You Never Met My Father

Graeme Sparkes

Published by Classic Author and Publishing Services Pty Ltd

Imprint of Jo Jo Publishing publishing

First published 2014

JoJo Publishing

‘Yarra’s Edge’

2203/80 Lorimer Street

Docklands VIC 3008

Australia

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© Graeme Sparkes

All rights reserved. No part of this printed or video publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electrical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

JoJo Publishing

Editor: Julie Athanasiou

Designer / typesetter: Chameleon Print Design

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Author: Sparkes, Graeme, 1951- author.

Title: You never met my father / Graeme Sparkes.

ISBN: 978-0-9925900-4-8 (eBook)

Subjects: Sparkes, Graeme, 1951–Childhood and youth.

Fathers and sons—Australia—Biography.

Mentally ill—Australia—Biography.

Compulsive gamblers—Australia—Biography.

Dewey Number: 306.8742

Digital edition published by

Port Campbell Press

www.portcampbellpress.com.au

Conversion by Winking Billy

For John.

2007

The young manager of Alice Springs Reptile Centre appeared flustered. The seating for her daily lecture was in disarray, moved by inconsiderate tourists. She ushered the gathering into another room and repositioned the plastic chairs into sensible arcing rows. Even then, on return, one or two still claimed the right to tweak her careful floor plan.

My mother clicked her tongue, as she often did when she disapproved of something. “You wonder how they were brought up, don’t you?” she said, loud enough for those around us to titter.

I led her to a chair, away from the disputed territory, to avoid smirking faces, which might have provoked further remarks about good manners.

Once everyone was seated the manager began her lecture. She found her rhythm and relaxed, speaking knowledgeably about her beloved creatures. She allowed some kids in the front row to handle a couple of sluggish lizards, and was about to introduce the star attraction when she anticipated another interruption.

“I’d ask anyone who’s got a phobia of snakes to leave before the next segment, please.” Her request came with an unintended sigh. “Too often someone panics when they see this little baby out of its enclosure.”

Nobody left.

She shrugged and made a fatalistic gesture as she went to fetch the resident python.

When she returned, the magnificent satin creature was draped across her shoulders and coiled around her arm, its diamond eyes searching for potential prey.

“I’m not feeling so well,” my mother murmured.

Her mouth and shoulders drooped. I’d forgotten her fear of snakes. But she had made no effort to leave. No doubt she didn’t want to cause a fuss.

On this trip she already considered herself a burden. She was eighty and getting frail, with a heart attack and triple bypass behind her. I had accompanied her to Central Australia, in particular to Ayer’s Rock, as she still called Uluru, because as far back as I could remember she had wanted to see it but never had the opportunity or enough savings while my father was alive.

With us was Sonia, my companion for so long that my mother referred to her as my wife. We had flown directly from Melbourne, hired a four-wheel-drive and spent a couple of days at Uluru and Kata Tjuta. Then we had driven to Kings Canyon and along the treacherous desert route to Hermannsburg and Palm Valley, before travelling on to Alice Springs, a distance in excess of a thousand kilometres. The journey home would be on the legendary outbacktrain, The Ghan, another of my mother’s cherished wishes.

She had walked a little at the base of Uluru, where the terrain was flat, but had found even the least arduous treks at Kata Tjuta and King’s Canyon daunting. I had planned this holiday some ten years earlier, but never with any urgency. A day or two after arriving I began to think I had delayed it far too long. She walked at a funereal pace and stopped often to rest. We had trouble finding shady spots for her to sit. She resisted drinking water, preferring to wait for a cup of tea back at the resort. When other tourists overtook us along the scorching tracks, I began to see her through their eyes and was astonished to discover an ailing octogenarian suffering in the desert heat. I could tell from their glances they thought I was an uncaring son. How could I explain to them that her age had crept up and taken me by surprise?

When the python appeared on the manager’s shoulders and my mother murmured she felt poorly, Sonia tried to get her to sip some water. But my mother was past caring. Her dentures protruded. She slumped towards my lap.

As well as her, I caught the teeth, and had the presence of mind to wrap them in some tissues, slip them into my pocket, out of sight, to preserve her dignity, while Sonia recklessly interrupted the speech to ask if there was a doctor present.

The manager had sensed it wasn’t going to be her day. She handed the python to her assistant, an alarmed work-experience student, and went to phone the paramedics.

I held my mother to prevent her falling, certain these were her final moments.

My sisters were the first to occupy my thoughts. Would they forgive me for killing her, for fooling her into believing she could undertake such an arduous trip at her age? Since Melbourne she had been joking about how her local lawn bowls club were about to present her with a Super Veteran’s Medal. The ‘OBE’, she called it, ‘Over Bloody Eighty’, reminding us in her inimitable way that she was getting old. But this was no longer a laughing matter. I looked at the back of her head. Her grey hair, permed as it always had been, looked unhealthy and thin. And the skin on her neck was crinkled and redundant. A wave of premature grief swept over me. Don’t die like this, dear ol’ Mum. Not yet. So far from home. Not before our trip back on The Ghan. Not in my arms like this. Not on my watch, for goodness sake…

An odd thing happened when I met her at Melbourne Airport at the start of our trip. She insisted on showing me another medal, which had recently been sent to her, as a War Widow, by the Veterans Affairs Department, commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. My father, who had been too young to be sent to the war, was posted to Japan with the Occupational Forces, not long after the Americans had dropped their second atomic bomb. No doubt the purpose of the gold-plated medal had been to honour those who had served our country. But my mother had been so indignant it wasn’t enough for her to tell me on the phone, as she had done several times; I had to view the object of her scorn, and by doing so, appreciate the intensity of her feelings. Still, I was surprised to see her with the over-sized, glittering thing amongst her hand luggage; it seemed so superfluous to a Central Australian excursion. I wondered whether she was beginning to lose her marbles. As she handed it to me, she repeated her telephone fulmination. “What good is this to me? What a waste of money! Why didn’t they spend it on something those poor boys they sent off to Japan needed. Gas masks or something. Denny might be alive today if they’d done that.”

Notwithstanding the uselessness of gas masks to the Occupational Forces, who moved amongst the radioactive ruins of Hiroshima, and the fact that the money spent on the medals was recent revenue, I understood her point. She was convinced his cancer was caused by exposure to radiation. And the statistics seemed to back her up. But why such enduring rage? My father had been dead for over twenty years, and when he was alive he had made her life—our lives—a misery.

It often occurred to me that my mother thought Japan was the starting point for all the dramas that followed. And if he had behaved insufferably most of our lives together, what he had experienced there went a long way towards excusing him. One thing was certain, she was still loyal to him, two decades after his death. And I couldn’t understand it.

I could never talk frankly to her about him. Even after he was gone she wanted to protect him, which for her meant concealing the truth with vague statements about his misfortunes, his ‘dirty rotten luck’, as she called it.

Whether or not what happened was all down to luck, those years living with him had left me chronically anxious, not just when matters of importance or significant moments in my life arose, but over trivial matters done almost automatically, like washing dishes, shopping, going out to socialise, where I rushed to get ready, rushed from one thing to the next, worrying about time, worrying about what’s next to worry about, and in my haste, forgetting to do things or take things, rushing back to rectify omissions, forgetting other things, never doing anything or going anywhere calmly, prudently. When I looked back, that seemed to be the pattern of my life. I found it almost impossible to relax. Even sitting alone on a remote beach in summer holidays, as I did sometimes, watching the timeless approach of waves, contemplating the wonders of nature and life, anxious thoughts would intrude: shouldn’t I be somewhere else? Shouldn’t I be doing something more productive?

I don’t know whether it was justified but I blamed my father.

For many years I thought if I wrote down what I remembered of our life together, it would help me to understand him a little better, it might lay some ghosts to rest, it might even grant me some peace of mind. But I hesitated while my mother was alive. I wrote about other matters. I had doubts about my motives. I wanted to be published. She wouldn’t want people reading about our darker moments. She knew from experience they wouldn’t understand.

For the first time in my life I stroked her head. I hugged her to me.

When the paramedics arrived, they took her blood pressure, which was dangerously low, put her on a drip and a stretcher, and took her to the local hospital where they gave her an ECG.

It wasn’t her heart; she was just dehydrated.

Later in the day I returned to the Reptile Centre and apologised to the young manager, who was gracious despite a ruined lecture. She asked me where we were staying and sent flowers.

The next day my mother was well enough for the trip home on The Ghan.

Uncharacteristically, as we travelled through the arid land, she was mostly silent. But at one point, while Sonia was fetching coffee, she turned to me and, to my astonishment, said, “I’m glad you brought your son, John, down to meet me that one time”. She nodded sincerely to assure me that this wasn’t one of her occasional sarcastic comments. “I always wondered what he would be like. He looked just like you, you know. And he was quiet. A nice boy. A pity your father never met him.”

If she was expecting a response she never got one. She watched the desert for a while until her eyelids drooped and closed.

As we travelled south I thought about my son, already a father himself. He had grown up with another family, a loving family by all accounts. I had not known him until I was in my late forties.

A wave of regret swept over me as it always did when he entered my thoughts or dreams. I wondered what had prompted my mother to mention him.

I glanced at her as her head lolled with the rhythm of the train. Her days were nearly up. There were mysteries she would take with her to the grave. I had never really gotten to know her, except as a mother. I never knew what she thought of the rambling way I had lived my life, or what she thought of Claire, who was my son’s mother, to whom I was married for a while, or even what she thought of Sonia. I never understood her loyalty to my father. I had an urge, a longing, to ask her, but she was sleeping, an old woman’s moribund sleep, dreaming no doubt of earlier times. Her breath rasped and wheezed as dry as the desert wind outside.

1951

BESIEGING POLICE DEFIED BY ARMED MAN DETECTIVES PARLEY

These were headlines from The Argus (Melbourne) on the 30th of November, 1951. The front page of newspapers across Australia bore similar news.

The gunman was Denny Sparkes, my father.

A man went berserk with a gun in a barricaded house…and held off all who tried to approach…The occupants were driven out, into the arms of horrified neighbours. A volley of murderous curses followed them down the narrow street. For the provincial Tasmanian city of Launceston, in the fragile post-war years, such a forcible seizure undermined the hope of a peaceful future after the carnage in the Pacific and Europe. Startled police arrived.

All available Launceston detectives secreted themselves in adjoining houses to watch for Sparkes to make a move.

He threatened to shoot anyone who came near, including his two brothers who had been summoned to negotiate. One of them was too angry to be helpful. The other chan ged his name when interviewed by the press. In accordance with the social mores of the day, my hapless mother, the one person who might have calmed my father, was kept away. He stormed around the house raising and lowering blinds, smashing windows, upturning furniture. In a rage he fired through the front door, narrowly missing the renamed brother who, with a young turk detective, had crept onto the porch and appealed to him to be sensible and come out. But nothing was further from his mind. Then, no doubt in light of his unfortunate military record, the army appeared. Warrant Officers met with police to discuss the possibility of dislodging him with tear gas and smoke grenades. Children milled around. Th ese were innocent times.

About 50 small children stood in the street, 100 yards from the house until scattered by police about an hour and a half later.

One reckless boy ran onto the verandah of the house, probably on a dare. Innocent times, pre-television days, with no live footage to view from the safety and comfort of a lounge room. Families drove up in taxis and private cars to witness the unfolding drama.

Many of them left hurriedly when another shot was fired at 7.30pm…

It would be a long night, the start of a long conflict, one that would last a lifetime…with authorities, with society, with himself… No, I’m wrong to called it ‘the start’…that, surely, came much earlier.

THE EARLY YEARS

As I was growing up my father rarely revealed details of his early life, those years before my birth, and even less about his family. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that he began to open up a little. Prior to that the only answer he offered, when I badgered him, was that his grandfather had been a remittance man, a disgraced English aristocrat banished to the colonies, and his great-grandmother had been the famous Tasmanian, Truganini. In my younger years I was gullible enough to believe anything he told me.

I didn’t badger him often, only when I was sure it was relatively safe to do so. In temperament he was unpredictable. It took a special moment, a lull in the storm, to dare a minor interrogation. In looks he rivalled the Hollywood beaux of the thirties and forties, with his impeccable wavy coiffure, luminous blue eyes and disarming smile, almost a poster boy like the local lad, Errol Flynn. But he had a minor physical flaw, which fascinated me as a child and led me to believe there was something not quite right about him: the absence of a left nipple. I was yet to learn it was the least of his oddities. He told me it had been shot off during the war—a remark I didn’t doubt until he admitted years later that he had never seen active service.

According to one of his cousins at his funeral he had been a wild child who grew to be a suave teenager, a charming lad to all the adults he knew (except his own father who had never been charmed by anyone), respected by men who had witnessed his boxing prowess, admired by women for his good looks. But something momentous happened to him while he was in Japan with the Commonwealth Occupational Forces. He was repatriated early, developed a ferocious temper, suffered dramatic mood swings and was prone to violent outbursts. He became an insomniac. He once told me that on his return to Launceston he went without sleep for eight months. A young man, barely an adult, probably dressed in unkempt clothes, his eyes gleaming madly, and his hair wild with neglect. Each night he wandered the streets into the early hours, which included a lonely journey up an unlit path beside the Cataract Gorge, until he came to a swinging footbridge, where he conversed with an equally restless apparition.

Who was the apparition? Some other self he might have been had he not joined the army? Did he tell it what had happened to him in Japan?

Did he say he was posted to Nagasaki, where he was caught stealing blankets from a US Army depot with the intention of distributing them amongst orphans wandering the ruined streets? Did he add that American MPs with no respect for his charitable work beat him up or, rather, threw him down a flight of stairs, doing permanent damage to the unique matter inside his head?

I heard such a story from my mother or father when I was young. But the Commonwealth Forces were never in Nagasaki. They were in the western prefectures, which included Hiroshima and Kure.

Decades later I discovered a different version. I was surfing the net one day when, to my astonishment, I found a number of newspaper articles on my father in the National Library’s digital archive that dealt with some of his misdemeanours from the late forties and early fifties. At one of his reported trials, his mental health was raised by the defence counsel, who stated he had been beaten over the head with a plank of wood by a Korean soldier in Japan. It was information given under oath but I had my doubts. I had never heard of Koreans being part of the Occupational Forces and a search for evidence of it in books and online revealed nothing.

When, long after his death, I got hold of his military and medical records, I was able to piece together a more plausible account.

Like his two brothers my father left school at the age of twelve. He began a five-year carpenter’s apprenticeship for the purpose I believe of joining his father’s construction team. But when he completed it in 1945, he defied his family’s wishes and enlisted in the army. He cheated on an eye test, memorizing the chart to conceal the corneal opacity in his right eye, and passed an entrance medical examination. No check was undertaken on the mental fitness of the eighteen year-old.

His conduct in the first few months after his recruitment must have been exemplary for he was promoted to corporal. But then he went AWOL for fifteen days during some training in New South Wales, for which he was penalised a month’s pay, fined £5 and demoted to private. A few months later he was incarcerated for 14 days and fined another £5 for ‘offering violence to his superior officer’, somehow avoiding a dishonourable discharge.

When the Second World War ended he volunteered to serve in occupied Japan. Assigned to the 66th Battalion of the Australian Infantry Forces, he arrived at the military port of Kure, which was a smouldering ruin, on the 26th of April, 1946. The barracks where he was billeted were twenty kilometres out of town at a place called Kaitaichi on the road to Hiroshima. In the weeks that followed he went on patrol around the port and perhaps even into Hiroshima. No doubt he witnessed some terrible sights but he made no complaint and his superiors considered him diligent and reliable. He showed no signs of anxiety or shock. There was no warning of what was to follow.

On July 4th, American Independence Day, he went berserk in his barracks, attacking other infantrymen, smashing furniture, overturning bunks and lockers. It took ten men to subdue him. He was put in a straight jacket and removed to the 92 Independent General Hospital in Kure.

As his Field Medical Card reveals, [he] suddenly became violent this evening about 20.00. Stated he was suffocating from the scent of a frangipani. Has not had a drink of any alcohol. Usually a quiet lad. He is a good worker. Th is is the first time he has shown any signs of unstable mind.

He was treated with morphine.

On admission he was quite rational though he stated the Japs had been trying to suffocate him by bringing flowers into his room, which used up all the air. He was in a state of fear and believed in the reality of his recent experiences. He said he had had suspicions of the Japs for the past three days but had only become certain of their intentions this evening.

He woke the next morning much calmer but still defended his account of the frangipani ordeal. By the following day, however, he began to feel he must have been imagining the whole thing and referred to it as a terrible nightmare.

His return to sanity didn’t last long. Further violent psychotic episodes—more smashed furniture, more attacks on army personnel—followed. Then he disappeared for three days and was found in a public area with bruises all over his body at the bottom of eighty or ninety steps, without any recollection of what had occurred. Did he fall? Was he pushed? Did it cause brain damage? The incident is barely mentioned in his military record.

During his confinement the resident psychiatrists and medical staff discovered a history of mental instability in his family (already quietly preparing a Departmental defence against liability). A maternal grandfather and an uncle had suffered mental illness. And Denny had shown neurotic traits ever since a fall from a tram in childhood. He had suffered blackouts, dizzy turns, and amnesic attacks, where he would wander and have no recollection of what had happened for an hour or more. He told doctors that since his arrival in Japan he had been extremely anxious and depressed. The doctors concluded that he had experienced a psychotic episode. He was diagnosed schizophrenic.

Eventually he recovered sufficiently to be discharged but was still suffering from anxiety. His army doctor, who considered his psychiatric condition ‘constitutional’, recommended he be reclassified as unfit for military duties and repatriated to Australia to avoid an inevitable relapse.

The definitive diagnosis was ‘psychopathic personality with emotional instability’. It was written across his military file and appeared on the majority of his Repatriation Department medical reports over the next few decades, as if it were immutable. But the degree of disability was deemed ‘negligible’.

Did he reveal what had happened to him in Japan to the apparition on the swing bridge?

Six months after his discharge, he was in the icy water of the South Esk River in Launceston, below the rapids where it reached the Tamar. He was clad in army issue fatigues, heavy boots, and a trench coat whose pockets were full of stones. There was a police launch nearby and a hefty hand grasping his collar. He wished the law would leave him alone. He was furious with its lightning response, furious he hadn’t yet sunk beyond its reach. The anger only made him feel more impotent.

Denny had been discharged from the army in late October 1946, but within weeks was seeing a psychiatrist, who worked for the Repatriation Department in Launceston. He told the doctor he was unable to concentrate, his ears buzzed and at times there were clicking sounds in his head. Then there were his blackouts of five minutes duration, which occurred about every eight to fifteen days. He also said he suffered from insomnia due to an overactive mind.

His inability to concentrate meant he had been unable to work since his discharge, which increased his anxiety and depression. He had been taught the importance of work growing up, and wanted to return to the trade he learnt before he enlisted. His family had always valued hard work. His father was a plasterer, a mean, overbearing figure who expected his three sons to follow in his footsteps, into the family business, which was built upon canniness and toil.

The doctor reported that his patient felt he was controlled by some outside agency, often experiencing a sense of unreality, as if he were watching himself acting on a screen. The doctor noted ‘depersonalisation’ . Denny fidgeted. As he sat, his legs moved constantly. His eyes darted around the room. He said he often felt as if something supernatural was happening. Hallucinatory voices commanded him to do violent things. These voices appeared to come from the back of his head. Sometimes they were vague and sometimes quite distinct. Startling the doctor, he slapped his head hard, as if to frighten the voices away.

The psychiatrist considered these symptoms of early schizophrenia and strongly recommended Denny’s immediate admission to Millbrook Rise Psychopathic Hospital.

Millbrook Rise was in New Norfolk, outside Hobart on the moody River Derwent. Set up with funds from the Tasmanian Veterans Trust after the First World War, it gave priority admission to servicemen and their families. Denny stayed there for a week. His official diagnosis came in one word: hysteria. But the hospital disturbed him, and he soon convinced his medical officer that he felt well and wanted to return home. He said he was confident about himself and was ready to go to work . He avoided more talk of voices in the back of his head. The doctors discharged him with advice to attend a psychiatric clinic in Launceston if he felt he needed further treatment.

Then paranoia set in. Three weeks after his release, a letter was sent to the Deputy Commissioner of the Repatriation, signed by his mother but in his handwriting, requesting information on the diagnosis reached for her son at the hospital. She had heard through outside sources that there was nothing wrong with her son; that he was just putting on an act in order to obtain a pension. She went on to defend his integrity, demanding an explanation for the turns he had, convinced he would never do anything improper that would distress his parents.

Perhaps his mother had heard the rumour and was affronted. Perhaps she was illiterate, and could produce little more than her own mark, so had dictated the letter to her son. But with a few of his letters before me I’m able to compare their styles and have an uneasy feeling he authored it, then cajoled his mother to sign.

The Deputy refused to release any details, citing privacy protocols.

Three weeks later another letter followed. This time it bore his signature and repeated the complaint about slanderous rumours. It authorised his parents to obtain his medical records.

He should have ended the letter there. But the rumours must have infuriated him. They must have offended his self-esteem and the belief he had in his own integrity. He began to rant: about the leaking of his confidential medical history, which he suspected had found its way into the hands of unauthorised personnel at the Launceston Red Cross; about his doctors—one in particular, who had apparently told him to take up wood chopping as a cure for all his mental problems; and he denied he had ever applied for a pension, other than on discharge.

And as far as I’m concerned you can take the pension I’m supposed to be trying so hard to get and go to hell with it, both your Department and the great psychiatrists on your Commission.

He demanded an X-ray of his head to discover what made it ‘behave like nobody’s business’.

By this stage he had worked himself into a state of pitiful indignation and he threw caution to the wind.

But this I would like to forward into the great psychiatrist Mr Commissioner, if by chance they [the doctors] should hear of someone being mysteriously killed or even hurt only slightly and I’m the culprit tell them to have a laugh for me would you and to think how they discharged me and said that I was only putting on a big act. I tried to explain all this to the so called doctors but it appears to have been taken with a grain of salt like the rest of the information I so hopefully forewarded [sic] to them.

But now Mr Commissioner if you’re not in hell, and that’s where your whole department should be along with a few so called mental doctors, seeing I’ve voiced most of my complaints I would just like to ask one more question before I sign off. How do I stand as regards a pension?

No pension was forthcoming.

A few months later he threw himself from a bridge into the South Esk River.

He was fed up with everybody and believed that all were against him. He had argued with his girlfriend and jumped. The police fished him out. He spent the next seventeen days in a watch-house before he appeared in court on a charge of attempted suicide, a crime, apparently, in those days. Later he insisted that he had felt compelled to jump.

Soon after, the Repatriation Department granted him a pension. Its medical officers probably thought he wouldn’t need it for long.

If the girlfriend mentioned at the time of his suicide attempt was not my mother, he had met her by the following summer. Pat had come to Launceston at the end of the war to work as a seamstress, an exile from the mainland, escaping her father’s callous housekeeper-mistress. They met one Saturday night in a dance hall when, at the entrance, Denny bumped against her, a tall brunette, whose hair was set in the cascading fashion of the day, revealing her ears and slender neck. Without introduction he led her onto the dance floor and impressed her with his mastery of the waltz, the foxtrot, the quick step and every other step they tried. She was dazzled by his bold poise and ingenuous smile. He was intoxicated with her soft laughter. By the end of the night she had decided to dump her boyfriend, who was away somewhere, and accept Denny’s request to meet again.

He courted her on the cheap, taking her to dances and the roller skating rink, where she paid her own way, accompanying her on picnics at the Cataract Gorge, which was his idea of dining out.

In September 1948, they married. There is a photo of them, taken outside the imposing door to St John’s Anglican Church in Launceston, in the first moments of marriage, matrimonial attire and nuptial smiles unable to conceal their incredulity.

I have no idea how much she knew of his mental instability, or whether it would have made a difference. If she was the girlfriend at the time of his suicide attempt and his jailing, she must have had a hunch about what to expect from their marriage.

Whatever she knew didn’t discourage her from starting a family. By the end of 1949 my elder sister, Jean, was born. And despite more psychotic episodes I followed two years later, just in time for the next major drama.

THE EARLY 1950s

I was less than a month old at the time of my father’s first siege.

Denny had bought a house in Invermay, a suburb of Launceston, about the time I was born, apparently with the help of a solicitor who had employed him to renovate old houses which were then sold for a profit. Living in one room at his parents’ house with a second child had become too much of an ordeal. He wanted to live the dream all young couples had of a quiet family life in their own home. The tenants, who had lived in the house for nine years, refused to leave. On advice from the solicitor, he sought an eviction order in court, but his action failed. Once more he felt the system conspiring against him. Brooding on the court’s decision, he went to the premises and asked the tenant if he could begin some renovations. His intention was to request two rooms be vacated so his young family could share the premises. She allowed him to strip the walls of some rooms in preparation for repainting. But when he pulled down a tool shed and a woodshed, her husband went to the police. They paid him a visit, but it failed to discourage his activities. He believed one of them was a relative of the tenants. Next he pulled down a fence.

Then early one morning in late November he knocked at the door and said he wanted to do some more repairs. The woman scowled at his suppliant tone. Imagining she had the upper hand and the law on her side, she told him it was inconvenient and asked him to wait until her husband came home. While he sat mutely on the back verandah, she sent a message to a neighbour, a hastily scribbled note hand-delivered by her youngest child, asking the woman to come over as soon as she could. She felt vulnerable on her own. The neighbour, sensing some urgency, obliged. They were having a cup of tea in the kitchen when Denny entered the house. Unsettled by the intrusion, the tenant requested he wait on the verandah. He took no notice. Instead he walked through the house, aggrieved. He moved from room to room, imagining what it would be like with his wife and two kids living there, his furniture, his pictures on the walls. Then like a gift from the voices inside his head he came across a .22 calibre rifle on a rack in the living room. That was the moment his mind tripped. Aggression was the only way others took any notice. He was nothing without it. Taught to use weapons in the army, he strode into the kitchen brandishing the gun and ordered the women from the house. He bellowed threats as they escaped into the street.

Later he would tell a psychiatrist that he could recall going to the house and becoming angry when the tenant refused to vacate the property. But he remembered nothing of the next hour and a half until he became aware of the rifle in his possession and an empty house. It seemed like a dream. He realised he should surrender but felt compelled to maintain the siege and shoot at anyone who came close, even his own brothers who had been brought in to negotiate. Eventually, in the early hours of the morning, sleep pacified him.

He woke at dawn with a very severe headache and only a vague recollection of what had happened; he no longer wished to continue with the siege. He realised the foolishness of his actions.

It ended when Denny put his hands through an open window to show he no longer held the gun.

The siege had lasted nineteen hours. Sixteen shots were fired, but thankfully no one was injured.

Court appearances followed. He pleaded guilty to three assault charges. After a trial, where his misadventures in Japan were presented as mitigating factors in his defence, he was sentenced to six months’ jail. Many locals wanted him to receive twenty years.

With the coverage the siege and subsequent trial received around Australia, Denny gained a good deal of support from fellow landlords who faced similar problems trying to remove unwanted tenants. They wrote letters to papers, declaring their admiration for his tactics. There were other letters from people who thought he had been treated scandalously as a returned soldier, having suffered a mental illness in the service of his country.

I have no idea how my mother felt. Decades later when I learnt about the siege, having lived through a second in my teens, I didn’t have the heart to discuss it with her. Nor do I have any idea what happened to the house or its uncooperative tenants. As far as I am aware we never lived there.

After he was released Denny shifted us around a lot, like a fox unsure of its lair. Launceston… Flinders Island… Portland… Launceston. Pat told me that we went to Flinders Island in the wild, treacherous seas of Bass Strait, because Denny found a job building houses in its main town, Whitemark.

I’ve seen a faded photo of an infant she claimed to be me. I’m twelve months old or so, standing on a drab beach (or at least the photo makes it look that way), bandy in a jumpsuit, arms akimbo, struggling to maintain my balance and a semblance of dignity, with a pose (and this corroborates her claim) that I find repeated in photos throughout my childhood, adolescence, and alas into adulthood where I’m more confident of my identity: head awry in an attempt to compensate for an eyelid that drooped over the left pupil, peering with mouth ajar, as if the external world was distasteful.

Was it the same beach where she had taken her cherished infant son to make sand castles, and looked up from her magazine to see him floating facedown in the shallows?

I nearly drowned on Flinders Island but my father was drowning in his own way. His work and home life were going badly. My mother saved me but could do little to rescue him.

He returned twice to Launceston to consult doctors about his mental instability.

One doctor wrote: [ He] returned from Flinders Island with his family two days ago. Is feeling no better. Very depressed and miserable. Says he is fed up with everything and everybody including himself—can’t concentrate or take an interest in anything…Paranoidal trends quite marked—says everyone says he is a no-hoper and a bludger—this infuriates him as he feels that he has tried to help himself as much as possible.

He gave accounts of waking up with his hands around Pat’s neck or threatening her with a knife. He felt detached from his surroundings, as though observing himself in a film. Sometimes screaming and thrashing around in his sleep, he would wake up in the night and see strange shapes at the end of his bed. Voices that were pitiless and accusatory shouted at him. He often experienced déjà vu. He became disorientated emerging from cinemas, unsure what was real or unreal. Alcohol was an anathema to him because after drinking he suffered blackouts and amnesia. His aggression towards Pat was depressing him. He told a doctor he had married her because she was just like his mother, and if it had been anyone else she would have left him long ago. He pleaded for help.

The doctor believed Denny was genuinely anxious about his behaviour and wanted him to return to Millbrook Rise, but the hospital refused to admit him due to his recent record of violence.

Almost twelve months after the siege he was in court again, this time on a fraud charge. He admitted gaining £200 by deception from a hire purchase company, having given a false name and address to the financier for money to cover the balance he claimed he owed on a car. He even presented a car, borrowed from an unwitting cousin, as proof of his intentions. The first repayment was never made. In his defence he claimed the money was needed to support his family after his stint in prison. He had lied to get it because the loan would never have been granted if he had revealed his true identity. He told the magistrate the money would be paid back if he received a bond, but not if he were jailed. Unimpressed, the magistrate committed him to trial, where a more compassionate judge gave him a bond on condition he refrained from gambling until the money owed was repaid.

Denny went back to Flinders Island but within two months, on the 11th of May, 1953, he was admitted to the Launceston General Hospital in a psychotic state. Pat was interviewed by staff at the hospital. She informed them that his rages had become worse. The doctor noted that he was a likeable young man who was apt to sulk and get angry whenever he was crossed. During a physical examination Denny grabbed the doctor’s hand, which was about to probe his neck, objecting to anyone touching his throat. While he was in hospital he received two electroshock treatments, the first of many he would endure over the years. He discharged himself after ten days, against his doctor’s advice.

He rejoined us. We stayed in Launceston. But Denny soon considered shifting away from Tasmania altogether. He told a social worker a decade later that, after the siege, he was blamed for everything that went wrong in Launceston. Police arrested and questioned him thirteen times in eleven months. He claimed that every time he got a job the police informed his employer of his criminal record, and ‘that would be that’.

It appears we moved to Portland, on the west coast of Victoria where one of Pat’s brothers and her sister lived, but he didn’t stay with us for long. Towards the end of the year he was at his parents’ address in Launceston, penning another letter to the Commissioner of Repatriation, in which he complained of financial hardship, his failed endeavours to shift interstate to start a new life, and the threats his wife had made to leave him. She was still in Portland, where he had the opportunity of obtaining a furnished flat, if only the Repatriation would grant him a small loan. He had been out of work for most of the year, but there was a part-time job waiting for him in Portland. He thought, with part-time rather than full-time employment, he would be able to manage his mental condition more successfully. His letter pleaded for the Department to consider his children. If the Repatriation couldn’t see fit to grant him the loan, then an increase in his pension would suffice. He reminded the Commissioner that it was only after his suicide attempt that his pension was granted, and that, while in jail, nobody from the Department had ‘come near me not even to see if my feet were clean’. Then there was the electric shock treatment to which Department doctors had subjected him. They surely knew how a patient’s brain could easily be fried. He insisted he was ‘no bludger’, but a victim. Society had conspired against him, depriving him of any chance of decent employment. The letter ended in typical reckless fashion: I’ll say this though that if something cannot be done to help me out one way or the other & my wife leaves me I’ll put on a performance that will make the Lee base & a few others look like gander parties. All I want is a chance to get away somewhere & start afresh & I think that with a little understanding on the Repat’s side this could be arranged.

I was curious about the reference to Lee base, which insinuated some kind of menace or disaster. The only reference to it that I could find in archived newspaper articles was of an accident that happened in 1937 at an airforce base at Lee-on-Solent, near Portsmouth, south of London, where a pilot crashed his plane into his own house, occupied by his wife and child. The house was destroyed but the occupants and the pilot survived with a few scratches. Whether it was a murder-suicide attempt went unstated. Was my father implying he would kill his family? Or worse?

Underlined by someone at the Repatriation Department, maybe the Commissioner himself, was a sentence pleading for a loan or a pension increase, a request that fell on deaf ears.

Soon after, Denny was exiled from the family home. His father came home one day to find all the furniture missing, sold apparently to fund a bet on a certainty that never eventuated.

He went back to Portland, took possession of a block of land somehow, maybe with the financial assistance of my mother’s brother, and started to build a house. He enlisted Pat as his assistant, until the frame of a wall toppled down on her and cracked several of her ribs. He called her careless and clumsy, but it didn’t stop him asking her for help with the guttering a few days later. When in agony and still hard of breathing she refused, he finished the house without her assistance. But it rankled with him. It was one of their few attempts to do something together and it ended in acrimony.

The house still stands: a square fibro-cement, flat-roofed bungalow, still painted vivid blue, almost the same colour as his eyes. It lacks aesthetic merit, is entirely functional and frugal. I make a point of passing it occasionally when I visit Portland, as a reminder of the sedentary life I might have led, a reminder of how life presents a myriad of trajectories.

My sister, Jean, insists we stayed there for a while. She also tells me that, while we lived there, Denny had possession of a black stretch limousine, a Plymouth, probably from the thirties, one of only four in Australia, with running boards and room in the back for two facing seats, not to mention a minibar, which was wasted on my teetotal parents. He drove it to Geelong to see the Queen on her first visit to Australia. Neither of my parents was ever a monarchist to my knowledge, although cultural ties to England were much stronger in the fifties. I never once heard them praise any member of the royal family. To the contrary, a few colourful words were used to describe their station in life whenever a member of the royal family featured in the news. Nevertheless, Denny took us all along, as well as Uncle Mick and his wife, Gerty, ‘to have a gander’, arriving half an hour before the Queen was due. As he drove through the streets, many of the onlookers who lined the streets, mistaking our imperial sedan for the royal vehicle, began to wave and cheer. Pat, with her hair cut shorter and permed, had an uncanny resemblance to the young Queen, and Aunt Gerty the frumpish Queen’s mother. Surprised by their ebullient reception, they responded with a royal wave.

Sometime after this episode of mistaken identity, we must have returned to Launceston. My mother, my sister and I, but no father, lived at my grandmother’s place, a ramshackle dwelling at the end of a cobbled lane, on a hill above the centre of the town, where today the ABC TV studios stand. Through the dimness of my fledgling memory, I see its kitchen. There’s a pungency of broth, warmth from a blackened wood stove, feeble light through a grimy, lofty window, and a wrinkly woman with startling white hair, who is apparently my father’s mother, sitting on a creaking chair. Her presence intimidates me but not my sister, who occasionally sits on her lap. And there’s another room where the walls have the same boards as the floor, only painted yellow or brown, and the paint is flaking off. There is a cast-iron bath on paws, filled to capacity with a fat uncle, steamy water lapping at the rim, an astonishing sight to behold, which I want my mother to share and am amazed, confused and disheartened by her stubborn refusal. My father is an abstraction that my mother sometimes talks about but only in hushed terms to my grandmother. To me he remains a mystery, like the ‘Good Lord’ that the old woman always talks about.

Where was my father? Why wasn’t he with us?

Did I ask anyone?

I was too young to know I was even supposed to have a father. I couldn’t really comprehend what such a person was. Would he be different from an uncle, who gave me cuddles and said I was a handsome little fellow (a lie, surely, but said with good intentions)? My older sister, who at five was almost twice my age and wise beyond her years, might have known. But, if I asked, her answer made no lingering impression. Or, if it did, she said he was a madman and I have wilfully forgotten it.

I was scared to ask my mother in case it upset her; an innate filial protectiveness, kicking in prematurely, or did I know that something was amiss between my parents? She would have answered with a lie, which would have upset her, since she was an honest person who took pride in her integrity.

The depth of my father’s mental illness and his gambling addiction permeated my grandmother’s house. It was a given that nobody talked about it, at least not in the presence of his children. But unspoken, it was palpable, like love or disgrace, the dual emotions wrapped in equal measure around my early memories.

A new member of the family appeared on the scene about this time, my other sister, Carol, although I had no idea where she came from. I have no memory of my mother’s changing size. Before Carol arrived I was told I would soon have a little brother or sister and asked my preference. And after giving it some thought, I declared I would rather a motorcar.

I remember getting a little red tin pedal machine, a gift from Uncle Geoff.

After Carol was born, we shifted to a house in a new area of the city called Waverly, where the yard was still clay and the only plants were weeds. It looked like a building site, with off -cuts and broken roof tiles strewn around and drainage pipes exposed in crudely dug trenches.

I trawl the deep recesses of my memory for images or events connected to this new home and only catch a few, which suggests we weren’t there long. If there is a cohesive element to these it would be that I am trying to help my mother, trying to please her, to be her ‘little man’ as she had started to call me, as if I were already a diminutive substitute. I see myself in pressed shorts that had straps up over my shoulders walking next to her, while she, a beautiful woman immaculately dressed in a long, pleated skirt, white mohair twin-set and felt beret, restrains a pram with my baby sister aboard, which is threatening to accelerate down a steep road. I feel I am keeping her company and my company is desired and helpful. I offer to take charge of the pram, which she appreciates but declines, perhaps already with enough drama in her life. And there’s another scene, with me again so eager to please, to be worthy of her love. I’m offering to put a new roll of toilet paper on the holder in the outdoor dunny. She asks if I know what to do but doesn’t stay to oversee, impressed by my show of confidence, my slow, thoughtful nod. Such a clever child! She leaves me to my own devices, returning some time later to find the roll unravelled around the back yard and me at the holder struggling to wind the paper on.

Then my father appeared on the scene, my first solid recollection of him, accompanied by a wary sensation, a feeling that it was prudent to avoid intimacy or any sign of affection. I was struck by how handsome he was, unlike Uncle Geoff, and how vivid and unnatural his blue eyes were, eyes I was too scared to look at for long.

I can’t remember any hugs and certainly no kisses.

But I have one unshakeable memory. He made me a billycart, presumably to supersede my pedal car. It was no ordinary billycart, either, for it had a reverse seat so I could take Jean along for the ride. Even though she was two years older, she was a girl, so I was the driver, the kind of privilege I gave little thought to as I was growing up. Our new place was at the top of a hilly street. He helped us aboard and patted my head and shouted, “Go, young fella!” and gave me a terrific shove to launch us. On the descent my throat constricted, the skin on my face went taut, my vision blurred and velocity tears channelled towards my ears. Unfortunately, halfway down, Jean with her rear view shouted a warning of a looming car, and in a panic I jerked the steering rope to one side, which caused us to crash into a concrete gutter, bruising my sister badly, shocking us both, and smashing my wonderful gift beyond repair, or beyond my father’s desire to repair it. This must have fatally damaged his burgeoning paternal spirit because, with the exception some years later of a leather satchel, a by-product of therapy, he never made me another thing.

I have other memories, authentic memories I’m sure, where we’re back at my grandmother’s with Denny gone again. Fatherhood, perhaps, is more than he can endure. My mother and grandmother are always cooking. My uncle sits in an armchair with a loud radio on a shelf above his head. But I like to be outside. I observe the stray cats in the lane, admiring their dexterity amongst the rubbish and their ability to disappear whenever I stealthily approach. I go to the park, a square with gigantic oak trees, at the end of the lane. Acorns are on the damp ground beneath the leafy canopy, their polished hue and rattle fascinating me, as I gather them into neat piles, with a feeling of earthly affinity.

The lane was cobbled with the same metallic stones as the walled embankment where the street began its descent towards the centre of town. On top of the wall the neighbourhood kids would muck around, which is where I met dark-haired, dark-eyed Louise, the baker’s daughter, whose character to this day eludes me, who accepted the only proposal of marriage I’ve ever made, after she consulted with her parents. Sadly, the engagement was short-lived. No sooner had I started school, in a brown brick school near the show grounds, with its hoard of shouting, crying, bawling, hustling, cowering kids, than I was whisked away, away from school, away from Nanna’s dingy retreat, away from the broad oak tree with its precious acorns, the awkward cobbled lane and sturdy stone wall, away from my dark-haired, dark-eyed fiancée whom I never laid eyes on again, who may still be waiting for all I know.

All due to my father’s sudden return, his eyes wild, his mood cagey, as if in his parent’s house, even with his own father dead, he felt unwelcomed.

He took us to the mainland.

To me it was strange how this man, who was hardly ever around, as elusive as the stray cats, had so much influence over my mother, and we—my sisters and I—had little choice but to follow.

At some stage my father had fallen in with a group of travelling salesmen who convinced him their career laid out the path to riches.

And riches lined his dreams.

The product they peddled was the recently invented rotary clothesline.

He started door-to-door sales in Sydney.

How we got there from Launceston I have no recollection. I was only five, too young to remember. Jean assures me we flew, and I have some vivid memories of flying when I was a child but none of destinations. I remember clearly seeing the plane Charles Kingsford Smith flew across the Pacific Ocean, the Southern Cross, which was on display at Brisbane Airport. But that must have been a year later on our rushed return.

While we were in Sydney we apparently lived in a few suburbs, but the only one I recall was Sylvania Heights on the south side of Botany Bay.

Every time we shifted, my father adopted a different surname, which used to upset my mother, who insisted at the very least that Jean and I keep our real name at the various schools we attended, anticipating the complexities and embarrassment if different names appeared on our report cards and other records. Even at a young age I thought it dishonest or at the very least sneaky to take a new name. It suggested to me that my father was trying to hide something. But I was an adult before I figured out that he might have been trying to elude police or debt collectors, that there might have been mischief behind our assumed names.

Perversely, the first surname he chose (Jean told me years later) was that of my mother’s former boyfriend. He even adopted his precursor’s first name. When I learnt this I wondered whether it had hurt her. Was it meant to be a joke or something more sinister? Was it his way of telling her she had made a mistake marrying him?

At Sylvania Heights Primary School we were to remain Sparkes; elsewhere we were to be Mathews. Any stranger who inquired was to be told Mathews. He scribbled the name onto scraps of paper for us to learn. Under no circumstances were we to use the ‘either-or’ option. When Jean wanted to know why we had to lie, he said, “You can’t be too careful”.

Pat, whose loyalty to her husband already seemed boundless, gave a stoical sigh and implored us to do what he said with the warning any slip up might cause trouble. I was confused. She had reminded me often enough, “always tell the truth”. But she proposed that this was probably not a lie, just a new name like when we were christened. You were allowed to change your name in a free country. But the expression on her face was unconvincing, even as she hugged me to her.

I shuffled around the house, clutching the scrap of paper. As I tried to commit the name to memory, anxiety kept flapping like moths against my ribcage.

Unlike Launceston, where I had been constantly cold, kept in a woolly jumper, suffered chilblains and red blotches on my salient ears and sculptured knees, Sylvania Heights was warm enough to get about in sandals and a short-sleeve shirt, which gave my skin a chance to gain an oily sheen. The sun was stronger. Sometimes it hurt. My colour changed.

“You’re starting to look like a blackfella,” Denny said, whose skin was even darker than mine. Carol was my colour, Jean was more red than dark, and Pat remained white, avoiding the sun when she could, wearing a broad-brimmed hat outside.

While Jean and I were at school, trying desperately to find some friends, my father worked the neighbourhood. He was selling a contraption that was to revolutionise washing day. Within a few years the company he worked for would become a household name. After a stint as a real estate agent some years later and a decade of selling cheap jewellery and tiled tables at flea markets, he told me rotary clotheslines were the easiest things in the world to sell. He just had to peep into back yards and see the unsightly wires looping from one side of a lawn to the other, propped up with cumbersome poles: so much wasted space, so untidy, so much heavy lifting. And the housewife on his brochures looked more like a beauty queen than a weary washerwoman.

He must have saturated the local market rather quickly, or had other urgent reasons for leaving, because without warning he shifted us again, this time to somewhere north of Sydney, by the shore of Lake Macquarie, near the port of Newcastle. Jean and I were put in another school, wondering if it was worth the effort to make friends with anyone.

I was starting to see the benefit of make-believe friends, who could at least come with you when you shifted.

The house we took, close to the lake, made a great impression on me. Only a few yards from the water, it was like a barn with a giant double door and space inside, I was told by my erudite sister, to house a boat. The living quarters were at the rear and in the loft. A salty, fishy smell filled the building whose size and shape fired up my infantile imagination. Outside, where pelicans rocked as water lapped against a pebbled shore, Jean, her blond hair swept back and her face ruddy from the wind and excitement, told me there were pirates, invisible for the moment but known to approach at tremendous speed when the wind was up. I had just become Peter Pan, she Wendy, and the house a mighty cave, a fabulous hideaway, where broom cupboards and dark places underneath the stairs were concealed nooks and secret tunnels that no pirate was clever enough to discover.

But without warning we were uprooted once again by my restless father, who moved us into an ordinary house in another town near the lake, where the rent was cheaper or the neighbours less nosy. Or he was harder to trace.

I was dizzy from the third new name in as many months.

What my mother thought of these constant changes I have no idea, although I doubt she enjoyed them. Later, when I was old enough to appreciate her as an individual, I realised how much a proper home meant to her. She liked a place she felt was her own, where she could grow flowers and vegies, and she could shut the door on the world and go to sleep in the same bed she’d been sleeping in for years, knowing she would still be there in the morrow. Yet, despite our nomadic existence, it would have pleased her that Denny had a job, and one that suited his temperament. He seemed to be happy, or at least not depressed. Occasionally an extraordinary grin would appear, a billboard promoting false teeth, which always startled me. It vanished as quickly as it came, like the sun poking through winter clouds, as if he could find no reason to sustain it. Yet he seemed optimistic, as if he too envisaged the day when he would have enough money to buy a place and settle down. They were both around thirty, still young enough to harbour dreams.

One day I came home from school to find a television in our lounge. It was early days for television in Australia and not every household could afford one. I had only ever seen them before in the display window at a Sydney emporium, where a crowd of curious onlookers had gathered. Denny had bought or hired this one. He was delighted with our excitement and gratitude. He sat on the couch to watch it with his arm around Pat’s shoulder. The program I remember was the Mickey Mouse Club. I remember it in colour, which of course is a false memory, since colour television wouldn’t appear in Australia for another two decades. But I remember red on the Mouseketeer uniforms. The show was thrilling. I laughed and joined in the singing. M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E. Mickey Mouse, ra, ra, ra! I felt the joy of privilege. But I squandered the opportunity when my mother caught me weeing in the bath one evening. She saw a yellow subterranean stream that I mistakenly assumed was undetectable. She banned me from watching TV for a week, which might as well have been a life sentence because it soon disappeared without explanation. I felt it was my fault, a punishment for a bad habit. I would be sixteen and properly toilet trained before we had another set. More recently I’ve realised it had probably been bought on hire purchase with a small deposit, and hocked or resold at a profit, which was to become a scam my father employed when he was desperate for some cash.

Around this time Pat managed to pay a professional photographer to do portraits of her three children, the earliest colour photos of us. We look happy enough, particularly Carol with her infectious grin, although my anxiety was never completely hidden by smiles. I’m dressed in a neat school uniform: brown-and-fawn checked, short-sleeved shirt, brown shorts, fawn socks, tan sandals. My hair is oiled, combed back and flawlessly parted on one side, the handiwork of my fussy mother. My head is on its usual angle to compensate for a lazy eyelid. One of my hands is raised to display a simple balsawood model aeroplane.

Flight.

I’m tempted to interpret the toy as a metaphor for my early years. But that would be reading too much into it. I accepted my mother’s explanation for our constant movement: we weren’t running away from anything but helping our father to do his job. But I wished he would stop because the shifting was making me chronically anxious. I wanted to love him as I loved her, but he was too elusive, too busy to slow down and pay me some attention.

Then Brisbane became our base for almost a year and my anxieties subsided, despite another name change.

When we arrived in this sultry city we spent a few days in a hotel where I used a lift for the first time in my life. I looked down in awe from our fourth-floor room upon the bustle of diminutive pedestrians and traffic. Denny was with me, which was exciting in itself, his hand upon my shoulder, our most intimate moment yet, pointing to scenes in the street, a policeman addressing some sailors, and someone trying to cross the road in a wheelchair, and the café where he had bought me a pie for lunch, now the size of a doll’s house. I knew I owed the adventure to him. I laughed to show how delighted I was that he had given me a new lofty perspective on the world. It never would have happened without him. I thought how wonderful it would be to live up so high and pleaded with him to let us stay, to which he said, “We’ll see.” He was grinning at me and even gave me a squeeze, pressing me to his side, my head against his hip, feeling his warmth. I thought in that moment he liked me as much as I liked him. And I thought if he lets us stay he loves me. But within a couple of days he shifted us into a weatherboard house in the hilly suburb of Kelvin Grove, and he became a stranger to me once again.

The house, whose back section was on timber stilts, had big sunny rooms with hazy views of distant hills, and enough space beneath its floor to hide and play, to evoke highwaymen, the landlocked cohorts of the pirates, whom Jean had recently discovered in books and generously shared with me. There were plenty of places in our lush backyard for the outlaws to maintain hideouts or hold ambushes: behind the garage, where a succulent banana tree grew, or even inside it, where they placed enormous, grotesque spiders, which Jean called tarantulas, for the sole purpose of terrifying us—undermining our bravery, our resistance—especially our little sister, who had been conscripted to swell our ranks but in effect, thanks to her constant blabbing, we would have been better off without.

My mother spent most of her time inside the house. We saw her when she came into the back yard to hang up the washing. I heard her singing sometimes as she cleaned the house or cooked a meal. Most of the time she seemed happy to me. When we went inside in the late afternoon, she would listen to our adventures, fuss over our clothes, and remind us to wash our hands and face. She licked her fingers and wiped away the smudges we had missed around our mouths. She warned us never to forget about tidiness. People judged a family on the appearance of its kids. She’d give us a brief cuddle to let us know she loved us.

Jean and I went to a double storey school where most of the students were friendly, the lunches were free, a blue tongue lizard lived inside a dead tree stump, and a derelict man used boiled lollies to try to lure young pupils into the bushes at the back of the school yard. It must have been summer because after school each day we walked home in a tropical deluge. We removed our sandals and kicked up the warm gushing water that gurgled in the gutters.

Warmth, verdure, the cloying scent of tropical fruit, the bananas and pawpaws that grew in back yards: these are the residual sensations of Brisbane.

I eventually felt comfortable in Kelvin Grove. It seemed to be the first time I managed to establish some friends at school, in part because I occasionally failed to respond at roll call whenever I became absent-minded about my surname, which built my reputation amongst some students as a fearless antagonist of teachers, amongst others as a harmless dummy, either way someone worth befriending. I made other friends outside of school, most notably the girl next door, who liked to play in the little tent we had in the back yard, where she was keen to compare and touch wee-wees, away from our parents’ prying eyes.

Denny was so busy we hardly ever saw him. Just as I got up he went to work in summer pants and a pressed white shirt, always clean shaven and with Brylcreem in his hair, selling clotheslines. At least I thought he was. Sometimes he mucked up my hair in a fleeting, friendly farewell. My mother had a strict rule about early bedtime, so he usually came home after I went to sleep. He worked five days a week. Sometimes on a Saturday he was home, sitting in the living room, with a paper spread over his knees (a form guide, no doubt), but he got impatient with me when I wanted to be with him, shooing me away with a flick of his hand.

Pat warned me to keep away. She held my shoulders and looked at me in her usual sympathetic way. “Your poor father works very hard, darling,” she said with the briefest of smiles. “Let him rest.”

There were times when he was cross with her too and would raise his voice. Mostly she said nothing but sometimes I heard her arguing with him.

“You’ll get caught, Denny,” I heard her say one day.

On another occasion she said, “I’m not a magician. I can’t pull meals out of thin air, can I?”

When Jean, who was listening behind the door with me, explained in a whisper what a magician was, I wondered what my mother meant.

“And money doesn’t grow on bloody trees either!” he retorted.

He had already told me that the jacaranda in our front yard was a money tree. He had stood at my side, his hand on my shoulder, and looked up at the tree for a few minutes, scanning for money. “Can you see that?” he said, pointing at something. “There’s a tenner! I’ll have to get up there and get that some time.”

I couldn’t see it. He squatted next to me and kept pointing, urging me to follow his directions.

“Up higher. To the left. A little further. Yeah, that’s it! See it? Are you blind?”

And then he biffed me, affectionately, and laughed.

“Get it now!” I cried.

“Can’t. Too busy.” He nodded at me seriously and went away.

I cherished the times I shared with him but he was always too busy for more than a few moments. I kept an eye on the money tree, wondering when my father would return to pick the ten-pound note he could see, waiting for coins to appear like acorns.

Once or twice I came upon him doing something beneath the house, fiddling with a piece of apparatus whose purpose I didn’t understand. I was eager to learn, especially from him, and when I inquired he answered, “It’s a wigwam for a goose’s bridle.” The second time I asked for its name and he called it a “thingummygig”.

When I told my mother what he had said, hoping for clarification, she just laughed and said, “Your father hasn’t got time for the names of things, darlin’. His mind’s too busy to stop and look for silly old words. He just races past them.”

Our lives revolved around, depended on, our steadfast mother, who fed us, washed and ironed our clothes, who taught us how to tie shoelaces and cut our nails. She made sure we were as clean and tidy as she was, made sure we had brushed our teeth after meals and went to bed early. She instilled in us the importance of sensible routines and respectability, while our father flitted in and out of our daily lives, a chimera whose jokes and commands were usually incomprehensible.

Once or twice we went on family outings, memorable because we were spending a few consecutive hours together.

Denny took us on a picnic to a park on a hill, where I saw some strange people. The men were dressed in shiny jackets and tight trousers that my mother called jeans, which we all thought was funny because it was like my sister’s name. The women wore colourful slacks that brazenly showed the shape of their legs, and tight tops that showed the pointy shape of their bosoms. The cuffs of the men’s jeans were rolled up enough to display their red socks and pointy shoes. All of them had their hair slicked into pompadours, held aloft with grease or spray. Denny told me they were called ‘Bodgies’ and ‘Widgies’.

We moved well away from them and must have had a pleasant time because I remember little else about the day, except that my mother was happy—she was smiling a lot—and he threw a ball to me once or twice. Or am I being fanciful, wanting to believe my mother could be content and my father did play with me sometimes?

He did, after all, take Jean and I to a public pool. I remember this clearly! The pool had cool, unnaturally blue, strange-smelling water. My mother didn’t come because she couldn’t swim. In his bathers he looked like a gorilla: powerful and covered in thick hair. Even his legs were a bit bowed. Gorillas were scary monsters. And when they rushed forward, beating their chests, they were terrifying. He tried to teach Jean how to swim but she sank to the bottom, where, engaging the independent attitude for which she was later renown, she walked across the bottom to an underwater ladder and ascended. Denny was grinning so much that creases appeared on his cheeks and his ears fluttered. He reassured her he would have rescued her if she had been in peril, but he wanted her to learn the most important lesson of all: “look out for yourself; you can’t trust anybody”. He held us both at the shoulders, first Jean and then me, and repeated the words and urged us to remember his advice.

Was this his oblique way of telling us we would soon be on our own?

A few weeks later I came home from school to find Pat distraught, packing everything, doing her best to avoid tears. She suddenly looked much older to me. Her face had lines I’d never seen before, like erosion along gullies after a downpour. She was calling me her ‘little man’ again as I tried my best to help her shut a bulging suitcase. I pleaded to be told what was going on and where my dad was. And in a voice that sounded unnatural, as if it were about to rupture, she explained that he had to go away because of work, which was only a small white lie, and she was taking the rest of us back to Portland, and “don’t worry about your father”, we’d see him again one day .

It felt as if the earth was spinning out of control beneath my feet, and if I didn’t run furiously I’d be bowled over and swept away.

All I wanted was to stand still with my father next to me.

WORKING FOR ANGUS CAMPBELL

Was Pat trying to protect us by keeping Denny’s whereabouts a secret? If so, she made a grave error of judgment. Her silence filled me with dread and doubt.

I couldn’t accept that he had left us simply for more work. After all, we had been following him along the eastern seaboard, shifting from city to city, house to house, school to school, as he sold rotary clotheslines. Why shouldn’t that continue? I suspected something more serious had happened to him. Something bad, in fact—something shameful—that Pat wouldn’t reveal to us. I suspected the various surnames we used had something to do with it. You would only change your name if you were ashamed of it or you didn’t want someone to find you.

He became a negative presence in my life, a shadow without embodiment. I couldn’t even bring myself to talk about him with Jean, much less Pat or anyone else. Except Carol, perhaps. She would have listened to me. But I thought she was too young to understand. So the shadow became my own secret, which set me aside from my mother and sisters, set me adrift, you might say. And that secret radiated shame. It was my first real experience of separation, isolation…individuality. My notion of self, who I am, I’ve come to understand had a morbid origin.

Years passed before I found out what had happened to Denny, although I was to learn much sooner of his whereabouts from an entirely unexpected source.

Bald, bespectacled Uncle Mick was my mother’s eldest brother. He looked cantankerous but a more benevolent, easy-going uncle I couldn’t have asked for. He lived with his wife, Aunt Gerty, and daughter, Brenda, in a fibro-cement-sheet house on the southern slopes of the hill that rose out of Fawthrop Lagoon. They were the Staggs and they took us in without complaint or any questions that I was aware of about Denny.

Conveniently our other relatives in Portland lived next door. The Stewarts: Aunty Barb, who was Pat’s sister, her husband, Harry, and their only child, Don. Why my relatives were neighbours I had no idea and never thought to ask. I was simply grateful for my unexpected inclusion in this gregarious clan after the uncertainty of life with Denny. The Staggs and Stewarts had been in Portland for more than a decade, more than my lifetime. A more sedentary tribe I couldn’t have hoped for. A gate had been installed in the side fence to reduce the number of steps between their back doors. And lest the journey be too taxing a private phone line linked their back porches so they could contact each other just by cranking an antique handset on the wall. All the adults had steady jobs. Uncle Mick worked for the post office as the teleprinter operator. Aunty Barb and Aunt Gerty worked as barmaids at the Mac’s Hotel. Uncle Harry kept the books at a local automotive workshop. After work, within the constraints of six o’clock closing, the menfolk drank furiously as if to negate the monotony of their days. Occasionally, at night and on weekends, they went ocean fishing off rocky outcrops on the capes. They followed the local football team, went to matches and stood as close to the boundary as possible to vent their feelings towards oppositions, umpires, work, the world, or anything else that sprang to mind. But what they were fondest of (it was easy to tell) was sitting at home in beery confabulation, by the wood stove when the wind was cold or outside when the sun poked through, preferably in the company of others. In summer, if a fly happened to land on the froth in a glass of ale, one of them would inquire as to whether it was doing backstroke or dogpaddle. Then the luckless creature would be removed with an artful puff and a grateful comment on how little it had managed to drink.

The beer consumption amazed me. I had never seen either of my parents touch alcohol. The Staggs and Stewarts, both men and women, swallowed copious amounts, supplying them with enough raw material to build impressive bottle walls, which for a while I was fooled into believing was the purpose of all the consumption. They took offence at my suggestion they drank too much.

Aunt Gerty was my favourite. She was a stout woman (in dimension as well as her choice of beverage) with a majestic bosom and blue-rinse hair. I liked her thunderous farts as she got up every morning. Her beer farts, she called them nonchalantly, as if they were as natural as the rising sun. They put me in a good mood for the day. She was raucous and always had something outrageous to say that raised the hackles of her husband or whoever happened to be around. Often someone dropped by and stayed the whole day, or at least until the beer ran out, which was a rare, traumatic occurrence that was in danger of transforming the mood of the entire neighbourhood, unless like a miracle a guest had an emergency stock in a car boot. Sometimes, when the beer was flowing, Aunt Gerty would play ditties on the upright in the lounge room while others sang along. If I was around she would sneak me chocolates and kisses. She liked to ruffle my hair, tangle her bejeweled fingers in it and tug until I protested. For reasons that still elude me she used to call me ‘Butch’ or ‘Butchyboy’, so often that others in the tribe, including my mother, adopted it. Perhaps she misjudged my character or her intention was ironic, but usually when she said it, she put a sweaty hand around my neck, drew me into her bosom, where I was in danger of suffocating, and chuckled while I squirmed.

“You’re a good kid, Butchyboy. You love your Aunt Gerty, don’t you? Then you look after your mother now, for me, okay? You be strong, won’t you? She’s going to need a good man in her life, not like that mongrel father of yours. You know he’s a no-hoper, don’t you, Butchyboy? Good riddance to bad rubbish we say, don’t we?”

She must have known something about my father that I didn’t know. If she did, she never bothered to enlighten me. But ‘good riddance to bad rubbish’ meant only one thing to me—gone for good. My heart constricted.

Aunt Gerty and Uncle Mick had three children. Rory and Ann had already left home and started families of their own. Brenda their baby was probably a mistake since she was more than ten years younger. She was about the same age as Jean but that was where the comparison ended. She was proudly dumb, conventionally pretty and immensely popular in the neighbourhood, especially amongst the boys who followed her around, played in the yard with her or went exploring in a thornbush paddock opposite the house.

Jean was pretty too but in a sisterly way. She and I often tagged along and were only tolerated because we were related. We could have played with our other cousin, Don, but he was a year younger than Carol and so of no consequence. Besides, he was an odd boy whose best friends lived inside his head. We weren’t offered cigarettes or taken into secret cubby houses like Brenda but allowed to play hide-and-seek or Cowboys and Indians when they were short of Indians. And once, as a reward for dying several times in Custer’s Last Stand, I was invited to spy on Aunt Gerty’s bum through the nightsoil-man’s portal at the back of the outdoor dunny, an offer I was too terrified to accept.

Pat enrolled Jean and me in the Portland Primary School. It was a red brick school not unlike the one I’d attended briefly in Launceston, with a smaller bluestone building in one corner, officially the first school in Victoria, which had become the art room, full of riotous paintings and swirling mobiles.

I remember my first day at the school, the harsh expanse of asphalt and a lofty classroom with rows of identical desks, a chalky blackboard, gawking students, some whose paths I crossed time and again as I was growing up without becoming a close friend of any (except Marty and that wasn’t until my teenage years). And, ah, yes, there’s my mother retreating, with reassuring words and a tentative wave goodbye, looking wistful in a summer frock and brand new white-framed glasses, her hair as scalloped and fixed as the coiffure of a marble bust. I felt abandoned but I understood even at such a young age that I had to be stoical about it. She too had been abandoned and now she had to find a job.

It was well over halfway through the school year, so I was considered an intruder by the rest of the class. Yet with a routine imposed upon my days I soon felt more at ease. I willed my father out of my thoughts, convinced that he didn’t care for us any more, if he ever had. In class I became a model student, reading aloud upon request, doing my sums diligently, chanting the times tables with my classmates. But at lunch I ate alone in a crowded shelter shed, intently focusing on cheese and Vegemite sandwiches.

Soon Pat had work for the first time since her marriage. Aunt Gerty and Aunty Barb managed to secure her a position as a maid at the Mac’s Hotel.

The hotel was a grand old double-storey bluestone building painted white, with balconies and wrought-iron lacework, an erstwhile Cobb & Co terminal close to the foreshore and opposite the post office in another historic building where Uncle Mick worked. Pat made the beds and cleaned the guest rooms upstairs. But then my aunties tried to induct her into their own occupation one evening when the hotel was short-staffed for a private function. The only mixed drink Pat knew was a shandy. She made mistakes, reversing the ratios of mixed drinks, pleasing the guests but not the management.

Realising the futility of training a teetotaller as a barmaid, Gerty steered her away from the hotel industry, into another cleaning job, this time working in an historic Portland mansion.

The owner was one Angus Campbell, a proud member of the Western District squattocracy and an ex-member of the Senate in the Menzies’ Liberal Government, which I was informed at a young age happened to be the enemy of all hard-working people throughout the nation. The mansion had been built by one of the early settlers in the district. But Pat and Aunt Gerty, who accompanied her initially, disregarded its significance and grandeur to talk about how idle the rich were. How untidy and thoughtless they were around the house! One thing my mother couldn’t abide was the notion that certain matters were beneath the dignity of some, while for others like her, it was their lot in life. She saw some irony in old Angus donating the Campbell Cup for Cleanliness to the high school, given each year to the House that accrued the most points for Yard Duty.

“You should’ve heard Gerty retching and swearing while she was cleaning the toilet,” Pat said when the topic came up years later. “She was shouting out filthy bastards and I had to tell her to keep quiet because old Angus was in his bedroom having his nap.”

An absentee grazier, Campbell owned a five-thousand acre sheep station in the Wimmera. He must have been impressed with Pat because he soon offered her the job of housekeeper at its homestead.

She accepted and was grateful. She couldn’t count on her brother’s generosity indefinitely and she had no other way of feeding her children. Arrangements were made to shift us and our few possessions north. It was the end of the school year, and despite my growing attachment to the Staggs I was glad to be leaving.

Shortly before the holidays a boy I didn’t know accosted me in the playground and pushed me in the shoulder.

“I know where your dad is,” he declared with a leer that startled me.

“So do I,” I lied quickly to hide my alarm.

But it sounded feeble.

Seeing I was afraid he laughed cruelly.

“So, you know he’s in jail, do yer?”

Stunned, I denied it, but without much conviction.

He insisted and added that his father was a policeman who knew these things. “My dad warned me not to have nothink to do with the likes of you. So keep out of my bloody way, Bung Eye.”

He pushed me aside and walked off.

I could hardly believe it despite my fears. My father in jail? That only happened to bad men. Criminals. Robbers. Murderers. Scary men…

Of course I knew nothing about his previous prison sentence for the Launceston siege. I knew nothing about his conviction for fraud. I tried to convince myself that Brisbane was too far away, even for a policeman, to know what had happened to him. I had tried my hardest, despite Aunt Gerty’s asides and my own doubts, to cling to Pat’s assurance that he had gone away for work. Now this boy’s accusation seriously undermined my fragile equanimity. Why would he make up something as terrible at that? The obvious answer was: he wouldn’t. Not only did I have no father in town, but he was emerging as someone who would make me blush violently whenever I was asked about him. I wondered what terrible thing he had done to deserve jail. I didn’t repeat the boy’s slander to anyone. Some things, I was learning, were better kept secret.

It was sweltering when we reached Kirkwall, the Wimmera sheep station, several hours north of Portland and eight miles from Apsley, a small rural service town, where Jean and I would be going to school. The sharp heat lifted my spirits despite the anxiety of another move into the unknown.

The parched paddocks shimmered, relinquishing what residual moisture there was in the ground. Sheep dawdled towards the meagre shade of dying trees or stood listlessly with their necks drooping and mouths agape in a silent pant. The sky was a pitiless blue. The track we travelled on consisted of brown powder that created a mock cloud behind the ute that Campbell had lent Pat for the trip.

We passed a fibro-cement sheet house where the station manager and his wife lived. Pat, with moist hands and droplets of perspiration on her forehead, drove further, on a grand sweep to the Kirkwall homestead, a sprawling brick mansion, rendered a faint pink colour, whose servants quarters we were to occupy. It was fully furnished but uninhabited.

“Well,” she said, holding our hands and giving us reassuring squeezes, as we walked, astonished, through the rooms. “We’ve come up in the world, haven’t we?”

My mother’s job was to keep the place spotless for the periodic arrival of Campbell. On average he stayed a few days, and while he graced us with his presence Pat’s duties included the preparation of his meals, to be served in a dining room big enough to be Apsley’s public hall, on the kind of table I had only seen in book illustrations of medieval castles. Mostly he came alone.

In the hot summer before the school year started I explored the vicinity of the homestead. Except for my sisters there were no other kids around. I spent much of the time alone, which didn’t bother me, being preferable to the company of others who might know something about my father.

The homestead was surrounded by gardens that a reclusive old farmhand maintained. A semi-circular driveway passed by a grand entrance. The eastern wing, where the bedrooms were located, overlooked a paved enclosure with a large fishpond. In the middle of the pond was an ornate fountain that operated whenever Campbell was in residence. Behind the homestead stood some spreading nut trees that cockatoos enjoyed feeding on.

Nearby was a shed that housed a generator and a bank of batteries, the source of electricity for the homestead. There was also a small dairy where Daisy the cow was milked. It had a special motorised vat that separated cream from milk. Up until then in my short life I had taken most endeavour and invention for granted, but these sheds opened my eyes to human ingenuity, gave me an inkling of the sort of creature I was. The smells, too, were intoxicating, the acrid fumes of diesel and acid, the sour fetor of the dairy, the smell of human cleverness. It made me anxious about growing up. About how much there was to learn.

Yet all this was nothing compared to the magical way my mother transformed cream to butter simply by adding salt and beating it for long enough, first with spoons or a hand-held beater and then with small wooden paddles, after draining off the excess liquid, the buttermilk, until it looked and tasted the same as what could be bought at the grocers.

I loved to watch her at work in the kitchen, whether it was making butter or cakes or scones, or roasting lamb, or doing dishes, or sweeping the floor. She wore a clean, ironed apron, and often hummed or sang to herself, unaware that I was watching her, a faraway expression on her face. She liked to listen to music from a bulky Bakelite radio on the bench near the meat safe, which played songs by Frank Ifield, Pat Boone and Doris Day. One of her favourites was a young man called Elvis Presley, but only when he sang his ballads, not that rock-n-roll, up-tempo nonsense. I soon had the impression that the kitchen with its cooking smells and music was her favourite place.

The smells always made me hungry, and if it wasn’t meal time, I would fill up on bread and honey or the scones she baked, which I ate with jam and Daisy’s cream and an earnestness fit for a rural show judge. “You must have hollow legs,” she’d say and we would laugh together.

My mother had grown up on a small farm in Gippsland, not far from La Trobe River. Living once more on a farm probably reminded her of the idyllic childhood she’d had. She often reminisced about her four older brothers who had treated her and their younger sister, Barbara, like mascots, taking them to their football matches, teaching them how to milk the family cow, taking them camping along the Ninety Mile Beach for Christmas holidays. Sea and sand. Brothers fishing in the waves. Garrulous gulls overhead. Making sandcastles with buckets and spades. Carefree times that she returned to in her mind as the years went by.

At home with her mother she had learnt the domestic skills that she would practise with pride throughout her life. But when her mother died suddenly, Pat’s life had veered off on an unexpected trajectory. Her father never had enough land to run a profitable farm. He earned extra money as a nightsoil man around the district. Yet somehow he took on a housekeeper to manage his large family and (according to some of my relatives) to be his mistress, just as the nation became embroiled in the Second World War. Two of his sons were conscripted, the eldest, Mick, was exempted on account of his Morse Code skills at the General Post Office, the other because he had a milk run, while the sisters were assigned to a clothes factory in the nearby township of Sale. The two girls spent the war years sewing military uniforms and dreamed of leaving home. They never warmed to the housekeeper-mistress and her daughter, who treated them like vassals.

Pat often told me the story of how she had moved to Tasmania with Barbara shortly after the war ended to escape the petty tyrannies of these ‘intruders’. It was her luck to meet Denny in Launceston. And my luck too, I guess.

Kirkwall had the feel of a sanctuary. I’d wake up in my own narrow bedroom to the enchanting warbles of magpies, so different to the raucous cockatoos and corellas that arrived later in the day. In the keen morning air, I’d visit the unexplored parts of the garden or the parched home paddock, with a long-retired greyhound and an orphaned lamb as my only companions. Solitude required so much less effort than company. I didn’t mind occupying my time with simple pursuits, like checking the progress of flowers, or counting pond fish, or studying cobwebs woven between trees, or following the trails of ants. I would feel the temperature rise by degrees with the regularity of a clock ticking over. I took pleasure in the day’s warmth on my neck.

The only outsider to visit that I can remember was the Rawleigh’s man, whose vehicle was a kind of mobile dispensary. He sold balms and medicines for minor ailments that needed no doctor’s prescription. Pat looked forward to his visits but I only had a passing interest in him. I secretly endowed him with evil intent; his lotions were clever poisons. Did he supply her with the Bex she took every day? I reconnoitred from behind a shrub, armed to the teeth, ready to defend our castle if he made one false move. I only appeared when the dust from his retreating van settled and silence returned.

Sometimes curiosity led me further away from the homestead towards low-lying land that was encircled by old, spreading eucalypts. As I approached an unpleasant hum seemed to emanate from the leaves. There was an eeriness about the place which intimidated me, and daring myself to walk to its centre, my courage failed. Still I went time and again to the periphery to experience the strange sensation.

“It’s the dead Aborigines, I bet,” Jean said, after I asked her to accompany me once.

Back at the homestead she showed me her evidence, a skull that the gardener had recently given her, explaining that the homestead was built on a “blackfellas’ graveyard”.

There was another place I discovered that was just as unsettling, on a neglected piece of land beyond the vegetable garden and the chookyard. A large cage had been constructed of wire netting with a funnel entrance on top. Rotting meat was placed on the dirt floor of the cage, and crows would arrive to drop through the funnel for an easy meal. Their woes began on departure. When they flew up to the funnel their wingspan was too wide to allow their escape. Every few days the old farmhand would check his catch and shoot any bird not yet dead from exhaustion or thirst. “They pick out the little lambs’ eyes,” Pat said to mollify me as much as explain the trap’s purpose. It crossed my mind that this was another manifestation of human ingenuity, and it disturbed me.

Pat did her best to fortify her brood against the starker realities of our predicament. I was still too young to understand the burden she faced bringing us up alone, the loneliness she must have felt. She was in her early thirties, a woman in the prime of her life, whose husband at the very least must have been a disappointment. But if she had regrets or resentments she never revealed them to us. Looking back there seems to be moments when I was concerned about her emotional state. But how can I be certain these are genuine childhood responses rather than something I later hoped I had once felt, when I was old enough to appreciate what she had endured? Besides, if I had such moments they were fleeting and private, shared with nobody, neither sisters nor mother.

One of my memories of Pat at Kirkwall is of her dressed in a floral frock with a hem to the shins, wearing glasses on account of her poor eyesight, with white-frames to match her white handbag, her hair moderately short and permed, her cheeks powdered, her lips glistening pink or red. It was how she was whenever we went to town: to Apsley, the closest little community, or Naracoorte, just over the border into South Australia for any serious shopping. I never gave her appearance a second thought, suffering the impairment of familiarity, but she must have been attractive. If she turned heads or received lecherous remarks I was unaware of them. Sexuality was not yet part of my consciousness, despite my intimacy with the girl-next-door in Brisbane. Pat was a mother without a personality, except for maternal traits and, since she laughed at some of the things I did or said, an unsettling sense of humour. I feared there was callousness in her laughter, but I might have been mistaken, oversensitive as I was about my childish foibles, half the time unable to recognise affection. Much to my surprise she was also capable of fear. I saw it once.

She had permission to drive the farm ute whenever she went to town. On her return one day she saw something crossing the track to the homestead. “A bloody snake!” she cried, more in fear than hatred.

She deliberately tried to run over it. I was in the cabin with her and she asked me if she’d got it, by which she meant killed it. I looked through the rear window and told her I thought it was still wriggling. Her trembling hand struggled to find reverse.

She drove over it again, backwards and forwards, a dozen times or more, unconvinced by my eventual declaration of its demise. Finally, with the blood drained from her face, she stopped and parked as close to our quarters as possible.

She shepherded me indoors.

Still shaking when the manager dropped by sometime later, she asked if he had noticed any dead snake on the track. Judiciously he inquired about its length. She guessed about three foot. He shook his head. The one he had seen was at least that wide and nine foot long.

She laughed at his joke, recalled it now and then throughout her life, revealing an ability to be amused by her own dreads and fears.

I loved her incontrovertibly. She took care of us without complaint. If I was unaware of the emotional strain of her predicament, precociously I began to realise that she had twice the work of most mothers. I tried to help her, doing whatever odd jobs I could: fetching kindling for the stove, polishing shoes, sweeping the back porch, feeding scraps to the chooks, dusting the big empty rooms of the mansion. I even volunteered to milk the cow, something she had learnt herself as a child. And after she taught me I took on that responsibility too, with gusto, seduced by pungent bovine smells, the warmth of Daisy’s yielding flank against my forehead as I reached for her rubbery teats, the harsh squirts against the metal pail. I would have liked to look after the sheep in the paddock adjacent to the mansion. Their smell, too, and their bleating, their silly woolly coats, far too thick for the climate, and little legs that made them run oddly appealed to me. But so far I was put in charge of only one, an orphan, and even that was not mine alone, merely a joint responsibility with my sisters, which we fed from a bottle, amazed at its appetite and wildly wiggling tail. I thought I could play a part when a farmhand moved them from one paddock to another, but I soon learned I could never compete with the clever farm dogs that already had that job.

Eventually the summer holidays came to an end. Jean and I were enrolled in the primary school in Apsley, but on the first school day we were cut off from the town by a grass fire that swept across the southern half of Kirkwall. Smoke rode on the sharp, unpredictable winds, leaving Pat fearful. She had lived through the ’39 Black Friday Bushfire in Gippsland, in which scores of people lost their lives and the sun had been completely blocked out by menacing clouds of smoke. The manager and the farmhands were in the paddocks shifting sheep to safety, while volunteer firemen fought the blaze from trucks with huge square tanks, which intermittently pulled up at the homestead dam. While they refilled, the sense of crisis was palpable even to us children, who watched the sweating blackened men accept cordial and fruit cake from Pat, too preoccupied to indulge their usual rural courtesy. Jean told me and Carol these men were heroes, just like soldiers who went to war. And while Carol wanted to know what a ‘hero’ was, I marched stiffly around the yard, saluting, imitating the Anzacs of Gallipoli.

The drama ended overnight and we went off to school the following day. As we rode in the front of the ute with Pat, I saw an eagle standing next to the roadside fence on ground charred and denuded by fire, its head reaching the height of the top strand of barbed wire as it watched us pass. I cried out in awe but neither Pat nor Jean saw it. When I looked back it had gone. I thought it must have taken flight but the sky was empty. Jean suggested I had a vivid imagination. Had I imagined it? If so, it had the same substance as any other bird. I looked for it, slyly, privately, every day I went to school while I lived at Kirkwall, but never saw it again.

Flight. Again flight.

“To be real,” Jean instructed, employing her superior learning, “you need at least one witness.”

I devoted myself to my education, eager to learn about my country and the world I lived in. Each Monday morning we assembled outside our classroom, saluted the flag while it unravelled, sang God Save the Queen, and repeated with sincerity the oath of loyalty— I love God and my country, I honour the flag, I serve the Queen, and cheerfully obey my parents, teachers and the law—a ceremony that established the appropriate degree of subservience for the rest of the school week, even if it begged the question about how to obey an absentee father.

I coveted my pencils, ruler, set square, compass and especially my plastic template of Australia with which I made copious maps, soon filling an entire exercise book. I enjoyed drilling the multiplication tables, chanting them with the other students like a tribal ritual, quickly memorising up to the twelve-times table. I liked to take my turn to read aloud in class. For Show-And-Tell I tried my best to impress. One morning I presented the skull our gardener had given Jean, not yet appreciating the grief such an act might cause the indigenous people of the district, if there were any left.

Jean was in Grade 4 while I was in Grade 2. My arithmetic was good enough to figure that by the time I made it to Grade 4 she would have reached Grade 6. I accepted stoically that she was always going to be brainier than me. Already she was three letters of the alphabet through a junior encyclopaedia. So I didn’t dare challenge her assertions. Nor in matters of dispute between us could I match her negotiating skills. We argued over who would have the crust at the end of a loaf of bread to eat. We fought about it until she came up with a solution: she would have all of them for the next four years; after that, I could have them for as long as I liked, for the rest of my life if I wanted. She persuaded me I was getting the better deal and so I agreed, much to my regret next time we started a loaf of bread. I skulked around the yard and climbed a tree to brood. I resolved to be extra alert whenever I made a deal with her.

When the shearing started at Kirkwall Pat had to prepare morning teas and lunches and deliver these to the shearing shed, which was a mile from the homestead. She was busy keeping up with her routine, getting us up in the morning and ready for school, on top of which Angus Campbell, a majestic, snowy-haired, ruddy-faced creature in a yeoman’s cap, moleskins and tweeds, arrived to oversee the shearing, expecting her to cook for him as well. He ordered French omelettes and declared he had tasted none better than hers, not even in Paris, in a land so far away it was breathtaking to think he had been there. We children were sent to raid the chookhouse to satisfy his appetite. And we had to keep our quarters tidy, get ready for school without our mother’s assistance, prepare our own school lunches, and check to see that Carol had dressed herself properly, doing chores normally done by Pat.

On top of that I was assigned an onerous duty: fetching golf balls that Campbell slogged from one end of the home paddock to the other, a little while after his breakfast. I was sent to the far end with a bucket, while he stood at the edge of the homestead garden in strange pants, gloves and cap, relaxing the muscles in his bum with a wiggle, as he glanced in my direction. Then he swung the stick he was holding in a great arc and a little white ball soon whistled overhead. The war had started. In-coming fire! I had to remain vigilant. As I picked up one ball to put in the bucket, another landed nearby. I realised my duty was not only to collect his golf balls but to be his pin as well.

Towards the end of the shearing season Pat took me to the shearing shed, a shimmering corrugated iron building with adjacent pens packed with sheep. Inside was a cacophony of bleats, shouts, curses and machines, a melee of men in navy-blue singlets, flailing clippers attached to long levers, dragging terrified sheep, scooping up fleeces, casting wool across tables; the stench of lanolin, men’s sweat and diesel in my smarting nostrils. My heart raced. No schoolyard activity compared to this frenetic scene. Pat took the occasion to reveal that one of her father’s occupations, beside dairy farmer, carter and nightsoil-man, had been shearer. My grandfather, whom I called Da, but was yet to meet, gained some substance, grew in stature.

Once the shearing was over, Pat, and so the rest of us, returned to our normal routines. I had made a few tentative friends amongst my classmates but outside school hours I rarely set eyes on them. I played on my own or with my sisters around the homestead. I observed Carol as she dressed the motionless old greyhound in doll’s clothes and improvised a fence around him with garden stakes. I encouraged a game she initiated of head-butting the orphaned lamb, Woollyofus, which was sprouting horns, until Pat discovered in horror what was happening and warned us with a sobering tale about how one of her brothers had once witnessed a bull confront a ram. While the bigger beast was stamping and snorting and tossing its head around, the ram had taken the initiative and charged. With a sickening crack it laid the bull out cold. I had seen a bull on a farm near Portland and had been totally intimidated by its massive stature. I stared at Woollyofus with a surge of respect. Pat gave me the authority to be in charge of Carol whenever she was near him.

Carol was a cute kid. Next to my absent father she had the brightest blue eyes I’d ever seen and little ringlets in her hair, which Pat made with a wet comb and her fingers every morning. She seemed a bit dopey but that was probably because she was younger. I loved her smile, the way it gave her dimples, the way her eyes lit up. I started to feel very protective of her.

Pat was aware of our isolation and whenever she had time to spare she did her best to amuse us. Now and then she put us in the back of the ute, armed us with a straw broom and drove out to one of the back paddocks where a large male emu roamed. Whenever a vehicle entered its territory it charged over and attacked. It would run at twenty miles an hour right alongside the ute and try to peck at us, which brought the straw broom into play.

On some weekends, usually a Sunday afternoon, we were invited to the manager’s house for a lunch of roast lamb, slaughtered on the farm a couple of days earlier.

I liked these afternoons because the manager and his wife always made an effort to entertain us with games and tricks. The one that impressed me the most was a sixpence spun on a needle. Before starting, the manager laid bets on his ability to do it. I boldly wagered a pound, a sum I had never possessed, sure that he would fail. The manager chuckled as he commenced an elaborate procedure, which involved two forks, a cork, a bottle, as well as the coin and the pin. In the end the coin, held in a slit of one half of the cork with the forks as a counterweight like a tightrope walker’s pole, spun on the tip of the pin, which poked through the other half, plugged in the neck of the bottle. The coin and the forks spun for a long time after the initial twirl, like a helicopter rotor. Graciously he released me from my impossible wager. And I realised at an early age, even when you were sure to win, you were likely to lose.

My delight in such days was only tempered by the roast lamb. I had never seen any animal slaughtered for meat, but I had been to the shed where it happened, seen a flayed carcass hanging from a meat hook, its bloody head still attached but the greasy fleece discarded in a corner. The gruesome scene, with its menacing chorus of blowflies outside the fly wire, horrified me. Had I known then that you could survive without eating the flesh of slaughtered animals I would have exited a vegetarian. But my mother’s obsession with feeding us meat twice a day, her insistence that it was necessary, convinced me that humans were condemned to a carnivorous life. I saw this as the dark side of our nature, a side that debased an otherwise noble creature.

I must have been an odd child in some ways. I felt fatherless, and the feeling left me shy and absent-minded, as if Denny’s absence denied me confidence and kept me in a state of nervous expectancy. I didn’t think I was the same as other kids. I knew I wasn’t when I arrived at school forgetfully wearing my slippers or without the lunch my mother had made.

I was becoming sensitive about a lot of things. Other kids at school talked proudly about their dads, who were either farmers or worked in agricultural businesses. And they pestered me for details about mine. I never revealed he was probably in jail but repeated Pat’s line about him being a salesman in Queensland. We had abandoned our habit of taking a false surname but I was still inclined to exaggerate or embellish a little, to protect myself and my sisters from the shame that would follow any true revelation. So they learned our father was making so much money it didn’t make sense for him to be with us. When some clever dick wanted to know, if my father was so successful and rich, why we weren’t with him and how come my mother was a housekeeper, I tried laughing it off to give the impression the question was ridiculous. Instead I sounded sneaky, which ruined my credibility and ended any desire to be close to my schoolmates. It bolstered the appeal of solitude.

Th ere was long white grass in the paddock next to the school where all the kids crawled and made secretive paths, which led from one fallen tree trunk to another, each a rampart or a hollow hiding place. In our games I played the rebel that nobody could find, without ever being certain anyone was looking.

A year had passed since I had last seen my father but it seemed a lifetime. Occasionally my mother talked fondly about him, with stories from a time before her marriage, stories that would appeal to a child’s imagination.

“He used to swim around the Basin at the Gorge in Launceston,” she said on one occasion, when I was begging her to talk about him. “We were having a picnic there one day and he saw a duck in the water. He said he was going to catch it for dinner. So he got in and swam after it for two hours.”

I couldn’t yet swim. “Two hours!”

“Yep, and guess what?”

“What, Mum, what?” I urged her to finish the story.

“The poor duck got so tired your father caught it.”

“But he didn’t get tired?”

“Nope.”

“Did he kill it? Did you eat it?”

“No, love. He felt sorry for it and let it go.”

I was greatly impressed. I wanted more stories.

“We went roller skating one day,” she said on another occasion. “It had a split level rink, you know, with a top deck and a bottom deck and a ramp in between, joining them. The top deck had a rail to stop you falling, but your father crashed over it. I thought he’d killed himself.”

“He wasn’t killed, was he?”

She laughed. “No, of course not, or you wouldn’t be here, would you?”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. He landed on his feet and just kept skating.”

“Wow!”

“That’s what I thought, love.”

In my mind my father had faded into a legend that bore little relation to the real world. He seemed like a wonderful man, good and strong and adventurous, just like a hero from the books my sister Jean liked reading to me.

Then one day he appeared without warning and was just as I remembered him, a handsome, broad-shouldered man with wavy hair parted neatly near the middle, an aquiline nose that was slightly oversized, and mocking blue eyes, standing in the doorway to my room. My heart nearly stopped. I wanted to rush up to him for a hug. But he made no gesture nor uttered a word to encourage me. Instead he handed me a large box, ruffled my hair with clumsy fingers and waited to see my delight as I opened it.

I don’t know where my mother was.

Perhaps my obsession with the gift, a battery-operated toy car that I followed around my bedroom floor, denied me memories of him elsewhere in our quarters or anywhere on Kirkwall. But perhaps I’m suffering selective amnesia. I remember childhood banalities easily but little of the momentous return of my father, an event I used to pray for each evening. Did something traumatic or sinister happen, which I’ve willed into oblivion? I’m convinced a recollection I have of him declaring Angus Campbell “a money-hungry bastard who could at least offer me a job so I can be with my family” is a subsequent fancy, perhaps from my adolescence. But I definitely remember going with him to the pictures in one of the bigger towns near Apsley—Naracoorte or Edenhope—to see a Norman Wisdom film, which was so funny I screamed with laughter. And even when I didn’t think it was funny I still laughed because he was laughing, so delighted was I that he was back with us.

I dared to glance at his profile in the dark. He was so close I could feel heat from his body. He was engrossed in the film, his eyes moist from laughing, reflecting the luminous screen, his mouth contorted in a wondrous grin, his head framed in cigarette smoke that wafted eerily through the theatre. The film had all his attention. He had forgotten me. My heart was a knot of disparate emotions. Near the end he upstaged the celluloid star when, howling and hooting, with tears running down his cheeks, his seat collapsed, adding his own riotous slapstick scene. The audience cheered him as he left.

I went to bed that night filled with joy and hope and anxiety. I had a father again. My jaw trembled at the thought of it.

The next day he was gone.

Had it been a dream?

There had been a disturbance in the night. What had happened? I was too afraid to ask.

“Where’s Dad?” Jean asked at breakfast.

Pat turned to me. I noticed she was wearing a lot of makeup on her face, trying to cover up some dark marks. “Go outside and play, darling,” she said to me, patting my head and steering me towards the door. “And take Carol with you, just for a while.”

Jean’s eyes sparkled.

I obeyed, fearful of the secret my older sister was about to learn.

Whatever my mother told her, Jean was honourable and kept it to herself.

Was it around this time that I began to experience a disturbing sensation that I thought of as my tiny-monster head? It started as a dream but often invaded my waking hours. I had no control over it, suffering it for years, any time of the night or day. It felt like my head shrank down to the size of an apple, putting enormous pressure on the organs within—my eyes, my ears, my tongue, my brain—and after a minute or two it suddenly expanded to the size and weight of a watermelon, accompanied by an onrush of nausea.

It happened less often when I was a teenager, and eventually stopped, but I can still evoke the sensation today, more than fifty years on. It was always vile and I’m glad it’s gone. I have no idea what caused it. I was too overcome by its weirdness whenever it happened to tell anybody about it.

THE PINES

Soon we left Kirkwall as well. The sheep station was being subdivided into five farms and put on the market. Angus Campbell wanted to retain Pat as his housekeeper on one of his other properties, closer to Portland. So we shifted to The Pines, where he ran cattle as well as sheep a few miles from a hamlet called Lyons. We never saw the old greyhound again, but Woollyofus, now a ram and too big to be kept as a pet, accompanied us south along with one of the farmhands who shifted into a cottage in Lyons. He looked after Woollyofus in an adjacent paddock.

The Pines was a contrast to Kirkwall, which had been vast and dry and flat. The new homestead was on a steep hill, a mile or so along a winding dirt road above the Crawford River. Dark pines towered over its narrow drive. When I stepped out of the ute I could hear the wind howling through the looming branches. The homestead was more imposing than Kirkwall, more European, which would have appealed to Campbell, who displayed an immoderate penchant for anything French, particularly its omelettes and wine. We shifted into an old bungalow behind the mansion, hidden discreetly from the main entrance. It had bedrooms and a living space but no kitchen to speak of. So Pat used the cooking facilities in the mansion.

I gradually settled into my new surroundings. I played around the mansion, which I easily imagined was haunted. I lay beneath the pines on a carpet of dry brown needles and stared up at the branches, which were like spiral staircases to a mysterious world. I dared not think of my father. But I suffered from his unexplained absence. And then I dared to think he had gone to another world.

Perhaps, like Jack-in-the-Beanstalk, whom my sister had told me about, I could visit it by ascending to the clouds. Sometimes I tried to climb a pine tree, but never got more than halfway before I lost my nerve, so never discovered what was at the top. I wasn’t as brave as Jack, who met an ogre. Fee-fi-fo-fum. I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he live or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread! I could imagine my father as one of those.

On the ground I gathered cones in hessian sacks for our fireplace. I dug my first garden plot, collected cow manure and planted carrots, which made my mother chuckle since they were one of the vegetables I refused to eat, along with cabbage, silver beet, beetroot, spinach, cucumber, parsnip and turnip. Undeterred by my fastidious palate I watched in wonder their green tops break through the damp loam and develop into delicate foliage. Under Pat’s instruction I learnt how and why I had to thin them out. I squatted close beside her, our sides almost touching, and joyfully copied her movements. Learning. Learning. The discarded seedlings I put with the scraps we gave to chooks. I found other things to do: sweeping paths, washing windows, helping with chores.

Now and then we went to visit the new manager, who lived in a house on the farm with his wife and a baby. He would sit down at a piano and play some of my mother’s favourite tunes, like ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’ or ‘Danny Boy’, while she sang along. And when he stopped to have a cup of tea, the piano kept on playing. These managers! They were magicians! The one at Kirkwall had spun a sixpence on a pinhead, while here at Th e Pines he could play a piano without touching the keys. Amused at my astonishment he eventually showed me some paper rolls with hundreds of small oblong holes punched in them. When the rolls were placed in a compartment of the piano, the keys would move in a certain order, just like they had been pressed by fingers, and a tune commenced. He said its proper name was ‘pianola’. It lifted once more my admiration for human ingenuity.

I started at my seventh or eighth school and was only in Grade 2. Pat took me and Jean down the dirt road to the highway in the ute where we caught a school bus a few more miles into Lyons.

Each day we passed the paddock where Woollyofus stayed. He was always eating grass and seemed content, not missing us at all. The school had two adjoining weatherboard rooms, a matching shelter shed, a corrugated-iron toilet block, and a patch of asphalt where every Monday morning, as in Apsley, the Australian flag was raised, the national anthem sung, and the oath of allegiance sworn. My patriotism flourished. And in class I returned to my habit of tracing maps of Australia. I also perfected my multiplication tables.

These drills in the classroom and with the entire school body on a Monday morning where everyone chanted as one were a potent influence on my early years, especially since I had no close friends. I could call myself an Australian and feel I was one of millions. And I could experience a sense of belonging even when I was alone just by absorbing the atmosphere around me. That’s why my plastic template of Australia was one of my most precious possessions. And that’s why I proudly learnt by rote Dorothea McKellar’s patriotic poem, I love a sunburnt country…

Besides the collective aspects of schooling I pursued more personal interests. After eating the cheese or jam sandwiches that Pat had prepared for my lunch, I left the shelter shed and went beyond the patch of asphalt to an uneven piece of ground to observe butterflies and other insects or small animals like lizards that abounded in the long grass. I was also fond of lying on my back and finding images in the clouds while I pretended to be dozing.

If my mother was bored with the daily drudgery she undertook, like getting us ready for school, cooking for us, keeping our quarters clean, as well as the housework she did for Campbell, if she was upset by Denny’s absence, she kept it to herself. She seemed happier at The Pines than Kirkwall. She was only twenty-five miles from her family in Portland. Still, with a fallible memory, I can’t claim that we visited them or they came to see us. I have a recollection I associate with this time, of making sandcastles on a narrow beach between timber piers, although it might be from some other period, or it might be my imagination. If only I had kept a diary, but it was early days for me and writing. Maybe visits were made, or their proximity was enough to comfort my mother, or maybe other matters cheered her.

Still, she wasn’t destined for a cheerful life.

Perhaps things started to go wrong for her again the day I sprang from a hiding spot on the far side of the mansion as she walked past. So tremendous was the fright I gave her, she almost collapsed. She languished on a stone step while I fetched her a glass of water, and after she had recovered enough to smile feebly at my distress, she begged me never to ambush her again. I secretly vowed to devote the rest of my life to her, to redress my terrible misdemeanour.

Not long after, one of Campbell’s bulls knocked down five fences, in its endeavour to reach a few cows, and had temporarily stopped in the home paddock next to our bungalow, another drama Pat could have done without, fearful it might harm us if it wasn’t quickly relocated. Perhaps it was an omen. It stayed for several days, but we were spared a goring.

Then a snake appeared outside the fly-wire kitchen door. From inside she watched it attempt to enter. It shimmied against the screen. She left by another door, found a spade, crept up behind, knocked it from the fly-wire and in a terrified frenzy chopped it into pieces. When I arrived an hour later she was still shaking. As I entered through the ruined screen door she asked me if it was there and if it was dead. Its pieces were still twitching. When I informed her, she taught me the saying ‘a snake never dies until sunset’.

After the school year finished, my sisters and I started preparing for Christmas. The manager produced a Christmas tree, taller than any I had ever seen. Pat handed us a box of decorations and even allowed me to climb the step ladder to attach the feature star, which represented, I had learnt, the star that led the Three Wise Men to the stable where Jesus was born.

My mother never went to church and never made us go to Sunday school, but she told us she believed in Jesus and had given us a Little Golden Book with the story about him.

Jesus seemed like a nice man and in the pictures he always glowed, so he was probably God’s son, like he said, because I’d never seen anyone else glow like that. And when he was a baby he was cute. He had a ring above his head that was called a halo, which was meant to let everyone know how good he was. Nobody I knew had a halo, so I guessed he was better than everyone else.

Christmas was his birthday so we were supposed to be very happy. But it wasn’t the Baby Jesus who made us happy so much as a nice old fellow with flowing white beard, who wore a red suit and was called Santa Claus, Santa for short. What his connection was to the Baby Jesus wasn’t clear but I wasn’t going to let that mystery spoil the occasion. It was like the Easter Bunny who came at the same time each year that Jesus died on the cross. The Easter Bunny seemed to come along just to cheer us up because death was a gloomy, spooky sort of thing, not the normal reason to have a holiday. But none of the stories I’d read about Jesus had the Easter Bunny in them. The other thing about Santa and the Easter Bunny was that you never got to see them when they dropped in; they just left their presents and were gone without even a ‘hello’, except maybe a written one, scribbled in a handwriting that looked just like my mother’s. It was to surprise you but you always knew they were coming.

Jean declared my query about rabbits laying eggs like chooks made no sense, and pretended to be privy to the Easter Bunny’s secrets. Th ere was one more mystery visitor: the tooth fairy that came whenever a tooth fell out as long as you put it in a glass of water. It never said ‘hello’ either but paid more visits than my father.

Early in the New Year the shearing started and Pat resumed her seasonal duties, preparing thermoses and lunches. The shearing sheds were on the other side of the homestead driveway, within easy walking distance. Angus Campbell was due to visit. I wondered if I would be chasing his golf balls down some of the steep hills.

At the height of the shearing, on a Saturday, Denny made another unannounced appearance, this time without gifts and in an irascible mood.

He arrived in the middle of the night and climbed through Jean’s bedroom window. Even in the darkness she recognised him and didn’t scream. Years later she told me about their brief exchange.

“Hello Dad.”

“Who are you?”

“Jean.”

“Are you a boy or a girl?”

It had been a genuine query. Most likely his confusion was due to weeks of shock treatment, which I knew nothing about for many years.

I awoke to the sounds of roars and wailing.

Terrified I sat bolt upright.

I heard my frightened mother pleading.

A wild accusatory voice sounded like it was spitting out poison. I didn’t understand all the words but they sounded bad. “You and that ugly fat bastard! Un-fucking-believable!”

I heard her indignant denials.

He roared again and something went crashing against the other side of my wall.

“Denny, don’t, don’t, please!”

I was convinced she was being murdered. There was a horrible gurgling sound followed by silence.

I fled under the bed and stayed there, expecting to be the next one murdered. I was shaking all night, out of fear as much as the cold from the lino floor. At some stage I wet myself but was too afraid to emerge to change my pyjamas.

I must have fallen asleep but awoke suddenly and shrieked when someone touched my leg.

“It’s all right, darling, it’s me,” my mother said softly. “What are you doing under there?”

“I thought I heard something in the night. I was scared.”

“It’s all right now. Come out.”

She must have noticed I’d wet myself. “Take these off,” she said, helping me out of my bottoms. “Get dressed before your father comes back.”

I shuddered and cried out when I caught sight of her battered face.

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right. Just have some breakfast and go and play outside. Just keep out of his way if you see him.”

I took some extra food for lunch into hiding, into a shed where hay was kept, feeling guilty, with my secret promise to protect her failing its first test. But to protect her from my father was a terrible duty. It seemed unnatural. And I was terrified of him. Through a crack in the shed wall I caught a glimpse of him, prowling like a hungry beast around the mansion. He seemed much bigger than I remembered, as if he were storing his rage in flesh and muscle. He looked like the criminal I had been told he was. He was far more fearsome than the bull that had stormed into the home paddock. It broke my heart that I should feel terrified of my father. I found a warm spot out of sight and willed myself to sleep.

Did he stay for long? My memory suggests he didn’t but, looking through his medical files decades later, I encountered a letter from Campbell to the Repatriation Department that suggested Denny was his employee. Perhaps his employment extended back to Kirkwall, for Denny received letters there between May and August 1959.

Late one afternoon, still keeping out of my father’s way, I heard Pat calling me in a desperate voice.

In trepidation I emerged and skulked over, brushing off bits of hay. Her face was still bad, from the initial beating or further attacks. The bruises were going yellow. But her swollen cheeks were dry. She dropped down to my level, took my hands and pressed them hard. Once again she was trembling. I could see the fear in her eyes.

“Your father’s just done something very bad, darlin’, and now he’s taken off in the car.” Her split bottom lip quivered. “I’ve got to go looking for him. Will you come with me? I need some company. Something might’ve happened to him.”

What she expected me to do if something had happened to him was left unspoken.

The bad thing my father had done (although I didn’t know this until I pieced together information that he and my mother revealed to me years later) was to break into Campbell’s cellar and steal most of the French wine, which he took to the shearing sheds and distributed amongst the shearers. It must have cost them The Pines contract, but, not insignificantly, it would have been an enormous fillip for their reputations within the shearing fraternity, which thrived on such stories, built legends around them. Sheep remained unshorn or half-shorn. One or two were inadvertently left in the sheep dip and drowned.

It was unfortunate, although not entirely unexpected, that the revelry occurred the same day Campbell arrived. He quickly figured, or more likely was told, what had happened, and in a fury confronted Denny, who by then was thoroughly intoxicated on the best wine money could buy. His face flushing with righteous indignation, Campbell ordered him off the property.

On the surface Denny’s action appeared delinquent and gratuitous, the behaviour of a man totally out of control and driven by a mad suspicion of his wife’s infidelity. His drunkenness was certainly out of character. Throughout his life I never once saw him drinking. He certainly never kept beer in the fridge or joined our Uncle Fred, one of Pat’s brothers, in his binges while he lived with us when I was a teenager. Whatever prompted Denny’s mischief, it took an ominous turn, unleashing his hatred of Campbell and everything he stood for. For a long time when I was older I was inclined to consider the looting of the French wines a calculated, rather than entirely reckless, act. It was done with some symbolism in mind, if not for the shearers’ benefit, at least for his own satisfaction. He knew it was something Campbell would have understood— them and us—the class divide.

Foolishly he ignored the order to leave and invited Campbell to be his sparring partner instead. He refused to take no for an answer. He danced around and flailed his arms in a poor imitation of those steps he had learnt in the army for battalion boxing tournaments, prior to his tour of duty in Japan. But being drunk his fists missed their target. Campbell fled. Denny staggered after him. In a moment of inspired madness he changed course and commandeered the farm ute for the purpose of running over his adversary. He did some serious swerving and revving, which left deep ruts in the soft earth of the home paddock, without ever reaching Campbell, who for a portly man showed a remarkable turn of speed and agility, suffering no more than dented pride and muddied moleskins.

Denny sped recklessly off the property.

I had no idea whether the incident had just occurred or whether it had been hours before when Pat borrowed another farm vehicle and we went looking for him. Maybe she knew already what had happened to him. Maybe she feared the worst. Why else would she have imagined she could catch up to him?

We followed the winding dirt road down towards the highway in dreadful silence, my eyes searching the roadside scrub for any sign of an accident. Pat’s knuckles were white as she gripped the steering wheel. As we came around the last bend before the bridge over the river, I saw the ute on its roof in a gravelly clearing beside the road.

I have no recall of my mother’s immediate reaction except for a pathetic sound, like a groan of doom. She stopped the car and stared at the wreck. The blood had drained from her face and for a moment I thought she was going to pass out. She closed her eyes and her head drooped forward until it rested on the steering wheel between her hands. I volunteered to go and see if I could find him, mindful of how much I owed her. Too afraid to look herself, she nodded gratefully.

I skulked over and peered into the crushed cabin.

It was empty.

Stunned and relieved, I made a half-hearted search of the scrub on the riverbank, without finding any sign of him.

When I returned to the car, I hardly recognised my long-suffering mother. She resembled a hideous clown. With her battered eyes squeezed shut and her torn mouth agape, I thought she was laughing.

It is an image of her that has stayed with me all these years, etched into the back of my mind by some malignant light.

But is this really what happened?

I found documents in his medical records that suggested otherwise.

After the incident, on the 9th of January, 1960, Denny was again admitted to the Repatriation General Hospital at Heidelberg in Melbourne ‘suffering from Psychopathic Personality & Emotional Instability’, and given shock treatment. Contact was made with Mr Campbell as his employer. A form had to be filled out, but Campbell refused. On the phone he said that he intended coming to Melbourne on the 29th and would bring Pat to speak to someone in authority about Denny’s condition. He also said that Denny should have been charged with ‘murder’ . The word was underlined. Was this Campbell’s disingenuous hyperbole or the notetaker mishearing ‘attempted murder’? Nobody, to the best of my knowledge, had been killed. If the Repatriation Department couldn’t give Campbell further information or insight into Denny’s condition, he felt disposed to take the matter up with the CIB. He wanted Denny certified but his request was declined.

Denny left the hospital against medical advice on the 22nd of February but didn’t reappear at The Pines. No one knew his whereabouts. But he returned to Heidelberg and was readmitted two days before Pat and Campbell’s attendance at the hospital.

Campbell was interviewed by the Officer in Charge of the Treatment Section at the hospital. The officer seemed to think that Campbell was extremely interested in our family and anxious to help us in any way possible. From what he told me he has obviously been most generous from the financial point of view to the whole family over a considerable period. He found the wife and three children about 15 months ago in a state of semi-starvation; gave the wife a job at £8/-/- a week plus full board and keep for herself and the children and they improved considerably.

These words incensed me when I first read them in the glass cubicle at the Veterans’ Affairs office in Melbourne. I jumped up and stormed around, arousing the curiosity of the public servant who was in the adjacent area to keep an eye on me. How dare Campbell lie about us to ‘big note himself ’ (as my mother would say)! We had never been half-starved. We had never gone without a meal in our lives. My mother would have forgone the clothes on her back to keep us fed. Had she known of his correspondence, she would have been mortified. And then she would have been outraged. I’m sure she would have left his employment immediately.

Campbell went on to tell the officer that, when Denny was released from jail in Brisbane, he arrived at the farm ( Kirkwall or The Pines?) in a new car, which had apparently been obtained through hire purchase. Campbell took him on and placed our family in a cottage at The Pines, but it soon became clear to Campbell that Denny’s betting and drinking problems (!) were quite severe. In early January some workers on the property reported to Campbell that Denny had just tried to run his wife and children over, but those who witnessed it had managed to prevent it. Apparently Denny made three unsuccessful attempts to kill us before he left the property.

My heart skipped a beat as something stirred in my memory. Could Campbell have been speaking the truth this time? I’m wary of the notion of repressed memory, but this feeling has become so strong, so persistent (the genie is out of the bottle!) I have to concede it might have some basis. A shard of fear is still embedded in some dark recess of my consciousness. The vaguest memory has me running with my mother. And being terrified, pressed against a timber fence, a corral, as a car swept past. But were we spectators or target of a murderous assault? Were we or Campbell the intended victim? Campbell, despite his pomposity and histrionics, despite the desecration of his wine cellar, might have had some genuine grounds for concern about our safety, as well as his own. Yet, if his claim is true and we really were the intended victims, why did my mother and I go looking for him?

About half a mile further down the road my father had crashed. He was taken to a hospital in the nearby town of Heywood by Campbell’s workers, which must have occurred before my mother and I arrived on the scene. He was admitted with concussion but recovered within twenty-four hours. To the medical staff he declared he couldn’t recall anything that had happened and was transferred to the Repatriation Hospital in Heidelberg.

Campbell told the Repatriation officer that Pat and her children were living in constant fear of Denny, whose erratic behaviour was increasing in intensity and frequency, and that if the Repatriation Department discharged him there would be a tragedy.

But Campbell didn’t get his way.

Much to his chagrin, Campbell was informed that Denny was not certifiable and would not be hospitalised against his will. He responded with a letter in which he threatened to terminate Pat’s employment the day Denny was released. He demanded to be informed when it happened and expressed his contempt for a medical profession that released such maniacs into the community.

I cannot agree to the bland illusions of Olympian Detachment of the medical profession in their indifference to mortal dispositions of those involved in their superior sport and therefore will take it as a kindness if you will advise me of Sparkes’ discharge from hospital.

On the 8th of February the Senior Specialist in Psychiatry at the hospital sent a memo to the Officer in Charge of the Treatment Section, stating that he had read the OiC’s minutes and Mr Campbell’s letter regarding my father. He felt that Campbell didn’t understand hospital procedures in such cases. While my father’s condition was (in the specialist’s opinion) ‘inborn’, it wasn’t ‘certifiable at present’. So, Campbell, if he so desired, had the option of reporting the unfortunate affair to the police.

A diplomatic response was sent to Campbell warning that the hospital was unable to hold Denny against his will. Campbell promptly removed Pat from her position as his housekeeper. Denny was discharged but did not reappear in our lives for a year. Or so it seemed.

Upon reading the material in my father’s medical files on Th e Pines episode, the confidence I had in the reliability of my memory was shaken. Was my ageing mind playing tricks on me? Either there was a terrifying incident that I have repressed, or my memory is quite malleable, easily altered by words on paper. If Campbell’s account were true, how had I replaced it with such a satirical version? The riotous scene at the woolshed? The drunken shearers? The drowned sheep? The pompous yeoman-politician fleeing for his life? Had I invented it and, over the years, embellished it to suit my own prejudices? Had my mother intentionally planted this more palatable notion? She would have realised that a child who remembers his father trying to kill the family is likely to grow up disturbed. Or is there some truth in both accounts? Were we all, family and yeoman, the target of Denny’s psychotic behaviour?

My memory of what happened over the next year similarly departs from those facts before my eyes in the Veterans’ Affairs office.

I was eight years old. That is my excuse.

GROWING UP IN PORTLAND

Once more I was enduring Aunt Gerty’s cuddles and her attempts to mould any opinion I was forming of my erratic father.

“He’s a bloody mongrel, isn’t he?” Her tongue clicked disapproval as she gave me another protective squeeze. “Don’t you ever turn out like him, d’you hear?”

“I won’t, Aunt Gerty.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

I settled back into life in South Portland.

The Staggs and Stewarts maintained their routines, which revolved around the consumption of beer. There were still soirees where Aunt Gerty or an inebriated guest pounded out a ditty on the upright. There were still her loud morning farts as reliable as any alarm clock. If it happened to be a weekend you’d find Uncle Mick working his vegie patch or loading his fishing tackle into the car. To protect his bald head in summer he wore a battered fedora; in winter, a football beanie. In either season he’d keep his beer nearby in an icebox. I mucked around with my cousins. The paddocks opposite, still covered in thorn bush, were excellent for exploring. So too was the thicket in the gully that our street crossed. We could play all day and when we got home all the adults, except my mother, would still be drinking.

I can’t remember how long we stayed with them. I went back to school. I had reached Grade 3. Jean was in Grade 5. Carol was just starting. In accordance with the custom of the day, I avoided consorting with my sisters at school, although Carol sometimes broke with protocol and approached to introduce her new-found friends.

My classroom was rather gloomy despite enormous timber-framed windows facing east. It had high ceilings from which light bulbs that were seldom used hung at the end of long cords. The teacher’s desk was on a platform in front of an ashen blackboard. I kept a low profile. I tried to make friends with popular students but I wasn’t too pushy, becoming more finely attuned to classroom dynamics. I avoided other students who through no fault of their own were on the outer, even ones I felt sorry for, like Stinky Finky who had a personal hygiene problem or Madeleine Foster, a girl from the Seventh Day Adventist community. She was shy but rather pretty and didn’t smell bad like some. I had no idea why my classmates shunned her, except perhaps because of her weird religion. Once I carelessly smiled at her and she smiled back, agog at my bravery. But it was too risky to repeat in case others noticed and dispatched me to the same no-man’s-land that she occupied. Often a tagging game began in class, accompanied by a chant, ‘Foster’s germs and no returns’ , I joined in but was shamefaced about it, sensitive to ridicule and the hurt it caused.

The playground dynamics were an altogether different affair. Here you could be assailed by a total stranger at any time. There was never any way of knowing when or where it would happen. Someone could take a dislike of you for the slightest reason, like the way you ate your sandwich, or even what was in it, or the way you wore socks or carried a schoolbag or combed your hair. I was fearful of running into the policeman’s son who had revealed my father’s imprisonment to me before we left for Kirkwall, an assertion I was yet to verify. But I couldn’t remember what he looked like. I expected an ambush at any moment and more denunciations. I expected someone to know what happened at The Pines. These never came. Instead I was assailed from an entirely unexpected quarter, the boy (whose name escapes me) that I sat next to in class. We got along well but out of the blue one day, during a lunch break, I heard a shout, “Hey, Bung Eye!”

I looked around and saw the perpetrator in the middle of a group of laughing boys I had never seen him with before. No doubt he was trying to make a favourable impression at my expense. And perhaps they had put him up to it. But the betrayal upset me enough to rush at him and demand he retract his slur. When he repeated it instead I lunged and managed to put a headlock on him. He struggled back. Soon there was a crowd around us. I had the advantage until the crowd began to chant, “Bung Eye! Bung Eyeeeee!” The force of their allegiance overwhelmed me. I released my foe and broke through the crowd in tears. I hid in my classroom for the rest of the lunch break, even though it was officially out of bounds.

It took me a long time to restore my credibility. My immediate need was an ally and so I offered my services to our teacher. I became ink monitor. In the morning before lessons I collected all the porcelain inkwells from our desks, took them on a custom-built tray to the adjoining storeroom and filled each with blackish ink from a large plastic container. I became milk monitor. Some time before morning recess a milk truck from the local butter factory delivered dozens of crates of quarter-pint bottles. It was my job to poke holes in the tinfoil tops with a length of dowel sharpened like a pencil through which students could push a chocolate or strawberry flavoured straw. I became board monitor, cleaning the board with a damp rag at the end of the day so it would look fresh in the morning. Having the teacher as my ally was a desperate move, but it certainly made my recent foes think twice about their campaign of ridicule. It was the circuit breaker I needed. It gave me the opportunity to establish my playground credentials.

Not that I articulated any such strategy during that difficult first year of my return to the school. It’s more how I interpret events now through the prism of time and my exposure to sociological theories.

I became reasonably adept at marbles, accumulating a hoard, which I kept in a calico bag, won from less dexterous kids. I was shrewd enough to play only kids I knew I could beat. I became very good at Sticks (a game of stretch), British Bulldog (a game of evasion) and Brandy (a game of pursuit with a ball). I was brilliant at various sports, which won me the most kudos of all. Football was the most esteemed pursuit for any red-blooded boy. I secretly resolved to become the best footballer in the school. Eventually boys picked me as a priority for their side in any team contests. I hadn’t yet risen to the rank of leader but I was seen as a major asset. I heard less of ‘Bung Eye’; more of ‘Sparkesy ’. Curiously I felt fearless in school-ground games or on the sporting field despite how rough and dangerous it could be. On more recent reflection I put this down to a sense of belonging to a group. I was no longer alone and therefore no longer vulnerable. Any pain I endured was for a greater cause than my own.

My growing interest in sport pleased my mother. Ever since the days when her brothers had taken her to watch them play football she had loved sport. She had been a keen participant when she was younger and was an avid spectator. She went out of her way to watch me play.

“You’re a good mark, love,” she said, one of the best compliments you could give a young footballer. “I’ve seen you take some spekkies.”

She bought me genuine leather boots and a football. She coached me in the back yard. I attribute my ability to boot drop kicks further than other kid my age to her. I could often hear her shouting encouragement from the boundary. She was my football mentor and number one fan, and would keep the trophies and medals I accrued throughout my junior playing career long after I outgrew my junior status, long after I had lost interest in playing the game.

Eventually we shifted into the back half of a bluestone house opposite the rambling showgrounds in Bentick Street. The reclusive old man who owned it lived in the front half. His gardens were overgrown and mysterious. The cypress hedge along one side of the property had reached a height too difficult to trim. There was a vacant block next door, full of weeds and brambles, and behind us was Fawthrop Lagoon, better known locally as the Swamp, a haven for black swans, water fowl, plovers and an assortment of venomous snakes.

I kept away from there but I loved to play spying games in the hedge, which had hidden passageways that tunnelled through its dense canopy. I was pursued by imaginary foes but always managed to escape by the skin of my teeth, thanks to some timely warning from my latest favourite superhero, the Phantom.

I spied on less fanciful but no less exotic characters, like the Hungarian hawker who camped on the vacant block once in a while, in a horse-drawn gypsy caravan, from whom the locals bought cheap kitchenware, clothes and bric-à-brac. The hawker smoked a pipe on the timber steps at the rear of his van while his draught horse grazed on weeds. Once, when I ventured closer, he invited me to sit on his horse, lifting me firmly until I was astride its massive flanks. While I sat there grasping some of its mane for dear life, it grazed nonchalantly, as taciturn as its master.

It was only remotely like The Phantom’s horse, Hero.

The ‘kind-hearted old gypsy’, as my mother called him, was not the only exotic character to enrich my life while I was living there. Our close proximity to the showgrounds exposed me to the people who worked in the carnival when it came to town. There were midgets, prize fighters, bearded ladies, a giant or two and all the roughnecks who supervised rides and sideshows. On top of that, a circus with acrobats, trapeze artists, lion tamers, bareback riders, clowns, fire-eaters and jugglers would arrive now and then and within half a day erect a massive tent next to the show arena.

Pat allowed us to go to carnivals and the matinee circuses and gave us a few pennies to spend. But what enthralled me were these strange people when I spied on them after their acts. They could perform like no other people I knew, yet they sat around in caravan doorways or on deckchairs, smoked and chatted. They washed, shaved, combed their hair, used mirrors like everyone else, except they were a little more public about it. They peeled potatoes and carrots and diced cabbage just as my mother did. They yawned and sniffed and hummed tunes. They laughed and shouted obscenities. They could be so banal, so normal, these unbelievable creatures who flew through the air, who subjugated lions, who climbed inside barrels too small for their bodies, which opened my mind to possibilities, revealed a world beyond my own that might just be within reach. It wasn’t a revelation that I acted on as soon as I could, but its significance was never lost on me. My own leaps through the air, my own contortions, would come much later and in the realm of the imagination, when I tried to be a writer.

Portland in the late fifties was witnessing its most dramatic change in a hundred years. A modern port was under construction. Sometimes Pat took us to Battery Point, a knoll which once had the sea lapping at its base, to watch massive vehicles called Euclids, whose wheels alone were taller than most trucks. These carried loads of bluestone boulders from a quarry south of the town to dump into the sea below Battery Point. Named after the ‘father of geometry’, according to Jean, these monsters were reshaping the coast. Two breakwaters were inching into Portland Bay, one north, one east, to protect its harbour from periodic sou’easterly gales that in the past had destroyed piers and wrecked ships. Each was to have a wharf on the lee side; one for cargo and grain, the other as an oil terminal. A timber pier, which had seen better days but was still operational, curved half a mile over the deep water. And there were other smaller piers and jetties, Edwardian seabaths with a kiosk and changing rooms over the water; rows of colourful bathing boxes along the shore. All these were inside the burgeoning barriers.

In summer I joined the crowds of kids swimming at the beach, playing on swings and slides, building sandcastles, hiring paddleboats or paddle skis to navigate around the jetties. The excitement and joy was contagious. I knew hardly anyone but felt a participant in something grand—a carefree idyll. I had no idea, looking down at the Euclids from Battery Point, that their work would continue until the idyll was destroyed, until much of the harbour was ‘reclaimed’, the timber piers, seabaths and bathing boxes were gone, the placid sea virtually unswimmable. That realisation occurred decades later as I walked along the polluted shore, my mother and father gone, with only ghosts of the carefree for company.

There were other beaches out of town where I occasionally went with my relatives: Dutton Way, named after an early whaler, Narrawong where the Surrey River ends, and Bridgewater Bay, between massive capes, where I played cricket with my relatives on the hard sand at the sea’s edge, fossicked in rock pools, and climbed sandhills and dunes.

My mother found employment as a cleaner at the local Anglican vicarage. The minister was Mr Sinclair. Maybe there was something wrong with his wife, or maybe she was getting old and couldn’t do the work herself. I doubted they were rich like Angus Campbell. Pat liked working for them. They were kind to her.

She was relieved to have her own income again. It meant she could keep us well fed and dressed without relying on her relatives. She was a proud woman who fought hard all her life to avoid the stigma of poverty, which manifested in appearances: the condition of your domicile, the cleanliness and neatness of yourself and your children, and your manners. She taught us to be polite to our elders and policed our table etiquette. She taught us not to be wasteful—with food, clothes, toys or time. She taught us to help with the household chores. Her method was rarely punitive. Rather, she appealed to our consciences. She appealed to what we had learnt was right and wrong. And knowing what she had been through we were usually eager to please her.

Around this time Nanna, my father’s mother, died in Launceston. She had lived to what seemed an impossible age, seventy-three. I vaguely remembered her.

My mother cried a little. “Nanna was like a proper mother to me,” she told us, remembering her own mother’s premature death and the difficult times she’d had with her father’s mistress. “She supported me when you were just a baby and your father was not well. None of us would’ve survived without her help.”

Pat had to bear her grief alone because Denny wasn’t around. She wanted to go to the funeral but the cost of getting there was prohibitive.

As far as I remember Denny never lived with us at Bentick Street. I place his momentous reappearance at our next home. Yet in his medical files there is a letter he wrote bearing the Bentick Street address, mentioning his recent treatment in Portland of a corneal ulcer, which was received by the Repatriation Department on 19th of June, 1961.

The ulcer had been aggravating him since he received shock treatment the previous year.

It confounds me that I don’t remember him being with us at Bentick Street. He could have just been using our address for his mail, but the letter also mentions the work he was doing in Portland, a job he had for a while, which I do remember, quite clearly, but place a year later. I thought his return, given the circumstances in which he departed, would have anchored itself chronologically in bedrock.

At the end of his letter, which is a request for payment for the treatment of a corneal ulcer he had suffered throughout his life, he writes:

I’m sorry to be such a pest but I’ve lost almost a fortnights [sic] work. The first for nearly two months as the work I was doing dislodged quite a lot of old whitewash at a woolstore which we have been reflooring, & I couldn’t take the risk of any lodging in the eye itself…but as I’ve been unemployed as stated I just could not afford the expense.

The Repatriation Department was unwilling to bear the cost of the treatment, since it refused to take any responsibility for the eye problem, even for its deterioration due to the electric shock sessions, as Denny was claiming, because it had existed before he enlisted.

The job he referred to was putting in new timber floors at one of Portland’s wool storage depots, a vast three-storey building where hundreds of tons of wool bales were stored for auction and export. In a different time-space dimension he took me there. I remember him in khaki overalls, steel-capped boots, a handkerchief knotted in each corner and fitted tightly to his head, a big leather pouch with nails and claw hammer at his waist.

“What do you think?” he had said as he paraded before me. And, suspecting I wasn’t impressed enough, he insisted I accompany him aloft.

I had never seen the interior of such a huge building. The whole area was dimly lit and reeked of lanolin. He led me up some rickety stairs to the level where he was working.

When he saw I was scared of the gaps, which revealed a great drop to the floor below, where bales of wool were piled, he grinned. He wanted me to know he wasn’t scared. He jumped around from joist to joist, like a circus performer. He took several boards from a stack, explained their tongues and grooves as he slipped them into place. I watched as he nailed them onto the joists. It took two or three clean hits to sink each large nail.

“Come on, Butch,” he said, shamelessly borrowing the nickname Aunt Gerty had bestowed on me. “Have a go.”

He handed me the hammer.

I hesitated, reluctant to make a fool of myself; worried I might make a mistake that cost him his job. He urged me on. I detected irritation in his tone. I tried to imitate what he had done. I swung the hammer, missed and dented the timber. I tried again and ricocheted off the nail. On the third try I bent the nail. He seized the hammer from me and sank several in quick succession.

“You see, huh?” His eyes were fervent. “You still think your old man is completely worthless?”

“I never said that.”

“I know. But I can see it every bloody time you look at me.”

Did his disappointment with my response drive him away again? As I was growing up I often felt that my reactions prompted him to leave. I didn’t know him very well. Mostly he frightened me. Whenever I was with him, my everyday anxiety intensified, which must have manifest on my face and in my body language. I wanted him to be like the father that other boys had. I had seen how relaxed fathers and sons could be. But Denny was never around long enough for me to get to know him, and for him to understand that I wanted to love him.

He wasn’t living with us when we shifted to another house, another half-a-house (again the back half) on Percy Street near the centre of town, right where these days a supermarket stands. I don’t know why we shifted, unless it was to shorten Pat’s walk to work at the vicarage, which was just across the street. I was disappointed to lose my cypress-hedge hideaway, but there was something appealing about living so close to the shops. The house was an old weatherboard place and in the back yard was a bungalow, which another family occupied. There were a few kids living there. One of them taught me how to climb onto the roofs of houses without a ladder, but the thing I remember most vividly about him was the day he took me to view what he had left in the outhouse. It was in the bottom of the toilet bowl, a long, incandescent green turd, the likes of which I had never seen before or since. He refused to reveal his secret method of colouring poo. Maybe he had none. Maybe it was normal for him.

The front tenants were the Hothmans; a woman Pat called Bev, her husband whose name was Robby, but Pat called ‘that mongrel’, and their three timid boys whose names I have forgotten. Robby was an overweight brute who used to batter Bev when he got bored with punching a huge sack of sand he had hanging from a rafter. He scowled most of the time. I only saw him happy when he was with his mates, riding huge black British motorcycles along Percy Street, or with his sons when he tried to teach them to use their fists.

I used to hide behind some bushes near the front corner of the house to watch his version of The Wild One. The noise the bikes produced impressed me deeply, enough to curse me with a lifelong interest in motorcycling.

I knew why my mother called him a mongrel. It started to dawn on me that a lot of men hit their wives. Maybe my father wasn’t so different from other men. Yet he never showed me the rough devotion Robby and other fathers showed their sons.

I was nine years old when I began to treat my sister Jean badly.

Pat lost her job when the vicar and his family left on a mission to Papua New Guinea. She was upset for the next few days but soon found another, packing lamb and beef cuts for export at Borthwicks, a large abattoirs on the northern outskirts of town, which employed a third of the town’s working population. Each weekday she started work at 7am, long before we were ready for school, much earlier than the vicarage had required. She got up before dawn, cut our lunches, got herself ready—made up her face and donned a starched blue uniform.

She left Jean in charge.

Once my mother was gone I proceeded with unprecedented single-mindedness to make my sister’s life a misery. I refused to get up. I refused to get dressed once I got up. I harassed Carol until she cried, sabotaging Jean’s efforts to get her dressed. Jean prepared toast for Carol’s breakfast. I ate it. She toasted more. I ate that. I refused to help her clean up the kitchen, refused to make my bed (although I always did eventually, unwilling to leave evidence of my insubordination for my mother to find), refused to go to school. I yelled at her, insulted her and cursed her until she was ready to cry. Then I left for school, on my own, without her knowledge, triumphant.

It was the first time in my life that I had deliberately misbehaved. I couldn’t understand why I kept doing it. Even today I can’t figure it out, unless I was seduced by the novel joy of triumph. But my insubordination ended some months later when Jean, at her wit’s end, told our mother.

Greatly upset and disappointed, Pat took me aside into my bedroom. I sat on the edge of my bed while she spoke about how difficult her life was without my father around to help, how she had to work so we could eat and dress nicely for school so others didn’t learn of our circumstances, how she would have to stop working if I kept upsetting Jean, who was only trying to help.

I knew her life was difficult. She always looked tired and the hair on her temples was turning grey.

She knelt before me and squeezed my arms and made me look into her eyes. “I wish your father was here with us.” Her voice was strained with abject emotion. “Looking after us. Don’t you?”

I suddenly had a sense of her as a person and not just a mother. She had a life I knew little about, an adult’s life, which for her was a sad, miserable affair.

I took the opportunity, despite misgivings, to ask about my father. “Where does he go?”

“Can you keep a secret?” she said, touching my knee, tapping it to show she had faith in me. “I don’t want you telling a soul.”

I nodded earnestly; grateful she was still prepared to put some trust in me after my recent disgraceful behaviour, relieved he was alive, at least.

“Your father stays in a hospital in Melbourne when he’s not with us. He’s been sick for a long, long time, darlin’. That’s why we never see much of him.”

“What’s wrong with him?” I stammered, astonished.

“You’re still too young to understand.” She sighed, realising she needed to say more. She looked tearful. “Something bad happened to him when he went to Japan at the end of the war, before you were born. It still gives him a lot of trouble. It gets him down. And sometimes makes him very angry. When you’re older, he’ll tell you, I’m sure.”

Her allusion to something tragic brought me to my senses. I remembered my promise to devote myself to her and felt deeply ashamed.

She gave me another squeeze and a wistful smile. “Now go and play, and promise to be good.”

My transformation was immediate. I began to obey my sister. I did more than my share of the chores. I constantly tried to please Pat, volunteering to help her with the groceries, the cleaning, running messages, anything to prove I understood the gravity of our circumstances. The mysterious illness that kept my father in hospital (as opposed to jail where I’d feared he might be) allowed me to hold my head high in the face of miserable adversity. This was in an era when single-parent families were somewhat shameful. So when I saw kids with both parents I felt like a martyr—a noble feeling I came to depend on over the years.

It wasn’t long after my mother took me into her confidence that my father did show up once more. I was starting Grade 5. Suddenly he was there, unannounced, just as I was about to go to bed one night during the second week back at school. He had taken leave from hospital and hitchhiked from Melbourne to see us. He gripped my shoulders with powerful hands and appraised me with his wild penetrating eyes but couldn’t bring himself to hug me. To put me at ease he ruffled my hair as he always did and commented on how much I’d grown.

“How old are you now?”

I had turned ten I told him.

“Jesus, I’ve missed you. I’ve missed you all,” he said in a whisper.

He produced gifts, school satchels he had made from leather, one for me and one for each of my sisters that varied in size according to our ages. They had miniature suitcase handles and clip locks, and were far more impressive than any school bag I had ever seen. I blushed with pride and couldn’t wait to take it to school and announce my father had made it (I still have mine, my one memento of him). My sisters looked radiant too, especially Carol who had come out of her bedroom, bleary-eyed, when she heard the commotion. She finally felt she had something in common with her older siblings.

Denny grinned with pleasure at our response.

Since he looked almost humble I summoned the courage to ask if he was going to stay. My sisters seemed keen to hear his answer too. A shadow crossed his smile. He promised he would and ordered us off to bed so he could talk to our mother.

When I got up in the morning I raced into the kitchen to talk to him, to tell him how I liked school and what I had learnt and about the green poo I had seen, but he wasn’t there—nor was he anywhere else in the house. We went off to school, where I had the sense to refrain from making any public announcement about my father’s appearance lest his stay prove temporary and require an embarrassing explanation at any school-ground inquisition. I deflected questions about my new satchel with a shrug and an allusion to it being a Christmas present. When Pat arrived home from work that evening my caution was vindicated. She told us that Denny had gone back to Melbourne.

“Why didn’t he tell us that?” I whined, tossing aside the satchel.

“He didn’t want to disappoint you.”

“Well he has.”

“He made you that satchel, which means he cares for you, love.”

Another year passed before we saw him again.

This was early in February 1962.

Lately I have learnt from his files that after my sisters and I had gone to bed Pat had told Denny some Hamilton detectives had recently paid her a visit with a warrant for his arrest for passing false cheques. He stayed the night but woke up with his hands around her throat. Horrified by his menacing behaviour and no doubt wanting to avoid the police, he headed for Melbourne before dawn, intending to return to the hospital.

He arrived back in the early afternoon in Melbourne, wrote a social worker who interviewed him at the hospital, and somehow or other (details again clouded with gestures) he managed to find himself at Caulfield races and despite all his good resolutions to give up betting altogether, got the idea that he could retrieve all his debts there, go home and pay everybody and all would be well. He had £30 when he arrived and finished up losing the lot.

He then returned to the hospital.

Denny spent at least six months of 1962 in the hospital at Heidelberg. There’s a record of him walking around his ward at 2am, being abusive, and soon after disappearing altogether. Police found him in the neighbouring suburb of Northcote in his pyjamas and returned him to the hospital. Another time he woke around two or three in the morning and felt ‘that he was outside himself ’. He stated that he heard compulsive voices talking him into acts of violence, which he tried to fight off.

There are a few fragmentary hints to his psychosis in the notes of his medical officer during this stay. Denny revealed his father was an alcoholic and ‘lord of the manor’ . His sister later told me their father was violent. Did fear of a brutal father contribute to his mental instability? The notes mention his fall from the back of a tram as a child. Did he receive head injuries? Brain damage? Was this the origin of his blackouts? Also he reveals that, while he was a child, he had endured several homosexual ‘approaches ’. Were these serious? Was the perpetrator an adult? Was he assaulted? Was he molested? Was he raped? Were the incidents traumatic enough to trigger his mental illness?

This was the year my elder sister started high school. While he was in hospital, Denny went to a resident social worker and requested funds for his daughter’s books and uniform. He was difficult and aggressive with the social worker, declaring that he didn’t want charity. He got angry when it was suggested he approach the Education Department, instead of the Repatriation Department, and stormed out of the office. He later returned to apologise for his behaviour. The Education Department was contacted, forms filled in, and some financial assistance rendered. From that point on, during his stay at the hospital he made several visits to the social worker, asking for payment for his ‘medical sustenance’, sometimes bringing with him other patients who were having financial problems, eager to assist them; eager for their gratitude. He was reluctant to talk to the social worker about his home life. If he had contact with his family in Portland it was done through his brother-in-law. The social worker noted that Pat did not correspond with him at all. After he had been in hospital for some weeks and the question of his discharge came up, he wrote to Pat again but received no reply.

He decided to tell the social worker about his life.

The story was very disjointed, he told it with half sentences, dismissing the rest of the sentence with a wave of his hand, a shrug of his shoulders or would put his hand to his head and say he couldn’t remember all the details…He then seemed to come to a blank in the story, he either wouldn’t or couldn’t remember how he ended up in hospital. He thought he might have beaten his wife up before he left and that was why she had not been in touch with him, but he seemed to think she had some justification for not wanting him back.

Eventually it was agreed that Pat should come to Melbourne at the Department’s expense to see both his doctor and the social worker.

The week Pat was due to visit Denny became very agitated. According to the social worker’s notes he rang her to see if all was well and to confirm her intention to keep the appointment. (In all my years living at home we never once had the phone connected, but maybe it was a pre-arranged call to her brother’s house.) The nurse believed he was told his children were all sick with hepatitis. (In our family only I have suffered hepatitis, and it wasn’t at this stage in my life.) Denny ‘promptly went AWL’. He returned the day Pat was due at the hospital. She wasn’t with him. Nor did she arrive later. The social worker completed her report with the following:

No contact has been made with the wife. It is understood that she feels she just could not go through the whole business of gaol sentences, etc. again. The man appears to realise this is his last chance and just how he will use it remains to be seen.

The social worker contacted his doctor in Portland who confirmed that things were bad between Denny and Pat. The doctor suggested the matter should be left to run its own course.

Th e social worker noted that Denny seemed very fond of his family.

He was discharged soon after, armed with a letter stating he was receiving treatment and that the staff genuinely believed he wanted a chance to ‘make good’.

But it seems that at some time the law caught up with him too. He later revealed to one of his medical officers that on more than one occasion he had spent time in the Portland lock-up for fraud.

MY ADOPTED FAMILY

While I was living at Percy Street I developed a death phobia. A cat that lived on the property had a large litter of kittens and one day the kids that lived in the bungalow drowned them all. I saw six tiny, sodden corpses floating in the laundry copper. The boy who taught me how to climb onto roofs and showed me his green poo was holding the seventh underwater with a triumphant smile, teaching me another thing: how easy it is for a delicate thing like life to be extinguished. I recoiled and raced inside to the sound of his laughter. In that instant I understood how fragile life was. Every night, after I went to bed and the light was turned off, I was transfixed by terror of a similar fate. Lying rigidly on my bed I endured panic attacks. I didn’t want to die before I grew up and grew old. In fact I didn’t want to die at all. Each night between gasps I chanted into a pillow that was damp with my tears, “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die” , until I fell asleep. I was spared nightmares but each morning I woke exhausted from the dead weight of dreamlessness.

Ashamed I told nobody.

I was saved by Paul Walters, the vicar’s son. The Reverend Walters was the new minister at St Stephen’s Church of England, which was less than a block from our place. Although I can’t remember how I met Paul, we became inseparable friends and the vicarage was soon my second home—perhaps my first home. Until I met him I had never had a close friend. He was my first because he never asked about my father or his whereabouts, which spared me the humiliation of lying or admitting I didn’t know. My mother had sworn me to secrecy about his long stays in hospital—in what I had figured must have been a mental hospital.

Paul was a solid, good-looking, laconic lad with a thick crop of hair and a nonchalant smile. Being a year older than me, he could be slightly condescending. He was very intelligent and knowledgeable. Despite his father’s vocation he wasn’t particularly religious, although he participated in all the rituals his father requested. He donned a blue cassock to sing in the choir when needed, a red cassock when he served as an altar boy. But he never gave the impression he was committed one hundred percent.

Soon I was involved in the church services as well, only with a great deal more zeal than Paul. When it dawned on me what heaven promised I became the most pious lad in all of Christendom. I clung to my new-found faith like a lifebuoy. My debilitating panic attacks soon ended. Over the next few years I learnt the Catechism, sang in the choir, served at the altar and seriously wondered whether God had me earmarked for the Anglican ministry. If I had doubts I put them down to my newness to religion. I expected them to disappear as I opened my heart further. Here was something that gave meaning to all the chaos I saw in the world, the senselessness of life, its cruelties. It was comforting, too, to have a father in heaven when there was little sign of one on the earth.

St Stephen’s was a bluestone church, built in the 1850s. Its design was grandiose but when Portland was passed over as the capital of a new colony on the southern coast of the mainland, episcopal funds dried up and it was never completed. Instead of stately bluestone, its back wall was made of corrugated iron. Resting in the grounds was a huge bell donated by Edward Henty, the first squatter in the district. It still needed consecration and a belfry. The interior of the church, if you faced the altar, was a sumptuous homage to Almighty God. There were polished timber pews, red carpet down the aisle and splendid lancet-arch windows with stained-glass images of the Apostles. The carved altar had tall candlesticks and, above the communion rail, a pendant oil lamp hanging on a long chain from the lofty heights. There were choir stalls outside the chancel, a huge pipe organ hidden next to it, a pulpit to one side and a brass-eagle bible stand in the southern wing, as well as a font for baptisms. It was easy to feel meek and therefore blessed in such a temple.

The vicarage was more prosaic: a modern, double-storey, brick house behind the church, not as grand as Angus Campbell’s dwellings but larger than most I had been in. It needed to be. The Walters had four children.

They were a happy family. The Reverend and Mrs Walters were rather formal but they doted on their children. They took them to beaches and sports events. They helped them make ice cream and ginger beer. They took them on holidays every year. They bankrolled their hobbies.

Paul had several. Stamps were one. He had accrued an impressive collection from all over the world. He kept them under cellophane in albums, arranged in alphabetical order according to nationality. It was through stamps I discovered countries had different names to the ones I knew and currencies I had never heard of. He encouraged me to start a collection too. Then he turned to another hobby—model aeroplanes.

I waited awhile, wondering how much time should elapse before I could follow his lead without seeming too much under his spell. I watched him assemble Meschermidts, Stukers, Spitfires and Lancaster Bombers from plastic kits he bought in a dingy toyshop on Julia Street. He had an eye for detail and a steady hand. He never had parts left over or poorly aligned sections. Wings were stuck in the right places, flaps moved up and down, propellers turned. His models matched perfectly the illustrations on the boxes.

When I begged my mother to buy me one she found the money somewhere. And she also gave me a sixpence a week to buy Boys Own magazines, like the ones Paul collected, full of brave adventurous lads.

When I first tried to assemble a model aeroplane, a Spitfire, I made a mess with the glue. I watched in dismay as it oozed from the gaps when I pressed sections against each other. It stuck my fingers together and its fumes left me dizzy. The finished product inevitably was second-rate. Unlike Paul’s, which looked ready to fly, mine could have had been something shot from the sky.

He used to grimace at my collection.

Within a year he progressed to a balsawood model that had a tiny petrol motor. I often accompanied him to a sports ground where he flew it. Standing in the middle of the oval he primed the motor with fuel from a miniature petrol can, found a smooth area for take-off and spun the propeller to fire up the motor. It sounded like a giant demented mosquito but flew spectacularly. Paul always maintained control with hand-held wires from the model. I was a mere spectator. I didn’t mind. He was my first real friend and I admired him. I adored him.

In the grounds of the vicarage we built an underground cubby, which was too claustrophobic for me to use, and another cubby in the gabled section of the garage roof, from which we ran a can-and-string telephone line to one of the upstairs rooms of the vicarage to relay urgent messages about enemy positions in our military saga fantasy.

I would visit Paul almost every day. I slipped into his family without being noticed. I was there for meals. I slept over whenever I could. I went on holidays with them to distant places. I felt closer to them than to my real family, which wasn’t quite a family anyway. I was like a young cuckoo, not the same shape or temperament as the rest of the brood but doing my best to remain inconspicuous, so I wouldn’t be thrown from the nest. I tried hard to be the vicar’s second son.

On weekends throughout summer we piled into their family car, a two-tone Austin station wagon, to be driven to Narrawong (which to amuse us the vicar called ‘Skinny Chinaman’) or to splendid Bridgewater Bay where we played in the open sea, or inspected rock pools for starfish and minnows, or played beach cricket. In all our games Paul led the way and I followed. When we got home from the beach, Mrs Walters put us in the upstairs bath together, and in a tub we filled to the brim Paul invented a new game, submarines, with our dicks doubling as essential pieces of wartime apparatus. Up periscope, down periscope. Paul had a more impressive periscope than I did.

Paul was the one to reveal the secret of sex to me. Apparently our periscopes had another, unfamiliar, use. He showed me a slim book the vicar had given him, after he had studied its contents thoroughly. The book was full of diagrams depicting men and women’s private parts, and in some diagrams the man’s ‘penis’, the official name for a dick, was erect and inside the woman. I observed each diagram, transfixed, unable to believe my eyes. The book claimed that babies were created this way. It was nothing short of preposterous. And nothing short of scandalous that a vicar gave such a book to his son!

I tried to imagine my mother and father doing what these diagrams suggested. Impossible! I thought of the vicar and Mrs Walters. Never! Surely the ‘crane theory of baby deliveries’, itself hard to believe, made more sense than this. It rocked my faith in God. How could The Almighty devise such a sordid and sinful beginning to life? But a small part of me obviously endorsed the whole idea. I thumbed through the book again and again, risking a catastrophic injury.

My faith took a hit only to be restored some months later when the vicar led a group of local church boys on excursion to the blowholes at Cape Bridgewater. It was a relatively benign evening. There were no great swells in the Southern Ocean. The vicar stood before us on the edge of cliffs that dropped thirty or forty metres straight into the sea, raised his arms as he would to praise the Lord and cried drolly, “Let us spray!”

We loved him when he made gently irreverent jokes like this. And our laughter would have been followed by attempts at puns of our own. But without warning a great wave rose up above the cliff and had us diving for safety. I gripped some craggy rocks as best I could and watched the Reverend in horror. With his eyes closed he hadn’t seen it coming. He was drenched but wasn’t swept away. In my eyes it was a miracle, and a warning not to mock the affairs of the Lord.

Oddly enough my trust in Reverend Walters was eroded by what (I have no doubt these days) were his good intentions. He used to take me away with his family to places like Melbourne and Mildura. Knowing my family couldn’t afford such holidays, he was simply acting on his charitable beliefs and had no idea what impact the trip to Mildura would have on me. Nor did he ever find out.

My mother was happy for me to go. She must have swallowed her pride, given me what pocket money she could, and made sure I packed clothes that wouldn’t embarrass her. She knew the Walters. She and my sisters came to church with me now and then. She liked to see me in altar-boy robes. She encouraged my church attendance, my Catechism classes and my eventual Confirmation. She had once told me she believed in Jesus and I had no reason to doubt her. I could see her from the chancel, sitting at a pew near the front, in a blue floral skirt and a tight white hat made from woven cane. My sisters alongside her were dressed just as primly. At home, however, God was never mentioned. Religion was a private matter in our house.

On the trip to Mildura the Reverend Walters had driven through the night. It was dawn when I awoke on the back seat. We were already in the river town. Paul and a couple of his sisters were asleep next to me. The vicar was driving around, looking for the house he had organised for our stay. Only half-awake I thought we were still travelling north but we must have been going in some other direction.

Maintaining my bearings in those days was extremely important to me, although I couldn’t say why. Perhaps knowing which way was north meant I knew where home was. Mine wasn’t much of a home but it was less scary than none.

Disorientated, I was convinced Mildura was on the north side of the river, despite evidence to the contrary that Paul produced: his road map, his trusty compass, his precocious confidence.

I wasn’t thinking cardinal points while we were having fun—playing in the Murray River on sweltering days, travelling its wide brown waters on an historic paddle steamer, eating ice-cream, climbing on vintage tractors in the riverside park and visiting museums—but when we left a week later the disquieting sensation returned. I was sure the Reverend was driving further north instead of south, heading away from home.

I sat in dumb apprehension, staring from the car window, trying to get some bearings, too scared to ask in case he thought I was being disrespectful.

When we arrived back in Portland the evidence before my eyes should have ended the doubts. But my false sense of direction prevailed. The Reverend dropped me outside a place that looked identical to my home, right down to the mother who appeared at the gate.

How could I be sure that she and the entire town weren’t fakes?

My anxiety was high. I had nobody to turn to, nobody to ask, nobody to help, nobody to rescue me. My trust of the Walters family, including Paul, vanished. Paul snorted derisively when I asked in a whisper if we were in the right place. He must have known; must have been part of the conspiracy to fool me. I felt abandoned. Worse, I felt they had somehow become aware of my secret yearning to be a part of their family, and had decided to get rid of me once and for all. I wanted to tell them that I was aware of what was happening. But I feared the consequences, feared punishment, feared something worse. So I pretended to be unconcerned. As long as they didn’t suspect I knew what was happening to me, I thought I would be safe. Eventually, if I were clever enough, I would devise a strategy to get back home.

The disturbing doubts lingered for months. I kept looking for evidence that this town I had come to was fake but spotted nothing out of place. I thought it was ingenious; an exact replica in every respect. My family was a perfect imitation. I couldn’t fault it. The woman being my mother might as well have been her. She looked the same, acted the same, treated me the same. The girls, likewise, were just like my sisters. I looked for minor details that could easily have been overlooked by the conspirators, like the initials I had scratched surreptitiously onto a fence post with a pocket knife a few weeks before the holiday, or a shilling I had hidden under a rock, but these and others I checked were there. I went further afield, down to the harbour where I knew of a crude skull and crossbones painted onto a rock at the end of an old fishermen’s breakwater. Still there. So too the piece of nylon rope I had tied to a rusting iron peg near the old lighthouse. Everything was consistent with what had been. Sometimes I turned around swiftly, trying to catch sight of someone relaxing, momentarily dropping their role in the deception. But everyone remained in character.

I began to think I was being punished for my sins, my disloyalty to my mother and sisters. When the tiny-monster head sensation recurred, I was convinced God had decided the fake home was not punitive enough. My head expanded and contracted beyond my control. It made me nauseous and scared. Maybe I shouldn’t have ogled the drawings of what men and women do to have babies. Maybe that was the sin I was being punished for.

One day I developed an excruciating stomach pain, which wouldn’t go away. I feared someone had poisoned me: my mother or the Walters. The fake Pat pretended to be worried. She took me to hospital. The hospital staff ran tests on me but found nothing wrong. I stayed in a ward overnight, sure the nurses were part of the conspiracy and sure I was going to die. By morning the pain had gone. When Pat came to pick me up I thought I noticed the nurses sniggering and winking at her.

With time I realised that I might as well treat this charade as the real thing. I couldn’t detect any difference. For in my real home everything would have been happening just the same. So I went along with it. I knew I was not clever enough to find my way back. My anxiety gradually eased until I was seldom aware of being in a counterfeit world.

Occasionally, lying in my bed at night, with my head still expanding and contracting, I would wonder if my real mother and sisters were missing me. I knew if I’d had a real father who took me on holidays, none of this would have happened.

LIVING AT DAISY’S

By the time I reached my eleventh birthday, I had accepted my fate. My mother’s efforts to make me happy, buying me a brand new leather football and giving me a party, seemed genuine enough. But I couldn’t dispel completely the feeling that people you love can betray you.

It was my father’s reappearance that finally convinced me I was mistaken. It seemed like a year since we had last seen him. Without warning he arrived in a late model Holden, a white sedan with bold scarlet side panels that led to dorsal fins and soaring tail lights, far more impressive than the Walter’s two-tone Austin. I gaped at it and him in wonder. How could he have gotten such an expensive thing? We were not the kind of people who could afford a reasonable second-hand car much less a new one. It was the crazy kind of thing only my real father would do. My delusions about the authenticity of the town and my family fell away.

“What a car!” I cried. “Is it ours?”

He grinned. “All ours, my friend. Do you like it?”

“My oath!” I chortled, trying to sound manly.

I followed him inside.

He was much gaunter than I remembered. His eyes were even wilder. His clothes looked brand new; a Fletcher Jones suit and patent-leather shoes. He looked like he was returning from a successful bank hoist rather than a hospital. He tried to embrace us all at once, to impart his enthusiasm for the family reunion.

I noticed Pat’s pained expression. It gave me a jolt. Shouldn’t she have been joyous? She put an extra potato in the pot and divided the lamb chops into another serve.

“This’s bloody good,” he said, grinning at each of us as we sat at the table, our eyes downcast, wondering how we should behave.

He asked me about what year I was in at school and if I liked living in Portland and if I had any friends. So I told him about Paul and the Walters and my recently acquired religious beliefs.

“Good, good,” he said, and asked my sisters similar questions.

At one stage he turned back to me and said that I needn’t waste any prayers on him; he had already sold his soul to the devil.

I was shocked by his confession. My father was doomed, lost in hell for all eternity. Yet it didn’t seem to bother him. He was cheerful, even merry. But during tea, when Pat asked him about the car, his mood changed swiftly.

“What’s the problem?” he demanded.

Pat’s elbows were on the table. She rubbed her wan forehead, as if she were pondering the wisdom of what she wanted to say to him. “Where did you get it?”

His levity vanished in an instant. It took less than a minute for his indignation to build into a full-blown rage. I watched the transformation in horror. His eyes bulged. His bottom jaw protruded. A livid vein appeared on his forehead.

“Where do you bloodywell think?”

“I don’t know where you got the money from, darl, but there’re more important things we need than a new car.” Her voice began to break. “If you spent more time with us, you’d understand. Clothes for the kids. Some more blankets. A warm coat would be nice.”

She always felt cold in winter. I had a sudden attack of guilt about my enthusiasm for the car.

“And how the hell am I supposed to find work without a bloody car?”

“Haven’t you got a job?” Jean interjected.

“Of course he hasn’t,” my mother said unwisely.

“How much money do you need to buy a new car?” Jean went on.

“I can’t even afford to buy you kids a bicycle on the wages I earn,” Pat said.

With a roar Denny tore off the tablecloth and all the plates and condiments. I heard them smashing on the floor around us. Our meal was gone.

“So this’s the welcome I get,” he roared. “Well, you can all go to hell!”

My mother leaned back in her chair, her chin tucked into her neck, her face drained of colour, her lips turned down, aggrieved and fearful.

“Oh, Denny,” she murmured.

He tossed aside the tablecloth and left us to clean up the mess.

When I pondered his return, years later, I suspected he had desperately wanted to impress us. He had craved our admiration and respect. What better way than with a brand new car? Instead our distrust wounded him deeply.

He frightened us for days, leaving Pat battered and bruised, and me cowering in my room.

I could hardly believe how fierce he looked. He would close his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them they bulged. His jaw would jut so much it seemed dislocated as he positioned his arm for a backhander. The sound when he landed a blow on my mother’s face was like a gunshot, her cry unforgettable.

“Oh don’t, Denny, please!” she whimpered. “Not in front of the kids. They don’t need to see you like this.”

Once he held the point of a carving knife to her throat, gratified by the terror in her eyes. In my room my guts rumbled, but I held my bum hole tight and endured the ache, too scared to race outside, past him, to the toilet.

Only Jean was bold enough to stand up to him, which must have brought him to his senses, a child letting him know his behaviour was inexcusable. He stared at her incomprehensively, and for a moment I expected her to be murdered. But he shook his head. His body lost its tensile bearing. He left the room. Silence descended on our household. A few more days passed. Then the sedan was gone.

But surprisingly he stayed. He sat in the lounge, reading the newspaper and a pile of Readers’ Digests, listening to a transistor radio and, on Saturdays, gambling. Where he got the money from to gamble I have no idea. I doubt if it even crossed my mind. Occasionally he disappeared all day and came home in the evening without explaining his absence.

It took a few jittery weeks without another incident before I began to think his attacks mightn’t become a regular occurrence.

I was naive enough to hope that, with him around, our fortunes would improve. While my mother had never blamed him for our lowly circumstances, she had led me to believe our lot had much to do with his long stays in hospital, which seemed to suggest things would improve if he were around. I desperately wanted to believe it. Most families had a car. Most had a TV. Most kids I knew had pushbikes. Most went on holidays with their own families rather than the vicar’s.

In the months after his return Denny seemed ready to be part of the family. He helped around the house. He got a job on a building site. And before too long he had another car, a second-hand two-toned Austin A40.

From the moment I set eyes on it I loved that little sedan with its brown upholstery and bone steering wheel, a modest vehicle but nothing to be ashamed of, and something he was paying for with honest money.

“Come on, Butch,” he said, “I’ll take you for a spin.”

Travelling alone with him I had the privilege of sitting in the front. I felt heady with pride, finally having a father who’d started to act like I imagined he should. And he was chuffed. He displayed dazzling white teeth (dentures I was later to learn) in a sustained grin. He winked at me occasionally. Each time he winked, he gave his head a little jerk sideways and clicked his tongue, a sound that emerged from the orifice he formed at the corner of his mouth. What it meant I wasn’t sure, but I thought he wanted me to know everything would be fine between us from now on.

“I’ll teach you to drive this one day,” he said, giving me one of his unnerving grins.

He took me to the site where he worked, a half-built house, a frame beneath a tiled roof, with planks across a muddy yard to stacks of timber. There were off -cuts scattered around the structure. It looked like a demolition site to me.

He insisted I follow him around as he showed me the sections he was working on: the bathroom, the kitchen, the laundry. He was building frames for cupboards. The ground everywhere was muddy and he was jumping from one timber off-cut to another and chuckling and urging me to keep up.

“What do you reckon?” he said at the end of the tour, fishing for a compliment. “Not bad, eh?”

I tried my hardest to show I was impressed, but I sounded insincere. I didn’t know how to keep the conversation rolling.

“Okay,” he said, upset by my tepid response. “I’ll show you something. Get in the car.”

He drove along Must Street, past our relatives’ houses, where he muttered some indiscernible words of disgust, to Wellington Road, which ran down to the harbour. He stopped in front of the square blue cement-sheet house he had built when I was an infant, on one of their first attempts to live in Portland, where my mother had cracked her ribs under a falling wall frame. It was half-hidden behind a hedge.

“Still standing,” he boasted. “I built the entire thing on my own.”

“Is that the one Mum helped you with.”

“A lot of bloody good she was.”

I tried diplomacy. “You did a good job.”

“You might have grown up here, Butch, in this place,” he said. “This might’ve been your home. But you can never tell what’s going to happen.”

“Why didn’t we stay?”

He didn’t answer. “How would you like to become a carpenter?” he said instead—with faint hope or sarcasm, I couldn’t tell.

I didn’t know how to reply. I hadn’t given work much thought; it was something adults did. My shrug was the wrong answer.

“So being like your old man’s not good enough, is that it?”

I maintained an uncertain silence.

“Well, if you don’t want to be like me, make sure you get a bloody good education. That’s what your mother keeps going on about. She’s always bloody right, isn’t she? That’s what you kids think anyway.”

“She’s right a lot of the time,” I said rather lamely.

“You know who put that idea in her head, don’t yer?”

“You, I suppose.”

“Too bloody right I did. Don’t think I don’t know how important an education is. I only wish your mother and I had had your chances.”

I said nothing, not knowing what to say.

“You think I’m stupid, don’t yer?”

“No, I don’t.”

“What’s thirty-six times forty-eight?”

“I don’t know. I’d need a pen and paper to work it out.”

“It’s one thousand, seven hundred and twenty-eight. Ask me another.”

“Nine eights?”

“Seventy-two. Something harder.”

I shrugged. “Twenty-four times sixty-seven.” I said it reluctantly, too intimidated to disobey.

“One thousand, six hundred and eight.”

His answer was immediate. I could see he wanted me to continue.

“Fifty-tree times ninety-eight.”

“Five thousand, one hundred and ninety four.”

“I don’t know whether you’re right or wrong, do I?” I protested.

“Yeah, well, you aren’t as smart as you think. And I never got past Grade Six.”

“You’re cleverer than anyone I know,” I said, hoping it would cheer him up.

And it did. He drove home in a positive mood.

“Not a bad little bus, this, eh?” he said, tossing me a glance as he tapped the steering wheel affectionately.

One day I went with him to inquire about a cottage that was half the rent we were paying for the place in Percy Street.

He parked outside a double-storey, bluestone mansion that had a gravel track and tall timber fence separating it from Portland’s Salvation Army Citadel.

The landlady was a middle-aged woman dressed in dirty jodhpurs and a brown cardigan worn out at the elbows. She kept her hair under some kind of net as if it was an annoyance or something to hide. She had a muscular neck and an angular jaw that made her look imperious. I had seen her often enough before. Her name was Daisy O’Brien and she operated the paddleboat business on Henty Beach every summer.

She took us into her kitchen, which was more cluttered and pungent than ours. Denny sat talking to her while we drank syrupy tea, trying to impress her with his knowledge of carpentry, letting her know that, even though he had work, his skills might prove useful in the off-season when she carried out maintenance on her paddleboats, gratis of course, trying to wheedle a few concessions out of her with regard to the rent.

She eyed him shrewdly. Her husband, Fred, a tall dour, grey-haired fellow, hovered around, declining to sit down, saying little.

After we finished our drinks she led us down the lane to a derelict cottage.

My heart sank. It looked like something out of the Deep South of the USA, or hovels I saw decades later along the Caribbean coast of Central America; rotting, unpainted weatherboards, cracked cement sheeting, rusted roof, a yard overgrown with weeds and thistles inside a crude cyclone fence. The chimney was built cheaply of sandstone blocks rather than bricks. The place was connected to electricity but had no gas and no proper hot water system. The bath and laundry sinks were in an outhouse whose weatherboards were in worse repair than the cottage. The water for washing clothes and skin would have to be heated in a wood-fired copper and transferred to our twin-tub machine or bath by bucket. There was another smaller outhouse behind it with a shit-can under a well-worn seat, mercifully well away from the house. Both outhouses were surrounded by geraniums. The kitchen had a wood stove. Hot water for the dishes could be heated in a kettle or copper urn. Cracked brown lino covered all the floors. Along the back of the cottage was a verandah whose timber floor had rotted at the edges after long exposure to the weather. It offered an intimate view of a tall fence topped with ivy that separated the cottage from two asphalt tennis courts at the back of the Methodist Church. At one end of the verandah was another small bedroom whose interior walls and ceiling were bare masonite. Its outer wall was against the fence. I looked around for something that might make living here worthwhile.

Opposite the cottage was a huge three-sided corrugated iron shed, more than twenty-feet high, where Daisy stored paddleboats, one on top of another. Its steel beams and rafters looked inviting. And there were other things worth climbing; behind the shed a pine tree twice its height, whose bark was like dinosaur scales and to my delight behind the back fence, at both ends of the tennis court were sprawling cypress hedges grander than the one I played on in Bentick Street.

Denny made some flattering remarks about the cottage before offering to rent it. Daisy O’Brien grunted, unmoved by his comments, but accepted after a few moments consideration designed to make him sweat a bit, knowing she wouldn’t get too many other offers. I thought grimly, well, he’s a builder, he can fix it up.

As we drove away, Denny, who seemed inordinately cheerful, perhaps because he was finally assuming control of family matters, warned me about crossing our new landlady. “Don’t forget, she’s the one with the balls, not old Fred.”

I was shocked by his observation, taking him literally, too embarrassed to ask how he knew.

He seemed keen for the rest of the family to view the cottage. But Pat, who was heartily sick of shifting from one place to another, resisted.

“It’s going to save us a lot of dosh,” he said with an incredulous smile, his hackles rising. “Why do you always go against everything I do for you, Trish?”

“Dosh for what?” she wanted to ask him, knowing full well the household budget would receive none of it. She held her tongue to avoid antagonising him further. But when she relented and went to view the cottage she couldn’t hide her disappointment.

She didn’t want to get out of the car to view it.

“Take a closer look, for Chrissakes!” he muttered.

She walked slowly along the path to the back verandah, observing the rotting weatherboards, the overgrown garden, the dilapidated outhouse that was the laundry and bathroom. Inside she looked through the gloomy rooms in grim silence. She noticed the thick grease on the walls of the kitchen, the blackened wood stove, the patterns worn from the lino or concealed by grime, the missing architraves.

“At least we don’t have to share it with any other bugger,” Denny countered, referring to our half-house, as if her silence was an argument. “Don’t worry about any of that stuff. I’ll fix it.”

Her chest heaved. “Oh, Denny, it should be pulled down.”

It was enough to stoke his simmering anger into a brush fire. He headed out of the house and returned, muttering “Jesus! Jesus!” He ushered us out forcibly and slammed the door. I prayed for Jean to keep her mouth shut. She had a propensity to speak her mind and a knack of choosing just the right combination of abrasive words to ignite a conflagration.

Mercifully she was silent this time, but he persisted. “When I get on me feet we’ll get somewhere better. Anyone would think I wasn’t part of this family. You think I don’t want the best for us?”

When no one answered, he drove us home, silently glowering, and after we were out of the car he drove off, leaving us to share a guilty, hopeless presentiment. We didn’t see him again for the rest of the day.

The next morning I sensed his presence. He hadn’t gone to work. He was in the lounge in one of his dark moods. He wanted nothing to do with us. The house was quiet.

By the end of the week he had arranged our move to the new address, refusing help from us, dismissing our attempts with a disgusted wave of the hand, as if we were annoying flies, shifting all the heavy and awkward furniture by himself in a car and trailer borrowed from somewhere. At the last minute he enlisted the help of our bikie neighbour, bribing him with beer. None of us dared to assist once he had scorned our initial offer.

When it was all done and we stood outside the hovel, dazed by the upheaval, he said, “Sort the rest of it out your bloody selves.”

He disappeared indoors and shut himself in the lounge. I heard him jamming an armchair against the door to prevent our entry.

None of us dared attempt it. We looked at each other and shrugged, unwilling to discuss it amongst ourselves, feeling guilty for something none of us understood.

Where he had placed the bedroom furniture determined what rooms we were to use. Carol and I were to share the room off the kitchen. Jean was the lucky one. She had the smaller, masonite-lined one at the end of the verandah. Pat had the dingy front room off the passage opposite the living room. We set to work washing and cleaning the place from top to bottom. With an old tomahawk left by the previous tenant, I cut some kindling from bits of timber I found in the yard. I lit the stove to boil some water for the cleaning but also for a cup of tea. Pat couldn’t function too well without one. We unpacked our clothes, our linen, our crockery and kitchenware.

“Well, we better get used to it,” she said with a forced smile that was supposed to fortify us.

She took a Bex.

WORKING ON THE WHARVES

There was no warmth in the house as much as we tried to make it cosy. The flooring throughout was old lino. Around the edges it was torn, exposing rotten floorboards. The house was draughty, with a broken window in the kitchen and gaps beneath the doors. The walls were thin. And a relentless chill, like a blast from the Southern Ocean, emanated from the off-limits lounge room. Pat shed some private tears. It upset her that Denny wanted to shut her out of his life, that his mood swings were so dramatic and forbidding. There was no doubt she still loved him.

While my sisters and I, hurt by his refusal to talk to us, were prepared to hate him, she made excuses for his behaviour. “You know your father’s not himself these days,” she whispered, lest he catch her remarks across the silence. “He doesn’t really mean to upset you. It’s just me. I’m the one upsetting him.”

“That’s not fair,” Jean cried.

“Shhh.”

We all pretended he had gone away. In the days after our shift none of us mentioned him, but we crept around the house to avoid any aggravation. Every evening after Pat had prepared a meal for the family on the old wood stove, she slid his plate into its cast iron oven, under an aluminium lid to prevent the food from drying out. It was always gone in the morning.

What upset me most wasn’t that he had wanted to be alone, but that he had pushed furniture against the door to prevent us attempting to enter, as if he couldn’t stand us being near him, as if we were vile, as if we were the cause of all his woes. He wanted to quarantine himself from us. I tried to think what it was about me, about us, that was so abhorrent.

Then one day he emerged from the lounge.

I saw him sitting at the kitchen table, as if he had just returned from another hospital stay. As Pat moved past, getting breakfast ready for the rest of us, he grabbed her arm and said, “Give us a hug, love.”

And she tried to pull away, shocked by his show of affection. “Oh, Denny, not in front of the children,” she responded, unable to hide her joy from us.

I was stunned.

The relief Pat felt transformed her. She looked younger and less haggard. The Denny she had fallen in love with, years before, was back. He also looked younger and more handsome. He punched me playfully, when I came near, and gave the girls a squeeze. He was as gentle as a monk emerging from a lengthy meditation. A rare sound filled the room—our laughter. Not a word was mentioned of his self-imposed exile.

Since he had no job, he started to help our landlady service and repair her paddle boats, probably because he had no way to pay the rent. The garish boats were stacked in the yard adjacent to the huge shed near our place. One by one, with Daisy on one side and Denny and Fred the other, these were hoisted onto a specially designed bench where each was inspected for damage to plywood, rudder, pedal mechanism and floats. Metal parts were greased, timber repainted, before the boats were stacked in the shed for the off-season.

For a while Denny was in an expansive mood. He enjoyed the work he did for Daisy. He often praised her strength and technical know-how. He was no weakling himself; nor was he unskilled. But he readily admitted he was no match for her. If he found a crack or hole he considered beyond repair, she scoffed at him and took over, directing him to a simpler task. It amused him that such a woman existed, who, if not repairing paddleboats, had her head in the engine well of one of her huge black American cars alongside Fred. Away from them, he voiced his pity for Fred, whose deadpan face he interpreted as a long-suffering expression of subservience.

It crosses my mind now, with the benefit from decades of feminism, that Daisy and Fred treated each other as equals, well before their time. But a man with such an attitude in those days was considered a weakling and effeminate. He was derided for allowing his wife, despite her capabilities, to perform so many tasks that were generally considered men’s work, to issue orders and dominate masculine conversations. Yet, if I publicly joined in the sly derision (nobody dared do it to her face), I privately admired her, as I believe my father did.

When his work for Daisy came to an end he was in such a positive mood, he looked for paid work and found it on the wharves.

The port, designed to serve the farming hinterland of western Victoria and the local abattoir, was still being developed. Because it was relatively small, stevedoring was casualised. Somehow my father was notified whenever ships docked. Perhaps he listened to the shipping news on the local radio. Whenever the wharfies were called, he attended recruitment meetings in a makeshift office, down on the foreshore, alongside scores of others, where work crews were selected by lottery.

In those days, before the container and bulk carrier revolution, loading ships was labour intensive. Wharfies worked long shifts, sometimes fourteen or fifteen hours a day, under gruelling and often dangerous conditions, hauling carcasses of sheep and beef or sacks of grain. If they loaded grain they had to endure its suffocating dust, which swirled around the docks like a spiteful animus. He would come home looking ghostly grey.

Denny didn’t shy from this kind of toil. He revelled in it. Perhaps it made him feel worthwhile. Perhaps it made him feel good about himself. Perhaps he enjoyed the kudos he gained amongst his comrades. He quickly gained a reputation around the wharves, not only for his endurance and his militant attitude at union meetings, but mostly for antics that relieved the monotony of the toil.

Once he walked across a plank over an open hull, where a fall could have meant his death. Another occasion he stripped down to his underpants, dived between the wharf and ship and resurfaced on the starboard side. Anything risky. Anything for a wager. A little extra spondulicks for the punting. Anything to amuse his fellow wharfies. But he never wasted a cent drinking with them, which no doubt marked him as an oddball, an outsider. Almost all the money he earned on the wharves went on the nags.

As for his militancy (which, he claimed, earned him the title of ‘Denny the Red’), there were periods of industrial unrest on the wharves in Melbourne, which spread to other Victorian ports that might have motivated him. It would have been hard for someone of his temperament to back away from a stoush of any sort. And he was a socialist, one of the rough-and-ready kinds who never bothered with theory. My mother had the task of washing his filthy overalls and flannel shirts, which she boiled in the copper. She never complained. She was just glad he was working. She felt it gave him some dignity, although she wouldn’t have expressed it like that. “He’s like a bear with a sore head when he’s not working” was more her line. But whether or not his dignity was the issue, it meant he was less likely to pressure her into handing over her wages for his gambling. So there were less disputes and bitterness poisoning the domestic atmosphere.

One day he brought a pup home from a ship that had docked in port. He said the merchant seamen had asked him to find it a good home. But I suspect he had won it with one of his stunts.

The pup had the proud stance of a working dog. It had a fawn coat with white markings on the forehead and chest. Nobody warmed to my suggestion that we name it after the Phantom’s dog, ‘ Devil’. Denny said he already had exclusive rights to that name. Besides, it was the wrong colour. So we called it ‘Sailor’ on account of its former lifestyle, even though on inspection it proved to be a bitch. Denny said I could keep her as long as I promised to feed and train her. I happily took on the task and in no time at all she and I were the best of mates. I taught her to sit, stay, come and roll over. I took her for walks, down to the beach and along the breakwaters. In return she gave me licks. I would have liked to take her inside, especially in bad weather, but my mother banned her from the house. Denny made her a kennel.

At home he laboured outside with the garden, dressed in his khaki overalls, pulling weeds, preparing vegetable patches, trimming bushes that had been neglected for years. I was nervous about helping him but I tried, keeping my distance, but seeking his advice and approval for what I was doing and chatting about school, pretending he was a normal father.

He wasn’t. He didn’t seem to know how to do the father-son two-step, or waltz, or whatever it was we were attempting. When the handle on our old rake broke, he tried to show me how to fix it. My effort was slow and tentative. It drove him too distraction.

“Here, give it to me,” he muttered, snatching the pieces.

When I tried to talk to him about football, hoping for some fatherly encouragement, he criticised me for ever playing. Couldn’t I see I didn’t have the right build for it? “Look at those matchstick legs of yours. How will they hold up? You’ve got no meat, no muscle. You’ll just get yourself hurt. You’ll end up a bloody cripple.”

I summoned the courage to suggest we go fishing together, but I should have known he wouldn’t. He didn’t have the patience to sit on a pier for hours on end waiting for something that might or might not occur. He merely clucked in disgust, his head jerking slightly, and didn’t bother with a reply.

Still I put my own feelings aside to avoid jeopardising the ordinariness that seemed to be settling upon us.

To impress him, I tried to improve my hammering skills. I borrowed his hammer and a few nails and went away from the house where he wouldn’t notice. I picked the old pine tree behind Daisy’s shed. On my first stroke, I missed the nail and hit the living wood. The hammer bounced back and smashed into my teeth. Enamel slivers dropped out of my mouth.

“For cryin’ out loud, who’s going to pay for the bloody dentist?” he bellowed when he saw what I’d done.

One day, a few weeks after he had taken me to a dentist that he had talked into doing some charity work, I came home to find him chopping wood, which was stacked under a crude arc of corrugated iron against the wall at one end of the verandah. The day before, he had yelled at me while instructing me on his method of cutting kindling with a tomahawk; I hadn’t taken advantage of the wood grain, apparently. To show I harboured no resentment, even though I’d run away to spare him witnessing my emotions, I crept up behind him and for a bit of fun unwisely shouted “Boo!” like I’d done to my mother at The Pines, again with unanticipated consequences.

He turned blindly and launched the tomahawk at me.

Fortunately he hesitated enough, when he realised it was me, for the axe to sail past my head, or our destinies might have turned out differently, mine considerably shortened. It crashed into the bathroom outhouse and smashed one of its rotting weatherboards. He was furious again, berating me for several minutes, his eyes bulging like a madman, his hair wafting. Did I realise what I had almost turned him into? Did I know where he would have ended up? No mention of what nearly happened to me.

Perhaps having tasted prison life he had no stomach for another stint. I sat on the edge of the verandah weak with shock, unable to stifle a few sobs. Longing for his sympathy I gained his scorn. Was I a man or a bloody fairy? Bizarrely he warned me to expect the worst from men as I grew up.

“Don’t ever go to jail. They’ll make bloody mince meat out of you.”

It was an opportunity too good to miss to ask him how he knew. But I did miss it. I was too afraid of provoking his rage further.

When he calmed down a little he claimed credit for my survival. But as I moved off I thought I heard a mumbled apology.

The next day he took me into the yard to give me a boxing lesson.

“You’ll be a man before you know it, and you’ll need to know how to defend yourself,” he said with an earnest nod. “Put up your dukes.”

I raised my fists tentatively in front of me.

He grimaced. “Like this.” He grabbed my fists and forced them into position before my face, pushing my elbows closer to my body to protect my ribs.

“Okay, throw a punch. No, no! Not like that, for Chrissakes! You’ll be laid out cold before you can say ‘Les Darcy’.”

“Who?”

“Never mind.”

He pranced around in front of me, hunched over, his head down, behind his fists, his eyes fierce.

“Throw a left. Straight. From the shoulder. Hard. See if you can hit me. Come on. See if you can land one to the body.”

As I thrust, he twisted sideways a little so that my blow slid harmlessly off his biceps.

“You see, you see. Keep the elbows tight to the body and there’s no way through. That’s your defence. Eyes on your opponent’s. Then you swing like this.”

His fist passed before my eyes at such a speed it was like a blur, with a fierce discharge of air from his lungs that startled me.

I reacted belatedly.

He laughed quietly, as if to himself.

“I could’ve knocked your bloody head off. Keep your guard up. Don’t turn away like a snivelling girl. Come on try again.”

I sparred with him for a while, trying hard to learn what he was showing me. He seemed pleased. And I was overwhelmed with gratitude. He was trying to teach me something; to help me towards manhood.

“Okay, that’s enough for today,” he said. “We’ll do some more tomorrow.”

But tomorrow was a Saturday, a race day, and my next lesson was forgotten. When I asked him about it, he was studying his form guide.

He dismissed me with an impatient gesture.

“Later,” he muttered.

It never happened and I wasn’t game to ask again in case it made him angry.

Even though I could see he was making a genuine effort to be a part of the family, it was hard to relax around him because of his volatile moods. I never knew whether he was going to be cheerful or morose. I never knew how to respond. Either way I felt like I was a drag on him; a drag on his cheerfulness, which brought him down, or a burden when he was gloomy. More often than not I felt responsible for his state of mind. I felt that he considered me a burden, one of the causes of his woes. That’s how I remember it, at least. But maybe I’m forgetting things…maybe more pleasant matters are less impressionable upon a young boy’s mind, less memorable…or maybe I’m wilfully forgetting happier times…

We did do other things together.

Once he took me to the races.

I can’t recall whether it was around this time, to a regional turf meeting near Portland—say, Warrnambool or Casterton—or much earlier, when we were still in Brisbane. But I remember him in an amenable mood, which I always found unsettling. I followed him around shyly, into the betting ring, over to the starting parade to view the majestic thoroughbreds, down onto the fence during the races to watch them thunder by. I think he wanted to impress me with the power of the horses and the excitement of the occasion so that I gained some appreciation for his obsession. He even asked me to choose a horse and placed a bet for me. Luckily, it ran last. I avoided out-performing him, just, which would have been disastrous. By the end of the day his mood had turned. Before the last race, we departed, and he never took me again, at least, not until I was almost twenty, and then it was to the harness races in Melbourne.

There was another occasion on a searing day. It must have been when we were still living at Percy Street, when I was about nine or ten. I remember he came to the beach with me. I already knew of his aquatic feats from my mother but he was keen to demonstrate them. There was an area between two timber piers that was popular with locals: the ocean pier, where cargo ships docked, and the fishermen’s pier, where recreational fishermen moored their boats, which had a catwalk lower to the water. A number of pontoons, made from heavy timber and 44-gallon drums, were connected to the catwalk. They bobbed upon the sea fifty metres from shore. The sea baths on the other side of the ocean pier were all but abandoned due to neglect. In summer the area was crowded with swimmers. While adults usually attempted a dignified immersion, kids dived or jumped squealing and shouting from the pontoons or catwalk. For me, the noise was so pervasive and persistent it became synonymous with summer. A summer without joyful cacophony was hardly a summer at all.

Normally I stuck to the shallows, lacking the confidence to venture out of my depth. But on the day Denny came with me he insisted we go onto the pontoons.

“Come on, Butch,” he urged. “I’ll show you a thing or two about swimming. You didn’t know your old man could swim, did you?”

“Yeah, I did.”

He turned to look at me, surprised. He was on the first pontoon, which was bobbing up and down. I was still on the catwalk.

“Mum told us.”

A grin slowly spread across his sweaty face. “She did, did she?” He seemed inordinately pleased with the news. “She knows.” His head nodded slowly as he took in the aquatic scene.

“Come on,” he said and strode forward.

I lowered myself onto the pontoon.

I crept along and gingerly jumped from one to the next as they rocked about on the water, following Denny, who looked handsome and muscular, although his back was hairy and his legs were skinny like mine. I sat on the edge, my feet dangling in the deep water, as he dived in. I waited for him to resurface, anxious about being left alone. There were older boys running along the pontoons, leaping across the narrow gap between each, shouting and challenging one another in arm-to-arm combat, which ended when one or both fell into the sea, yelling. Their unruliness intimidated me. With little confidence in my swimming, I felt vulnerable and panicky. I was unable to move, to retreat to the catwalk, the pier, to terra firma. I scanned the water for Denny without success, my hands gripping the solid planks of the pontoon, abandoned in a new way. Eventually I saw him waving in the distance, beaming like a signal buoy.

Even if I’d had the nerve to release my grip I wouldn’t have reciprocated. I suspected he was taunting me. I willed him to come back. I saw him submerge and some minutes later he resurfaced at my feet. He chortled as he levered himself onto the pontoon with his powerful arms, splashing water around, droplets forming on the hairs of his chest and bushy eyebrows.

“Did you see how far your old man can swim under water, eh?” He was beaming again. He looked around and then at me, drilling his wild eyes into my fear.

As he settled onto the planks next to me, some teenage boys raced past and shoved me into the sea. I looked up as I sank into the depths, alarmed that he hadn’t plunged in to rescue me. I could just see the soles of his feet beneath the surface, signalling his indifference. I had no ladder to climb as my sister had in a Brisbane pool years before. Horror filled my lungs. I flayed my arms in panic and somehow managed to ascend.

When I broke the surface I screamed for help.

He stared at me incredulously.

“Swim! It’s only a couple of yards, for Chrissakes!”

I pleaded for help. I was scared. It was too deep.

Suddenly he was in the water next to me. He grabbed me roughly and somehow tossed me onto the pontoon. I cracked my knee on its hard edge but suppressed a cry, petrified by his fury. He lifted himself out of the water again, with half the sea coming with him like a fluid cape. He didn’t sit next to me again but stood, muttered a prediction about my future manhood, and walked away.

AN END TO WORK

In the first year we lived at Daisy’s place, Pat’s attitude gradually improved. She managed to transform the place into a home, making cheerful curtains for the kitchen and putting cut flowers in vases. She was still taking Bex each day for headaches, but looked less worn out. She sang more as she worked around the house. With fewer concerns about Denny, she showed more interest in our lives, especially about what we did at school. She had always encouraged us to take our education seriously, seeing it as the only realistic way out of poverty, if not for her, at least for us, her children. And for us kids it seemed a sensible distraction. Schoolwork took our minds off our father.

Still, despite some semblance of normality in our lives—my father getting casual work now and then, my mother still working at Borthwicks, our schooling going okay—weekends were usually difficult.

On Saturdays Denny set himself up in the living room. Our lounge suite consisted of some steel-framed armchairs with varnished timber armrests and vinyl-covered foam cushions. He had claimed one as his own. Next to it he put a paper rack for his collection of turf guides from a bi-weekly scandal rag The Truth, a daily tabloid The Sun, and a weekly publication dedicated to the turf optimistically titled Best Bets.

The paper stand doubled as a small coffee table. It had a laminated top where he placed, in a set array, his mug of strong instant International Roast coffee, his Albany Trims—a doctor having advised him to take up smoking for his nerves and these being the cheapest smokes he could buy—a glass ashtray and a portable transistor radio. Saturday morning he listened to turf experts and marked the latest scratchings on his guide. He concentrated on the commentators’ remarks as if they were clairvoyants. He gambled all afternoon, jogging a block to and from the TAB, where he placed his bets between races, radio in hand, form guide grasped under his armpit, his loose change jangling in a pocket. He eventually cut a tiny gate in the tennis court fence to shorten the trip, without the permission of the church, whose curator tried unsuccessfully several times to board it up to prevent him appearing in the middle of weekend tournaments. There was a bench against the fence where spectators sat. On occasion they found the fence behind opening up and my father squeezing past them. If he still had money left in the evening he tuned in to the trots.

Saturday was a time when the rest of us tip-toed round the house. If possible we avoided the lounge room.

“Stay out of his way,” Pat advised in a hushed voice. “Don’t upset him. You know how easy it is to upset him.”

If we happened to make a noise he complained or cursed us, making out we were inconsiderate and disrespectful. If either my mother, trying to do some housework, or Jean with her uncompromising personality, interrupted his concentration on the delicate task of picking a winner his irritation could turn to rage.

If Denny was on a losing streak, which was the norm, even silence could irritate him and seem like a taunt. Gloom hovered over his hunched shoulders like a fiendish aura. It sucked in all our energy and left us exhausted by day’s end.

Usually, then, most if not all his wages were gone and we were to blame. Either our noise or lack of it, our silence, was responsible for his bad luck.

“I feel so tired,” my mother would complain on a Saturday night. “I don’t know why. I haven’t done much.”

She would take another Bex.

I found refuge in the hedge around the tennis court. I discovered hiding places and resumed my superhero fantasies. The Phantom, by now, was well and truly Number One. The ghost who walks. I felt like that. I felt like a crusader against all evil who bore the burden of possible martyrdom. I stepped into the Phantom’s skin and longed for a horse called Hero. My dog Sailor would have to do as Devil, although she resisted my attempts to get her to accompany me into the lofty sections of the hedge. I sent away for imitation gold skull rings with different coloured luminous eyes and a rubber version that I could press into an ink pad to leave the Phantom’s sign all around the neighbourhood, to strike fear into the hearts of all evil-doers. I bought a cut-out cardboard face, black-masked and purple-hooded, attached a length of hat elastic, and poked holes where its eyes would be. I wore it while secretly pursuing my nemesis, The Evil One, from the safety of the hedge as he took a short-cut across the tennis courts on his way to another foray into crime. I hovered over him as he passed through an archway in the hedge, planning the best way to ambush him so he could be brought to justice. I got plenty of chances. He was backwards and forwards all day, his face shining unnaturally with optimism in the morning and becoming grimmer as the day wore on. I imagined a fight to the death. Once, as it was getting dark, I dropped onto Jean and some of her girlfriends as they passed underneath, as a kind of dress rehearsal. It scared the life out of them, and for that Pat scolded me. I spent long hours poring over maps of Africa in my school atlas, devising a strategy to remove The Evil One from the tennis court to Bengali, the Phantom’s homeland, which I assumed was near the Congo.

Sometimes I just lay in a kind of nest I had made myself and watched the sky, idly projecting meaning onto the random shapes of clouds. I loved the sour resin the hedge exuded, which stuck to my skin and clothes. Occasionally I would put my hand inside my shorts and rub away. The sensation took my mind off family matters.

Around the house I kept out of Denny’s way. I avoided leaving the Phantom’s mark inside, unless it was on a wall beneath a bed where he was unlikely to detect it. I knew how easy it was to infuriate him. His moods were unpredictable and frightening, whichever way they swung. Often they were so violent he would grab the nearest sharp object to wield like a samurai warrior. Kitchen knife. Screwdriver. Hammer. Axe. Even the biro if we happened to interrupt his perusal of a turf form guide.

Whenever that happened I went to jelly. I disappeared into my room or into the hedge, leaving the others to their fate and me to brood over my cowardice, which had a physical manifestation, an invisible barrier that was as cold and unyielding as a prison wall.

On rare occasions when he had a big win, when one of his hundred-to-one chances got home by a nostril, he reached a jubilant crescendo that threatened to burst into madness where anything could happen. Bear hugs. Shouts of hallelujah. Dancing in the laneway. Chinese take-away. His whole appearance was transformed. The glare went out of his eyes, replaced with an impish sparkle, like the look of an urchin who had just found a shilling dropped in the street. His smile, purloined it seemed from someone more accustomed to merriment, was enough to unnerve me. His false teeth gleamed. His shoulders drooped, as if he had been released from an obligation to stand to attention all day. He looked years younger. He wanted us to join in his celebration, the joy he felt. He almost begged us to love him for his achievement, his long-awaited success.

When he tried to dance with Pat, she fended him off. “Don’t Denny. I’m busy. I’ve got to cook.”

“Come on, darl, my luck’s turning! Can’t you see? Put the spuds away. Tonight we’ll get takeaways!”

It didn’t matter which way the pendulum swung I ducked for cover. I couldn’t stand these extremes. There was no in the middle. No normalcy. No neutral mood. No chance to relax with him. Whenever he was around I was uptight and anxious. I awaited the next argument. It was usually over money.

Pat had learnt to be thrifty. Leftovers never went mouldy in the fridge but became another meal. No slice of stale bread was wasted. It was turned into a pudding of sorts. Bed sheets that were worn out in the middle were cut in two and re-sown so the less-worn edges became the middle, and so extended their use. Socks were darned. Patches were put on the torn knees of my school trousers. Still, she had to struggle with the household budget: the weekly groceries, the bills, and, with us kids growing unstoppably, clothes and shoes. And at birthdays and Christmases, money was needed for presents.

While we never went without a meal, or a present for that matter, it came at a personal cost. Pat had to hide the wages she earned and face abuse from Denny. Sometimes when she refused to hand money over he crossed the line from verbal threats to physical abuse, leaving her bruised and cringing.

She would plead with him to stop, as if gentle words might bring him to his senses.

“I can’t Denny, I’ve got to feed the kids,” she’d say, nursing a swollen jaw. “If I had any spare I’d give it to you.”

It was usually enough to deter him.

As far as I know his own monetary contributions were meagre and sporadic, often given one day and retrieved the next. Even our presents were fair game to him.

One Christmas to my delight I received a wristwatch. It had luminous hands and a tiny window that displayed the date, which changed automatically each day. It changed seven times before disappearing from the dressing table where I left it each night before I went to bed.

Fearing burglars had stolen it I informed my mother.

“Denny’s taken it, love, to hock.” She sighed and gave one of my arms a consolatory squeeze. “Jean’s too.”

“What’s ‘hock’?”

Again she sighed. She puckered her lips. Her embarrassment was acute. “It’s a way of borrowing money, from what they call a pawnbroker. Ever heard of them?”

I nodded.

“You swap something of yours for a loan,” she went on. “If you don’t pay it back with interest, this pawnbroker fellow sells your stuff.”

It sounded desperate and shameful.

“Please, love, don’t bother him about it,” she pleaded. “If he doesn’t get it back, I’ll buy you another one as soon as I can.”

An opportunity arose to earn a little extra. Pat heard that Borthwicks hired people to tie strings to labels, for which they would be paid piece rates. The exact amount eludes me but I remember it being a pittance, perhaps a shilling for every hundred. Nevertheless, Pat began to bring home boxes and in the evening the entire family sat in the lounge room under a stark light bulb, threading strings through the eyelets on the labels while listening to the radio. Even Denny participated, yielding to the logic of the cash flow.

Perhaps the experience depressed him. Or it was the current affairs programs on the radio that used to make him mutter and curse, from which I gathered he blamed the government for all his woes. Each night he took medication to help him sleep. Yet in the morning he looked gaunt and tired, as if he had spent the night awake. Throughout the day he scowled and muttered away at no one in particular and the world in general.

His mood was always better when he was working. But work on the wharves was intermittent. When he tried other jobs, they never lasted more than a few days. And even in work he had no luck.

One job was on a construction site in the port. SAFCOL was building a fish factory near an obsolete breakwater, which had been converted into a dock for the trawling fleet. When he told us about this job it struck us all as a great opportunity. He was back in his old trade as a builder. We held our breath, hoping he would last. But he was only there a few days when he blacked out and fell ten feet from a scaffold to the ground. Miraculously, he landed upright.

I learned later that the impact crushed a couple of discs in his lower spine. His ability to work had always depended on his physical well-being. He had been a carpenter, a soldier, a labourer, a wharfie, where brawn was required. He wasn’t vain, but he was proud of his strength. It was the one genuine thing about him. He must have been devastated. The accident meant an end to his working life. He wasn’t yet forty.

THE ‘ITINERANT PSYCHOPATH’

I don’t remember it happening.

It dismays me now to think I have forgotten. What had I become by the age of eleven that I would pay such little heed to his catastrophe? Was I starting to live in a kind of denial?

In recent years, when I had access to his files, I discovered more.

His local doctor wrote that Denny had ‘aggravated a probably already existing lumbosacral disc degeneration’.

He developed severe headaches and saw black spots in front of his eyes and again had feelings of unreality. Curiously he kept working for about a week but then had an argument with his boss and quit. Eventually he received some compensation through the courts but most if not all of it went to pay off his debts. Denny later told me the ‘blood-sucking’ lawyer took most of it.

Six weeks after his accident he was back at the Repatriation Hospital in Heidelberg, with ‘terrific headaches’, apparently from his medication, and complaining about being ‘allergic’ to noise, to his boss and to work. He repeatedly asked the medical officer questions like: Why can’t I stand work? Why do I dislike people? Why do I get feelings of unreality? Why do I drop my fork at the table?

He was back there a month later, on the 19th of February, 1963, and his medical officer noted that Denny was very pleased with himself, was working whenever he could find a job, and was off all medication. He told the medical officer that Pat was delighted with him, and he was no longer allergic to noise. But he felt drowsy all day.

In early March he reported that he’d had a few drinks and once more caused problems at home and told his boss ‘what to do with his job’. Two weeks later he was in the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital for an extended period. He told his medical officer on the 14th of March that Pat had kicked him out and called him useless, ‘with which he in part agreed’. (Did he go to the hospital because he had nowhere else to stay?) He added that his wife and children detested him. “ I’m no use to them and they’re right. I haven’t been for years.” He also revealed that he wasn’t having sex with Pat. Once he had admitted their sexual relations had deteriorated, he must have feared his sexuality might be questioned, because he ‘spontaneously stated he was not a homosexual, never played with little boys, [but had] “seen it” in the army’.

During his stay he undertook occupational therapy. His clinical report states that on initial contact he appeared depressed and sullen , and wasn’t relating with staff or patients, but within a week he had become co-operative and over-anxious to please. He participated in all the department’s activities. Three weeks after he first attended the sessions he was still co-operative and helpful. He liked to offer others advice. His therapist remarked he had ‘a marked influence on other patients’. But by early the following month his attitude was beginning to change. He was affecting the group dynamics, becoming intolerant towards the other patients and irritable when he was unable to enact his own plans for the day.

By the 23rd of May there is a note from his medical officer: I am afraid he is an itinerant psychopath, manifesting his oral needs in an aggressive & immature fashion. He is rapidly reaching a stage where he seems to have a grudge on society—refuses assistance in a practical way & looks for the easy way out.

What is meant by ‘itinerant psychopath’ and ‘oral needs’? I am unsure. But the hostile tone is unmistakable. On the same day, Denny signed a release form stating he was being discharged at his own request against medical advice.

Bizarrely, amongst the documents for this period of hospitalisation there appears an employment reference from a building contractor from Warrandyte, a town on the outskirts of Melbourne, claiming to have known my father for three years. He said he had employed him for approximately six months on a large building project, and added: [Denny] was a very good worker and willing to do anything he was asked, cheerfully. His habits were very good and if he did any drinking it was during the weekend in moderation.

There is no explanation for its appearance in his medical records, and I can only guess that Denny presented it as evidence of his sobriety and work ethic, which throughout his relationship with the Repatriation Department was under question from the professionals he dealt with. The authenticity of the reference I’m unable to establish. The signatory, Ian W. McKellar, and my father’s relationship to him, remains a mystery to me. How had the building contractor known Denny for three years? When had he employed him? Was he really a building contractor? Yet the reference might be genuine. During the years we lived at Daisy’s place, my father was away from home for lengthy periods without me knowing where he was. If my mother knew, she never enlightened me.

I discovered from his medical files that around this time attempts were made by the Repatriation Department to shift all of us to Melbourne. There was a job lined up for Denny in the suburb of Burwood. Was it with McKellar? There was mention of buying a house in Croydon, which required a deposit of £400. But at the last minute Denny turned it all down.

It appears that the Department acknowledged that his back injury was partially due to his military service. This note was in his file by September: I am pleased to advise that the Repatriation Board has decided that incapacity resulting from Disc Degeneration Lumbo-Sacral joint is due to your war service. This decision operates from 30/5/63.

There is no line of reasoning given for this decision, so I can only assume that it ran something like this: his blackouts were due to what happened to him in Japan, perhaps his fall down the flight of stairs or the hit on the head with a plank. He blacked out on the scaffold at SAFCOL where he was working and damaged his spine. So, what happened in Japan led to his spinal injury.

Denny must have thought the pension he had been hustling so long for was in the next mail.

One day, when he was out of hospital and at home, I was returning from school with the son of the Methodist minister at the church next to our place. My dog Sailor came out to greet me coming up the lane. My awkward companion went to pat her but grabbed her by the throat. She responded in kind, leaving teeth marks around his Adam’s apple.

Denny insisted Sailor had to go before she killed someone. It took a day for him to hatch a plan. By Sunday morning she was no longer with us. He told me he had taken her to a farm overnight where she would be out of everyone’s way.

I didn’t believe him but said nothing. I was devastated. Sailor and I had become inseparable. She was my only real companion.

I hid in the hedge and wept. I should have gone to church, but as the tears ebbed I decided against it. Instead I walked down to the port and found a spot on the old breakwater, amongst the broken concrete blocks, to mope. I stayed there most of the day, crying over my dog. She had been a wonderful friend. And now I would never see her again. Eventually I got hungry and headed home.

When I arrived, there was nobody around. The house was quiet. Pat had scribbled a note and left it on the kitchen table. Denny had swallowed a lot of sleeping tablets and she had taken him up to the hospital. I was to help myself to lunch. There were cans of spaghetti and baked beans in the cupboard, and bread in the crock. She would be home before tea. I was not to worry. Everything would be all right.

I had no idea where my sisters were.

When my mother arrived home with my sisters it was obvious she had been crying. Her makeup, which she must have put on in a hurry, was messy. He lips were dry.

“Your dad’ll be all right,” she said. “Where have you been? We were all worried sick.”

My sisters glared at me.

Within days a rumour reached me—from the vicar via Paul— that my father had killed Sailor. According to Paul, the Reverend Walters claimed that Denny had put sleeping tablets in the dog food as an experiment. He had buried her in the early hours of the morning and spun me a story so I wouldn’t be too upset.

An experiment? For his own suicide attempt? And how did the vicar know all this? (Nowadays, more familiar with the workings of the adult mind, I imagine the vicar had merely made a rather cynical guess.)

I was reluctant to believe it. Instead, I took offence. I thought I detected a derogatory tone as Paul delivered his father’s accusation. I felt betrayed by the vicar and his son. Later I interpreted the whole unfortunate affair as another blow to my friendship with Paul, who, anyway, was now in high school a year more than me and had established a new circle of friends. It signalled the end of my close association with his family, if not the rest of Christianity.

Before I heard the rumour, my mother wanted to take me to visit my father.

“Why?” I was nervous about seeing him after an overdose. I thought he was mad.

“I think he’d like to see you.”

He was in a padded cell in the small psychiatric ward, wearing a straight jacket, which looked like a heavy-duty shirt worn back to front. I was shocked to see him bound like that, his arms and hands concealed inside canvas sleeves, which were tied, left to right, around his waist. It seemed like an adaptation of some medieval punishment. He grinned at me and said something about how ridiculous and unnecessary his situation was.

Going home, my mother said. “He’ll be all right in a day or two. They should just leave him alone, let him calm down. Fancy putting him in one of those things, as if he was a lunatic.”

The following day he was taken by ambulance to his mysterious hospital in Melbourne.

His records show that on the 15th of September, 1963, he was admitted to the Portland Hospital after an overdose of barbiturates and was treated with a gastric lavage and recovered consciousness within eight hours. He was discharged the following morning, but readmitted a few hours later after another overdose. I knew nothing of this. He must have arrived home while I was at school. He was treated again and transferred to the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital.

His Portland GP, Dr Beavis, revealed the circumstances in a letter accompanying Denny to the hospital:

Thank you for taking this man. Yesterday he is said to have poisoned his pet dog with Amytal 100mg tabs, then arrived up here (of his own free will) & gradually lost consciousness. He must have taken 15-20 of the amytal tabs.

He was washed out and recovered in about 8 hours. Th is morning he lashed out at the matron, who admits however that she may have provoked him.

This morning we were going to give him some traction for the lumbo vascal disc lesion (genuine enough) but unfortunately cancelled it, as I wascalled to the labour ward, and this made the patient more unmanageable. He went home in a taxi and immediately consumed a fair no. of Sparine tabs (100mg). He was brought here about 1 hr after & and I washed him out again…During this he struggled violently.

At the moment he is semi-conscious…

He has a wonderful wife who is very faithful & apparently some very good kids.

This final comment seems rather gratuitous, given the letter was directed to medical staff in Melbourne. Perhaps it was a wistful appeal, a wish and a prayer for the experts to do something, on the strength of a foreboding. If so, Dr Beavis was rather prescient. He was to feel the wrath of Denny soon enough.

The medical superintendent at Heidelberg wanted to place my father at the Repatriation Department’s Bundoora Mental Hospital, which housed those ex-servicemen classified insane: We feel [Sparkes] now requires longer term hospitalisation for his own protection.

He was certified to Bundoora.

Before being transferred, he absconded.

THE ‘INADEQUATE PSYCHOPATH’

We again got on with our lives without Denny.

Pat continued her job at Borthwicks, where she packed cuts of meat for export on a cold production line. In the evening we still strung labels, although with my father gone the financial imperative had eased somewhat. On Sunday nights in the lounge room, Pat tuned into a radio program featuring old-time dance music and tried to teach me the Waltz, the Pride of Erin and the Fox Trot.

“It’s one, two, three, kick, back, two, three,” she’d say. “Again. Yeah, you’ve almost got it. Don’t give up yet.”

She enjoyed our sessions together. It reminded her of a time when she was young and her father used to take her to Saturday night dances in small public halls around Gippsland.

“He was an MC, a good MC, too. People loved him. He was the band leader as well. He used to play his button accordion. You should’ve heard him. All them old time tunes. Your Auntie Barb and I used to dance along with all these old blokes, even though we were just girls.”

I tried to imagine her at dances—then and later when Denny was courting her—but it was easier to imagine her walking on the moon. Her life, for as long as I had witnessed it, was unfairly devoid of leisure. Now and then she got the chance to listen to the football or a cricket match on the radio, or she came to watch me play sport. But most of her time was taken up with work and looking after us. Taking on the task of teaching me to dance must have been a bittersweet experience, reminding her of a life she had once led that had passed her by and was now beyond her reach. These days she had only a gauche son to partner her.

It was an occasion when I was aware of her as a person or, more to the point, having once been a person rather than a drudge and mother. Her youthful beauty had faded. The heavy physical work she did, the long hours she worked and all her worries had seen to that. She was well over thirty. The makeup she wore now seemed to be hiding, rather than highlighting, her features.

There was pathos in her attempts to teach me how to dance, of which I was aware but never quite understood at the time, just as when I heard her singing to herself once in a while, pathos that alluded to loss and abandonment.

These dance lessons, alas, turned out to be a waste of time. Despite her best efforts she couldn’t overcome what she called my two left feet.

“You better stick to footy,” she said with a chuckle. “You’ll be a champion at that one day.”

“Do you think so?” I replied hopefully.

“Sure do! Then nobody’ll give two hoots whether you can do the Charlston or a tango or the flippin’ ballet. Footy’s the thing.”

For my twelfth birthday I received my first bicycle, which my mother had bought secretly on lay-by from the bicycle repair shop. She knew I had wanted one since learning to ride on my cousin’s bike in South Portland. But how she had managed to afford it I had no idea.

“It’s second-hand,” she apologised.

“It’s great!” I said to let her know it didn’t bother me at all. I knew we couldn’t afford a new one. “Th at doesn’t matter. It looks brand new.”

She grinned. “Good boy,” she said, gratefully, giving my head a pat. I was beginning to understand what a good person she was. With all the drama in her life the easiest thing in the world for her would have been to give up on decency, to neglect her kids, to hit the bottle, to smoke, to indulge in some way or other for any cheap gratification on offer. But she never abandoned the duty of looking after her children. She remained true to what she considered right and wrong. Whereas right and wrong rarely appeared on my father’s radar, and when it did he took little notice of it.

The bike had a blue paint job, straight handlebars, hand brakes front and rear, and a free wheel. I spent weeks riding it all over town, down to the port, along the breakwaters, round and round the hard tennis courts next door, where I tested its turning circle until the tyres lost traction and I spilled onto the asphalt. But it was the country lanes I loved the most. Along these I felt like a bird. I pedalled with a fury until my lungs screamed. Freedom! I thought I’d burst with it! That bike was the best present I ever received.

My father reappeared shortly after and I was afraid my new gift would soon disappear. I kept it chained up at home, hoping to discourage him. And to his credit he never attempted to hock it. Perhaps my mother warned him it would be the last straw for their marriage if he did.

Regrettably, I finished primary school, where I was beginning to feel I belonged. Throughout the summer break I played alone. Against the sandstone wall of the church hall I hit a tennis ball, honing my skills. I climbed around the cypress hedges. I rode my bike a lot.

Around this time at last something positive happened to my mother. She befriended one of her fellow meat packers, Connie Yallock, who lived half a mile from us and owned a television. We started to visit a few times a week—Pat for the companionship, my sisters and I to watch TV. She, too, tied strings to labels to supplement her income. So we sat around watching shows like Pick-a-Box and Bonanza with cartons of labels at our feet. Connie was the first friend I ever knew my mother to have. Judging by their perms and rinses they were a similar age. She had four kids but no real husband. The man she had married, the father of her children, lived in another town with another woman. She endured the shame of it with dignity. There was always a gracious aura about her. She was very fond of Pat and was kind to me and my sisters. She never spoke a bad word about anyone, least of all her husband, who turned up now and then to claim his conjugal rights. I became friends with one of her sons, Gary, who was my age, being drawn together by the shameful burden of maverick fathers. He taught me how to shoot an air rifle, aiming at cans on top of fence posts and the occasional sparrow that strayed into range. In return I showed him my hideouts in the hedge around the tennis court.

Connie enjoyed a beer and was addicted to cigarettes, but both were private concerns rather than the focus of her social life. She impressed me with her quiet manner and her considered responses to questions regardless of how trivial they were. Perhaps I was too young to judge but she became my idea of a wise person. I was even more impressed when she treated my father with respect for no other reason than he was the husband of a friend, unlike my relatives in South Portland who used to criticise him mercilessly whenever the chance arose and pitied my mother for having married him.

To repay her kindness Denny did various favours, which included a regular supply of sleeping pills and other medications for colds and sprains and lumbago, which he acquired, gratis, on prescription. He did repairs around her house. Occasionally he ran errands. And once he gave her several cartons of the cigarettes, saying they had fallen off the back of a truck.

For a while we settled into a routine of visiting Connie three times a week. My father enjoyed these sessions as much as Pat did. It was a time when our lives were free of histrionics. Connie seemed to have a calming effect on Denny. He was always on his best behaviour. There was an aura of tranquillity about him. I began to think the storms had passed for good.

Then in January 1964, four months after his first attempt and just before I started high school, he took another overdose of pills.

It didn’t kill him. He woke up in the late morning and staggered around town in his pyjamas. I remember my mother telling me he had been picked up by the police, sleepwalking, but whether it was this occasion or some other I can’t be sure. I had assumed sleepwalking occurred in the middle of the night. Police accosted him at the football ground, which was a block from our house. He struggled with them. Dr Beavis was called to the scene, and while he attempted to calm his patient, perhaps with a tranquilizer, Denny punched him in the face. He dismantled a seat and threatened the police with an iron bar from its frame. More police were called. Eventually he was overwhelmed, put in a straightjacket again, and taken on a three-hour journey by ambulance to the Ballarat Psychiatric Hospital, whose admission sheet puts his diagnosis rather blandly as ‘an anti-social reaction’. It also states: He went berserk being brought into hospital. The ambulance driver told staff that the police had found him wandering around the football ground drinking methylated spirits.

During the first day there he refused to communicate. Pat must have gone to see him shortly after, because the record states he accepted tea from her the following day when he was still groggy. He had bruising on his face and body, and pains in his chest, attributed to his struggle with the police. His corneal ulcer was bothering him. When he began to speak he said he had no memory of the drama on the previous day but denied ever drinking methylated spirits. Pat supported his claim, saying that he never drank any form of alcohol, that he had an aversion to it. He told the medical officer that he had been a ‘bludger’ since his accident at work. He kept hearing voices from outside his head ‘above to the left’ telling him he was no good. The doctors who treated him over the next couple of weeks made several references to the voices he could hear that told him he was worthless.

One medical officer commented that Denny was depressed because he was in a position where he had to do housework while his wife went out to work. [He] resents this very much but cannot do anything about it because of chronic back disability. The doctor noted that more than anything the patient wanted to work but two things conspired against him: his back injury and his police record. He didn’t see any point in continuing to live. A week after admission a doctor noted that he seemed more settled mentally but required a few more days of further observation. The diagnosis shifted from ‘paranoid schizophrenic’ to ‘more sociopathic than schizophrenic’.

Pat was interviewed. She was ‘ concerned and defensive about her husband—she loves him’. She admitted that Denny had a ‘bad temper, but he is alright if no one interferes. He gets over it’. She didn’t understand why the police had ‘stirred him up’. She insisted that Denny didn’t drink but had taken too many sleeping tablets because his inability to work ‘was getting him down’.

Throughout his hospitalisation my father denied any knowledge of the events that had led to his admission. At one point he stated that he was upset to learn he had hit Dr Beavis, although the medical officer noted that he didn’t seem terribly disturbed about it, and cited the absence of empathy as evidence of sociopathic tendencies.

The final note to appear on his diagnostic sheet suggested Denny had had a ‘dissociative aggressive outburst’ and recommended he stop using sleeping tablets and receive early treatment on his back.

The notes of the nursing staff for the same period offer further insight into his state of mind. The day after he was admitted he was fairly sociable and co-operative. The next day he was again co-operative and grateful for all that was being done for him. He was very sore and stiff and ate little food. Over the next week he attended art classes, spent most of his days in the recreation room, was rational, cheerful and willing to help with ward work. He sometimes helped with the washing up at meal times, and at one stage he cleaned the windows of the recreation room. But once when he was having trouble breathing and demanded to see a doctor, he became abusive when he was told he might have to wait. The day after Pat visited him for a second time, a week after his admission, the nurse noted, ‘patient appears to be much improved’. He was discharged the following day.

Within a month he seems to have gone back to the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital. The medical reports written during February 1964 strike me as being rather hostile towards him. The Senior Specialist, Psychiatry, wrote on the 13th: He is shallow, very immature, impulsive, hysteroid, aggressive and an inadequate psychopath. But I have checked on the internet and it appears these are all part of the psychiatric lexicon. An ‘inadequate psychopath’ isn’t someone who never reaches their full personality-disorder potential but someone who is psychopathic about their inadequacies. The suggestion is that they are distinct from the aggressive psychopath, more passive. But it appears that my father qualified as both.

On the 23rd a Repatriation Treatment Report states: Th is patient (despite all efforts made in the past) has continued to frustrate all attempts to place him in employment. He has worn out his welcome with local employment services in the Portland district. Because of his attitude I consider that he is unemployable. It was his attitude and not any genuine back injury, according to the report which made him unemployable. In the records over the subsequent years many statements appear with varying degrees of subtlety that imply Denny was a malingerer.

It was going to be a bad year for him.

HEDGING THEIR BETS

I started high school in 1964, made friends with a few boys from my class, and together on weekends we went fishing and exploring around the port, flew kites, rode a hand trolley half a mile over the sea on the Ocean Pier, pumping its handle like frenzied navies, and we threw old 75rpm records like flying saucers from the cliff tops into the sea. None of us talked much about our families, which suited me fine. If any of them knew about my father they mercifully kept it to themselves.

Halfway through the year, Denny went to St. John of God Hospital in Ballarat, this time, I think, to get some outcome for his back injury. Mindful of his patient’s psychiatric history, the doctor requested a Collins Street specialist, Mr N.R. Langford, provide an opinion on the psychological repercussions of surgery.

I found evidence of his schizoid personality. I could only get very spasmodic assistance from him when I asked him to carry out certain tests, but there is evidence of some central nervous system damage. He has a very marked rapid tremor of his right arm when it is outstretched with his eyes shut. There is a slight tremor of the left arm. He was quite unable, I believe, to put his finger to his nose when his eyes were closed although I instructed him to do this many times, which only resulted with an increased trembling on his part. Th is may be a purely hysterical reaction, but I felt that it was certainly a genuine one.

I think it was the sort of finding one has where there is organic damage to the frontal areas of the brain and someone who has had a schizoid personality and has had E.C.T. would be quite a likely person to develop such a mental block…

I felt that the man had such a bad psychiatric record that to interfere surgically would be something to be avoided at all costs. He seemed quite agreeable to deferring any question of surgery for the time being at least and I have sensed this from the patient himself and from Dr Beavis. He is seeking a full pension from the Army because of his trouble and I think that he is likely to get this. Maybe the back problem will settle down once this is sorted out.

Again, despite acknowledgement of some evidence of brain damage, possibly caused by electric shock therapy, this report ends on a cynical note with the implication that Denny’s injury wasn’t genuine. There is no mention of his fall down eighty or ninety steps in Kure as a possible cause.

On the 23rd of June the law firm Nicol, Silvester & Culhane wrote to the Repatriation Department: Mr Sparkes instructs us that, as a result of War injuries he suffers forms of blackouts, and that, on 3rd October, 1962, or thereabouts, as a result of a blackout, he fell from a scaffolding in the course of his employment as a result of which he suffered injury to his back.

The Department however refused to take responsibility. This was despite a note to Denny more than a year earlier that the Repatriation Board had decided the deterioration in his spine was due to his military service.

Were these professionals, unsure of a diagnosis, just hedging their bets, unwilling to put their reputations on the line with any categorical diagnosis? Is this why so many of the reports I’ve read about my father repeat the exact words in the original diagnosis, made in Japan in 1946 of ‘psychopathic personality & emotional instability’, so that at least if a different diagnosis eventuated, their authors were in the company of peers, a dent in one reputation a dent in all? Much safer. Reading these reports I began to doubt the quality of my father’s treatment.

As I worked my way through his records, I came to the conclusion that the people who were employed to deal with his illnesses allowed his aggression to impair their judgment. And I found I was not alone. In August 1964, Dr Stevenson, whose opinion was solicited regarding a review of my father’s pension, stated:

He has obviously the ability to cause an almost immediate aggressive reaction in others—notably the police and his medical attendants, and it would seem that some of his problems in the past may have resulted from a non-medical decision by his M.O.s [Medical Officers].

There appears little doubt that he is an immature, unstable personality who is psychopathic; although he could not be classed as a true psychopath.

There is ample evidence that this had nothing to do with his very meagre and unsatisfactory war service. His service record alone gives an indication of constitutional difficulty.

I do not think it is reasonable that his “psychopathic personality and emotional instability” should have been accepted, but as it has we must now assess to what extent he is incapacitated.

Here his record of causing personal antagonism among his doctors, including psychiatrists, (who should have known better), must be disregarded and the fact which is seen to exist is that he is unemployable and likely to remain so by nature of his psychic disability.

If his spinal injury or injuries is added to this, the need for unemployment support is greater.

Further to this his attitude to his physical injury and disability is too warped by his personality instability and the chances of clinical recovery is [sic] slim.

While I hesitate to advise TPI [Totally and Permanently Incapacitated] I point out that while it is undoubted that this man is not ‘deserving’, the original questionable judgement lies in the acceptance of a constitutional condition with no relation to war service having been accepted. But having been accepted is [sic] must now be admitted he is unemployable and a Repat. responsibility.

On the grounds that his personality may mature at a later age it could be said that permanence is not yet established, but TTI [Totally and Temporarily Incapacitated] is.

Dr Stevenson’s comment that psychiatrists ‘should have known better’ caught my eye, along with the fact that the doctor couldn’t help indulging in a little hostility himself.

His recommendation was accepted. Denny again failed in his bid to get his pension upgraded. Towards the end of September he approached a Department social worker for help with £100 in rental arrears, a substantial amount in the early sixties, and £80 in hospital bills.

In early 1965 my father was still visiting the Repatriation Hospital in Heidelberg, with or without appointments, in his dogged pursuit of a TPI pension.

A medical assessment report from the Appeal Tribunal on the 20th of January stated: This man appears to aggravate all his symptoms and it is considered that most of them are nonexistent.

I remember his return after a couple of week’s absence. He was in the same Fletcher Jones suit as he’d come home in once before. It looked a little shabbier. His eyes appeared to have had the blue drained from them. He seemed calmer. He claimed he’d been selling real estate in Melbourne. When he sensed none of us believed him he added that he’d put a deposit on a block of land in the outer suburb of Greensborough.

“As soon as it’s paid for I’ll build a place for us,” he said looking around the kitchen at the gaps in the wall, the damp stains on the ceiling, the soot below the stove, “so we can get out of this shit hole”.

The possibility of that ever happening seemed fanciful.

“What’s wrong with Portland?” I complained, reluctant to move again to a place I knew nothing about.

Momentarily the life returned to his eyes, the old anger, but it quickly subsided. “When you’re older, my friend, you won’t want to be stuck in this joint.”

If he was interested in a career in real estate, he made no attempt to pursue it in Portland. He went on a long gambling binge, using any money he could get his hands on, hocking household items, robbing our piggy banks. He was probably up to his old hire-purchase scam. There was an argument with Pat over her wages, which almost ended with her throat being cut. I saw the knife pressed against the yielding skin at the bottom of her throat, my mother passive with fear, her eyes moist with sorrow, his eyes bulging, his temples throbbing. One foolish remark and it would have been all over. Sitting at the kitchen table with my sisters, I could feel my heart pounding. I heard Jean murmur, “Oh don’t, Dad, please,” a soft, rational voice. I repeated something similar and so did Carol. I realised if our mother’s throat was cut, ours would surely follow. But the weight of our pleas brought him to his senses. He hurled the knife at the sink.

Despite my fear, I felt sad too. I didn’t condemn him outright. I didn’t believe he wanted to be a horrible man. The thought of demons possessing him crossed my mind.

He shut himself in the lounge room again, pushing furniture against the door, emerging only at night when we had all gone to bed to scrape together something to eat, usually a dinner gone cold that Pat had prepared and put in the oven for him.

One morning the lounge-room door was open and empty. Pat had found him lying on the verandah when she got up for work. She suspected he had tried to overdose again. His breathing was sporadic and heavy. She had managed to remove both sets of his dentures to prevent him choking. I helped her to drag him back into the house, across the threshold and kitchen lino, over the slight step out of the kitchen, along the short passageway to the lounge, no easy feat, since he weighed fourteen stone. There was no way we could have lifted him onto a bed. He lay on his back like a corpse. I moved away. Even unconscious he intimidated me.

I found a couple of empty sleeping-pill bottles on the floor.

My mother was in a daze. She didn’t know what to do. Most people would have called an ambulance but it didn’t occur to either of us. She probably feared it would enrage him and cause more trouble with police and medical personnel.

“A normal dose doesn’t have much effect on him,” she said, trying to excuse his behaviour. “His body’s so used to them.”

After we stood over him for a while, watching his chest rise and fall sporadically, she murmured, “What should we do? He wouldn’t want us calling anyone.”

“He’ll survive.” I was struggling with ambivalent emotions. “He always does.”

“He’s as strong as a bull,” she added hopefully and perhaps with a touch of nostalgia.

She stayed at home to keep an eye on him.

I was in my second year of high school, my first year as a teenager. I took my studies seriously and didn’t want to miss a day of school because of him. But I was too distracted to concentrate on study. The morning dragged. When lunchtime finally arrived I raced home, just in time to see my father getting up. He started staggering around and muttering incoherently, partly due to his missing dentures. I moved out of his way. No doubt my alarm was evident. He gave me a wild contemptuous look and headed out the door. He fell off the verandah, picked himself up and made for the gate. His cardigan, which had caught on timber as he fell, was soiled and torn. Pat clutched my arm as we watched him disappear down the lane.

“Go after him, darling,” she pleaded. “See no harm comes to him. I’ll try and get his doctor.”

I wanted to refuse. I could see nothing but humiliation in the pursuit. But she was getting maudlin and almost in need of help herself.

Reluctantly I set off after him. I tracked along the street some fifty yards behind. He was weaving and staggering worse than any drunk I’d ever seen, even in films where actors depicting intoxicated behaviour often exaggerated for comic effect. But his route seemed purposeful. He went past Daisy’s bluestone mansion, a few old weatherboard houses and a fishmonger’s shop. He headed in the direction of the school and then at the end of the block turned south into a street that led to the swamp.

There were students everywhere, on their way back to school from lunch, from milk bars and fish-and-chip shops in the main shopping strip and outside a popular corner store that we called the Tuck Shop. When they saw Denny many of them laughed and shouted at him.

What a distraction from the humdrum of school!

“Look at that drunk dickhead!”

“Have you ever seen anyone so fucking pissed?”

One or two approached to taunt him but only for a moment, until they noticed his wild eyes. Mercifully none identified him as my father or realised I was following him.

I kept my distance from them because I was afraid they would see my tears. Oh, Dad, this is so shameful… He was making it hard for me not to hate him.

After a few blocks the street dropped away towards the swamp before turning sharply to the left. He managed to descend the steep gradient without incident. At the bottom he stepped off the bitumen, slid down an embankment, picked himself up and headed into the reeds. Alarmed I yelled at him to let him know I’d been following. He kept moving. In a panic now I yelled again from the embankment. He was up to his knees in stagnant water. He turned and, slurring, made an attempt to order me away. He gesticulated wildly as he waded further into the swamp. Black swans and water hens skimmed out of his way. I was in my school uniform: pressed grey trousers, school blazer, loosened maroon tie, leather shoes. When the water reached his waist, I pulled off my blazer, my shoes and socks, hitched my trousers above the knee and followed, down the clay bank and into the slimy water.

Convinced I could do nothing to stop him drowning himself, I started yelling for help. There were houses above the lagoon with magnificent views. Someone appeared on a balcony and saw us. He hastened inside.

I cried out again, adding, “He’s going to kill himself, I swear!”

I gaped back at Denny, my heart pounding, my heart torn by his suicidal intent. He wanted nothing to do with us, his family. We were not enough to make living worthwhile. It never crossed my mind that he was trying to unburden his family.

Soon a man came hurrying down the road. I recognised him. He had been my music teacher in primary school. He must have been home for lunch.

When he reached the embankment, he looked beyond me and shook his head, in disgust or disbelief—I couldn’t tell.

As I stood in the fetid water up to the top of my shins, with the soft bed of the lagoon yielding under my feet, he urged me to calm down. He had rung the police. They would arrive at any moment. I returned to shore too stunned to respond. He paid me the courtesy of pretending not to recognise me or notice my tears, for which I was grateful, forgiving him for excluding me from the school choir years earlier because I had sung a tad off key.

Shortly I heard the police sirens. Denny was more than fifty yards into the swamp. The water was up to his chest. I had no idea how deep it was further out. But already, if his legs gave way, he would sink beneath the slimy surface. The police had brought wading gear, rubber suits that came up to their armpits. They looked at each other and shook their heads, as if sometimes they wondered why they had bothered to join the Force. One of them told me there was nothing more I could do and ordered me to leave.

I obeyed. On my walk home I had an unpleasant epiphany. Anything can happen. Humiliating things. Grotesque things. Brutal things. And I was powerless to stop them. I thought of the future and saw nothing but bleakness.

Fortunately the lunch hour had ended. There were no longer any students in the street to observe the filthy state I was in.

Pat met me at the front gate as I came up the lane. She was dismayed by the sight of my sodden clothes and my tearful face. She led me inside as I recounted what had happened.

“You’re a brave boy, darlin’,” she murmured, grateful for my efforts.

She cried for a moment and hugged me to her.

“But go and have a quick wash, and get changed. There’s still some hot water on the stove. I’ll fix you a sandwich. Then go back to school.”

It was a wish for everything to return to normal, whatever she thought that was. I left her on the verandah, dressed in an old floral dress, her face drawn and wan, her glasses slightly awry, wringing her hands.

My heart went out to her. I waved to give her some comfort. And after a moment she waved back.

“Don’t say anything to your sisters,” she called, her voice breaking. “It’ll only upset them.”

When I got to school I listened to the buzz of some of my classmates as they related a story about the drunk they had seen in the street. What amazed them the most was seeing someone that intoxicated so early in the day. They were quite unaware that they were talking about my father. When one of them mentioned that he thought he had seen me following, I shrugged and pouted dubiously.

The police must have managed to drag my father out of the swamp.

“They’ve taken him to a hospital in Ballarat,” my mother informed me, when I got home after school. “I’m going to try and get up there tomorrow.”

“Do you want me to come with you?”

“No, darlin’, you’ve done plenty for him already. You saved his life. He’ll be upset anyway. And you don’t want to upset him more. He wouldn’t want you neglecting your schoolwork. He’d already be feeling bad about you doing that today on account of him.”

“I thought you might need some company.”

She hugged me to her, pressed me to her chest and held me tight for a moment. “I’ll be right,” she whispered unconvincingly.

The details of this suicide attempt, found in his medical records, corroborate my recollection of the incident.

After I had gone home the police had waded to Denny and held his head above the water. He had struggled and at some stage, perhaps when they were back on land, had assaulted the police with a piece of wood. There must have been a violent struggle. He was restrained with handcuffs and taken in the back of a police van to the Ballarat Mental Hospital. As the van was opened, hospital staff saw him lying down banging his hands on the van floor, trying to smash the handcuffs. His clothes were wet. He struggled and fought police removing him from the van, and with staff as they tried to take him inside.

Once he was in the ward, he was still aggressive, telling staff he would not settle down until he was allowed to go home to his wife and family. But the following day he was subdued. He claimed he had no memory of the suicide attempt. He didn’t feel depressed and blamed the incident on his medication. He told the doctor who interviewed him that he had stayed up waiting for his eldest daughter to come home. At 9pm he had taken three sleeping tablets and one more at 10pm when she arrived home. After that he couldn’t remember a thing. In the provisional diagnosis notes the doctor states Denny is ‘charming and plausible’. Denny said that he had been getting mixed messages from doctors about whether or not he should be taking sleeping tablets.

The doctor also commented, [He] makes out that this brief experience in Ward 25 has altered his perspective—he’s never seen severely mentally ill patients before. [He] feels that he has been wasting pity on himself.

Pat was interviewed by a doctor at the hospital three days after his admission. She called her husband’s psychotic episodes ‘turns’ and believed they were brought on by worry. She said he became confused and usually ‘sleeps it off’. She refused to accept that he took overdoses on these occasions. It was her view that he was someone who couldn’t handle too much worry. On reflection she felt that she should take more of the family troubles on her own shoulders.

There was no mention of what these troubles were, no mention of his gambling, which was at the root of them all. When all our money was wasted and there was none left to pay bills and rent, panic set in. He had no way of asking for help with his addiction. He was too proud for that. He would have denied it was a problem. Besides, there was none of the anti-gambling organisations or Help Lines that exist today. So his response was to act like a wild beast driven into a corner. My mother’s desire to shoulder more of the burden, under the circumstances, was a noble gesture but no solution at all.

The doctor noted: She is obviously very fond of her husband.

He was released a week after his admission.

Did I ever wonder why my father was like this? His suicide attempts. His compulsive gambling. His sudden eruptions of violence. His black moods. Did I ever try to understand what effect bad luck had had on him? These questions never entered my head. Or if they did I have no memory of them. I think my mind would have shut down if I’d probed too deeply. I would never have understood his psychological state. In fact, because most of what he did left me saddened, chronically anxious, and at times terrified, the only question that plagued me was: what would he do next to make our lives more difficult?

Denny continued his hostilities with the Repatriation Department over the next few years as he argued over his pension. And it was becoming political. He once revealed he had voted for Malcolm Fraser, against his political proclivities, because of the assistance the local federal Member of Parliament had offered him with some issue. On September 22nd, 1965, my mother wrote Mr Fraser a letter regarding a reduction in Denny’s pension. When I first read it, the complexity of its language made me doubt it came from her pen, or my father’s for that matter, but there was an accompanying letter from the local Anglican minister (in this story, Mr Walters). So perhaps he helped my mother with hers. Still, I have little doubt that she was prompted to do so by my father. It is reminiscent of the letter his mother wrote on his behalf in 1947.

Several pages long, it details all the injustices my mother thought Denny endured at the hands of the Repatriation Department in its refusal to consider independent medical reports on his condition which supported his application for a TPI pension, alluding to a personal vendetta from within the Department, which had resulted in a considerable reduction to his TTI pension.

What we both [Denny and Pat] would like to know is if one is examined by outside Specialists who give their opinions as to a person’s capabilities and condition, then a Repatriation Doctor who hasn’t seen the person involved for quite a considerable time can reduce his pension as he thinks fit. I know that Denny has clashed with Dr. Myles who has threatened to have him sent to Bundoora Repatriation Mental Hospital when he was hospitalised at Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital.

The only conclusion that I can come to is that Denny is being victimised…

I will admit he was annoying people, but under the circumstances I think he was justified to do so…

I’ve been working as much as I can to help out but Dr. Beavis told me that I had to have a rest as I was completely run down and couldn’t carry on. When we were assured of a regular weekly income everything was much better. I know exactly what to budget for and we could manage, but as things are now if things don’t improve I don’t honestly know how things will work out…

It’s curious that this letter to a local Member of Parliament (not yet Minister for the Army) should find its way into my father’s medical records at the Repatriation Department, but I am grateful that it did because it gives me an insight into my parents’ lives at the time. If my mother signed the letter, I am certain its contents would have been an honest account, despite receiving help with its composition. There is a note of desperation in her message. It had been difficult enough to get by, as it was, without Denny’s meagre pension being cut further. If it were true that the Department was ignoring the medical opinion of independent specialists about Denny’s ability to work, Pat and Denny had a reasonable case for suspecting discrimination. Over the years there had been plenty of mutterings within the Department that Denny was an unworthy recipient of a war pension of any shape or size.

A month after my mother’s letter to Mr Fraser, the Assistant Chief Director (Medical Services) (Psychiatry) wrote in a minute paper that Denny was one of those cases in which it is difficult to determine “how bad he is or how mad he is.”…Since the termination of his [paltry] military service, the member has been quite unproductive (except for producing children), but has been a social problem. His motivation towards work and being self-supporting is negligible, and all efforts to alter this have been unavailing.

I am disturbed that this member should be T.T.I., as this will inevitably lead to T. & P.I., which is the member’s desire…

I fully agree with Dr. Stevenson’s report…but it would seem that the Repatriation Department is now “stuck” with the member.

The haughty Assistant Chief Director recommended a TTI pension for Denny to be reviewed in six months.

THE POST OFFICE

My mother lost her job at Borthwicks. A contraction in its overseas markets had led to lay-offs. Forty years later she still felt bitter towards the foreman who had retained a flirtatious young woman instead of her, someone who could only pack half the amount of meat she did in a day.

“And I let him know it,” she recalled. “He tried to say a single woman needed a wage, and I said what about the three kids I’ve got to feed? Bloody men!”

She was worried enough to contact her brother although it distressed her further to ask him for help again. But Uncle Mick was a kind man who loved his sister, and he was as indignant about her dismissal as she was. He told her he would see what he could do.

The next day he got a message to her via a telegram boy. There was a job going at the post office where he worked and he could fix it with the postmaster, if she wanted it.

Before the week was out she was sorting mail, for a higher wage and more civilized hours than she had ever been offered before. It was one of the few times in her life, while Denny was alive, that luck went her way.

The post office was situated near the railway station with views across the port, a grand old bluestone building that had been painted white. It had an elevated entrance, up stone stairs worn down by a century of entering and exiting feet. It had lofty windows that bore cumbersome timber slat blinds that gathered dust from the port and grime from cigarette smoke. Surrounded by other historic bluestone buildings—the customs office, the police station and jail, the courthouse, the public library—it had an aura of importance and solemnity, until Uncle Mick started cursing in the rear office, loud enough for the public at the front counter and further afield to hear.

He had worked for the Postmaster General all his life, first when telegrams were sent in Morse Code and later after the teleprinter machine was introduced. He was a two-finger typist of impressive speed but aired his frustrations whenever the machine broke down or failed to transmit. On other occasions he started fires in the waste paper basket when he carelessly tossed a match or cigarette butt aside, which also provoked his outbursts. He put these out with his and his colleagues’ cups of tea. He wasn’t afraid to express his feelings loudly, since he had grown to hate his job over the years and wouldn’t have minded the sack, which was unlikely, given how indispensable the rest of the staff found him.

When he also arranged a job for me as a telegram boy in the busy summer-holiday period, and I was dazzled by my first pay packet ever, he took me aside and warned against any silly notions of pursuing a career in the postal service.

“It’s okay for your holidays, for a bit of dough to tide you over, but that’s all, Butch. You don’t want to bloodywell turn out like me.”

A poor argument when I compared him to my father.

But he had at least one weakness: weekends of heavy drinking. Each Monday morning he asked Pat to check the death notices in the paper to see if he was listed.

My mother appreciated the stability the post office job promised. With Denny away and a little extra in the pay packet each week she was able to buy a few things she badly needed for herself: new shoes, new dress, new glasses and a new handbag. She also bought some cut flowers for no obvious reason and put them in a glass vase in the living room.

She enjoyed her job, enjoyed the camaraderie and appreciated the respect the postmaster showed her for the diligent way she worked, which soon earned her a promotion.

We all dared to entertain a turning point in our lives.

The atmosphere around the house was always more relaxed when Denny wasn’t there. Pat had an old pedal sewing machine, given to her by her sister after she upgraded to an electric version. While Pat used the machine, her forehead was knitted in concentration and her eyes were focused on the needle. She would swirl the material into a new direction with a confident flourish, and hum like she was without a care in the world. Her skills as a seamstress hadn’t faded.

On weekends while she did the housework she listened to the cricket, since the radio wasn’t needed for the races. I maintained the vegetable garden that Denny had started and chopped wood for the stove and copper. Often in the evenings we played cards, usually cribbage.

“We learnt it from our father,” Pat told me, referring to her siblings. “We were all keen crib players. Dad, Mick and Fred used to play for a penny a hole. They could cheat, those boys. Dad would give ’em a clip over the ears if he caught ’em.” She sighed as she remembered. “We used to have great fun in those days.”

“Not any more,” I said foolishly.

“We can’t afford a penny a hole, that’s for sure,” she chuckled.

As a telegram boy I raced around Portland on an unwieldy post office bike, delivering missives with an air of importance, especially those inside red envelopes that declared their urgency. I convinced myself the job was essential for the smooth running of the world. I loved the riding too, even when fierce winds were blowing, which they did every second day in Portland, even when it was raining, for that allowed me a sense of sacrifice, adding more weight to my responsibility.

Sometimes I had to ride to the wool auctions in a modern auditorium amongst the wool sheds, where I saw my first real Japanese men, the men we had fought in the war, the men my father had been sent to subjugate in the Occupation, who looked more civilised than I imagined in their immaculate, tailored suits and preened appearance—more civilised, in fact, than the locals.

When my holiday job ended at the post office I started working at the Star Theatre, the local picture house. I was a lolly boy a couple of nights a week and at Saturday matinees.

I worked for a grey-haired woman who was stout and swayed from side to side when she walked due to some problem with her hips. I have forgotten her name but she was a kind old soul, patient most of the time with her team of teenage boys, and trusting, but given to outbursts of exasperation when one or another of them seriously short-changed her.

I donned a white jacket and carried a red tray filled with sweets, ice creams and nuts. I plied the aisles at interval.

Although I had enjoyed delivering telegrams, working as a lolly boy was far easier and had better perks, such as being allowed to watch B-grade movies, gratis, before interval.

Over the next few years I saw scores of films, Westerns and war movies, comedies and romances, and on rare occasions when the usher allowed me in after the interval, some that were blockbusters like Spartacus or The Sound of Music. Rarer still were the torrid movies forbidden to someone my age, like Irma La Duce, and even some that were steamier, featuring mythical starlets like Bridgette Bardot whose breasts I glimpsed through a glycerine fog.

Besides the chance to see so many films, there was the opportunity to be on the streets at night, a sense of freedom never extended to my sisters, a privilege, which I began to associate with being a male. I became enamoured of the shadowy streets, the closed shops, the dark alleys, the unsighted laughter and giggles. I knew the excitement that seemed almost within reach was the privilege of adults.

On top of everything else I began to save money.

Often on weekends my mother would take us to our relatives in South Portland, where I played with Brenda and her retinue of followers, or Don, my other younger cousin.

There always seemed to be someone at the Stagg’s piano, Aunt Gerty herself or an inebriated guest, like the ambulance driver whose favourite tune was The Drover’s Dream, which was about a parade of native fauna with human capabilities. I loved to watch his wet lips flap and his hands jerk up and down as if at the ends of invisible strings, amazed that such dislocation could produce fluent music without the trick of a pianola. There were other guests who sang rowdy numbers or sweet ballads.

Once I remember my mother was asked to sing a Harry Belafonte song about leaving a pretty girl in Kingston Town, at the end of which she received some hearty applause.

“Good on yer, Pat!” someone shouted. “You’ve got the voice of an angel.”

She blushed. “I can’t really sing.”

“Of course yer can, love. What do you think you were doing? Sayin’ yer prayers? Have a shandy,” he teased. “Then you wouldn’t be so bloody modest. You might even sing us another one.”

When the adults had finished, Brenda put on her own records and taught me the latest dance sensations: the Limbo, a back-arching creep under a lowered broom handle, and the Twist, which generated so much friction with the floor that the balls of my feet felt on fire.

Around this time my grandfather, Da, arrived from Gippsland to live with the Staggs. He was my mother’s father, but I had only met him once before, when Uncle Mick had taken us to see him in Sale, shortly after Pat had left Angus Campbell’s employment. I had been born on his birthday but that hadn’t granted me any privileges. He hadn’t paid me much attention at all, so I had played in his back yard, while he drank beer with Uncle Mick and talked with my mother.

Now he was over eighty and no longer able to take proper care of himself. So Uncle Mick and Aunt Gerty housed and fed him. Pat cut his remnant hair and flinty yellow toenails. And as I recall Aunty Barb looked after him during his occasional bouts of illness. Uncle Mick supplied him with beer and tobacco.

He seemed a stern old bugger to me. His smile was fierce. His face was sharply sculptured, a skull with diminishing layers of skin and eyes floating in gaunt sockets. His nose was a rugged outcrop, like a feature of the cliffs of Cape Nelson. His lips were cankered with burns from cigarettes. I marvelled at the way nicotine had stained much of his bony hands. He had a voice that was thin and breathless but it could still intimidate me. He seemed like someone from a different era.

At the Stagg’s I can’t recall seeing him moving about much, although I assume he slept in a bed at night, used the brand new lavatory connected to mains sewerage and still drove his pale blue Hillman, brought from the other side of the state by a relative, which was kept in the back yard, sagging on one side due to a broken spring. He must have gardened too because I have a photo of him between some beds of vegetables leaning on a spade instead of his walking stick. He was usually hunched in an armchair when I saw him, with a translucent droplet of fluid gathering like dew on the tip of his nose. But whenever there was a sing-along he shifted onto a kitchen chair brought into the living room for the occasion, and took up his heavy accordion, wheezing bellows attached to great reddish compartments with rows of mother-of-pearl buttons. His gnarled fingers moved inexplicably to capture melodies like When Irish Eyes Are Smiling or Danny Boy, while his eyes glazed over and his lips puckered in concentration. And, if he stumbled a little now and then, people were polite or drunk enough not to notice. All the adults enjoyed his music. They showed their appreciation with applause and calls of Good on yer, Jimmy! More Jimmy! which he drank in like a desert wanderer at a soak.

Pat was glad to have her father close by, glad of the opportunity to reconcile with him decades after her jaundiced departure from the family home as a young woman. A dutiful daughter, she rolled his tobacco into dozens of cigarettes at a sitting, since his fingers had lost their dexterity, a skill more demanding than playing the accordion, apparently. She reminisced with him, judiciously avoiding the topic of his house-keeper mistress, who had died long ago, and her own husband, who was still alive and kicking. She gossiped with him about the Stagg family.

One of his sons, who lived in Perth on the opposite side of the country, was coming over to see him. Another son had suffered a massive stroke and looked like a deflated pumpkin, an object of pity, who gargled and spluttered incomprehensibly from a wheelchair, and was shortly to die. He would be brought to Portland, too, for a final reunion. Then there was Fred, the derelict, whom I would get to know better than any of my other uncles, who arrived in Portland now and then, always intoxicated, with a couple of his own ragamuffin children in tow.

Others dropped by to see Da; a swarm of my cousins who lived in different regions of Australia, many with families of their own already. The Staggs, of which I was a part, were arriving to pay tribute to their patriarch.

My mother loved the gathering of the clan. She showed them around the Portland district. She took them to the beaches, the lighthouse, the capes, across the border to Mount Gambier to view the Blue Lake and over to Port MacDonnell, a fishing village at the northern end of Discovery Bay. It was like a return to the pre-war years when, in her mind, life had been idyllic. It provided the sense of belonging she craved, which had never interested my father. It refocused her life, away from the misery she routinely experienced, onto a uniformly insouciant bunch she could call ‘family’.

Yet loyalty to her extended family wasn’t enough to protect her from the dramas Denny had in store for her.

VALENTINE

When I was still in primary school I fell in love with a girl called Kathy. She was on the dumpy side but had a pretty face and a seductive way of smiling, which made her popular with all the boys. And she enjoyed the attention lavished on her. But I was too shy to follow their example.

On St Valentine’s Day I surreptitiously placed a cheap butterfly brooch I bought at Coles and an anonymous note saying nothing more than ‘ I love you’ inside her desk.

I was in the class when she discovered my humble offering, so I witnessed the kerfuffle it created.

First there was the crowd of girls that gathered around her before the morning lesson started, the squeals and giggles, followed by a hush as she whispered instructions. Then they suddenly dispersed, eyes flashing at boys for any sign of culpability. Some boys wanted to know what was going on and word soon got around about the St Valentine’s mystery.

Kathy, a businessman’s daughter, was enthralled. A secret admirer was every schoolgirl’s dream. Her spirits headed for the stratosphere and remained there for weeks. No one had any inkling who had planted the gift, and a confession from me was out of the question. I gave not the slightest hint to anyone. The degree of attention the brooch generated unnerved me. What if she was horrified when she discovered that I was her mystery admirer? Her feelings about it were in the public domain, which meant the entire class, and beyond, would find out it was me. If that happened I was doomed. I could already hear their mocking laughter. I concluded I had done a very stupid thing and couldn’t wait for the weeks to pass for the incident to die down.

Kathy eventually found out it was me towards the end of the year through a careless comment I made to my sister, who told her friends, who told others. But all the steam had gone out of the issue and she was surprisingly gracious about it, saying what I had done was cute.

One day during the holidays before I started high school we met by chance as I was taking a shortcut through the grounds of the Methodist Church, where she was a member of the congregation. Waylaying me, guiding me into a nook, she repeated how pleased she had been and how sweet I was. The cherry colour my face turned was only partly due to her forwardness. I was afraid she would realise where I lived. She startled me with a kiss on the mouth and promised she’d consider ‘taking things further’ without elaborating, without even the slightest curiosity about my presence in the church precincts.

But in high school she discovered there were bigger fish to fry. My hopes were finally dashed when I heard her speaking to a friend on the other side of our fence where she was playing tennis at the end of second form.

“Remember my secret admirer in Grade Six?”

She mentioned my name, barely above a whisper, unaware I was watching her through a crack.

“Yeah, he sent you that cheap brooch.”

“Sweet. That’s where he lives—in that dump there.”

Despite the barrier between us I went crimson. She knew where I lived!

Her friend could see the top of our house: the rusted roof, unhinged guttering, unpainted weatherboards. “Oh, gawd, poor guy. No wonder it was cheap.”

After that, despite a lingering infatuation, I avoided her at every opportunity.

Second Form had been a mixed year for me. I stopped using hair oil and grew a fringe in a tentative imitation of the Beatles, who had burst like a tsunami across our cultural backwater. As the fringe grew towards my eyebrows I dared to hope, like almost every boy in the school, some Beatle magnetism might rub off on me. Those who kept their pompadours looked sadly out of touch. I longed for a girlfriend. I wanted her to want to be my girlfriend. I went to see A Hard Day’s Night, and, like every other teenager who saw it, my life changed forever.

While I watched, surrounded by screaming girls, I entered through an invisible membrane the realm of adolescence, abandoning my parents, who became no more than background noise. The message these four zany lads were sending, loud and clear, was just have some fun, do crazy things, even goofy things, that your parents would disapprove of, and the girls would come stampeding after you.

I looked askance at the female faces around me. They were wild, fierce, unconstrained, as if something primordial held deep inside had burst asunder and unleashed its accumulated energy.

Puberty arrived soon after, not in a wet dream as with most boys, but in my hideout in the cypress hedge where I kept some photos of naked women, which I had impulsively torn from a Swedish magazine I had discovered in Uncle Mick’s paper rack. I had no idea if he knew they were missing. Nobody ever interrogated me. I was never arrested. The stolen pictures showed everything except pubic hair, which had been airbrushed out. The pictures made my heart beat furiously. As I studied them for the umpteenth time, holding each on the best angle to catch the sunlight and clutching myself, I experienced an astonishing convulsion, followed by a less desired damp, sticky sensation, just as Paul Walters had predicted.

Within weeks I started to get acne, especially under my jaw and around my neck. I squeezed these and covered them with a steaming face washer, hoping to purify the area. They kept reappearing throughout the year, gouging tiny craters in my skin. I was getting more hair on my groin and armpits, as well as my top lip. I could conceal the groin. The armpits didn’t matter. But the lip concerned me.

In the mirror I saw a gawky bumpkin. Droopy eye, downy lip, ears that alarmed me whenever I noticed my shadow on the ground, and now a faulty cap on the tooth I’d snapped off with a hammer, whose metal backing had tarnished its white enamel, a verdigris incisor—charity’s cheap work—that I hid behind a hand whenever I laughed. The Beatle hairstyle couldn’t hide any of my shortcomings.

Around this time Denny reappeared for a short time, arriving early in the morning. He had hitchhiked as far as Port Fairy, and walked the last forty miles overnight. He looked exhausted. Yet his eyes were still fiery and intimidating.

“You look like a hillbilly,” he said.

My hand went to my face.

He fetched me a shaving brush and razor.

“Just the lip,” he advised. “The chin’ll sprout hair soon enough without your help. Don’t cut yourself. And do something with that bloody hair of yours. Put some Brylcreem on it, for Chrissakes.”

Rebelling against the hair oil order, I did what he suggested with the razor, soaping my lip with the dampened brush and drawing the blade down. I felt a pleasant scraping sensation as the lip meekly resisted. A few strokes and it was over. I gazed at the result. My face was transformed. I could hardly believe such a little thing could make so much difference. Hope flickered faintly against my befuddled heart.

But if any girl noticed she didn’t bother informing me.

For my part I was besotted by every second schoolgirl I passed. She only needed to smile politely or say a friendly word and I was hers. I could read a certain meaning in the most casual of remarks. Had any of them voiced what I wanted to hear, I probably would have run a mile.

The pretty girls who completely ignored me attracted me the most. There was one from a grade below mine, who was a sultry creature with long dark hair, and whose mother ran the school canteen. She helped her mother out at lunchtime and I shuffled around in the queue to make sure, when I reached the counter, she was the one who served me.

Coming face to face I blushed furiously. Every time. I was sure she noticed but said nothing, merely waited with an indifferent gaze for my lunch request.

I had to console myself with a photo I had of her, a group photo of the school swimming team of which we were both part. I once lay on my bed with the photo and tried to place a kiss on her head without my lips touching anyone else. For a long while kissing photographs was the closest I came to the real thing.

But at least now I could do it in the privacy of my own bedroom. Denny realised it was inappropriate for me to still be sharing with Carol. He ordered Jean and me to swap rooms.

Eventually, Denny took me and Connie Yallock’s son, Gary, to a Father-and-Son evening at the Methodist Hall, a Christian introduction to sex, recommended by our school in a sealed letter to parents. I remember it well because of the number of tense fathers and tittering boys, the most self-conscious gathering I’d ever been a part of.

At the end of the evening Denny gave us a sheepish grin. “So, now you know everything,” he said, as if that would be his final word on the subject.

“We already knew that much.”

“Well, if you want to know more, just ask your mother.”

The matter was never raised again.

WEST PORTLAND

HOUSING COMMISSION ESTATE

Portland was still evolving into an industrial mire. The port was getting bigger. Silos were under construction on a site that was once sea. The displaced water was forced to find a new level across the bay, destroying the Dutton Way beach where we had sometimes gone to swim and play, threatening houses, holiday cottages and the highway. To protect them, boulders were heaped in a great barrier, nearly two metres higher than the road, ruining its recreational attraction and the pleasant view. Yet on a rough day the waves still broke over the rocks, making a trip along the road hazardous.

In keeping with a modern port, a modern municipal district was deemed essential: shire offices, council chambers, police station, civic centre and a public library. Some of the earliest administrative offices in Victoria, all solid bluestone buildings, were demolished to make way for functional cream-brick counterparts. Around this time the railway station below the post office was also pulled down and the tracks removed, altering the character of the foreshore forever. The post office was earmarked for relocation nearer the main shopping precinct. On a national level, pounds, shillings and pence were being replaced with dollars and cents.

Apart from the currency change, 1966 was an uneventful year. I hung around with a goofy British immigrant, Derrick Yardley, who, coming from the land of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones was considered something of an authority on popular culture. He wore his hair in a mop like George Harrison. He knew before anyone else what was in: hairstyles, clothes, music, jargon. It was like he had a hot line to the Merseyside. When he decided to form his own pop group and asked me to join, my head swirled at the honour. It didn’t matter I had no musical ability; none of us did. And the only instrument between us was Derrick’s second-hand electric guitar, which he got for Christmas. Next Christmas he hoped to get an amplifier. He decided I would be the bass guitarist because my hairstyle looked like Paul McCartney’s, and like McCartney I was left-handed. And until I bought a bass guitar I could improvise with a broom. Needless to say the band fizzled out after a few rehearsals, which really amounted to just sitting around debating what the name of our group would be. We settled on ‘The Redbacks’, in keeping with the creepy-crawly motif our heroes had established (although sadly devoid of any musical pun), or discussing the latest Top 10, the latest fashion, the latest crazy outrage of the latest musical sensation. It was imperative to keep up with the latest. When our parents disapproved of all this—the music, the hairstyles, the clothes, the pop-star antics—we had no choice but to consider adults irrelevant. We were still financially dependent upon them but their significance in every other respect was hardly worth thinking about.

I didn’t mind the currency change. One pound equated to two dollars. Overnight my savings from the job at the cinema appeared to have doubled, until Denny returned again and I seemed to lose twice as much.

He arrived late in April, dressed in a St Vinnie’s suit this time but looking more handsome than ever, healthier and perhaps a little chubbier, as if he’d had a protracted stay at a resort rather than the loony bin. He told us he felt like a new man, and declared he had changed his ways. But within days he raided the kitty.

I offered my mother money to help with the groceries. In effect my savings for a bass guitar began haemorrhaging into the coffers of the TAB via our domestic budget.

While he was away Denny had been working overtime on getting a TPI pension from the Repatriation Department. He had been to see a back specialist in Ballarat who supported his case for a pension. But apparently the Department took little heed of the recommendation. In January a medical officer interviewing Denny at Heidelberg wrote: despite my best efforts to discuss his case he worked himself up into a rage and finally succeeded in grabbing me by the shoulder and pushing me out of the chair. (He desisted when he heard the tearing of my suit and it is my belief that his rage was quite a degree under his control).

By September his pension was again reviewed: [Sparkes] is well known to me. Today he is quite aggressive, expressing his usual material against doctors and the Department. He eventually stormed out of the interview.

This man is a very aggressive psychopath who has an extremely low stress tolerance. He maintains that he is unemployable & strongly states that he wants a decision one way or the other about his pension—he considers that the indecision of the TTI is doing him harm (this is one statement with which I agree—it is therapeutically harmful due to his low frustration level.)

He threatens to suicide if some decision is not reached regarding both his pension & his back condition. This threat is not without meaning—he is quite capable of violence to himself & others.

His psychiatric state is so well developed now that he will not improve…

Although it is felt that [he] will never work again I cannot say that this is completely due to his accepted psychiatric disability.

Despite the final sentence, the assessment of psychiatric disability was given as 100 per cent.

Yet Denny’s campaign for a TPI pension, while well under way, was far from over. Further medical examinations took place. In October a doctor reported a near normal range of spinal movement. In February the following year a report cast doubt on the amount of back pain he was actually feeling, stating there was no real organic lesion detectable in his lower lumbar spine. It added weight to the view that he was a malingerer.

We never heard anything more about the block of land Denny claimed to have bought in Greensborough. Perhaps he had taken our wishes into account and quietly sold it. Instead he applied for a Housing Commission home under construction on a new estate in West Portland. I didn’t know anything about the application. As with his medical history, neither he nor my mother revealed anything about such adult matters as a change of address (which had happened every year or two throughout my life) or the state of the family budget (if ever one existed), bills and rent, or legal issues.Th ese were matters children need not know about.

When the application was approved, my sisters and I were told about it, and we soon went to view our designated home under construction. The street and an adjoining cul-de-sac already had a bitumen surface, concrete drainage and footpaths. It was a thrill to see, first, the foundations and then the timber frame, tiled roof and aluminium windows of our place.

Occasionally we would visit the estate to check its progress. If the builders had clocked off for the day, we would climb around inside, stepping from joist to joist, imagining each room. The area that was to be my room looked tiny but it would do. My sisters would have to share a bigger room.

As we climbed around the structure, Denny admired the builders’ handiwork. “What do you think, my friend,” he would say to me.

He was calling me ‘my friend’ more often, which I preferred to the excruciating nickname, ‘Butch’.

Finally lime-green cement sheeting with minute corrugations was attached as external walls, leaving only the interior to be completed. A brand new house and very modern-looking by Housing Commission standards. It was set forward on a deep tapering block with a partly concreted driveway. There was even a small tool shed in the back yard.

I could hardly believe our change of luck.

We didn’t take up the option of buying the place. We couldn’t afford the modest deposit. But, as its first tenants, it would seem like our own. My impatience to take possession grew with each day.

Before we shifted in Denny had the floors in every room and passage covered in a grey, floral-patterned lino. We moved a lot of our old furniture—our table with a red-and-white patterned laminex top and fading red vinyl seats, the stainless steel framed single beds, my mother’s old timber double bed, our clumpy kapok mattresses, our worn cream vinyl covered armchairs—but he bought new venetian blinds, our first television since the time we were travelling along the eastern seaboard, and our first automatic washing machine, on hire purchase, which of course meant he didn’t have to pay for anything straightaway, a gift-horse to a compulsive gambler.

Denny was proud of his domestic achievements. Despite his bad back he immediately went about raking the ground, front and back, until it was even and smooth. He cast lawn seed around and watered it in. The effort left him unable to move for three days. From his chair he issued instructions on various tasks that had to be done. There were a couple of small bushes he had got from somewhere which needed to be planted, briquettes to be bought for the heater in the lounge room, a TV antenna he had already attached to the roof to be adjusted a tad, seedlings to be requisitioned from Uncle Mick’s hothouse for our vegetable garden. When he finally got to his feet he seemed satisfied with everything I had done, which surprised me and raised my spirits. I dared to ponder the possibility that this new place might change him. In a rash moment I even imagined he would stop gambling.

He remained friendly towards us. He sounded optimistic about the future. He sat in his chair with his legs crossed, tapping a beat on the timber armrests as if he were a jazz percussionist. I could tell he thought it was a new start for him. He kept saying, “we can do this…” and “we can do that…” laying down plans, which we all endorsed, hardly able to believe our ears. He kept tapping a syncopated beat.

“There’s a talent you didn’t know your old man had,” he said.

“What? Playing the armchair?” I joked, expecting his fury as soon as I’d said it.

But he half-closed his eyes, moved his neck and shoulders rhythmically. “The drums, my friend. Something I learned in the army. I could’ve been a drummer, you know.”

He looked nothing like Ringo Starr.

He was also friendly towards the neighbours who were all just shifting in. He offered to help unload trailers of furniture as they arrived, despite what had happened to his back while labouring on our lawn. He offered to run those without cars down the street to do their shopping. If they had an intractable cold or looked in need of a good sleep, he offered them medicines they couldn’t buy without prescriptions.

As a TTI pensioner he got whatever medicines he wanted free of charge. He requested pills and ointments for a wide range of ailments in quantities well beyond the needs of one person or one family.

He took it upon himself to operate a communal dispensary, specialising in Kenacomb, an antifungal, antibiotic ointment, which he believed could be used on any type of injury, sleeping pills and BTZ cream, whose use I have forgotten but seem to remember rubbing on muscular pains and swollen ankles after football matches.

Denny saw this as a community service, ‘helping your own kind’ . You took what you could from the powers that be, whenever you got the chance. You looked after your own. “The poor bloody worker,” he would say. But such generosity, such friendliness, wasn’t to everyone’s liking. It made some of the neighbours wary.

Everyone on the estate had arrived at roughly the same time, which meant none could claim dominion. Nobody was shifting into anybody else’s territory, which was especially important for children or teenagers like me. If disputes arose they weren’t settled on the basis of precedence.

There were about twenty households. Within a few months we more or less knew everybody. One of our next-door neighbours was a violent drunkard, whose wife Denny drove to Casualty once or twice, her face swollen and bruised almost beyond recognition, a tad ironic, I thought, considering the condition he’d left my mother in on occasions. Our neighbour on the other side was a homely religious nutter. Every so often some evangelicals paid her a visit. They carried printed brochures containing dire warnings with biblical quotes to support them. In return she gave tea and biscuits and as soon as they were gone, she was leaning over our fence, announcing to me or my sisters or my mother the exact date that the world would end—Tuesday 27, Friday 3, Wednesday 15—with a well-intentioned warning to repent and prepare for the Lord. And when the day passed without the slightest hint of Armageddon, not even a tremor, a dress rehearsal, disappointment replaced her eagerness. Her gloom prevailed for weeks. In a sombre mood, she would busy herself in her garden, planting plastic flowers rather than real ones, shifting them from one bed to another until the clean-cut evangelicals knocked once more with an apology for the miscalculation and a revised date, which would immediately cheer her and have her rushing back to our fence with the good news.

We took no notice of her. Nor did her husband, a fat, taciturn fellow, who scowled a lot and occasionally managed a cynical guffaw. If she wanted Armageddon she needed to look no further than him. He was a slaughterman at Borthwicks, the Grim Reaper to all those terrified cattle in its mustering yards.

One woman around the corner in the cul-de-sac, a tall grey-haired widow, a migrant with what I eventually learnt was a Yorkshire accent, was known to clip her boys around the ears if they complained about her poor house-keeping. Needless to say the house was in chaos. Her four or five boys were wild. One reportedly was in jail or the army, or both. They were all feared for their volatile tempers. And the youngest, the mother’s favourite, turned out to be the wildest. One day he killed his mate with a shotgun after a dispute over sharing the day’s catch of rabbits.

And there were other bellowers and beaters besides the drunkard next door, besides the woman around the corner, besides my father. Even having a policeman living on the estate made little difference. But there were quiet households as well, which I found reassuring, people who kept to themselves, who watched the commotion, peeking through their blinds from time to time, no doubt horrified by the behaviour of some of their neighbours. They were the ones I hoped were normal. As for boys my age, there were a few on the estate, some I played football with but none I would call a friend.

Pat was pleased with her new house. In the kitchen there was an electric stove, far superior to the old wood stove in our former hovel. There were hot water taps throughout. There was an indoor bathroom, which had a shower, a novelty for us, and an indoor toilet (mercifully independent of the bathroom) that flushed! She could hang the washing on a rotary clothesline like the type Denny used to sell, instead of wires that looped across the yard and were raised with heavy props at our previous place. Denny saw that she approved and for a while they got along fine. It was the first time she had ever possessed her own space. Being new, the house was clean too with nobody else’s grime, and she intended keeping it that way.

Denny helped her. He was no loafer, despite his erratic work history and injured back. The inactivity thrust upon him by his industrial accident, left him frustrated and restless. Providing there were no races on and his mood wasn’t too dark, he would take up a broom or a duster, sweep or mop the floors, dust down the venetians. They argued over who should do the cooking. Pat felt, as mother and wife, the kitchen was her domain. All Denny wanted to do was make himself useful. She begrudgingly let him help around the periphery, peeling potatoes, cutting onions, turning chops and sausages. He accepted that graciously. To my surprise once or twice he came up behind and gave her a hug, which she endured momentarily but then shrugged off with an almost inaudible Oh, Denny, her usual dissenting utterance, embarrassed by her children witnessing their intimacy.

Then he got another job.

A massive contraption arrived in the bay one day, an oil rig, a tripodal monster that towered over the port and attracted crowds to the cliff tops and breakwaters while it was fitted out for exploratory drills off Cape Otway. It had been towed from the other side of the world and was one of the first to be seen in Australian waters. When he heard of the lucrative wages being offered to work on it, he applied for and got a job as a slusher. He thought it was the kind of job that wouldn’t be too taxing on his injured back. Two weeks at sea. One week break. That was the roster. He thought the job would be a cinch.

Soon the oil rig was towed away with him aboard. I watched it until it slipped beyond the horizon.

He lasted two weeks. He said his back let him down. But I heard a rumour that he had been in a fight, which would have been unacceptable on a tall platform in the middle of the sea.

Resigning himself to an idle life, he settled back into his routine, setting himself up in the lounge room, his coffee and ashtray and form guide laid out beside him on a little coffee table, his trannie on 3UZ, listening to Bert Bryant’s call of the city races. The TV was directly in front of him. In the evening he could watch the replay of the final furlong of each race on the evening news, groaning with a hand sheltering his eyes if he had backed a loser, hissing with his fists clenched on the rare occasions when he had won.

Once, while he was out buying dinner after one of his wins, and a mood of levity lingered, my mother spoke about his gambling. “Did I ever tell you what your father said straight after our wedding?”

I shrugged and pouted. “Tell us.”

“When we left the church we took a cab to the wedding reception. And while we were going he tapped the driver on the shoulder and asked what had won the race that was on while we were getting married.” She gave a little strangled laugh. “I should’ve known then, shouldn’t I?”

For a while we were like a normal family. No great affection but no arguments either. Pat would cook tea, which we still ate at the kitchen table rather than in front of the TV. She always prepared an Anglo meal: meat (chops, sausages, rissoles or corned beef) and three vegetables (potatoes, peas or string beans and one other: boiled carrot, pumpkin or cabbage). For sweets we ate canned fruit with cream or ice cream, or a pudding of some sort for dessert, a rhubarb sponge or bread-and-butter custard. We ate early—around five o’clock—the dishes were done, and then we’d file into the lounge room to catch the news. Every night we sat together before the box. Pat liked I Dream of Jeannie and Bonanza. Denny’s favourite shows were F Troop, The Red Skelton Show and The Andy Williams Show. He liked the crooners who appeared with Williams, and occasionally he sang along, although in a voice so soft it was difficult to tell whether he could hold a tune. His favourite singers were Bobby Darin and Nat King Cole.

The first big dispute in the new place happened when Pat complained that the automatic washing machine Denny had bought on hire purchase produced inferior results to her old twin tub.

Fury descended on him like a fiend. “Jesus wept! Every time things start to go okay for us, Trish, you find something to bloodywell complain about!”

My mother was equally adamant that it was a waste of money, which was not strictly accurate, since he was yet to pay for anything.

And that became a problem too. One day he received a summons over his unpaid installments. He warned us not to open the door to strangers, who might force their way in to repossess the television, washing machine, venetians, floor coverings and a few other things besides, like the encyclopaedia he had ordered from a door-to-door salesmen and never paid for, which stood proudly in its complimentary bookcase in our lounge room.

He went to court and returned unexpectedly triumphant. The magistrate had ruled against him. But since he had recently gained an invalid’s pension (which was independent of TPI pension he sought), he had only been ordered to pay off the debt at a nominal rate.

“Twenty bloody cents a week!” he chortled, unable to believe his luck.

“Do you think they’ll ever let you buy anything on hire purchase again?” Pat said, weary of his antics.

He winked, as if he were already working on a plan. “They’ll let you, though, Trish.”

He wanted Pat to give up her job at the post office. If she was unemployed, a pension would come her way as well.

“Why work for bloody peanuts?”

But she had no intention of resigning no matter how much the pension was worth and not merely because she was suspicious of his motives and unsure of the actual destination of the fortnightly payment, but it would have meant giving up some of her independence, the bit of her life beyond his control. She had recently been shifted to customer service, working behind the counter, dealing with the public, a promotion that meant a great deal to her, since it came with responsibilities. She also emptied the town’s postal boxes each evening. For the first time in her life she felt respected and trusted by others outside her family. But he mistook her resistance as part of an ongoing endeavour to oppose, out of spite, every scheme he had ever devised to improve our lot.

The washing machine disagreement affected him badly. He saw it as another slight; another insidious way of putting him down, of refusing his efforts to do something positive for the family, and for her in particular. A period of silent hostility ensued even while Pat was at work. He would sit with his legs crossed in his armchair, his back to the wall you might say, an elbow on the timber armrest and a hand against his forehead, not drumming any more, concealing his face like a barrier to anyone else in the room.

I could feel the resentment every time I entered. Usually he’d ignore me, even if I bothered to greet him. Sometimes he looked up long enough to glower. He’d turn the radio up a decibel or two.

At night he slept in the same chair. He claimed his spinal injury caused too much pain to lie in a bed overnight. If I got up early enough I saw him sprawled in the chair, out of his day clothes and in his pyjamas at least, his mouth agape, his false teeth on the coffee table, where his packet of smokes, an empty ashtray, a biro, and a cold cup of coffee from the previous night were arranged in their usual order. The only difference since our shift was an empty milk carton (recently invented to replace glass bottles) opened completely at the top, into which he tipped the contents of his ashtray after every cigarette.

His mood could last days, if not weeks, where the entire family had to tiptoe around and converse in muted tones again, as if someone was dying. I think all of us found it a relief when occasionally he left the house to place some bets at the public phone box a couple of blocks away, or entire afternoons when he took a straw broom and swept our street from one end to the other, making separate piles for rubbish and metal screenings, leaving the rubbish for the council to collect and barrowing the screenings to a path he was constructing around the front of the house, which he intended to concrete if he ever found he had enough spare cash to buy cement. I used to wonder what the neighbours thought, getting their street swept, having the cleanest street in Portland.

It left him doubled over in pain by the end of the day, his spine locked into some kind of hideous shape, from which it took days to recover. There is no doubt in my mind that his suffering was genuine, despite all the scepticism the medical team at the Repatriation Department was showing. Nevertheless, he kept doing manual tasks with grim determination, as if he were punishing himself for his ill luck, or he expected the pain might explode, like a sonic boom. Breaking the pain barrier. Then it might dissipate.

In a moment of sympathy or guilt I offered to help him. I wheeled a load of screenings to the path and tipped it between the edging boards he had erected. The weight of the load was more than I expected. The barrow tipped over and one of its handles punctured our cement-sheet wall.

I almost collapsed with the fear. But when he saw what I had done he said nothing. He went inside. He abandoned the path and never went back to it.

Partly to get out of the house while he was in it, partly to help my mother, I began to accompany her on the postal round in the evening. She drove a red van from pillar box to pillar box, and I jumped out at each with a key and emptied its contents into a large canvas sack. She claimed that my assistance shortened the task by half an hour.

I enjoyed our time together. We didn’t talk much—a little gossip, a few questions about my football training, the occasional mention of schoolwork—just enjoying each other’s company without histrionics or mood swings spoiling anything. It was like we had a secret pact, a special allegiance that nobody knew about. I felt close to her, as I had when I was young and my father was elsewhere. We had been through a lot together, my mother and I. We had looked after each other.

One day out of the blue I mentioned my father’s moods, which were getting me down. “Why’s he like that all the time?” I complained, without expecting an answer.

“It’s not his fault, darl. He doesn’t really want to be like that. He can’t help it if he gets cranky now and then. You heard what happened to him in Japan.”

I hadn’t heard the full story of what had happened to him in Japan, and ‘cranky now and then’ seemed a slight understatement. But she said it as though that was her final word on the subject. It never occurred to me to ask her if she ever talked to my father about his mental problems or his gambling, whether she let him know how serious she thought his problems were, and whether they had discussed ways of dealing with them. I suspect her approach was to roll with the punches, as they say, and hope that one day things would settle down. But she had been rolling with the punches for twenty years. She probably believed that talking about his problems would only make matters worse. She probably had no idea how to deal with him. Nothing in her upbringing had prepared her for her life with Denny. And there was no one around to advise her.

“How long can he go on blaming Japan?” I said bitterly.

As she pulled up at our next pillar box she glanced at me with pained expression. “That’s just my thoughts, not his. He doesn’t talk about it. He won’t talk to me about anything.”

I emptied the box and when I returned to the van I changed the topic to football.

Helping her each evening was good for me in other ways. Besides our collaboration, it gave me the chance to feel like I was doing something useful for my community. For the first time in my life I felt a strong bond to a place. It wasn’t much of a place, a tinpot port with spurious claims, I had learnt, to the title of first settlement in the region that would become Victoria, but a place, all the same, where I had been to the one school for several years and now had a house resembling a home, not to mention a few friends I could count on.

Besides, I was about to meet a new friend. And so, too, was Denny.

THE WOODS

There was a house that backed onto our place, which was still unoccupied, the last vacancy on the estate. One afternoon, a few days before Christmas, I was in the back yard weeding our vegetable garden when I heard the sounds of removalists unloading. I peered over and saw a sandy-headed tribe. The kids, with broad foreheads and vivid green eyes, all resembled the man. I counted six. Only the woman had dark hair. The eldest boy came over to say hello. He was about my age. When we shook hands he gave mine a mighty squeeze, smiled boldly to let me know he wasn’t someone to be trifled with, and declared he was Jimmy Woods. A few hours later there was a knock on our front door.

Always cautious about opening the door to a stranger lest it be a debt collector, Denny parted the venetian blinds in my bedroom where he could get a glimpse of the front porch, until I, behind him, recognised Jimmy and his father. When I explained who they were he went to the door.

Jimmy’s father introduced himself as Barry. His handshake was intended to place you somewhere in the pecking order below him. He wanted to know where the nearest phone booth was.

Denny knew it well. Since the shift to West Portland, some distance from the TAB, he had started up a phone betting account. He offered to drive them there, and I went along for the ride.

There was a store near the phone booth, and while Barry was ringing someone, Denny went to buy cigarettes. I was in the front passenger seat feeling tense with Jimmy behind me. I didn’t know what he was like or what he might say. As soon as the adults were out of the car he took the opportunity to speak.

He leant forward and tapped my shoulder, as if he needed to grab my attention. “Hey, what are the birds like here in Portland?”

“Most are all right.”

I must have sounded aloof.

“Yeah?” he persisted, wanting more information, probably details I was unable to provide.

“Magpies and cockies are all right. I’m not that fond of seagulls or plovers.”

“You’re kiddin’ me,” he snorted. “How do you get on with the other sort of bird? Sheilas?”

So I lied about my popularity with the opposite sex, exaggerating the true state of my romantic liaisons. But to avoid a cross-examination I quickly headed for neutral territory and asked him where he was from.

He told me he grew up in the western suburbs of Melbourne but had shifted to Perth and more recently to Brisbane, criss-crossing the continent. I waited for him to explain. Maybe his father was a travelling salesman like my father had been. But before he had a chance Denny returned with some ice creams.

The gratuitous gesture made a favourable impression on Jimmy. And the smokes that Denny shared with Barry were equally well received, even if the brand he offered was short on quality.

On the way back Denny asked if they needed anything while they settled in: groceries, linen or blankets, household cleaners, tools?

Barry looked Denny over, grinned and availed himself of everything on offer.

My mother was peeved, to put it mildly. She resented Denny’s sudden bouts of generosity.

“Charity begins at home,” she said to me. “It’s hard enough without him giving everything away. I work bloody hard to buy that stuff. And you saw that fellow, love. You only need to take one look at him to know you’ll never get one thing back off of him.”

When one of the youngest Woods’ boys knocked at the door the next day, thrust a bowl towards her and demanded salt, she refused, telling him to come back after he had learnt some manners.

Word of the incident got back to Denny.

He was furious with her, taking the antagonism she had shown towards the new neighbours personally. Why did she always try to undermine and embarrass him? Why had she disapproved of every friend he’d ever had?

Pat ignored his spurious claim to friendships and responded with a retort that was on the lips of everyone on the estate. “How come they jumped the queue to get a house? They don’t even come from Portland. And what Graeme tells me, they don’t even come from the state. If you’re worried about the needy, giving away our blankets and groceries, then what about all the needy locals who haven’t got a roof over their heads?”

Denny was cagey, giving a dismissive gesture, as if he were already privy to information that explained the Woods’ preferential treatment.

He began to spend a lot of time with the Woods, helping them settle in and taking them shopping. He even chatted, something I’d never seen him do, at their kitchen table.

As for my friendship with Jimmy, after my initial wariness, we got along well. I didn’t trust his father but Jimmy was different. He was straightforward and honest. And even he was capable of a few acid remarks about his ‘old man’, as he always called his father.

“Don’t let him get to you. He’s a bullshit artist.”

“Yeah, mine too,” I admitted.

It didn’t take long before Barry was bragging to me about something, about his brilliant memory (a photographic memory he claimed) or what poor cuts of meat he had bought, and how he could do better than all the Portland butchers, being a qualified butcher himself, or how liberal-minded he was about sexuality, making jokes about Jimmy’s virginal state, and guessing at mine, and telling us of the myriad girls he had already had ‘sexual intercourse’ with by the time he was our age, as if to say, you’ll never be the man I am, boys, you’ll never catch up to me. He kept asking me about my eyesight.

Jimmy enrolled in my class at Portland High at the start of the school year. We were both fifteen but he could have passed for someone older. He wasn’t tall, but able to shave meaningfully every day, and muscular enough for football. I thought he’d be an asset to the team I was going to play for in the local junior competition, once the new season began. In the meantime I hoped some of the respect given to a virile, untested new classmate would rub off on me.

His impatience to meet some of my female friends was finally placated when on the first day of the school year, much to my astonishment and relief, two of the most popular girls in our class, Kathy and Dawn, approached and requested to sit beside us at the back of the room. They handed us a biro each and asked for our autographs. Kathy was the girl I had given a brooch to in primary school for St Valentine’s Day. She had long since lost interest in me and gained a reputation as a girl who ‘did it’. Sidling onto the desk pew next to me she pulled up the hem of her uniform and pointed to the part of her thigh she wanted me to sign, not very far from her panties, which caught my eye inadvertently. My heart beat like a kettledrum. I don’t know how many notebooks I had filled over the years, practising my signature, trying to perfect it for just such a moment, but any calligraphic ability I’d gained deserted me the moment I touched her soft flesh.

“Jesus,” she muttered. “Not so hard.”

I had finished in a few seconds. But Jimmy, being a slow writer, apparently, took twice as long to sign Dawn’s thigh.

Later when we were alone Jimmy put his arm around my shoulder. “Sparkesy,” he said, “for a while there I thought you were crapping about all them pretty birds you knew. I reckon I owe you an apology.”

“I was just waiting to get back to school,” I murmured, blushing.

He gave me a grateful squeeze. “Things are definitely looking up.”

Ashamed of my shyness, I realised I was trying to create a myth about my virility to hide the truth that girls like Kathy and Dawn intimidated me. In fact I found most girls intimidating. Suddenly it occurred to me I ought to start climbing out of the deep hole I was digging before I made a complete fool of myself.

“You don’t want to get too carried away with those two,” I said. “They’re just mucking around, testing you out. Dawn’s got a boyfriend who’s already got a car. She’s not going to be interested in you that way. She only wants you to be interested in her. If she’s got a string of blokes walking around after her with their tongues hanging out, it gives her some bargaining power with the guy she really wants. But you and me, Jimmy, we come from the wrong side of the tracks. They wouldn’t go out with anyone from the Housing Commission, no matter how good looking he was. It’d be beneath them.”

Jimmy chewed on his cheeks and pursed his lips, impressed with my insight. “Jesus, Sparkesy, you’re right. You’re not half as dumb as you look.” He burst into laughter and punched my shoulder affectionately. “Only joking.”

I wondered which part he was joking about.

My logic was as effective as a cold shower on Jimmy. He studiously ignored Dawn and Kathy, much to their confusion, and turned his attention to girls that I knew were working-class. But they were a lot harder to impress. To my relief, if not Jimmy’s, the attractive ones had their eyes fixed firmly on bigger fish than us. We had to content ourselves with observation.

At a discreet distance we followed them home after school. We mooned about, channelling most of our frustrations into sport. With money I earned as a lolly boy at the Star Theatre, money I had started to hide from Denny, I bought myself a cheap, portable record player. Then Jimmy and I fell into the habit of listening to records in my bedroom.

The first single I bought wasn’t anything by the Beatles or Rolling Stones, who had started taking drugs and putting out weird albums, like Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Instead it was The Green Green Grass of Home by Tom Jones. Another I bought was Release Me by Engelbert Humpeldink. Jimmy’s favourite was Johnny Preston’s Running Bear. The poignancy of the lyrics honed our virginal angst.

When March came around pre-season football training started. Jimmy hadn’t played much, not competitively at least, but I was gaining a reputation as a possible future champion. Oddly enough, despite my slight stature, football was the one aspect of my life to which I was committed recklessly. On the field I was fearless. It was as if some intrepid being inhabited my body for the duration of the match but vanished as soon as I walked off. Knowing my sporting prowess would impress him, I took Jimmy along.

I was confident that someone with his build, regardless of ability, would make a half-decent ruck-rover, which just required a bit of muscle and tenacity, attributes he had plenty of.

On the first training night I noticed a few of the more senior boys huddled together, occasionally looking at him. Off the playing field, I was wary of every one of them. None of them still went to school. A few were already fishermen and well on the way to earning their first million. A couple had well-deserved reputations for toughness, even delinquency. I had played against them in previous years and copped a few blows to the kidneys and knackers, an aggression they were quite happy to display beyond the football field, in the streets whenever our paths crossed, although so far I had been spared a belting. So I knew it was unwise to aggravate them.

Once the training was underway, each one made a point of passing by Jimmy, at my side, to ask him if he knew a ‘Mr Lee’. Their behaviour baffled me. Jimmy became tense. Then one of the fishermen came around again and asked him if he knew of ‘any fences’.

In an instant Jimmy decked him.

Notwithstanding my mettle on the football field, my legs turned to jelly. The other toughs, taken aback momentarily by the unlikely turn of events, were sure to advance on us. I could see myself unwittingly and unwillingly targeted, outnumbered and outgunned. I felt sick in the stomach. I watched the fisherman struggle to his feet. Jimmy braced himself, waiting for the logic of his actions to unfold.

Then an amazing thing happened. The fisherman, cradling his jaw, emitted a nervous chuckle. “Fair enough,” he said and started to back away. His mates retreated with him.

“What was that all about?” I asked as soon as we were left alone. I glanced sideways at him in admiration and incredulity. To have as a friend someone unafraid to take on one of the town’s delinquents and have him retreat without so much as a scowl was a development I needed time to absorb. I wasn’t totally convinced the capitulation I’d witnessed was due just to Jimmy’s audacity. There seemed to be something else behind it.

Jimmy shrugged, reluctant to enlighten me.

During the rest of the training session, they steered clear of him.

“Come on, who’s this ‘Mr Lee’, for chrissakes?” I badgered later as we walked home, lugging a footy bags and boots, but with a touch of levity in my voice to make him think I didn’t care one way or the other for an explanation. “And what was he going on about bloody fences for?”

Jimmy, his shoulders hunched in thought, refused to answer for a while. He dropped behind me. I realised something worried him and let him be.

He eventually spoke. “Does your old man get Th e Truth?” His face was grim.

I nodded. Denny bought The Truth for the form guide but it contained a lot of salacious material, which is why I browsed through it, and scandalous stories of crime and corruption in high places.

“You know what a fence is, don’t yer?”

I patted the one we were walking past. “Here, mate.”

“Yeah, right,” he said, disgusted.

I was completely baffled. It didn’t seem the topic you’d find in The Truth. Nor did it seem a good enough reason to deck someone.

Jimmy walked in silence for a while, sucking in his gums and chewing them in thought. I dared not interrupt his reverie. He kicked a stone along the path. He sniffed profoundly, drawing snot down into his throat, which he ejected on an accurate trajectory towards a lamppost.

“I might as well fill you in, Sparkesy, since you’ll find out sooner or later. Better you hear it from me than them pricks.” He twisted his mouth like he had a toothache and looked at me sideways. “My old man was a fence.”

“What kind? Barbed wire? Electric? Cyclone? Picket?”

Jimmy snorted. “A receiver until he ran out of favours with the pigs.”

His father, I learnt over the next few days, was a crim, a fully paid-up, card-holding member of the Melbourne underworld. He had been a fence, a receiver of stolen goods, and to be a success in his line of business required doing favours for the police, mainly in the form of bribes. Police would come around to his house in Yarraville with a search warrant and find the garage full of stolen TVs, fridges, washing machines. Barry would slip them a pre-arranged amount and they would leave with an apology for the intrusion. “I understand. You’re just doing your job, boys,” he would say. Occasionally the police walked off with a TV or stereo, anything that would fit in the back of their paddy wagon. Jimmy had witnessed it often enough. But eventually the police started asking for more—information on crimes and other criminals—under the threat of arrest. Eventually he was an informer to some of the top detectives in Melbourne. For Barry, and most likely the rest of his family, it was a dangerous development. If the underworld found out, he was as good as dead. Or his wife, or kids, could be targeted. For a couple of years he managed to avoid suspicion. He became quite good friends with two or three members of the major crime squad, who were corrupt. But after some of his closest associates were convicted and imprisoned, he was ostracised at his local pub.

Terror gripped him as he contemplated possible reasons. Shortly afterwards he was arrested himself and held in remand. He phoned one of his contacts in the force who told him he was on his own. Somehow he had lost favour. He realised his cover had been blown. All the proof he needed soon arrived. An attempt was made on his life. Someone tried to put him in one of the large ovens when he was on duty in the prison kitchen. He fought ferociously and survived but knew it was only a matter of time before the underworld would have its revenge.

In a desperate bid to save his life, he managed to contact the Attorney-General’s Department to reveal all he knew about police corruption. He named several ‘bent coppers’. He was shrewd enough to insinuate that someone in the press already had the details and would release them if anything happened to him, a lie he used to pre-empt any official manoeuvres to silence him. The Attorney-General swiftly secured bail. Barry then did go to Th e Truth, whose editor-in-chief, fond of a good scandal decided to cover the story. An inquiry was held, not a Royal Commission as Barry had hoped, which would have had the power to summons suspects, but a Police Discipline Board Inquiry with limited scope. His name was suppressed. He was known in the court as Mr X. He was the star witness, in fact the only witness as it turned out because the inquiry ran into a wall of silence. And the few police that were charged had brilliant lawyers, who successfully discredited much of his evidence with withering marathon cross-examinations. Most charges were dismissed.

In desperation Barry requested and received protection. His family took an assumed name and disappeared, around the country at first, at each stop their cover being blown, until they reached Portland where it appeared their identity had also preceded them.

“We’re staying this time,” said Jimmy. “We’re getting sick of moving.”

“Know what you mean.”

“Our real name’s ‘Lee’ not ‘Woods’. That’s my grandma’s maiden name.”

“Fair enough,” I responded, having lived under a few aliases myself.

“Is this going to make a difference?” he asked me. “To us, I mean, mate.”

“No, no,” I answered, with a whistle, contemplating a boost to my own status: the mate of the son of a notorious underworld figure. “Makes no difference to me.”

He faced me and gripped my shoulders. “Thanks, Sparkesy.”

“Think nothing of it.”

Jimmy told me all this and more besides about growing up amongst criminals, about his father who could be more vicious than my own, like the time he had broken a beer glass against the bar and thrust it into the throat of someone he was arguing with; or lewd, telling filthy jokes that mocked women, small penises, virginity, homosexuals (‘faggots’, ‘fairies’, ‘poofters’, ‘queers’), the anatomy of black men, all of which Jimmy was keen to repeat. Barry was educating him to be open-minded. That was his intention, Jimmy said. That’s why there was an edition of Havelock Ellis’ seminal work on sexual mores and practices available to all his children and a supply of condoms if they ever needed them.

I listened to all this, utterly enthralled. The world seemed to have suddenly doubled in size. Not only was his father a criminal and a libertine, it turned out he was a communist as well, an ex-Melbourne wharfie and erstwhile member of the Ship Painter and Dockers Union, an unapologetic supporter of the Soviet Union. Perhaps this was why he and Denny became friends and got along so well. Both had been wharfies. Both were familiar with the inside of a prison. Both hated the police. Both were mavericks. But Denny was also, if not a communist, a believer in the state owning everything and the equitable distribution of wealth. Both were staunch members of the working class, even if neither of them worked. (Marx would have slotted them in with the ‘lumpenproletariat’.) They belonged to the last generation to hold an unshakeable faith in socialism.

And there was another thing they shared. Like Denny, Barry enjoyed a punt on the gee-gees. In fact he considered himself more astute at it than Denny, based on his success rate. He was more inclined to back favourites than any old nag at long-odds, which was Denny’s technique. My father was always hoping for the big win that would lift him out of the hopeless vortex he considered himself caught in through no fault of his own. The one big win… that made Barry smirk. They often spent the morning in the Woods’ kitchen, form guides spread across the laminex table, the tipsters on the radio, a cup of tea or coffee mug in one hand, Denny with one of his humble Albany Trims and Barry with a superior Rothmans in the other, discussing track conditions, weights, distances, jockeys, odds, the recent form of each horse, the likelihood of the race being fixed and any other issue that might influence their choices. Usually by mid-afternoon Denny would be back home, unable to stand the prospect of entertaining Barry with his accumulating losses.

Barry’s wife, Barbara, often attended these morning sessions. She liked to have what she called a ‘flutter’, a frivolous interest and a small bet on one or two races. She had an uncanny ability to pick winners but neither men took much notice of her, which usually prompted a quiet smile.

She was a taciturn woman, with long, straight, black hair, more suitable, I thought, for a teenager than a woman close to thirty, and moist green eyes that seemed to reflect some private sorrow. Quite a bit younger than Barry, she was his second wife. He had met her in a rough city pub six months or so after Jimmy’s mother had died in childbirth. I liked the way she used to say a lot with her silence. She obviously loved him but was under no illusions about what sort of man she had married. She knew of his criminal past; had lived through part of it. She knew he was mad enough to attempt to disinter his dead wife in a fit of guilt and grief. She had heard that story. She had heard all the stories he told. Barry rarely stopped talking about himself. She smoked constantly and, like Barry, enjoyed a beer, which meant she was unlikely to socialise with my mother. Two of the Woods’ children were hers.

The Woods’ house was not big enough for the entire family. Soon a bungalow was built for Jimmy and his brother, Tom, with a little help from my invalid father. And behind the bungalow, against our shared fence and to my mother’s disgust, a chook pen and ferret run went up.

Barry was a keen rabbiter. He bred ferrets and always had ten or twenty of them in various cages. On a day when the north wind blew, an awful stench wafted over our place, giving Pat another reason to loathe him.

The Woods eventually bought an old green Ford Customliner. They needed a vehicle not only to get around town but to carry their rabbiting gear: traps, ferret boxes, nets, spades, mattock, crowbar and knives. Barry had never learnt to drive so Barbara always went with him. Jimmy was even keener on rabbiting than his father. I often accompanied them, as Denny did on some days when there were no race meetings.

It seemed weird for me to be doing something with my father. Even things like our vegetable garden, which he had prepared, we never tended together. The experience would have been too raw for me. He would have found fault with whatever I did. If I saw him milling around the beds, tugging at weeds or planting seedlings, I kept away until his back gave out on him. Likewise he never appeared while I was there. We never made or fixed things together. Nor did he show much interest in my schooling except to remind me now and then of its importance if I wanted to avoid ending up like ‘the poor bastards around us’. Going rabbiting, then, with the Woods didn’t feel like I was doing something with him. Rather it was an experience more akin to being on a train together. We were merely travelling in the same direction due to shared space in economy class. Like strangers in a carriage, we avoided each other’s eyes, kept out of each other’s way as much as possible, exchanged words only when it would have been more embarrassing not to do so. I observed him surreptitiously, which was like watching someone who was yet to learn how to behave normally in public.

I wondered if he was trying to ingratiate himself when he took more than his share of equipment from the boot whenever we arrived at our destination. He was still young—just on forty—and strong, but he was bound to aggravate his spinal injury. Once he got home after rabbiting from dawn to dusk, having done more than his share of digging up burrows and hauling the catch or ferret boxes back to the car, he could barely lower himself into his armchair. As his body cooled his vertebrae locked together and for days he was barely able to move. Was he trying to prove his masculinity to Barry? Sometimes he acted the clown, falling into rabbit holes with arms flailing, head flopping like a rag doll, or chasing rabbits that escaped the nets, as if his life depended upon competing with the Woods’ whippet. At other times he held hapless rabbits aloft when he managed to extricate them from nets as a child might brandish a sporting trophy at Little Athletics. Jimmy used to snigger and whisper remarks about what a funny bloke my old man was, but I couldn’t see it. All I felt was humiliation. I couldn’t reconcile this man with the one who skulked and scowled around at home.

“Dad, stop it, will yer?” I whispered to him once. “Stop muckin’ around.”

“What?” he said, as if he was at a loss to understand what I was talking about.

“They take their rabbiting serious.”

“Me, too, my friend. It’ll save us from the poor house.”

Years later I thought that perhaps his chronic depression and the long periods he had spent in psychiatric hospitals had deprived him of the ability to socialise in a way that wouldn’t raise the eyebrows, either in amusement or alarm, of those around him. He had no idea how to be sociable. None of this occurred to me at the time. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I rarely tried to understand him. I was only concerned that others might think I was tarred with the same brush.

Still, with or without him, rabbiting with the Woods was something I looked forward to. I enjoyed getting up before dawn and being in the paddocks as mist rose from the waking earth.

I didn’t enjoy killing rabbits although I did it from time to time, pulling their necks or less frequently cutting their throats to bleed them, the preferred Woods’ method of slaughter. I felt sorry for these small creatures, ending their lives as if it were trivial when I sensed it was no laughing matter for them. But there was something about the self-sufficiency of rabbiting that appealed. Not only did the Woods have free meat to eat, they sold it around the pubs and caravan parks to supplement the invalid pension that Barry received for his ‘dicky’ heart. I enjoyed the feeling that they were beyond ordinary society in a way I was yet to fully comprehend. Partly it was their notorious background but it also had to do with the way they helped themselves. They asked nobody’s permission to ferret on farmland or set traps along fencelines. They merely opened gates and drove across properties in their imposing Ford Customliner whose huge motor rumbled arrogantly. What they did felt powerful. And it was enterprising. It seemed infinitely more sensible than gambling as a way to make a bit on the side. On top of that there was always talk about corruption: of police, of politicians, of ostensibly decent members of society, especially those in business, who often employed criminals to steal from their warehouses or retail outlets for insurance purposes.

To the Woods everyone was trying to rip everyone else off. We lived in a dog-eat-dog world. There were ‘them and us’. We were ‘the workers’ (without work, as it happened). And the workers were always getting screwed. We had to ‘look after our own’. I just had to keep in mind ‘which side of the fence I was on’. And we had to stick together. I began to feel like I belonged to their world. And Denny did too.

THE BIG WIN

The day came when Denny did have a big win. I don’t remember how big. Perhaps it was a double or a quadrella. He was at home. I remember being at the kitchen table reading the paper when the hissing started. That was his way of offering encouragement to the horse he’d backed. The closer it got to the lead the more strident his hissing, which was interspersed with shouts of Go! then You…little…bloody…beauty! as it crossed the finish line, each word enunciated separately, as if he were speaking to someone without much comprehension of English.

He came prancing into the kitchen. “It come from bloody nowhere!”

He hugged Pat from behind as she stood before the sink. “No cookin’ tonight,” he said.

Of course my mother was delighted but a little unnerved. I remained hunched over the newspaper, reluctant to participate in gaiety that wouldn’t last long.

“You see, your old man can occasionally pick a winner,” he said to me, as if he sensed how I felt about him.

That night we had to watch the sporting section of the TV news and listen once more to his hissing through the replay while we ate Sweet-and-Sour.

The following Monday, after much thought, he bought Pat a gift, an ironing board, as a gesture of atonement.

But she spurned it. “What do I want that thing for?” she complained. “I can’t iron on that. Look how wobbly it is. I’m happy just doing it the way I’ve always done it.”

My mother was someone who ironed everything except socks: sheets, pillow slips, towels, tea towels, hankies, underwear. She pressed everything on an old blanket covered by a sheet spread across the kitchen table. I had the feeling she was addicted to housework, or any sort of activity, which kept her from thinking too much about her circumstances.

“And I’ll keep on doing it that way, thanks very much. You might as well take this useless thing back and buy me something I do need, like some new underwear. I could do with that. All I’ve got is rags. Lucky no one can see them…”

She kept going on, ungrateful and tactless, which earned her a few choice expletives, and when these failed to change her mind he delivered a whack to her head.

“First it’s the washing machine and now the bloody ironing board,” he yelled. “Jesus wept!”

She cried out in pain and used some derogatory terms of her own, questioning whether a proper husband would do what he was doing, while I hid behind my newspaper.

I was afraid for her. She appeared to have finally had enough of his abuse. She had reached some kind of tipping point and it had emboldened her.

“Why don’t you give it to that mate of yours around the corner? You’ve given him just about everything else.”

I heard him open the cutlery drawer and the clatter of knives.

Suddenly Jean was in the room, flailing her arms and shouting at him. Her indignation was majestic. It shamed me. She placed herself between them, facing him defiantly, and was decked for her trouble.

For some reason he turned to me. “I suppose you think I’m a bastard too,” he jeered.

I turned the page and shrugged, scared of meeting the same fate as Jean.

My mother refrained from further incendiary comment. She withdrew, aware of how close she had come to the edge of her own sanity.

But this was the first skirmish of another period of domestic hostility, which had long stretches of cold war with the occasional flare-up, the occasional flashpoint, when Pat or one of us kids would be threatened with his fists or a kitchen knife. We were blamed for his run of punting bad luck, which in reality was a return to the norm. We were forced once more to creep around the house to avoid antagonising him. Pat kept providing him with meals, which he took without a word of thanks and ate alone in the lounge room.

In my room I would sometimes wonder if he enjoyed the violence or whether he was ashamed of it. Did he feel good after pummelling my mother or sister? Did it leave him feeling elated? Or did he feel bad about it? Did it fill him with self-loathing and remorse? Perhaps it was both.

With my fear of him and my conviction that a normal life would always elude us, I was turning away from my family, taking as little notice of its petty dramas as possible. What I did with my mates, like Jimmy, was becoming the only thing that really mattered to me. When I look back on that time now I can see how insecure I had become. My fear of Denny was one of a litany of apprehensions I faced each day, which perhaps most teenage boys experience to some degree: insecurities with regard to the opposite sex, insecurities about my looks, insecurities about my intelligence, my wit, about whether people liked me or not. My anxiety level was high and I tried to deal with it through displays of nonchalance or bravado, or arrogance at times, and indifference towards those I loved: my mother, my sisters, even my father. I can’t claim I was a teenager whom I look back fondly upon. I wasn’t heroic. I wasn’t like my elder sister who stood up for decency and paid a price for it.

I have only sketchy memories of my sisters, probably because I was stressed and becoming quite self-absorbed, although I do have photos of us together where we look happy enough. In one I have an arm around Jean’s shoulder. I’m slightly taller than her. My hair is short and so is hers. She is in a short skirt with a thick, glossy, black plastic belt around her waist. Both of us are smiling. At whom? At what? Posterity? The future? What sort of message were we hoping to transmit across the years? The truth? I remember once, mucking around, I gave her a Chinese burn and accidentally broke her arm.

In another photo I’m close to a school-uniformed Carol, giving a two-fingered salute behind her head. But, really, my little sister was off my radar. She was just starting high school and was almost always surrounded by a group of giggling friends who lived in the neighbourhood, including Jimmy’s sister, Wendy, all of them still scrawny kids.

Jean was doing her Matriculation. She wasn’t studying hard; she had no need. Everyone knew she would pass with honours. The infuriating thing was that, had she put in some effort, she could have been dux of the school. That didn’t interest her. Nor did the prospect of going to university. Ignoring everyone’s exhortations she refused to apply for any tertiary courses, not even for Teachers College, despite her interest in primary school teaching. Denny was infuriated. He took her defiance as a personal slight and reacted predictably. They were increasingly at loggerheads. Her independent spirit riled him. What I remember is a pattern of antagonism throughout her Matriculation year, which might have influenced her final act of rebellion.

After she received her results, which were good enough to get her into any tertiary course she wanted, she announced plans to travel. When she declared her intention to go to Western Australia, Denny became apoplectic.

He must have interpreted it as a desire to be as far from home as possible without actually going offshore. Her motive was pure spite, he bellowed. They argued bitterly. The quarrels were drawn-out and ominous. His threats only hardened her resolve. When finally she set out on foot for the railway station, lugging a suitcase, he went after her, raging and frothing, and forced her home.

My mother tried to intervene and for her trouble was shouted down. I stayed in my room. A week later Jean packed her suitcase again and headed back to the station. This time she escaped. But she left with neither parent’s blessing.

Carol and I felt a mixture of vicarious triumph and apprehension. With dread like a leaden weight in our bellies we contemplated the chances of becoming the new object of his chronic fury. Being older, I thought I would be next in line. Carol countered that, as a girl, it would probably be her. Together we made a pact to keep out of his way but fell short of extending it to any avowal of solidarity.

Jean went to Perth and we didn’t see her again for a couple of years.

Sometime after she left, Denny succeeded in his long campaign to have his TTI pension upgraded to TPI, which seemed to mollify him somewhat. I never knew about it. He never talked to me about his pensions. Nor did my mother. Jean became persona non grata in our family and wasn’t talked about. He settled into a period of inscrutable passivity, like a geriatric tucked under a blanket in an armchair in a dim corner of a nursing home, reading a mountain of penny westerns.

Around this time Pat had a long overdue breakdown. She couldn’t get out of bed and couldn’t stop crying. She kept the blinds drawn. I didn’t know what to do. Denny ignored her. I summoned the courage to ask him whether we should call a doctor or take her to the hospital.

“What for?” he scowled, staring vacantly. “Give her a week and she’ll be back on her feet.”

His prediction proved accurate.

In turns Carol and I took trays of soup and toast, and cups of tea to her. Eventually she decided to have a bath. She locked the door and stayed in the tub a long time. When she emerged she was in a dress instead of pyjamas. None of us commented, not even to ask her if she were feeling better. We simply carried on as if nothing unusual had happened. We collectively obliterated the week. Within a day or two she was back at work.

I admired her resilience. I let a few weeks pass before I asked her about it one evening as we were doing the rounds of pillar boxes.

“What choice have I got?” she said, unable to conceal her bitterness. “People like us don’t have the luxury of moping around for too long, do we, darlin’? I just needed a few days rest, that’s all.”

“Why don’t you just leave him?”

She glanced askance and sighed. “I might one day. But not until you children have grown up and gone.”

“You don’t have to wait for us. We’ll come with you.”

I had a couple more years of school to go. Carol was three years behind me.

“Once you’ve got your lives sorted out, I’ll decide what to do with mine. Promise me one thing, though, love. Never bet. Never waste your money on them bloody nags. It’s ruined poor Denny’s life.”

I was annoyed by her sympathy for him. She always seemed to find excuses, as if she knew or understood something about him to which I would never be privy.

“I’m not completely stupid,” I replied.

The temptation to gamble was there. Jimmy was quite a keen follower of form, if not yet a punter. Each Saturday he would study the guide and make his selections. But I had already developed an aversion to it. Jimmy considered this, along with my Christianity, a character blemish. It was, after all, what working class men did on the weekend. It gave them hope of a better life.

Was that what Denny wanted? If so, he wanted it desperately. He was never gracious about his continual losses, always finding someone to blame for his ill luck: Pat, me, my sisters, Barry Woods, the jockey, Da.

Our grandfather, Da, came in for particular attention towards the end of his life. Well into his eighties, he refused to give up driving around in his old unroadworthy Hillman. The family had begged him to stop but to no avail. So they plotted to hide the car, which ended up in our backyard.

I can’t remember how Denny felt about this development.

Although he was fond of Uncle Mick, whom he always called ‘Master’ (for reasons I never discovered), he would have been hard pressed to think of the last time anyone from Pat’s family had done him any favours. But there the car was, taking up space and killing the lawn beneath it, and being there when the police came around to question him over its theft.

Denny suffered paroxysms for weeks, even though no charges were laid. Aunt Gerty came in for particular attention. He saw her as the prime mischief maker, but he reserved most of his venom for Da.

“That silly old cunt! He’s fucking demented!” he bellowed. “The sooner he bloodywell dies the happier I’ll be. No bugger should be allowed to live beyond seventy, much less bloody eighty-something! They’re just a waste of space. I promise I won’t be hanging around. And anyone with any nous’d do the same. Spare the rest of us, for cryin’ out loud. I’m dead serious.”

He never lived long enough to put his assertion to the test.

Not long after the car episode was settled, Uncle Fred arrived in need of somewhere to stay. We took him in. Even Denny consented. An extra bunk was placed in my small bedroom. If he had been a conventional adult with superior airs and imperial ambitions towards my small territory, I might have complained. But he was a gentle soul who apologised every other day for his intrusion.

He was the only one of my mother’s brothers who still had hair. Perhaps that had something to do with the quantity of alcohol he consumed. Or the type. His preference was sherry. Port would do. Beer was his chaser. If there was nothing else around he didn’t hesitate to imbibe a little methylated spirits, or cough syrup. Indeed, we had to start locking the medicine cabinet after we discovered most of my father’s stockpile of fluid medications was missing.

He was so undernourished his brothers and sisters called him Slim. When he was young he had looked just like a youthful Frank Sinatra. But fate had been less kind to him than the crooner. His face was ravished, his body stooped, his lungs were clogged with tar. He had once been a long-distance truck driver. Travelling somewhere in the outback he had fallen out of his cabin, dead drunk, but had only run over his own arm, which was spared amputation thanks to the famous orthopaedic specialist Dr Kneebone. It now hung rather sadly at his side, full of pins. He could still use it but its muscles were atrophied.

He resembled a skid row derelict and perhaps that’s what he really was, but one fortunate enough to still have relatives willing to take him in when his wife, Val, kicked him out of their house in the city. She was a hard drinker herself, with seven or eight kids, only a few of them his, some from a previous marriage and others from more recent liaisons. Pat’s side of the family asserted that Val had the crudest mouth of any woman they knew, which coming from some of them was a bit rich. It impressed everyone that Fred was still alive, surviving both the booze and his wife’s regular bouts of abuse. The seasoned wits amongst us put it down to the pickling qualities of alcohol.

Despite his drunkenness he soon found work a few miles out of Portland at a small sawmill. There were vast pine plantations west of the town, but he milled hardwood from the patches of State forest to the north. Neither his inebriation nor his poor arm hindered him.

I half-expected the circular saw to finish what the semi-trailer had started. Each day he drove to work in an old Peugeot given to him by his brother Mick, who had a flash new Mini Minor. Each evening he arrived home drunk. One day, sometime after the Portland Railway Station on the foreshore had closed forever and the North Portland Station near our place had become the passenger terminal, Fred took a right turn instead of a left and drove through an open freight gate onto the platform. Fortunately the next train wasn’t due for a while and there was nobody waiting around. With the front wheels over the edge, Fred staggered away in a panic, imagining an imminent disaster. On the hoof he headed to the nearest pub for spiritual fortification.

As luck would have it the stationmaster recognised the car. He contacted Uncle Mick who in turn contacted Denny and together they managed to pull it from the platform with our sturdy Austin A40. By the time Fred made it home the drama was over. As he paused to catch his breath at our gate he was transfixed by the sight of the Peugeot parked in the driveway.

One misfortune followed another. Soon after this he inadvertently dislodged his dentures while peeing and flushed them down the toilet, only to retrieve them, months later, after Denny suggested submitting a lost property requisition to the local sewerage authority. Delighted, he brought the dentures home and gave them a cursory rinse before replacing them in their rightful location.

Denny and Fred got along well. They often sat in the lounge together listening to the race previews in the morning. Fred was always deferential, which pleased Denny, and he never made him feel bad about losing money. He understood what addictions did to a bloke.

Meanwhile Denny, as an inveterate campaigner for the TPI pension, set about trying to arrange one for Fred. He worked almost as hard at it as he had on his own.

A conscript in the Second World War with mechanical know-how, Fred had been posted to New Guinea where he had maintained and piloted a launch for Colonel Blainey. It had come under enemy fire a few times, enough (Denny argued) to turn Fred into a skid row alcoholic. The fact that he was well on the way years before the war started was an irrelevant detail that seemed hardly worth mentioning to the pension board.

Fred was a keen gardener. Now and then I went with him to collect cow manure from paddocks, picking up dry pads and putting them in old hessian potato bags. When we got home we emptied these into forty-four gallon drums and added water. Soon we had liquid fertilizer. To apply it Fred placed one end of a cut length of hose into the drum and sucked on the other until a murky flow began. It worked a treat. He didn’t seem to mind the taste. Besides, it was an excuse to rinse his mouth with a little purifying beverage. We had never produced any vegetables as robust and, dare I say it, as delicious, which bolstered my admiration for him considerably. The other thing he was good at was drawing. He could copy the cartoons from The Post and The Pix in perfect imitation. We stuck his best on the back of the dunny door.

His only undesirable trait, as far as I was concerned, was his constant inebriation. He usually retired early after tea and shut the bedroom door behind him. By the time I went to bed some hours later I would enter a cloying fog of alcoholic fumes, which no doubt accounted for my weird and wonderful dreams. He impressed Pat because he insisted on making his own bed each morning. She thought he was being considerate, he wanted to be useful, but that wasn’t his only motive. When eventually he departed and we decided to give his mattress a good airing, underneath it we discovered dozens of empty sherry bottles.

I could have done without the fetid air each night but Jimmy and I had a special reason for liking Fred. He was our driving instructor.

“Come on, boys,” he would say to us at every opportunity. “Time for another lesson.”

He would head for the country roads via his local, The Royal, where he always bought two bottles of beer and a bottle of sherry or port. As soon as we were out of town, he pulled over. Jimmy and I jumped in the front and took turns to drive while he sat in the back with his liquid dispensation. Sometimes we would take the ferrets and do an hour or so of rabbiting but mostly we kept driving around, along the coastal roads and through the State forests, our buoyant instructor on the back seat, occasionally offering us words of encouragement. “You’re doing a good job, boys.” By the time we returned to the outskirts of town, Fred would be nursing three beloved but empty bottles. He swapped places with whoever was at the wheel and drove home as best he could. Once he got the giggles as he swept around a corner and let go of the steering wheel to hold his sides as he tried to catch his breath. Had I not grabbed it and managed to hold our line until he recovered, the car would have ended in someone’s front yard.

Fred left us in a hurry. I thought it was because he had discovered a cache of duty-free alcohol, belonging to Rory, Uncle Mick’s son, who worked on a tax-free island in the Pacific and brought home bottles whenever he took leave. He kept them in a trunk in Uncle Mick’s garage for future consumption. When Fred found it he must have thought he’d won the lottery. Aunt Gerty discovered him asleep amidst empty bottles and unleashed a cyclone of well-placed kicks and abuse that eventually woke him. He begged for mercy and received it on condition he paid for every last drop, much of it top shelf, which would have seen him working at the mill for the next decade, a proposition beyond his imagination. Wisely, I thought, he absconded.

Jimmy and I regretted his departure. Despite his casual attitude to driving instruction, we had actually learned to drive quite well.

And he gave us moral instruction as well. Almost every day we spent with him, he advised us against boozing, smoking (‘If you have to, never do the drawback,”) fighting, hating, gambling and loving the wrong woman.

“Or you’ll end up like me, boys,” he lamented, wisdom I, for one, was ready to heed.

About the time of Fred’s departure Denny had a heart attack. I came home from school to learn he was in intensive care. My younger sister was already with my mother and close to tears. Pat said he was lucky to be alive. Her distress was barely constrained but she tried for our sake. Carol wanted to visit him. But due to the gravity of his condition it wasn’t yet possible. I overcame bouts of guilt to dream of a future without him. If he was too ill for his family to visit, he might still die. I went to school the next day animated by this queer feeling of independence. But when I went home Pat met me at the door and urged me to be quiet.

“Denny’s home.”

“He can’t be!” I said with wildly conflicting feelings. “I thought he was about to kick the bucket.”

“Don’t say that,” she whispered, genuinely affronted. “He shouldn’t be home.” She told me he had discharged himself. “They wouldn’t let him go to the toilet. He won’t use one of them bottle things you wee into in hospital. Says he can’t use them. The nurses and the doctor wouldn’t let him out of bed. They reckoned he was too ill. The doctor told him he could go home if he didn’t do what the nurses told him. Stupid bloody doctor!”

To the doctor’s horror Denny had called his bluff.

Once at home he had taken to bed for the first time in a year. The bedroom door was closed. Again we were creeping around the house on account of some misfortune. Not long ago, my mother with her nerves; now, my father with his dicky heart. On top of that, for months he had been complaining of a pain in his guts. He was shitting blood. His doctor had diagnosed an ulcer and prescribed Alka Seltza. But he was convinced he had cancer.

I went into the bedroom on the third day and inquired sheepishly about his health. He looked drawn and his skin was grey.

“At least here I can piss where I like,” he muttered.

In a week or so he was back to his old routine, sleeping on his armchair in the lounge room, reading the form guide, or, on days where no races were scheduled, a penny western from the stack he kept behind the paper rack—aside from a few school library books the only novels to be found in the house. And a gloomy intensity returned, like it used to be before the advent of the Woods.

Barry came around to see him a few days after he got out of bed.

My mother gritted her teeth and let him in, the first time he had come into our place. When he put on an extravagant show of civility, she assumed correctly that he was ridiculing her. He noticed she wasn’t fooled, which prompted him to be more polite. But with Denny he dropped the facade, and joked about mortality and the need for temporary celibacy, which he would have known was fairly redundant advice. Pat made him a cup of tea, how he (but not she) liked it, white, strong and syrupy, to remove an area of criticism he would have used against her later to amuse his family. The atmosphere in the room was palpable, as if a storm were about to break. Mockingly, he raised his little finger as he drank. But Pat kept her wits and avoided showing any sign of outrage or disgust until he left. Then she vented her indignation by mimicking his finger action, decrying the implication that she was a two-bob snob.

Denny told her not to be thin-skinned.

Soon he was well enough to resume his visits to the Woods, which, paradoxically, were a relief and an aggravation to Pat. Denny was getting better, but it rankled that he preferred the company of someone like Barry to his own family. Around at the Woods’, Barry would be bragging as usual about all the dare-devil things he got up to as a young man: the scores of women he’d had, the fishy smell of their genitals, or the crimes he’d got away with, the criminals and corrupt cops he knew, the police corruption inquiry he’d instigated. No doubt he exaggerated. No doubt he wanted us to believe he was in the big league, and we, the Sparkeses, were mere babes in the woods. Underneath all his glib bravado it struck me that he was really trying to ‘big note himself ’, as Pat would say, which was really a way of putting us down. He wanted us to know that he, more than anyone else, knew how the real world operated. And it wasn’t a pretty sight.

“It might be his world,” Pat said, when she heard of his exploits second-hand. “But it isn’t mine. And it doesn’t have to be yours.”

As much as I thought my life had gained a new dimension since the arrival of the Woods, I had grown to dislike Barry as much as she did. He was arrogant and cruel, even to those who befriended him. Once he showed me an article from The Sun that was about a man who had bet his pants at the races, a country track in the Western District. The man, who had lost all his money, left early and was trying to raise some funds for a bus fare to another town where he lived. He went into a pub to listen to the last race and, with the publican, wagered some work pants he had bought before the races. He lost. No name was given, but the gambler was Denny, according to Barry, who took great pleasure in letting me know.

“He’s a card, your old man,” he said between snorts of laughter, but what he meant was he’s a dickhead.

He was intentionally hurtful. He enjoyed seeing me blush and grimace. My father was a hopeless gambler but I didn’t need him to point it out. I didn’t want him to laugh about it.

I grew wary of him. He seemed volatile and treacherous to me, as well as a weak character, constantly demanding our admiration. And aggression usually followed if it wasn’t forthcoming. When he shot dead one of his sons, years later, after a drunken argument, neither my mother nor I was surprised.

Curiously, Denny never bragged about anything. Except for that one time with me, when he showed me the house he had built and gave me a mental arithmetic lesson, he never boasted about any of his achievements, his unusual strength or his boxing prowess. And I never heard him talk about women either, not about any conquests, nor in a salacious way, not even to comment on their looks as they walked along the street, as Barry made a point of doing with a leer or lewd snigger. There was Daisy O’Brien, our former landlady, but his comments about her were expressions of admiration. Indeed, when I look back on those years, I can’t recall a time when I noticed my father eyeing a female like most men are in the habit of doing. Perhaps he considered bragging and perving unseemly, but I doubt it. He probably realised nothing positive would come of it. Besides, for someone as determined as he was at self-destruction, trumpeting achievements would have been the last thing on his mind. As for his sexual attraction to females, throughout his life I never once saw the slightest evidence of it. Perhaps, unlike most men, in his heart he believed in monogamy.

Another factor: he never talked much. He didn’t know how to keep a conversation going. His friendship with Barry probably lasted as long as it did because he rarely interrupted the other man’s monologue.

But one day Barry raised a butcher’s knife to Denny’s throat. Jimmy witnessed it and told me about it. What had provoked the incident I never found out. Maybe Denny had spoken out of turn. Or stopped listening. Or maybe it was something he had said in jest that reminded Barry he was not the great hero, the great champion of the working class, he deluded himself he was. Or perhaps Denny had picked a few winners and he hadn’t.

Denny reacted calmly enough when the knife touched his skin. He knew when he was at a disadvantage. He knew what Barry was capable of. And his heart wasn’t the best any more, certainly no longer up to street brawls. He told Barry to calm down and, when the weapon was withdrawn, went home, the friendship over.

But Denny wasn’t the only one to experience Barry’s aggression. Perhaps the ex-informant was cracking under the pressure he felt he was under from the local police, who kept close tabs on him, harassed him whenever possible, pulling over the Customliner regularly for roadworthy inspections, inspecting the boot for stolen property, arriving at the house with search warrants, never letting him forget that he was a squealer who had tried to frame some of their colleagues. He began to threaten his family, over trivial matters. Jimmy, trying hard to ignore him, spent a great deal of time in my company.

We often went rabbiting on our own, usually riding into the countryside on my pushbike, loaded with a box of ferrets, a Gladstone bag of nets, a long-handled shovel, a lunch box and thermos. We’d take it in turns to dink each other, our dogs running alongside.

I had another dog, which I had called Sailor, after my first dog. He was a big, good-natured mutt, who spent much of his time during the week at the local primary school, where he allowed small kids to climb onto his back. But on weekends he wouldn’t miss the opportunity to hunt down a few rabbits with us. The Woods’ whippet came too. Together they dashed across the paddocks their noses to the earth following scents, occasionally flushing out a hare or rabbit, rarely making a kill. A hare in full flight was a marvellous sight to behold. It barely touched the ground. It even made the whippet look at tad sluggish. We laughed and hooted as the dogs in pursuit yelped their frustration.

Usually by late afternoon we had caught ten to twenty rabbits.

After Jimmy knitted their legs together in pairs and suspended them from the shovel across the handlebars, we headed home. I left Jimmy to gut and skin them in his backyard. He fed the offal to his ferrets and hung the skins in a shed to dry. But later in the evening, after I’d had a bath and changed my stinking clothes, I went with him to sell our catch around the caravan parks and pubs. We split what we earned evenly, and, since he did most of the work, he took all the profits from the skins, selling them to an itinerant furrier.

Barry resented our independence. He often grumbled when we arrived home with a good catch, complaining that we were overworking his ferrets, or ruining his nets, or blunting his knives. One Saturday morning he wanted to come with us. When Jimmy objected, his father punched him in the face and broke his nose.

He had started to slap Barbara about too. The attacks on her were becoming severe enough for her to genuinely fear for her safety. She secretly planned to abscond, but getting the Customliner down the driveway without rousing Woods wouldn’t be easy. It was too heavy for her to push by herself. So she got a message through to Denny, who agreed to help her.

Regardless of the condition of his heart, it was still a big risk for him. He knew what Barry was capable of if they were discovered in the act. Nevertheless he joined her at midnight.

Denny was always generous. He never refused to help anyone who asked. I’m certain, had he been rich, he would have given most of his money away. Since he had none, what he had to offer was his time and his assistance.

They managed to get the car onto the street without arousing anybody. But, queerly, the old V8 wouldn’t fire up. She tried a few times but then desisted, losing her nerve, afraid Barry would hear the starter motor cranking over and catch her deserting him. Unable to push the heavy vehicle back up the driveway, they left it on the street. Denny disappeared into the shadows and she crept inside. In the morning, when Barry found the car outside, he didn’t seem too surprised. Barbara was composed enough to suggest anonymous pranksters, of which there were plenty in the neighbourhood, or possibly the cops.

The reason the car failed to start was soon revealed. Barry produced the distributor cap he had removed the evening before, and tapped two fingers to his temple.

“Thinking,” he said. “Never trust any cunt.”

She never tried to leave him again.

MARTY

Jimmy and I had a friend, Marty, who lived about a block off the estate. He wasn’t too enamoured of rabbiting, but he liked to play sport. I had known him since primary school, but we only really became close friends after my shift to West Portland and into the same junior football team. We played kick-to-kick in the street after school. We practised basketball in the old drill hall every Saturday morning. We played tennis now and then on a bitumen court in our neighbourhood. We hit golf balls around his large backyard. His family was sports-mad. His father was crazy about golf. So was his mother, who also played tennis at the Portland grass courts during the week and didn’t work as far as I can recall.

Marty was better off than Jimmy or me. His parents were buying their own place. They had two cars. But his father was a boner at Borthwicks, a worker and a shop steward for the meatworkers’union. So we accepted Marty as one of our own.

On the football field he was a bit of a show pony, which we tolerated because he was in our team. He liked to play full forward so he could kick goals and gain the glory. But he was an accurate kick and won more than a few games for us. And we approved of his celebratory antics after each goal because these unsettled the opposition. Humiliating the opposition was a crucial objective of any contest, as far as Marty was concerned.

His arrogance often transcended football. He laughed at anyone’s weaknesses or foibles. He considered a strict adherence to any principle a handicap, not a strength. To bend the truth, then, was a sensible strategy on occasions, which often brought him into conflict with Jimmy, whom he considered naïvely honest. Their friendship was rather erratic, but in spite of this I got along well with him, in part because his arrogance was always garnished with humour and seemed to me to be laced with irony, as if self-deprecation loomed over every one of his wisecracks. Jimmy couldn’t see it; he rose to the bait each time. And each time Marty took his pleasure from Jimmy’s fury.

I never expected their friendship to last, but it did, at least until we finished high school and went our separate ways. There were even times when I was jealous of the depths of their affinity. For instance, while I barracked for Melbourne in the VFL, they both barracked for Collingwood, an allegiance I could never overcome. Being a Collingwood supporter was as good as being a member of a secret society, like the Masons. I could only stand outside and ponder the mystery.

Most days we were inseparable. We walked to and from school together. We were in the same classes. We spent morning recess, lunch and afternoon recess together. We eyed the same girls, fancied them and talked about them. Marty, in his cynical way, would tell us who he’d like to screw. On the other hand, Jimmy, the sentimentalist, would tell us who he’d like to be the mother of his children. I was less forthcoming. I’d merely contribute with a snigger and a nod, never a proclamation; such was my diffidence when it came to matters of the heart or the fraught erogenous zone. Only when they undertook an inquisition would I reveal my latest infatuation.

And it could change from week to week, for all of us, which often led to complications. Once, when Jimmy declared his attraction to a particular girl, I realised I fancied her too. I considered her unattainable but Jimmy’s confession made her more so. She had long flaxen hair, an angelic face and breasts ready to feed his babies. Her name was Katie and she strolled home, part of the way at least, in the same direction as we did. Jimmy would delay our departure from the school grounds until he saw her leave with her girlfriends, and then we would follow fifty metres behind, clowning around to draw attention to ourselves. If he accidentally passed her in the school grounds, he would manage ‘hello’, to which she usually responded with a silent glower.

But once she answered. Once she said ‘get fucked’.

The rejection broke his heart but my spirits soared. Afterwards I thought she looked at me in a special way, and I was about to try my luck with her when it suddenly occurred to me how disloyal it would seem to Jimmy. Unwilling to risk our friendship, I desisted. This set a pattern that would govern our lives over the next couple of years. It was Marty who got the first girlfriend, but that wasn’t until our final year of high school. Prior to that we just watched and envied other lads who seemed totally at ease with the opposite sex.

Instead of trying to chat up girls, we did what we did best, what we loved: playing kick-to-kick on the sports field, trying to out-mark and out-kick the dozens of other schoolboys. The football should have burnt off all my excess energy. Yet when I arrived home after school I was still restless. I often went inside, ran a bath, and sank into its steamy water to masturbate.

But it would be a mistake to think sex was the only thing on my mind after I reached puberty, or that girls was the only subject I discussed with Jimmy and Marty. There was sport, of course, but we were more sophisticated than that. Jimmy in particular took politics seriously. And not just the day-to-day machinations covered by the daily press and the TV news. He was a big-picture man. He was all for a total rearrangement of society, so that the working man would have the upper hand and all the rich bastards would be cleaning public toilets or washing dishes or collecting garbage or opening doors for the working man in big hotels or doing some mind-numbing job somewhere on the production line.

“The day will come,” he prophesied.

In our economics class he would argue with the teacher, who was in thrall of Adam Smith. Jimmy would ridicule the notion that prices fluctuated according to supply and demand.

“What fluctuations are you talking about? It’s a one-way street. Do you ever do the shopping, Sir? Well, then, just name one thing, one thing, you’ve ever bought that was cheaper than on the previous occasion you bought it?… Can’t think of anything, Sir? I rest my case.”

He clapped his economics text shut in a dramatic gesture.

While prices never dropped in a capitalist society, they wouldn’t rise in a socialist state, he declared.

I was all for the socialist state myself. Why shouldn’t the state own everything and the profits be distributed to all the people? The state, after all, already owned banks, railways, Telecom, the Gas and Fuel, even some factories in Melbourne. It ran schools. All those things seemed to work without the sky falling in. So, why not all the factories and all the businesses? Why should businessmen get all the profits? They did virtually nothing to earn them.

I held this view despite a sustained attack upon socialism from one of the mentors in my local branch of the Church of England Boys Society, to which I belonged for a while. He considered it the Devil’s work, particularly in its Soviet incarnation. And I held this view despite the hours I was forced to listen to Jimmy’s father extolling the virtues of the Soviet system. Any recommendation he made had to be spurious.

Strangely, both these harangues occurred while I was sitting in the back of their parked cars; the former in the middle of winter outside the granite church in the proximity of severe carved crosses; the latter on a sweltering evening just before New Year on the edge of what was known locally as the Nun’s Beach, on account of its proximity to a convent and a couple of bathing huts that the nuns used, with my father in the driver’s seat and Jimmy next to me, and all of us, except Denny, drinking beer and smoking Cuban cigars.

“The Russians give all their workers a house to live in. Everyone’s got a job. Everyone. Even the cripples. Hospitals and medicine’s free. There’s no lying bloody religion. They’ve got the best scientists in the world, working for the common man. They beat the Yanks into space. They’ll be the first on the moon, too, you mark my words. The working man’s got his dignity. He lives in a country he can be proud of. Everyone’s happy in Russia…’

Jimmy and I turned our attention to the girls on the beach in bikinis.

Despite what the deputy from the church said about the Soviet Union, I always thought of Jesus as a socialist. The New Testament was full of socialist stories. Blessed are the poor. The rich had less chance of getting to heaven than a camel getting through the eye of a needle. Jesus’ outrage at the venders who had turned the holiest Jewish temple into a marketplace, etc., etc… A lot of the people who went to St Stephen’s, particularly the church elders, were members of the local business community, whose attendance I suspected had more to do with appearances than conviction. I wondered how they could read the stories of Jesus’ ministry and still look so sanctimonious.

Their children, boys I went to school with, usually the ones who had failed or been expelled from private boarding schools, looked down their noses at me. They smirked at my piety, as if I misunderstood the real purpose of the church. At school they were an exclusive group.

In our Matriculation year, some of them already owned cars, birthday presents, which enhanced their status amongst the school’s female population. Whether they were ugly or not didn’t seem to matter. They socialised together, were choosy about their company; they even vetted the females allowed into their circle, who had to be bland, blond and willing. The one thing they were keen to let the likes of Jimmy and I know was that they had all dispensed with their virginity.

Some of them played football but their preferred recreation was surfing. Th ey were wealthy enough to afford surfboards, wet suits and, for those old enough, the vehicles necessary to reach remote ocean beaches.

Marty aspired to be one of them but Jimmy and I were different. We resented their air of superiority. To unsettle them a little, Jimmy would stroll right through the middle of their group, his hands in his pockets, his head cocked impertinently, nudging aside anyone in his way without an apology. Once when they were in a line, leaning against their lockers in the corridor, chatting to a group of appreciative girls, Jimmy strode past, his hand fixed at head-height. He slapped their faces lightly so that their heads turned sideways one after the other, like a row of mechanical sideshow clowns into whose mouths you dropped ping-pong balls. None of them uttered a word. It was left up to their female companions to protest.

I admired his audacity, his defiance, his pride. I was delighted to be his best friend. We were becoming inseparable.

I got him a job at the cinema. We worked the same nights. After interval, we might watch the main movie or walk around town. The air was always dank and salty but it didn’t bother us. We observed the Portland nightlife, the youths in flashy cars, the women who made money from the merchant seamen, the town loners walking their dogs. And if it was late enough when we headed home, we would pass by the bakery and help ourselves to some hot bread that had been placed on racks to cool outside. It didn’t seem like pilfering, more like plucking fruit from a branch overhanging a fence, which I supposed was the public’s right. In a socialist world it would be legal to help yourself. What pleasure we took—gorging on hot bread! It always gave us indigestion, but no matter! The cloying sensation made it worthwhile.

There were other cloying moments too, which occupied my mind more than socialism. We often lingered outside the cinema before interval, talking to people we knew, who were on their way inside or had emerged from the cinema for a smoke. A friend would come out with a damp stain on his trousers, wondering how he could clean himself up before he returned to his girlfriend. There was a new girl at our school who occasionally went to the pictures with her younger sister, a diminutive beauty whose blond hair fell around her shoulders, its fringe overshadowing her dark eyes. Her name was Judy Thompson. If Jimmy and I were outside she would stop and chat. I was soon besotted and lived with an irrational hope that she might notice my feelings and reciprocate. But her own gaze was turned towards the rakes in town who already had cars and incomes. She was affable and incapable of deliberate cruelty, but would inquire if particular youths were inside and, if so, with whom, unaware that her words were flaying me. I could tolerate the pain just to be near her, to feast on her sensuality. I focused on her lips, and imagined the day I would kiss them and she would respond with astonishment and regret that she had failed to notice I had been around all along. When I looked at her lips like that, something strange happened to the tendons behind my knees.

She started to turn up to the movies with the fisherman that Jimmy had decked at football training. Always they sat in the last row, which offered them the privacy they needed for exploratory amorous activities. I knew where they sat because at interval I was in the cinema with my tray and they bought ice creams from me.

At school I began to follow her around, accompanied by Jimmy and Marty, who were amused by my infatuation. Occasionally she allowed us to chat with her. It was enough to keep my hopes alive that somehow, miraculously, she would fall for me. Like my father, I ignored the odds, prayed for the rank outsider to get up and beat the field.

And then one day it almost happened.

There was a dance in a public hall that I attended with Jimmy and Marty, halfway through our final year at school. I was loitering with them in the vestibule, watching the girls as they arrived, when suddenly Judy appeared right next to me, in front of me, and I was bending forward, kissing her, without asking or thinking, and she responded, my first ever real sensual kiss, a cool, yielding sensation that invited me in deeper, into her heart I hoped, a kiss which I can still feel now half a lifetime later, even though it lasted less than ten seconds.

When she pulled away she said, “I’ve got to go to the ladies, I’ll be back. Promise.” And vanished.

I was dizzy. Jimmy and Marty were agog. And so were some of my rivals for her affection. I leant against the wall and waited, numb and unable to focus on anything, certainly not my future.

She never returned. I didn’t see her again that night. I did see her latest boyfriend arrive, not the fisherman but an overweight, baby-faced rich boy, who owned a powerful garish ute. I waited most of the night and then I scoured the hall, but they must have left through a different exit. At school the next week I saw a group of boys looking at me and laughing. Judy saw me and took evasive action.

Soon she no longer showed at school. Someone told me she had left. I thought it must have been my fault. Our kiss. Then I heard she was pregnant and engaged. Before the year was over she was married. I caught a glimpse of the swelling bride emerging with the careless groom from the Wesley Church, which I just happened to be passing.

Out of all the uncertainty and confusion of adolescence one idea began to form in my final years of high school that I would cling to like a lifebuoy. I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life in Portland. If I stayed to work in town after I matriculated, I could see all my wages being syphoned off by Denny. Like my sister before me, I wanted to get as far away as possible. As I approached an age where I could be independent, I was beginning to believe family life was a disastrous way for anyone to live. And I could see some plausible escape routes looming.

Jimmy, too, wanted out. In the evenings, when Jimmy and I hung out in my room, we often talked about travelling Australia once we had driving licenses and a car. We would work our way around the country, doing seasonal work on farms, away from our fathers who wouldn’t know where we were.

But for me at least this was a backup plan. A tertiary education was a more enduring escape route. So I decided to focus on my final years of high school, regardless of what my mates were intending to do.

Still, when I started my Leaving Certificate, I didn’t exactly select the most suitable subjects to advance academically. I decided to study art. And so did Jimmy. Neither of us had a gift for it. But I fancied I had artistic proclivities, and it promised to be a lot more interesting than mathematics.

When our fathers, at this point still talking to each other, discovered what we had enrolled in, they conspired against us, going so far as to approach the headmaster in person to request that we be transferred to a maths class.

Their involvement astonished me. I considered both of them far too self-centred to concern themselves with our education. I was amazed they were even interested in the subjects we had chosen. Both were highly intelligent men. But both had only a primary school education. It occurs to me now that, had they been given the opportunities that I had to finish high school and go on to university, neither would have wasted their lives in gambling or crime. They were thwarted individuals, frustrated and angry at the fate they had been dealt. Had they been given the chance to channel their intelligence through education, they might well have become contented men rather than violent and self-destructive. When I look back on it now, their intervention in our education seems like their way of saying as much.

They succeeded but their triumph was short-lived. Jimmy and I misbehaved every time our maths teacher turned his back to scribble an equation on the board, and we failed our first tests, which was all the excuse he needed to remove us.

By then it was too late to return to art classes. So, effectively we dropped a subject. I suspected Denny would be furious, but his interest in my education ebbed and flowed, and fortunately the tide was out by the time he discovered what I’d done.

On the surface I was blasé about the incident but realised I’d put my future at risk, and privately I decided to study doubly hard. I passed the Leaving Certificate reasonably well and went into my Matriculation year with a full scholastic head of steam, which seemed to bewilder Jimmy and Marty, whose interest in girls was intensifying with each rebuff they received.

Suffering similar feelings but lacking their tenacity, I avoided following in their footsteps, as they pursued girls around the town, hanging out in places where they thought they might meet the one in their dreams. There was a certain amount of self-pity behind my academic zeal. Once more I broke out in acne.

Without warning, early in my Matric year, the tide came in again. Denny decided my education needed urgent attention. I suspected he was trying to ensure I didn’t follow in my elder sister’s footsteps. He insisted on taking me to the Repatriation Department in Melbourne so I could talk to one of its educational officers about my future.

We left Portland at four-thirty in the morning. I tried to sleep in the front passenger seat but he woke me before Port Fairy, near the Craggs.

“You missed it. The cross, just by the side of the road back there,” he said. “The first white man killed by a blackfella in Victoria. Speared.”

He had seen it on occasion, when he was on foot, trying to hitchhike to Portland.

Throughout the trip, across the volcanic plains of the Western District, he gave a running commentary.

At Tower Hill, near Warnambool, he said, “It’s the largest sunken volcano in the world.”

And on our descent: “This stretch of road’s called the Miracle Mile. Experimental surface. Best in the world.”

He put his foot down to be part of the experiment.

Past Garvoc and over a railway crossing: “Saw a train plough into a car here once. Four killed. I raced down the track but there was no chance of pulling the poor buggers out. Looked like they’d been through a mincer.”

Seeing a hill near Camperdown, he said, “It’s a perfect cone. But some money-hungry bastards are digging it up; turning it into a bloody quarry.”

Across the Stony Rises: “These fences were built by convicts, back in the old days. They’re still standing.”

Past Colac: “See that old mansion up there on the rise, belongs to the Manifolds. They own half the bloody district, and they run the Victoria Turf Club. Lot of money there. Lot of influence.”

It was four hours to Melbourne, providing you drove at seventy miles an hour and didn’t take a break. Denny only stopped once because he had to fill the tank. He was as manic about driving as he was about everything else he did. When we reached the city, he scared the life out of me trying to catch every green light.

It became apparent within minutes of our arrival at the drab building in South Melbourne behind Victoria Barracks, which housed the Repatriation Department, that he hadn’t made an appointment. While we waited for an interview, he paced the customer service area, his hands thrust into his trouser pockets, fiddling with his keys and coins, becoming increasingly agitated as the morning wore on. Occasionally he argued with the hapless junior at reception, and once he thumped the counter with tremendous force.

When lunch time arrived and we were informed to come back in an hour, his indignation burst asunder with a verbal torrent about the treatment of poor rural clients who had travelled for seven hours to get here and had a seven-hour return journey ahead of them, only a slight exaggeration.

I was so surprised I can’t remember what else he said, just the menace in his voice. Others shifted warily in their seats. To everyone’s astonishment he leapt over the counter, his cardigan billowing like a superhero’s cape, and disappeared into the office.

There were no security guards around. Their deployment was not even contemplated in those days.

I heard more shouts and curses and cries of alarm. Within minutes I was being ushered into a side room. Denny was there, triumphant, with a flustered public servant, a diminutive, bespectacled man, who sat down with a profound sigh and told me the importance of maths or a language as a university entrance requirement. He spent some time asking me questions about my current studies and educational plans.

Finally, I explained I wanted to study at La Trobe University, which had no particular prerequisites, like maths. He shrugged, informed Denny that I was right, and rose to show us out.

He spoke to Denny at the door. “Come back when he’s got his results and we’ll see how we can help.”

I didn’t detect any condescension in his tone but Denny apparently did.

“You’re making it sound like charity!” he railed. “I’ve bloody-well earned this, you little runt, just like every other poor bugger who’s had his life ruined fighting for this useless bloody country.”

“This country does its best by its ex-servicemen, Mr Sparkes.” The man retreated to his desk and stood stiffly behind his chair, prepared to wear as much personal abuse as my father could muster but unwilling to take the vilification of his country sitting down. “We understand the sacrifices made, yours included.”

“Like bloody hell you do! Sitting on your arse all day!”

“Look, Mr Sparkes, let’s not argue, please.” He was trying his best to sound conciliatory. “When the time comes we’ll discuss your son’s education in earnest. But your boy has got to pass his exams first.”

“You needn’t worry about that,” he muttered. “My family’s got more brains than this entire bloody department.”

Outside Denny straightened his cardigan, hoisted up his trousers whose belt had dropped low on his belly, and chuckled. “That’s the only way to deal with these bloody pen pushers,” he said. “If you don’t yell and scream, nothing ever gets done. These bastards’ll just ignore you. In the end they’ll walk all over you.” He paused a moment, then added: “You better not let me down, my friend.”

Back in the car I dared to ask him what he had meant about his life being ruined.

He glanced across at me with his incendiary eyes.

“Never bloody mind.”

“You didn’t actually go to war,” I pressed on tentatively. “Did you?”

“I went to bloody Japan.”

I said nothing, waiting. He didn’t elaborate so I spoke again.

“Mum once told me you were beaten up by Yankee MPs for stealing blankets from a US army depot to give to orphans.”

There was a flash of anger but it subsided. “What’d she bloodywell tell you that for?”

“I pestered her, I suppose. She only said it to explain why you get mad at everything.”

“Did she now?”

We were still parked. I stared out the window at the car in front of us, unable to bring myself to look at him.

He snorted at my silence. “Surprise you, does it?”

I knew he’d been a boxer. And I’d seen how indefatigable he could be once he was in a fury. But I imagined he had been outnumbered, not to mention outgunned.

“All I remember is waking up at the bottom of a whole lot of bloody stairs.”

I turned away, unable to decide whether to believe him.

“Any lasting damage?” I said grimly.

“To me? Brain damage, they say.”

“Your brain’s all right,” I murmured.

“Tell that to the experts.”

While he started the car and forced his way into the traffic, I mulled over what he had told me. One mystery solved, I thought. So I summoned the courage to ask him about his disappearing act in Brisbane years earlier, adding recklessly that I had found out long ago that he had gone to jail. “From a policeman’s son,” I said so he wouldn’t be blaming my mother for every revelation. “That had something to do with what happened to you in Japan too, I suppose.”

He merely shrugged and said that he’d hit someone. He’d witnessed a driver speed through a school crossing. No kid was hurt but the recklessness had so enraged him he had set off in pursuit. (Again for the sake of children.) He managed to overtake and block the offender’s path. Pretending to be a plain-clothes cop, he ordered the driver out of the car and gave him a ferocious lecture. When that failed to make an impression he grabbed the fellow’s nose and gave it a punitive twist. Civic duty done, he drove off, unaware his victim had managed, through watery vision no doubt, to memorise his car registration number. Denny was tracked down and arrested on two charges: unlawful assault and impersonating a police officer, which culminated in a nine-month sentence.

“I try to do the right thing,” he said with a disgusted cluck as he accelerated to beat the changing traffic lights. “And look what happens.”

A car swerved to avoid us.

I sat hunched, reluctant to look at him. I felt weird, suddenly privy to his secrets, which I had brooded on for years.

As we travelled through the western suburbs my emotions were in turmoil. I thought of my mother. If she knew all along what I’d just learned, her enduring attitude towards him—her tolerance and passivity—was more understandable, more dignified. In his own eyes, and probably hers, he had done the right thing.

Then it occurred to me he had no car in Brisbane.

“Anyway it’s all in the past,” he said. “You don’t have to bother yourself with what happened to me. But don’t ever think I haven’t got your interests at heart. I only wished your sister hadn’t been so bloody stupid.”

Jean had gone to New Zealand with her boyfriend to work as a rouseabout. They had separated soon after. But she had met a Samoan in Auckland, a national footballer, and had already married him.

“Look at the mistakes she’s making. She’ll never get anywhere. She could’ve gone to university too and become whatever she liked. It was pure bloody-mindedness on her part. Don’t you do the same, Butch. Make something of yourself.”

Perhaps I had judged him too harshly over the years. As on this occasion, there were times when he’d shown an interest in us. There were times when he’d been affectionate, when he’d put his arms around my mother and hugged her and called her ‘pet’, or given me a friendly wrestle, or hugged his daughters. There were times when I caught sight of him sitting in his chair with a contented look on his face, a faraway expression, which looked so innocent I could hardly believe it was him. And when he noticed me gaping at him, he would smile, an innocent smile, a smile without a trace of malice. There were times, too, when we’d had fun with him…surely.

Only a few weeks before the trip to Melbourne, he had entertained some of my friends with a paranormal experiment. We were in my sister’s room because it was bigger than mine, playing cards on the floor, when he came in with a kitchen chair.

“Hi, Denny,” said Marty, audaciously using my father’s first name. “Know any good card tricks?”

“Pack up the cards and try this.”

He opened one side of his mouth, clicked his tongue, and gave a droll wink. He placed the chair in the middle of the room and sat on it, one eyebrow raised.

Marty and Jimmy were amused. Marty’s new girlfriend, Julia, began to giggle.

Once he thought we had dwelt long enough on the mystery of his presence, he spoke. “Three of you circle around four times, saying ‘you weigh nothing’.” He paused to allow his instructions to sink in. “Then stop, one on each side, one at the back, and lift me up with just your two fingers, like this.”

He clasped his hands together and made a point with his index fingers. Th

ere was a glint in his eye. His mischievous grin provoked us to try.

While Julia watched, Marty, Jimmy and I followed his instructions and lifted all fourteen stone of him with ease.

Amazed we hooted and almost dropped him from shoulder height.

It didn’t deter him.

“Now do the same thing, only this time go, ‘you weigh a ton’.”

And we couldn’t move the chair an inch off the floor.

This reminds me of another supernatural display. He appeared in my room holding a needle aloft one day when Jimmy and Marty were around.

“Here,” he said earnestly. “Jab this into my arm.”

He offered the needle to my friends. They looked at each other. Jimmy took it.

“Go on, try it,” said Denny. “I won’t feel a thing.”

Jimmy jabbed tentatively, reluctant to hurt him, until Denny insisted he do it harder.

Marty took the needle and jabbed as hard as he could, expecting Denny to cry out, ready to laugh at him for being so stupid. But Denny just grinned at him without an utterance.

Marty was nonplussed. “What the fuck?” he muttered. “How do you do that?”

We looked at my father’s arm to survey the damage, but there was no sign of blood.

Another time he thrust his arm before Marty. “No wrist watch,” he said. “What’s the point of wearing one? They always stop on me.”

Skeptical, Marty lent him his, a good quality watch he had got for his birthday. The next day when he came to collect it, Denny held out his wrist. The watch had stopped.

When I think back on it these days, the face he presented to my friends was amicable, almost avuncular, even a little whimsical. None of them, not even Jimmy, had seen his violent side, although he must have heard it often enough, living next door. There was a softness about my father that belied his aggressive behaviour, a passivity that led others to believe he was ‘a great bloke’, ‘a good sport’, ‘a real funny bugger’, whom they wouldn’t mind having as their own dad.

We were almost to Geelong before he broke into my reverie.

“Why don’t you become a teacher?”

“Maybe.”

We fell back into silence.

Somewhere along the highway he stopped to pick up some hitchhikers. They were down-and-out, carrying their possessions in a nylon bag, trying to get to Hamilton. He took them there. It was a hundred-mile detour. It turned our return trip into a seven-hour journey, just as he had predicted to the public servant. He listened to their hard-luck story, stopped along the way and bought pies for them. They thought he was a saint.

MATRICULATION

I had no idea what I wanted to become. Teaching, with its promise of extended holidays, had some appeal, but I had been in enough classes to know its downside. Football was my only endeavour where I showed some potential. Yet I couldn’t realistically see myself reaching the elite level where it was possible to make a modest living. I had excellent ball-handling skills, I could mark better than any of my opponents, but I wasn’t fast enough. Nor did I have the physique. I was described as wiry, which was a polite way of saying I sparred above my weight. It made good sense to focus on my education.

At school I buried myself in study to ensure I gave myself the best chance of getting to university. I had an aptitude for geography and I enjoyed or, rather, was intrigued by biology. But I couldn’t see a career emerging from either of these subjects. To pursue science at a tertiary level I needed maths, which I had dropped. Instead, I focused on the humanities: history and literature.

I learned about the Renaissance, about its splendours, at least. Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, the Medicis, Dante Alighieri. In literature we started with Chaucer and Shakespeare. I learned by heart the verses we studied. Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote/The droghte of Marche has perced to the roote… Soon I could quote soliloquies from The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, Hamlet. Later I fell under the spell of modern poets such as TS Eliot and Dylan Thomas. I secretly tried to write verse of my own. The notion of tormented poet complemented the sense of martyrdom I was assiduously cultivating. Unfortunately my poems were rather wooden. And the gravity I tried to instil failed to sound authentic. I turned my attention to theatre. Besides Shakespeare, there was Arthur Miller, whose Death of a Salesman neatly summed up the faults of modern society for me. There was Samuel Beckett who with Waiting for Godot encapsulated my existential plight. I started to think there was something remarkable about the stage. For a while after playing Henry Higgins in a school performance of Pygmalion, I even toyed with the idea of a career as an actor, before novels captured my imagination: Dickens, Forster, Scott Fitzgerald, Steinbeck. Each book I read was more enlightening than the last. It seemed to me that just about everything I studied in my literature class was significant. Each book offered me an insight into the world and myself that I would never have had otherwise. Each book, I soon realised, set me aside from my parents, who only read penny westerns, Mills & Boon and the occasional Readers Digest.

One day, on impulse, I bought three tubes of oil paint—the primary colours—two brushes, a palette and a masonite board which I sawed into smaller pieces. I loaded it all into a bag and cycled to a tiny remote beach on the cape south of the town, near Point Danger, where I propped on a large piece of driftwood and commenced to paint a seascape, yearning for a maiden of unbearable beauty, barefooted and loose-robed, to happen by. When she failed to appear, on that occasion and the next, and with an unsalvageable mess upon the masonite, my enthusiasm for a life as a solitary artist ebbed into the indifferent sea.

Neither Jimmy nor Marty knew about my brief flirtation with the visual arts. They would have been as derisive of it as Jimmy was of my religious devotion, which still mattered to me despite my adolescent preoccupation with everything carnal. I was still attending church each week, still an altar boy, even if the Reverend Walters had been posted to a different church in the diocese and had left town with his family. The arts, religion, spirituality, lofty thoughts were the last things on the minds of my two closest friends.

For one brief moment, when I was captain of our Under-18 football team, my father showed some interest in my sporting future. When we made the semi-finals, he gave Jimmy, Marty and I some pills before the match.

“Take these, boys,” he said in an unnecessary whisper, since we were in our lounge room and there was nobody else around who could hear him.

He was stooped because his back was playing up. He had on an old cardigan that hung loose into the space between his chest and the floor. His hair was getting long and he was growing salt-and-pepper sideburns, reminding me of the villains in Oliver Twist.

“They’ll have you moving like bloody greyhounds.”

He winked at Jimmy and Marty, who hooted their delight and then turned serious.

“Right,” Marty said, while Jimmy nodded, as if our lives depended on it.

Denny was right. We popped the pills before the game, played with great stamina, and won. But the following week, without a further supply of pills forthcoming, our performance in the grand final was sluggish and inconsistent. We faded in the last quarter and succumbed to an opposition we had defeated throughout the season.

That year I gained the ‘Best and Fairest’. Pat was inordinately proud of me. She had been my lifelong fan. And because I loved her dearly for what she had endured over the years for us, for me, I dedicated it to her. I wanted her to think I was growing into a fine young adult, even if I had doubts about that myself. Once when she instructed me to do something I lifted her up in an affectionate hug, until her feet were off the ground, just to let her know I wasn’t her little man any longer.

With just over a month till my exams I turned my complete attention to study. I discovered I had a fine memory. Fortunately the Matriculation Certificate in the late sixties focused on regurgitating facts rather than demonstrating analytical skills. I memorised most of our biology text, The Web of Life. Geography was fairly straightforward. History, English Expression and English Literature were intellectually more demanding. When the exams commenced in early November, I was surprised how relaxed I was. Jimmy was anxiously chewing his cheeks and puckering his lips, his eyes glazed, envisaging failure. Marty—mirthful, uncaring—mocked Jimmy for being uptight. He gave the impression he didn’t give a hoot.

Following the ordeal, spread across two weeks, we found work at Borthwicks while we waited for our results, which would appear in the newspapers in January.

Jimmy and Marty shared a job hanging up hides, while I worked inside, cutting beef carcasses into quarters with a splitting saw, working with a man who went to the toilet every half hour to take spirit from the flask he kept in a pocket. I was not far from the packers, where my mother had once worked. I saw what they did and the conditions they worked under. Once more I felt grateful to her for the hardships she had endured to keep us fed and clothed.

It occurred to me that the duration of this job at Borthwicks depended on how well I did in my Matriculation. I had a nightmare vision in which I was working there year in, year out, for the rest of my life, getting married to a homely local girl and starting a family. I wouldn’t neglect my kids, like my father had, no matter how dreary it became. It was a vision devoid of pleasure or joy, and replete with drudgery and unwanted responsibility. At eighteen that prospect depressed me. I wanted to live an interesting life, a life free of dread and anxiety, a carefree life, a life that was exotic and exciting. I wanted nothing to do with families.

But worse was the thought I would never be able to get beyond the clutches of my father. One thing I was certain of: he would never change. If I were stuck in Portland with him, how could I resist the constant demands his gambling made? I doubted I would have the will to resist his incursions.

I still believed in God. I had never asked Him for anything before, not even to see what He could do about my father’s gambling and violence. But now I asked him for a favour.

I woke up early on the morning my results were due to be published, with the light-headed, panicky feeling I imagined an accused felt at the end of a trial with the jury about to deliver its verdict. In a daze and without breakfast I rode my pushbike to an early-opening newsagency, and along with some other silent, wan-faced classmates, bought a newspaper. Thankfully Jimmy and Marty weren’t around. This was a moment to endure alone. I avoided searching the lists of names outside the newsagency as others were doing, some whooping, some ominously mute, but climbed back onto my bike and headed up to the cliffs, where I sat on a park bench for a long time, the newspaper on my lap, looking over the port and the broad bay beyond, waiting for the sun to rise from the sea. My hands were trembling. On my knees lay the key to my future. Please, God, just this once…

It was a beautiful January sunrise. In an instant I could feel its warmth. I found the Ss, then the Sps. Sparkes, Graeme. Good Lord! An A, B, C, and D, and the essential ungraded pass in English!

The sun was above the horizon. Through my blurred vision the sky was a glorious abstract painting.

My results were good, far better than anyone had expected, myself included. I was offered a place at La Trobe University, a major in sociology, for which I had applied after perusing a long list of subject areas before my exams, not fully understanding what sociology meant and without much conviction, but thinking the scientific study of society sounded important enough to be interesting.

I won a Commonwealth Scholarship, but Denny insisted I forego it in favour of the scheme offered to the children of war pensioners by the Repatriation Department. When I expressed reservations, reluctant to abandon the sort of intellectual prestige that accompanied the scholarship for a social-security handout, Denny was furious.

Where were the brains I was supposed to have?

The fortnightly allowance the Repatriation Scheme paid was more than a Commonwealth Scholarship offered. It seemed too good to reject but still I dithered. Denny’s enthusiasm aroused my suspicions. On the day he took me to Melbourne to enrol at La Trobe University, he detoured via a Repatriation Department office in South Melbourne, this time apparently to a pre-arranged appointment, where I was interviewed by an educational officer, who eventually persuaded me to abandon the scholarship. Besides the superior allowance, the Department bursary supplied all my stationery needs and footed the bill for all the books on any of the Required Reading lists in the subjects I undertook, which was worth hundreds of dollars.

Once I agreed, Denny’s attitude changed immediately. He put an arm around my shoulder, even squeezed it enthusiastically.

“Things are looking up, my friend!”

His mateyness unnerved me.

“We’ll see,” I said.

He drove to La Trobe University in the northern suburbs, a fellow interloper, which was how I felt, as if we were about to infiltrate a foreign country. He was extolling the opportunities awaiting me.

“Aren’t you bloodywell glad I’ve been pushing you all these years?” he said, indifferent to the road rules as he raced to the north. “Now you might make something of yourself.”

He dropped me near the boom-gate entrance to the campus.

“That’s my boy,” he said, touching me once more, patting my leg encouragingly before I had a chance to get out of the car. “Your mother and I, we’re proud of you, son.”

“Thanks,” I said, genuinely touched.

After he left me there to enrol and went off on some unspecified business, I walked around in a daze amongst the pale brick, oblong buildings. In the brochures I had seen the university had a semi-rural setting, which had been its main attraction. There were gum trees everywhere but that was the extent of its idyll. As soon as I set eyes on the place, I realised I was moving out of my league. Children from families like mine never went to places like this. I felt like a phony as I filled in the admission forms, had a mug shot taken for my student card, enrolled in History-Sociology 1, a couple of statistics subjects necessary for a sociology degree, and Philosophy 1. I didn’t have much of a clue about what I was doing. I chose Philosophy because another fresher informed me, as I dithered, that passing it was a formality.

“Everyone does it,” he said with a conspiratorial wink.

I took a few moments to sit alone in the bare central plaza, called the Agora, looking across at the vivid glass mural in front of the library. I tried to get excited about the new direction my life was heading. Finally I was getting away from my family. That alone should have made me happy. But I was numbed by the unfamiliarity. I tried in vain to glimpse the future. I hoped for wisdom, independence, courage, happiness. I had little idea then that it wouldn’t be that easy to get away from Denny, or that the next few years would be the most tumultuous in my life.

In the weeks before I shifted to Melbourne some odd things happened.

First Denny suggested I stop working. “Have a break before you start your course. You deserve it.”

His concern unsettled me. In recent weeks he had become rather accommodating, a trait I couldn’t remember him ever displaying before.

I took his advice.

Then to my amazement he offered to go rabbiting with me. Just the two of us! A father-and-son bonding session is what it would be called these days. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I borrowed a couple of ferrets and some nets from Jimmy, who chuckled at the prospect of Denny and I going it alone. I could see his point but pretended our excursion was nothing out of the ordinary.

We only went a few kilometres out of town, as if both of us wished to get it over and done with. We hardly spoke. And when we did our voices sounded unnatural, in his case higher than usual and evanescent, while mine became a strained, dull monotone.

Adding to our discomfort, the ferrets were inexplicably lethargic. Usually they couldn’t wait to leave their box and shoot into the dark recesses of the earth to terrify their quarry. This day they moped around the entrance, as if nothing was going to lure them deeper. I suspected Jimmy was behind some practical joke. More than likely he had just fed them before my request and hadn’t bothered to tell me, or he hadn’t wanted to risk his best predators with rank amateurs like the Sparkeses. So he had given us the duds. Still, I scanned our surroundings in case he and his father were hiding in the bushes somewhere, delighting in our predicament. When an hour transpired and we were still waiting for our first rabbit, I suggested we go home. And he was as eager as me to leave. He made a feeble joke about having to eat a different sort of rodent again tonight.

A few days later he asked me to accompany him to a men’s wear store, which was having a sale on summer shirts. To be able to buy me something, he must have had a win on the horses. Surprised, I thanked him.

But when I saw the shirts my heart sank. They were in a style I thought looked foreign, probably French—horizontal stripes, half-length sleeves, and, instead of a collar, a slit that exposed the shoulders—but nothing like any recent fashion trend, most likely failed stock from the previous summer, as their reduced price suggested. Denny invited me to choose a couple. I did so reluctantly, fussing over the choice, as he bargained with the shop assistant for a discount. The shirts were in a large crate in the centre of the store. There must have been well over a hundred. I fossicked around, wasting time, hoping to wear out his patience and change his mind. But, with no sign of him relenting, I picked out two. Denny came over and insisted I take more. Annoyed, I grabbed a couple from the top of the pile and handed them to him, thinking I could dispose of them once I went to live in Melbourne.

As he drove home he commended my choice.

“Why couldn’t I have chosen some other shirts or maybe a couple of T-shirts? I could do with a few more of those.”

“You saw the price I squeezed out of him!” he protested.

I went to my room and tried them on in front of a mirror, trying to convince myself they might one day come into fashion.

Denny poked his head around the door. “How do they fit, my friend?” He was giving me his unnerving grin. “Nice! Beaut!”

A short while later he got into his car and went out again.

When he returned he came to my room and asked for some help. The car was full of cartons. The front passenger seat. The back seat. The boot.

“What’s in them?” I asked.

“Have a look.”

They were packed with shirts from the sale.

“What do you think?” he said, immensely pleased with himself.

“You’ve bought me enough shirts for the next sixty years!” I cried.

“Keep your bloody voice down,” he muttered, looking around to see if the neighbours were spying on him.

After we had deposited the cartons on the living room floor, he began to pull the shirts out and hold them up to my chest. He had purchased the entire stock. “I got twenty percent off the sale price too. Twenty bloody percent!”

“How could you afford so many?”

He gestured off-handedly, as if I need not worry over such trifling matters.

“The guy just wanted to get rid of them,” I mumbled, feeling defeated, as if I were never going to escape his interference.

“Take as many as you want,” he said, ignoring me. “There’s plenty. You’ll need them for university. I’m going to make a killing on the rest of them. But take what you like.”

“You’re going to sell them?”

He mistook my query for greediness and was aggrieved. “You don’t think they’re all for you, do you?”

“Who do you think’s going to buy them?” I replied, my voice rising.

He gave me a wink, his mouth momentarily drawn down on one side.

“Come payday, I’ll set up outside the gates at Borthwicks.”

I stared at him, hoping he was joking.

“Oh, how embarrassing, Dad,” I said, when I realised he wasn’t.

“For who?” he demanded, his temper simmering.

“Jimmy and Marty are still working there.”

“They won’t care.”

“People coming out will laugh at you,” I pleaded.

“Rubbish.”

“These aren’t exactly the latest fashion.”

“Workers are never too proud, my friend.” He held another shirt up to my chest. “Keep that in mind as you’re mixing with that lot down there…your university mates.”

I moaned involuntarily at his plan, relieved I no longer worked at Borthwicks, relieved I no longer strolled out the gate alongside Jimmy and Marty. I couldn’t have endured their mirth when they spotted Denny with his wares.

But I was wrong.

The day he set up outside the gates, arranging the cartons like a guard of honour, pegging up some samples along the wire fence, Jimmy and Marty saw him. They hung around and humoured him with a bit of spruiking that seemed to set the ball rolling. The shirts sold well and for their assistance he offered them a few each from the remainder.

Jimmy declined but, surprisingly, Marty took his. He was deeply impressed by the initiative my father had shown, so much so that, when our paths crossed some twenty-five years later and we started reminiscing, it was one of the first anecdotes he related.

“He used to keep you on your toes, Sparkesy.”

“I could’ve done without that.”

“Nah, it’s all the crazy buggers, like your old man, that make living worthwhile.”

For me the most unsettling moment in the entire episode occurred that same evening, as Denny displayed what was left of his merchandise on the living room floor with an indecent grin and his pockets stuffed with dollars.

“I’ll sell the rest next pay day,” he said.

“What’re the cops coming in here for?” I asked.

Through the front window I had seen a police car pull up. He rushed to shut the venetians. Urging me to assist he began scooping up the shirts.

“Some little prick’s bloodywell dobbed me in!” His voice rose in disbelief.

I didn’t have a chance to ask him what he had done wrong. We rushed into my room and stuffed the shirts beneath the bed. He instructed me to lie down on it and read a book or listen to music. He didn’t explain what he expected me to do if the police entered.

I lay there catching my breath, with Tom Jones singing the condemned man’s lament, Green, Green Grass of Home.

When the door opened I expected to be arrested, but it was only Denny. He put his head around the door and grinned sheepishly.

“She’s right. They’ve gone,” he said, giving the all clear. “They just come about something else. Nothing to worry about, my friend.”

I asked him why he thought someone might have dobbed him in.

He shrugged, as if it were of no importance, now the police had left. “I haven’t got a hawker’s license.”

The only hiccup in our rapprochement came a few days later, when we heard from Jean that her marriage had ended.

“What did I tell you,” Denny cried. “Marrying one of them black buggers was never going to bloody work. Why didn’t she marry one of her own kind?”

“Someone like you, you mean?”

We were eating lunch at the kitchen table. The handle of his knife cracked against the table, startling the rest of us. “And what’s wrong with that?”

I sniggered warily. “Well, you’re just a bum.”

I was stunned by my own audacity. Or stupidity.

He stared at me, unable to believe what he had heard. Then he leapt from his place and rounded the table, hauled me off my chair and flung me across the room. I hit the wall and crumpled to the floor.

“You might think you’re better than the rest of us.” He stood over me, breathing heavily, his eyes protruding wildly. “But you’ve still got a bloody lot to learn. So don’t get too up yourself.”

And in that, at least, he was right.

I spent hours mulling over my life, realising it was about to change completely. What had it amounted to so far? Nothing much. Some sporting talent that wouldn’t extend much further than junior football, a middling scholarly aptitude, a faith that was diminishing by the day despite the divine intervention in my Matric results, no girlfriend, my virginity sadly intact, only two close mates, and a family I wanted to get away from. My school days were over. My dependence on my family was drawing to a close (or so I thought). The world I was about to enter would treat me as an adult. Was I ready for that? What impact would university have on me? What would happen to my friendships?

Marty had managed to scrape through his Matriculation and would go to Teachers’ College in Geelong. But Jimmy had failed. Jimmy was going to repeat.

I remember his face when he learnt his results. A stony expression. Injured pride? Resentment? He went off on his own to consider his future looking devastated and abandoned.

We still hung around together in the weeks before I left. We went hay carting together. The hard physical work did me some good. And so did the camaraderie. But nothing more was said about our plan to travel Australia.

“What’s another year?” he said. “I’ll join you after that.”

Yet I could see from his demeanour that he was already drawing a line beneath our friendship. And I was too. We had spent a lot of time fantasising about escaping our families together. But I had gotten my chance before Jimmy, and I wasn’t going to waste it.

One day I had an argument with him about the existence of God, in one of his ferret compounds, a topic we had avoided judiciously throughout our friendship.

I was still going to church each Sunday. I served as an altar boy for the new minister, a gaunt medieval-looking man, who kept pressing me to study theology and follow in his footsteps. As pious as I was, it felt like a trap, and he only succeeded in making me feel mean-spirited and guilty.

Jimmy ridiculed the notion of the virgin birth, the resurrection and every other fantastic episode that happened in between. He said he couldn’t respect anyone who believed such nonsense. I have scant recollection of the details of our argument but I remember it became more physical, a wrestling match, although neither of us was harmed before we came to our senses. Yet something impassable had come between us.

I started to cycle alone along country lanes on pleasant summer afternoons, hoping God would reveal Himself to me. I had laid the most important friendship I’d ever had on the line for Him. I opened my heart, waiting. The sun was balmy. Gum leaves shimmered. The breeze was on my skin. I had never been more receptive, more ready for Him to fill my heart. But He was as elusive as ever.

Towards the end of summer my grandfather gave me an accordion with large red panels and mother of pearl buttons, hoping I might follow in his footsteps by learning to play some old-time music. He was too old himself to offer me lessons, but there was a glint in his eye, an optimism and the wish of the aged that something precious of theirs would outlast them. Thinking he had chosen me, of all his descendants, probably because I was born on his birthday, I promised him I would learn to play. I fiddled around with the cumbersome accordion for a while but couldn’t imagine ever mastering it, or ever wanting to. I put it away, in my wardrobe, thinking it was something I could return to in my semester holidays.

Just before I left for university it disappeared.

UNI DAYS

I’m walking the grounds of La Trobe University, amongst all those imposing buildings, in a state of suspended belief. I’m so far out of my territory I’m beyond anxiety. I might as well have been marooned on another planet. The one certainty is I’ll never return to the place I came from. I’m in some kind of stupor. Yet, despite the alien environs, I don’t feel there’s any danger. It’s pleasant enough here and there are many familiar objects. The sun is drifting between puffy white clouds. There are ducks on a reedy moat and languid eucalypts everywhere. The inhabitants don’t seem much different from me, except they’re moving around in groups and I’m the only one dressed in a striped French shirt. Like others I carry a bag full of books and pens. But I clasp a map of the campus and a piece of paper with my lecture times, and I see no one else doing this. Eventually I locate the Eastern Lecture Theatre complex, which is shaped ominously like a flying saucer. It’s about to carry me to the furthermost reaches of the galaxy. I ascend one of its ramps and open the door to Lecture Theatre One. A blast of air, as if from a furnace, greets me. But it’s just the sensation of a myriad undergraduates gathering in the one place, filling the auditorium in layers above me, like passengers on board Spaceship Esteem that travels express to Planet Privilege.

Philosophy One. A guaranteed pass. The most popular course at La Trobe. The undergraduate noise is like an engine rumbling. I climb the side stairs, relieved that no one is taking any notice of me, until I find a vacant seat which has a varnished five-ply board that pivots into position for my notebook. Like a seat belt it makes me feel secure but slightly claustrophobic. Slyly I scan the auditorium. The sensation of being part of a herd is overpowering. Precisely on the hour a door opens and a nondescript man walks in, makes his way to the lectern. He’s old, bespectacled, slightly stooped, with sagging jowls and bulbous lips. Perhaps he’s myopic; he doesn’t pay much attention to those before him. Without waiting for the noise to subside he begins to talk into a microphone and some minutes transpire before all the audience realises the lecture has started.

It’s the first time I hear the word ‘utilitarianism’. I figure it’s important because of the number of times he repeats it. I write it on a blank foolscap sheet, my first comment on a new life. Weeks pass before I grasp its rather simple meaning, months before I learn that the lecturer, whose superfluity grows with every appearance, is one of the world’s pre-eminent utilitarian scholars, according to the gossip I overhear. After each lecture he sighs and puffs his cheeks until those lips start trembling. On the hour precisely, he turns and shuffles out, his face a dejected knot. Philosophy One…Utilitarianism.…the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Too bad if, like the professor, you’re in the minority.

Despite the strangeness of the world I had entered, my own happiness began peeping through. I was away from my father, and the freedom I felt left me light-headed. I was giddy with the notion of being my own master. It was a little scary but at least the heavy weight of my home life was lifting, like a fog before the rising sun.

The day I enrolled I had organised a place to board. It was twenty minutes south of the university by bus in the drab working-class suburb of Fairfield.

For the next few months Fleur was to be my landlady, an enormous matron with a scowl engraved on her jowls as if she found the simple act of respiration distasteful and tedious. For a modest fee she fed me two meagre meals a day, allowed me to use her bathroom and toilet, which tilted, incidentally, whenever I wiped my bum due to the structural damage she had wrought with her tremendous weight. I watched the programs she chose on TV and slept in the bungalow behind her pink weatherboard house, which had two narrow bunks with a couple of threadbare blankets, a painted wardrobe and an old dresser whose varnish was worn away. She wanted a second boarder, so I arranged to share it with another student from Portland who was attending Melbourne University.

James was a good-natured soul who didn’t mind me listening to his collection of records and once or twice asked me to accompany him on social outings. We shared irreverent sentiments towards Fleur, who complained loudly and constantly about the way we were eating her out of house and home, or how strands of our hair were blocking the bathroom drainpipes. We shared a lonely devotion to masturbation, which he performed on his squeaky bunk once he thought I had gone to sleep and I enjoyed more discretely behind the locked bathroom door. We also formed a secretive alliance with her diminutive husband, Norm, who would shuffle around behind the bungalow each morning for a chat about the weather and a surreptitious smoke, out of sight of his doctor’s avid enforcer.

I had known my roommate for years. We had gone to the same school and church. But a lasting friendship was unlikely. Coming from a well-off, reputable family, we had our differences. While money and the easy lifestyle that accompanied it was no obstacle to him, I was constantly trying to contact Denny somehow to beg for my living allowance.

I tried to ignore the financial straits I was soon in. I wanted to enjoy my independence. Wherever I went on campus I saw students revelling in the hedonism that defined university life in the early seventies. Few of them seemed to pay much heed to their studies. It sufficed to absorb knowledge through osmosis, their presence on campus the only requirement to gain a degree with honours, which meant they might as well spend their days having fun. Even the serious ones with a passion for student politics, who denounced the Vietnam War at rallies in the Agora most lunch times and organised protest marches through the industrial district immediately south of the university in a gesture of solidarity with the working class, with whom they assumed shared values and allegiance—even they seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely.

I was very impressionable in my first months at university. I remember a couple of students who strolled around the campus in fur coats (well before winter), their lovely thick beards and long hair reminding me of Paul McCartney on the cover of Let it Be. I yearned to be like them, to walk, laugh and fraternise as they did. Since leaving Portland I had been growing my hair longer, relieved that my father wasn’t around to order it cut. I cultivated thick sideburns. But what I saved on haircuts wasn’t enough for a fur coat.

On campus strange activities occurred daily. Odd behaviour seemed to indicate strength of character, a truly liberated soul. So no matter how silly it seemed at face value, it was worthy of admiration. Worthy of inspiration but not imitation for that would be ridiculous.

There was a student who stood silently above an internal stairwell in the library each day, dressed in a red-collared black cape, wearing ghoulish makeup, rather like a vampire. His arms were crossed and, except for his eyes, which followed your ascent or descent, he was motionless.

Perhaps he was part of a club called Strawberry, an anarchist group whose solemn duty it was to satirise academic life.

One day some Strawberries invaded a Mexican History lecture I was attending. Dressed as peasant followers of the revolutionary Emilio Zapata, they brandished toy guns beneath huge sombreros.

The lecturer stormed out, humiliated.

¡Viva l’insurrección!

Some days the university seemed like a circus.

Other activities were more orthodox but no less histrionic. As I mentioned, often there were students delivering ardent orations in the Agora outside the library, usually on the evils of the Vietnam War, which led to confrontations with student supporters of the government or to occupations of the administrative wing and the Vice-Chancellor’s office, where furniture was smashed and banners dangled from windows.

The orators were Marxists, immensely popular and charismatic. I listened to them, envying their confidence and commitment. I agreed with much of what they had to say but doubted whether I would risk expulsion or worse, jail, which seemed to be their goal.

I already considered myself a socialist without going to the extreme of calling myself a revolutionary. When Maoist students, the most radical revolutionaries on campus, handed me an English translation of The Little Red Book and recommended I discipline my mind, a quick perusal led me to doubt their sanity.

As I watched the barricades go up and the waving of red flags by Lenin and Trotsky look-alikes (none of the Maoists on our campus had the physiognomy to mimic their idol), it occurred to me that student activism was a pantomime or the political equivalent of sowing wild oats.

The other wild oats thing was going on everywhere too. The colleges of residence, Glenn and Menzies, seemed to pulsate with sex at any time of the day or night, with the possible exception from daybreak to mid-morning when exhaustion set in. It was as if I were the only one of several thousand students not involved, which left me feeling wildly desperate.

As in high school I became infatuated with unbecoming ease. Many female students wore no bras beneath their T-shirts, and their jeans were as taut as sausage skins. If the sun toyed with their golden hair I wanted to take it in my fingers and bury my face in it.

Of course nothing of the sort occurred. It wasn’t something you could just do without taking certain preliminary steps, of which I seemed incapable. On the rare occasions when a female student greeted me unexpectedly or asked me to listen to some music with her in a student lounge (Step One) I turned to stone. My mind solidified like lava oozing into an arctic sea. It was absurd. I kept thinking what is wrong with me?

I tried to develop a social life off campus. I heard of a folk club in the city that was free. I went and sat alone pretending to be an aficionado, suffering waves of nauseating self-consciousness but determined to come again until I was a familiar enough presence for some of the regulars to make my acquaintance. But after a few times, sitting alone the whole evening, I lost my nerve.

Meanwhile Fleur was demanding the rent money.

The mistake I was to regret for the next few years became apparent within weeks of shifting to Melbourne. Had I kept the Commonwealth Scholarship, a living allowance would have been lodged on a regular basis into my own bank account. The Repatriation Department, however, considered me Denny’s dependant, and the money from my bursary went straight to him. He was supposed to forward it all to me. Instead he channelled most of it into his TAB account. My situation soon became desperate. Fleur was demanding payment. And I was forced into the humiliating position of inventing excuses. At times I barely had enough for my bus fares.

At uni I made the acquaintance of Charles and Ian. They had seen me sitting on a bench outside the Eastern Lecture Theatre complex and must have noticed I cut a pathetic figure. They assumed I knew nobody on campus. But I was too ashamed to tell them that for the moment companionship wasn’t my most pressing need. My first impression of them was hardly favourable but I was grateful for the distraction. They told me almost straightaway they had just abandoned the idea of becoming Christian Brothers, alluding to the reason with a wink and nod towards the female students milling around.

Despite his background, or maybe because of it, Charles was a rakish character, whose gaunt face and dark beard resembled D.H. Lawrence’s, a comparison he alluded to often enough by drawing attention to a photo of the author on the back cover of his copy of Sons and Lovers. He had remarkably skinny legs and moved with a jaunty gait that created an impression he was rather keen to reach his destination, whatever it was: lectures, female dormitory, lunch.

Ian, on the other hand, was a nuggetty redhead with teeth that looked like a hastily erected barrier around some wild animal’s lair. Like Charles, he was majoring in English literature, dissecting such novels as Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre and Sons and Lovers. He had no interest in study per se. It was a means to an end, a way into some comfortable career, probably teaching, although anything labelled professional would suffice, while his heart was in sport—football. Nothing would have pleased him more than a career in the VFL. That much we had in common. He had the temperament, too, being pugnacious and dogged, but like me he didn’t quite have a professional footballer’s physique.

Charles on the other hand aspired to a literary life, which was perhaps why he sought a comparison to Lawrence. He already wrote lyrics and accompanying melodies for the guitar, which he saw as a kind of apprenticeship. He was in no hurry. He was enjoying his youth. But one day he would turn his talent to serious writing. He fancied himself as a poet. His favourite poet was Keats.

They were both from middle-class families and turned out to be politically conservative. But they were personable enough and I was in dire need of a bit of company, if only to take my mind off financial matters.

Not long after I met these two, a young woman took up lodgings with Fleur. I seem to recall her name was Maureen. She was Fleur’s niece. As was my wont I became absurdly infatuated. She was wilful and eloquent in her own peculiar way. She was ravishing despite a surfeit of freckles. She soon let me know I was in the presence of a female with a little too much sophistication for a country lad like me. She lived for clubbing. She had a lover. She hinted she took drugs whenever the mood was right. Her father, a divorced airline pilot, was worried enough to send her to his formidable sister to see if she could straighten her out. But even Fleur found her challenging.

The niece had a room inside the house but would have preferred the bungalow. She was peeved that her aunt was more interested in making money from rent than in her peace of mind.

One day she called on me while my roommate was out.

“If you guys weren’t here, I’d have this room,” she lamented. “It’d be almost tolerable here then.”

She flicked through the record collection in a bored sort of way.

“You’re so straight,” she said, at a loss to choose one to play, drawing out the ‘o’ in so to exaggerate her point.

“They’re not mine.”

“Do you like this uncool shit too?”

I feigned distaste, glad my meagre collection was still in Portland.

“You’re nice,” she added, playfully tugging at my sprouting whiskers. “Cute.”

The magma inside began to solidify. A cold arctic sea surrounded me.

She lay on a bunk, watching me, her hands behind her head, her raven hair spread over my absent roommate’s pillow. “I wish I could be out here with you guys, instead of where the old battleaxe can keep an eye on me. Even if you are a bit uncool, you’re nice.”

I glowed with self-consciousness and prayed she mistook my wordlessness for a kind of studied indifference.

She moved close enough for me to feel her humid sigh.

“I bet you wished I was out here too,” she said in a tormenting, breathless way. “I could teach you a thing or two about living in Melbourne.”

She jumped up and opened the door. She had to meet her boyfriend.

Our only other meaningful encounter came a week or so later on a night hot enough for a swim at the public pool, across the park behind Fleur’s place. My roommate, being a sociable lad, suggested she accompany us.

Seeing Maureen in a bikini was as close to a vision of perfection I had ever encountered. Her skin was white and silky. Her freckles and moles reminded me of leopard spots. She was in a gay mood. She started to splash us. We reciprocated. I ducked beneath the surface to escape her playful assault, and caught sight of her thighs and that slight mound most teenage boys dream about. She seemed to sense my eyes on her because she lowered her hand and ran some fingers teasingly beneath her flimsy bikini bottom.

When I resurfaced, spluttering, she put her arms around our shoulders, drew our heads towards her heaving chest and kicked her legs to splash us all.

“I think we’re going to have some great times together,” she laughed.

I went home full of youthful optimism. I had had some setbacks in my first months of university. I had been lonely. But now there was Maureen. And lately I was finding some of the students in my tutorials pleasant and interesting and amiable. I had no money. But it crossed my mind that I could speak to someone at the Repatriation Department. They surely knew my father well enough to see reason. I would ask them to forward my allowance directly to me. They must know of his gambling. After all, they had a long relationship with him, probably longer and more sustained than my own. I resolved to phone their offices and make an appointment. Once I had decided on that course of action a great weight seemed to lift from me. My spirits soared. I lay awake long after Maureen had disappeared indoors and my roommate had gone to sleep. My life would be wonderful, I resolved. My life would be interesting and full of joy.

The next day, out of the blue, Denny arrived, the first time I had seen him since university had started. He was dressed in a light-grey cardigan and tan pants. His hair, which was going grey, was immaculately parted, even after a wearying trip from Portland. One eye was patched to protect a corneal ulcer.

“Surprised to see me?”

More than surprised, I was incensed. But at least, I tried to reason, even he would have enough sense not to arrive empty-handed.

“I need money,” I said without a greeting. “You’ve haven’t sent me anything for weeks. How am I supposed to live? How am I supposed to pay Fleur?”

“Don’t worry about Fleur. I’ll fix her up. But I’ve got good news for you, my friend.” His broad grin made me wary. It meant something rash, I was sure. “We’ve shifted down to Melbourne.”

I gaped at him.

“You’ll be coming back to live with us. How about that, eh?”

“What have you done that for?” I said, unable to disguise my dismay.

“What’s the matter?” he said with a scowl. “Instead of getting your nose out of joint, you ought to appreciate the sacrifices we’re making for you. Getting a place down here wasn’t bloody easy.”

“You needn’t have bothered on my account. I’m quite happy where I am. All I need is my money.”

“Your sister’s pregnant.”

“Carol?”

“Jean.”

Jean had shifted back to Melbourne after her marriage broke up. She was working as a bookkeeper and boarding with an elderly woman in Camberwell. I had visited her once and had afternoon tea, but I realised we had little in common beyond family ties and had decided there wasn’t much point making it a regular rendezvous. “She goes and leaves that bloke in New Zealand,” my father went on, careful not to raise the estranged husband’s ethnicity again with me. “And now she finds out she’s up the duff. Didn’t I tell you something like this would happen? Huh?”

He was glaring at me, challenging me to disagree.

“What’s that got to do with me, my circumstances?”

“Soon she’ll have to give up her job,” he said. “She won’t be able to pay board any longer. She’ll have to come home and live with us.”

“She could’ve returned to Portland.”

“Portland’s no place for an unmarried mother.”

“She’s not unmarried.”

He kept grinning at me, waiting for me to reciprocate in appreciation of what he had done for me.

“She won’t want to live with us,” I went on rather desperately.

I looked around at the place that had offered me my first real taste of freedom. Fleur didn’t seem so bad after all. I groaned.

Denny slipped old Norm a cigarette, winked conspiratorially, and went inside to negotiate a financial settlement with Fleur, probably with an offer to pay my debt to her at the pensioner rate—twenty cents a week.

WEST HEIDELBERG

Somehow Denny had convinced the Housing Commission to rent him a two-storey red-brick tenement at the Olympic Village in West Heidelberg. The estate had provided accommodation for athletes during the Melbourne Games in 1956 and had been in decline ever since.

How he managed to pay removalists to bring our furniture from Portland, I had no idea. But there it was, already set up, disconcertingly familiar, in the middle tenement in a block of five on Boyd Crescent, one of several identical blocks that formed a semicircle around a wasteland that the locals called a park. From my upstairs bedroom window I looked across the squalid expanse towards the other dwellings, some with broken windows and doors, with flywire screens hanging off and gates unhinged. Plastic bags and paper, drifting across the park, caught on thistles or abandoned supermarket trolleys. Most of the cars around the periphery were destined for the scrap heap. Denny was pleased. My mother and Carol looked distraught but I was still too angry to bother with them. Why hadn’t they resisted the shift? Pat had to abandon the job she cherished at the post office. Carol had to leave her school friends behind.

Denny tried to put a positive spin on it. “Well, at least the family’s back together again.”

He looked surprised and hurt by the bitterness in our laughter.

The help in securing the transfer had come from a social worker at the Repatriation Department.

Mr Sparkes has apparently fallen out with [Mr Wood] and the latter is now ‘taking it out’ on Mrs Sparkes, eg. taunts her, insults her and tries to upset and frighten her at every opportunity. [An explanation of who Mr Wood is appears in the social worker’s report] [Mr Sparkes] feels that the situation is now at crisis point and that he will have to leave Portland or not be held responsible for his actions.

For this reason Mr Sparkes would like to live in Melbourne, but cannot afford the accommodation required by the family.

[Jean] , the eldest daughter is now also pregnant and will shortly have to leave work and return home to the care of her mother.

Mrs Sparkes.

A quiet timid woman who seems to be holding the family together at present. However she is obviously under great strain. It seems unlikely that she will be able to cope for much longer with her husband’s behaviour and with other problems…It is therefore recommended that the family…be helped to find accommodation in Melbourne as soon as possible.

This latest change in our circumstances upset my mother more than most she had endured. It was probably an accumulative effect, but at least in Portland she’d had an independent income, and there had been family and friends, like Connie Yallock, to depend on when Denny’s moods or behaviour became intolerable. Now on the Olympic Village housing estate she had no one except her children who as fellow sufferers could offer little consolation. She had never felt more isolated.

She found Melbourne too large and impersonal. She hated driving; the traffic was nerve-wracking. She hated the sprawling Northland Shopping Centre, where the only supermarket in the area was located. To her it was the antithesis of shopping in Portland. Shop assistants were rude and other customers more so. Crowds milled around. The air conditioning was stifling. When she wasn’t at Northland she felt confined to the house. Back in the Olympic Village she saw sufficient signs of violence and vandalism to worry about going anywhere on foot. Even the back yard was a disappointment, with barely room for a Hill’s Hoist and a garden shed. In a lighter moment Denny reckoned he could piss from the laundry door over the back fence and was willing to bet on it. Long-odds and a tad optimistic, as usual, but we took his point. Pat planted a few flowers along the wall and dug a small plot for some silverbeet and rhubarb but nothing like the garden we had cultivated in Portland.

Despite the antisocial appearance of the street most of the locals were friendly enough. They said hello and then kept to themselves, which suited us. But the next-door neighbours to our right were different. I met them when a burning armchair was tossed from their tenement into the front yard on the day I arrived. They were the Lawsons, and the youngest, a boy of three or four they called Tiger, had applied a cigarette lighter to it.

“He’s a little terror, I tell yer,” Mrs Lawson announced proudly. “He’s just got himself expelled from kindergarten.”

The entire family gathered round as the father, without a word to anyone except himself, extinguished the fire with a garden hose before he returned indoors, leaving them to enjoy the smouldering aftermath alone. No other neighbours took any notice.

The blackened chair would stay there for months.

Later that evening their little daughter, Fiona, who was a few years older than Tiger, arrived on our doorstep, dressed like an urchin, with a snotty nose and knotted hair.

“Mum says lend us some flour.”

It was nine o’clock. Pat, who prepared our evening meal around five, looked surprised.

Jean pressed her for a reason.

“Rissoles,” Fiona explained, annoyed by such a stupid question.

Surprisingly Pat obliged.

Soon after, we could smell more smoke. When Denny went to investigate, expecting to find another chair alight, he discovered the neighbour’s kitchen fogged with the oily fumes of deep-frying rissoles.

Fiona’s requests became a regular event. “Mum says lend us a tin of fruit. She forgot to get some.” “Mum says lend us some soap powder or we’ll have to wear our filthy fings again.” “Mum says lend us some sausages. She’s gotta cook tea for Pa before he gets home.” The girl fixed Pat with an accusatory stare. “Or else he’ll belt her up.”

Pa worked for Customs where he checked overseas mail for contraband. It must have been a tiring job because when he got home each afternoon he went straight upstairs to bed and demanded his supper.

We could hear him through the walls. “Woman! Where is it? Get a fucking move on!”

Pa was gaunt and stank of alcohol. Mrs Lawson was grey-haired and toothless. They looked too old to have young children. It turned out Tiger was a grandchild. But Fiona was theirs. When I mentioned to Mrs Lawson that I had never seen the young girl go off to school, she merely shrugged, as if the reason was self-evident.

“She hasn’t got all her marbles, has she,” she said, nodding her head to acknowledge the seriousness of it. “Fell down them stairs when she were young.”

She patted her daughter’s head affectionately.

Tiger’s mother, Suze, showed up a month or so after we shifted in.

I was about to drive down to the West Heidelberg Mall to buy some fish and chips for tea when she accosted me and introduced herself. As I got into the car she jumped in the passenger seat, telling me she wanted to get some smokes. She mentioned straight off she had just left her husband after he had threatened to ‘punch her lights out’ for being unfaithful to him.

“What I do is me own business,” she added, as if I were her regular confidant.

Her eyes widened suggestively as she waited for me to concur.

She looked like a crude imitation of Marilyn Monroe or Jane Mansfield. Platinum pompadour. Aqua eyeshadow. Scarlet lipstick. Ample bust accentuated by a clinging jumper. Bruising around one eye was a blemish and so too her doughy skin, which was erupting here and there.

“Well, Gary, I couldn’t see a bloke like you treatin’ a woman bad.”

“Graeme,” I corrected with a blush.

“Well, at last I’ve found a real gentleman I can talk to about these things. I appreciate it.’

She adjusted the blue pastel tights that chafed her crotch as she settled into the front passenger seat.

“And living right next door. There’s not many of yers around, believe you me.”

I smiled nervously.

“You’re the quiet type, aren’t yer? Not like the blokes I normally get to know.” She patted my thigh to console me. “Never mind.”

She sighed, musing, searching in her bag for a cigarette, forgetting why she was with me. “You don’t have a smoke, do yer? I’d do anything for a smoke.”

When we reached the mall, I couldn’t get out of the car quick enough.

I ducked through an alley, which was little more than a wind tunnel between a couple of rundown stores with their shutters down for the night.

The pungent takeaway joint was an unlikely sanctuary but I was grateful for the fifteen minutes it gave me. When I got back to the car, Suze had already bought cigarettes and was keeping her bum warm on the bonnet while she smoked.

She offered me one and smirked when I declined.

For a moment I imagined she was mocking my naivety. She had figured I was a virgin and was enjoying the tease. But the sensation quickly passed when we got into close confines of the car.

“Gary, you know, I really like talking to yer.”

I turned the ignition until the motor spluttered into action.

“You’re a good listener, I can tell. Not like me hubby. He won’t never listen to me.’

“You say you’ve left him?”

“Yeah. But I reckon, him and me, we should be talkin’ ’bout the future of our kids.”

“How many kids have you got?”

“There’s Tiger, and…’

Suddenly she raised her top and lowered the waistband of her tights to reveal a slightly flabby belly.

“I got another one in the oven. Me hubby reckons it’s not his. I tell him o’course it is, who else’s would it bloodywell be? I’m not gonna take no accusations from him!”

She had a protruding navel, I noticed, as she began to rub her skin.

“D’yer reckon I look pregnant?”

I gaped at her belly.

“I wouldn’t know,” I stammered. “I haven’t had much experience in these matters.”

“Yer sister’s well on the way, i’n’t she?” she countered, reaching for my hand. “Go on, see if it feels pregnant to you.”

It was the first woman’s belly I’d ever touched. I rubbed it tentatively and withdrew my hand, despite how pleasant it felt.

“What?” she demanded, offended by my reaction.

“Nothing,” I mumbled. “But the fish and chips are getting cold. My old boy will get wild.”

I grated the gears, trying to find first.

“One good thing about one in the oven,” she said. “You can stop worrying about getting pregnant for the next nine months.”

She chuckled, a practised husky sound.

I drove home fast in silence.

As we stepped from the car she lit another cigarette, eyed me coolly, and sniffed.

“Lots of things get cold if you leave ’em too long, Gary,” she called cryptically, as I headed for the front door. “Know what I mean?”

Pat was embittered. Her voice had a constant flat tone. Harsh lines had formed around her mouth. Her eyes were parched. Her skin was taut and pallid. It was as if a searing resentment was ravaging her. She had endured most of Denny’s whims over the years because ‘he wasn’t a well man’. But his decision to uproot her from Portland had depleted her reserves of tolerance. She made no effort to befriend any of the neighbours. She rarely went outside. She busied herself with housework, approaching it with a punishing doggedness, like an aggrieved menial. I tried to chat with her as I helped with the dishes or dusting or sweeping, but her responses were uncharacteristically terse and discouraging.

The prospect of being a grandmother didn’t lift her spirits either, as I would have expected. With our finances in their usual parlous state, she saw a grandchild as just another mouth to feed. To me her indifference towards the approaching birth was an indication of the depth of her depression. I was concerned she might be heading for another breakdown.

I didn’t talk to her about it. I didn’t know how. Besides, I tried to remain focused on my studies. I was desperate not to give up on that part of my life.

I attended uni from Monday to Friday and often on weekends. Sometimes I drove the family car, an old blue Holden, which had replaced our Austin after I left Portland, but mostly I caught a bus on the same route I used to take from Fairfield, along Oriel Road and through the industrial estate that surrounded Doherty and Waterdale Roads. La Trobe University was like an oasis, a haven amidst factories, high schools, a cemetery, marshlands and insane asylums.

Most of my time was spent in the library, pawing over journals and books, taking copious notes for tutorials. I was a slow reader and a slow learner. The texts were difficult but they kept my mind off domestic matters.

It had been obvious from week one that tertiary education bore little relation to anything I had experienced at school. There was little support or guidance, no obvious boundaries. I had no idea how to skim over texts, scan for relevant details, answer theoretical questions, and there was no classroom teacher to offer me guidance. I read every word. Reread. I tried to make sense of these marks on the pages. Easy enough when they stood alone, but as soon as they were combined with others they became a conundrum, which I laboured to the point of exhaustion to comprehend. I endured terrible anxiety and bouts of self-deprecation. And when I wasn’t ridiculing my own intellectual shortcomings I was feeling sorry for myself.

I found a corral in the library where I could hide behind a pile of books and pretend to be a scholar. I spent long hours there, pawing over Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Parsons, Marcuse and a dozen or so sundry luminaries, awestruck by the scope of their ambition.

There had been minds—there still were—that thought society could be explained in one majestic seamless theory. It was a comforting notion and perhaps these formidable intellects were merely acting on a tendency that’s in all of us: to find order where there could just as easily be none. But what impressed me most was the lengths to which they had gone ensuring their monoliths were consistent with every aspect of society, which included everything done by all the humans who’d ever traipsed the earth. What incredible audacity. To think they believed they had the answer to that, and then to pursue it doggedly for the rest of their lives.

If I leaned towards any of these seers it was Marx. I wanted him to be right, an orderly progression (at least between revolutions which I hoped in future would be brief and bloodless) towards a more equitable, just society, where nobody was master and nobody servant, and everyone got along amicably and could do any job they turned their hand to.

Yet, despite my hopes, I harboured doubts. What I saw everywhere was chaos and caprice. Everything seemed pointless, unless its point was private gain, personal ambition, indulgence, greed.

In idle moments I found myself studying the photo of Karl Marx that accompanied his tomes, trying to discover in that stern biblical face what motivated him. There was something about his face, partly his hairline but mainly his eyes that reminded me of my father. Was the old scholar manic? Was he psychotic? Was he schizophrenic? Was he sociopathic?

Once again I find I have retained scant memory of my sisters. I can’t remember offering or seeking any moral support. Perhaps we had a fairly normal relationship, with nothing memorable happening… little or nothing that has traversed the next thirty-five years or so.

My little sister Carol began attending a high school adjacent to the university, so I would drop her off whenever I took the car. She soon made friends with several girls from Heidelberg Heights and Rosanna. I think she was happy enough, once she had settled, but her skin, ravaged by acne and nervous rashes, suggested a different story. As for Jean, who had arrived to live with us shortly after we shifted in, she was swelling by the day. She became rather reclusive, preferring her condition to be a private matter, spending as much time as possible alone and reading in the bedroom she shared with Carol, who only went there to sleep. I suspect she resented Denny’s move to Melbourne but like the rest of us she had no say in it; she too became dependent upon the pension money he (and Pat since she had stopped working) received. Whatever the case might have been, I don’t recall any tension between her and Denny while we were at Boyd Crescent. They seemed to have worked out some kind of truce. I think he was secretly pleased that she was back with us, as if it vindicated his stance on her waywardness.

In his own way Denny was endeavouring to get a handle on his chronic financial shortcomings and maybe he was attempting some rapprochement with his family too.

For a while he seemed to be trying to moderate his gambling. He limited how much he bet in an afternoon. There was money remaining for food and groceries, and less histrionics when his luck ran out. He even seemed aware of Pat’s misery, offering to help out around the house, doing the groceries with her, buying her a bunch of flowers on Mothers’ Day, endeavouring to chat with her, although she seldom responded.

One Saturday evening he offered to take her to the trots with him. When she declined he invited me. I accepted in the hope he was trying to improve our strained relations. He never went to pubs so he couldn’t ask me to join him for a drink. He never went to the football or the movies. I saw the trots as his offer to socialise. It was territory that was familiar to him. I was prepared to take it as an olive branch. And I was happy to meet him halfway. Perhaps he just hadn’t liked kids, had never wanted his own, and now I was growing up a new more agreeable phase was evolving for us. Perhaps we would end up friends after all.

He drove to the Showground on the other side of town and led me into the grandstand where I’d have a decent view.

I was surprised by the casual ambience. Even though I had seen TAB agencies full of punters, gambling had always struck me as an aberration, a neurosis, a rather sad and solitary pursuit. Punters often congregated in TABs or betting yards, but most were reluctant companions. I assumed that was why Denny preferred to use a TAB phone account to the agency, even when it was not much further than the phone box.

The scene at the trots was an altogether different affair. It felt like a festival. Whole families seemed to be there together. It was as if they had come to enjoy the spectacle, the silks and horseflesh glimmering in floodlights. Despite periodic overtures of regimentation through the loud-speaker system, it was casual and relaxed rather than sordid or pathological. Many parents brought their youngest in pyjamas and dressing gowns.

“Your mother’d like this,” Denny said ruefully. “I don’t know what’s got into her lately.”

“She hates Melbourne.”

He didn’t get angry, as I half-expected he would, when he felt like he was being blamed for something. “Well, what could I do, with you down here and your sister about to drop her bundle?”

I wanted to remind him that there was no shame in Jean’s condition. Even if she was separated she was still married. Besides, when had he ever taken any notice of community mores and opinion? As for me, I would have been happy boarding at Fleur’s for the rest of my university days if he had only forwarded my bursary money. But I held my tongue and shrugged. At no stage did he tell me that Barry Wood had been menacing my mother.

When a race was about to start, everyone’s attention gradually turned to the track. Horses pulling sulkies milled around, assembled behind a barrier attached to a ute, and began to pace along the track behind it until at a certain point the ute began to accelerate and the barrier folded away, a signal for the harlequin drivers to urge their chargers forward. I remember the sound more than anything—the exertion of the horses, the hard breathing and the slip of hide against tense straps. For a few minutes the atmosphere around the track changed to a singular intensity, which rose to a crescendo and then was over. Cheering and laughter ensued and people’s attention returned to more gregarious matters, as if the race had been a diversion.

In the midst of all this Denny came and went, ascended and descended the stadium, like Sisyphus on the mountain in the essay I had been reading by Albert Camus. Had I not been there he probably would have remained in the betting yard all evening. But I figured that by getting him away from the bookies my presence acted as a restraint on his betting and so served some useful purpose, of which he was aware. To bolster our new-found camaraderie, he offered to place bets for me, offers he found easy to make since it was my bursary money he was using. I declined with a tactful wave of the hand. What unsettled me, though, was the smile he gave me each time he returned. It was so full of hope, as if he wished to say see what fun we can have together, see what our life could be like, if you would only come my way.

It wouldn’t have occurred to him to come my way a little. He showed no interest in my studies, despite the attempts I had made to talk about them. He had never asked me if I had a girlfriend, or even given me a sly wink like a normal father would have done, whenever Suze waylaid me at the front gate. He never remarked on it later, man-to-man, or chuckled at my embarrassment. He had never bothered to watch me play football.

I had joined a university team and was performing well. Pat occasionally came to watch me play, the only diversion she allowed herself. But not Denny. I went to the trots with him a few more times in the hope he would discover what interested me and might decide to be a part of it.

My mother was worried. “You’re not starting to bet too, are you?” she asked one evening as we did the dishes together. “That’d be the death of me, darlin’.”

I looked around to make sure my father couldn’t hear. “I’m only going to keep an eye on him. He mightn’t bet so much with me there. Does he give you enough to makes ends meet?”

“I make sure he doesn’t get his hands on my cheque.”

She had her hands submerged in the sink. I put my arm across her shoulders, which drooped under the weight of my sympathy.

“Don’t worry, Mum,” I whispered. “Jean won’t stay with us forever. I’ll bet she’s gone within the year once the baby’s born. And I’ll be finished uni in a couple more years. Before you know it you’ll be back in Portland.”

“What about Carol? She’ll want to go to uni. There’s another three years.”

“She’ll be old enough to look after herself. When I finish I’ll get a good job and set you up in Portland.”

I gave her shoulder a squeeze and she looked at me gratefully.

“You’ll have a better life then, I promise.”

“Some people are just born unlucky,” she said, not believing me.

She placed another dish on the rack for me to dry.

One day when I came home from university Pat announced grimly that Denny was in the Repatriation Hospital, having urgent surgery to remove a stomach tumour. He was in his early forties. I remembered how he had complained for years about the pain in his stomach. His doctor had treated him for an ulcer but he’d insisted he had cancer. He used to tell me there was blood in his stools. Perhaps he had been frightened and had wanted someone to believe him. But I had taken little notice, had even thought on more than one occasion it served him right for the hard times he’d given us.

I didn’t visit him in the hospital, which was only in a neighbouring suburb, but Pat went each day, sometimes with Carol. When he came home a week or so later I hardly recognised him. He seemed decades older. His hair was almost white. He had already lost a third of his weight. For the first time in my life I was heavier than him. He moved around hunched like a person who had been badly winded. Half his stomach had been removed.

I felt sorry for him. There was a good chance he wouldn’t survive long. If anything the anger etched into his gaunt features looked more intense than ever. I think he knew that any remaining traces of his youthful physique had been erased by this latest assault on his body.

I wanted to show him my sympathy, but stupidly I asked, “Are you all right?”

He grimaced and glared. “What’s it bloodywell look like?”

And then, guessing my thoughts fairly accurately, he added, “The sooner I kick the bucket the better off you’ll be.”

Pat was moved enough to put her own misfortunes aside for the time being. She nursed him. He went upstairs to bed for a week. She administered his medications and took him meals, soups mainly because that was about all he could eat. She was aware of the significance of his latest setback. It was another cruel, perhaps deadly, twist of fate for the young man she had fallen for so many years ago, whom she hadn’t stopped loving despite all that had happened, all the ‘rotten luck’ he’d been dealt.

I helped out as much as I could, running errands, keeping him in smokes, but my sympathy for him ebbed and flowed. I thought, if he dies, she can go back to Portland, my bursary would be sent to her, she would forward it all to me, and I…well, I would be where I wanted to be. Then guilt crept up on me, like a sea fog.

To avoid thinking about him I spent more hours in the library hidden behind books. With my degree well under way, I tried to convince myself that there were more important things to worry about than a dying father. The nature of society, for one. More Marx, Weber, Parsons, Merton. The indomitable march of history…

I was so engrossed I hardly took any notice of my sister’s pregnancy. So much so that after she went off to the Queen Victoria Hospital in the centre of the city and came home with a swarthy baby that had a smudge of sooty hair, I was more surprised than anyone, including Denny, whose reaction I watched with a degree of cynicism. We had a coloured baby in the family.

Yet to my astonishment Denny adored it at first sight—his first grandchild. The colour of the baby’s skin mattered ‘not one iota’, as he put it. Seeing my father, still recovering, still emaciated, standing on the front doorstep in flannel shirt and boxer shorts, looking down with a beatific smile at the infant cradled in his arms, I was struck by ambivalent emotions. Had he held me as an infant in his arms like that? I had no recollection of it, no photographic evidence, no tactile experience as I was growing up that might have indicated a loving bond existed between us. I wondered if his recent brush with mortality had something to do with his new-found affection.

I took a photo for posterity.

Having a baby in the house was just the tonic both my parents needed. Young life took my father’s mind off the gravity of his condition and hastened his recovery. You’d see him heating bottles of milk, testing the temperature by squirting it onto his wrist; even see him changing nappies when Pat or Jean wasn’t doing it. You’d see him with the daily laundry, washing the soiled nappies and hanging them out while whistling a quiet tune. If you woke in the night to a cry from the baby you’d soon hear Denny’s muffled voice offering to settle him down for Jean so she could get some proper sleep.

And Pat was just as solicitous. The baby took her out of herself. She carried it around swaddled in a pale blue blanket. She talked to it and blew bubbles until it smiled. She gently pressed her finger against its nose or the dimple in its chin. She kept telling Jean how lovely it was and offering maternal advice. She doted on it as if it were her own.

Perhaps that’s why within six months Jean was gone. As headstrong as ever, Jean would have resented all the children-rearing suggestions. She had her own ideas on good parenting and she could only see disputes as the child grew older. So she left to board in a distant suburb for a while and then to return to New Zealand.

A wistful quiet descended on our tenement.

Despite being forced back into the bosom of the family, I tried to maintain at least a semblance of independence. I wanted my parents to understand I was no longer a child. I spent as much time away from Boyd Crescent as possible.

My friend from university, Charles, had a car. So I went on trips with him or to parties. Someone was getting married in a country town; we went to the wedding and stayed the weekend. We had a few days camping on the coast. We went on a trip to the snow with a youth group from his church.

Towards the end of the year I accompanied him to Sydney to see the Pope, a pilgrimage that meant nothing to me beyond an excuse to get away for awhile, never having been a Catholic and abandoning Christianity after my philosophy tutorials on the existence of God convinced me that He was, by definition, impossible, an all good, all powerful being, who permitted the existence of evil. But to go I had to ask my father for funds. To my surprise he agreed and gave me what I considered a generous amount of money for the trip.

In Sydney we stayed with Cynthia, an ex-school friend of my elder sister, who had kept in touch with Jean and left an open invitation for any of our family to stay if we ever went north. She had married into a large family that had recently been featured in a popular national magazine. The patriarch was a renowned cook. One son was a ballet dancer. There was a violinist. The mother was a pianist. The youngest child was a prodigy who was already composing symphonies. The magazine had labelled them bohemian. How Cynthia had encountered a member of this family I had no idea. Perhaps it was because she was a talented artist and singer, and came from a middle-class family that was immersed in the Arts, someone with a creative streak who fitted effortlessly into the bohemian scene. The entire family was vegetarian. They made their own beer and yoghurt, and listened to classical music on the ABC. They painted and danced and sang. For me, at least, this was an astonishing experience. They lived in an ivy-clad terrace house in Annandale, which was full of clutter and pungent cooking odours, with musical instruments and easels in various rooms, and bookcases in passages and ceramic pots with exotic plants near windows, unlike the tidiness, the sterility, the smell of disinfectant in our place. It was so far removed from the insular world I had grown up in that I had to shake myself now and then to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. The way they lived opened my eyes to all kinds of possibilities.

Charles and I went to see the Pope. We waited in the crowd that lined the road from the airport and caught a glimpse of him as he was driven past. But we also went to Bondi beach. And one night we went to a strip club in Kings Cross.

Charles was unfazed by the mixture of spirituality and hedonism. Both were important to him. He liked the Catholic rituals more than the faith. Appearances were what mattered. Barely catching sight of the Pope didn’t disappoint him; he was able to return and impress his family and fellow worshippers with the tale of his papal encounter. The time we went camping, he found uncomfortable and a bore. Nevertheless, he took photos that belied his experience, and on return he invented an adventure to go with the pictorial display that kept his family enthralled.

He wanted to impress me too. So he took me once to his home in East Malvern, a posh suburb, south-east of the city, a comfortable Edwardian dwelling in a street lined with elms. I met his parents. It was a Saturday. Both were reading in the living room. But they were dressed in their Sunday best. Both raised their heads momentarily to greet me politely and to study the boy from public housing whom their son had charitably befriended, before returning to their books. The house was clean and, unlike our stay with the bohemians in Sydney, everything was in place. In that respect it had more in common with our place.

Charles pointed out the antiques: the teak dining table and tapestry chairs, the chaise lounge, the genuine Persian rugs, the elegant chandelier, the sideboards and buffets and bookshelves, the leather-bound books, the statuettes and Victorian oil-paintings of pastoral scenes.

His home was as strange to me as the house in Sydney, where at least I had felt relaxed enough to move. Charles’ family home had little to do with homeliness. It was formal, like an old-fashioned museum. Disaster would befall the entire house if anything was moved an inch.

He showed me framed photo portraits of his siblings. Two of his brothers were at Melbourne University, studying law. His sister was at La Trobe doing an honours degree in economics. They were a brilliant family, he wanted me to know. Every child had made it to university.

Before I left he took me outside so I could watch him shoot at birds with his air gun.

A few weeks after I returned from Sydney, one of my mother’s cousins, Carl, dropped in while he was passing through Melbourne. How he knew where we lived I have no idea. Perhaps he had found out through our relatives. Years before, he had stayed a few days with us in Portland during one of Denny’s long absences. I remembered the occasion because he had baked a huge salmon with an apple in its mouth, the first baked fish I had ever eaten and the first man I had seen cooking. I remembered him too because of the way his sides had touched door frames as he passed through. This time, at Boyd Crescent, he only stayed a few hours. But it was long enough for him to reminisce about the years he had shared with my mother in Rosedale. They talked and laughed until she wept. She grieved for her carefree childhood. Carl squeezed her fondly and told Denny how he’d had a crush on her throughout his teenage years, and what a lucky bloke my father was to have married her.

Denny nodded and pursed his lips but said nothing. He didn’t know how to respond.

When he learnt that Carl was a chef for the Fishermen’s Club in Eden on the south coast of New South Wales, he asked for a job in his kitchen, on the sly, so as not to relinquish the pensions. I was to go as well and Carl would ask the manager to take me on as a barman. I was to be my father’s alibi if the pension police got wind of his deception. It was during the summer holidays and I desperately wanted to earn some cash of my own.

As we set off towards Gippsland I experienced a queer sense of satisfaction. We were heading for work together, acting like responsible adults, working collaboratively as father and son. The times I had spent socialising with him at the trots finally seemed to be paying off. I was on his radar at last. I wanted to point this out to him but couldn’t bring myself to do it, fearing such a delicate matter might prompt him to change his mind. I didn’t want him turning around.

Instead I tried to learn a little more about him. I was beginning to realise I should try to get to know him better. I asked him about his family in Tasmania. I knew virtually nothing about them. I knew both his parents were dead. But he had two brothers and two sisters. All except one of the siblings had children. I knew none of them. He told me his elder brother had become a civil engineer and had overseen the construction of Launceston Airport before his premature death on a golf course. His other brother, Geoff, the one who had been kind to me as an infant, had disappeared into the highlands of Tasmania, working on the Hydro. Geoff was a bachelor as far as my father knew. One sister had married a forester. The other, a nurse, had gone to New Zealand to work and had married an author of children’s books. Denny had no contact with any of them. I gathered from what he had to say that he was either ostracised or estranged from them all. He hadn’t gone to any of the family funerals.

“Your mother writes to my sisters,” he said, “not me.”

When I asked about his father he made a strange noise, as if something astringent had coursed into his throat.

“He was a plasterer…taught me everything there is to know about the trade,” he said. “But he was a bloody mongrel, I tell yer. I used to get a hiding every day for nothing. I swore I’d never do the same thing to my son.”

He glanced at me but I was staring straight ahead.

“Did I ever belt you?” he insisted.

It was my mother and elder sister who had endured his beltings.

“No,” I admitted. “You tossed me across the room once but I deserved it.”

“There you go,” he said, vindicated.

It was a long drive to the New South Wales border. We passed through Rosedale, Pat’s hometown, and Sale where she had lived during the war years; over the Mitchell River at Bairnsdale, where decades later I would have a near-fatal car crash, past Lakes Entrance, a fishing port and holiday resort, and on through the remote State forests of East Gippsland. I was dead tired by the time we reached the border, but not Denny, despite driving most of the way, despite his debilitation from the surgery. He appeared more alert than when we set off.

Eden might not have rivalled the mythical beauty of its namesake; nevertheless, it was a picturesque fishing village, perched above a tiny bay, with trawlers, a cannery, gulls and craggy fishermen. I took to it immediately.

Carl lived with his wife and infant daughter in a rambling old timber house with a view over the Tasman Sea. Denny and I were offered the sunroom as our quarters.

After scallops for breakfast the next morning, Carl took us to the Fishermen’s Club, a garish place with a bar and a lounge full of poker machines. I had never been in a club like this before. In Victoria the pokies were banned and clubs served a different purpose to those in New South Wales, mostly lawn bowls.

He introduced me to the manager, a ruddy-faced fellow with hair that was greased straight back from the forehead and a thin moustache on an overhanging lip. He invited me to share a beer while we talked. As he explained my duties, should he decide to employ me, and questioned me about my experience in the liquor trade, which was less than my mother’s, I sipped gingerly on the beer he had provided.

Like my parents I rarely drank any sort of alcohol. After the first few mouthfuls I felt nauseous. The more I drank, the more I felt like throwing up. I cursed Uncle Carl for feeding me scallops. Seafood had never agreed with me. I tried to appear relaxed, confident, as I struggled to prevent my stomach disgorging its contents.

He took me behind the bar to show me how to pour beer that was on tap, and in the middle of his demonstration I excused myself, rushed into the toilet and vomited.

After I cleaned myself up and returned to the bar, the manager gave me a queer look and asked if I was all right. I feigned nonchalance but he wasn’t convinced. He told me he would give me a day’s trial. If I handled the work he would employ me the following day.

It turned out to be easy. All I really had to do, I soon figured out, was keep the customers in change for the pokies. Coins only. They

bought drinks as an excuse for getting more coins. Some stayed all day, losing money. The machines were as voracious as fledglings.

As much as I found the job unpleasant and dreary I could have put up with it for the rest of my summer break, for the sake of the money I’d earn. But my physical condition deteriorated as the day wore on.

When Denny came by to see how I was doing, he gaped at me.

“God Al-bloody-mighty!” he muttered. “Come on, let me get you out of here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Look at you, boy. You’re as yellow as a Chinaman.”

There were several country hospitals in Gippsland but he decided to return to Melbourne.

His eagerness to leave aroused my suspicions. All manner of possibilities crossed my mind before I entertained the thought that he might genuinely be concerned about my health. Besides, I didn’t for a moment consider there was anything seriously wrong with me.

“Look at yourself,” he advised, turning the rear view mirror my way.

I did and needed no more persuading. The few times I had walked through Chinatown in Melbourne, I had never seen anyone the jaundiced hue I had become.

“Every bloody time I get a job something conspires against me,” he muttered.

“I’m sorry.” I felt wretched.

The journey home was nightmarish. My condition deteriorated with every mile we travelled. By the time we reached Melbourne I was beyond helping myself.

Denny took me to casualty at PANCH, the general hospital nearest our home, where an intern recommended I go straight to Melbourne’s Infectious Diseases Hospital in Fairfield.

“Don’t let any bugger tell you I don’t care for you, my friend,” he said awkwardly.

The hospital was on the banks of the Yarra River, surrounded by bushland, a few kilometres from the heart of the city. I was placed in an isolation ward for hepatitis sufferers, which was as gloomy as a prison, with grey walls and barred windows. I had no view of the sedentary river.

I lay on my steel-framed bunk and stared at the stains on the ceiling high above, too weak to move. I was sweating so much from a fever that my bedding and pyjamas had to be changed three times overnight in the first week I was there. During the day I stayed on my bed in a torpor, listening to the radio, without the strength or inclination to hold a book. The doctors had told me I could be confined for weeks, and that only members of my immediate family could visit, just for short periods and wearing hospital gowns and masks, for fear I might infect others.

The days were boring. Each hour dragged. I drifted in and out of reveries about my life. What had I done with it so far? Where was it heading? What did I want to do with the rest of my days, assuming I survived the disease? But I couldn’t concentrate, not even on trivial matters, much less abstractions like these. The persistent sensation I had was of a life going wherever external forces took it. I was like litter blown here and there by fickle winds.

I shared the ward with few others, a young fat man who smiled but said nothing, and a sullen teenager whose hair was cut short, except for a few strands down his neck, who wouldn’t stop talking to me about a rock star I’d never heard of called Alice Cooper and the song ‘I’m Eighteen’ from the album Love It to Death. There was also an older man in the bed opposite mine, who said his name was Casper, like the friendly ghost, which is why I still remember it, but was probably spelt ‘Kasper’. He tried a few times to talk to me but ran out of words or fell asleep mid-sentence. In an adjacent ward were the Hep B sufferers, an exclusive group of junkies, who had caught their disease through shared needles. They stayed aloof, too cool to fraternise with Hep A-ers.

One morning I noticed Casper’s bed was empty and when I inquired, after allowing enough time for him to emerge from the toilet or the bathroom, the nurse revealed in a matter-of-fact way that he had died in the night.

“He never made it,” she said and cheered me up by letting me know all the nurses had half-expected me to die, too, in my first few days on the ward.

But the danger had passed.

She explained how I was lucky to have youth on my side. Casper had been in his thirties.

Her voice sounded churlish.

I was nineteen. Thoughts of mortality were making me more depressed. I abandoned introspection but I did try to figure out how I could have caught hepatitis.

Pat was such a house-proud mother you could have eaten off her floor, as they say, without getting so much as a belly ache. When she visited me, her eyes always moistened guiltily behind the hospital mask, as if she feared slovenliness on her part was responsible for my illness. I wanted to put her mind at ease.

When one of my doctors told me hepatitis took six weeks to incubate, I calculated I had been in Sydney with Charles. After seeing His Holiness fleetingly as his cavalcade swept past, we had gone to pay homage at that antipodean holy site, Bondi Beach. I remember swimming out beyond my depth and when I stopped to tread water, an armada of human turds floated before my eyes. I was surrounded. In those days untreated Sydney sewerage was pumped straight into the sea.

My mother and younger sister came to see me a few times. But my father, despite his declaration of concern, never bothered. Still, I could hardly hold it against him, since I had treated him the same, the last time he was in hospital. After three weeks confinement I was allowed to go home.

I was still weak and sick. The day before I was discharged I played a game of pool in the recreation room. It felt like I was tapping my cue against cannon balls. I’d struggled back to the ward and was barely able to lift myself onto the bunk. The rest of the day I lay motionless, too exhausted to raise my head.

Nevertheless Pat came to collect me and I spent the next three weeks in my own bed.

Jean was no longer living at home. Without the infant around, the house seemed as quiet as a catacomb. Denny didn’t venture upstairs to see me. He sat in the living room but he too was quiet. I was listless, apathetic and self-piteous. I was glad that Pat and Carol were kind enough to bring my meals upstairs on a tray and that the toilet was on the same floor as my bedroom.

“Dad wants to know if he can get you anything?” my mother said one day.

I smiled, strangely pleased with his offer, even if he hadn’t managed to make it up the stairs to my room. At least he had given me some thought.

I spent hours staring out the window across the desolate park with no other thought than what is to become of us? I desperately wanted a happy life, not only for me but for all of us, which still depended on my father. I clung to some of the changes I thought I saw in him since his arrival in Melbourne; his attempts to moderate his gambling, his approval of my trip to Sydney, the concern he was showing my mother more often and his affection for his grandson. There was also his eagerness for us to work together and his concern about my health. But above all he seemed to have his mood swings and his terrifying temper under control. All these struck me as positive shifts in his attitude towards us. They were modest shifts, to be sure, but at least he was heading in the right direction. I had to remind myself that his transformation wouldn’t happen overnight. I had to be patient. And I had to encourage him, which required me, too, to change my attitude towards him.

When the new academic year started I was well enough to attend. So I buried myself in my studies again. I saw less and less of my uni acquaintances. By the afternoon I was usually exhausted and needed a sleep. When I got home Pat was always in the kitchen, dressed in clothes that were faded and shabby, but always with a clean, pressed apron over them, peeling potatoes and shelling peas for tea, keeping herself occupied and any introspection at bay, while Denny was in his sprung chair, legs crossed, a form guide on his lap, fingers pressed against his temple holding an Albany Trim.

I would take a nap and return to the kitchen to see if I could help my mother. I felt responsible in part for her misery. If I hadn’t gone to university she would have still been in Portland. I tried to talk to her, to chat, but found we had less in common than we used to have. I felt sorry for her, not having the understanding of the world I had gained from study, and it pained me to think it was a breach that would only get wider.

At uni things were hotting up politically. The anti-war movement across the nation had such a head of steam it looked like bringing down the government, ending two decades of conservative rule.

In Melbourne massive demonstrations were planned. A convoy of thirty or forty buses would bring students and academics into the centre of the city to join forces with unionists, schoolchildren, families, any office workers with a conscience, proselytized shoppers and conviction politicians, like Jim Cairns from the Labor Party, who was an unabashed socialist.

As weak as I felt, I was determined to participate. I was against the war. I was against all wars. I was against the Americans trying to rule the world. ‘Imperialism’ and sometimes ‘hegemony’ were the words student activists shouted. To any clear-headed person it was obvious the USA was meddling in the affairs of other nations. And the Australian government supported it slavishly. Who could forget the shameful spectacle of our Prime Minister grovelling to the American president a few years earlier? All the way with LBJ. Jesus!

I was against my own government. More than that, I was against the state. I had become an anarchist, although a law-abiding one. There were many students calling for revolution, the violent overthrow of government, but I had seen enough violence to know such talk was the talk of ideologues with their heads in the clouds, students who had lived soft, comfortable middle-class lives, mostly, and knew nothing about violence and the impact it had on victims and perpetrators alike. Political violence was no different and no more excusable than any other form of violence. People got damaged. People’s lives were destroyed. I was all for people, nations, solving their differences in a civilised manner, talking things through, using reason, that incredible tool that had taken so long evolving, to find a solution to all of the world’s problems. I was for the free association of people and the destruction of the oppressive apparatus of the state. I was for co-operation, and not just in a silly way—a touchy-feely, hippie way—but in an earnest, socialist way, where people built a world together for the benefit of all, not just a few, a world that had justice at its core. That wouldn’t be easy. Convincing the powerful to relinquish their privileges would take some doing. But it would be worth it. Eliminating such people had only led to greater horrors: the regimes of Stalin and Mao. The anti-war movement would get the ball rolling. It gave me heart. My despondency began to lift. And there was another reason why I was against the war. In a year my number might be drawn from the conscription lottery.

More reason to attend the rallies. I took one of the buses, packed with fervent students, all chanting radical slogans and cheering and laughing as we made our way into the city, as if we were on our way to a VFL grand final. More than a hundred thousand people gathered in the city streets. Melbourne had never before seen anything like it. I pushed as far forward to the stage in front of the steps of the Victorian Parliament to see and listen to the charismatic politician Jim Cairns, who was leading the campaign for a moratorium. And afterwards I knew Australia’s part in the war would soon be over.

My mother was ambivalent about the war. She wasn’t fond of Asians, didn’t trust any of them but had her suspicions about our allies.

“We’re always following the bloody Yanks.” she would say.

At least here we had something we could talk about.

Denny, of course, had no time for the Yanks either. He believed more Australians were killed by Americans than Japanese in the Second World War. “They’d shoot at anything that moved,” he said. “You wouldn’t want them behind you, that’s for bloody sure.”

But there were more urgent matters he had to attend to.

One day he asked me to accompany him to the regional office of the Housing Commission. It was the next to the bowling alley at the corner of Bell Street and Oriel Road, a prefabricated building that looked like the field headquarters in a war zone much closer to home. I had no idea what he was doing—paying the rent, I assumed—or why he wanted me to be with him.

Inside he demanded to see the manager. I followed as we were led into a back room, where Denny got straight to the point. He tossed a letter onto the desk and demanded more time to pay his arrears.

The manager was a slightly built young fellow with a gaunt face and sunken eyes too close together. He was ensconced on a padded chair behind a huge desk, which seemed much too stately for the outpost. No doubt his rise through the ranks of the Ministry of Housing had been rapid; you could see it in the smug expression he wore.

“My son.” Denny pointed at me. “He’s at university. You can imagine how much that’s costing me. He’ll have to give up his studies if you don’t give us more time.” He picked up the identification prop from the desk and studied the public servant’s name. “Maurice…My son will be a dropout, Maurice. You want that hanging over your head?”

An argument ensued, the details or substance of which I no longer remember. But I started to pay attention when he said, “You listen here, you little worm,” and he started to excoriate the hapless fellow.

I had witnessed the transformation in his appearance often enough when he lost his temper, but I doubt if Maurice had ever seen anything like it. Denny’s skin seemed to tighten and lose its colour. He would close his eyes for a moment. Then they would suddenly bulge, while their pupils constricted. And his bottom dentures would wobble around in his mouth as if they had a life of their own. He looked possessed. And it was the perfect mien for what he did next, which even took me by surprise.

He leant over the stately desk and pointed his finger a few centimetres from the shocked district manager’s nose. His eyes protruded so much I could see their whites in profile. When he spoke he sprayed him with cold fury.

“I’ve only ever put the hex on two men in my life before and both were dead within six months.”

And then, to my utter astonishment, his final utterance was sibilant. “And now it’s your turn, Maurice.”

It was an utterly convincing performance. And judging by the expression on the poor fellow’s face he was no less impressed than I was.

I hastened from the office, mortified.

When Denny emerged he was wearing a triumphant grin.

“What did you want me in there for?” I protested.

He was genuinely surprised that I asked. “I just needed a witness,” he answered with a defensive lilt.

“To what? Your Lucifer act?”

“You saw how reasonable I was with him. He wouldn’t listen when I tried to explain what our costs are like, would he? It’s not cheap, you know, putting you through university. I wanted him to realise I wasn’t just wasting our money.”

We drove home in silence, both of us knowing where our money went. It was like the elephant in the car, if that were possible. As he parked he reached across and squeezed my neck reassuringly.

“Don’t worry about him. He’s only small fry. You’ve got to give ’em a bit of a scare so they’ll sit up and take notice, that’s all. You’ve got to let ’em know you mean business.”

And I assumed from this that there would be some agreement reached about our arrears with the unfortunate man’s superiors.

Th

ere were other signs that financial matters were once again going awry, which I should have picked up on. But I was so hopeful that he had turned a corner, that this scene at the regional Housing Commission office was a minor aberration, that we were still on track to normalise our lives.

A travelling salesman came around and installed a small cigarette slot-machine on the kitchen wall. It contained ten or so packets of cigarettes, which Denny could access one at a time after putting coins in a slot. The idea was that each week the salesman would return to collect the money and refill the dispensary. What the benefits of this were over buying cigarettes from a shop I never quite understood. But there it was, getting filled with coins as the days passed. It proved successful for a week or two, until the temptation to retrieve the coins proved too great for my father. He jemmied it open with a screwdriver and spent the money elsewhere. I came home one day to find the dispenser gone, presumably removed by an irate salesman.

On another occasion I suspected my room had been searched. Some money I kept in my underwear drawer was gone. It was a piddling amount but I was furious and should have confronted him about it. I should have demanded to know what was going on. I should have put two and two together and realised that he wasn’t dealing with the rent arrears. But I still couldn’t ask him, lest it trigger an aggressive reaction, which I wanted to believe was a thing of the past.

Whether my mother was aware of the trouble that was looming I have no idea. She had retreated inwardly, unable to adapt to life in Melbourne. She must have been depressed but I didn’t probe, afraid of what I might find, afraid my fragile optimism might be misplaced. I came into the kitchen one day and found her seated at the table, a cup of tea in her hand and a blank expression on her face. She didn’t register my presence. In that moment I experienced the weird sensation that she was a complete stranger to me. It passed but left me feeling uneasy. Despite all her care, her nurturing, her protectiveness and her moral guidance, I realised I hardly knew her. I was of an age when adolescents began to view their parents as people, as individuals who perhaps had more to them than rearing offspring suggested.

I occasionally caught glimpses of who she was. It was obvious she loved sport. She could listen to test cricket all day on the radio or to VFL matches all afternoon. She watched the replays on Saturday nights. She would sit up late for the tennis at Wimbledon, if Australians were playing. Sport was her respite. It took her mind off the unfortunate reality that held her captive. And I suspect it gave her a sense of belonging, with cricket at a national level and football at a local level. But I saw other sides to her too. She could be rather prudish. She disapproved of women who dressed scantily, who displayed too much cleavage or thigh and wiggled their backsides when they strutted about in stilettos. She avoided Suze, our neighbours’ troubled daughter, who modelled her image on Hollywood starlets, while Suze’s mother, who strolled our street in a tattered pink nightgown and slippers, her legs bare and her hair in rollers, left Pat tutting, or puckering her lips as if she had just tasted vinegar. “I can’t stand a slovenly woman,” I once heard her mutter, rubbing her forearms in a motion that suggested she had a chill. Men, too, who got about in singlets, tracksuit pants and thongs, and were unshaven when they were down the street, had her tongue clicking intolerantly. She considered people who under-dressed in winter had ‘no sense, no feelings’. If some of her own clothes were a bit worn, she always took care to conceal the worst of it. She always kept a good coat that covered a threadbare skirt. She could be stubborn too. She had a set way of cooking and doing the housework. She had a set day for shopping and was reluctant to change it even if something more pressing occurred. She held firm to certain views about the world—for example, homosexuality was ‘disgusting and immoral’ or politicians were ‘crooks’, or most men were ‘mongrels’—and she wouldn’t be persuaded otherwise.

She was outraged when motorists flaunted road rules, something I inherited from her (except for my lapsed years when I rode a motorbike). If inadvertently she transgressed, running a red light or speeding a bit, she pretended it hadn’t happened. Musically, as rock and roll pervaded the airwaves, she found a station that played country and western. While I was discovering the music of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, James Taylor, Carol King, and Leonard Cohen, she was tuned in to Glenn Campbell and Tammy Wynette. It surprised me to hear her singing along to ‘Stand By Your Man’ while she did the dishes and Denny completed his equine homework in the lounge room.

Months passed and I was slowly recuperating. I went to uni each day but usually came home early for a rest. The football season began. I had no stamina but that didn’t stop me participating in matches. I would play three quarters and then come off, unable to finish. But while I was on the ground I could still perform uncanny feats. I wasn’t a spent force entirely. My doctors had warned me it would be at least a year before I would get my strength back completely. And here I was, within a few months, back doing one of the few things that really mattered to me. It comforted me too to learn that Albert Camus, the remarkable French thinker whose philosophy of the absurd was beginning to appeal to me and make sense of the way my life was evolving, had loved to play football, although a different and, in my view, inferior code.

My father still disapproved of me playing football on account of my slight physique and now my health, which was still at the delicate stage. But he was showing some interest in my studies, again a sign that he was changing. One day I talked to him about an essay I was doing on Karl Marx’s journalism about British rule in India, which had appeared in the New York Daily Tribune throughout the 1850s. I could see he wasn’t really interested, so, thinking he might need some background in Marxist theory, I began to give him a summary of dialectical materialism.

“All very interesting, my friend,” he interjected before I’d finished. “But what sort of job’s that going to get yer?”

One day, as I was pawing over some case studies on delinquency in a sociology journal, an announcement came over the library’s PA system requesting my attendance at the borrowing counter. I half-expected I had a book overdue. It was nothing of the sort. I received a message to return home urgently. When I asked the librarian why, she couldn’t enlighten me.

I didn’t have the car because it had been out of petrol and Denny had no money to refill the tank. So I caught the next bus, which generally took twenty minutes, enough time for the butterflies of anxiety to start flapping. I had no idea which member of my family the message was from. As the bus passed through the industrial zone I considered various scenarios and settled upon the one I thought most likely: Denny had suffered another heart attack. As the thought crossed my mind that he was finished I felt a surge of relief, followed soon after by another of guilt. I steeled myself for my mother’s grief. Despite all the hardship and brutality she had endured, I knew she would mourn his passing. I would make it easier for her by inventing excuses for the way he was. I was ready to start eulogising.

But all my plans vanished the moment I came around the corner into Boyd Crescent.

I saw two fire engines with their red lights twirling. And outside our place there were police cars (blue lights twirling), a crowd of onlookers, a television van. As I drew closer I craned my neck to see what damage fire had done to our house. There were no black smoke stains on the outside walls. The roof was intact. But a couple of upstairs windows were shattered, the ones to my bedroom.

“What’s happened?” I asked the people around me, none of whom I recognised.

“Siege,” an old fellow said grimly. “It’s over but. Cops carted the bloke off. Now they’re chucking the furniture out. They’re evicting ’em.”

In shock I rushed forward. The police were indeed removing our furniture. “What’s going on?” I demanded of a young constable struggling with Denny’s sprung chair. He ignored me. I repeated the question to a man in a suit who was scribbling notes on a pad.

“Eviction order,” he said. “The bloke resisted, was going to blow the place up. He was up there with a couple of petrol bombs.” He pointed to the broken windows. “The cops called in the heavy artillery.” He pointed over his shoulder at the fire engines. “It’s some story. Who are you?”

“I live here.”

Suddenly he was very interested in me. He grabbed my arm.

“What’s your name? You’re not related to this bloke, Dennis Sparkes, are you?”

So the press already knew his name.

An 18th of May, 1971, edition of The Herald included an article with the headline, “I’ll kill myself ”: bomb man.

A man, 44, threatened to blow himself up with petrol for more than an hour after police tried to issue him with an eviction warrant at his home in Boyd St. [sic] , Heidelberg, today.

The man stood at the window on the first floor of his Housing Commission home yelling: “Come near me and I’ll kill myself.”

He had a petrol bomb in each hand, and two others were on a table behind him.

Police called two fire units.

After 80 minutes four police officers charged the premises.

At the same time firemen poured water into the room, knocking the man to the floor.

Sen. Constable J.R. Matthews took the man to Austin Hospital.

Later he was driven in a police van to Heidelberg police station, where he was put in the cells.

Earlier the man allowed his wife and daughter, 16, to leave the house.

They ran crying into the street, where they were comforted by neighbors [sic] .

The man told police he would not hesitate to set the bombs on fire.

Sen. Constable Matthews said the man was on his hands and knees when the four officers reached the top of the stairs.

“He came easily. There wasn’t a struggle,” he said.

Sen. Constable Matthews said: “The man was a long way behind in rent.”

I found the newspaper article and a police notice that gave a similar account in his medical files years later. The amount of arrears was $186, probably in those days about ten weeks rent.

I broke free and headed indoors, bustling past the constables carrying furniture. Pat was slumped in the only chair left in the lounge room, her hands covering her face. She looked like one of those shrunken old ladies in a nursing home.

I knelt in front of her and touched her arm. She withdrew her hands and stared at me as if I had awoken her from a nightmare. She looked around and quickly realised she was mistaken.

“Oh, Graeme, Graeme, your father….” Her voice retreated into an inaudible cry. After a few moments she managed to add, “We’ve got nowhere to live.”

I hung my head momentarily and murmured a farewell to my adolescence.

“Just take it easy, all right?” I said softly. “I’ll organise something.”

My sister was sitting on the floor in a corner. I asked her if she was all right and she nodded. She had rung for me at the university, apparently.

I found the police sergeant in charge and asked what had happened to my father.

They had taken him to the Heidelberg police lockup where they were going to charge him. But he’d had the wit to inform the police doctor of his medical history. After the doctor contacted the Repatriation Department, Denny was transferred to its psychiatric hospital in Bundoora, not far from La Trobe University.

I could see the sergeant was exasperated by the drama Denny had put him and his constables through, and so I dressed what else I had to say in diplomatic tones. I asked him if there was any chance of us staying on, since our father had kept us in the dark about the eviction.

He was reasonable enough. He said he had no discretionary powers in these matters. It had already been decided by the courts.

“What courts?”

“Evictions don’t just happen, son. There’s a judicial process. It takes six months or so.”

“But we knew nothing about it. I went to university this morning completely unaware of this.” I waved my hand around.

He shrugged. “That’s not our fault, son. It’s your father’s.”

“Well, how about giving us a few days, until we find somewhere else to live?”

“Can’t be done, sorry.”

“We can’t live on the footpath!” My voice was rising in desperation.

“We just enforce the law. There’re government departments that deal with cases like yours.”

“Which ones?”

He gave me a phone number to contact, which was probably standard practice when they threw defaulters out on the street.

“Can I at least make my mother a cup of tea?”

“If you’re quick, son.”

I asked Carol to make a cup of tea while I went off to find a phone box that worked. I rang the State Welfare Department and explained our situation to a public servant, who said she would arrange emergency accommodation. I was to ring back in an hour.

I returned home and went upstairs to my bedroom. There was broken glass and water across the floor. Most of the furniture had been removed. The wardrobe was still there against the wall opposite the broken windows. Shards of glass, like transparent daggers, were imbedded in it. I felt numb. I figured that Denny had barricaded himself into my room with his petrol bombs and the firemen had turned their hoses on him. I wondered where he had gotten the petrol from since he had no money and there was none in the tank. I wondered if he had been injured. The fire trucks were still outside. Our furniture was piled on the nature strip. The crowd had all but dispersed. Just a few curious stragglers and a dogged member of the press remained.

When I rang State Welfare back, the bureaucrat told me she had made arrangements for us to stay a few nights at the People’s Palace, a Salvation Army hostel in the centre of the city. As for long-term accommodation, she recommended I contact the Housing Commission and try to get them to reconsider.

“And try to get some charity to store your furniture in the meantime,” she suggested. “Do you belong to a church?”

I hadn’t attended church since Portland but I figured after the years I put in as an altar boy, gratis, the Anglican Church owed me. I rang the local parish vicar and after a good deal of moral coercion on my part, he begrudgingly agreed to have our belongings collected from the footpath and put in storage for a month.

I walked to the nearest garage with a plastic container and bought petrol with some money I had concealed in our back yard shed. Carol and I helped Pat gather a few of her personal effects together, packed some spare clothes for ourselves, loaded them into our car and left Boyd Crescent for good. There was not going to be any cleaning up. If we were being forcibly removed, why lend a hand?

As I drove off, I noticed Suze sitting on the low wire fence next door. She smiled and shrugged. Her boy, Tiger, was already fossicking through our belongings.

I bought more petrol with the few dollars I still had in my pocket and drove to the People’s Palace.

The hostel was a seven or eight storey building on King Street. It had seen better days but our room was clean and tidy, if somewhat noisy from the traffic below. We had to share a bathroom with other guests on our floor. I tried to cheer Carol up a little with distractions, taking her up to the roof to observe the city while Pat had a nap, exhausted from the ordeal.

With the din of the city resounding from the stark walls, water tanks and discarded crates, Carol flung her arms wide and stared at me. “He’s fucking mad!” she shouted. “What do we do now?”

While Pat was still asleep I contacted the vicar to make sure our belongings had been collected from the footpath. Then I rang the hospital and spoke to one of the resident psychiatrists, who asked me to meet him to discuss Denny’s situation as soon as possible. I left Pat sleeping and drove to the hospital, a Dickensian edifice on a forbidding rise with a view across the northern suburbs to the distant city towers, barely visible through the smog. Most of the windows had bars and there were no signs of life, until I went to the reception desk in a cold gloomy anteroom. I was led from there to the office of the psychiatrist I had spoken to, who gestured towards a seat in front of his desk.

“I’ll come straight to the point,” he said with an expressionless stare. “Despite recent events that might suggest otherwise, there’s nothing wrong with your father’s mental health at the moment, which means I could discharge him immediately, and he could leave with you this afternoon. I have been briefed on the circumstances you find yourself in. I understand it’s a bit of a crisis and you don’t need any further complications. So I wouldn’t discharge him without taking into consideration your wishes. It’s your call. However, I would caution that if he is discharged he’ll be arrested. The alternative is to have a family member commit him to this hospital.”

“If I do that, how long does he stay in here?”

“Three months and then it’s reviewed. Your mother will have to do it. If he left here today no doubt he’d face a lengthy jail sentence, given his record. It’s up to you.”

Putting aside my surprise that he knew of Denny’s criminal record, I gave his words due consideration. It crossed my mind that he deserved a lengthy jail sentence, but I couldn’t have lived with my conscience. So I decided to bring Pat out to commit him.

From the medical notes after his admission, Denny had shown no sign of aggression. He seemed very dopey, apparently from taking too much medication before the siege, although the doctor suspected there was some acting in his behaviour. He asked to be tested with a pin or needle, saying he couldn’t feel anything, except a bit in his thigh. The test was never carried out. For the first few days he was subdued and rational. He talked about what he had done, revealing that he had wanted to prevent eviction by ‘making a martyr’ of himself. He told a medical officer that his debts accrued because he had bought an old car, which had needed a lot of expensive repairs.

There is a record of my visit. These comments were made:

Son interviewed.

He does not seem resentful towards his father.

Said that father gambles—hence the debts. Mother has never been allowed to manage the income. Father has never told anyone what he does with the money—son did not know there were arrears of rent. Family would like time to get new accommodation before the patient is allowed out.

They would be quite happy for him to be here 2 or 3 months.

In view of his history I do not think this would be unreasonable.

I did not seem resentful towards my father. That stopped me inmy tracks. Perhaps I’ve grown more bitter with the years. Perhaps I had more wisdom in my adolescence. Perhaps I was a better person then. Or perhaps I had already learnt the art of disguising my emotions. To live through the dramas of life with my father and not feel resentful would have required a more noble spirit than I had then, or now. The siege had left me deeply angry. How could he have done this to us—to my mother who had endured so much abuse, to my sister whose skin told the story of her emotional state, and to me, who now had the burden of sorting out the mess he had left us in, who had to stay level-headed against all his inclinations?

Back at the hotel, as we ate a charitable meal of sausages and mash in a half-empty dining room, I gave my mother a summary of the circumstances that Denny found himself in.

“Did you see him?” she asked with some trepidation.

“No. I’m still too angry for that.”

Carol remained silent. She had expressed her feelings earlier on the roof and was reluctant to do so again.

I studied my mother. I thought she had recovered enough to face a few questions I dearly wanted answers to.

“I thought he was changing,” I began. “I thought he had his gambling under control. How come he got this far without one of us knowing about it?”

She understood I meant her.

“I didn’t know anything about any eviction, darlin’,” she said quietly, her head cast down. “It was as big a surprise to me as it was to you, believe me!”

She had known nothing of Denny being subpoenaed to appear in court over the rent arrears, which didn’t surprise me. Since her arrival in Melbourne she had become withdrawn and incommunicative. But he must have been given notice, known the exact date we were to be evicted and kept it to himself. Perhaps he hadn’t even bothered to attend court. I remembered going to the regional manager of the Housing Commission with him and regretted I hadn’t insisted on some sort of agreement about the rent. Now we were bearing the consequences.

“Someone mentioned a petrol bomb,” I said.

Pat could barely look at me. “Oh, that,” she sighed. “Of course he didn’t have a bomb. He just wanted them to think he did. He didn’t even have enough petrol, you know that, and no money to get any.”

“Why did they think he had it then?”

“It was beetroot juice.”

I gaped at her, unable to decide whether to scream or laugh.

She went on to say he had gone to the car in the night and siphoned what little bit of petrol he could out of the tank and into an empty jam jar. Then he had opened a can of beetroot from the pantry and emptied its juice into a couple of clear plastic bottles. When he filled these with water, the juice was diluted enough to reproduce the pink colour of petrol.

She shrugged her shoulders and stared at the table. “He wouldn’t tell me what he was going to do with it.”

In the morning, after I had left for uni, he had locked the front and back doors and gone up into my bedroom. When the police arrived, he threw the jar with the trace of petrol through the window into the front yard. Then he held up the two bottles with diluted beetroot juice and yelled out to the police that he was going to blow the place up if they didn’t leave him alone. Obviously his ruse was successful.

My mother raised her head looked up at me. “He fooled them.”

I thought I detected a trace of pride in her voice.

“What happened next?”

“They called in the fire brigade, didn’t they? And turned their stupid bloody hoses on him.”

She paused to control her emotions.

“They could’ve killed him,” she went on after wiping her nose with a tissue she found in her handbag. “He was just lucky he had on that big thick coat of his. That saved him.” She had heard the glass breaking. “Fancy them doing that to him, the mongrels.”

The pressurised water had hurled him across the room and knocked him out. I had seen shards of glass sticking out of the wardrobe, which must have passed close to his throat.

“I thought they had killed him,” she added indignantly.

“Jesus,” I murmured. “Where was Carol?”

I looked at my sister. She grimaced and said, “Outside with Mum.”

She still looked traumatised.

Pat hunched over her plate and poked at her food. I could see she no longer had the resilience to think about what we should do next.

I told her of my plan to take her to the hospital so she could commit Denny. “For his own sake,” I added. “Or he’ll be chucked in jail for a lot longer than he’ll stay there.”

“He’s used to hospital,” she said to make it seem more palatable.

“You could go back to Portland,” I suggested. “Ring up Uncle Mick. He’ll help us.”

“But what are you going to do? You’re at university.”

“I’ll find somewhere. Carol can go back to school in Portland.”

I thought she was about to cry. “I can’t ask Mick to help us again.” She was barely audible. “He’s done enough for me. I just can’t ask him again.”

She was a pitiable sight. I was scared she was going to have another breakdown. I didn’t know whether I could cope with that.

I touched her hand, trying to reassure her. “I’ll go into the Housing Commission tomorrow and get our place back,” I said, feigning confidence. “There’s no way they can throw an innocent family out on the street and get away with it, especially with Dad certified insane. I won’t leave until we’ve got a roof over our head.” I made it sound like I was complete master of the situation, that there was nothing to worry about. But I was utterly at a loss. I had no faith in my ability to organise anything. “You’ll have to meet with the people from welfare to get some money. The psychiatrist also told me the Housing Commission would call in the Public Trustee to manage all his debts. That means it will control his pension and it might affect yours. And there’s my bursary money. I need that.”

I was glad I had a room to myself. My mother and Carol shared another. I lay awake a long time, fully clothed, on top of my unyielding bed, thinking about my father. Beetroot juice! It was clever. Edward De Bono would have been impressed. But did he really imagine he could get away with it? Even if he had fooled the police with his beetroot juice bombs, even if they were convinced of his intentions, did he think they would shrug their shoulders and go away and leave us in peace? If he did, surely he was mad. But I didn’t for a moment believe he thought he could achieve any such thing. So, why do it? It took me a long time into the night before it struck me that the siege was about his self-esteem. There was no way he would submit meekly to an eviction. It would bring his manhood into question. Pushing him around had consequences. Like all his dealings with authority it had to be a violent affair. No matter how outrageous he was, at least people feared him. And he misinterpreted that as respect.

In the morning I rang the Welfare Department and made an appointment for Pat. I took her to the hospital and waited outside while she signed the papers. It didn’t take her long. She wasn’t up to visiting Denny. Before I headed off to the Housing Commission I had a bad attack of the nerves and decided to contact my uni friend, Charles, to see if I could enlist his moral support. He listened in amazement as I told him what had happened, and was only too keen for a role in the drama. When I met him outside the Housing Commission office in the city he was dressed in a suit and tie, ready to play the lawyer.

The area manager agreed to a meeting after a predictable delay.

When he finally took us into his office and invited us to sit opposite him at the desk, he saw through Charles’s masquerade immediately and allowed a cynical smile to warp one side of his face.

“What can I do for you?”

I started to give an account of our eviction but he tapped his pen impatiently and interrupted.

“Yes, yes, I’m acquainted with the case, and I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s been a matter before the courts for some time. I can’t just on a whim overturn a court’s ruling as you would appreciate.” Saying that, he smirked at Charles, challenging him to contradict him.

“My father’s been certified insane,” I replied. “He has not been responsible for his actions in this whole affair. The rest of the family knew nothing about the court proceedings or any of its rulings. The first we learnt about it was when the police arrived on our doorstep to evict us. With all due respect, my mother, sister and I have been victimised in all this. So I’m asking you to take that into account. Show a little humanity. We’ve got nowhere to live.”

“With all due respect,” he echoed, “that’s not my concern. I can’t be expected to address all the personal problems afflicting members of the public, now can I? It’s patently unrealistic. Of course, you’re quite within your rights to make another application for housing, which would be considered in due course. But I’m afraid at the moment there’s quite a waiting list.”

I glanced desperately at Charles, whose face was atypically inanimate.

I knew how Denny would have handled this: thump the desk, do his warlock’s act, scream and rant, threaten murder. A different tact suddenly occurred to me, one that my old mate Jimmy’s father had used when his life depended upon it.

“Well, it’s unfortunate, but you leave me little choice,” I said, trying to conceal my desperation. “There’s a reporter downstairs from The Truth, who’s here at my request. He’s keen to get a scoop on this.”

“And you know The Truth likes a good scandal,” Charles added opportunely. “So read the next edition, sir.”

I glanced at Charles who had fixed his gaze on the manager with one eyebrow raised, as if to impress upon him the brilliance of our manoeuvre.

“Thanks for your time,” I murmured. “Goodbye.”

As I rose the manager thrust his palms forward in a conciliatory gesture. “Now, wait a minute. Wait.”

He mumbled something inaudible as he pushed back his chair.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

I resumed my seat, sagged into it, as he disappeared into the inner sanctum, taken aback that such a tactic worked. It seemed too simple. I looked again at Charles and now both his eyebrows were in play, rising and falling like Groucho Marx’s.

The manager was out of the room for ten minutes. When he returned he was carrying a file, which he dropped heavily onto the desk, as if it were a great burden.

There was contempt in his eyes as he studied me for a moment.

“The dwelling you had is no longer available. It has already been let to another family. So you will have to accept something else, I’m afraid. There’s a flat in Carlton. And a condition on your acceptance: under no circumstances is your father’s name to appear on the documentation. Your mother will have to sign the contract. She’ll need to fill in these forms.” He slipped the paperwork across the desk. “No need to see me again. Get your mother to sign these. Then return them to level one. They’ll deal with them there.”

I got up and thanked him. He sniffed and dismissed us with a gesture usually reserved for bothersome flies.

CARLTON

The flat was on the third floor of a walk-up block on the Carlton high-rise estate. From my new bedroom I had a view of the grey residential towers, which housed a hodgepodge of luckless working-class Australians and migrants, the rear section of the Motor Registration Board and Transport Accident Commission offices, which have since been converted to apartment towers, and, beyond these, a glimpse of the vast Melbourne Cemetery, which housed thousands as well but from a broader cross-section of society and some in better lodgings than the living. On the corner of our street was the Woolshed Hotel, which only bona fide alcoholics patronised, a rundown stone building that perhaps dated back to the days, more than a century ago, when livestock grazed nearby.

The block of flats was one of half a dozen that stood on massive concrete stilts surrounded by car parks. When Pat climbed the three flights of stairs to our unit for the first time, with the wind whistling up her skirt and the sound of our heels resounding around the grimy stairwell, her heart sank. She must have thought, as we were rising up, her own luck was spiralling further down. As she stepped inside and realised the entire flat was concrete, she gave a quiet moan. The walls and ceiling were a bland cream colour. The bedrooms were tiny. All the floor coverings were tiles of hard grey linoleum.

The lounge room had a small balcony with enough space for a clotheshorse if she wanted to dry a few towels and some undies, but the laundry and lines were on the rooftop to be shared with seven other families. She hated communal facilities. For someone with her standards of cleanliness, these were difficult to use. Invariably when she wanted a washing machine another resident would have beaten her to it or left it soiled with lint and grime. Washing day always began with disinfectant and sometimes ended in bitterness, with the discovery of clothes missing from the lines.

One day, shortly after we shifted in, there was a knock at our door, and when Pat answered it a charity worker stood before her, lugging a half-full sack of material.

“Have yer got any old rags, missus?” he asked.

“Yeah, but I’m wearing them,” she replied.

Th e charity worker, no paragon of sartorial splendour himself, gave a wistful smile. “Fair enough,” he said and turned away.

After we retrieved our furniture from storage and set the flat up as comfortable as possible, I went to visit Denny in the psychiatric hospital. I hadn’t seen him since the day before the siege.

In the asylum’s gloomy dormitories were rows of twenty or thirty bunks with cast-iron frames and grey blankets. An intern in a white coat led me through. It was mid-afternoon but some of the beds were occupied by inmates as motionless as the dead. The air smelled of disinfectant.

Denny was in an adjoining recreation room with a dozen or so others, sitting on a bench against a wall beneath a barred window. Another intern unlocked the door to let me in and locked it again as he pointed to him.

A scrawny old man was standing naked on a pool table while others played pool around him. His hooked body was ghostly white, his dick a button mushroom emerging from grey moss. In a far corner someone wailed like a famished infant. Patients sitting in pyjamas near Denny rocked to and fro in silence, mouths open, some with drool hanging from their lower lips, staring at a point a metre or so in front of them.

The moment I set eyes on my father I noticed the change. It was his sheepish, obsequious smile. He looked pleased to see me. He even thanked me for coming. It was one of those moments when my world went topsy-turvy. My anger towards him fell away like a tattered old skin. He looked like a child who had done wrong. I sat down beside him to avoid his gaze, lest he detect the volatile state I was in.

I began to explain what had happened to us since his siege, rambling on as he listened with his head down. “And we had to commit you for three months,” I revealed at the end. “I don’t think we had a choice. You would’ve been arrested and jailed for much longer otherwise.”

“Good, good,” he murmured. “That was my plan all along.”

He looked awry at me and grinned as if he wanted me to believe him, to recognise how shrewd he’d been. When he realised I thought his claim was preposterous he lapsed into silence.

“The Public Trustee’s taken control of our finances,” I said, “until all your debts are cleared up. Our new place is in mum’s name. So she’ll be in charge of it.”

He merely shrugged.

Realising the absurdity of talking finances with him, I decided to change the topic. “So what’s it like in here?”

He looked at me for a moment as if I were stupid, and then turned his attention to the other inmates.

“Look at them, the poor trapped bastards,” he muttered, as if he were a mere observer. His voice was full of emotion. “Some of them have been here since the war. Nearly thirty bloody years. If they weren’t mad then, they are now.”

There was silence for a moment and then his tongue clacked as it did whenever he was genuinely disgusted.

“Have you been in here before?” I ventured.

He returned his gaze to me, surprised that I didn’t know. “They tried to once but I did a runner. I’ve been in others like it. This kind of place is my second home,” he declared with a cynical snort.

I refrained from asking him where he thought his first one might be.

“Do you receive good treatment?”

He snorted again and turned his head away. I thought he wasn’t going to answer.

“When you’re in a place like this,” he said eventually, “you’re just a bloody guinea pig.”

I frowned but remained silent, waiting for him to elaborate.

He paused again, rocking slightly, as if his thoughts were too disturbing to express. “Once they tried out that LSD on me, just to see its effects.”

“When was that?” I said, sceptical.

“In the early sixties, well before flower power got onto it.”

I asked if it had any effect on him.

“They ended up giving me too much of the stuff. It took me back a long way. Too bloody far. I went through my own birth like it was the real thing.”

Despite his mirthless laughter, his face was soft, as if the memory distressed him. I knew that stuff could do permanent damage to the mind. I mulled it over. Did that explain his behaviour, his deteriorating mental condition, his suicide attempts? Then he started to tell me how the doctors had once asked for ten volunteers for a medical experiment.

“Fancy asking these poor buggers to volunteer.” He gave a sweeping gesture, a familiar glimmer of anger in his eyes. “Some of them, they’re as nutty as bloody fruitcakes. A lot were POWs. They come home looking like skeletons. Like that old fella, Teddy, there.” He pointed at the naked inmate on the pool table. “Never recovered from what the Japs did to him. But at least I was as strong as a bloody bull, physically, so I put my hand up, to spare one of these poor bastards.”

“What was the experiment?”

“Encephalitis. That’s what they gave us. Trying to work on a cure, they told us. A good cause. All for the sake of bloody humanity.” He paused for a moment. “Just two of us survived.”

Stunned, I took a quick look at him. His jaw was tense. He was staring, moist-eyed, at the men in the room as if they were his mates, his kin. I thought of the times he had been placed in an asylum, suicidal. And they had asked for volunteers for something they probably knew was going to cause deaths. It would have been like a second chance for him. That afternoon he also revealed he had once received shock treatment on thirty consecutive days.

I shared tea with him without further discussion. I might have interrogated him some more about his time in asylums, which most likely would have revealed more horror stories, but I was feeling too fragile, too depressed by the scene before me.

“I have to go,” I said, getting to my feet.

He signalled to an orderly.

“Thanks for coming,” he said again. “I really appreciate it.”

I looked back at him sitting there passively, without a skerrick of his aggression on display. I could have believed, in that moment, he was not the same man I had been living with, masquerading as my father. He gave me another fleeting smile as I turned to hide my emotions.

I went across to La Trobe University and found a quiet spot to sit by the moat to recover some composure before I headed back to Carlton. The campus, I realised, had become my refuge. There were ducks and water hen waddling around but no students nearby. The afternoon was unusually quiet. I sank into a morose reverie.

While my father’s psychiatric history might have helped to explain his appalling behaviour and his violent outbursts, I wasn’t prepared to say it exonerated him. But I was ready to concede his time spent in grim institutions like Bundoora, suffering reckless medical experiments over the years, would not have helped him. Just an hour or so in there was more than enough for me. I couldn’t imagine what state of mind he would have been in after spending months at a time inside over many years.

I remembered the occasions when he had reappeared in our lives, sometimes inexplicably exuberant, at others washed out and depressed. It made some sense to me now. I had been fearful and contemptuous of him most of my life for all the hardship and humiliation he had brought upon us. But as I headed home I felt some sympathy for what he had endured. A grain of compassion took root in my befuddled soul.

How much time he actually spent at Bundoora I am unable to determine. Access to the Bundoora files was limited through Administrative Release rather than Freedom of Information with no right of appeal. I found evidence of his shock treatment at other hospitals but no mention of medical experiments in any of the files I viewed, although that didn’t surprise me. No institutional authority would have been foolish enough to leave a paper trail of the crimes it might have committed.

CLAIRE

While my father remained in the asylum our lives seemed less desperate. My mother still received her pension. The Public Trustee didn’t give us much extra money but enough to live off. I went to uni by bus each day, an hour long trip that took me through Fairfield and West Heidelberg, quite close to our former abode. I never stopped off. (It took me another thirty years before I went back to take a look at Boyd Crescent. The house was still the same but some attempt had been made to beautify the park.) Carol kept going to the same high school, although we had one of those unspoken sibling compacts to avoid travelling on the same bus. Pat kept the house cleaned, the clothes washed and the shopping done. The nearest supermarket was a small grocery in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, to which she drove once or twice a week. It was run by a ‘wog’, as she called its cheerful Italian owner, but she found shopping there more tolerable than at Northlands.

Carlton in those days was still working class, with a bohemian element on account of its proximity to Melbourne University, but not the working class that my mother was used to. It was populated by migrants, who couldn’t speak English in a way she could comprehend, who preferred to ‘ jabber away in a foreign tongue’, which irritated her. She kept to herself, distrustful of neighbours, feeling isolated, bitter about her life. I could see it in her face, which was starting to harden and lose its gaunt beauty, formed by years of fortitude. Her mouth was drawn down in a permanent expression of discontent.

Almost daily she lamented leaving Portland where she’d had friends, a job, her own income, a decent house, an extended family. The distance from her family was one of the hardest things for her to bear. Her brother and sister in Portland had been the bedrock of her sanity. Without them to turn to whenever Denny went off the tracks or spun out of control she would never have been able to cope with her life—of that I was sure. It distressed her to be so far away. She was turning sour.

But she was also proud and could be quite obstinate. Again I suggested she take the opportunity, while Denny was out of the way, to shift back to Portland.

“Just go down there and see if you can get your old job back.”

I thought that would appeal to her.

“What about Denny?”

“He’ll survive,” I said, barely able to contain my frustration. “When he gets out he can go back there too.”

“He hates the place.”

“And you hate it here? It’s about time you put yourself first. It’s always been him or us. Think of yourself for a change.”

But she wouldn’t hear of it. Despite everything she had endured, she remained loyal to him, a loyalty that was costing her any hope of happiness.

Yet she was less stressed with Denny out of the way. There weren’t any tantrums or abuse to deal with. No knives were wielded in unpredictable bursts of anger. Our lives settled into a routine that was uneventful. If happiness eluded her, some level of equanimity settled over her at least. She had what she called ‘a bit of peace and quiet’, which was probably the best she could hope for.

Once or twice a week she went off to Bundoora to visit Denny for an hour.

I was still convalescing. Seven months after I contracted hepatitis its effects had only abated slightly. I was seldom able to stay awake beyond nine o’clock. I had no reserves of energy, no stamina. I forced myself to go to a few student parties despite the likelihood of falling asleep at them and medical orders to avoid the consumption of alcohol. My anxiety in the presence of females failed to dampen my desire for a girlfriend if for no other reason than I wanted to be able to consider myself normal. And there were other compelling reasons.

Sex. Love. I believed love would be my salvation, would lift me out of the mire into which my life was sinking. The longing for that explosion of smitten love was rather debilitating. Sex on the other hand seemed less exalted but far more urgent. I rarely went into a newsagency in those days without sidling over to a certain stand to flick through the most promising girlie magazines, in the company of half a dozen other furtive men. With regard to other forms of literature I had already got my hands on a copy of Lady Chatterly’s Lover and the more thrilling Tropic of Cancer.

I met Claire at one of the parties I went to. She was a friend of a female student I knew. The moment I set eyes on her I was smitten. I had been smitten often enough throughout my teenage years, but this time I resolved to ask for a date, at least, no matter how inarticulate my self-consciousness left me. I usually fell for petite girls, but she was quite buxom, although I didn’t notice it at the time because I was mesmerised by her raven hair (raven again!), which cascaded down her back as far as her waist. She and Kate, the student she accompanied, were both sitting on a rug. Kate was rather gregarious, jocular and homely, which made conversation with her easy. I steeled myself, anticipating an ordeal, went over and sat next to her, cross-legged. For a while we joked about parties and university, as if we were above it all. Claire seemed content to sit and listen. Eventually I summoned the courage to lean past Kate and ask Claire for a dance. She gave Kate an apologetic look before accepting. As we shuffled about she tried her best to discourage me. No, she wasn’t a student, she was a factory worker, she hated parties, hated university types and had only come to please Kate who was trying to meet a nice boy, and why didn’t I go and ask her to dance with me? I glanced at Kate. She was laughing with some other students, which eased my guilt somewhat. I turned my attention to Claire, glad the lighting was dim.

“I’d like to go out with you,” I managed to say, putting my mouth close to her ear, so I didn’t have to shout above the music.

Amused by her failure to deter me, Claire accepted, but in a manner that suggested I would have been wiser to have taken her hint to move on. I hastily made arrangements before I explained I had to go.

“Why so early?” she asked, her head awry, curious.

“It’s past my bedtime.”

“It’s a little after ten,” she said, doubting me. “Home to the wife, is it?”

“No,” I said, surprised she would think it. “I just need my beauty sleep.”

I chuckled at my feeble joke, reluctant to tell her the real reason: my slow recovery from hepatitis. But she only managed an awkward smile.

We started going to cheap restaurants and movies in the city. One our third or fourth date, we returned to her father’s house in the eastern suburbs, where she was temporarily staying. Her father and stepmother were out. She took me into her bedroom and we had sex, a brief, fumbling encounter, which had her guessing correctly about my virginity.

She reached over and squeezed my arm. “Cheer up,” she grinned. “It’s embarrassing for everyone the first time.”

Soon she shifted into a house with some of her friends and I started spending my weekends with her.

If my mother disapproved she didn’t comment. Ever since Denny’s siege she had been treating me differently, as if I were no longer her ‘little man’ but an adult. Having to deal with the aftermath of that debacle had been my rite of passage. She was relieved to have someone sharing responsibility in the family. It was evident in such banal matters as using the car. I no longer asked to borrow it; rather, I merely mentioned I’d be taking it. I even had some say in the programs we watched on TV. If I decided to sleep overnight with my girlfriend, that was no longer her business.

In a quiet way I relished this change, which I felt I had earned. It was obvious that together we could handle our affairs much more effectively without Denny around, even with the pittance the Public Trustee allowed us. I started to feel in control of my life. I was still nineteen but had grown up suddenly, maybe a little prematurely, but with few regrets, glad to be abandoning the hapless shambles of my adolescence.

A new football season began but my interest in playing was over. At the end of the previous season, I had disgraced myself in a final, playing against the all-Jewish team, AJAX, when one of its players defended his goal by kneeing someone from my side in the groin, and I yelled out, ‘Jewish bastard’, intending to offend, without much thought for the consternation and hurt it would cause around the ground. I had never hated Jewish people or any other race of people, which, in a way, made my behaviour less excusable. I might have once been an ignorant boy from a Housing Commission estate, but not anymore. I might still live on an estate, but I had a university education. I knew of the historical suffering of the Jews. I understood the odium of racism. I should have known better. I should have gone into their rooms after the game and apologised, but I didn’t. And I still live with the shame of it. I was suspended for four games, but I vowed never to play again. I never spoke about it to Claire, or anybody else for that matter. My mother, of course, was disappointed and baffled. She had supported me faithfully over the years and had long harboured a hope that I might one day play football at an elite level.

Neither Claire nor her friends were the least bit interested in sport. Art, about which I knew a little, and music, particularly ‘the blues’, about which I knew less, occupied them to the detriment of most other things outside of sex. Food, for instance, was of such little importance to them that I often found myself staring into an empty fridge, or at things on shelves so old they were giving new meaning to life. Meals were irregular and often a mere irritating adjunct to the important artistic acts that were taking place before my eyes. If she made a meal it was usually frog-in-a-hole with a bacon side dish.

I began to associate insalubrity with creativity.

It so happened that Claire was a gifted artist, who did the most exquisite life drawings and painted many of the grotesque figures that haunted her imagination and dreams: vile, gnomish creatures that unsettled me and made me wonder about the state of her mind. The contrast was astonishing. It was difficult to accept the paintings were from the same hand as the drawings, which delighted in the human form. Her explanation was simple: the body was natural, our animal state, while the mind was cultural or social and reflected how far humans had removed themselves from nature. Our retreat from Eden was mental, not physical.

I had long, enlightening discussions with her about art and how it reflected the evolution of human society. She talked about contemporary culture with a passion most people I knew only showed at sporting events. Her understanding of the world was much deeper, I realised, than any of the glib recycled commentary I heard at university. It seemed based on experience rather than theory. For every idea I put to her she had a considered response that surprised me. Despite my education I was learning more from her than the books I pawed over daily or the smug tutors whose musings I endured each week.

She took me to art galleries to view the latest works of Melbourne artists. I went with her to the National Gallery of Victoria on the wide leafy boulevard of St Kilda Road. In its gloomy courtyard she stood for half an hour before Rodin’s imperious statue of Balzac, who seemed to be emerging in all his towering glory from a clinging primordial bog.

I was overwhelmed and a little apprehensive to find myself in her company—at art galleries, or in her rented room, or in the company of her friends. What they thought of me I had no idea. I was a university student, and that, to say the least, made them distrustful.

One night she disappeared. We were in bed together when she got up and left the room around 10pm. She didn’t come back. I searched around the house and the street, but couldn’t find her. None of her housemates knew where she was. None of them seemed to care. They had their own preoccupations. I slept alone in her bed and went home the next day none the wiser. When I managed to contact her a few days later she said she had been in some trouble with the police. Her voice over the phone sounded deadpan. We arranged to meet in a park but she didn’t show. I went to her place and begged to know what was going on. She was propped up in bed, watching TV, looking wan and fatigued.

I turned off the TV.

She looked at me for a few moments without a word.

“Well?” I said.

“I’m an epileptic.”

There had been a boy in my class at high school who used to have fits and we had to put a ruler in his mouth to stop him swallowing his tongue. That was the extent of my knowledge of epilepsy. I hadn’t yet read Dostoyesvky. I didn’t know Charles Dickens, Beethoven, Van Gogh and dozens of other great writers and artists were epileptics. It almost seemed a prerequisite of genius.

When Claire was seven or eight she had ridden her pushbike into the back of a parked truck, which had resulted in head injuries. Soon after, she had suffered a seizure. Epilepsy was diagnosed and she was put on medication. The medication prevented fits, but it wasn’t all good news. The side effects of the medication left her with little control of her moods.

When her mother fell ill with cancer and died, Claire had plunged into an emotional pit from which she was still struggling to escape. In a constant mood of gloom and self-deprecation she began a relationship with a member of the Melbourne chapter of the Hell’s Angels, and later with a warlock who had the ability to change physical matter before her eyes and claimed to possess the power to eliminate undesirable people with nothing more than his mind. She had broken with him just before she met me. But she was attracted to people like that. When it came to lovers I was the exception rather than the rule. I gave her some hope. She wanted to change. She was fed up with cynicism and gloom. But bouts of depression still affected her.

Depression crept up behind her like the bogeyman and grabbed her by the neck. The other night when it happened she left her house and wandered the streets in the dark, dressed inappropriately for the freezing conditions. The police found her sitting in a gutter, assumed she was on drugs, bustled her into their paddy wagon, took her to the lockup and, as was their wont, slapped her around a bit and strip-searched her. Later they had allowed her to phone her father, who came to the lockup in his army uniform and persuaded them to release her.

As she sat under her blankets, hugging her knees, I asked her what triggered her bouts of depression.

“Work, usually.”

She managed a soft laugh.

“Give it up then,” I said with an earnest gesture, “And why don’t you try living without your medication?”

She took my advice on both counts and straightaway found the rim of the pit within reach.

When Denny came home after a couple of months, earlier than I had expected, he inspected the flat, went onto the balcony and cast his gaze over the dismal estate, declaring it a vast improvement on our Olympic Village tenement, as if it vindicated his reckless behaviour. He had with him a number of tiled concrete flowers pots that he had made in therapy sessions.

Pat had helped him load them into the car boot after his discharge from the hospital, and together they had struggled with them up the stairs. When I arrived home from a weekend with Claire, the pots were in the middle of the lounge room.

“What are you going to do with them?” I asked, dismayed by the amount of space they took up.

“Sell ’em,” he said. “There must be a thousand flats around here. Someone’ll buy ’em.”

I could see the fervour in his eyes. He stared a lot. He moved around each room, studying its potential as a workshop. He pursed his lips as he did whenever he was in a strategic mood.

His early release was on condition that he attend occupational therapy sessions at the hospital two or three days a week as an outpatient. He only went for two weeks. His absences led to the hospital discharging him, which terminated the Public Trustee’s authority over his financial affairs.

Even as he regained control of his pension, Denny had his eyes on other sources of income. The pots were a god-send. Within a couple of days he had hawked them all, which prompted him to buy more tiles and concrete pots. For the tiles he went to display rooms and purchased seconds, which he brought home by the bootload. Soon he had a brain wave—tiled coffee tables. He bought pieces of chipboard of various dimensions and boxes of screw-on table legs. Tables were quicker to construct. Laying out the patterns was easier; gluing the tiles and grouting less tedious. And they leant themselves to larger tiles than could be applied to flower pots. Again easier and quicker. And he could adapt his carpentry skills. Our lounge room became his workshop, full of coffee tables under construction; our kitchen a storeroom of raw materials. Its furniture had to be rearranged. The table was shoved against a wall. In one corner tiles descended like a multicoloured glacier, fanning out from the ceiling, occupying a quarter of the kitchen floor.

Pat wasn’t too pleased with the appropriation of her kitchen but she seemed resigned to it.

“At least it keeps him busy,” she sighed.

I’d help to carry the tables to the gloomy foyer of a residential tower early each morning, while Denny, in a cardigan and PP trousers from a charity store, set up a makeshift stall outside the lifts to await customers, right under a ‘No hawkers’ sign. I couldn’t watch him do business. Th e exaggerated smile as potential buyers approached upset me for some reason. I kept thinking, I’m glad I’m not you. I’m glad I don’t live your life. It must be hell, every moment of it. As I moved away I realised I didn’t hate him. I had often feared him but never hated him. All I had ever felt for him was a humiliating pity.

I left him there until late afternoon, when I returned to help him home with any table he hadn’t managed to sell. Sometimes he arrived home early, rubbing his hands together, having sold his stock, eager to finish more tables. He never asked for assistance with their construction, sceptical of my ability to meet his standards.

Eventually a janitor on the estate discovered what he was doing and he was ordered to dismantle his stall or face the police. Nevertheless, he kept hawking his wares, employing an alternative strategy, riding the lifts, taking the tables a couple at a time door to door, with even greater success than he had in the foyer.

One day he arrived home and asked me to come downstairs with him. When we were standing under the flats, between the concrete pillars, he pointed at our car. “See that yellow one next to it?” he said, lifting his hand onto my shoulder.

It looked fairly new, a later model than our own Holden.

“It’s yours.”

I was astonished. A car for me? How could he have afforded even the deposit for it? Surely not from hawking tiled tables around the housing estate. It crossed my mind that he’d had an improbable triumph at the races, but we would have heard the hissing and exhortations or at the very least had takeaways. I had no idea how easy it was to get credit.

“It’s an automatic,” he added proudly. “Go on, take it for a spin.”

He dangled the keys before me.

“What have you bought that for?” I muttered, thinking of a thousand other needy things he could have spent money on.

“For you, my friend. To get you to uni.” He gaped at me, dismayed at my ingratitude, “You must be sick of the bloody bus. Besides, you’ve got a girlfriend now, I hear.”

I guess it was my reward for sorting matters out after his siege but that didn’t occur to me at the time. I focused on the absurdity of anyone in our financial straits having two cars.

“Unbelievable,” I muttered.

I headed upstairs without further words.

He arrived shortly after and out of breath from the climb. “What’s the matter with you?” he demanded, his temperature rising. “Why didn’t you take it for a spin?”

“I’m hungry,” I said lamely.

I was in the kitchen, buttering a slice of bread to eat, to mollify my anxiety and anger. The knife I was using had a loose wooden handle that over the years had begun to rot away in the daily dishwashing ritual.

“Look at this,” I said, trying to sound reasonable but conscious of the shrill pitch of my voice. I pulled open the cutlery drawer behind my chair. “We need new knives and forks. These are all falling to pieces.”

I wasn’t game to add ‘instead of another bloody car’ but he got my drift.

I disappeared into my room, but the next day as a gesture of conciliation I asked him for the keys to the new car so I could go to university.

He was delighted.

One of my subjects was urban sociology. I had to attend a tutorial whose focus was on high-rise housing and its impact on the family. Students eager to display their erudition or their solidarity with the ‘proletariat’ who were housed no better than animals in a zoo by an oppressive state, raised issues like the paradox of isolation in a high-density community, crime rates, delinquency, alienation, the absence of critical services, such as health and education. The Housing Commission estate in Carlton, one student mentioned by way of example, housed over seven thousand people, the population of an average-sized town, but had no supermarket, no medical centre, no welfare centre, no police station, no primary school and no high school. I bowed my head so no one would notice my flushed complexion. As each issue was discussed and subsumed into one theory or another (but predominately Marxist social theory) I remained silent, despite agreeing with much of their analysis, too ashamed to reveal my familiarity with the subject matter. (My essay on the topic read like an autobiography.)

When I returned from university, tea was on the table. As I sat down to eat I noticed my mother or sister had set the places with brand new cutlery.

Denny was in front of the TV in the lounge where he preferred to eat.

“Where did these come from?” I said loud enough for him to hear, again sounding shrill.

“Your father got them,” Pat informed me when no response was forthcoming from the lounge.

“How could we afford a car and these?”

I noticed a sly smirk on my sister’s face. Carol evidently knew the story. “They didn’t cost a cent,” she said. “Dad exchanged them.”

“Exchanged them?” I gaped at her. “You don’t exchange knives and bloody forks.”

She shrugged, content to let the evidence speak for itself.

“Besides, who’d take them?” I persisted. “You know what condition they were in. They were worthless.”

“Well, you’re father managed it,” my mother said with a faint smile.

There was a rare note of satisfaction in her voice.

“How?”

“I packed the old ones up in their box.” Incredibly, through all the recent turmoil she had kept their original packaging. “And then he took them in to McEwan’s and asked for a replacement.”

“We didn’t buy them there.” My voice rose again, alarmed at my mother’s apparent complicity. “We got them in Portland years ago!”

My mother ignored this point to avoid its implication of impropriety. McEwan’s was having a sale, she explained. Its brochure had been put in our letter box. “There were these nice sets of knives and forks.”

“To buy, not to bloodywell swap!”

My reputation as an anarchist was looking rather misplaced.

“And after what you said yesterday,” she persisted.

Denny emerged from the lounge, somewhat stooped from his chronic back pains, with his cardigan falling loosely.

“I went in there this morning and demanded a refund,” he said, reluctant to let the story unfold without his contribution. “The kid that served me, she refused. She reckoned they didn’t stock that type of knife and fork.”

“I bet they didn’t.”

“So I kicked up a stink.”

Shrewdly he had counted on the allegiance of other shoppers who were there at the sale in great numbers. When he started creating a scene many of them gathered around him. Confused, the young sales assistant hastened to find the manager, who strode over ready to send Denny packing. But when he failed to intimidate or shame him with declarations of dishonesty, he raised his eyes at the sales assistant as if to say there’s one at every sale. His next move was to try to get Denny away from the crowd, offering to discuss the matter in his office.

That had been the cue for another outburst. “Isn’t that bloody typical,” Denny appealed to the crowd. “They get you away from the public and that’s the last anyone hears about it.”

There were murmurs of agreement.

“I’m not moving until I get a replacement for these knives and forks,” he shouted. “Is everything you sell in this place bloody rubbish? I spent half me pension on these. It’s daylight robbery. Look at ’em!”

There were more rumblings of sympathy from the crowd. The manager, fearing the worst and doing some hard-nosed calculations, instructed the sales assistant to let him choose another set of cutlery and set him packing, before striding back to his office.

With a new set in his hands Denny insisted the store take back the old ones.

I marvelled at his audacity but tried to disguise my feelings lest he interpret them as approval or, worse, encouragement. I bowed my head in concentration as I applied a new stainless steel knife to my sausage.

My mother’s tacit endorsement of Denny’s antics concerned me. Far from being wary of any further antisocial tendencies he displayed, she was ready to participate. Since his siege and his latest stay in the asylum she seemed to have resigned herself to his world. Perhaps it was the isolation she felt in Melbourne. Better to accept Denny the way he was than suffer his hostility and estrangement as well. After all the drama in their lives she supported him. Was it enduring love? I suspect she had never lost sight of the charming young man she had married who had always had a good heart, a generous spirit, whose true nature had been thwarted and twisted by something terrible that had happened to him at the end of the war when he was hardly more than a boy and afterwards by an uncaring country, the high-spirited, charismatic bloke she’d fallen for when she was barely out of her teens herself, still full of hope and joy. She’d endured the battles he’d had over the years with his illness and the Repatriation Department as he tried to get a decent pension. She would stand by him now more than ever.

It reminded me of a short story I had recently read, about a woman whose husband went mad. He had entered another world that excluded her. But she decided she would never abandon him. If he could no longer share her reality she would follow him into his. Soon she was seeing the same flying statues that her husband saw.

For me the new cutlery was another watershed. Pat might have decided to follow Denny but not me. I was desperate for a way out before I went down the same track. Claire, not the most stable of people herself, seemed my best hope.

I eventually invited her home to meet my parents, after procrastinating for many weeks, worried about her judgment of our humble abode, worried about the impression my father might make, worried too about what she would think of the pile of tiles in the kitchen and the tables being assembled in the living room.

My parents were very polite and welcoming. Denny tried his best to be urbane. He probably guessed I had warned her about him. And for a while she considered him quite charming, wondering what my concern was.

But one day, soon after, when she arrived at the bottom of the flats she could hear him bellowing at Pat. She came upstairs rather gingerly, the outcry resounding down the stairwell, and hesitated before our door, wondering whether it was wise to interrupt. When she finally knocked, the shouting ended abruptly and he opened the door, wearing his friendliest smile.

The transformation unnerved her. He attempted to talk to her about his tables, to get her opinion on his designs, to offer her any one of her choosing. Speechless, she headed for my room.

“You’re right. He’s nuts,” she decided.

She begged me to get the phone connected so she could contact me to find out the lie of the land before she came around. Often she insisted we go somewhere else to talk. And the only place I could think of where we could be alone without costing money was the Melbourne Cemetery across the road. Usually we could get some peace and quiet there.

She pointed out something that I hadn’t noticed about my father. He loved his tables. She had watched him on occasion applying the tiles, with as much concentration and aesthetic judgment as an artist, balancing colours and patterns. There was not a skerrick of aggression in his body as he worked on his designs. It reminded her of young children when they were handed bright paints, a brush, and some butcher paper.

“Maybe he’s a frustrated artist,” she ventured.

Denny eventually tired of making the tables. But the pile of tiles in the kitchen remained and he had boxes of screw-on table legs stacked on top of each other in the lounge room with nowhere outside the flat secure enough to store them. Then one day he hit upon a novel idea: hawking table legs, minus the tops, around the housing estate.

He bundled them into sets of four, attached to each a small plastic bag containing mounting plates and screws, and went from door to door.

To my amazement people bought them. I couldn’t for the life of me think why, unless it was to get rid of him. Once he even managed to exchange a set for a more edible leg at the local butcher’s.

Increasingly Denny’s behaviour and my mother’s acquiescence were alienating me. There was a vast no-man’s-land between my home life and the circles I moved in at university and even at Claire’s place, where her friends and acquaintances weren’t exactly conventional, law-abiding citizens. But at least we occupied some common ground (I liked their music and was beginning to understand more about art), while there was nothing, now that I’d abandoned football, which I felt I could talk to my family about. It was an effort to be in their company. We no longer seemed to share the same language.

I didn’t blame them. I was the one drifting away. And I was helpless to prevent it.

I was almost grateful when Denny had another heart attack, which landed him in the Royal Melbourne Hospital for a while towards the end of 1971. I just needed a respite from him.

It wasn’t long enough.

There is a note in his files on his time there.

Normally a patient of this age group would be anti-coagulated, but because of his manner of leaving the hospital this has not been possible.

DRAFTED

It was only a few months after Denny resumed control of our financial affairs that we began to experience difficulties again.

The first sign of it came one afternoon as I arrived home from university. Denny was waiting downstairs under the flats. As I pulled up in the automatic he jogged over and instructed me to get in the other car, while he took my place in the automatic. I was to follow him. There was a note of concern in his voice and he surveyed the carpark furtively.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Just follow me.” His manner was rather sheepish. “I’ll explain later.”

He headed along St Georges Road, switched to Plenty Road, driving erratically, cautious at intersections, reckless between, speeding past the psychiatric hospital where he had spent two months, and on through the suburbs until he reached Settlement Road (which in those days was the northern limit of the city). He stopped a short distance from some kind of storage depot. There were decommissioned trams and heavy machinery stowed in its yard, and a shed near the gate with a sign indicating it was the office. The land around was degraded: rocks, rubbish, thistles. There were views across the neglected landscape to the hills around King Lake.

When I pulled up behind him he came over and told me to wait. He returned to the automatic and drove it into the depot.

After twenty minutes he emerged from the office, jogged out of the depot and slid into the passenger seat.

“Let’s go,” he said, looking pleased with himself.

“Are we leaving the car behind?”

“It’s collateral,” he said in an undertone, as if someone else might hear him. If he had received money for the car, he had already secreted it. “We’ll get it back in a month or so. Not a word to anyone, you hear?”

I figured it was the last I’d ever see of it. Yet I didn’t grasp the entire purpose of his actions until the next day, when a representative of the hire-purchase company that Denny had used knocked on our door. He demanded to know the location of the automatic, which was to be repossessed due to a series of repayment defaults.

Denny kept him at the threshold. “You’ll never see it again,” he warned, his eyes bulging. “Not unless you renegotiate. It’s as simple as that.”

“There’s the payment of arrears to be dealt with first.”

“Out of the fucking question. I already told you that, but you won’t listen. It’s a completely new deal or zilch.”

It was a triumph for Denny. He had managed to turn a debt into a financial windfall from a finance company. To rub salt into the wound, he arrived home a few weeks later with a huge van, a down-payment for it made with some of the money borrowed on the automatic, under the gaze of the company’s representative, who became a regular fixture beneath the flats lest the automatic miraculously reappear. I used to pass him on my way upstairs and we’d exchange a fatalistic look that acknowledged he’d been out-manoeuvred.

Once I said, “You’re wasting your time.”

Once he said, “Come on, where is it? Please.”

For a couple of weeks he was there every other day. Then his visits became less frequent until they stopped altogether. But it crossed my mind that he had found a more concealed observation post.

With the arrival of the van Denny went into business, despite the fragile condition of his heart. And I was dragooned into it. Without my assistance it would never have gotten off the ground. He was the brains behind the enterprise while I was the brawn. I went with him to an aerated-waters factory on Geelong Road in Footscray called Boon Spa, where he negotiated a deal to buy wholesale several dozen crates of soft drink in sundry flavours. I loaded the van while he put the final touches to the deal. And when we got back to the housing estate, he headed off to solicit orders. Afterwards I became the delivery boy, riding the lifts of the high-rise or climbing the stairwells of the walk-up flats, lugging a crate at a time, containing a dozen bottles, banging on the doors of identical flats, exchanging crates for cash.

Then to my amazement the yellow automatic turned up again.

Denny arrived in it, euphoric. Apparently the finance company had yielded to his conditions. He tapped his temple gleefully to indicate his ingenuity. There were ways of getting what you want. The only requirements were a bit of gumption and some unconventional strategies.

Suddenly we were a three-vehicle family, which created its own problems since each flat had rights to only one parking space. And parking in the street had time limits. With two cars Denny had managed to arrange access to the parking space of a family that had no car, but a third was more problematic. It looked seriously acquisitive, which aroused suspicion and resentment amongst those who kept the neighbourhood under close scrutiny.

But as it transpired the issue never festered for long.

Within a short while Denny defaulted again, only this time the company was ready for his chicanery, responding with what these days would be called a pre-emptive strike. The company representative who arrived to repossess the automatic was the same one who had shown up beneath our flats for weeks, over and above the call of duty, on a futile vigil. I watched him through our kitchen window. His perseverance led me to believe he was probably the agent who had done the original deal with Denny, and his reputation, if not his job, with the company had been in jeopardy all those months. Perhaps he looked up and caught sight of me as he drove out of the parking bay, for he wound down the window and gave me the bird.

For a few weeks the soft-drink business flourished, even extending to a neighbouring high-rise estate on Nicholson Street, until it came to an abrupt end one night with the disappearance of the van. Denny’s refusal to report it to the police brought on a bad case of déjà vu. Under sufferance he confessed the van had been repossessed after a cheque he had written to pay an instalment had bounced.

Secretly I was relieved. My feelings towards him were becoming so stark I could barely bring myself to accompany him on the daily merry-go-round he had created, despite recognising how much we needed the extra money. As far as I was concerned the less I had to do with him the better. I stayed with Claire as often as I could, although, wary as I was of her volatile moods, I wasn’t prepared to move in with her entirely. My financial dependence on Denny limited my options anyway. I avoided thinking of my mother and what she was going through. My heart was hardening into an ugly ball of resentment. Sometimes when I walked past the TAB near the corner of Lygon and Elgin Streets, I saw Denny inside. He noticed me on one occasion and grinned guiltily, like a naughty boy caught out by his father in a lolly shop. I shook my head in disgust to reinforce his shame.

One thing I had to admit, though: he hadn’t been violent for a long time. Bad tempered, yes. Abusive on occasion. But no violence. No knives brandished. No fists. No strangler’s hands. Not even a ferocious grimace. Perhaps the heart attacks and the cancer had emasculated him. Perhaps he no longer had the will to assert himself so demonstratively.

I continued to bury myself in study, spent long hours at university and, when I was at home, shut myself in the bedroom to write essays or read. All this reading and writing was not exactly helping me, but at least it kept more vindictive thoughts in check, pushed them into some dingy recess of the brain, which no doubt they still inhabit, waiting for the moment when I drop my guard to emerge and horrify everybody; myself more than anyone.

More than halfway through my degree I had less of an idea than the day I started about what career I wanted to pursue. I’d come no further with my thinking on the matter than the public service or teaching, both of which were barely more appealing than factory work. I was distracted too by the government, which was still sending young men to fight in Vietnam, and the day was rapidly approaching when a marble bearing my date of birth might be plucked from the national service barrel.

I had tried to avoid thinking about being conscripted. Besides my opposition to a war that I considered was nothing more than international thuggery, the thought of being routinely barked at by some megalomaniac drill sergeant was almost too much to bear. If the issue was ever raised by those around me, I was adamant I’d never accept conscription: I’d be a conscientious objector or a draft dodger. And since I considered my objections political more than ethical, it would most likely be the latter, the illegal option.

Denny called me a fool. What was the point of ruining your life by going to jail just on a principle? Who’d care? As far as jail was concerned, he probably knew what he was talking about. But he didn’t want me going to war, either, not for the sake of ‘them bloody Yanks’ or anybody else, not with the risk I might end up in a psych hospital, like he had.

“When they make you do the medical just tell them you had rheumatic fever on Flinders Island,” he suggested. “They never kept medical records there, so there’s no way they can check. They’ll never take you then. Not worth the risk.”

“Why not?

“They’ll reckon you’ve got a dodgy ticker.”

I thought his suggestion was fanciful, but it started me considering other ways to cheat at a medical examination, if it came to that.

One day as I arrived home my mother met me at the door and urged me to listen to the radio. The conscription lottery was on again. I sat at the kitchen table as a marble bearing my birth date was drawn.

My head began to spin. Why couldn’t something go my way, just once?

“What are you going to do?” my mother murmured.

Without answering I went to my room and propped on the edge of the bunk. My mind was torpid. A stagnant pond. I had no group of supporters like some student activists who had become draft dodgers. Nor had I made any attempt to contact the underground movement. I had nowhere to hide. If I refused to take the medical examination, the Federal Police would come knocking on my door. The thought of going to prison filled me with horror. Gradually I came round to Denny’s plan.

But I wasn’t happy about it. Over the next few months and years I indulged in a good deal of self-recrimination.

The medical examination was conducted in a dismal office in the city. No money had been wasted on décor. All the walls were painted in a prison hue. Why worry about the sensitivities of those already condemned? As I queued I saw a lad from Portland I knew. We talked briefly about our rotten luck. He was counting on the Labor Party winning the next election and ending the draft. At my interview, when I was asked to list any diseases I had ever contracted, I made a big deal about how I was yet to recover completely from hepatitis. When the time came to test my hearing I was instructed to put on headphones in a booth and asked to indicate when I first heard a sound in each ear. A bell chimed. The volume increased. It chimed again. Once I detected it I waited until it chimed a few times before I signalled that I thought I heard something. Throughout the examination I tried to downplay my health. I felt sneaky and cowardly but it worked. Within a month I received a letter announcing I had failed the medical.

The only honourable moment in the whole affair for me came from my determination not to mention rheumatic fever.

Everyone was pleased except me. I moped about, at home where my family ignored me, at Claire’s where her housemates didn’t notice, at university where anti-war activities were a daily occurrence. I was convinced I’d let the peace movement down, a betrayal that I’d have to live with the rest of my days.

Then something happened that jolted me out of my navel gazing.

Claire announced she was pregnant.

A BOY

"How did that happen?” I murmured, shocked.

She glared at me. “How do you think?”

It came as a complete surprise to me; to the best of my knowledge she was using the contraceptive pill. But that was no excuse. If I’d been less naïve, if I’d had my wits about me, I’d have taken my own precautions. I knew how unreliable she had been with the medication she had taken for epilepsy. Why then did I imagine she’d keep to the pill’s unforgiving schedule?

She was four months pregnant before she learnt of her condition. On earlier visits to her family GP her suspicions hadn’t been taken seriously. The doctor considered the missing periods a consequence of her depression, and never bothered with a pregnancy test. Despite her instincts she accepted his diagnosis and never sought a second opinion, wanting to believe the improbable. By the time the pregnancy was confirmed, an abortion, which was still difficult to arrange even under more favourable circumstances, was out of the question.

“But you needn’t worry,” she said with a bitter laugh. “It’s probably not yours.”

It took a moment for this to sink in. “What?”

“Before you get all indignant on me, I want you to know this is worse for me than you.”

“Who was it?’ I couldn’t conceal my hurt. “Who else did you have sex with?”

“Dan,” she said, without looking at me.

Dan was one of her co-tenants, an aspiring musician who rarely spoke to me.

“Do you think I wanted it?” she went on, anticipating my questions. “I was depressed. He came into my room with a flagon of wine to try and cheer me up. I had a drink with him, quite a few actually. Then he was all over me. I told him to stop but he took no notice. He forced himself into me.”

“That’s rape!”

“Yeah, but who’d believe it?”

“Fuck,” I said, shocked. “What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing. No stupid heroics, all right? I just want to forget it.”

“What about the child?”

“It’ll be adopted.”

I groaned, bewildered, unable to think clearly. “I wouldn’t want you to do that on my account.”

“Not because of you,” she murmured, despairing.

“You shouldn’t be living in the same house as him.”

“He shifted out weeks ago.”

She made a futile gesture and buried her head in her hands to weep alone. I wanted to suggest she go to the police but I knew what her answer would be.

Within a week she shifted back into her family home.

Her father was a decent man but conventional, and once he learnt of her condition he refused to let her stay for the duration of her pregnancy. When it became obvious he insisted she move into Berry Street Babies Home, which offered shelter to unmarried pregnant women on condition they adopt their babies, which the agency arranged.

The home was adjacent to Yarra Park and a stone’s throw from the MCG in East Melbourne. I used to go there as often as I could to stroll around the park with her, while she smoked and talked about the rotten state of the world, of society, of art. We both observed her girth expand with grim incredulity. I remember she used to wear a yellow crenulated dress that reminded me of a paw paw.

Sometimes she would come back to the housing estate with me on weekends. Pat and Denny assumed I was responsible for her condition, and neither of us said anything to disabuse them. They took it in their stride. They urged Claire to reconsider adopting. She could come and live with us, as Jean had with her baby. Neither of them could understand why we would want to give away our own flesh and blood. They seemed to take it as a personal slight.

I was relieved that Claire was adamant about the adoption. Besides the doubts over its paternity, I wasn’t ready to face parenthood. I had vowed often enough that I would never be a father like Denny. I would never harm a child with a father’s resentment or indifference. When, or if, I finally wanted children I would look after them properly. If it crossed my mind that giving up a child for adoption might be just as cruel, I never allowed the thought to linger. There was too much chaos and uncertainty in my life to try to persuade Claire to change her mind.

As the expected date of birth drew closer both my parents put pressure on me to keep the child, even offering to be surrogate parents until Claire and I were ready to take over. They thought I was only worried about finishing my studies before I started a family.

I was agitated enough without their meddling. Then just as the child was due, Denny took me aside and told me that, when I was conceived, he’d been going through a difficult time, receiving treatment in a psychiatric hospital. His own mother—my grandmother—had tried to persuade Pat to have an abortion on account of his instability. Pat was on the point of agreeing when he got wind of it and intervened.

“If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t be here,” he whispered to keep privy what he had to say. “I beg you, as a father, don’t give up your own flesh and blood.”

Once again I was stunned. I stared at the wall for a long time after he left my room. Was he telling the truth? And, if he was, why had he been so concerned about my birth? It made no sense. It was bullshit. He had shown virtually no interest in me as I was growing up. Was I supposed to feel grateful?

His assertion struck me as unfair, preposterous and manipulative.

With my emotions so brittle any burst of laughter from my family watching the sitcom in the room next door, any shout from the street might have broken me into pieces.

I grabbed my jacket and left the flat. My eyes were raw. I walked for a long time, trying to quell my rage. If I had misgivings about the adoption they were lost in his words.

The baby was born a few days later at the Royal Women’s Hospital. I remember being there, watching Claire in labour, and thinking she’ll change her mind. The intensity of the experience left no room for detachment. Her face was contorted. The waves of pain were palpable. Beneath a sheen of sweat, her skin was wan, as if her blood had retreated to the interior drama.

“Good luck,” I said with a feeble smile as an orderly wheeled her into the delivery theatre.

I stood around with a few imminent fathers in a waiting room. Our collective anxiety made the room unbearable. Some of them had cigars poking from their jacket pockets. I went out for air and when I returned I was informed the baby was born. A boy. I went to see Claire, hoping she would be pleased that I was still around, but she was withdrawn, impassive.

The following night I went to see the baby, which was held up to a viewing window in the nursery. There was nothing remarkable about him, nothing that set him apart from other babies, nothing to identify him as Claire’s except for a band around his tiny wrist. There was nothing in his appearance that suggested he was related to me. But as I looked at his face—his eyes clenched and his mouth experimenting with shapes—I had an unwanted feeling that he was mine.

My heart constricted.

I wondered if I would ever see him again. I wondered how often I would think of him over the years, ponder what he was doing or where he was, ponder if he ever thought of us. I remembered the story Denny had told me of how he had turned away to avoid identification as my father when, twenty years earlier, I was held up at a viewing window. It was a shameful thing to do and a cruel thing to tell a child. But wasn’t what I was about to do—turn my back on this baby—far worse? In my heart I knew it.

My mother and sister visited Claire in hospital but I wasn’t there and have no idea if they saw the baby or discussed his fate. Subsequently the subject was never raised at home, at least not in my presence. It became another of those episodes we never talked about.

When Claire left hospital she returned to her father’s place to live. She didn’t talk about the adopted child. She didn’t talk much at all. Now and then she went to visit another woman who had been at Berry Street with her, who had given birth to a child just before she had and was having trouble coping with its adoption. Once I went with Claire. She tried to reassure the woman they had both made the right decision. Her words sounded hollow but the woman found them reassuring and she pleaded with Claire to visit her more often. Claire did visit until the woman’s emotional state became unbearable, undermining her own defences.

For a while I feared our relationship would be a casualty of her trauma but she seemed to want my company more. She kept away from her other friends whose tact in fragile situations she couldn’t rely upon. We went to the movies, to cheap restaurants, to pubs to listen to bands. We avoided any talk about what had happened. She seemed to treat the pregnancy and birth like an illness, and having recovered she had no inclination to dwell on the experience. At times we talked about renting a flat and living together. Then one day while we were sitting on a swinging garden bench in her father’s back yard, enjoying a quiet afternoon in the insipid warmth of a rare winter sun, she suggested we get married.

I was taken aback. Both of us had rather negative views of marriage. And amongst most of our friends it was considered unnecessary or obsolete.

“Look, don’t be so astonished. It’d mean nothing to me. It just seems to be the easiest way of us living together. You’d get more money from any studentship you got and my father would leave me alone.”

I gave my lukewarm agreement. If we were going to live together and I was going to train as a teacher, it made sense. The idea grew on me. I desperately wanted to get away from my own father. Since his release from the asylum his behaviour had become increasingly erratic. Or I, at least, was becoming more conscious of how antisocial he was and how little concern he had for the most basic norms. I might have admired him for that but I was concerned I’d be dragged into his madness, which I suspected had already started to happen to my mother.

I should have been more enthusiastic, some independence at last, but at the back of my mind there was a question: if it was our intention to marry, why did we abandon this child of ours?

Before we got married, my grandfather Da died—begrudgingly. His lungs had finally collapsed. He had smoked rollies since he was seven. Eight decades of smoking. What did he expect?

I travelled to Portland with my mother and Claire, and saw him in the hospital just hours before he died. He stared at me with resentful eyes and trembling lips, the cheekbones almost visible beneath his skin. When I took his clammy hand and squeezed it, I felt a faint reciprocal pressure.

The funeral was held on a bleak day at St Stephen’s Anglican Church. We followed the hearse to the Portland Cemetery where egregious rows of headstones defied the contours of a windswept slope. Denny had refused to attend. But Pat was there in subdued colours rather than black, weeping quietly, with the Stagg clan at her side. Many of them I barely knew. The display of grief from some of them added to a sensation weighing on me that we were all part of a charade, a clan that pretended loyalty and closeness, a sensation that returned at every family funeral I attended over the next couple of decades.

I don’t remember Uncle Fred attending his father’s funeral. But he showed up at our flat in Carlton some time later. My mind was in such a self-absorbed state I’m unsure if it was days, weeks or months later; or how long he ended up staying. The only thing I recall clearly is his delight at discovering our proximity to the Woolshed Hotel. My room was too small to share. So he bedded down on a fold-up bed in the lounge, next to Denny, who still slept upright on a sprung chair. I was fond of Uncle Fred but his drunkenness was becoming more severe, if that were possible. His physical condition had deteriorated spectacularly, and he was more maudlin and ingratiating. If he was going to stay, the best thing for me to do was get married as soon as possible and move out. It would create more space in the flat.

We prepared for our wedding discreetly, set a date in spring, a few months before my twenty-first birthday. Claire was already twenty-one, the age of consent, but I had to get my parents’ permission to marry. The legal requirement annoyed me. I procrastinated.

In the meantime I worked on excuses to justify our decision to friends who had heard me disparage the institution of marriage often enough. It was also the last year of my degree and I was facing a decision about my future. In truth I didn’t want a career. But I could see myself either joining the public service or the teaching profession by default. When I weighed up these options, teaching came out slightly ahead on the grounds it meant another year of study. One of the reasons I had gone to university was to postpone the day I was condemned to the workforce, although I seemed to be constantly in work, at the fly-screen factory during the academic year, or temporarily at Golden Poultry, a holiday job I’d arranged through Jimmy, whose family had shifted from Portland to Frankston.

The other factor in favour of teaching was the opportunity of receiving a studentship, which offered a sum greater than the amount Denny received from the Repat on my behalf. A married recipient of the studentship received almost double. Why I hadn’t applied for one earlier as a means of gaining an independent income, I have no idea, except perhaps the dread I felt in those days of making a decision about a career before it was absolutely necessary. A studentship had contractual obligations: each year of payment required a year of service.

I remember the day I showed my mother the engagement ring that I had just bought Claire. (God knows how many chickens went to their death at my hand to pay for it.) We were on a tram in Carlton, in public, but that didn’t stop her tears from flowing.

“What’s the matter?” I muttered. “I thought you would’ve been pleased.”

“Oh, Graeme,” she sniffled. “You’re too young.”

“It’s just Claire, isn’t it? You think we’re not suited.”

“There’s plenty more fish in the sea, darlin’.”

Snapping the ring box closed, I sat in a cold silent rage. So, finally, she had let slip how she really felt about Claire. Plenty more fish in the sea!

Knitting, gossiping, shop-loving, sports-mad fish that could talk sales, football and sewing patterns in the one breath, or go ga-ga at the sight of a baby! A garrulous fish. A conventional fish. Any fish was preferable to my unconventional catch!

Again I realised how far apart we’d become. Somewhere in the last year or so our trajectories had separated and were heading inexorably in different directions. And I knew there was nothing either of us could do about it. The thought never crossed my mind that she might not have wanted a daughter-in-law who wouldn’t keep her own child.

After we set the date Claire stayed over more often. She was there the day Denny announced we were shifting to a house in Reservoir, a suburb on the northern fringe of the city. He tried to argue the merits of the shift: we would be closer to La Trobe University and Carol’s high school. But I figured we were about to be evicted again.

Once more I was given no warning of this, despite the flat being in my mother’s name. He must have persuaded her to hand over control of all their finances and once more had landed us in a pickle. But at least this time he had steered away from the folly of another siege. This time it would be the moonlight flit.

We left the move until the last moment. Denny went out in the evening and returned around ten o’clock with a van. He said the move was easier at night since there was less traffic around to worry about. After he backed it up to the stairs beneath the flats we started carrying our possessions down. He decided to lower some of our more cumbersome items on a rope from the balcony, past the living rooms below. Around eleven o’clock, while Carol and Claire were taking kitchen chairs across the plank that Denny had laid from the stairs to the deck of the van, a solitary policeman emerged from the darkness to investigate our activity.

Claire exchanged a guilty look with Carol, who mustered as much dignity as she could to explain our flight.

He shrugged, po-faced. “Saves us doing it in the morning,” he said.

The weatherboard house in Reservoir had four bedrooms, which was just as well, since Uncle Fred was back living with us. With Claire occasionally staying over I was less prepared to share a room with him again. It had carpets with a smell that required a few bottles of household deodorant to disguise. There was a garage, the first we had ever had, and a big back yard where Fred soon started a vegie garden. Denny tried again to convince me he had made the move for my benefit, being closer to La Trobe University, but I dismissed his lie with a silent shrug, refusing to give him the approval he sought.

Our wedding couldn’t come soon enough. Claire and I approached a clergyman who agreed to perform the nuptials at her father’s house.

My uni mates insisted on giving me a bucks’ party. I was shanghaied to Ian’s family home in Bentleigh. The family was out. Ten students were there, all male, only Ian and Charles I considered friends. I was spared the indignity of a stripper but not the attempt to give me an enema with a garden hose. I successfully fought them off and made such a racket screaming, Ian (his feral teeth gnashing) called it off, concerned about the attentions of his respectable neighbours.

I hired a purple velour suit. Claire bought a bone calico dress that came to her ankles, which she wore with leather sandals. My old mate Jimmy, who had passed his Matriculation and was studying to be a primary school teacher in Geelong, agreed to be best man. The bridesmaid was one of Claire’s friends on day leave from a private psychiatric clinic where she was receiving shock treatment for depression. Pat and Denny attended. I remember it was a fine day, weatherwise.

The ceremony was in the lounge room. We muttered our vows rather shamefacedly. The vicar was merciful. He used the abridged version of the service, accepted payment discreetly from Claire’s father and disappeared.

The wedding breakfast was held in the sunroom on hired trestle tables. When I rose to give the groom’s speech, Jimmy put his hand to his mouth to shield his words and interrupted. He told me my fly was undone, a tired old joke from our school days that never failed. To check it I dropped back to the seat bench, which duly collapsed, plunging the entire bridal party to the floor.

I can’t recall anything else about the occasion, except Claire’s brother-in-law had assumed the role of wedding photographer. None of his photos came out. The only snap I have of the day was taken by Claire with my mother’s instamatic camera. It is of me and Pat and Denny on the front lawn: Pat in a floral dress, which used to be her Sunday best when I was still an altar boy, Denny in a St Vinnie’s suit and yours truly between them in purple velour. All of us look inept and shabby.

Instead of a honeymoon Claire and I shifted straightaway into a flat overlooking a leafy street in East Melbourne. The building was Edwardian. It had charm, which suited my burgeoning sense of aesthetics. It had character, which I hoped bolstered my own. But above all it was cathartic. After the places I had always lived in it helped establish the psychological space I desperately needed. It allowed me to believe I was unlike my family. I needed to feel different to negate the hopelessness I had endured most of my life.

When I turned twenty-one we had a small party in our flat. Pat dutifully supplied a birthday cake, a sponge with lemon icing, which she knew was my favourite. But cruelly I didn’t invite her.

DENNY’S FINAL YEARS

As I had hoped, my contact with Pat and Denny diminished after my marriage. I saw them now and then but claimed I was too busy to visit regularly. They got behind in their rent again and were forced to move into a two-bedroom flat in Alphington, just off busy Heidelberg Road. I helped them to shift. Carol still lived with them. But Uncle Fred was no longer around. He had started on a bender in the city one Anzac Day and when he finally returned a week later, just as Pat and Denny were about to report him missing, he announced he was moving out. He had run into an old army mate who was going to put him up for a while, which was just as well, for there was no room for him in their new place.

Denny’s fraught relationship with the Repatriation Department continued. Although I was unaware of it, he spent more time hospitalised.

Mr Sparkes has been feeling unwell, anxious and depressed for 6 months prior to admission. Also he felt excessively tired, and complains of a consistent dull tightness in the chest, present for 3–4 years, that has exacerbations up to several times daily. These exacerbations seem most clearly related to emotional stress…He refuses to discuss his domestic situation at the time, but admits that he was extremely angry with his wife that night, and that he has felt this severe degree of anger on previous occasions.

I was studying for my Diploma of Education on a studentship and still making fly-wire screens to earn a little extra cash. I completed my teacher training in a year and received a posting to the Myrtleford High School in north-eastern Victoria. By then Carol had shifted in with her boyfriend, and Pat and Denny, perhaps running out of options in Melbourne, had moved back to Portland.

How they got the furniture to Portland I have no idea but I later heard the story of the way Denny took the ceramic tiles he had accumulated and wouldn’t part with. Carol had started university. She had a friend, Bruce, who offered to help out with his panel van. Bruce was an obliging soul. They loaded the tiles into the back of his van until its springs were totally compressed. Carol and her boyfriend, Peter, went with them. Pat took the car, which was packed to the roof with other chattels. With no more room in the front of the panel van, Denny volunteered to squeeze into the narrow gap between the metal roof and the pile of tiles. With a little help from Bruce he managed it. He lay spread-eagled and immobile for the five-hour trip without complaint.

Before I took up my teaching post in Myrtleford, Claire and I went to Portland for Christmas. Since shifting away from my parents I felt less mean-spirited towards them. With the distance growing between us I had begun to see the humorous side of my father’s antics. He was, after all, thumbing his nose at a society that had done him few favours.

The flat they were renting was in the aptly named Casino Court. It was tiny compared to the home we’d had in West Portland. And the living room seemed crammed with TVs. There were three stacked on top of each other in a corner. Each played a role in their nightly entertainment. The bottom one didn’t work at all but had solid legs and was used solely as a stand for the other two. The middle one had a picture but no sound. The top one had sound but no picture. Together, the complete caboodle! Next to them was a Christmas tree surrounded by parcels.

Claire and I had decided to abandon the tradition of giving gifts at Christmas. We were convinced commercialism had hijacked the festive season and it was our duty to rise above such trivialisation. Besides, we were non-believers who wanted to avoid any hypocrisy. And maybe we should have stayed away altogether. A few weeks earlier I had contacted them about our decision and asked them not to waste money on us as well. It might have upset Pat who loved all Christmases and birthdays, but knowing how tight finances always were for her I felt doubly magnanimous. And I didn’t think it would bother Denny who would prefer to put the money to other uses. I had just finished listening to his explanation of the column of TVs when he took me by the arm and led me into their bedroom.

The bed was covered with parcels. “These are yours,” he said.

For a moment I mistook what he meant. “I asked you not to waste your money buying me presents.”

“No, no, they’re not for you. They’re from you,” he corrected. “See this one here. That’s for your mother. And here that one’s for me. Cigarettes. And that’s for Claire. I hope they fit her. Panties. Hard to judge the size.”

I was stunned. He had bought these gifts, wrapped and labelled them on my behalf so that my empty convictions wouldn’t spoil their Christmas.

“You know what your mother’s like.”

“Okay, thanks,” I murmured, unable to look him in the eye. I sat on the edge of the bed, dumbstruck and ashamed. It wasn’t the first time he had done something thoughtful for my mother, but it seemed more poignant, to me.

Claire was amused, at least, and was prepared to set aside our decision in order to maintain the peace. I put the presents under the Christmas tree, and after a lunch of roast chicken, baked vegetables and peas, followed by a plum pudding that came out of a tin, Denny played Santa Claus and we all pretended what lovely gifts we gave each other.

A month later they helped us shift to Myrtleford. Claire and I had found a ramshackle farmhouse in Happy Valley, fifteen kilometres from the township. The farmer who owned it lived out of sight behind a hill. He took some persuasion before he rented it to us. When I promised him we would renovate it with the help of my father (a builder by trade, I explained) he eventually agreed, setting us a nominal rent.

The rooms had slanting floors and cracked walls. The kitchen, which was reached via a collapsing verandah, was beyond use. Much of its floor had caved in and the wood stove was smashed. (A concrete slab would eventually be laid and an electric stove fitted with the help of Claire’s father.)

Pat and Denny showed up and started work immediately. Pat took to cleaning cupboards. Denny assessed the structural problems of the front rooms, removed floor boards, climbed under and began to raise the joists with his car jack. I passed him chocks of timber to place on top of subsiding stumps.

In the middle of it all, I took him to a hardware store in town to buy some nails. He went to the counter and asked for a tradesman’s discount. I muttered to him that I was happy to pay the full amount for a few nails, which cost just a couple of dollars. He ignored me. When the shop assistant asked to see his certification he changed tack, asking for a pensioner’s discount. The assistant glanced sceptically at me and charged the full amount.

“It’s all right for you,” I muttered as we stepped outside, “but I’ve got to live in this small community.”

“So you’re ashamed of your old man, are you?”

They stayed a few days and did a marvellous job getting the old farmhouse habitable. In the daytime Pat cleaned and scrubbed alongside Claire and me, while Denny plastered walls. We set up camp stretchers for them in the room next to our bedroom. And at night for the first hour after we had gone to bed, we listened to the slaps of a rolled-up newspaper, while Denny barked orders at Pat to pursue cockroaches or spiders he spotted emerging from beneath the skirting boards, incapable of pursuing them himself due to the excruciating pain in his back.

Before he had finished plastering all the rooms, Denny’s back gave out on him completely. I had overlooked his disability. Feeling guilty but relieved to see the last of them, I waved them off as they started the eight-hour journey back to Portland, appreciating what they had done for me, thinking I’ve been wrong about my old man. He helps me when he can. He probably would have been the ideal father if he hadn’t been such a desperate soul. And his desperation wasn’t all of his own making. Society had to take its share of the blame. And maybe I should take my share for not understanding him better and acting more sympathetically.

As they left I promised to visit as often as I could.

But over the next few years I saw very little of them. I managed to get there once a year, which was like stepping into the past. The meals my mother cooked were the same as I’d had growing up, always meat and three vegetables, followed by dessert, usually canned fruit and ice cream. Denny sat in his chair, smoking and studying the form guide, taciturn as always, not so much unwilling as unable to chat. They watched soapies and sport on TV. In between visits I received letters from Pat, always starting with “Dear Graeme, just a few lines…”, telling me, amongst the family gossip, how Denny had started making jewellery or that he’d had another scare with his heart or more treatment for his bad eye, or how he’d repeated his old-for-new-goods routine, this time with a vitamiser, taking it to a Warrnambool department store in its original packaging and successfully demanding a replacement; or how he was making more tiled tables.

The two years I spent teaching at the high school in Myrtleford were full of conflict. Its conservative policies were at odds with the principles I and many of the staff considered vital for a modern educational program. Much of my energy went into endeavours to change the place.

My preoccupation with the school was one of the reasons my marriage began to falter. Claire had found the isolation of the farmhouse difficult and the life I had imposed on her rather boring. Increasingly she resented the hours I spent in the evenings and on weekends discussing school matters with colleagues, mulling over pedagogical issues, dealing with my anxieties. She read a lot, but that just seemed to make her more restless. She tried to continue with her art, starting a course at a Wangaratta college some forty kilometres away. But the results depressed her. She started to collect dogs and cats. She said she found them more honest than people. She looked after injured wild birds. Mostly she couldn’t stand my colleagues, but one of them, Richard Ireland, owned a large capacity Italian motorbike. Perhaps remembering the wild days she spent with the Hells Angels, she accepted his invitation to tour Queensland during the September holidays. Without a bike of my own I stayed behind. When they returned she announced she hated the whole idea of marriage, regretted that we had ever thought it was a sensible idea, and was returning to Melbourne. Ireland resigned and followed. I was broken-hearted but couldn’t really blame either of them. I felt I had nothing to offer Claire in the way of an artistic life.

“We’ll always be friends won’t we?” she said.

Depressed and feeling a total failure, I resigned from teaching at the end of the year. I stayed at the farmhouse and for a season picked tobacco, which was cultivated in the valleys throughout the district. Claire approved and, to my surprise, came back for the summer. We worked for an Italian couple, voluble peasants from Calabria who hardly had a word of English but fed their pickers homemade salami and pickled green beans and wine for lunch, allowed them a siesta afterwards, and offered them a drop of grappa before they went home each evening.

After the harvest, Claire and I returned to Melbourne and shared a house with a friend in a rundown area of Kew.

I bought myself a motorbike, a small capacity Honda at first and then a BMW, which also pleased Claire. Our marriage had loosened up considerably. We were like lovers. But she kept up her relationship with Richard Ireland, and through him I met, Helen, who became my other lover, until she too yielded to her restless spirit and headed north to Cairns. I shifted into a small house on five acres of land on the fringe of the city and, in desperate need of an income, returned to teaching.

Residing close to Melbourne made it easier to visit my parents. They seemed to be getting along much better than they ever had when I was younger and living at home. The departure of my sister, Carol, who had married her boyfriend and shifted to Geelong, must have brought them closer together.

They were still in the same flat. Jean had returned from New Zealand to travel around Australia with a Kiwi friend, leaving her son, Dylan, in their care. Denny showed more interest in looking after him than he had ever shown his own children.

Like his mother Dylan was rather stubborn, and it was amusing to watch the clash of wills when Denny disciplined him. But Dylan could be affectionate. He loved to sit on Denny’s knee and give his Pop a hug.

I watched them with mixed feelings. I had never experienced the simple joy of intimacy with my father. Maybe I should have been more affectionate, more assertive.

Denny gave Dylan the job of packaging his jewellery. He made earrings from silver coil, which he cut and threaded through tiny coloured plastic beads before twisting it into loops and hooks with plyers. Dylan placed each pair into sealable plastic pockets. Each Sunday Denny sold them cheaply at flea markets around the district, along with tiled tables.

Pat accompanied him. She sat on a stool behind a fold-up table guarding the money tin, while Denny spruiked and promoted his merchandise. When Denny was in the Bundoora Psychiatric Hospital after his second siege his doctor had urged him and my mother to seek some activity of a socially satisfying nature preferably that they can undertake together. The likelihood of that ever happening would have struck me as zero, but finally it had happened. I went to one of the markets on the Portland foreshore and stood some distance away, observing them through the crowd. Pat and Denny together. Laughing sometimes. Smiling at each other. It was another poignant moment for me, bittersweet and incongruous after a lifetime of discord.

In the coming years they would travel farther afield, attending flea markets as far away as Geelong and Melbourne. One winter Denny came up with the idea of making his earrings using the colours of VFL teams and flogging them to merchandisers around the grounds. On his first deal he was swindled out of the earrings. He approached the administrators of the club but they refused to intervene on his behalf. For years until his death he railed against the club.

In 1977 Uncle Mick died. Just after he retired from the post office, from a job he swore he had hated all his life, he had been diagnosed with emphysema and within a year he could hardly move outside the house.

I followed his slow decline with morbid curiosity. I had worked at the post office with him and had heard him curse his job aloud every second day so nobody had any doubts about how he despised it. He could barely wait for his retirement. I saw him on a couple of occasions, confined to his armchair without the strength to lift his arms and later to his bed, his whiskery face beneath an oxygen mask, sunken into a hideous caricature. I vowed one thing: I wouldn’t wait for retirement before I started to enjoy my life.

Soon after he died I decided to resign from the Education Department.

In the New Year I returned to Myrtleford, not to teach, but to pick tobacco again. I worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day, rising before dawn to empty the tall kilns, picking the soft green leaves from dawn till dusk, loading kilns in the evening. It was exhausting work but deeply satisfying. No onerous responsibility, like teaching. Sunshine and fresh air. The magnificent Mount Buffalo as a backdrop; laconic sharefarmers as boss and comrades.

After the harvest I crossed the state to visit my parents again.

While I was in Portland I had an accident on my motorbike. A car suddenly turned in front of me. I swerved but clipped the back of his car. It slightly injured my leg and damaged the steering on the bike. The driver was charged with failing to give way.

I managed to ride back to my parents’ flat. When Denny saw my leg he insisted I should go to the hospital, “in case there’re complications later”. He took me and sat quietly with me for two hours in Casualty until I was seen to. There were no histrionics and I felt grateful for his consideration.

The charges against the driver were heard the following year. I was working on the tobacco harvest again when I received a summons. I went back to Portland, attended court to explain what had happened. I was awarded travelling costs and the wages I had forfeited attending court.

The duty sergeant told me it would take a day or two to complete the paperwork before I received my costs. When I explained I had to return to Myrtleford immediately, Denny volunteered to collect the sum owing. Perhaps the sergeant knew Denny. He raised a dubious eyebrow and made a point of asking if I was sure it was what I wanted, which annoyed me enough to agree to the arrangement. The sergeant shrugged. I left the court without expecting to see the money. Denny was certain to collect but it would never reach me.

I was wrong.

A few weeks later a personal cheque from Denny for the exact amount arrived in the mail. I was so pleasantly surprised I stared at it for a long time, thinking finally he had changed. I considered keeping it as a memento, which might have been his hope, but I now needed every cent I was making.

I took it to the bank to cash.

It bounced.

I spent a few years picking tobacco, travelling north to Queensland for winter, returning to the Ovens Valley for the next harvest. Claire had a flat in Melbourne. Sometimes she travelled with me. Sometimes she was with Richard Ireland. Both of them worked on the tobacco for a couple of seasons. Usually the farmers I worked for allowed me to stay in the pickers huts rent-free after the harvest, on condition I occasionally worked for them on the hoeing or planting. I had a lot of idle time between harvests. So I started writing. I fancied I might become a writer.

Claire was thrilled. She said, “I knew you’d do something like this one day.”

Writing soon became an obsession.

When I tired of tobacco picking I tried the pear and grape harvests but found the conditions too unpleasant. I returned to Melbourne to live, sharing a house in Northcote with Claire and Richard, driving a taxi on weekends to pay the bills. During the week I wrote. I managed to get a couple of articles published in newspapers, which was just the bait I needed to keep tapping away on the antique typewriter Claire had bought me to encourage my creativity. Eventually I shifted into a bedsit and went on the dole. I sold my motorbike.

Years had passed since I left home, enough time for me to pass a more dispassionate judgment on my parents. The chronic anger I endured was no longer directed at them. Like me, I reasoned, they were products of their circumstances. I began to feel guilty, particularly about the way I had treated my mother, who didn’t deserve my neglect after all she had done for me, the years of work to keep us fed and clothed as well as the solitary parenting. And in a way I actually admired her for sticking with him as his health declined. Despite everything, she had kept her noble spirit intact.

I started to give my father the benefit of doubt too. The bouncing cheque had raised my suspicions about the state of their finances, but I wanted to believe they had them under control. Three pensions between them—two of them full war pensions—besides some pocket money from the flea markets. And they had shifted into a council unit next to the lagoon where he had once tried to drown himself. On the rare occasions when I was around, Denny still sat as he had always done, in a sprung chair, thighs crossed, with the portable transistor on the coffee table next to him tuned in to the racing station, the packet of Albany Trims next to an ashtray he kept clean by licking a tissue, scouring out the ash after each cigarette, and placing it in an empty milk carton that sat opened beside his turf guide. But he was nowhere near as demonstrative when he lost, which led me to believe his gambling must have involved less money than in years past. And I thought, if not exactly in a state that the Buddhists called Enlightenment, the old boy is finally mellowing. He never went so far as to take up lawn bowls, like my mother, who established a whole new lot of friends at the club she joined, lovely garrulous country women who were kind and generous and kept her laughing. He was still too unsociable for that, but mellow all the same. I could sit down and have a yarn about world affairs, without him having a tantrum over our politicians, which was more likely to have been my response. He even occasionally made some astute comments that gave me pause, like: “There’s too many money-hungry bastards in the world, my friend. Greed’ll tear the human race apart, if not in my lifetime, in yours, mark my words.” Once he even praised Pat. “She’s a good woman, your mother, the best there is. Anyone who can put up with the likes of me…”

He was in his fifties and, with wild sideburns and un-oiled hair, looked like a consumptive old rock star. But I had never seen him as relaxed and content as he was around this time of his life. He sometimes showed impatience with Pat but rarely allowed his rage to resurface. There was only one incident I remember that festered with him, that kept his rage on simmer for months, and that was when his doctor left the consulting room for a moment and Denny, taking the opportunity to see what the doctor had written in his medical file, discovered a note that claimed he was selling his prescription drugs under the counter at flea markets. He declined to tell me what he said to his doctor or if he had been reported to the police. But he denied the accusation categorically. His eyes lit up with fury as of yore.

There is even a note about this in his Veteran Affairs [formerly the Repatriation] Department files from the 4th of August, 1977:

Patient arrived without appointment.

Patient refused to go without seeing a doctor and got very aggressive towards me, bringing up past failings of the Repatriation Department:

• Lack of contact regarding his Physiotherapy.

• Lack of co-operation on his medical drugs that his doctor will not prescribe for him.

All this was shouted at me in the Waiting Room with about thirty other patients waiting for their appointments…

I checked with Dr Myles in Portland who stated he had not sent the patient down to see us, also that he had been authorised by the Department of Veteran Affairs not to repeat these drugs for Mr Sparkes as he was no longer on them. Dr Myles then said he also knew of Mr Sparkes selling the drugs prescribed by himself in Portland market place.

When they shifted again, back into a larger public housing unit in West Portland, I was mildly surprised. Had the Ministry forgotten our record?

On the phone Pat informed me that Denny had recently made contact with his only living brother, Geoff, who had long ago bought me a little red pedal car. Geoff had disappeared when I was still an infant. He had made no contact with his family for decades. Eventually Pat learned of his whereabouts and began corresponding with him. He wrote back in a childish hand. He was sick and wanted to retire from his work in the highlands of Tasmania. Denny began scheming to secure him a pension. Geoff would shift to Portland and live with them. Plans were finalised. Denny was going to meet him at Melbourne Airport. Just as Geoff was about to leave, the illness was diagnosed as cancer. He only had weeks to live.

When I heard the news, I was sharing a house in North Fitzroy, living in a windowless room so small I had to roll up its foam mattress to open the door or to sit at my desk to write, indulging in what I fancied was a writer’s existence, occasionally visiting Claire and Richard, who had retreated to a bush block in Gippsland.

I saw the irony of this latest episode in Denny’s life. He was returning to Melbourne to reunite with his dying brother. Why hadn’t he tried to find him years ago? Why had it been my mother who eventually corresponded with him? Why had he left contact to the last minute? Why had every plan he ever made turned to dust? Was it fate? Was it karma? He scraped together enough money for a ticket, flew to Tasmania, and saw his brother just hours before death mocked their reunion. Geoff used to be a huge man, a man whose size had made the bath overflow, but he had wasted away until he resembled a starving waif. It shocked Denny and he never recovered.

“It was the sight of his brother that brought it on again,” my mother said after Denny’s cancer reappeared some months later. “It happens. It just takes a shock. Denny had to arrange the funeral and everything.”

Denny inherited his brother’s car, a Fiat. On one of my rare visits to Portland, after his brother’s death and before he knew about his own resurgent cancer, Denny insisted I take his other car. He wanted me to have it, a Kingswood no less, to settle accounts. I was stunned, not so much by his generosity but by his acknowledgement that he owed me. It wasn’t just the bouncing cheque but my belongings he had hocked or stolen over the years: a record player, watches, an accordion my grandfather had given me, sundry piggybanks. I turned away from him to conceal my emotions. And I dared to think we were finally starting to get on okay. Or maybe I had been wrong about him all along. Given half the chance maybe he would have always been considerate. The idea of writing a book about him took root. It would tell all but in a way that showed how circumstances had led him astray. It would tell of his ‘dirty rotten luck’ as he and my mother often called their circumstances. Before I had a chance to mull over the entire matter I received a phone call from Pat—Denny was coming to Melbourne for some medical tests.

Back in the Repatriation Hospital, where he had been operated on for his first cancer twelve years earlier, he was up to his old tricks.

Mr. Sparkes is a 57 year old man who was a recent inpatient with a left-sided chest lesion, most probably carcinoma of the lung, who had discharged himself against medical advice but had now re-considered and was admitted with a view to thoracotomy (left) and left lower lobectomy.

Denny indeed had cancer again. As he told me he was smiling, a smile which meant just my luck. The cancer was in his lungs. On their way home they stayed at Carol’s place, where he steamed open the letter his specialist had asked him to deliver to his GP in Portland. Carol’s husband, Peter, retrieved a medical encyclopaedia from his home library and discovered that the type of cancer the specialist had diagnosed was unrelated to smoking—a rare incurable cancer. He realised he only had months to live.

When the cancer spread to other organs he was hospitalised in Portland. Tumours showed up in his liver and brain. It spread through his lymphatic system. I had a distressed phone call from my mother. She wasn’t coping well. So I decided to go and stay with her for a while, to give her some emotional support.

It was a chance to do something for her, a chance to repay her for some of what she had done for me, a chance to appease my conscience, to make up for the limited number of times I had stayed with her since leaving home. My private excuse had always been that we could no longer communicate in any meaningful way, and to try was just stark and painful. No doubt it was my selfishness that had guided me. My mother always loved to see me, would have loved to see me more often, even if I talked very little, even if I just sat and read the paper, even if I spent a lot of my time going for walks along the beach alone. She would have been happy because I had come home to see her.

It was just as well I was unemployed because Denny took a long time dying. Pat said I could use the room set up for Uncle Geoff, “since he won’t be needing it, will he?” Again she presented her theory about the impact of Geoff’s death and the recurrence of Denny’s cancer. “He wouldn’t admit it, but I saw how much it shocked him, seeing his brother like that after all those years.” It was an observation she returned to time and again over the next few months.

I encouraged her to maintain her normal routine: her shopping and gardening and her lawn bowls, which had become a big part of her life. Her sister played as well, and she had made other friends at the club. She showed me the prizes she had won—glasses embossed with the club emblem in gold, and souvenir teaspoons—and the trinkets she had bought or received as gifts that delighted her, such as a Brazil nut dressed in a tiny, white bowls outfit, stuck to a board that bore the message, ‘I’m a bowling nut’. Her buffets were full of these types of knick-knacks.

I was pleased she had a social life outside her immediate family. She told me endless stories about her friends—their tournaments and their trips together to other bowling clubs. And when she completed her repertoire, she retold them. My attempts to deflect them usually failed. Comments such as ‘you’ve told me that already’ were just a minor annoyance to her, like a fly buzzing around. I began to spend a lot of time at Denny’s bedside.

I watched his slow decline from a state with little outward evidence of illness, which left me doubting there was anything seriously wrong with him, to the pitiful sight of a carcass taunted by the obstinacy of life.

There were times of long silence between us, which I should have used to talk about his life, our lives together. We might have finally come to some understanding of each other, even a rapprochement. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it and nor could he, if indeed that was what he wanted. I asked stupid questions like, “How are you feeling?” which invariably made him angry.

As I sat there and the hours dragged by I sometimes wondered if his silence meant he had turned inward. He knew his end was coming. Was he reflecting on his life? Was he looking at the ledger and asking , Am I satisfied overall? I made my choices. Did I conduct my life well, or at least as best I could? Was he finding peace?

When he asked me to arrange his funeral I grimaced, which again made him angry.

“What’s the rush?” I joked lamely.

But he insisted. He wanted to know the details. I thought it was macabre but agreed. He also told me he wanted to die at home.

Dying at home seemed a reasonable request. But my mother, for once, put her foot down.

I was surprised and annoyed.

“I couldn’t cope,” she said.

Perhaps she was afraid of sharing a bed with a dying man.

“He can have the bed I’m using. I’ll sleep on the couch. A nurse would come by each day.”

But she was adamant. I thought it callous but didn’t put much effort into changing her mind, not after the way he had treated her throughout their life together.

I knew it distressed him because he asked me more than once. I tried to convince him that hospitalisation was the best thing for him, but it merely reinforced his low opinion of me.

One day he could no longer make it to the toilet and was forced to use a bottle. I remembered how he had discharged himself the day after his first heart attack because the nursing staff had insisted he use one. He was beyond a repeat performance now. He had to ask me to hold the bottle while he peed. He sat on the edge of his bed.

In such close proximity he had trouble starting. He muttered something about turning on the tap over the hand basin near his bed. At a stretch I was able to reach it. There was no dignified way to do this.

His humiliation was palpable and contagious. Finally I was having an intimate moment with him, a moment I had always longed for, and it had to be helping him pee. I averted my eyes while he struggled to commence the most mundane of functions. I had felt sorry for him before this, but not so profoundly, not for both of us, not without a trace of anger.

I would have liked to have read to him Dylan Thomas’s poem Do Not Go Gentle Into the Good Night, but he would have rebuked me for talking nonsense. Once upon a time he told me, and I can’t remember when exactly (or even whether I have invented it), that life was shit, life was a joke, life was a gamble, and he had drawn the short straw.

I returned to the unit and informed Pat I was going to Melbourne for a break.

In the depths of winter the city was bleak. My tiny room was as gloomy as a prison cell. If I had previously romanticised it as a writer’s sanctum, it merely reminded me of some dead-end I seemed to have stumbled into. I stayed a week, went to my usual haunts, trying to retrieve some of my optimism. I saw the same people who were always there. The same people I used to find interesting or amusing, seemed jaded, neurotic and sad.

The night before I returned to Portland the other residents held a party. It was someone’s birthday but it was a joyless occasion. Relationships were falling apart. People were on edge. The music was too loud, too harsh. Hysteria was looming. Spiteful sex was happening in most rooms and the garden. I retreated to my den alone, snibbed the door and unfolded my mattress, which had developed a mouldy smell in my absence. I tried to sleep. My week in Melbourne had been anything but a respite. Depressed and weary, with images of Denny intruding, I tossed and turned and pulled the pillow over my ears, waiting for slumber. But I couldn’t escape the cacophony. Fractious voices and sudden changes in the sound-system volume kept me awake all night. In the morning I was exhausted and petulant. I swept aside the mess on the kitchen table and ate breakfast in the pall of post-party silence. Sleeping bodies littered the living room. As soon as I had packed my bag I left, vowing to find somewhere else to live once Denny’s funeral was out of the way.

But Denny was yet to die. When I got back to Portland I dropped in on my mother before I went to the hospital.

“He’s not good, darlin’,” she said, her voice strained with dread. “You better call on him straight away. You might not get another chance.”

I spoke to the charge nurse when I arrived.

“He’s stopped responding to morphine. Any higher dose would kill him.”

“If there’s no hope, why not give it to him?”

“As much as I’d like to,” she said, “I’d be up on a murder charge.”

She took me aside. “Between you and me, we’ve pulled the plug on him. No more life support. Nothing intravenous. He can’t eat. We’ll do all we can to make him comfortable and hope he doesn’t linger too long. It’s the kindest thing. He’ll only last a few days at most.”

His deterioration in the week I had been away undid me. I was exhausted from the sleepless night and a five-hour drive. I had no reserves of energy to cope with the withered creature coiled in agony before me. I whimpered and groaned and then the tears flowed, ugly sobs that caught in my throat as I tried to stifle them.

He moved his head and summoned as much strength as he could. He opened his eyes long enough for me to see a glimmer of contempt.

I heard him speak. It was almost inaudible. But I heard him clearly enough. “Stop yer blubberin’.”

These were the last words he spoke to me.

He took another fifteen days to die, which unnerved the medical staff and knocked the stuffing out of my mother. I raged at my own impotence and despaired that euthanasia was illegal. If I’d had the gumption I would have gone back to Melbourne and found a dealer. Heroin works when morphine fails. And, if not, an overdose would end it.

Instead I sat by his bed every day observing his final act of defiance. I tried to make sense of his life, his compulsive gambling, his terrible luck, his years in and out of asylums, his time in jail, his suicide attempts. And it occurred to me that for someone who had been so self-destructive, here was the final irony. When death offered the only release from suffering, he was clinging stubbornly, defiantly, to life.

I wanted to be with him when he died. I thought nobody deserved to die alone. One night I stayed long after my mother had gone home. In the silence of the opaque ward I brooded on the opportunities I’d missed to talk to him frankly about my feeling towards him, to tell him that all I had ever wanted from him was his love—a father’s love. And I would have returned it in spades. But maybe the fault was mine. Maybe the love was there and I had failed to detect it.

His breathing came in slow gasps, like water draining into a plug hole. The hiatus between each sound grew longer.

I was worn out, struggling to keep my eyes open. My will was weak. I was drifting in and out of sleep. In the early hours I rose like an automaton and went home.

The phone woke me. My mother answered it.

“He’s gone,” she said, coming into the bedroom.

It was just after three.

Through an unnatural silence I dressed and took her to view his body.

Standing before him, she seemed shrunken, depleted and as fragile as old tissue paper. I heard her sob or sigh.

“Fifty-eight’s too young to die,” she murmured.

The skin on Denny’s face was taut, his mouth drawn and narrow, his eyes closed as they used to be just before an outburst of rage.

THE WIDOW

The bowling ladies were making sandwiches for the wake in the kitchen. I was sitting in the lounge with the gathered relatives: my sisters and their families, Denny’s cousin who lived in Cranbourne on the outskirts of Melbourne, and the Stewarts.

Claire was there. Fond of my mother, she had come to offer us some emotional support. And she was still fond of me. Besides, there was a bond between us nobody could break: a child, a son, we didn’t know, who was growing up somewhere unknown to us.

Pat, who was dressed impeccably but not in black, entered, looking distracted.

“It’s getting on,” she announced, tapping her watch, a gift from the boyfriend whom Denny had superseded long ago, which she had always worn for want of an appropriate replacement. Too late now. “We better get to the wedding.”

The faux pas made me titter. I couldn’t help myself. And once I started no one else could restrain themselves either. Our muffled chuckling upset her. She puckered her lips and blinked back tears.

“You know what I mean. We don’t want to keep him waiting.”

The funeral service was held in St Stephen’s, the church where I used to be an altar boy. I can’t remember a great deal about it: whether someone spoke a eulogy, apart from the minister, how many mourners attended, or who, besides myself, were pallbearers.

Portland Cemetery was on a windswept slope with stunted vegetation offering little shelter and with no ocean vista to ease the bleakness. Grey was the hue: rows of tombstones, the indifferent sky, a mound of clay beside the open grave. With rain threatening, the vicar expedited the ritual.

After the coffin was lowered and handfuls of sodden dirt tossed on top, everyone headed back to their cars. My mother was in the arms of her sister.

I took one last look at the coffin. I had seen Denny dead at the hospital, within an hour of his death, and again at the funeral parlour where I went with Uncle Harry to pay our last respects. I tried to imagine him lying on his back forever in a St Vinnie’s suit, without a trannie or a form guide, and thought even in death he’d fidget. Not far away Uncle Mick was buried and nearby was the grave of my grandfather who had accused Denny of stealing his car.

Uncle Harry took my arm and drew me away.

“There’ll be some chin-wagging down there tonight, wouldn’t you say?” he chuckled, nodding towards the plots of my dead relatives, unaware that within a few years he’d be joining them.

To my surprise my mother grieved my father. I knew she would miss him for a while, but her bereavement was deeper and far more durable than I expected. I knew they had become much closer in later years, but I suspected it was more complicated. I suspected it had something to do with a dream or a hope she had nurtured as a young woman, perhaps in the first heady days of their courtship or even before she had met him, of married life, a family, the fairy-tale ending, the promise of fulfilment, contentment, which she kept alive, never relinquished, stored somewhere in a forgotten recess of her being, despite mounting evidence year by year to the contrary, until he died; the finality that laid it bare.

Yet every month, almost until her own death in 2009, she visited the cemetery and put flowers on his grave.

JOHN M.

Fifteen years after my father’s death, I received a letter in the mail. It must have been late autumn because the sunlight in the afternoon was feeble and the air had gained a wintry asperity. My partner, Sonia, and I had just returned from work and she had gone upstairs to our flat while I checked the mail.

The letter was written in a rather nervous hand, requesting the whereabouts of Claire ‘who I believe you were once married to’. The letter writer wanted to contact his biological mother. It was signed John M. I had never heard of John M. but I understood who he was. He didn’t know he had sent the letter to his father whose name was missing from his birth certificate.

I sat for a long time, staring at the letter. I stared at the signature. John M. So that was the name my son had been given.

I ran my fingers across the name. John. A child I had never known. Years of regret almost overwhelmed me. I dropped onto the edge of one of the cumquat tree tubs next to our entrance for support. He would have traced me through the Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages, and the electoral roll. But Claire was harder to find. She was too cynical about politics to be a registered voter.

We were still friends. I took the letter to her.

“So, the day has come,” she said, abandoning her easel, where her latest painting stood, incomplete, beautiful, a lot softer than the art she used to do when we lived together.

She slumped onto an old couch.

“How do you feel?” I asked, seeing the colour had drained from her face.

“Afraid. Relieved. Old. What about you?”

“Well, I guess we’ll be able to get an idea of whether I’m his father or not.”

Claire wrote back to him with her details. He rang and arranged a meeting. I wasn’t involved until they had established a relationship that suited both of them, where they saw each other regularly, alternately at each other’s place. She told me his paternity was obvious; he looked uncannily like me and apparently had similar personality traits: quiet, reserved, artistic. His adopted family were conventional working class people who lived in a coastal town in Gippsland. He loved them but felt like a round peg in a square hole, which was the main reason he had decided to find his biological mother. He was married. His wife worked while he stayed home and looked after their child, a boy. He wrote poetry.

One summer evening I received a message to meet John at Claire’s place. We were greeted at the door by Theisa, John’s wife, who gave us a smile full of warmth. She carried her shy young child, my grandson, on her hip. John was seated in a sprung armchair in the living room, as shy as his son. He offered to shake my hand and said, “It’s good to meet you.”

My throat constricted, overwhelmed by the young man whose existence I was partially responsible for.

I was overcome with regret. Nearly thirty years had passed since I saw him as a newborn at the Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne. That day there were two paths I could have taken: the one I was on now, and the other where I would have been with him virtually every day, grown with him, loved him. It wrenched my heart, yet I maintained my composure, a façade, to avoid alarming him. I could demand nothing of him, not a place in his life, not even forgiveness.

The thought I had when my head cleared enough to think was, the only decent thing I can do is offer him an explanation.

To John

So, I have come to the end of what I wished to write about my father…your grandfather. No doubt my thoughts on him—who he was—will continue to the end of my days. I can’t decide whether he was genuinely mad or a malingerer or just thumbing his nose at the world. It was probably a combination. Th e terror and dread he fomented has faded and so allows a more sympathetic reflection, but it is impossible for me to reach any rock-solid conclusions. And perhaps that’s a futile pursuit anyway.

I am glad you came back into my life and hope this story brings some understanding.

In a day or two I’m going to Portland to tend my mother’s grave. I have no living relatives there to keep an eye on it. I think of it as my mother’s grave but really it’s my father’s too. Th ey are buried together. It was what my mother wanted.

As I pause now for a moment, now I have finished, an image floats before me. It’s of a terrified young soldier on an iron bunk in his dilapidated barracks, surrounded by flowers that he thought were frangipanis—exotic flowers, at least—an incident I have come to interpret as a fear of the unknown, in a world where he had no control of anything.

When I was a child, in one of the places we stayed at while my father was selling rotary clotheslines along the eastern seaboard, I accidently locked myself in a caravan closet and was terrified I would run out of air. I thought I would die. I, also, have experienced the fear of being in a dark place where the air is too thick to breath and there seems no way out; the panic that makes you thrash about in a desperate attempt to survive; the fear of suffocation.

CLARIFICATION

This memoir has fictional elements. For the sake of privacy, the names of most people who appear in the text and some incidental facts have been altered. My intention was never to upset anyone. None of the dialogue is word perfect, although I have tried to capture the sentiment and character of the participants. I was able to consult various official records and newspapers for parts of this book, but most of the episodes are drawn from memory. Ask my sisters about these and they will complain and give you a different account. Anyone who has reached the age I have will tell you that memory is a wily companion.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the support and advice I received from the following people: Sonia Gatti, Jill Bolitho, Steve G, Monica Harte, Libya Charleson, Phillip Dimitriadis, Janeece Toose, Bernice Kelly, Maggie Bryant, Lesley Walker, and Michele Gierck whose encouragement at critical moments meant this book would receive a wider readership.

I would also like to thank my editor, Julie Athanasiou.

Table of Contents

2007

1951

THE EARLY YEARS

THE EARLY 1950s

WORKING FOR ANGUS CAMPBELL

THE PINES

GROWING UP IN PORTLAND

MY ADOPTED FAMILY

LIVING AT DAISY’S

WORKING ON THE WHARVES

AN END TO WORK

THE ‘ITINERANT PSYCHOPATH’

THE ‘INADEQUATE PSYCHOPATH’

HEDGING THEIR BETS

THE POST OFFICE

VALENTINE

WEST PORTLAND HOUSING COMMISSION ESTATE

THE WOODS

THE BIG WIN

MARTY

MATRICULATION

UNI DAYS

WEST HEIDELBERG

CARLTON

CLAIRE

DRAFTED

A BOY

DENNY’S FINAL YEARS

THE WIDOW

JOHN M.

CLARIFICATION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS