Sunshine & Shadow

By Larry Writer

A moving and inspirational Australian story about the power of brotherly love over poverty and circumstance, a tale of playing the hand you've been dealt.

A moving Australian story about the power of brotherly love over poverty and circumstance, a tale of playing the hand you've been dealt. At the age of twenty-one, James Dack found himself alone and responsible for raising his younger brother Stephen when their cherished mother lost her battle with cancer. Long estranged from their abusive father, the pair became homeless and took up residence at the local Police Citizens Youth Club.

Through determination and loyalty to each other - and with the memory of their mother's love as the compass by which they kept their bearings - the brothers survived the often brutal culture of the inner-city public housing estates they had always called home and found their places in the world. James obtained work as a hospital orderly to keep his brother at school, but soon found some influential mentors who led him to becoming one of the most successful and respected figures in Australian real estate today.

Stephen - always battling the alcoholism he shared with his father - became a professional boxer, then a street sweeper to support his studies and eventually a criminal lawyer who earned the loyalty of many. The brothers always remained true to the neighbourhood that shaped them, spending much of their time supporting young people in difficult circumstances. That was until Stephen - wanting most to avoid hurting those who loved him - took the ultimate step to destroy his demons.

In Sunshine & Shadow, James and Stephen tell their remarkable story, with both searing honesty and heartfelt emotion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pier 9
• Release date: Apr 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781742662060

Larry Writer

Larry Writer is a Sydney-based author whose books include Dangerous Games: Australia at the 1936 Nazi Olympics; Razor (adapted into the hit TV series Underbelly: Razor); Never Before, Never Again; Pleasure and Pain (the official biography of Chrissy Amphlett); and Bumper: the life and times of Frank ‘Bumper’ Farrell.

Book preview

[JAMES]

rocking horse years

I was named after my father. He was christened James but he was always known as Jimmy. I came to believe that bearing the same name as my father was a curse. I wanted no part of him, starting with his name. So in my own mind I have never been Jimmy, always James.

I was born on Christmas Day, 1960, at St Margaret’s Hospital in Bourke Street, Darlinghurst, in Sydney’s inner east.

Like many people born on 25 December, I have always felt a bit short-changed at having to share what should be my special day with someone as high profile as Jesus Christ. And instead of getting presents and cards at Christmas and on my birthday, I would get a joint Christmas–birthday gift. When I was young it annoyed me that everyone else got presents on my big day: it should be my presents, my cake, me blowing out candles, everyone singing to me. Even though since I’ve had children I’ve always made their birthdays special, I still dread my own.

The fates also ganged up on me for that other milestone in a young man’s life, my twenty-first birthday. That fell on the Christmas just two months before my mother, Florence Dack, died. Mum was riddled with cancer by then and I knew she would soon be leaving my life, and my sister’s and brother’s. We’d be left to fend for ourselves, and that realisation made me just too sad to think about any coming-of-age celebration.

My first home was a terrace house in Liverpool Street, Darlinghurst, that had been divided up into tiny flats. In 1960, Darlinghurst was far from the fashionable and sought-after location it is today; it was down-at-heel then, with unkempt, falling-down houses, and a lot of street crime and random violence, the perpetrators of which were usually drunk.

There was my mum, my father and me. Our flat, on the first floor of the terrace house, comprised a bedroom with an enclosed balcony. There was a communal kitchen and living room with a TV, and a bathroom that we shared with the other boarders and with the proprietor, Miss Shaw, who lived on the ground floor with her cat and dog, a blue cattle cross named Tuppy. The dunny was out in the backyard and not a lot of fun to visit on bleak and rainy mid-winter nights. The terrace house must have been worth a thousand or so dollars back then. Recently I sold a similar property not far from Miss Shaw’s for $1.5 million.

I suppose we had one of the better flats because we also had our own tiny bathroom, more a closet really, with a gas water heater. It was an ancient contraption. You had to turn on the gas, and then pass a lit match over the outlet from which the gas was hissing out. The gas would explode with a roar into a flame and if you happened to be standing too close you could say goodbye to your eyebrows. I was around two years old when I first became aware of this gas flame and I was sure it would blow the entire terrace to smithereens. It never failed to scare the life out of me when Mum lit it.

I have no memories of watching the communal TV set, probably because I was the only kid and the adults would have been watching the news, Bandstand or the races, which I wouldn’t have been interested in. What I liked was to have Mum read to me, which she found time to do every day, no matter how hard she was working at her job as a cleaner. She would sit by my cot and take me to wonderful imaginary lands, inhabited by fierce dragons and brave knights. I can still see her so vividly today, sitting in a chair beside my bed, holding a Snugglepot and Cuddlepie book with a blue and red cover. When she moved the book, the little bush creatures on the cover would dance about before my sleepy eyes, as if they were alive.

Mum also told me stories about her childhood. She was born and raised in Darlinghurst. One yarn that stuck in my mind was about a night when her family – her mother and father and, as was common in the 1940s, a whole tribe of siblings, maybe nine or ten – was getting ready for dinner. It was a special night because hamburgers were on the menu. One of Mum’s brothers became so excited at the prospect that he took off his belt and swung it wildly around in the air like a cowboy twirling his lariat. Unfortunately, the flying belt struck the naked light bulb in the kitchen, shattering it, and glass particles sprayed everywhere, including into the hamburger mince. There would be no burgers that night.

One day a small television set turned up in our flat in Liverpool Street. I don’t know how it got there. I’m pretty sure neither my mother nor my father, a wharfie at that stage, could afford such a luxury. I seem to recall that instead of watching the new television, I preferred to sit on my own and think or play make-believe games. Well, not exactly on my own. My constant companion was Yogi, a bedraggled teddy bear which I carted everywhere around the flat or when Mum took me out to the shops or to an aunt or uncle’s house. Whenever Mum washed Yogi in the laundry tub and hung him out to dry I would climb up on a stool and rescue him from the clothesline in the backyard and he’d soon become filthy again. Yogi was my little mate, and I came to depend on his friendship because I was often alone. Mum was busy doing housework or off cleaning an office or hospital ward. My father disappeared for days on end, drinking himself into a stupor. Even though I was only a toddler, I was aware that my old man had only two states: drunk and angry, or hung-over and morose.

The most vivid memory I have of those very early Darlinghurst years was the great rocking horse catastrophe. I was three. Mum was down in the laundry washing, and she’d left me in our flat. I was mounted on my rocking horse, galloping over an imaginary prairie like Hopalong Cassidy. I galloped so hard that the rocking horse tumbled forward. I flew over its head and landed hard on the linoleum floor, and the heavy wooden horse smashed down on top of me. I cried and I screamed for Mum. She couldn’t hear me. I lay there, shocked and wailing and yelling my lungs out. I was in danger of drowning in a pool of my own drool.

After a bit it dawned on me that I hadn’t been hurt, and that I was perfectly capable of climbing out from under the wooden horse, but I wanted Mum to see that I’d fallen down and for her to pick me up and kiss me and tell me that I would be okay.

The minutes ticked by. Eventually I thought, Well, she’s not coming, and I extricated myself from under the rocking horse. I stood up, righted my noble steed, hopped back on and started rocking again. Maybe it’s a hindsight thing, but I distinctly recall that the realisation hit me like a brick, young as I was: from now on I would be in charge of my own destiny. No one else would pick me up when I fell down. I would just have to get on with it myself.

[JAMES]

dreams die young

When I was five, the three of us left Darlinghurst and moved into a ten-storey Housing Commission block across the road from the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children in Pyrmont Bridge Road, Camperdown, in the inner west of Sydney. It was an horrific place, grimy, mean and with an oppressive atmosphere born of the hard and impoverished lives of many of its residents. The plumbing and the wonky lift rattled and clanked all day and night. That block should have been demolished the day it was built. We lived in a shoebox of an apartment on the third floor. In it there was a little kitchen with a bench and sink, a dingy living room with a cramped balcony off it, and a hallway that led to two little bedrooms and a bathroom.

When we left that apartment I souvenired the flat number, 314, and I keep it close to this day to remind me of where I came from and why no loved one of mine will ever live in a place anything like it.

I have just one positive memory of my father. One positive memory, that’s it, and even that’s most likely bogus. He and I were walking down the street at Camperdown and I saw a toy fire engine in a shop window. I fell in love with that little red truck with the ladders and hoses on top and must have made that clear to him. A couple of days later I woke up to find the fire engine beside my bed. Did he buy it? I thought he did. He probably didn’t. More realistically, he would have mentioned it to Mum and, knowing her, she would have somehow conjured up the money, maybe worked an extra cleaning shift, and gone to the shop and bought the toy for me.

Bad memories of my old man? How much time have you got? When I remember one thing he did to me I still get a shudder of anger and revulsion deep in my gut. When I was five, I was fascinated by a little cartoon on the TV that they played most nights to fill in time between one show and another. In it a cartoon rocket ship was fired at the moon and it soared up through space and plonked onto the surface of the moon. The soundtrack that played as the rocket zoomed was the song ‘ Telstar’ by the instrumental band The Tornados: da da dah, da da da da da dahhh ... It was a catchy, rollicking tune that wormed its way into my head and simply refused to leave. It obsessed me. All day I’d hum it, and when the cartoon came on the TV I sat in front of the box transfixed, volume turned right up, imagining that it was me piloting that rocket ship.

In fact, this one day the volume was so loud that I failed to hear my father, who was drunk, yell at me from the next room to turn the bloody TV down. DA DA DAH, DA DA DA DA DA DAHHHH. My father stormed into the room and hit me in the back of my head as hard as he could. His blow sent me hurtling across the room and I lay in a weeping heap in the corner as, his face red and angrily contorted, he bellowed at me, ‘I told you to turn that fuckin’ TV down!’ When he left, I stumbled off to my bed and cried myself to sleep. Mum didn’t come to comfort me. I was upset that she didn’t and I felt she was siding with my father, but now I understand that she was just too frightened to take a stand against him. As soon as he left the house, she ran to my room and smothered me in hugs.

At this stage my father would have been nearing forty. He was born in England and, I learned later, he had a wife and children there before he abandoned them and came to live in Australia. He worked on the wharves, off and on, mostly off. He had sandy hair and was of medium height and was fairly handsome until the drink bloated and coarsened his features and gave him a beer belly. He told Mum and me that he had been a fine cricketer and soccer player in his youth. Perhaps; perhaps not. He had a loud voice and he shouted a lot. Occasionally he sang old English novelty songs, but even then, to my ears anyway, there was anger in his voice.

As well as being a drunk, he was a thief. He had a trick of going to the pub and reaching up to the radio, ostensibly to adjust the volume or change the station, but instead his reaching arm would change direction at the last moment and he would silkily snaffle a bottle of rum or whisky from the shelf and it would be sitting snug in the deep pocket of his coat before anyone noticed. If I was with him, he’d invariably give me a sly, gloating wink, and it made me sick.

My old man had another rort, one that required an accomplice. He’d hatch a plan with a poker machine attendant in a club whereby my father would play the pokies for a short time and then put up his hand for the attendant, indicating that he’d hit the jackpot. His mate the attendant would hurry over, open the machine, spin the wheels so the four sevens or whatever were in alignment and the coins would come spilling out. They would split the stash and for the next month all our household expenses would be paid in twenty-cent coins from Dad’s big bag. He pulled these petty crimes as long as I could remember.

He pilfered our food from the wharves, coming home with bulk boxes of chocolates, a carton of two dozen ice creams, or a slab of meat that would last us three weeks. Into the fridge they’d go. Until I knew the truth, I wondered why we’d get all this food in one hit and then live on dripping and stale bread for the next two months.

He thought it a hoot to pluck stray dogs and cats from the streets and bring them home. The filthier and more flea-ridden they were, the better. They’d become part of the family and then disappear, to be replaced by another purloined pet.

My father did terrible damage to my mother and me, not that I didn’t have the knack of knocking myself around at times, like when I fell from my rocking horse. I was, as they say, injury prone in my childhood years. At around age five or six, I pulled a saucepan of boiling water off the stove and scalded my legs. I lay in bed for two weeks, unable to move, as Mum tended to my burns. Miraculously, I bear no scars.

I loved my mother for loving me, for her bravery, strength, hard work and her beauty, and although she is long gone, I love her today and will love her till I die. I think of her, her beautiful face and soft voice, her warm hugs. Memories flood back: how, when I was four or five, she would take me, holding my hand all the way, to the shops in nearby Glebe and Broadway.

She had the most beautiful singing voice. On the few occasions when there was happiness in her life, she would sing her favourite songs. Of all of these, the song she loved the best was ‘Red Roses For A Blue Lady’. She knew a lot about being blue.

Her only mistake was choosing the wrong man to fall in love with and marry, after he had swept the young and impressionable Florence Messiter off her feet with his smooth-talking charm when they first met in a pub in Maroubra. Had she met a good man, her life, and mine and my brother’s and sister’s, would have been so different. She unflinchingly took my old man’s physical and verbal abuse, his unwillingness to support her. She pressed on, being the best woman and mother that she could be. I often heard her crying, but never did she take out her despair on me. She was always loving and gentle. Nothing was too much trouble for me, her son.

We lived in poverty, but she was always well dressed – don’t ask me how she managed it – and she spoke beautifully, and had wonderful manners, which she taught me, and later my brother and sister. Today it is my habit to ask if I may be excused from the table, I unthinkingly stand when a woman enters a room, I give up my seat to a woman on the bus or train, when with a woman I walk closest to the kerb, and I won’t put up with men being uncouth in a woman’s presence. These things are second nature to me, because my mother made them so.

One night when I was seven, I was woken by shouting and wailing and the thwack, thwack of a fist hitting flesh. My father was screaming abuse at my mother and she was crying desperately for me to come and save her. To my shame, then and today, I shut my eyes tight and pretended I was asleep. I was petrified by fear. After what seemed an age, there was silence, broken occasionally by drunken snores and the soft moaning of my mother.

After an especially bad binge, my old man would sit sullenly at the kitchen table, shaking and groaning and reeking of grog, literally unable to speak. Then the promises to change would come thick and fast, and the vows to treat us better in future. ‘ Tomorrow morning, first thing, we’re going to the zoo,’ he declared one hung-over afternoon. Wanting to believe him, Mum and I were up and dressed next morning bright and early. Of course, my father had rewarded himself for his magnanimous zoo plan by going straight out and getting plastered once more. As Mum and I sat in the kitchen champing to get going, he lay in his bed in an alcoholic stupor from which he did not emerge until nightfall.

Sometimes he’d attempt to make amends for his rotten behaviour to us by spouting on about all the presents he was going to buy us. ‘What would you like?’ he’d wheedle while shaking uncontrollably from last night’s alcoholic excesses. ‘Just say, and it’s yours. I promise!’ Once I told him I’d like a pushbike for Christmas. ‘Done!’ he crowed. Off I went, boasting to my pals in the neighbourhood that soon I’d be getting a bike just like they had. Of course, Christmas Day came and there was no bike. There were no presents. My old man had either not come home or was sleeping off his bingeing in his bed. I went down into the street and the kids all flocked around. ‘Well, where’s your bike, Dacky?’ I mumbled something about it being an imported bicycle that hadn’t turned up yet. ‘Bullshit!’ they chorused. ‘You’ve got no bike, and you ain’t never getting one!’

The kids were cruel, but their cruelty was nothing compared with my father’s. As I walked home disconsolately, I thought I would never trust that lying bastard’s word again.

Another time, after he had drunkenly hit Mum and shoved me to the floor, he tried to make amends by offering to take me to a first grade rugby league match the following day. He had to go out in the morning, he explained, but he would meet me at the corner of our street at 11.30, then we would go to the big match together. Oh, and it was fine if I asked a mate to join us and, of course, he would treat us to a pie and chips at the ground. I invited a pal and at 11.30 we were waiting at the corner. Midday came, then 12.30, 1 and 2 pm … no sign of my father. My friend said, ‘He ain’t coming.’

I said, ‘Yes he is … he’s been held up, that’s all. He’ll be here any minute.’

‘Well, I’m not waiting any longer. I’m off to the game.’

Around 3 pm, first grade kick-off time, my mother looked down from the window of our flat and called out to me to come back home. I replied angrily, ‘He is coming. He promised! I’m waiting right here.’ It was 6 pm, with the match long decided, when I had to admit Mum was right and, hurting badly, I skulked inside.

I had long before stopped believing anything my father said, but his no-show that day broke my heart. The fact that I can still remember it so vividly, and my shame when my mate just walked away, attests to that.

When I was five I started school at St Joseph’s, Camperdown. The year before, Mum had taken me along to an open day and I’d loved the thought of going to school and couldn’t wait. I still count some of the St Joseph’s kids as friends today.

We were blessed with a special teacher. Her name was Kay Tierney. She was beautiful and tall and had long blonde hair and would sit cross-legged on the mat with us all around her and play the guitar and sing to us in the sweetest voice. One favourite song was about a shoemaker named Johnny who sailed to sea and went to the war. Miss Tierney was my first love.

She also taught me a life lesson. It came in the form of a tale about two mice that fell into a vat of milk. Neither could swim. One soon gave in to despair and exhaustion and stopped flailing around and trying to climb up the side of the vat to safety, and he sank beneath the surface and drowned. The other didn’t pack it in. Although exhausted too, he kept kicking. He kicked so long and so hard that he churned that milk solid, into butter, and was able to stand up and scamper over the rim of the vat to safety. The moral: never give up, even when everything is against you. If you’re reading this, Kay, I hope you’ve had a great life.

Apart from Miss Tierney, probably the best thing about Camperdown was the Weston Biscuits factory. The aroma of baking biscuits that wafted from that old pile of bricks was sublime: warm, sweet and guaranteed to make your mouth water. When I was old enough to play out in the parks and streets of our suburb I joined a bunch of pretty wild kids, mostly from the Housing Commission blocks, and we did mischievous things. One of which was to prise open the gates of the Weston factory and pinch boxes of biscuits from the factory and the delivery trucks. My favourite was Wagon Wheels, big round biscuits with jam and chocolate coating which came individually wrapped in a colourful paper bag.

My mates and I were a ragtag and rugged bunch. We were into stealing, risking our lives and fighting – ourselves and others, including adults. Looking back now, I was as naughty as any of them, but I suspect I was just an average kid who’d been brutalised at home and the streets gave me a chance to get my own back. You had to be tough to survive Camperdown, just as you had to be to make it in Woolloomooloo, where we would move a few years later.

(I knew a boy in Camperdown named Peter Kelly whose grandmother lived in Woolloomooloo. He took me over to her place every now and then. Even at seven or eight I loved the ’Loo. To a kid from stultifying Camperdown it seemed an exotic, dangerous and exciting place. And Woolloomooloo’s racy allure was well and truly enhanced for me when I learned that a body had been found in the then-under-construction Eastern Suburbs Railway tunnel. Great subterranean tunnels were being blasted and drilled from Martin Place to Bondi Junction. Some kid named Donald Puddyfoot claimed to have found a dead body in one of the tunnels. He told us, ‘I swear to God, there’s a stiff hangin’ in the tunnel.’ We all dared each other to investigate. I wasn’t game and begged off. Others plunged in, hoping to see the corpse. It turned out there was a body deep inside, some poor soul who’d hanged himself.)

I was a square peg in a round hole, a sensitive kid with a tough front. I played hard, but just as I’d done when I was little, I also liked to sit alone and think things through. One pastime was to sit in my room at night with the lights switched off so no one could see me and gaze out my window onto the windows of the other flats in our horseshoe-shaped block. I would see people sitting alone at the kitchen table looking sad; see them drinking until they slumped unconscious on their couch in the silver glow of their TV; see couples arguing, kissing and cuddling, celebrating; see kids I knew doing kid stuff; see people changing the paper in the bird cage. I would look at their furnishings and fittings and get annoyed, for some reason, at their different coloured blinds.

The police were called to our block many times to quell the daily domestic disturbances. Occasionally, something more serious occurred. One time, as I watched from the window of our flat, four or five squad cars and paddy wagons screamed up, sirens blaring. The officers piled out, guns drawn. Passers-by flung themselves to the ground. A resident’s door was smashed down and he was carted off in handcuffs. I didn’t know what he’d done, and I still don’t.

We haunted the sewers. We’d climb down into them from the street with our torches and walk for hours, as far as White Bay near Balmain. If a storm had struck while we were in those malodorous, mossy tunnels we would have drowned.

In 1965, my brother Stephen was born, and my sister Alison came along three years later. Now there were five of us sardined into the flat. Increasingly by now, my father was staying away on his benders. None of us knew where he went. To a pub, a club, a party at a private home … a lover’s place. All we knew was that when he returned three, four, five days