by Robert Drewe
To worsen matters, the rebellious miners were refusing to pay for the new mining licences the government had introduced.
With the police force overwhelmed and undermanned, the governor, Charles La Trobe, begged the Mother Country to send troops to maintain order and guard the regular gold transports to Melbourne. The British government responded briskly to the suggestion of endangered gold and lost revenue from unpaid mining taxes, and three months later Her Majesty’s steamship Jupiter sailed into Port Phillip Bay.
The Jupiter, 250 feet long and 40 feet wide, had been converted from a frigate to a troopship, enabling it to carry 500 soldiers and officers. There was also separate space for 150 women and children, even a lying-in ward for wives in childbirth.
In dispatching the Jupiter and the 40th Regiment of Foot to Australia, Britain had clearly decided that the soldiers and their families wouldn’t be returning home from the colonies any time soon.
One of those soldiers aboard was the fifteen-year-old, five-foot-five, red-headed infantryman Conor Cleary.
With Maori war chants still ringing in his ears and Maori shotgun pellets, too deep for the medic’s probing, embedded forever in his buttocks, battle engagement, never a pleasurable prospect for Conor, lost any faint attraction it might have had.
So two months after his disorderly-though-ordered withdrawal at Taranaki, Corporal Conor Cleary, married eight years and at age twenty-six already a father of five, responded positively to what was at best an under-a-cloud, sideways posting. He was assigned to the decidedly unglamorous (but far safer) position of assistant to the quartermaster at Victoria Barracks.
The quartermaster, Staff Sergeant Albert Moult, was a well-padded and flatulent Yorkshireman who kept his moustache imaginatively waxed. ‘We provide the guns, grub and gaiters,’ he informed Corporal Cleary. ‘Let me be clear, Paddy. We are the fucking ant’s pants. We are it. Without us, nowt fucking happens, not a fucking bullet fired, and the natives and their boomerangs could take back this country by Friday. I’m not enormously fond of the Irish so don’t agitate me. Your job is to ease my load, do the lifting, get the sizes reasonably accurate and make the fucking tea. Mine’s three sugars.’
Nine months later, defying the job’s essentially passive nature, Quartermaster Moult, while attempting some lifting himself, dropped a crate of regimental brass and webbing breastplates, heavier than he’d estimated, on his right foot.
The accident broke most of its bones, healing was slow, and complicated by the quartermaster’s weight and the onset of gangrene. Of the various artificial legs available after its amputation at the knee, Moult was provided with the prosthetic closest in length to the good leg, only an inch shy of the other, and invalided out of the army.
As the most knowledgeable substitute available, his deputy, Corporal Cleary, suddenly found himself promoted to staff sergeant, just a whisker below warrant officer, and responsible for the acquisition, maintenance and dispensing of weapons, supplies and uniforms for the military of the colony of Victoria.
He was feeding and arming the British now. Dressing them in their socks and under-drawers. Putting the potatoes and mutton in their gobs.
18
Mick decided he’d better snap out of it or he’d soon succumb to the old sadness. The depression thing. As they drove from Melbourne, Thea had warned him, ‘No moods today, please, Dad. Maudlin’s not attractive when you’ve had a few too many.’
For weeks Mick had keenly anticipated the prospect of having a few too many. If ever a weekend was the perfect opportunity for a few too many, this was it. He wanted a few too many right now. As Hugh was passing by, Mick grabbed his arm, hailed a passing waiter carrying glasses of cabernet sauvignon, and passed one each to his son and Cousin Doug.
‘Good speech and a great turnout,’ he told Hugh. It was pleasing to say this in front of Doug, whose only son, Marius, was a public servant in Sydney, some sort of arts bureaucrat. Opera? Ballet? Theatre? To Mick they all came with a confirmed-bachelor question mark hovering over them. Not a barrister or a doctor anyway. And obviously not family-focused enough to be here today.
‘Thanks.’ Hugh frowned at the rare paternal compliment. ‘Everyone pitched in.’
‘So you’re serious about the wine caper?’ Doug asked. ‘Fashionable as it is, what does a Cleary bring to this financially risky endeavour?’
‘We hope a wine with character, imagination and a strong sense of place.’
‘Sounds like you’ve already got the labels written, anyway.’
The meaningful pause, the eloquent silence, were two tricks from the barrister’s handbook. Hugh didn’t reply. He had his father’s view of Doug. He sipped his drink and nodded slowly.
Mick jumped in. ‘Fill Doug in on your year. Several landmark cases, if I remember. And the High Court appearance.’
‘The Federal Court, actually.’ Hugh was already glancing over their heads. ‘Pretty dry stuff. A tangle of state versus Commonwealth balls-ups to unravel.’ And still no fucking QC! ‘I don’t want to bore him.’
‘A modest barrister,’ Doug said. ‘That’s one for the books.’
‘Yep,’ said Mick. ‘Thea’s the barracks lawyer of the family.’
‘She sure is,’ Hugh said.
‘On top of her international medical expertise,’ Mick added, in case his cousin had forgotten. ‘Saving lives overseas.’
Doug ignored the opportunity to praise Thea’s commendable good works and gave a matey punch to Hugh’s departing shoulder. ‘Hugh, how many lawyers does it take to change a light bulb?’
‘Depends on how many you can afford, Doug. Good to catch up.’ And he hurried off.
‘Good answer,’ laughed Mick, gulping more wine. Amid this onrush of feeling, the usual frank, if sentimental, recollections abruptly intruded. Hugh’s and Thea’s success was because of Kath’s influence. He’d willingly ferried Thea to ballet, sure, and the boys to sport and music lessons, but the real child-raising had been left to her while his mind was on the bank and the Tigers.
Kath’s insistence on serious study, on intellectual pursuits, on reading, debating, drama, and especially the midweek television embargo, had caused buckets of tears over them missing popular shows they’d heard about from friends. But her policy had reaped dividends, he could see now.
He regretted the man he’d been at forty, a total stranger to him these days. The knucklehead who when asked a question during a board game after a fondue dinner at Jim and Judy Bullock’s – Truth and Lies, or some such popular ’70s pursuit – whether he’d rather a hypothetical child became prime minister or a football star, the Richmond centre half-forward position had sprung instantly to mind.
It started lightly, humorously, but as the game and drinking progressed he’d got caught up in it, and opted so vehemently for this imaginary son’s football career, one that his own sons would never have, all that resentment pouring out (‘Isn’t this bloody game about telling the truth, for God’s sake?’) that after a series of fondues – the greasy, cheesy, melty dinner-party dips so modish then – the party had abruptly divided on gender lines over the port, the women showing surprisingly savage solidarity (meek housewives like Judy Bullock and Anne McNamee he’d known for decades changing their personalities and shouting, ‘Why a son? Wrong question! What about a daughter as prime minister?’), and had soon disintegrated, the men reloading their glasses and growling that this wasn’t the point.
‘Jesus, girls, we didn’t make up the rules of the game. This is all because Germaine Greer’s back in town and stirring all you women up.’
The party broke up, and although he’d softened his stance on the drive home (‘It was just a board game, Kath!’) she hadn’t spoken a word all weekend.
The apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree with Thea.
Of course Kath had been right about the kids. Even in Simon’s case, when it was clear he was no student like his brother and sister, there had been the music lessons she’d insisted on. And he’d su
cceeded at that, too.
No matter how things had turned out, there was no denying that. Oh, the sharp memory of ‘Chopsticks’, of the little Beatle-fringed tyke at the piano, frowning and thumping through ‘Für Elise’ and ‘Ode to Joy’.
And of coming downstairs one morning to the tune of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ and seeing Simon pounding away at his daily practice. A narrow ray of Yarraville industrial dawn streaming through the window onto his pyjamaed son. Sooty dust motes floating in this beam of sunshine. A warm, happy sound. A family sound.
Half an hour later, as the boy ate his breakfast toast, he noticed SIMON carved deeply through the varnish and into the walnut surface of the piano lid.
‘Why, Simon?’ was all he could say to him between slaps.
His face was so white his freckles had disappeared, but he didn’t cry. ‘I don’t know.’
He’d read somewhere that no matter how much love and effort you put in, one of your children would be a mystery to you from the day they were born.
Look at him now, Mick said to himself. Just take a look at my loony son. He was standing mute at the edge of the festivities, staring into the distance like a bemused kid. Staring at what? Thinking about what? His surroundings, everybody, everything, Australia, the world? He looked like an aloof tramp, an old vagrant, but his brow, his manner, were as calmly unselfconscious as a four-year-old’s.
Strangely peaceful. Like he used to be at four, when he was playing with his imaginary friend. John Johnson, he called him. More than just Simon’s pretend playmate, John Johnson was his son’s crony, his confidant.
His identical twin, apparently. ‘He looks just like me and likes the same stuff,’ Simon explained happily. Even then he realised his older siblings Hugh and Thea did not resemble him, in looks, interests or habits.
Although John Johnson was a very capable imaginary boy he sometimes needed help doing complicated things, like climbing stairs while carrying a glass of water. Simon hadn’t appreciated the occasion his father teased him while John Johnson was doing so.
‘Oops, I accidentally bumped John Johnson,’ Mick joked. Just a bit of fun. The staircase at the bank residence was steep and winding. ‘Oh, no, John Johnson’s tumbling all the way down. And he’s spilled his glass of water!’
John Johnson was inconsolable. And so was Simon; his tantrum was fierce that day and his friendship with John Johnson soon faltered and faded away.
Some months later another imaginary friend – Dinko – came on the scene. As Mick walked Simon to kindergarten one morning the boy pointed out a maroon Ford station wagon parked nearby every day. ‘That’s Dinko’s car.’
This time Mick wasn’t going to tease or say anything that a sensitive imaginary person could construe as mean. ‘OK. Tell me all about Dinko.’
‘Dinko and his parents are shopping in the supermarket. They’re buying eggs and carrots and shampoo.’
Mick really enjoyed their morning walk to preschool, just the two of them, father and youngest child, a nice start to the day – and he felt fond of Dinko, too. After several weeks of hearing the same story, he remarked amiably, ‘Dinko and his family must really like eggs and carrots. And have very clean hair.’
Simon didn’t mention Dinko and his parents again. A week later, noticing the maroon Falcon was absent, Mick wondered aloud about the family’s whereabouts. Simon was holding his hand and jumping over the pavement cracks, avoiding the pavement bears. He didn’t look up.
‘Dinko’s house burned down,’ he said. ‘They all burned to death.’
Now barbecue smoke smeared Mick’s glasses and when he took them off to polish them, the Cleary family celebrators spread before his eyes in an idealized panorama of multicoloured connecting dots just like the coloured specks in those TV commercials for Bunnings Warehouse that ran in the football season, where all the capable-looking hardware-store employees with their authentic hardware-store faces and competent bulky bodies, and their hardware-store red shirts and green aprons, and evident ease with hinges and shovels and paint thinner, and their working-class and migrant accents, like nails rattling in a can, became miniaturised into tiny
blurred specks that blended into the company’s name.
Would Kath have enjoyed today’s sweeping vista of family? For about the thousandth time, the contrasting visualisations of a smiling, contented Kath and a quizzical, frowning Kath rose up and then, as usual, plummeted to his usual reflection: how he’d never considered he’d be spending such a long retirement without her.
He and Kathleen Darmody were junior clerks together at his first branch at North Brunswick. When his promotion to Clifton Hill came through, and despite the two branches being only minutes apart on his bike, he’d missed Kath Darmody’s daily office presence so much, her wide-eyed glances and shared cups of morning tea and Devon creams and the whiff of her Arpège as she counted banknotes, fingers flicking as brisk as a Mississippi card sharp’s, that he’d doused himself in Old Spice to propose to her, and given up his Malvern Star racing bike for his first car, a second-hand Morris Minor.
Their married years always came back to him in a succession of bank postings (and cars, too: Holdens after the little blue Morris), with a child born in three different branches. First, Thea in Clifton Hill; then Hugh in Heathcote, in central Victoria; and then a gap in beachside Frankston where Kath lost two babies in early pregnancy, and they thought that was it for them and children, physically and emotionally, Kath taking it very hard, before he gradually edged his career back into the suburbs of Melbourne, via Cheltenham (another miscarriage) and then Bentleigh, where Simon, the thunderclap child, came along and surprised everyone, weighing only 4 pounds, and yellow with jaundice, for the first month squirming like a little squirrel monkey in his humidicrib. All the kids raised in the identical two-storey red-brick manager’s residences in the main street, above and behind the shopfront, the tellers’ cages and the big Chubb vault.
And finally there was the sideways posting to working-class, heavy-industrial Yarraville, where the bank abutted the butcher’s shop and Kath complained that the residence’s dry and sooty garden so lacked energy and sun warmth that nothing grew in the exhausted urban dirt except some weary, barely-pink hydrangeas that she eventually revived and transformed to mauve with aluminium supplements, and where the view from the main rooms was a huge and unnerving trio of cartoon animals’ heads: a smiling bull, pig and sheep nestled together in meaty livestock harmony on the dividing wall.
The leather-hooded abattoir men resembling medieval executioners who shouldered carcasses past his entrance every second morning, as well as the customers tracking sawdust from the butcher’s floor into his tidy bank, soon hinted to Mick of some sort of dire conclusion hovering at the Yarraville branch. And one Friday morning in July, the event he’d always fearfully anticipated, the longest five minutes of his life, actually happened. The armed robbery.
Although banking legend had it that every branch manager experienced one some time, and no one was injured, and the bank’s insurance covered the stolen nine grand, and they eventually caught the wasted desperado shooting up the last of the proceeds in a wintry St Kilda laneway, his hands still covered in indelible ink from the marked notes, head office by no means saw the armed robbery as either inevitable or career-enhancing. And then Mick’s own personal robbery was followed by the CBA takeover and forced retirement.
What a month of shocks that was! Not least because the bank robber, a jockey-sized specimen with a fleshless face, was wearing a Richmond beanie.
‘Boy, that was rubbing salt in the wound!’ A bitter joke he’d tell people later. Much later.
Kath hadn’t once protested about the constant uprooting and moving. Or the effect on him that Friday morning of the junkie’s shaky pistol pointing at his head. Of watching the man’s face for what seemed like hours, staring at his sallow cheeks with the teardrop tattooed under an eye. From the description, the cops guessed who the bank robber was. ‘You’ve been robb
ed by a well-known spineless prison bitch,’ they told Mick.
Did that mean he shouldn’t have been terrified? For his staff and, yes, himself? His skin twitched for twenty-four hours after. He couldn’t forget his staff’s stunned faces, the poor girls ashen and sobbing, and two regular customers, Merv Neuman from Neuman Panelbeating and young Angela Mirmikides, the greengrocer’s daughter, lying face down on the floor. Merv and Angela trembling among the rolling, spinning coins Angela had brought to change. Angela crying for her mother.
Afterwards he wasn’t worth a cracker and took the offered sick leave. They went on a holiday, just the two of them, without the family for the first time in twenty years. And maybe it was their nervous state after the hold-up and the work tensions, but they were strangely shy with each other, as if they were new and hesitant friends. Not a young couple, of course, still fifty-eight and fifty-six, but people watching their restaurant manners and bathroom noises, and not yet lovers.
The coast. The ocean. Potential tsunami territory. But the robbery drama, the changed banking circumstances, had altered his attitude to everything, and for the first time since Krakatoa: East of Java at the East Hawthorn Rivoli he accepted the beach.
They’d driven north to Lennox Head in northern New South Wales. Peaceful and quiet, 7 miles of ocean beach called, sensibly, Seven Mile Beach. Not a glitzy beach like the Gold Coast but ordinarily suburban in its sobriety, lack of coastal glamour and holiday entertainments.
Here the surf rolled politely to shore and any potential tsunami anxieties were gradually allayed by the ocean’s sedate rhythms, by the pelicans squatting plumply on the electricity poles, by the ibises and water dragons stalking the cliffside parks for sandwich crusts, and the cappuccinos and blueberry muffins Kath suggested in the sunshine every morning. A placid beach suburb with nothing to do at night but eat Chinese or fish and chips, visit the local pub for a couple of drinks and then stroll back to watch motel television to the steady background throb of the breakers.