Cairns Connect

Literature

EFIL YM 4891

By James Travers-Murison

(a serialised autobiography of same name as above featuring in TMMAG.COM over 24 editons initially. Each edition will transmit another chapter.)

...Is currently writing the second volume of a socio-political autobiography of his generation, who were born in the 60s and are now ‘thirty something’. This is the first chapter of volume one.

A freelance photo-travelwriter who studied law, asian/american history and psychology, qualified as a solicitor, worked as a tax consultant in London and has spent five years travelling the world some of that time spent searching for a meaning to life, has returned home.

Ch. 1 Birth

i. My mother

Well I finally made it to my very own home. It took a long time - more than several years. My heart was still beating, pumping softly, and was healthy for all intensive purposes. I am an optimist and I have survived this world as painful as it is. I was brought from my mother’s womb to face the warm secure world of a cot in a freak heatwave that summer of late-ish June. It was some time in the morning around ten and the sun was pouring in through the military hospital windows. A stream of light. An effusion from the gods that brought a smile to my mother’s lips.

I was two weeks early, but I am an optimist and wished to see the world perhaps before I was quite ready for it, and who was I to refute the will of a mother’s bodily right to bring her second and last son out into the warmth of a military hospital in Woolwich, greater London, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and sixty four. My mother could not remember the time of the birth. She was not an astrologist nor inclined in any respect to that way of viewing the world, for her outlook was strictly masculine, a pragmatic atheist; she believed only what she saw done. So it was fate that dictated that she gave birth to a child who believed only what he saw not done.

***

The cupboard above the stove was full of cans stained red with dirt and olive oil. The last of the outback supplies I had purchased at the old store at Hughenden. I eat stew cooked in the rusty iron pot the Canadians sold to me at Bamaga. Burnt to the bottom of the pot, stuck in chunks of coal, I eat the remains chewing slowly to fully imbue the char, the crunchy toasted dry bitterness with its graininess almost like sand, like the washed up black drift wood on a chilly beach. The conglomeration a burnt offering of organic food bought from the Victoria Market in West Melbourne. It feels like lead in my stomach, cold hard lead..

***

Let me return to that fateful moment in the hospital when I first breathed and the world irreconcilably changed. The wind blew from the south in Woolwich so it was a hot wind as it picked up pace and by the time it reached the military hospital in Woolwich, before it crossed the Thames, it had a sleepy bite to it. A dozen days before, Nelson Mandela had been finally sentenced with seven other African Nationalists to life imprisonment, and in some dingy alley of old Jerusalem the Palestinian Liberation Organisation was formed. The U.S. Civil Rights Act was passed a week after my birth to give Blacks equal treatment and hopefully to end the race riots burning America, but I can remember none of that with any degree of consciousness. Yet subliminally these events irretrievably altered my life.

I was released from the hospital into an old Bromley house that belonged to my great Aunt Tommy. I met a 16 month old baby and a 2 year and 10 month toddler who had been staying with my father’s parents near Reading. My brother ran off in the other direction when my mother arrived back with me. I otherwise merited little attention. The toddler had a predilection for puzzles, writing on walls, answering the telephone, biting and generally being very busy. The baby though rather fat and retired, would smile everytime I was put close to it. My father was on a regimental shoot down at Bisley. My mother and he took me up to Edinburgh the next day. On the 9th of July my birth certificate was signed by H. Blackman, Registrar of Births and Deaths for the Sub-district of Woolwich and numbered PLVE /371.

During the English Summer of ‘64 when the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed by the United States Congress. A little grey-white U.S. Destroyer, the USS Maddox, covertly monitoring raids by South Vietnamese commandos, was attacked by even tinier green North Vietnamese torpedo boats and the way was opened for escalation in Vietnam. What Australia would have done if we had split in a civil war, the other half of the country had gone communist and a large Soviet fleet had settled itself a couple of miles outside our territorial waters? Or if we had fought a civil war against Britain and half the country had chosen communism and gained independence, the other half had clung on as a semi-independent colony with a large proportion of the people discontented (this is what happened in French Indochina 1953). Then the U.S. had intervened blocking a UN agreed general election for the entire nation on whether to reunite the country. Blocking it because they knew the people would have voted to join the independent communist state (this occurred in South Vietnam in 1956). Twelve years later the corrupted relic of the other half had decided to call upon the U.S. to help sustain it and the U.S. sent military advisors and then a fleet which moved to a position a few miles outside our territorial waters and waited. The colony raided our communist state with commandos, as a US destroyer approached 8 miles from our shore, 4 miles from our islands, when we had declared a 12 mile territorial limit. As our radar installations were attacked we finally agreed to send 3 patrol boats against the ship.

Summer turned into Autumn, a Labour government came to power in Britain after 13 years of Tory rule and I saw my father up in Aberdeen where we lived with the regiment. He was training soldiers where he had wanted me to be born, a Scotsman and a Murison. He was hardly a Scot himself, for his entire female lineage on both sides for several generations had been either Irish English or English. He had only spent a few years of his life in Scotland during the War, where his father, a squadron leader, lectured to pilots who were fighting off the Germans after the Battle of Britain. Until he joined the Gordon’s his life had been in Kings School Bruton, a military public school in Somerset. I finally visited the School in 1992 when I was 27 and had long hair and was following the power of love. Two Australian women were in my tow, alternative lifers; India was in my blood, finding Nirvana.

Twenty years back we would have been called hippies, flower children. In the nineties in Europe the term was "freak" and nirvana was the rainbow tribe, rainbow circle where everyone loved everyone. We walked through the school created by Henry the VIIIth and where one of the original copies of the Magna Carta had lay hidden for hundreds of years, until it was discovered during WWII by a master who hid it under his bed. It now resides in Parliament House Canberra. Schoolboys in suits and ties strode past, until a master with squinty glasses and a rather shrunken and balding demeanour asked us if we needed any help. He pointed out a few historical features and kindly pointed us to the gate and a rather interesting old 11th century bridge across the Brute. We hitched to a remote camping park in the midst of the rolling Glastonbury Hills. It was mid-May, spring just before summer.

***

I look at my possessions and wonder where to begin. I managed to side track the bulk of them into the bedroom and moved my swag, my sleeping gear into the living room. It is a cream white rectangle with upright verticals, blinds in long shafts like an enormous air conditioning vent. Everything is on the carpet, the computer, the Nepali ornaments, the books, the files, everything and I lie semi-reposed like a bacchantic god in an existential empty box. I have chipped away at the good old Canadian’s pot, crunching up the last of the charcoal. The last of my food except cans and I have no can opener. I managed to puncture a small hole in the can of baby beetroot with a fake Swiss army knife I purchased in Bamaga. It broke on its first use. I scraped charcoal off my teeth and slid my tongue round the particles of carbon caught there. Curriculum vitaes, budgets and job applications line the floor - it feels a mess. A half-written add in pencil for a typist in return for ‘tuition in writing novels and articles and learning yoga’ lies to my left. I am in the cosmic brain once again, restoring order out of chaos, like Shiva triumphing over the demons of the Id. And demons there are a plenty. I read a handout on spirituality produced by Saint George’s, the local parish church. It assures us that ritual and ceremony are not superstitious, but a physical action to ignite something deep within. That is their importance, which is waiting to be rediscovered it says.

I chew cordon bleu raison toast and capsicum and chilly cream cheese. It has been a long uneventful day. My brother finally telephoned and we tried to work out a scheme to recoup tax for backpackers. I’m applying for a job as a solicitor at Mirimbiak Native Title Aboriginal Corporation. Went there a couple of days ago all dressed in cashmere coat and old Melbourne Grammar tie, the aboriginal at the desk started to shake as he told his friend to get to work. And today the work search goes on, in amongst all the cluttered possessions of my past that gradually have to be sorted through then let go.

***

In Australia, my mother’s homeland, back in November 1964, Prime Minister Robert Menzies reintroduced conscription and George Johnston wrote ‘My Brother Jack’ and the great Mount Isa mining strike caused Queensland to declare a state of emergency.

I barely saw my father at the beginning of ‘65 just before we had a whirling tour of his family. He headed off to face the Indonesians in Borneo and we shipped off to Australia. That was the last I saw of my grandparents. On the ship my mother cried not at all and wiped our noses and changed our nappies. A huge freak wave caused the ship to lurch and a great wave arose and bore down across the toddler pool. It must have appeared like the great nemesis, the proverbial "flood" where the heavens opened up and deluged the unrighteous. God let forth the waters of the deep to punish the sinful and the torrent bore down on my brother. It shocked his little nervous system and the scars still remain. The water never touched him. My mother pulled him away. He screamed inside when he was put near water after that - for six weeks after reaching Australia, but the scar remained for many years. The rest of the passage to Australia was uneventful on that enormous, enormous boat.

The swamp the troops were in was a torrid mess on the Sarawak border. Great Russian helicopter troopships full of Indonesian paramilitary had landed near the border of the newly unified Malaysian Republic. Suharto was turning towards the Communists with his desire to liberate the Indo-Asian people. The ‘Bay of Pigs’ was well over in Cuba, Kennedy was dead, and Vietnam was beginning to boil. Mao struggling to survive was beginning his Cultural Revolution in China as the Soviets solidified their ‘iron curtain’ across Europe. They were in a swamp and morale was low, my father was leading the company. He had led them there deliberately but had not realised that heavy rains had turned the undergrowth into a muddy quagmire. They were heading to the Indonesian's airfield to 'spook them'. However it soon became clear that they would not reach there before daylight. He could have continued to the airfield, but instead he chose to pull out and march across the open fields back to the border. Exposed, it could have seen them with no cover in a bloody contact with Indonesian paratroopers. He took the chance. At 33 he was old enough to question the morality of war, of senseless killing in a cold war. He was always prepared to do his duty as he put it. To kill if necessary, to never be a coward, but to act with minimum force and to avoid hostilities if possible. He ended up in a military hospital with scrub typhus. Keen to give civilian life a go and Australia he decided to give up his military career and a year after we had arrived, demobbed he was in Australia.

It was years later I realised how important my father was to me. I was staring at a pair of sunglasses in his house that looked very valuable, I almost wanted to pick them up, but I stopped myself and examined them. The frame of gold metal, the slight flecks of dust on the clear solid reflective surface, and it crossed my mind that my father keeps things of value, protects them. I thought of my hastily bought sunglasses from the Hughenden petrol station. They were a cheap piece of mirrored plastic and pseudo-false gold metal. I couldn’t make up my mind which to buy, so I chose them. I carefully looked closer at his sunglasses and I saw they were all along the Hughenden ones.

ii. Australia and the Vietnam War

I saw the wintry storms of Metung collide across Bass Strait and the Gippsland Lakes. The lightning fork and the distant rumble of green-blue-grey fill the horizon with rolling monotonous thickness. My mother’s mother, Cathy, would be baking rather sodden scones and my mother bathing me in warmish water, both reciting Shakespeare or Shelley. And my mother would be dressing my brother and sister to go for a walk down to Lake King and then to the village. To play amongst the driftwood and seaweed, the great old concrete dividing blocks that kept the sand from draining away. My mother probably heard Menzies announce over the radio Australia’s decision to send combat troops to Vietnam. Those were the quiet country years, if they had lasted more than a year, for in early ‘66 my father returned. He came over on the five pound immigrant’s airfare. My family moved to Melbourne, all except my grandmother who would never willingly leave Metung. It was the home she had married into, had lowered herself into from the Adelaide Hills and the settler aristocracy of the Hawkers. That was a long time back, in the libertine days of the late 20’s when the stock exchanges were booming, the suffragettes and unions had triumphed and everything seemed possible.

In 1966 Melbourne was having a wet autumn as Menzies was no more, having battled it out with Holt and lost. The veterans in the R.S.L. (Returned Serviceman’s League) began to talk of communist infiltration and the Beetles in the same breath. It was the old guard against LSD and so the Australian forces joining the Americans in Indochina were tripled, while the U.S. satellite base at Pine Gap near Alice Springs was negotiated. Decimal currency was introduced replacing the pound, the miniskirt came in and restrictions on the entry of persons of non-European descent relaxed. And in Rhodesia my father’s sister watched Ian Smith declare a white Republic, her husband was commissioner of police in the capital. I was almost 2 years old in an old Edwardian house at the end of Wattle Avenue, Hawthorn. It was the slightly derelict house of Professor Poynter of Melbourne University my parents were renting while he toured the U.S.

The house was full of nooks and crannies and it had a large attic with fold up stairs which my brother and sister explored. We fought over toys, got minded by nannies, screamed and laughed. I threw many tantrums especially when my brother watched me play with his toys. He would then withdraw them with a look of defiant mortification. I clearly remember the red tin pedal car that was shaped like a twenties sportster. Meanwhile U.S. troop levels past a third of a million in Vietnam and Aboriginals in Australia got the vote. The first major firefights were occurring with the North Vietnamese People’s Army and the bombing of civilian cities in the North escalated. 100,000 marched in New York against the war. No one was that concerned in our family, my father was office manager at Borthwicks, a very large meat suppliers, my mother teaching English at Taylor’s College. The "Six Day War" where Israel destroyed Egypt, Jordan and Syria with barely a casualty was just another example of heroic Western might. And while Australia boomed, in India the population explosion and drought brought the country to near starvation such that the U.S. sent millions of tonnes of grain to their aid. It was the year that Prime Minister Harold Holt disappeared in the surf off Cheviot Beach, Portsea. He had been ‘all the way with LBJ’ and the Vietnam War, his body was never found.

By the beginning of ‘67 we were in our own house in Campbell Road, Hawthorn East. A late Victorian villa with a Regency semi-hexagon front half, single storey at the front, double at the back, I was to later see how it was almost New Orleans in its style, bordering on the colonial. When my parents bought it they or rather my mother slowly started to renovate it. I had my third birthday in ‘67 there with candles I could not blow out except on the second puff and the shame of failing to do so on the first.

Like many Australians the house renovations started to become an obsession for my mother. My father was not particularly interested, he was an Englishman and an officer and as such a gentleman. So I suppose he thought he need not be inclined to such menial tasks. As my mother began to excavate the garden, the Australians began to blow out the Viet Cong tunnels near Saigon. My father rested with his pipe in his study, the front room, to the sound of the Gordon bagpipes. He would sit there blowing large clouds of foul smelling smoke. The smell of the most expensive sweet burning dung filled the room, as the English government formally criticised America when the Napalm began to fall. The English in dire financial straits attempted to bow into the EEC, but were vetoed out by France. This was ‘68 the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, long hair and rock. I was four and attending Glamorgan, the Geelong Grammar pre-school for the Toorak rich and psychotically disturbed. I remember on the third day being forced up a tree by one of the Mantons, on the fourth day running miserably down the street after my mother as she drove off to work. A Vietnamese girl blasted and naked from napalm ran terrified down a bombed out road surrounded by other children and U.S. backed soldiers, a victim of an accidental air strike by South Vietnamese jets monitored by Americans, the people who came to give her protection. But that photograph was not taken until 1972, not revealed until we were almost out of Vietnam, but it existed throughout that cruel war where perhaps more than a million civilians died. When the numbers reach this level it is hard to say who was killed, or even how many people were in both countries. I stayed with my mother in Saint Catherine’s being doted on by the voluptuous girls, until I was bribed with matchbox cars to return to Glamorgan. I used to spend my lunchtimes alone under a tree. That was when I was allowed outside, for I was forced to sit in front of the egg custard given for desert. I sat and wondered why was I meant to eat something that made me feel so ill. Maybe the disgust at eating eggs was a precursor to my spiritual beliefs that I would later develop together with vegetarianism and sanctity towards life. I guess there must have been moments of happiness, but all I remember is the loathing and relief of returning home. It was on my fourth birthday that English comedian Tony Hancock suicided in Sydney.

Courtesy of The Age, Newspaper, Melbourne

I suppose in some insane way I should thank this little Vietnamese girl for bearing the pain, the horrendous, miserable, ‘stupid’ pain that existed in the misguided idealism of that conflict between capitalism and communism and all the suffering that it inflicted on that generation. She took it through the eyes of the world’s press, through the camera of a newsphotographer. One photograph that changed the world. Changed people’s perceptions of acceptable violence, of a nations right to use force.

It was above the wooden boxes that I used to lie watching through a knot hole in the wood and think of love.. and beneath on the wooden slats the gentle coercion to persuade a victim to come up and play. Two little boys hid in the box, which opened sideways, and I was appointed the solitary guard to sit on top. Once they had lured their prey they would sweetly coax them in. It was not so much to oblige their fancy as to be drawn into the realm of sexual power and I would look through the knothole. The old oak tree in the tan stretched its tired wings over the boxes and below the boys would gradually entice their prey to lower their shorts and as they would come down, a kind of thrilling fear would overcome us. Their pants would then be taken down and finally sand would be poured on their little soft chillblained cheeks. The leader I think was a Jewish boy called Stern, a Jew from a rich intellectual family. This I think was the only feeling of warmth I got from Glamorgan, that and a later taste for WWII escape from prisoner of war camp movies.

‘68 saw the Prague Spring, the Paris student riots and American troops reach the half million mark in Vietnam. It saw the all out Vietcong Tet offensive to break U.S. domestic morale. But it was the occurrence of the My Lai atrocity by U.S. Lt Calley and his platoon who executed an entire village in disorganised manic revenge that sealed most peoples sympathy against the war. It was a year of assassinations as Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy died. Dubcek’s reform movement also died as Eastern Block tanks rolled through Czechoslovakia. The space race for the Moon accelerated and through that insane year came Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film that foretold man’s future spiritual evolution - that was always there. But it was Nixon who won the U.S. presidency at the end of the year and became the roman God everyone was looking to sort out Vietnam. It was a revolutionary year and anti-war protests were out of control.

In Australia the moderate Liberal John Gorton became Prime Minister and the 21 year old semi-dictatorship of Johannes Bjelke-Petersen of the National Party began in Queensland. In sleepy Melbourne 1,500 anti-war demonstrators were charged by mounted Police outside the U.S. Consulate. The Manton boy stole my toy popgun and when I tried to get it back the teacher scolded me and gave it back to John.

We started to go skiing at Falls Creek, which was one of my greatest joys. Skiing was an incredible thrill and the cosy private BSM lodge built by a small firm of Melbourne architects was hidden away at the edge of the village on Parallel street. The lodge with its teenage girls doting on us was mostly more exciting than the skiing.

1969 and the C.I.A bought in the ruthless "winning of hearts and minds" campaign to annihilate the Vietcong. Prostitution and drug trafficking ran rife in Saigon and "the Doors" and "Jimmy Hendrix" were turning rock into heavy metal and the politics of dissent. The youth were out of control in the bastion of Christian capitalism. Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon and ‘Easy Rider’ hit the cinemas. In Australia the women’s liberation movement and Germaine Greer’s fame began. Mining shares skyrocketed, Gorton was accused of seducing a young woman and our only aircraft carrier H.M.A.S Melbourne cut in half its second ship, this time a U.S. destroyer off the coast of Vietnam. I was still being forced to eat the Glamorgan egg custard and still resisting. They never triumphed over two years and after that I was shifted to Trinity Grammar School, a smallish private school in Kew. What we have all forgotten was the war the USSR had with China and the Soviet landings of Venera 5 and 6 on Venus, but I was too young to remember any of this. What I can remember is my mother and me watching Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon and the barely audible static of a voice "one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" on that fuzzy little black and white television screen and the awe.

That small blurry screen on the black and white television hired for my mother’s mother, granny, when she came down for her monthly stays. My parents, particularly my father did not approve of television.

‘70 saw the beginning of major troop withdrawals from Vietnam, I was six and I can remember watching television of perhaps twenty year old soldiers on the beach heading for a swim in a tropical paradise. I remember the fear of dying, the dread of conscription, on the static covered screen.

***

Kitchen hand at Miracles vegetarian restaurant in Glenferrie Road was my job. They said I could start as a volunteer and eventually learn the ropes. The woman was a large Slovenian with a rather distinguished hooked nose who had been in Australia for thirty-five years, she was a follower of Sia Baba and had been to Putrapati in India to show devotion. I had always found Sia Baba a bit too ritzy with his miracles producing ash out of nowhere and his limousines and frizzy hair. She had the usual postcards of him. She said to come back the next day and meet her Chinese partner Sammy. Sammy was an instructor in the course on Miracles and he thought he knew everything. He had round glasses was barely five foot and had one of those all teeth oriental grins. He used to jig rapidly around the kitchen trying to imitate the latest techno jive. He looked at me for the first time in a long time with a degree of purely monetary respect. I was going to be given the opportunity to work. The first paid job in 6 years.

Sammy had come from Shanghai as a student ten years back and chose to stay when Tiannamen Square blew up and the Democracy movement crashed into oblivion. He said he was not political so I suppose he merely took advantage of the chance to live in wealth. He was a fast mover with a heart and if cornered on spiritual questions knew the book backwards such that one would find it difficult to escape.

"You really want to learn then you must work hard. It’s much quicker in a kitchen than at home."

I was on that evening with a Chilean cook. He had a frizzled goatee and looked liked he had escaped from the 16th century of De Goya, those seeping bleeding heart eyes, the look of eternal pain inspired by inquisitorial zealousness and too much pot. He huffed away as the orders came in and I looked on half in awe and half in disgust at the cohesion of it, in that mess of a kitchen. The stoves thick in grease, everything years old, yet food that was more than divine.

***

‘70 the beginning of the secret war. The bombing of Cambodia, the beginning of the Khmer Rouge and the infamous killing fields. The North Vietnamese had fully mobilised and were pouring in down the Ho Chi Min trail through Laos and Cambodia. This was the time of ‘Apocalypse Now’ and ‘Go Go’ dancers, Jumbo Jets, Playboy magazine, flared trousers and wide surreal ties. It was when four students, two of them girls were shot dead by the National Guard in an anti-war demonstration at Kent State University. The P.L.O hijacked and blew up three jets and during ‘black September’ all the Palestinians were expelled from Jordan. In Melbourne it was the collapse of the West Gate Bridge and the "the Box" on Channel 10 and that outraged in later years with the first nude scenes on television. Prostitution on all levels hit a record peak in Saigon.

And I had moved schools starting first grade at Trinity Grammar Kew. I was terrorised by Mrs Plenderleaf who was disgusted at my left-hand writing and thought I was retarded. She insisted on having our bottoms checked for poohs and would line us all up and one by one pull our pants back. It was in the Gym that our red-necked PE teacher was requested one day to do the job; our pants were fully pulled down. I remember in a way a sort of anxiety of embarrassment as we lined up in alphabetical order of surnames. Sexual fantasies followed in the nights. She also had a habit of not allowing people to go to the toilet during class, Mrs Plenderleaf that is. Which caused even me some embarrassment, tight bladder control that I had. Trying to hide the patch of urine as I walked to Mrs Nathan’s car.

She was our babysitter who drove my brother and me to her house where we watched television till Mum picked us up at 5.30 PM. A prim and proper lower middle class woman in her late thirties she bossed us around in her rather tasteless flat. Disgusting treats of hundreds and thousands and lollies were occasionally given to us. Her rather nauseous and very spoilt three year old daughter we had to put up with, who would drool all over us when her dummy was allowed out of her mouth. She had another nine year old daughter called Ruth who would boast to us about her antics. Mrs Nathan smoked and was very ‘non-U’. They lorded over us and we had to tolerate it waiting for rescue by our mother.

I remember being forced to swim in the freezing water of the Xavier swimming pool where frozen shaking young boys would try and brave the water turning different shades of purple as the autumn leaves fell. Leaving brown murky patches on the cracked concrete tiles. My mother was now teaching at a prestigious yet rather decaying Toorak private girls school called St Catherine’s. She was appointed head of the English department and my father having moved from Borthwicks to Caterpillar as a steel purchasing officer was failing to gain promotion. In 1971 he finally decided to go back into the Army. He was made second in command of a training battalion in Pukapunual. Troops that would go to Vietnam to fight the ‘gooks’. They wanted him for his jungle combat experience in Malaysia and Borneo.

My incessant nightmares began of witches, I had my own room now with wallpaper I was meant to have chosen, but mysteriously my mother’s choice seemed to prevail and the paper was that of a mosaic pattern of some surreal golden grain that looked like deathheads in the half-light from my bed. Perhaps her hectic life never gave her enough time to check what I wanted. I used to lie in terror, perhaps as those young soldiers did, not knowing what they were about to face in Vietnam. The terror would reach such a point I would run up the long passage to my parent’s room and safety. It was always witches that would haunt me, the abyss like fragments from another past. The impact of television can not be underestimated. The fear created by even quite poorly produced dramas like Division 4 had their affect on my developing mind. At that age where one totally believes.

We had two cats Salty and Litty. Salty was grey-white like raw salt and Litty was black with a white bib named because she was rescued from a garbage bin at the bottom of the boarding house stairs in St Catherines. She had big terrified eyes and would be always running for cover. Mum would often find her asleep on my head. Second grade and we had to learn to write. Wrong-handed, the torture of writing backwards with my left-hand was humiliated out of me and I began to improve and occasionally receive a gold star. Much of the time I would stare dreamily out the window wishing I was with my mother. Mrs Plenderleaf did not approve and would tell me to pay attention and ask me what she had said. I almost always remembered.

1971 was the funny years of compulsory seat belts and old Billy McMahon who looked a bit like something out of A Winter’s Tale or Scrooge. He was Australia’s Prime Minister, leader of the Liberal party and like the Liberal party at that time was somewhat of a Dickensian throwback, an anachronism in the sexual revolution of the 70s.

Bjelke-Petersen declared a state of emergency in Queensland so the South African Springboks could tour. The Beetles had split and Australia was still going through the minerals boom. An Aboriginal, Evonne Goolagong won the Wimbledon singles. No one knew what inflation was nor unemployment. It was innocent years and dying years. The end of the Great British Empire, the end of Anglo dominance in Australia and the end of the Vietnam War and our sordid part in it, but mostly it was the end of faith in America. I remember watching television in a luxury white kitsch house in Toorak, everything in the house was a shade of white and new and Nixon was speaking. Everyone listened as if god spoke.

I played with washing up water and watched my brother and sister bake amazing Chocolate cakes.






NEXT EDITION: We see James grow up into the 70's and Trinity Grammar School. A new world where the war is over and new possibities abound with Whitlam's government. That is until both are called two account. Family conflict boils over into a bitter separation as he moves to Melbourne Grammar and mixes with Melbourne's elite as Fraser storms to pre-eminence.

Tell us what you think of this article and if your comments are meritable we will post them up.

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