A Secret Country Read online

  The sounds that came with the light belonged to locusts and currawongs. The locusts provided a background of incessant, mad humming. When summer was over they would rise like a black squall of minor Biblical proportions and expire en masse over Bob’s Gully, where their carcasses lay until March. The currawongs sat on Mrs Esme Cook’s iron and tarpaper roof – you could hear them sliding on the corrugations – and they sang and called to each other ceaselessly. Currawongs are garrulous birds with voices like flutes and a range from shrill to almost bass; in full cry they sound like an ornithological Welsh chorus. Ebony black with white plumage, they are a sort of primeval crow whose genetic origins, like birds of paradise and so many Australian creatures, are little known.

  Like most scavengers, currawongs are not universally loved; they fix you with a gleaming yellow eye and they dive-bomb and raid nests and eat like goats. They decimated Moore Street’s backyard fruit trees, making sorties from Mrs Esme Cook’s and the roof of our dunny. ‘Get those flamin’ birds outta here!’ Mrs Cook would say to Ted, her snowy haired husband. I liked those birds: I liked their song and their wickedness. They kicked over the traces with style.

  There is a smell and taste that come with the diamond light. By December, when the king tides have arrived from across the south Pacific, the salt spray blows up from the beach. It stiffens the air, covers windows with a sticky mist, corrodes paint on cars and mortar between bricks, and tastes like Bondi and summer. I still run down to the beach with my heart thumping at the prospect; by the time I reach Hall Street and turn into Campbell Parade, which skirts the length of the beach, the spray has the texture of sand. If a ‘southerly buster’ is blowing, the sand is in my hair, nose, ears, on my tongue. Bondi is the site of one of Sydney’s main sewerage outlets; in an enduring environmental atrocity raw sewage is pumped into the ocean just beyond the last line of breakers. If a hot westerly blows, the nostalgic cocktail is complete: salt, sand and shit.

  The beach is Australia’s true democracy. Such a notion will infuriate those who do not like the beach, who do not regard Bondi as Hindus regard the Ganges, who prefer to remain grey skeined with sweat rather than covered in carcinogenic rust.

  I have a friend like that. He was, admittedly, born way out west, somewhere near the Great Sandy Desert, which his childhood imagination might have conjured as a vast beach without water. Certainly, whenever he has visited me in my Bondi ‘office’, as he calls the south end of the beach, in order to discuss matters so urgent he is obliged to fill his uncongenial shoes with sand and to wear zinc cream on his nose, his temper is foul, and our friendship is strained. Not even G-stringed sybarites, close at hand, leaven his mood. I have told him he is not a real Australian. He has retorted that I am ‘just a bloody expatriate’. The last time I persuaded him to meet me on the beach his ankles turned the colour of freshly boiled beets. He has not forgiven me for this.

  The truth is that we Australians did not derive our freedom from bewigged Georgian founding fathers and their tablets of good intentions. There was no antipodean Gettysburg. We are still finding our freedom among condoms on the sand and joggers on the dole, ‘banana lizards’ on parole and others on illicit business, ageing ‘hot doggers’ and gays eyeing lifesavers and mums with ‘toddlers’ and tourists from Osaka. In short, we have found our freedom by taking our clothes off and doing nothing of significance, and by over the years refining and elevating this state of idleness to a ‘culture’ now regarded highly in the world’s most fashionable places.

  This is not quite the vibrant image promoted by Paul Hogan. Paul and his people are rich and shiny, and have excellent teeth. We are not like that. Sydney, our greatest city, is only recently glamorised, its skyline only recently Manhattanised, its vocabulary only recently Americanised (‘lifts’ into ‘elevators’, ‘holidays’ into ‘vacations’, ‘I reckon’ into ‘I guess’), its heroes only recently transmuted from underdogs who struggled to the top to become corporate spivs and money launderers.

  Not long ago Sydney was an impoverished city, whose working conditions were at times worse than the worst in England. The sweatshops of east Sydney, with their low wages, long night shifts and unsafe practices – unguarded machinery and floors so hot the soles peeled from your boots – produced an hypnotic routine from working lives. Smoke from industrial chimneys blotted blue skies and congealed winter afternoons into premature night; and the silhouettes that moved along ribbons of tenement houses in the inner city might have been painted by L. S. Lowry. The repossessors, the bailiffs, the Dickensian sharpies, the man who sold clothes-props, were from lives on the edge.

  At Central Station the rural poor, white and black, spilled out of the overnight mail trains that come from ‘out west’, the northern rivers and the southern tablelands, and dragged their cardboard cases, tied with string, to the hostels and a cheap hotel known as the ‘People’s Palace’. Here there were army surplus stores and greasy spoon Chinese restaurants with newspaper tablecloths and tiled pubs from which people staggered or were thrown.

  In Balmain, now gentrified with houses that sell for a million dollars and more, people went hungry. In Paddington – a slum just down the road from Bondi – owl-eyes peered from behind lace curtains and the streets were places for tramps and winos and kids with serge short pants and bloody knees. If you lived in Paddo you were a ‘battler’ and a loser. Here, too, houses once rented to battlers and losers sell for a million dollars and more.

  Bondi was borderline. Bondi was alleys of litter and smashed beer bottles and fences of rusted corrugated iron, and faded art deco flats, with stairwells that smelt of cabbage, and ‘Bondi semis’ where the occupants never seemed to turn on the light. Bondi was Jewish refugees who were known as ‘reffos’ and others who were known as dagos, wogs, Eyties, Baits, Chinks and boongs; and Catholics who were known as tykes; and women who were known as sluts, nymphos, old fowls and ‘very nice ladies’.

  Bondi was men coughing up their innards in a rush-hour tram because an entire Australian division was mustard-gassed on the Western Front. Bondi was men weaving home on a Saturday night clutching bottles of ‘Dinner Ale’, shaped like ten-pins, and bottles of Shelley’s lemonade for the kids and a chook for the missus: the chook having been ‘acquired ’, or won in a pub raffle. Bondi was domestic trench warfare, with bodies thudding against thin walls, and a woman in an apron led bleeding to an ambulance: street entertainment for the young. Bondi was the inexplicable kindness of shopkeepers; at Mack’s Milk Bar and Nick the Fruitologist’s they seemed to give away as much as they sold.

  In Bondi, even the crankiest streets have a glimpse of the Pacific, if not of the beach itself. Whatever the state of life in the streets, the great sheet of dazzling blue-green is always there, framed between chimneys and dunnies. On weekdays my friend Pete and I would ‘scale’ a Bondi Beach tram if we spotted an old ‘jumping jack’ type, which had a peculiarly high suspension and could be bounced off the rails by a swarm of eleven-year-olds synchronising their efforts. And of course Len’s apoplexy was part of the fun. Len was a famous Bondi tram conductor who liked his grog and consequently had a face like a crimson ant hill. ‘Forcrissake youse kids, you’ll gimme a never sprak tan!’

  All principal beaches in Australia are public places. This is not so in the United States and Europe, where the private possession of land and sea is rightly regarded by visiting Australians as a seriously uncivilised practice. Although private property is revered by many Australians, there are no proprietorial rights on an Australian beach. Instead, there is a shared assumption of tolerance for each other, and a spirit of equality which begins at the promenade steps. I ought not to make too much of this, though foreigners, Americans especially, admire it.

  Perhaps the reason for this sense of ease is that many on the beach are there to elude and evade: in other words to ‘lurk’. Lurking, an Australian pastime, can mean being somewhere you are not meant to be. When I worked in a postal sorting office in Sydney one summer, I would clock on, sort
letters for an hour or two, then, with others, slip out through a hole in the back wall. We would then proceed to Bondi for a day of lurking. Indeed, the hole was known as the ‘Bondi Hole’. I was told the bosses knew, but they did nothing about it. The attitude this represented was summed up by Jean Curlewis in her book, Sydney Surfing, published in 1924. ‘Why toil to get rich,’ she wrote ‘to do exactly the same thing that you are doing now, not rich? Why get all hot and bothered over More Production when the thing you want is produced by the Pacific cost free? It is a philosophy that drives the American efficiency expert into a mental home.’1

  Whatever racists and Jeremiahs may say, Australia, a society with a deeply racist past, has absorbed dozens of diverse cultures peacefully. The beach and the way of life it represents are central to this. A spectacle at Bondi in the 1950s – second only to the sight of thousands of bathers beating their personal best whenever the shark bell rang – was the arrival on the beach of the first post-war immigrants: Geordies and Cockneys, Calabrians and Sicilians. Bolting lemming-like into a deceptively light surf, they would be duly rescued by lifesavers with a large trawling net. The ritual was repeated as each national group arrived; Cypriots, Greeks, Lebanese, Turks, Chileans, Mexicans and Chinese.

  Today the sons and daughters of these people are often the majority on Bondi Beach, where lifesavers have Italian, Greek and Turkish names and board riders are Vietnamese. Walk at dusk along the colonnade of the Bondi Beach Pavilion and the laughter and banter and music belong to fonner dagos, wogs, Baits and reffos. Call them that at your peril; the beach is theirs now.

  From an early age I was aware that what happened on and around the beach posed a threat to the ubiquitous custodians of civic virtue in Australia and was something called pleasure. One such custodian, Eric Spooner, became infamous as the ‘Minister for Public Taste’. Eric was responsible for a local law which stated that ‘to secure the observance of decency swimming costumes must: (1) have legs at least three inches long; (2) cover the front of the trunk down to the legs; (3) have shoulder straps or other support; and (4) include half a skirt if worn by a bather over the age of twenty years’.2

  Eric did not understand that grey, tight-lipped Australia ended at the beach promenade, where the nation’s lascivious, hedonistic alter ego took over. The beach was our secret life. The beach was where most of us would discover sex, no matter that the price was being stung on the arse by a blue-bottle at midnight, or the arrival of a large, uniformed beer gut and damning torchlight. The writer Meg Stewart recalled her ‘first time’ one New Year’s Eve at Bondi when ‘after a succession of hopeless parties, a photographer friend and I finally fell into each other’s arms at the last party, drove to Bondi, swam naked in the surf, the most magic New Year ever . . . Walking out of the water was not so magical. Headlights blazed, horns blared.’3

  Perhaps Australian beach life is healthier and freer sexually than anywhere outside the Trobriand Islands. Certainly the dilemma has always been whether to surf or perv. You can do both, of course; but serious surfing and serious perving are almost sectarian pursuits that do not necessarily mix. The south end of Bondi, where clothes have always been unpopular, is best for the latter. It was to the south end that I took Fiona. Fiona was a 1934 Austin Ten, a car for midgets, a coupé with running boards and a ‘dicky seat’ also known as a ‘rumble seat’. It was a model described as ‘the original gutless winder’; and named by the previous owner after her mother. Fiona had mechanical brakes which operated with a cable stretched the length of the chassis. This often snapped.

  The first time I took my girlfriend to the south end of Bondi the cable snapped and we ended up jammed in the entrance to a barber’s shop, with the radiator hissing steam at the barber and a man with lather on his face. When the barber and the man with lather on his face helped us to push Fiona back on the road, the front bumper bar fell off. My girlfriend put it in the dicky seat.

  The second time Fiona’s brakes snapped, she was parked. It was after midnight and the crescent of beach was spread before us with the sky reflected in its gentle breakers. The hand brake went limp, and with my girlfriend and I otherwise engaged, Fiona proceeded downhill towards a fifty-foot drop on to the rocks below. We awaited our fate. Inexplicably Fiona altered course and rolled instead into the radiator grill of a parked Hupmobile, more a tank than a car. In the back seat of the Hupmobile was a naked, entwined couple. Upon alighting from a seriously concertinaed Fiona, my girlfriend, who was not retiring, put her head through the window of the Hupmobile and said immortally, ‘Gidday, howzitgoin’?’

  There was another side to this. The few chemists who sold contraceptives kept them under the counter and unavailable to teenagers. (Wearing a towelling hat, stubble and a falsetto voice sometimes worked.) When girlfriends fell pregnant, which happened frequently, their fear was justified. Few of us told our parents and many took the deafening train across the Harbour Bridge to a notorious chemist who was our tormentor. For weeks he would string the girls along with brightly coloured pills, which of course were fake, while reassuring us that they would ‘work’. When the appropriate time had passed, he would make ‘the arrangements’ with a backyard abortionist for a fee of up to £A200, a huge amount then, especially to impecunious teenagers. Naturally he had a time-payment scheme with interest at 20 per cent. With Fiona on a parking meter outside a dry cleaner’s, I waited in dread a day and a night for the ‘doctor’ to do his job.

  Of course our spirit of freedom was not extended to gays. Almost all were in the closet then: a remarkable fact set against the current estimate that a quarter of Sydney’s population is homosexual. They hung about the public lavatories, where they were duly set upon by thugs and cops; the Sydney Vice Squad was then run by a detective-sergeant called ‘Bumper’ Farrell, who had distinguished himself on the Rugby League field by biting an opponent’s ear off.

  At the southern end of the beach stand Bondi Ocean Baths, dominated by the Bondi Icebergs’ Club. Since 1929 the Icebergs have swum through the winter season, from the first Sunday in May to the last Sunday in September. To qualify for membership a prospective Iceberg must swim at least three out of four Sundays ‘irrespective of the weather and with good humour . . . for five years’. There is a 90 per cent dropout rate and the club is for men only.4

  Reg Clark was a Bondi Iceberg who swam through storms. His skin might have been the product of a tannery. Reg said little; his extraordinary power and grace in the water expressed all that he seemed to want to say. I was eight when Reg taught me to swim seriously. Unsparingly he drove me to his standard, for which I am grateful. With the sun barely up over Bondi Baths, and waves crashing against and over the sea wall, I swam lap upon lap with Reg walking along the wall beside me. He was mostly silent; then a familiar intonation would enter my sodden brain: ‘Face down . . . neck down . . . reach out . . . reach out . . . reach out . . . Go!’ I was a loyal member of Bondi Swimming Club and raced every Saturday over 50, 100 and 200 yards. Reg would sometimes be there, not speaking but moving his lips: ‘Reach out . . . reach out.’ When I came second to Murray Rose, who went on to win an Olympic gold medal, Reg was waiting at the finish. ‘Wherejageto?’ he said, almost smiling.

  When the races were over my friend Pete and I would defy Big Norm, who blew the whistle of authority at the baths, and dive from the wall into the ocean. Waiting for a wave to cover the rocks below, plunging into it as it recedes, then grabbing a safety rope slung between the wall and rocks, is a perilous ritual practised by generations of Bondi kids. I missed the rope once, was picked up by the undertow and despatched downward, spinning like a top. I re-emerged with the ocean in my head and gut and blood pouring from ‘barnacle rash’. ‘Get outta there with that blood,’ bellowed Big Norm, ‘or the sharks’ll have yer!’

  Sharks came on overcast days, when the ocean was still and sullen. Pete and I comforted ourselves with talk about sharks being ‘blind as bats’: a myth that expired one Sunday morning when a shark bit the shank of a boy
called Sandy. On the same day Jack Platt, the official Bondi shark catcher, landed a fourteen-foot tiger shark after struggling for an hour and a half in his dinghy. MANEATER! said the front page of the Sydney Sun the next day.

  A woman called Bea Miles, whom Elsie, my mother, knew as a student, used to dive off Ben Buckler rocks with a large knife in her mouth and look for sharks. Bea had performed brilliantly at university, then ‘something snapped’, said Elsie, and Bea ‘went potty’. For years she was Sydney’s most famous ‘bag lady’, whose speciality was tearing the doors off taxis that refused to pick her up. She often slept on Bondi Beach, like a caravan resting at an oasis, a variety of animals tethered to her button-up boots. Once she arrived on Bondi with a sheep and when the beach inspector told her to take it away, she pointed to a sign that mentioned only dogs and ball games and said nothing about sheep. ‘Everyone used to say’, said Jack Platt, ‘that she was over-educated.’5

  The great swells, known as bomboras, that sweep around Ben Buckler rocks deliver not the biggest but among the truest bodysurfing waves in Australia. You scout for the swell and watch it build inexorably, while assessing its power and whether it will ‘dump’. A ‘dumper’ begins as a wall of unbroken water and is to be avoided; a ‘roller’ is an inviting pyramid. Reaching the top of the pyramid before it breaks requires strength, but also a style of swimming that has you skimming the water like a ski. Then, when the wave breaks and you feel the surge and know you are on it, you move your arms to your sides and dip your head; and you are suddenly free and moving down the face of the wave. And then you can raise your head; your torso protrudes from the bank of the wave, like a ship’s figurehead. Using your feet as rudder, you can ride all the way to the kids building sandcastles.