All Balls and Glitter (5 page)

Although he rarely lashed out physically, he would look like he was about to and we were afraid of him, anyway. But once he was drunk, he never shut up! He would spout off about anything and everything and we could forget any plans we had to watch television, because he would always talk over it all the time.

All through the Sydney years, he would rant about politics; the Prime Minister, Edward Gough Whitlam, and nuclear war were particular favourites. He made us watch films about atomic bombs that were meant for naval training and were far too gory for children, so we were scared witless. We knew all there was to know about nuclear fallout: that we should go against the wind because the fallout goes with the wind; about not drinking water; the importance of getting underground; how we should eat only tinned food. It was all stuff that kids normally wouldn’t have to listen to, but we were trained in the navy way.

Even so, his biggest rant was reserved for the navy. In 1975, he was posted to HMAS
Hobart
, the ship on which he achieved his highest seagoing rank, that of lieutenant. During his two years aboard the guided missile destroyer, he circumnavigated the globe, attending the American bicentennial celebrations in New York and sailing through the Panama Canal on the way out and the Suez Canal on the way home. He used to tell stories from this trip over and over again, always repeating the same old things. We never found out anything about him as an individual as the drink masked the real man. He blamed everything on the navy – his drinking, his temper, his whole life.

We didn’t feel we could bring our friends home. The few times we did, we were so embarrassed by him that we stopped inviting them.

Dad hit me twice. The first time was for swearing when I was thirteen: we were in Sydney in the backyard and I told him to
‘fuck off’, which he richly deserved at the time, and he gave me a backhander across my face. The second occasion, a year later, was punishment for getting in his way and supposedly answering him back.

Mum was a very loving mother and she had a lot to do, bringing up such a large family. Most of the time she was at home with us, although she also had an occasional job working at a motel, laying tables and generally helping out. For a while, she was a telephonist, at one of those old-fashioned exchanges where they would plug little wires into sockets to put through a call from overseas or another state.

She always managed to have a tasty meal ready at 6 p.m. without fail, with dessert to follow. I don’t know if any of us can recall our father actually eating at the table with us. He would rather sprawl in the lounge and get sozzled while we all ate in the kitchen. Sometimes he would sit with us, but he would keep a handy little ‘behaviour-modification device’ next to him that we called ‘the strap’. If we laughed at the table, boy, would we get it. The tension made us even more prone to giggling, of course, because if we looked at each other we couldn’t keep it in and the guffaws would burst out uncontrollably.

Even the girls couldn’t escape the strap. Back in Fareham, at the age of six, Sue accidentally smashed a vase and got belted so hard that she couldn’t breathe for sobbing. I think it’s fair to say that we preferred dinner without Dad.

Sue and I, as the eldest siblings, tried to take on responsibility where we could. When we were old enough, we would babysit the younger kids so that Mum and Dad could go out together. They never really went anywhere romantic as I recall; it was always to do chores and errands. They never asked us to babysit so that they could go out for a nice meal. Mum was totally starved of that side of Dad. He preferred to buy a leg of lamb or a kilo of prawns and have them at home as a treat for Mum. She would get the choice of the biggest prawns, though, which
always put a big smile on her face. She loved being fussed over, as it very rarely happened.

Dad’s drinking kept him at home: he could then consume as much as he wanted – which was a lot – and for a good price.

To earn money, I would stack all his empty beer bottles in the shed; once a whole wall was lined with bottles, I could take them to the man at the local shop and exchange them for cash. Dad always let me keep the money so I didn’t mind doing the stacking.

By necessity, Mum hid a lot of things from my dad. The running of the house and the care of the children were always her domain and I don’t think she told him what we got up to when he wasn’t there. In fact, we never really heard them having a proper conversation. The only communication between them was arguments.

It was an odd sort of household, and full of drama. One time, Dad was shouting at us all and my plucky little sister Mel, who was about nine, attacked him with an ‘icy pole’ (one of those long ice lollies). She jumped on his back and started hitting him on the head with it. Our house had loads of sliding doors inside and all of us ended up chasing him through these doors while she was on his back. It sounds funny now, but it wasn’t at the time because he used to lay into Mum a lot, calling her a host of ugly names – ‘cabbage’ was an all-time favourite – and she didn’t deserve that.

On another occasion, in Sydney, Dad decided to make some home brew. It was so strong that a single bottle was all it took to get him off his head. His parents, Phonse and Mozza, who were visiting us from Perth, were both horrified. Dad got very drunk, belittling Mum and talking absolute shite all night. He was shouting about every politician who came on TV, and banging on and on.

Mozza, who was never really a drinker himself – in fact, he loathed the booze – was the angriest he’d ever been. He went over to the home brew, which was fermenting in the kitchen and stank to high heaven, and tipped it all out. There was lots of yelling and
screaming. Phonse is the most placid, loving person, and a really calming, soothing personality, but even she’d had enough. I’ve never seen her so animated and charged. Phonse seemed to take Dad’s side, defending him, whereas Mozza was clearly championing Mum, so it felt as though the whole family was at war that night. But nothing could stop Dad drinking.

My parents are divorced now and, looking back, it’s easy to think that Mum should have left him many years before. But times were very different then. There were us kids to think about and Mum didn’t know how she would get on without the money that Dad was bringing in, so she was in a difficult position.

Then there was the self-esteem issue, which many a wife of an abusive man will recognize. Dad would taunt and chide with comments that were deliberately designed to make her feel worthless and useless. He did a good job of it, too. She took everything he said on board and started to believe that the hideous life with him was far better than a life without him. I also think she was desperately in love with him. I suspect she still is, to this day. We loved him too, when he was sober – but we hated him with a passion when he was drunk.

Living with my dad was never easy, but there were some good days, like the times when he’d take me on a ship or on an outing. When I was twelve, in Sydney, I helped to paint HMAS
Hobart
, which was the most sophisticated ship that Dad had ever served on. I really enjoyed the experience, but I think he was embarrassed because I had long hair and all the officers thought I was a girl. They said, ‘There’s some girl running around with a paintbrush, painting the ship.’ And then Dad took me to the officers’ mess and had to tell everyone, ‘This is my son.’

Another time in Sydney, he showed me round a nuclear submarine. I couldn’t imagine how people managed to live in those tiny little quarters. My father’s cabin was miniscule and he also had to share with another lieutenant. Someone my size (I’m 6 foot 2) wouldn’t fit in one at all; I would find it impossible.

The shore depot HMAS
Watson
, where my dad was based in the early seventies, was the site of some of my favourite memories of time spent with Dad. He used to take me to the naval base and buy me a raspberry fizzy drink as he mixed with the other officers at the bar. It was so exciting going through the front security gates and I felt special.

Dad also tried to teach me how to play cricket once, which was a huge failure. Mozza was a really keen cricketer and he forced Dad to play it, even though he wasn’t really interested. Then, because I was his son, Dad thought he ought to introduce me to the sport – handing down the knowledge from one generation to the next, so to speak – but I hated it too.

Those were the only real things we did together. We never embarked on any other father-and-son activities, except going fishing occasionally, which was a nightmare. It was a six-hour drive in the blazing hot sunshine up to the Murray River, on the border of Victoria and New South Wales. We had to prepare food for ourselves and, although Dad was quite good at cooking, we would simply peel potatoes with a knife and carve them into chips and that was all we ate. He was too busy drinking to make anything else.

Perhaps because of Dad’s alcoholism, we didn’t go on many holidays. I do remember one family vacation at a place called Foster, though, which is a seaside resort in New South Wales.

Mum and Dad had hired a lovely house by the ocean and we were all really excited. On the very first day, my sister Diane cut her foot open, so she was bandaged up and out of action. She couldn’t go swimming or play with us on the beach at all. Then I got sand rash from jumping on a blow-up boogie board, so I couldn’t go in the sea either because it stung so much in the salt water. And by the end of the first day, we all had excruciating sunburn.

It wasn’t great, but it was the only proper holiday we ever had. Mostly, we would go on trips to visit relatives.

Our family car was an old blue Holden. We used to take that on
the long drive from Sydney to Ballarat, which took about twelve or thirteen hours. Once, when Phonse was with us, the car overheated and smoke started pouring from the engine. Phonse panicked and screamed, ‘Get out! Get out of the car!’ We all piled out and ran away as fast as we could.

This was before the days of highways, so we were in the middle of nowhere on a dusty old road in the heart of the bush. Apparently, there was no water in the radiator, which was why it had overheated. Dad had to walk miles to the nearest dam or waterhole to find more, while we just lay under a tree and waited.

Whenever we were due to drive to Ballarat to visit Nanna, Dad would rouse us at about 3.30 a.m. He and Mum used to make nests of bedding for us kids in the back of the car and we’d sleep on the way, but I hated being dragged out of bed in the early hours of the morning.

I have no idea how we all fitted into the car. In the end, we had to buy a combi van.

Our time in Sydney also saw a new, and final, addition to our family. My brother Trent, the youngest of the five of us, was born in Auburn Hospital in Sydney’s western suburbs on 7 December 1977, when I was nearly thirteen.

We all went up to the hospital to see the baby, who was really ugly and red, but Mum looked surprisingly well. There were so many of us gathered round – Dad, me, my sisters Sue, Diane and Mel – it was certainly a momentous occasion.

Trent was destined to be spoilt by everyone, and indeed he was. He was such a gorgeous toddler with big brown eyes and a lovely nature: always a good little boy. He was a very late addition to the family and a mistake, or so we were told.

I was delighted I finally had a brother, but for me it was thirteen years too late. I always dreamed that when I was twenty-five and he was twelve I’d have a red MG sports car and I would pick him up from school in it, making all his classmates jealous.
Then I would take him for rides around Sydney, letting him take the steering wheel and beep the horn, and we would have a real brotherly relationship. It was all very clear to me how I would handle being his big brother. Sadly, that wasn’t to be, as we moved back to Ballarat the following year and, to this day, I still don’t have my driving licence.

I didn’t really get to know my handsome little brother until recent years, as I left home early, when he was just a toddler. We didn’t grow up together at all. Trent was raised the Ballarat way, loving Aussie Rules football, fast cars and motorbikes. He was also a keen drummer, which is what he now does professionally, playing in a band called Mushroom Giant. I know it’s his passion, so we do at least have something in common – and that’s rhythm. I just do it with my feet.

A
fter Dad left the navy in 1978, we moved back to Ballarat for good. We stayed with Nanna for a short time, while Dad built an extension on our own house to accommodate the now seven-strong family.

Ballarat is Victoria’s biggest inland city, but it’s quite provincial nonetheless. In more recent years, a highway has been built so it’s more commutable, but when I was growing up it was two-and-a-half hours to Melbourne on the old roads. Consequently, people worked locally and it had that small-town, country mentality.

The Sunshine biscuit factory had provided many jobs, but when that closed down, Mars came to town and a Mars factory was built. I remember my old man going for a couple of job interviews there once his naval career had ended. Other people worked in tourism or retail.

The town had originally sprung up around gold mines; a lot of the alluvial gold mined there built the city of Melbourne. The gold ran out, but a tourist attraction called Sovereign Hill now exists, where all the shacks have been rebuilt and you can see life as it was in the nineteenth century when the gold was discovered. Visitors dress up in period costume and there’s a little old gaiety theatre, which plays host to end-of-the-pier-type shows, in which the cast sing ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’ and suchlike. It’s one of the major attractions in the area, so lots of people come on day trips to see it. When I got
into amateur theatre as a teenager, I performed there a few times.

Two hundred years ago, there were 65,000 people living in Ballarat. Today, there are about 80,000, so it hasn’t really grown much. It’s become a lot more modern, but there are some classic buildings there – if you can call 150 years old ‘classic’, which you can in Australia. In the UK, that’s almost a new build!