Mug Shots (5 page)

So this is Darwin

The time I dreaded had now arrived—the post-graduate Diploma of Education year. To take our minds off it, Desmond O'Grady and I set out on a hitchhike to Darwin over the summer holidays. Every father needs something to hold up to his children about his youthful adventurousness. The now white-bearded and slippered patriarch, too young for World War II and too old for Korea or Vietnam, sometimes falls back on his second hitchhike: he too had once been at the hot gates.

In 1953 Darwin was a remote outpost, and to try to hitch there was regarded by our mothers as foolhardy and ­possibly dangerous. But Desmond was a doer, not a dreamer or a drinker. He would sometimes come to our Campion Society meetings. During evenings of what we thought were merriment and ­ribaldry, Desmond would sit over his glass of milk, unsmiling and unmoved.

If I was holding back in life because of shyness, Desmond was pushing forward, meeting editors, poets, professors and girls, getting stories published in
Melbourne University Magazine
. I was once in the study of Father Golden, the genial Newman Society chaplain, when he picked up a copy and said to Desmond: ‘Starting to make a name for yourself, I see.' I felt wounded and out of it—literature as well as life.

This was my chance to catch up.
Newsweekly
, a strident Santamaria tabloid, had agreed to run my despatches on the adventure, only fragments of which, mercifully, remain:
We breathed deeply the cooler air. The morning was warm blue.

We made good progress to Wangaratta and then Dubbo, and between Cobar and Wilcannia I had an experience (later to be inflicted on
Newsweekly
readers). Slim, the surly Cobar mailman, conveyed to us in the pub in a series of ­monosyllables that he wasn't allowed to carry passengers, but if we waited at 4 am at a spot ‘a coupla miles outa town' he'd take us on to Wilcannia, for a fiver apiece.

We walked out of the copper-hard town at sunset, rolled out our sleeping bags and tried to get some sleep. I lay there unsleeping, while my friend snored, and looked up at the stars. The roof of the universe seemed to have been suddenly lowered, and looked brilliantly and tantalisingly close. As I confided to my readers:
I felt a strange doubleness. I was as near as I'd ever be to the mystery of things, two miles out of a town on the edge of the world. Overpowering centrality and marginality at the same time.

At Wilcannia we were stuck for two days on the side of the road. The town had more crows per hectare of sky than anywhere we'd ever known. We were picked up by two men who'd spent all day in the hotel arguing over a woman, and who were comatose with drink. The driver kept falling asleep over the steering wheel, and we'd start to veer off the road. Desmond and I took turns leaning over from the back seat and doing the steering. We tacked all the way to Broken Hill.

At Quorn we gave up and caught the Ghan, which at the time took forty-eight hours to get to Alice Springs. There were first and second class and rough class, reserved for Aboriginal people and drifters like ourselves. At every stop there was a stampede over the sand to the pub. Men came back with hessian bags stuffed with bottles of beer and settled down to drink themselves insensible. Before he reached that stage, a lonely Finn went mad and came at us with a knife. We calmed him down, but after two sleepless nights on the jolting floor of the carriage I knew how he must have felt.

At Alice Springs we hitched another illegal ride on top of a truck, shielding ourselves from the fierce December sun with our groundsheets and hats. Hundreds of miles later, somewhere past Daly Waters (where were the waters?) my hat blew off, and when I got down from the truck at Mataranka I fell to the ground raving. (‘You were babbling about golden arrows going into your head,' said Desmond. ‘Literary, even in delirium.')

After much grumbling about city idiots from the south, I was driven to Katherine by a tough guy in crocodile-skin boots who lit one cigarette off the butt of the one before. It took him a packet of Army Club to get me to hospital, where I was put in a ward with a ringer whose pride was the turn-the-matchflame-blue-with-a-fart trick. There was also an old prospector who refused to be washed. He had to be forcibly squirted with water, which set him yelling that the river was coming up and the crocs were going to get him.

SO THIS IS DARWIN trumpeted the
Newsweekly
headline, but it wasn't. I never got there. Desmond went on, noted what he saw, collected me on the way back, and with a little help from him and a few adjectives, I made Darwin up.

Deeply constipated on a round-Australia hitchhike, 1954.

After further adventures, we found ourselves in central Queensland as Christmas approached. Near Biloela we managed to thumb down a train, and as we rattled through the outback we had an argument about the Symbolist Movement in French poetry. When we got off, constipated, sleepless and sick of one another, we squatted by the side of the road about a cricket pitch apart. I declared myself to be at the bowler's end, and reinforced my argument about Symbolism by pitching small stones at him. Desmond walked up from the batsman's end and started kicking me round the legs. While he kicked and I punched, a group of railway fettlers resting on a nearby fence shouted encouragement. ‘What's up with youse blokes?' I imagined them saying. Our response would have been a puzzler: ‘We're fighting about the Symbolist Movement in French poetry.'

Do you think he's normal?

None of these rigours gave me the slightest help in my quest for maturity and poise. Valerie had already noted the oddity of a Catholic taking her to see a Communist film at the New Theatre, and I had more in store. She agreed to come with me to a symphony concert at Melbourne Town Hall, in a tone that suggested this could be my last chance.

We arranged to meet under the portico, and to calm my nerves I had a couple of beers beforehand. Unable to say the words toilet or bathroom in her presence, I didn't go at interval. The concert finished with Brahms's First Symphony. As the music built, so did the pressure on my bladder. The adagio—come on! The andante—get on with it! At last, the finale (which Brahms was accused of pinching from Beethoven). My companion's transported, while I'm about to explode. Will row five disappear in a golden shower? Would I have to rush out and suffer irretrievable loss of face? With only a couple of minutes to go, with crescendos thundering around me, I suddenly got up and pushed past endless knobbled knees to the exit. All the evidence was now in. Valerie was out with a madman.

Jane from my student teacher days had long gone elsewhere, but there was still the handsome Heather, my tormentor from behind the frosted glass. How to ask out the girl next door? Planning was needed. She lived with her aunt, so her car had to be out, and my mother had to be out too, and Heather had to be in.

Three planets had to be in alignment. When the time came, I took up the phone and dialled, and was so unmanned to hear it ringing next door that I put it down again. I took two nips of my father's whisky, dialled again, and heard it again, counterpointed by the high throbbing of my heart. Heather answered. I heard her voice on the phone and, distantly, off it as well.

‘It's me,' I said, attempting insouciance, ‘your next-door neighbour.'

She sounded interested: ‘We haven't really met, have we?'

‘What about the Alma Road bus stop in twenty minutes?'

‘Okay.'

To avoid the absurdity of our both going up the street together to meet, I walked round the block. I was there, waiting, as she—to again Mills-&-Boon for a moment—swayed towards me, statuesque and smiling. The auguries were good.

Over the next few weeks we pooled (Olympic, Batman Avenue), pictured (
Attila the Hun
, with Jack Palance) and parked (Alma Reserve)—but why, she wondered, did we always meet at the designated place, and not go there together. It's hard to explain, I'd reply, because it was.

Our sunny relationship ended in the usual way—in embarrassment. One night I'd made the customary covert arrangement to meet Heather, this time outside the Town Hall, in the city (‘You're seeing a lot of Dick Hughes,' my mother said—after I'd overheard her saying to my father, ‘D'you think he's normal?'). I waited and waited, then gave up and went home. ‘Heather rang from next door,' said my mother, in a voice in which hurt and triumphant discovery were mingled. ‘She said she was sorry, but she couldn't make it tonight. She's not well.'

As her own marriage gradually failed, my mother had built up a powerful emotional relationship with me (and my brother), and as well as being hugely embarrassed, I felt I'd let her down. I'd let Heather down too. Why the secrecy? Why my mother's shock when she answered the phone? Was I ashamed of her? Why a man of twenty-three had to conceal a relationship with the attractive girl next door from his mother is something even now I can't fully explain—though Ron Conway would have been only too pleased to. The affair cooled and died.

Are you sure you're cut out for this?

February 1954 would not be put off: time for the Diploma of Education year to begin. I liked the safety of the lectures and dreaded when we were to put them into practice. My shyness was now forced out into the open. I had to face large groups of up to forty smirking adolescents and give them lucid, structured and lively lessons (the recommended adjectives).

I had only two defences: pills and alcohol. Oblivon had just come onto the market, and was only a vowel away from the desired state. The instructions on the packets stressed that only one should be taken initially, so before my first exposure to an English class I took two with difficulty: they were almost the size of toy footballs. On no account, the instructions went on, should alcohol be consumed while on this medication, so after getting them down I went over to a nearby hotel and had a couple of beers.

Something strange happened on my way back to Northcote High School: a highly bearable lightness of being. I sailed into the classroom, floated up to the platform, introduced myself with a deprecatory laugh, and said we'd now have a look at Alfred Noyes's
The Highwayman
.

At this stage in my literary life I'd cruised past T.S. Eliot and moved into Mayakovsky and Apollinaire, whose
Zone
, I insisted, was the great modern poem.
The Waste Land
was passé and the Georgians not worth considering. Each student was to read a portion, and as the couplets began their balladeering progress around the class, I began rocking backwards and forwards with the rhythm. As the metre got faster, so did I. When we reached the climax, with the highwayman riding unsuspectingly to his fate (‘Tlot, tlot, tlot, tlot—had they heard it? The horse's hooves ringing clear') and the class laughing at me, the poem or both, gripped by a pharmaco/alcoholic fever, I held up a hand: ‘Class,' I said, my notes about rhythm and rhyme forgotten, ‘this is a silly poem. A romantic, melodramatic fool of a poem.' At this, Mr Brophy, the supervising teacher, got to his feet. ‘Okay, class, Mr Oakley doesn't seem to like this poem, but I do, and tomorrow I'll tell you why.' Then the bell rang, and Brophy, grim-faced, waited for them to leave. He could manage only a single sentence: ‘Are you sure you're quite cut out for this?'

I wasn't cut out for this, and a few weeks later I proved it. The school was the prestigious Melbourne High, and the teacher a short, irascible man called Baker. There'd be no nonsense here. Since mine was the final lesson of the morning,
I forbore
my medications, and in a state of pre-teaching terror got the runs instead. I fled to the student, not the staff lavatory, because it was closer. After I'd finished, the door refused to open. After some futile kicking and punching, I had no choice but to slide out underneath. What did the group of boys in 4B make of their visiting teacher suddenly presenting himself to them feet first, followed by an arm holding a briefcase?

Smirks and titters

At the beginning of February 1955, when England was winning the fourth test in Adelaide, and Tom Dougherty of the Australian Workers' Union claimed a secret society known as The Movement was trying to take control of the ALP, my father drove me in his pre-war Plymouth to the central Victorian town of Maryborough, to whose Technical School I had been posted by the Education Department. I had failed in Practical Teaching, and would have to complete my Diploma of Education later on.

Accommodation had been arranged by my fellow-Campion Kevin Keating, who was teaching at the high school. I had a large room in a red-brick building that had once been a Mechanics' Institute, and was now Wandsworth, a warren of flats.

Kevin, who was destined for the Dominicans and who tried, usually in vain, to get me to go with him to daily Mass, offered to teach me how to drive his Vespa. One twilight, when I was at the controls, we went from sealed to unsealed surface on a back road. The front wheel wobbled and suddenly we were airborne. I hit the ground hard, suffering abrasions to fingertips and hip. We changed positions on the hardy Vespa, and Kevin took me to Maryborough Hospital, where I spent a week.

I was tended by a nurse's assistant of Amazonian proportions. She was big, but it was a shapely bigness, and when she offered to carry my suitcase home for me I accepted. And when I offered in turn to escort her home in the dark (who would have dared attack her?) she accepted.

The darkness improved her (and maybe me), and since we were both over six feet I didn't have to lean over for our lips to meet. My brother and I had once been fans of the wrestling at West Melbourne Stadium. We'd seen Dutch Hefner seize Chief Little Wolf in a bear hug, and I was likewise pinioned. After some close bodywork in which I got trapped against a gatepost, I freed myself and escaped.

Next day, when I bought my bread at the bakery, there was smirking and tittering as my loaf was wrapped, and I discovered when I returned to my room that the paper was covered in drawings. They showed, in a range of positions, a stick figure labelled ‘Teecher' engaging with a girl the size of a zeppelin.

I'd learned my first lesson of country town life. The next day, the third form English class, all girls, broke into giggles as soon as I entered the classroom. The prefabs we taught in were walled with windows, and the windows gave onto the road. Not long after I'd calmed them down and announced we were going to have a look at conjunctions, a couple of dogs demonstrated their function on the footpath outside.

The windows were a mistake. Not much happened in Maryborough, and a lot of what did occurred in that particular street. There was the bolting horse incident; the peroxide blonde imbroglio (‘Who wants to ride the town bike?' was whispered from boy to boy as she high-heeled past); the furniture van fiasco (when the back doors gave way and chairs and tables tumbled out); and the squeaky progress of Harry King and his son, their horse-drawn cart piled high with junk. They went past once a week, and the whole class would stand, turn to the window and salute.

But the road was handy for Bob Buttsworth, the head of the English Department (there were only the two of us). Bob, bustling, jovial and pencil-moustached, was quick to recognise he had a fellow malcontent. ‘We've got to get out of this,' he'd say. His way out was a complex betting system (‘The Graduate System', the advertisement proclaimed—‘Devised by a university academic.'). He did well out of it, at least for a while. For Bob, the road was perfect. He could slip out and listen to the mid-week races in his car. Apart from the horses, his other interest was his new black Holden. A row of cleaning cloths hung from his garage wall, with a label above each: Bonnet, Hubcaps, Boot, Mudguards, Windscreen. In the dim light, the trophy glowed.

I spent an occasional evening with Alf Berryman, a fellow inmate of Wandsworth. Alf was old and deaf and ran music classes, in front of whom he'd sometimes fall asleep after putting on a record. His morning departures for the school were one of the sights of the town. His vintage Riley gave out whirring death-ray noises when he started it up. Then he'd whine down the driveway and head straight onto the road, to angry tootings from cars he'd narrowly missed.

Most weekends I followed Bob Buttsworth's advice and took to the highway to Melbourne. Friday was sports day, so I could set off early in the afternoon and hitch a ride, often with commercial travellers, who'd sometimes insist on calling in to hotels on the way—drinking from Castlemaine to Kyneton to Diggers' Rest. You could drink after hours if you were that legal fiction, a bona fide traveller, and signed a book to this effect. For the rest of the Victorian population, hotels still closed at six.

In amoral New South Wales, six o'clock closing was abolished in 1955, but Victorians had to wait another ten years, perpetuating one of the great frontier spectacles—the dynamo roar of the Young and Jackson's drinkers as closing time approached, the lining up of beers as last drinks were called, and the stumbling of drunken men across Flinders Street to the station afterwards.