Swimming to the Moon Read online

  Looking back, Mrs Kerfoops had a notorious propensity for attention, although Rafferty’s rules generally applied when she was about. I always felt that if cornered (otherwise she tended to melt away into background anonymity) and asked why she behaved so oddly, she’d answer confusingly, ‘For fun and fancy to please old Mother Nancy.’

  That’s the sort of person I imagined as Mrs Kerfoops. She was definitely a Jimmy Woodser, and she tended to spread sweet Larry Dooley wherever she went, but she was also known for her sly, amusing side. And she didn’t stand on ceremony. You could just be Joe Blow but, with her, Bob was always your uncle.

  Strangely, Bali suddenly seemed the perfect locale for her quirky Aussie personality. The streets and lanes of Kuta and Seminyak, teeming with sweaty overweight Australian males in thongs and Bintang beer singlets, Clayton’s Ray-Bans on the top of their heads, their Reg Grundies hanging over their shorts, and their wrists weighed down by giant Clayton’s Rolexes, was her natural home ground.

  As night falls on the nightclubs, after numerous Wally Grouts at the bar, many misguided boys here mistakenly think they’re in like Flynn. (Even the Drover’s Dog could crack on here, they reckon.) But they’ve got Buckley’s. Sweet Fanny Adams. They’re so Adrian Quist on the Bintang they don’t know if they are Arthur or Martha.

  As drunk as Chloe, they urgently need to call Ralph or cry Herb in the gutter, and after two or three days (they’ve forgotten this is Asia, home of the notorious Bali Belly), many are going flat chat, spending many hours on the porcelain telephone and suffering extreme cases of the Edgar Britts and Farmer Giles. Despite the favourable exchange rate, they quickly run out of money. The huge number of noughts on the local banknotes confuses them, the money-changers Schapelle them, and no one will cash their Gregory Pecks.

  Sadly, many of them end up having a Barry Crocker of a holiday. Heat, grog, spicy food, tropical bugs and reckless behaviour on motorbikes can lead to trouble. Even Blind Freddy could have told them that.

  Incidentally, we know who the legendary Blind Freddy probably was. According to the noted lexicographer Sidney Baker, a blind hawker named Freddy used to operate in central Sydney in the 1920s, selling ties, razor blades, hair oil, cigarettes and matches. Although blind, he was reputed to have been able to find his way around the city streets with great ease and to recognise scores of customers by their voices.

  Unlike Blind Freddy, our Mrs Kerfoops managed to keep her mystery intact in the Denpasar departure lounge. However, I like to think she is a colourful Perth woman of a somewhat bossy nature, and I think I have met her many times.

  TROUSER SINGULAR

  Ashamed at my usual state of country-coastal fashion oblivion (T-shirts and shorts), and egged on by females close to me, I was browsing through a magazine catalogue of stylishly rugged menswear looking for suitable clobber for an interstate trip.

  Intrigued by the ruggedly stylish names of the various clothing items, I soon came upon fashion nomenclature new to me: the word ‘trouser’. ‘Trouser’ singular. Then ‘pant’ and ‘jean’. Singular.

  Oh, no. Whatever happened to trousers, pants and jeans: clothes with two legs – hence plural? No sign of them in this rustic collection. Here were featured such outdoor fashion items as the Gunnedah Classic Trouser, the Jerilderie Jean and the Aberdeen Pant.

  The square-jawed, ruddy chap with the gun-metal hair who was modelling the Gunnedah Classic Trouser did look quite at ease in it/them as he stared masculinely into the countryside, and the kelpie at his knee/knees certainly added to the outdoorsy effect. I did wonder, however, what Ned Kelly would have thought of the Jerilderie Jean, especially as portrayed by a suave young male model whose dimpled cheeks were perhaps at the farthest remove from those of a member of the Kelly gang.

  Jerilderie Jean sounded like the Aussie outback equivalent of Calamity Jane. The jean came in ‘bone’, ‘wheat’ or ‘sand’, macho-sounding shades almost indistinguishable from each other. Until now, I hadn’t thought of sand or bone as actual colours, or particularly male colours either, but if you are planning to dress ruggedly enough to rob a country bank (if you can find one) the Jerilderie Jean looks up to the task.

  The gun-metal-haired man in the Gunnedah Classic Trouser soon appeared again, kelpie-less this time, though still gazing into the middle distance. He was holding a copy of Stock & Land for suitable bush-cred while teaming his trouser with a Harvester Double Pocket Shirt and a Deniliquin Traditional Rugby Sweater in ‘charcoal’ and ‘forest’.

  Meanwhile, the dimpled model had swapped his Jerilderie Jean for the Aberdeen Pant (in ‘wheat’) and a Morrison Moleskin Blazer (‘French navy’) and was inclining improbably against a dusty ute. Next he was straddling a drover’s quad bike, having changed into a Ballarat Crew Neck Heavyweight Wind Jumper (in ‘bottle’, i.e. green) and gathered up three kelpies.

  By now Mr Gunnedah Classic Trouser was visiting some empty cattle pens, donning for his tour a Traditional Trentham Jumper (in ‘Bordeaux’ – or red, to me) and an Akubra, and acquiring another kelpie along the way. He was still firmly contemplating the distant horizon (perhaps searching for the missing cows) but from the strained look on the dog’s face, this was one fashion shoot too many. Mr Jerilderie Jean, meanwhile, was enjoying leaning on the wall of a riding stable in his Talbot Premium Oilskin Vest with Detachable Tuck-away Hood and holding a bridle. No horses were there.

  At this stage, the catalogue moved from rugged bush fashion for Margaret River wannabes to rugged work gear as worn by real tradesmen. At last, I thought, as the page opened on photographs of no-frills males, a return to plural pants. Alas, the alleged plumbers, electricians and carpenters present were displaying the Sinclair Stretch Work Jean, the Utility Trouser, the Trade Short and something surprisingly called the Tool Short (with phone, tool, coin, ruler and cargo pockets).

  This was too much. Now shorts were singular as well. It reminded me of that irritating white-African affectation whereby all plural animals – not just the usual grass-eaters like sheep, deer, antelope and buffalo – are referred to in the singular.

  On a safari in Zimbabwe once, my melancholy guide kept pointing out: ‘Look, five elephant! And there’s three cheetah!’ Round the waterhole at night he’d indicate miscellaneous baboon, twelve warthog and five or six hyena. And of course the sycamore-fig trees overhead were full of bloody dozens of monkey.

  Anyway I didn’t buy a new trouser or jean for my travels. I just wore a pair of pant I’ve had for years. And a fairly new pair of shoe. Maybe I’m just not outdoorsy enough for rugged rustic fashions, although the trip was pretty exhausting and I couldn’t wait to get home to our three dog.

  TINS OF AIR

  Reminiscing about Perth of yesteryear, I remember a canny businessman at the pet-rock end of capitalism making a killing by selling empty, sealed tins labelled ‘Guaranteed Air from the City of Light’.

  They gave people a giggle. My father bought a dozen tins of air and gave them away to bigshots visiting from Melbourne head office. In 1962 we were still a branch manager’s town.

  After Perth became the City of Light, following John Glenn’s approving mention as his space capsule passed over our glow, the town began to kick over the traces. Some boisterous businessmen even suggested officially changing Perth’s name.

  There was new bravura in the beer gardens. Women no longer had to sit in hotel carparks while drinks were ferried to them. Middle-class women moved from Pimms to other drinks. Fizzy wines shyly appeared on restaurant tables among the longneck bottles of Swan.

  When girls got pregnant they didn’t necessarily leave for aunts in Melbourne any more, though many were embarrassed and bullied enough into giving up their babies.

  New restaurants opened in competition to the Seacrest and the Latin Quarter. The Della Marta was the height of bohemian sophistication. Food north of the railway line was ethnic, cheap and exciting.

  Historic buildings were torn down for little reason. The prison from which the Fenian priso
ners escaped Fremantle in 1876 on the Catalpa was levelled for a carpark. No one wrote letters to the editor about it. The key word was ‘development’.

  Jump forward to 1987, and an even bigger leap towards conspicuous prosperity. I accept an invitation from an Alan Bond executive (later gaoled) to spend the day aboard Bond’s sharply appointed motor yacht Southern Cross II. I’m delighted to watch the America’s Cup defenders’ final despite a lack of white trousers, docksiders and sunglasses-on-a-rope. But as every other male in Perth, Fremantle and probably Widgiemooltha is presently wearing yachting clobber, perhaps my khaki shorts and Dunlop Volleys have a rebellious élan.

  In minutes, the contagious enthusiasm and fierce bloody marys of the Bond Corporation have turned my impartiality into strenuous barracking for Australia II.

  Though everyone puts a brave face on it, it’s soon clear that the race – and probably the final – is over. As Kevin Parry’s Kookaburra III rounds the second buoy a minute ahead, a Bond executive whispers, ‘You know you’re watching history? You’re watching twenty million dollars go down the gurgler.’

  But the atmosphere aboard Southern Cross II remains calm. Now the conversation can drift to matters other than sailing. Those guests who are racehorse owners and/or big punters turn to the Australian Derby on television.

  A woman watching the Derby casually chides the massive horse-buying habits of another guest (since gaoled and deceased). ‘You’re such a naughty boy. One slow run on the track and you shoot them!’

  Above us the Bond airship floats eerily in the strong breeze. Around us a flotilla of lesser vessels bobs reverentially, most advertising Bond’s Swan Lager. Perth is already his city. Now it seems this is his ocean, too. It’s almost irrelevant that he lost the race.

  Having worked for Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer, no slouches as despots, I know company yesmen when I see them, but these employees’ attitude is different. They find him, well, entertaining.

  ‘Alan’s always interested in good ideas,’ one executive says. ‘Got an idea for a TV series?’ I don’t pick up this hint that in two days Bond will (momentarily) own the Nine network.

  Two executives laughingly quote the recent view of their boss voiced by a Texan banker. There’s no wariness or looking over their shoulders. ‘Doing business with Alan Bond is like wrestling with a pig. You both get covered in shit and the pig loves it.’

  One executive then gets serious. ‘See that big stretch of coast between Scarborough and Fremantle. Alan has this dream of turning it into another Gold Coast.’

  What can I say? The idea is horrendous. This coastline is the stuff of my dreams just as it is. The wind is fair on this mogul’s yacht, the sun glints off the white sands. The year is 1987, I’m a young West Australian expatriate and, not for the first time, I ponder the possibility of changing my life, of returning to this shining place and selling tins of air.

  THE GYMS OF LIFE

  You wouldn’t think so to look at me but I’ve been going to gyms for many years. I’ve lifted weights, pumped iron, hoisted metal all over the country. I can remember when gyms were called health clubs and fitness centres and health studios. I go back so far I can recall when gyms were called gyms the first time around.

  I remember when gyms didn’t have wall-to-wall carpets and women weren’t allowed. I remember when they were smelly places where surly heterosexual sportsmen went to get fit off-season or sweat out hangovers. There were no models, lawyers, airline stewards, hotel receptionists or accountants. Certainly no journalists.

  The drill was that you joined up for six months, or twelve months, or – what a bargain – life, and when the proprietor went bankrupt two months later you were left with a minimally muscled body and a long membership of a large empty space over a hamburger shop.

  I’ve momentarily changed shape several times at gyms, sometimes for the better. I saw my most memorable gym, in a sedate suburb, turn gradually into a massage parlour. For weeks I was mystified by all the businessmen coming up the stairs with nary a bench press to follow. I finally became suspicious when a woman in a green negligee began sauntering into the showers for hot water for her mug of soup. Suspicions were confirmed when various Northbridge personnel began calling in for ‘management consultations’.

  The proprietor, a 160-centimetre, 130-kilogram Turk named Omar, was arrested on the premises twice in one week for divers offences, the gentlest of which was tax evasion. Omar was a very savage health entrepreneur. He used to handle his business affairs by throwing his bills, Tax Office correspondence and summonses into the steam-room boiler, when it was working, or tearing them up and throwing the confetti out into the shopping centre.

  His bulk made Omar look even shorter than he was. He was the shape of a refrigerator, and had to edge through doors sideways. As is common among gym instructors, muscles were a height substitute. From the waist up he was bigger than Arnold Schwarzenegger, from the waist down he looked like a fat jockey. When he walked he more than rolled from side to side; he rotated.

  The first time the police came for him, on behalf of the taxman, he went quietly. Just a bit of arm-waving, swearing and shouting. The second time it took eight rapidly bruised cops to get him down the stairs, even with the handcuffs, and they confiscated our personal membership cards ‘for the department’.

  Omar epitomised the breed. Not only did he refuse to pay creditors, but he physically threatened them. Omar’s whole muscular life was a threat to everyone and everything he encountered. He threatened us to lift heavier and heavier weights. He threatened us to leave two hours before closing time because he was tired. He threatened the barbells themselves into weightlessness. He put up threatening signs all over the gym. ‘Put Weights Back or Many Hurt’ and ‘Not My Folt (sic) You Injure’ and ‘Who Made Lat. Machine Unfix Monday Night? Omar Punish’.

  The lat. machine was always ‘unfix’. So was any gym equipment the least complicated. Omar didn’t pay for maintenance. He soon presided over a steamless steam room and some stationary bicycles that were absolutely stationary. I can’t imagine Omar having the yoga and Pilates rooms of today. I cherish the impossible vision of Omar leading aerobics instruction and Zumba dance-fitness classes. Omar never talked of having a conscious tie with his physical body or asked members what star sign they were.

  When you arrived in his gym, Omar would always grunt, ‘You need suntan. Have suntan now. Ten dollars more. Pay me.’ If you were someone, unlike me, who did want a suntan, you had to settle just for a tanned upper right thigh: five of the six ultraviolet globes were ‘unfix’. Sometimes the green-lingeried woman would be sitting in the sunroom drinking a mug of soup.

  These days I exercise – sort of – in a small no-frills gym attached to my local swimming pool. It’s a calm, unisex place. Occasionally, between extremely moderate bench presses, I recall Omar and his fellows. Between them, they owe me four life memberships. That’s a lot of muscle.

  SWIMMING TO THE MOON

  I was swimming laps with my eldest son in the Bicton pool in Perth the other morning when I was struck by a wave of swimming-pool wistfulness. My son was leaving me behind in his powerful wake whereas only moments ago he was a shivering five-year-old and I was teaching him to swim. How could this be? I’d had to tread water for ages in Sydney’s Balmoral Baths, cajoling the anxious, skinny little boy to gain the courage to jump into the harbour and my arms.

  Lap swimming induces a trancelike state. As we churned up and down the Bicton pool, the distance between us growing with each of his strokes, I tried to recall all the public pools and swimming baths of my life. Naming one for each lap, repeatedly chanting it in my head for the duration of the lap so it wouldn’t float out of my consciousness, I counted forty-one before giving up. Taking in all those laps in all those pools, not to mention a lifetime’s ocean swimming all around the country, from Broome to Cairns, the countless swims between Cottesloe and North Cottesloe, at Bondi and Byron Bay and Broken Head, I must have swum to the moon by now.
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br />   The St Kilda Baths was the scene of my first swimming experience. For a couple of seconds I actually floated there. Aged five, transported on the tram by my uncle Ian, an amusing red-headed youth with the looks and manner of Danny Kaye, I was negotiated through forbidding confrontations with turnstiles, lockers, the icy bay, damp change rooms and the strange sight of naked men, and brought safely home again despite Ian’s attention being mostly on the girlfriend who’d accompanied us.

  The next year, resident in Western Australia, I was taught to swim amongst jellyfish at Claremont Baths, my Swan River swimming lessons remembered chiefly for the jellyfish fights, the scratched limbs from the barnacles on the ladders, the sweet-smelling Brylcreem machine, the slab of honeycomb that compulsorily accompanied the bus ride home, and then, in adolescent years, for the Howson sisters, the attractive daughters of the baths proprietor, statuesque in their clinging cotton Speedos.

  While memories of Claremont Baths are steeped in nostalgia, recalling Crawley Baths still provides a twinge of nerves. Until the 1962 Commonwealth Games, when Perth’s first Olympic pool opened at Beatty Park, Crawley was the main competition location. Competing with river waves was one thing; we developed the raised-head-and-arm style of surf swimmers. Awaiting the start of your race while hypnotically watching big brown jellyfish (and sometimes even more forbidding floaters) bobbing into your swimming lane, added that extra frisson of competitive tension.

  I have fond recollections as a young Melbourne Age night-shift reporter of quiet midmorning laps in near-empty pools at Fitzroy; at Hawthorn, adjoining the football ground; at Prahran; in the small, tree-shaded and always freezing Camberwell pool; and at the wonderfully inappropriately named Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Centre at Glen Iris; similarly, at the Sydney Harbour pools at Nielsen Park and Balmoral and Redleaf; the North Sydney Olympic pool, in the shadow of the Harbour Bridge; in the Sydney CBD’s Boy Charlton pool and Cook and Phillip Aquatic Centre; and, with waves breaking over my head, in the Bronte, Palm Beach, Avalon, Dee Why, Clovelly and Bondi ocean tidal pools.