Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds (14 page)

C
olin Batty's father was a pioneer surfer from further back along the coast at Devon Beach. Long before the average Victorian male in their twenties was thinking about anything other than test cricket and the Australian crawl, Arthur Batty, or Art as he was known, had taken to riding the local breakers out of sheer, only-child boredom. On a cornery plank of splintered cypress which he'd grabbed from a nearby windbreak that was being chopped down and milled on site, he would struggle through the tide and undertow and attempt to chime in with the propulsion of the surf. It couldn't quite be said, as Art Batty later claimed, that he was ‘hotdogging the small fry' during those supposedly halcyon days he described as the true beginnings of Australian surfing; rather, he would often be seen hauling the leaden cypress plank awkwardly back through the overcast waves for yet another attempt at standing up, his frail body almost blue with the cold, his nose sniffling, his nostrils running sea-green, and his mind full of a kind of blank abandonment that even the energy of the waves could not interrupt. However,
the bare fact remains that well before the surfing craze began to properly hit the eastern shores of Australia, before the images of bronzed Californians with bleached smiles, perky girlfriends and lollipop boardshorts started trickling in from the US during the 1960s, young Art Batty was indeed, like some unwitting omen of change, riding a plank through the choppy waves on the front point at Devon Beach.

The fact that he did this for only one spring and summer, that of 1952–53, did not deter Art Batty one bit from creating his own personal legend, a legend which eventually became entwined with the larger destiny of Devon Beach itself. The splinters and bruises from where the heavy hunk of wood kept hitting him when he fell off had conspired, along with his own general physical delicacy, to drive him back out of the water and into a small gang of schoolboys dedicated to British radio comedians and the card game 500. But when those images from the Californian coast did finally start appearing a decade or so later, Art Batty immediately saw his opportunity. Informing his hardworking father that he would no longer be happy helping dole out the milk in the dairy, Art hitchhiked to Geelong, from where he took the train to Melbourne to have his teeth fixed by a Collins Street dentist. Three days later he returned with a new smile and a loan, to open up the prototypical, and eventually semi-mythical, Art Batty's Surfer's Shop.

History has decreed that Art Batty's Surfer's Shop is now so legendary, and such an icon of the pure and soulful dawn of surfing, that no-one is exactly sure if it ever existed. Except Colin Batty of course, who grew up amidst the smell of fibreglass and boardwax in his father's shop, listening to Art subtly propound his own myth, to whoever would listen, as the Duke Kahanamoku of the local coast. Young Colin knew, in the squinty dissatisfaction of his own childhood, that his father was a con-man like no other. He also had no doubt that that was why his mother had shot through with a curly-headed
giant on a Triumph motor cycle when Colin himself was only nine years old. Such was the elaborate nature of the Art Batty charade, however, that there were moments when young Colin almost admired his father's assiduous ability to play the role of the pioneering surf guru, complete with goatee and lingo, when all the while the drawers under the shop counter were full of antacids, Disprin and antihistamines for his various malingering ailments. As an adolescent son with an active mind, however, Colin's shame about the situation burned deeply, easily outweighing any admiration he had for the consistency of his father's imagination.

He grew up resentful therefore, with his mother's red hair but alone, alongside his father in Art Batty's Surfer's Shop. He swore to himself on a daily, if not hourly, basis that as soon as he could he too would shoot through like his mum, and never come back.

Wearing a blue duffel coat and carrying a green vanity case of his mother's in his hand, Colin Batty walked out of Devon Beach on the day before Christmas 1975. He spent that summer working as a general hand at a children's safari park at Bunyip, on the You Yangs side of Geelong, and then the whole of 1976 as a farm labourer further up into the Brisbane ranges near Blackwood. There at night he would sit alone on the tiny, sloping verandah of the paddock shack where he slept and feel his freedom. As the winter encroached he would also feel an intensity in the cold of the ranges like he'd never known on the coast.

He began to read by the fire after dark rather than gazing at the stars. With all the disused gold mines scattered in the hills around him he became fascinated by the gold rush years, when the almost deserted Blackwood area had been the bustling site of the first Victorian strike. He learnt about it all from Hec Spate, who he worked alongside during the day, and who seemed to know the gold history like he'd been there at the time. Hec Spate was one of a dying breed, an itinerant whose penchant for yarning as he worked receded at
nightfall to a blank-eyed solitude. With his daytime yarns he fed Colin's imagination on wild and curious stories of fortunes made on the diggings, until the young man found himself with a thirst to know more. From Hec Spate, Colin borrowed a beaten up copy of
The History of the Australian Gold Rushes
, which he would read at night, looking up occasionally from the pages to see the glow of Hec's campfire out on the fringes of the paddock.

Not having had books at home he experienced the joys of reading for the first time. For months he combed the pages of that one gold rush volume. He grew fascinated with the children of the diggings, who went about collecting the fallen scraps of gold in the leaf litter of the bush, just as he had dived for golf balls in the dam on the Devon Beach golf links. He admired the perambulant nature of the diggings too, the adventuring and the risk taking, the willingness of it all, and could imagine as he worked, fence building and hay carting with Hec Spate and the others during the day, the dry, pitted hills back in time, teeming with filthy tents and bearded prospectors.

Hec Spate described those steep hills around Blackwood as a ‘honey pot run dry' and by the new year celebrations of 1977, having exhausted his fascination and deciding that his own gold lay elsewhere, Colin had moved on to the southern banks of the Yarra River in Melbourne with a thirty-year-old married woman from Gippsland. Then, through a one-night stand with a girl he met in the Lennox Hotel in Richmond, he got a job as a barman in the Sandringham Hotel, in the bayside suburbs. In Sandringham he was well liked, his bosses trusted him, particularly because he wore his hair unfashionably short, and before he knew it he had stayed for over three years and had enough money in his passbook to leave for London at the age of twenty-seven.

Colin Batty hated England. It was rainy and expensive, he made no friends, especially not of the opposite sex, and after only nine
months of living despondently on the thirteenth floor of a council high-rise in Battersea whilst working at a snobby bar across the river on the King's Road, he took off to France. He wandered through Brittany on his own before meeting a Spanish girl in a hostel and heading for Holland, but after only a few weeks the girl complained of homesickness and caught a train back to Granada. Colin flew out of the northern hemisphere in disgust, headed for New Zealand. He didn't know it yet but after many years away from his home coast, he was about to find his way back.

It was in New Zealand that the wandering course of his life since he had left Devon Beach found its direction. He spent two carefree months hitchhiking from town to town, mountain to mountain, family to family, lover to lover, in the North Island and the South, until by the time he laid down his pack and pitched his tent at Whangamata Beach on the east coast of the North Island in November 1981, he was the happiest and most relaxed he had been in his whole life. When people asked him in years to come how he had ended up selling real estate in Mangowak he never described to them his hatred of his legendary father in Devon Beach and how he'd vowed never to return to his home town, but rather he'd talk about those little moments of inspiration that can change your life and that you often only experience when you pull the pin and go travelling.

So there he was, sitting in front of a newfangled one-man nylon tent on the beach at Whangamata, with a trumpet-shaped joint waiting to be lit in his right hand, when a rainbow appeared between the lap-lap of the rivermouth and the verdant little island not far offshore. All the travelling of the previous years, and in particular the healing of the previous two months, had prepared him for the moment. Without any warning he had a sudden and entirely unexpected desire to go where he never thought he ever would again – back home to the southwest coast of Victoria.

His vision did not include returning to the weighted treelessness and biting wind of Devon Beach, however, but rather he saw in his mind the town of Mangowak, some thirty or so miles further down the coast. Mangowak had always seemed a happy place to him as a child, due to the charming old Meteorological Station buildings dotted against the blue sky on the golden cliff at the edge of the town. He'd always looked forward to driving through there with Art. Now in Whangamata the vision of that cliff in Mangowak rose in his mind out of a Pacific rainbow, a rainbow which itself rose out of the lambent blue-black water, and over the silver-green pohutukawas of the little island in the bay. As he struck a match and prepared to light his joint, Colin Batty knew his travelling days had finally come to an end.

He returned to Australia and moved permanently into Mangowak in 1982, but ever since, Colin Batty had felt the annoying undercurrent of not quite belonging in his adopted town. This was largely due to his famous surname being synonymous in the minds of locals with Devon Beach. Each town along the coast had its own disposition, after all. Added to this problem, however, once he took over Des Mooney's old pink fibro West Coast Real Estate office on the main road next to the CFA depot, was the fact that it was Colin's job to sell properties that at times had been in the same family for what seemed like forever. He never ripped any of the locals off, he made sure of that, but nevertheless there were some elements amongst the more established families in the town who thought, as the older Devon Beach folk had thought of his father Art all those years ago, that Colin was a harbinger of no good.

As far as the Mangowak locals were concerned the place where they lived could speak for itself but as the 1980s rolled by and Colin started to get the knack of his trade, they started to overhear him at auctions spruiking about their ‘gorgeous Mediterranean climate', their ‘riviera cliffs', and ‘champagne lifestyle', and they quickly
concluded that he was a con-artist, not to be trusted. Every now and again Colin would attend a real estate industry conference at which he would be reassured that
local resistance
was one of the standard obstacles of a progressive agency, and that nine times out of ten this resistance ended in
local resignation
, but for Colin this overgeneralising truth was not enough consolation. The whole issue was touching a raw nerve. It was an old familiar feeling. Ever since he was a boy in his father's shop he'd felt somehow bogus, an outsider. He had blamed his father for it back then, and ever after for that matter, but now that he found himself stuck with the same feeling as an adult he didn't quite know what to think or, for that matter, who to blame.

Being bypassed over the sale of Ron McCoy's land therefore really got under Colin's skin. He'd always been very kind to Ron and his old mum, he'd employed Ron to fence his own property when he first bought it and also to shoot his horse when it broke its leg. He'd always bought the District Association raffle tickets Min sold in front of the general store, and always had a bit of a yarn with Ron in the pub, but obviously it had done him no good. He felt that it had been casually implied that he would be the man Ron would turn to if he ever needed that kind of help. ‘The fucken old bastard has gone behind my back,' was how he put it to Craig the day that he discovered the news of the sale.

Craig was taken aback at the vehemence of Colin's reaction but knew him to be intensely competitive and so patched together a version of what could rile him so. The McCoy land was important, with large acreage for a town block, and it was in a prized position. There were many different agencies vying for land and house sales on that part of the coast and a bluechip property like the McCoys' took a business up a notch. What Craig could never have understood about his boss's reaction was that, after all these years, Colin Batty did not feel entirely welcome in the town. Ron McCoy had just rubbed salt into his wounds.

Exacerbating Colin Batty's feeling was the fact that for a solid eighteen months after the construction of Dom Khouri's house got under way, nearly every tradesman in Mangowak, and therefore nearly everyone he bumped into at the pub after knock-off, was working on Dom Khouri's house, and thoroughly enjoying it. In the bar they'd talk about it nonstop and Colin would be on fire inside. It was the biggest architectural event in the town since the building of the Meteorological Station buildings over a hundred years ago and he'd missed the boat. He imagined how pleasant it would have been to be the agent who'd facilitated the whole glorious affair, how he would then have been able to talk freely over a beer about it all, how the cut the earthmovers had made nestled the house into the cliff so perfectly, and how artistic the glass and stonework was. But as it was, the whole incessancy of the talk about Dom Khouri's place drove him spare.

One Monday afternoon, as Dom Khouri's house was in its very final stages of construction and Colin could see some relief from the whole affair in sight, Craig came into his office unannounced and sat down with a worried look on his face.