got to around 10 p.m. I would say he was on the tear. In fact, he was not far away from us, on the other side of Frankston.

  As my mother was to tell me not long after I lost my taste for corned beef, the woman was the ex-wife of George who had years earlier been fighting with my father in our front yard. She was living in another part of Frankston with her young son, and effectively my father had settled into a routine of dividing his time between two households. I can only assume, especially in light of the delivery of the three dollars, which I took to be an act of passive aggression, that, to use a colloquialism, he copped a lot of shit from both ends. Looking at this situation all these years later, it’s easy to wonder why the adult participants put up with it. I certainly put this to my mother, who in the months and years after the Saturday lunch episode took me into her confidence when there was no longer any point in trying to pretend. This was several years before Lionel Murphy’s Family Law Act. She was strongly of the view that if she moved out of our house, my father and the woman would assume ownership even though my mother’s name was on the title, along with my father’s. She had no job, no marketable skills and no money. She also would have felt shamed by what was going on in the eyes of her family in New South Wales. How much of that would have eventuated, it is too hard to say. It’s possible that she was, to some extent, comfortable inside this drama; she at least knew its physical, financial and emotional layout. It was a great relief for her to be able to tell me her side of the story and to explain some of the things that had left me confused.

  She said this had been going on since I’d been a baby and that she concluded that he’d been frightened by the permanency of his marital status, of which my arrival had been an indelible reminder. ‘He should ha
ve just lived on his own, in a unit, not a house with a lawn and in need of maintenance and upkeep. If he could just please himself, that would suit him. He has to have women around him who tell him he’s marvellous. That’s what his mother did. “Oh, Jim, you’re so wonderful” and all that rubbish.’ I was already close to my mother but we got closer during my adolescence because I became the man in her life, her confidant. I’m not sure it was good for me to hear all this stuff. What she was telling me was that my coming into the world had split my parents or at the very least killed their love story.

  At one point, when I was in my late teens, she must have felt the need to assure me that she wasn’t a hypocrite who talked critically about my father to me and then gave herself to him. ‘I haven’t had sex with him for a long time, you know that, don’t you?’ she said. My mother was a very proper woman who did not drop her g’s—when she heard people speaking poorly she would describe them thus: ‘He’s all goin’ and doin’ and ain’t’—and was not given to discussing such things in any context. Her language was very much of the pre-F-bomb Australia. When annoyed, she would say ‘Oh, dash it!’ or ‘Shivers!’ Those she regarded as fools, she described as ninnies or nongs or clots. The worst thing I ever heard her say was ‘Shit!’ and that when she dropped one of her favourite teacups and watched it shatter on the kitchen floor. I really wished she had not felt obliged to share this information about her conjugal relations. It was almost as though she was declaring her fidelity to me rather than my father.

  Around the same time, my father started volunteering information about his own physical past. Once, when I was in my late teens, as we were travelling along Hoddle Street in Clifton Hill, on the other side of the park that faced his childhood home, he motioned towards a large military gun that had been placed in the park perhaps to commemorate some past battle. ‘I had my first naughty underneath that gun,’ he said, using the same tone that one might employ to point out a milk bar that sells nice sausage rolls. This then led him to take me through his sexual history and his estimate that he’d bedded between twenty and thirty girls by the time he met my mother at age twenty, although few of these encounters presumably took place on an actual bed. ‘I was never afraid of getting a girl pregnant but I was terrified of getting VD. We all were, all the blokes,’ he said. Seated in the passenger seat of his Valiant sedan, there was nowhere for me to go as I nodded knowingly, hoping that this would mask my sense of horror. Again, I was receiving information I preferred not to hear.

  Knowing about my father’s dual life coloured, but did not destroy my view of him. I had no intention of taking sides. Out and out confrontation was not something with which I had any familiarity. I tried to see the situation from both angles, although my access to information skewed heavily in my mother’s favour because she was willing to talk about it, while he had to pretend that there was no problem. I did not understand this then but it was clearly useful training for journalism, especially political journalism.

  At the end of Form One, I had already set my heart on becoming a journalist, firming up the inclination I’d developed as a devotee of Adventures of Superman. I read The Herald and The Sun from front to back every day. I did not feel especially talented. I had become a mediocre student at my new school. But I knew that I could not face life if I did not organise an existence in a place bearing little resemblance to Frankston. Not because I did not like Frankston but because I wanted to get much closer to where things were happening. My father had come here to get away from ghosts but they had chased him and found him anyway. Even if I didn’t have what it took to do something great myself, I wanted to be able to talk to people who did and then tell everyone else about it. I formed a picture in my mind of being in the wings at a theatre where there was a spectacular show going on with tremendous applause shooting out from the audience. But where I was, just off the stage, was quiet. I could see everything—how the show was put together before, during and after. And when the main players came off the stage they would want to talk to me. That looked like the life I wanted. I would think about it before I went to sleep, hearing the sounds of the Channel Nine orchestra from the lounge room as my father stayed up and watched In Melbourne Tonight starring The King, Graham Kennedy.

  Shortly before I began Form Two, when I was twelve and a half, my father and I were lying on our towels at the beach on a Sunday afternoon. By this point in his life he had stopped smoking Peter Stuyvesant and had moved on to Belvedere, which came in a gold packet. He held one between his index and middle fingers. He said, ‘So have you put any thought into what you want to do with yourself? You can go to work at fifteen, you know. You need to think about it.’

  I said, ‘I have. I want to be a reporter. A journalist. That’s what I want.’

  He could not hide his surprise. ‘A journalist? Bud, I’ve never even met a journalist. I wouldn’t even know how you’d go about getting a job as a journalist.’

  I was not interested in anything else. I knew that. ‘Well, that’s what I’m going to do,’ I said.

  ‘Well, if that’s what you want to do, that’s good. You never want to let anyone tell you that you can’t do something. I was going to suggest that you might want to be a teacher,’ he said.

  ‘No, I’m going to work for a newspaper,’ I said.

  10

  WHAT’S IN A NAME?

  IN FEBRUARY 1972, the pioneering English heavy rock group Led Zeppelin, riding high on the success of its fourth album—the one with ‘Stairway to Heaven’ as the closing track on side one—came to Melbourne. Although I knew little of them apart from their hits, one of which, ‘Whole Lotta Love’, I had bought as a single, I was keen to go to their show at the Kooyong tennis stadium. Music and music journalism and figuring out chords on an ancient Hawaiian guitar that my father had bought as a teenager and left in its case, was where I went to keep away from the geopolitical tensions in our lounge room. It was, I figured, time to see what a band looked like. I never made it. Buying tickets was not easy. It involved travelling to the city to a handful of ticketing outlets—the Melbourne Sports Depot store in Elizabeth Street and Myer were the chief ones. I couldn’t swing that—not on a school day—which was a shame for me and my new mate Geoff Tickell because we both had the $4.20 that Led Zep and the promoters were charging.

  As a form of compensation, Geoff and I resolved to take the train to Flinders Street on the Sunday of the Labour Day weekend in March to attend a Moomba Festival show at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl. The show was free and the Australian music scene was burgeoning. It had in the previous year become commonplace for local acts to have big number one hits with original songs. Melbourne’s Spectrum had done it with ‘I’ll Be Gone’. Daddy Cool had enjoyed two massive hits: ‘Eagle Rock’ and ‘Come Back Again’. And Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, once a teenybopper act, had transformed itself into a highly popular live band—a fixture of the large beer-barn pubs in Melbourne’s suburbs. The Aztecs’ music was relentless, spectacularly loud blues rock, the perfect soundtrack for young adults getting stonkered on beer and/or rum and coke. The audiences’ regular chants at Aztecs shows was, according to Go-Set, ‘Suck more piss!’ I wasn’t any great fan of Billy Thorpe but his new single ‘Most People I Know (Think That I’m Crazy)’ was on its way to being a giant hit. Among the other acts at this show were La De Das, who’d recently had a hit with ‘Gonna See My Baby Tonight’—some tougher and more knowing boys at school would replace the word ‘see’ with ‘fuck’ when they sang it in the art room, which I suppose was the idea behind the song—and Gerry and the Joy Band, then enjoying solid airplay on the new dominant rock station 3XY with a remake of Buddy Holly’s ‘Rave On’. Estimates vary of how many people attended this free concert. Go-Set said it was 200 000. The police believed it was closer to 150 000. Either way, it was a lot of people, especially for a bunch of local bands. We were throwing off the cultural cringe. You could feel it. The trees in the parkland surrounding the Bowl swayed under the weight of the kids who’
d climbed almost to the top in order to catch sight of the stage. Groups who’d brought blankets stood up, grabbed the blankets’ corners and threw girls into the air before catching them. The crowd sang along with Thorpie, except for the line in ‘Most People I Know’ that finished with the lyrics ‘the glory that God is’. Geoff and I didn’t especially enjoy the show—the music was too repetitive and the songs too predictable—but we were amazed by the music’s power over the audience. That’s what we talked about on the 1920s red rattler train that took us home.

  I felt for the first time that I was moving towards something. I’d taken typing as an elective subject in preparation for the career I was certain I would have. Thankfully, several other boys did too, and there was strength in numbers. We did not face taunts about being pansies in the way that a sensitive English boy in my year called Joe did when, keen to pursue a career as a chef, he chose home economics as his elective. He was the only boy in a classroom of girls and was dubbed forever more by the less kind boys as a bum bandit. Homophobia was woven into our lives. When I ran out with the Frankston under-16s football side, it was common for opposing players awaiting the centre bounce to accuse each other of being poofters. No-one appeared to take offence because everyone assumed that there could not possibly be any poofters out on the field. We even appropriated the term to suggest that someone was dumb or unworthy. If we wanted to shut someone up, we would turn to a third person and ask: ‘What’s this poofter on about?’

  I also found politics. Even to my uninformed eye, Billy McMahon could not continue as prime minister beyond the election due at the end of the year, not against Gough Whitlam. The latter was a giant, the former a pipsqueak. I started looking for Laurie Oakes’ pieces on federal politics in The Sun each day and would read every piece twice to make sure I understood everything. On Saturday mornings, before I went off to play football, my father would send me to The Shop to buy The Age, the first time the paper came into our house. Like so many other working class Victorians, he bought it for the classifieds; he toyed with the idea of getting another job so he’d spend several hours on the weekend in his recliner chair thumbing through the employment section. I got into the habit of grabbing the first section of the paper and reading Allan Barnes’ political column from Canberra. It had a relaxed, knowing feel. There seemed such authority in it. Writing that column looked like a good job to me.