Whole Wild World (13 page)

The rallies would focus on Yugoslav state outposts, such as consulates and trade missions, with Tito's minions – just like Labor's elite, funnily enough – drawn to the prestige locales of Double Bay and Woollahra. Protest signs captured the zeitgeist: ‘I am Croat not Yugoslav', ‘Freedom for Croatian Intellectuals', ‘Yugoslavia No, Croatia Yes', ‘Long live free Croatia'.

The event on the protest calendar I grew to like most/hate least was Captive Nations Week. The rally was to highlight the oppression of people under communism, specifically in the Eastern bloc. As we were walking in large numbers Croatians didn't stick out as fanatics. There was a captive, clubby solidarity with other miserable-looking kids being dragged to demonstrations by their parents. Many of the children were dressed in folkloric costumes. I'd never seen some of those poor bastards in anything other than the
narodna nošnja
, national costume.

Mercifully, Sam and I avoided dress-ups and dancing because Tata worked evenings, when practices were held, and like most of the women we knew, Mama didn't drive. I fancied the blonde girls from little-known Soviet republics, with the highest ratio of fair-haired spunks, as good-looking girls and boys were called, from Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland. There were also protesters marching behind signs for Georgia, Byelorussia, Ukraine and Czechoslovakia, places more obscure than Croatia.

At least the demos were outdoors. After a few hours of denouncing Tito's barbarism, we'd often have a family picnic in the Royal Botanic Gardens. Sam and I would watch the ducks, climb over a bronze horse and behold the giant Moreton Bay figs, craggy and foreboding, like a haunted house had burst inside out. Further around Farm Cove was the Sydney Opera House, a building that had been under construction for five years before I was born. On visits, we'd peer through holes in the white painted
shuttering to see the same old scaffolding, over giant shells threatening to break it apart. Tata was more likely to win the Opera House lottery than see this marvel finished.

National celebrations also felt never-ending. Speeches were on a loop, as the head of each cultural association and political faction had a turn at the microphone, deploying the same grave intonation and worthy sentiments. Liberal politicians attended these gatherings and received rapturous applause after greeting the audience with a simple
dobar dan.
Good day. Effort was rewarded. The advanced level, not for amateurs and vowel lovers, was
Sretan Uskrs
, Happy Easter.

Croatia's independence day of 10 April was often close to Holy Week. Given the monotony of the speakers, I looked forward to the dancing, piano accordion solos and poetry recitals by middle-aged women for sensory relief. If the venue was the Sydney Town Hall, with its magnificent organ behind the main stage, spooky music insinuated itself, as if I were trapped in a vampire's castle in Transylvania. I also found myself humming ‘Monster Mash' by Bobby ‘Boris' Pickett and the Crypt- Kickers. When I was older, if an event were at the Hordern Pavilion, I tuned out, hoping AC/DC or Skyhooks were out the back tuning up, as the wall posters touted. How could this big barn hosting a dreary talkfest be transformed into a loud and sweaty rock house? At sixteen, English trio The Police put an end to that idle question.

I zoned out because I didn't understand what was being said. At St Joseph's I was bright enough, but dull at Croatian school, especially as I was in a class with Sam and others older than him. They taught proper Croatian there, as my father spoke it. But as I spent more time with Mama and Teta, I absorbed the island dialect, an abomination of Croatian, melded with botched Italian, and a few mangled English words thrown in like stray darts. Being younger made it difficult to get on socially with
the other Croatian kids, who did music and dancing together. I resented school on a Saturday and felt even more of an outsider there than at St Joseph's.

If I was an undercover Croatian at school, I was a full-time, flag-waving, soccer-chanting one at home and at weekends. Croatian church was an ordeal, partly because I hated dressing in the same outfit as Sam. If we were anti-communists, how come we were forced to dress like little comrades in uniform, marching to the same beat? At St Anthony's we attended 10 am Mass. It meant you saw the people who went to 9 am and 11 am as well, as changeovers were tight. Families sat in exactly the same pew every week like they were squatting on a mining tenement. I knew where to look for my cousins. Tata's singing was loud and off-key, as if he were trying to sabotage the hymn. Mama sang sweetly but was drowned out by him. There was no central aisle, so when Communion came, it was a New York City gridlock of men, women and children piling in intently from four directions. Tata was a stickler for an archaic Communion protocol and only received it if he had recently been to confession.

Mass was not a wasted hour because it was my time for reflection and daydreaming, peace therapy for an incessant brain. As I was getting older and the days cramped with play, homework, reading and television, church was a free-your-mind experience. I couldn't understand the sermons because of the formal Croatian register used by the Franciscans, but the familiar rhythm of the call and response of the liturgy was soothing. I'd think about people in the church, like my relatives, startled to see them as if for the first time, wondering what it must be like to be them. I'd stare at the faces of old people and try to imagine their life story.

Questions rushed in. How did you get here? Do you have children? How do you live? Do you have a car or does the person next to you drive you here? How would Baba Luca look if she were sitting here right now, dressed in black and clutching her
rosary beads like in the pictures we had of her at home? I focused on the stained-glass windows and wondered about Mr and Mrs McDonald, for instance, who had donated a pane. There was a foundation stone outside revealing the church was first Congregational, a Protestant group. When did they outgrow the smaller white church next door? Were they kicked out? Will they come back for it? Can you just buy a church from someone else?

Mass spawned more questions than answers. I didn't mind the gentle tug of curiosity. On the opposite side of the church to where we sat I could see an immense window, made up of six smaller stained-glass windows, arranged in a circle. Each window had a single word: Palestine, Gallipoli, Ypres, Bullecourt, Pozieres, Passchendaele. I knew Palestine was in the Holy Land and Gallipoli was about Anzac Day but I couldn't see the connection with the other words. Are all those places in the Bible?

Maybe they were about wars. At Mass I drifted off and made up stories, volumes of them, with me as a superhero doing marvellous deeds. I'd rescue blonde girls as the pillars of St Anthony's came tumbling down. I'd fight off big-nose Murphy's goons from the government when they came to arrest Croatian men who were sitting in church. They would cheer my name. My older cousins, sitting just over there, would be amazed I could fly.

In the final year at St Joseph's, we had more responsibility but did less schoolwork: a fair trade. As the big boys of fourth grade we had chores around the school and tried to keep the peace. A new boy in the grade below had been terrorising the girls and younger kids in a freaky way. He was able to fold back his eyelids – how do you find out this is even possible? He looked like a boy-sized cicada that could eat Belmore, and parts of Lakemba.
The boy cut through the playground like a one man Old Testament plague, leaving half-eaten infant psyches in his wake, only to return in the dark in their night terrors. My solution was a biblical wake-up call.

Otherwise, we spent our days winding down. Friday afternoons turned into long sessions of unsupervised woodwork under trees in the playground. We sawed, sanded and varnished pieces of plywood in the shape of Australia and New South Wales. The girls brought sewing baskets to do intense, good works, making items to be sold at the Mother's Day stall.

My best mates were Anthony, Kevin and David. When school broke up at the end of each term we giddily roamed the playground and chanted, ‘The war is over, the war is over', a thing Kevin picked up from an older brother.

We also spent as much time as possible with an attractive student teacher, who had long, straight hair and a way of treating nine-year-old boys with the deference such worldly blokes deserve.

‘Do you smoke?' Yes.

‘Can we have a puff?' No.

‘What's the
Little Red School Book
? Does it show you how to have sex?'

That last question is from David, who captivated us with intricate, lewd tales featuring his teenage babysitter. He had a pornographic memory. Who cares if the stories were true or not? David told them brilliantly, losing nothing in constant retelling. The erections his stories aroused in me were spectacular, with due allowance for weight and age. Sex and explaining the mysteries of what's down there on a woman were David's specialty. Adding to his authority is the fact his dad is a pharmacist. Like a kid with an eye on taking over his father's business, David had a working knowledge of every sex-related product in the shop. Like the Pill, a wonder drug that allowed women to have sex and not get
pregnant. He knew about frenchies and KY jelly and described how they are used.

I'm well on the road to understanding sex, and life for that matter, because I stayed up late to watch
Number 96
and
The Box
: one was about the lives of residents in a block of flats in Sydney and the other was set around a TV station in Melbourne. From the shows I got a surplus of full-frontal nudity and a solid grounding in things the nuns or my parents never talked about: homosexuality, drug use, swearing, infidelity, relationships and office politics. And, critically, I received a lesson in the pernicious effect of gossip, as practised by hapless busybody Dorrie Evans from flat number three. Mama and Teta Danica watched
Number 96
and saw it for the slapstick, camp and ridiculous soap opera that it was. Dorrie's killjoy instincts perfectly mirrored Teta's natural flair for snuffing out fun. When this was merely hinted at by Tata, on a rare occasion that he was home on a weeknight, it's taken as an affront so severe Danica threatened to move out – hence proving his point.
Number 96
to me was about grown-up stuff happening in a part of the city I had never visited. Can all this be going on in Sydney?

I'm going to miss the girls next year. In our woodwork sessions we tell each other which girls we like, and are keen to hear what the student teacher's take is on the matches. My first choice is a sporty girl called Jane, but because one of the other guys likes her and is more likely to be liked by her, I opt for Paula, the diligent girl I sat next to in kindy. We also started playing chasings with the girls, which often turned into catch and cuddle. This breach of Catholic etiquette will be stamped out soon enough, but for a few weeks girls and boys played Cocky Laura (or Bullrush), a game of elimination where the caught have to become chasers. There's a receding tide of kids running from one side of the playground to the other. Jane was the fastest girl, often the last one running. One time every boy in the grade was chasing
Jane and at the moment of capture, still running, she eased back her arms like a gymnast; the boy who thought he'd caught her was left holding her navy-blue knitted cardigan. Jane evaded us all. On the next run, she was caught by a dozen boys and rumbled, I hope, in good fun.

While we didn't do much new work that year, our teacher Miss Monaghan read to us from Australian novels and
The School Magazine
. There was a book about a bushfire in the Blue Mountains told from the point of view of a boy about our own age. I was mesmerised by the descriptions of the bush – places I had actually been to on day trips with my family – and the boy's perspective. I'd ache for the resumption of the story, read usually in the mornings between the two meal breaks. Fires and floods felt distant from suburbs like ours, even though they were on the news every summer. But Miss was a perfect reader. I'd close my eyes to see trees aflame and feel the smoke and ash seeping into my skin and nostrils.

Our athletics carnival was a highlight of the school year. It was held at a running track overlooking Canterbury racecourse, a couple of suburbs away. There were sprints, high jump and long jump, as well as a march past for points. The walking races were as corrupt as those at the Olympics. If the carnival was on a Wednesday, and you were sick of cheering, you could sit on the benches and watch the midweek horse races at Canterbury, albeit from a great distance.

Tunnel ball, where netball meets gymnastics meets bowling, and the three-legged race for pairs, were girls-only events. There were events for boys that suited me: tug of war and the horse-and-jockey race. In tug of war my yellow colour house had the benefit of several overweight and over-age kids (held back because of poor English) as well as some ultra-competitive rakes. Our gigantic anchor Adrian, in the year below (recently arrived from Lebanon, he was the same age as my brother in sixth class) was
obliged to tie the thick rope around his waist. The other nine in our crew were spread towards the middle, in reverse height order. Rather than staying put as anchor, Adrian was a prime mover truck. We dragged the other teams on their knees and bums, beaten, into the sandpit. A lot of tug, not much war. Superman Adrian would leap two grades in a single bound – from three to six – at the end of the year and grow into a ultra-confident and talented basketballer. Catchphrase: ‘I never miss'.