by Shaun Carney
_______________
In my youth, football meant so much to me. But not now. I maintain a Carlton membership—the cheapest one, which gives me free admission to three games each season. Most years, I do not go to any games. As an adult I’ve found most games boring. Once it gets to the halfway mark of the third quarter, I’ve seen enough and my mind starts to wander. But I cannot imagine discontinuing my membership; it is a physical link to my early life, a version of me that imagined a bright future and wondered what my life would and could be like. How Carlton were faring mattered. Now, I follow their fortunes and hope for the best, feel happy when they win or show genuine effort in their losses. But it is one interest among many. The most important aspect of this link to Carlton is that there was one thing in my childhood home upon which we were all as one: our devotion to the Blues. The VFL grand final in 1972 was played a week later than scheduled because a drawn semifinal between Carlton and Richmond forced a replay, thus extending the finals series into the following month. I do not need to check on the date of grand final day that year. It was 7 October. I remember that day for two reasons. Carlton and Richmond found themselves playing each other for the third time in the finals series. Carlton, given hardly any chance by anyone, shocked Richmond at the first bounce with a series of highly unorthodox positional selections, took the lead and never surrendered it. They set a record grand final winning score of twenty-eight goals, nine behinds and Richmond set a record losing score of twenty-two goals, eighteen behinds.
The other reason I have such strong memories of the day is that I was handed the piece of information that helped to explain why my first fifteen years had felt like they’d been built on sand. My parents and I were listening to the call of the game on 3KZ. Ian Major and the legendary former Richmond captain and coach Jack Dyer were the commentators. Dyer was a loveable personality but our tribal disdain for Richmond led us to enjoy his discomfort as he had to commentate on his club’s imminent defeat. It was during the half-time break, with Carlton up by forty-five points, and we were in high spirits. I reflected on this being Carlton’s third premiership in five years and wondered aloud about how Jack Carney would be feeling and whether I would ever meet him. He was no longer reserves coach but was still involved with the club at the committee level. My father assumed a serious demeanour and began to speak quietly.
I don’t think you’re ever going to meet him and I’ll tell you why. You’re old enough now for me to tell you. When I was growing up, when I was your age, my name wasn’t Jim Carney, my name was Jim Bren. Bren was my father’s name. His name was Jim Bren too. That’s how everybody knew me at school and when I was an apprentice. All the way until I joined the army, I was Jim Bren. My mother’s name was Carney. That was her married name. My mum and dad were never married and that’s why I don’t like people using the word ‘bastard’ to abuse someone. I was a bastard and so was Molly.
I will note here that he embraced all other available slang terms and in his later years abandoned his disdain for ‘bastard’, usually attaching ‘rotten mongrel’ as a prefix. ‘My mother, Annie, was married to a fella from Colac, a bit of a professional runner called “Trot” Carney. He ran a shoe shop. She had two sons with him. Jack Carney was one of the sons. The sons were born a fair while before me.’ In fact, Jack Carney was born almost eighteen years before my father and started his VFL career with Geelong, playing in their 1931 premiership side before moving to Carlton and playing on the wing in their 1938 flag side.
For whatever reason—I don’t know how they met but they must have fallen in love—my mother got together with my dad, got pregnant with me in 1926, and left her husband and her sons and never saw them again. She never got divorced. There was a bit of bad business when she died in 1961 because she didn’t leave a will. Under the law, the sons from her marriage were her legal heirs because they were the product of a marriage so they got her house in Clifton Hill. Molly and I weren’t entitled to anything.
This still didn’t explain why he was named Carney or why my mother was named Carney. Or why I was named Carney. I asked him why he changed to Carney.
When I joined the army just before the end of the war, I was only eighteen [this later turned out not to be true, he joined in early 1946 when he was nineteen] and you weren’t an adult until you were twenty-one so I needed to have my papers signed by my next of kin. I put my mother down as my next of kin and her name was Annie Carney. I didn’t want to have to explain to the army why I had a different name from my mother. That would have been too much. No-one knew how my mum and dad got together. There was too much shame attached to that, so I put my name down as Carney.
All right, I said. But couldn’t you have changed your name back to Bren when you came back to Melbourne after the army? ‘Too much had happened. I’d met your mum and got married. She took my name. That’s what you do when you get married, of course. We were Jimmy and Eddie Carney. And you’re Shaun Carney.’ When he said this, my mind wandered slightly. I recalled a story I’d been told several times about how I came to be called Shaun. My parents were convinced that this baby that they’d spent almost ten years waiting for was going to be a girl. They had no doubt. One of the biggest tennis players in the 1950s was American Tony Trabert, whose first wife was a glamorous model named Shauna. My parents liked the name and decided to give it to their daughter. Except that their daughter turned out to be me and in a panic they simply decided to cut off the final vowel from ‘Shauna’ to create ‘Shaun’. Now I had two names that I probably wasn’t supposed to have. Then the siren beginning the third quarter sounded on the radio, and we returned to the game and the Blues’ glorious victory.
I did not think about this revelation obsessively but it definitely placed a different lens over my view of my father. It was not perhaps a dreadful thing to happen to someone—or more accurately a dreadful choice to make—but it was damaging, this decision to change his name. I could see that. How could you just split your life up like that? One day you were known as one person, the next you were someone else. And it was driven by a sense of shame. Now I understood why, apart from a couple who had been next-door neighbours in Clifton Hill and his sister and her family, he hadn’t maintained links to anyone from his pre-army life. He’d wanted to get away from his life in that Clifton Hill house so badly that he was willing to discard one identity and take up another. And the name that he took up had come, through his mother, from a man whose life was almost certainly wrecked by the choice that his mother made—a man he’d never met and who probably cursed his very existence.
Yet again, one major revelation led to a whole new series of revelations from my mother. She told me how she came to find out. She knew nothing of the name change until well after she had married my father—in fact not until she had moved with him to Melbourne after he was demobbed. It must have been a tight squeeze in that house. Molly and her husband Bernie, their little boy Kevin and baby Loretta lived there, along with Jim Bren and Annie Carney, and my parents—all in a single-fronted terrace house in a part of Melbourne that was still trying to shrug off the effects of the Depression. For my mother, the extra dimension was that my father, when he was courting her, regaled her with tales of Sunday afternoons back home with his father getting the car and bringing it up the driveway to take his mother out for a drive. There was no car and certainly no driveway. Clifton Hill was then not much above a slum. When she went to do some shopping on nearby Queens Parade, a shop assistant said to her: ‘So you’re Jimmy Bren’s wife. Are you settling in?’ Afraid to sound rude, she said she was doing well, thank you. Further along the strip, another woman behind the counter in the grocery store asked her something similar. This time she said that there must be some confusion. She was married to Jimmy whose family live just across the road from the gardens in Gold Street. Yes, said the woman, Jimmy Bren who’s just come back from the army. So my mother waited for my father to return from work and asked him what this was about. He replied, she said, at first in a nonch
alant way. ‘Oh, that. I just had to use that name so that I could get into the army. You don’t need to worry about that.’ She pressed him and he admitted in a far more sombre way that it had been necessary because of the circumstances of his birth. She hadn’t known about any of that either. I wanted to know if she was angry about it.
‘Yes, I was angry about it but I also felt sad—for him,’ she said. ‘That’s how it was. I thought, “What have I done?” You know, there was drinking in his home and I think he created this fantasy for himself where everything was wonderful. The change of name fitted that. He does live in a fantasy. He can’t admit that he doesn’t know how to do anything. You know that, don’t you?’
She then told me stories about their early times in that Clifton Hill house in the early 1950s that she felt were amusing rather than damning. My mother had played competition tennis in Maitland before meeting my father and there were tennis courts in Mayors Park in Clifton Hill, a short walk from their home. She was keen to have a game and asked him if he played. Oh, yes, he replied, I’ve played. When they arrived at the courts, it became clear pretty quickly that he’d never held a tennis racquet before. ‘He was hitting the balls up in the air, right over the high fences surrounding the court. He was missing the ball altogether. I had to pretend that nothing was wrong. I didn’t want to embarrass him. But it was funny.’ A similar thing happened when they bought their first car, a 1934 Chevrolet Roadster. He had arranged the purchase and told her to expect him to bring the car home after work.
‘Can you drive?’ she asked. She’d never seen him drive.
‘Of course I drive,’ he said. ‘I drove in the army.’
A few hours later, she was in the upstairs bedroom awaiting his arrival when she heard the sound of gears being crunched, and an engine dying and then restarting. She looked out the window to see a ’34 Roadster swerving along the street, mounting the kerb and stopping suddenly as he tried to park it. He did not know how to drive.
‘That’s the way he is. If it looks like he has missed out on something or if he has a problem, he just bluffs his way through,’ she said.
I felt myself becoming a spectator in this story of my mother and father. This was their life and I didn’t want it to be mine. I couldn’t save their situation. I couldn’t undo my father changing his name or having another household or my mother’s apparent acceptance of it. I was fifteen. I had to work on an exit plan.
I had the beginnings of it. How could I make my life different to theirs? I would go all the way to the end of high school, do my Higher School Certificate. Should I go to university? I’d never really wanted to. My parents had never placed any roadblocks on me. I knew that if I decided to go, I could. All the same, despite my ambition, I still felt that I didn’t have what it took. It was the duality that would always plague me—I want to be noticed, please don’t notice me in case I fail.
At this point, I was getting to know the boy who lived at the other end of my street, the boy my mother had pointed out to me as I panicked on my first day of school, John Middleton. He was a brilliant, hard-working student, determined on a career as a scientist. He was a good footballer and, I learned after we started walking home together from Monterey High, a devoted guitarist. We had started working up Beatles songs on our guitars in our bedrooms together after school and we had become strong friends. On one of our walks home, when he was telling me about his intention to get a science degree and then a doctorate, I told him I didn’t think I could make it to university because no-one in my family had ever even graduated from secondary school. He scowled and shouted at me: ‘Awhh, you can’t talk like that!’ Then he walked off and headed for home on his own. I realised I was being a self-defeating tool. From then on, I didn’t talk like that.
11
A BETTER RUN
IT’S A MORNING in October 1977, around 9 o’clock. I’ve deposited my car at an all-day car park on the northern side of Beach Street in Frankston, an area that until the previous year was full of comfortable inter-war homes but is now featureless bitumen and concrete kerbing. The houses had to go in order to meet the parking needs of the ever-expanding shopping precinct. Frankston, the slightly tatty resort town where my parents bought their scrubby block of land twenty years earlier is now a city of 80 000, with emerging suburbs of its own. I’m heading by foot to the railway station, where I will buy a return ticket to Flinders Street Station, a one-hour trip each way. I’ve bought that morning’s Sun News-Pictorial at the kiosk and I’m going to read every page before I reach my destination. I’m feeling good. I’m dressed in the ‘neat/business’ clothing for young adult males of the time: a shirt and a suede bum-freezer jacket that are too figure-hugging, and trousers that, around the waist and upper thighs, provide an excess of information and, below the knee, flop around and give up on the whole idea of relating to what lies beneath. Fashion at this stage of the Western world’s development presented each of us as caricatures. And the joke was, and is, that we thought we looked good.
Life has been okay. I matriculated, not spectacularly but comfortably enough to get into my chosen course, a bachelor of economics at Monash University. Within weeks of beginning there, I realised I hated economics and transferred to an arts degree in second year, keeping economic history and politics as my majors, with a minor in history. I was within a month of completing the arts degree. I had attended university for two reasons: because I could, and because I knew that if I was to get a job as a journalist I needed more time to work on my presentation and personal skills. What I’d learned from watching my father was that personality and first impressions counted for much more than most people knew. He had been able to get away with so much because of his personality. Although I was genuinely interested in everyone I met, I found speaking easily with people to be hard work. The skill I had to work on was making it look like it wasn’t hard work. I had to find a way to be someone else when I needed to.
At uni I made a point of introducing myself to as many people as I could in my tutorials and lectures and I would ask them about themselves. In my final summer break at university, between second and third years, I searched around for a holiday job that would improve my skills with people. Rather than filling in as a warehouse storeman or a Christmas mail sorter or as a shop assistant, I looked for something that would force me to approach people and win them over. I secured a two-month gig as a travelling salesman for Shell Shop, the business that sold the products that service stations stocked behind the counter in those days, mostly automotive accessories. This meant that I got to drive a truck packed with these products all over metropolitan Melbourne and had to persuade the poor souls who ran these often marginal businesses selling petrol for fifteen cents a litre that they really needed an extra box of Holden fanbelts and a dozen more spark plugs for a Valiant. It was often excruciating work but served its purpose. After two months, I’d got closer to the right approach: smiling but serious, intensely interested in them, empathetic, determined to help. This training enabled me to win over even the most reluctant strangers from whom I wanted something. Weird, I know, maybe even creepy, but it meant that this one interview that I was heading to with Bill Hoey, the man charged with finding eleven school leavers and three graduates to fill the 1978 trainee intake for The Herald and The Sun, elicited no nervousness. I was either well prepared or stupid.
After I seated myself in a carriage and glanced at The Sun’s front page, a bloke my age plonked himself down in the seat opposite. It was a guy I’d gone through high school with, Ray Carter. Ray had been a big Creedence Clearwater Revival fan and, when the haircut rules basically collapsed around the time we reached Form Four, he grew his hair out in a spongy sort of bowl cut so that he fully resembled CCR’s leader, John Fogerty. I’d really admired him for that. Ray was attending the Caulfield Institute of Technology and while it was great to catch up with him—I hadn’t seen him for three years and he was a very funny guy—I started to wonder whether I’d get enough time to go through th
e paper. I decided there was no point in getting fidgety and opted instead to ask him about himself, what he’d been studying and what he hoped to do, while also recalling such important incidents from our schooldays as the time that our mutual friend Iain Wilson emitted a fart during a maths exam that sounded exactly like a boy soprano plaintively calling out ‘Paul?’. This was memorable because Iain was sitting next to a boy named Paul. There are only six stations between Caulfield and Flinders Street. I did not know that I could speed-read until that day. After Ray stepped off at Caulfield, I consumed that newspaper. I did not know how important it would be to have done that. It seemed to be the wise thing to do if you were going into a newspaper building to have read the latest edition. I followed a hunch and it was a lucky decision.
The Herald building was built by Keith Murdoch in the 1920s on the site of an old city mansion on the corner of Flinders and Exhibition Streets. It is a five-storey monolith that extends for half of a city block and in the half-century following its construction, the company bought up the surrounding buildings and joined them together via walkways. It had also extended its reach to the other side of Exhibition Street, where it built an underground car park for its fleet of editorial and executive vehicles and employed mechanics to keep them going. Two thousand people worked in this complex, where more than a million papers were printed six days a week.