by Mark Dapin
More than one hundred people came to the service, most of them footballers. Many people loved him more than I did, and I felt as if everybody knew that. My uncle, my father’s brother, a bookmaker who had not played much of a part in my life, looked after my brother and me. My uncle was being kind, too, when he told me, ‘Your dad loved football more than he loved you.’
It meant I was not so bad. My dad and I were very different, and maybe he did not love me enough, either.
Then came The Thing That Changed Everything. Jo and I were living with two friends in a rented private house in the middle of a council estate in Coventry. Jo was much more practical, sensible and driven than me. She had a car and a job, and was studying for her professional social-work qualification. Our landlord came for a visit, and announced he wanted to sell the house. As sitting tenants, we were entitled to be offered the first option. We told him we had no money. He offered to waive the deposit, to simply tell the bank we had paid him, so we could get a loan for the rest of the mortgage. All we would need was 250 pounds to cover the solicitors and the conveyancing, but we did not even have that.
I was against buying the house, because it meant we would have a stake in capitalism, and I believed private property had a limited future – so Jo borrowed the cash from her sister and took on the entire mortgage herself. She kept the other three of us on as tenants, paying her a third less than we had given the landlord in rent. Eighteen months later, Jo sold the house at £25 000 profit. She gave back to our housemates all they had paid her in rent, lent money to her sister to buy a house of her own, and beautiful, selfless Jo split the remaining profits with me. I paid off my brother’s debts, and returned to Guy £45 I had borrowed – much to Guy’s annoyance; when I owed him money, he knew that the world was how it should be.
I had never had any cash in my life, and as soon as I got it, I wanted to spend it. We flew to Hong Kong, took trains through China, spent three months in Thailand, where we ate extraordinary foods and smoked opium in the hills. We met Guy in Bangkok, on his way to join his girlfriend, Lorraine, on a long trip to Australia. Pub-crawling Chris joined us for a while, too. We lingered in Malaysia, scraping curries from banana leaves, and rushed through grimy, pestering Indonesia, from Jakarta to Bali.
Seven months after we started out, we landed in Melbourne, consciously more confident, optimistic, open-minded and relaxed. We found Australia was all those things, too, and from the afternoon I saw a mob of kangaroos crossing the back paddock of my aunty’s farm in Victoria, I never wanted to go home again.
TWO In which I get a job, dwarfs get
thrown and a World War 2 bomber
gets found on the moon
I am not the person I used to be, but I remember who I was.
I loved to spend long nights in the snug of a dark Irish pub with a bunch of mates, talking harmless rubbish until closing time. Jo and D, two women who had little else in common, both told me they liked me best when I was standing at the bar, with a beer in my hand and a cigarette in my mouth, because that’s when I looked the happiest. Occasionally, in Coventry, my sadness would rise to the head of my beer and I’d come home and tell Jo how wounded and trapped I felt by everything – the city, the dole, our relationship – and I would wake up feeling like a murderer. I believed my disappointment was something I should keep to myself, because everything was bullshit so it should not matter.
My years of torpor were, in part, a genuine attempt to lead a moral life. I did not want to be party to anybody else’s misery; I would rather have left no mark on the world. I was very calm. Day to day, nothing much bothered me. I was unprejudiced and aimlessly well-intentioned. I believed every human life was equally precious – except my own. I wanted to help other people, particularly if it didn’t take a lot of effort. I could always get everyone laughing, because everything struck me as ridiculous vanity, a transparent con trick, a surreal sham.
When I was hospitalised after a drunken accident, the nurses invited me to share a cigarette in their office. They pulled my records from the filing cabinet – notes made during my nights in Casualty after I was kicked unconscious in the pit village – and across the top of my card was written ‘a very pleasant gentleman’. That was all I aspired to be, really.
I regret the time I lived in Coventry, because now I know you don’t have to stay in an ugly, hating place, so far from the sea. My time in Asia gave me back my life. When I came to Australia, I decided to start myself again, to rebuild from the base. I wore my sleeves rolled down, shed all but one earring, bought a sensible jumper, made up a CV, and started applying for jobs.
Jo and I moved into an apartment in Sydney, behind Kings Cross police station. Chris had rented a unit a couple of blocks away, and quickly started going out with a girl from the backpackers’ hostel next door. Guy’s around-Australia trip had turned into a disaster: Lorraine had gone back to England – where he was later to marry her – and for a while, he slept on our couch.
I was back with my mates from the old days, part of the big gang of backpackers, and I was melodically happy. King Cross was impossibly glamorous. The bars opened late into the night and had bouncers at the door and prostitutes in the street outside. I could walk around the corner and watch a band at the Kardomah Club in Kellett Street, although I never did. I could drink for twenty-four hours straight in the Bourbon and Beefsteak, and I did not do that either. If I had wanted to, I could have gone out at 4 am to buy a hamburger – but the urge never struck me.
Sydney was about possibilities and, within four days, I had found a job. The year before I left England, I completed a short course in sub-editing at the Polytechnic of Central London, and I suddenly found something I could do. Sub-editors write headlines, captions and introductions in newspapers and magazines. They check the journalist’s facts, spelling, grammar and syntax, and cut stories to fit into the spaces allocated in the layout. A sub-editor needs strong English skills, a knowledge of current affairs, and a sense of humour. These were my only three attributes in life, apart from an ability to open bottles with my teeth.
In my fabricated CV, I declared I had worked as a sub-editor on Keith the Terrible’s free paper. I went to an interview for a job as a proofreader, and told a gentle old South African called Jim that I was a sub-editor who had just arrived in the country. Impressed by my English accent, my newly sensible appearance, and my honours degree, Jim took me on. He had other reasons to hire me: we worked for the typesetting arm of a design company. The company produced packaging for cereals and soft drinks, but the typesetters had recently taken on a heavy load of magazine work, and my imaginary publishing experience would help me liaise with these unfamiliar clients.
In those days, most designers and journalists did not use computers. Typesetters keyed in the copy, set the line lengths, loaded the correct typefaces, and added their own errors. Proofreaders were employed to check the typesetter’s work against the client’s submission. Proofread and corrected columns (‘proofs’) were then sent back to the magazines’ sub-editors.
At first, proofreading seemed a sedate, gentlemanly profession. I read in silence in a room with South African Jim and another South African, also called Jim. The two South African Jims were separated by personal and political differences. Each South African Jim felt he was the more professional and ethical of the two. One had left his homeland because the blacks were oppressed; the other, I think, because the blacks were not going to be oppressed for much longer. South African Jim-tension hung like a dangling participle in the reading-room air, and each was more comfortable talking with me than with the other. They were friendly, gracious men, with pride in their craft. Old Jim was in his fifties; young Jim perhaps twenty years younger. Both seemed settled in their jobs for life. Both were gone within six months.
The company was based in Surry Hills, where most of the typesetting trade squatted around the small publishing houses that spread out from Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd’s headquarters in Holt Street. There were at
least four typesetting businesses on our street, three pubs and a club. They sat among shreds of the rag trade – garment houses, importers, outlet shops and a few stubborn manufacturers – in the shade of the brooding, apparently empty warehouses that dominated the district.
Typesetting used to be a man’s trade. The type was something real that you could hold in your hand, and had to be set, character by character, on metal slugs in a bed of hot lead. The hot-metal days, when letters danced above the baseline like musical notes, had ended when the old technology was replaced by phototypesetting equipment.
Phototypesetters sat at computer terminals that looked like a 1960s space opera’s imagining of the workstations of the future: small screens in big frames, with heavy keyboards and glowing type. The system’s engine was a large and mysterious machine that contained families of fonts (typefaces) on big, rolling drums. There was still an element of physicality to type: when the phototypesetter needed to change fonts, he would sometimes have to change the drum.
I knew nothing about proofreading, beyond what I had learned on the sub-editing course. I photocopied a list of proofreaders’ marks from the back page of a dictionary, and hid it under my desk while I worked. The days were languid and interesting and I was seduced by the minutiae of typography, the arcane lore of the print trade. I was delighted to learn to distinguish one font from another, to identify families of type, to optically gauge point-size and leading. I loved mark-up, the now largely lost language of communication between sub-editor and typesetter. I felt I had finally found an honest job, a quiet vocation with an inherent dignity – but that craft was already disappearing.
In pubs such as the Excelsior or Forresters on Foveaux Street, I drank VB with readers and operators from other companies, and shared the dark whisper that the industry was doomed. It was rumoured that a barely trained schoolboy with an Apple Macintosh could do everything we could do, without the hulking machinery of bromide printers.
We knew newspaper journalists could already create fully laid-out pages themselves. The technology they used was fantastically expensive, but it had mated with what were then called ‘home computers’, and given birth to a voracious bastard that would grow up to devour us all, desktop publishing. Operators would be eliminated by programs like Ventura and PageMaker, and proofreaders would be replaced by spell-check functions. I could not gauge how much was half-drunk alarmism (typesetters were always half drunk) and how much was a sober assessment of an industry in decline, so I occupied myself with moral questions instead.
Among the publications we typeset for Century Publishing was a bizarre weekly magazine, The Picture, which I suspected of being reactionary, with its peculiar cast of very fat people, topless women, talking animals and dwarfs. I was uncertain if I should work on The Picture. I asked my typesetter friend, the magnificently named Phil Snoswell, if he had any reservations about setting a magazine that included pictures of semi-naked women. He said it was all work, and he did what he was told. I presumed this was the way real workers behaved.
The Picture gave me an introduction to the reality of magazine publishing, although The Picture’s reality was tinged with many kinds of madness. I visited the office every day, to pick up and drop off copy, and I spied on the sub-editors’ desk with covert fascination. In the office, we rated each sub according to the clarity and completeness of their mark-up. Privately, I studied every story, absorbed its special vocabulary, and took it 28 sex&money apart to see how it worked. The design of The Picture reflected its cocky, undisciplined journalism. The magazine’s artists compressed type until it screamed, squeezing out legibility for visual effect. Giant forced italics were splattered across gaudy collages of unlikely photographs, appalling typesetters and proofreaders alike.
The Picture was a sub-editors’ magazine – although the sub-editors were called staff journalists. Most of the stories were written by the subs, usually surreally reworked from copy supplied by syndication agencies. The editor of The Picture was a man named David Naylor. I knew him only as a balding, vaguely avian head hovering above a partition, seen from behind a window. Naylor had come to Century from Kerry Packer’s publishing company, Australian Consolidated Press (ACP). There, he had been editor of People, an enormously successful, bawdy, ‘barbershop weekly’ that competed with Australasian Post, which specialised in outback yarns that got more worn and leathery, dry and dusty, with each passing year.
The barbershop weeklies were the thumbed, creased and often lacerated magazines that lay scattered across vinyl-upholstered chairs in every Australian barbershop. The barbershop was a place of boys and men. If a father had no other domestic duties, at least he had to take his son to get his hair cut. In the whole sorry history of postwar father-son relationships, no boy had ever felt his hair was long enough to be attacked with scissors, razor and clippers, and no man had ever considered his son’s hair so short that it would not benefit from a little tidying up around the ears.
Generations of young males waited in dismal line under photographs of the Queen, breathing cigarette-smoke air soured with acidic cologne. Their only comforts were the magazines, forbidden at home but somehow permissible in this world without women. They spoke of bloody crimes – slashings, stabbings, mutilations, decapitations – all of which could have been committed by barbers. They warned of a dangerous universe, populated by hostile visitors in flying saucers and man-hungry, homicidal sharks. They whispered of sex, and fed countless confused fantasies.
David Naylor grew up fascinated by the barbershop weeklies, and started work as a sub-editor on what was then titled Pix-People in 1976. Pix-People had come to share the news values of the British tabloids. It ran stories about the topless beaches of St Tropez, and volleyball and grocery shopping in Queensland nudist colonies. A story was anything that could be run alongside a photograph of a woman’s breasts – or, at a pinch, a shark. Amid unlikely ads for foolproof racing systems burned the torrid flames of ‘Case History: “I am a Nymphomaniac”’, ‘Wives Who Sleep Around’, ‘Sex And Girls Who Live Alone’, the chilling ‘Bad News About Sharks’, and the men’s magazine mainstay, ‘Amazing Beer Diet: Drink And Lose Weight!’
The covers showed bikini tops slipping in the summer, winking nipples to keep the boys quiet while they waited to choose from the chart of a dozen identical hairstyles.
Naylor was made editor in 1982, by which time People was entirely owned by John Fairfax Ltd – also the publishers of The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Australian Financial Review. People used to print a large picture of a girl in a wet t-shirt, and a smaller insert of the same woman topless. Naylor’s first innovation was to reverse the order of the two photographs. When Naylor took over, People’s circulation was around 140 000. Four years later, it stood at 250 000. Naylor had decided People would become ‘a larrikin’s magazine’. It would stand for larking about, mucking around, blokes getting their boots dirty doing things the Aussie-bushie way. It would be in bad taste like farting through your sister’s wedding vows, or shearing her groom on his bucks’ night.
In a nation split between Rugby League and Australian Rules Football, Naylor saw a chance to unite sports lovers behind a single code: dwarf-throwing.
Dwarf-throwing began in 1985, as one event in an ironman contest for bouncers at the Penthouse Nightclub in Surfers Paradise. The club’s manager, Robin Oxland, had hoped to stage a jockey-throwing match, but no willing jockeys could be found. Dwarfs, traditionally restricted in their employment opportunities to tagging along behind Snow White or being fired out of a cannon, were easier to recruit. Four hundred people turned up to watch Queensland doormen competing to toss 124 centimetre dwarf ‘Wee Robbie’ Randell across the dance floor. A proud Aussie record of ten metres was established.
An outraged member of the European Parliament introduced a private member’s bill condemning Australia. In the US, an attempt to beat the ten-metre record was scheduled at O’Sullivan’s Public House in Chicago, but law officials said dwarf-throwing c
ould not be promoted without the proper permit – and no such permit existed.
When Naylor heard dwarf-throwing had reached England, he approached Oxland and said, ‘Let’s have a Test series between Australia and England, and decide once and for all that Australia is the superior dwarf-throwing nation. We can have a big conference, play ‘Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go’ and burn a copy of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, tip it in an urn, and that can be the Ashes.’
They needed other events to pad out the bill, so Naylor came up with the idea of dwarf-bowling. At first, he had hoped to grease the dwarfs and slide them down a lubricated alley to knock over a bank of tenpins at the end, but it did not work in rehearsal. It was difficult to propel oiled dwarfs, so they strapped them to skateboards instead.
The first Test was held in a Brisbane nightclub. The thrown dwarfs were pitched at mattresses by straps around their bodies. The point where their heads landed was deemed the official distance thrown.
The Brisbane Test was to be followed by events in New South Wales and Victoria. England was represented by Lenny the Giant, an Anglo-Indian nude balloon dancer from Birmingham, who weighed 44.5 kilograms – a whole 11.5 kilograms lighter than Australian dwarf Trevor Gray.
The New South Wales Police Minister said the effort was in bad taste, and New South Wales Licensing Squad boss Superintendent Robert Jones warned, ‘Licensed premises that hold dwarf events will place their licence in jeopardy.’ Victorian police also threatened to act against participating venues.
The Little People’s Association of Australia expressed outrage, but Naylor said, ‘Nobody has the authority to prevent dwarfs and their throwers from pursuing their chosen sport.’
Naylor chose to emphasise the element of skill in the spectacle. ‘The dwarfs have to know how to keep themselves in flight as long as possible, and also how to fall short when it’s the opposition’s turn to throw them,’ he told the SMH. ‘Not every dwarf can do it,’ he added, unconvincingly.