Such were the rewards of the private and abandoned places of our valley for a boy who crept around alone like a small Attenborough. We didn’t have any TV that even tried to make sense of life. But we had this stuff everywhere. Homes were small and generations crammed together. Privacy was found out here in the bush, out here in these fields of broken things. People played out their ecstasies and treacheries amid rust and thistle while I slit my eyes and cocked my ears and tried to figure out what it all meant.
By high school the blackfellas had vanished. They wouldn’t be needing a tertiary education, so they’d gone to the tech schools to get fitted out with manual skills that might lead to apprenticeships in trades, if the other life didn’t pull them down, as it was likely to do. Race came at high school. From above. From without. From within. From our widening consciousness, and our intensifying sensitivity to difference. Suddenly we were no longer an array of individuals, known for our wisecracking, or skill at pinball, or ability at concocting excuses, or our long blonde hair or pretty eyes or kindness or throwing arm. We were now just as much not something as we were something. We were not wogs. And we took this as a damned lucky escape.
Eighty per cent of the boys in my year were unaffected by the need to revel in their racial superiority and declare the tattered humanity of others. Two gangs formed from the remaining twenty per cent. The gang I belonged to was made up of the white and latterly successful imperialist races of the British Isles. We were workaday boreal blends of Scot, Celt and Anglo-Saxon.
It was our fathers who had first discovered Australia and tidied up a messy indigenous scene that was going nowhere. Our folk had built this place and we felt this should be frequently acknowledged. This place, Shepparton, was ours. And not just this place. Being adrift in historical ignorance made us easy owners of all the world, as it tends to for every grass-skirt tribe whittling sticks to spears.
The other gang was made up of Turks, Albanians, Greeks, Italians and even Russians. But really, why fidget with gradations of ignominy? They were just wogs. Chocolate frogs, dagos, wops, spaghetti-munchers.
Wogs were a type of freeloader who had latterly arrived to ride the gravy train now that the heavy lifting and frontier unpleasantness was done. Wogs were, in one sense, like poofters; in that we didn’t know much about them, hadn’t been to their homes, tasted their cuisines, talked to their parents, or kissed their sisters, so our ignorance enabled an unexaminable and almost flawless bigotry. Even Elvis was a wog, and I despised his greasy smugness beyond words.
The wogs called us ‘skips’. A shortening of the name ‘Skippy’, a marsupial version of Rin Tin Tin then kicking baddies around on TV. When I found out they called us this I was outraged. Not at being likened to a serially heroic marsupial. Skippy was okay – smart, wry, able to keep a secret. It was the fact they had a name for us at all. We weren’t some subset of humanity. We were the real, plain, proper people that humanity aspired to be. Others had to be categorised. Not us. We were normal.
Our loathing for wogs was made easy by us knowing nothing of the Classical world – of Ancient Greece or Rome, the Renaissance, or the Ottoman Empire. Because … these would have taken no little explaining away. But we would have done it. No one in our gang was prone to admire sculpture or theatre or art or architecture or democracy, so they could have been demolished as achievements if we’d known of them.
Wogs were from a clueless rural peasantry, never enlightened by the modernity of close, acrid suburbs born of an industrial revolution, as our people had been. Our people had lived in and fled fetid northern cities and thus loved the bush. Their people had lived in and fled rural vassalage under dukes, raising crops and herding goats, thus they took comfort in the novelty of suburbia and the futuristic promise of concrete. Green concrete as often as not.
As with the Sioux and the Apache, occasionally two warriors were chosen to represent the tribe at war and thereby save the tribe from war. So, each week nestled in the valleys between the furthest portable classrooms that stood empty and shattered, resembling the abandoned barracks of a defeated army, a wog fought a skip. Stowey took on the statuesque Nik Nostromo, and punched holes in him. Hearts, the leader of our gang, stocky and as muscled as a working man, especially fearsome because one of his eyes was sewn permanently shut, fought a disappointing draw with their boor-faced leader Camel (Kemal, I realised in later years). Rob Godden fought a small and, when unburdened by the obligations of race war, friendly Italian named Varapodio who wore a bullet around his neck on a leather thong. (And who, upon reaching full maturity, would go to jail for shooting a man in a cheese heist. Yes. Cheese. Mozzarella, parmesan and gorgonzola.) Rob’s long hair flew like a lead guitarist on a psychedelic solo as he leapt and kneed that kid.
Then it came my turn to fight a dark and wordless wog named Ludo. Ludo was a dull-eyed pouter, in every bottom set and at the bottom of every bottom set. Seemingly scared of speech for its ability to unravel and leave him surrounded and swarmed over by a lot of half-sentences and random words. His silence, and the fact he ticked, gave him the air of a time bomb. His tic was facial, his right cheek leapt every thirty seconds, pulling his mouth corner into the subliminal suggestion of a smirk.
He came up to me at the bus stop after school where I was waiting with Bill Kuszcniacuk, a giant Russian, above all the racial argy-bargy and a member of no gang. Ludo’s shirt was hanging out and his shoes unlaced, this scruffiness a blatant ad for the rebellious state of his mind. He was flanked by a couple of lesser wogs, Frankie Camarro and Joe Maloni, comedians not warriors, urgers and enablers of ticking malcontents.
He spat at my feet. ‘I’m pickin’ you.’ I was alone, with no gang member in support, and suddenly frightened. Hundreds of kids were milling about here, waiting for buses, talking to girls, shouting to one another, jostling and laughing. This would be a massive audience. To fight and get beaten here would be an indelible stain on me and on my gang. To fight and be trounced. To fight and lose one’s nerve and surrender. To fight badly and be thought a coward. To look ungainly, to make noises like a girl, to not live up to one’s reputation … Here was the possibility of a massive come down.
To refuse to fight was a more contained cowardice. Only those close by would bear witness. ‘I don’t want to fight. I’ll miss my bus.’ I threw this last in hoping it sounded a legitimate, even urgent, consideration. This dumbfounded Ludo, but, then, everything dumbfounded Ludo. He shook his head and stepped closer and poked a fist into my chest. ‘I’m pickin’ you.’ I told myself he was a beast too dumb to know fear, or pain, and was beyond humiliation. I had everything to lose and he had nothing.
‘I don’t want to fight.’
‘Fuck that.’ He pushed me.
Bill Kuszcniacuk was, at thirteen, about the size of a VFL centre-half forward. He was affronted by this intrusion into his space. I had been quietly talking to him. He put his massive head up into Ludo’s face and said, ‘We’re waiting for a bus here. Piss off.’ You couldn’t argue with that. Kuza would just pick you up and break bones. So Ludo backed off, promising to get me later, his sidekicks calling me a poof and a chicken and a sheila.
It was a long bus ride home. I’d done a shameful thing. A big moment had come and my warrior’s heart had flipped and flopped as bewildered and panicked as a carp on a pier. The sudden gravity of Ludo’s challenge had stripped me bare, there were no smart words, no will to fight, it had found me a coward, one of the quiet boys I preyed on, stole from, laughed at. Refusing to fight – that was an option for the boys who weren’t in the gangs, not for us. What would happen when Hearts heard? Or Stowey, who couldn’t consider not fighting when the chance came.
My reputation as a fighter was mostly undeserved, mostly bluff, made from my being able to talk shrewdly into the confusion all boys felt when violence was in the air. But this day even talk had deserted me. I didn’t thank Kuza. When he got off the bus I felt less ashamed. But I knew this was all coming back to me, amplified in rumour and retel
ling, tomorrow.
When I got home I stripped down to my footy knicks and called Bindi, our terrier, and got in my dinghy and rowed downstream to a sand island and walked around alone thinking about what had just happened, who I was, and wondering what other horrors as well as cowardice lay inside me.
My reckoning of the shame grew greater and greater. The collective honour of Aussies had been defiled. It was as if I’d taken a tyre lever to the town cenotaph and smashed the brim of that marble digger’s slouch hat. Over the next half hour I resolved to make this right. Tomorrow morning before school I would pick Ludo. The declaration of war would be mine. The pacifism of yesterday obliterated by my loud hostile challenges. Alone, the smell of our muddy river in my nostrils, I began to shadow-box. On my toes in the sand, throwing punches, skipping forward, left and right, kicking at air, bobbing and weaving. This wog was going to get a serious belting.
I would have to be at school early so news of the actual fight subsumed the shameful rumours of my refusal to fight. I would pick him as soon as he came through the school gate. I began to compose lines with which to call him out.
I was so ashamed I fought that fight all night. I whispered out loud in my half sleep, ‘Come on, Ludo, you poofter wog fuckhead, let’s go.’ I was scared of losing … getting hurt. But even a loss was a win from the ground I now occupied. A loss at least rewrote my refusal to fight. A loss, if it had to be, was better than what I had now.
All night I fought. And despite making demands on my imagination, laying down rules and making threats to that black-toothed Lord Haw Haw that lived autonomously in my head, I lost as many times as I won.
Ludo came in on the bus from the small, post-war wog orchards to the east of town. As he stepped down I pushed off the school fence and shouted, ‘Come on, you wog fuckstick. Let’s go.’ Sirens and war cries had been sounding in my head as I watched the bus drive toward me. I was at the adrenal pitch required for cannon fodder. There were plenty of other kids around, but of his mates only Frankie Camarro, a soft boy, a second-rate jester, worthless at war. Beside me Stowey smiled at Frankie, knowing if hostilities became general he would have one of those easy, show-boating victories that might enhance your reputation as a stylist.
As I stepped to him, yelling, surprise lit Ludo’s habitually impassive face, and became shock, and maybe fear. ‘Come on, fuckhead,’ I shouted. He wouldn’t raise his hands so I pushed him. Where was the coward of yesterday afternoon? My fists were up, ready to go.
‘I don’t want to fight.’ He said it as if mistakenly giving speech to a mystifying thought.
‘Pig’s arse. Put ’em up, wog.’
‘No. Piss off.’ He shook his head, eyes down.
‘He doesn’t want to fight,’ Frankie Camarro said. ‘Leave him alone.’ Seeing Ludo frightened and unwilling to fight made me a beast. ‘You wog coward.’ I slammed the heels of my hands into his chest. ‘Poof won’t fight,’ I yelled to whoever might hear. Other, older boys got involved, pulled me away, while I strained to get at him. They told me to forget about it, you can’t hit a wog who won’t fight.
Were we back on equal terms? Had my cowardice been expunged by his? What happened to him, anyway? How could a kid be a serious goon one day and a chicken the next? He was weird.
At morning recess I received Ludo’s challenge to fight, delivered by Camel. Ludo will fight you at lunchtime in the changing room. It seemed now that the shock of my ambush had worn off, and he had presumably trod the same path of shame and renewal as I had. He was ready to go.
Between recess and lunch, during Mrs Swaby’s science class as we built potash volcanoes, I began to contemplate the downside again. Beating Ludo would profit me nothing. He was just the sort of troll who came wandering out of a forest in movies to commit gigantic vandalism. But he wasn’t their famed warrior. The profit/loss balance wasn’t right here. The risk/reward ratio stunk highly. To beat up a troll was no more than expected of me, and wouldn’t lead on to fame. To be beaten up by a troll was a disgrace. If a protagonist is only ever as mighty as the antagonist he defeats, then I deserved a better adversary than Ludo, the very killing of whom might leave me a reputation as a hammer of dimwits. I couldn’t see much possibility for enhancement of my status in fighting him.
But Ludo was what I had. So we fought in the changing room at the end of the male toilet at lunchtime. A small room, impenetrable to teachers when a fight was on, only one way in or out, choked off by jostling spectators, wogs and skips yelling a muddy brew of advice and abuse. We circled and threw punches. When I got hit sweetly, heard the crunch and saw the flash of light, I’d hang on to him, waiting for the world to come again, which it always did – the cheering came back first, then the exhaustion and maelstrom of thought. Sometimes I’d land a perfect punch on his head and he’d hang on to me while I tried to throw him off and work on him in his darkness. We circled around and swayed in front of each other in episodic consciousness sucking for breath and seeking an end.
When I took a punch and didn’t fall it was because of guts and bravery. When I clocked him one and he stayed standing it was the Cro-Magnon brow, the dumb mulishness typical of a wog, bred like a beast of burden to take a beating, and not really an animal an Aussie should be fighting as much as shepherding through life with a bullwhip.
The baying of the crowd eventually brought teachers, who began to wrestle their way through the wall of fight fans. By the time they’d made it into the room it was a ruck of boys and Ludo and I hung our heads to hide our bloodied mouths and held our torn shirts closed. Someone had been fighting but they knew not who. Get out. Get out of here, you animals.
Outside in the breezeway, me doing a post-mortem with Stowey, Godden and Hearts, discussing missed opportunities and fine blows, Ludo came to me, stood outside our little circle until we noticed him and the talk stopped.
‘What?’ Hearts asked. ‘Fuck do you want?’
He stepped to me and held out his hand. I took it and we shook. ‘You fought good. You hurt me. I thought you would, and you did.’
‘Thanks. You did too. You got me a good one. So … yeah … see you round.’ I felt a moment of dizzying empathy for Ludo. With this fight we had freed each other from combat for a while. We shook hands. Hate was easily known. It was the rare moments of compatibility, even fraternity, that were truly confusing.
The most bewildering rebuttal of the racial inferiority of wogs was the way desire flitted between our various ethnicities. I guess the problem, in a nutshell, was the loveliness of Italian girls. Wallster had an Italian girlfriend we nicknamed the Italian Job. She was a couple of years older than us. She would drift down from the senior areas of school, shyly, silently, to hang out with him, a short way from our gang. And if I have a vision of her batting her lashes as she looked at me over her shoulder, then that is the sort of fleeting, flirting presence she had, or the sort of hex-amore I was under. Cinnamon skin and brown eyes – she was a far-fetched beauty from the fairy tales and romances. Here was a reason to be a man. Here was a reason to fight wars and compose poems. Here was purpose beyond any other.
She was never mine. I was never hers. We were never a thing. There was never anything near so serious as one of those blurted contracts where you asked a girl to ‘go with’ you and she says, yeah, all right. She was Wallster’s girl. But she flirted with me for a week or so, doubtless detecting my infatuation, thinking it cute, and feeding it a little, and walking it a little, and stroking it now and then with a wink or a blown kiss or a glimpse of bra strap. She ran her fingertips along my forearm once, held my chin between her fingers. To meet her gaze, and then to see her smile, set off a deep blue yearning in me.
It is strange to think of her now, as a man in my fifties, and feel an echo of the longing her beauty wrought in me, the billowing wonder at the thought of kissing her, and to realise I am thinking of a girl of, perhaps, fourteen. I must conclude that the boy of thirteen still lives in the man, quietly, unobtrusively, but ready always to honour
the adumbration of that lovely girl. And that many differently aged iterations of self live on in the mind, the younger inside the older, like babushka dolls, each waiting their moment to salute a ghost as real as the Italian Job.
The teen society that was forming at high school began to break free of the campus and assert itself around town. We began to socialise, to sit with friends in parks and talk of songs, and to meet girls in shops and reveal who was keen on who. We played emissary for one another on little expeditions of romance. Kerryn told me she’d say yes if Goddo asked her. Goddo told me he’d probably ask her if he knew she’d say yes. Such laconic oil enabled Shepparton’s young love to run smoothly.
When cafe society came to our town I embraced it as a new and exciting way to do nothing. I had mastered all previous methods, and was ready for this one. Sitting and talking while the latest pop tunes were disparaged by the cappuccino machine clearing its throat was suddenly an essential and meaningful pastime. It was ace to hang out. Other people, especially girls, had become exciting. We’d cram into a booth: Wallster, Hearts, Stowey, me, Sharon S, the Italian Job. And if I timed my entry right I might sit next to the Italian Job. In constant dance with those cinnamon eyes I couldn’t look at and couldn’t not look at. Inhaling the scent of her hair and ogling her olive skin surreptitiously. My thigh or forearm grazing hers set the rhino of adoration charging at the cage of my ribs and a mishmash of Dobie Gillis’ many romantic soliloquies looped through my brain, jamming my syntax, purging my witticisms and making me the cafe cretin. Everyone was in love, or they would have surely noticed I was in love. We had discovered a new capacity for romantic love, and like a new song, you would play it for a special someone to dig … and if they didn’t dig it you’d play it to someone else tomorrow.
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