Brother Fish

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Nah, worse. I’d just gone through a colourblind war with my battalion, we’d fought our way through Syria, Kokoda, Gona and Shaggy Ridge. When I got home the RSL had a reception for the fifteen veterans who’d returned to Condabri, only there were sixteen – they forgot to count me. Not only did they not invite me to the reception, but I was not allowed to use the RSL club. On Anzac Day though I was invited to have a beer in the keg room out the back.’ He gave a bitter little laugh. ‘The president said it was a special dispensation in recognition of my service record.’

  ‘So you told him to shove his beer up his arse, the whole bloody keg?’ Dave McCombe suggested.

  ‘Nah, I might be a blackfella, but that don’t mean I’m an idjit. I’d made it through the war alive, I wasn’t about to become a peace-time casualty with a posse o’ drunken hoons coming after me in the back of a ute one dark night.’ He raised his glass. ‘Here’s to K Force. When they asked for volunteers to go to Korea I reckon I must have been the first veteran to put me hand up.’ He drained his glass. ‘Drink up, fellas, my shout.’

  It was the first time I’d ever heard anything like this. Here was a guy with a chest full of ribbons who’d fought for his country and whose grandfather had done the same and he was copping shit from the town he lived in. Baldwin had its share of misfits, bastards and no-hopers but I was pretty certain this wouldn’t happen in the island pub.

  Later when we got to know each other a bit better, after a drink or seven, Johnny would get a bit maudlin and then someone would say, ‘Garn then, Johnny, give us yer Abo poem.’

  Anzac Day, Living with Granny (Cherbourg)

  Grandad died when I was three

  My mother called me in explained to me

  I had to live with Granny from now on

  I said why because Grandad’s gone

  I helped Granny from daylight until sundown

  Later she sent me to school in this black town

  Grandad was a returned soldier went to war

  Middle East Light Horse Battalion seen his medals when I was four

  Granny used to work in town four miles away

  She would have had permission to go to work each day

  Condabri town was racist to the core

  Natives Only sign on the toilet door

  Black people not allowed in pubs sell bottled wine out back

  Not allowed in the streets after dark if you were black

  Every day Gran was the old black woman working here

  Except this special day Anzac Day every year

  Granny wore Grandad’s medals and smiled with pride

  Tears in her old eyes she didn’t try to hide

  Mrs Gordon this Mrs Gordon joins us at the Town Hall

  After the Anzac march lunch together colour didn’t matter at all

  Granny was treated like a Queen Anzac Day

  See the shiny medals flashing from far away

  Next day they crossed the street racism was back

  Didn’t treat her equal just because she was black*

  * I’m grateful to Cec Fisher for the use of his original poem – B.C.

  At the conclusion we’d all clap and then one of the blokes might say, ‘Okay, you silly bugger, we’ve suffered enough. It’s your shout!’ We’d all laugh and, good-naturedly, Johnny would call for another round.

  Johnny Gordon was the first person I’d met who’d been subject to racial persecution. I knew, of course, in the historical past, the Aborigines had been treated badly by the white settlers. But even that was a fair way from home. The Tasmanian Aborigines and those on Flinders Island, isolated from the mainland for 8000 years, had lost the knowledge of making sea-going craft, so Queen Island, in the middle of Bass Strait, apart from visits by sealers and a few convicts who’d escaped from shipwrecks and who were rounded up from time to time, remained unpopulated until white settlement in 1888. Furthermore, the traditional owners on the other two islands had either been murdered, bred out or eliminated by various diseases brought in by white settlers more than a century before I was born. It was something you learned a bit about at school but when you asked, people would say it was in the dark past and better left alone, that lots of things happened in them times which were different from ours. I guess us white people didn’t want to be reminded that we’d pretty well murdered a whole race of people.

  At home the subject of racism never came up in discussion, except for an occasional mention of the yellow peril just waiting to invade us. In my imagination I saw them as a plague of human locusts coming in, yellow as the sunset. Our grandpa, father of my father Alf, had warned us about them. ‘They’re the Chinese and they’re coming to get the abalone. Eat anything that mob, beetles, caterpillars, even cockroaches – if it moves, they eat it, even puppy dogs. But their favourite is abalone, of which we’ve got heaps. Filthy stuff, tough as old boots, can’t do nothing with it. The buggers love it. They can have it far as I’m concerned, bloody rubbish.’ Then he’d add quickly, ‘But we can’t have them comin’ here to get it.’ So, by virtue of a geographical accident, I grew up with no real preconceptions about colour except for the brilliant yellow Chinese who were less a colour in my imagination than a sort of perpetual feeding frenzy threatening to come out of the sunset.

  True, I’d served in New Guinea at the war’s end and for the first time met people of a different colour to myself, but this didn’t mean they were inferior. The fuzzy-wuzzies, as we termed the near-naked native population, were a happy and likeable people who helped us survive the difficult terrain by acting as scouts, porters and general dogsbodies. While they outwardly appeared more primitive than us – some they said were still head-hunters – I didn’t think of them as lesser humans. Sure, they seemed childlike by our standards and some villagers still used the bow and arrow to hunt. We soon learned that they were much better adapted to their own environment than we were, and under the prevailing circumstances were clearly superior to us. Thinking back I’m sure we would have treated them in a somewhat patronising manner, but at nineteen and very naive in such matters, I wouldn’t have seen this as a form of racism.

  Nor, for that matter, could I feel superior to the Koreans or Chinese. We termed them noggies, chinks, chows, chonks and gooks, but I accepted this as the usual deprecation of one’s enemy, a part of the process of taming them in our imagination. Colour – yellow, black or brown – as a notion of inferiority seemed pretty bloody stupid to me, so the colour of Jimmy’s skin was irrelevant.

  There was a fair bit of panic in the US after the Korean War over the performance of their prisoners. If some Americans in captivity behaved less honourably under pressure than their trainers expected of them, it should be remembered that they were just frightened kids, while I was a man of twenty-five and ought to have behaved a lot better when confronted by the enemy. Your average Yank grunt was around five to seven years younger than the Australian K Force soldier, and most were still decidedly wet behind the ears. I certainly couldn’t claim the same excuse.

  Also, I have to say that one of the wounded Yanks with us was one of the bravest men I have ever known. Fifty years later I still think of him with deep admiration. His name was Chuck Ward, the tail gunner on a B29 shot down over China. He’d managed to bail out when the bomber crashed, though the rest of the crew were incinerated. Bob landed deep in snow-covered mountains and managed to elude the enemy search parties for five days. But in the sub-zero weather his feet became frozen and he was forced to give himself up to a Chinese patrol. The Chinese then forced him to walk the thirty miles to our medical hut on his frozen feet. I still recall the day he came to our hospital shed. Long before he arrived we could hear his cries and screams of pain echoing across the icy landscape. Dr Wong, a truly decent man, even if he was a gook, did his best to save the airman’s feet, but, in the end, was forced to amputate.

  So, if I appear to be slagging the Yanks, then I’m giving the wrong impression. Men simply don’t come any braver than Chuck Ward. But the o
ther prisoners were just kids – some were conscripts who didn’t want to be there in the first place, young lads just out of high school, though many, like me, hadn’t completed their education. The odd bruise or a broken collarbone from a football game was probably the worst pain they’d experienced. Some looked as if they hadn’t yet had their first shave and, generally speaking, had very little understanding of the reasons for the war.

  The prisoners who were volunteers looked even younger. Many of them had joined the army lured by large colour posters along the major roads promising ‘Have Fun in Japan’. It wasn’t entirely a lie, not like the First World War poster with General Kitchener pointing a finger at Australia’s youth and instead of the English version that said, ‘Your Country Needs You!’ our version read, ‘Join the Grand Picnic in Europe’. The American poster kept its promise and young American armed-forces personnel had a ball in Japan, where most of the work they did was ceremonial. One young bloke from Louisiana confessed to me, ‘I was the best in my company at rifle drill, I did all the ceremonial duty, only one problem: I couldn’t shoot!’ Another admitted to me that they were soft and when the South Korean army crumbled much sooner than expected, and with the marines on the other side of the Pacific, the regiments stationed in Japan as occupying forces were thrown into the battle entirely unprepared and with no time to even reach full strength.

  As the war turned nasty for the Americans, so desperate did the situation become that reinforcements were thrown into battle with only six weeks’ basic training, ten weeks short of the usual requirement to turn a civilian into a fighting man. Passing through Japan on their way to Korea, these reinforcements were issued with rifles and carbines. But so urgently were the troops required at the front that there was no time to fire their weapons so that they might be correctly calibrated. These were mostly city and small-town kids who knew little or nothing about weapons, and they went into battle as indifferent shots armed with rifles and carbines that couldn’t be relied on to fire accurately at any distance.

  A lot of shit has been shovelled onto the Yanks in Korea and if I seem to be making excuses on their behalf, it’s because the real circumstances are never explained. There was another thing – members of the Australian ground forces were all volunteers and if we were a bit rusty we’d initially been very well trained, while so many of the Yanks were ill-trained conscripts who deeply resented being forced into a war they neither understood nor wanted. This happened again in Vietnam. Anyway, this wasn’t the sort of military mix you would expect to become a bunch of Hogan’s Heroes in captivity. Nor, for that matter, could you expect them to have the experience or motivation to stand up to North Korean brutality or Chinese interrogation.

  However, Jimmy Oldcorn, the only member of a coloured battalion among the Yank prisoners in those field hospitals, was different. He wasn’t much older than any of them, but he never kowtowed to the enemy. He didn’t bait or defy them but he was obdurate and persistent when it came to what he believed to be our rights. I guess, in one way or another, he’d been at war all his life and didn’t scare as easily as we did. In fact, the presence created by his huge blackness and deep basso

  profundo voice seemed to intimidate Mao’s little yellow soldiers, who usually modified their high-pitched yapping when they attempted to interrogate him and generally treated him with more circumspection than they did the rest of us. If we were all foreign devils then Jimmy was the devil wrought bigger, darker and more dangerous than the rest of us. In any man’s army he would have been the bloke you’d want beside you when the shit hit the fan. But, despite his humour and his calm strength, I sensed that underneath Jimmy was a loner. I guess I wanted him to feel I was the one bloke he could trust.

  Make no mistake, by proffering my friendship I wasn’t offering Jimmy Oldcorn any big deal. I’ve scrubbed up a fair bit over the ensuing years, mostly from reading widely and having a good ear and better-than-average memory, which, to my advantage, some people have mistaken for intelligence. To this has been added a good tailor, and a penchant for silk ties and handmade shoes. Most of these phoney appurtenances I’ve picked up from wealthy conservative Hong Kong Chinese with whom we do a lot of business and who have a preference for bespoke English tailoring, French linen and Italian leather. While it may be different today, in most of the boardrooms I’ve frequented in life, it was important how you dressed. The American CEO of a large corporation once told me that a gold Rolex on your wrist would generally get you over the line in an important interview, though diamonds around the perimeter would immediately disqualify an applicant. Anyway, over a period of time my grammar corrected itself, a process inadvertently started earlier in my life by our town librarian.

  But, when I first met Jimmy I was a pretty knockabout sort of bloke, your regular ocker who didn’t amount to much and who might well be expected to spend the rest of his life on a fishing trawler. Fortuitously circumstances changed for me and I found myself mixing in elevated business circles, which, in turn, led to being accepted at a social level requiring some semblance of culture. A few quid in the bank and the status that goes with it does a whole heap to tune up your vowels while allowing people to see you for what you ain’t. I make no apology for this, I was poor a long time and I’ve never tried to conceal my background. On the other hand, I haven’t, as some do, felt the need to announce my common-as-dirt beginnings with every word that comes out of my mouth sounding as if it’s been fashioned with a pair of tin snippers.

  That’s what being Australian is all about. You can stay put and nobody thinks any worse of you, or you can have a go and, if you’ve got the determination and are prepared to work you can be what you want to be, rise to any level in life without being prevented from doing so because you happen to come from a working-class family. Although today, with so many Australian families on some form of welfare it’s a lot harder for the bottom to rise to the top.

  My family were fisherfolk and when I was a kid on the island, ‘fisherman’ was very close to being a dirty word. Fishermen were on the bottom rung, and the sea was one of the last frontiers where you could hunt for food you didn’t need to pay for. Access to the sea is free to those willing to take the risks involved. The way things were, we seemed never to have fully recovered from the Great Depression.

  There wasn’t a lot of work about other than on a fishing trawler or a cray boat – a hard, dirty and dangerous way to make a crust. The interior of the island’s Anglican and Catholic churches boasted almost as many memorial plaques carrying the names of fishermen who had disappeared at sea as there were headstones in the churchyard.

  Queen Island, set slap bang in the middle of Bass Strait, is subject to sea mists and furious gales, and over the past hundred years many a sailing ship has been wrecked on our notoriously dangerous coastline. The small fishing craft that met their end smashed against the reefs and cliffs or lost in a sudden storm were simply too numerous to count. Everyone knew fishing was a mug’s game, nevertheless it was the only game in town a poor family could play.

  In those post-Depression years most Australian working-class parents dreamed of their sons growing up to be something a little better. On the island this hope was simply defined in a mother’s prayer: ‘Dear God, please don’t let him grow up to be a fisherman!’ If you couldn’t read or write you could always work on a fishing boat. As a fair number of men on the island fell into this category, including my old man, the cruel sea was how we scraped a precarious and always dangerous living.

  Alf, my old man, was a rough sort of cove, what some might call an ignorant man. But if he couldn’t read or write he wasn’t a whinger or in the least resentful of those who may have been considered more fortunate than him. He’d give you the shirt off his back if you needed it and he’d always provided for his family. Even during the Great Depression when he couldn’t get work on a trawler he’d go out in a skiff and set craypots or bring home a snapper or a couple of bream. Our clothes were made on the faithful table-top Singer from th
e same sugar bags we used as towels, but I can honestly say Alf saw to it that we never went hungry. He was as honest as the day is long, even though honesty wasn’t a virtue much discussed on the island – it was simply taken for granted that people didn’t steal from each other, and crime against property was thought to be something that happened on the mainland or the big island where people thought they were better than us but whom we knew were a bunch of crooks and shysters, or as my mum would say, ‘People who’ll steal the wax out of your ears to make communion candles’.

  That was the curious thing: while, like us, most of the island’s inhabitants came from convict stock who’d moved in from Tasmania in 1888, there was virtually no ‘conventional’ crime on the island. When we were kids the community did have a policeman who carried the grand title ‘Bailiff of Crown Land and Inspector of Stock’ but whom we all knew as Mike Munro or ‘The Trooper’, who got just as pissed as everyone else of a Saturday night. But if you wanted some documentation done that concerned the law you went to see Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan, the bossy-boots librarian and local piano teacher, who also acted as justice of the peace and who somehow managed to scare every schoolkid on the island and not a few of the dimmer adults into believing that she had infinitely more power than any policeman when it came to matters of upholding the sanctity of the law.

  The words ‘justice’ and ‘peace’ were a powerful combination that came together in our imagination to mean that if there was no peace, then the justice meted out by Miss Lenoir-Jourdan would see it soon restored, with dire consequences for the bloke who’d had the temerity to disturb it. While there appeared to be no immediate evidence that the offender had been punished, we kids sensed this was done in such a deep and covert manner that the offender would carry the inward scars for life and never again dare to repeat the offence. Little did I know at the time that this fearsome justice of the peace was going to have a large influence on my life.