This Is the Grass

by Alan Marshall

  The next night I returned to the city, drawn by a desire to experience all that it could offer me. Though many of the trams and trains had stopped running, the streets were crowded with people. The crowd differed from that of the night before when theatre-goers and late shoppers had predominated. Now most of the people were sightseers, suburbanites excited at the thought of seeing lawlessness. They hurried to those spots where shouts and yells suggested violence. They talked together, circulating rumours they had heard.

  ‘I believe they are going to smash into Myer’s.’

  Several of these people to whom I spoke earlier in the evening expressed disappointment that nothing exciting seemed to be happening.

  Hurrying through these people, pushing them roughly to one side, were gangs of purposeful men, members of Melbourne’s underworld who regarded this night as theirs.

  The authorities, anticipating outbreaks of violence, had hurriedly begun recruiting men as special constables. Many of those who volunteered were country men or young businessmen with little idea of what the strike was about.

  I was standing talking to a wharf labourer when a batch of them marched up Swanston Street clutching their truncheons and glancing nervously round them at the hostile crowd. They were booed and abused, taking this hostility with self-conscious glances at each other, but many of them flinched when the word ‘scab’ was hurled at them.

  The wharf labourer told me: ‘Some of the hatchmen and men on the winch were scabs in the last strike I was in. I don’t believe in whitewashing scabs but some of them are all right. Some of those chaps marching over there, now, they’re not a wake-up, that’s their trouble. One bloke down on the wharf—he scabbed during the strike—he says to me when it was all over: “It’s all right for you; you can look the world in the face—you went out. All I can do is die. I’d give my right arm never to have scabbed.” That’s what he said to me. It was sad in a way, the poor bastard.’

  I left him and walked down to the Flinders Street corner. In front of the station the crowd had surged back from a cleared space on the tram-tracks giving it the appearance of an arena.

  Two sailors stood in the centre of the space shouting at the crowd. They were both drunk and were issuing challenges to any man ‘looking for fight’. They imagined that because of their uniforms the responsibility of keeping order had descended upon them and they were under an obligation to defend some abstract concept they called ‘loyalty’.

  ‘Loyalty, me foot!’ shouted a cynic from the crowd.

  ‘You come out here and I’ll flatten you like a tack,’ answered the sailor.

  He was not a man who believed in discussion to reach agreement. It was much easier to force an acceptance of one’s opinion by violence.

  ‘You’ll do me,’ retorted the man who had taunted him. ‘I’ll have a bit of you, you floppy-legged crawler.’

  He was short and wiry, and wore a blue coat with holes in the elbows. He stepped out from the crowd buttoning up his coat, a grim expression on his face.

  A man next to me said conversationally: ‘If a bloke comes at you buttoning up his coat you always king him when he’s on the last button. It’s just common sense. I’ll tell you now . . .’

  He was going to give proof of his argument by way of illustration, but I wasn’t listening.

  The challenging sailor was quickly joined by his companion and they both rushed the short man who defended himself skilfully, giving ground but still retaining confidence.

  The sight of two men attacking one angered the crowd and several men rushed into the arena. They began throwing punches at the sailors who, in a moment, became the centre of a knot of fighting men determined to subdue them. But the sailors had the sympathy of some and these joined in the fight, which rapidly grew into a turbulent mass of men swinging their fists and hitting savagely at whoever stood in front of them.

  The mass began moving in a slow, convulsive fashion up Swanston Street, seemingly with a sinister purpose of its own, a purpose that had no relation to the object of the struggling men that comprised it. It circled slowly round an axis of intense action, a vortex spiked with flailing arms that threw out, on its perimeter, a debris of staggering men clutching their bellies, men snorting blood from bowed heads. It sucked in unmarked men to replenish its losses; it engulfed the special constables who had raced to meet it and whose truncheons flashed up and down in a frenzy of hitting before they too were tossed aside. It moved beneath a canopy of sound—swears, roars and yells, and a strange, horrible gasping.

  I had been thrown back in a panicky surge of the crowd away from the fighting. The people were like a thick crop, every stem of which swayed to a gust. We were packed so tightly together it was impossible for me to fall as a tree falls: the danger was in collapsing like a sack in the cylinder of space I was occupying. I knew I would be trampled if that happened.

  I held my crutches tightly by my side, securing the armpit-rests in position by jamming my upper arms against them. As long as the crutches remained beneath my armpits I couldn’t go down. I turned my elbows outwards, burying them in the bodies of those beside me, transferring my weight to them. In this position I was carried quite a distance down the street.

  The thought came to me that Gunner Harris would enjoy this. What a harvest of wallets would be available to him here. I could remain erect while the pressure held but it began to slacken and I was staggering. A man and a woman, who had been taking all my weight while fighting to retain their own balance, suddenly realised I was on crutches and they began shouting this information to the people.

  ‘There’s a man on crutches here,’ the woman cried. ‘Be careful. Don’t hurt him. Stop pushing.’

  ‘Open up,’ demanded the man. ‘Give him room, can’t you! Stop that bloody swaying till we get him out.’

  The faces of those who heard their pleas showed no responding expression. Those belonging to short people were all turned to one side so that their cheeks rested between the shoulders of the ones in front of them. Women’s faces rested against the backs of men; men’s chins rested upon the heads of women.

  The partly submerged ones, their hands upon the shoulders of those against whom they were pressed, were like baby koalas clinging to their mothers. All the faces were blank with still unseeing expressions. Their eyes were turned in upon themselves as they swayed or were impelled forward in quick flurries. All their thoughts were concerned with the problem of staying erect.

  But some repeated the cry of the woman beside me: ‘There’s a man on crutches in here.’

  The man beside me hunched his shoulders and tensed his neck. He began using his elbows to open up a space. There were shouts and grunts and someone shouted: ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  But his efforts were successful and I pushed close behind him as he forced a passage to the shop-fronts. I stood holding on to a window for a moment then, when the pressure eased, I began edging along the building until I got ahead of the whirlpool of fighting on the roadway. I kept going until I reached the Town Hall, where the crowd was in a turmoil, surging across the street and back again, antagonised by officials and special police in front of the building. I could not see them—I was buried in people—but I could feel the crowd’s reaction. It was not rage: it was a savage, hungry compulsion to smash and destroy. It was a mass emotion, a leashed animal straining to break free.

  I sensed the breaking of the leash and I struggled along the shop-fronts to get away. I was well past this congregation of people when the fire-hoses were turned upon them. I heard their shouts and screams, saw people tumbling amid water and the frantic splitting of the mass by a concerted heaving and thrust of bodies. Wedges of space suddenly appeared in the midst of the mob and, down these, snakes of water arched and shattered.

  Those fleeing up the street towards me had the appearance of a menacing flood that would sweep away all before it. I wrapped my arms around an iron veranda post and clung on. Several women grabbed the posts near me. The mo
b overwhelmed us, almost tearing me from my post. Leading them were men with brutalised faces or shifty-eyed men wearing expensive suits.

  I heard the crash of breaking glass as the windows of the Leviathan Store were smashed. A deluge of glass fell to the pavement. Men leapt through the jagged openings throwing out fur coats, suits and women’s clothing. Women and men pounced on the articles, clasping fur coats and frocks close to them before turning swiftly to escape with their plunder.

  A stalactite of glass hanging from the upper edge of one smashed window fell as a man laden with clothes stepped out. It sliced his cheek to the bone and he clutched his face. Blood came through his parted fingers and trickled down the back of his hand.

  Women with staring eyes and parted lips grabbed and grabbed. They thrust small articles into handbags, some with a defiant glance around them ready to defend what they thought was their right to take things lying on the street. Men slipped shaving-brushes and safety-razors into their pockets after holding them in their hands for all to see, pretending they were going to put them back in a moment. They pocketed them swiftly when they thought they weren’t being watched.

  There were screams and shouts as the windows collapsed but these sounds were submerged in a bay like that of hounds. Frightened husbands began raising their wives up on to the roofs of verandas. They sat perched there, their legs dangling, bewildered, worried over their husbands below. Two men tried to raise me but I couldn’t stand on their shoulders. They lowered me again and I continued clinging to my post.

  The mob swung round the corner into Bourke Street and the sound of smashing windows became continuous. The people with whom I was left had reached an end to the experiences they had sought. They were afraid of what had happened. Concern was on their faces and in their questioning looks at each other. A little while before they had been surging up the street in a welcome to a spurious freedom that beckoned them into areas of violence and promised them an excitement denied them in their ordered lives. They were sympathetic with the police in their strike but something had gone wrong. Now they wanted to dissociate themselves from the broken, empty windows and the ravening mob down Bourke Street.

  ‘It’s a serious crime to interfere with the business life of a city,’ a man said to me. ‘As far as I’m concerned I just walked down the street.’ He thought a moment then added: ‘I’ll go round the corner a little way and see what they’re up to.’

  I walked with him to the corner. In Bourke Street rings and watches were lying in the gutter where they had been tossed from jewellers’ windows. The mob were still smashing windows lower down.

  I felt exhausted. I could not remember having felt so tired. I walked slowly home through the Fitzroy Gardens, pausing every now and then to rest.

  Book Three

  1

  Melbourne in the twenties was a city on a bender after emerging from the restraints imposed by war. The days of singing round the piano in the front rooms of homes had gone, and girls sallied forth unchaperoned to express the spirit of the time in uninhibited dancing. Jazz was sweeping the world, the foxtrot had supplanted the waltz and dance-hall after dance-hall was opening in the city and in the suburbs.

  Self-titled teachers of dancing opened academies where young people, in the company of older men and women seized by the same craze, looked down at their awkward feet while tentatively shuffling round a polished floor to the tune of ‘Old Man Jazz’ or ‘Swanee’.

  Musical comedies were filling the theatres. Gladys Moncrieff and Maude Fane had become images of romance and glamour to factory girls, and clubs devoted to their worship were formed by groups of ‘gallery girls’ who clambered up to the gods at each new opening to applaud their appearance.

  Boxing, under the control of John Wren, was experiencing a boom. The stadium could not hold the crowds that fought for admission in front of the steel-lined doors erected after eager patrons had smashed in the earlier ones with axes. Bert Spargo, Australia’s champion, was the best featherweight in the world, the posters declared, and Melbourne’s stadium crowds believed it.

  Then came Billy Grime who defeated their hero in bout after bout while Stadium Ltd grew rich on his protracted downfall.

  The boxing boom gave way to the wrestling boom and brilliant actors from overseas descended upon Australia to play a role before emotional crowds who believed that the contorted expression of an actor hammering the mat in pretended agony was a genuine expression of pain and helplessness.

  The streets began to reflect the atmosphere of the entertainment centres. They drew from the stadiums, the dance-halls and the theatres the excitement developed behind doors arched with globes of pulsating lights, and they clothed themselves in it till they, too, became a source of feverish gaiety.

  Melbourne’s people, fed by newspapers skilled in whipping up emotion, were not satisfied with the atmosphere of their homes but sought stimulation in the city. They were the victims of advertising and propaganda that was establishing sets of values inimical to the development of culture or the encouragement of high ideals.

  ‘Spend freely and experience the rich and full life earned by sacrifice in the war fought for freedom, the war to end all wars’—this was their creed.

  I was seized by the prevailing fever. The streets drew me out each night as the dance-halls and theatres drew my contemporaries. I did not seek girls to assuage my hunger as young men of my age would normally do; I had accepted without question a conviction that girls were not interested in cripples as lovers.

  There are times when poor people wish they were as rich as the men they see passing in cars, but they know the wish is a futile one and they turn to the problems of the life they are experiencing. The impossibility of attaining wealth does not trouble them. So it was with me when I saw boys taking girls to places of amusement: they were rich and I was poor.

  I flung myself into the life open to me. I was an ear and an eye and a pen. I was too immature to be more than these but in them I found an answer to my yearnings. I never read: I had no money to buy books. I was living a book and I read it avidly, not understanding all it contained but remembering it for ever.

  The men I met on the streets were interested in boxing, football and racing. Their interests became mine. With many men conversation was impossible without some knowledge of these sports. I read the newspaper reports of the Spargo-Grime fights, the Melbourne Cup, the football matches—first, to be equal to any conversational demands made on me, then from a genuine interest.

  There was another reason for my interest in boxing.

  In my wanderings round the streets I came on a pie-cart standing on the corner of Elizabeth and Flinders Streets. A pony with hairless patches capping each thrust of bone beneath its hide stood quietly between the shafts munching chaff from a nosebag. Occasionally it jerked its head, tossing the bag upwards to bring to the surface of the chaff the oats that had sifted through to the bottom.

  It rested one hind leg by taking its weight with the other three. No clang or rattle or shout from the street disturbed it. It was a city pony and had probably never known the delight of walking on grass.

  Built into the cart was a metal oven and firebox resembling a tiny locomotive minus wheels and cabin. The iron door of the firebox was at the rear of the cart, low down so that those standing in front of it felt the heat against their legs. Above this door was the door of the oven. At the other end a brass-capped chimney breathed a lazy mist of smoke out over the street. The cylindrical body of the combined oven and firebox was encircled with bands of brass.

  Built along the sides of this iron body were two shelves. On one of these stood a large bottle of tomato sauce with congealed streaks of red dividing its surface. On the other was a cardboard box containing bread rolls. A boiler full of steaming frankfurters rested on a grating in front of the firebox door. The oven was packed with pies.

  A man stood at the rear of the cart with his back to the fire. He was short and thickset with cauliflower ears and a flattened
nose. The skin of his face was leathery and brown, tough, poreless skin, folded and creased on the throat but unlined on his narrow forehead. He had thick, coarse hair, and eyes that gave the impression of having been punched back to a safe position beneath his overhanging brows.

  He wore a white apron held in place by a tape that encircled his waist before being knotted across his belly. His working-shirt of striped cotton was unbuttoned at the neck. The sleeves were rolled up above the elbows, revealing thick, hairy arms ending in curled hands with bones flattened by years of punching.

  His name was ‘Flogger’ Davies but he was generally known as ‘The Fighting Pieman’. The police knew him by other names, names that Flogger had probably forgotten but which still lived in the records of minor trials.

  He fought regularly in the preliminary bouts at the stadium. The preliminary boys were either beginners seeking to establish a name that would bring them top billing and a main bout, or else tough ageing boxers who had never made the grade to the big fights.

  Their pay was poor—thirty shillings a fight—and they were expected to make their fights willing. A boy who was knocked out in the first round was a bad investment for Stadiums Ltd since the company was then forced to fill in with a makeshift bout that added to the expenses of the programme.

  Flogger was one of the men they called in to fill the gap caused by a premature knockout. He sold pies at the stadium entrance each Saturday night and when, from behind the heavy door, came the roar of savage joy that followed a knockout, he took off his apron and went inside to see if the programme had been shortened sufficiently to warrant his appearance in the ring.

  He was well known to the stadium crowds. He was a ‘tiger for punishment’, they said. He always went the distance, was always aggressive. Years of fighting, both on the streets and in the ring, had taught him enough shady tricks to survive against opponents younger and stronger than he. He raked eyebrows with the lacing of his gloves for blood to blind the eyes, heeled with his hand, jabbed with his elbows, but so skilfully that he never earned a reputation for dirty fighting. When driven to the ropes by young, undisciplined fighters urged to indiscretion by a yelling crowd, he caught the blows on his gloves and elbows, then emerged with a tight-lipped grin on his face following, following, like a bulldog.