A Month of Sundays

by James O'Loghlin

  Eighteen’s tiles were black. What’s going on with that? Ivan’s plans showed a big airconditioning unit he wanted to put on his back balcony. Maybe if he got tiles a colour that didn’t conduct heat (i. e. any colour other than black) he wouldn’t need it.

  If you say the word ‘Cabramatta’ to most Sydneysiders it brings to mind two things. One is its cultural identity, predominantly Vietnamese. The other is its curse, heroin.

  Cabramatta is in the south-west of Sydney, just north of Liverpool, and is officially Australia’s most multicultural suburb. About three-quarters of those living there were born overseas and four out of five people speak more than one language. I don’t know what percentage use or sell heroin, but it’s a lot less than that.

  It’s near Sydney’s edge, at least at the moment, but there’s nothing spacious or rural about it. To get there you used to have to battle along the Hume Highway through Ashfield, Yagoona and Villawood, but now coming from Bondi it’s left into South Dowling Street at Moore Park and then you’re whooshed traffic-light free south past the airport, then west out to Liverpool. You don’t see anything except other cars, a toll booth and noise barriers that have various things painted on them that attempt, unsuccessfully, to disguise the fact that they are noise barriers. But it’s fast.

  At Liverpool we turned right and then a kilometre later right again into Cabramatta. The suburb carries such baggage that I half expected the light to immediately dim and to see shadowy figures lurking around lampposts and disappearing into alleys. But the geography and architecture of Cabramatta is inspired by neither its heroin culture nor its Asian influence. If all the people and some of the shop signs vanished there would be very little evidence to suggest that Cabramatta was anything other than an Anglo Aussie suburb or that its drugs of choice were anything other than the normal Anglo Aussie selections of booze and smokes. The Vietnamese influence didn’t grow with and influence the architecture of the suburb, it arrived afterwards.

  We parked a block from the shops and train station in a street full of shabby grey blocks of flats. No apartments here, or if there are they’ve been carefully disguised to look like flats to keep their value down. There was the odd house too, on blocks twice as big, but worth half as much, as those in the east. Most had bits of car somewhere in the yard. A front half, a stack of tyres, a back half, a whole one with no tyres. If only they combined resources they could make full ones that worked. Right in the middle of all the residentialness, for no apparent reason and blending in like an elephant on a train station, was a huge white-walled Russian Orthodox church emitting a strong smell of incense. It wasn’t quite what I expected as a first impression of the centre of Australia’s Vietnamese community. Maybe the connection was that citizens of both countries had fled the commies.

  The centre of Cabramatta doesn’t look like a bit of Asia in Australia, it looks like a lot of Asians in Australia, grafted onto what was already here. The shops, the streets, the layout, the mall, the carparks are all typical Anglo Australian suburbia. It’s what’s inside them that’s different.

  About 80 per cent of the faces in the streets were South-East Asian, mainly Vietnamese, but I didn’t feel an outsider. It seemed a busier, more welcoming place than Lakemba but maybe it was our attitude again. Over the years we had been more exposed to, and had become much more used to, seeing Asians than Arabs and therefore felt less threatened by them. And we were bigger than most of them.

  The shops don’t look Asian from a distance but they do up close. There are restaurants and toy shops and newsagents and fabric shops and $2 shops and travel agents and all the other shops you find at every other shopping centre, but they all have an Asian feel. Which means what, exactly? Well, it’s obvious in the restaurants with whole pigs being carried in and then hung dangling from the roof, and ducks and greens being chopped up by white-aproned men wielding machetes, but everywhere is a bustle and a busyness. In every shop the shelves are tightly packed, and close enough together that you have to squeeze your way down the aisles. There are as many goods in every place as can fit, not elaborately arranged to make the shop look and feel comfortable and elegant, but crammed together any old how. There are plain functional signs rather than elaborate neon banners. It’s function, not fashion. No space or expense is wasted on making things look good, on marketing.

  The effect is to create a sense of discovery. You can’t just follow the signs to the item you want to find because it could be anywhere, and so shoppers graze from shelf to shelf, and on the way perhaps find something unexpected. The seemingly random disorganisation could, in fact, be a clever ploy to ensure that in looking for what you want you inevitably come across all sorts of other things you might decide to buy as well.

  The fact that it is so obvious that money isn’t being wasted on décor or banners or space suggests there are bargains to be had, too. A beautifully interior-decorated shop may be a great place to look around in but I wouldn’t want to buy there. These are their antidote. It’s like law firms: a foyer full of paintings and coffee tables may make you feel relaxed and comfortable, but when you get the bill you’ll know how they were able to afford them.

  The attempt to use every inch of space even extends to mannequins. One in a chemist shop was covered in every type of bandage there is—elbow, biceps, knee, thigh, head and about fifteen others—so that it looked like the world’s most accident-prone statue. The only exposed bits were the toenails, painted red to show attention to detail.

  There is specialisation in Cabramatta you don’t see elsewhere. In the mall is a shop that sells only mangos, and near it a butcher that only does chicken. Maybe you have to get each magazine from a different newsagent and there’s a separate pub if you want mixed drinks.

  In a toy and electrical shop we came across a plastic truck, just big enough to sit in if you were a one-year old, for $35, jammed into a space between heaters and stereos, and thought about buying it for Bibi.

  Okay, I thought, this is Asia. I’d been to Asia. I knew how things worked. The price tag was merely an invitation to negotiate. The art of the deal is an Asian delicacy. If you don’t haggle they don’t respect you. It’s how they do things. As I suspected, it wasn’t long before the Vietnamese owner approached.

  ‘You want truck?’ he said.

  I knew my opening words would be vital. Too keen and he would know he had me. I affected disinterest.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  ‘Okay,’ he said and turned and walked away.

  ‘Err . . . yes we might want it.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said over his shoulder and kept going.

  Perhaps he’d been in Australia a while.

  As we moved out of the shop I tried again.

  ‘We might get it on the way back.’

  ‘Okay,’ he smiled.

  Outside the shop the fact that Cabramatta was truly multicultural and not just Vietnamese was underlined by the presence of a Pommie street vendor selling $2 t-shirts.

  Our progress was slow. Bibi had decided she’d had enough of being carried. She wanted to walk. She wasn’t good at it yet but she was keen. She would fight her way out of our arms as if from the clutches of an arch villain and stagger off determinedly in whatever direction we weren’t going, forcing all the busy bustlers to dodge her.

  I don’t know why there’s an extra bustle that seems particularly Asian. Chinatown has it too, a sense that life is loud and busy and crowded. People don’t stroll, they rush, and every conversation seems to involve talkers who are extremely adamant about whatever is it they are talking about. Two people meet and immediately gesture and speak as if they are arguing. They are probably just saying, ‘Hi. How’s the family?’

  There are reminders of Cabramatta’s other side, too. A sign reads ‘Townsafe: this area is under constant surveillance’. I wondered if it was from cameras or people but when I looked around couldn’t detect scrutiny from either. Across the road we spotted a drug dealer, surely he had to be, a twentyish Asian man
lurking suspiciously outside a video game parlour. Why suspiciously? Well, he was wearing a beanie for one. On a bright spring day. Very sus. He probably had fifteen balloons of heroin tucked up under his hat. And he was chewing gum. A clear sign of nerves. Plus he kept glancing up and down the road.

  We kept going, and ten minutes later he walked past us, smiling and holding the hand of an older woman who looked suspiciously like she might be his mother. I’d either got it wrong or he’d reformed pretty quickly. He’d even got rid of the gum.

  In fact, apart from jumping to the wrong conclusion about him we saw no evidence at all of Cabramatta being the heroin capital of Sydney. No junkies, no needles, no dirty alleys, no young men wandering in the direction of pawn shops carrying stolen video recorders under their arms and no outraged television crews from A Current Affair. Actually, not even any pawn shops. Or porn shops. We didn’t even see any cops. Maybe we were in the wrong place.

  In fact we were. The police blitz on Cabramatta hasn’t ended the dealing but it has forced most of it off the streets into houses, out of sight. If nothing else the place looks a lot better, and the sense of decay and grot that is present in other heroin hotspots like Kings Cross is utterly absent.

  We looked for somewhere to have lunch. There was no shortage of choice. There are dozens of Vietnamese restaurants from ‘$3 lunch 5 great choices’ up. Like the shops, none are too elaborate or expensive. The places are plain and functional. No one gives a stuff about the marketing or the look. As it should be, in my opinion. We chose a place that looked pretty much like all the others, a glass-fronted square with plain, tightly packed plastic tables. We were seated by the wall and a baby seat appeared without us having to request it. The fact that they’d gone to the trouble to provide it didn’t mean Bibi would sit in it, of course. She was full of wriggles.

  Even though the place was full, menus appeared and orders were taken in a third of normal restaurant time. I love that. I hate the waiting bit in restaurants. Waiting to get the menu, then waiting to order. You’re all ready and then one person says ‘Just another minute’, and it’s another quarter of an hour. If you get impatient in restaurants, eat Asian.

  We tried to order by pronouncing the Vietnamese and I imagined the waitress rolling her eyes on her way back to the kitchen after trying to unmangle our words, thinking, ‘The numbers are right there next to the dish. Why can’t they just say the bloody numbers?’

  In a parallel universe I am a waiter in an Aussie restaurant in Saigon, gritting my teeth as Vietnamese customers try and pronounce ‘Grilled chops with peas and spuds’. ‘For chrissakes, just say number 26.’

  The food appeared in moments. It fits, the fast service, into the busyness and functionality of Cabramatta. The restaurant was all about the food, getting it and eating it, a refreshing change from trendy eastern suburbs places that look more like fashion and furniture boutiques than places to eat, and where more care is taken draping the asparagus over the veal at exactly the right angle than cooking it.

  Our food was fantastic. Chicken noodle soup sounds like a pretty functional dish. You can get it out of a packet and the ingredients are pretty standard. Chicken, noodles and soup, plus a few greens tossed in. Yet this was as tasty and satisfying as any posh restaurant snazzy dish described as braised, poached, sautéed or any of those other words restaurateurs use to attach snobbiness to what is essentially fuel. Those places make food that looks like a work of art and tastes okay. Here was food that looked okay and tasted like a work of art.

  Each mouthful was a joy. It was more chickeny and more brothy than any other chicken brothy thing ever. It had enough comforting warmth to be nurturing, yet enough spice to keep things interesting and there was exactly enough of it. The end of the bowl was just far enough away to make reaching it neither a disappointment nor a relief. I wouldn’t be walking away hungry nor would I be staggering out painfully carrying a bloated gut.

  The freshly squeezed lemon juice set if off beautifully and together they were exactly $10. By the time we left, 40 minutes after we’d arrived, we were officially content.

  Cabramatta itself was as disarming as that restaurant. We walked in uncertain, we immediately felt comfy and interested and we left satisfied. It seemed a confident place, busy but not tense, and I wondered if that was at least partially because, while it had only recently become a Vietnamese suburb, it had always been a multicultural one. German, Italian and Yugoslav migrants established it, then in 1975 the first Indo-Chinese refugees arrived.

  They had fled war and hunger and most had had to cope with a lot, and a raft of welfare and assistance services sprang up around them to help, some government-run, some not. Seeing what a vibrant community has grown up from those who arrived carrying fear and uncertainty and not much else seemed to underline how much has changed in the way we treat those who come here today fleeing the same things.

  If the Vietnamese asylum seekers had spent their first one or two years here locked up, how much more difficult would it have been for them to adjust and prosper? And if, when released, they had only been given the uncertainty of a temporary protection visa (as refugees are now)—which lasts three years and then has to be re-assessed to see if the holder deserves further protection—how much more difficult would it have been for them to commit to their new home, to put down the roots that so obviously exist in Cabramatta?

  The children who arrived here in and after 1975 would now be adults in the prime of life. What long-term effects would the detention system that exists today have had on them? We don’t know, of course, but we might in twenty years.

  With these thoughts in mind we decided to take a trip down memory lane on the way home to a place that a decade ago I had visited almost every week for two years: the Villawood Detention Centre.

  When I had finally realised that corporate law was not for me I sent round after round of increasingly desperate letters to criminal law firms begging for a job. Eventually I got an interview with one and as soon as I walked into the interview I knew I was in the right place. The boss had jeans on, his legs crossed and his shoes up on the table. A superficial impression, sure, but after coming from the tight-arsed formality of the big end of town it felt right.

  I got the job, in part because of my desperation. The boss said they couldn’t pay me anywhere near the money a corporate firm could and I hit back with, ‘Well, there’s no way I’m going to turn this job down over money.’

  The boss smiled and offered me the job on the condition I accepted possibly the lowest salary ever paid to a lawyer, about $10,000 a year less than I was on.

  ‘Great. Great. Fantastic. That’s great. Oh great,’ I said.

  His brow furrowed. I think he was wondering, given how hard I negotiated on my own behalf, what sort of a job I was going to do cutting deals for clients.

  Half of the job was doing criminal law and the rest was doing immigration matters, mainly acting for asylum seekers. Each week I’d go out to Villawood and have conferences, usually via interpreters, with clients from Ghana and Sri Lanka and Iraq and Iran and Somalia and lots of other places. Detention wasn’t a political issue then in the way it has become recently, and yet I wondered what the occupants did all day for months on end while they waited, waited and waited. I guess they just waited, waited and waited.

  Even back then, there seemed to be a cynical attitude toward asylum seekers, as if people thought they had run away from their home, their family, their everything and risked their lives to get somewhere where they didn’t know anyone—where they couldn’t even speak the language—just for the pleasure of hoodwinking us by pretending to be refugees. Economic migrants posing as refugees are incredibly rare. Here’s why. To get here without a visa by boat or plane you have to have a fair bit of money to pay a smuggler and/or buy a ticket. If you have that sort of money, you don’t need to flee for economic reasons. The people who would like to escape their country for purely economic reasons don’t have the money to do so, and certainly don�
��t have the money to get here. If they did, they wouldn’t need to leave for purely economic reasons, because they’d have money.

  The only remaining reason that I can think of to leave for somewhere where you don’t know anyone, is fear.

  It was Lucy’s idea to have a look. It was pretty much on the way back from Cabramatta and she was shortly to be in a play set partially at Villawood. The detention centre is right in the heart of suburbia, separated from houses only by a fence, some parkland and a street. The old entrance I used to drive in was blocked up and we had to go round to the other side. As we circumnavigated we got a clear view of the detention centre from the back. The accommodation blocks were still there, seemingly unchanged, and the layout was as I remembered from ten years earlier. We passed the shops where I used to buy the paper before I went in, in case I had to wait (I didn’t once think about bringing detainees in some foody treat to break their culinary monotony; at the time it seemed so important, for some reason, to maintain professional distance). We turned into a driveway and a hundred metres along pulled off into a dusty space full of parked cars. Behind us a red sports car pulled in containing a middle-aged Eastern Suburbs Mrs and a younger African man. They got out, each carrying big plastic bags of food.

  ‘Shall we?’ said Lucy.

  ‘You go. I’ll mind Beeb.’ I gestured behind. She was asleep. Lucy got out and through the rear-view mirror I watched her follow other visitors toward a turbaned Indian guard.

  I didn’t want to go in. I didn’t want to gawk and perve and stare. At first I tried to tell myself it was because it would be treating the detainees like zoo animals. But it wasn’t that. Then I tried to tell myself the reason I didn’t want to go in was that I’d done all my head-shaking ten years earlier and that having another look wouldn’t achieve anything.

  But that wasn’t it either. The real reason I didn’t want to go in was that going and looking again would remind me that, despite all my head-shaking, I hadn’t done anything.