Working Class Boy (8 page)

My older brother John said to me one day, ‘Come on Jim, you're coming wi' me and we're gonnae play cowboys.'

I was happy to be included in anything John was doing; he was my big brother and I worshipped him.

‘Where are we going, John?' I asked him, hoping I wasn't going to end up getting tied up or something.

But John was the head cowboy – he always was and still is – so I would go wherever he wanted to go. I don't think we had guns or cowboy hats or anything like that. We were just going to be cowboys I guess. I thought we would run around and pretend we had horses but no, John had a better idea.

‘Just shut it and follow me,' he said as he ran across the paddock.

Over the other side of the black forest, across the Main North Road, was the abattoir. It seemed like we walked for miles to get there, but once again I have driven past there recently and it's not that far. I guess with smaller legs we had to take more steps. There were acres and acres of fenced-off paddocks full of animals standing around eating. I didn't really understand what an abattoir was, so I didn't realise they were waiting to be killed.

We didn't know a lot about anything really. Being cowboys was new to us, so we did things a little differently. Instead of
jumping on the backs of horses or bulls, which were way too big for kids our size, we rode on the back of sheep. We were only small and the sheep still looked huge to us. We would get thrown into fences and trampled by the stampeding flock, which doesn't sound that scary now but then it was terrifying. So in our minds, we thought we were daredevils, risking our lives every time we stepped into the ring to take on one of these monsters.

It was only once I looked more carefully at the place that I worked out what happened there. Maybe I knew all along but never really wanted to think about it. You could smell death and fear in the air around there. But I had smelled fear everywhere I had been in my life and learned to ignore it unless it was affecting me. We stopped going to play at the abattoir, at least I did anyway.

When we worked out what the abattoir was, and what happened there, we realised why the area smelled so bad. Up until then we thought that when it got hot, the Australian bush smelled bad.

Music seems to add markers to my life and certain songs remind me of particular times. The song I remember most from those days was ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight' by The Tokens. I used to walk around singing something I'd made up that sounded remotely African, pretending I was in the jungle hunting wild, dangerous animals. I loved Tarzan as well so I would be yelling out at the top of my voice doing my best Tarzan impersonation, calling out, ‘Ah ah ah ah ah ah ah,' to all the wild beasts in the paddocks around the hostel to come to me. Luckily they never heard me.

One day there was a lot of excitement among all the kids at the hostel. A circus had come to our town and set up in the paddocks near the hostel, probably thinking they would clean up with all the immigrant families living there. I'd never seen a circus before; I don't think they came to Cowcaddens. I had seen
a few clowns walking around after closing time, but no circus. Anyway, unfortunately for the circus owners, no one had any money to spend on circuses; they had drinking habits they had to support.

But we kids would walk to the circus site and ask, ‘Can we look at the animals, mister? We just want to see what goes on when there's no show. Please, mister, we'll be good.'

I think most of us secretly thought about running away and joining them but that changed when we saw how life in the circus really was. For a very short while they were nice to us but as soon as the carnie folk realised we had no money one of them yelled, ‘Piss off, you brats, or we'll set the dogs on you!' So we ran as fast as we could. The evil carnie side had come out. They can be very nasty when they want to be, those carnies. One minute they're playing violins and reading your Tarot cards, next minute they're taking your passport and drinking your blood. Or is that vampires? I get them confused sometimes. Anyway, when they got nasty we all decided we hated them and their circus and wanted nothing to do with them.

After a few days we sort of forgot that they were there and were back to playing in the paddocks, doing whatever kids do in paddocks. I remember looking up one day and seeing people waving frantically at us. We thought they were just giving us the usual message to get home, and we ignored them. Next thing I knew there were police with guns running through the paddocks yelling, ‘Stand perfectly still. Do not move. I repeat: stand perfectly still.'

Now this was exciting. What could be going on? Was it a man-hunt like I'd seen on television? Before I knew it, I was being bundled into a car and taken back to our hut. I thought that we must have done something really wrong. It was possible – my mum said we were always doing things wrong. So it seemed this time we got caught doing whatever it was we couldn't remember.

But we weren't in trouble at all. We were being rescued from wild beasts. The lions had escaped from the circus. Now I've heard since that the trainer didn't treat the lions very well; in fact, he beat them. All the poor animals in this circus were badly treated and malnourished. I found this out many years later when my band Cold Chisel did some
Circus Animal
shows. The circus working on the shows with us was the very circus that had set up in our paddock thirty-odd years earlier. I asked them about the lions escaping and they told me the truth about it.

It appears that the lion trainer was a bit of a drunk and to stop anyone else from getting to his booze, he had taken to hiding his bottle in the lions' cage. You would have to be really desperate to try to get it out of there. Well, he was really desperate it seems. One day, after a particularly heavy few days drinking, he went to get his secret bottle from the cage.

So the lions not only escaped; they seized the opportunity to rip him apart and eat him. Then they escaped and were, for the first time in many years, running free, through the paddock. It wasn't Africa but they were free. It must have felt great for them to stretch their legs after being caged up in those appalling conditions. Having the wind blow through their manes not to mention getting a bit of revenge on the man who beat them every day. But all good things come to an end. The police shot them dead. At least they were free again, even if just for a short time, and they died like lions, with a full stomach and with the blood of their tormentor on their lips. They were, for a moment, happy again.

I started school in Australia and had to repeat a year because I hadn't finished the year in Scotland, which meant I was a little bit older than the other kids in my year. Not a lot older, just half a year, but it was enough to help me later on. At the time, though,
I wanted to be in the class above and I was worried about being the oldest in my class for years after that. Like most kids, I wanted school to finish as soon as possible.

I heard all Australian kids were Vegemite kids and I wanted to be an Australian kid so bad. One day when Mum went shopping I asked her to buy some of this stuff, which really was a super food before super foods were even thought of. Mum was worried but got it anyway and put it high in the cupboard where her Scottish friends would not spot it. Then, one day while she was busy visiting one of the other families who were caged up in the hostel, I snuck in and grabbed the Vegemite and a spoon. All the kids who went to school seemed to love this stuff so I wanted to find out why. I didn't know you were supposed to spread this treat thinly onto freshly buttered, toasted bread. We didn't have bread or butter and we certainly didn't have a toaster.

So I ran out into the paddock and began to eat it by the spoonful straight out of the jar. Well, it tasted great and I was hungry, really hungry. So I kept on eating it. By the time I had nearly finished the jar, I had started to turn green. Just a little at first but very soon I was blending in with the grass; I was really green. Then I started vomiting. One of the kids who lived nearby ran and got my mum in case I was going to die.

She found me lying next to our hut with the empty jar beside me. ‘That's what ye get for being a greedy little pig,' she said. Realising I wasn't going to die she left me to get over it, hoping I would learn a lesson.

I think the lesson was that too much of anything is not good for you. Well, as you probably know, it took about another forty-five years before I even started to learn that lesson.

* * *

Dad went from job to job and we went from school to school, Mum went from sad to sadder and we all went from hungry to hungrier. I can understand why my folks were unhappy – where we were living was atrocious. We had no privacy and the whole hostel knew when Mum and Dad had a fight. Well, we knew when any of our neighbours were fighting so I presume they could hear us. And like I said earlier, everybody seemed to have brought their problems from Britain to Australia, so there were a lot of arguments around the hostel. I would hear the sound of raised voices coming from the house next door; then there would be a crash and it would all go silent. That silence was the most frightening sound of all. I heard that same crash and silence many times as I lay in bed. It appeared that everybody was fighting with each other and waiting for the government to tell us all where we would be living on a more permanent basis. The longer that took, the more strained the relationships became. Tempers were frayed, a lot like the clothes we were wearing, and like our clothes, Mum and Dad's relationship was in tatters.

We thought that every couple fought like they did and that they all had the same problems. Maybe some of them did, but it became clearer and clearer to us that Mum was getting more unhappy. Not just when they fought but all of the time. She would sit at the table and tell us, ‘That's it, I'm leaving yer bastard of a father. I cannae take any more o' this.'

We would be crying and begging her, ‘No, don't go Mum. Don't leave us. We want tae stay wi' you.'

‘Don't worry, I'd never leave you kids with this pig. You're ma babies and no one is ever gonnae separate us. Remember: I love you more than life and I'll never leave yous.'

Something went horribly wrong while we were in Seaton Park or Tea Tree Gully. I'm not sure what or where. There was
something horribly wrong from the start but this was a new, more life-changing kind of wrong that I have never worked out.

Dad stopped working for the Italian builder. He never said why. All I know is that he and Mum were going through even more shit than they were before. Something had happened between them. Something drastic.

No one wanted to talk about it; it was just pushed under the rug, which would have been fine except we didn't have a rug. It was always there in front of us, along with all the skeletons that should have been in the closet we couldn't afford.

My little sister Lisa came along on 12 December 1962 and she was beautiful. She had dark olive skin and thick black hair. Dad called her his little pizza pie. The rest of us kids loved Lisa and carried her around whenever we could. She was an angel and we all thought that having a baby as lovely as this would fix the problems Mum and Dad were having, but it didn't. Life for the two of them could no longer be sorted out by Mum giving birth to a beautiful baby. Looking back, I can see it had never helped before.

In the meantime, Mum and Dad were waiting to find out where we would be living. For all we kids knew this hostel might have been permanent but obviously Mum and Dad were being told something by someone. We started to hear about this place out of Adelaide called Elizabeth, we heard that it was a satellite city, which sounded pretty impressive – we had no idea what a satellite city was but it sounded good. It turned out to be about twenty-odd miles to the north of Adelaide and it was a place that would shape the person I would grow up to be, for good and for bad.

A
s kids, you adjust quickly to your surroundings, so I had settled into life in the hostel and the thought of moving again didn't appeal to me at all. I had friends here and a place to live. It wasn't great, but we were dry, and most importantly, I liked all the trees and open space around me. What if we moved into another dirty city or a tenement building?

We'd been in Australia for nearly two years when the big news came. Mum couldn't wait to break it to us so finally, after chasing us all over the hostel, she got us all together, sat us down and said, ‘We're moving into our own hoose. This will be our hame and you kids will be going tae a new school. There'll be no more moving from place to place. This is where we'll stay forever. I promise. And it'll be clean and new.' I believed her. She had never lied to me, I could trust her.

As the day of the big move came closer, the excitement and the tension grew. There were a few more fights but there was also a bit more laughter. Could this be the answer to our problems? Mum started to plan what the house would look like. Her dream home. I hadn't seen her this excited before. She hadn't even seen
it but she was happy. I think she thought she would at least get away from the nightmare the hostel had become to her.

‘We'll have a garden and maybe even a dog. This'll be so great for us.' Looking back, I'm not sure who she was trying to convince – us or her.

On the day of the move the heavens opened. It could have been a sign. I hadn't seen rain like this since the day we arrived in Australia. It looked a lot like the Scottish summer. The rain was coming down sideways. Was God really going to make this harder for us than he needed to? Couldn't he just give us a break and let it stop long enough to pack up the house and finally get to a home? It seemed that he would make it as hard as he possibly could.

By the way, I'm not sure my parents even believed in God. I'd heard a lot about him at Sunday school. But I was sure Mum and Dad only sent us there to get rid of us while they got over Saturday nights. Where we came from, the only time people really prayed was when they wanted something they couldn't afford or when they had messed up so bad they needed someone to forgive them because no one at home would. ‘Oh God, forgive me for what I did last night and help me get through this wi'out gettin' killed. I promise I won't fuck up again. Sorry, I didnae mean tae swear; forgive me for that too, please.'

It seemed we would have to fight against God and the elements for our home and our happiness. I was really starting to dislike this God character I kept hearing about. He didn't seem to do anything for anybody, especially the people we knew. Maybe we didn't deserve his help.

The people moving our stuff told us the roads were flooded and we probably wouldn't get through so maybe we would have to move another day. I'm not sure if it was the pleading of my mum or the thought of telling my dad they couldn't do it that made them push on through and brave the rising waters. But they did it.

Everything we owned, borrowed or were given by the government was packed in the truck. All that was left was to squeeze the family in too, and we could be off. After some tearful goodbyes to friends, it was one last look back over our shoulders at the tin can we had called home and then off, to face whatever life had to offer us. It was late 1963 and we were moving to Elizabeth.

To say it was wet was the understatement of the decade. The rain never stopped for a minute. By the time we were halfway to Elizabeth we felt like the truck was more than just a moving van, it was our life raft, and if we all held on tight it would save us from the raging torrents that threatened to wash us off the road and back to the hostel, or worse, back to Glasgow.

About five miles out of Elizabeth we had to cross a creek that was so swollen that the water had risen up to the doors of the truck. It felt like there was a good chance we would be washed away, but we drove straight through it, without a second thought. Nothing was going to stop us reaching our new home.

As the truck got closer we could see that some of the streets were not quite finished, but it looked like heaven to us. This was a place that was actually being constructed from the ground up instead of being torn down or falling down like we were used to in Scotland. It looked like there were football fields on every corner, and shops, and parks and swings for little kids. It all looked too good to be true. But it had been a long day and I was getting really tired. I was trying to keep my eyes open so I could be first to spot our house, but it was getting harder with every minute. By the time we finished the drive, the excitement and the rain had worn me out. I don't even remember getting there.

Mum must have carried me into the house and put me to sleep on the floor somewhere and covered me with a coat. That's what always happened when Mum took us out at night. I'd wake
up in a corner in the middle of a party, not knowing where I was or how I got there. Not to mention whose coat I was wearing. I was normally not the only one who didn't know where they were. The adults looked the same.

Eventually our beds were put up and I slept until morning. When the sun came up, the clouds had cleared to reveal our dream home. By then I could hear Mum telling Dad, ‘Move that over there. No, no there, over there. Are you deif or somethin'?'

This went on until she was happy or he'd had enough, but by then the place almost looked like home. I walked around the house and I knew straight away that this place was much better than any hostel. It was made of bricks and was solid and felt permanent. Permanent was something new to me. Not only was the house new, it was clean – and, most importantly, it was ours.

It smelled of fresh cut wood and paint. There was a bath and a shower and a toilet built into the house. The boys had a separate room from the girls. We even had a small fireplace to remind us of Scotland. Mum was happy, everything was great. Mum was busy hanging things and moving what little furniture we owned around the house for the tenth time, much to my dad's horror. He wanted to go out and find a drink somewhere. There was even food ready to eat. Life was looking up and again I felt like we were going to be all right. I felt like this most mornings, by the way, and normally that didn't change until something went wrong later in the day. How long would it take this time?

The sun was shining outside and I ran straight out to see where we were in this new world. There was a big paddock across the road from us and beyond that there was a train line. I heard a whistle blowing and spotted a train as it raced across the horizon. It was like a magnet to me. I would have to go across the paddock and check out the train lines when I got the chance.

The rain had stopped but there was water everywhere in pools. There was mud in the yard where the builders had been
working until the day we arrived. They must have left just before our truck got there. I could see tracks across the front yard, deep troughs where the wheels of the truck had fought their way out of the mud that gripped onto them like quicksand.

Our street was neat and tidy in its layout, except for the mud. As I looked down the street I could see rows of houses, all nearly the same as ours. All new and waiting for families to arrive and breathe life into them. There were pale brown brick homes and red brick homes, in no certain order, some were bigger than ours and a couple seemed smaller. But they all looked roughly the same to me.

A few of the houses were already occupied. There were cars parked on the street and some of the houses had lawns fighting to push their way up through the mud. I could see signs of other children living nearby: the odd bike leaning against a fence and a ball or two that had been left out in the rain overnight. I knew I would be fine here.

Forty-five Heytesbury Road, Elizabeth West, was my home for the next few years. They would be some of the best and some of the worst years of my life so far. In those years life twisted and turned like none of us could have expected.

Time passed, and Mum and Dad didn't find their dream; in fact, things went from worse to much worse. The life lessons that they were supposed to hand down to us, didn't come as they should have. Those lessons – like every other lesson – got lost in fear and violence and drunkenness. We never learned about hope or the chance of finding our dreams. That didn't happen to families like ours. Dad drank more and gambled more, Mum tried harder until she had nothing left to give.

* * *

Elizabeth looked like such a great idea on paper. They called it the City of Tomorrow. Bring out a hungry workforce ready to seize an opportunity to start fresh new lives and put them in a place where there were factories for employment, schools for their kids and homes for them to live in happily ever after. What could go wrong? But everything seemed to go wrong, right from the start. The factories paid just enough to feed the families and if they were frugal enough, and if they didn't drink at all, they might just scratch out a life. But when you throw in alcoholism and ignorance along with all the other problems that people brought with them from Britain, life fell apart for most of them pretty quickly.

The families we knew had trouble making ends meet, mainly because of the drinking problems they all seemed to have. The ones who didn't drink were doing a little better. The families whose parents were sober seemed to keep away from our type of people and even looked down on us. I can see why now. Don't get me wrong. It was hard for all the families, even the sober ones. But somehow if the parents weren't drinking all the money, things went a little smoother. Funny that, don't you think?

When I walked home with the kids from school who seemed to be doing better than us, it sometimes got uncomfortable.

‘Can I come into your place for a while and play? I'd like to see inside your house.'

‘My mum doesn't want you . . . er . . . anybody to come in tonight. Sorry Jim, you'd better just go home.'

‘That's okay, I've got things to do anyway.'

And I would walk away feeling ashamed of myself and embarrassed that they didn't like me.

Some families drank more than others. My dad drank as much as any and we were struggling because of it. Dad would work hard trying to keep his drinking under control until pay
day, then he would be gone. At the start of every week, Mum would work out a budget that might just feed us and clothe us, and then would have to scramble to make ends meet when Dad drank the budget. Many a time we would have gone hungry if Mum hadn't whipped up something from nothing. Mums seem to be able to do that.

Mum tried her best to make Elizabeth our home. She got out in the garden and planted a lawn and fruit trees. She planted candle pines in the driveway. I know that sounds grand but the driveway wasn't that long, which didn't bother us because we didn't have a car. I'm not sure Dad knew how to drive. Later I would take little cones off the pines and use them as ninja weapons to throw at my sisters. They were hard and spiky and I could throw them from a distance and still have time to make a getaway – most of the time.

Even Dad got involved in the planting. I remember one of the trees he planted was called a million-dollar peach. I can still hear him saying, ‘Aye, million-dollar peaches, kids. These are the best peaches you can get. It won't be long till you're eating them every day. You'll be almost sick of them.'

We stood listening to him with watering mouths. We would have been happy with any peaches. Two-dollar peaches, fifty-cent nectarines would have done. It didn't matter what they were worth. We just wanted them, right now. But these did sound like something really special. Unfortunately, it took quite a few years for the trees to fruit and when they did, Dad had lost interest in them. The birds and bugs seemed to be the only ones who got to eat this glorious, expensive-sounding fruit. And by the time they were ripe enough for human consumption the best were already gone and all that was left had been half eaten.

The other thing Mum and Dad wanted to plant was corn and after a few months the backyard looked like a farm. Well, a really
small farm if you shut one eye. We hadn't eaten corn that much before and it didn't take long until we all got sick of it. I think it was all we were eating.

Later on, Mum tried to grow other vegetables besides corn, so that we would have something to eat when the wages didn't arrive but they died pretty quickly. You need to look after the plants and water them. If you don't they won't grow to be any good, a lot like kids when I think about it. The pumpkins thrived; they took over the backyard for a while. We ate a lot of pumpkin for a little while there.

Before long any interest in gardening was gone. Mum and Dad were back to only being interested in indoor pastimes again, like drinking and fighting.

The house seemed to me to be quite big even though I know it wasn't. There were four bedrooms, and a lounge and a kitchen of course. I remember Mum cooking in that kitchen. She had bought a pressure cooker and everything seemed to be cooked in it. Potatoes, cabbage, anything.

The sound of the pressure building up was
Tsh Tsh Tsh Tsh
. It reminded me of the sprinkler on the football ovals at night.

Tsh Tsh Tsh
. . .

‘What's for dinner the night?' Dad would ask.

Tsh Tsh Tsh
. . .

The noise of the pressure cooker was speeding up.

‘Cabbage and mince and totties.'

‘Again,' he'd moan.

Tsh Tsh Tsh
. . .

‘You've always said ye loved it.'

Tsh Tsh Tsh
. . .

‘I do, but no every fuckin' night.'

Tsh Tsh Tsh
. . .

‘And shut that pot up, it's drivin' me nuts.'

Tsh Tsh Tsh
. . .

It seemed to get faster and faster.

‘I need it tae cook for the kids. I'm cookin' for them, no for you.'