Mug Shots (7 page)

Man and wife

So instead of a ship to Italy with my friend Bill Hannan, I took a night train with my new fiancé to Mildura, where we'd both been posted, to alight dazed at 6 am at Ouyen for refreshments in preparation for the final unsteady leg—because, we were told, the desert sand doesn't provide a firm foundation for the tracks.

Mildura might have been remote but its population was surprisingly mixed. As well as pastoralists and blockies (grape growers) in wide flat hats, there were Italians, Greeks, Slavs, bodgies, pig-hunters, ferals, Aboriginal people and drifters. A few days later a Hungarian refugee train further enriched the mix (they were from the failed uprising two months earlier). We were paying a Saturday visit to the Catholic church when it began to fill up with them, with United Nations Refugee Organisation in white letters on their brand-new bags. They processed up the aisle behind a priest in gold vestments, and chorused responses to his intonations of lament or thanksgiving. (Where in the hell have we ended up? they must have wondered.)

To avoid temptation we took rooms at a chaste distance. The Education Department solved the problem by declaring Carmel ‘surplus to requirements' and exiled her temporarily to a place even more remote—Manangatang, where the big event, she told me, after coping with the culture shock, was the arrival of the weekly Melbourne train.

In the May term holidays we married, at St Mary's East
St Kilda
, with my old school friend Gerrard Briglia the celebrant. There was giggling amongst some of Carmel's relations at the little gong the altar boy bonged at the Nuptial Mass's consecration. We still have a brief colour movie of the couple leaving the church afterwards, in which Carmel looks dazedly beautiful and the groom is pulling strange faces—perhaps because we were both sedated on Oblivon, the unswallowable calmative that had got me through my Diploma of Education year.

The reception was to be at swish 9 Darling Street, but financial stringencies forced us to cross this out on the wedding invitation and replace it with the less-fashionable Esplanade Hotel. As we arrived, Ted, the man who used to deliver butter to my grandmother and whom she inexplicably married (her second time), broke away from the welcoming guests, produced a ten-shilling note with a conjurer's flourish and put it in my hand. ‘Keep it,' he said loudly. (Ted was as mean as he was ugly. When we visited them later with little children, he'd take off the tops of the garden taps so they wouldn't waste water.)

Bride and groom, sedated by the primitive tranquilliser Oblivon. May, 1957.

My brother drove us afterwards to a Warburton guesthouse, where we lasted only one night. The bed was uncomfortable and kids ran up and down the corridors too excited to go to sleep. The following morning, I complained to the manager. He was a rural humourist, accustomed to mocking honeymoon couples.

‘Sleep?' he said. ‘You're on your honeymoon, and you got no sleep?'

‘That's right. We didn't get any.'

‘You didn't get any, and you're complaining?'

‘You're not getting any either. We're leaving.'

‘You booked in for a week.'

‘You've got the deposit, and that's all you're getting—though there might be more—on the sheets.'

We moved to a nearby hotel, where our trials continued. After our second night, Carmel broke out in giant hives. When I appeared at the highly public breakfast, and naively gave the reason for her absence, the news went round the tables and caused general merriment. ‘Bad news, son,' said one bucolic wit. ‘Looks like she's allergic to it.' Like mothers-in-law, honey­moon couples were comic figures. Ripostes were impossible.

Dutiful Catholics

We began married life in a flat in Thirteenth Street. Presumably the Chaffey brothers brought the idea of numbered streets from America, with the irrigation system on which Mildura is based. Every morning I'd ride my bike along Deakin Avenue to the Technical College, and Carmel would ride hers to Mildura Central.

Snob that I was, I'd hide in my little office at lunchtime and read copies of
Current Affairs Bulletin
on Wittgenstein or The Modern Novel. We'd both get home tired—so many kids, so much heat. On Friday night this would escalate to an argument over the shopping and washing, after which we'd go to the Rendez Vous, the town's only restaurant, enjoy freshly caught Murray cod and Mildara riesling, and share the latest schoolboy howlers with our friends Geoff Richards and Jack Thomas: ‘After the Romans had defeated all the countries they grew lazy and ate about a six-course meal and were defeated so their Empire fell.' Gibbon in a sentence.

We seemed to exert a powerful attraction upon lonely bachelors. The first of what would prove to be many was James McGrath, with whom I taught. James's only company, apart from us, were adolescent boys. Here was a man who could transfix a school assembly, yet who spent his spare time taking favourites to the movies, or leading one gang against another. We came to live in fear of him. In drink he'd lie on the floor, mouth agape, lips furled like a donkey's, declaring his great love for Carmel, and taking umbrage when finally asked to leave. ‘But I
live
here.'

We were dutiful Catholics at the time. Every Sunday we endured the pulpit polemics of Father Carroll, tall, bony and intense. ‘Get this into your Catholic heads,' he'd bellow. ‘While we fish and we swim and we go on drives, the Communists are taking over the unions.'

He came to the school to give Religious Instruction, and locked onto me. He called on us one night, dispensed with the civilities, and said he wanted to form a study group for the professional men of the town. I knew what was coming. ‘A united front, that's what we need.' Calling on my years of dialectical experience with the Campion Society, I told him I was against united fronts.

‘Ah,' he said, ‘you're one of these individualists.'

‘And intend to remain so.'

‘I'm disappointed. You could be a great help to us.' I knew what he meant by that ‘us'. It was a Movement word, a Santamaria word. For us or against us. He refused another beer and left. Never one to waste an experience, I based a piece of fiction on it later which went, via
Southerly
, into
The Oxford Book of Australian Short Stories
.

Teaching was closing in on me. The principal, the egregiously misnamed Mr Witty, decided it was time I took some responsibility and put me in charge of the bike racks, and I had to address the assembly regularly on the state of them. There were also staff meetings, to thrash out such matters as whether teachers should have to shut the windows after school, and whether qualifications should be added to names of staff listed in the school magazine.

Newly married, at Mildura Technical College, 1957. (I'm the happy one in the middle, top row.)

Escape! Attempts to do so by applying for positions in Manila and Japan failed. My first novel—inevitably about a teacher in a country town—was rejected, with red wine stains on some of my purplest passages. It was sent off twice more, and back it came each time, by now on the point of disintegration.

With pathways to literature and travel blocked, I applied to return to Melbourne. The Education Department had a way of dealing with those desperate to get back to the city. They'd be sent to the toughest schools: Collingwood, South Melbourne, Richmond. I was given Richmond, and the hardest year of my life.

Don't be nice

On my first day at Richmond Technical School, as we came down the stairs to the quadrangle, the kids booed. ‘You can forget about your Diploma of Education,' said the head of the English Department. ‘It's war, and you have to win it. Have you got a strap?' I said I hadn't. ‘Get one from the office,' he said, as we lined up in front of the still-booing kids. ‘Don't be nice.'

I hadn't mastered not being nice, and had to use other means. The toughest class was 3CD—forty leather-jacketed adolescents who didn't want to be there. They didn't want Dickens or Wordsworth, so I read from John O'Grady's
They're a Weird Mob
. If this was English literature they liked it, revelling in Jeez and bludge and ‘flat as Aunt Maude's chest'. Things were okay as long as they were entertained, so in the football season I told them to buy the
Sporting Globe
. They were all Richmond supporters. Every Monday we'd read and discuss the prose of the hacks who described Richmond's match. They soon learned what clichés meant, and developed a skill in spotting them. Language badly used can be as instructive as its opposite.

In the classroom across the corridor, the war was being lost. The teacher, Livio, a gloomy Italian with an unwise moustache, spent the time either shouting at the class or riding the waves of noise that followed, with the noise eventually winning. ‘I cannot go on like this,' he said. He didn't, and left.

Further along the corridor was the opposite: a totally silent class, ruled by a Mr Trevaskis. Mr Trevaskis was short but solid, and gave off a whispery menace, to such effect that he'd sometimes walk out and leave the class, and still there'd be quiet. I once witnessed a strapping when passing his room. He ran at his victims, to gain extra momentum. It happened only rarely.

My classes veered between order and chaos, with occasional recourse to the strap. Like the offender, I found this deeply unpleasant, but the problem was eventually solved for me. Someone had used their break-and-enter skills to get into my locked desk. The strap, each time I used it, seemed slightly shorter—it was done subtly, a couple of centimetres at a time. After a few weeks, my defensive armament was a harmless little leather flap.

There was only one strategy left. I collected a stack of
Walkabout
travel magazines from the library, and at difficult times gave them out. Suddenly, they'd go quiet. The search was on, I soon realised, for tribal articles that showed bare-breasted women. If erotica couldn't be found, the kids were happy to supply it. I thought they were busy taking notes, but what they were in fact doing was decorating almost every photograph—of man, woman, kangaroo, even aeroplane—with outsize male genitalia.

At Richmond I met my first genuine bohemian (if that's not a contradiction in terms). Jason Gurney taught art at the school, and he'd throw lumps of wet plaster at troublemakers instead of using the strap. Gurney was a large man who wore a shabby corduroy jacket and matching trousers. He had long greying hair, a goatee, a black beret and purple bags under his eyes. In profile he looked like Paul Gauguin.

I used to have morning tea with Gurney in his little office (he despised the other teachers) until I grew tired of being told that Melbourne was a provincial outpost, and that next year, as soon as he'd saved the money, he'd be back in Paris, London or New York. But if he'd had successful exhibitions in these places, if he knew Dylan Thomas and Ezra Pound, what was he doing here, under the plaster apples, with his Gauloises and airmailed copies of
New Statesman
? The answer, I eventually realised, was that he needed insularity, it was where he showed up best—where would he be in Paris with his beret and beard?

I went to one of his parties, in his studio, a converted stable behind St Kilda Road. He greeted guests in a red roar of a waistcoat and paint-flecked pants. He'd assembled a crowd of painters, phonies and poseurs, and looking down on them were his paintings, vacuous abstracts, blank and banal.

Jason Gurney wasn't very good, and this was why I witnessed one of the greatest snubs of all time. One afternoon, when I was having a drink with him after school, he noticed someone, a dark, handsome, bearded man, across the counter in the saloon bar. ‘That's Clem Meadmore,' he said, ‘you must meet him.' He called out to him, in a voice more and more plaintive—‘Clem—Clem—Clem …' Clem kept his eyes down as he got his drink. ‘Clem!' There was as much steel in Clem as there was in his chairs, and he paid for his drink and turned away as if he were stone deaf.

By the middle of this exhausting year, when Carmel was pregnant, we'd extricated ourselves from my mother's house. (‘Go on, take a flat. Your father's never here and Gavan's on the other side of the world, but I'll manage.') We moved into a place in Caulfield, where we could begin proper married life, and which Carmel furnished with a table, buffet and chairs in the new Scandinavian style. Melbourne was taking the first steps towards civilisation, and so were we. Every afternoon after work, pale and tired, I'd change into bottle-green corduroy trousers, settle into a Fler chair, and sip a Coonawarra claret.

We'd had a hectoring cleric in Mildura, and now we endured another at our local church in Caulfield. Father Gleeson was an Irish priest of the old and thankfully declining school, built like a bull with a roar to match, regularly inveighing against the modern world and predicting its eventual collapse. The birthrate would decline because of antisocial methods of contraception, and we'd be overwhelmed by more fecund races—including, presciently enough, those of Muslim faith. At one performance he was fulminating about contraception's evil when he was interrupted by a crying child. He stopped and waited, and the infant howled on. ‘Either I go or that child goes,' he roared. The child went, enabling Gleeson to continue about the blessings of large families. And then we went, and didn't come back.