I was living there around the time they converted Pentridge, Australia’s most hellish prison, into medium-density apartments for the upwardly mobile. I search ‘pentridge village where are the bodies’ and discover that most of them, the prisoners who were murdered in that frightening place, by others or by the state, Ned Kelly, Ronald Ryan, have been exhumed and either returned to their families or left in the morgue awaiting identification, what a time to be alive. And, full circle, when the owners of Pentridge started selling off the D block as wine cell-ars ha-ha one of the inmates bought his old cell to store his Grange. I used to go running down Merri Creek to Coburg Lake, which skirts the edge of Pentridge, and it’s the only place I can think of in Moreland where you can find a platypus that’s not actually a misidentified rat, and when you’re near the water you can for one second imagine what it might have been like, long grasses lizards birds, if John Batman had walked through this space and thought, maybe I’ll just leave it as it is, maybe I’ll just leave it to the people who know how to live here to live here and save everyone all the trouble. Because that’s what it is, it’s enshrined and systematic trouble that no one knows how to undo, because, apart from the one platypus who moved back to the area and maybe her one platypus friend, this trouble can’t be undone.
But I am one of those people who is always baulking at injustice; I can’t look at a rat without thinking about how sick humanity is. Had I been male, this might have been of use to some kind of extremist organisation, or to federal politics, but because I am female I am contemptuous of male power, and because of this my body is a body of emasculation, and because of this I just have a bad attitude. I dig my fingers into the earth in front of my house and I get it under my nails, weeding round the pearly succulents, because that’s supposed to release serotonin and I wonder what on earth we are doing here, as in us, the rats, how are we all here now in this place, and I remember at high school a prized skill was being able to tell what nasho someone was by looking at them, and a lot of it was to do with how a person coded themselves fashion-wise, but it’s true that some had a great knack for telling apart a Lebanese and an Iranian a Vietnamese and a Chinese an Eritrean and a Somali, and in the same place the white kids played up their Irish or whatever background because they didn’t want to be left out of the fun, and you’re not supposed to talk about things like this in adulthood because it’s pretty offensive but I think that although problematic it was in earnest, acknowledging the dislocation each person felt in their heart and connecting somehow through its affirmation. And all you have to do with so many families, poor families that were altered irrevocably by industrialisation and imperialism, is scratch back a few generations and no one knows a thing, the line fades away to the primordial bodies moving around looking for food, for work, gravitating to places to nurture their young, protect them from nature’s brutality, like the rat family and the warm underside of my fridge.
After travelling overseas when I was eighteen, my first attempt at leaving, I was in debt and so I moved back to the end of the tram line, back past the factories, back home. Mum and Dad were not as thrilled to have a grown adolescent living with them as I was to pay no rent and so I stayed away from the house a lot. One of the places I stayed away at was a warehouse where some friends and a boy I was dating casually were living, smack bang in the middle of Brunswick. They were wild people and truly bohemian, as in they didn’t notice the squalor and thought my homework was endearing, and with them it was a different Brunswick from the underage gigs at the Town Hall and the tinnies in alleyways, but still Savers was a central theme along with the food bargains like Tiba’s and Green Field. The main reason this guy I was dating casually was dating me casually was because he was not interested in me as a young woman in love, not really. So one night I went to a poetry reading with another boy, a serious young man from another city, good looking but not very funny, who was doing his masters at Melbourne ‘for the pedigree’, and from memory, it’s not like I can ask him about it now, we drank boxed wine and argued about whether Sartre’s communism was genuine (I stand by my no) and we made out in the taxi. His apartment was on the third floor and overlooked the warehouse of my friends but I didn’t point it out. In the morning we awoke naked though we hadn’t slept together, you know, screwed, but for whatever reason we just stayed naked all morning, and he made me coffee and he said, I’m glad we didn’t sleep together last night, that would have been contrived, and I had no idea what that arrangement of words was supposed to mean but I stood there on the balcony, topless, maybe to seem sexy or adult, and I looked down along the piss alleyway and across it to the warehouse where some hippies I didn’t know were moving terrible furniture and I gave him my assent, yes. Yes, that would have been contrived.
…
Before it was Coburg Coburg was called Pentridge, the satellite city built around the foul prison, the ‘bluestone college’, secure housing for the indentured labourers who built the road from Melbourne to Sydney, prisoner chain gangs carving the stones and laying them out rain hail and blistering wind. I google ‘chain gang melbourne’ and I find an article about the ‘music band Chaingang’ and a clever headline about chain restaurants. It helps to feel constant low-level indignation, I suppose, though I wonder about its overall effect on a person’s health. I take beta-blockers to help with the general whiplash feeling in my body, tension of the mundane kind, my jaw tight and my sleep sleepless but I lie there anyway with my eyes closed waiting. In one episode of real chain gangs of Melbourne some prisoners (slaves?) from Pentridge village working in the mud field smashed their leg irons and made a run for it, five of them, and then another one who hadn’t been in on the plan, Robert Taylor, seized the opportunity and bolted too, but he was older and slower and he ran in the wrong direction and by the time the guards knew it Robert Taylor was the only one within firing range so they shot him in the back, the bullet entering from the left side of his spine and exiting from the right breast, and afterwards someone wrote that ‘the expression of his countenance was calm and serene, as though he had died without pain’, what a hero, and what of the other five men, let’s hope they ran and ran and found new names and something to fill out their days other than chipping boulders and laying stones, and who descends from these mavericks anyway, whose great-great-great-grandfather fled indentured labour and made life anew, if new life is possible, truly, in this old haunted land.
When I picture this scene, the mud, Robert Taylor, the gunshot, the pale shock on the faces of unshockable labourers, it takes place in the middle of Sydney Road in Coburg, it takes place right in front of where I spent every Saturday of my fifteenth year spruiking baby consumables out the front of Sam’s Baby World. Like, good morning ladies and gentlemen; like, twenty per cent off all socks bibs and booties, this week only; like, come in, have a look around and get yourselves a bargain. At the spot an older Italian man, in his sixties maybe though fifteen-year-olds don’t know a thing about age, always tried to get me to go out with him, and of course I refused him every week, I’m not that foolish, but I should admit that he bought me packs of Benson & Hedges Ultra Lights and I accepted these and I suppose that by accepting his gifts I was giving him horrible old-man permission to stay there talking at me week after week. This older Italian man, pleasingly slim for his age but his suit dull and dirty, filled me with dread. My every Saturday was governed by the fresh horror that he’d come by and demand my attention, and so it was to my great surprise that later, many years later, he appeared in my middle eye as I touched myself, short glimpses and imprecise, he’s on his knees head bowed with his hand up my skirt, like he’s praying me, or I’m lying down in the back of his car and he’s begging me to let him eat me, so full of lust, and while I understand in this unwelcome fantasy I don’t have a choice, I laugh nervously and then I climax, pulsing with shame.
For a long time I didn’t know that some people chose where they lived, I assumed you just moved somewhere and you found the cheapest house on the market
and you moved in, a fresh start some real beginning and the house was always haunted by traces of a before, before the beginning, but you put up some paintings and some kid photos and slowly it became home. There were clues this was not the case for all people, for instance I was once in the car with a friend’s dad, who was in effect a house flipper, as he pointed out the real-estate pockets that were already plush and the ones that were crap, and he said you’d want to buy somewhere in between, as though we—his daughter and I—would ever be in the position to choose, because years later he turned away his good daughter and not for any reason I ever understood. You don’t want to be the first gentrifier, he implied, safer to be in the second wave and do a decent job of it. I knew about rich people and the middle classes because sometimes I was those things but usually not, but I didn’t get it, choosing, until now that I pay real money, professional spec, to live in a kind of nice-enough house within a couple of kays of where I went to high school because of my aforementioned parochial connection to it. I am a consumer(!) paying for the choice to live where I believe I am at home. I can’t see grass anywhere, native or otherwise, from the bench on my front porch, I can only see my neighbour across the road, a handsome but unhappy-looking middle-aged man living with his white-haired mother, oh well, great real estate, puffing at the pavement with his leaf blower, and I can see the other neighbours who live next door and all their visitors who come in and out in a way that suggests they are a bourgeois brand of drug dealer.
I dream a lot and good dreams too, meaty ones, but I never dream in nature, by which I mean I never dream I am in a great-outdoorsy setting unless I am being pursued by a human or a human force with terrible intentions. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: non-human—extra-human—nature is terrifying, and I know there is something of a colonial legacy in this fact, which I am comfortable admitting; I have seen Picnic at Hanging Rock. When I was little and I lived in the country with my parents, neither of them much connected to land outside the city yet into things like growing veggies, they’d take us bush-walking because they wanted us to know about the world beyond tarmac and bourgeois drug dealers and meat-pie fog, and from this slice of childhood I remember useful facts about the bush, about treating nettle stings and how to behave around a snake, and I remember how Mum sounded singing cooee from the bottom of a canyon, me glowing with joy unadulterated, but still I am scared of the bush because I never spent long enough there to feel at home, just as I am still scared of the ocean, just as I am scared when I am at home alone at night, no human noises next to me, and I think of my house, the house I rent, built long before I was born, and I imagine the reptiles round it sunning themselves and spiders and birds everywhere, and it’s the painful thought, or perhaps it’s just boring, that I’m too tender for nature, not tough enough to unwind amid the sounds and dangers of animal chaos, and while I’m not phobic about snakes I am attacked by a snake in many of my dreams, but then I am told that these dreams are not about snakes at all, they’re about men. And perhaps fear of nature is fear born of the sense that civilisation was supposed to make things easier and in many ways it does but the cost is very high, maybe fatal, for nature as well as for women, and the snakes, which are a placeholder for masculine triumph over everything, is what is destroying me incrementally is what is destroying, you know, nature.
…
There was a time when I felt very powerless, I was a young woman and so that’s natural and I had chosen a profession that was always going to be difficult technically and financially and also hard on the ego, and one day an activist whose work I had reviewed and mildly criticised made contact and said we needed to talk about it, and this was kind, this real-life coffee scenario where a person older than me and more powerful took my words seriously enough to want to go beyond the internet warfare, and we had a falafel at the Half Moon Café and we got along in a way that we could get along because I accepted most of what he said and I didn’t yet know that I wasn’t always required to give my time and assent to men or perhaps more precisely people who looked down on me in a neutral, natural enough way, and then he announced lavishly that he had moved into my old neighbourhood, and the way he romanticised it really pissed me off, the way he was proud of himself for moving into this bleak place and the implication that this was rather transgressive of him and I said, yeah that’s where my folks live, but he ignored me as male activists are wont to do and went on to explain its working-class history, the dairies that used to be there, how cool, and I thought briefly about how this phase of gentrification was the worst one, the phase where the newcomers’ stakes in a place are purely accumulative, accumulative of some minuscule capital based on perceived riskiness, and sure, this guy moved in because he was an activist and an artist and he probably couldn’t afford to live anywhere else, but still it’s not cool it’s sad and it’s forgotten and when you live there, really live there, it’s annoying that it’s ages to the nearest corner store and frankly the absence of street lights is a public health and safety issue.
After school in the slow suburban afternoons I’d jump on the 19 and take it all the way home, and one day, bowing under the weight of my nerd-sized backpack, I walked home past a heavily armed police unit out the front of the blonde-brick flats by the train line, they hadn’t even closed off the street, just cops in black standing there on a bright afternoon, long guns cocked. Not long before that, the night my little brother breakdanced at a school concert—he did the worm, which was a hit with the parents—Lewis Moran was shot to death one hundred metres away. I guess this was awful in all the ways anyone can imagine, but you can’t deny the community-building aspect of a local gang killing, especially when it’s old hardened career crims with beef and it doesn’t really affect your life aside from the police tape blocking the passage to the fish and chip shop. People were out that night, then later we were all on the phone comparing our near-misses with the murderous underworld, attracted as we were to the animal qualities it promised: the treachery, the callousness, the sheer brazenness of murdering someone in public, during peak hour no less. And though most of the killings now are not related to this underworld story, it’s still a hot topic at parties, stories about a friend who moved into a West Brunswick sharehouse and discovered false walls and secret rooms, you’d think it was the nouveau riche suburbs of New Jersey—how desperate we were for this gangland story to stick, for it to make real the cinema of crime, when in most instances crime was just kids bottling each other at the pub or your TV getting pinched in the night or men trying to force you into their cars so they could hurt you just as they do everywhere. Some people call the whole of Australia a Crime Scene because of what started here over two hundred years ago, but this Crime Scene isn’t glamorous or attractive, because unlike the drive-bys and the Morans we’re all, settlers at least, a little bit implicated in it. And then, around the time of the underworld gangland renaissance, Howard’s terror laws passed and it became frightening to think what could happen to you, well, not you if you were an Anglo, but what could happen to you in the collective sense if you overstepped some undefined line of political propriety particularly if you were an Arab and I can’t comment on this further because the fear for me was never material except to say that there was a feeling in the air and that feeling was powerlessness.
…
When I was at uni and trying to pay off a big debt I worked all kinds of jobs, mainly at bars and restaurants, under-the-table jobs for under the legal wages, and one of my jobs was at a shisha bar. I’d clean the shisha pipes out the back and pack them with apple mint strawberry tobacco for non-drinking teens and slice up melon and white cheese and pour black coffee for the owner of the bar and his friends. The owner’s wife taught me how to stew bulgur and pack it in hollowed-out zucchinis. The bar didn’t make any money, as in, we’d sell enough shishas and bitter black coffees to pay my wages for a shift, forty dollars, but little else, yet the owner spent every evening in there with his friends, sitting around, speaking only i
n Turkish. My boss was polite to me and with only a hint of condescension, I think he enjoyed having me there playing the role of personal assistant, I was a young girl in his palace there to make him hot drinks on command and follow other mundane instructions—go and puff up those cushions, wipe down the leaves of the indoor plants, bleach every glass object in the building. And one of the men who spent time there was my age, maybe his uncle or older brother forced him to come along, but he’d get bored and come over to the coffee bar and talk with me. At one point we swapped numbers and went out for shisha just me and him and he told me: credit-card fraud and importing drugs. He didn’t tell me which drugs. But. That is how I came to learn I was a domestic worker in the headquarters of an organised crime outfit and it was just as well that I don’t speak Turkish because otherwise I might have become an accessory.
When we were kids in the country for the full experience my city parents did things like send us out horse riding a few times and now I am terrified of the power of horses to really dominate the human spirit. One of the riding teachers had a Grandma Gladys, who lived across the street from us. Her pony, old Bluey, spent most of her time alone in a square paddock, so my parents offered to take Bluey off Gladys’s hands and put her in our small backyard in town. We took Bluey home and rode her bareback barefoot round the streets like we were in Puberty Blues and Mick our fat-ish blue cattle dog would come out with us too no leash necessary real white-trash style. Well, one day someone left the side gate open and Bluey escaped and ran all the way home and Mum got in the Toyota Crown ’72 and followed her and the punchline is that the pony went round the roundabout the right way. If there is always a question, and I believe there is, in this case it is this: where is home and what is freedom. The promise we accept is that freedom is the freedom to make ourselves anew, but in our hearts we are running home, running the right way round the roundabout, so is freedom the freedom to have a home even if home is a fenced-in square of lonely grass.
Blueberries Page 7