My parents were racists in private speech but not in action. Did that make them secret racists who hid their racism from the wider world? Or were they non-racists who played with racist speech? Or a bit of both? Who can possibly say? My worry is that by conflating racist or offensive speech or attitudes with racist or offensive actions or activism, we push people like my parents and Ricky (who represent large chunks of every dominant ethnicity or tribe in every country on earth) over to the wrong side of the political fence. By setting unnegotiated limits on attitudes and speech as well as actions, we claim too much territory and thereby risk losing it all.
The desire to create a world devoid of cruelty and unfairness is unquestionably noble, and the idea of a racism-free society is rhetorically useful – especially when you are dealing with impressionable children – but it is only a happy fantasy. Tribalism is a global phenomenon. Its roots may be evolutionary or cultural or both, but it appears everywhere, and it flares up whenever people fear that their way of life is under threat. When we believe our rhetoric and use coddled, middle-class experience as our reference point, we lose sight of practical objectives, and ignore obvious risks as well as genuine social accomplishments.
Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of a middle-class life is the extent to which it shields its beneficiaries from fundamental, brutal realities. Most lower-class people of all ethnicities quickly learn that universal justice doesn’t exist, and probably never will, yet unbridled fantasies of fairness are continually thrust upon them from above. Don Quixote rides his workhorse, Rocinante, with the same blind abandon. But the lower classes are not as tolerant as old nags, and they express themselves with actions rather than arguments and complaints. If you direct them to gallop at windmills, they stand still. When you try to whip them forwards, they buck you off. If you then rebuke them, they kick you where it hurts. And they are right to do so.
People Power at the Ponderosa
Mandy Sayer
Take twenty-four single people from diverse backgrounds. Add poverty, disabilities and old age, then house them among drug dealers and creeping mould. A recipe for chaos? Not at all. Here’s proof that life, in any circumstances, is what you make it.
Ten days until Christmas
‘You know how we can tell that someone has died?’ asks Woolley, standing in the corridor of his Department of Housing building.
He nods at the door of the apartment adjacent to his own unit. ‘Flies on the door handle. The flies always figure it out before the smell gets going.’
Woolley tells me that last week he noticed the insects buzzing around his neighbour’s lock and called the police, who broke into the flat to discover the corpse of Peter, in his early fifties, who hadn’t been seen for three days.
‘He was a bit of a conspiracy theorist,’ adds Woolley, the unofficial caretaker of the building. ‘He reckoned J.F.K. was murdered by the Mob.’
Woolley, however, suspects no foul play in the death of his neighbour. Now there is a sign on the door, posted by the authorities, warning that the interior has been contaminated and that no-one should enter until it has been detoxified by forensic cleaners.
‘Probably an overdose,’ he murmurs.
Residents call the building ‘Ponderosa’, in reference to the ranch on long-running US TV western Bonanza. It’s a block of twenty-four studio apartments in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, built in the 1970s, filled with single disability and aged pensioners. All but one survive on Centrelink payments and donations from charities. The majority, Woolley tells me, have no family support.
‘You don’t want to plan too far ahead, because you don’t know who’s going to die.’
It’s now ten days until Christmas, but he is ambivalent about organising the annual party because four of the building’s residents are in hospital and the recent passing of his neighbour puts Ponderosa’s death toll for the year at three (thus far).
Woolley leads me into his studio filled with clothing racks and his collection of vintage Hawaiian shirts. A three-quarter bed is wedged into an alcove. A flat-screen TV is mounted on the wall, below a small round table. It’s a tight squeeze, even for one person. I ask him about the actual size of the unit. He shrugs and replies, ‘Nine paces by five paces. That’s how I measure it.’
We walk out into his small, private courtyard and he shows me a huge freezer he’s installed under the awning, where anyone in the building is welcome to store their frozen goods. In order to provide round-the-clock access, Woolley has removed three palings from his fence so his neighbours can duck in and out without disturbing him.
‘Three good square meals a week. That’s enough to keep us going.’
As we walk back inside, eighty-four-year-old Don, who lives upstairs, limps through the open door carrying a steaming plate of fish and chips. He delivers it to the kitchen counter. Don is the unofficial chef for six other Ponderosa dwellers who are either too ill or too lazy to cook a hot meal at night.
‘Sunday is a baked dinner,’ Don says, leaning against the wall and lighting a cigarette. ‘Wednesday is spaghetti bolognaise, or lasagne. And Friday is fish and chips.’
Every Friday morning, Don gets up, collects his shopping trolley and limps fifteen minutes to the local outlet of the charity OzHarvest, where he selects donated fruits and vegetables for his various neighbours. ‘I know that Jose likes Asian greens. And Butch loves kiwifruit. I know what everyone wants so I can pick up stuff for them.’
‘And on Fridays we do the washing up and return the plates to Don,’ adds Woolley. ‘And we check his fridge to see what he needs.’
‘Do you charge people for the meals?’ I ask.
Don smiles and glances at Woolley.
‘We’ve got a kind of bartering system,’ says Woolley. ‘It’s all based on reciprocity.’
He tells me that some years ago the residents of Ponderosa worked out a plan that would benefit them all – and one that would remove the need to constantly borrow and repay money to each other. ‘For example, we all buy the same cask wine – Golden Oak, $12 for four litres from the cellars down the road.’
‘Sometimes it’s $10,’ chimes in Don. ‘When it’s on special.’
‘We all smoke the same tobacco – Endless Blue – and use the same papers, Tally Hos.’
‘It’s an open-door policy …’ adds Don, stubbing out his cigarette.
I glance at Woolley, hoping he’ll further explain the scheme. ‘… So we can walk in and out of each other’s apartments. Say, if I run out of wine, I can stroll into someone else’s place and help myself. Same with tobacco. And food. And they can let themselves into my place, without having to find me.’
The ninety-year-olds are housed on the second floor, so they have level access to street exits. Woolley also tells me that all the men in the building have swapped three sets of keys, so that no-one is accidentally locked out of his unit.
‘And when one of us goes to hospital,’ he adds, ‘the rest of us sneak into the empty apartment and clean it all up – like a bunch of elves!’
Sixteen years ago, when Woolley and Don first moved in, the side garden was denuded and filled with trash. Drug dealers stalked the security gates. When Woolley called the police, he was referred to the Department of Housing, and when he called the department he was always referred back to the police. So Woolley and his neighbours decided to take matters into their own hands, marshalling sentries at the windows above the security gates. Whenever a dealer was spotted lurking outside, he’d be pelted with rocks and buckets of water. After a month or so, the block was free of both junkies and dealers.
It was then that Woolley, Don and their new friends set about turning the building’s common property into a sanctuary. They cleared the garden, planted trees and ferns, and set up tables and chairs in the shade. Now it exudes the cool green light of a tropical rainforest.
‘There’s a Chinese guy upstairs,’ says Woolley. ‘He’s eighty-six – and we call him Jose.’
‘Why do you call
him Jose?’
Woolley grins and lights a rollie. ‘’Cause he’s always hosing the garden. We’ve sort of given him permission to use a fire hose on the third floor. He stands in the corridor and waters the plants from there. You see, we’re only supposed to use the hose in the event of a fire. But because Jose is Chinese, we figure that if he ever got into trouble from the authorities he could pretend that he doesn’t speak English.’
As Don bids goodbye and disappears into the corridor, Woolley sprinkles his hot dinner with water and pops it into the oven on low.
At night, Ponderosa becomes an amplifier for the many frustrations of the neighbourhood. A guy upstairs has been yelling obscenities over his balcony for five hours. Woolley tells me that he and a neighbour have been warring for days, but no-one can remember how it started exactly. Bottles and glasses shatter on the street; car alarms wail; and, just before midnight, I can hear somebody spewing. Soon, police sirens are howling over the shouts of neighbours.
‘Raid,’ says Woolley, calmly, topping up his drink. ‘The house two doors up – they’re always getting busted.’
Nine days until Christmas
The front door swings open. ‘You there, Woolley?’ cries a man in an urgent voice. ‘Woolley, are you there?’
I look up to see a solid, dark-haired man wearing sunglasses peering down at me, sporting a wide, maniacal grin.
Woolley rises from his chair and introduces me to Leo, who at the age of forty-eight is the ‘baby’ of the building. They’ve been close friends since Leo moved in to Ponderosa fifteen years ago. Every morning, he arrives at Woolley’s at the same time – 9.30 a.m. – and they walk around to a local pub to buy takeaway coffees.
Today is no different. Woolley grabs his mobile phone and they disappear out the door together. I stay behind to await the arrival of a health inspector. Woolley has told me that five units have been badly affected by mould, and has already shown me a photograph on his phone of an eighty-seven-year-old man slumped on a bed, with the wall behind him furred with mildew.
‘Maybe we can paint over it,’ says Woolley, as he and Leo return with the coffees.
‘You can’t paint over mould,’ I say. ‘It’ll make it even worse.’
‘Well, it’ll look a lot better,’ Woolley reasons. ‘You know, some of these blokes don’t have much time.’
We wait for the health inspector. Leo, who is on the autism spectrum, tells me a little of his life. He was born in Australia to Italian parents who returned to Naples when he was two years old. He grew up speaking fluent Italian. When he was eleven, however, his family moved back to Australia and Leo struggled to adapt both culturally and linguistically. Hence, when he speaks English, he is compelled to state everything twice.
‘When he speaks Italian,’ says Woolley, ‘he only says things once.’
Leo does his bit for the Ponderosa community by repairing second-hand mobile phones and giving them to neighbours.
‘Since Junkie John moved in, the cops have been called twice and Bikie Dan has stabbed him once.’
‘Everyone gets a basic Nokia when they move in,’ explains Woolley. ‘And we get them all on the same plan. Thirty bucks a month. It’s cheaper than a landline.’
Suddenly, what looks like water or weak tea begins falling past the open door and into the courtyard. It continues for eight or ten seconds and stops as abruptly as it began.
‘When we get junkies in here,’ announces Leo, ‘it wrecks everything.’ After repeating the statement, Leo lets Woolley pick up the story.
‘Was that just someone pissing over the balcony?’ I ask.
Woolley replies by rolling his eyes and shrugging. He goes on to explain that Junkie John supports his habit by stealing luggage from the carousels at Sydney airport. ‘The only problem,’ he continues, ‘is that John’s a clean freak. As soon as he moved in, he ripped up the carpet of his unit and dumped it in the garden. And he had his own washer and dryer in his unit going 24/7, laundering all the stolen clothes and luggage before he sold them on.’
Leo chimes in – twice – that John also threw his television from his balcony and damaged the herbs that Jose had planted. And one day, a neighbour grew so tired of the noise of the washer and dryer, he got up in the middle of the night, broke into the power box and secretly turned the junkie’s electricity off. So the junkie moved into the communal laundry, sleeping there and monopolising the three available washing machines.
‘And he lives off eggs boiled in an electric jug!’ adds Woolley, shaking his head.
We hear footsteps outside and turn towards the open door, anticipating the health inspector. But it’s only a neighbour on his way upstairs.
‘So how else do you cope?’ I ask, ‘When you’re living on such a tight budget?’
‘Lowes!’ announces Leo enthusiastically. ‘Lowes!’
Woolley tells me that all the male residents of Ponderosa have secured a loyalty card from Lowes department store. ‘During sales, it’s 15 per cent off. You can get a whole new wardrobe for seventy bucks!’
‘Tell her about the toilet paper!’ enthuses Leo. ‘Tell her about the toilet paper!’
Woolley laughs and explains to me that a few years ago, several residents of the building used to raid the expensive restaurants and bars in the area and steal rolls of high-quality Sorbent. They would then meet at a local pub with their bounties and pretend it was an Addicts Anonymous meeting.
Woolley stands up and strikes an embarrassed pose. ‘“My name is Henry and I’m a spendthrift. It’s been six weeks since I bought my last roll of toilet paper.”’
Leo laughs and slaps the table. ‘So we gotta have a Christmas party this year, Woolley! We’ll have it at your place.’ Leo gets up and disappears into the bathroom. ‘I’ll chip in and bring a case of beer!’
Woolley turns to me and lowers his voice. ‘Leo says this every year. “I’ll bring a case of beer!” But I’m the one who has to buy the food, and I also have to host it.’
Five days until Christmas
It’s so hot today that waves of heat rise through Woolley’s courtyard like funnels of steam. I open the freezer and briefly stick my head inside to cool off. Since my last visit, the health inspector has been and gone, yet still nothing has been done to remove the life-threatening mould.
‘Usually it takes up to fourteen working days for them to fix a problem,’ explains Woolley. ‘But with Christmas coming on, it won’t be done until next year. I don’t blame the Department of Housing. They’re doing the best they can.’
Trailing cigarette smoke, he leads me through the gap in his paling fence and onto a narrow strip of common property. We spot a heavily tanned man sitting in his undies in the sun, drinking yellow liquid from a plastic one-litre Coke bottle.
‘That’s Butch,’ whispers Woolley. We nod a greeting and continue walking.
‘What’s in the Coke bottle?’ I ask, curious.
‘Golden Oak,’ replies Woolley. ‘Butch used to be a two-cask-a-day man. And he lived under the Harbour Bridge. But after he got a home here, he got a job as a cleaner, which he’s managed to hang on to for years.’
He points out a honeysuckle tree further ahead. ‘Butch is also the building’s spotter.’
‘What does he look for? The cops?’
Woolley shakes his head. ‘The rats.’
At first, I think he is joking. But Woolley tells me that the rats come from three sources: the first is the nearby bay, where naval ships dock; the second and third are an old hotel and a community centre on the next block, both of which have been recently renovated and re-plumbed.
‘They come up through the pipes,’ he explains. ‘Don nailed chicken wire over our bathroom windows,’ – he points up to a mangled screen – ‘but the rats ate right through them. For a while there, I thought someone was coming into my unit and stealing my soap all the time. That is, until I saw a cake of Sunlight on the floor of the shower recess, covered in bite marks! Apparently they like the taste of the fa
t in the soap.’
We walk up the concrete stairs to the open corridor of the first floor, where the branches of macadamia and umbrella trees form leafy canopies. Woolley knocks on a door and we’re soon greeted by Flora, a smiling, petite Peruvian woman in her late sixties.
He begins to discuss Christmas plans with her: if he organised a party on the day, would she care to come along? Flora is more than enthusiastic. ‘He good man!’ she announces. ‘He very good man! He look after me!’
Woolley promises Flora he will be in touch with the details. I can sense that he still doesn’t feel motivated to throw a Christmas party, but it’s lonely residents like Flora and Butch who will probably change his mind.
‘Flora likes to sew,’ remarks Woolley, as we walk up the stairs to the second floor. ‘She does all my mending for me.’
‘Does she charge you for it?’
He glances at me as if I’ve just asked a silly question. ‘When she moved in, we found out she liked to sew. So we sourced a sewing machine for her and hooked her up with the local community centre to take lessons.’
We reach the second landing and are now facing the tops of the many trees. ‘There was a neighbour here a couple of years ago, Neil; he had a tumour on his side the size of a basketball.’ Woolley pauses and relights his rollie. ‘And he couldn’t leave his flat because nothing would fit him.’
We continue walking down the corridor. ‘So, we went down to Lowes and bought two oversized shirts. Flora cut them up and sewed them into one big shirt. That’s how Neil was able to go out when he had cancer.’
Woolley stops in front of a screen door, opens it, and sticks his head in. ‘Is it okay to come in?’
‘’Course it is!’ we hear a voice call.
We walk into a unit filled with shelves of books by bestselling author Wilbur Smith. Don’s kitchen is equally packed with pots, pans, colanders, utensils and crockery. Don is sitting on a chair in his singlet and shorts, watching the cricket.
‘Is it okay if I have a drink?’ says Woolley, heading towards the fridge.
The Best Australian Essays 2017 Page 16
