Purple Prose (11 page)

‘All over Australia, people come to race birds in Adelaide. We send them when they are babies. November thirtieth. Then July we race them from Marla or Coober Pedy, one thousand kilometres to Adelaide. That bird is a famous bird. He came –' he holds up two fingers.

‘Second?'

‘Yes. Three thousand dollars prize.'

I have to say that at this point I was dangerously close to becoming a pigeon fancier. I'd entered the murky world of a subculture previously beyond my ken. I was beginning to understand the theme song to his YouTube clip. Stalker song? I think not!
Oh, can't you see, you belong to me
is really about the relationship between a man and his homing pigeon.

‘Can you tell me the name of the club president?' I asked Dante.

Dante put me in contact with an old man who knew a thing or two about racing pigeons. Days later, Ray and I sat in the sun outside his house. He was eighty-seven and had been in bed all week with the flu, so he was appreciating the warm air.

‘You want to know about pigeons?' He handed me a book. ‘This is the best bloody book I ever read, mate. Got everything in it. Here, take it.'

‘They say I have a way with birds and animals,' he said. ‘But specially birds. I've been racing birds for seventy years now. Since I was little. That'll open your eyes, hey?' We talked pigeons for a little while. He told me about his pigeon lung, a common pigeon fancier's affliction. He talked of how young people weren't interested in racing, how well the races used to be attended and not so much anymore. I followed him up the hill to his hutches where pigeons
sat on the roofs, gleaming, iridescent, eyeing me cautiously.

‘But I can tell you another story if you want to listen. It's all in here.' He stabbed with his fingers at his West Coast Eagles beanie. ‘Have you ever heard of the Kalgoorlie race riots?'

‘No … I don't think so.'

‘Nineteen thirty-four, mate. Bloody race riots. I was there. I remember it. It's all in here.'

There was an intensity to his words. I thought, my goodness, these pigeon racers are fanatics.
Race riots?
Did these guys really riot over their pigeons? In 1934?

‘Let's go and sit down,' I said. ‘Do you mind if I record your story?'

‘Nah, nah, mate. I'm happy to talk. You can tape whatever you like.'

The recording, because I couldn't work out how to do a voice recording on my phone in the seconds I had before he started talking, is a ten-minute video of a pigeon fancier's sock in a black plastic sandal. This next piece is transcribed verbatim.

‘In Kalgoorlie about that time, they reckon they were doing slingbacks, you know? To make a bit of money on the side?'

‘Who? The pigeon owners?'

‘Nah mate! The Italians. And the Aussies. Anyway. That's only half the story. This day … er, the bloke's name was Jordan. And the Ding's name was Mataboni, he was the one who owned the –'

‘Was that Maroni?'

‘Nah, Mataboni.'

‘Okay.'

‘He threw this bloke Jordan out of his pub, you know? But when he hit the ground, he was stone dead. And some stupid bastard yells out, “He's got a knife!” but Mataboni didn't have a knife at all but anyway, the game was on.'

‘So the Australian man was dead?' I had realised by then that this story wasn't about pigeons.

‘Yeah. But anyway, it was one of the best sporting families
in Kalgoorlie, the Jordans. The game was on. So this Saturday morning, six or eight o'clock, a bloke, an Aussie bloke, he come to our place, said to my mum, “We're gonna give the Dings the run around tonight, Mum.” You know … lucky for me I got it all in here. And that night it was on, mate. The Aussies burnt all their hotels down. We were kids. I remember it all. Then they burnt all their houses down. All their shops down. Ah ha. Then anyway. There was a copper there and he's taking all the kids' names, you know? He couldn't stop them, a lot of bloody maniacs, anyway, this is true. They were going along saying, “This one's a good Ding”, “This one's a bastard, we'll burn his house down”, this is true. So they came to this house and this Slav is standing in front of his house trying to protect his family and the bastards shot him dead, see?'

Ray shook his head. ‘My old mate, he said, “You can't do that,” he said. He said that. They were his exact words. He said, “I don't mind burning his house but I don't wanna shoot no poor bastard.” They were the exact words he used to me. But he died years ago, so I'm using them myself now, see.

‘You may think it's bullshit but it's not bullshit, mate. This is the truth … but anyway … two days burning houses down and a bloke called Joe who had more testosterone than bloody brains, so all the Dings were down by the railway line building trenches to save themselves, dug themselves in and this bloke got his mates together and they pulled all these pickets off the fences and used them to charge them, they charged them just like in the war with bayonets. It's true!'

‘That was nineteen thirty …?'

‘Nineteen thirty-four.'

‘Was that the same year as the Kristallnacht? You know, the night of the breaking glass, with the Nazis …?'

‘Nah, nah that was a few years later.'

‘Oh. Okay.'

‘Yeah well. There was other blokes see? Good blokes. My father was a violent man. You wouldn't know it from looking at me but
he was. Oh, but he was a violent bastard. Anyway, so that night, he got his twenty-two out the bloody corner behind the kitchen door and a packet of cartridges out the cupboard, I can see it now. Like it was the other night. I didn't know he was gonna go out and find this Ding though and bring the poor bastard home, see? His best mate from up on the mine. So he brings him home and hides him under his bed for two days and two nights. I didn't even know he was there. Two days he hid him. I'll bet that'd open your eyes, hey?

‘I tell you what, the people who were there, there's no one left alive now. My mates are all dead. One of my mates said afterwards, “You couldn't find any young men between sixteen and twenty in Kal after that. They'd all bolted!” '

‘Right. So you reckon men between sixteen and twenty were the ones who were burning and –'

‘Oh yeah. All over the world, it's the same age, no bloody brains …' He laughed then and I could see the tension of the story leave him for a moment. ‘I was six, you see? Six. And I can remember that bloke saying to my mum, “We're gonna give those Dings some hurry up tonight, Mum.”

‘There was another bloke too. Everyone reckoned he was getting slingbacks from the Dings so they burnt his house down too that night. And while they were burning his house down, he was trying to put it out with his garden hose and someone chopped off his hose with a bloody axe. That's the truth. But of course it goes back a lot further than that. Hoover, the bastard. He sacked all the Aussies from the mines and kept the Dings and Slavs on. Bloody well cut their wages and increased their hours! It'd been bothering the Aussies for a long, long time. Twenty years. You know how that is?'

‘Mmm. Yeah, I get that … hang on, hang on: Hoover?'

‘Yep, took off and became president of the United States, didn't he. Left all that bloody trouble behind. Jesus Christ, that's the truth. It'd open your bloody eyes, eh?'

He finished up at this point, took off his glasses, wiped his eyes and put his glasses back on. I turned off the recorder.

Then he said, ‘You know, two days later me and my mum were looking out the front window at these Italian women walking down the road, in the middle of the road they were, with wheelbarrows full of tents and cooking pots and clothes and water bottles and things. Those women's faces were as black as the clothes they wore … from the soot, you know, from sorting through their burnt out houses. Me and Mum was watching the women, and I remember her crying. Mum had tears streaming down her cheeks.'

None the wiser about the Great Southern pigeon racing fraternity that day, I drove home with Ray's book about pigeons and some rather chaotic thoughts. Kalgoorlie Race Riots? Hoover? Pigeon lung? I kept thinking about those homeless women walking with all their worldly possessions,
their faces as black as the clothes they wore
, to the outskirts of Kalgoorlie where they set up a refugee camp by themselves.

Not long after talking to Ray, I was to have an unexpected interview with a third pigeon fancier, during a trip to Bali.

In a small room off Hanoman Street, Ubud, the tattooist pauses his needle from my foot and looks at me.

‘You alright, sista?'

I nod but he had already felt my leg twitching as his gun hit nerves and pressure points. I am sweating, lost in a strange world of low-level, insistent pain.

‘We have a quick break,' he says.

It's early evening. The noise and heat is intense. Scooters, jeeps and taxis beep and roar by, ferrying people between the day and the night. Street-side, the tattooist smokes, his bare hands streaked in the powdered flock from his plastic gloves. His little brother comes to sit with us on the bench, waves his fist at his leonine dog to squat on the concrete at his feet.

‘
Selemat mallam, guark
,' says the little brother, looking at the outline of a crow on my foot.

‘Good evening, crow?' I ask him. ‘Is that what you say?'

‘Yes,
guark
, a crow,' he smiles. He is softer, younger than his brother. ‘I like birds.'

‘What is your best bird?'

‘Pigeon. I have plenty of pigeons.'

‘You have pigeons? Do you race them?'

He looks confused.

I say, ‘You know … ah … competition?'

‘Ahh, yes! All around Bali. Very fast birds. When I was little –' he holds his hand a metre above the ground, ‘I have lots of pigeons. My mother say, “Take birds away! Too many pigeons!” So I took them to the market and sold all the pigeons. The next day, they all come home!'

‘Ha! Homing pigeons. So you had money
and
pigeons!'

‘Yes!' He laughs. ‘Now, I have fifteen pigeons. I sell them every week at the market. Sometimes they do not come back but most times, I get my pigeon back and I sell them again.'

‘That's so cheeky! Don't you get pigeon buyer come to your house with big stick?'

He shakes his head. ‘Another man sell them for me.'

His brother, smoking, watching the street with the kind of detached cool that only tattooists possess, stubs out his cigarette in the bakelite ashtray and nods me inside.

It seems that I am now the proud owner of a book about pigeons.

I rang Ray a few weeks after he'd told me the story of the Kalgoorlie race riots. I begged him for a longer loan of his book because I hadn't finished reading it yet. Also I'd promised him a copy of my own book,
Salt Story
, in return for his allowing me to interview him.

‘Keep the pigeon book for as long as you like,' he said on the telephone. ‘I've been a bit sick anyway. Been in hospital. Had a minor heart attack apparently. That'll open yer bloody eyes, won't it!'

‘Sorry to hear that, Ray. I won't stay long. I'll just knock on the door and drop off my book.'

‘Nah, mate. It's too cold for me to go out today. Just put the book on the back veranda for me.'

The weather was rancid that day and it started hailing as I drove to Ray's house. I parked in the driveway and hunched around through the chill to the back of the house, past brightly painted concrete gnomes, potted geraniums and cast-iron garden chairs. I left my book, wrapped in a plastic shopping bag, under the veranda clothesline. The plastic sandals he'd worn the last time I'd seen him lay beside the doormat, the imprint of his feet pressed into them.

Five days later, his death notice was in the local paper.

Ray had told me that he was the last person alive who had witnessed the Kalgoorlie race riots. I'm not sure if he was right about that, but I reckon he'd be close. His passing away, he being a man with whom I'd had a cursory but … what is the word … instructive? … enlightening? conversation with just once, reminded me of those pigeons who were given medals after World War I, for carrying one small but vital story strapped to their bodies. Ray wasn't a loved one to me. We'd not even shared a cup of tea but he told me that story because he wanted someone to remember it.