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Authors: Bryce Courtenay

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BOOK: Brother Fish
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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 the 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.

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.

BOOK: Brother Fish
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