30 Days in Sydney (13 page)
Authors: Peter Carey
COULD MY EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OseLlDf have seen me at the Dawn Service on Anzac Day he would, if he had not wept with disappointment, have jeered and shouted slogans at the man he would become.
In the eyes of that eighteen year old, Anzac Day was celebrated by men who hated Asians and loved the Queen of England, racists, royalists, homophobes, soldiers in uniform who saw his long hair as an enemy badge. Anzac Day meant the Returned Services League and RSL clubs, and that single minute of every alcoholic day when a dreary male voice intoned LEST WE FORGET and the beer ceased flowing and the poker machines fell silent in tribute to the dead.
I might have mocked and feared the reactionary RSL but even as an opinionated teenager I knew the issue was more complicated. My heart was easily stirred by the story of Gallipoli. My own father had fought in neither world war but we had family friends who had suffered the Burmese Railway, Changi Prison and the horrors of the Kokoda Trail. The road into our little town was lined with a massive avenue of plane trees, each bearing the name of a local boy or man who had lost his life in war. It was the most beautiful place in the entire town and one could not drive through it and not think why it was there. 'The Japanese,' my mother said, 'were coming to take my little baby.' Why would I not believe her? Had I not, in the grounds of State School No. 28, played with the currency the Japanese had printed in readiness for the time when our country would be theirs? Did we not dance home along the footpaths chanting
Step on a crack and break a Jap's back?
But then came the 1960s and Vietnam and the RSL was still fighting the same old Asian war, and we heard their fear and hatred of the Japanese and could see nothing more complicated than their racism. At eighteen I was becoming aware of some of my country's bloodier secrets. I joined protest marches against the Vietnam War and the White Australia policy. Aboriginal activists like Charles Perkins were continuing the long fight for human rights for black Australians.
In this climate, Australia was bitterly divided, and the RSL, the guardians and administrators of the Anzac Day march, stood on the right. Their members were the mythic diggers but now they were my enemy. I could not see that they were also me. I did not know that history is like a bloodstain that keeps on showing on the wall no matter how many new owners take possession, no matter how many times we paint over it.
Year after year the old diggers pinned on their medals, and at four thirty in the morning, at the hour the Australian and New Zealand army corps was landing on the Turkish coast, they laid their wreaths on their dreary monuments to the war dead, and then they marched and later they drank and for many of them the marching turned to staggering as they wandered bellicose or sentimental through the streets. We had no idea of what they'd seen and done and now we did not want to know. They were the old Australia, white men with names like Smith and Bennett and Kelly and McGrath, and each year they grew older and we waited for the time when the last of them would die and then, we imagined, Anzac Day would wither and nothing would remain but some dreary statues in country towns and that great granite cenotaph in Martin Place. Korea, of course, supplied a few new marchers, and Vietnam topped up the crowd, but by the year 2000, on that morning when Vicki had parked her station wagon in Bligh Street, there were only thirty-one survivors of the battle against the Turks at Gallipoli. I was fifty-seven, finally old enough to honour them.
Kelvin looked slumped and miserable, as you might expect of a married man who had stayed out all night and now had no reasonable explanation for his behaviour. Fix and I did not look a whole heap better, but Sheridan was dressed in a neat black suit with two Vietnam medals on his breast. I had never seen these medals before. I was not surprised he had them, only that he wore them. My attitude towards Sherry's Vietnam service had been shaped, long, long ago, during all those smelly hours he had held his feet to the radiator, spreading the bright pink rash he was sure would save him from the draft.
Beside him walked Vicki in a crisp black suit, her foster father's raft of medals pinned across her breast. On her right lapel she wore a large Aboriginal Land Rights badge.
It was still before dawn when I realised that Anzac Day was not something that had withered. There were teenagers here, young couples in their twenties, so many of them that although we had risen at half past three we could not even push our way into Martin Place. We could not see the cenotaph or the dignitaries who presided over the event.
In 1967 Fix had gone to jail for burning his draft card. Kelvin and I had been too old to face the lottery but he had been an active member of the Vietnam Moratorium Committee in Sydney (just as I had in Melbourne). I don't know exactly what my friends felt now, but I was certainly ready to make peace with our past.
Then I looked down at the printed programme. And what I felt will seem unreasonable, I'm sure.
0430 hrs. MC Leon Becker AM.
Hymn: Abide With Me.
Prayer: Senior Chaplain.
Address: Commander Blah Blah Blah. The Patron: His Excellency, the Honourable Gordon Samuels AC, Governor of NSW, will recite dedication.
Everything about this language depressed me. It was like going into a lift in an old building and detecting the odour of Bakelite in the light fixtures, the smell of Australia in 1955.
Will recite dedication.
Oh charmless people!
His Excellency, the Honourable.
Kissers of royal arses!
The Patron will place the wreath of the Australian Legion on the Cenotaph. Official representatives will immediately follow.
Oh nation of postmasters and accountants, is this our greatest story? Are our poets in prison?
As the dawn is even now about to pierce the night so let their memory inspire us to work for the coming new light into the dark places of the world.
What new light? I thought as I listened to that dull dreary voice on the PA. What dark places did they mean?
The Patron will place the wreath of the Australian Legion on the Cenotaph.
And then, incredibly, the band struck up 'God Save the Queen'.
Jesus, whispered Fix. Not that.
Shut up, said Vicki fiercely. Her eyes were glistening. We shut up. But Vicki did not sing 'God Save the Queen'. Few people did.
Catafalque Party move off. Troops move off. Ceremony closes.
ADVANCE AUSTRALIA FAIR.
The crowd obeyed. They sang 'Advance Australia Fair' which is described, I believe, as our national song. But it is a song filled with so many lies and errors of fact and it is not our real song and never was. Our real song is the song about the swagman who stole a sheep and committed suicide rather than be arrested. It does not misdescribe our sterile soil or claim we are young and free but it is the song of our heart. It was not written in Sydney but its spirit was born where we were presently assembled with the Tank Stream flowing like a dirty secret underneath our feet. It is 'Waltzing Matilda' that we cannot paint out, the template that shapes even those who feel beyond it. The past is never dead, wrote William Faulkner, it is not even past. In 'Waltzing Matilda' we are at our best. We do not have a Statue of Liberty but when we sing, when we thereby imaginatively inhabit the world of 'Waltzing Matilda', we become all the poor and all the down-trodden. It is not a song of triumph but of empathy. It suits us. We can be very confident that the men who died at Gallipoli loved that song, and it is not just the RSL who is too embarrassed, too prim, too bureaucratic to remember it.
After the service the five of us walked very slowly through the streets named after British naval officers and prime ministers, past the two big state government buildings, the larger one named for Phillip, the smaller one for Macquarie, and we drove down by the wharves at Woolloomooloo, past the entrance to the Garden Island Naval Dockyard, up the hill to Macleay Street to the one part of Sydney we expected to be still awake. But Kings Cross at six in the morning was not a pretty sight, and whatever excitement or tawdry glamour it commonly borrows from drugs and criminals and prostitution was not available at this hour. Still, the Bourbon and Beefsteak was open and young men and women in dirty denim were staggering from its wide door into the street.
Come on, said Fix, let's get some steak and eggs.
No, said Kelvin, the food is shithouse.
But we drifted uncertainly into the entrance where a dangerous-looking bouncer was shepherding a crying woman out into the street. Downstairs a band was playing, but we stepped sideways into the restaurant which was decorated with incongruous British-looking bric-A-brac, incongruous because the owner of the Bourbon and Beefsteak was a former US naval intelligence officer, a partner of the Nugan Hand Bank, a CIA front which is commonly reputed to have played an active role in destabilising our elected government in 1975.
Let's go, said Kelvin. Let's go up the road to Bar Coluzzi.
Mate, this is a perfect complement to Anzac Day.
How's that? asked Vicki.
In 1915 we gave our blood for the British; exactly sixty years later we sacrificed our government to the Americans. This is one of the places where the deed was done.
The service is bad and the food is lousy. Not even the Mafia would eat in a place like this, said Kelvin, looking around at the marooned diners who had been abandoned with no comfort other than that provided by a laminated menu and a glass of tepid water.
We drank our water. We read our menus. Half an hour later, still not having placed an order, we left the Bourbon and Beefsteak and walked through the wet streets on a bickering search for breakfast.
Bar Coluzzi, a place where we would normally expect to see many of our friends, was shut. So we settled for Tropicana just across the road and there the five of us ate bacon and eggs, and talked and drank coffee and watched the television and drank more coffee. But no matter how much coffee we drank I cannot manufacture enough cups to justify my memory that it was on the flickering television in Tropicana that we saw John Howard appear. It was just before dawn on Gallipoli and there he was, together with the Turkish prime minister and thousands of young Australians who had travelled to make remembrance on Turkish soil.
It was in Tropicana, without a doubt, that we saw our prime minister speak. We heard him say we were comrades with the Turks today. This long-ago event would live with us for ever. It had been the making of our nation, and for once, just briefly, I did not feel myself his enemy.
Then I looked at Vicki and saw the tears welling in her eyes, and it was only then I understood the bitter irony of this moment.
Our prime minister could embrace and forgive the people who killed our beloved sons and fathers, and so he should, but he could not, would not, apologise to the Aboriginal people for 200 years of murder and abuse. The battle against the Turks, he said in Gallipoli, was our history, our tradition. The war against the Aboriginals, he had already said at home, had happened long ago. The battle had made us; the war that won the continent was best forgotten.
Hearing the prime minister speak, Vicki bowed her head and began searching in her handbag. I thought she was looking for a tissue, but instead she produced a slim pair of nail scissors. By the time she had removed the medals from her jacket, her eyes had become curiously cold. Very carefully, one might say thoughtfully, she removed the ribbons from each decoration and cut them into strips as thin as string.
We old white men said nothing. What could we say? We watched as she swept the ribbons into her open hand and dropped them into a polystyrene cup.
Sheridan looked down at his own two medals.
Don't, said Fix.
Sherry's big hands fluttered over the medals as if he planned to do the same.
Don't, said Vicki. Please, just don't.
HOW CAN I HOPE to convey to any reader my idea of Sydney? I have seen nothing to equal it in the way of landlocked scenery, in the particular relationship between the races, in the easy tolerance of crime and corruption, in the familiar mingling you can witness on the footpath outside Bar Coluzzi any morning, where you may find judges and writers and the euphemistically labelled 'colourful racing identities' all bunched happily together in the sunshine, somehow feeling themselves to be at the red-hot centre of the town. On the wall inside you can see photographs of George Foreman, Clive James and Claudia Cardinale.
Jack Ledoux would not have described himself as part of any crowd, let alone this one, but he was a regular at Bar Coluzzi and it was here we met to say goodbye on the day of my departure.
I had by now given up all hope of getting his story, but I was happy to be meeting here because it seemed so very expressive of the town's character, because it seemed connected, by long, long threads of custom, to the first day of the colony.
I carried to this meeting a newspaper article from the
Daily Telegraph
on December 23 1999, and this seemed a very rich document to me and one which I had highlighted in the places which are italicised below.
Former coffee-shop owner Luigi Coluzzi yesterday escaped a full-time jail sentence for bashing a man unconscious on Darlinghurst's cafii strip last year.
NSW district court judge Brian Wall instead ordered Coluzzi, 34, to serve two years periodic detention for assaulting artist Max Droga outside Bar Coluzzi on Victoria Street on January 23.
Judge Wall said yesterday that it was a violent attack at the upper end of the scale of grievous bodily harm.
He found Coluzzi had deliberately, rather than recklessly, caused serious injury to Mr Droga, and on the objective facts he deserved to be jailed.
But under the subjective circumstances - that Droga had harassed him for five years and that Coluzzi had
a 'very vulnerable personality'
- he opted for the lighter sentence.
The bad blood between Coluzzi and Droga, the Telegraph later reported, dates back to 1989 when
Coluzzi smashed an aggressive dog over the head with a baseball bat, killing it
, outside Bar Coluzzi.
Four years after the event, local
coffee-lover
Max Droga began taunting Coluzzi, calling him a
'dog-killer'
and 'psychopath' every time they crossed paths.
On January 23 last year, after more jibes
and five years of restraint,
Coluzzi snapped and began swinging punches at Droga as stunned customers looked on.
At least one of his punches connected, knocking Droga unconscious and head first into the pavement, causing him serious head injuries.
Droga was rushed to St Vincent's and later underwent a partial lobotomy
.
During the three-week trial, caf6 owners from Victoria Street, some of their customers, an Olympic boxer and even ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] boss David Hill gave evidence.
I despair of being able to explain all this, I told Jack Ledoux, but it seems somehow that this is where the book should end, here on this footpath, with everyone eating their focaccia and drinking their lattes and espresso. I should read you this article and then we should discuss it.
Jack did not say a thing for a while but looked away from me, and I knew I had offended him with my negativity.
You know, Peter, he said at last, this is not owned by the Coluzzi family any more.
Yes, but the clientéle is just the same. There is this same mixture of legal power and art and people who are, shall we say, less than legal.
Yes, but you see, Peter, you're missing so much that is wonderful about this town. You told me the story of Vicki and her father's medals.
Surely you're not saying that these stories should not be told?
No, no, of course not, but it's a question of balance. You're the chap, remember, who arrived here a month ago and all you wanted to do was collect stories of Earth and Air and Fire and Water.
Well, Jack, some people made that difficult . . .
You lost your batteries, he reminded me. Do you have them now?
I do, yes.
If I tell you this story will you at least put it after the Coluzzi story, and after the medals?
You want a happy ending.
Well, I don't know how happy it is, he laughed. I very nearly died.