‘With this egg, I will devise an omelette to rival the culinary orgies of Ancient Rome.’
The Munsters and The Addams Family gave us our first notion of the Gothic, The Addams Family being some of TV’s finest comic writing ever, also the era’s supreme example of alternative-thinking social satire. For this bourgeois family, good was bad, bad was good, black was white. Who will ever forget Gomez’s delight at blowing up his train set? But you may not recall one episode: the show opens with Morticia sharing her husband’s thrill at the lead-up to the inevitable rail disaster, yet she is shocked when, after he pushes the TNT plunger, Gomez is, for once, clearly dissatisfied.
Morticia: ‘But, Gomez! I thought it was one of your finest wrecks!’
Gomez: ‘Aw, I dunno, Tish. Sometimes I think you’ve seen one train-wreck, you’ve seen ‘em all.’
Morticia: ‘Gomez! How can you say such a thing?!’
Gomez: (whispering ashamedly) ‘Sometimes I almost wish they’d miss.’ And we were privileged to all this as kids. The successors to these shows in recent years have, of course, been The Simpsons and South Park. Yes, kids love them (they’re cartoons), but you have to be thirty-something to get the majority of the jokes.
The Hand-me-down System
Music was becoming something really important to me and becoming so in the nicest possible way. John Vandermark was handed down excellent pop music from his older brother, Willem. John handed it to my brother and my brother down to me.
In 1978, music didn’t come on CDs or from MP3s downloaded off the Internet. (In 1978, the Internet was just a thing used by two blokes in America.) Music came on a 7-inch disk made out of black vinyl and called a ‘single’. These disks were then played on something called a ‘record player’.
Putting up the Christmas tree year after year, I’d progressed from ‘keep him away from it’ to me putting the whole thing up, my sisters by now having better things to do. Pat’s sole contribution was to agonise over what music should be played during the ritual. David Bowie fitted the bill a few years in a row on those hot, hot summer days. His rich, mournful sounds seemed somehow tailor-made for the impossibly heavy December atmosphere of Howard Place. The baubles might go on to, say, Deep Purple, the tinsel to Led Zeppelin, my final placing of the Christmas fairy atop the nylon tree coinciding with the genius guitar string plucks of one Mr Carlos Santana. I will be forever grateful to my brother for introducing me to such monumental sounds.
Early every Sunday evening, Countdown aired on ABC TV. This program marked the end of an era when pop music shows featured, rather than big-budget music videos, the actual band up on stage playing their song. Unbelievable, but in an age before the video sold the song, the music had to. And, in this twilight before MTV, Australian bands were heavily featured. They were miming to a prerecorded soundtrack, but the vocal was live and their visual performances were worth the price of admission alone. We saw Skyhooks, Sherbet, Hush, Marcia Hines, AC-DC with Bon Scott, The Ted Mulry Gang, John Paul Young, Jon English and many more – all brilliant music.
One song at the time had a profound effect on me. Specifically, it made me jump around the room uncontrollably. It had such a distinct quality to it, like nothing else on the radio, the guitar riff sounding like a cross between a saxophone and a buzz-saw. After hearing it on the radio a few times, I was careful to jot down the title and band on a piece of paper. It was called Satisfaction by a band called The Rolling Stones.
Convinced that liking the latest pop music made you more attractive to the opposite sex, the next day I marched up to a lovely young student teacher I was keen to impress and asked her whether she liked this song, certain that my doing so would show her just how groovy and up-to-the-minute I really was. I didn’t know the song was from 1965!
‘My, my, Justin, but you are the very hipster!’
We’d had Sing Sing Sing again in Fourth Class, but I’d been keenly aware that the selection of songs wasn’t as good as the previous year. Yes, I was reflecting as early as Fourth Class that Third Class had been a golden age.
Chapter Eleven
Siii-lent Night …
On Christmas Eve, Howard Place was the site of carols by candlelight. One night every year, Mr Simpson’s prize possession and envy of the suburb, the Yamaha Family Organ, was wheeled out of his living room and onto his front porch.
The first time he’d played it for me, I’d done my best not to wince. I’d failed, but he hadn’t seen my reaction as he played. It had fifty different ‘tackiness’ settings, each rumba/bossa-nova percussion option more awful than the previous. I don’t know how a musical instrument can be embarrassing just to listen to, but this one managed it.
When he finished, luckily he interpreted my gobsmacked expression as me being deeply impressed. Instead of ‘Well, I’m not even ten yet and that was hideous’, I forced out, ‘Amazing!’ which he interpreted as in ‘amazingly good’. (If Mrs Smith had had such a machine, I’d have emigrated.)
On Christmas Eve, however, the Yamaha Family Organ seemed anything but an instrument of torture. A gun organist from the local Presbyterian church was even roped in. People flocked from miles around to Mr Simpson’s front lawn directly across the road from us, hundreds from all over the suburb. I walked down our driveway into Dreamland, the night warm and still, aglow, the hum of many voices converging. To this day, a string of coloured light-bulbs takes me back there.
By my tenth year, though, I noticed that attendance numbers were starting to wane. Local kids were growing up, moving on from this annual ritual they’d long held so dear. Perhaps the older kids were beginning to find singing Rudolf The Red-Nosed Reindeer a little nauseating. It’s nothing but a banal tale of a whole bunch of bitchy, bitter, downright cruel bloody reindeers who gang together to isolate one of their number because he’s prettier than them. Then Santa turns up and says how pretty the victimised one is, causing the bastard majority to do an instant and completely fickle back-flip, as one proclaiming their undying love for Rudolf. If I’d been Santa I’d have given them all a damn good slap, sacked them and replaced them with some nice reindeers! I can’t imagine what lesson generations of children derived from this carol exactly, but the ‘group’ of boys I so despised by Fourth Class seemed to have adopted it as their moral mandate.
That year I burnt my finger in a hole in the lawn that somebody had just filled with hot candle wax. Maybe this was some delayed-action karma punishing me for having told Sarah from next door that Santa wasn’t real. I’d been three. Mrs White had been really mad at me about that.
‘Yeah, thanks a whole lot, Justin.’
My Special Old Girl
That Christmas, for the first time ever our house had become too crowded with overseas guests for Josie to have a bed on Christmas Eve. Though in all honesty I’d have preferred waking up in my own home on Christmas morning, I volunteered to stay with Josie at her flat on the night of Christmas Eve until the morning when we’d be picked up and brought to Howard Place. Only then could the day start. I heard Josie insisting to Mum quite anxiously, ‘Now, Barb, I don’t want you opening a single present till I get there.’ For, more than anything else in her simple life, Josie needed to be part of things. Maybe I was her ‘special boy’ as she knew I was aware of this in those years when her Christmases were numbered.
The strange urgency with which she needed to live life, to be part of it all, may have stemmed from when she was a young woman. She once griped to me about how people had considered her younger sister, Nell, the more beautiful. But Josephine had been the ‘natural’ beauty, make no mistake about it, and she’d been admired too! I saw the tear in her eye when she told me about her sweetheart who had not come back from the First World War. She was seventeen when he was wasted and when her lifelong aversion to history began. She told me she hated history.
‘It’s good for nothing,’ she vowed. ‘All full of old buildings and dead people. What d’you want to know about all that for? What good does it do you?! It’s go
ne, past.’
At ten, I knew that was a childish statement. I didn’t tell her I knew it, as I loved her too much. As a child, I’d never felt closer to any adult than I had to Josie. And never had we felt more bonded than when I was staying over at her flat. That year, although it had been my idea to stay with her on Christmas Eve, I had a conscious feeling that I was putting myself out for her. Also a new, secret sense of guilt that I felt that way.
New Year’s Eve!
That year, I was granted a stunning personal freedom with no precedent. It was New Year’s Eve, and I could stay up! And in my play-clothes too, not just pyjamas like for Midnight Mass! For the first time in my life, I found myself emancipated from that nightly bondage of ‘time for bed’, that dreaded daily death-sentence: Clock on the wall of the Criminal Court strikes 9 o’clock. Father puts on black cap of capital punishment, the look in his eyes pronouncing my imminent doom …
I wonder why it is that children so hate being sent to bed at night? Adults savour the release it gives them from the day, waking up hours later reluctant to leave a haven of cosiness only ever bettered by the womb. Fear of the dark aside, I can only imagine this childhood repugnance was due to an all-engrossing need to ‘be part of it all’. Perhaps it was because in childhood our energy was infinite and hated to be shut down. Whatever the case, being sent to bed was the ultimate punishment, the ultimate dissuader from bad behaviour that my parents could wield against me, just as solitary confinement is the worst punishment the prison warden can deal short of death row.
But on this night, I was set free. And not only could I stay up, Frances said I could go berserk into the bargain! With impunity! Apart from firing ball-shooters at speeding traffic, no holds were barred. The moment I became aware of this delicious prospect (‘You mean I can …’), I grabbed Sarah White and, armed with pots and pans and heavy ladles, we rampaged down Howard Place and the streets surrounding making a noise that could be heard from the moon, my body burning a lifetime’s adrenaline in a single hour.
On my return, with his Hanging Judge’s hat firmly donned, my father examined the pot I had been using to raise hell and insisted that I had ruined it.
‘Look. You’ve ruined that.’
I looked closely at the pot. Then back up at him. Then down to the pot again. It had hundreds of tiny dints in its base and around its interior, but I hadn’t made any holes in it – it would still work perfectly. It wasn’t even bent. Why’s he saying I’ve ruined it when I haven’t? I looked up at him again.
‘No I haven’t …’
‘Go to bed.’
For some strange reason, the ‘ruined’ pot wasn’t thrown out that night. Nor the next day. Nor the next week. This cheap aluminium implement was, in fact, still in constant domestic use at least a decade later.
The only downside to New Year’s Eve was the annual melancholy that followed it. The month/date readout on my Timex digital watch had reverted to ‘01/01’. Now the monthly build-up all year to the magical ‘25/12’ would have to start all over again.
Bugger.
The End of the Seventies
One thing that definitely said how cool I was was my digital watch. Frances had backpacked around Europe in late ‘78 and had brought my Timex home as my present. All the way from London, it was the last word in exotic. Indeed, digital watches would become an icon of the next decade, the decade of the silicon chip when wearing a watch with actual hands would have been like arriving at school in a horse and cart. In 1978, a digital watch was what every kid desperately wanted and I was the first ever kid in my class to have one.
Joe Bashir had sat at the desk in front of mine. His big, smiling face would turn around and ask me the time a hundred times a day just so he could look at it. I would miss that smile in the new year; for, though it was customary for St Mary’s boys to transfer to Marist Brothers Eastwood for Fifth Class, for some reason Joe’s parents were sending him elsewhere. If only he’d been there for the magic moment when my Timex had changed from 1978 to 1979! I went around to his place on New Year’s Day and showed him the ‘01/01’ readout. He took all afternoon getting over it.
The new year did bring good things, though. For one thing, more of Steve; Juliette had ‘dropped’ him on Boxing Day. Some other boy. Steve seemed almost relieved. That summer holidays, we spent almost every day together, down the creek, riding our bikes, and on some really long rides too, one time starting before dawn and going as far as Pennant Hills. It was as though he was making it up to me for lost time.
I didn’t ask him much about Juliette and their time ‘together’. They’d gone back to being ‘just friends’, and that was enough for me. I might have asked more, if I hadn’t been so quietly elated; I’d regained an old friend. It felt so reassuring, this return to normal, just being boys and doing boys’ things. I was scared of the future, of girls, but feeling happy enough in the moment to pretend I wasn’t. I suppose I was in a state which, these days, you would call denial.
I saw more of Juliette in the new year too. I kept being sent over to her place for tea, our parents having now entered into a reciprocal childminding arrangement. I wish to God they hadn’t. Nothing to do with Juliette – it was the food!
Changing Tastes
Tea at Juliette’s was agony. There I had the pleasure of sampling a menu that should have died with the Great Depression. Juliette’s dad liked tripe and her mum just loved to cook it for him. Juliette’s dog lived in seventh heaven on a diet of smuggled lamb’s fry, steak and kidney pie, corned beef and mashed potato with raw onion in it, good dog. Whereas I would actually swallow this stuff, good Jussy, Juliette worked a highly efficient system for its disposal. Her parents usually ate while watching the news and, though Juliette was allowed to eat with them in front of the TV, she always elected to remain at the kitchen table under which she used to secrete significant portions of the food directly into her dog’s mouth. The animal knew he’d been extra good when his master parted with her favourite … crumbed brains!
At Howard Place, Sundays meant the Sunday roast, which was always held at lunchtime. In a famous account by seventies chef, Margaret Fulton, one Sunday morning she was driving the long mountain descent into Wollongong and realised she was coming down into a haze. Though it wasn’t air pollution from nearby heavy industry; it was the sickly-bland, fatty fog of a thousand Sunday roasts in the oven.
I loved having lunch at Joe Bashir’s where his mother never served up anything from the same planet as the Anglo Sunday roast. Luckily I was soon able to convince Mrs Bashir that my constitution did not require Aussie toasted sandwiches! This having been established, I may have been one of the first Anglo-Australian kids ever to lay eyes on something called ‘tabouli’. I’d never seen or tasted a salad like it, so tangy and delicately salted. But even better, the meat they barbecued on Sunday afternoons didn’t need tomato sauce (?!) It was already tasty, a fact confirmed when, in 1979, my sister Frances took my family to a restaurant called ‘Abdul’s’ in Surry Hills for the first time …
It was unlike any restaurant we’d ever been to. The first thing that struck me was the decor – there wasn’t any. This didn’t sit at all well with my grandmother, who didn’t consider a restaurant a restaurant without white tablecloths.
Frances ordered for us – she had to; we didn’t know what hummus was, let alone babaghanoush, kafta or kibbeh. The food quickly arrived and was so intensely delicious that I felt as if I was eating for the first time. But perhaps most amazing of all was that you didn’t even need the meat dishes; the vegetables were so delectably spiced with cumin, garlic and paprika that they could stand on their own, a concept completely foreign to 1970s Anglo-Australia. In our nightly ‘meat and three veg’, the veg was for fibre, not flavour. Luckily for us, Frances was at Sydney Uni and finding out about such extraordinary places.
The fact that Joe Bashir’s mum had offered me ‘Australian’ food initially spoke volumes about Australian society of the seventies. Running the corner sto
re and sandwich bar, her customers were nothing but plain-eating Aussies and she intended to stay in business. In the same way, the Greek community in Australia ran the local fish and chip shop or hamburger bar and served up precisely the opposite of their own supremely flavoursome diet. They’d clearly done their market research and knew that the Anglo-Australians expected their food to taste of very little.
By the age of eleven, flavour had become something really important to me and no wonder, given my exposure to the delicious fare first of all at Tessoula’s down in Melbourne and now at Joe Bashir’s home and at Abdul’s Restaurant. These experiences gave me my first notion of cultural contrast; for, to me, the flavour differential between these ethnic foods and ‘Australian’ food was colossal. When Juliette’s mother cooked the same Depression foods her own mother had – liver and tripe, for example – they came out tasting, unfortunately, like liver and tripe. In sharp contrast, when Tessoula had cooked the same things, she’d clearly said to herself, ‘Okay, the liver, she is inferior cut of meat. In old country we cooking her ‘cause we no got no choice. If we no got no choice, at least I make him taste good.’ Hence, when Tessoula cooked liver it tasted less like liver, more like garlic, oregano, lemon, chilli, salt and olive oil. It’s little wonder that in the English language, ‘tripe’ means ‘crap’. I assume, in Greek, ‘tripe’ means simply ‘tripe’.
Goodbye Crackernight Page 13