Street Sadness

    In 1969 my father decided to drive the family, clockwise, around Tasmania. We had emigrated there from the UK the previous year. I had just turned eleven. Much of this road trip remains a blur, while a few scarifying moments have been seared into my brain.     The trip was made in a battered, rusty old, red Volkswagen van which my father had purchased second-hand that same year. Apart from the windshield and the front-passenger side-windows, there were no other windows in the van. Apart from the front bench-seat, for my father and mother, there were no other seats in the van: the back had been gutted, and was essentially just a metal box in which the five of us kids swarmed, unsecured. Had we been hit by another car on the journey we would have all pinballed around inside the metal shell, our heads shattering like eggs.     Both my mother and my father smoked for the entire trip. They were reluctant to open their side windows, due ...

     Barry Kelvin (not his real name) was a boy in my class at school. I was eleven, he was twelve. He was shorter than me, with light brown hair, which was usually styled in a crew-cut. He had a nervous tic whereby he constantly twitched his nose, in the manner of a rabbit. We became kind of friends by virtue of the fact that we were both quiet boys who were bypassed socially by the other students.      Barry lived in Chigwell, a northern suburb of Hobart. Chigwell had a reputation as being, in the words of my mother, ‘a bit rough’. I knew of only two other people who lived there: a brother and sister in their mid-teens, who were rumoured to be conducting a sexual relationship; they could be observed leaving school at lunchtime each day, and walking home, hand in hand, or with their arms around each other’s shoulders.       As Barry’s house was fairly close to the school, he also used to go home every day fo...

      In 1969 I was eleven years old and a first-year student at Claremont High School, in Hobart, Tasmania. John Bertram (not his real name) was a boy in my class. He was a serious, studious boy with a severely freckled face and dark auburn hair that fell over his forehead in a short fringe. He rather kept himself to himself, which I thought was an admirable trait. After a few weeks of attending the school I became aware of John Bertram’s tragic burden: his mother.      One afternoon there was a small commotion down at the school’s perimeter fence. A small group of older boys had gathered in the shadows, beneath the trees. On the other side of the fence a middle-aged woman stood on the sandy path that ran through the trees. She wore a white summer blouse and beige slacks. She was unsteady on her feet and it was evident that she was drunk. She kept glancing guiltily up towards the school building. The boys were laughing: it was the k...

     When my family landed on the shores of Tasmania in 1968 we were sent into varied states of shock from which I don’t think we ever fully recovered. The violent upheaval of leaving all of our friends and extended family behind forever and moving to a foreign country on the far side of the planet left deep scars on all of us in a trickle-down effect, from oldest to youngest, as we each tried to cope with, and acclimatise to these bizarre new surroundings and the strange inhabitants who we now found ourselves living amongst. My own response to this inexplicable, completely alien new environment, as a sensitive ten-year-old, was, as I now realise, to sink into a trough of depression that slowly gouged its way through my psyche and which took decades to slowly clamber out of. This state of mind set the scene for the rest of my childhood and teenage years and became the unrelenting backdrop to my family’s terrifyingly rapid devolution into total dysfunctio...

     Between 1968 and 1970 I lived in Claremont, a suburb of Hobart, Tasmania, where my family had emigrated from England. Claremont was a deadly dull suburb whose chief claim to fame was the Cadbury chocolate factory perched on a rise above the treacherous Derwent River. Its chimney and cylindrical pods gleamed across the water like some kind of metal castle. Annually, at the end of the school year, all the schools in the area would organise an excursion to the factory so the kids could follow the process of the chocolate, from cocoa bean to boxing-up. The highlight of this trip was the small sample box of chocolates that everyone was given at the end of the tour.      There were three boys at the school who each had a malformation of one ear. On the side of each of their heads, in place of a regular ear, they had what can only be described as something resembling a blob of well-masticated chewing gum. Perhaps it was a congenital disorde...

    In 1970 I was twelve years old, living in Claremont, Tasmania. I was a Boy Scout and I had the opportunity (if it can be called such) of attending the Boy Scout Jamboree, which that year was held at Leppington, 55 kilometres out of Sydney. Boys and youths from all over Australia were crammed together for a fortnight, in a pungent melting pot of testosterone and sexual tension. Khaki-coloured tents were erected by everybody, working together; little rain-trenches were dug around the perimeter of each; guy-ropes were tightened. Each tent housed six boys, and each boy was drawn at random out of a hat, so that everybody was forced to mingle with people one wouldn’t necessarily piss on should they be on fire. My tent housed two tough, street-wise fifteen-year-old boys from Sydney, named Lance and Kevin; two fourteen-year-old rapscallions from Melbourne and an attractive deaf mute kid from Adelaide with wavy blonde hair and lean good looks, who was a year older than me. His n...