Press Escape

by Shaun Carney

  One encounter I had with Peter in March 2007 captured, I think, the nature of our relationship and affirmed my belief in his decency and generosity. It was a hot Saturday afternoon. In that morning’s column, I’d offered a view about the assault on Kevin Rudd’s character by several senior members of the Howard Government, notably Tony Abbott and Alexander Downer. The charge against Rudd was that he had overstated or just plain lied about the circumstances in which his family had left a share farm it had been operating when Rudd’s father had died in early 1969. Rudd was eleven when his father died two months after being injured in a car smash. I thought this was pretty low politics by the Liberals, who were at the time in a flat panic over the recently installed Rudd’s high poll ratings and were embarking on a form of psychological warfare against him to see if he would crack. Why they thought they could come out looking good had me beat. They were making a political plaything of an eleven-year-old boy’s loss of his father, his family’s resultant departure from its home, and the loss of its source of income—none of which was in contention. But I had a more specific criticism. Every individual has an untrammelled right to tell their own story, told from their own point of view. Even if Rudd was compressing or obscuring some details—and even if in his middle age he wasn’t a very pleasant fellow—he was entitled to tell the story of how he went from being a broken-hearted kid to a uni student to a leader of the federal parliamentary Labor Party in his own way. Some years later, Malcolm Turnbull made much of having been brought up by his father after his mother walked out when Turnbull was a child. Turnbull lived with his father in some of Sydney’s most desirable suburbs and boarded at one of its best schools. By the time Turnbull was in his teens, his father was wealthy and lived comfortably. But the emphasis in his account of his childhood was not on that, it was on the trauma of his mother leaving him. And why not? That was surely the event that shaped him most. None of us should impose our point of view on someone else.

  With that belief in mind, I began my column on the attack on Rudd by recalling how Peter Costello and his brother Tim had given me slightly differing accounts of their lives in their childhood home when I interviewed them for my Costello biography. I noted that even though the brothers shared a bedroom, what they took away from their experiences was not exactly the same.

  Peter called me after reading it, furious. ‘Why are you dredging all this up?’ he wanted to know. ‘What have I got to do with the attack on Rudd? Why are you bringing me into this?’

  I said I wasn’t, that I was simply using my experience as his biographer to make a point about how we all own our own stories. He wasn’t interested in that. As the conversation went on, I started to lose my temper. ‘Why do think you can ring me and then not listen to my explanation?’ I said/shouted. ‘Why do I have to explain? What I’ve written is so obvious. Anyway, are you condemning these latest attacks on Rudd?’ I asked.

  He wouldn’t answer that directly but he made it clear that he was uncomfortable with them. ‘Just leave me out of this in the future,’ he said. He’d write his own book, he said—which he did later, after he announced his departure from politics, and it was vastly more successful than my biography of him.

  The exchange now seemed so silly. My six-year-old daughter, rather than playing in the local park in the beautiful sunshine, had been reduced to skin and bone by her treatment and was spending her Saturday in the outpatients section at the hospital being given an intramuscular injection and trying not to cry. And here I was taking this seriously. To my discredit, I gave voice to that thought and played the victim. ‘Why are you giving me this grief when you know what I’m going through personally right now?’ I asked.

  He pulled up short and responded, slightly affronted: ‘What, because you’ve got a sick daughter I’m not allowed to take you to task over something you’ve written about me in the newspaper?’

  That wasn’t what I meant, but I understood why he thought it was. What I was really doing was giving voice to two concerns. One was: after all my years of writing about him, why would he think that I wanted to do him harm by attaching him to the assault on Rudd (or alternately act as an unpaid public relations agent for him, for that matter)? The other was something that had been on my mind and was much harder to explain: I’d been thinking about what Jane’s experience would mean to her should she survive her cancer. By now, she had worked out that her life was endangered, although we hadn’t talked about it. She felt sick all the time. She was exhausted and had to watch as her schoolmates ran and played. What story would she take into adulthood? I wasn’t the one with cancer. Caroline wasn’t the one with cancer. Our little girl was. I realised as I whinged to Peter that this was what had subconsciously motivated me to write my column in the way that I had, sparking this unpleasant phone conversation in which we were both uncontrolled. There was no way that I could explain this to him. Fortunately, I didn’t have to try. Having both gone too far, the temperature of our exchange went immediately from hot to moderate.

  ‘No,’ I explained, ‘you can call me any time to express your view. That doesn’t mean I’ll just roll over and concede to you but it’s fair enough for you to let me know what you think.’ He replied by asking how things were going and repeating something he’d said months earlier: that if there was anything he could do, I just needed to tell him. So I did. I alerted him to a series of recent stories by the Age medical reporter Christian Catalano, who later went on to study medicine and become a doctor, about the lack of funds for the screening of platelets, a blood product that had already saved Jane’s life. Only a tiny proportion of donated platelets were being screened for harmful bacteria and this had led to a number of infections of cancer patients and possibly the deaths of several recipients. The states and the feds were bouncing this back at each other and not getting it resolved. It all seemed pretty simple: the Commonwealth needed to stump up the money for across-the-board screening, I said. ‘Why not do it in the budget you’re putting together right now?’ He took a note of what I’d told him and said he’d look at it. We ended the conversation on a more conciliatory note than we’d started. Seven weeks later, the section of the budget papers relating to the Department of Health and Ageing carried this sentence under the heading Blood and Blood-Related Products: ‘… the Government will contribute to improving fresh blood safety standards through the implementation of universal pre-release bacterial testing for platelets and the move to universal leucodepletion by 2010–11’. I’m glad I wrote that column.

  16

  NO GLOSS

  AS JANE’S CHEMOTHERAPY approached the two-year mark, the end of her crushing treatment regime and all of its knock-on effects at work and home—disrupted or unreliable schedules, perpetual fatigue, an overload of anxiety, a faint but unshakeable sense of despair and uselessness—started to become a tangible prospect. We couldn’t be sure of the exact date, but we’d been told that the treatment, even in its more extended form, would not last much beyond twenty-six or twenty-seven months. We’d be emerging from this fug soon. I started to walk around the block near our home at night, hands jammed in pockets, contemplating it. The walks weren’t long, just seven or eight minutes. It was winter and I’d look up at the night sky and try to make out stars through the clouds. Was this really coming to an end? Yes, but not without a few bonus challenges.

  My father hated paying full price for anything or to anyone. To him, finding that something needed repair in the house was never the time for calling up a repairer or a tradesman, asking him for a price and then committing to get the work done. That was for mugs. For my father, everything was a deal, to be achieved based on someone he knew or something he could trade. TV’s broken down? Get Bobby, his friend the TV repairman with Hills, to look after it, which meant, because it wasn’t a paid job, we could be without television for three or four months at a time. Dinged up your car? He knew a panelbeater who could do it for you at weekends. Need paint? Get Peter, his next-door neighbour, who was a housepainter, to get
it at trade price. I made the mistake of telling him once in my twenties that I was planning on painting my first house, a small Victorian cottage, and he insisted on getting the paint for me through this method. The difference between retail and trade back then for the purchase might have been forty dollars. I couldn’t see the point but I went along with it. I had no choice. I selected my colours—one for the external walls and another for the trim—and called my father to tell him what I needed.

  After giving him the names of the colours, he said: ‘So you want that all in a high gloss’.

  ‘No, I don’t want all of it in a high gloss. I don’t want the walls to shine. I want to do them in a semi-gloss and I’ll do the windows and the front door and gutters in a high gloss.’

  ‘So you don’t want a gloss?’

  ‘I don’t want the walls in a high gloss, just the trim.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure.’ This was said in a puzzled tone. I suppose because he was holding a receiver up to his ear, he couldn’t have shaken his head, so he would have shrugged his shoulders. He had regularly painted his house in a high gloss every few years, once choosing an iridescent cherry colour in the mid-1960s. With the sun glinting off it, the place looked like a gigantic block of frozen cordial with windows. That was what I was trying to avoid. By the early 1980s, he gave up on painting and, with my mother’s agreement, applied brown mock-brick cladding to the walls, which was a way of telling the world they had given up on the house.

  Generously, he offered to help me paint my place after delivering the paint. We organised the ladders, brushes, trays and dropsheets beside the side wall, which faced on to a bluestone lane, and opened the first can of paint. As I started to apply it to the weatherboards, I noticed that it seemed watery. ‘Is there something wrong with this paint? It doesn’t have a lot of body.’

  He seemed bamboozled by the question. ‘No, it seems pretty right to me.’

  ‘But it’s going on too easily and there’s not a lot of coverage. It’s almost as if it’s a flat paint.’

  ‘Well, it is. That’s what you wanted. You didn’t want the gloss.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Hold hard. You said “no gloss”. Peter thought it was unusual when I told him. He said, “Are you sure that’s what Shaun wants?” and I said, “Yeah, well, that’s what he says he wants.”’

  So this was good. The two of them indulged in a bit of a private crack at me while organising to get me paint I didn’t want. I reflected on that as I slopped the flat paint on to the weatherboards, stuff that was appropriate for the inside of a house. There was nothing I could do but use it. It had been made up into my colours at the paint store, so I couldn’t return it. Within two months the walls started to look awful, absorbing every bit of dirt and dust that swirled into the street. Within a year, I decided on a new colour scheme, visited my local paint supplier, got my own paint—semi-gloss for the walls, full gloss for the trim—and my father helped me with that job too. That was him: generous with his time but controlling and habitually more attuned to what he was saying than what he was hearing. And oh, so cheap.

  Which was why in mid-2008, rather than paying a pittance for some garden stakes at the local Bunnings, he insisted on fashioning some from a bundle of leftover, scrappy timber that was lying beside his garage. He arranged for a mate to help him, using the mate’s table saw. As they were cutting the timber, my father absent-mindedly reached across the top of the blade to pick up an offcut, slicing open the palm and two fingers of his right hand. Thus began the descent in his health that would eventually end his life.

  I got the call from his mate late afternoon telling me what had happened and was assured that my father was okay but that this had been a serious and very bloody accident. He was in the emergency department at Frankston Hospital, the place where I was born, where my mother died and where my father would die too. That evening I found him on a trolley placed against a wall in a hallway attached to the emergency department. Tape on the floor marked out trolley-sized spots on which patients could be parked. He stayed the night there. No beds were available and this was apparently a common thing, for patients to be admitted and to spend a decent portion of their stay in open areas near a nursing station or administrative section. The repair job on his hand was first-rate, involving, he told me, 112 stitches. The injury meant that, as he was a right-hander, he couldn’t fend for himself for quite a while. He would require rehabilitation and care that would last for months. He spent several days in the hospital after his surgery and was then relocated to a respite centre 10 kilometres to the north of Frankston in Carrum Downs. When I’d gone to high school in the 1970s, Carrum Downs had been a collection of paddocks containing a small farming community and a home for the aged run by the Brotherhood of St Laurence. It was the next locality along from Frankston North on the road to Dandenong and the handful of kids who lived there were bussed in to Monterey High each day. By 2008, it was a burgeoning suburb with a population of about 18 000, a massive blob of new suburbia, with big shopping centres surrounded by lots of bitumen surfaces for parking, relatively cheap homes and mini-industrial parks made up of small businesses. My father loved it at the respite centre, a large modern single-storey facility that played host to a wide variety of people, from young adults with psychological problems to middle-aged victims of industrial accidents to older men and women with chronic illnesses. There was a large communal area that was well used by the patients, unlike similar spaces in other rehabilitation and respite centres I’ve visited. This suited my father because it gave him the opportunity to work the room, flitting from one small group to another.

  One Saturday I arrived at the centre to see him through the windows talking to four other patients, men and women like him who were in their late seventies or early eighties. He was smiling and giving them his full attention. He was standing, they were seated. He looked and acted like he was an aged cruise director on a ship checking to see if the guests were taking advantage of the shuffleboard courts. As I approached, he looked up and said, ‘Oh, my boy’s arrived, I have to skedaddle. Now, don’t you forget, okay?’ and gave them a big cheery wave of his good hand. I asked him what he’d been talking about. ‘Just the state of the world, buddy boy.’ He then peppered me with questions—about work, about my family, about the road conditions on my journey to the centre—to get a conversation going. This was always his greatest skill. With him, there were never any silences. He seemed to hate silence. When you watched television with him, he would provide commentary. ‘So! Mannix is in a bit of a tight spot! How will he get out of that?’ Or ‘That Matlock, I don’t like his character. He thinks he’s Jesus Christ’s brother’. Or he’d be reminded of something by what was on the screen and riff on it for five minutes, rendering the rest of the show difficult to follow. (This differed from my mother’s TV watching habit, which was to use every opportunity to ask where she’d seen various actors before. ‘What show have I seen him in?’ she’d inquire when a face appeared on the screen. ‘I’m not sure.’ ‘Oh, yes, you are sure. What was he in?’ ‘I’m not. Seriously, Mum, I don’t know where you’ve seen this fellow.’ Annoyed, she’d return to her viewing, convinced that I was messing with her.) Even in his final months, when my father was in considerable pain, he still knew how to start and maintain a conversation. He would call me up and have six subjects he could produce to keep the exchange going. Afterwards, it was hard to recall much of the conversation but he’d moved his way through it so effortlessly that it didn’t matter. It’s a skill that I’ve never felt I’ve mastered. I was too much into silence.

  For all of his natural insouciance, the accident and the months spent waiting for the wounds to heal slowed him up. After a few weeks in the respite centre, he went home and managed reasonably well. He could drive, he could shop. He could drink four cans of light beer, starting at 5 p.m. every day. He could listen to 3MP, the radio s
tation that had started broadcasting in 1976 from the top floor of Frankston’s big new shopping mall, the Bayside Shopping Centre. It was always playing at a low volume on the lounge room stereo during the day, at a level that I assumed was too low for him to hear clearly, given the profound industrial deafness he suffered due to decades of working in noisy metal shops. But, again, it guaranteed that there were no silences. He was eighty-one, with a pacemaker and type 2 diabetes. He was recovering from a painful and traumatic injury, no matter how much he uttered one of his favourite sayings—‘Nah, she’ll be right’. He lost weight and some of the colour from his face.

  During this period of shuttling between the city and my father’s whereabouts, Jane developed a fever and was admitted once again to the cancer ward, getting antibiotics to fight an infection that was especially tenacious. Her skin looked like white crepe paper and she was distressingly thin. Her hair covering was more like fuzz than hair, just 3 or 4 millimetres long. She was approaching her eighth birthday. After a week hooked up to the IV machine, she was judged to be well enough to go home.