Whole Wild World Read online

  Up the hill at Clemton Park, on the way to North Kingsgrove, was a disused brick and pipe works. There was a huge chimney overlooking the footy fields, a structure out of time with suburbia and much taller than any of the buildings in the area. More than once I’d been in trouble from a coach for getting lost in the moment while staring at it. Why did it need to be so tall? Were there ever any guards near the top? Could a plane hit it? One time we broke through the fence and went into one of the dark, abandoned factories. The floor was earthen, the air cool; all the machinery was gone and it was remarkably clean. There was a vast, still pool, obviously not to swim in. We called out names and listened for the sound to bounce around the cave-like walls. It was our bunker to do as we wished; only the lack of things to throw meant we didn’t trash the place.

  I felt safe anywhere with Sam, sensible, cool in a crisis, fearsome when under assault, just like street-smart, billycart Steve. Once, in a canal running through a park in Campsie, the three of us came upon a wild six-pack of urchins on bikes. They bombarded us from above with rocks, both sides of the levee. This was proper battle, under fire from jagged, heavy projectiles, not your garden-variety ‘poof balls’ that vaporised on impact. You couldn’t run from trouble, no matter how ominous the hit squad. Stay and fight, even if you were shit-scared, because at some innate level you knew you weren’t going to die. But if it got to hand-to-hand combat, which was rare, we’d spent years perfecting kung-fu kicks and Phantom Agents moves – in our heads. Missiles whizzed past my nose, making the hair on my neck stand up. But at least they were missing and we scurried around collecting ammo.

  Blonde girls our age on new dragsters were hissing at us.

  ‘Ya poofters!’

  ‘Go home, ya dirty wogs.’

  One threw a rock that hit me on the arm. I was a screamer and a swearer, scaring myself with out-of-body expletives. Faaarrrrkkk! The smaller girl was now a legitimate target. You had to hit her in the head, not to draw blood, just to knock one down to make them stop.

  It was hot, nuclear warfare compelled to unload the whole arsenal. We got the upper hand. Steve and Sam had strong arms and great aim, and they drove the rest of the gang into retreat. We backtracked, knowing there would be no reprisals, today or tomorrow, as this was alien terrain and we’d never see those kids again.

  We’d been on foot for several hours and had reached the boundary of Canterbury Racecourse, near the pool, or ‘bars’ as our migrant ears had designated the baths. It would be at least an hour at marching pace back up the main drag to get home. But we were pumped, bouncing up the road, recalling the near-mortal hits we’d taken and embellishing the severity of the wounds we’d inflicted in the skirmish. We hunted – without luck – through every bin on the way home, hoping by chance to find a used bottle so we could claim a deposit to buy lollies or gum. It would have tasted like victory.

  A new boy arrived midway through an innings in the front yard of the flats next door.

  ‘Can I play?’

  His name was Seneka. He had the quiet air of a prince and a surname so long you’d never get it onto a scoreboard. He bowled express pace with a little leap at the popping crease à la Dennis Lillee (he’d say Andy Roberts) and batted in the manner of Viv Richards, ‘Smokin’ Joe’: bum out, eyes hungry, decadent as a man chewing a silver toothpick. Seneka was visiting family at the flats. His ancient great grandmother reminded us how he’d gone to a prestigious school called St Thomas’s in Colombo. (We thought St John’s was pretty flash.)

  Seneka was closer in age to Sam than to me, but he was in my grade at school. To escape the war in Sri Lanka, or Ceylon as the family called it, Seneka’s mother had brought him and three sisters to Australia. Soon, more of the clan would arrive – aunts, cousins, great grandmas, with as many as a dozen people living in two two-bedroom flats. Like the Lebanese, but more flamboyantly, they brought noise and spectacle to an Anglo- Mediterranean street. They ate exotic, aromatic food, pungent curries and rice, with their hands, clasping the tiniest morsels in their fingertips without making a mess. Just like Number 96, there were eight flats in the complex and a rolling cast of tenants. Each time someone moved out there was fresh hope a family with kids our age, up for cricket or footy, would move in. That was a rarity; the tenants tended to be couples without kids or younger families with infants.

  Every afternoon the Chalmers Street boys – Frank, Carlo, Seneka and me – dawdled home from St John’s, on a stroke rate of banter. I told the story of a distant cousin, a tale I’d heard second-hand by eavesdropping on adults, which was ripe for improvement. Cousin Wally had got a girl pregnant, stolen cars, done drugs, gone to prison, cheated on his wife and made his parents’ life a misery. All those elements were in the mix, more or less. Wally stood as the prime example of the road to perdition if you did not do your homework, respect your parents, get your haircut, go to church and Croatian school or fell into the company of loose Australians.

  In an inspired moment Frank decided the legend of Wally should be celebrated.

  ‘You’re just like Wally,’ he said to Seneka.

  And Wally stuck. That mix of free spiritedness and louche swagger implied in cousin Wally’s challenge to authority was a perfect fit for our mate. The Belmore boys had a bad boy on which to project our racy fantasies.

  Wally had a metallic red Brumby dragster, with raised handlebars, a curved seat and a sissy bar at the rear. I was on a Cyclops scooter with pneumatic cream-coloured tyres that I could scoot, goofy foot, as quickly as a bike. The two of us covered a lot of territory alone, as the Italians and younger kids didn’t have wheels. By the next Christmas everyone had caught up, with another half-dozen scooters joining the fleet. There was a path around the apartment building that we used as a velodrome, but with moving obstacles like unpredictable kids in nappies and women carting the washing to the clothesline at the back of the flats.

  We’d line up on the race track in formation then wait for the traffic lights on Canterbury Road, 150 metres away, to change. When the lights turned green, we’d burn off the grid; scooters had a significant start advantage and on tight turns. But in the two long straights Wally would come into his own if he could push through the pack. The aim was to beat the red light that would change after thirty seconds and everyone who got through would ride a victory-like lap and be at the back of the grid for the next light change. It was Formula One and roller derby combined and Wally was the champ; even from the back of the pack he could muscle through the little kids and be rolling as the lights turned green, a master of anticipation and guile.

  The peloton was a whirring ball of energy and competition; one false move, one bend taken too tight or too wide by the leaders could set off a catastrophic pile-up. Fingers became jammed in spokes and chains, knees were skinned by concrete, heads scraped against the rough red bricks of the complex. Pile-ups brought blood, wailing, parents and consequences for the older boys like Wally and me, deemed protectors of the little ones.

  ‘Who is Volly?’ Mama demanded one time when I was telling Sam about a colossal stack. ‘Volly, Volly, Volly.’ Undaunted by peer pressure, sly and cool, Wally was the boy most likely to stray.

  In my family, morality plays were built around the exploits of older kids – too old to either pay attention to us, or for Sam and me to check the truth with them. Their broken-hearted parents admitted they’d brought miseries upon themselves by sending their kids to a public school, allowed them to mix outside the community or, worst of all – a sure path to debauchery – allowed them to sleep over at a friend’s house. This last point was the common link for the heroin girl who had been kicked out at eighteen and the boy who had joined the Hare Krishna.

  My parents allowed us free rein in the city, but there was never any possibility of sleeping away from home. The threat of popravni dom, reform school, was ever present as a deterrent, but we pushed the boundaries all the time, especially as Tata was at work and ‘wait till your father gets home’ was not something that would
carry over until the next day when we saw him at breakfast time.

  Tata’s temper was fearsome. There’d be a tremble in a distant time zone, a mild comment that said beware or back off. But we would carry on, oblivious to the coming calamity. Our warning systems had not caught on that Volcano Joe was about to blow. Smoke would rise, the table would shake, the volume would blow off the dial, the kajiš, or belt, would come off. Only once or twice did Tata forget himself and use the buckle on us, a breach of international law I was sure to look up in Encyclopaedia Britannica.

  These eruptions were usually related to domestic issues, especially meals. Sam and I were fussy eaters, to be kind, used to the laissez-faire of weekdays when we did as we pleased. But sit-downs on Sunday could be fraught. We moaned about the food, asked why we had to have roast chicken every Sunday. We began meals with juha, a clear broth made from veal or chicken. On summer days it was the last thing you felt like eating; we knew there was no alternative but Sam and I would carry on and complain, especially if the soup had Mama’s signature oily sheen, with a hundred little globules of gag-inducing fat that had not been skimmed off; Tata regarded this heart-endangering element as the best bit, nutritionally.

  Salad was another faultline. I liked cucumber, hated tomatoes; Sam was the opposite. Instead of being able to free-trade our way out of this dilemma, we were forced to eat both. There was a root vegetable called blitva, or chard, cattle food, the leaves boiled for an hour (to get rid of all the bad stuff; our mother did that for all veggies) then drenched in oil. One taste, you’ll never try it again.

  ‘Don’t they teach you manners at that school?’ Mama would say whenever we failed her at meals or misbehaved. We’d break out in stitches, as if it were the most preposterous thing in the world.

  ‘Manners isn’t even a subject.’

  ‘I wonder what you get up to at school if you’re like this at home.’

  As both Sam and I were well behaved at school her follow-up point seemed equally ludicrous.

  ‘Nothing,’ we chorused. ‘We’re really good at school.’

  ‘Then why can’t you be good at home?’

  ‘But we are. You should see what other kids get up to.’

  ‘What do other kids do?’

  ‘Nothing. But we’re angels. Our teachers would be really surprised to hear us having this conversation.’

  My sixth-class teacher Mrs Gannon was the antithesis of Mr Castagnet: a graceful swan to his hapless dodo. She had an even temper and her classes were disciplined. Healthy competition was the way to advance learning, to her mind, rather than the free-for-all of the previous year. Mrs Gannon ran impromptu tests for times tables, spelling and other skills and kept the progressive score on a leaderboard. At the end of every term she would give the top-placed student a 10 prize.

  I was quick out of the blocks and won the first-term prize. On Holy Thursday she took me to a toy shop in Lakemba and I chose a globe: the whole wild world, right there in my hands. It wasn’t large but it felt chunky and solid, with a firm wooden base, the colours set deep. Around the Himalayas, which were a deep purple with white ice streaks, it was slightly raised. The distance from Yugoslavia to Australia was several spans from index finger to thumb, a very long haul. What were they thinking?

  The globe was handy because my favourite subject, by a long way, was social studies: it combined history and geography with people and culture. We learned about the great deeds of men and women, even then largely forgotten – inland explorers and heroines like Grace Bussell, Florence Nightingale and Mother Mary MacKillop. Each week Mrs Gannon assigned a country project of several pages in an exercise book. We were required to set out vital statistics, draw a map of the country and its flag, and stick in pictures of their exports, animals and leaders. You never knew which country Mrs Gannon would choose. They sold kits to help with these projects but I relied on the Britannica, the most authoritative source I knew, followed by Sam and TV.

  George’s family had been the first to buy the twenty-four- volume set (they had brown leather, we chose white) and it was only a matter of time before the salesman made his way through our entire extended family. My favourite section was ‘ANATOMY, GROSS’ (volume 1), featuring what were known as ‘anatomical chromographs’, a series of clear plastic plates you worked through, fourteen views, anterior and posterior, which revealed both male and female body parts, plus their English and Latin names.

  The next term I dead-heated for first with my mate George, so the prize was 5 a piece. I bought the new Skyhooks album Ego is Not a Dirty Word. I don’t think Mrs Gannon approved of my choice, especially as George had chosen a book. Because we had Britannica I was in a shameful, post-book phase. Mrs Gannon perused the LP’s cover, opening the gatefold; on the back was an image of a severed finger dripping blood, stuck to a fan’s letter from Denise, ‘not a bandmole’, but who ‘would love to be all your girlfriend’.

  At the start of the third and final term my luck came in. The USA was country of the week. I was obsessed with America, our ally in the Cold War, home to Ali, the Fonz and JJ from Good Times. As part of our induction into the Britannica family we received an atlas and a photo-heavy USA book, with sections on every region. There were pictures of George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon, the Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in Salt Lake City and the skyscrapers of Manhattan.

  I vowed to produce a fifty-page project, which no one had ever done. I buried myself in the reporting, came up with an ‘America the Beautiful’ concept, from sea to shining sea. There would be statistics, a history of great events, sections on Hollywood, sport and national parks, all gleaned from the Britannica. Such an epic required ten times the work I’d usually do. This was a labour of love, a test of endurance.

  It was a publishing and planning debacle worse than the Seven Seas Stamps crash of the previous year when my love of exotic stamps with a sporting motif exceeded the means of paying for them. The best stamps were from micro states I’d never heard of, doubted they even existed, tiny isles and dodgy tax havens, unlike those solidly real ‘captive nations’ I knew all about. I’d hidden this debt exposure from my parents, fearing the Dubbo-based giant of philately would send debt collectors. I was doubly suspicious of clean-cut Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, convinced they were Seven Seas repo men about to confiscate my stamp album and take my soul.

  In the grip of the grand America project, I fell behind in all other work. The term’s projects were all due towards the end of the year – just as I was finishing USA, which had become its own sixty-four-page book. I was out of puff, but nine countries behind, the deadline imminent. There was only one thing to do: fake an illness and play catch-up. I pumped out five countries on Day 1. Working round the clock actually made me sick. On Day 2, staying in bed until noon – faking illness is multitasking and tiring – I finished only three. Day 3, exhausted, the final project was a miserable two-page effort, unworthy of the feelings I now have for the good folks of Thailand. But I still had my opus to show Mrs Gannon: U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!

  The whole venture had been an extravagance, an overweening experiment, driven by pent-up emotion and a bold declaration of my dependence on America. On the page, Project USA could never live up to my vision splendid. Beautiful, but a failure in the broader scheme. Which may have been how admirers of Gough Whitlam, who tried to soar like an eagle, but led a team of dodos, felt on 11 November. Governor-General Sir John Kerr dismissed the Prime Minister. The furies collided, the shockwaves reaching our playground, in uproar as news arrived during lunch.

  ‘Whitlam’s been sacked,’ said a bearded science teacher, fond of the brainy weekly National Times, who was listening to a transistor radio via an earpiece. This was bigger than Ali versus Foreman, with older kids speculating about what was happening in Canberra.

  ‘It’s a coooo! A bloody coooo!’ I heard a prefect say as I exited the school gate. A cooo, as if we were in Africa!

  There was a sense of unease, but al
so relief and excitement. I shed no tears for Gough, having followed the unfolding cataclysm in the pages of the Sun. Labor had been reckless and the nation, the world itself, seemed off-kilter. Just outside of Sydney’s suburbs were bushfires and flooding; beyond that cyclones, famine, hijackings and wars. None of this was Gough’s fault, but the front-page stories about inflation, sackings of ministers and murky deals made it all seem like it was. The world was wild. There would be an election before Christmas.

  Tata was thrilled, singing fresh couplets, ‘Bloody Mister Whitlam got the sack, There’s no way he’s ever coming back.’

  I thought the Libs would be especially good for Croatians, given how often they came to support us and tried to even speak our language. Dobar dan, Mr Fraser. Libs never called us terrorists or Ustaše. Tata went to a function and brought home a blue Liberal badge. It had a funky design and fat lettering, like an album cover. I didn’t dare wear it out of the house but tried it on with the same high spirits of lighting up a cigarette. I pierced my thumb. A blood blot elicited an exaggerated cry of faaarrk. False hope. Pain. Annoyance. It was an omen of things to come from Malcolm. Shame, Fraser, shame.

  My father’s retail mantra was not so much ‘buy local’ as ‘buy Croatian’. No matter what the product – food, property, air travel or medical – Croatians banded together on this article of faith. Dentistry, however, was a problem as no one here had graduated in the field. Unlike haircuts or spirit distillation, pulling teeth was considered too fiddly to do at home, although Tata once yanked a small tooth out of Sam with cotton thread tied to a door. Dalmatian engineering.