Brother Fish (5 page)

‘Me mum got the polio and . . .' he paused, and grinned self-consciously, ‘me daddy was someone I didn't never know.'

‘Sometimes that's better, mate. Me old man was an alky, come home pissed and beat the crap outta me most days of me life,' Dave McCombe said in an attempt to cover Johnny's embarrassment. Then he asked, ‘How'd yer live? You know, make a crust?'

‘Me granny got a permit.'

‘What, that like the dole?' Tiger Anderson asked.

Gordon shook his head. ‘They called it a Certificate of Exemption, and it meant she didn't have to get special permission every time she wanted to leave the mission to go to work in town. Without it, if they seen her on the streets at night, the police would pick her up and throw her in the slammer 'til mornin'. She'd walk the four miles from the mission each day, get treated like shit as a cleaner and get paid about half what the whites got doing the same yakka, then she'd walk home again at night carrying the groceries she'd bought.'

There was silence all round, then Tiger Anderson said quietly, ‘Why didn't she bugger off, I mean, go somewhere else?'

‘Couldn't,' Gordon replied, ‘it was against the law to leave the mission.'

I was finding all this hard to believe. People who couldn't leave, go where they wanted like other Australians, was an entirely new idea to me. I wondered for a moment if Johnny was conning us, but he didn't seem the sort of bloke who'd bullshit for a bit of gratuitous sympathy.

‘Your grandad, where was he?' Jason Matthews asked.

‘Dead, when I was a little kid. He was a TPI – totally and permanently incapacitated, something he got in the First World War, my gran never said. He coughed a lot, probably his lungs were buggered from the gas. He fought with the Light Horse in the Middle East. I reckon he must have been a pretty good soldier – he was mentioned in dispatches twice.' Johnny Gordon then gave a bitter little laugh. ‘On Anzac Day my granny would arrive at the ceremony wearing Grandad's medals and for that one day a year she was treated like a whitey. “Mrs Gordon, would you like a cup of tea? Do have a scone.” I get real agro when I think about it, but my gran glowed with pride.' He took a pull from his beer, and continued. ‘Next day they crossed the street to avoid her. To them she was a twenty-four-hour once-a-year white and then, at the stroke of midnight, she magically turned into a dirty black lubra again.'

We were all silent – I wanted to ask if his mother died from the polio, but I mean there wasn't a whole lot you could say. I reckoned we'd asked enough personal questions.

Then Rick Stackman spoke up.

‘That's pretty crook, but it don't explain why you joined up for World War II, Gordie.'

Gordon grinned. ‘What do you reckon, mate? Anything to get away from bloody Condabri! You join the army and they gave you an exemption certificate.'

‘Yeah, exemption to get your balls shot off!' Rick Stackman joked.

Johnny Gordon lifted his glass. ‘The army was a different world for a blackfella like me, for the first time in my life I was an equal. I remember writing home to Granny saying how we'd wear each other's shirts, eat from the same plate, wash in the same water, shit in the same toilet – wonders would never bloody cease!' Johnny laughed, recalling. ‘She wrote back and said that was very nice but if I ever used a word like that again she'd take a stick to me.'

We all laughed. ‘Righto, Gordie, from now on we're gunna treat you like a boong so you don't get too bloody uppity with us white guys!' Rick Stackman jested. He was the one among us who always had a wisecrack at the ready.

Rick's joke seemed to clear the air a bit. ‘Yeah, them were the bad old days, all right. Must have been a bit different though when you got back, you know, from the war?' John Lazarou suggested a bit clumsily; Lazarou had been made a lance corporal only because everyone else had refused the job and he was too dumb to work out that as a lance corporal he'd end up being everyone's dogsbody. Predictably enough he was known as ‘Lazy', which wasn't a bad sobriquet for a bloke who was by nature energy deficient among other things of a dilatory nature, but who had been stupid enough to be elected lance corporal of our platoon under the mistaken impression that the added authority was going to give him an easy ride in the army.

‘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 other 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.