I had a lot in common with Seamus O’Rourke. We both had mild speech impediments – he lisped, I now had the stutter – and we were both completely uncoordinated at ball games, ‘un-co’ as it was then called. However, if I was alert for my age, Seamus was seriously intelligent and a true bookworm. His father was a mail sorter on trains that went to Moree, his mother a wonderful, warm hen of a woman, always making sure we had enough to eat, always an ice block on a hot day. Seamus was also the youngest like me, with five elder brothers and sisters, all sixfoot-something and all with fiery Irish red hair and freckles.
His eldest brother, Dan, was at the time very much into late John Lennon. Not ‘the late’ John Lennon – this was before his death in 1980 – I mean Lennon in his post-Beatles stage. This was clear from the wall posters in Dan’s den, a place it was a real honour to enter. Most striking was that one of Lennon with granny glasses, conspicuously short spiky hair, denim jacket and the white armband saying ‘A People for Peace’.
Even at the time, there was something powerful about Dan. He was a teenager and, in the 1970s, teenagers commanded respect. They seemed a sort of royalty, in fact. I don’t quite know how, but at an age when I couldn’t yet spell let alone understand concepts such as revolution, challenge to authority, social conscience, or ‘now’ generation, you could feel something in the air around these young people. Something noble. Whether or not this mood was a hangover from the youth protest movement of the late sixties, I was obviously too young to be aware. (In the ‘Summer of Love’, I was but a gleam in my father’s eye.) Teenagers of the seventies simply exuded it. You could feel it. Something so very exciting and for the better. I wonder if kids look up to teenagers in this way today?
I felt at home with the O’Rourkes. It was an environment I understood, the parents being just as devout as my own, if a little more so. The first time I stayed over at their house, going to sleep I noticed that those odd, green plastic statues on each bedside table were actually glow-in-the-dark figurines of Jesus Christ.
Religion
I think we were the single Catholic family in Howard Place, except maybe for the Jacksons next door, but they weren’t ‘practising’. For that matter, I suspect my parents may have been the only residents of Howard Place who voted Labor, the vast majority being Liberal voters as well as something called ‘nominal C of E’ or ‘Church of England’, although the Church of England kids never seemed required to go to actual church like me. Lucky bastards. Stayed home and watched cartoons on a Sunday morning for all I knew. Sarah from next door never had to go, so I could never understand why she was still so adamant about being Church of England. I don’t think she ever really knew why either. She just was, ‘and don’t you forget it!’
So, with the exception of us and technically the Jacksons, Howard Place was White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. There were certainly no Asians in the street. There was only one Chinese family in my whole primary school, and I envied Timothy Chan simply because he was. At the time, there was a popular local rock band called ‘Hush’ whose lead guitarist, Les Gock, made being Chinese a really cool thing as far as I was concerned. Besides, I was lucky; my parents brought me up to be the opposite of xenophobic, their attitudes possibly helped by the fact they’d spent the early years of their marriage overseas. In any case, children aren’t racist by nature, are they. It’s something they’re nurtured to become.
Directly across the street from us lived its oldest resident. Clive Simpson was an elder in the local Presbyterian church. He fixed my slot car set for me one day and explained in the most clear and accessible terms why its electrical system had been going wrong. In World War Two, he’d been part of a Royal Australian Air Force team that had pioneered new world developments in radar whilst fighting the Japanese.
One Anzac Day, he was working in his front garden and my mother asked him why he wasn’t in the city, marching. He stopped, leant on his rake handle, looked at Mum and replied, ‘You know, Barb … I think it’s time we forgot about all that.’ During his long career in the electronics industry, he’d been very greatly respected by the Japanese executives with whom he’d dealt. I once saw a plaque they’d presented to him, its engraving honouring Simpson-san ‘for big service’.
Mr Simpson was, like most of the street’s residents, a conservative man, yet I suspect he’d seen a few things in his earlier life that set him apart from them: death, mutilation, disease. The horrors and waste of the Pacific War, the loss of mates. He never spoke about these things to me, but there was a special tolerance in his eyes when he talked, a quiet wisdom in his voice.
John Howard was seen in Howard Place from time to time. Of course, he wasn’t Prime Minister back then, merely treasurer under Malcolm Fraser. He was on his way through, pressing the flesh with other eagerly aspiring Liberals in our street.
He wore the same polyester, powder blue safari suits as them; yet, unlike them, ‘Johnny’ made it out of Epping, last known address: Kirribilli.
Even at age seven, I was aware that the previous Prime Minister, a big man called Gough Whitlam, had been sacked for some reason. Whatever that reason may have been, it was clear to me that most of the parents in Howard Place were smiling about it. Seamus O’Rourke’s big brother wasn’t, though, nor was my sister Frances. She came in from uni one night and told us she’d been at a ‘demo’ that day where she’d found herself yelling out, ‘We want Gough! We want Gough!’ with thousands of other teenagers.
Around that time I remember Mum pointing out a man on the ABC news who she said she thought would be Prime Minister one day. I didn’t think so. He looked too scruffy. His name was Bob Hawke and he was the head of something called the ACTU, which I assumed stood for ‘Australian Capital Territory Uranium’. They were always talking about uranium on the news, as was Frances. I wasn’t quite sure what it was except that it was a bad thing, so one night I went into Frances’ room for a chat while she did her homework.
‘Frances … what’s uranium really?’
‘It’s a thing they dig up out of the ground called a mineral, and it’s very dangerous.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because they make the Atom Bomb out of it.’ ‘That kills lots of people, doesn’t it?’ ‘Yes,’ she replied, pointing out a poster on the back of her door. ‘Under one of those.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s called a “mushroom cloud”.’
She fished in her desk drawer and gave me a red-on-yellow coloured badge saying: ‘Ban Uranium Mining’. The next day I pinned it on and wore it to school. Poor Mr Hawke. Mum said he was good man, but given the whole uranium thing, I didn’t like his chances for the future.
Mum
She and I must have argued about twice in my entire memory, not because she avoids conflict, but because with Mum, a disagreement never really has the chance to become an argument. Then, as now, there’s nothing that can’t be worked out, no mutual agreement that can’t be happily reached, no Heaven and Earth she wouldn’t move to help you. It would seem that the majority of women of her generation were expected to become typists, teachers or nurses, but only as a prelude to marriage. My mother worked as a typist until she married. She and women like her should have become diplomats.
One day during school holidays, we were having a game of ‘sneak-ups’. The main rooms in our house at Howard Place were adjoining in a way that you could literally chase each other ‘around the house’. The game had been going on for about fifteen minutes on and off, I’d snuck up and caught Mum a few times, she’d caught me a few times, it had been great fun. But after a while, somehow I thought the game was finished. That is, until Mum caught me, ‘Boo!’ from around a corner, and I was so taken by surprise that I let out a completely involuntary ‘Fuck!’ – and loudly. This froze us both in our tracks. I wasn’t even eight yet, and swearing was still very definitely taboo and a seriously punishable offence. She’d never heard anything like this from me before. To say ‘shit’ within your mother’s earshot was unthinkable; to say ‘the F-word’ in close
proximity to an adult was punishable by death, presumably, and I braced for it.
But this darling woman didn’t punish me for it, she didn’t even caution me. She just giggled, albeit a little secretively. She knew I hadn’t meant it, I’d just blurted it out with the shock of my unexpected capture, so I wasn’t in trouble. I was saved by her sense of fair play and, to this day, I have never met a person more gracious, more completely just and reasonable.
Her parents had been battlers, had almost no education and both worked full-time, so Mum had to spend her early years being minded at neighbours’ houses or by relatives who, by Mum’s own admission, didn’t really want her there. Her father, Ray, suffered from ill health and, despite an impeccable character, struggled from job to job during the tail end of the Depression, even selling vacuum cleaners door to door. His one suit was so worn that it became shiny. At least it matched his one pair of shoes, which he shined every night. These never had holes as every few months he would glue black rubber retreads onto the soles which, when filed down to the shape of the shoe, did just fine. He also took good care of his nails and cuticles, filing Mum’s for her with a kind and determined smile.
When he sat in the backyard on Sunday afternoons, he wore an old hat; or rather, the top of an old hat with the brim removed for some reason. For ventilation, he’d made two small holes in it. Into one of these, Mum would place a flower.
Ray, Jose and Mum had lived in a crappy extension at the back of someone else’s house in Lane Cove. Evidently built in the days before ‘council approval’ had been invented, it had no inside toilet, a ‘sort-of’ kitchen, and Mum certainly never had her own room, just a corner where she kept her ‘dress-up’ things in paper bags. Still, with these she would transform herself into Carmen Miranda and put on all-singing, all-dancing floor shows for her mum and dad after tea. It was these insecure, uncomfortable conditions that turned her into the type of woman she is. A woman whose first instinct is to make all those around her feel at home.
I used to stand by her as she sat at her make-up table mirror before she and Dad went out to functions of an evening. Blonde and with the blue eyes she gave me, she looked so pretty. Picture a cross between Grace Kelly and the girl-next-door. No, it wasn’t a model’s beauty she possessed but the beauty of one who’s always smiling. And her perfume smelt so good.
Dad
My father was, and still is, a stern man. He is also the only man I have ever known to be completely devoid of any sense of personal vanity, caring nothing about his appearance, his clothes, nor for the expensive possessions or status symbols which he could afford. Despite being a cultured man and a medical professional, he was devoid of any associated airs and graces. When I was very young, and naturally wanting to imitate him, I observed him one night as he continued to pick his nose on entering a room full of guests. I promptly started picking my own. What a role-model!
In addition to picking my nose freely and with abandon, he also taught me never to call ethnic kids ‘wogs’ or to waste things (certainly never a good bogey)! I took his words seriously and was vigilant about turning lights off when not needed. Even when small, I was quite conscious that electricity cost money and that Dad was working to earn that money and pay the bills. He taught me to be considerate of others and I think I was, at least by contrast to my sister Bridget who demonstrated a pathological need to have every single light in the house blazing, even during the day. I think she was trying to get a tan inside. (Evidently, not having a chocolate brown tan in the seventies was a criminal offence, so I suppose Bridget’s extra effort was understandable.)
Though I respected her chronic need for my eyelids not to be blinking too frequently and that I maintain a monastic vow of silence in the house, Bridget would play music so loud in the bathroom that she could hear it right over the primitive hair dryer perpetually blasting in her ear. Oh, and she also didn’t like the fact that I opened windows on hot days – little things like that. Don’t breathe near her was another. In church, I found regular solace in the words, ‘Blessed are they who suffer, for they shall be comforted’.
Dad could be a hard man, and no wonder. From a long line of what you’d call ‘the stubborn Irish’, he became not only captain of his school but dux, made the First 15 and 11 and only, he insisted, out of pure hard work. And I can believe him. His grandfather had been a school teacher in Ireland but had to work on the railways in Australia where his qualification was not recognised. His father had done the same, rising to the lofty heights of stationmaster. These were the Irish Catholic poor, possessing little except the respect of their street, their pride, and their railway punctuality. Hence with my father, being anything but ahead of time is as good as being late, being on time is less than acceptable and actually being late is a capital offence. (It is conceivable that Dad started with State Rail before dentistry but was fired as all his trains ran early.)
Ironically, it was from this Catholic man that I received my introduction to the ‘Protestant Work Ethic’. Fit, sinewy and with wiry black hair, his idea of a relaxing day off was labouring in the garden from dawn till dusk.
One thing I learnt never to be by Dad’s example was homophobic. I think my father would have been sunk if I’d grown up a homosexual, but he’d been a dentist in the Royal Australian Navy during the 1950s and had had many gay men as his dental assistants. On one occasion, the ship’s Chief Petty Officer – God Below Decks – gave one of Dad’s assistants a hard time, and openly. My father, as an officer, though only a short-service commission one, outranked the man and told this career prick in no uncertain terms that unless he apologised to the gay man and promised never to do it again, Dad would put him ‘on report’. This would have seriously damaged the Chief’s career and he did as he was told. If ever there was a closed circuit of a place to grow up, it was a cul-de-sac called Howard Place. Luckily for me, I never learnt prejudice from Dad. Because prejudice loves a closed circuit.
Sometimes I think such a disciplined man as my father could have done worse than to have stayed in the navy. In fact, he only gave up certain promotion to Lieutenant-Commander to marry my mother, for in addition to this natural Spartan feeling no cold, hunger or fatigue, he was always a sailor at heart. Despite living an altogether modest existence out in North Epping, Dad’s one self-indulgence was his racing yacht, surely enough the kind of self-indulgence that demanded nothing less than endless carpentry and maintenance. Aptly had he been named after Saint Joseph. Personally, I would have loved a lemon squash at the Sydney Amateurs Sailing Club on the way home (as Dad was a member, we were entitled to it), and the clubhouse was such a pleasant looking place. To Dad, however, a yacht club was a place you passed through where yachts were mended.
On our slogs around Sydney Harbour, I constantly saw where the rich dentists lived, and also the ships of the Royal Australian Navy. Ever pressing Dad to tell me about them and his earlier life on them, he would dismiss them as a waste of taxpayers’ money, pronouncing, ‘The Australian Navy puts on the world’s best cocktail party. That is all.’ Though he’d topped his initial training course on the pistol and machine gun (gaining a perfect score with no previous experience!), Dad abhorred firearms and emerged as my first ever example of a pacifist and ‘small-L liberal’.
Dad’s pacifist stance may have stemmed from what happened to two of his navy mates. They were two shining young stars with whom Dad went through officers’ college, except he would graduate as a surgeon-lieutenant, they as naval aviators – ‘fly-boys’ as they were then called. These young men were brilliant sportsmen with tons of personality as they were highly intelligent – they had to be to become flyers. They were, in fact, the ‘top guns’ of the 1950s. Even air force pilots will concede the higher skill/danger levels attendant to taking off and landing on the confined space of an aircraft carrier, especially as it’s pitching and rolling on the surface of the open ocean.
One was a pilot, one a navigator, and together they flew something called a ‘Fairey Firefly’,
sort of like a Spitfire built for two. One day the navigator hopped out, Dad hopped in and took off from the carrier HMAS Sydney, the pilot firing rockets at a target tugged along on a cable out the back of the carrier in a simulated anti-submarine attack. After experiencing high G-forces in the screaming pullouts from several dive attacks, they then did an arrestor-hook landing back on the carrier.
Dad had great times with these blokes. Picture three young men having a beer out on the town, immaculate in navy uniform, the world their oyster. I imagine they broke a few hearts. In time Dad’s friends were posted to England to bring back a stateof-the-art anti-submarine aircraft called a Fairey Gannet. The next thing Dad heard of them, they’d been killed in the process. Fifty years later, there was still emotion in his voice as he told me: ‘Two delightful young guys wasted in peacetime.’ I’m not sure if it was related to their deaths, but from a very young age, Dad always urged me to be utterly careful with fire and flammable liquids.
Though I relate all the above about him in one go, Dad only revealed such details of his remarkable experiences over the course of decades. (‘High G-forces’? ‘Screaming pullouts’? These weren’t Dad’s words, only the technical facts he admitted to when I pressed him.) That’s Dad’s way, modest to a fault, certainly in expression.
One day while racing his yacht, it was speared by another yacht and sank to the bottom of Sydney Harbour. When he got home and told us what had happened, his tone was as if he’d merely had a flat tyre driving home: They knew where it was, they’d be getting divers and a maritime crane in the morning, what’s for tea, Barb?
Dad hadn’t whacked me, he’d just driven to work the morning when, much younger, I’d painted his hub caps pink. Either he considered me too young to know better or that I’d only done it to please him. Whichever the case, I suspect he may have derived from the incident the inspiration for some of his own very special work on the car, as we shall see, at which time my claim regarding his complete lack of personal vanity will be demonstrated as no shit.
Goodbye Crackernight Page 5