Brother Fish (68 page)

Father Crosby looked down at Gloria at his knees, then smiling again, with his hands outstretched, palms turned upwards, he made a small lifting motion as if to nudge the long-neglected soul of Mary Kelly just a fraction of the way to glory. ‘May the saints applaud when Mary Kelly is finally granted forgiveness and leaves purgatory and rises up into heaven where, for all eternity, she will play her harp in the company of angels,' he said to a tearfully grateful Gloria.

Later that day, when we all gathered around the kitchen table for supper, Gloria gave us a ‘blow by blow' delivery of her session with Father Crosby. The retelling went on a bit and she seemed to have entirely forgotten about our dinner. So we were all pretty hungry by the time she got to the part where Father Crosby, wearing a smug smile on his bog-Irish face, with his eyes cast upwards at the Virgin and child, was about to begin the protracted process of raising Mary Kelly from purgatory. Gloria stopped at the beginning of this eventually-to-come soul-departing moment and looked around the kitchen table, her blue eyes blazing with her faith, her voice tremulous. ‘His Irish eyes were smiling when he prayed to send Mary to heaven,' she said softly.

This time she'd gone too far! We all simultaneously reached for our harmonicas and commenced to render ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling'. Gloria's eyes popped wide open, a shocked expression on her face. The frumpish, shrill-voiced Kelly in her came rushing to the fore. ‘Bloody heathen! Protestant scum! God will punish you for this! You're goin' straight to hell, the lot of you!' she screamed. We continued playing, until she finally said, ‘Stop it! Or ya'll get no bloody dinner!'

In Gloria's eyes Mary Kelly, who'd been well prayed into heaven even before I left for the Korean War, had been elevated to the position of principal harpist in God's foremost heavenly choir, and Gloria claimed Mary was largely responsible for our family's musical talent. While it was as plain as the nose on your face that we'd inherited it from both sides of the family – perhaps more so from the McKenzies than the Kellys – Mary-bloody-Kelly was always credited with passing her ‘amazing gift' to ensuing generations. She'd done that all right, but it had been her propensity for the whisky bottle and not the harp.

I think, in telling all this, I'm trying to make a salient point – though perhaps not very well. My point is, with us coming from nothing and amounting to nothing – and there were lots like us – I simply couldn't reconcile how, as a nation, we could unilaterally dismiss black or yellow people as inferior.

My experience of the Chinese and our time in Japan certainly contradicted this notion and you would have had to go a long way to find a better type of bloke than Johnny Gordon, who didn't even have the vote when he died for his country. And, of course, there was Jimmy. Sure, there were drunks among the Aboriginal people, but fair go – my own family testified to the fact that these were greatly outnumbered by drunks of my own race. The white male population remained more or less pissed for the first hundred years in Australia. Moreover, the second century of white occupation isn't proving to be a hell of an improvement.

I'd once read about the arrival of the Chinese in New South Wales in a history book given to me by Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan when, as a young bloke, I was still in her dreaded clutches. ‘Know your history, Jack, and that way you won't repeat it,' she'd cautioned me darkly as she'd handed me a large, dull-looking tome. In the book there was the story of the Chinese who came to New South Wales in the 1860s to take part in the gold rush. Rather than stake original claims, which they mostly couldn't afford and if they could would alienate them further from the white miners, they would take over the abandoned claims where the easy pickings were no longer to be gained and sheer hard work was required to extract whatever ore remained. The Chinese recovered significant amounts of gold from these supposedly worked-out diggings and were greatly resented by the white miners for their success. Race riots followed against ‘the celestials', as the Chinese miners were known at the time, and several Chinese miners were killed. Nevertheless, the thrifty celestials prospered and, when the gold at Lambing Flat was finally exhausted, they moved on to Sydney and opened shops, cheap eating houses and commercial vegetable gardens. As a consequence, they were deeply despised by the large influx to Sydney of ne'er-do-wells left over from the gold rush who'd squandered the money they made at the diggings and had lost the taste for hard work.

This resentment of the Chinese who stayed behind after the gold rush caused the politicians of the day to focus on the fact that the celestials had opened opium dens in Sydney, largely for use by their own kind. They asserted that these devilishly wicked opium dens were a conspiracy by the celestials to reduce the young female population of the city to dependence on the poppy. In doing so, their sweet maidenhood was supposedly rendered into the lascivious clutches of the Chinese, who, having used them to satisfy their own carnal appetites, would then employ these hapless innocents as prostitutes for their own gain. This accusation was based on the fact that many young Sydney prostitutes smoked opium, just as today many of the same profession use heroin.

As Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan had pointed out later when we discussed the book, ‘Double standards are a prerequisite in the business of politics, Jack. Outcomes are seldom brought about for the good of the people, but invariably for the benefit of enhancing a political career or maintaining a political party in power. When the two ideas coincide, this is considered a fortunate accident. When a political leader arrives among his people who doesn't put his own self-interest or that of his party above those he represents, then we think of him as a great man and raise a statue in the park to his memory. Those very same politicians who called for the return of the Chinese to their homeland wouldn't have dreamed of standing up in parliament and calling for the closure of Sydney's notorious sly grog shops or the banning of opium-based cough mixture or children's soothing syrup. For them to do so would have quickly terminated their careers. Politicians may be vainglorious and self-serving, but they all have a well-developed sense of survival.'

The politicians at the time had vociferously demanded that the celestials be sent packing by being forced to return to China. It was here that the idea of the White Australia Policy had been born. It would take another generation before, at the time of Federation, the policy was written into law. Fifty years on it remained unaltered and immovable, tenaciously clinging to the layers of prejudice carefully constructed in the emotional education of most Australians.

Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan called our campaign to allow Jimmy to stay ‘Admission Impossible'. ‘We might as well know what we're up against, Jack,' she announced. ‘If we accept that the most obdurate position will be taken by the forces of evil then we will not become disillusioned. When the fight gets hard and we keep on butting our heads against an adamantine wall of government intransigence, we must never let them see us emotionally affected and must remain strong and resolute at all times.' It was her way of saying that, come what may, we should keep our cool and never give up.

We started with a small piece of luck when we discovered that Jimmy didn't have to go back to Japan to be demobbed – he could take his discharge from the army at the US consulate in Melbourne. In the meantime, posing as a journalist, which I suppose she was, being the owner of the
Gazette
, Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan began gathering background information. We discovered that after the scare of the fall of Singapore in World War II and the possibility at the time of a Japanese invasion, Australia's population of seven million had been seen as dangerously inadequate. The nation embarked on a strong, almost desperate push to increase its population. Migrants were coming in from far and wide under the ‘populate or perish' incentive initiated by the immigration minister, Arthur Calwell, in 1945. While we hadn't seen any of the effects of this on the island it seemed just about anyone could come in, so we were terrifically encouraged that things might have changed. The next piece of good news was that ever since the war, US ex-servicemen were to be considered one of the categories the government was anxious to encourage to immigrate.

‘Whacko!' I exclaimed, when Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan told me this.

‘Don't get your hopes up too far, Jack. We'll just have to wait and see,' she cautioned.

But it seemed her caution was misplaced. When she rang the Commonwealth immigration officer in Hobart he checked that Jimmy had a visitor's visa, and when she told him that Jimmy was an American and a Korean War veteran and wanted to remain in Australia – immigrate, that is – he sounded quite encouraging. ‘He's Category A, shouldn't be too much trouble. You'll need to come into the office to complete the forms and we'll have to do a check on his background.'

‘We only have one worry,' I said to Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan when she told me what the immigration official had said. ‘Jimmy's past life has not been without the odd incident. On the other hand, the judge said if he went to Korea they'd wipe his reform-school history and later street-gang convictions from the records and he'd be a cleanskin.'

‘Let's hope for his sake the judge kept his word,' she answered, adding, ‘though I can't imagine James doing anything truly disgraceful.'

Buoyed by the news of American ex-servicemen being in a priority immigration category, we still hadn't told Jimmy about the White Australia Policy. ‘No point in jumping the gun. Hopefully, he'll never have to know,' I said to Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan.

We took the Douglas DC3 to Launceston then the bus to Hobart, staying at the same boarding house we'd been at for my medal ceremony. Nothing is very far from anything else in Hobart, so the following morning the three of us walked to the immigration office on the ground floor of the Colonial Mutual Life Assurance Society at 97 Macquarie Street. Jimmy and I were dressed in our army uniforms, me hoping the ribbons on our chests would impress the immigration officer. Blokes like him might just know what they meant. Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan wore the same summer suit she'd worn at the medal ceremony, only she wore short white gloves and was without her straw hat with the pheasant feather. She saw me glance at her silvery-blonde hair as we left the boarding house. ‘Women don't wear hats when they mean business,' she said quietly to me, out of Jimmy's hearing. I was pretty confident that our visit would be a good one, and so was surprised at the note of caution in her voice.

The office turned out to be small and crowded and seemed pretty busy with clerks coming and going, calling out names from the reception desk. The receptionist, a thin woman in her fifties, wore heavy-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses with her dyed black hair pulled back into a severe bun on the top of her head. I glanced at Jimmy. ‘Gobblin' spider,' I teased, grinning.

Jimmy grinned back. ‘Spider got dem big googly eyes but ain't got no legs,' he said, out of the corner of his mouth.

I approached the desk and the receptionist looked up at me without interest. ‘Yes?' she said.

‘We have an appointment with Mr Cuffe.' Then I added gratuitously, ‘It's about my friend here, migrating. My name is Jack McKenzie – I'm the sponsor.'

She removed her glasses and, moving her head to one side so she could see past me, looked over at Jimmy and Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan. ‘The soldier or the lady?' she asked.

I grinned. ‘The soldier.'

‘Are you sure?' she then asked.

‘Yes, of course. We phoned Mr Cuffe from Queen Island.'
This bird's real strange
, I thought to myself.

She looked down at her appointment book. ‘Mr Oldcorn? Mr James Pentecost Oldcorn?'

‘Yes, that's right.'

She bent with her mouth close to a small intercom on her desk and, pressing the button, announced, ‘Mr Oldcorn and his sponsor have arrived, Mr Cuffe.'

‘Sponsor
s
,' I said quickly. She glanced up, sighed, and pressed the button again. ‘Sponsor
s
,' she added in an impatient voice.

A crackly male voice came back. ‘Send them in, please.'

The receptionist didn't rise, but instead pointed to a door to the side of the desk. ‘You may go in.'

I opened the door, allowing Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan to enter first, then Jimmy. The bloke behind the desk facing us was busy writing and I could see he had a bald spot on the top of his head that resembled a monk's tonsure. He was big – or rather he was fat – sitting in his shirt sleeves, and had those elasticised metal bands halfway up his arm keeping his cuffs clear. When he glanced up I saw the bushiest eyebrows I'd ever seen, even bushier than Bob Menzies, the prime minister. He started to smile at Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan as he rose ponderously from the desk to greet her. Then he saw Jimmy enter the room, and his smile abruptly disappeared. His mouth formed a distinct ‘Oh', although he remained silent.
Oh shit! What now?
I thought.

Cuffe's manner became formal and official as he indicated the three chairs in front of his desk. ‘Please, be seated.' He returned to his seat without shaking hands and began to shuffle a pile of papers, finally bringing one to the top.

‘Lovely day,' Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan ventured. ‘You have a nice glimpse of the water.'

Cuffe looked surprised, and glanced in the direction of the office window. ‘Never look at it,' he said abruptly. I could tell right from the start things were not going to go well. He cleared his throat and addressed Jimmy directly. ‘Mr Oldcorn, I was just wondering, what is your ancestry?'