by Larry Writer
The Police Boys Club most probably saved my life. Even being a member and into my sport, I still got into trouble and mixed with a tough bunch. Fights and petty crime were my thing. It would have been easy for me to become addicted to drugs – they were sold all over Woolloomooloo – or, like many of my mates, become a criminal. Thankfully I never did.
[JAMES]
between god and the devil
Seeing and being on the receiving end of the rough treatment my old man dished out meant that by the time I hit my early teens I was used to conflict and violence. So I was never really intimidated, once I got used to it, by the tougher side of Woolloomooloo. But I was never one to contribute to it. I was never a fighter. I was a bit of a loner, a gentle, quiet kid in a suburb of squalling, brawling bovver boys and girls. I enjoyed playing sport, rugby league especially, and going to Bondi Beach, sometimes with Mum, and I enjoyed singing. I had a good voice, good enough to have represented my school in Camperdown, St Joseph’s, in an eisteddfod, and I’d acted and sung in St Joseph’s productions of Dr Doolittle and Prince Charming.
St Mary’s Cathedral Christian Brothers High School, my new school had a choir and I was selected to sing in it. I said no. I didn’t want to be seen as a sissy. I didn’t get the chance to further explore my theatrical potential. That was okay. I was good at sport, not bad at schoolwork when I put my heart into it.
On my first day at St Mary’s, in Year 7, I was given the acid test by a pack of tough Lebanese boys. They tried to goad me into a fight at the school gate. One boy whacked me hard on the head. Another spat in my face. He wanted to know, ‘What are you going to do about it?’ What I did about it was turn the other cheek. I didn’t want to fight these kids. They kept needling me, and soon my main preoccupation at school was avoiding my tormentors.
In a very low moment, brought on by my persecution, I actually made a suicide tape. I saw myself as a romantically doomed and misunderstood teenager who everyone mistreated and underestimated until he killed himself and then everyone realised how wonderful he really was. I made that goodbye-cruel-world tape and played it to myself a couple of times, then forgot all about it. One day I realised I hadn’t seen it in some time and I thought, Gee, I hope no one ever finds that tape.
I purposely failed to do my homework so the teacher would keep me in after school and by the time I was let out the gang would have got tired of waiting for me and gone home. Because Mum left before dawn to work as a cleaner, my job was to get Stephen and Alison and myself out of bed and washed, breakfasted, into our uniforms and off to school. At the time I was being picked on by the Lebanese gang, I often played truant all day. I even went to the extreme of attempting to cut my foot with a razor blade so I would have to go to hospital and have it stitched and not have to attend school to face them. My scheme failed because I was too squeamish to slice my foot too deeply. I got a little way in, produced a couple of tiny drops of blood and put the blade down. Sometimes I pretended to be sick so Mum would let me stay home. I was missing a fair bit of school. These measures, of course, were only a temporary reprieve, merely delaying my inevitable showdown with the kids who had it in for me.
I went to the school counsellor who told me I would just have to put up with being bullied. I was in despair. Things were tough enough at home, living on the bones of our arse, my old man coming every few months to cause havoc, and what should have been a safe haven, school, had turned into a living hell as well.
Another problem at St Mary’s was that there were a couple of paedophiles among the teachers. These people would isolate vulnerable boys and try to seduce them. One boy came to me and complained that a particular lay teacher had rubbed his penis against him and grabbed his testicles. I took the terrified kid straight to the Brothers. He poured out his story to the concerned teachers. The guilty teacher left a little while later, probably to work elsewhere.
In time, I made a friend of a very special Aboriginal boy named Alan Ferguson. I’d known Alan on and off since we were nine and playing junior footy. He was a free spirit and the most sublimely gifted rugby league footballer I had ever seen. Alan became one of my closest friends at St Mary’s and later in our lives.
Alan was a shining light in junior rugby league. In one year he played for Mascot in the C, B and A grade finals. He also starred for the indigenous team the Redfern All Blacks and won the Koori Knockout with them. If his heart had been in it he could have gone on to play first grade for the Rabbitohs or the Roosters and maybe even won higher representative honours. Alan was also a shining light in my life. Being his mate inspired me to stick up for myself. That, and the realisation that, as happened when I was being bullied in Camperdown, if I did not draw a line in the asphalt the bullies would continue to make my life hell.
I brought on High Noon when one day I told myself, I’m going to have to sort this out if I want to stay at St Mary’s.
One afternoon I walked straight up to the Lebanese boys who were lurking around the front gate. I singled out the loudest of them, the bloke who had spat in my face. I looked straight into his eyes and said in my best Clint Eastwood voice, ‘You want a fight? I’ll give you one. Today. This afternoon. In the Domain. And I promise you that I will drag you up that hill and I will fight you and you might knock me down but I will keep getting up and in the end I will beat the fucking life out of you.’ He blinked first. I saw his eyes flicker, he was scared. He went white and gulped. Seeing their mate turn to water, his mates backed off, looking uneasy. There was silence for some seconds. I stood there, my eyes drilling into the spitter’s. Would he or his mates jump me? No. Instead, he gave a grin and said, ‘Hey mate, do you play footy?’
That’s all it took. For the next decade, those kids and I and some other kids from the ’Loo played rugby league together with a lot of success in junior comps. I partied with them. Talked about girls. Played a lot of cards. I stayed up late with them, 2 am was an early end to our evenings; I never felt the need to drink heavily. Just didn’t enjoy it. They were tough kids, much tougher than me. I did one, whose name was Joe, a big favour one night. This angry kid liked to wear steel-capped shoes when he went out and had a thing about using them on his opponent when he got into a fight, which was most nights. There was a melee outside a club on Oxford Street, Bondi Junction, and I saw him line up a boy who had been knocked down and he was set to kick him in the head. At best he would have fractured his skull or jaw, at worst he could have killed him. I stuck my foot in front of the kid’s head and Joe kicked me instead, hard in the ankle. I wouldn’t be able to walk for a week. Having defused his kick, I grabbed Joe and said, ‘Mate, calm down … think what you’re doing. Kick that kid and you could spend the rest of your life in jail.’ He came to his senses, thank God.
When one of my new Lebanese mates invited me home, his mother had an important question to ask me. ‘James,’ she said, ‘if my boy gets into a fight with an Australian boy, who are you going to stick up for?’ I replied that her son was my friend so I would stick up for him. ‘That’s good,’ she said, ‘you’re a fine young man.’ That gives a sense of the prevailing racial tensions at the time, and also of our acceptance that violence would be an everyday event. Forget talking things over or defusing a situation with humour; fighting was the immediate response to any slight, real or imagined. A boy’s worth was measured by his ability to handle himself in a scrap.
Peter Chidiac, who was in the group of boys who persecuted me when I first attended St Mary’s, loaned me $10,000 when I was trying to save a deposit for my first home. Peter’s parents, Nobby and Effie, were staunch and loving people and Nobby for years ran a milk bar in Redfern called The Friendly Store, where we fronted up for our chocolate and strawberry shakes with double ice cream. Nobby died in 2008 and most of Redfern was in mourning. Stephen and I were at his funeral and the church was overflowing. My brother and I were hugged by the Chidiac family as if we were related, and in many ways we were. I’m still friends with most of those old mates today.
<
br /> When I was fifteen, in 1976, I noticed that Mum was looking different: tired and drawn, and her skin was grey. Her mind seemed a million miles away when I tried to talk to her, and she seemed sad. Her energy, once so prodigious in the face of hardship and abuse, flagged. She still worked hard – there was no alternative with four mouths to feed – but I would surreptitiously watch her. I realised that she was shrinking before my eyes. Was she sick? I wondered, and not being able to bear that prospect, I convinced myself that she was fine.
Obviously I was a pretty mixed-up kid, because of my old man coming around and causing trouble, my haphazard school life and my mother’s new lassitude. I wanted to leave school and get out into the real world. I only stayed at St Mary’s because it offered a structured life amid all the chaos and because Mum was so proud to be able to pay the fees each term and I didn’t want her hard work to go to waste.
A school blazer was beyond Mum’s budget, and I had to borrow one from other kids for school photos. This was a problem because I was taller and had way longer arms than the other boys.
I still have my 1978 Year 12 class photo. There I am, right in the centre in the back row – they put me there because I was the tallest boy in the class. I’m smiling, my tie is askew, and I’m sporting a boofy big hairdo, like all the other kids in the class. Alan Ferguson, my great mate, is four down the row from me, on my left. He looks desperately uncomfortable, squirming at having to stand still for the photographer. It’s interesting to look at the kids in that photograph: in those days before multiculturalism was enshrined, our class had Anglo kids, Aboriginal kids, Asian kids, Greek and Italian kids, Lebanese kids and other kids from the Middle East. It was a mixing pot of creeds and cultures.
Sport was my main focus at St Mary’s. I was in the school’s first grade rugby league and cricket teams.
My marks were always fair to middling. Before I was electrocuted back in Camperdown I’d been a top student. Since then, I’d found it hard to concentrate and knuckle down to study. I mucked up in class a fair bit, though I don’t think that I was worse than a lot of other kids. The teachers didn’t agree. When I was in Year 12, and the Higher School Certificate was just a month away, the principal came up to me. He told me, ‘I don’t want you to come to school tomorrow, Dack. You’re finished here. You’ve done nothing for six years but waste yours and the school’s time. I’m not letting you sit for the Higher School Certificate.’
I looked at him, stunned and upset, my mouth gaping. I turned on my heel and marched straight home. I didn’t say anything to Mum. I went to my bedroom and decided then and there that I wasn’t going to be a victim. I thought, My mother has worked her fingers to the bone paying my school fees for the past six years. Who is that prick to tell me I can’t sit for my Higher School Certificate? I couldn’t care less what he said. I’m going to keep turning up at school and whether I fail or not I am going to do that exam, and stuff him.
I turned up next day. The principal saw me in the playground at lunchtime and stared hard at me, but said nothing. Apart from a few days when I played truant with my mates, I spent the next month at school, and I sat for my HSC. I just kept showing up at school. I wondered what the principal was up to. Maybe his telling me I wasn’t fit to do the exam was a clever psychological ploy to make me get stuck into my work. I like to think that the principal knew I’d fight back when the odds were stacked against me.
Unfortunately, the principal’s ploy, if it was a ploy, didn’t work. I was too far behind in my schoolwork and too preoccupied by Mum’s illness to do any good in the Higher School Certificate. I was simply emotionally destroyed by the poverty and the family ructions and I was worried sick about Mum, who by then had been diagnosed with cancer and was spending long stretches in hospital – I was sole carer for Stephen and Alison during those times. I sat in my major exam as long as I could, doodling on my exam paper. I waited forty-five minutes, a reasonable amount of time, I thought, then got up from my desk, walked out of the examination room, out of the school, and I never went back. I scored a miserable 115 out of 500 in my HSC. I didn’t even attend St Mary’s end-of-year celebration. I dumped my uniform and burnt it in the backyard and then I thought about getting a job. I was seventeen.
[STEPHEN]
the end of innocence
At St Joseph’s at Camperdown where I went to infants school, I received a report card which I have kept. It read: ‘Quite intelligent and capable of doing well in school. Shows little interest in school work. Can be very troublesome in class.’
After we moved to Woolloomooloo, nothing much changed. I enjoyed going to school, not for the schoolwork but for the sport and mates.
A nuggetty kid with long blond surfie hair and a stroppy attitude, I was good at athletics and rugby league, which was the game to play at school. I was also the schoolyard scrapper. I was not intimidated by kids or the Brothers at St Mary’s. I loved to fight and could fight very well. In a blue I didn’t pace myself, just went at the other bloke as hard as I could. I was having too much fun punching on and getting punched to feel the pain.
My schoolmates were the same kids I got into trouble with on the streets of Woolloomooloo before and after school and on the weekends. There were about twenty of us. We’d meet down in the ’Loo about 8 am on week days, and have a game of touch footy or smoke or dive off the Finger Wharf into the bay, then when 9 am approached a decision would have to be made: ‘Do we go to school today, or do we wag it?’ Occasionally we went to school, but even when we did we were always late for first lesson. Incredibly, I was never expelled or even suspended.
The ’Loo was wonderful. If things got boring for us urchins, we’d spice it up with a fight. There was a guy down there named Eric, not a bad fellow at all, he was five years older than us, around seventeen, and like us all, he enjoyed a rumble. We’d accommodate him. All us little kids would gang up on Eric and he’d put up a good show before, like Gulliver and the Lilliputians, weight of numbers prevailed and we’d engulf him and bash him up.
Following the bad example of my brother and his mates, we’d drive the forklifts along the Finger Wharf. We had forklift fights, riding the machines like knights on golden steeds along the wharf. I tried to emulate James’s skill at handling the contraptions. Once I saw him tear along the old wooden planks of the wharf and ram a kid driving another forklift. James’s forks punctured the other vehicle’s tyres, and they popped with a bang.
Jim Dymock, who went on to play rugby league for Wests, Parramatta, and Canterbury (he won the Clive Churchill Medal for being best player in the Bulldogs’ grand final win in 1995) and Australia, lived down the road from us with his older brothers Milton, Angelo and Paul. Jim was a few years younger than me. Their mum was a lovely woman, so kind to all the kids in the ’Loo. She was a brilliant squash player and tried to teach me to play, but I never mastered the sport. Her sons, who were all good footballers, inherited her sporting talent. Even as a kid at school, Jimmy’s talent shone through. He was never a big bloke and wasn’t that quick, but he had wonderful ball skills and could read a game, which is a special talent. And he was durable. Jimmy coached Tonga in the recent rugby league World Cup and today is assistant coach at the Bulldogs. A successful career as senior coach of an NRL team surely awaits him.
James did all the mean tricks to me that big brothers do … When I was eleven or so and he was sixteen I wanted to buy his mate Michael Borlotti’s racing bike. I’d saved up the necessary $75 over many months by hoarding the money I made on my paper route and throwing myself into my old Camperdown pastime of picking up bottles in the street and collecting the deposit. In a portent of his later career, James was the entrepreneur broking the deal. When it came time to hand over the $75 and take ownership of the bike, James coolly informed me that there’d been a slight change in the arrangement. He said he wanted his cut for broking the deal, and that it just so happened that it would be $75, so now I had to come up with $150. I told him he was being outrageous … and then I w
ent and stuffed more copies of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph under people’s front doors and collected more bottles, enough to buy the bike and pay James his extortion fee. James realised he was onto a good thing and for some years he worked out another little scam in which he would let me hang around him, so long as I paid him 20 per cent of every dollar I made. When I’d howl, ‘But James, I’m doing all the work and you’re getting rich,’ he’d reply, ‘Of course, that’s true, but you’ll keep paying because you love me.’ And he was dead right, I would because I did.
My big brother also made me massage his legs after he’d played a game of footy, and, you know, I was happy to do it. I did love him. And he loved me. I was still massaging his legs years later when he got graded with the Roosters.
I had an inkling all wasn’t well with Mum, but I didn’t worry too much. I was too caught up in my eleven-year-old’s dreams and schemes to notice. Did she look ill, was she short-tempered when she had always been patient and loving? I can’t say, I’m afraid. There were times when she was away – I know now she was at the hospital having tests for cancer – when James would give Alison and me our breakfast and get us off to school and cook our dinner at night, but he did that anyway when she started work before the sun came up cleaning at the stock exchange, an office or hospital.
I’ll never forget, or forgive, the way I came to learn that Mum was very ill. I was twelve, and hanging around at the home of my aunt. I was watching television while she, as she usually did, drank cask wine and downed Bex powders, one after the other. This day she was pissed, and spoiling for a fight. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that she was looking at me evilly. Finally she blurted out, ‘You know your mother’s got cancer and she’s not going to live.’ It wasn’t a question, it was a statement, made in a flat, emotionless voice. She was obviously hoping for a reaction and a dramatic scene. She got neither. I sat there on the floor in front of the TV, looking at the screen but seeing nothing, for my eyes had filled with tears. She kept goading me. ‘ That’s right,’ she said, clutching her cheap plastic wine glass, a tinge of excitement having crept into her voice now, ‘she’s got cancer and she is going to die.’ Still no reaction from me. Finally, when the huge lump in my throat subsided and I could speak, I said softly, ‘ Thanks. I’ve suspected Mum was sick but I didn’t know how sick. Now, thanks to you, I do.’ There was silence for a while, and then I went home.