Press Escape
Page 2
And I needed predictability and familiarity. They were as vital to me as oxygen. I was shy, pathologically so. My shyness was like a big, bright red wound—a slash mark running right through my personality, my sense of self. I couldn’t face up to meeting anyone, be they an adult or a child. I could not form words when people spoke to me. I had only one thought: how could I get away? Most people will tell you they are shy. That is how they like to look at themselves. It is a way of explaining any residual social insecurities, a good check on the ego. I operated—and to a great, and often debilitating, extent still operate—with the knowledge that every social contact, even with people I knew well and regarded fondly, would be exhausting, frightening and potentially disastrous.
I resented my mother’s firmness during our exchanges about the inevitability of school attendance and I felt that she wasn’t telling me the truth. Who was she to cast me out into this world? I didn’t understand school but I knew enough to know that I would not, as she was suggesting, be playing with the children already at school. You played exclusively with kids in your grade. Everyone knew that. I would be with a bunch of strangers who, like me, had not set foot on the schoolground before. Who were these unseen kids anyway?
I did not want to join the world. It looked frightening and confusing. I enjoyed watching it very much but being part of it didn’t appeal at all. Anyway, I already could read. I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t read. From the moment I could talk, I would ask my parents about words. What’s that word? How do you say it? What does it mean? This was my chatter when we would drive around Melbourne’s half-built outer southern suburbs in our 1948 Chevrolet ute. My father was a welder, he needed a ute, he liked Chevrolets and he definitely wasn’t going to have any more kids, so that’s why we had a Chev. ute and not a family sedan. A ute had room for three on a bench seat and that would always be enough.
There were no other children in my life to distract me or my mother. There was a family with children living next door but my mother didn’t like me playing with them because they were ‘rough’ and ‘older’, so I kept to myself. Before I turned four I would thumb through The Sun News-Pictorial in the morning and The Herald in the evening, and try to match up the words with either the pictures accompanying the stories or the items I’d hear on the radio news bulletins during the day.
But on that blazing hot February morning in 1962, my high level of literacy, which, in a just world obviated any need to engage in any formal education as far as I was concerned, counted for nothing. I was starting at school and my mother was putting me in the line. My institutionalisation was beginning. I did not fight or complain but I also did not make any effort to hide my discomfort. Clearly I bore a look of distress crossed with bewilderment. Perhaps she could see that I felt betrayed. My mother pointed over at another boy who I did not know but recognised because he lived at the other end of our street, and I had seen him through the front window walking past our house with his older sister and their border collie on the way to and from the milk bar—also known as The Shop—that was just a block away from my house. ‘Look, there’s John Middleton. You know him. He’s starting today, too,’ she said in a desperate attempt to make me feel that I wasn’t all on my own. I could not avail myself of the appropriate language to reflect my response but I recall my internal reaction. The modern locution would be: I don’t give a fuck; I’ve never even met the kid!
All the same, in some small way I appreciated that she was at least trying to mollify me, that she saw I was ill at ease and was making an effort to provide comfort, futile as that was always going to be. Like her, I knew I was a goner, that I would have to go inside with all these strangers and the matronly lady who was standing at the head of the line, smiling at us.
And then the PA pinged the school bell sound and the lady led us away, into the breezeway, past the girls’ toilet on the left, up a set of wide steps to the right that ran from the school building’s central corridor and then left into the classroom. There were two prep classes that year, which were known universally throughout the school as ‘bubs’. In fact, ‘prep’ was never used. My bubs class was small and was made up exclusively of the four-year-olds.
The lady made us sit on the floor and told us her name was Miss Claffey. It might have been Mrs Claffey but when you’re four, you just say ‘Miss’ anyway. For the next seventy minutes, she busied us with some games and an explanation of the need to hold on if we needed to go to the toilet because we couldn’t just go when we wanted to as we did at home. ‘This is not like home,’ she said with a smile. That was enough for me. When the bell rang for morning play, she told us we could go out but when it rang the next time, we would have to line up again and she would take us back into the classroom.
We ran out of the room and down the steps into the breezeway. I looked to my left and could see my house with its big feature windows just on the other side of the schoolground. I opted for escape. Without breaking step, I headed for the house, running across the oval, through the gate, over my street, and up the gravel driveway to the side door. It was locked. I set myself up on the step, which was the most interesting element of the near-featureless two-bedroom timber home my father had built only a few years earlier. The step consisted of alternating grey and white bricks, with a light ochre slab inlaid on its top. It was a very 1959 look; many two-tone sedans of the time bore similar colour schemes.
I sat on the step, content that I’d got away. Within a minute or so, my mother appeared at the end of the driveway carrying a string bag with her right hand. She laughed and was either genuinely pleased to see me or amused at what a sooky little twit she had introduced to the world. ‘Well, what are you doing here?’ she said and motioned with her left hand at the string bag. ‘Look, I got you some lemonade. You’d better come inside.’
I got inside! And there was lemonade—Marchants’ raspberry flavour. As part of its ongoing war with the market leader Tarax, Melbourne’s other big cordial manufacturer, Marchants made great play of the screw top for its bottled soft drinks. The threaded top was made of orange plastic, with a black plastic ring to form a seal. It was marketed as revolutionary and it was; until then, once a bottle was opened, it couldn’t be resealed. Marchants promoted its soft drinks as ‘sparkalarkalarkaling’ but it was fighting a losing battle against Tarax, which sponsored The Tarax Show on Channel Nine each afternoon—the show was a particular favourite of mine.
The soft drink was a rare extravagance. Only a few months earlier, my father had been forced to declare bankruptcy after his tiny engineering firm had been overwhelmed by his poor business practices, some bad debts and a credit squeeze implemented by the Menzies Government. My mother had bought the lemonade in anticipation of me coming home for lunch. It was common for children to walk or ride home for lunch at the time. Instead, she was giving me a glass at twenty past ten in the morning. As I downed it, she said, ‘When you’ve finished I’m taking you back to school. You have to go.’
I knew the jig was up. I folded. I said all right. Just like that. Where else could I go? I drank up. She walked me back just in time for the bell and I joined the other kids. There had been a single act of not quite rebellion, let’s call it resistance, and I had been bought off with a little act of kindness and indulgence. I don’t remember trying to take off from school again or ever really wanting to create a disturbance or challenge anyone or anything after that. I had joined the world. There was a simple explanation. On my return to the classroom, realising that I could run but not hide, I studied the other children. I looked at their hair and their eyes. I watched the way they sat at the little chairs at the little tables. I listened to the way they talked to Miss Claffey. I realised they were all interesting. I never really felt completely comfortable with them; my comfort came from watching them, trying to understand why they did what they did. I should also admit that I drew comfort and satisfaction from the times that they listened to me and laughed when I tried to amuse them. All the same, my defau
lt position was a conviction that I would really prefer not to be there.
Thus began a continuum that was to last for a few months more than fifty years, coming to a close in 2012. Sixteen years full-time study. Straight into full-time work as a journalist at The Herald, where I lasted for eight years and one day. A single week off during which I was officially not employed but had lined up my next job. Then twenty-six years, six months and twenty-eight days at The Age. I got to see society. I got to delve around in it. I walked up to the machinery of power and its operators, asked them how things worked. I talked to people who’d just lost a child, people who’d just been terrified by a gunman, people who entertained and amused millions. I saw dead bodies. I got paid by my employers to travel around Australia and America and Europe, sometimes just for the heck of it. And all I had to do was write about it.
And then, it was over. I had become surplus to requirements. I wasn’t needed by the economy and the society—at least not in the way I had been needed before. I couldn’t feel bad about it, no matter how hard I tried. And I did try. As it turned out, walking away—my long-time employer applying, with one hand, a steady amount of pressure firmly to my back just like my mother and, with the other, offering me an enormous wad of cash—was the making of me.
_______________
I am an Australian, Frankston-born. I am a white Anglo-Celtic male, born in 1957. In the sweep of human history, I must be in the top percentile of the top percentile of the top percentile of winners in the cosmic lottery. I was never in danger of being conscripted. I have never been threatened by war or an economic depression or the political breakdown of my society. The community in which I have lived all my life is one of the safest and most affluent on the planet, one of the most secure, free and prosperous humanity has ever seen. I attended government schools that cost my parents next to nothing. When I began at high school, the fee for the year’s tuition was two dollars. The next year, it shot up to three dollars. At the time, my father was earning 100 dollars a week. When he saw the mimeographed, typewritten bill from the school demanding the three bucks, he exclaimed: ‘Kerr-ist! How much did I have to fork out last year?’ Postwar Australia in all its glory. All I had to do at school—and I did sense this at the time even if, sadly, some of my schoolmates did not—was show up, resist the temptation to be a dickhead, do the work as instructed by the teachers, and I was assured a life of relative material comfort. During the three years I attended university after matriculating, the Commonwealth Government paid me 1000 dollars per annum, no strings attached, even though I was still sleeping in the little bedroom I had occupied since I was a toddler at my parents’ house, only a thirty-minute drive from the campus. Then, when I graduated with a pass degree remarkable chiefly for its utter lack of academic achievement, I applied for two positions in the only field I had ever been interested in, newspaper journalism. One company, David Syme, publisher of the prestigious broadsheet The Age, displayed a total lack of interest, sending me a thanks-but-no-thanks letter. The other, the Herald & Weekly Times—whose publications were considerably more popular and larger selling, and whose papers were read cover to cover Monday to Saturday in my family home—gave me an interview and, ultimately, a job on The Herald. I managed to parlay that one-year Herald cadetship into full-time employment on metropolitan papers for thirty-four and a half years and I probably could have stayed longer if I’d wanted to.
My letter of application to the Herald & Weekly Times, then by far the biggest newspaper company in Australia, was written in longhand on two sheets from one of the Embassy-brand writing pads that my mother purchased regularly from the Coles variety store in Frankston, on which she used to write her weekly letters to her sister Flo in New South Wales. The pad was kept, with the teledex that held the numbers and addresses of friends and family, in a kitchen drawer, the one just under the brown AWA wireless. To write what would turn out to be the most important letter of my life, I used a green ballpoint pen. I do not know why. Although I had for several years put an immense amount of thought into my ambition to be a journalist, I applied myself to these applications only minimally. I dashed them off and did not show them to my parents or anyone else before mailing them. The letters contained the bare information: I am graduating in politics and economic history at Monash University; I am twenty; I am interested in being a journalist; I would appreciate being interviewed by a representative of your company.
The clueless arrogance. Somehow it worked out. How the hell did that happen?
3
ENGLISH–IRISH–GERMAN
IT’S PEACETIME. A dance, a chance meeting and I am made. Eddie Foot was at the dance. For all of her twenty-seven years, Eddie’s world had been the Hunter Valley in New South Wales. Except for a visit to an aunt’s house in Sydney as a child, plus a stint in a Sydney hospital at age twenty to have a goitre removed from her throat—as she lay in the ward post-surgery she heard prime minister Robert Menzies on the radio dispensing his melancholy duty to take Australia into armed conflict with Germany alongside Great Britain—and a trip to the Blue Mountains a couple of years later on the orders of her father to remove her from the clutches of an undesirable suitor, she’d never spent a day anywhere else. She did not work, not at a paid job, anyway. The last of six children in a family that had extracted a meagre living from a dairy farm near the small town of Seaham, she had been required by her parents to stay at home to ‘look after’ them as they moved into middle age and relocated to the regional centre of Maitland. This was the way of things in many rural families at the time. Children were expected to become useful soon after infancy, to perform as part of an economic unit. They were assigned roles on the farm and were expected to follow them. My mother’s role, given that she was female and the last in the line, was to ‘help out’, deploying all of the domestic skills she had learned from her mother Clara in the farmhouse’s kitchen and laundry. Her formal education had been solid but not extensive. She had attended Seaham’s one-room public school between the ages of six and thirteen. She was never sure whether in her final year she had graduated from Grade Six or Form One. After that she went back to working on the farm, helping out with the milking or carrying cups of tea to the farm workers during the day.
The Foot farm was overseen by the patriarch Stan, of English stock, a descendant of an assistant ship’s surgeon on the First Fleet. Clara was the daughter of German immigrants. Life followed schedules and rules. There was hard physical work over many hours; cricket or rugby league on Saturdays; regular attendance at St Andrews, the town’s little sandstone Anglican church, after Sunday milking; a stoic aversion to the discussion of feelings; and a good deal of laughter, often at the doings of people outside the household. The family made its own entertainment by recounting stories. Of the cousin living on a neighbouring farm who asked a companion in a laconic country drawl as they watched the Williams River, swollen by heavy rains, coursing past: ‘Would you swim across that river for a new Leyland truck?’ Of the time a cat jumped through an open window into the parlour and landed on the local vicar’s back as he was about to take a sip from a steaming hot cup of tea, leading the two creatures to embark on a frenzied piggyback dance around the room. Of the nicknames given to local people. A delivery man with a long chin was Horseface. A woman with an assertive gait was known as Clip-Clop. In this environment, understandably, equine imagery was strong.
Eddie started out a shy, quiet child and in this small, almost closed, community little happened to bring her out of herself. A lack of iodine in the rainwater that the family collected in tanks and used for cooking and drinking had led to an overactive thyroid. This gave her prominent eyes, all the more noticeable because of their blazing blue colour. She was teased. A boy at school delighted in telling her frequently: ‘I’m going to get a stick and knock your eyes out of your head’. She entered adulthood plagued by self-consciousness and insecurity, and chained to her parents. She hated her name, Edna. She was always Eddie or Ed. After recovering from h
er goitre operation, which left her with rough scars across her throat thanks to a ham-fisted nursing sister who had ripped out the stitches, with her twenties starting to fritter away, she made a decision. If servitude to the family was to be her fate, she was going to try to intersperse it with fun. Eddie had a natural gift for ballroom dancing. She could make any man she danced with look good. Although this was wartime, there were dances in the Maitland district most nights. She set out to attend as many as she could. The alternative was to sit at home with her parents Stan and Clara listening to the radio, reflecting on this prison sentence of a life. This was her existence for years, extending beyond the end of the war.
In early 1947, she went to a dance in Greta, 20 kilometres west of Maitland. Jimmy Carney was at the dance. He’d joined the army in April 1946 and was stationed at the large military camp at Greta established in the early weeks of the war to process and prepare the Second AIF. Jimmy was brash, charming and entirely confident in himself. He saw a roomful of strangers as an irresistible bowl of ripe fruit. His lineage was Irish and his family was avowedly Catholic in the blue-collar, hard-drinking, inter-war, inner-Melbourne style. He’d been raised in a rented terrace house in Clifton Hill, part of the City of Collingwood, and educated by the Christian Brothers to intermediate level. His father Jim was a labourer. Heavy work, earthmoving. One of Jim’s first jobs after leaving school at eleven had been operating a horse-drawn scoop on the construction of the Waranga Dam in northern Victoria. Jimmy’s mother Annie looked after the home and Jimmy’s younger sister Molly. Jimmy was twenty in early 1947. When, a year earlier, he’d signed up to join the Japanese Occupying Force—the war being over, looking after Japan became the Australian military’s new mission, although Jimmy never made it out of the country—he had not completed his apprenticeship as a boilermaker. But he wanted out of Clifton Hill, with his parents’ drinking and fighting, and he figured he could return to his apprenticeship and get his tradesman’s ticket after a couple of years in the army.