Brother Fish

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘What about the feathers?’ Steve, ever the practical twin, asked.

  ‘What feathers?’ Alf replied.

  ‘If them mutton-birds plopped into the frying pan they’d have feathers on them,’ Steve correctly pointed out.

  ‘Oh, those feathers! I see what you mean,’ Alf said, scratching his head at a momentary loss for an explanation, but soon recovering. ‘Have you heard of people being frightened out of their skin?’ The twins nodded their heads. ‘Well, with mutton-birds it’s the same – they’re frightened out of their skin, only with them it’s their feathers because they’ve only got feathers for skin. Well, with the terrible fright they get, all them feathers fly into the air and they’re blown away in the wind and there they are ready for frying, lying on their backs with their toes in the air, lard sizzling in the ole frying pan.’

  ‘Oh yeah? So what about the guts?’ Steve asked.

  ‘Delicious! When you’re hungry, mate, that’s all part of the meal.’

  ‘Even the poop bag?’ Steve persisted, while Cory giggled.

  ‘Delicious! It’s filled with these little prawns and baby crabs all mashed up somethin’ beautiful – fried in the lard pan, you couldn’t eat better,’ Alf said, licking his chops in an exaggerated manner.

  ‘Yuk!’ the twins would chorus joyfully.

  But cray fishing in a small boat was anything but fun. Alf would be out for a week, with no radio on board to tell anyone where he was. Bass Strait is treacherous water, and it was hell on the family. Often a sudden gale would blow up, the wind howling over the island and the rain hitting the corrugated-iron roof like lead sinkers striking down. If you put your ear to the bedroom door you’d hear Gloria sobbing, not knowing if she’d ever see Alf again.

  But this venture didn’t last long – the dinghy was too small, and Alf couldn’t place sufficient pots to bring in the catch and make a decent living. There was no mother ship to unload his catch onto on a daily basis, so he had to keep the crays in the coff all week and bring them all in at the same time so they got to the co-op still alive.

  In just over a year Alf had paid the bank all but ten pounds of the original loan, but after the fortnightly repayments there was precious little left and we were worse off than when he’d worked on one of the big boats. Alf had his pride, and even during the Great Depression he’d been a good provider and wasn’t someone who gave up. He probably secretly knew it couldn’t last, but couldn’t bear to be seen to fail. Just bringing in enough cray to survive was a credit to his seamanship and skill as a fisherman. The dinghy was in reality no more than something you’d use for a bit of weekend cray fishing and couldn’t hope to cope with a week or more out at sea or to bring in enough to support a family and repay the bank.

  Then Alf only just survived a bad storm and had to walk two days through the bush to get home. The dinghy ended up on the rocks badly damaged, and he lost most of his pots and fixed-gear flag line, so Gloria finally put her foot down. No more cray fishing, or she was taking the kids and moving out. It wasn’t just that she was having difficulty making ends meet – she’d have washed more sheets and scrubbed floors until she dropped if she could’ve fitted more hours into the day – but she was scared she was going to lose Alf. She was afraid that he’d become just another memorial plaque on the wall of the Anglican church. Although, even though Alf was Anglican, she would probably have opted for the Catholic church, which had its fair share of plaques as well, because Father Crosby would have done a better oration than the Reverend John Daintree. The Anglican minister was known as ‘His slowly dying, never retiring misery’, and even then was older than Methuselah.

  Reverend Daintree had taken to rambling disconnected sermons and had long since lost the plot, so that only the old people who were profoundly deaf turned up of a Sunday morning. Sometimes you’d hear the church bell going on a Tuesday or a Friday morning. If you were foolish enough not to know any better and, thinking something might have happened, went around to have a look, what you’d see would be the silly old bugger delivering his rambling, confused sermon to an empty church, having mistaken the day for a Sunday.

  Nobody complained, as he could still do a passable christening and funeral, though he’d usually forget somewhere along the line who he was burying, even to the point of changing the gender of the deceased. Both christenings and funerals often attracted a bigger crowd than they might normally, there to see how he would manage to screw things up. For instance, when he buried old Murtle Barnes, who’d been one of his parishioners for fifty years, halfway through the funeral service he turned her into a turtle that had died in a barn. He assured everyone present that God loved all creatures great and small as much as He loved all of us – that he felt privileged to be burying one of His slower-moving creations, as he was having trouble getting about himself. He then admonished everyone for keeping turtles in barns when it was as plain as the nose on your face that the order Chelonia had webbed feet and belonged in ponds, where the dear creature wasn’t slow-moving at all. Then he commended Murtle, the supposed turtle, to the grave: ‘Dust to dust, ashes to ashes and turtles to water.’

  With the dinghy wrecked, Alf had the opportunity to quit with honour and take back his old job on one of the bigger boats. It took him another three months to pay the last instalment to the bank, which charged him interest because he was six weeks late with the final three payments.

  Of course things were a bit different now that Jimmy and I were contemplating going into the cray business. All the boats had transceivers, which were usually army-disposal radios from World War II and weren’t all that crash hot, although a damn sight better than nothing at all. The fishermen complained bitterly when radios were made compulsory – the fact that a two-way radio on board might save their life meant very little against the notion that the Tasmanian Fisheries Department had imposed a survey fee for a radio network.

  Jimmy, as usual, did as much homework as possible, and looked into the business of crayfish and the possibility of doing our training on one of the bigger commercial cray boats and eventually working for ourselves. He even came up with the idea of flying crayfish from Flinders Island to the mainland and from there to the States. I told him it was a crazy idea – who’d be mad enough to go into such a venture? Jimmy thought for a moment. ‘Plenty pilots left from da war and Korea. We buy us a C47 war surplus – you calls dem Dakotas – and we in da busi-ness, Brother Fish.’

  ‘You’re mad, ya bugger!’ I told him. Not only were we thinking of becoming cray fishermen off our own bat, a big enough leap in the dark, but now we were also into aircraft! It was too big a step for my imagination to embrace. There had never been a McKenzie who was self-employed except for Alf’s short and ultimately doomed cray experience, and possibly my grandfather – who, when you think about it, never really worked at all, except as a failed gold prospector, ne’er-do-well gambler, sometime professional harmonica player, small-time con man and lover and spinner of tall yarns. The rest of us, on both the Kelly and the McKenzie sides, had always ended up with some boss calling the shots and deciding how our lives would be led. Now Jimmy was proposing to send crayfish halfway round the world in our own aircraft.

  With the exception of having to work for someone in order to learn the ropes, I vowed I’d never work for anyone else again. Jimmy felt the same way. Apart from nearly three years becoming street-poisoned he’d been in institutions almost all his life, the only respite being the short spell with Frau Kraus. When you added the army and the prisoner-of-war experience, we knew we were both through obeying orders and taking any more crap from some bastard whose job you could do better than he could. Making enough to get by was just about the extent of my ambition, but Jimmy was beginning to see things differently.

  At one of their discussions, Jimmy mentioned to Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan that he’d be returning to the island after he had taken his discharge from the army. She’d acquired a little grey Ford Prefect, and that night she called around and asked if I’d
accompany her on a drive as she had something she needed to discuss with me. We drove down to the headlands, where she parked. She chatted all the way about this and that, though mostly concerning the woes of running a weekly newspaper with what she referred to as a bunch of ‘dunderheads’ for staff. Once we stopped she was silent for a while. It was a near-full moon and the great orb ran a silver path across the sea, seemingly all the way to South America. Finally, she said, ‘James tells me he’s thinking of returning permanently to the island.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. He likes it here a lot,’ I replied, then added, ‘There’s nothing for him to look forward to when he gets back to America.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t talk about it much, but every once in a while he says something in a discussion that makes you wonder about his past.’ It was then that she hit me with a bombshell. ‘What about the White Australia Policy, Jack?’

  ‘The what?’ I asked.

  ‘Australia won’t accept James as a migrant – he’s Negro.’

  ‘Surely that can’t be possible!’ I said, laughing. ‘We fought together in the same war – they can’t ignore that!’

  Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan remained silent again for quite a while, and the longer she remained silent the more I started to panic. ‘Let’s hope you’re right,’ she finally sighed, then turned to look directly at me. ‘Jack, we need to know the extra facts. Would you mind if I sourced the actual statute from Canberra?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘If we’re going to fight for James we need to be thoroughly acquainted with the law,’ she said in her typically firm way. ‘We have to know it chapter and verse.’

  I wasn’t listening, my mind elsewhere, thinking about what I owed Jimmy. ‘But, but . . . if it hadn’t have been for Jimmy I’m certain I’d have died more than once – doesn’t that count for something?’ I bleated lamely. ‘Besides, Mr Menzies is dead against communism, and Jimmy fought against communism. Surely that counts for something?’

  ‘Perhaps, Jack.’ She could see how confused I was. ‘That’s the very point – we need to know a lot more. I’ll get straight onto the wire service tomorrow.’

  ‘What shall I say to Jimmy?’ I asked, feeling a hopelessness beginning to take hold of me. After all I’d said to him, after all we’d been through together. In those frequent times when I hadn’t thought we were going to make it, Jimmy had always been there for me. ‘Brother Fish, we’s

  gonna make it! I’m gonna have me some yo’ mama’s cray stew. Ain’t nothin’ gonna stop dis nigger!’ How could I tell him he was unwelcome in Australia – that we had a law, a special law, that effectively branded him as inferior to us?

  I thought of Johnny Gordon, who had been even more one of us than we were ourselves, who’d died beside me in the deserted Korean village, and the story of his grandmother, who only became ‘white’ once a year on Anzac Day. Of Johnny himself, who’d ultimately given his life for his country yet hadn’t been allowed in the RSL Club when he returned from the Second World War, his chest blazing with campaign ribbons. My heart sank. If there were people around who could do that to Johnny and his grandma, then the politicians in Canberra could ban Jimmy. I’d already made up my mind to go and see Johnny’s grandma and tell her what a great bloke he was.

  However, deep inside I kept telling myself, Jimmy’s different, he’s an American! They wouldn’t do it to an American. But then I recalled Jimmy’s frequent references to racism in the army – in fact, almost everywhere in America. It seemed most Americans would understand and accept our White Australia Policy.

  Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan reached for the starter button. ‘I suggest we say nothing to James at the moment – let’s first see what we’re up against, Jack.’ I can’t recall any conversation between us on the return trip except for a single sentence: ‘Nothing in life is immutable – eventually the walls of Babylon fall down.’ There must have been something else said but I was too shocked to remember anything but this single sentence. She dropped me at the door. ‘Remember, say nothing, Jack,’ she advised. ‘It’s much too early to start jumping to conclusions.’ Then she drove off.

  Steve walked out onto the verandah. ‘Her tappets need looking at,’ he said.

  But, of course, I’d long since jumped to conclusions and barely heard Steve’s remark. I didn’t sleep a great deal that night and every once in a while when Jimmy cried out in his sleep I’d feel the anxiety rise in my stomach.

  The very next day a letter arrived with my name and our address handwritten on a Government House envelope. I opened the single sheet of paper to see, apart from the embossed type at the top of the page, that it too was written in a strong, clear hand.

  Rt. Hon., Sir Ronald Cross, Bt, KCVO

  Government House

  Hobart

  2nd February, 1954

  Dear Private McKenzie,

  It would give my wife and me a great deal of pleasure to welcome your immediate family plus your three friends to Government House on the 25th of February. I look forward especially to meeting your American comrade-in-arms.

  Please rest assured that the gates will be thrown open for you to enter and we will have sufficient tea and cake for the occasion. Furthermore, I look forward to hobnobbing with you all.

  Yours sincerely,

  Ronald Cross

  Governor of Tasmania

  The following day a letter from the personal secretary of Ronald Cross, Mr Mathews, arrived with invitations inscribed with each of our names, plus a free travel voucher for eight people. Gloria was overjoyed, but immediately smelled a rat when I showed her the letter from the governor. ‘Why has the governor written that last bit?’ she asked suspiciously.

  ‘What last bit?’ I replied, acting innocent.

  ‘About the gates being thrown open and having enough tea and cake to go around, and the hobnobbing business. You read us your reply when we got the letter and it didn’t say anything about who was coming and tea and cake or the gates and hobnobbing,’ she said accusingly. ‘What’s going on?’

  There was no point in lying – Gloria was too tinny and the news was good, anyway. So I produced the letter I’d written to the governor asking for clemency. ‘Otherwise,’ I concluded, ‘I for one wasn’t going to turn up for the ceremony without my family.’

  ‘Quite right, too – they could stick their ceremony up their backsides!’ Gloria suggested, as I’d predicted she would. ‘Ronnie Cross, the governor, seems like a good bloke,’ Gloria admitted. ‘Perhaps he’d like us to play for him?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Mum – they’ll probably have a quartet,’ I said, my heart taking a sudden jolt.

  ‘Well, we can do better than that – there’s five of us!’

  ‘Classical music, Mum.’

  ‘We can play classical music,’ Gloria persisted. ‘“Ave Maria”, “Danny Boy”, “O Sole Mio”.’

  ‘Probably Mozart,’ I replied, trying to settle the question quickly.

  ‘Oh, him! Well, I beg your pardon!’ Gloria sniffed.

  I thought that was the end of it – Mozart was pretty formidable competition for a harmonica group. The next day Gloria went up to Mrs Dunne’s shop and bought a photographic frame and framed ‘Ronnie’s letter’, as the governor’s letter became known overnight, and added it to the mantelpiece above the stove. At tea that night she said, ‘I’ve been thinking.’

  We all stopped eating, except for Jimmy – but when he saw the look on my face and my fork poised halfway to my mouth, he stopped too. Whenever Gloria used the dreaded ‘I’ve been thinking’ words, there was usually trouble of one sort or another on the way for all of us.

  ‘We’ll take them anyway. You never know, do you?’ she said.

  Twenty-four hours had passed since the Mozart quartet conversation.

  ‘We’ll take what?’ Sue asked.

  ‘Our harmonicas, of course!’

  There was a howl of protest around the kitchen table. ‘Mum, it’s a
vice-regal occasion – there’ll be all sorts of people there!’ By this she knew I meant posh people, not our sort of folk.

  ‘It’s not the first time, you know,’ Gloria pointed out. ‘We’ve played there before.’ Then she added tartly, ‘Well, at least the Kelly side of the family has.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Mum?’ Cory asked, thoroughly confused as usual.

  ‘Government House. Mary Kelly played the harp for Lady Jane Franklin – not just once, lotsa times. They were called soirées them times.’

  ‘Mum, Mary Kelly was a convict!’ Sue protested.

  ‘So? Does that make her a bad musician?’

  ‘No, but it’s not exactly the same, is it?’ Sue persisted. ‘We’re guests.’

  ‘Can’t see why it’s different. She was a guest of the British Government. They used to send a soldier to fetch her – Jacko’s a soldier.’

  The logic escaped us all. ‘Mum, she was invited to play. We are not!’ Sue said emphatically.

  ‘I didn’t say we were going to play. Just to take our harmonicas. We haven’t performed off the island since Alf’s disgrace ban. We’re bound to find somewhere to play, and it will be the first time Jacko has performed publicly with us since he went to Korea.’

  There was a palpable sigh of relief and we all began to eat again. There was always somewhere to play – a pub on the way to Hobart or somewhere else. We were a professional enough group to know we’d be welcome in almost any place where ordinary people congregated. Besides, I think we all quite liked the idea of taking our music off the island again. To do so was symbolic, a part of the act of lifting the disgrace ban. I could sense that we were all happy we’d reached a compromise we could live with.

  ‘Well, at least we won’t have to paint our faces and arms black with Kiwi boot polish like the time we did for your Al Jolson concert,’ Sue said, remembering the disastrous experience.

  Gloria chuckled. ‘I’ll never forget your father escaping to the pub halfway through the concert, running for dear life, melting Kiwi polish streaking down his dear little face and neck.’