Whole Wild World Read online

  WHOLE

  WILD

  WORLD

  TOM DUSEVIC is an award-winning journalist who has been a reporter and editor at The Australian Financial Review, The Australian, Good Weekend and Time.

  WHOLE

  WILD

  WORLD

  TOM DUSEVIC

  A NewSouth book

  Published by

  NewSouth Publishing

  University of New South Wales Press Ltd

  University of New South Wales

  Sydney NSW 2052

  AUSTRALIA

  newsouthpublishing.com

  © Tom Dusevic 2016

  First published 2016

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Creator: Dusevic, Tom, author.

  Title: Whole wild world / Tom Dusevic.

  ISBN: 9781742234724 (paperback)

  9781742242385 (ebook)

  9781742247755 (ePDF)

  Subjects: Dusevic, Tom – Childhood and youth.

  Dusevic, Tom – Family.

  Immigrants – Australia – Biography.

  Children of immigrants – Australia – Biography.

  Dewey Number: 305.906912092

  Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

  Cover design Natalie Winter

  Printer Griffin Press

  Excerpt from ‘The End and The Beginning’ from View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems by Wislawa Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh. Copyright © 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright © 1976 Czytelnik, Warszawa. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

  All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

  This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

  For Mara

  Those who knew

  what this was all about

  must make way for those

  who know little.

  And less than that.

  And at last nothing less than nothing.

  Someone has to lie there

  in the grass that covers up

  the causes and effects

  with a cornstalk in his teeth,

  gawking at clouds.

  – from ‘The End and the Beginning’ by Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

  Contents

  Preface

  1 Escapees

  2 Love-struck

  3 Lost in space

  4 Hit and run

  5 Smoking gun

  6 Tug of war

  7 Year Five blues

  8 Rule Britannica

  9 Employed at last

  10 Where eagles dread

  11 Wombles

  12 Night fevers

  13 Crossroads

  14 Slow learner

  15 Freestyle

  16 Above the clouds

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  Even before my fourth birthday I’d had enough of life under a dictatorship. Denied a lolly by Tata, my father, I demanded to know why.

  ‘Zašto?’ I asked in Croatian, our mother tongue. Talking him round would be almost impossible, but I would try. Besides, I didn’t see what it had to do with my father, lollies being part of my special bond with Mama.

  Lying on the couch, Mr Chesty Bond in a white singlet, bit of grey around the temples, keeps reading the newspaper. He does this after lunch every day, before snoring into a pre-shift nap. I shake his skinny leg, punch him in the shoulder, ruffle the Sydney Sun he is immersed in.

  ‘Zašto?’ I pound and plead like a dissident.

  He folds the paper looks me straight in the face.

  ‘Zašto? Why? Perché? Warum? Zakaj?’ He mocks me in five languages, but to my ears he’s simply conjured up from nothing a cruel nursery rhyme. Tata worked his shtick for decades; like a nightclub entertainer and his catchphrase, he savoured the rising inflection of those last six syllables.

  That’s it. Too far, mate.

  I dig out one of my mother’s blue, fine-mesh nylon shopping bags and begin filling it with essentials. Even at this age I know where she stashes stuff. Plastic bowl. Spoon. Cup. Pyjamas. Blanket. One-eyed teddy.

  This could be a long trip. It had to look like one. I’m only three, improvising.

  ‘Ja idem.’ I’m going, I say, poised at the front door. ‘I’m going. I’m going.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ asks Mama, who’s come from the kitchen.

  ‘Away from here. Far away. I’m not telling.’

  ‘But how will you live?’

  ‘I’ll get a job and have some money.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Why aren’t they trying to stop me?

  ‘I really am going,’ I declare, shopping bag in hand, teddy under one arm, straining to reach the twist lock on the door with the other, despite being tall for my age. I shuffle down the stairs to the front gate, as slow an exit as there’s ever been. I take short strides in the direction of the railway line, not knowing my next move. I look back, expecting them to stop me. I’m at the next house by the time Tata appears at the front door.

  He’s going to beg me to stay. My relief instantly morphs into the wild idea that a whole bag of lollies will be my prize.

  ‘Watch out for the doggy on the corner, I saw him outside this morning when I went to the shops.’

  Doggy. Big. Bites. Loose. Was that a bark?

  I bolt home, face first into my mother’s soft apron, inconsol- able in defeat. I feel my father’s cackle like a face slap, see his barrel chest pumping like a piston, bottom teeth a regiment of gaunt yellow soldiers. He’ll remind me of this episode for years. Ja idem. Ja idem. But I wasn’t going anywhere for a while.

  I was trapped, twelve years a Slav.

  This is the story of people itching to leave but having to stay. It’s mostly about a boy from a migrant family shaped by curiosities and fears during the 1960s and 1970s. Told slant and skewed, true, save for the protective coatings and sifting of memory. Here are dispatches from a busybody edging away from a stifling home life towards something I sensed had to be a better fit.

  While scanning the frontier, I stumbled over knowledge without stopping to take it with me; I missed the patterns because I was lost in the details.

  Fact-gatherer. Slow learner. Prisoner of sensitivities.

  My parents, unsettled in their skin, were pulled in other ways. A decade too old for a fresh start, displaced and unsure of the ways of their new homeland, haunted by flickers of the troubled old one. Its glories, which flared brightly for the exiles, were alien to me. We were odd-shaped space debris on different orbits.

  I am an Australian, Sydney born. Sydney, that pleasurable city of escapes. This is the start of my flight: freedom via parental neglect, joy in loose play, security in friends, dread and wonder stoked by mass entertainment. It was a time to improvise and to keep asking why; to push back the past and daydream about what I might find under a dappled sky that cradled the whole wild world.

  1

  Escapees

  I broke free on a lazy Sunday to mixed notices. My father Joso welcomed a second son, hoping one boy would become a priest, the other a soldier. Although Milenka wa
s a mum again, six months shy of forty, it was unlikely she’d be able to have a longed-for daughter.

  Two-year-old livewire Šime sized up a likely deficit in attention against the bonus of a playmate – a hard-fought draw. Outside the bosom of the family there was a pall of discontent. Due to the fresh delivery at Canterbury Hospital, the weekly beer and bocce after Mass in our backyard was cancelled. By January 1964, our cast was complete. The postwar boom, baby, was over.

  But the Cold War was in full swing, even in Sydney. Milenka had her heart set on naming me Boris, after a beloved nephew of her own age who had died young. My father shot down that small wish not long after I was launched. Having escaped the communists in Yugoslavia, Joso wasn’t going to share his home with even a tiny reminder of the USSR.

  ‘Boris is a Slavic name,’ he declared. ‘I believe we can do much better than that.’

  A more fitting name was Tomislav, after the first king of Hrvatska, land of the Croats. Tata tended to get his way. Šime had been the name of his late older brother. Besides, as Tata would say in his tender moments, this name was pure romance: ‘Tom is love’. Or perhaps even a lion, he’d tease, playing literal with the Croatian lav.

  Tomislav seemed grand for a punk and too exotic for a kid in Australia. I traded under Tommy until it seemed infantile and became Tom towards the end of primary school. Boris would have been a stretch for us all, especially me.

  We had recently settled in Belmore, in Sydney’s southwestern suburbs, in a three-bedroom house in Chalmers Street that could grow to five if the living areas were rented out to tenants, which was not unusual. Single men and women, rarely couples, stayed for weeks or years. The arrangements were fluid: share house, boarding house, emergency landing pad. Much to her annoyance, just like in Croatia, Milenka was expected to cook for everyone, and people came and went according to factory shifts.

  My mother’s sister Danica had migrated in 1960, soon after my parents married. Ship delays meant Teta, as we called her, missed the wedding by a few weeks; the bride and groom dressed up again for Danica and to take pictures to send back to Croatia. In family albums there’s a picture of me as a two-month-old baby on my parents’ bed. I’m frocked like a girl in frilly bits. My eyes are slightly crossed, arms out, hands tightly closed. I was ready to rumble. (Teta, who professed expertise in infant semiotics, maintained my clenched baby hands were an omen for being tight with money or not wanting to share stuff with Šime, her favourite.)

  There was shuffling about in the household because I did not settle at night. A deep-voiced female cousin who was staying with us was able to comfort me, Anka’s soothing low-end murmur in contrast to Mama’s high pitch. According to family lore, the blond man who rode a motorcycle to an early-morning job, and always wore a black leather jacket, was the first to bail due to excessive noise. He was called Žuti, which translates to ‘yellow’. I thought he lacked courage in adversity, but no, it was all about his fair complexion.

  Nicknames were common in our community, given so many men were called Ante (Anthony), Marko (Mark) and Mate (Matthew) or were on the run. Joso (pronounced yo-so) and Šime (she-meh) are ubiquitous on both sides of the family, not because of a lack of imagination, but because they’re bloody good, solid names. Our wider clan includes a Dado, Bepo, Yoya, Geza, Micho, Maza, Chicho and Charlie. And just like Brazilian soccer players, those handles had no resemblance to actual names, but were permanent nevertheless.

  Women were typically variants of Marija, our way for Mary or Maria. To make gossip possible, Marias were sorted by home village, appearance or scandal. Maria could be prefixed by ‘your’, ‘our’ or ‘my’, depending on who was speaking. We had Baba Maria, Uncle Joe’s Maria, Black Maria, Little Maria, Maria from Arbanasi, Kuma Maria, Tia Maria, Two Husbands Poor Maria, Three Daughters Lucky Maria, Farmer’s Wife Maria, Crippled Maria. Ave Maria! After a falling out a couple of Marias were never politely mentioned again. There were different designations for Tata’s and Mama’s sides of the family, and variations within. Aunts, for instance, could be strina, ujna or teta. Get it wrong and you’d never see another chocolate block.

  To non-Croatians, my father Joso was Joe (but on immigration cards he was recorded as ‘Jozo’). Bizarrely, at least to my ears, Mama always called Tata ‘Dušević’. It’s pronounced Dushevich, which will give you an idea of how to sound out the Croatian ‘š’ and ‘ć’. When he went to school my brother was called Sam, a lucky break because Simeon or Simon would have trapped him in no man’s land, names our parents would have struggled with outside the home.

  Šime was a runner, with fugitive in the blood, as fast as any two-year-old with chunky thighs and girl’s sandals could be. On excursions to the shops, our pregnant mother put a harness on him, and a short leash. He’d been born in the inner-city suburb of Newtown, into a huge share house in Alice Street that my father had bought in the mid-1950s. Šime was used to playing with, being held by and being around adults, many of whom were just off the boat or plane from Croatia.

  Their world was centred on Sydney’s inner city. They went to Mass at St Peter’s in Surry Hills and there was a Croatian hall or dom near there. My parents walked or used trams, but for big trips they’d book taxis. Šime would stand on a box in the front yard at Alice Street, across the road from the Pick Me Up food factory, calling ‘Tat-si, tat-si’ as my parents waited inside. When the cab arrived they’d make a fuss about how Šime alone had summoned the driver.

  My parents wanted space to breathe, especially a garden to grow vegetables and a yard for Šime to play in, and bought the house in Belmore, ten stops from Central on the Bankstown railway line. Belmore was a well-established working-class suburb of detached houses, mainly California bungalows and post- Federation cottages. It attracted Greeks, Italians and other migrants, many like my parents fleeing a squalid inner city to pursue traditional Mediterranean lifestyles: growing olives and grapes, bottling tomato sauce, making wine and fortified spirits and feuding with neighbours. Still, there were enough entrenched Anglo-Celts to stuff the Catholic schools, control the local councils and fill out the backline for the Berries, as the local rugby league team was then known.

  Our block of land may as well have had its own postcode. If hide-and-seek was in the Olympics this was your training venue. You could never be bored in such a backyard, bendable to every kind of mischief. Down one side of the yard were five evenly spaced palm trees. Dead branches, spiky and weighty, dropped from the sky. Orange-coloured seeds were littered around trunks so big you needed four kids joining hands to encircle them.

  We were as resourceful with palm bounty as Indigenous Australians. Nothing was ever wasted, and there was a season for every part. The long, green palm fronds were used as roofs for cubby houses and lean-tos. The bulbous dry husks were fashioned into weapons such as mallets; seeds became ammunition for slingshots or thrown like tiny missiles.

  These gigantic palms rested over a flat, grassed area the width of two cricket pitches and the length of one. It was here that men sat on old crates and chairs to drink, smoke and talk into the night, or came to play bocce on Sundays and after work in summer. There were play yards for us at the front and sides, as well as a front veranda that wrapped around to catch the afternoon’s gift of shade.

  The palms gave the joint extra pizzazz, and a resort-like feel, perfect for parties. People were drawn to it. Photos from my christening show an occasion with only a few kids, big cousins like Blanka and Jure, and Šime. But in those snaps there are many single men and women, some of whom will marry each other and have their own families.

  An off-white picket fence stood before a thick green hedge at the front. Behind a gate, a slightly curved path took you to the front door. There were two swing gates for the side driveway. My parents would go to great lengths to keep the gates closed, elaborately tying wire around the bolt locks. It was tedious for them and anyone visiting, but absolutely necessary to keep their little runaway inside the fortress. He should have been kitted ou
t in an orange suit for easy tracking.

  ‘Did we used to have a dog?’ I asked Mama a few years later as I was rummaging through a cupboard, a hint of panic forming about being mauled by a mutt.

  ‘No, never,’ she said.

  ‘Oh yeah, then what’s this?’ I demand, holding up a worn, white leather device, buckles still shiny silver.

  ‘That’s the harness I had to use on Šime when I was pushing you in the pram. He always wanted to get away. It was the only thing that worked and I had to fight him to put it on.’

  Our house was a street away from St Joseph’s Catholic primary school. When children were in the playground, a constant buzz permeated the neighbourhood, like the lid taken off a can of Spring Bliss. Naturally, this was a siren song for Šime. One morning, when he was three, Šime went missing. My parents checked the house, yards, outside dunny and laundry, vegetable garden and shed.

  No luck, some concern.

  My father jumped in the car to look for him. He found Šime at the school fence, on his toes, shorts riding up above his belly, straining to see the children, hoping to join their games. Tata said when he arrived my brother was speaking to the kids, although in those days Šime only knew Croatian. Unlike me, he’d been slow to start talking. Before becoming a taxi caller, he’d communicated by pointing and uttering ‘eeee, eeee’ with various degrees of urgency and frustration.

  Who knows how often he slipped the net, making it home without being missed? Maybe he had connections on the outside. One time, Šime turned up at the front door with a white-haired woman in tow. The story goes she found him on top of the wooden bridge over the railway line halfway between Belmore and Lakemba stations, almost a kilometre away. He’d been watching the trains come and go.

  Šime then led her back to Chalmers Street, which is a lot of steps for an old lady. In those days, I stayed put and could reliably be found clutching my mother’s leg. I didn’t trust these people not to run away from me.