by Judy Nunn
Wally enquired after her name at the front counter and left.
Phyllis Pickford was a smart woman. A woman who could have done all the men’s jobs in the department. A single woman, she had devoted herself to her career. She was as qualified as the men, more intelligent than most, but because she was a woman she had graduated to head of the typing pool and remained there for fifteen years. Although she enjoyed her position of power within the small area over which she reigned, Phyllis was just a little bitter at her lack of advancement.
‘Miss Pickford?’ He greeted her as she left the offices two days later. He’d made his enquiries in the interim, and he knew a lot about her.
‘Yes.’ Phyllis recognised Wally Kendall immediately. She had seen his picture in the business and social pages of the newspapers. In the flesh, despite the extra weight he was carrying, he was far more attractive than the newspaper photographs depicted; he was almost handsome in fact.
‘Wally Kendall of Kendall Markets. How do you do.’ He offered his hand.
‘Mr Kendall,’ she said and she shook his hand firmly, briskly, as if she met men of Wally Kendall’s ilk every day of the week.
‘I wondered whether we might have a cup of coffee,’ Wally smiled. ‘A little matter I’d like to discuss.’ She was about forty-five, he guessed, and could have been attractive if she’d done something about her hair which was greying and scraped back into a severe French roll. And what did she have against makeup? Still, she’d kept her figure. Beneath the beige skirt and brown twin set was a neat little body.
She looked at her watch, pretending she had an appointment. ‘Yes,’ she agreed, wondering what on earth Wally Kendall could want with her, ‘I have time for a quick coffee.’
‘I won’t beat about the bush,’ Wally said as they sat down at the booth in the far end of the coffee lounge. But he did, he needed to soften her up. He told her that his wife had died fourteen years ago, and that he’d been left with three children to rear on his own.
‘A son and two daughters,’ he said, smiling fondly. ‘They were difficult times I can tell you, but I wouldn’t swap those years watching them grow up for a thousand quid. ‘Course, they’re nearly adults now. Well, Wallace is, he’s twenty this year.’
He looked even more attractive when he spoke about his children, Phyllis thought. ‘What exactly is it you want of me, Mr Kendall?’ She asked the question gently enough, but she was direct, it was time somebody got to the point.
He told her. In no uncertain terms. And Phyllis was shocked. She stared at him, barely able to believe what she was hearing.
‘He’s my only son, Miss Pickford,’ Wally was still playing the fond father. ‘I’ll do anything to prevent him going to war. His medical examination’s next week. When the results come through, it’d be so easy for you, they’re only draft letters, and of course I’d make it well worth your while …’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Kendall,’ her lips were set in a thin, hard line, ‘what you ask is out of the question.’ She rose to go.
‘Fifty thousand dollars.’
She sat down heavily. It was the shock. She needed to catch her breath. That was twenty-five thousand pounds! Australia had only recently converted to decimal currency and Phyllis still thought in pounds, shillings and pence.
‘In cash,’ Wally added.
She must leave, the man was outrageous, she could not be bought.
He put his hand over hers. ‘Fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money, Phyllis.’ There was concern in his voice, kindness, as if her wellbeing were important to him. ‘You could buy a house, you could set yourself up for life with fifty thousand.’
‘It’s not as easy as you think,’ she heard herself say. ‘It’s more than just a draft letter, there is other correspondence, there are records, lists.’
‘I’m sure there are, but then you’re a very clever woman, Miss Pickford.’ Wally smiled winningly. Everyone had their price.
Kitty and Artie were only too grateful that their son Rob was too young to go to war, but they were nonetheless passionate in their anticonscription beliefs.
Kitty joined the SOS, a movement of mothers opposing the conscription of their sons for Vietnam, and she and Artie regularly took part in antiwar marches and sit-ins. They demonstrated alongside the ‘flower power’ hippies who wore bright kaftans and beads, headbands and sandals. These youngsters reminded Kitty of herself at their age; youth didn’t really change all that much, she thought.
Every evening Kitty and Artie sat glued to their television set, watching the American reports on the war, even footage of the combat itself filmed by intrepid teams of cameramen and war correspondents. Since the Australians’ clumsy introduction to television in 1956, the medium had grown to become a sophisticated purveyor of the news, and it brought the Vietnam War into people’s lounge rooms.
At the commencement of the Tet Offensive on 31 January 1968, when the Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops attacked US military installations throughout South Vietnam, television coverage showed that the Americans were not winning the war as they would have the world believe. People realised that they had been lied to and that the war was far from over.
Students were arrested for handing out ‘Don’t Register’ leaflets, and those draft evaders who openly burned their cards and refused to comply risked a two-year gaol sentence. Many fled the authorities, hiding out in safehouses provided by a network of supporters. One such safehouse was in Campbell Parade, where Kitty and Artie regularly took in conscientious objectors.
By 1971 the Farinellis’ house served as more than a refuge. Paul Dundas, a leading figure in the Draft Resisters Union of New South Wales, hid in the rooms upstairs and held secret meetings there. The DRU was only one organisation amongst many actively opposed to conscription, but it had a high profile and its key members were keenly sought by the police.
One morning, after Kitty and Artie had been sheltering Paul for a number of months, the phone rang.
‘Quick, get him out. The police are here.’
Kitty recognised the voice of Andy Kaminskis from the pie shop downstairs. Andy had been in the country for fifteen years, but he still had a thick Latvian accent.
She raced to the lounge room and looked out the front windows to the busy street below. She could see no sign of police, but she had no reason to doubt Andy, he was sympathetic to their cause.
‘Paul,’ she urged, running back to the kitchen, ‘the fire escape, quick, Andy reckons they’re here.’
It was a Friday afternoon, Artie was at work and eighteen-year-old Rob at university. Thank Christ there hadn’t been a meeting in progress.
Paul moved swiftly—two years on the run had taught him to be always at the ready for a quick escape. Shoving a couple of books into his backpack, he said, ‘Get rid of any pamphlets, they might have a search warrant,’ then he was out through the back kitchen door and onto the small landing which led to the fire escape and the courtyard below.
Kitty grabbed the pamphlets from the drawer in the lounge room, ripped some into shreds and flushed them down the toilet. Then another handful. But they choked the cistern and remained swirling in the bowl.
She dashed into the lounge room and threw the remaining leaflets into the fire grate. Matches, where the hell were the matches, she’d given up cigarettes years ago.
Downstairs, Andy Kaminskis was pretending he had trouble with his English.
‘Policemen?’ he said, looking the two plain-clothes detectives up and down, as if bewildered by the fact that they were not in uniform. One of them showed his identification. ‘Ah,’ Andy said and ushered them into his shop.
The man who was doing the talking said something about a search warrant, and Andy made a great show of taking them both through his pie shop and into the kitchen out the back where his wife made the steak sandwiches.
As his dumpy little wife, flustered and genuinely confused, distracted the men in the kitchen, Andy glanced out the back door to the courtyard in time
to see Paul throw his backpack over the paling fence.
‘You see?’ Andy said from the doorway. ‘Is all clean, no dirt in my shop.’ The policeman tried to step out of the kitchen but Andy barred the way. ‘You check the stove,’ he insisted, ‘you see is all very clean in my shop.’
Senior Detective Fulham was irritated. Bloody immigrants. ‘We’re not from the Health Department,’ he snapped, ‘we’re Commonwealth police. Now show us the rest of the place.’
‘Ah,’ Andy nodded, seemingly impressed. ‘Commonwealth. Very important.’ And he fumbled about for a moment, trying clumsily to get out of their way.
Of course he’d known they were Commonwealth cops, their car had been a dead giveaway. The moment he’d seen it pull up out the front of the shop, Andy had known the HR Holden with the aerial in the middle of the roof was a Commonwealth police car. In the early days, when his papers had not been in order, Andy had learned to recognise any sign that might spell trouble.
By the time the detectives looked out the back, Paul had scaled the fence and disappeared.
The policemen examined the old reading room which had long been closed off and now served as a storeroom. Then, ‘Upstairs,’ Fulham demanded.
Andy looked blank.
‘Show us upstairs.’
‘Ah. Upstairs.’ Andy grinned. ‘Upstairs is not me. Upstairs is Farinelli’s.’
The detectives looked at each other. ‘Bugger it,’ Fulham muttered. They’d been given only a number in Campbell Parade. And the number had been in big, blatant lettering above the shop. They’d presumed the shop was the front for the DRU safe house.
The toilet cistern was still flushing when Kitty let them in. But there was nothing in the bowl. And there were fresh ashes in the grate, still smoking a little.
‘December, strange time for a fire,’ Fulham said between clenched teeth.
‘Just burning off a few bits of rubbish,’ Kitty said brazenly, as if daring him to differ.
The men made a perfunctory search of the place, but they found nothing. That bastard foreigner downstairs, Fulham thought. He’d brick the bloke, he’d plant some dirt on him and get his shop closed down. Fulham didn’t like being taken for a fool.
‘We’ll be watching this place from now on,’ he warned Kitty.
‘I don’t know why on earth you’d bother,’ she said as she saw them out the door.
She and Artie sent word through the network of supporters that the house in Campbell Parade was no longer safe. But the end was in sight and, barely a year later, there was no longer a need for such refuges.
Nine days after its historic victory, the Whitlam Labor Government withdrew Australia’s last remaining military advisers from Vietnam. The troops would soon be on their way home.
Amongst the first wave of conscriptees, Jim Hamilton served two terms in Vietnam, surviving the Battle of Long Tan and the early horrors of the war, during which the Australian troops experienced the majority of their casualties.
He returned to Sydney a changed man. Physically uninjured he was nonetheless a casualty of the war. The army offered no form of counselling. It simply didn’t occur to the military authorities that the aggression and violence which it had so successfully instilled into its raw young recruits might continue unchecked following theirdischarge.
Not long after his return, Jim and his friend Shorty Barber went to the Bondi RSL. Jim and Shorty, who was six foot four with a build to match, had served together in Vietnam and had become close mates.
They walked straight into the bar, ignoring the grizzled old bloke at the front door who seemed about to ask them something.
They plonked themselves down on the bar stools and Jim called out, ‘Two schooners, mate, whatever’s on tap.’
The barman looked up from the glass he was wiping and past them to the old bloke who’d appeared at the door.
‘You boys members?’ the barman asked.
‘Course we are,’ Jim said and he looked at Shorty who nodded. But behind them the old bloke was shaking his head.
‘Sorry, can’t serve you if you’re not members,’ and the barman put down the glass, picked up another from the tray on the bar, and continued wiping.
‘You what?’ The glint in Jim’s eye was dangerous.
‘Gotta be a member, mate, or you gotta be signed in by one.’
Jim looked around at the bar and lounge. There were half a dozen old men in the place, one bloke propped at the end of the bar, the others sitting in lounge chairs sipping their beers. ‘R … S … L,’ Jim spelled out slowly. ‘Returned … Servicemen’s … League.’
Shorty recognised the signs. The calm before the storm. ‘Come on, Jim,’ he said, ‘let’s go.’
But Jim ignored him. ‘This is a club for returned soldiers, right?’
‘Yep,’ the barman nodded.
‘So I’m a returned soldier, mate,’ Jim snarled. ‘How about you?’ He stood and turned to face the men in the lounge. ‘How many of you old bastards have been to war?’ he yelled at the top of his voice.
Probably most of them, Shorty thought. ‘Hey, Jim …’ He tried to interrupt but, as usual, there was no stopping Jim once he’d started.
‘Well I’ve been to bloody war, I’ve fought for this fucking country!’ Jim shouted. ‘I’ve fought so that old bludgers like you can sit on your fat fucking arses and do bugger-all all day!’ He picked up two beer glasses out of the tray, one in each hand, and he hurled one, with all of his might, at the mirror behind the bar.
‘Fucking bastards!’ he yelled as the glass smashed and the mirror cracked. Then he hurled the other glass. ‘Fucking bastards!’
He grabbed two more glasses.
‘Get your mate out of here,’ the barman said to Shorty as the old man at the door ducked out to call the police.
Shorty dragged Jim out of the bar. ‘Come on, mate, let’s get you home.’
One of the old men ducked as a glass careered past, and they all sat watching silently whilst Jim was hauled, screaming, through the door.
‘Fucking bastards!’ And the final glass smashed against the wall outside.
The nights were bad for Jim. Regularly he woke in a sweat, paralysed with fear, reliving his terror. He was lying in the mud of a riverbank. He could hear their voices. Four of them, Vietcong, not far away, getting closer now. And closer. Death was preferable to being taken alive, and the muzzle of his rifle was in his mouth, his finger on the trigger. Now? Should he do it now? Surely they could see him, theirvoices were directly above. But he daren’t look up, he daren’t make the slightest movement. Now? Slowly, his finger moved on the trigger. That was when he woke up.
There were the images, too, and the smell. The charred bodies, barely recognisable as human, the acrid stench of burning flesh, but worst by far were the heads on spikes.
In the dead of the night, the sheets sticky with his sweat, Jim saw the American’s head. A sergeant he’d been, or that’s what the Yanks who’d known him had said, and his severed penis had been stuffed into his mouth. A young American soldier Jim had met, just a kid, his helmet too big for his head, had had an obsession about doing the same thing to the Gooks. Every dead Gook he found, he cut its head off and shoved its dick into its mouth.
Jim often awoke gagging, the nights were bad for him. In fact Jim Hamilton was a bitofa mess altogether. As some soldiers aptly put it when describing casualties like Jim, the war had ‘fucked his brain’.
Caroline knew that her son was suffering, but she was powerless to help. If she tried, he became irritable and accused her of fussing, so she left him alone. But her son’s alienation was the final stamp upon Caroline’s awful loneliness. Emma had been living in London for over three years, and Bruce had shifted from the Woolloomooloo house into a flat in Kensington with two other students. She understood, of course. He needed to be closer to New South Wales University where he was studying economics.
Caroline was extremely proud of Bruce, he would be the first of their family to achie
ve a university degree. How proud Kathleen would have been. But she sorely missed her youngest son. And perhaps if he’d been living at home, he could have helped Jim. Although Caroline knew, deep down, that nothing could help Jim.
Thankfully, Kitty visited often. Caroline wished she could be like Kitty, passionate and committed. Every day was full and exciting to Kitty. But Caroline found passion in nothing, and her days were empty and dull.
When the weather was fine, she idled away the hours walking through the Botanic Gardens and down to Circular Quay where she sat and gazed at the boats on the harbour and marvelled at the ever-expanding city.
The expansion was as much upward as outward. The AMP building had led the brigade in 1962, and others had soon followed—the State Office Block, Australia Square, like termite mounds, they clustered about the Quay, towering competitively to increasingly dizzy heights.
On Bennelong Point the country’s most controversial building was slowly taking shape. Opinions were divided about the Sydney Opera House and its inflated cost. Somesaid it was an indulgence, and when its designer Joern Utzon had resigned from the project in 1966, the denigrators had been quick to label the thing a disaster. But there were those who loved its design and followed its progress with interest. Caroline was one.
On days when the weather was inclement, Caroline sat in front of the television set, taking little note of what she was watching but finding the midday American soap operas, and the noise in general, somehow comforting.
Kitty was most disapproving when she arrived to find Caroline in her dressing gown curled up on the sofa, mindlessly watching TV commercials which advocated to housewives the advantages of this or that soap powder for a whiter wash.
‘For goodness’ sake, Caroline, how can you?’ Daytime television was a sin to Kitty. In fact she wasn’t too sure about the evening variety, with the exception of the news.
Kitty would then switch the set off and make them a coffee, and Caroline would say, ‘You’re so bossy,’ but she was always pleased to see Kitty. Kitty Farinelli was a breath of fresh air.
