The Sparrow Garden

by Peter Skrzynecki

  On my left, before I enter the driveway, is the split-slab hut with its louvered glass window high on the front of its V-shaped roof — the hut where I played under a corrugated iron roof, cobwebs, inside its walls lined with harnesses and ropes, among tables stacked with oil containers, funnels, cans, bags of concrete, pieces of machinery, tools and farming implements. A pair of metal scales hangs from one of the rafters. Peter will later inform me that the hut is the old Bartley’s Creek shearing shed built in 1871 as a hay shed.

  Outside stands a red combine harvester, a tractor, a fuel tank on a metal stand and several forty-four-gallon drums. There’s the smell of dryness and dust that only a wooden hut like this can have. Gum trees grow to one side, huge trees whose bark is stripping. There’s also the separate smell of diesel near the drums. Further back are shearers’ huts that look like the small schools I once taught in. They’ve been joined together and create an elongated shape. There’s a chimney at the front, its top crumbling, again an image out of Australia’s past — perhaps the kind of dwelling that one of Henry Lawson’s characters might have lived in, or Lawson himself.

  Peter and his wife, Pixie, greet me at the door and formalities are exchanged. Peter explains and apologises that he couldn’t be interviewed earlier in the week because of his involvement in the campaign for the National Party in the forthcoming state election.

  I’m shown around the house and not long afterwards their son, Jason, joins us for lunch. At one point I remark about the guns on a rack on one of the walls. I describe the target practice that I witnessed down by the creek, past the tennis court, with the three boys on a day when my mother brought me with her to the property. I remember the pungent smell of gunpowder, turtle doves flapping in trees, the white tails of rabbits bobbing, escaping among tussocks. Before lunch, while walking around the property, we visit the tennis court that is now a brown sheet of hardened dirt, like a floorboard, a steel roller standing at one end, propped against the cyclone-wire netting, its perimeter fringed with bleached yellow grass. Among tall trees, not far away, is where the target practice took place. The sky’s a pastel blue, light as shallow water, without a cloud in sight. Birds flit and sing among the trees; they sound like finches.

  After lunch, Peter and I retire to the drawing room. He broaches the reason for my visit and says he doesn’t mind being interviewed.

  He begins speaking immediately and says it was one of the first times they’d used the circular saw. They didn’t know much about it or how to use it properly. Andrew was on the handle of the machine. Peter’s account is told in a quick voice: the cypress pine trees; the wind that blew back on the blade; the blade jamming and then becoming free, “coming out in a big arc”; Peter turning around and getting cut behind his knees. We talk a little longer and then he ends, almost abruptly, like a businessman or politician speaking.

  I tell him how I discovered the incident as a news item on microfiche, but not in the newspapers because all the copies from 1951 were missing.

  The topic of conversation changes to a strong memory I have: the name of the small black horse I’m sitting on in a photograph taken on the property. The same horse that threw me. Was it Pig?

  Peter says the horse was called Dodger because he’d dodge his head around when anybody attempted to put a bridle on him. He was also called Pig because he became fat.

  He shows me his collection of books. We speak about our favourite Australian poets and he proudly displays his collection of Will Ogilvie volumes, tells me that Ogilvie worked and lived in this area. We share our memories of who studied what for the Leaving Certificate examinations and discover our subjects and results are similar.

  When it comes time to leave I give them the gift I brought and request a photograph, as I did with the other two brothers. They agree and stand before a climber rose, itself outlined against the dark green and pink of the homestead, Pixie in a pink blouse, Peter in a blue shirt, his arm around her. One is smiling, the other laughing, both so happy, like teenagers in the sunlight, green grass at their feet.

  I feel no regret in driving away from the property. There’s a lightness, a feeling of relief, in a sense, that all the interviews have been completed. What each brother said has helped me to understand the events of that day in May 1951. Whatever buried images the events have revealed, whatever disturbances they caused, subconsciously and consciously, perhaps now, with these explanations, they can be laid to rest in peace. I remember the headlines that I copied down in the library earlier in the week:

  FRIGHTFUL INJURIES IN CIRCULAR SAW ACCIDENT

  TWO LADS SUFFER SEVERE LACERATIONS

  The memory prompts me to make a detour to the library before returning to the motel. To my surprise, I’m informed that the toner for the photocopier hasn’t arrived yet from Bathurst. I remember promising Mrs Dziuba I’d return and take some photographs. Also, I have a gift for her, a small doll bought in one of the gift shops.

  As I turn into Russell Street I can already see Mrs Dziuba in her garden, on the footpath in the centre, facing the street, her three Pomeranians snapping at the air, barking at the stranger who has returned briefly into their lives to say goodbye.

  That evening I drive out to the Radio Telescope with Anthony Boys, a friend of my son. Anthony is working in the Forbes-Parkes area, selling calculators; earlier in the week we’d made contact and arranged to meet. Afterwards we eat in the restaurant at the Bushman’s Motor Inn. It is good to have company from Sydney.

  Trying to get to sleep under that vast central-western night sky, I imagine the souls of my mother and father somewhere among the galaxies of stars, moving on, among creation, bodies free of illness and pain, minds free of memories.

  10 Mary Street

  I am running down a dirt road of stones and gravel; long paspalum weeds grow on either side and they have black sticky ends so that the seeds attach themselves to skin and clothes. The dirt of the road has been packed hard by cars and the timber lorries that deliver logs to the three-ply factory in Bellona Avenue, just around the corner from where I live.

  There are vacant blocks of land between the houses, land covered in paperbarks, wattles, blue gum and prickly scrub. On the western side of the street, behind our house and the five others, runs Duck Creek; it is full of bulrushes and wild fruit trees grow along its banks — peaches, lemons and sour oranges. Duck Creek was named after the brown ducks that fly up from the water; they quack loudly when you surprise them and they have emerald green, black and white in their plumage.

  Between these houses and the creek is an uncleared tract of land, a council reserve, too narrow to be built on and which has never been cleared since we moved into the street. Blue-tongue and frill-necked lizards live there; so do black snakes. Blue cranes and kingfishers live along the creek, as do other birds that belong to Sydney’s undeveloped suburbs — peewits, magpies, cranes, doves, sparrows, blue wrens, willy-wagtails, kookaburras, silver-eyes. Totally overgrown with trees, weeds, blackberry bushes and white moth plants, the area is our playground, our Garden of Eden. We build our cubbyhouses there, our bonfires. There we play chasing and hide-and-seek. Any game that we can think of that will take us away from our homes and into the freedom and camouflage that such an environment gives us. By “our” I mean the small gang of children that is running down the street with me — or, rather, of which I’m a part. We run as one. We are yelling, calling out, shooting capguns and arrows into the air. Some of us are cowboys, others are Indians, girls and boys alike, whooping in the afternoon sun that is pouring down the street and turning light into pure gold. We feel no heat, no thirst. We are never hungry except when it’s time to go home, when our mothers call us from front gates or over backyard fences and we climb those fences and disappear through doors into kitchens and dining rooms.

  Most of us are barefooted or wear sandals. The boys wear shorts and short-sleeve shirts. The girls wear summer cotton dresses. There are six of us, four boys and two girls. Sometimes there are more, depend
ing on who joins us from neighbouring blocks, from Elaine Street, Carlingford, Clapham, Barbara or Helen. There are many streets in Regents Park with girls’ names.

  Nearly all of us are immigrant children. Some of our parents know each other from various Displaced Persons’ camps in Germany or migrant hostels in New South Wales, or they met on the ship coming to Australia; others have become friends since moving into this suburb or into the street. Theirs is a close community and they socialise as often as they are able to, but many of these adults work double shifts in factories, shops, on the railways, or for the Water Board like my father does. They come home and then go out to work again at another location, often not too far away from home. Many are building their own homes on these blocks of land on weekends while they live in garages. This is happening all over Sydney, all over Australia. They have brought their building trades and skills with them and are putting them to excellent use. Others, like my parents, have bought a home and are working to save money so they can pay it off as quickly as possible. In the meantime they are making the house a home — painting it, furnishing it, creating vegetable and flower gardens. For all of them it will be a far cry from the lives they left behind as a consequence of displacement and dispossession. All this is being done for themselves and, in the long term, the sake of their children.

  In the years to come I will hear my parents argue about the house, about the circumstances that led my father to put a deposit on it while he was working in Sydney and my mother and I were living in the camp in Parkes. She will blame him for not consulting her, claiming he should have waited and they could have chosen a house together. She makes the accusation that he was influenced by friends from Germany and Poland who had purchased homes in nearby suburbs. He, true to his nature, will say little by way of explanation. He will swear for a while and then go off to the garage or chookshed and smoke until the disagreement passes. He never explained why he chose Regents Park as a suburb, or that particular house, and it won’t be until almost forty years later, when I visit Raciborow, his birthplace in Poland, that I will begin to understand why — not until I see the resemblance between his village, set low on a plain, surrounded by forests, with a railway line running through it, just like the railway line running through Regents Park. Mary Street, too, is set on the low side of the northern part of the Bankstown municipality that is prone to flooding from Duck Creek because of a poor drainage system reaching further back towards Birrong and Potts Hill Reservoir. The whole suburb is surrounded by trees, bushland and vegetative growth, with dirt roads running through it except for the two main sealed roads.

  But a little boy of eight or nine doesn’t know what he will learn as a grown man. First he must run like the devil with his own playmates and chase the wind until he is hoarse from yelling and laughing — running into somebody else’s backyard to play or the whole gang of friends disappearing into the bush, to go trekking down to the far end of Duck Creek where they think they’ll catch eels.

  I am examining various official documents that belonged to my parents; these have been stored in large plastic wallets and kept in the drawers of one of the wardrobes in my father’s bedroom. They are papers relating to the purchase of our home as well as my parents’ wills.

  We moved into 10 Mary Street, Regents Park, in November 1951, and the earliest photographs that exist of the house are three black-and-white ones taken in 1952. They are approximately 3 inches by 2 inches, so worn with age and handling that the print has started to wear off and all three are starting to turn brown. I have never discovered who took them. In each of them my parents and I are dressed in our best clothes.

  Compared with what it became in the next four decades, the house appears old and almost dilapidated, and yet it was only five years old, having been built by one William Henry Joshua Hyde on land purchased from Mary O’Curry, widow, of Strathfield. The house was named “Shirleen”. Alexander Allen Brown, a retired railway employee from Pyrmont, purchased it from Hyde and my parents in turn purchased it from him on 27 November 1951, as the Certificate of Title states, “at 57 mts. Pt 12 o’clock in the afternoon”. The firm of solicitors acting in the sale and purchase of the property were Charles A. Morgan, Potts & Cullen of Somerset House, 9 Martin Place, Sydney, also at Parramatta. The purchase price was £2700, of which my father paid £270 as deposit. A loan of £1600 was arranged through Manchester Unity. Five pounds was added for a rates adjustment with a further £73 3s for fees. A month earlier, on 5 October 1951, one Leslie Joseph Hall, of Homer Street, Kingsgrove, surveyed the property which was then known as “Lot 12, No 9 Mary Street”, Regents Park. The mortgage was discharged on 30 December 1955. My parents had paid off our home in four years!

  The writing on another set of documents is in blue, in copperplate, the style I was taught in primary school. The papers are stamped in blue and purple ink and parts of them are underlined in red ink. Where there is typing, it has been done on a ribbon typewriter.

  The CERTIFICATE OF NATURALIZATION AS AN AUSTRALIAN CITIZEN is a document that belonged to each of my parents, although my name is written only on the back of my mother’s. I was told that because I was under sixteen years of age I was automatically included in the oath that my parents took. But why am I only on the back of my mother’s papers? Was it because Feliks was not my biological father? Both are dated 15 July 1960 and signed by the then mayor of Banks-town, Murt O’Brien. The certificates are embossed with a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II.

  Something begins to gall me, makes my skin grow prickly. I feel anger rising inside me. My breath shortens. I want to escape into my earliest memory, into the darkness, but cannot.

  We are sitting in a spacious office, my parents and I. There is brown linoleum on the floor. The walls are painted in cream colours. The two desks are of a dark hardwood. Chairs are a grey metallic colour, as is the filing cabinet at the back of the office. The door at our backs is of the same hardwood as the desks and has a translucent glass panel. My mother is to my left, at a desk, away from us. A man is interviewing her.

  On my right, my father is being interviewed by a young woman. She is dressed in a blue two-piece suit and has short blonde hair. We are being “processed” to determine our eligibility for Australian citizenship and I am acting as my father’s interpreter. That he arrived in Australia in his mid-forties, has had little contact with those outside his ethnic work groups, and manages with only a rudimentary English vocabulary, is of no consequence to the interviewer.

  He answers to his name, age, address, occupation, his birthplace and country of origin without difficulty, but he is becoming increasingly nervous and his body language betrays him. He crosses and recrosses his legs. His hands are starting to shake. He has become hesitant, unsure of himself.

  The blonde’s formal approach changes. What does she sense, what does she read into the situation that makes her smile secretly? She now starts to speak quickly, and that is my father’s downfall. While she spoke slowly, and I translated, he kept pace with her questions, was able to compose his reply without assistance, but once the speed of questioning changed, became what I can only think of as an interrogation, then he became nervous, unsure of his answers.

  She asks, Do you have any hobbies at home?

  Hobbies? Is she serious? My father works all day in a pick-and-shovel job for the Water Board, leaves home early and returns late; then he’s out in the garden, doing what he’s been doing all his working life. The garden is his hobby. I know what his answer will be.

  I translate her question. My father says to tell her that his garden and chooks are his hobby.

  I begin to tell her and she stops me cold, holds up a finger. Uh-uh, she says and shakes her head. He must answer himself.

  My father says, Yes, I have garden. I have chooks. There is nothing secretive about his smile. It is a smile of pure nerves, coupled with an anxiety to please, but he also wants to flee.

  And do you have a rooster? She asks.

  Kogut, I say to my fat
her; then in English, Rooster.

  Oh yes, yes, my father replies happily. He senses that he is making progress.

  And when your rooster and hens breed, how many chickens would you have on an average hatching?

  Breed. Average. Hatching.

  What’s she up to?

  She looks up with her cold blue eyes straight into my father’s and pow! She’s got him. She’s got me too. I might be able to translate that, but it’s his answer that she wants, and she knows he’s confused at the length of her question and its vocabulary. This is the start of a short but scary rollercoaster ride. I can feel it in my bones!

  I translate and my father shakes his head, shrugs his shoulders.

  What do you mean? Don’t you know, sir? Can’t you count? Look, it’s easy. She holds up a hand, spreads her fingers and wriggles them in front of my father’s face. His face has reddened and I know he won’t answer. He turns away from her. As far as he’s concerned, the interview is over. One, she says, two, three … Look at me, sir …

  A mirror could not show me anything I don’t already know about the colour of my face. Red and getting redder. Shame creeps over it, spreads like a port-wine birthmark.