Swimming to the Moon Read online

  It was placed offshore at North Coogee in 1999, at the approximate spot where Engineer-in-Chief O’Connor committed suicide near Robbs Jetty on March 10, 1902, ten months before his famous pipeline to the goldfields was successfully completed. His spirit broken by constant newspaper harping and political misrepresentation, he rode his horse into the surf and shot himself. (The misrepresentation continues today: a persistent local myth suggests he killed himself because the pipeline failed to deliver the water. Wrong. It worked immediately.)

  As a longtime O’Connor enthusiast whose novel The Drowner fictionalised O’Connor’s story, I’m as moved by this statue as I am impressed by O’Connor’s operatic life. (There’s also a more traditional statue of O’Connor, by Pietro Porcelli, in front of the Fremantle Port Authority building.) A terrific photograph by Joy Lefroy of the weathered statue standing alone in the blue ocean, with a modern cargo ship in the background, taken for the National Trust, gives the Jones work a timeless quality. It’s battered by sea, wind and sun, standing alone against the elements, but not even seagull droppings can diminish its melancholy dignity.

  I guess you could say that Eliza represents the popular contemporary reaction to artworks (keen community interaction and affectionate piss-take) whereas C. Y. O’Connor Horse and Rider, to give it its official title, brings us face to face with the dramatic history of this place that is bordered by water and infatuated by a watery lifestyle, and whose environment so wants for it.

  DAPHNE WALKING PAST

  I sometimes wonder if Daphne McCarthy is still alive. If so, she must be in her late eighties at least. When I was growing up in Perth’s western suburbs she lived four houses up the hill, in a stucco-fronted house hidden behind a barrier of poisonous pink oleanders.

  Back then she was a long-legged, forty-something brunette; to a teenage boy a sexy cross between Jane Russell and Susan Hayward as she strode past our front curtains and up the hill to the 202 bus. But surprisingly lonely looking.

  Not as forlorn, however, as her husband, the mysteriously ravaged Chas McCarthy, a head shorter, trudging his usual five or six paces behind. He looked like an abject courtier. Neither of them drove cars. I never saw them walking together, or speaking to each other.

  She always appeared to be dressed for a day in town, in hat, suit and pearls, whereas he seemed to have just set down a can of turps or a bag of nails, removed his leather apron, and left the counter at Drabble’s hardware shop where he worked.

  In the 1960s my mother’s friends still gossiped about Daphne McCarthy. It was enough that she was more attractive than them, but she was said to have ‘gone with Americans’ during the war. Twenty years had elapsed but social ostracism was the only answer to that sort of reputation, thank you very much. Did I mention that she was Catholic?

  My mother’s cronies – all Protestants – implied that Mrs McCarthy’s war had passed in a miasma of champagne, nylons and carryings-on with the American pilots at the Catalina flying-boat base at Crawley Bay and Steve’s Hotel nearby. This level of licentiousness was matched only by women who ‘went with’ Dalkeith book-makers, the other big spenders in those innocent Perth days.

  Years later I learned that Mrs McCarthy’s experiences weren’t dissimilar to those of thousands of Australian women of all classes and ages, single and married. Married, our street’s gossipers were still pointing out two decades later, to husbands away fighting for their lives.

  Such histories as John Hammond Moore’s Over-sexed, Over-paid and Over Here and novels like Xavier Herbert’s Soldiers’ Women and Robin Sheiner’s Smile, the War is Over have dobbed in many of the mothers and grandmothers of West Australians born since – and during – the war.

  The media of the time described how the Americans were welcomed throughout Australia by both sexes as heroic saviours. By war’s end, however, their novelty had waned in the east, soured by their constant brawling with Allied soldiers and the Melbourne murders committed by US Private Edward Leonski.

  As usual, attitudes were different in the west. Perth women went ape over the Yanks, and have stayed ape. As Anthony Barker and Lisa Jackson pointed out in Fleeting Attraction: A Social History of American Servicemen in Western Australia During the Second World War, former Pennsylvania factory hands, Depression flotsam and Arkansas farm boys struggling with their Navy primers on how to read and write suddenly found themselves regarded as urbane Hollywood heroes.

  Perth’s adoring relationship had a genuine basis: gratitude. Americans offered protection from Japanese invasion to an isolated state whose northern towns had already been bombed. My own neighbourhood still had old air-raid shelters hidden under the lantana, compost heaps and beer-bottle piles in our backyards.

  As well, the exotic Americans were generous with their money and, compared to local men, polite and charming. If the cover photograph of Fleeting Attraction is any guide – a group of jolly US servicemen partying with a stout and homely bunch of women – they weren’t all just after sex either.

  Recently, the centenary of the first American fleet’s arrival was recalled here by the writer Joe McCain. McCain, the brother of the former Republican presidential candidate, and the son and grandson of four US admirals, reiterated this received view of Perth’s lasting love affair with American servicemen.

  McCain’s article rang fairly true but something didn’t quite fit. I can’t forget the smugness of some tea-sipping ladies at the sight of a good-looking woman, her chin held defiantly high as she strode past our house. And her permanently dejected husband trudging along behind.

  THE LIONS OF CLAREMONT

  The scene was a dinner-table conversation at that late stage of the evening when people begin confiding about those times that Life had them reeling against the ropes. Now it was Steve’s turn to divulge all. ‘So how did you and Chloe break up?’ an inquisitive woman asked him. ‘I blame lions,’ he said.

  He’d always wanted to see Africa – the bush, the jungle, the animals – and in the company of Chloe, his partner of nine years. His was a complex fascination, however, because while Africa intrigued him, he had a lion phobia. As a child his fears had extended to closing his eyes before MGM films, even Tom and Jerry cartoons, until the MGM symbol had finished roaring and its savage profile had faded from the screen.

  Lions entered his childhood dreams. The lions of his sleep preferred a domestic setting, padding into his childhood home, bounding through the laundry window and sauntering into the kitchen. Young Steve presumed they had escaped from the zoo. Of course they always spotted him and immediately approached for a closer inspection.

  Dream-Steve had the good sense to play possum. The lions were curious rather than ferocious, but as they loomed over him, sniffing his body, he smelled their hot, meaty breath and felt their dusty manes brushing his cheek. In their overwhelming presence, he’d close his eyes and fall instantly asleep, whereupon real-Steve would wake in his real bed, his heart beating fast. If an easterly was blowing, he heard the hungry roars of the real South Perth zoo lions carrying over the river and the hum of the early morning traffic.

  Of course he was over that phobia, wasn’t he? So when, after their visit to Chloe’s family in England, the chance came to return to Australia via Zimbabwe (this was 1990s Zimbabwe), they would’ve been crazy to ignore it. So, as Steve related to his dinner-table audience, there they were in the bush in the Hwange National Park, at a small camp run by a white ex-Rhodesian farmer turned safari-guide.

  Their first night under canvas passed sleeplessly. First an elephant strolled in silently, and delicately picked up their toothbrushes and toothpaste from the toilet stand outside their tent. Then a lion wandered into camp and the two teenage African helpers had to chase it away by beating saucepans and throwing deckchairs. Nature was urgently calling by now, but as the lavatory shelter was fifty metres away in the dark, and the lion was still roaring nearby, they held on till dawn.

  So lions were already on Steve’s mind when next morning the African youths re
ported that lions had killed a giraffe three kilometres away. The safari leader, who doubled as a wildlife ranger, said he would have to investigate. Did Steve and Chloe want to accompany him? Yes, why not?

  With the armed guide leading, followed by the two Africans, then Chloe, with Steve at the rear, they set off in single file, in classic King Solomon’s Mines style, through ‘adrenaline’ grass to the dead giraffe. The two-metre-high grass (so called because of its effect on one’s nervous system) prevented you seeing to the left or right or, as Steve discovered as the grass closed instantly behind him, behind you. His heart beating out the words lion, lion, lion, he tramped along behind, thinking, ‘At least I’m protecting Chloe’s back.’

  In a clearing they found the dead giraffe, only recently killed and hardly nibbled, much less devoured. ‘They’re obviously watching us,’ said the guide, casually, and then proceeded to chop out the giraffe’s jawbone, to be taken to town for analysis. There followed a tense return to camp through the adrenaline grass, this time carrying a bleeding jawbone. In the rear again, Steve thought, ‘If I get back, I’ve beaten the lion worry forever.’

  The rest of the African adventure was the most enjoyable holiday he could remember. Chloe, however, was increasingly subdued. They’d been home only two weeks when she said, ‘Remember that day when we stole the lion’s kill? It was the sort of live-or-die situation where I thought I should make a momentous decision. So I’m leaving you.’

  The dinner table was silent for a moment. ‘I’m well over it now,’ he said. ‘Do you know you can adopt a lion at the zoo for only fifty bucks a year? I have.’

  COMBUSTION

  It’s interesting to see the nineteenth century’s most dramatic literary device back in the news. I’m referring to a plot contrivance sadly neglected these days: Spontaneous Human Combustion. This is the phenomenon where a living human being mysteriously catches fire as the result of intense internal heat. What modern novel wouldn’t be enlivened by a combustible character?

  Regrettably for him, an inflammable Irishman, Michael Faherty, seventy-six, of Ballybane, Galway, has just joined the popular storylines of, amongst others, Charles Dickens (Bleak House), Herman Melville (Redburn), Nikolai Gogol (Dead Souls) and Captain Marryat (Jacob Faithful) by becoming a human inferno.

  A West Galway inquest has found that Mr Faherty spontaneously and completely combusted – to ashes – in his living room last December 22. No one else had entered the house and no trace of accelerant was found by fire and police officers. Nothing else was burnt but Mr Faherty, the floor beneath him and the ceiling above.

  The coroner, Dr Kieren McLoughlin, said it was the first time in twenty-five years he had returned such a verdict. ‘This fire was thoroughly investigated and I’m left with the conclusion that this is spontaneous human combustion, for which there is no adequate explanation.’

  Considering Mr Faherty’s unfortunate surname, and that most biological theories blame ‘internal gases’ for the phenomenon, I suspected a hoax. But as the story ran in all the Irish and British papers and news services, let’s put it down to coincidence. (Coincidence: another plot contrivance not permitted in decent fiction, though ever-present in real life.)

  For many years I’ve owned a paperback, Spontaneous Human Combustion, by the British researchers Jenny Randles and Peter Hough, picked up for fifty cents at some market or other on the off-chance that I’d open it one day. Well, now I have. And I find that there are scores of well-documented cases like that of Mr Faherty. A fairly common thread is that the victims are old, fat (thus more flammable) and heavy drinkers.

  Alcohol was definitely blamed by the censorious nineteenth century writers. Melville describes how ‘greenish fire, like a forked tongue’ issued from between the lips of a drunken sailor as it consumed him. Dickens inflicted the phenomenon on wicked drunken Krook, discovered by two characters, Mr Guppy and Tony Weevle:

  There is a smouldering suffocating vapour in the room, and a dark greasy coating on the walls and ceiling … What is it? Hold up the light. Here is a small burnt patch of flooring … and here is – is it the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes, or is it coal? O Horror, he is here! And from this we run away … overturning one another into the street.

  This scene was to cause a public debate between Dickens and George Henry Lewes, a philosopher and critic, who denounced Bleak House as a ‘vulgar error’ and chastised Dickens and the other novelists for perpetuating ignorance and superstition.

  The idea of alcohol as the cause survives today. Some sceptics see a link between alcohol abuse and incineration, but in a different way from that intended by the Victorian moralists. They argue that as an intoxicated person is more liable to stumble or be in less than full possession of their faculties, they’re more prone to accidents with fire.

  It’s always good to have a local angle for such important topics, so we’re indebted to a Mrs Barton of Manjimup, who is quoted by the authors of Spontaneous Human Combustion about her particular condition. As she was not a drinker and seemed to be in a lazy, meditative state when overheating, the authors suggest she must have been overcome by the Kundalini effect, as in the tantric tradition of Hinduism.

  Mrs Barton says she regularly got so appallingly hot while relaxing in bed that she had only her husband to thank for saving her from bursting into flames. ‘My husband always says that knowing me convinces him of the reality of spontaneous human combustion. On several occasions when I have fallen asleep in bed, and my husband has later joined me, he has found my skin unbearably hot.’

  Mrs Barton wonders what would happen to her if she didn’t urgently throw back the covers on each occasion.

  BUTCHERS’ SHOPS

  It was a sad sight: the ‘For Sale’ sign suddenly appearing the other day outside the village butcher’s shop, the last one in the region. And not only the last one, but – unique for butchers’ shops – a local benchmark in incivility.

  I could see the writing on the wall. These days the fellow occupants of the handsome century-old building, which once housed a proud country-town bank (remember them?), are a hypnotherapist, a yogalates studio and a ‘wellness centre’.

  I guess there weren’t enough customers. The butcher’s shop already looked out of place. So did the butcher. Alan parted his hair in the middle, butcher-style, and raised and slaughtered his own beef. Alan’s wife Meryl helped in the shop. But they weren’t jolly, rosy-cheeked, classic butchers: they were thin, pale and bad-tempered.

  Alan looked to be fighting a losing emotional battle against the yuppification of the village: against small but favourably reviewed restaurants and expensive boutiques displaying linen draped over driftwood. My first run-in with Alan reminded me of the famous cafe scene in the movie Five Easy Pieces. Jack Nicholson wants just plain toast with his omelette but the waitress says it’s not on the menu.

  Nicholson: ‘OK, a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast, no mayonnaise, no butter, no lettuce. And a cup of coffee.’

  Waitress: ‘A No. 2, chicken salad sandwich. Hold the butter, the lettuce, the mayonnaise, and a cup of coffee. Anything else?’

  Nicholson: ‘Yeah, now all you have to do is hold the chicken, bring me the toast, give me a check for the chicken salad sandwich, and you haven’t broken any rules.’

  Familiar with city terms for beef cuts, I made the mistake of asking Alan for a couple of New York steaks (alias sirloin or porterhouse). With great disdain, he announced, ‘We’ve only got Australian steaks here.’

  ‘OK, porterhouse steaks then, please.’

  ‘No porterhouse.’

  ‘Sirloins?’

  ‘We only sell rump and T-bones.’ Macho meat. Sirloins were obviously for sissies. He was really playing butcher hard-to-get now. I pointed to a display of obvious sirloins. ‘What about those?’

  ‘They’re boneless T-bones,’ he said.

  I had no wish to have a pedantic argument about international beef cuts, but according to Me
at Standards Australia, sirloins, porterhouse and New York steaks are all the same. All of a sudden I was Jack Nicholson.

  ‘Then give me two T-bones without the T-bones,’ I told Alan.

  ‘I hope you’ve got the exact money,’ growled Meryl, as she wrapped them up.

  Alan and Meryl never seemed happy in their work but their meat was delicious. What did grumpiness matter when set against wonderfully thick steaks and delicious local pork and duck. Stepping into their shop was a meaty blast from the past. Cattle, sheep and pig carcasses hung in plain view, not out of sight and away from tender vegetarian feelings.

  You felt that only modern Health Department regulations prevented them from still carpeting their shop floor with sawdust and wrapping your meat in newspaper.

  Alan and Meryl communicated with each other in a series of sullen grunts. ‘Beemal,’ he’d order her. Or ‘feeb’. At first I thought it was a foreign language but an old-timer in the pub set me straight. They were speaking the secret language of elderly butchers. The trick was to pronounce words backwards. Thus ‘feeb’ is beef. If a word can’t be easily turned backwards, a couple of letters can be swapped (for example, instead of ‘bmal’, ‘lamb’ is pronounced ‘beemal.’)

  The language, called ‘Rechtub klat’, originated among butchers in order to talk openly about customers, especially women, without getting caught. According to the website Tricks of the Trade, older butchers ‘have entire conversations in the language, but these days a core vocabulary of about 20 to 30 essential words are used.’

  No wonder the butchers of my youth were always grinning. ‘Doog tsub!’ they were probably saying, as the young matrons of Waratah Avenue breezed in for their chops and sausages. ‘Doog esra oot!’ With poor old Alan and Meryl, however, at the end it was clearly ‘Ssip ffo! Ew era tuo fo ereh.’