Hunger Town (10 page)

Before the summer reduced us to melting exhaustion there had been a huge free speech rally at The Stump. Charles Reeve and Donald Grant, two of the Industrial Workers of the World previously jailed under the War Precautions Act for opposing the war, addressed a crowd of some six thousand people.

I recalled being moved by Grant's comment that if Christ came back to earth he would weep for the abysmal poverty of working people and it prompted me to draw Joe Pulham's grave. On a gravestone I inscribed ‘RIP JOE PULHAM, KILLED BY INDUSTRY, OCTOBER 1926' and above the gravestone I sketched a weeping angel offering a laurel wreath.

It was my first attempt at drawing a cartoon. Previously I had sketched in a haphazard manner anything that took my interest. But for some months now I had found myself searching out and studying the cartoons in newspapers. Their power to convey an insight in a few sharp lines fascinated me and I knew that, if I could create work like this, it might give purpose and meaning to my drawing. So, feeling brave but presumptuous, I sent my cartoon to the
Sun News Pictorial
. They regularly published cartoons. Maybe they would take it.

Despite the Board of Governors of the Botanic Gardens swearing that no IWW would ever speak there, the demonstration had gone ahead. Harry had been jubilant. ‘It was a triumph,' he said. He had heard all about it when he had gone to see Nathan and Jock about volunteering to help with propaganda for the Free Speech campaign.

Nathan and Jock were elated by the size of the crowd. Even though Donald Grant had called the communists ‘tin-pot Lenins of the Comical Party', Nathan was forbearing. After all, they had staged an enormously successful event. ‘However,' Harry chuckled, ‘Jock was livid. He fumed that “Donald Grant was a base double-crossing stab-in-the-back bastard”. Hadn't he stuck his neck out to support a bloody IWW and now Grant rewarded him with treacherous comments behind his back. The IWWs were always determined to undermine the Communist Party. You couldn't trust any of them.'

Nathan, Harry told me, had responded quietly. ‘Not quite behind your back, Jock. Six thousand people heard it. We must ignore these pettifogging differences and work together. We all have a common goal.'

‘Do we?' Jock snarled.

Harry smirked. ‘I don't think Jock liked being dismissed as pettifogging but he seldom argues with Nathan. Nathan was very forgiving, Judith. After all, it was quite a public slur. A bit mean.'

‘Forgiving?' I snorted. ‘Pious, you mean.'

My father had been both amused and exasperated by Harry's story. ‘Fat chance we have of those two lots working together. You should see them in the union.'

The temperature continued to rise. Fires exploded in the Dandenong Ranges behind Melbourne. People fled for their lives. A call went out for all able-bodied men to volunteer for fire-fighting. Harry went.

A thick pall of smoke hung over Adelaide from fires in the Adelaide Hills. We breathed its grey heaviness; the sky a vermilion haze through which a fierce sun struggled. The smoky sunlight did strange things to the light and the day looked as if it were lit by an opalescent moon rather than a bright sun.

My father couldn't go fire-fighting. Trading ships couldn't hang around the harbour for days waiting for fuel. In the midst of the heat wave we chugged to the Outer Harbor to fuel a coastal trader. Our hulk had an iron hull and this increased the heat on board.

Coaling was an exhausting job. A team of men worked with my father and were dependent for their lives on his skill at the winch. The coal lumpers brought their own tools—shovels, baskets, boots, ropes and their own physical strength. The gear on the collier—winch, rope and baskets—had to be rigged so the coal could be shifted from down below up to the deck before moving it into the ship that was being coaled. The baskets were attached to the rope that ran through a pulley and a winch on the deck above the hold. The shovellers worked in the hold filling the baskets with coal, but if the winchman brought the basket up too quickly the heavy load could fall on the men below.

Fear of killing the men in the hold made my father's life at the winch enormously stressful. At times he had to stand at the winch for up to forty hours and not make a mistake. My mother told me that often he woke in the night, sweating with terror from a nightmare in which he had killed a shoveller. As a child I simply accepted the gangs of men moving about our hulk but now, with Joe's death, I observed their terrible work. This, too, was a grand killer of men.

The Chew It and Spew It was so hot that one day I fainted and had to be driven home by a friend of my boss. My mother pursed her lips when she saw my white sweating face. ‘That's enough,' she told my father. ‘She's not going back.'

But through 1928 unemployment was worsening. He had a permanently worried look and constantly urged my mother to save what she could. She scrimped on everything.

I lay on the deck on a mattress with cool cloths over my head. He was distressed. ‘I don't know what to do, Eve. On a union count we guess one in five of our men is out of work and this bloody government is talking of bringing in immigrant labour to undercut our wages.' He was grim. ‘I'd like to see those immigrant scabs employed as coal lumpers. That'd be a joke. The government would need to import an army of giants to take on that job.'

It was the first cry of despair I had ever heard from my father and it wrung my heart.

Later I said to my mother, ‘There is the hundred pounds from Joe.'

‘No!' she was fierce. ‘We're not going to take everything from you.'

I returned to the Chew It and Spew It.

Harry had agreed to help advertise the next street meeting by putting up posters around the area. This was part of a continuous campaign to defeat the ban on street meetings. Before an illegal meeting was held volunteers went out at night and secretly stuck up posters on walls, trees, lamp-posts, shop windows, giving the date and place of the next meeting. Sometimes posters were distributed during the day at shopping areas but there volunteers had to be fleet of foot to escape watching police.

The three of us, Winnie, Harry and I, were to say that we were going to the Saturday night pictures and afterwards I was to spend the night at Winnie's home. I felt guilty lying to my mother and uncomfortable seeing the easy charm with which Harry beguiled her. Sometimes Harry's duplicity bothered me.

In my mother's eyes nothing could be more innocent or more desirable. That I was included in Winnie's family life delighted her. She constantly worried about my isolation on the hulk and I realised she feared I might suffer the same loneliness that she experienced. It was not that she didn't go out or have women friends but because of the difficulties in visiting us she couldn't have that easy drop-in lifestyle.

When friends visited it was usually as a result of a formal invitation. They expressed amazement at our different way of life and mother preened herself on their admiration for the strangeness of it all. She showed them over the hulk. But their visits were intermittent and rare and often relationships died for lack of proximity.

‘It's out of sight out of mind,' my mother sometimes remarked bitterly, ‘and it's always me who has to make the visits. They won't bother to come this far although it's only a tram ride from the Semaphore and a bit of a walk along the wharf.'

But I knew that it was also the problem of the times when we were docked. Finding us at home was unpredictable and friends grew tired of trying to visit when times convenient to them were not possible for us.

I also felt guilty at involving Winnie.

‘She'll love it,' Harry was casual, ‘and we need her. You have to stay somewhere and I need you.'

‘But her parents won't love it.'

‘Come on, Judith, put your outsize conscience in your pocket. You're always worrying about something.'

‘Yes.' But I was doubtful.

Harry came for me with his usual assurance to my mother that I would be quite safe with him. We took the train from the Port into the city and then a tram to Winnie's suburb. From the tram stop we walked along the footpath. The houses here hid behind high walls, overshadowed by leafy trees. Winnie's home, built from the lovely Adelaide pink stone, was double fronted with a central door and windows on each side opening onto a wide veranda.

Inside, a passage ran centrally to a kitchen at the back. Bedrooms and living rooms opened off the passage. They were high ceilinged with decorative cornices and plaster rosettes circling central light hangings. The large lounge room had a glittering chandelier. Winnie's bedroom had two single beds and a long window, which overlooked the garden. My cabin would have fitted into a third of the room and even the beauty of my mother and father's cabin could never match the elegance of this house. This house said ‘money'.

‘Winnie,' I said, suddenly anxious, ‘perhaps you shouldn't come with Harry and me tonight.'

Awed by my surroundings I had a terrified feeling that Harry and I held something exquisite and fragile in our hands and by a moment's carelessness we could smash it into small pieces. I don't know why at that moment I thought it a crime to endanger Winnie's beautiful lifestyle. Perhaps it was akin to the feeling I had had many years earlier when I dropped a delicately carved wooden box Ganesh had given me, breaking it into several pieces.

This house was luxurious beyond my wildest dreams, elegant and peaceful. I envied Winnie, but I wanted no part in destroying it. Winnie's eyes filled with the ubiquitous tears. ‘You and Harry always leave me out of things these days. Harry used to be my special friend.

‘Oh, Winnie,' I cried, ‘I'm so sorry. It's not like that at all. Harry loves you. You're his favourite cousin. Of course you must come with us.' She brightened and dried her eyes.

Winnie's parents were away for the night and had happily agreed to allow her to stay home so long as I was there also. ‘They think that you're a solid, hard-working, admirable girl,' Winnie said, rolling her eyes, ‘and, of course, there is also our dog to take care of both of us.'

She patted a large lolloping good-hearted Labrador that would have loved to death any intruder but because he was a dog he was considered a protector. He did have a deep bark but it was more joyous and welcoming than threatening. ‘It's hard to know with dogs,' she said wisely. ‘Now if I were threatened, who knows?'

I regarded the grinning snuffling beast that had laid his head trustingly on my lap and could not imagine him attacking anyone, even to defend Winnie. But then even the gentlest can fight for the ones they love, I thought. Maybe, we're a lot like dogs.

‘I would have liked a dog,' I said, ‘but it was impossible on the hulk. We had a cat called Emerald because of her green eyes but she found her way into the hold and died under a fall of coal.'

I had never been allowed to cuddle Emerald. My mother feared her fleas. Some years earlier, before I was born, there had been a scare in the Port of an outbreak of bubonic plague from foreign ships. So we kept a cat to control the rats and then my mother worried that the cat might be a carrier. So I had grown up with an uncomfortable, sometimes embarrassing fear of animals.

Winnie said it was their cook's night off but she'd left some cold meat and salad for us, and some cake. We sat around the table which the cook had set for Winnie before she left. We munched in conspiratorial ‘brotherhood' Harry said. I said ‘sisterhood'. This seemed to delight the other two so much that they laughed uproariously.

Harry had brought three old paint tins with clag in them and three brushes. The tins had handles so were easy to carry. He also had a pocketful of gypsum pieces, which he had stolen from the gypsum works at the Port.

‘What's that for?' Winnie and I asked together.

He grinned. ‘For writing on the road.'

Winnie took a piece and turned it over in her hand. ‘That would have been great for drawing hopscotch when we were kids. I never had enough chalk.'

Harry reclaimed his piece and pocketed it. ‘I'll do the writing on the road.'

‘And why is that?' she bridled. ‘I've drawn on the pavement many times.'

‘When you were a kid.'

‘I haven't forgotten how. It's not difficult.'

‘You take orders from me tonight, Winnie, or you don't come.'

She pouted. ‘Oh, you, Harry.'

To fill in time after tea we played several games of Animal Grab. We were tense, nervous and excited and shrieked hysterically at our own antics. We waited until it was that time of night when, if people were going out, they would have left, and if staying at home they were settled in to listening to the radio, reading or entertaining friends.

I had brought a small case with me and changed into some serviceable and darker clothes.

‘Should we black our faces?' Winnie was eagerly dramatic.

Harry guffawed. ‘You are an idiot, Winnie.'

‘Well?' she was defensive.

‘Well,' he mimicked, ‘if a cop catches us what will he make of a pretty little girl with a blackened face?' She blushed.

‘It's quite a good idea, Winnie,' I said to mollify her, ‘but Harry's right. We need to look normal.'

She was still put out and said regretfully, ‘I suppose so.'

At about ten o'clock we collected our gear and set out. The streets were quiet and heavily shadowed. A sliver of moon threw only a pallid fitful light. We were apprehensive and jittery. We jumped when a possum coughed a throaty sepulchral sound and Winnie shrieked.

‘Shut up, Winnie,' Harry hissed. ‘But you don't have to go on tiptoe, you idiot.'

I took her arm. ‘Let's try that lamp-post,' I whispered. ‘It looks like it's got a nice smooth surface.'

‘Let me try,' she whispered back, ‘please.'

‘OK.' I stood beside her as if more experienced, which, of course, I wasn't. Harry, a little further along the street, was slapping posters on a house wall.