Hudderstone Wash-Up

By David Morisset

Daniel Anstiss is a battler from a meatworks town on the outskirts of Sydney, Australia’s oldest city. After setbacks during his early school years, he eventually excels at his tertiary studies and joins Australia’s diplomatic service. Despite his commitment to his vocation, it gradually becomes clear to Daniel that he is an outsider with little hope of navigating Canberra’s pathways of privilege and networks of influence on the basis of merit alone.
'Hudderstone Wash-Up' is a coming of age story that begins during the 1950s in a fibro cottage on a flood-prone dirt road next to a railway line on which steam trains transport doomed livestock to nearby slaughter yards. An eyewitness tracks Daniel Anstiss’s formative years and depicts his resolute drive towards academic success at the Australian National University in the early 1970s. Then, through ad hoc recollections, a former colleague provides eccentric descriptions of the political upheavals and bureaucratic expediencies that threaten to derail Daniel’s career.
David Morisset is the pen name of an Australian writer who grew up at Riverstone in the Hawkesbury River District, northwest of Sydney. After roaming the world, first as a diplomat and later as an economist, he published several novels as well as collections of short stories and poems. His poem, 'Persian Princess', was commended in the John Shaw Neilson Poetry Award (2009 Fellowship of Australian Writers National Literary Awards).

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Morisset
• Release date: Feb 22, 2024
• ISBN: 9798215595862

David Morisset

David Morisset is an Australian author who grew up in Riverstone, which was then a meatworks town in Sydney's semi-rural western districts. He moved to Canberra to study at the Australian National University and chose to roam the world, first as a diplomat and later as an economist. Although he has spent most of his life in Australia, he has also lived in Iran and Tanzania. His work as an economist involved extensive travel throughout Asia, North America, Western Europe and Oceania. Over recent years he has published several novels as well as collections of short stories and poems.

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HUDDERSTONE WASH-UP

A novel

David Morisset

Copyright David Morisset 2024.

All rights reserved.

This novel is a work of fiction. It is partly based on some true events but it is a fictionalised interpretation of those events and certain details, including timelines, locations, and identities of people and organisations, have been altered for dramatic purposes. Apart from the historical identities specified in passing, the story’s characters are products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Where institutions of state, government agencies, public offices, and private businesses are mentioned, the circumstances involved are fictitious. Please see the author’s notes at the end of this book.

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For Scott and Angela

PART ONE

An Eyewitness’s Account

I

Like many small towns in southeastern Australia, Hudderstone swaggered through the middle years of the twentieth century. It does not swagger much any more. According to urban planners, it is now just another dormitory suburb northwest of Sydney. It is also much diminished. A few years ago, Hudderstone was divided into several different locales bearing new names that were considered more appealing to the ears of young home buyers with pinging wallets in their smart phones and cosy relationships with mortgage brokers ready to secure for them hefty loans and mammoth monthly payments well beyond their means.

Few of the residents of today’s rows and rows of two-storey eyesores in the Teviot River district ever reflect on the fact that, when the railway line through Hudderstone was built in the 1860s, the area was sparsely populated and mostly rural. Hudderstone had been named after a cold and windy peak somewhere in the greyly distant British Isles in what was probably an example of early nineteenth century satire. No one knows exactly when — but it was long ago — the citizens of Hudderstone gave it a nickname — Huddo — and that sobriquet stuck.

The former home of the Anstiss family is still standing on Railway Road, which is part of what is left of Hudderstone. In the 1950s, Railway Road was full of small children and their parents, who were recovering from the war, and grandparents, with their memories of their own parents and grandparents, who had arrived in boats from the old world with little more than their determination to start new lives and find new reasons for hope.

The Anstiss family lived in a small fibro cottage about two hundred and fifty yards from the junction of Railway Road and Hudderstone’s main thoroughfare. Roger and Joyce had married just after the war. Their two boys, Daniel and Mark, had both been born in the early 1950s along with thousands of other children who eventually became known collectively as baby boomers — an American term that Australians were slow to adopt until it became pejorative as a lazy label in political debates about intergenerational equity.

Two doors away from the Anstiss residence was an older house that was the home of the Morrows. Frank and Lillian were the parents and there were two Morrow girls, Julie and Sally, who were both born just before Daniel and Mark Anstiss. The girls had an older brother named Gregory, who was known to everyone as Greg. He was much bigger than the other children and he was already at school, having come into this world two years or so after the end of the war in the Pacific.

When the Anstiss boys and the Morrow children got together, their games were usually uncomplicated. For example, in late spring and early summer, they would climb a mulberry tree in the back yard of the home of old Mrs Anstiss, the beloved grandmother of Daniel and Mark. The children ate the berries with the purple juice running down their bare arms and dripping on to their shirts, shorts and dresses. Greg and Julie were the most competent climbers and they often passed choice clumps of mulberries down to the younger children, who were clinging to the lower branches of the stately old tree.

At other times, even in the winter months, the children would play on the dusty edges of the road in front of the fibro and weatherboard house occupied by the Morrows. The street was unsealed, like most of the roads in that part of Hudderstone at the time. At its crown, the clay of the carriageway was packed hard even though it never hosted anything resembling what might be fittingly referred to as traffic. Most of the cars using Railway Road were owned by the Morrows because they operated a hire car business. Potholes loomed every few yards. Their presence was a source of consternation for Frank Morrow because he feared they might damage the suspension and the tyres and the wheel rims of his costly fleet. He often complained to the local council about the state of the street, but his efforts had no impact. It was a Labor council and Frank was a conservative Liberal — one of the few people so inclined in Hudderstone in those times. Frank Morrow also complained about the Sunday morning bells of the Church of England’s steeple, which was almost three hundred yards away on one of the streets across the railway line. Again, it seemed his efforts had no impact. His wife, Lillian, was not so bothered by the bells and sent her children to the church’s Sunday School. The Anstiss boys attended the same institution every Sunday morning.

On the western side of Railway Road — the only side on which houses were built — the street’s shoulder disintegrated into powdery dust. Then there was a narrow grassy strip and fences of varying standards and usefulness that bordered the front gardens of the dwellings. Greg Morrow had a talent for turning the fine dirt on the side of the road into foundations for networks of miniature roadways. The dust could be pounded together and shaped whether it was dry or wet — although a little water often helped because of the residual clay that was present. Once the imitation highways were ready, out would come Matchbox and Dinky replicas of cars and trucks made from metal alloys with enthralling detail marred only by patches of flaking paint on a few of the older vehicles’ panels. In some ways, the make-believe roads and hills resembled diminutive copies of the colossal open cut iron ore mines that were to be constructed in the Pilbara region in the decades to come, but none of the children could imagine that mindboggling future as they played happily in the dirt.

‘Brmm! My Mercedes Benz can beat all the other cars.’ Daniel had once seen a photograph of a German car. His mother had assured him that it was a Mercedes Benz and the dinky toy in his hands was the same silver colour.

‘That’s not a Mercedes.’ Greg’s response was slightly condescending in its delivery but his primary intention was to encourage Daniel to get his facts straight.

‘Yes it is. Anyway, what’s your car?’ Daniel was not inclined to give any ground.

‘It’s an MG — a sports car!’ Greg was very proud of his convertible. Its top was permanently down and the only evidence of it was an immovable fold of black metal behind the car’s bucket seats.

‘What happened to its roof?’ Daniel’s question was genuine. He had never seen a convertible on any real road and the notion of a car being designed for sports was a new one to him.

Greg ignored him and turned his attention to smoothing out a new section of his model road network.

Sometimes the girls would tire of games involving cars and, especially if it had been raining, they would decide to make mud pies. Out would come pink plastic tea sets and the girls would cajole the boys into accepting their mucky fare along with cups of lukewarm tap water obtained from a chronically tangled hose in the Morrows’ front yard.

‘Daniel, do you have milk in your tea?’ Sally would coo.

‘And how about a nice pie. Would you like tomato sauce with it?’ Julie would add.

‘There’s cakes too. They’re not as good as your mother makes but they’re not bad.’ Sally grabbed some particularly small patties of mud and put them on a plastic plate.

Naturally, none of the Railway Road children remembered their births. Daniel Anstiss had come into this world by causing his mother much pain in a hospital designated for women in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. In those times, fathers were consigned to waiting rooms during labour, if they were actually in the hospital building at all. Many stayed at work or waited in one of Paddington’s pubs. Roger Anstiss, was not even the first man from outside the hospital’s maternity ward to see his first child. He was still on his way to the hospital — a steam train journey that he was able to commence only after he had finished his shift at Hudderstone’s meatworks — when his father-in-law visited the hospital’s nursery. Albert Coppard had taken a short ride on a tram from the western edge of the city centre, where he worked as a storeman in a warehouse, and he had peered for a few moments at his first grandchild through a plate glass window. Then Bert, as he was known, had set off home to Joyce’s mother, May. He began the journey by jumping recklessly on to the running board of another tram and then boarding a workers’ train that steamed out of the inner city from the terminating platforms at Central Station. Bert and Roger might well have unknowingly passed each other as they navigated their way through the crowds of men who rushed through Central Station’s vast concourse with their eyes set straight ahead — just another two anonymous men in grey flannel trousers and mackintoshes, for the bleak shroud of an overcast sky suggested that rain was likely and even the premature darkness of a winter evening could not mask the probability of precipitation.

As a foreman at the Hudderstone meatworks, Roger oversaw packing processes in a small production unit concerned mostly with rabbits. There was an expectation that the unit was likely to be closed down soon in response to shifting consumer tastes in the booming economy. Employment at the sometimes industrially chaotic meatworks was a situation that did not suit Roger, who had been greatly affected by his wartime experiences. A lot of the managers and foremen at the meatworks had not been eligible for war service because they were in protected occupations. Roger was conscious that he had been exposed to an aspect of life they would never know. He had been a signalman in New Guinea and the Pacific Islands, having joined the Second Australian Imperial Force just before his eighteenth birthday when Japanese invaders were threatening Australia’s north.

Soon after Roger’s discharge from the army, he had married Joyce Coppard and the couple had built their new house in Hudderstone. Starting a family, with his mixed feelings about the meatworks and the people who worked there and his doubts about his own future in the place, led Roger to seek other work and he eventually took a job as a travelling salesman for a supplier of butchers’ equipment — knives, steels, bandsaws, mincers and the like. In addition to higher pay, the new role would see him provided with a car, which was then a conspicuous luxury in Hudderstone. Most meatworkers rode bicycles to work or walked the short distances from their homes in the town. Others, from neighbouring locales, caught the steam trains that shuttled up and down the Runnymede line.

A year after Daniel’s birth, his brother was born. While they were toddlers, Daniel and Mark were seldom separated and wore almost identical clothing so that many people asked Joyce whether they were twins despite the rather obvious age difference. One of Daniel’s earliest memories was the way Joyce had told him that ‘Mark is your brother. He is your little brother and you have to look after him, especially later on when you both go off to school. So, Daniel, who is Mark?’

‘My brother,’ Daniel answered.

‘And?’

‘I have to look after him when we go to school.’

After Roger had started his new job, he was absent during weekdays as he travelled the state with his work. So, almost all of the burdens of child rearing were borne by Joyce. She was a strict disciplinarian even by the standards of the 1950s. Mark and Daniel had few freedoms. There was a stick, as Roger and Joyce called a stiff length of maple that might once have been part of an old man’s walking cane. It was kept in the kitchen on a shelf that was beyond the reach of the toddlers. Bad behaviour resulted in a belting across the buttocks with the stick, which was wielded with almost equal effectiveness by both parents.

Soon, the stress of looking after two energetic boys, and her unflinching perfectionism as a homemaker, proved too much for Joyce and, as if to pre-empt nervous exhaustion, her physical health deteriorated so that she became very ill. Discovery of an enlarged thyroid gland saw her undergo a series of treatments, including surgery. Joyce’s health was soon restored but she was put on medication for the rest of her long life.

Daniel’s paternal grandmother, Hilda Anstiss, lived next door in a weatherboard house that had been built towards the end of the Great War. To Daniel, the widow seemed like an antique figure from another era in her demure floral dresses, teashade eyeglasses, bib aprons, and low-heeled shoes. She was, however, loving and gentle and her grandsons were frequent and sometimes uninvited visitors.

Indeed, Hilda’s house was a source of fascination for young boys who were keen to explore. In the main sitting room there were two huge prints of red deer stags with their antlers resplendent against a backdrop said to be typical of a Scottish glen. One of the pictures hung above the granite mantlepiece of a decorative fireplace. Nearby, there was an upright piano and an art deco wireless and sagging lounge chairs that seemed prehistoric. The kitchen was full of curiosities. A fuel stove stood proudly in one corner. There was a table scrubbed so white that it almost shone and a sideboard that supported glass-fronted cabinets full of china crockery. Outside, under a corrugated iron roof, a lattice-enclosed verandah wrapped itself around the front and the southern side of the dwelling and two three-quarter sized beds abutted stretches of the house’s exterior walls. In the morning the sun would stream through the lattice-work making patterns on the faded eiderdowns that covered the cast iron beds. Daniel’s young mind accepted without question family folklore that described how his father and his uncle had slept on those beds when sweltering summer nights made the bedrooms inside the house too hot for restful sleep.

Hilda had been born in 1890, soon after her Scottish mother and Dutch father had arrived in the colony of New South Wales to seek their fortunes. Their decision followed encouragement from hard-working Scots who had joined mining communities west of the Blue Mountains. The couple never made it to the mines, preferring to settle on the fringe of Sydney where there was secure employment at the Hudderstone meatworks. The young Hilda inherited an allegiance to the Church of Scotland and a stubborn but benevolent puritanism from her mother. Early in her adult life, Hilda’s faith had been tested by capricious fate and the twentieth century’s proclivity to spawn tragedy. Her first husband died on the battle fields of France in the Great War. Both of her parents perished in their sixties in the aftermath of the same war. Her second husband, Archibald Anstiss, was a carpenter who built many houses in Hudderstone. Despite his Christian name, he was always known as Arthur, and he died of stomach cancer less than a year after Hilda’s sons returned from fighting the devastating war with Japan. Arthur Anstiss’s ancestors had come to the colony from Cornwall in the middle of the nineteenth century and they had settled among the farms of New England where they found steady work but never acquired significant wealth.

When Daniel was a boy, Roger’s brother still lived in Hilda’s house. Two years older than Roger, red-headed and stocky, Oliver was a clerk at the meatworks. At home, he occupied a snug bedroom which opened on to a makeshift storeroom at one end of the verandah. He used the storage space to stow items associated with the pastimes afforded by his bachelor existence — rugby league gear, cricket bats, balls, stumps and pads, and a heavy bag that contained his lawn bowls. Beside one wall, there was a lowboy, above which were positioned two black-and-white photographs of Hudderstone A Grade rugby league premiership winning teams. The drawers contained old jerseys with the maroon primary colour so faded that it had almost turned into a milky mauve, while the gold stripes had taken on a hue more reminiscent of straw than the yellow metal. In an old wooden cupboard were scuffed leather footballs — some missing their laces and bladders and others painted white for night training under lights. There were also bottles of liniment, tubs of petroleum jelly, a torn headgear, and a two mismatched boots with most of their metal sprigs puzzlingly absent, leaving only some of the nails that had once fastened them to the soles of the footwear. Incongruously, in one corner, was a pair of almost new white canvas sandshoes that appeared recently whitewashed (as if Oliver was readying himself for a tennis match).

Hilda would often caution Daniel not to interfere with Uncle Oliver’s things and, for the most part, he obeyed her. Besides, the yard around the house was also full of wonders that demanded attention. The grass was always long in one section, which was dominated by sticky stalks of paspalum in the warmer months of the year. At one of its most accessible edges were stinging nettles and blades of grass that were sharp enough to inflict nasty scratches. Daniel steered clear of this area for his mother had assured him that it was full of snakes — black ones with bright red bellies, Joyce claimed. Every now and then, Oliver would bring a sheep or a goat from the meatworks and the animal would be set the assignment of eating back the dense growth. Daniel found the beasts disconcertingly impulsive. Even when they were securely tethered they would charge at the boy because they obviously regarded him as a ne’er-do-well trespasser. Whether the grazing animals were equally conscientious in driving away the snakes was never clear to young Daniel.

In another part of the yard was a pathway, which was shaded by a long trellis supporting a leafy vine that, in spring and early summer, hung heavy with grapes so purple that they were almost black. Daniel considered the grapes rather tart and disliked their velvety skins. He much preferred the taste and texture of the sweet fruit of the mulberry tree that towered above the bare ground behind the trellis.

Roger Anstiss and Frank Morrow had met at the end of the war. Both had become foundation members of the local Returned Services League club in Hudderstone. Frank’s wife, Lillian, and Joyce had also become friends, sharing recipes and comparing solutions to the problems encountered as mothers of small children. The four new parents would sometimes share a couple of bottles of Toohey’s Flag Ale in the final daylight hours of a hot Saturday afternoon. On one such occasion, the Morrows took great delight in showing off their newest acquisition — a television set. The flickering black and white pictures and the coarse, static-ridden sounds were simply miraculous. It was even more wondrous than the crackling two-way radio the Morrows had installed to direct their hire cars to fares around the district. Around the time their television arrived, another Morrow daughter, Lucy, was born. Roger and Joyce purchased a television set a few weeks after the Morrows. To Daniel — at four years old — those weeks seemed like a lifetime. In these early days of television, his favourite program was Disneyland, which screened early on Sunday nights, well before his eight o’clock bedtime.

At the back of the Morrows’ large block of land, well away from the quadruple garage which sheltered their hire cars, was what was left of a gymnasium. Frank had been a prize fighter and had even held some state-level boxing titles for a while. He had built the gym as a training facility for young boxers in the district but, with the demands of an expanding business and a growing family taking up most of the old champion’s time, the facility had fallen into disrepair and it was no longer used for its original purpose.

From the outside it looked just like any of the other corrugated iron sheds that were often found in the back yards of the town. Most of them were testimony to the number of Hudderstone residents who were involved in harness racing and their consequent need to provide accommodation for their valuable horses and equipment. In those times, there was a training track around the perimeter of Hudderstone Park’s football field and main cricket oval and, in daylight hours, the well-maintained course was in almost constant use with muscular trotters doing their conditioning laps at the bidding of their sometimes fanatical drivers.

Inside Frank Morrow’s gym, there were reminders of forgotten sporting dreams in the form of posters advertising upcoming professional fights of long ago, a lingering smell of liniment, and various pieces of pugilistic paraphernalia. Although the ropes around the main ring had been dismantled, the mat was largely intact, making it an ideal surface for childish attempts at wrestling. In one corner of the gym, there was a damaged and deflated speed bag that, when struck, swayed gingerly from a clanking metal hook. Nearby, with its spheroid shape distorted into oblateness by hard floorboards and frequent use as a makeshift chair, there was a weighty medicine ball with split seams. On another section of floor lay a heavy bag shaped like a giant sausage that no one had ever bothered to rehang. Dusty boxing gloves of varying quality and utility were encountered on shelves, as were oddly assorted boots, some of which still had white laces looped through the eyelets, and there was one solitary headgear that was, on one side, still slightly sticky from smears of petroleum jelly. Spiders often emerged from the innards of the gloves and boots.

At the back of the Anstisses’ block of land was a structure