by Derek Haines
Dead Men
by
Derek Haines
Dead Men
Copyright © 2011 by Derek Haines
All Rights Reserved
Cover image: http://www.morguefile.com/creative/Alvimann
‘To all the girls I loved before.
Who travelled in and out my door…..’
Willie Nelson
East and West
On the western coastline of Australia a city grew from a small colony first settled in 1829. With the simple act by a lady named Mrs Helen Dance of chopping down a tree, the colony was officially claimed in the name of George IV by the recently appointed Governor. He had in fact only appointed himself that very morning. As Captain of the ship ‘Parmelia’ that bought these first settlers to this remote location, James Stirling thought it only right that he should get the top job. This little colony was built on the banks of the Swan River. Named so originally by Stirling that morning because of the large number of black swans floating on the river’s surface and the fact that Stirling really had quite enough of the tradition of naming places after English locations and places, the New Thames River was the choice of his second-in-command. He then set about his second official act; naming the colony. With the assistance and input of his newly appointed bureaucrats, the very original name selected was, The Swan River Colony, in keeping with the aforementioned river and the fact that Stirling was inexperienced at naming things. So he ran with his one original idea. His legacy would be that name. Over the next two hundred years or more no one ever had a better idea, so anything that needed naming would be Swan something-or-other.
It was fitting that Stirling would be remembered in years to come by the virtue of a Highway named in his memory. The Stirling Highway meanders along the banks of the Swan River, making its way from Fremantle, directly to the doors of the old Swan Brewery then towards what is now the city of Perth.
From the beginning, this colony had a few small geographical disadvantages. Firstly, it was located nearly two thousand miles from the nearest colony on the continent. Secondly that colony, soon to be Adelaide, hadn’t even been settled yet. Thirdly, it was bound on the western side by the Indian Ocean, with its vast areas of watery nothingness until it bumped into Africa, and to the East the almost equally vast and barren Nullarbor Plain and Gibson Desert. To the North there was the balance of Western Australia, which consisted of desert, desert and more desert, until it ran out some two thousand five hundred miles north of the colony. Then further north of that was more ocean, until Asia appeared. To the South, a long way away, was Antarctica.
With its very own time zone, ranging from two hours in winter to three hours in summer behind the rest of Australia, Perth exists within itself, for itself, by itself. Some on the east coast have even suggested that Perth is three hours and twenty years behind. To the majority of the two million or so residents of this remote city, there are only two other types of people in the world. They are Eastern Staters, being anyone who lives in Australia but not in Perth, and Foreigners; those who don’t live in Australia.
Perth is on its own and is inhabited by very unique creatures. It’s a place where immigrants from a variety of cultures came to start a new life. Thousands of English, Scottish and Irish immigrants came to settle in Perth. This new life began for them as soon as they learned how to complain about the number of ‘whinging Poms’ there were in the city. (Poms being a collective noun for anyone born in the United Kingdom.) It’s the only place in the world where one could listen to the diatribe of a recently arrived Philippine mail order bride about the appalling level of Asian immigration and what should be done to stop it. Of course she had an attentive audience. Dinky Di Perth Aussies sitting around the barbecue, cans of beer in hand, all nodding in approval of her sermon. Perth has this effect on people. No matter where they come from or what ethnic or cultural background, as soon as they arrive, they are consumed with the need to complain. Once bitten by this desire, and once they get the hang of it in practice, they’re accepted as a local.
Unless you happen to come from Melbourne, Victoria. It’s an unfortunate fact, that anyone who uproots from Melbourne and relocates to Perth, will never be accepted. Perth has three suburbs set aside for these Eastern Staters. Sorrento, Duncraig and Ocean Reef. As long as these drop-ins, normally only there on transfer with a national company, stay in their allotted suburbs, there is peace.
Apart from the mindset of the population, the place is outwardly normal. To the visitor it is a beautiful place to holiday. Beaches, sun, exotic wildflowers in spring. A sparkling city built on the banks of the Swan River. Almost rebuilt entirely in the money making days of the seventies and eighties, its tall glass and concrete towers can be seen by its inhabitants for miles. At night, from the trendy restaurants of South Perth, the lights of the cityscape dance in the still waters of the Swan River. The reflections of every light symbolising the wealth that has been mined from the rich earth of the state, and all these jewels are on display in the night dance.
It’s a tribal group that lives here. Tribal battles are fought on the green grass of sporting fields. The main battles are fought out mercilessly on the football field or the cricket pitch. In 1992, this tribalism came to fever pitch, when the local football team reached the Grand Final of the National League. This was the chance to defeat the dreaded Eastern Staters on their own battlefield. Now sport has a following all over the world but Perth must be the only place where a single football game would stop an entire city completely. The day of the event, the last Saturday in September, produced an eerie city. Not a soul was away from their television set. Roads, streets and major freeways were deserted. The main street of the city was populated by a couple of Japanese tourists looking as if they where the last survivors of a nuclear holocaust. Shopping centres closed. Nothing moved. The city died for those three hours.
Every single inhabitant wanted the blood of those Victorians. And blood they got. Perth won in a thrilling game. They had defeated the dreaded enemy. On the final siren, the city exploded in celebration. The type of celebration reserved for the end of major world wars. To the people of Perth, this was bigger than any world war, and they celebrated for days, weeks and months. In most other places in Australia, this victory hardly rated a mention. In Sydney it occupied six lines in the Sydney Morning Herald. Hidden somewhere next to the greyhounds and country trot results.
To the rest of the country Perth is the city where people always want to go to, but never get there. In other cities it is the place that you can never quite see on tomorrow’s weather forecast map because the weather men and women in all other places in Australia stand in front of the map just where Perth is located. Its location is a convenient place to stand because their little pointers can point to every other city in Australia from there.
A very long way to the east of Perth is Australia’s largest city, Sydney. Originally claimed by the British for use as a penal colony in 1788, it has grown from a small colony of convicts, gentry and police, to become a thriving metropolis of four million people. The ratio of convicts, gentry and police seems to have remained unchanged over the years however.
Sydney is a brash city. Fast. Aggressive. Dirty. Beautiful. Disgusting. Cultured. Loud. Greedy. Adventurous. Busy. Lazy. Everything for everybody. Bound by famous sandy beaches to the east and the Blue Mountains to the west, it is a city of activity. Two parts of the city, North Sydney and Sydney City are joined by the world’s largest ‘coat hanger’, the Sydney Harbour Bridge. It is an engineering marvel. Carrying across its span hundreds of thousands of cars and hundreds of trains every day. Hidden beneath the harbour it spans, is a tunnel carrying yet thousands upon thousands more cars, with drivers who pay their same two-dollar toll to cross the harbour, but pass on the s
pectacular view. Maybe they have seen it once too often.
Sydney is the home of the Sydney Opera House and The Love Machine. The Opera House being the height of culture, and The Love Machine being a famous strip club in King’s Cross. Located only a short distance apart, they make for an ideal night of entertainment. Shortly after enjoying the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the Opera House and the privilege of paying a paltry two hundred dollars or so for a seat, it’s only a short five-dollar taxi ride to the Love Machine. Both events are timed so you don’t miss a thing. When the last round of applause has finished at the concert, the best strippers in King’s Cross are taking the stage at The Love Machine. The expensive champagne of the Opera House is replaced by exorbitantly priced cans of beer in the Cross, but once you are pissed, who cares. If you’re still awake at two-thirty, you’ll get to see the live sex onstage that has been promised by the spruikers to every passing soul since eight o’clock. It’s worth staying awake for. If you like comedy. Some poor drunken idiot is lured onto the stage by something that resembles a naked female. Once there she yanks down his trousers and discovers ‘brewer’s droop’ as she has every other night and tries in vain to make it into something useful. The crowd have a laugh, the poor idiot will have forgotten it by the morning, and the ugly stripper takes a bow and disappears behind the tatty curtains of the stage. Once the poor fellow has hoisted his trousers back up, it is your cue to go home.
When you do, you will encounter a Sydney phenomenon. At two o’clock in the morning, just when the entire entertainment and party scene of Sydney disgorges its human contents to the street, all Sydney taxi companies have a shift change. Every single taxi in Sydney returns to base to change drivers. This presumably involves a chat with the new driver over coffee and scones, because it is well and truly four o’clock before they reappear. If the police could organise the same arrangement, this en masse exodus of drunken, singing, vomiting party and club goers could drive home promptly without fear. But being as it is that the chances of being caught for drink driving are very good, everyone waits patiently on sidewalks from two until four. Pointlessly hailing taxis that are returning to base and have no inclination of stopping is the only way to pass the time.
The greater Sydney basin from Newcastle in the north, to Wollongong in the south, to Katoomba in the west is home to nearly one half of the population of Australia. This fact in itself ensures a city that has its own self propelled economy. It also has self propelled poverty and crime. Self propelled pollution and filth. It also has self propelled wealth and greed. Sydney reeks of opportunity, smells of garbage.
It’s a magnet to many types of people from both within the country and without. Four out of five immigrants to Australia choose to settle in Sydney. Many people relocate to Sydney from other parts of Australia. As the rural heartland of the country disappears, the cities swell. Sydney swells the fastest. Some come for the opportunities Sydney has to offer. Some come to hide in the enormity. Some come because there seems no other place to go. Three men from Perth are attracted to this vast metropolis. All come with hope in their hearts for a secure and prosperous future. They will all find what they are looking for, and more. It is the more that they will have difficulty with.
David
Born in a small country town sixty miles east of Perth, David James Holdsworth began his life in 1956 after waiting for the local town doctor to come home from the cinema. He was ready to take his first breath but somehow got stuck on his way to freedom. No doubt this was an unpleasant wait for his mother too. His passage to freedom and his first gulp of air in the middle of a loud squawk was assisted by the recently arrived doctor and a pair of large forceps. David had waited impatiently for his freedom. In some manner the die had been cast for his life as his appetite for freedom would never be satisfied. He would never feel freedom as he wished it would feel or appear, so would spend an indeterminate amount of his life chasing it. The seemingly irrational urges to run, to escape, to flee, to be free that David would undergo during his life would be difficult for those close to him to understand.
He was a quiet baby. The type that leads first time parents into a false sense of belief that child raising is easy because he only cried to be fed, to be held or to be changed. But he didn’t do as most babies do and cry for no obvious reason, which drives parents to distraction. David was easy to understand, but only as a baby. As he became older, it became harder. Every year that passed led David’s parents further away from understanding their son.
His father was a carpenter; a simple hard working and honest man while his mother stayed home with her child and later, children. Their life wasn’t blessed with more money than was needed for a simple lifestyle but they were happy. Until the work ran out in the small town. The town was dying and it was time to move on. The city wasn’t an attraction for his parents so David moved with his mum and dad to another larger country town three hundred miles north. Arriving at the age of four, it was here that David collected his first memories. Memories to build on through life. As he would discover later in life, some memories are easy to carry while others become emotional baggage and weigh one down heavily.
School was interesting for David and he thrived on interaction with other children. Being an only child, the company of other children was something David adored. Most were attracted to his warm personality, but this isn’t to say he didn’t stand up for himself and have the odd schoolyard fight. They were few and far between though and his win loss ratio was about even. He was developing as a normal young boy. During his first few years of school his marks were good. Always near the top but never right at the top. He was little trouble to teachers, the type of child who can be overlooked because they don’t need attention.
Behind his house, through an opening in the paling fence, was a small shop. The owners had built the shop onto the front of their house. They had two children. A boy and a girl. The boy a little older than David. The girl a little younger. The three became close friends. They played together after school, and their respective parents always knew they would be at either house or somewhere in between. A few trees in David’s backyard were a favourite place for the three. Collecting and having races with cow beetles was a standard game. It didn’t matter if they were playing with a train set, cowboys and indians, cops and robbers, or with a tea set and mud cakes, the three were inseparable. Being children of course, they weren’t complete angels. But apart from one little game with matches under the house and the resulting panic attack with the garden hose by David’s mum, and numerous cuts, abrasions and falls, dropped plastic cups full of soft drink when they walked around the houses instead of staying at the table as they were told, these three kids were normal, and abnormally well behaved.
Shortly after turning ten years old, he and his little sister who was six years younger than him, were told by their mum that they would be moving to the city. Dad’s work was slowing down again, and grandma was on her own in Perth. Granddad had died a year or so back. The excitement of the adventure of going to Perth and being able to watch television at grandma’s overshadowed the fact that David was about lose his best friends. However, as he was ten years old and there was no television in his country town, the thought of being able to watch television every night won the day. He was ready. Although far too young to realise how settled he was, David would look back later in life and realise this period of time in this small country town would be the most stable and settled part of his life. His two friends would be the first of many he would lose along the way. He would later reflect on this loss and wonder if he had ever said goodbye to them.
Arriving in Perth was a disorganised time for the family. A rented house, a new school, looking for work, building a house. It was organised chaos. David shared a bed with his sister because the house was so small, and he hated his new school. He hated the teachers especially. He wasn’t all that keen on the other kids either. This was unusual for David and he retreated into himself. The only bright spot was the
new black and white television set sitting in the lounge room. David would get impatient watching the test pattern, then waiting for the national anthem and the station announcement to finish before the programs started. But wait he would. He loved television. Like any novelty, it would wear off but while he hated where he lived and went to school, television was his escape.
After what seemed forever, but more likely one year, the new house was ready. It was in a different suburb and the change of schools was just what David needed. He made new friends quickly and returned to his grades that took him near but not quite to the top of the class. He loved sport but wasn’t very good at it. It didn’t matter. He tried his heart out. He started at this new school with a little less than two years of primary school to complete and there was a high school near by so the future looked stable. But it wasn’t.
David entered a music scholarship contest at the suggestion of his teacher in his last year of primary school. He had no idea what it meant, he just enjoyed playing the violin. The adjudicator came to David’s school for the audition so it didn’t seem like a big event to him. Once the audition was over he forgot all about it. Until he won. His parents were so proud of him. He had been accepted to go to a high school that specialised in music tuition. He would receive the standard education but have extra periods of music and out of school activities. It was a marvellous opportunity. However, the school was three buses and one and a half hours away from home. In accepting the scholarship, David sentenced himself to three hours travel a day and the loss again of his newly acquired friends at his primary school.
For a skinny freckled face boy with a haircut always a little shorter than he really wanted and who thrived on the company of his friends, David had made a regretful decision. He knew it. He was an intelligent boy with deep and thoughtful blue eyes that never revealed what was inside his mind. He fully understood that the scholarship was an honour and an opportunity he was lucky to have received but he also knew he would regret leaving his friends. The amount of travel he would have to do wouldn’t allow him to see his friends after school, or participate in local sporting activities near his home. At the young age of twelve, David was feeling that friends for him would only exist in short time frames. When other children were building on their friendships that had started at kindergarten or primary school, David was starting high school without a solitary friend. Outwardly he didn’t show his feelings, nor discuss his fear and loss with anyone. The outside of David smiled, the inside cried.
