Chapter 1

I once had a friend, the last male I would call 'friend' for rest of my life. Jerry Dolanski and I grew up five houses from each other, on the opposite sides of the street. We didn't meet until we were in kindergarten, but once we realised how near we lived to each other, we became almost inseparable: swimming, scouts, boy's club, after school and on weekends. We were, as our mothers called us, Mutt and Jeff. I was Mutt because I was so big and quiet, and big and quiet always equals dumb. You could never shut Jerry up.

Our family incomes were similar. We spent half our free time in each other's homes.

Everything was rosy until Dad stopped coming home. Both Mum and Dad worked, and Jerry liked coming to my place, as we could muck around without having parents looking over our shoulders ... until Dad stopped coming home.

I blamed myself, though I didn't understand what I could have done, or not done, to cause it.

Mum spent hours having irrational rants at everyone and anyone, but I was awake when she made the phone call. She told the listener that Ron had found out about them and was divorcing her on the grounds of adultery. I had to look up the word in the dictionary. That placed the kibosh on any sympathy I had for her.

I was pleased she didn't bring 'him' home with her, because I would have gone straight to Jerry's and stayed there. I was pissed at Dad because he didn't talk to me, and because he didn't take me with him. I guess men just didn't do that in the nineteen fifties. Jerry and I still hung out together, but the way his parents acted towards me, it was if I had a communicable disease. They were making it uncomfortable for Jerry to hang out around me.

Seeing Mum was getting home later from work, a lot, I ended up home alone a lot. I was between ten and twelve years of age, then. Jerry and I still hung around each other at school, but he said his mum wouldn't have me down at his place any more, or allow him at mine. Things pretty well stayed that way for a couple of years.

There were times when I didn't see Mum for up to a week or more. She said she was doing a lot of overtime, because my rat of a father had deserted us. She claimed she was coming home after I went to bed. She also must have been sleeping on the floor, as she wasn't using her bed! Who was the big and dumb one now?

I was cooking for myself. Seeing I was self-taught, the can opener took a beating. After a while, she had been 'coming home after I was in bed' so much, that I ran out of food. She supposedly worked at an office that was a twenty minute train journey from home, in Hurstville. I rang her at her company to bring some food home with her, but the lady said that Mrs. Berry didn't work there any more.

One of the benefits of the fifties was that a kid could get some spare time work, as long as he didn't mind being paid badly and working terrible hours. I quickly found a job on weekends and after school at a huge fruit and vegetable shop. It was about a half hour bike ride from both school and home, on the highway in Sylvania. I was earning £1/18/6 for twelve hours work, or about 38 pence an hour. Homework stopped being done, I spent a lot of time falling asleep on school desks, and the cane was an ever present threat. I had to be healthy, as I had an exclusively vegetarian diet. It was cheap, but always raw.

At one point in time I hadn't seen mum for almost six months. Then one night, she was standing in the loungeroom when I got home from work. It was late, after eleven at night. I was knackered. I had ridden to work directly from school, did six hours of lifting sacks of potatoes and pumpkins, and then spent another half an hour on the bike ride home. I was starving after eating nothing all day but apples, bananas, oranges, and whatever other fruit I was loading on the shelves. I'd also had a hotdog from a roadside caravan, across the highway from the shop. I'd had a growth spurt, and I was doing a lot of heavy lifting, which simply exacerbated my hunger.

The mother whom I had not seen in months, decided to act like a mother for a change, and didn't appreciate it when I ignored her rant. She slapped my face, and I slapped her back! She landed on the other side of the room. While she was lying stunned on the floor up against the wall, I went through the kitchen. I opened every cupboard, which were supposed to hold food. A mouse would have starved. The only thing in any of them was a half a packet of curry powder and I had no idea what to do with curry powder. The fridge was empty and I had turned it off to save on electricity. Her nose was bleeding as I dragged her by her collar into the kitchen. I then said the only words I had spoken to anyone, in three days.

"I'm earning as much as I can! Fix it, or fuck off!"

That next night when I got home, there was a carton of baked beans on the kitchen counter. Big whoop!

Things went on a very similar vein until I turned thirteen, and met a girl. On the days I wasn't working, I would walk Jenny Carruthers home from school. I liked Mrs Carruthers. She would put biscuits and cakes out as a snack for me, along with large glasses of milk, saying I was a growing boy. I was six foot three by then, and was always on the cusp of starvation.

Mum came home less and less often, and we were receiving threatening letters in the mail, warning us that they were going to turn the electricity off and kick us out of the house for non-payment of the mortgage.

I dropped around to Jenny's place just to see her unexpectedly, one free afternoon, and heard her on the phone telling her girlfriend how she was making a fool out of me, and was still going out with my ex-friend Jerry who had money to spend.

Unfortunately, I was standing next to her mum at the time in the very next room, only feet away from that phone. Her mum suddenly acted as if she had gone deaf, and couldn't bring herself to meet my eye. I just told her mum goodbye.

I went to work the rest of that week, instead of school, then gave them my notice. After I was paid, I threw the few clothes I had left that still vaguely fitted me, not many it's true, into an old haversack. I then rode the train into the city to look for work on building sites. I didn't even bother closing the front door behind me.

It was early during the Viet Nam conflict, and most potential young labourers with strong backs and weak minds were sent into the army without recourse, so there was no shortage of heavy labouring jobs around. Some politicians, who were too old to be sent to this war and too young to go to last war, invented conscription; that then made it politically, a money thing. Most of the eligible conscripts with money, found an urgent need to go overseas for the duration and Canada and Great Britain was very handy to ride it out. However nowhere in their plans was included an exotic place like Nam. Foreign universities were very popular during the sixties, and early seventies. All it took was money. I had five years before those pricks would come looking for me.

Finding a roof to live under was my first main problem. I slept under a railroad viaduct the first night, and later in the disused underground railway tunnels. Luckily, there was no shortage of them, and there was lots of company for me inside them. Eventually, I began sharing a unit's floor space with some Uni' students, some of whom I worked with, casually. These units were basically drop in centres where you slept on the floor anywhere you could make a space, no beds and bare concrete. As long as they were at school, they were exempt, so study had some incentive built in. Being female also helped, as they only sent blokes out to get shot.

I was walking home down George Street, mid-City, late one afternoon, after completing ten hours on a jackhammer. I'd left home more than six months ago, and a uniformed copper pulled me aside to ask if I was Ross Berry, who was posted as a missing person a while back. I just looked at him, one eyebrow raised, and he said I couldn't be him. The kid was only thirteen, and I would have to be the biggest thirteen year old he'd ever seen in his life, to be him. I was by then six foot four, and had shoulders with which I regularly lifted bags of cement, four at a time.

It was early 'hippy' days. The pill was becoming available, but most of the doctors (they had a tendency to be Catholic as that where the money was), wouldn't prescribe it, as it 'promoted immorality, infidelity and promiscuity.' My mum couldn't blame the pill as an excuse, so I think there were way too many Catholic doctors around. I was having regular sexual stints with the female students who were forever short term dossing in the flat, so I use to buy a lot of condoms.

After work one Saturday, (I was an old man of fifteen by then) I was having a quiet beer in my favourite pub, opposite the Town Hall and on the corner of Clarence Street. A bloke stood beside me and stared into my face.

Dad just said, "Son, they've been looking for you, everywhere."

I just told him that they couldn't have been looking very hard.

He asked me why I had left and I just looked at him, and asked what it had to do with him. Okay, I had attitude, but I think that I had earned it. I drained my schooner of New1, and headed for the door. He followed me and when we were on the footpath, he told me not to walk away from him, and he grabbed my shoulder. I hit him hard, straight under the chin. He went down, and didn't get up again. I just headed at my normal stride for the Town Hall underground station. I was pissed because my favourite pub was now out of bounds for a while. I believed the cops would be looking for me on an assault charge, so I stayed away from my usual haunts, and the major roads.

I had been saving a lot of money. I wasn't much interested in the airy fairy type of clothes then fashionable, and my eating habits were basic and pedestrian. So, my expenses were minimal, even for a fifteen year old. I gave it some thought and decided to go interstate ... as far interstate as I could get.

The train trip over there was before the one step Indian Pacific had started, and I travelled the long and tortuous journey to WA. I might have as well as gone to China, it would have been quicker though admittedly not by train.

2I took the train from Sydney Central to Albury on the Murray River, and changed to the Victorian gauge at Albury, to go to Melbourne Capital of Victoria. Then I changed to go to the Victorian/South Australian border and the South Australian gauge, change to go to Adelaide, capital of South Australia. You changed again to go to Port Pirie, change then onto the Indian Pacific Train to Kalgoorlie and the narrow Western Australian gauge, and then change at East Perth to get to Perth. It could be wondered why the Western Australians felt they were alienated from the rest of Australia. The only other methods otherwise to move between this state and the others were more than a week's road journey, half of which was a dirt 'road' (see track) across the vast Nullarbor Plain, or a very expensive air trip.

Sound boring? You betcha! Going across the Nullarbor, you spend all day look looking at the same, one and only tree, way out on the horizon. For three whole days, looking at the same tree became a bit much though it is said to be an optical illusion as there is no trees, or anything much else on the Nullarbor. The train stopped four times a day to drop supplies to rail gangers, for an half an hour at a time. Now that's a lonely job! They don't pay enough, no matter what the wages.

The first night in Perth, I stayed in a good hotel. I read the West Australian to find somewhere better (see: more affordable) to live. I eventually found an old rooming house in East Perth. It was an old mansion, across a multiple intersection from the police traffic branch, and very near the 3WACA grounds. That wasn't very useful for someone who believes 'cricket' is a noisy insect. It was cheap and central, though. All I had to buy was cooking stuff, and bed linen. Those domestic forms of paraphernalia I had never needed to own before and I can see them being a hindrance to moving easily around in the future.

I was astounded by two things. Firstly, there was more work than double the available workers could handle. Secondly, the locals were so insular that if you were an Eastern Stater, half the time the locals wouldn't talk to you. Luckily, most of the people I met were blow-ins from all over the world, and very few are what we would later call backpackers.