Whole Wild World (28 page)

Sharlene had arrived with friends. Even though we saw each other all the time, we had not had much time alone away from school. It now felt as if we were starting over – talking, dancing and feeling our way to comfortable ground. But all was still fresh. I was conscious of the game clock. Is this the moment to ask her to ‘go around' with me? Maybe we could go to the rugby league Grand Final or 2SM's Concert of the Decade at the Opera House.

Eventually we end up in a tipsy, tight squeeze, sitting on a fold-up lawn chair with another girl. It collapses, the split metal tubing slicing a gash over my right wrist in the place you find a pulse. It was a decent-sized wound but I couldn't feel a thing. I still bear the 2-centimetre scar of a fevered night, a lasting memory of tender Sharlene in my arms, the air pungent and heavy with spring flowers in Sam's backyard, a tinny cassette player moaning through a beer buzz, and the joyous wave of laughter as we tumbled to the ground.

13

Crossroads

Not long after he turned fifty-five in 1979, my father took a lump-sum payment of \12,000 and retired from Kellogg's. I once checked his payslip: #270, ‘hard-working Joe', was clearing just over \120 a week. It was a heartbreaking figure. Teta Danica's contributions eased financial pressures, as did rental income from the Adelaide Street property. I'd retired from the milk run, so no one in our household was earning.

How could we possibly afford our living expenses, school fees and fanatical political activism? Tata's meagre wage meant we had grown up frugally. No family holidays or meals at restaurants. Second-hand Holdens were held for so long they assumed vintage appeal while in Joso's service. Sam and I had been conditioned to expect little, beyond the treats Mama splurged on every Friday, meant for visitors, but were gone by Saturday morning. Christmases and birthdays were done with little fuss, except on one marvellous occasion. On a ten-week long-service leave towards the end of 1976, Tata was able to secure, through a cousin, a job at an appliance factory. We scored the best Christmas presents of our lives: a metallic purple Speedwell ‘Flying Wedge' bike for me, a Sanyo radio cassette recorder for Sam. My dad worked under the alias ‘Josip Kovačević'. For a short time, this second income was akin to a modest lottery win. The windfall bought a few luxuries, but was treated as a buffer for
contingencies. My parents were children of the 1920s and 1930s, escapees. Security was never taken for granted, the little they had would be saved, built upon, not frittered away.

Yet Joso had set his mind on an ambitious scheme to fund retirement: property development. There was a grand, double-block estate at the back of our house and the flats, with two-street access. The York Street property had a horse stable, workshop, lock-up garages, greenhouse, a fishpond (with red and yellow fish, frogs on lilypads) and a grass tennis court. The house itself wasn't opulent, just marooned out of time. It fell into disuse after the aged owners passed away. The family divided the estate into three blocks. Tata coveted the parcel that ran behind our house and the flats. But another Croatian (schemes part of the émigré's DNA) beat him to it. When those development plans were rejected, Tata bought the block for \20,000. Like a marauder, he chopped the back off our property – cricket pitch, palm trees, vegetable garden, shed, and smoking den/dunny, all sacrificed.

It was just like the Berlin Wall in 1961. One day I returned from school to find a new fence. Joso had a large L-shaped block to play with. I lamented what we'd lost. Tata, however, saw four brand-new townhouses, income-producing assets, plus more opportunities down the track. Grassroots capitalism. Wealth accumulation. Up yours Tito, who was on his last legs, literally, holed up in his Adriatic holiday villa. The slogan of a poster on the side of an inner-city terrace house caught the moment: ARMS FOR AFGHANISTAN. Legs for Tito! Someone had added in a graffito scrawl.

And so, despite a genetically dodgy heart and a quiet life of risk aversion, Joso became a spec builder. I'd wandered around construction sites in the adjoining streets as houses were turned into unit blocks, collecting offcut timber, tiles, plastic buckets, and all types of useful detritus for school projects. Or to make
things in my shed, just to see what a collection of bits could become. Now, just over the Wall in North Joso-Land, we had a project taking shape out of nothing, except Tata's urge to make something.

We didn't have to drive all over Sydney to do the work; ‘Buy Croatian' came to us, as uncles and friends from every trade participated in the construction. Everything was covered except site demolition – the Lebanese had a lock on knocking things down in our area. We had a working bee that tied up the whole family for the next year: down in the trenches tying steel for the footings, carrying bricks for bricklayers, guarding freshly poured concrete, waiting for deliveries of materials and appliances. The structures (two three-bedroom, two two-bedroom townhouses) were built quickly but the internal fit-out and landscaping dragged on for months. Sam and I were responsible for the constant cleaning of the site as well. As Sam was doing his final year of high school, he secured light duties. My folks had gone back to their roots; tied to the land like pioneer farmers, except now they were growing four dwellings.

Tata was happy as a builder and around all the time. It meant things were stricter, especially at meal times. But Sam and I were older and less likely to be picky at the table. When we were younger Tata would fly into rages for what seemed like the smallest things. He was a stickler for never wasting food. He'd complain to Mama that she'd prepared too much.

‘Why can't we just have it later as leftovers?' I'd ask.

‘If the food is there I have to eat it, even if I'm full,' Tata said, tapping his stomach. ‘I can't bear to see even a single piece wasted. If you'd ever been hungry my son, you'd understand.'

One night during the school holidays, after he'd finished at Kellogg's, Tata took Sam and me to the Botany factory he'd worked at for twenty-three years, almost exclusively on the afternoon shift from 3 pm until 11 pm. Everybody know
two-seven-oh, hard-working Joe. We timed our visit for the dinner break so he could catch up with his former workmates. Tata introduced us to men, pretty much all of whom were Greek, Italian, Turkish or Lebanese. They knew about our success at school.

‘Are you the clever one on TV?' asked one of the men.

‘We've both been on TV,' I said.

‘This one does very well at school,' Tata said, pointing to me. ‘Second last. At least he's not last!'

Tata didn't have to boast about us, but I resented him cutting us down, especially me, which he always justified by saying he didn't want to spoil us, or have us ease off on the effort, by praising us too much. I just wanted my due or for him not to say anything about me.

The canteen was like the United Nations or the mess hall at the Olympics, as men sat around a Laminex table and argued about politics and world affairs: the Middle East, the oil crisis, refugees arriving from Vietnam.

‘When are you coming back to Kellogg's, Joe?' a Greek man called Jimmy asked. ‘We don't have as many Croatian bomb-throwers to stir up anymore.'

‘You Greek communists know more about bombs than we do.'

‘We miss your father, he is a good man,' Jimmy said, taking me aside. ‘I tell my children “study hard at school so you don't have to work in a factory, like me”. What you want to be?'

‘I'm thinking about being a journalist or, if I can't get into that, maybe a lawyer.'

‘Oh, lawyer!' Tata cut in. ‘More like liar. Lawyer, liar, he's already a very good liar.'

Joso knew every corner of this sprawling food factory. He'd spent almost his entire working life in Australia in a furnace here, where grains were cooked for cornflakes, rice bubbles and the
bran varieties. The heat from the oven was oppressive and everyone wore overalls, hairnets, earplugs and safety glasses. He led us out to a balcony, although it was really the open part of a stairwell.

‘I'd stand here for a break in the cool air for a few minutes when it got too hot inside,' he said, casting an eye over the harsh yellow-lit truck bays and walkways, the blinking eyes of forklifts.

Night fever. It was quiet enough, a muffled whirr of wheels and machine grind from inside the plant. A cloudless sky was overhead, the night was warm, yet our relief immediate. How did he manage twenty-three years in this inferno?

The makeshift balcony offered the simplest pleasure, a moment alone away from the heat and noise to think about those things that needed to be thought about with a clear, cool head. I imagined Tata in overalls and a hairnet, trying to figure out why the cornflakes coming out of the hopper were charred on one side. And the foreman declaring ‘Bullshit' when Joso, just a ‘process worker', figured out why, long before ‘big boss' Kennedy was told. Or maybe he dreamed about what would happen to Yugoslavia once Tito was dead and the republics pressed for autonomy.

Is this where, on a moonless night, he planned his escape from Kellogg's? One look at Joso, a touch of his elegant hand, as soft as a diplomat's, a minute of conversation, told you he didn't belong in a roasting oven. Or in a canefield wielding a machete. Or with a rifle slung over his shoulder. His village and family nickname was the ‘student', the bookish boy sent into the world to become a storekeeper, not a farmer.

The place and boy were still there, just below the surface crust and grime of a working life, now almost completed, but there was a mysterious past, deep down, a solid inner core that would take me years to reach.

‘Australia.'

I pause to take on ballast, signalling to the audience at Bankstown Civic Centre that this speech will be long and pompous.

‘Where are we now?' Pause.

‘Where are we going?' Pause.

‘Are we heading for disaster? Two-beat pause.

‘Or are we on the brink of massive, financial, enrichment?' Hold that thought, audience.

‘I believe Australia is at a crossroads.'

At this same venue, fourteen years later in 1993, I'll cover Prime Minister Paul Keating's back-to-the-wall pitch for re-election as a journalist. He, too, began with a single AUSTRALIA, although craftily he had the letters pinned to a backdrop in case voters forgot where they were.

Right now, I'm projecting Bob Hawke. Actually, I'm shamelessly ripping off the trade-union leader via the helpful concision of
Reader's Digest
in the final of the senior public speaking at the St John's eisteddfod.

‘Mate, you were terrible,' says Fitz, witness and necessary truth teller. We've been together since kindergarten and he is running things backstage. ‘Your head was like a searchlight, this way, then back again. You sounded all Pommy and posh. I've never heard you speak like that. How come?'

I'd overcompensated and under-rehearsed, and fallen short. The searchlight was pure hubris, as if trying to touch every lucky soul with my magic.

Things went askew straight after ‘I believe', sliding into Malcolm Fraser life-wasn't-meant-to-be-easy mode. ‘I believe' was also my father's catchphrase, the prelude to a dissertation on the issue of the moment. After I said, ‘I believe', I paused, thought of him in the audience and smiled. I'd like to think the opening
‘Australia' was solid. Had I stopped right there, I would at least have secured the patriots' vote. In Sharlene's kind opinion the phrase ‘and then Mum got a second car', about halfway through this road accident of a speech, connected well with women in the audience.

I was competing against two boys who spoke beautifully, perhaps because they had spent a lot of time away from Lakemba. Peter had just come back to St John's after several years in England, while nineteen-year-old Charles had emigrated from that tiny part of Lebanon where people sound like British lords reared at Swiss boarding schools speaking on the BBC.

‘You know,' he'd said to me wistfully, above the screeching of the playground, ‘in Lebanon you can ski in the morning and in the afternoon be swimming in the Mediterranean.'

I'd never met a person who could ski. Snow and sun: inconceivable. In the MoD's English class Charles, old cock, uttered the word ‘flowers' in a manner that would have marked Laurence Olivier as vulgar.

‘Have you read Khalil Gibran? The
Prophet
? You should, Tom, he's marvellous.'

We responded to his fine sensibilities in the only way we knew: ‘Hey Charles, do you go to the pub on weekends?'

To us Charles was an alien from a distant place and another time. Which was true. A nasty war had brutalised his beloved Beirut, but not his gentleness or refinement. He was a reminder of the world beyond Lakemba. Charles and Mohammed, at either end of a displaced cohort, spatiotemporal astronauts floating off in an expanding diaspora. My LEB/837 epiphany was now making sense: there were 837 varieties here; there was no archetypal Leb, rather an entire civilisation had turned up in Lakemba. Charles was as typical as Mop, Harpo, Fast Eddie, Chids, Yaz, Kaz or Baz. Over the years, St John's most likely educated 837 types of ‘Elias' alone: redheads we called ‘Blue', top brains, footy
stars, basketball magicians, disco boys, sly bookies and one who stole cars and, later on, carried a gun. Leb bread, cedar tree logo, wicked cursing, Bulldogs mania and strict mums were the clichés we clung to, in much the way others reduced ‘Aussies' to Vegemite, meat pies, Holdens and convicts, a term that caught me with a jolt the first time I heard it at school.