Swimming to the Moon Read online

  THE LONE AVENGER

  As a ten-year-old in Perth, a ravenous reader, I was the comic-book king of Leon Road. I was obsessed with comic books, comic strips and cartoons. All my pocket money went on comics. Every day I read and swapped them, and I copied the drawing styles of artists such as Dick Tracy’s creator, Chester Gould, and The Phantom’s Lee Falk.

  Two Australian cartoonists especially appealed to me: Paul Rigby of the Daily News, and the creator of the Lone Avenger, Len Lawson. Although Lone Avenger comic books were Australian, their characters populated an unspecified country of canyons, saloons, livery stables and banks very like the American West.

  The Lone Avenger was a sheriff, an unusual lawman in one respect. Despite the heat in his desert town, he wore a hood covering his head and tucked into his shirt collar. Only the eyeholes were cut out. We never saw him eat or drink or – of course not – kiss. On top of the hood he wore his stetson. When his hat was knocked off in a fight, or when indoors, the hood gave him the pointy-headed look of a Ku Klux Klansman. I never knew why he was protecting his identity, but at ten I suspended disbelief. I was sure his reasons were sound.

  Len Lawson signed his name with a proud vertical flourish in every comic panel. So ever-present was his signature that I thought of Len Lawson as the man beneath the hood, the Lone Avenger’s secret identity, like Clark Kent to Superman.

  I remember the Lone Avenger as chivalrous to women, just as gallant to the ranchers’ feisty daughters as he was to the overdressed city ladies who arrived in a tizzy on the noon stage. He was even polite to the sassy dance-hall girls. But if he was ever romantically inclined he kept it from us. Strangely, the women didn’t seem put off by the hood. Indeed, a wistful note crept into their goodbyes after he’d solved their problems and was about to ride away.

  Each month’s comic featured a find-the-bullet contest based on the ricochet principle: a scene where the Lone Avenger had just shot the revolver from the hand of a whiskered gunslinger. You had to work out the angle of deflection, guess the route taken by the victorious bullet, and mark with an inked cross where you estimated it was now. The contest’s premise depended on time and motion being suspended. You had to presume that the Lone Avenger’s bullet wasn’t buried in the wall of a saloon, or a horse trough, or a person (some goggling cowboy onlooker) but hanging weightless somewhere in the dusty air.

  Of all the nation’s readers, my friend Tony Gibson guessed it correctly and won a Lone Avenger gun belt. The Lone Avenger personally wrote to congratulate him. I was very envious. Tony still has his winner’s letter decades later. When he showed it to me, I was impressed by its solemn tone: ‘Always remember, in victory or defeat, to obey the Lone Avenger’s Code.’

  This was strict and all encompassing. He insisted we should worship God, venerate the Queen, honour our parents, be polite to adults, respect people of all creeds, be kind to animals, do three good deeds a day, study hard, play healthy outdoor sports and obey the law. The Lone Avenger wanted us to make something of ourselves.

  In the circumstances this was ironic. His alter ego, Len Lawson, would be found guilty of raping photographic models; of raping, bludgeoning and stabbing another sixteen-year-old girl to death; of holding a girls’ boarding school at gunpoint while he demanded that the then Miss Australia and the Olympic athlete known as the ‘Golden Girl’ be brought to him. He then shot and killed a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl before being overpowered. Gaoled for life, he stabbed a visiting dancer at a prison concert.

  After fifty years in gaol, he died in 2003, aged seventy-six. A portrait of a Northern Rivers girl, Corinne Mair, that he painted in his Grafton cell was recently auctioned on eBay at a starting price of $35,000. ‘Whenever I look at it, all I think about is those poor girls,’ said Ms Mair. ‘I don’t want my children growing up to ask me about it.’ No bids were received. Maybe the ricochet has ended.

  SNUGGLEPOT AND THE HOBYAHS

  Ever optimistic, I recently tried to break the children’s-entertainment stranglehold of Hollywood and the Disney channel. What ten-year-old country girl wouldn’t be intrigued by Australiana both cuddly and exciting? Anything to lure her from the precocious dilemmas of LA nymphets. Maybe our famous bushland literary characters stood a chance.

  Enter Snugglepot and Cuddlepie. Her giggly reaction was, ‘Why have they got bare bottoms?’ I’d wondered that myself. I perused a few pages of the May Gibbs classic. ‘It’s only the boy gumnut babies that have bare bottoms,’ I said. ‘Then why haven’t the boys got willies?’ she wondered. ‘Because they’re gumnuts,’ I said.

  She was checking out the gumnut girls now. They wore micro-minis made of stamens, the male reproductive organs of flowers, although their skirts tended to ride up, too. ‘Weird,’ she said. ‘Were bare-bum books what you children read before television was invented?’

  ‘Forget the bottoms, what about those Bad Banksia Men?’ They were what I remembered most – the black, hairy, warty bogeymen from the Australian bush. The Banksia Men were what drove the action of the story. ‘Scary, or what?’

  ‘They haven’t got pants either,’ she observed. ‘Or willies. I’ll probably have nightmares now.’

  Few writers have left such a lasting cultural legacy. I googled May Gibbs and discovered that Snugglepot and Cuddlepie hasn’t been out of print since 1918. As a child I used to confuse her Banksia Men with the Hobyahs. They were interchangeable: evil and black and apt to abduct and eat people.

  For the first sixty years last century, the education departments in most states taught children to read from the eight-volume Victorian Readers. I’d guess the learning-to-read experience that stands out in most minds is ‘The Hobyahs’, author unknown, from Book Two of the Readers.

  A publisher recently sent me a set of the old Readers and I went looking for my scary childhood Hobyahs. Intended for six-year-olds, the story features a tribe of black hooded figures with hooked noses who regularly prey upon an old man, his wife and their yellow dog, Dingo, when they’re asleep.

  Out from the gloomy gullies came the Hobyahs, creep, creep, creeping. Through the grey gum-trees came the Hobyahs, run, run, running. Skip, skip, skipping on the ends of their toes ran the Hobyahs. And the Hobyahs cried, ‘Pull down the hut, eat up the little old man, carry off the little old woman.’

  Every night the Hobyahs come creep, creep, creeping, but Dingo’s barking frightens them away. However, his barking wakes the old man, who punishes him, in macabre stages, by cutting off his tail, his legs and, finally, his head – until he can’t bark. When Dingo can’t scare away the Hobyahs, they carry off the old woman in a bag, in order to eat her. (The old man has cravenly hidden under the bed.) It’s only when he restores the dog’s head, and heroic Dingo eats the Hobyahs, that his wife is rescued.

  It’s hard to see children’s librarians accepting that plot nowadays. A woman I know is still having Hobyah nightmares forty-five years later. Perhaps Jung would have something to say about them and the Banksia Men. Maybe these swarthy villains are fixed in this nation’s collective unconscious. Indeed, could an ingrained fear of them be behind our more emotional political decisions? Boat people anyone?

  I remember finding the Hobyahs deliciously frightening, but I decided not to introduce them to my daughter. There are many gloomy gullies around here. It’s easy to imagine things coming creep, creep, creeping in the night, and I need my sleep.

  OBITUARY FOR A BROWN DOG

  Have I told you about Ella? In her youth one of Australia’s most idiosyncratic dogs, Ella grew to combine the proud demeanour of the pure German short-haired pointer and the blasé attitude of a Las Vegas showgirl. In a long, eventful life she attracted wide notice, even notoriety, for various occurrences including gatecrashing the reception for Pope John Paul II at Randwick Racecourse, eating dead pelicans, and managing to speak and repeat an actual human word – the name Owen. This was all the more remarkable since there was no one in her household or neighbourhood called Owen.

  As noted in her
biography, Walking Ella, she was a voracious eater, exceptional even for her breed of enthusiastic feeders. Her first year was noted for her consumption, with no ill-effects, of two dead pelicans and an Indian picnic for eight in Centennial Park, a deceased fox, a baby’s nappy, a packet of snail pellets, kitty litter, several hundred sea monkeys, miscellaneous road-killed cats and possums, washed-up cormorants, stolen Thai takeaway, and the contents of a David Jones’ delicatessen’s shopping bag, as well as the bag, whose familiar check pattern made a startling appearance a day later.

  As her biographer wrote, ‘She’ll eat anything that isn’t strictly classified as mineral.’

  As both a cosmopolitan and a regionalist (Ella spent her life in inner-Sydney and on the NSW far-north coast), she was testimony to the inadequacy of such academic notions that to be regionalist is to be communitarian, while to be a cosmopolitan is to seek the empty non-places of the city.

  She shunned country friendships – regarding farmers, cows and sheep as boring and incomprehensible – while enjoying entering random inner-city houses and hotels, climbing into foreign bedrooms and snuggling under the bedclothes, or following total strangers with packets of chips onto trains.

  While preferring her family to outsiders, she would adopt any stranger with a Chiko roll. She knew no fear – except of umbrellas, fireworks, balloons, people wearing hats, men outside pubs, female power-walkers with rustling thighs, and cats.

  Early in her career she laid down the rules. She would defy her breed’s raison d’etre and neither come nor fetch. A beckoning whistle brought a toss of the head and her rapid disappearance in the opposite direction. A two-week stint in the strict Dog and Master Training School brought no change in her behaviour but did break up the relationship of the married couple running the school.

  Ostensibly a gun dog, bred to point at, and retrieve, game from water, she was frightened of the smallest popping sound (balloons, whoopee cushions, paper bags), braved swimming only once in her life, and refused to drink running fresh water. Paradoxically, she attempted to drink sea water on every beach walk, and was always unpleasantly surprised at the taste. Once she assumed the point position at a mudhen until it stared her down.

  Making up for lifelong deficiencies in sight and hearing, her sense of smell was remarkable. Tired of her becoming lost on her daily beach walk, her frustrated ‘master’ would have to run upwind of her, remove his shirt and wave it in the breeze. She could detect and differentiate his body odour at about 500 metres. He wasn’t sure how proud he should be of this talent.

  Her most remarkable attribute, however, was her affectionate nature, which enabled her to patiently suffer the indignities heaped on her over the years: hauling a sled and a skateboard and playing many roles (shark, lion, wolf, witch, pirate), mostly in costume.

  She never lost her huge appetite. When she couldn’t stand any longer she lay down to eat. Twice, the vet suggested her meter had expired, but she rallied for another six months. Her last year was spent tottering around the house in her green jacket, like an old showgirl in stilettos, occasionally calling for the phantom Owen and venturing outside every day at 5 p.m. to bark at ghosts until nightfall.

  She ran the household for seventeen years. Despite my distaste for sentimental animal stories it seemed ignoble to let her death go unrecorded. She was a character, our brown dog, and we’re still sad.

  SHARP AND ONIONS

  Like the unexpected people who surface in your dreams, odd personnel come to mind when you’re writing a memoir. Especially in the football season. This week my brain threw up the names Sharp and Onions. Because they sound like an English TV comedy series I’ve always bracketed them together, but Sammy Sharp and Wilson Onions were separate and prominent individuals from my Perth adolescence.

  I used to be fascinated by the curious name ‘Wilson Onions’ when it cropped up regularly in the sports pages. It was like the name of a comic-strip character, paradoxically tough and humorous, a moniker matched by his relentlessly tough and comic deeds on the football field.

  I used to follow East Fremantle. The club was a stalwart of the old WANFL (now WAFL) and Wilson Onions, a backman, was – and still is – a stalwart of Old Easts. Apart from his name, what endeared him to me was his comically wayward reputation. He wasn’t particularly big, at twelve stone and five foot ten, but not many games went by when he didn’t flatten at least one player and face the tribunal.

  There was no sly, behind-the-play ‘sniping’ from Wilson in those pro-bump days. He just couldn’t help openly hitting the opposition. In the club history, Old Easts 1948–1975, the opening photograph is of Onions glaring at the camera. The caption, headed ‘Bad Boy’, mimics a radio broadcast of the time: ‘East Fremantle has just had to call on nineteenth man Wilson Onions and he’ll take over on the wing on the far side of the ground … Hello, he’s knocked down three West Perth players on his way across.’

  What made Wilson so engaging was that he was always unaware of having done anything wrong. Once, charged with knocking over his own brother, he answered, ‘Well, he didn’t have on an East Fremantle jumper, did he?’

  Not surprisingly, he wasn’t enamoured at the formation of the AFL and its effect on the local competition. ‘They buggered the game up,’ he maintains. There’s not enough biff. ‘Where’s the man on man?’ he grumbles.

  Sammy Sharp also perfectly fitted his name. He was a trumpet player and former band leader who laboured to teach me the cornet. At twelve, I liked jazz and was determined to be the next Louis Armstrong, a tricky task on several levels.

  Sammy had a distinguished musical past. He’d played the London Coliseum with Ted Heath’s Band and led the brass section of Van Phillips’ and Eric Winstone’s orchestras in England. Back home in Perth, he’d led the band at the Embassy ballroom while recording three weekly radio programs: Sunday Serenade, Sammy Sharp’s Rhythm Five and Thursday Night at Eight.

  But by the time I met him twenty-five years later, up two flights of stairs in a dusty Murray Street warehouse, Elvis and Bill Haley had arrived and he was grumpily resigned to teaching the trumpet to those few remaining adolescent boys with hip aspirations and copies of Down Beat in their pockets.

  ‘Here,’ he said, handing me a dented cornet. ‘Blow it like you’re spitting a piece of tissue paper off your lips. Take this home and practise every day. Give the neighbours a thrill.’ The neighbours weren’t thrilled, exactly. There were only three protesting deputations to my parents, by the Stockwells, the Dolans and the Morrises, but it seemed they represented a wider range of opinion.

  A badly played trumpet is a dangerous weapon. Even forgetting my ear-splitting blasts, the fact that the cornet mouthpiece painfully pushed my lip onto my irregular front teeth, and bloody spit dribbled out the bell end during my interpretation of ‘Cry Me a River’, rather marred any cool jazz-lick effect.

  With Satchmo’s and my only common ground being our trumpet-dribble, after six months I wiped my chin and regretfully farewelled Sammy Sharp. I handed him back the battered cornet. ‘It cuts my lip,’ I explained. Sammy didn’t get up from his chair. ‘Rock’n’roll, is it?’ he sighed.

  I’d always loved ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and now the Beatles and Rolling Stones loomed ahead. ‘I really like Miles Davis,’ I said to him.

  He frowned. ‘Is that so? You better push off, son.’

  STATUES

  Forced by the vagaries of life to live in the dreaded Eastern States, this ardent West Australian has come to believe some of his deepest, most personal feelings for his hometown are perfectly represented by two statues.

  They’re statues sited in water. I’m referring to the Eliza statue in the Swan River and the C. Y. O’Connor statue in the Indian Ocean, both created by the noted local sculptor Tony Jones. As a joint artistic statement they accurately sum up for me the complete and complex West Australian ethos.

  Eliza, the state’s most popular public artwork, is of course the bronze sculpture in Matilda Bay, just off the Mo
unts Bay Road shoreline, which since 2007 has depicted a woman preparing to dive into the river. It commemorates the long-gone Crawley Baths nearby, where generations of Perth swimmers and divers, learners and experts, gathered between 1914 and 1964.

  In its latter years I was one of the many. There I competed in interschool competitions, earned my bronze lifesaving medallion, scraped my legs on its barnacles, crunched delicious after-training chunks of honeycomb, dived off the twenty-foot board (but chickened out on the thirty-footer), avoided change-room perverts, lost money in the broken Brylcreem machine, and felt strong yearnings for certain girls in clinging racing bathers (unrequited, due perhaps to the river algae clinging darkly to one’s facial peach-fuzz).

  There, too, while standing on the blocks in relay races, I learned the meaning of suspense. Forget the competitors; would the team mate thrashing towards me enable me to dive in before a particular brown jellyfish (or, worse, another brown floater) bobbed into our lane? (When asked to display to us juniors their prowess at Crawley Baths, the Olympic champions John Konrads and John Devitt, accustomed to actual swimming pools, showed surprise at these unique lane impediments but bravely swam through them.)

  I think that Eliza, named after Mt Eliza behind her, captures the devil-may-care spirit of the baths; as much for the amused way the community regards her (specifically the pranksters’ constantly dressing her in weird clothing) as for her stalwart pose. Strangely, she also reminds me of my mother. Though only 160 centimetres rather than 2.2 metres high, she was an accomplished diver who actually did jack-knife off thirty-foot platforms in her youth, earning her the nickname of Jantz, after the Jantzen swimwear diving-girl trademark. She died young and this is how I best remember her.

  The O’Connor statue by Tony Jones resonates for other reasons. It depicts Charles Yelverton O’Connor, on horseback, looking back over his shoulder at the Fremantle harbour he created by blasting rock from the riverbed. Bronze and two metres high, it’s not a naturalistic artwork like Eliza, but a more abstract work, nevertheless strongly poignant and reminiscent of Sidney Nolan’s Burke and Wills paintings.