Ten Pound Pom Read online

  ‘By the late 1880s… Brisbane’s image was changing from that of an unlovely frontier town to a city of dignified buildings. A contemporary report described the architecture as a “mixture of handsome modern and sordid early”.’ Apparently, William Clarke of North Quay successfully tendered for the building of Yungaba, with a quote of £14,285. Dates of construction and completion are ‘a mystery’ but certainly passed Clark’s quoted deadline of fifteen months, largely due to wet weather; floods in 1887 ‘caused havoc’, but the first immigrants were housed in Yungaba the following year, arriving on the SS Duke of Buccleuch. Not that it was called ‘Yungaba’, then; it was given that name in 1947, to welcome post-war migrants, and meaning ‘land of the sun’. From the Maryborough dialect, apparently.

  The place has been in my head for three decades and for the first time I have some idea of its history. Not that I can draw anything from it particularly, even if my head wasn’t so fuzzy with jetlag; my family was simply one of many to have passed through this place. I was one of a hundred thousand boys or more to crawl breathing into bushes in search of birds or bugs. And Brisbane today? I flick through the ‘official visitor’s guide’ for 2007. Discover that the Story Bridge doesn’t have an ‘e’, and that you can climb, if you want to, to its 80 metre summit. Am asked: ‘Have you ever woken up, looked outside and been greeted by a morning that has literally taken your breath away? You walk outside… the gentlest breeze wraps around you, the sun kisses you as if to say good morning, and the sky, well, heavenly could almost describe it. These mornings, these days, are commonplace in Brisbane. And they haven’t just inspired the 24hr wearing of flip-flops and the planting of palm treed promenades. The blissful climate has had a profound effect on what we do and the way we do it.’ Jeez, and they accuse the Brits of being weather-obsessed? At least in Britain we have seasons; in Oz, it seems, it’s either hot or dead hot. On your Brisbane Dream Day you’d start the morning on the Kangaroo Point Cliffs and see the sun rising over the skyscrapers, ‘not to mention the rock climbers creeping over the cliffs like cats’. Give that copy-writer an A for alliteration. Then you’d take a stroll through Roma Street Parkland, ‘the world’s largest urban subtropical garden’, which is, apparently, ‘paradise in the heart of the city’. Then you’d start walking at the ‘ruggedly beautiful’ Botanic Gardens and go north onto the Riverwalk, then ‘swim, splash [or] wade your way’ through South Bank Parklands, Oz’s ‘only inner-city beach’. Lord, this love of the littoral; an infatuation so strong here that they need to build a beach in a city only a few miles away from a real beach. Puzzling. Then the Brizzy Dream Day appears to fizzle out because the guide abruptly shifts to list other attractions outside the city, like North Stradbroke Island and Redcliffe and Moreton Bay, where I visited as a kid and to which I’ve also picked up a guide, which I also flick through; pictures of pelicans. And koalas. And more bloody beaches. And Steve Irwin hugging an elephant’s leg before he got murdered by a fish. There’s another leaflet called ‘Greater Brisbane Drives: Get Out of Town!’, but I can’t be arsed looking through it, no matter now attractive that proposition might, in a few days, become. I’m tired and jetlagged and need a pint or a kip. Or a pint and a kip.

  Tony and Higgy find me and we chat to a Serbian groundsman with whom I blether about Belgrade, a city I like, and then we go to the Bridge Hotel, the pub where my dad, and Peter himself, used to drink. All the grown-ups used to go there. Still do, of course, and now I can join them, because in 2007 now I’m a grown-up too. The beer works on the jetlag woozily and confusingly. There are plaques on the wall to a regular customer, a young woman, who died in the Bali bombings. I read them. Look at the pictures of her smiling face. A few pints and then the ferry over to the city, all bigger but all smaller than I recall. Really needing sleep by now. There’s the old post office, from where my parents used to ring relatives in Britain; a queue for the phone then a long wait for the connection and then a seven second delay on the line, that’s what it used to be like. Now, of course, I text my girlfriend and the words bounce around the planet and reach her in seconds. The time that separates these two methods of communication is, really, too short. How fast we move. Are moving. Too fast, perhaps.

  The main street is pedestrianised, now. In a cinema that used to stand here we went, as a family, to see Jaws. Blearily I recall a conversation with my sister outside the cinema after the film:

  SISTER: That shark ate all them people.

  ME: Yes.

  SISTER: That first lady, there was only her top half left.

  ME: Yes.

  SISTER: That means the shark ate her bum. And there would’ve been poo in her bum. So that means the shark ate the poo.

  Another bar, and Higgy tells us that he’s been diagnosed with leukaemia, but it’s now in remission, thanks, largely, to a new orally-administered drug. I’m shocked by this news, but he certainly looks healthy enough. Says he feels it, too. Tony’s almost asleep on the table, as am I. Finding energy from some hitherto untapped well we drift around Brisbane in a daze then drive to the Gold Coast, Surfer’s Paradise, and I fall asleep in the car and wake up in Alicante. Or what looks like Alicante. This was once a scruffy caravan park where we briefly holidayed and where I saw a UFO, us children outside at night, a huge blue-white ball trailing vapour between clouds. No longer; this is all tall tacky condos and traffic and tourism. Some shacks still stand on the beach with sky scrapers in their back gardens; poor settlers bought these ramshackle dwellings some decades ago and are now multi-millionaires. We want to build a giant, tasteless tower in your back garden. Here’s several million dollars. This isn’t the Oz you once knew, blue.

  We find a hotel suite. About ten floors up. I open the doors out onto the balcony and collapse onto the bed and am immediately deeply asleep until about 5:30 a.m., at which point I’m woken by the strangest dawn chorus I’ve ever heard, birds making noises that birds shouldn’t be able to make, all falling whoops and rising shrieks and Swannee whistles and five-note airs, odd and alien and wondrous. I smoke a breakfast fag out on the balcony and stand smiling in the noises and watch the sun rise between the skyscrapers and over the blue sea behind them then I go back inside and wrap myself up in blankets and sleep some more. Wake happy. Move lodgings into Higgy’s unit, which he shares, and which we had to wait to be vacated. We explore the Gold Coast, and I very, very quickly grow to loathe the place. It might not look, anymore, like 1970s Queensland, but Jeez it acts like it. See, in the seventies, Queensland was ruled by the virulent rightwinger John Bjelke-Peterson, who used his pet corrupt police force to ‘suppress demonstrations with violence’, and ‘bugged political opponents, supported the South African apartheid regime, made law that discriminated against Aborigines, and relied on gerrymandering to keep power from 1968 to 1987’.* A fascist regime, indeed. He ran the state as if it was his own private fiefdom, accountable to no-one, deferential to nothing but his own greed. I don’t know where Peterson’s gone, but thank God he has gone, yet the Gold Coast coruscates with his legacy; the architecture would make Albert Speer engorged with pride, as would the ubiquitous prohibitions: No smoking (of course). No flip-flops. No singlets. No walking in a funny way. The doors of every bar or pub make you feel hugely unwelcome before you’ve even stepped inside.

  And one night we’d arranged to meet Higgy in a surfer’s bar so we turned up at the appointed time and met the manager at the reception desk, tightly T-shirted, slick-haired, self-satisfied, preening, strutting, peacocking prick of a man. Wouldn’t let us in cos we didn’t have ID. So we went go back to the unit, got our passports, returned. Members? No. Then you can’t get in. But we can get signed in, can’t we? Need a member to do that. Yes, we’re meeting one inside. Yeh, but you can’t get in without being signed in. Alright, what if one of us goes in and the other waits here? Much dithering and thinking. Okay. But the one who doesn’t go in has got to stay here, at the desk. Tony goes in, I wait in the foyer, under this dickhead’s gimlet gaze. Tony comes back out
with Higgy, who signs us in and is interrogated by Bruce Hitler, who eventually condescends to grant us entry into his club, on the understanding that he’ll be watching us like a hawk. Oh, he says, and points to me. You’ll be taking ya hat off, n all.

  Right, that’s it. D’you really think I’m going to let myself be ordered to doff my cap to you? D’you really think that I’m so keen to get into your poxy little bar that I’ll allow myself to be humiliated like this? Fuck you and your fucking smug strutting. Fuck you and the invisible carpets you’re carrying under your arms and shite on your muscle T-shirt and your surfing tan and your Tom Cruise teeth and your orange glow and your fucking preening and shite in the hats I can see on the heads of your patrons through the doors in that overlit and overloud Euro-pop-thumping tacky theatre of self-congratulation that you call a fucking bar. Bars are supposed to be fun. What’s going on in there is my idea of some kind of torture. Shove your fucking bar up your fucking Aussie arse and fuck off into the sea and I hope a bronze whaler rips you limb from limb you fucking idiot. I’m 12,000 miles from home. Australia’s not the best country on earth and nor is the Gold Coast the best town in that country and nor is your fucking bar the best bar in that town. Shite on you. Fuck you and your surf bar.

  –Bollox to this, I say to Tony. –I’ll see yis later.

  Tony comes with me to eat stir-fried beef and noodles on the promenade and then returns to the bar to fetch Higgy and I go back to the unit and watch a documentary on Palestine; Gaza Strip kids and Israeli kids are filmed meeting each other. It’s touching and makes me think that only the fact of our growing up forestalls the establishment of peace in the world. Nothing else, just that.

  Still seething, I take Higgy’s swag-bag onto the balcony so as to sleep in the cool air and give the other two a break from my snoring, and myself a break from them whacking me with pillows to stop me snoring, and, truth be told, from their snoring, too. Below me, suspended between two trees, a spider dangles, its spread legs the span of saucer. Maybe, in the night, he’ll crawl up onto the balcony and bite my face as I sleep. Fucking Australia.

  In the morning, I ask Tony what he thought of the surf bar.

  –Shite, he says. –Full of Bet Lynch lookalikes, only with less class.

  THEN

  At school, the boy and his British friends teach the Australian kids about porridge mines and scouse mines and haggis hunting. He draws a diagram of the scouse mine, a cut-away sketch showing the pit-head and the sunken shaft and the subterranean lake of scouse. A Scottish friend describes how the haggis run in herds across the hills around the town where he used to live, and he makes a drawing of one, like a potato with a smiley face and a pigsnout and sticky-out ears. The Aussie kids are fascinated.

  Bullying begins, an extended and vicious bullying campaign against the boy and his siblings and other British and Irish kids. Every morning in the exercise yard, whilst singing ‘Advance Australia Fair’ during assembly, the bullies outline to the boy what suffering will be visited on him throughout that day. The boy’s brother will remember the names of his tormentors: Colin Brassington and Ivan Dureki. These are children, true, but a level of sadism also extends to some of the teachers; one goads the children into catching cane toads, nailing them alive to boards, bloating their bodies with salt then slitting them open to reveal their working innards. Beating hearts, etc. The boy and his brother refuse to do this, and thus invite more bullying. The boy’s brother reports Brassington and Dureki to the headmaster, who writes their names down on a fag packet.

  The boy’s mother takes him into the city, shopping, and they attend a street auction where a man holds up a velvet box and declares that what it contains is worth thousands of dollars but he’s selling it for a fiver and the boy’s mother buys it and of course it is empty. He’s very convincing, the man.

  As a family they visit Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary, Moreton Bay, the Gold Coast (UFO), Beenleigh (famous for rum), Southport and Coolangatta. Wellington Point, Stradbroke Island, Bribie Island. At Currumbin, the boy holds a plate of chopped fruit as brightly-coloured parrots flock around him, perching on his head, his shoulders. The weight of them gathered on the plate strains and hurts his arms. At Bunya Park, the boy has his photograph taken holding a koala called Bill.

  NOW

  At the side of the highway that leads from the Gold Coast into Brisbane are large advertising hoardings. A local canvassing politician features regularly on them, sensibly-coiffured, shirtsleeves rolled up, arms folded, firm-but-fair facial expression. His caption simply reads: ‘JEFF TURNBULL – A GOOD BLOKE’. How Australian can you get?

  –You should be on one of those, Higgy, I say from the back seat. –Peter Higgins: a proper gobshite.

  –Get fucked.

  –Tony laughs.

  We drive to Inala. This place had a bad reputation in the seventies and still has one now, but it seems to have improved, from what I can remember; it’s cleaner, there’s more shrubbery. There’s less evident vandalism. Thirty years, thirty years. Hispanic-looking guys in baggy jeans and baseball caps hang around. Dogs abound. Thirty years. The same sun under which we age, all of us, every one.

  Poinciana Drive, number 53. On the land where our house once stood there now stands a beige bricked, balconied place that stands out like an angel fish in a toilet bowl from the clapboard and corrugated iron dwellings that surround it. I feel disappointed and slightly sad, but I photograph it anyway, hanging out of the car window. I don’t know what I expected to find, after thirty years, but some trace, however small, of my past presence would’ve been welcome. Yet I did walk this street, all those years ago. My little white Pommie knees. I was here, once. And am again. It’s changed unrecognisably but I can feel myself all over it.

  Inala West School, by contrast, is almost exactly the same, just painted a different colour. Blue – was it blue? Did it used to be blue? It’s now a kind of creamy white. Tony and I vault the fence and cross the playing field where we once, and in a much smaller way, played footy (both Aussie rules and the proper kind) and cricket and rounders and prey to Oz kid bullies. We find a toothless groundsman and explain to him who we are and what we’re doing there and he takes us up to see a teacher and we explain ourselves and our presence again. He’s nice – lets us explore. There’s my classroom. The wooden racks and shelves outside it where pupils stored their bags. Still there. It looks the same. Memories torrent back in. There’s the window behind which I sat and through which Tony appeared, grinning, a large and long-tailed lizard draped over his finger. There’s the assembly yard. ‘Advance Australia Fair’ and ‘Waltzing Matilda’ in the hot and heavy sun. The playing field, scrubby and dry. So strange, this is, to be back here. The other side of the planet and the other side of a life. All those years between then and now and all the living done in them and how all of it with its great weight depends on one thin hinge, ramshackle and small. Gone like a breath, really, slight and sustaining and fluttering and brief. The feeling is not too far removed from being bereaved.

  The trip is getting interesting.

  Back on the highway, heading up to Noosa, Higgy drives us through Moorooka.

  –D’you remember the advert, boys? We all used to sing it together. D’you remember it?

  And we do, suddenly, and we all three sing it, thirty years on from when we last did, two forty-somethings and one fifty-something now and less fingers and less hair and greyer hair and more scars and tattoos and muscles and height and bones and so much more living done since:

  Moo-roooooo-ka!

  Magic mile of motors!

  Moo-roooooo-ka!

  Service with a smile!

  THEN

  The boy and his family travel to Noosa Head for a day out. On the way there, they pass a giant pineapple by the side of the road and at Noosa the car begins to cough and splutter like an ex army major watching a documentary on glam rock, so it is taken to a mechanic in the town. Watch this kids, the mechanic says, and puts his finger to a spark plug and hi
s tongue on the propped-up bonnet and blue sparks leap between the two. The boy’s father roars with laughter. The boy stares at the fire that dances around the older human. They’re of the same species.

  On the beach called Squeaking Sands, the boy loves the sound the beach makes as he walks on it. His dad explains that all the grains are the same size so they produce a high-pitched noise when rubbed together. The boy likes this very much. Squeak, squeak. Men can make flame and a seashore can whistle.

  NOW

  –Look! There’s that bleedin’ pineapple! Still there!

  And it is; house-high pineapple by the side of the road. Exactly the same. I didn’t know what it indicated in the seventies and I don’t want to know now but I’m happy that it’s still there. Bloody stupid thing and what good is the world without such things?

  –Noosa, says Higgy, who’s driving. –It won’t be like you remember it. Round about the time you boys were last there a mate of mine bought a house for eight thousand dollars and he sold it about ten years ago for ten million.

  We drive over the Blackall Range Mountains, promoted on a map I pick up at a filling station as ‘the Calm Behind the Sunshine Coast’, which I sincerely hope it is, and can believe that it is, observing the seemingly-empty immensity that we pass through. So much space here. I’m knackered, today, very tired, after sleeping badly for three nights; I sleep better on the balcony than I do in the fiendish orchestra of apnoea inside the unit but I’m still woken early every morning by the dawn cacophony. It’s a long drive to Noosa Head and when I get there I don’t find it very exciting; money, beaches, tourists, big houses, usual stuff. Dull, except for the bush turkeys which wattle and scrat everywhere; them, I like. Funny little busy blue birds with velociraptor feet. I buy a take-away coffee from a kiosk on the beach and the guy takes the lid off the cup and shows me the liquid inside: