The Shark Net

by Robert Drewe

  Eric Edgar Cooke would be the last person hanged in Fremantle Gaol, on 26 October 1964, and the second-last person to be executed in Australia. (Ronald Ryan, hanged in Melbourne’s Pentridge Gaol in 1967 for killing a prison warder during an escape, would be the last.) Fremantle Gaol would be closed to prisoners and become a historic site. Former prison warders would become tour guides at this popular tourist attraction.

  Sally Cooke would visit the gaol again – with her grandchildren in their school holidays. ‘The littlest one, Brodie, he was about six, and I kept losing him, and he’s in all the cells, and I find him in the death cell, and he’s sitting on the seat, and I said, “Get off there!” and the poor guard, he knew who I was, and he’s trying to keep it hush-hush, and of course Brodie’s calling out, “Is this where Grandpop sat, Grandma? Did Grandpop die down there, Grandma?” This poor guard, his face is getting redder and redder, and I said to him, “Just forget it.” I couldn’t help laughing because kids are kids, aren’t they? He’s a character, that Brodie. He couldn’t have got closer to the gallows if he’d fell over it. Fascinated, he was. They don’t realise the seriousness, you know.’

  The Sunday the police came to the house in Rivervale to tell them his father had been arrested for murder, Tony Cooke, the second son, was eight and he and his brothers and sisters were waiting to give him his Father’s Day presents.

  His father had warned them one night about the murderer. ‘At the time it was a very warm and secure experience, and maybe it expresses his sense of humour, but he said no one was safe and we had to lock our doors. All the boys used to sleep out in the sleep-out, and it was a small house – well, it’s got to be a small house, there were seven kids – and he put all the mattresses on the lounge-room floor and we all slept in the lounge room together and he was there to stand guard over us.’

  I had to ask Tony, too, about those final minutes before eight o’clock on that Monday morning. He said before he left for school he was watching the Tokyo Olympics on television with Ron Woodward. Woodward was the young policeman assigned to guard the family while the father was on death row because they had been getting prowlers and curiosity seekers hanging around their house. ‘Dawn Fraser was swimming for Australia and it was pretty exciting. I forgot eight o’clock. The next time I looked at the clock it was ten past eight.’

  He said no one was watching the clock. ‘I mean, I’m sure the neighbours were. The day is a blur to me. I can remember the whole day being very, very quiet. I can remember that unearthly quiet. People came. It wasn’t like people stayed away. People offered some comfort, people just making sure she was OK.’

  I told him I was watching the clock.

  5

  THE VIEW FROM THE ESPLANADE HOTEL

  I agreed to meet Graham Perkin, the news editor of The Age, the venerable Melbourne daily, at the Esplanade Hotel. He’d written to me first from Melbourne the week before, then he phoned me on his arrival in Perth. He was on a recruiting mission. The West Australian was regarded as a good training ground for young reporters and the big city papers had begun poaching them.

  My name had been one of those mentioned to him, he said mysteriously. Would I be interested in talking to him about joining The Age?

  I guessed a couple of former Perth reporters currently on The Age had given him my name. I was flattered as much as interested. On my way to the hotel, however, passing the usual open-faced, slow-strolling pedestrians and considerate motorists, I wondered vaguely what I was doing. Life was calming down. The paper had promised me an early upgrading. In a month I’d be a graded journalist. I was getting bigger assignments. I had good friends here. It was a cosy place to work. And how could I ever leave the beach? All I wanted was to hunker down in the dunes with Ruth and James and gather my scattered wits.

  But I was curious to meet Graham Perkin. He was only in his early thirties and his reputation had even crossed the Nullarbor. The grapevine said he was The Age’s editor-in-waiting. I said I could see him in my lunch hour.

  We met in his hotel room. I found him friendly but also slightly intimidating, with a brisk sophisticated manner, high colour and fierce, protruding blue eyes, not unlike Billy Graham’s. Although he was better groomed and dressed than Perth’s crumpled and tweedy newspaper executives, his collar and small tie-knot seemed too tight for his neck, and his overflowing cheeks and laconic, down-turned mouth gave him an air of exasperated amusement. Even in this relatively calm situation his speech and gestures were clipped and speedy.

  To see if I was on the ball, we batted around some current news events. When a topic made him mildly emphatic his eyes bulged even more, his colour rose and his nostrils flared back towards his cheeks. He referred to leading newsmakers by their first names – ‘Henry’ and ‘Bob’ and ‘mad old Arthur’. His whole impatient, insider manner said there were things to be done, changes to be made, stories to be covered and uncovered. And if they weren’t – and soon – he would burst.

  He was sitting with his back to the view and I was facing it. The wide Swan River estuary filled half the window. There was no wind and I couldn’t remember the river looking more placid and scenic. In the picture-frame of the window one small yacht sat becalmed, so still it could have been painted on the glassy surface. Not a wisp of cloud, not a bird or plane or puff of smoke marred the sharp blue sky. Below the river, crossing the crisp green stripe of the Esplanade, parallel lines of sprinklers sprayed high into the air. In the absence of wind the silver sheets of water dropped directly to the ground. The whole familiar scene was bathed in a generous golden light.

  I knew a more newsworthy and urbane world lay east of this glistening view. But as we talked I felt a growing conflict. I felt sentimental and nostalgic about the river and the sky, as if I’d already deserted them. Being impressed by Graham Perkin’s big-city presence seemed treacherous. It denied their unique charms.

  Some sort of loyal West-Australianness on my part wanted him to turn and glance at the view. Congratulations were in order. Crazily, I wanted him to pay the view and the climate and topography – the very elements – the lavish compliments they deserved. (What fabulous water! What great sunny weather! What white sand! Keep up the good work!) Especially the view. Then I could let them go.

  He continued to ignore the view. He wanted to let me in on his plans to revitalise The Age. He implied he’d be editor before long. A changing of the guard was imminent. He spoke of bringing in keen young reporters and changing the paper’s fusty layout and content to make it a great newspaper. As he did, he stared at me even more intently, as if only the participation of a naive and untested youth from the boondocks could help him bring it off. Then he swore me to secrecy. It was a shrewd and seductive recruitment technique. I bought it entirely.

  ‘Well,’ he said then, briskly lighting a Kent. ‘Tell me about yourself, chap.’

  I’d planned none of this but I suddenly realised the extent of my frustration and it shocked me how stifled I felt. I wanted to stretch my wings. I wanted adventures. I was tired of being the black sheep, and of supporting three people on a teenager’s salary. Far too much had happened here. It was holding me back and perhaps it would hold me back forever. I had to get out.

  His enthusiasm was catching. As soon as I started speaking I forgot the halcyon West Australian way of life. I lied about my age. I put it up three years and said I was twenty-three. I upped my status, too. I was a third-year cadet but I said I was a D-grade – a graded reporter. I didn’t feel bad about this exaggeration; I’d been promised my grading next month. But I raised my actual current weekly salary by ten dollars.

  He bought it. If he didn’t think I was really twenty-three, he didn’t turn a hair. He said he’d give me a C-grading, with an extra margin of ten dollars a week. He was offering me thirty dollars more than I was getting! ‘When can you start?’ he said.

  I didn’t think to ask for moving expenses. When it occurred to me later, I thought better of it. I already had an amazing deal. I didn�
��t want to seem greedy.

  ‘One more thing,’ said Graham Perkin. ‘What’s the best fish restaurant in town? Not a grease-trap. Something classy.’

  Naturally once I’d made the decision to go to Melbourne and join The Age everything became settled in Perth. As I served out my notice, life seemed more serene than it had for years. Instead of being swept along in a torrent of dramatic events I felt in charge for once.

  Being recruited by an Eastern States newspaper gave me more confidence. It also brought a new respect from my old bosses on the West Australian. I stopped taking Dr Synott’s phenobarbitone. (I’d never noticed any sedative effects anyway.) And Mr Goldsmith suddenly got my name right. After three years he stopped calling me Rodney.

  With a huge sense of relief Ruth and I found we weren’t self-conscious exiles any longer. We discovered we were sociable. We began holding regular keg parties at the House of Meat. Suddenly we enjoyed having lots of people around – all those amusing, argumentative journalists who had become our friends.

  All the reporters came to the House of Meat parties, the suavest, Harry Potter, often arriving with an actress or a Beachgirl Quest contestant, and once with the female chorus from South Pacific. Even library girls turned up. Not Roberta, of course. Nowadays she was twice removed from the smoky, languid world of newspaper files and Stanley knives. After a brief stint as a reporter on the Daily News she’d married her grazier and moved to his country property.

  We pooled our money and bought kegs from the brewery and set them up in the small cement yard between the butcher shop and the house. In high spirits we drank under-or over-gassed beer and argued animatedly about news events (whether South Vietnam was a bigger story than the Profumo/Christine Keeler affair) and stomped to surfing music in draught-beer froth and the watery blood seeping into the yard from the butcher’s cool-room.

  A party generally lasted until dawn, or until the neighbours called the police, or the cigarettes ran out and the smokers reeled off in search of more. After it broke up, our clothes always smelled of lamb fat as much as cigarette smoke. The smell hit hardest in the fresh air of the Swanbourne sandhills when we peeled off our clothes in the glary dawn and rushed into the surf.

  But a party got a new lease of life when the night-shift reporters and sub-editors arrived. They brought cigarettes and the first edition of the paper with them. The smokers fell upon the Rothmans and Kents of the recent arrivals; everyone grabbed the fresh, inky newspaper, and several more hours of circuitous bantering argument began.

  So it was late one humid summer night, a week before we left, that I learned from the still-warm front page that Roberta had been decapitated that day.

  My eyes moved back and forth from the heading to her picture. It was a relaxed, smiling photograph, probably snapped originally for her Press pass or a story in House News, the staff magazine.

  She’d been flying with her husband, Digby, in his single-engine Victa Airtourer from their property at Northampton to his parents’ place at Toodyay. Caught in an unseasonal summer storm, he landed in heavy rain. Upset, shaken by the turbulent flight, Roberta rushed from the aircraft. Apparently blinded or confused by the rain, she stepped off the leading edge of the wing instead of the trailing edge and stumbled into the propeller.

  My father telephoned from Sydney out of the blue. He sounded very hearty as he asked after us all, but he seemed to have something else on his mind. I detected an anxious note. I wondered if anything was wrong. Finally he blurted out that he was getting married.

  I didn’t even know he had a girlfriend. As usual with an important emotional event, he’d left it until the very last minute to tell us. He said he’d send us the wedding details. They’d already booked the church and made the arrangements. I must have sounded stunned because he was at pains to stress that he’d known his fiancée for some time.

  Even though he was talking in his bluff managerial voice he started to explain their meeting as if our situations were reversed, as if I were the parent needing convincing. He said they’d met when he was in Singapore and had hit it off immediately. She lived in Sydney, as it happened. She was a nursing sister. It was a stroke of good fortune we were moving to Melbourne because we wouldn’t have so far to travel to the wedding.

  I recalled how swiftly and efficiently he’d pulled out of Perth and moved to Sydney. Things suddenly fell into place. He’d been in quite a hurry. ‘Congratulations,’ I said.

  ‘So we’ll see you soon,’ he said. But he seemed to be lingering on the line. Was he worried how I felt about our mother being replaced? Did he want the blessing of his eldest child?

  ‘We’ll be there,’ I said.

  Three years to the day after I started there, I finished work on the West Australian. It was my twenty-first birthday. We were leaving town that evening on the Trans-Continental to Melbourne, travelling second-class across the Nullarbor Plain and changing trains at Kalgoorlie, Port Pirie and Adelaide. We’d already packed and sent our few possessions ahead. We were paying our own fares. The Age’s largesse didn’t run to air tickets.

  I didn’t have a twenty-first birthday party. My father, brother and sister were all in Sydney now. And the rush and hubbub of departure got in the way. In any case, the traditional coming-of-age celebration – the proud parental speeches, the presents, the champagne toasts, the ceremonial passing over of the big cardboard key to the door of adulthood – seemed ludicrous in the circumstances. I’d been supporting a family for nearly three years. It seemed like I’d been an adult forever. As a special ritual, my twenty-first birthday could slide quietly past like our wedding and the birth of our first child. That was fine by me. I’d had enough of parties.

  Early in the morning, I walked to Cottesloe Beach for a final swim. The idea of turning twenty-one this day and leaving my job and hometown and taking my family across the country to a bigger, busier, colder city had me feeling somewhere between elated and already homesick for Perth. Something struck me for the first time: I’d thought of us as intrepidly setting off, but wasn’t I actually returning? Hadn’t I come full circle?

  Walking up the hill to the beach, I couldn’t help imbuing everything I saw – the suburban houses with their dogged gardens, the jaggedly pruned council street trees, even the dry veldt grass and dandelion weeds on the sandy road verge – with great seriousness. Every object was a symbol of my life so far and a portent of all the travelling ahead. I mused on how mature and intelligent it was of me to think like this, to wonder and worry about the lasting nature of things but to press on. I didn’t consider this focus on myself naive or imagine that my optimism couldn’t always be replenished by a good story, a glimpse of the sea and a particular angle of sunlight.

  The way the early morning summer light struck the surface of North Street, the outlines of houses, the first scruffy dunes, and then streaked across the beach and the glassy ocean, was the way sunlight always fell on the last day of the school holidays. It was the way the rays slanted through the Moreton Bay fig trees on Rottnest Island when I trudged back to the Islander with my bag on my shoulder. It brought the same pangs of romance and remorse. It was an achingly familiar and sentimental tableau. But it was all used up.

  At Cottesloe Beach I dived under a couple of waves and tried to catch a few more but they were breaking too close to the shore. Then again, I thought, they always did. I had my last swim and walked home.

  When I got back a truck was pulling up outside. It wasn’t the usual morning carcass delivery by the medieval executioners; the truck was yellow and black. Two men got out and opened the back tray of the truck and hauled something out. It was my father’s twenty-first birthday present to me. The nature of the present made me wonder whether he perceived me differently these days. But then the company had long ceased making the Bumper Leisure Shoe. His gift was a Dunlopillo mattress.

  As we set off that night for Melbourne the sunset was at our backs and the lights of the suburbs fell away surprisingly quickly behind the train. A yo
ung couple, a small, sand-coloured boy and a double-bed mattress, we hurried across the coastal plain, up the steep gravel slope of the ranges and into the desert.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is both a book of memory and my portrait of a place and time. Memory may falter and portraiture is a highly subjective endeavour, but I have tried to tell a truthful story. A handful of names have been changed for the usual reasons.

  Early drafts of some parts first appeared in Granta, Westerly, A Sea Change, Toads (Allen & Unwin) and My One True Love (Random House). The song ‘Where the Blue of the Night’ was written by Bing Crosby, Roy Turk and Fred Ahlert in 1931.

  I’m deeply grateful to Sally Cooke and Tony Cooke for their time, patience and memories, as I am to Jan Purcell, Ian Watson, Nicholas Hasluck and Loss Whittig. None of these generous people, however, can be blamed for the track I’ve chosen to take through the sand dunes.

  Read on for a preview of Robert Drewe’s new memoir Montebello, a sequel to The Shark Net.

  ‘Listen to me,’ my mother says. ‘They’ve let off an atom bomb today. Right here in W.A. Atom bombs worry the blazes out of me, and I want you at home.’