Whole Wild World (32 page)

‘You've just failed,' says a new examiner. ‘You rolled back and hit the car behind you. Do you want to get in some driving and I'll tell you what you need to work on?'

Sam had left the handbrake off, as he usually did, except on steep hills. I'd got into the habit of putting the clutch down,
changing into first and then starting the engine. A car had parked inches behind us, illegally, in the red No Standing zone. I wasn't aware of the rollback or contact.

I'm too cranky with Sam, no practice run. Fail.

A month later, ultra-confident, I'm an L-plate professor, aware of just how good I am. Check that cockiness. Take it easy, now off we go. This time, I've been too tentative. Too slow! Fail. This saga is grabbing attention at school: world's slowest learner.

A month later – good God, this started in January, and we've slipped past Easter – I'm going for an unofficial school record. I've presumably racked up a thousand column-shift hours, driven from Sydney to London. I'm driving to school each morning while Tata reads the paper in the passenger seat. Not too slow, not too fast either, I say to myself before the test. Be serious, no smile, humble, polite enough.

On my fifth attempt, I pass. Jubilant, it was never in doubt! For the next year, while driving, I'll display a ‘P': for plodder and perseverance.

My father had done his sums, over and over, studied every angle, anticipated problems; so calm and moderate, even in his fancy. A hot Sydney property market was doing its best to take us to the next level of comfort and security. Joso's rule of thumb had been to sell two of the townhouses, covering the land, materials and builder's fees, and keep two. One would be held for rent, the other sold to free up capital for his next project: the house of my parents' dreams.

Years earlier they had become partners with relatives (on my mother's side) in a dilapidated house on Taylor Street in Condell Park, just below Black Charlie's Hill, one of the highest points in Sydney. The house sat on a huge block of land; the idea was
to build home units or townhouses. The plans fell through, so the block was subdivided to build two big new houses; we got the street frontage, our cousins got the battle-axe block. We'd sunk years of maintenance on the ruined weatherboard house – mowing the grass, clearing junk and overgrowth – for virtually no return. The stench alone left you high, in a sick way.

If I could slip out of the overlord's sight, I liked sorting through the debris of tenants past: tools, car parts, magazines (not the ones I'd usually see: tattoos, tits, motorbikes) and vintage clothes. No single family would have such a span of stuff, from broken high chairs for infants to medications for ailments I imagined were for people close to death.

I'd heard bikies once lived here. There was a huge pantry, a great hiding spot for kids or a place bad dudes stashed cash and drugs. My imagination ran free with tales of police being called after parties got out of hand, Harleys in the hallway and a head smashed through a wall; an old person who'd been forgotten, dead, their bones found in bed. To me these were semi-real tabloid stories finding their way back to terra firma, not just wild flights of fantasy. Is this ‘news sense'?

At the end of Taylor Street was a nine-acre block, beneath which was the Bankstown Bunker, a secret two-storey building that served the Royal Australian Air Force during World War II. Fearing attack from the Japanese, the military monitored sightings of all aircraft in the eastern area of the Southwest Pacific from this command post, issued air-raid warnings and controlled searchlights.

In the mid-1970s, as we tried to control the trees and weeds on our forlorn patch, a mini housing estate for defence workers was built over this shrine of surveillance and intelligence, integral to the defence of the realm. The editor of the
Bankstown Torch
had rediscovered the bunker a few years earlier, reporting its exact location; soon after, vandals destroyed any chance of us
exploring it. The past and that distant war were buried right here.

Work excursions to Taylor Street soaked up school holidays; stuck out in the sticks for a day, a picnic lunch among the ruins. I moaned about the make-work. I'd toil for cash any day, but this seemed a futile quest. To me, it encapsulated my father's dedication to the Croatian cause: fundraising, committee meetings and protests, but for what? Nothing would ever change in the old country. I was convinced nothing was ever going to happen here, on this sinkhole for council rates and scarce leisure time, a shallow burial ground for evidence on crims and vagrants.

Then one day, it did.

Tata built a four-bedroom, full-brick, double-garage mansion: rock-solid, concrete slabs on both storeys, it could stand a hundred years. Welcome to bunker country. Most of our cousins were leaving older homes in the inner-west and St George district to build new houses nearby or in the expanding suburbs of the southwest around Bankstown and Fairfield. Whenever we visited relatives, the adults spoke constantly about home prices, construction techniques, the cost per thousand of laying bricks, the quality of tradesmen, and most important, the ideal placement of a
konoba
(a wine/moonshine cellar and meat-drying bunker). Having sampled a dozen new houses, Tata declared my cousin Bepo had arrived at the winning spatial formula. With only slight modifications to that design, and again buying Croatian, the new house was now underway.

The fresh foundations also put paid to one of my concealed fears. When I was starting high school Tata said in a matter of fact way if Croatia became independent we would be moving back there: leaving this life behind and starting over. No question. Quietly, I wished freedom would be a train delayed. How could I begin over there when I hadn't had time to finish whatever it was I was doing here? So this house was a threshold moment; there was no going back from a home on this scale. We were digging in.

I was looking forward to having, for the first time, my own bedroom. A bonus would be moving closer to school and my best mates. Wally and Harpo were in Georges Hall, an adjoining suburb of new houses, Pip was in Yagoona near the Hume Highway. Joso would come to regret the house-wide rear balcony that blighted the entrance to the cellar, meaning everyone bar Teta had to duck their heads to enter; the downstairs shower was never used, but cleaned every week, and Mama believed the placement of the wall phone in the kitchen was, in hindsight, a mistake.

But the finish – woodwork, tiling, brickwork, guttering, driveway, paths, fencing – was flawless. Every shade of cream and brown were represented. New trees and a vegetable garden were planted, as well as a Hills Hoist. All who came to visit Joso and Milenka's new home said it was superb.

Tata made it happen. He bought a lawnmower, wheelbarrow, ladders and winemaking paraphernalia to keep us busy. A lifetime of collecting Croatian folk artefacts and Teta's ancient glory box would still not yield the supply of doilies that would adequately protect the sheen on this palace.

‘
Bože moj
! My God. Just cleaning this house is going to be the death of me,' Mama will say to Tata even before we moved in.

‘Boys, no shoes on the carpet!' is the sum of his help.

‘
Ajme meni
. Oh me, Oh my!' she'll say. ‘As soon as I finish cleaning, I'll have to start again. Dušević, you're going to have to help me. It was you, not me, who wanted such a big house to show off.'

‘I will help you darling,' he'll reply. ‘I'll sleep a bit extra for you in the afternoons.'

My father often changed his address but never his lines.

15

Freestyle

Like a proto screensaver, a world map is laminated into my bedroom desk. I count time zones, left to right. Jaundiced and obese, the ailing USSR is etherised upon a table, its chilly eastern extremity a baby step from Alaska and the might of Reagan's USA. I'm visualising geopolitics, channelling T.S. Eliot, getting ready to do maths, first subject among equals.

It's 1981, my final year of school and I've abandoned studying in front of the TV, given I can get it all done before the 6 pm news. That's the beauty of Benilde's restricted trading hours and sawn-off extracurricula. To loosen a tight jaw, some Bazooka gum. Debbie Harry caresses me through calculus with the soft reggae of the ‘Tide is High' and, to enhance focus, I raise the pulse with her motor-mouthed montage in ‘Rapture'. High-fidelity homework.

I'm tracking well in English, maths and economics, but there's a trail of debris behind me. In a cavalier move, I'd ditched modern history at the first sign of footnotes in Year Eleven. Towards the end of the year, dropping chemistry was cold-blooded. (Report card: ‘Tom did not attend the final examination'.) I was losing momentum in physics and came to a stop at the end of first term.

In English we were studying texts by long-dead writers or about distant places.
Sons and Lovers
was melodramatic and obtuse. Hormones ablaze, we were hungry for action
and the direct route to the prize. Paul Morel and his mum! Patrick White's
Tree of Man
, about a dreary, mythic Australia, was out of reach as well. Eliot's poetry, so beautifully crafted, was itself a mindscape of misery: blokes who were past it and impotent in smelly London. The confessional American poet Robert Lowell, mercifully more recent, may have been depressing but his imagery was immediate and haunting: Murder Inc. killers, mental illness, making out in cars, resilient skunks.

I'd latched on to economics because it was dominating the news. The budget, an inquiry into financial deregulation, a wages explosion and the mining boom were the essence of our studies and the main battles in politics. The theory explained the cost of life's necessities, why taxes or interest rates were being raised and why jobs were scarce. In essays we offered advice to treasurer John Howard and the Reserve Bank. Why did we bother? Why did
they
bother? Imperious Malcolm Fraser had won his third election but wasn't a man of action, unlike our economics teacher Mr Ireland, a black belt in martial arts, or union boss Bob Hawke, who'd just entered federal politics.

Perhaps because it was loosely defined, I was especially keen on general studies, a subject about society and culture. Mrs Young once asked us to think about which class we belonged to.

‘Raise your hand if you are working class.'

Hands went up, emphatically, bar two. The great split: the ALP herd and a couple of stray, mongrel Croatians, probably DLP groupers.

‘Middle class?'

Željko raised his hand. Like most Croatians we knew, his parents voted Liberal. But I'm not putting up my hand.

‘Tom?'

‘My dad's retired, so technically not working, but he's busy building a house. Is there anything other than middle?'

‘Upper?'

‘More like uppayaself, Luigi!' said one of the delegates from the Bankstown Right.

Drawing on fact memory, personal beliefs and what was reported in the newspapers you could simply improvise the entire time in general studies.

‘What larks, Pip!' as Joe Gargery put it in
Great Expectations
, a novel we studied the previous year.

If only there were a career in such a lark. Advanced maths had become esoteric, remote even from the verities of physics, equations floating off the page, numbers and letters bursting into particles. My Easter report was solid, except for maths, where I'd blown the exam by getting bogged down in a difficult equation – pure pride – and not leaving myself time for easier ones. Numbers wizard Lehane, son of a professor, said the difference between boys and girls in maths is that faced with a vexing question, boys will say the question is too hard, girls will think they are not smart enough. I didn't fit in either camp.

Doing Croatian on Saturdays meant I was down to a light burden at school, a case of Mediterranean backsliding. I had more free periods than anyone else; when the timetable moved into certain, fortuitous phases I wouldn't be required at school until morning tea or I'd be finished an hour before lunch. I'd do essays last-minute, no panic, giving every deadline an even chance. In the library I spent my ‘frees' in the study cubicles distracting Nazareth girls and absorbing the
National Times
, the
Bulletin
, the
Australian Financial Review
and the
Australian
, figuring this was building my storehouse of facts, learning ‘news sense'.

I was noticing bylines, developing a taste for writers who showed flair in features and opinion-writing. I felt they were reaching out, writing for me. In the
National Times
, I'd search out Elisabeth Wynhausen's zesty dispatches from America, still the Promised Land, that vibrant place vast and menacing, encompassing all creation. Although I didn't appreciate all the nuances
in Craig McGregor's profiles, I understood he was trying to inhabit his subjects and play with the form itself. In the
Herald
, which I bought every morning, I was on the hunt for human-interest stories by Lenore Nicklin and Tony Stephens, and the crabby cricket analysis of Bill O'Reilly, who scorned Kerry Packer's pantomimes in pyjamas.