The War Within

By Don Tate

...a memoir that is at once dramatic, disturbing, sexually charged, and often very funny, but ultimately a moving portrait of a man who has found the inner strength to overcome.... - Paul Ham, international journalist and author

This is a complex, virtuoso analysis of an Australian life written by an unabashed and unrepentant authoran acidic dissection of the role that genes and environment have in developing a persons character, as well as a sauntering chronicle of social analysis.

In turn, we follow the life of the author as he comes to terms with being a disaffected youth, a patriotic but naive infantryman in the Vietnam War, and an alienated, disabled veteran struggling with male status anxietyapparently inexhaustible in its capacity to cause suffering. Along the way, Tate examines the dark crevices of the male psyche as he battles inner demons and the unconditional love of his beautiful Christian wife, Carole.

Above all, this memoir is a celebration of the human condition and of a man with a can-do, cavalier attitude to life and his desire to rise above mediocrity.

An outstanding contribution to Australias rich heritage of memoir.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781475920406

Don Tate

Don Tate is an award-winning author and illustrator of many books for children, including The Cart That Carried Martin by Eve Bunting, Whoosh! Lonnie Johnson's Super-Soaking Stream of Inventions by Chris Barton, and Poet: The Remarkable Story of George Moses Horton, which he also wrote. He lives in Austin, Texas. Visit him online at dontate.com and on Twitter @Devas_T.

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Copyright © 2008, 2012 by Don Tate.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-2040-6 (ebk)

iUniverse rev. date: 05/11/2012

Contents

Dedication:

Epigraph

Acknowledgments

FOREWORD

PART ONE

SINS OF THE FATHER

CHAPTER 1

The nut house

CHAPTER 2

The ‘Blunda’

CHAPTER 3

The crocodile coast

CHAPTER 4

The fire

CHAPTER 5

The monsters

CHAPTER 6

The watermelon days

CHAPTER 7

The Viking blood

CHAPTER 8

The ‘gang’

CHAPTER 9

The ‘bodgies’

CHAPTER 10

The jailbird

CHAPTER 11

The orphan

CHAPTER 12

The blue ribbon

CHAPTER 13

The supernatural

CHAPTER 14

The stirrings

CHAPTER 15

The neighbors

CHAPTER 16

The Waltons’ man

CHAPTER 17

The merry-go-round

CHAPTER 18

The slut

CHAPTER 19

The divine hand

CHAPTER 20

The archives

CHAPTER 21

The tapeworm

CHAPTER 22

The chrysalis

CHAPTER 23

The end of days

PART TWO

THE BUSINESS OF WAR

CHAPTER 24

The recruit

CHAPTER 25

The screw-up

CHAPTER 26

The Cross

CHAPTER 27

The nurse

CHAPTER 28

The bouncer

CHAPTER 29

The intruders

CHAPTER 30

The real deal

CHAPTER 31

The retribution

CHAPTER 32

The breaking-in

CHAPTER 33

The ‘evil-speaker’

CHAPTER 34

The confession

CHAPTER 35

The curse

CHAPTER 36

The snake pit

CHAPTER 37

The orphan platoon

CHAPTER 38

The murderer

CHAPTER 39

The listening post

CHAPTER 40

The ‘death battalion’

CHAPTER 41

The genuine hero

CHAPTER 42

The new world

PART THREE

THE MEASURE OF A MAN

CHAPTER 43

The second-class man

CHAPTER 44

The death of ideals

CHAPTER 45

The twilight world

CHAPTER 46

The dead ends

CHAPTER 47

The white light

CHAPTER 48

The plaster prison

CHAPTER 49

The sword

CHAPTER 50

The death

CHAPTER 51

The nowhere man

CHAPTER 52

The evangelist

CHAPTER 53

The sows’ ears

CHAPTER 54

The hornet’s nest

CHAPTER 55

The survivor

CHAPTER 56

The gunslingers

CHAPTER 57

The ghosts

CHAPTER 58

The war without

CHAPTER 59

The betrayal

CHAPTER 60

The grand design

CHAPTER 61

The sovereignty of God

CHAPTER 62

The darkness

CHAPTER 63

The barking dogs

CHAPTER 64

The analysis

CHAPTER 65

The loose ends

EPILOGUE

The AUDIO VERSION

Dedication:

To my wife, Carole, who gave me her hand, and her heart.

For my children, Paul, Joanne, Lisa, Brad and Laura.

And for my grandchildren—

Lauren, Jake, Jessie, Jordan, Madison,

Elliot, Georgia, Oliver, Emmason, Hannah, Theodore

. . . and those to come

Epigraph

I will not cease from mental fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand . . .

From ‘Jerusalem’, William Blake, 1757-1827

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the veterans of the Vietnam War, especially those who fought the enemy, and in particular: George Mansford AO; Neil Weekes AM MC; James B. Riddle; Andrew Ochiltree MM; Ian Morrison; Garry Heskett; Bill Dobell; Bernie McGurgan; Barry Corse; Tony White; Ben Morris; Kevin Bovill; Mick Davidson; Peter Bunn; Brian Vickery; Garry Winchester; and Brian Holborow; and to thank the following for their friendship over many years: Glen Graham; Noel Harding; Allan Parrott; and Kevin Skippen; and the following people: Jacqui Cope, who got me to think; Susannah Tobin, who got me to talk; Deanne Hinder-Hawkins, who got me to write; and Sarah Baker, my editor and dear friend, for her patience, skill, and the respect she gave me on this major undertaking.

FOREWORD

By Jacqueline Cope, Clinical Psychologist, Wollongong

During the years of the Vietnam War, I was a child growing up in peacetime. I can remember the coverage of the peace marches on television, and my mother talking about whether my brothers would be conscripted one day. But we were children, newly arrived in the ‘Lucky Country’ and we were enjoying the sunshine.

I knew little about the Vietnam War, or its impact on veterans and their families, until 1992, when I met Don Tate—a veteran who had been referred to me after he had been violently assaulted whilst teaching.

Many people who have met Don have been left with the impression of a bitter and angry man filled with hate for a community that has continued to judge and reject him. But few would see that he is a man fighting for the recognition of countless injustices while searching for peace within.

Don has put the pieces of his story down in writing in the hope that others could understand his bitterness and rage. However, I have observed that his writing has allowed him to come to understand himself, and as such, his story portrays his own healing journey. Many other veterans identify with Don’s story.

It is the story of men who were trained to fight in an undeclared war, for a cause more politically expedient than anything else, for a country that made them feel ashamed of what they experienced as a consequence. Worse still, they were not taught the skills of how to stop being warriors when they came home. For over half their lives, they have remained alone in a psychological war zone, ever alert for the next tragedy to unfold, and trusting nobody.

As a naïve young man, Don sacrificed his innocence, his youth, his career, and his health for his country. People said it served him right because Australia should never have fought in the Vietnam War. The nation knew little about the political hypocrisy that had taken place, even less about the lasting effects of traumatic war experiences, and nothing about the long-term consequences of exposure to toxic chemicals.

Nobody said thank you.

Last month, my own father received a service medal for his active service in Kenya as a conscripted soldier, forty years ago. Nobody shook his hand or pinned the medal to his chest. It arrived in the mail in a little white box.

I am profoundly grateful to Don for sharing his story with me because although my father looked embarrassed when he showed the medal to me, I thought my heart would burst with pride and respect for him.

Every veteran has a story to tell. The rest of us cannot heal their pain, but we can listen.

For me, listening to Don’s story has been a privilege.

PART ONE

SINS OF THE FATHER

part one.jpg

My father, William Harry Tate (1925-1975)

CHAPTER 1

The nut house

Trust me, I’m no philosopher.

But in my fiftieth year, I had cause to seriously reflect on my life. I’d reached a point where there’s not a lot of light, or fight, left in a man. The darkness that followed me home from Vietnam had engulfed me completely.

I realised it one morning when I stared into a mirror and didn’t recognise the man looking back at me. His face was unshaven; his skin lined and old, marked with scars that ran across his chin and down his throat; his eyebrows raised from stitching; his nose broken.

But it was in his tired, sunken eyes that deeper scars were revealed. There was sadness there. A hint of despair. And if you looked closely enough, looked deep into those eyes, you would have seen a rage there too, bubbling under the surface—just one of the demons I’d brought home with me from the war.

Standing there that morning, while the rest of the hospital ward began to rouse, I found it difficult to hold back the tears. But this time, I did.

Crying openly wasn’t something I made a habit of. Not as a kid, and never afterwards. Not even after the war, when I had a damn sight more to cry about. It wasn’t in me, or if it had been, it’d been knocked out well and truly by my father.

‘No man cries,’ my father had said, back at Ellen Grove when I was a boy. ‘And no son of mine had better start.’

As he saw it, a man’s toughness was defined by his ability to fight. Everything else was peripheral to being able to throw a punch, and take one. So he taught me and my brothers how to fight as soon as we could make a fist.

‘A man’s gotta be tough to get through this life,’ he’d say, jabbing at our faces with a closed fist. ‘If he ain’t, he’ll get eaten alive.’

Only my father was a loser, so he wasn’t the best man to teach us about life. The trouble was, the boys in our family didn’t know that then. We accepted everything he said as gold.

I reckon he would have disowned me if he’d seen where I’d ended up. He’d have judged me weak, and that man couldn’t abide weakness in anyone. In fact, if he’d still been around, he’d probably have given me a good clout round the ears for it. But he’d given up the ghost many years before, not long after I’d come home from the war, and I thought he was as weak as piss when he did, just quietly.

He gave up without a whimper.

At least he hadn’t ended up in a nut house though, like I did. It bothered me something awful that I had. Disappointed me too.

I wasn’t even sure why I’d ended up there. I tried thinking it through for a few days when I was first admitted, but I was in no fit state to make sense of anything. At first I thought it might have been the ultimate consequence of having served in Vietnam as an infantryman, having seen the vicious underbelly of man at close quarters, because it had weighed heavily on me at times. But the damage from that war ran much deeper. Then, I thought, perhaps it was the ‘thrill stabbing’ on a main street in Brisbane back in 1999 when I copped a couple of stab wounds to the back that had finally brought me undone. It was a more likely excuse, being the most recent in a litany of unfortunate events that stretched back over forty years. There had been bashings with fists and timber, and even a steel bar on one occasion, but I quickly dismissed them too.

The truth was, there were many reasons why I’d ended up where I had, and had become the man I was, and there was such complexity in the mix, it made my head spin to even think about them.

Mind you, maybe I was just my father’s son, but I was reluctant to go there, simply because, for my entire life, I had never been able to work out exactly what he meant to me, or even how I felt about him. Not as a boy, or a teenager, and certainly not as a man. I veered between loving him and loathing him. What he said and did had such an impact on my life that I could never reconcile his effect on me, either at the time, or years later.

So a greyness prevailed. And in itself, that greyness was enough to contend with.

Whatever the reasons for my being in hospital, it was time I ‘worked through’ those things that troubled me, according to Bernadette Connor, the chief psychologist. Time to question, evaluate and make sense of all that had gone down.

It sounded like hard work to me, and I was already tired. Tired of life. Tired of fighting. So I wasn’t all that forthcoming, at first. And I didn’t even know where to start.

I suppose the anger that raged within me might have been the best place, but I wasn’t about to volunteer anything like that as an excuse, up front. Anyway, I mostly kept the anger hidden, and under control. Though even doing that was a real battle.

Like having to sit in a circle at ‘group therapy’ with a dozen others and talk about what ailed me. Nothing made me angrier than having to listen to other people’s baggage. I had enough of my own to carry. Moreover, most of them weren’t legit. I thought they were just playing up their chances for compensation and pensions. I didn’t have a lot of empathy left in me. Some said I’d become a bitter old man.

But I didn’t think I should add to their problems by airing my own dirty laundry in front of them. Sometimes, in other places, I’d seen men visibly wilt when I told them bits of my story.

That’s not to say there weren’t some interesting characters in the group, with interesting stories to share. There were some coppers who’d seen some harsh things, like murdered babies. There was a woman who’d been raped a few times, and was sullen and silent, shunning any males who sat near her, which most of them tried to do because she was the only woman in the group, and ‘still worth half a chance’, some of the hard-up blokes reckoned. There was a male nurse from a psychiatric hospital who’d been stabbed in the hand by a ‘scissor-wielding madwoman’ apparently, and he shivered and shook whenever doctors were around, and maintained he always had to sit near a door. I thought he must be after a large compensation payout, because the shivers and shakes seemed to go away as soon as the group therapy sessions ended and we hit the poolroom. There were a couple of prison guards as well. They’d been threatened with rape by some tough long-timers, who promised them and their families a shot in the mouth before killing them—and they weren’t talking about guns. And then there were veterans, like me, of the Vietnam War—soldiers mostly, but also an airman and a couple of bullshitting sailors.

No one had time for the sailors. Except for drinking poisoned water, and having a few rockets fired at them once or twice, most agreed they’d had a soft cop in Vietnam, and had nothing to whinge about, all things considered.

But what did I know.

Some of us were sailing a lot closer to the wind than others. I’d been sailing so close to it I’d almost overturned the boat. Not that any of them knew that. Mostly I sat quietly, and kept my thoughts to myself. But that’s not what they wanted.

‘Mr Tate,’ said Bernadette Connor, ‘you must contribute. The group dynamic depends on everyone participating.’

‘I’ll participate when I want,’ was all I said.

No one ever made me do anything I didn’t want to. Certainly not a woman. And spilling the beans in front of a good sort wasn’t my cup of tea. No, sir. Not good form, in any respect. There are unwritten laws about women; only men know them.

When it came to women, I was a lot like my father in that respect.

Bernadette Connor made notes and said she’d speak to me later, privately. ‘This is not a holiday home,’ she added, like I thought it must be.

I nodded. I got her drift. I’d play along. Even in a cuckoo’s nest, you have to abide by some rules.

I must say, not everyone in there wanted to admit that they were in a nut house. But that’s what it was—fruitcake palace. Even the most deluded inmate should’ve worked that out. The biggest clue should have been the doors shutting tight at midnight. Everyone had to be tucked away in bed and counted by pussy orderlies, who shone torches at us through the door.

It was the ‘Post Traumatic Ward’, thank you very much, as those in authority round the place would tell you in sober tones. But it was really just a smokescreen, because most of the inmates were either partly round the twist, or all the way there, and most of them knew it, deep down. They knew it in the night when their bravado dissipated in the darkness, and when their dreams and memories and fears came up for air.

Tears ran freely then, when a man thought no one else could see.

Mind you, when you went into the place, the rusted sign above the main gates didn’t give anything away: ‘St Matthew of God Hospital’, it simply announced, astride a narrow road branching off the highway. The road snaked along a grassy spur in the hilly countryside, flanked on both sides by grey-white ghost gums, standing tall like soldierly statues.

When I went down that road the first time, I allowed myself a wry smile when I noticed the trees. I almost saluted them. They reminded me of the way old soldiers line up outside a church to honour the passing of one of their own. Silent, solemn, gnarled and twisted—giants in one sense, but largely ignored, diminished by a world that couldn’t understand what war really did to a man. Especially a war like Vietnam, because it damaged a man in so many ways.

If I was pressed, I’d have blamed the war completely for where I ended up. Enough went down in that place to drive any man nuts, but just to blame the war would have been the easy way out.

No, as I said, the reasons went much deeper.

It hit me that morning, staring into that mirror, that the war had been only one aspect of my life. There were plenty of other factors that had taken their toll, and I needed to sort through them. That’s why I was there. After all, I had nothing better to do.

Eventually, Bernadette Connor did get me talking. It wasn’t easy at first, but she persevered. I hadn’t meant to tell her all of it when I first got started, but she was a good sort, like I said, and good sorts were a weakness of mine. So I got conned.

She was soft of face, with dark, luxurious hair that hinted at a touch of Spanish blood, and she was generously curved in the way that catches men’s eyes. Certainly hadn’t passed her use-by date, that’s for sure. What’s more, she seemed to have an inherent confidence that comes with knowing she could take her pick of men, and had done so, and wasn’t racked by any inner conflicts along those lines. Most importantly, there was a serenity about her, like nothing could unsettle her. And while she had a gentle disposition, and at times was even disarmingly aloof and distant as she listened to my story, you could tell she cared.

That was mighty important.

‘Tell me, Don,’ she said one morning, after I’d sat there for a few minutes, yawning. ‘Why are you here?’

‘You know why,’ I said, avoiding her eyes. ‘Because I tried to kill myself.’

‘No, what I want to know is, why are you really here?’ she asked again, more earnestly. ‘I mean, a man doesn’t do such a thing, and doesn’t end up in a place like this unless there’s a darn good reason for it.’

I looked her in the eye. What did she want me to say? That my old man hadn’t made me tough enough? That I was weak, after all? That after everything I’d been through, I’d caved in at last? That I was a certified loony toon like half the other bastards round the place?

‘I don’t know,’ was all I could muster. ‘I don’t know.’

She sat forward, her breasts resting against the edge of her desk like she was taking the weight off. I realised I’d better look at her face, in case she thought I was a perv. She had furrows in her brow like she was doing some serious contemplating.

‘Don, you’re going to have to tell me,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to do some digging. See what we can find. There’s healing in words, but you must speak them out.’ She spoke softly, with an embracing smile that threatened to melt some of my hardness.

I just nodded, at first, uninterested. I was inclined to dismiss her words as just another trick to get me talking. They were always trying something in there to get us talking about what ailed us. Some were all too keen to run off at the mouth in those ‘open sessions’, and tell of exploits that justified their behaviour. There were lots of lies told there. Generally, you could tell who was bullshitting and who wasn’t. Some were quiet, and recalcitrant, like they were consumed by inner struggles that strangled their tongues. I found that they were the ones most likely to be genuine nutters, and telling the truth.

I didn’t know where I fitted in, exactly. If I had told them all of it, they’d have cast me in the ‘bullshitters’ category; and if I’d told them only part of it, I’d have gone in the ‘weak as piss’ one. It was always the case. I found I never fitted a mould anyway.

To make matters worse, I wasn’t used to deep thinking, or much of a talker. So I was caught between a rock and a hard place.

Anyway, so much had gone down in those five decades, I really didn’t know where to start, even if I wanted to. Far too much.

But there came a day, when a winter squall lashed a strand of frangipani trees outside Bernadette Connor’s room, that I began to reconcile things. Like bullets in an ambush, I thought, watching the raindrops shatter like crystal against the foliage. And just like that, right there and then, without her using any tricks of the trade to get me started, my mind clicked into gear.

It seemed to be the right time to tell her things.

All sorts of things. About being a boy from a rough environment, about being a soldier who fought in the nation’s most unpopular war, and about what makes a man, and how all those things were intertwined.

Time to tell her of the things I’d seen and done, things that ate away at me at night, and consumed my soul. Time to tell her about the demons that pursued me.

I hadn’t meant to tell her all of it, but once I started, it spilled out and overflowed, like a dam had burst within me.

‘I’ve got lots to tell you,’ I said. ‘Lots of stories. But I’d prefer to write them down. I’m not much of a talker. Is that okay?’

‘If that’s easier for you, then put it on paper. I don’t have a problem with that. But start at the beginning, Don,’ she said, gently touching my arm. ‘Start from the first thing that impacted you. Try and explain what’s important about it. Then keep doing it. If I don’t think it’s important, we’ll just skip over it. But I want to know who you are, and where you’ve come from. I want to understand why you’ve become the man you are. Write it down, bit by bit, and we’ll talk it through as we go.’

I thought, fair enough. I had a way with words. Though I had some reservations. ‘I’m a decent man,’ I said. ‘But I’m afraid I’ve done some indecent things. Should I include them?’

She nodded, and shrugged her shoulders. ‘Haven’t we all got things like that to live with?’

I didn’t know what others had. I only knew that mine had weighed me down.

But in time, I did as she asked. I wrote the whole story down, from beginning to end. Tried to make sense of it all as I went. Tried to seduce her too, with the words. Didn’t want her thinking I was like the lifeless Prozac boys in the corridors outside, holding hands, or stumbling round like they were looking for lost coins. After all, you never know your luck in a big city.

Telling the thing, though, even on paper, was like eating an apple when you aren’t concentrating. Sometimes the memories were luscious and sweet on the tongue. At other times they were bitter and rotten like I’d chewed on a worm, and I wanted to spew the whole thing out as quick as I could.

Sometimes, I think I wrote about things a woman has no right to hear.

CHAPTER 2

The ‘Blunda’

Me and my brother Graham are running blindly through the bush, panic-stricken. I’m in front; he’s behind.

Graham’s wailing. I’m not.

Every little while, I check behind me to make sure he’s still with me.

Tree branches lash our faces. Our feet are cut from the blady grass and stones and tree roots. There’s blood. The whole world is rose-red—sweat and tears, intermingling.

Graham’s got more blood on him than me.

I don’t know why we’re running, and I don’t know where I’m running to. It’s lost in time, lost in the darkness of memory. There’s a madness about it, that’s all I remember. And the terror of being lost in the bush that stays with me.

Perhaps that’s why I cling to Carole, today—my wife of more than forty years, all these years on. Assurance. Comfort. Safety, even.

But back then, back when I was that little boy, all I sensed was the danger behind me, back amongst the scraggly shrub and paper-bark trees. And safety ahead of us, somewhere through that bush—my mother’s arms.

I don’t know how long we ran, either. Hours? I don’t think so. Perhaps half an hour. It matters not.

Then, comes the sound of cars. A road? There’s a sense of euphoria.

I veer towards it. Graham follows, and his wailing gets even louder like he can really let loose, now that we’re almost safe.

Suddenly, in the twilight, I run into a three-strand barbed wire fence linking star pickets, and it flings me backwards tearing my shirt and cutting my chest. More blood. I scramble to my feet, and see houses across the road. They are Housing Commission homes, plain and simple.

Suddenly, I know where we are.

‘It’s all right Graham,’ I yell. ‘It’s all right. We’re home now. I can see our house.’

And there it was all right, a few hundred metres up the main road linking Serviceton to Oxley, on the corner of Crocus Street—our home. And in front of it, staring up and down the street, our mother.

You could see she was agitated. Head going backwards and forwards, the hands restlessly wringing a tea towel or apron.

We run to her.

Her arms open, and enclose both of us. There’s some comforting, and tears, too, from her, raining down on us. We stay like that for a short while, before her anger comes to the boil.

‘What’s happened?’ she screams, seeing the blood on my front. ‘Where’s Uncle Joe?’ she yells at us. ‘Why isn’t he with you? Where have you been? Why are you running?’

So many questions.

I had no answers.

All I knew was, Uncle Joe had taken us for a walk through the bush looking for the ‘Blunda’—reportedly, a wonderful billabong somewhere out in the endless acres of virgin bush that stretched from Inala to Oxley on the outskirts of Brisbane, back in the 50’s.

From all reports, it was a wondrous place, that ‘Blunda’. Not that any of us local boys had ever seen it, but there’d been rumours that some bold adventurers from down Darra way had stumbled across it one time, and spread the word about it. Only thing was, they weren’t able to remember exactly where they’d seen it. They’d spoken of a tranquil place where beautiful large-leaved lilies and other extravagant flowers floated on crystal-clear waters the likes of which us boys from Inala could only imagine and wonder at.

The ‘Blunda’ was the Mandalay of our lives—as far from the dreariness of suburban Brisbane as could be. And more importantly, it was a secret, still. A mystery.

Finding it, and experiencing it, was our holy grail.

I can’t recall if we ever did get to see the ‘Blunda’ that day, though I have images in my mind of some strange, exotic place just like that, so we might have. It’s the smallest of memories, a fragment, buried a long way down in the darkness. I see the smooth, clear water, and the lily-ponds, and the reflection of tallowwoods and grey-gums along its edges mingling with a dying afternoon sun.

But that’s all. It may even have come from some other place at some other time and is confused in my mind. The mind does some strange things like that—a disorder of time and people and geography that rattles around in the deep recesses of the grey matter.

I have no recollection of anything more about that day. Nothing at all, save for that terrified scramble through the scraggly bush of Inala. Perhaps it’s just as well.

I know it was the last we ever saw of Uncle Joe, which was probably a good thing.

My parents had given him a room for a short while he got his life ‘in order’ as my mother called it, a decision she had objected to strenuously.

‘Billy, he’s not a good influence,’ she’d said to my father. ‘Don’t you remember the time he dropped his pants on that bus stop when we were younger and did his business near that telegraph pole in front of everybody? No paper, no shame. Then pulled his pants up and just left it there like some dog had done it. What sort of man does something like that?’

Her shoulders shivered with the memory.

My father and his brother, Joe weren’t even the closest of brothers. Never had been. In fact, Joe beat the shit out of him religiously when they were boys, and then some more as he moved into tougher ranks within West End, on the outskirts of Brisbane city, not far from the river. He needed to prove himself.

‘Well, no one ever gave me much of a chance,’ my father replied with a rare insight. ‘It might be the only time I can ever do something good for someone myself. You never know what might come of it.’

My mother saw through the falseness. The real reason he had shown Joe any kindness, she thought, was that my father had vague notions that he’d be rewarded for it, somewhere along the line. Not that he’d ever expressed such a notion.

She knew what made him tick, though.

Anyway, whatever the reason, it hadn’t been a good move, with Joe taking up space around the house, and making a lot of drunken noise that came with the ‘long necks’ he swigged and stacked up against the outside wall in glass pyramids.

Uncle Joe moved out that very same night well before my father arrived home from his job at a wire mill in Archerfield, and there’d been something of a screaming match in the house when he did.

I don’t know what was going down. I wasn’t yet eight years old.

There was rage in my mother’s voice.

‘You’d better be gone by the time Bill comes home,’ she’d screeched at Uncle Joe, throwing his belongings in a pile in the hallway at the doorway to the room he was staying in.

‘I’m not scared of Bill,’ Joe sneered back.

‘This time, you should be,’ she screamed back at him, and went to strike him across the face, herself.

He grabbed her arm.

‘Don’t ever hit me, Gladys!’ he said in a threatening tone, his eyes glowing black, and his lips snarling like an Alsatian. ‘Don’t ever raise an arm to me. Ever!’

My mother had backed down then.

‘You’re an evil man, Joe,’ she said. ‘Get out of my house. I don’t ever want you in my house again.’

Then he’d left with a solitary suitcase, eventually, slowly and deliberately, and she watched him like a hawk every inch of the way until he’d gone down that long flight of steps and out into the night air.

He looked back at her just the once, and flourished his hat to her like it was a compliment.

My mother huffed, and glared.

She kept to her word. It was the last time I ever saw him.

Probably just as well.

As for the ‘Blunda’—I don’t know if we ever got to see it. We found pockets of water, similar, but they were a letdown. Maybe the ‘Blunda’ was always a fantasy, a haven, an ideal. Some sort of utopia.

It had been a destination to aim for in life, if nothing else.

When I was not yet eight years old, a mate of mine, Jeffrey Senescall, bought my new bicycle, because we were moving away to North Queensland. I was real proud of that bike. He got it for three shillings, a steal. I was sorry to lose the bicycle because I had only owned it for about three weeks.

Dad had had a good win at the Rocklea trots, and our cups overflowed. It was the only present I ever received as a kid, and meant a lot to me.

But I didn’t mind that Senescall got it, because he and I had shared a small adventure only a couple of weeks earlier, and I thought he might as well have it as anyone else, on account of that.

Senescall was a much bigger boy than me, and about three years older too, I guess. He lived over the road from us, and since there were only a few boys who lived in Crocus Street in those days, we got on okay.

He and I had gone down to a creek at the bottom of the main road that linked Inala to the largely undeveloped suburb of Serviceton. It was a favorite swimming area for a lot of boys in the area, and we swum naked and unashamed down there, swinging from ropes slung over overhanging willow branches into the deeper, black-green water of the lagoon, lush with its blanket of wide-leaved water-lilies and pink flowers.

We liked to think it was our own ‘Blunda’, or perhaps even the real one.

A teenage girl had come walking along a narrow track that wound its way between Inala and some larger farms on the other side of the broad belt of bush land that divided the suburbs. It was a shortcut to the shops.

She was dressed in a floral skirt that looked like a tablecloth from a cheap Italian cafe, and had a scarf to protect her face. She carried a cane basket, and looked liked a peasant might. When she spotted us swimming naked, she stopped and stared for a few moments in interest. We jumped up and down a lot in the water and splashed water and generally showed off, letting her have a good look at our dangly bits.

I was too young to appreciate the eroticism of it, and was just following Senescall’s lead to be honest, but it seemed a bit rude, and the appropriate thing to do at the time. I was at ease with it.

Senescall though, wasn’t one to pass up an opportunity. While I floated near the edge of the creek holding on to the tree roots of a willow, he walked out of the water right up to her.

‘G’day,’ he said, touching himself as he spoke. ‘What’re you doing?’

‘I’m on my way to the shops,’ she said, her eyes showing some interest in what Senescall was playing with.

‘Want to come for a swim?’

She hesitated, and with good reason. An odd thing was happening to Senescall’s cock. It seemed to be getting a whole lot bigger than it was while he’d been swimming, and I was amazed at the change in it. I wondered if mine was about to change too, but it didn’t appear so.

The girl started shaking her head.

‘No,’ she said, eventually. ‘I don’t think so. I’d better keep going. I’d like to, but . . .’

‘But what?’ cried Senescall, almost pleading with her. ‘It’s too hot to be walking in the bush. Come and have a swim with us. It’ll cool you off. C’mon . . . .’

But she wasn’t going to be in it. She started shaking her head more animatedly, like she thought it mightn’t be a wise thing after all, especially with what was staring her in the face. But she smiled at the same time like she knew she had the whip hand.

Senescall just got angrier.

I couldn’t work out why he was getting so agitated.

He wasn’t one to be rejected though, and his mood changed abruptly when he realised his efforts were in vain.

He began to call her names like ‘whore’ and ‘slut’, and started a torrent of swearing and abuse that I could hardly believe. Seemed like he became an entirely different kid when the girl didn’t do what he wanted.

Nothing more came of it. Senescall kept at her for a long time though, and kept her prisoner by holding her arm, touching himself all the while.

Suddenly, she broke free and bolted, like he’d said or done something even worse than the rest of it, and took off up the track in a gallop, through the bush and out of sight. Senescall gave chase for about ten strides before slumping to his knees. He seemed to calm down very quickly after that, though he was all sweaty and panting like he’d run a mile when he returned to the water.

He slid back into the billabong like he was going to fall asleep.

He calmed down pretty quick after that, I thought, like nothing else mattered. It was a real turnaround.

Afterwards, I thought a lot on what had happened that day.

Seemed like life could be much more interesting if it involved girls.

Life proved to be a hazardous enterprise for my father, and became an adventure for his wife and us as a consequence.

I think now, that he was simply bored, and bored people seek adventure. Though, in my father’s case, the adventures mostly arose out of bad luck, or being caught.

The first time my father got into trouble since he’d been married, that I was aware of at least, was when I was about eight years old, and all I recall of the matter was that it involved rolls of copper wire at the wire mill where he and Uncle Tom worked on Archerfield Road on the way to Darra, and a knock at the door with policemen standing there.

My mother answered the door, and a conversation followed, then she slammed the door, brushed past me and started to cry.

That was the first time my father went away, but it was only for a few months, and I didn’t ask questions, and never saw no harm done.

Then, one day he suddenly turned up at home again, and thumped the table with his fist, and declared, ‘I think we need to move and make a new start.’

It came out of the blue.

My mother didn’t say anything at all. Just looked at him oddly.

She was proud of our housing commission home. It had a front and a back lawn that my other three brothers and I were able to play on, and that was all that mattered to us. My father had built vegetable gardens out the back with tomatoes, lettuce and beetroot planted; and in the front, he’d dug four flower gardens, shaped as a spade, a diamond, a club and a heart, which probably said something about his interests. In those gardens he planted zinnias, marigolds, sunflowers, snapdragons, and azaleas, which flourished under his care because he had a green thumb, as well as light fingers.

But as young as I was, I knew he had a restlessness about him he couldn’t shake. He was always looking elsewhere, looking for someone, looking for an opportunity, or looking over his shoulder. He was a bit like Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett, I thought, who were my heroes. It was like he wanted new horizons, new challenges—or somewhere to run to.

Maybe he was looking for the man he might have been. Or running away from the man he was.

I think my mother had similar thoughts.

‘A new start?’ my mother said aloud, but meant it for herself as we packed some time later. ‘A new life? Maybe a change of heart or a change of character would be the first place to start.’

‘Why are we leaving?’ I asked her.

I was in my third year of school, and save for one solitary day when a female teacher had forced me to sit on the girls’ side of the eating area as a punishment for talking loudly—a humiliation of the worst sort when you’re a boy—I loved school, and was loathe to leave it.

‘Your father thinks he’ll become more responsible up there,’ she replied, rolling her eyes upwards. ‘Maybe he’ll start doing the right thing by us all.’

I sensed that my mother was sorry that we were leaving that home, and I know she was even more sorrowful about it later as the years rolled on, that she had allowed him to snatch that security from her grasp.

But, move we did.

That decision was the start of my first real adventure, and not only changed the direction of our lives dramatically, but set in motion, processes that forever changed me as a person.

Let loose a wildness in me.

CHAPTER 3

The crocodile coast

One of my uncles, Jim, had a house in Holloway’s Beach, about twenty miles north of Cairns, and the plan was, we were to live in it and my father was to help them operate a small post office and corner store. Others might have thought it was akin to putting a fox in a chook run, but not Jim. He thought his brother deserved a second chance in life.

So, not long after being done for stealing the copper wire, my father stormed into our house with a big grin, and threw me in the air with a whoopee at the top of the stairs.

‘We’re off to Cairns,’ he exclaimed, his face ablaze with excitement. ‘Life will be great up there.’

He was the eternal optimist. Everything was always going to be great, he reckoned. Only, it rarely turned out that way.

With little fanfare, he sold off all our furniture in great haste, and the few toys we had as well. That included my bike.

The trip to Cairns took about three days by train in the Sunlander.

My mother spent the whole time keeping me and my brothers from tearing each other to bits, while my father played cards, drank in the eating car, and flirted with other women. I didn’t know he was flirting at the time. I just thought he was very friendly, because he was a friendly sort of bloke. He brought food and drink back to us as it was required, or when the ladies had gone to bed and he got around to it

We arrived late at night in Cairns, and my mother was beside herself from lack of sleep, and seemed mighty testy for reasons beyond me. Uncle Jim was waiting for us at the station, and he and my father met each other warmly. My mother was a little more recalcitrant and hung back, anxious to complete the last leg of the trip out to Holloway’s Beach and getting the trip over and done with.

We piled into the back of an old utility truck, and if my mother despaired at having to travel for another hour in a rattling old ute along a potted, dirt road in the enveloping darkness, she despaired a damn sight more when she opened the door of the house a while later, in absolute darkness, and found it was unfurnished and the floor covered in shit.

She was outraged, and almost fell over backwards, reeling from the smell.

‘Bloody aborigines!’ my Uncle Jim exclaimed, shaking his head ruefully through the door. ‘If a place is left unattended for ten minutes, they break in and shit all over the place.’

‘Then why wasn’t it cleaned before we got here?’ my mother screamed at him. ‘How am I supposed to move in here tonight with five children?’

Uncle Jim looked perplexed.

‘I’m sorry Gladys,’ he droned. ‘It must have happened during the day. Anyway, you’re getting it for half what the rent should be, you know. I’m doing you and Bill a favour. I wasn’t to know they’d done this to it,’ he added, shrugging his shoulders like he was outraged himself at her attitude, and couldn’t see her point.

‘What favour?’ she yelled. ‘I’ve been travelling for three days with five children cooped up in a train, then we get here and find we have another long trip ahead of us, then we find a house with no furniture, no power, and this . . . all over the floor,’ she cried.

I’d never seen her so distraught.

Uncle Jim was really taken aback. As far as he was concerned, he was the good guy. He’d put himself out by offering the house to my parents, and thought he’d given them an opportunity to save some money and perhaps get a real start in life because they hadn’t got too far up to that point, and everyone knew it.

My father had even had to even borrow his elder brother’s suit when he’d gotten married, while my mother’s elder sister, Marge, had paid for most of the wedding. This lack of money was a consequence of my mother’s habit of giving all her earnings away to anyone who needed anything. She was a charitable woman, even when she had little herself.

I guess we looked like a sorry lot to Uncle Jim—five rough-looking kids, a distraught sister-in-law, a brother whom he felt no great love for, and a few battered, tattered suitcases sitting in a pile in his backyard.

‘Well I’m sorry you feel that way,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry about the state of the place. I didn’t know the dirty bastards had got back in again. What do you want to do? Go back to Brisbane? I’ll take you back into town if you want, and you can get a train back tomorrow. It’s no skin off my nose. I was only trying to help out.’

But my father would have none of that.

He’d come this far, and he wasn’t about to quit and run that quick. I think to some extent he felt that in a new part of the country he might yet prove himself. Inside, I think he suspected a decent man was lurking, and all it needed was an opportunity to present itself for that man to shine through. He knew that he was being given a golden chance here. It was time to make a stand.

‘We’ll stay, Gladys,’ he said. ‘I’ll clean it up as best I can. We’re not going back.’

He extended his hand to his brother.

‘Thanks Jim,’ he said. We’ll make it work somehow. I appreciate what you’ve done for us.’

And then, Uncle Jim drove off, and left the seven of us standing there in the middle of the night with our luggage, in front of a house unfit for habitation.

It was a clear night. The sound of the gentle, rustling ocean floated over the mangroves on the crisp tropical air, heavy with the perfume of ripe mango and lantana and sugar cane. Toads jumped to and fro. Mosquitoes swarmed over us.

‘It’ll be all right love,’ my father said to her softly. ‘I’ll make it right.’

He made up beds on the ground, and laid us children and his wife on them, went inside the house with a hose and started to hose the filth out.

Still, it was a day or so before he got it right enough for us to move into, and we slept on the bare floorboards for a week or so after that, till he and his brother got some mattresses and bedding organized.

While all the time, my mother shuddered the whole damn time with the indignation of it, and the unfairness of life, because the post office and grocery store gig never eventuated. Someone else had got the contract, after all. Or maybe the owners that be had thought twice about putting the fox into the coop.

We’d given everything up, and detoured a couple of thousand miles north for nothing.

It was up in Cairns as a boy when I started to go down the wrong track, I reckon. At the least, it was where I wagged school for the first time. I was in Grade Three at Holloway’s Beach State School, and I’d just turned nine.

I had a mate up there for a short while called Ashley Cooper. He’d been named ‘after a famous Queensland tennis player’ he boasted. He talked me into absconding from school for the first time, or ‘waggin’ it’ to be more precise. His parents owned a small aluminium dinghy they used for crabbing and prawning, and he thought we could use it to row up Holloway’s Creek one day, up as far as we could, like explorers.

‘What better day to do it than a school day when there’s not a cloud in the sky?’ Cooper reckoned.

‘Yeah, why not?’ I agreed.

Why not indeed. I’d be in anything if it was exciting. Perhaps the fact that it was wrong also appealed to me, though I didn’t think that deeply about it when I was nine. I just went naturally down that road. I was easily led.

I also went along with it because I was top of my class at that school, and didn’t think I could do much damage to my grades. It was a one-teacher school and it only had about thirty kids in it, in total. I topped the class because I was the only student in Grade Three, so I kicked butt. Cooper, on the other hand, was in last place out of four kids in his Grade Four class, and saw no sense in school whatsoever if he was running last, and preferred a Huckleberry Finn existence to school at every opportunity.

The first time we used that dinghy could’ve been our last.

We rowed backwards and forwards for a little while, until we got the hang of it, and our balance, and then decided to row upstream towards the escarpment that towered over the mangroves and jungle. It was a great adventure we thought, out on the water under a blazing sun that burned through our school shirts, and even more of an adventure being kids and doing it on our own.

Until Cooper told me about the crocodiles, that is.

‘They’re everywhere,’ he told me. ‘But don’t worry about it. They’re freshwater crocodiles. They don’t eat us.’

But I did worry about it, and I made no bones about it.

‘Don’t they attack people?’ I asked.

‘Not usually,’ Cooper replied. ‘These are freshwater ones. They’ve only got little teeth. They chase fish and crabs and things.’

Now, since I’m only young, and I’m new to the area, and I’m in a flimsy dinghy boat in a crocodile-infested river with this rough-looking kid who was almost as brown as an abo and just as dirty and untidy, it struck me that getting the five and six times multiplication tables down pat might have been a wiser thing to be doing right there and then. Because suddenly, everywhere I looked, I could see crocodiles lurking. One or two, at least.

‘They don’t do nothin’ much,’ Cooper explained, sensing my concern. ‘Mostly they just lay along the edges in the mud sunbakin’, and go for a feed every now and then.’

This didn’t allay my sense of unease to any extent at all, and sure enough, I could see them after a while, half in and half out the mangrove swamps along the edge of the creek, mostly covered in black mud like cardboard cut-outs, or floating past us in the water like dead logs.

‘I think we should go back,’ I said. ‘I’ve had enough.’

‘You’re not worried by a few crocs, are ya?’ laughed Cooper. ‘God, where do you come from? Didn’t they have crocs down in Brisbane?’

I told him we didn’t, or at least not where I’d come from, and that I was glad about that, and he thought me being worried about it was a great joke, and was hell bent on showing me how there was nothing to worry about. He started standing up, and slapping the water with an oar to let the crocs know we were out and about in a boat on their turf.

I was holding on to the sides of the boat like grim death, while Cooper had it rocking backward and forwards, and side to side. My gut instinct told me this wasn’t going to end right, and sure enough, it didn’t, because that idiot was so intent on getting a reaction out of me and the crocs, he overturned the boat.

Suddenly, we’re in the water, and let me tell you, those placid crocs didn’t seem as placid any more, and I was sure an eyelid opened here and there with interest. But I was off, swimming for my life, and heading straight for the creek bank. I didn’t know if that was the right course of action, but what I did know was, I wanted some land under my feet if nothing else if a croc got hold of me, and I knew I’d made the right decision when Cooper raced straight past me like I’d stopped dead in the water, and left me in his wake.

But getting to the creek bank was just half the battle. Walking through that thick, stinking, mangrove quicksand, pulling our way along by grabbing the dead limbs of drowned trees was altogether another, and we weren’t talking much. Cooper, for all his earlier bravado, was now in a real sweat, plowing through the knee-deep glue like he was possessed, his head swinging back and forth, looking out for any crocs that mightn’t have been as innocent as he had thought.

Anyway, we made it back safe to the main road, and were in a real sweat, coated in the foul mangrove-mud, and lay there drying off in the sun like geckos, exhausted.

Wasn’t much else in it, but I mention it here because it was also the first time I seriously flirted with the wild side of life, and been aware of the thrill that comes with doing wrong. It made the spirit soar.

I never did get to go a-rowing up that creek again, because the dinghy was sunk, and I never found out how he explained that away to his parents.

But he talked me into waggin’ it another day, off not long after, and I don’t recall the teacher ever even missing us. I got the feeling this was the way of it—the wilder you were, the less you were held to account for it.

This time, we hitchhiked a ride into Cairns, and wandered down to the wharf. We stole a barnacle-encrusted rowing boat from under the pier, and began rowing it between the giant container ships moored to the pylons. The air was thick with adventure, and the sickly-sweet smell of molasses. You couldn’t help but think it was just great to be alive on a day like that, being a boy in a boat with the sun on your back and the ocean beneath you, and not a care in the world.

The local policemen and the port authorities thought differently though, and before we knew it, they were running backwards and forwards along the wharf, stopping every now and then to look through cracks in the timbers, trying to spot us, calling out smart things like, ‘Hoi! Hoi! You, down in the boat. This is the police. Get up here now!’

As if that was going to work. They couldn’t catch us, or do anything about stopping us. We slipped in and out of the rotting wharf posts, and in and around the giant ships, and although it got a bit dicey at times when a ship heaved against one of the giant timber pylons, we came to no harm, and the police gave up pursuing us.

When they stopped looking, we stopped rowing. Cooper thought it wasn’t as much fun as when the police were running all over the wharf trying to catch us. The police probably thought if the silly little bastards want to get themselves crushed by the ships, let them, and they let us be.

Cooper had a lot of fun in him, but I was only at that school for a few months, before my mother decided to take us into Cairns to live. And she didn’t know it then, had no idea what I’d been getting up to, but getting me away from him might have been a good idea.

We lasted about eight months at Holloways Beach before my mother took matters into her own hands.

‘I will not have my children brought up like this,’ my mother screeched at my father one night in a heated argument at the dinner table. It had been brewing a while.

Uncle Jim had provided a table and chairs and a couple of wardrobes and a double bed for the house by then, and we kids had thought everything was rosy.

Actually, we thought it was a paradise.

The house itself wasn’t of interest to us. Of much more interest were the surrounds. There was a dirt track that served as a road along the front of the row of dilapidated houses that ran parallel to the beach, and then swung out through acres of sugar cane. The beach itself was a relatively narrow one. Coconut trees swayed at right angles, prone to lashings by cyclones and storms and tides, and their fruit littered the beach. There was a headland at one end, and a freshwater lake running into it at the other, and the air was rich with the pungent, sweet, sickly smell of mango and frangipani and sugarcane. Tropical birds sung in the patches of rainforest, and far inland, framing the coast, were the age-old mountains of the Great Dividing Range.

We boys ran wild up there on Holloways Beach, and naked, and swam in the murky, lukewarm waters that had crashed over the reef further out, and having dissipated their power, now lapped meekly at the mangrove verge. It was like having a dirt bath when we swam, but the sun was strong, and me and two of my younger brothers, Graham and Neville, swam with the aboriginals and were one with them and their sense of freedom.

Until the abo’s told us one day that there were crocodiles in the seawater as well, that could take off an arm or a leg in a flash. It didn’t bother them too much, but scared the shit out of me on account of the previous matter, and I got to