The Boy in the Green Suit: a memoir

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Early in 1954, when nothing at all was happening in the rest of Australia, my home town was destroyed. It was neither a sudden nor a natural disaster that brought about the destruction, but the result could not have been more complete if a cyclone had swept down the valley and flattened every house. It left families in mourning and fell like a shroud over the town’s vision of its future. Most who experienced the disaster never recovered.

It happened like this.

Into the lazy, green valley in which my home town of Eildon lay came a small army of highly skilled and almost fanatically motivated engineers from America. The year was 1949. The American engineers had been contracted by the government of the state of Victoria to construct an enormous dam on the site of an existing, more modest dam. The Americans were also required to build a power station and a number of ancillary dams. To house the workers who would do all the pick-and-shovel stuff, the Americans extended the existing town, erecting hundreds of homes up and down a grid approximating the design of Manhattan—many streets known only by a number; a few fancy avenues.

The completed town was a masterpiece. The houses were comfortable and attractive. Everything worked as it should. Hot water units never failed; the laundry coppers afforded a washday result that the most modern Maytag could not better; the plumbing was perfect; the sewer system was state of the art. The houses were all built to the one design, but no matter; they looked great. What the Americans had created was a Bauhaus Siedlung: a settlement based on inexpensive, functional housing for people who earned their living with the sweat of their brow.

The Americans were geniuses at both work and leisure. My town, unsurprisingly, did not have a golf course; the Americans built one. They built a rifle range, too, and a movie house. Noting the paucity of feast days in the local calendar, the Americans established Halloween, Independence Day and Thanksgiving as important community fetes. Baseball was introduced as a rival to cricket, and won some converts.

The leisure-time innovations of the Americans were welcomed, but more admired was the sheer vigour with which the Yanks went about entertaining themselves. Rural Australians of the 1950s knew of the relationship between getting pissed and feeling jolly, but not much of the variegation of amusement. When the Americans hired the Progress Hall and staged square dances, the locals loved it. The people of my town might have hired the Progress Hall themselves and whooped it up on a Saturday night, but they hadn’t thought of it. The dances organised before the Yanks arrived had been lacklustre.

The pay was terrific, working for the Yanks. An ordinary, unskilled worker could afford things that had been fantasies a few years earlier. A second-hand car came within the financial reach of most. And for each kid, an everyday pair of shoes and a second pair for best. My second pair of shoes thrilled me. When I put them on, I felt that nothing bad could ever happen to me. What my shoes were to me, a black Humber with only thirty thousand miles on the clock was to others, or the soul-deep satisfaction of being able to pay all bills as they arrived.

But as the project drew toward completion, bravado took the place of confidence. Saturday night parties dragged on a little too long. The drunks I met when I woke late at night and wandered down to the kitchen for a drink of water were no longer smiling drunks. They’d left the party in the lounge room to mope. Instead of tousling my hair and commenting on my gorgeous eyelashes (as the lady drunks did), then taking me back to bed for a story from my Adventure Ahoy! book of illustrated sea yarns, they glanced at me with empty unconcern and turned away. Denny Holmes, a friend of my dad’s, attempted to shoot trout from the town bridge with a .303 at midnight and had to be restrained. Women with Yank lovers aired claims of abandonment. Heartache was everywhere. We thought they loved us, the Yanks, and now they were off to build another dam in Brazil, or Peru, or somewhere. When they left, the gaiety died, the town collapsed. Two thousand jobs became one hundred. My family stayed on.

The community slid into the drabness of the past. Or perhaps it was all to do with contrast. After all, I didn’t know the past all that well. But I knew that a meanness, a bitterness, a spiteful ill-will was loose in my house, and in the homes of my friends. Joan Horton no longer tucked her dress into her knickers and drew little faces on her knees with lipstick and made the faces talk to each other as she danced across the living room floor. Horrie Cooper was not interested in pretending to drink his beer through his ear. Parties died out altogether. Former friends became rivals for the few remaining jobs. Wives grew resentful, imagining that their husbands could do more to fashion a future than trapping rabbits in the hills or tapping a nine gallon down at the Progress Hall to discuss the establishment of a Tourism Committee.

Marriages broke down in the same way that the cars of the Yank era chugged to a halt. No money for a new starter motor, no money for a uniform now that the oldest kid had moved on to high school. In my house, the level of bickering increased until it seemed that anything at all could lead to screaming. Or worse than screaming. I came upon strange dramas that cast my parents in roles that could not have frightened me more if the props had included bleeding goats’ heads mounted on stakes. My father holding the neck of a broken beer bottle to his own throat, while my mother, perfecting an expression of supreme uninterest, shelled peas at the kitchen table. My mother at the stove, dreamily placing the tip of one finger on the hotplate, flinching and shaking her hand rapidly in the air, then trying another finger, and another. Without knowing what lunatic behaviour of this sort foreshadowed, I knew that something horrible was stalking me.

When I look back on the last days of my parents’ marriage, I think of the little colony of ruin that lies in all adult hearts—the lightless place where all that is too ugly or squalid to face is sent, as lepers were once hidden away. I see that the colony had spread, had invaded the mainland. I looked to my sister Marion, years older than me, for some relief. But her distress was even worse than mine. The fear that was stalking me had already overtaken her.

My mother left. She went dressed in a beautiful red overcoat, one I had always admired. She carried a large suitcase. My sister was on the high school bus to Alexandra. I had been told to take myself to the primary school. I was in Bubs, and normally my mother would walk me to school. I didn’t want to leave. I loitered, and was permitted to loiter. I sat on the front step and watched my mother walk down the street, leaning to one side to balance the heavy suitcase. I went back into the house and stared at the letter she had left on the telephone table for my father. I picked it up. It felt too light in its white envelope to mean anything. Then I went to school, hoping that my mother would be there, believing that she would. I was baffled to find that she wasn’t.

In the years that followed my mother’s departure, my bafflement grew. She made no contact with me or my sister or my father. I believed that she had gone to America with all her square-dance dresses and was living in Chicago or Texas and was having a great time, twirling on the toes of her shoes as she used to and making her petticoats lift and swell. (This morose reverie turned out to be a close approximation of the truth.)

I associated the dreariness of the town with my mother’s absence. My most pressing concern became the obstinate ordinariness of the town, and the life it offered me. The paradise years, when a crowd of cheerful people from America had made my mother and father joyful, had convinced me that great happiness was my due and my destiny. I was no worse off in my small town than any other child in any other small Australian town. But I believed in paradise. My paradise altered with my age. It was a place where an enormous banquet table afforded me a fabulous choice of breakfast cereals—in the days of skinny pay packets for my father and stale bread soaked in watery milk for breakfast. It became the most magnificent library in the world when I discovered the miracles that writers could conjure in books. It was a green paddock where my mother and father set up a picnic on a plaid blanket and invited my sister and me to sit on their laps while they whispered endearments into our ears. That version owed something to a television advertisement for Tarax lemonade, I think.

My Eden projects were probably more obsessive than those of other kids, though hardly unique. Every child fashions versions of paradise. But in my case, no correctives were offered. My sister left the town for the city. My father, a busy fantasist himself, only occasionally registered that I was off the track and into the mulga.

One evening, after my father had finished his day’s work clearing drains for the shire council, we went out into the hills in his old Morris van to gather firewood. We did this twice a week in winter. We ended up not far from one of my little Edens. I thought I would show it to him. I led the way to the mouth of an abandoned gold mine—one of a number of old mines tunnelled by misinformed prospectors in the early 1900s. My father carried the Tilley lamp we used when chopping wood in the evenings.

Some way into the dark mine, after a number of turns, we came to my project. I had set up a makeshift table, and on the table rested the handpiece of a telephone with a short length of flex attached. I’d found it at the town tip. Two candles stood in the necks of tomato sauce bottles, one each side of the telephone. I lit the candles then explained to my father, who looked perplexed, that I came here to make telephone calls, sometimes with the candles burning, sometimes in the dark. ‘Who to?’ my father wanted to know, more worried now. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘to anyone.’ And I added—it seemed important to do so—that the calls were pretend calls. ‘Yeah, but who to?’ my father persisted. ‘Oh, to you, to Marion, to Mum.’ My father’s face, bathed a pale yellow in the candle light, took on an expression of concern. ‘Don’t do this anymore,’ he said, and led me out of the mine. In the fading evening light, he said again, ‘Don’t do this anymore, understand?’

I didn’t do it anymore. Instead, I began searching for lost cities, ready-made Edens, concealed in the hills. I didn’t go to the goldmine again. The telephone handpiece may still be exactly where I left it. I could go and check, if I wished. I could take my own children with me. But I won’t go. For one thing, attempting to persuade your children that you yourself had a childhood is too algebraic for kids. For another, I wish to believe that the telephone does remain where I left it all those years ago, its length of flex connected to nothing.

Whenever I used that telephone, I conjured the listener. I heard the voice at the other end. I heard sounds of encouragement. I told stories to the listener, stories of fact, stories of myself, what was happening at school, at home. I gave football scores, gave an account of the death of a friend who had drowned in the lake, offered summaries of the books I was reading. It comforted me to tell the stories.

The telephone, undisturbed, sits on a tea chest deep in the gold mine. The candles are burning. I have a cut lunch, a cask of cheap lambrusco, a packet of cigarettes. The silence is so intense that I can hear the sound that flame makes as it consumes a wick. I’ve taken a cigarette from the packet and I’m leaning forward on my knees to ignite its tip.

I am as ready as I will ever be.

I pick up the telephone.

Butcher Shop

On a green island across the seas, naked women, tall and supple, laboured in the fields of a tea plantation—or so it was said. But it was later said that the women were not entirely naked. They wore bright sarongs tied at the waist. A few other details were also changed. I began to fear that the women would turn out not to be naked at all. It was important to me that the description of their breasts as ‘full, very full’ should not be altered. Their smiles flashed an invitation. ‘Kiss me. I am yours, blue-eyed Aussie soldier, visitor to our shores. Kiss me, and my sister, too.’

I came to know of these generous women when I was eleven years old. My father told me about them. He’d met them during the war, somewhere in the Islands. Successive episodes of his encounters with them provided more intimacy. ‘My Aussie darling,’ they said as they undressed him. On occasion, three sisters would vie for his attention. They were always sisters, never just friends. Sequential sexual adventures with women related by blood seemed to gee my father up.

The story of the bare-breasted women was the most wonderful story I’d ever heard. But I was careful, always, to make sure that my attention did not betray anything lickerish. That would have been the end of the stories. I looked interested, I smiled, I sometimes laughed. But I never embarrassed my father, never said, ‘Wow!’ or, ‘Boy oh boy!’ My expression said, ‘Thanks Dad, fascinating stuff.’ Nothing more. He was educating me, he allowed himself to believe. I was eleven. I needed to hear stories like this.

With fiction, the audience is everything. The idea of authors writing to please themselves and no one else has always seemed crazy to me. You write for people who are just a little bit more difficult to please than yourself. My father’s fictions (as they surely were) took proper account of his audience. I was a little more difficult to please than he. I liked detail, and he gave me detail. One of the women had a silver filling in her tooth. (A worker on a tea plantation?) Another played the mandolin while her sister sang. His story-telling manner was nonchalant, yet conscientious. We would be fishing down on the river or up at the lake. He always sniffed twice before he began, as if inhaling the little extra air needed to prepare his narrative voice. ‘I dunno if you should be hearing this,’ he would say, and then he would tell me. I loved him for it. I loved the lies. If none of this happened to my father, I thought, it must have happened to someone.

Any child can pick up a yarn that draws together fragments of daydream, threads of ambition, only to find much later that it has become the initial paragraph of a life story. Those first few lines of story may determine who you marry—your choice puzzling those who know you. They may reverberate when you choose the names for your children, find yourself in bed with your best friend’s wife, invent an amazing system of airborne travel, shoot yourself. The opening paragraph will act as more than words, as a wax holding together the feathers of homemade wings. The green island of absurdly complaisant women became the opening of my story, which is a new version of my father’s story. Passing on your genes is said to be a formidable imperative of species. To pass on your fantasies, to have your children act out a new and possibly improved version of the yarn of your life, might constitute a more subtle tactic in the quest for immortality.

I was fifteen in 1963, and dim. I should go further and say that even amongst a crowd of dim fifteen year olds, I would have stood out. I had left school early, more or less because my father had expected that I would. He saw no virtue in education beyond the subsistence level. I could read and write—what more did I want? What I wanted had only partly formed in my mind at that time, but through the mist I could make out an edenic island, white sand, palm trees, small but well-made huts grouped beneath the trees and, nearby, a library. The library was important. I enjoyed reading, but on the island, so far as I could tell, it would be difficult for me to earn much of an income for the purchase of books. I would probably have to be kept as a type of pet by the beautiful and salacious women who were the only other inhabitants of the island—or the only ones I cared to bring into slightly sharper focus. But that was in the future.

For the time being, my father had accepted a job for me, offered in the pub by Bertie Fisher, the butcher in my home town. I was to become Bertie’s apprentice.

‘You’ve got to do something, y’ know,’ my father explained. ‘You’ve got to do something for a living.’

‘I know.’

‘Well, what’s the matter with it? It’s a good job. Make money as a butcher.’

My sister Marion, now living in the city, had gone to work at the age of fourteen. My father had always spoken proudly of her initiative. It was important that I measured up to my sister, gave my father equal cause for pride.

‘Okay,’ I said.

My father had lived through the Great Depression. Employment to him, and to every other male Australian of his class and generation, was victory. He didn’t trust life or anything about it, but if you had a job, you’d had a win. It wasn’t possible for him to study me for a minute or two, with all his prejudices put aside, and ask himself if this slight and dozy boy with pink cheeks and a girl’s eyelashes could comfortably take his place behind a zinc counter in a striped apron. It was a good job. It was a victory.

I was worried about Bertie, more than anything else. The island—well, I would still get to the island. But Bertie was a tough bastard, that was what everybody said, and he scared me. He was short and ugly with a powerful chest and over-developed forearms. His nose looked as if it had been chewed by something—human, animal, machine—then partly repaired. It tapered to an unnaturally flat tip. It was his hands that properly frightened me. He could lift things with just one of his huge, club-like fists that most people would struggle to hoist with two. He would take hold of a pig’s carcass and toss it along the butchering slab with a nonchalant flick, and once I watched him sink a spade into a pile of offal, lift it horizontal with a single hand (he had a Lucky Strike in the other), study the greyish-pink mass for a minute or more, then heave it into the copper.

I worked in the backyard of the butcher shop most of the time. The furnace and copper were kept there. I would load offal and offcuts into the copper, rendering it all down to lard. The stink was awful. I could gaze up to the hills that circled the town, and set my soul on routes of escape. The near hills had been cleared root and stump by