Wrestling

By Posted in Family, First Australians, friendship, Life Tagged , , , , , , , 2 Comments

(Someone told me recently a blog post is supposed to be of six hundred words. It sounded like one of the Laws of the Universe, like when we have an Equinox and when we have a Solstice. The Law reached me too late to stick. What follows is a story longer than the prescribed six hundred words. If you read it to its end you will understand I post it now to encourage a friend.)

Wrestling with the Murderer

 

***

It was in the late ‘nineties that I first met Chief Inspector John Bailey, the son of a policeman who had been awarded the George Cross posthumously. I had come to Albury expressly to hear the story of Eric George Bailey, the police officer who arrested his own murderer.

In the course of that first meeting John Bailey showed me the George Cross that the King of England awarded to his father. A large man, he hefted the silver cross in his palm, raising and lowering it slowly, in time with the cadence of his weighted words, as he told me of his father’s life and death.  Then he passed it to me. The medal, small in John Bailey’s hand, surprised me with its weight. Bailey said, “It’s what I have had to remember my father. It’s a rare and precious thing, a George Cross, but it’s not a father.

“I’ve got to pass it on, the medal. The Police Museum wants it, but I won’t let it go to them. I’ve seen too many things disappear from there, precious things, things that ought to remain when a man is gone, things that honour a person. This one was my father’s. “I’d trust the War Museum in Canberra. I’d be happy to see it go there, but not the Police Museum.”

The Chief Inspector was a tall man, stooping more for courtesy than for age, more or less pear shaped. Only his nose and his fingers were thin, arrows of curiosity projecting into the world before him. His eyes, hooded in age-loosened skin, looked at me, hawk-like, as he nodded slowly, “No, not the Police Museum.”

Bailey excused himself: “There’s a book I want to show you. I’ll bring it out.” I sat in the late afternoon sun on the Baileys’ small verandah and pondered the old man’s words: it’s not a father.

John Bailey returned carrying a copy of “They Dared Mightily”, an account of all Australians who had won the Victoria Cross or the George Cross. I learned that only about 400 of the latter have ever been awarded; in the echelons of courage it is the full equal of the Victoria Cross; and together with the VC it is the only royal honour ever awarded posthumously. Bailey opened the well-thumbed volume at page 279, pointed to his father’s citation and handed it to me to read. A quietly spoken man, he wanted me to know how history recalled his father, but he would not declaim or boast. The record must speak for itself.

The full citation was published in a supplement to the London Gazette of 25 October 1946 and read in part:

St. James’s Palace, S.W.1, 29th October, 1946.

The King has been graciously pleased to make the undermentioned awards of the GEORGE CROSS: —

Eric George BAILEY (deceased), Sergeant 3rd Class, New South Wales Police Force.

At about 8.30 p.m. on the 12th January, 1945, Sergeant Bailey (then a Constable 1st Class), whilst on duty in Adelaide Street, Blayney had occasion to speak to a man whose movements were suspicious. During the questioning the man pulled a revolver from his pocket and fired a shot which struck Bailey in the stomach. The Constable immediately closed with his assailant who fired two more shots. Although fast succumbing to his injuries and suffering from the effects of shock and haemorrhage, Bailey continued the struggle with the offender and held him on the ground until assistance arrived. Shortly afterwards he died. The fortitude and courage manifested by this Police Officer, in spite of the mortal injuries sustained by him at the outset of the encounter, constitute bravery and devotion to duty of the highest order.

 

Almost in passing there follows an account of an earlier act of heroism, desperate and unsung:

 

On 20 April 1939 he moved to Moruya, here he was highly commended for his part in the rescue of survivors from the fishing trawler, Dureenbee, which had been attacked by a Japanese submarine on 3 August 1942. He was transferred for the final time, to Blayney, just eight days before his death.

The face of Eric George Bailey looks out from his photograph on page 280. It is a young face, small and fine-boned beneath the broad visor of his police hat. The gaze is steady. I looked up at John Bailey and there was the same steady look. The look of the young man who was his father. In coming to Albury to learn about Eric George Bailey, GC, the father. I had no expectation of this man, his son. I had not imagined him. The son, I soon learned, was a story in his own right.

I asked John Bailey for his own recollections of his father’s passing. He was glad to oblige: ”Just before my father left the house to go to work, he paused and bent down to me and rubbed my head. He kissed my mother. He reached down to pat my little sister. Then he went through the doorway. I never saw him alive again.”

When John Bailey spoke he was irresistible. Speaking slowly, his voice emerging from his deep body, he chose his words carefully, simple words, spoken steadily by the old policeman, who regarded me steadily as he spoke. John Bailey looked across the small verandah towards me – and beyond me – to the scene he described. He looked at me, bringing me with him into that scene. It was alive in him as he spoke. I was soon to see that it had been alive to him ever since his father died, on January 12, 1945.

“The previous evening my father had said to all of us, ‘Tomorrow is the start of a new life.’ He and mother had brought us to the town of Blayney a week previous. Father had a week of leave that he used to settle us into our house and into the town.

“I remember Father brought a whole trailer load of onions and garlic with us to Blayney. He was a great gardener. He had grown them at his previous posting and he spent the last day of his leave fixing chook wire high under the roof in the garage to keep the onions and garlic dry.

That night Father said: ‘Tomorrow’s the day, the start of a new life.’

The next afternoon he walked out through the door for the 3.00 o’clock shift… I can still see him going out the door…”

“Father was one of nine children, the youngest. His family didn’t have much. My father didn’t own a pair of shoes until he was ten years old. He left home when he was fourteen to join the Post Office. He was a telegram boy. When he was twenty he joined the Police Force in Sydney. He worked for a while in Traffic, like all of them. Then he asked for a posting to the country. He was from the country himself… from Tenterfield. His people were farmers there.

“Father had married my mother in Sydney. She was a Sydney girl. When they were posted to the country it was to The Rock, not far from here…

“The Rock is a pretty small town. There were only a couple of hundred people. It was a one-man police station. It must have been a terrible shock to my mother, coming from Sydney to a place like that. But she accepted it.

“After The Rock Father was posted to Gundagai. I was born in Gundagai, in 1929. Then we went to Narrandera, then to Deniliquin, then Balranald. Every posting we went further west. Do you know Balranald?”

I shook my head. I knew the other towns he named: Narrandera is only 19 miles up the road from my home town of Leeton.

“Well, you would know Hay then – Hay, Hell and Booligal – Balranald is further out still… I remember the summers in Balranald. They were hot. The police house was very hot. A low roof…it was tin. One day the Chief Commissioner called in at the Station and Father invited him up home. He stopped with us for the night. I remember him and Father, both sitting out the back in the hot night. There was Father in his singlet, sitting with the Chief Commissioner of Police. He stripped down to his singlet too.

“That’s my first memory of the Chief Commissioner.

I met him again… after…

The Chief said to Father: ‘How can your wife live in this heat, a woman, with a child?’ So we were posted to Moruya. We were there from 1939 to 1945.”

“We arrived at Blayney on January 3, 1945.  Father started work in Blayney on January 12. He was shot that first day.

“My father was the only police officer to arrest his own murderer.”

A John Bailey pause. He lifted the little black leather casket and hefted it a couple of times. He put it down again.

When he resumed John Bailey shifted to the present tense: “Father walks the three quarters of a mile to work. On his way he stops at the picture theatre, to introduce himself to the proprietor. Father is the new police officer; he wants to meet the people who do business in the town.

Just then a man runs in, shouting that a man is waving a firearm about in the Exchange Hotel. Father knows the Exchange. We stayed there our first few nights in Blayney while they got the Police House ready for us.

“Father goes straight to the Exchange. In the Lounge they point out a man wearing a sort of uniform. He’s talking excitedly. Father doesn’t want an over-excited man with a firearm inside with all those people. He says: ‘You had better come outside with me.’

“They go outside. The man is wearing the uniform of the American Merchant Marine. Father questions him – name and address and so on. His answers aren’t satisfactory. He does say he is staying at the hotel. Father says ‘I think we had better search your room.’

Now the man becomes really agitated. He pulls out a handgun. Father says: ’Give that to me.’ He takes a step towards the man. The man shoots at my father. The bullet enters the left side of my father’s abdomen, passes through his liver, then up into his chest and lodges finally in his right shoulder.

“My father begins to bleed. My father closes on the man and grabs him by the arm. They wrestle and my father throws him to the ground. He comes to rest in the gutter, where they continue to wrestle. My father is getting weaker, but he manages to get on top of him.

The man still has the weapon in his hand, and my father attempts to take it while the man tries to shoot again. He manages to discharge the weapon but Father has deflected the gun so the shot goes astray. The bullet is found later in the ceiling of the hotel verandah. The man shoots again but my father has forced his wrist forward so the shot goes this time into the man’s forearm, where it shatters the bones and lodges in his elbow…”

There is another Bailey pause. The old policeman is looking downward and across his own verandah, across the years, at two wounded men in their mortal struggle. There is no anger in his expression, only sorrow.

The voice, the telling, is delivered like the plain fact testimony that I’ve heard police officers give in a court of law – no verbal colour, nothing in the words to convey hurt. Only the silences between words, only the pauses, allow me a sense of the speaker’s experience.

Old Man Bailey does not once refer to the killer by name – he remains ‘the man’ throughout – but the police officer is ‘Father’, flesh of his flesh. The father and his memorialising son have the colour and heat of human relationship. ‘The man’ has no human connection.

John Bailey resumes: “The gunman cannot escape. My father’s body is heavy upon him, his gun arm is shattered. My father has been bleeding heavily. Two railway detectives arrive at the scene from the railyards close by. They had heard the shots. Father says: ‘Take the handcuffs and cuff him. They are on my belt.’

The detectives put the handcuffs on the gunman, and someone calls an ambulance. The ambulance takes Father to the hospital in Orange, thirty miles away. My father dies on the way to hospital from loss of blood.”

Silence.

Then John Bailey repeats: “My father is the only police officer that I know of who arrested his own murderer.”

***

“An officer came to the house and told Mother that Dad was hurt. She went away with the officer and I took my little sister to the neighbours’ house. We stayed the night in the house of Death. That was the neighbours’ name – Death. They pronounced it Deeth.

“ I saw my father once more – in the casket, at the funeral. My father was 38 years old when he was killed…

“The Force paid full Police honours to my father. There was a procession at the funeral, with the Police Band, the Mounted Police, a motor cycle escort, officers marching in formation.

Afterwards we packed up and went to Mother’s people in Sydney. That was Bondi. Later there was a function to award my father the Geoff Lewis Trophy – that’s the annual police award for valour. At the function the Chief Commissioner said to Mum, ‘I want your boy John in the Police Force.’ He wanted to look after me for my father’s sake and for my mother. But mother didn’t want it. I didn’t either, really.”

“My father said I should go into the Post Office and that was the plan. I never intended to join the force. But after the funeral, the Chief Commissioner said to Mum, ‘How old is your son, here?’

Mother said I was fourteen.

The Chief said as soon as I was old enough I should join up: he would keep an eye on me.

So, when I was fifteen I went to the Recruiting Office. I wasn’t very big. Officer Russ Sadler was a big man. He said: ‘You delivering a telegram, son?’ I told Officer Sadler I was going to join the force.

He measured me and he weighed me and he said they wouldn’t take me. I was too small. ‘Go home and eat some Weet Bix, son’, he said. ‘Come back when you’re bigger.’

But the Officer-in-Charge, a Scot called Gordon McKechnie, bellowed and wagged his finger at the junior officer and told him off. ‘This young bloke is going to be a policeman. Sign him in.’

“So, even though I was less than five feet nine tall and I weighed less than ten stone, they let me into the Police Cadets – on a condition: I had the three years as a cadet to become tall enough and heavy enough. And I soon grew and I made the height and weight comfortably.”

I could see that he did. John Bailey, even in old age, was tall enough and heavy enough. Ample in fact.

***

John Bailey pointed again to the book.  I read again the citation. It described the actions of Officer Bailey. It steered well clear of any feelings. The officer saw his duty and he did not hesitate.

Only one year after his father’s death, John Bailey enters the fatal force. He serves for forty-five years. I wondered aloud,” Did you sometimes remember your father’s death during those years? Did you look over your shoulder as you went about your work?” What I did not ask – but I wondered – when he was a young father, did he not recall the night when grim-faced officers took his stricken mother away, leaving him, a fourteen year old boy to take his small sister to the neighbours called Death?

“I never forgot my father. I thought about him whenever I worked alone. As a country policeman I was usually alone. One night I was at home. I heard someone screaming wildly in the front room. I pulled my trousers on and there was a man in there, terrified, in a panic. He was shouting – something about a man, a gun. Someone had been shot in a house close by. “I pulled my boots on and ran straight there. I went into the house and saw the body. He was dead. I could see that straight away. Half the face had been shot off. It must have been a shotgun.

The gunman had to be somewhere close by. There was no-one else in the house. I went outside to look for the killer. It was dark. I didn’t want to turn on my torch and show him a target. I listened. There was no sound. I was pretty sure he was in the garden somewhere. I spent three quarters of an hour trying to find him.

“I did think of my father…

I tried to move quietly. Eventually I found him. He was sitting against the back fence, dead. He had shot his own face off.”

***

I did some research into ‘the man’ who murdered Eric George Bailey. I read he was released from gaol only two days before the murder. The man was a professional crook whose specialty was stealing passengers’ luggage from railway stations. He’d spent some time in prison for theft elsewhere in country New South Wales. On his first day of freedom he stole a couple of suitcases from a railway station. In one of these he found an American uniform.

It was just after closing time at a gun shop in Sydney that ex-prisoner Thomas Couldrey (alias Cyril Norman) knocked on the door of the shop. He persuaded the proprietor to admit him on the pretext of Couldrey’s planned departure before opening hour on the morrow. Couldrey examined a number of guns as if to make a purchase, loading one. He distracted the shop-keeper then attacked him, shooting him dead. He then looted the shop of weapons and ammunition and cash, which he packed into a suitcase. He travelled with that suitcase to Blayney, where he booked into the Exchange Hotel. Here, dressed in the American uniform, he proceeded to drink rapidly. It was there that ‘the man’ met Eric Bailey. It was outside the hotel – where Bailey chose to question him for the greater safety of patrons – that the officer said: “I think I’d better search your room.”

In time Couldrey recovered from the injuries he sustained in the struggle with the policeman who arrested him. He stood trial, was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging. In the event the sentence was commuted. Couldrey died in prison some years later of natural causes, thought to be tuberculosis.

***

By the time I met the son John, he had retired from the Police Force. We met at his home in Albury where he cared for his wife whose memory was failing. It was not old age or his wife’s infirmity that brought about Bailey’s retirement; it was, he said, disgust.

Four decades after his father’s murder Chief Inspector John Bailey underwent an exhaustive sequence of interviews and assessments that would have seen him promoted to Commander. He progressed smoothly through every stage. Next, Bailey underwent examination by an Ethics Panel. This was the final stage. From here promotion would be a formality: “There were five examiners on that panel. I recognised the faces of a couple of them, I knew the names of a couple more. The fifth was a senior man in the magistracy. I knew that name too. Everyone in the force knew him, the greatest paedophile in the state. Everyone knew, everyone turned a blind eye. And that… that man was about to determine my ethical fitness. It sickened me. I withdrew my candidacy. Not long after I retired.”

***

Much of this account I wrote shortly after first meeting John Bailey. Earlier he had recovered from ostensibly successful surgery for colon cancer, only for it to recur. His daughter Chrissie knew what this must portend. Her young children did not know and, she decided, should not know. Not yet.

So the time was not right for me to tell the story of John Bailey’s long, long struggle. Meanwhile he had other things on his mind, a great task before him in the care of his failing wife. After many years, when Mrs Bailey was beyond caring or knowing, John allowed his wife to move into professional care. Now he could retire from his second career.  In the years that followed John Bailey wrestled with his own murderer, an opponent more like a tag team, returning now as cancer, now as open heart surgery, now as diabetes, now as blindness, finally near his heart. He yielded only at the final fall.

***

My oldest friend Johnny Wanklyn phoned me from Albury. He produced only a few words, the bare few. Long before my friend became John Bailey’s son-in-law he’d been the elder man’s close friend. John married Bailey’s daughter and the two Johns remained tight.

Johnny had called a few times over the previous week or two. The first time Johnny wanted to know: “What’s the best place in Melbourne for chest diagnosis?” Unspoken was our shared knowledge of the colon cancer. The new problem was a mass in his chest. More calls followed: “The local specialist wants a biopsy – should it be taken in Albury or in Melbourne?” The last call: ”The old man’s too ill for any procedure.”

John Bailey’s son flew from Far North Queensland; his grandchildren gathered from Melbourne, from Geelong, from Christchurch. And now, the minimum, the inevitable: “Doff, John has passed.” My friend’s voice failed him.

Eventually he managed, “Bye for now.”

***

It was only six weeks previously that John Bailey and I talked over a long dinner at the house of his daughter, Chrissie and his son-in-law, John Wanklyn. I was about to fly to Wadeye, reputedly one of Australia’s most lawless towns. After a long career spent as an officer of the law in rural and regional areas, John Bailey was keenly interested: “I’ll be anxious to hear what you find in Wadeye. Tell me what you think.”

I readied myself to offer the veteran copper my apologetics, some extenuation of Aboriginal lawlessness. Old Man Bailey put down his glass. He raised his right hand, clawed by age and arthritis, and waved away my preconceptions of his preconceptions: he had none; he had, in his eighties that rare attribute – a genuinely open mind on Aboriginal matters. “Howard, I am glad you are going. Be sure to write and tell me about the town and the life there. Write and tell me what you see.” I did go, I did write. But I didn’t manage to complete my long piece about Wadeye – one of Australia’s hidden cultural capitals – in time to share it with John Bailey.

The uncompletedness of my task was a weight. I felt I owed some personal debt to John Bailey, to his remarkable life and lineage and service – this man who lost a father and gained a vocation through a murder.

***

A year after her father’s passing, John Bailey’s daughter supplied information he had not seen fit to mention to me. “Pa was honoured many times by the force. In 1972 they awarded him the Police Long Service and Good Conduct Medal; in 1986 he was awarded the National Police Medal; and in1988 they gave him the NSW Police Medal with 6th Clasp. Do you know what that means?”

I didn’t.

“It means they awarded him with that honour on six separate occasions.”

A Bailey pause.

“So the force honoured Pa lots of times in his lifetime. And one final time after he died: that was at his funeral. There was a motor cycle vanguard and a motor cycle rearguard. Police officers in numbers. The local chief commander spoke. Pa was buried in his dress uniform, with all his decorations attached.  A Police flag covered the casket and Pa’s police hat rested on it.

“One funny thing happened that day. I wouldn’t have seen the funny side at the time: a member of the motorcycle escort recognised the driver of the hearse. The man was a disqualified driver who’d lost his license through drink driving or some other offense. I don’t know what the copper did about it, but I know what he didn’t do. He didn’t arrest the driver on the spot and spoil Pa’s funeral.”

Postscript: I sent John Bailey’s daughter my notes. She wrote: “It took me a little while to brace myself to open it…You tell a story that I know, and have known for most of my life. But you have woven into the fabric of this new telling, the very essence of my father and his long-felt and deep loss of his father. I often think that the answer to the question “who would you invite to the ultimate dinner party?” would be, my father and grandfather, just to see and hear them together.

Thank you for reuniting father and son in words. I know Pa would have seen it as a precious and tangible thing to hand on to his children, grandchildren and beyond …”

I dedicate this story to a friend who is wrestling in another mortal struggle.

The World Sounds Very Crisp

By Posted in Life Tagged 8 Comments

In recent days my world has clicked and rustled and rattled. Birds have started singing again in the early morning. My foot strikes the carpet and a smart rap is heard. Opening an envelope is a musical experience, and as I type these words the keyboard clicks smartly.

I have re-entered the world of sound. I’m reading lips less and hearing more. The winds of winter blow and my ears sense the rustle of molecules in flight. Most remarkable are the slurpings and the snapping of my own mastication.

I am newly born into this world of sound.

My hearing aids literally cost more than my car. I’m learning small skills: In the morning I poke a slender little microphone into an orifice that I cannot see; in the evening I remove it and encounter the day’s crop of soft brown wax. I use an alcohol swab to cleanse the mike. This routine will bring excitement to the balance of my days upon this earth.

So loud, so clear the clarion of the world! Is this how the baby feels on leaving its mothers warm, wet world of silence?

Never at home with gadgets I advertised first for an ear trumpet. E-bay offered none. So I play host to these miniature miracles in my auricles, bemused as ever by the absurdity of surviving longer than my senses as well as numerous other worn-out parts.

Next will be the cataract surgery. I hope to report then on a world of light.

In Praise of a Very Small Town

By Posted in First Australians, Life, Medical, Travel Tagged , , , , , , 2 Comments

Before I answered the calI I’d never heard of Trundle. When I googled it I might have giggled. A town of six hundred souls, Trundle boasts the second-widest main street in New South Wales, and its pub boasts the longest verandah in the state. I didn’t giggle. I held my mirth.

All morning I chased my tail in the big city, I caught my plane, I recited the Traveller’s Prayer and I breathed out.

It was dark when the plane dropped me at Dubbo. The bloke in the burger shop near the airport added up my bill for one bottle of iced coffee, one bottle of putative lemon. I pulled out a ten-dollar note.

Something was different: the man didn’t scan the bottles. He did his calculation in his head. Ten dollars fifty, he said. The man looked up and saw my money. Ten bucks, he said. I thanked him. You’ll know where to come next time, he said. I said I will. I meant it.

I took the shorter route to from Dubbo to Trundle. I didn’t realise the shorter route would take me by dirt roads for much of the distance. Over the two hours on those back roads I startled a few kangaroos but encountered no vehicle passing in either direction. The dark of Dubbo was darker out there in the quietness and the road signs were unlit. I took a wrong turning and got lost. I got unlost and entered Trundle. The wide main street was brightly lit. Nothing moved.

At the hospital I asked the nurse, can you direct me to my quarters? No, she said, I’ll take you. Follow me. She jumped into her car, I into mine and we drove through the dark to a house that wasn’t brick. We bought this to let to visitors, she said.  We’ve spent seven years renovating it. The nurse opened the front door and I stepped into the perfumed past. Motel deodorant swamped all olfaction. The nurse pulled a switch revealing animals that greeted me from every side. A steel sheep and a steel cow stood at either side of the front door. In the lobby a crocheted mouse in a lilac dress stood knee-high by a bedroom door. A second mouse in white stood guard at the second bedroom. A third mouse in soft pink waited by the third bedroom. Ladies’ hats hanged from hooks, trailing ribbons of many hues. A large painting of Trundle’s main thoroughfare (famed for its width) stood on the loungeroom floor. The streetscape peeped brilliantly from behind a swath of brown paper upon which someone had written, apologetically, Sorry, Not For Sale.

Flowers fashioned of bright fabrics overflowed from waterless vases in every room. In the kitchen, mugs of colourful ceramic spilled from every cupboard.

Relentless decoration everywhere. Art deco china cabinet, four kinds of chilli sauce and very white bread indeed.

Décor surrounded me, pressing in from every side. Furnishings that dated backwards in time from the year 1950 overflowed in every room. Here was the Australian rural past in glowing abundance.

Tucked behind a bedroom door, in the depths of a very large leather hatbox, sat a felt hat in sky blue. An emphatic navy ribbon decorated the hat. Above all stood a framed text, written in smart neo-gothic. Its title read, The Story Of a Hat. The story told how that hat was made by hand for a wedding at a period when no woman went to church unhatted or ungloved. It was a matter of respect. The story, unsigned, ended with the words, This hatbox belonged to my grandfather.

Two thoughts registered: This house was, not renovated but de-novated – a home to memory. You would not sneer at sincerity. And kitsch would not be the word; this was love.

In the main street shopfronts stood beneath brave signage. Two of every three shops were closed. A sign read, Trundle Talkies. Excited, I raced across the road to check the movie times. I was too late by thirty years. I read the signage above the garage. Pontiac, Plymouth – those makes that ferried my family across the state in the 1950’s – now extinct.

A card in one shop window read, closed until further notice, ill child. I saw five clothing shops. The stock seemed to be the same in all five. Three were closed, one with a notice advising, Yvonne comes Thursdays and Mondays, 11.00 to 3.00.

I went to the first of the open shops to buy undies. The child in charge was sorry, they had none. I might try the Op Shop two doors down. No undies there either, but I noted the stock in the Op Shop looked the same as in its competitors.

Two doors down was the office of the Annual Abba Festival. Thousands attend. They put on a special train from Sydney. Everyone dresses up as one Abba person or another. Great are the festivities.

I doctored in Trumble for three days. Most patients were farmers, heirs to farms worked by their families for generations. Many of these people were older than I. None complained when an emergency elsewhere in the hospital detained me. If I said, sorry to keep you waiting, they looked mystified, then assured me it didn’t matter.

I thought about this. These people worked the farm from sunup to sundown. There was always work to do. But they had time to spare for other people. They’d survived the long cycles of dearth and plenty. In the present dry – the worst in memory – people were feeding their stock by hand. They’d stopped planting crops, waiting for the rains. They knew time differently from my patients in the centre of the great city.

My principal in the practice spoke of an epidemic of depression, of farmers dying of sadness. Others would be forced from the land, to walk away from the family farm. It occurred to me to ask, where are the Aboriginal people? Not here. We’re not on a river. And there’s no community in Parkes either – no river there. But strong communities in Dubbo and Forbes. They’re on rivers.

My three days completed I rose at 2.45 am to drive to Dubbo to catch the earliest flight to the city. I drove down that wide, wide street, built for the bullock trains to do their long u-turn.

I hurried through the dark, eyes wide for suicidal kangaroos. I arrived at the airport and checked in. I checked my phone: I’d arrived on time. Chasing my tail again.

Reds Under the Beds

By Posted in Books, Family, friendship, Life, Opinion, Reviews, Work by Others, writing Tagged , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Michael Benjamin Komesaroff was a conspicuous proletarian classmate of mine during our later years at Scopus (1963). He had a lived political ideology, like other Komesaroffs before him, an indivisible loyalty to Jewishness and to his country of citizenship. I recall his vernacular speech deafening us classmates in his espousal of Labor politics. We called him Kommo; he was a social democrat before most of us knew the term. Those same politics marked the generation of his immediate ancestors, and brought them to the attention of ASIO. At the time Lenin was preaching international revolution, a doctrine that unsettled Australia’s conservatives. Here were the Komesaroffs, newly arrived from that revolutionary hotbed. Where did their loyalties lie? ASIO became very interested in them, and now their descendant, with a career in international journalism behind him, investigates the investigators in a new book. “Reds Under the Beds” is the result.

“Reds Under the Beds” describes the abiding interest of Australia’s intelligence community in a family who had immigrated in the early decades of the Twentieth Century.  The author’s love and respect for those ancestors match his feelings for Australia. His meticulous research informs this account of a group whose hallmark was loyalty. The Komesaroffs were loyal Jews who became loyal citizens of Australia. Jewish loyalty mandated their love of Zion and their opposition to fascism, while loyalty to the country of adoption saw them acknowledged as exemplary citizens. Somehow ASIO became all too interested in the Jewish concerns of the Komesaroffs and quite blind to their lives as citizens.

Michael Komesaroff writes his family’s story dispassionately, in clear and clean prose. His analysis of the political tides and times is  revelation, as is his understanding of the contest for middle Australia between Social Democrats and Conservatives. With a calm that is unusual he identifies prevailing anti-semitic attitudes without inflating it beyond its true dimensions. Most topically, Komesaroff shows us how Australians of the most ordinary loyalty can come under pervading suspicion and investigation by Intelligence organisations. In our times, when mistrust of the citizenry is translated into something of a growth industry, a poised and intelligent balance is needed between the community’s needs of security and of community. In the case of these ‘Reds under the Beds’, ASIO emerges, showing limited intelligence.

“Reds Under the Beds” is published by Hybrid Publishers and is available from most booksellers and Amazon. Further details of the book are contained on the Amazon website (here).

As outlined in the flyer, I have the pleasure of launching the book at 4:00 pm on Sunday 15 July at Glen Huntly Park Function Room, Glen Huntly Park, corner of Neerim and Booran Roads.

Ecclesiastes, 12, 1

By Posted in Childhood, friendship, Life, Love Tagged , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

A letter arrived inviting me to join a panel of former students addressing a bunch of peers from my old school. Panelists were to discuss a number of questions which all boiled down to If you knew then what you know now, what would you have done differently?

The questions made me think about my schooldays. I loved school. I felt happy. I thought the brutality of our teachers was somehow just the way of things, neither wrong nor right, simply conduct that lay beyond judgement. I didn’t like it – in fact when I witnessed it I’d whinny with the ugly mirth of the unpunished; when I received it I felt I might vomit. But then I didn’t like winter either. Winter and corporal punishment were both unpleasant and both lay beyond lawmaking.

As I reviewed our jungle behaviour my older self felt sad and ashamed. I wished we had been kinder. An instinct revealed to us whoever was the most vulnerable. Arriving as a new boy in mid-term I was conspicuously vulnerable and the hounds duly bayed and pursued me. Being new was a temporary condition; others suffered perpetually. In my turn I identified one or two of these and I teased them with relish.

In time I saw how that fat child, this gay person, that person whose father belted her every day, attracted the crows, and I declined to join in the pecking. In time two of these three were to die by their own hand; the third tried and failed.

I wasn’t fat, or gay. My father didn’t beat me. My schooldays were happy. Inspiring teachers inspired me; loving mentors nurtured me. I suppose I blossomed.

Half a century and more have passed since I lived in that arena of mind-nurture and bloodsport. My eyes, clouded now with cataract, my knees grating, my hearing dimmed, my balance wonky, my farting – ever a reckless delight – now hazardous, what advice would I offer today’s schoolchild? Should I say Rejoice in the days of your youth before the evil days come when you will say, “I have no pleasure in them”?

I watch those tender green shoots anxiously as they don school garb and they venture into their jungles. I hold my breath and hope. Will she make her way? Will she find a friend? What wise words might I proffer?

Instead of speaking words I hope I might hold my peace and let her be, and let her become.

Faith and the Flu Vaccine

By Posted in Faith, Family, Life, Medical, Opinion Tagged , , , , , , , , 13 Comments

Some trust in God, some trust in nature, others trust in nothing and no-one.

The roots of these feelings lie deep, too deep generally for the light to penetrate.

These feelings are almost religious: they express some faith or, occasionally, a fear of all faith.

If you try to debate feelings of this nature you’ll find them impervious to argument. They are held sacred and well away from the light of enquiry.

If you believed I held a particular faith you might consider my belief absurd. But because of your good manners you’d probably keep that view of my quaint beliefs private. You’d realise argument would not budge me and, out of kindness you’d refrain from locking horns with me.

Circumcision evokes a great example of quasi-religious positions. Whenever you hear the subject discussed you’ll recognise the intensity with which a person expresses a position. Here we find conviction, not opinion. Convictions are guarded fiercely, they are immune to fresh evidence: conviction is the opposite of scientific openness of mind. I have noticed how lay people, doctors and nurses alike defend their positions on the foreskin with religious intensity. I do not argue with the foreskin zealot.

Winter has come to Australia with promise of our regular influenza epidemic. With winter comes a rise in religious sentiment on the matter of immunisation against the flu. The government preaches immunisation, we doctors echo with our own hosannahs, the trusters in nature shriek back. We all talk at each other. We find it hard to listen when our faiths collide. Doctors trust in herd immunity. On Facebook my daughter tells ‘friends’ she trusts her doctor father. One respondent trusts in nature (“I‘ve been vegan for seven years, and I’ve never had the flu during all that time.”). Another respondent trusts no-one and nothing (“ It’s a conspiracy. Big pharma in cahoots with government.”)

I looked up some facts about influenza and vaccination. I found plenty of facts but these will change few minds. (Two thousand proven influenza deaths. Lots of people become unwell in the two weeks following vaccination. Not everyone who is vaccinated with be immunised. Not a single proven death from the vaccine.)

I had been doctor for two weeks when I saw my first influenza death. The patient caught the flu late in pregnancy. She deteriorated rapidly, developed pneumonia and was soon brain-dead. Her baby was delivered by emergency caesarean section and lived. That baby never knew her mother. Mother was twenty-four years of age. That was my own age at the time.

Last week I vaccinated my children and my grandchildren against the flu. I had the vaccine myself. I offer the same vaccines to all my patients. I answer their questions, I provide information, but I don’t enter into religious disputation.

Autumn Notes, IV

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As I write this it’s still autumn. I need to point that out lest winter arrive before this is posted. You know how pedantic my blogmeistress can be.

Winter is lurking, waiting its moment. I left the hospital last night and walked into the dark and rain. Rather than wait in the wet for the correct tram I took another which would take me close to the station. ‘Close’ was actually a mile or two. I enjoyed a philosophical walk through the bleak, absorbing heaven-sent water through hat, jacket and leather shoes. Three jolly Chinese women sheltered in a doorway beneath bright umbrellae that flapped in the wind. Nice and damp by now, I thought of the umbrella, a found object, furled, resting in my bag. If ever I’d have an umbrella moment this would be it. I don’t like umbrellas – a prejudice from childhood dressed up as a principle. The umbrella stayed furled.

On the tram this morning three young women sat and consulted their screens. Melbourne passed by them, damp, dark, unnoticed. Their devotion was religious. One of the three wore an eskimo jacket, her face fur-framed, her free hand clutching two slices of vegemite toast. The bread looked like rye. A semicircular bite in the upper slice showed where the screen interrupted the young woman’s breakfast. Twenty minutes after boarding, eskimo-lady alighted, her neglected toast undepleted. I mention the breakfast because it looked hearty, just right for the weather.

At the hospital last night I ate the meal I brought from home, a soup described as ‘Tuscan Lentil & Grain Broth’. A woman I know found the recipe in one of the weekend magazines. The soup was new to me. Among the ingredients were carrot, celery, onion (of course), garlic (gratefully), tomatoes, lentils, barley and a green called cavolo nero. That’s Italian for kale. I saw through the disguise; I don’t eat kale, like umbrellae – a matter of prejudice. Well I ate the soup, hot and hearty. Oh what a moment! The soup warmed me and filled me so all the wet and wind and cold that followed could not dampen the love I felt for the soupmaker. I decided I wanted her to be my wife. Which, happily, she is.

I Blame Seinfeld

By Posted in Life, Opinion Tagged , , , , , 1 Comment

I blame Seinfeld.

Someone has to be blamed.

My kids watched as they grew up. My wife watched. I tried not to. There was the hapless George: no shabbier soul ever sullied a screen. Every so seldom Kramer might pop up. He’d break me up. A wondrous comic creation. But between cackles I could feel something niggling at my austere soul. It was only later, with the advent of ‘Friends’ – not as funny, the characters even more ordinary – that I could define what offended me.

Nowadays, what was subtext in Seinfeld and in Friends is the explicit in the great world. What those characters (Seinfeld) and those nonentities (Friends) did constantly was normative and, in time, became normal. The banks do it, the captains of cricket, the captains of industry do it. The incumbent in the White House does it, the churches, the military, politicians (of course) – they all do it.

They all lie.

In those TV shows the ethos was subterranean. You could feel the tremors but you didn’t always sense the accumulating weight of untruth; nor how truth as a value kept receding into distance. In response to any difficulty, every character lied. They lied by reflex. Awkward situation? Tell a fib. Everyone does it…

I’ll tell you a story from the Olden Days. It goes like this: A child goes into a bank with his piggy bank.  The banker, a man in his fifties, helps the child to open a savings account. The banker congratulates the child on her thrift. The banker does not sell further products to the child.

 

 

Today that’s a fairy story. That banker will never drive a Ferrari.

Here’s a contemporary story: A customer goes into a bank and asks the banker a question. The banker replies, “I’m a banker. I tell only lies.” Should the customer believe the banker?

The makers of Seinfeld knew what they were doing. They were blowing a whistle on untruthtelling.

The makers of Seinfeld made us laugh. We laughed and we laughed. And we paid no attention to the whistle. And now the Liar in Chief sits in the White House tweeting. And the laugh is on us all.

 

 

Autumn Notes 111

By Posted in Blog Policy, Childhood, Family, Life Tagged , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The ruler of this blog disqualified the title of my previous post. I’d proposed “Autumn Notes -III”, but the blogmeistress ruled that out. ‘It’s a book review, Dad, it’s nothing to do with autumn. You’ll confuse people if you call it that.’

I disagreed.

She insisted.

I demurred.

She overruled.

So here we ago again. I’m writing this in autumn. Brown leaves are falling, the air is chilling, malicious winds lash the streets. What’s more, I’m in the autumn of my days. And today when I visited my aunt I glimpsed Winter.

My mother-in-law is a beauty. At 91 years she dresses like my daughters and she’s still admired as a beauty. Her name’s Helen. As in Troy. Ma-in-Law Helen remarked to me once,   ‘Your Aunty B was the most beautiful bride I ever saw’. On a separate occasion Aunty B said to me ‘Your mother in law was the most beautiful bride I ever saw.’

I’ve seen wedding photos of them both and I can’t disagree with either of them.

Today I visited Aunty B. Family news had filtered through the dark: B isn’t doing well. I found her sleeping in her room, surrounded by her daughters and her doctor-granddaughter. I saw her, I saw that same face, beautiful still. I thought of Aunty B’s life of battles, of her buoyancy and grace, her good cheer. I remember how she took this bewildered country boy under her wing on lonely visits to Melbourne. Now Aunty opened an eye. Was that a smile? Her hand opened to my touch, the grip strong. My last surviving aunt opened her mouth to speak. No words. The eye closed and she slept. Like Hemingway’s Old Man (of the Sea), did she dream?

It’s not yet Winter but it’s coming.

The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted

By Posted in Books, Life, Literature, Love, Opinion, Reviews, Work by Others Tagged , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Every so seldom I come upon a book to treasure. Every day I read. I inhabit a forest of books,

I sleep between towers of books, some read, some half-read, most unread. No day goes unbooked.

Some in my world of books inform or advise or enlighten. Others – not enough of them – delight or tickle me. Some inspire, some shock, others outrage and a few disgust me. Plenty bore me. But every so rarely comes a story that calls for that overused word, love. Robert Hillman’s ‘Bookshop of the Broken Hearted’ is a book to love.

What do I mean here by love? In two separate surveys carried out a decade or so ago, respondents were asked to name their most-beloved Australian novel. I saw listed many books I’d enjoyed, by authors I admire. Before reading the results I made my own nomination – Tim Winton’s ‘Cloudstreet’. I read the rankings, and there, topping both surveys, was Cloudstreet.’Just so: Winton’s characters, their stories, their rich and variegated humanness, are given to us in their fulness, given us to love. ‘Cloudstreet’ stays with the reader and is recalled with love. ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ is another such.

Ripe for adding to that list is Hillman’s ‘Bookshop’. It broke my heart and it healed it. I laughed (my guffaws this morning alarmed a tramful of screen-trapped commuters) and I ached for the child. And for the adults who saw this child and that child torn from them I felt a distress that has visited me only once outside of a book, when the (false) report arrived that my child had a fatal malignancy.

‘Bookshop’ left me hopeful but not complacent. I will cherish the simple farmer who is the protagonist and I will tremble for him so long as memory abides.

I invite you come to Readings Bookshop in Carlton, to hear Robert Hillman in conversation with this happy blogger at 6.30 pm next Monday, May 7th.