Brother Fish

by Bryce Courtenay

  In other matters where an adult needed sorting out for an undeserved act of violence against a member of the community, if he was a Protestant, his mates saw to it; if a Catholic, then Father Crosby would summon him to the church and take him out the back and make him put on a pair of twelve-ounce boxing gloves, whereupon the Irish priest, the ex-cruiserweight champion of County Cork, would give him a damn good thrashing and then haul him into the confessional. With a bloodied nose and a fistful of ‘Hail Marys’ as penance he was forgiven, and life on the island returned to normal. One way or another most things got sorted out. Looking back, this rough justice may seem little better than a kangaroo court, but I tell you what, it worked a treat.

  Like all his mates off the trawlers and cray boats, Alf would get thoroughly pissed of a Saturday night. But to be fair to the fishermen, most of the other blokes on the island, with far less cause to drink the miserable week right out of their heads, were also down at the pub nudging elbows and getting equally legless.

  Like many a small man before him, and a redhead to boot, Alf McKenzie was of a fiery temperament and quick to take offence; moreover, he couldn’t hold his booze. It was a deadly combination and he was apt to get into regular blues, usually over some imagined insult and, with disquieting regularity, he’d pick on someone way above his own fighting weight, a fox terrier taking on a rottweiler.

  Although, in his defence, unlike a lot of other men on the island, when pissed he didn’t become a wife-beater – one of two crimes, the other being incest, that seemed to go unpunished in the community. This was probably because the former was too common to be remarked upon except as women’s gossip, and the latter too shameful to be admitted under any circumstances by anyone. It’s only now, decades later, that I realise that incest was not uncommon in many an island family.

  Alf would occasionally take a half-hearted smack at us kids, though more out of a sense of duty than from real malice. For a bloke who could pick a fight at the drop of a hat I can’t remember him ever seriously beating any of us boys, and he never laid a hand on my sister, Sue, either in anger or the other hidden and secret thing.

  I recall how at Monday-morning roll call at school there’d be dozens of kids with black eyes, thick ears, split lips and multiple bruises who’d supposedly run into the doorknob or fallen off the chook-house roof or some other such euphemism for getting the tripe knocked out of them by a drunken father. By the time they were teenagers most of the boys had flattened noses that hadn’t come about as a result of fights behind the school dunny.

  As for the other, I dare say the female children and some of the males will carry the scars, secret guilt and shame for the remainder of their lives. In recent years the priesthood, Anglican and Catholic, has come in for a hammering for child abuse and with just reason, but, at least on our island, their parishioners were often just as guilty. Not that I think Father Crosby was up to no good. Certainly nobody has come forward and nothing untoward has surfaced over the ensuing years. As for Reverend John Stephen Daintree, our Anglican rector, he was nearly eighty when he came to the island and could barely raise an arm above his head to invoke a blessing, much less anything else. But then again, when you scratch the surface of any society, island paradises included, you’re certain to find a darker side.

  Of course, there was no such thing as child welfare at the time. Island folk, as they’d done since settlement, kept to themselves and resented any sort of bureaucratic interference, even if it proved to be in their own best interest. My mum would say we were a three-monkey society: see, hear and speak no evil, even if, plainly, there was a fair bit of it going on around us.

  Alf McKenzie, a small man on an island of predominantly big ones, was considered a part of the Saturday-night entertainment where half-a-dozen serious fights usually took place at the back of the pub. Pound for pound he was a half-decent fighter, but his stubborn refusal to take on anyone around his own weight made his contribution to the evening’s fisticuffs the curtain-raiser with all bets off. If he looked like getting the tripe knocked out of him a fellow fisherman would step in and pull him away from his opponent, always to Alf’s loud protests that he should be allowed to finish the mongrel off.

  If he wasn’t a contender in the brawls behind the pub, nevertheless, as a drunk, Alf was the scourge of Baldwin. After closing time, when everyone had stumbled home to beat their wives and children or to sleep it off, his caterwauling would keep half the women in town awake. He’d be banging dustbin lids together, serenading the female population at three a.m. on his harmonica and generally making a bloody nuisance of himself. As the husbands of the wives he took to serenading had long since passed out from the grog, he had the women of the town to himself. The odd bucket of water or the amber contents of the occasional chamber pot seemed only to freshen him up for further mayhem. If he wasn’t a good drunk, you couldn’t fault him as a stayer.

  He’d come home at dawn usually with one ear torn and wearing a shiner or evidence of an earlier bloodied nose or all three, buttons missing off his shirt and his person cut and bruised from falling on his arse, still pissed as a newt as well as toothless. His missing teeth were by way of precaution. He’d leave them in a tin mug on the mantelpiece above the kitchen stove prior to departing for the pub, his real teeth having been singly and collectively knocked out, the last three on the night of his twenty-first birthday party. When you’re forced to be a fish-eater all your life teeth don’t assume the same importance as they do to the carnivores in society.

  You could hear him coming a mile off and my little mum would be standing on the front verandah in her pink chenille dressing-gown, felt slippers with the left big toe sticking out, the barrel shapes of her hair curlers visible through a matching pink chiffon scarf. She’d be standing grim-faced with her arms crossed, cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth, squinting through the half-light waiting for his shambling, stumbling, falling-down self to appear through the early Sunday-morning mist, shouting, ‘Gloria, I’m coming, lovey! I ain’t deserted yiz!’

  ‘No such bloody luck,’ she’d sigh, as she waited to grab him by the scruff of the neck and lead him into the washhouse in the backyard where, clothes and all, winter and summer, she’d shove him under a cold shower, requiring him to stay put until he’d shown some semblance of sobriety. When she judged the time right she’d chuck him a well-washed sugar bag to dry himself off and then put him to bed to snore away the rest of the day until he rose in the late afternoon to a plate of fried eggs and toast and a cup of scalding sweet black Bushells tea. Later in life, after she’d embraced the Catholic faith, she’d put him under the shower and haul him out when she returned from mass, usually some two hours later.

  As the children of Alf and Gloria McKenzie, we were the fourth generation from convict stock on both sides of my family. Today that passes for some sort of status. When we were kids and had done something we ought not have, my mum, who usually got things in perspective, would sigh and say, ‘Four generations of McKenzies and Kellys and we still haven’t produced anyone worth a pinch of the proverbial!’ Though, in a thousand years, she would never have admitted to it, we all knew what the substituted word was. We were crap, a family at the bottom end of the social heap, and that was that, there was no point having tabs on ourselves. Sometimes though, by way of conciliation she’d add, ‘Although one thing: God, in His infinite mercy, gave us a good ear on both sides of the family that, until your father got his disgrace ban, has saved us from being total no-hopers.’

  What she was referring to was the harmonica, or mouth organ as we all called it. It seems, going way back in time, we’ve always been a musical family. John McKenzie, my convict great-grandfather on my dad’s side, played the fiddle, though my grandpa, Cliff McKenzie, took up the mouth organ when it first came out from Germany and was known as the aura. As a young bloke of eighteen in Burnie, where John McKenzie had settled after gaining his ticket of leave, Cliff quit fishing to join the 1860 gold rush on the mainland.


  He soon discovered that he didn’t much care for digging and, after staking several useless claims, he found he was marginally more successful with a pack of cards than sluicing for ore. While playing poker with an American prospector, he won a harmonicon known as the Prairie Queen, an instrument far superior to the aura. It was all the encouragement he needed to quit and become a bush musician.

  This new career inevitably led Cliff McKenzie into country pubs, picnic races, bush celebrations, weddings and wakes, enabling him to continue the family tradition on two fronts: as an expert in making music and a proclivity for getting drunk, and to this he added an addiction to gambling. He eventually grew tired of the itinerant lifestyle and when, in 1888 he heard that Queen Island was to be opened for land settlement he came to the island at the age of forty-six where he received a grant and took up farming. He married a girl from Burnie, a cousin twenty-five years his junior. My grandmother, Maud Jasmine, gave him six children and died giving birth to Alf.

  Of course my grandfather, despite his career as a bush musician where he should have picked up a thing or two about rural living, knew nothing about tilling the land or keeping livestock. He soon got into debt with the bank, which eventually foreclosed on him. With the change he got after the bank had sold his farm, Cliff McKenzie bought a small house near the harbour and resumed life as a fisherman, one of the first on the island.

  He never bothered to marry again but, with his background and the social graces he had acquired as an entertainer, the mouth organ wasn’t the only instrument he employed to charm the island ladies. In the process he succeeded in scattering his seed widely and generously. Two generations along, a good few kids at school possessed our red hair and pale freckled skin and, moreover, had a distinctly McKenzie look about them.

  On my mum’s side, also an original island-settler family as well as convict stock from Hobart, there appeared to be a string of Irish tenors going way back to County Clare, and a great-grandmother, Mary Kelly, nee Flannaghan, who legend has it, played the Irish harp like an angel but was sent to Tasmania as a convict for keeping a bawdy house. She is said to have earned her ticket of leave early by being regularly requested by Lady Jane Franklin, the wife of the governor, to be allowed to leave the Women’s Prison to play the harp at her Friday-evening soirees at Government House in Hobart. So it was not unexpected that the Kelly and McKenzie combination made us a pretty musical bunch.

  By island standards we were a small family, just four kids, with me the eldest, then Sue, followed by my twin brothers, Steve and Cory. Most of the fishermen bred like bunny rabbits with eight or nine kids just about the norm. Birth control, even among the Protestants, was unthinkable. Boys from the age of fourteen usually left school to work on the boats and the girls cleaned fish, mended nets and made craypots, the more kids the better being the prevailing philosophy.

  ‘Thank Gawd for the mumps!’ my mum would say after we’d visited one or another of our multitudinous relations or another fisherman’s family. At the age of twenty-five Alf had contracted mumps, which, to the everlasting gratitude of my mother who’d conceived the four of us in slightly less than six years, caused him to become infertile. Furthermore, with him on a fishing boat most nights and suffering from brewer’s droop of a Sunday and back on a trawler pre-dawn on Monday morning, she was seldom obliged to share the connubial bed. This was yet another reason why she’d come to believe there must be an understanding God in heaven, and at the age of forty she came to the conclusion He must be a Catholic. To everyone’s surprise, she turned from a lukewarm ‘Christenings and Christmas-morning communion Anglican’ to a red-hot Catholic, to become one of Father Crosby’s most devoted parishioners.

  If it hadn’t been for music we would have been pretty well anonymous, no different to any other fishing family. It was our expertise on the mouth organ that singularly separated us from the other interchangeable island family groups. The name McKenzie meant mouth-organ music and had done so for three generations. The mouth organ was cheap and melodious and could be carried in one’s pocket, and so became a hugely popular instrument amongst the poor and in the bush. Many people on the island played it but, it seemed, the McKenzies had the sublime touch and could make a Hohner do things, hit notes it wasn’t supposed to be capable of reaching. In his later years, playing a twenty-reed, ten-hole Hohner imported from Germany, my grandpa, leaving the island once a year for the championships on the big island, became Tasmanian champion two years running.

  My dad often recalled how, in 1912 at the age of fourteen, his father presented him with the very latest mouth organ known as the ‘Cobber’, bought from the prize money he’d won at the last Tasmanian championships and subsequently placed on a horse that, for once, came good. It was Cliff McKenzie’s way of saying that Alf was the one in the family who had ‘the gift’ and, in effect, passing on the musical baton to his youngest son.

  Alf McKenzie didn’t have much he could truly call his own, and the Cobber was to become his most treasured possession. The cabinet it rested in was crafted from specially selected Queensland maple and was proudly Australian-made. My grandpa Cliff made him learn ‘The Cobber Song’, an early version of an advertising jingle. In turn, as kids, Alf made us all memorise the words. When he was pleasantly oiled, say on a birthday or late on Christmas afternoons, the only occasions my mum allowed grog in the house, he’d take his Cobber out of its fancy maple box with its faded maroon velvet lining and we’d sing along while he played, extemporising an elaborate musical break of his own composition between each verse.

  My Cobber

  Who cheers me up when I am sad,

  And makes me feel supremely glad,

  And quite a well-contented lad?

  My Cobber.

  Whose tones are so divinely sweet,

  That when I play it in the street,

  It soothes the bobbies on their beat?

  My Cobber.

  Who can produce the latest tunes,

  The crazy rag, the song of coons?

  O, greatest of all music boons.

  My Cobber.

  Who keeps me company all day,

  When ’er I wander far away,

  And ‘Home Sweet Home’ upon it play?

  My Cobber.

  Its fame is known from Cairns to Perth,

  How can I estimate its worth?

  The best mouth organ upon this earth.

  My Cobber.

  Alf McKenzie followed in his father’s footsteps and even went one better, winning the Tasmanian and Victorian championships three times in five years until, on the sixth, competing at the National Harmonica Championships held in the Colosseum at Ballarat, he was bitterly disappointed at the marks awarded him by one of the adjudicators, a certain Maestro Gustave Slapoffski. True to family tradition, Alf went out and buried his sorrows by getting pissed. Two hours later, filled to the brim with Dutch courage, he stormed back onto the stage to tell the audience what he thought of the two adjudicators, the second being a Mr Mansley Greer. He pointedly observed, not without wit for a man of no education, ‘I can only say that one judge was “Mansley” enough to mark me better than average, but I’ll bet London to a brick Mr “Fuckoffski” has a well-greased palm out to ensure some bloody sponsor’s little darling gets the nod.’ For this honest, if entirely specious appraisal, he received a lifetime ban from the championships and any future performances under the aegis of the Australian Harmonica Association. Alf’s ‘disgrace ban’, as Gloria ever after termed it, ended the McKenzie family’s brief flirtation with fame and we were back where we belonged, bumping our heads against the bottom rung of the ladder.

  We all played the grand little instrument – Dad, Mum and the four kids, a sextet that could make a fair bit of ear-pleasing, foot-tapping noise when we put our minds to it. Alf’s disgrace ban meant we were restricted to playing on the island, which didn’t concern us overly much as we couldn’t have afforded the money for the whole family to travel to the big island, let alone the m
ainland.

  We’d scrub up pretty well, though. Mum with her curlers out, Sue wearing a green ribbon in her blazing copper-coloured hair. Alf and we boys, short back and sides with the parting arrow-straight to the left and the quiff in front held rigid by means of ‘A little dab’ll do ya’, part of the jingle for Brylcreem, a universally popular hair grease where on the back of the jar it said it restored the life and shine that shampoos take out. I recall wondering what shampoo might do and why people would be stupid enough to use something on their hair that took away its life and shine. The label went on to say that it contained mineral oil and beeswax, which I assumed was what was meant to put life and shine back in. As we only used soap to wash our hair we obviously had no need for its shine-producing properties and used it only as a means to paste our hair down and to look snazzy.

  Brylcreem, a little dab’ll do ya,

  Use more, only if you dare.

  Brylcreem, the gals’ll all pursue ya,

  Simply rub a little on your hair.

  I also noticed that not a single girl ever chased me when I was wearing it.

  From the neck down, even if I say so myself, we were a bit of a sensation. We wore blindingly white starched shirts, pressed black pants with the centre crease sharp as a favourite kitchen knife and, to set everything off, Irish green bow ties, all made by my mum on her table-top Singer sewing machine. On the pocket of our shirts and blouses Mum and Sue had embroidered in green running writing the name of our family group, which, predictably enough, was The Cobbers. We wore black socks and our boots, only to be worn on special occasions, were so polished you could see your face in them. This sartorial elegance usually got applause from the audience even before we’d commenced to play, which pleased Gloria, my mum, no end, but really got up Alf’s nose. My dad took himself seriously as a musician. With the audience applauding in anticipation you’d hear him mumble out of the corner of his mouth, ‘The bludgers should judge us on our musicality, not our poncy clobber.’