Whole Wild World (21 page)

Our parents had a troubled relationship with Australians. These ‘kangaroos' were drunks and no-hopers, people who had to rent because they didn't have the discipline to save, bludgers lacking the will to work. Or they were snobs: Queen-loving, wog-hating Poms, or the uppity Irish who had lived in the same street for years but cut you short at the shops and at St Joseph's, or the foremen at work who knew less about the job but told you what to do. My experiences were entirely different; the teachers and parents I knew from school were nothing like that and neither were the kids.

‘I'm Australian,' I'd say, the one-time preschooler's defiance.

‘No, you're not a kangaroo,' Tata said. ‘You're a
Hrvat
. You're always what your parents are. You'll never be seen by Australians as one of them, no matter how nice they seem to be.'

I'd never been to Croatia. I was hopeless at the language. I loved footy and cricket. Even though I was a wog, I pretty much looked like all the other kids. Would my parents have to die before I could claim to be Australian? Maybe when I had kids they would be Australian; I could fall in behind them. I was born here, not trapped in Tito's broken, mixed up, crazy country.

So where did I belong?

In his final year at St John's Sam became school captain. It took me a little by surprise. Not that Sam wasn't the complete leadership package – 16A basketball, eisteddfod finalist, prize-winning scholar, member of the choir and astronomy club, solid school citizen – but because I was caught up in my own campaign to be king. I'd lived in Sam's silhouette and strived to find areas of renown whenever a chance presented itself at school or in the neighbourhood. Sam was too old for the dramas and other kids in Chalmers Street.

At school the expectations on me from teachers were high as he'd been a fine student. But the constant comparison got under my skin. When I'd just started high school, the trim deputy principal, Mick Keeble, Sam's basketball coach, called me out as I was exiting the school gate.

‘Hey, sunshine, fix that tie,' he said, while typically engaged in a conversation with a group of MacKillop girls. ‘You're Sam Dusevic's brother, right?'

‘No, Sir, Sam Dusevic is my brother,' I replied far too confidently. I wasn't completely sure whether I'd made my point or if it were in dispute at all. But I wanted to make my own mark.

Back in the kingdom of Year Eight, we were studying medieval history. A young teacher and footy coach who'd come to the school a year earlier thought the best way to learn was by doing.
We would stage a medieval pageant with the whole year playing roles: nobles, knights, squires, clergy, minstrels, jesters, farmers and peasants. It was to be a multidisciplinary approach in technics (a design and technology course), art, music and history. We made wooden shields and swords, as well as other military paraphernalia, with boys modifying homemade numchucks into dangerous weapons of medieval battle.

At a meeting we were assigned roles to get started on our costumes. Competition was fierce for the part of knight; at the other end of the scale were female roles and peasants, bottom of the social order. I'd figured the way to preselection for King was to volunteer to be a noble and then build a support base. Or be the tallest noble.

It worked. The King would make a speech during the evening and the teachers decided I would make a good fist of it.

St John's had acquired the services of an opera-loving music teacher to run the choir. Mr Connell was determined for singing to be the centrepiece of the pageant, a concert in fact, with medieval bits as ornamentation. His standards were as impossible to reach as we were to corral. In class, Mr Connell would play scratchy records of Enrico Caruso as Canio in
Pagliacci
. He'd close his eyes and let the music take him to a better place than this school of oafs in Lakemba.

In the extravaganza Mr Connell would play a priest. At one point Fraser Paul, a peasant, would say: ‘Hey father, sing us a song. You used to sing in the opera.'

After some theatrical reluctance, the music teacher launched into song.

Non nobis Domine, non nobis.

Sed nomini tuo da gloriam
.

The fact opera started well after the Middle Ages was neither here nor there in 1977 Lakemba. During the feast there was jousting, sword fights, juggling and dancing. We ate roast
chicken and potatoes from Henny Penny with our hands and drank cordial as if it were wine, mead and ale. Some boys slipped in harder stuff from hip flasks, such was their Method acting and dedication to detail in revelry. The noble women, including the Queen (a short Egyptian boy) danced around the maypole, before a show-stopping number we all sang to celebrate the harvest.

After the pageant, the merriment didn't last long. The King was dead, a series of rebellions involving female teachers followed.

‘You're the worst class in the school,' our home room and technics teacher said during one detention.

He was right, although thirteen-year-old boys had stirrer in their hormones. We called our teacher Tex, who was calm on the surface but fearsome when cornered, and took advantage of his nature – we were attracted to the good and bad versions of him! Tex lacked finesse with the strap, so you were extremely unfortunate to be pinged by him. He couldn't land the blow and would hack the wrist, an extremely painful spot with no padding. It was only natural for kids to pull away as the leather was coming down; some teachers, perhaps taking this as an insult or unable to cope with fluctuating conditions like the wind and fear, overshot the strike zone. The ensuing bruising a few days later was nothing short of stunning, as long as it wasn't on you. Parents, who were generally supportive of corporal punishment – some, like my parents, had paid for it and demanded it – were aghast.

We learned about irony in English but here it was before our eyes: Tex was a technics wiz, a master of woodwork and leatherwork, yet he had poor technique with the strap. Faced with a flogging most of us busily rubbed our hands on the way to the
executioner, to take the sting out of the blow, especially during winter. But with Slasher Tex, one boy, no doubt hamming it up and still in character as a jester in the coming pageant, made a show of rubbing his wrists together. The six-stroke payback for his defiant mocking of Tex was savage.

Strapping technique was a mode of personal expression, a window into the soul. Picking your punisher was vital. There was a South African commerce teacher whose downward stroke was astonishingly quick. Art master Mr Oon, who called us ‘donkeys', was not to be messed with; he flogged hard in the privacy of the art materials room. The science teachers were big, no-nonsense blokes; wiser to do your homework and not muck up in the labs. DLS Brothers evidently majored in punishment at the novitiate. Other than old Brother Basil, a sweet-hearted maths teacher who was forgetful and mumbled, their hand techniques were sound.

The Master of Discipline was a boy-thrashing machine. He stood 6 foot 4 inches, a pitiless mountain of a man, wispy hair at altitude covering a lunar-like summit. Just staring up at him was enough to set me right and make my neck sore. The MoD coached the First XIII league team and had the endurance to get through twice that number of reprobates at the end of a Monday assembly. Not only strap-fit, he had the complete game, varying his stroke for the size of the kid and the offence. He taught religion, without the mystery or majesty we had come to expect given our patent maturity in faith and other matters. Homework was routine, a chapter from the Cathechism, in which the format was fixed: we did a heading, drawing, summary, reflection, and answered questions. There was also a formula for the way it was assigned.

‘
Chapter 15
, in the usual way, 8 Gold,' he'd say at the end of a lesson. ‘Get it?'

‘Got it!'

‘Good.'

Mr Castagnet had demystified the strap for me in Year Five. I did my best to avoid it, going clean for a few years. Strapping was arbitrary and pervasive, built into the culture of the place, but it did not define St John's for me; it was only one element. Given the belt was the law at home, I opted for rewards at school. That underlying brutality did keep order in the place. In a multiracial, disadvantaged school with over six-hundred boys, fights were extremely rare.

Yet those punishments would leave scars on some. As the decades rolled on, boys would become fathers, even teachers. Another MoD, a man who once played in Sam's basketball team, would carry out the mission of his predecessors in probably the only way he knew. Out of the mists of the future, a damaged St John's old boy would emerge to successfully sue the Catholic school system for \2.5 million for permanent damage and emotional trauma seventeen years after a day when he was strapped eight times, thrice in the morning and five in the afternoon.

10

Where eagles dread

Mama was still enslaved to her patented washing ceremony. I was playing basketball and rugby league, the only team sports available at St John's. Dirty clothes were piling up in the laundry.

‘You're killing my hands,' Mama said, once again, so often I'd switched off. ‘Look at them! Why can't you look at them? I've got rheumatism and this is just too much. If you have to play rugger-bee then don't get dirty or find someone else to wash your clothes.'

‘Can't you just throw it all into the machine?'

‘The machine,' she said, contemptuously, the way you might refer to an inferior rival that was getting all the limelight. ‘Rubbish.'

Clothes notwithstanding, rugby league was regarded with disdain by the adults at our place, seen as thuggish compared to the skills required in, say, soccer, basketball, water polo or European handball, sports at which Croatians excelled. True to form, Teta, was most contemptuous of footy, declaring as beast-like the way players packed in for a scrum. She called the code ‘bum sniffing'.

Footy at St John's was a guild, characterised by honour, devotion, ritual sacrifice and military discipline. It should have featured in the medieval pageant. League enjoyed an exalted status due to its storied past at St John's and politics. Detentions could
be escaped because of footy training. Except in rare cases, there was only one team for each age group. At assembly every Monday after lunch we heard a match report from the captain of every team, which always began: ‘On Saturday, we versed …' On Fridays there was a footballer's only newsletter
Where Eagles Dare
, highlighting the previous week's games. The school's elaborate war cry was belted out after footy victories and at combined De La Salle athletics and swimming carnivals. It was tribal, rich in Z and R sounds, similar to the African crowd chants in Kinshasa for Ali at the ‘Rumble in the Jungle.' Who knew where this strange primal scream came from? In full voice it was a guttural explosion:

I subscribed to the Eagles code. The coach of H Grade, the Under-13s, was school principal Brother Luke, a bantam with the energy and charisma of Bob Hawke, who ran the unions at the time. He carried rosary beads and a mammoth key ring with forty keys on it, master of the entire Eagles realm.

My taste for the high-sugar life meant I had loaded on several extra kilos over the summer. Early in the season, as we tried to improve fitness, we warmed up with a mile-long run around the streets encircling St John's – with our shirts off. I came jiggling in at the back of the pack, all baby fat and breathless.

‘Hey Jelly Belly, we can't wait for you all day,' said Brother Luke.

The nickname stuck. His approach to coaching was no different from the way he ran the school: iron discipline, muscular Christianity, idiosyncratic passion. After the team was finalised we went with the Firsts (or Under-15s) on a three-day footy camp to De La Salle Cronulla, where the order had a retreat: a weekend of prayer, tackling practice, specialist coaching and running the sand dunes beyond Wanda beach. We played a game against DLS Caringbah on Friday afternoon, with Brother Luke refereeing and making outrageous calls to frustrate, humble and run us into the ground.

‘Every time we get a penalty,' he instructed Jerry, our best player, ‘I want you to kick it as far as you can into their territory down the middle. And I want the rest of you gentlemen to chase it.'

It was a fruitless, punishing tactic. Caringbah cottoned on to it immediately, passing the ball forward and creeping over the five-metre line in defence, knowing Brother would not penalise them. We tackled ourselves to a standstill, but the blond surfie boys won easily. At least Brother Luke's merciless ‘what doesn't kill you only makes you love each other with the tenderness and trust of gulag prisoners' meant we slept well. We had team meetings about honour and mateship, and pushed our bodies hard, toughening up as if we were in a State of Origin camp. Peter, soon to be ‘Bullfrog', Moore, who ran Canterbury, visited us and spoke about his club's ethos of respect.