Press Escape

by Shaun Carney

  Jimmy had done a lot of his growing up on the street. The Great Depression descended on Australia when he was three. When he was six, he was sent out by his father to find a way to add to the household’s income. His first after-school job was running errands for a shop near Clifton Hill Station. At seven, he started selling newspapers. Clifton Hill was a major transport junction point. A cable tram from the city terminated there and passengers intending to head further on to Northcote and Preston had to walk 100 metres over the Merri Creek Bridge to join up with an electric tram service. Two rail lines converged at the station nearby and a complicated set of boom gates was needed to coordinate road traffic where busy Hoddle Street and Heidelberg Road met. The area swarmed with people heading to and from work. Paperboys secured and defended the most lucrative street corners and sales positions with their fists. Jimmy didn’t mind. The occasional fight was worth putting up with given the job’s other attractions, chiefly the opportunity to interact with scores of people every day. In his teens, his sport was cycling. Like every other Melbourne boy, he’d played football, but team sports never felt right to him. One afternoon, his Young Christian Workers team lost but he’d played well. Sitting in the change rooms after the game he was happy, his teammates weren’t. That was the end of Jimmy the footballer. If he’d had a good game he didn’t want to have to hide it. In road cycling, you might be notionally part of a team but everybody knew that each rider was riding for himself. One competitive ride, from Melbourne to Colac in the Western District on a Saturday with the return journey on the Sunday, led to an intriguing opportunity. The people of Colac threw a ball on the Saturday night. When the local master of ceremonies failed to show up, Jimmy, aged eighteen, volunteered to replace him. He was a hit, so much so that the manager of the local radio station 3CS wrote to him the following week offering him a job as a trainee announcer. Jimmy’s mother immediately killed that idea, declaring that the family needed the steady wage he was drawing from his boilermaker’s apprenticeship. For all of his brio, Jimmy was trapped too. That’s what led him to sign up at the drill hall on Queens Parade, taking him eventually to Greta and that dance, where he met Eddie.

  Jimmy and Eddie were the most exotic creatures either had ever met. An age difference of seven and a half years, with the woman the older one. Country–city. Anglican–Catholic. Reserved–extroverted. On the one side, German–English stoicism, on the other Irish exhibitionism. On the one side, a willingness to listen and watch along with a strong desire not to be noticed, on the other an innate impulse to be the one to tell the joke or regale anyone who’d listen with a story or a tune at a party. It was a short engagement. Eddie and Jimmy went out together—it would be another sixty years before Australians fully embraced the use of the American term ‘dating’—for just a few months before marrying in November 1947. They had only one child, born ten years later.

  That was me. English–Irish–German: what could possibly go wrong? The genetic battle inside my mother’s womb must have been intense. I want to believe it was fought honourably, with my parents’ respective genetic offerings showing more consideration for each other than my parents themselves often managed to show each other throughout their long and uncomfortable marriage. What gives me some sort of hope that this might have been the case is that, by my reckoning, the battle resulted in a draw: I’m a fifty-fifty split between wanting to hang back and possessing a compulsion to be noticed. Unfortunately, however, my birth did not produce a genetic truce; the war simply moved to another theatre. The conflict continued inside me. It has raged on throughout childhood, adolescence and into my middle age. The introvert who’s also an extrovert is a well-observed model; for example, the unobtrusive journalist who writes a book about his life.

  By the time I came along, my father was thirty, my mother thirty-eight. They had led a life together that was, if not peripatetic, what you might call undefined. For the first eighteen months of their marriage, they rented rooms in a house in Greta, near the army base. This got my mother out of sequestration with her parents while keeping her within an hour or so of her extended family. For my father, he got to feel part of that family and he played up the city slicker bit with his in-laws to the hilt. They liked him. The thing he loved more than anything was to put on a show, to get attention. But this stint of married life on my mother’s home turf was only ever going to be temporary. He had to finish his apprenticeship and he didn’t intend to live out his life either in the army, where he’d been a cook, or in the Hunter Valley: he was returning to Melbourne, where he would get his ticket as an oxy and arc welder. This had suited my mother, of course. Instead of facing the life of a spinster consigned to tending to the needs of Mum and Dad, she would move to a new state, leaving her parents and siblings 600 miles behind, scattered around Maitland and Newcastle. At last, she could begin an adventure.

  _______________

  For a while, I suppose it must have looked like an adventure. Upon my father’s discharge, they travelled by rail to Melbourne, changing trains at Albury because the systems in New South Wales and Victoria used different gauges, and moved into my father’s family home in Clifton Hill. They took an upstairs room in the rundown two-storey terrace house, with a balcony and a magnificent view of the Darling Gardens on the other side of the street, and set up a hotplate on the landing at the top of the stairs so that my mother could prepare meals. They lived like this for several years, sharing a roof not just with my paternal grandparents but for some of the time with my father’s sister, her husband and their two small children as well. They then moved on to other rented accommodation, firstly in Hastings on the Mornington Peninsula, 60 kilometres south of Melbourne, and then, two weeks after I was born, in Mordialloc, in the southern bayside suburbs. Incredibly, for their first two and a half years as parents, they chose to lodge with an elderly woman they barely knew, a relative of one of my father’s workmates, in a house just two doors away from the small engineering works where my father was foreman. They had to do this because they were saving for a home of their own.

  In the week I was born, they paid £250 for a heavily treed quarter-acre block on the southern edge of Seaford, about 2 kilometres north of the town centre of Frankston, then in the process of transforming from a bayside fishing village into a sprawling dormitory suburb, bursting with people just like us—Anglo-Celtic men, women and children who wanted space that was going cheap. Frankston marked the southern perimeter of metropolitan Melbourne; its railway station was at the end of the electrified line, 40 kilometres and an hour by train or road from the CBD. The block was on the corner of two unmade roads, opposite a soon-to-be-opened primary school, and was a ten-minute walk or three-minute drive to an exquisite beach that was shielded from the busy traffic coursing back and forth to Melbourne by a thick wedge of native vegetation, mostly ti-tree. You could sit on that beach and stare at the horizon across Port Phillip Bay and then turn around and look up at the gnarled, hardy littoral foliage and forget that you were only 50 metres away from one of Melbourne’s busiest highways.

  While we lived in one room of a house in Mordialloc, my father set about building a house on the block. His experience of building anything with wood or even working with it was zero. He knew about metal. He was, by all accounts, a skilful boilermaker. He had attended night classes in metallurgy and structural engineering at the Melbourne Technical College, later renamed RMIT, for five years. He knew how to cut metal, reshape it and join it up. He was responsible for a lot of decorative wrought-iron work—full of curls and twists or geometric shapes, and then painted white—that graced the triple-fronted cream brick homes that were proliferating in Melbourne’s new south-eastern suburbs in the late fifties. But he refused to pay anyone to do anything. It was a belief he pursued with a missionary zeal throughout the fifty-two years that I knew him. He built the house because he thought he could. Early in the build, he started up his own business, so for help, he turned to his employees. They too were trained exclusively in working with
metal, not wood. When work was slow they would drive from Mordialloc to Frankston to do a bit more to the house, a simple, rectangular timber box with two bedrooms.

  By late 1959, the house was habitable, but only just. The three-panel front door was nailed shut and would remain so for thirteen years. Entry and egress were gained through the side door with the multicoloured brick step. A slow combustion stove, fuelled by briquettes delivered weekly and stored in a hessian sack by the back door, was used not just for cooking but for the hot water service too. The toilet was a small, bespoke shed deep in the backyard, appropriately painted brown; the pan man employed by the shire council made his collections every Wednesday morning. The flooring was linoleum in the kitchen, bathroom and bedrooms and bare, unvarnished Tasmanian hardwood in the lounge room. The lounge room floor would eventually be sanded and polished seven years later. Not by a professional sander and polisher but by my father.

  We moved into the house a few days before Christmas, twelve years after my parents married. I have some memories of this time, even though I was only two. I do not possess a fully eidetic—or what is commonly known as photographic—memory, but a lot of what I’ve seen and experienced seems to be easy to recall: dates, people, names, conversations. It was always handy throughout my career. My earliest recollections predate the move to Frankston. One involves the front seat of the Chevrolet ute, with its cracked leather seats. My father had taken me to the shops in Balcombe Road in Mentone and bought a pound of beef mince, which the butcher had wrapped in white paper and newspaper. When we returned to the car, my father realised that he was running out of cigarettes—his brand then was Peter Stuyvesant, which he referred to as Stuyvos. He left me on the seat with the minced meat package and headed off to a nearby milk bar to buy a pack. I was hungry and the temptation was too much. I ripped a hole in the parcel and started consuming handfuls of the mince and the newsprint. He returned to find me with the ink dribbling from my chin, long chains of black drool dangling from my fists. I remember feeling contented until he swept me up and took me to the fruiterer’s shop outside which he’d parked, and handed me over to a lady serving there, begging her to clean me up. The lady obliged. Apparently, that was a woman’s work. Another memory relates to the ingestion of another ill-advised substance. It comes from the final stages of the house-building. When it was time to paint the house, my parents took me along. I can recall the look of the paint, smooth and alluring and creamy in the can. It looked too good to resist. What else could I do but drink it?

  The next memory is of the first night in the Frankston house. As well as the slow combustion stove, the kitchen housed a kerosene fridge, coloured a pale, dirty olive green. I recall standing next to it in the dark, crying quietly, a noiselessness surrounding the house. It was a very small house. My parents could hear me but they could have found me anyway simply by following the trail of piddle that I’d laid between my bedroom and the kitchen.

  Years later, my mother told me that the thirty months she spent in Mordialloc constituted the lowest point in her life. She hated having to learn how to be a new mother in full view of the landlady, someone she barely knew. The house we lived in was on Lower Dandenong Road, a main road that carried a lot of traffic. To the west was Mentone and the Nepean Highway, to the east was Moorabbin Airport, one of the busiest aerodromes in Australia. Once I started to walk at eleven months, my mother was in constant fear that I would break loose and run out on to the road. She had good reason to worry; I was always trying to get away. Once, I succeeded, giving her the slip and heading along the footpath towards the airport. I covered 100 metres and crossed a side street before she discovered I was missing and caught up with me.

  There are two enduring emotional memories I have when I look back at my earliest days and think about my mother: that she was loving and angry. By then, she’d worked out that for her running wasn’t an option.

  4

  GIVE US A SONG, JIM

  AS FOR ME, the fear of my self-liberation seemed to recede at the new house. There were no fences, the doors were hardly ever locked (what was there to steal?), the streets were unmade, out front there was just a track instead of a footpath, and on the side street there wasn’t even a track, just bushes, and 80 per cent of the surrounding building blocks were nothing but scrub—the postwar outer suburban frontier in acute expression. The front street was named Boonong. At its western end, closest to the beach, ran Kananook Creek: slow moving and dark brown, discharging its contents—thoroughly befouled by the upstream use of backyard septic tanks—into Port Phillip Bay by the Frankston town centre. There is no clarity about the Indigenous meanings of Boonong and Kananook, although there is speculation that Boonong means ‘resting place’ and Kananook relates to either ‘fishing place’ or, hilariously, ‘sweet water’. If anyone in my family or the numerous neighbours who helped us transform this wild hinterland into a predictable, ordered, proudly unremarkable piece of industrialised Australian domesticity ever gave a thought to the people who had camped or hunted here for thousands of years before we arrived, I’m not aware of it. But we uttered bits of their language every day. Kananook was the name the Bolte Government gave to my primary school when it was built in the late 1950s.

  Only one block to the east of our house was The Shop, a secondary road that ran to Frankston in one direction and through paddocks towards Melbourne in the other, and the electrified suburban railway line that also linked the same two destinations. On the other side of the line was a newly opened bypass road, created to allow motorists to avoid the Frankston township on the way down to the Mornington Peninsula. That was the neighbourhood. In the 1970s, the bypass road was upgraded and became a freeway, protected by high wire fences. The Shop and the roads and the rail line were not so much civilisation as a reminder of it and a suggestion that it was somewhere else. From the start, the place bore the sense that wherever it was that something interesting was going on, this wasn’t it, and that was its very purpose—a haven for people such as my father who had grown up surrounded by bitumen and concrete and noise and wanted a bit of grass and some quiet. The neighbourhood was barely formed, with just the occasional car passing by. Unless you lived on these streets or had something to sell, there would never have been a point to entering them. A bus stop lay some 300 metres or so away, on a service that ran between Dandenong and Frankston. Walking into Frankston took twenty-five minutes for an adult going at a steady clip, so carrying groceries home by foot was out of the question. Each Tuesday, a large red van would pull up on the side street—in the middle, for there was rarely any traffic to be obstructed—and a man would sell fruit and vegetables from the back of it. It could be said he had truly found his calling, for his name was Mr Barrow. All of the exchanges between him and my mother began with ‘Hello, Mr Barrow’, and ‘Hello, Mrs Carney’. This formality did not seem odd, even though he lived in a housing estate less than a mile away and had a daughter who was just one year ahead of me at primary school. His weekly visit was a highlight. Mr Barrow always wore a grey felt hat and could be counted on to give me a banana or some grapes, while also showing me the stump of a finger he had lost in some never-discussed mishap. Its smooth, healed surface, suggesting a full digit had never existed, disturbed me every time. But I ran out every Tuesday morning to get another look at it.

  _______________

  In the week that we moved into our house, the film On the Beach opened in Australian cinemas. Based on Nevil Shute’s novel of the same name, the film was a full Hollywood studio production featuring big-name actors including Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins. It was shot in Frankston, Mount Eliza and the Melbourne city centre. Shute lived near Frankston in rural Langwarrin and situated his story about the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse in his local environs. Just why United Artists and director Stanley Kramer needed to bring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner to Frankston Station to be filmed greeting each other on Platform One and then departing via a horse and buggy, doing a U-turn outside the Kookaburra C
afé, just up from Crowder’s real estate office, rather than somewhere closer to Hollywood and thus easier and presumably cheaper, I do not know. But the experience gave some of us growing up in Frankston in the sixties and seventies the opportunity to observe in our barren, self-pitying moments that the filming of On the Beach wasn’t the biggest thing to happen in Frankston, it was the only thing that had ever happened in Frankston.

  That bit of easy snark lasted until 1979, when a minor altercation on a Friday night between a couple of police and a young reveller on the street near the intersection housing the town’s three hotels led hundreds of post-adolescent pubgoers to lay siege to the police station just around the corner. Police reinforcements drawn from all over the metropolitan area, sirens blaring as they raced to the scene, eventually restored order, confiscating baseball bats and fence palings from the crowd in the process. Frankston really outdid itself with that one. It was national news. I was especially happy because I was in charge of The Herald’s police rounds coverage the next morning and I got to write the page one lead story for the big Saturday paper. When I visited the scene in the early hours of Saturday I was able to catch up with the younger brothers of a few old schoolmates.

  That sort of social ruction was unimaginable when we moved in during the last days of the fifties. Being away from noise and complexity and bitumen was exactly what my father had been looking for. Here was a piece of the world apparently unburdened by history. In the homes lived no ghosts. The streets, the school across the road—all were new, untainted. This had nothing to do with him having a sense of order. Of all the men I have known, he was one of the least organised. On the very few occasions he ever cooked he could, within minutes, create leaning towers of dirty mixing bowls and smeared saucepans on benches, sinks and tables, with discarded utensils scattered around them like confused tourists. His night attire was the singlet and underpants he’d worn throughout the day. His first morning ablutions centred on a white enamel chamber-pot kept under my parents’ bed (a visit to the backyard toilet would often follow after breakfast, allowing him to peruse the parts of the previous night’s Herald that he was yet to absorb). Upon rising, he would reach under the bed, lift the pot, face the bed, unharness his member—which he called his fred rather than his dick or donger—with his right hand, begin micturating, cough, spit into the pot, then break wind, producing a note that coincided exactly with what my imagination told me was the ‘parp!’ sound that Noddy’s car made in the Enid Blyton books I loved and collected. The early morning sounds of the house were cough–spit–parp!, with the hissing of pee and the murmuring sound of 3DB announcer John Eden in the near distance. If you listened closely, you could occasionally hear a scraping noise, as Dad managed a quick scratch of his bum crack with his free right hand as long as the stream was fully established and his fred was in no risk of going rogue. Fortunately by then, my mother was already in the kitchen, preparing breakfast by frying bacon, making toast and boiling the kettle on the stove. The chamber-pot–backyard toilet era ran from 1959 to 1972, concluding soon after my suburb was connected to the metropolitan sewerage network.