Sunshine & Shadow

by Larry Writer

  I first walked into the club aged twelve, and to this day I often drop in, to train there or conduct business in my role as Patron and Life Governor. The club’s mission today, as it was when I first joined and back when it opened its doors in 1937, is to get young people active in life, work with them to develop their skills, character and leadership, and to prevent and reduce crime by and against young people. The five-point star above the ‘Y’ in the logo symbolises fitness, honour, loyalty, friendship and citizenship.

  Unlike my brother I wasn’t that into boxing. I was quick and could punch hard, but I didn’t have the killer instinct that you need in order to want to knock someone out; I preferred just working out. I became competent with a skipping rope and can still skip for half an hour without stopping by mentally breaking the time into five- and ten-minute chunks. The rhythm of swinging that rope, of jumping, and going ‘phoo-phoo-phoo’ as I skipped – I found it all very calming.

  The guys at the Police Boys Club made me consider cops in general in a different light. There are bad apples and there always have been, but I have enormous respect for the police. How would you like to do a job where you could be called to a domestic dispute and be confronted by a maniac wielding a gun? Or attend a road accident with no survivors? And for all the dangers, receive low pay and work long hours, and take a beating from the media, politicians and the public? It’s the old story: police are the first to get bagged by the public and the first people we call when we are in need of help.

  The club became a home away from home for me. There, skipping or boxing or doing sit-ups till my stomach muscles screamed, I could forget. Forget my abusive father who kept showing up like an evil troll in a fairy tale with his violence and drunkenness to trash the life Mum was trying to make for us. Forget the pain and sorrow I saw daily in Mum’s eyes despite her best efforts to put on a glad face. Forget the poverty that was all around me. Forget my struggles at school. Forget to pretend to be an insensitive thug so I wouldn’t stand out from my mates. At the club I didn’t have to pretend. I could be myself, and that was enough.

  I don’t know if the electric shock fine-tuned my senses, but after it I became very intuitive. I seemed to know things whereas before I was not particularly perceptive at all, just ambled about in a daze like most kids. I seemed suddenly to know what people around me were feeling and thinking, how a situation would develop. I could tell if a person had good or bad intentions, whether they were telling me the truth or a swag of lies. I have retained that intuition and often it comes in useful in my life and work. I can usually tell if a person is going to be important in my life. I felt this buzz when in my late teens I literally bumped into John Ireland, the man who would change the course of my existence, and I felt it the first time I met my wife, Mary.

  Once I was walking in Woolloomooloo and I saw a homeless man sitting in the sun in Bourke Street near a telephone box. I had never met my mother’s brother, George, only been told about this bloke who walked the streets and slept rough, but somehow I immediately knew that this fellow was him. Something compelled me to walk up to him and say, ‘Is your name George?’ He mumbled something unintelligible and hustled away. Eighteen months later I was at an aunt’s house. There was a knock on the door. She opened it. There stood the homeless man I had seen in Bourke Street. She said, ‘James, I want you to meet your Uncle George.’

  One afternoon I came home from school and my father was sitting in the kitchen. Mum was there, squirming on her chair and looking alarmed. The old man had knocked on the door, said he was sorry for all he had done and that he had turned over a new leaf and pleaded to be allowed to return to the family. Mum being Mum, hoping against hope that he was really reformed, knowing that any money he brought into the house would be welcome indeed, gave him another chance.

  It didn’t work out that time, nor any of the other times, usually a few months apart, that he’d snake his way back home.

  What would always happen was this. He would be fine for a day or two, singing his old English novelty songs, helping around the house, doing the shopping. Then he would start drinking again. When he was drunk he would hit and yell and smash things. He would rough me and my mother up. As far as I know, he never touched Alison or Steve. It was Mum and me who he had it in for.

  Nevertheless, every morning she dragged herself, aching and humiliated, from the bed of the man who had attacked her, and went to work. She single-mindedly, against all the odds, kept earning the money in nasty, backbreaking jobs to put food on our table.

  My father’s drinking would get increasingly worse, and then, always after one huge final fight, he would storm out of the house, vowing that he was finished with us and we’d be fucking sorry for treating him so badly, mark his words. For Mum and me, his departure was cause for a celebration. The relief we felt every time he left was immense. We prayed that this time he would stay away. Mum would only rarely discuss my father with me, just give me a bigger hug when he was out of our lives once more. Those hugs spoke volumes.

  I had never been able to forget when I was seven. I had heard my father bashing my mother that night at Camperdown and I had reacted in fear and shame, pretending to be asleep. One day, I swore, I would pay him back.

  Just from being around my mother I developed loyalty, self-esteem, self-belief and a sense of morality. She was a very proud woman and I like to think that I’ve tapped into her strength. After she contracted cancer a few years later, it took six years for the disease to kill her and I watched her fight it every day. Imagine a single woman working a night job in a poor and pokey house with three kids and no partner trying to provide for and entertain the kids, and never a boyfriend. I never saw her with another man. She was a very intelligent woman. She never had the chance to use her intelligence. I’ve come to think that she existed only for her children, never for herself. She never did a selfish thing, and always put our needs and desires before her own.

  My mum was never broken down by anything except her cancer. I’m sure my father was responsible for damaging her body and mind to the point where cancer took hold of her. She’ll live again in this book and that’s why I’m doing it. She exists for me, every single moment of every day. She was a soldier in a pretty heavy war. She died knowing I loved her.

  When I was about thirteen, my old man, after staying away for some months, again slithered back into our lives. Maybe he’d had an attack of the guilts. No matter. What did matter was that he was drunk and demanded to drive Stephen and me to a Kentucky Fried Chicken shop and treat us to a feast of chicken and chips. We were too scared to resist and against all my instincts we went along. He hustled Stephen into the back seat of his car, and motioned for me to sit in the passenger seat beside him. He smelled like a distillery. We made it to the store, and he bought a big bucket of fried chicken pieces, told Stephen to hold it tight and we’d share it out when we arrived home. We got in the car and headed back to the ’Loo.

  Suddenly, he jammed his foot down hard on the accelerator, and I saw the speedo hit 100 kilometres per hour as we hurtled through the narrow streets. He tore blind across cross-streets, cackling hysterically. I thought we would die. At the bottom of the street was a solid brick warehouse and he made straight for it, going so fast that everything outside was a blur. I reached behind me and clamped my hand on Stephen’s thigh and braced for the crash. Suddenly my father slammed on the brakes. The bucket of chicken shot forward from Stephen’s hands and chicken flew everywhere. The car halted a metre from the wall. I leapt from the car, crying and screaming. I yelled at my father, ‘You fucking, fucking … bastard!’ and ran off into the night. At the corner I turned to see if he was chasing me, but he was still inside the car, scrambling around on the floor picking up the pieces of fried chicken. Stephen stood by helplessly. He looked to me as if he was counting his blessings at having survived and yet seemed sad that our night out with our father had ended this way.

  [STEPHEN]

  woolloomooloo lair

  In W
oolloomooloo, there was no stigma attached to not having a father. Hardly any of the kids had one.

  James and I look at our father differently and that’s understandable because James was older and exposed to the violence for longer. I understand James’s point of view. Yet I could not share James’s hatred of my old man, simply because I was too young to have seen him at his violent worst. From the time I started accumulating memories, he was rarely around. Now we were in Woolloomooloo and he didn’t live with us, just came back every few months and after a lot of shouting with Mum he would take off again.

  A good father is priceless, but having no father is better than having a bad dad. In my life I’ve had problems. Before I was rescued in 2002, by myself and by those who loved me, I was hopelessly irresponsible, I hurt people, and I almost killed myself with alcohol. How many of these problems were caused by not having a loving and supportive father? I reckon I inherited the X factor that made Dad an alcoholic. As for my other crimes and misdemeanours, I, and the booze, will take full responsibility for those!

  At times when I was small I missed my father. I missed the joker he was when he was sober, the cheeky charmer who knew all the words to those funny old English pop songs and sang them in a broad cockney accent just like the singers on the radio. They were wonderful ditties and he’d sing ’em out and I’d try to join in but couldn’t keep up.

  To live with him would have been impossible but when he came back through our front door every blue moon like he did, he seemed – to me at least – exciting and attractive. Alcohol stole his life and turned him into a coward who ran away from his obligations and put his wife and us kids through terrible hardship while he was off getting drunk with lovers. He’d had a wife and kids in England and he did to them what he did to us. He just wasn’t strong enough to beat the booze.

  I also missed a man who I could show off to and impress with my sporting talent, which I exhibited almost from the time I could run. For better or worse he was my dad and I craved his approval, and I hoped if I could win that by starring in a rugby league match or a running race maybe he would be so impressed that he would come back to us and we could all live happily ever after.

  It’s no surprise that I gravitated towards father figures and mentors from the sports I loved: my rugby league coach back when I was six was Johnny Lewis, from the Police Boys Club, who would become one of the world’s top boxing trainers, taking Jeff Fenech, Kostya Tszyu, Jeff Harding and American Virgil Hill to world titles. Johnny would play a huge role in my life. Dedicated, kind, wise and caring, he was everything that my father wasn’t.

  As I grew older, and realised the predicament my father had left my mother in, my feelings towards my old man hardened. How could he abuse and then walk out on such a beautiful woman, leaving her to bring up and educate their three children alone in dire circumstances? What he did was inexcusable and cruel, and her early death is on his head.

  Somehow we Dack kids never went without. Mum always found ways to buy us treats. Actually, it’s no secret. If we wanted anything, a new orange Midget Farrelly surfboard, a Surfa Sam skateboard, a football or footy boots, we’d tell her and she’d work harder to be able to pay for it. She could have sent us to a public school, but she believed a Catholic education was best so she slaved at a second and third job to pay our fees at St Mary’s. My mother’s example, and her spirit, have driven me to achieve everything I have ever done.

  Mum was a young woman who was stretched to the limit financially and emotionally. The stress she endured must have contributed to the cancer she contracted. She was hog-tied by her circumstances. She was so special. She did it all for us and no sacrifice was too great to make. James and I have gone through our lives and at every crossroad, every decision, we think, what would Mum expect of us, what would she want us to do?

  Mum would start her main work as a cleaner at Camperdown Hospital at 4 am and finish at 2 pm. James, although he was only twelve or thirteen himself, would wake Ali and me, prepare us cereal and a cup of tea for breakfast, make sure we were dressed and our teeth were cleaned, and then hustle us off to school. Mum would be there to greet us with a glass of milk when we arrived home in the afternoon.

  When she wasn’t working or sitting with us as we told her our daily dramas and dreams, Mum read Mills & Boon paperbacks. I suppose she was trying to inject a bit of romance, even if vicarious, into her life. As she turned the pages of those little books, engrossed in the love stories they told, for a time she could be the beautiful woman adored by the wealthy, kind and handsome man who was taking her away to fabulous and exotic places rather than just being a battler in Woolloomooloo. So it was like a gift from God the day I was rummaging through an old abandoned house and came across a big box of discarded Mills & Boon books. Sweating and struggling, I dragged that box up the street to our house and gave it to Mum … There were sixty books, and she read every one, getting lost in the romance that she had never had.

  Like James’s, my memories of Woolloomooloo when I was a boy, apart from my mother’s daily struggle and the periodic returns of my father, are happy ones. I got picked on, too, at school by the Lebanese and Greek boys, but unlike James, I relished the conflict and the chance to fight. I got into tons of brawls. One time I was tested by a kid named Sam Ianni, and we fought. I beat him. That wasn’t the end of it. All defeating Sam meant was that I now had to take on his mate, George Lucarelli. I beat George, and next in line was Max Ruello … and so on.

  I enjoyed pitting myself against another kid, or kids, if it came to that. As I had discovered in my blue back in Camperdown with my then best friend, when I was in a fight, punching as hard as I could, grappling on the ground, cut and bleeding and bruised, covered in dirt and gravel, I was happy. I felt no pain. Someone could whack me on the nose or mouth, and I’d shrug it off and whale in.

  As usual in a dog-eat-dog world, once you prove you are tough, you are accepted. Soon I was off fishing and swimming and playing footy with the same boys who’d been trying to knock my block off. I became fast mates with an Italian kid named Sam whose father was a fisherman. He took us out in his row boat at five-thirty in the morning and when we rowed back into Woolloomooloo Bay at dusk, our nets were full of fish.

  Each day, as we kids roamed the streets before going home for dinner, we saw the Italian mothers and their daughters sitting up in front of their terrace houses in Cathedral Street and all the way down to the wharves, mending the fishing nets of their husbands and brothers so that the men could take them out again tomorrow for a new day’s fishing.

  We used to run across the roofs of derelict houses, and about twenty of us would divide into two groups of ten and play Hares and Hounds. The kids who were the hares had an hour to run and hide, then the hounds would be after them. Any hare who was hunted down had to stand still while the hound belted him for two minutes. Not a bad incentive to find a good hiding spot.

  I was a menace around the district. Apart from my scrapping, I was always up to skulduggery on the Finger Wharf and along the wharf on the western side of the bay where there is now an expensive residential development, on the way to the Andrew ‘Boy’ Charlton swimming pool. Many times the police chased me and my mates up and down the wharves. We usually got away. We had our escape routes sussed.

  At that stage I had no time for the police. I saw them driving drunk around Woolloomooloo, taking protection money from prostitutes, and harassing kids for no particular reason.

  I was loitering outside the City of Sydney Police Boys Club one morning when I was eight. I saw a police car parked outside and, naturally, I gave its door a damn good kick. The officer whose car it was, whose name was Bill Pearce but whom we called Pruneface because he was so tanned from surfing, saw me and I took off. He pursued me through the streets of Woolloomooloo. Instead of hauling me in to the police station, or telling Mum what I’d done, he sat me down and we had a real good heart to heart. We became mates and he took me on surfing safaris with him up the coast. He convinced me
to join the Police Boys Club. I did, at about the same time that my brother did, and I’m still a member today.

  I loved that place from the beginning. I became addicted to the ripe smells of sweat and leather, and accepted when Bruce Farthing offered to teach me to box properly. That club has a terrific history and many of the boys who trained there went on to hold boxing titles, from world champ Jimmy Carruthers, who went on to own The Bells Hotel in the ’Loo, to myself, to the current heavyweight Solomon Haumono.

  When Muhammad Ali visited Sydney in the 1970s he made a beeline to the club, and I’m happy to say I met the great man, though I was too tongue-tied to attempt conversation.