Ten Pound Pom Read Online Free PDF Page B

tormentors: Colin Brassington and Ivan Dureki. These are children, true, but a level of sadism also extends to some of the teachers; one goads the children into catching cane toads, nailing them alive to boards, bloating their bodies with salt then slitting them open to reveal their working innards. Beating hearts, etc. The boy and his brother refuse to do this, and thus invite more bullying. The boy’s brother reports Brassington and Dureki to the headmaster, who writes their names down on a fag packet.
    The boy’s mother takes him into the city, shopping, and they attend a street auction where a man holds up a velvet box and declares that what it contains is worth thousands of dollars but he’s selling it for a fiver and the boy’s mother buys it and of course it is empty. He’s very convincing, the man.
    As a family they visit Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary, MoretonBay, the Gold Coast (UFO), Beenleigh (famous for rum), Southport and Coolangatta. Wellington Point, Stradbroke Island, Bribie Island. At Currumbin, the boy holds a plate of chopped fruit as brightly-coloured parrots flock around him, perching on his head, his shoulders. The weight of them gathered on the plate strains and hurts his arms. At Bunya Park, the boy has his photograph taken holding a koala called Bill.
NOW
    At the side of the highway that leads from the Gold Coast into Brisbane are large advertising hoardings. A local canvassing politician features regularly on them, sensibly-coiffured, shirtsleeves rolled up, arms folded, firm-but-fair facial expression. His caption simply reads: ‘JEFF TURNBULL – A GOOD BLOKE’. How Australian can you get?
    –You should be on one of those, Higgy, I say from the back seat. –Peter Higgins: a proper gobshite.
    –Get fucked.
    –Tony laughs.
    We drive to Inala. This place had a bad reputation in the seventies and still has one now, but it seems to have improved, from what I can remember; it’s cleaner, there’s more shrubbery. There’s less evident vandalism. Thirty years, thirty years. Hispanic-looking guys in baggy jeans and baseball caps hang around. Dogs abound. Thirty years. The same sun under which we age, all of us, every one.
    Poinciana Drive, number 53. On the land where our house once stood there now stands a beige bricked, balconied place that stands out like an angel fish in a toilet bowl from the clapboardand corrugated iron dwellings that surround it. I feel disappointed and slightly sad, but I photograph it anyway, hanging out of the car window. I don’t know what I expected to find, after thirty years, but some trace, however small, of my past presence would’ve been welcome. Yet I did walk this street, all those years ago. My little white Pommie knees. I was here, once. And am again. It’s changed unrecognisably but I can feel myself all over it.
    Inala West School, by contrast, is almost exactly the same, just painted a different colour. Blue – was it blue? Did it used to be blue? It’s now a kind of creamy white. Tony and I vault the fence and cross the playing field where we once, and in a much smaller way, played footy (both Aussie rules and the proper kind) and cricket and rounders and prey to Oz kid bullies. We find a toothless groundsman and explain to him who we are and what we’re doing there and he takes us up to see a teacher and we explain ourselves and our presence again. He’s nice – lets us explore. There’s my classroom. The wooden racks and shelves outside it where pupils stored their bags. Still there. It looks the same. Memories torrent back in. There’s the window behind which I sat and through which Tony appeared, grinning, a large and long-tailed lizard draped over his finger. There’s the assembly yard. ‘Advance Australia Fair’ and ‘Waltzing Matilda’ in the hot and heavy sun. The playing field, scrubby and dry. So strange, this is, to be back here. The other side of the planet and the other side of a life. All those years between then and now and all