The Summer of ’82 Page 4

  I think we can also blame Paul Hogan for this. He had a character called Leo Wanker – yes, imagine that. On Channel 9 at seven-thirty in the evening, there’d be skits on The Paul Hogan Show featuring a dodgy stuntman called Leo Wanker. I’m pretty sure the word wanker can’t be said on Channel 9 these days … well, perhaps when Richard Wilkins walks onto set.

  I didn’t mind the bit about going to the cop shop – in fact, I was quite looking forward to it. Talking to the bomb squad, wow! But the part about getting a job … no thanks. And I knew that if Dad was involved, it wouldn’t be glamorous like that elusive Brashs gig – no, it would be industrial, dirty and quite possibly dangerous. Because Dad had contacts in that world. As a trades teacher, he loved nothing more than walking around a factory floor, looking at machines.

  In fact, that’s how we spent quite a few of our holidays. We would go on an FMTA camp – that’s the Fitting and Machining Teachers’ Association, for those not cool enough to know. When most people were heading to the beach we would be going on a long drive to industrial hubs like Albury-Wodonga or Wollongong, where we’d tour factories that made things like dog food or the metal casings of traffic lights. So you went to Sea World last holiday? So what! I went to Screwdriver World, otherwise known as the Stanley factory.

  The O’Neil name had great weight in the world of ‘fitting and turning’. (To be honest, I still don’t really know what that is.) I could have got a serious leg up if I had decided to take up the trade. Dad had already got my brothers and me part-time jobs in factories by the time we were starting high school. He’d speak to one of his work contacts, a bloke who worked in some hellhole where they made asbestos or something, and pretty soon we’d have a job in the factory. People say nepotism doesn’t exist, but I’m here to tell you that it does.

  My brothers and I worked at a refrigeration factory after we each turned twelve or so. We would turn up after school and sweep the floor, no doubt taking the pressure off the teenage apprentice who was being traumatised with some good old-fashioned workplace bullying. The older workers might’ve spray-painted his pushbike pink or hung him from a metal press by his overalls for forty-five minutes or so. He must have kissed the ground when we walked in.

  Although at first we were protected by the legend that was Kev O’Neil, that soon faded and we became fresh meat for bored guys who made large industrial fridges. They gave me a nickname after seeing how slowly I swept the floor – they called me ‘Flash’. But I was coping okay – until one day Mum dropped me off and announced to the factory floor that I had secured the lead role in our school musical, Noah and His Ark.

  Yes, I was playing Noah, and in a stroke of genius casting, Glenn was to play God. No doubt the theory was that it would be cool if Noah and God looked the same. Dad was happy because Noah had been a tradie. I would’ve preferred to be a rhino or a tiger, and not give these factory guys anything to work with. ‘Give us a song, Noah’ was fast becoming the most frequent thing I heard.

  I decided to get my own back on the world of industrial refrigeration. These guys built fridges for ice-cream shops, so it was not unusual for there to be a fridge with large tubs of ice-cream in the factory overnight. And this was no normal ice-cream. At home we were used to simple tubs of Neapolitan – chocolate, vanilla and strawberry. The vanilla was always the last flavour to be eaten. You’d open the tub and all that’d be left was a thick line of vanilla down the middle, sitting there defiantly like the Berlin Wall. But the ice-cream in the factory fridge was for the American Maid chain, which had exotic flavours like licorice and bubblegum. And of course we lowly workers weren’t allowed to have any.

  But this was no deterrent for a sweet tooth like myself! This was the late 1970s and sweet treats in the O’Neil household were rare. Hell, we fought each other for one of Mum’s rock cakes. So one evening I left the side door of the factory open before I went home. Later, my older brother Mark (always up for criminal activity), Noddy (see Mark) and I crept in and ate the whole lot.

  We felt sick, sitting there gorging on flavours such as Raspberry Ripple and Tutti Frutti, but it was part greed and part revenge. When I went back to work the next afternoon the police were dusting the door for fingerprints. The manager came out and told me there had been a break-in; did I know anything about it? I just shook my head and went back to sweeping. Thank God Constable Darren Dewey wasn’t on that case. He would have noticed the band of pimples that had suddenly appeared on my face.

  Noddy and I also delivered the weekly local paper – well, one of two which competed in the prized outer-eastern suburban marketplace. There was the established Nunawading Gazette and the new kid on the block, the Eastern Standard. We delivered the latter, and initially we were very good paperboys, diligently pounding the pavement every Wednesday night and ignoring the ‘No Junk Mail’ stickers. Hey, this wasn’t just some Coles New World catalogue – this was important local news, jammed between thousands of real estate and tradies’ ads. We were delivering news that people needed to know, with headlines such as ‘Power tools top Nunawading’s theft list’ and ‘Illegal rubbish dumping on the increase’. But soon we grew tired of our Wednesday night ritual, so we used other methods to get rid of the papers. We threw them down the creek, burned them in the backyard and tossed them into rubbish skips in industrial areas.

  Soon enough we had a visit from the Eastern Standard ’s distribution manager. Now there’s a job. I can just imagine the conversation with the careers adviser:

  ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’

  ‘I want to intimidate thirteen-year-old boys.’

  ‘There’s priest, or distribution manager for a local paper.’

  The guy didn’t tell us he was coming; we just came home from school and he was sitting on top of the latest delivery of papers. He was perched up high, a bit like a gnome on a rock. ‘Boys, we’ve had complaints,’ he said. ‘People say they’re not getting their paper.’

  I pretended to be affronted. ‘Which people?’

  Now he looked affronted. He looked down at his clipboard and listed off a few names. ‘Ah, let’s see … Mrs Jamieson, 4 Holly Court, Mrs Rossiter, 12 Reserve Avenue …’

  ‘Who else?’ I demanded.

  ‘Mrs Jones, 6 Berry Street, and a Mr Saunderson, 15 Rupert Street.’

  I remembered them all, and from that day onwards we only delivered to those four people. We were target-marketing before it had even been invented.

  Back to the bomb. The next day I woke early – well, Dad woke me up. He didn’t do his normal trick of starting the lawnmower outside our bedroom window; he simply walked in and snapped, ‘Get up!’

  I had a quick breakfast and we went to pick up Noddy. He was happy to own up, whereas Drago wouldn’t even come to the phone. His mum said he was doing his schoolwork. I pointed out that school had finished, and she said, ‘It’s extra homework,’ and hung up.

  We drove in silence to the police station. Dad didn’t even put on his beloved Tijuana Brass cassette. The only conversation came from Noddy, who made occasional comments on what he saw out the window.

  ‘Pub’s got a special on Tuesday night – nachos. Sounds good.’

  Silence.

  ‘St John’s fete is coming up.’

  More silence.

  ‘The Fussy Furniture Fellow is open.’

  More silence.

  ‘Have you ever been in there? He’s not that fussy. I reckon he should be called the “Yeah, Whatever” Furniture Fellow.’

  I started to giggle and Dad cracked it. ‘Shut up.’

  More silence.

  ‘Wanker.’

  The Nunawading police station was a classic 1970s suburban outpost of the law, a double-storey brown-brick building with steps up to the front door. First you came to a counter, and behind that were offices, meeting rooms and interview rooms. Downstairs were a car park and the jail cells. This was a place that loomed large in the youth folklore of Mitcham. Despite all the tough talk of the local te
enagers, no one wanted to spend any time at the Nunawading cop shop.

  We met Constable Dewey and were ushered past the counter and into an interview room, which had the two-way mirror and everything. Noddy and I sat there while Dad talked to a policeman outside the door.

  ‘Mate,’ I whispered to Noddy, ‘let me handle everything. I’ve seen a lot of cop shows.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’ve been here three times before.’

  Oh yeah – I forgot Noddy had a misspent youth.

  He kept talking. ‘It’s not like it is on the cop shows. You reckon this is going to be like Cop Shop? I don’t see J.J. or Paula Duncan anywhere.’

  ‘Do you reckon they’re going to charge us?’ I asked. I had no idea what was going to happen. For all I knew we could be arrested and taken straight to Turana, which was the jail for teenage boys. This place actually came up fairly frequently at our house. ‘I’m going to drop you off at Turana if you don’t behave,’ Dad would threaten. He got so angry with Mark one day that he actually drove him there and pushed him out of the car in front of the youth criminal facility. Luckily for Mark, Mum intervened and made Dad go back to get him.

  ‘Nah, I reckon they’ll just try to scare us. It’s what they normally do.’

  A large plain-clothed detective walked in with an older Indian man in a white coat. He looked like one of those ‘scientists’ on the ads for the Pond’s Institute. His white coat said ‘I went to uni and I do something in a lab’. Or he could have been directing cars at the footy or the races. The friendlier Constable Dewey was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘All right, boys, I’m Detective Warrenson and this is Inspector Rajeed. He’s on loan from the Indian bomb squad and is here at Nunawading on secondment.’

  ‘Are there a lot of bombs going off in Nunawading?’ I asked.

  Noddy sniggered, but the detective wasn’t impressed. ‘Son, I ask the questions around here.’

  ‘What was in your bomb?’ Inspector Rajeed asked. ‘I can’t establish the chemical elements.’

  ‘Woah,’ said Noddy. ‘We haven’t even admitted to making the bomb.’

  That cracked the detective. ‘Listen here, nitwit. We know you did it.’ Then he pointed to me. ‘He told his mum that he did it and that you helped. It’s not rocket science, mate. Just tell us what was in it and we just might let you go with a warning. If you want to argue about your innocence, I’ll take you down to the cell and you can think about it there.’

  ‘It’s illegal to lock me up like that,’ Noddy said.

  ‘Well, let’s call it a guided tour, where I was showing you the cell and – oh, what’s that, I lost the key.’ Detective Warrenson was on a roll.

  I was impressed that our bomb was so advanced that even the expert in the white coat couldn’t work out what it was made from. Still, the scare tactics may not have been working on Noddy but they were certainly working on me. If he was doing the lie and deny, I was about to do the cry.

  ‘The bomb was made of chlorine and brake fluid,’ I said in a quiet voice.

  Inspector Rajeed seemed impressed. ‘Okay, and the chemical reaction of the chlorine with the hydrocarbons in the brake fluid would cause an explosion. That’s quite ingenious – how did you work out that formula?’

  I looked at Noddy and he smiled. ‘Brian told us,’ he said.

  ‘Brian? Who’s Brian?’ Detective Warrenson shouted. You could see him going through his criminal files in his head: Barry, Bob, Brian? Have I heard of some scumbag called Brian who knows about this stuff ?

  ‘Brian tells us everything we need to know,’ I added.

  ‘Who is this Brian?’ Inspector Rajeed asked.

  Noddy started singing. ‘Brian told me, Brian told me, Brian told me so.’

  We were both singing like canaries.

  The detective sighed. ‘They saw it on the bloody news. That’s all we need – little shits getting their dumb ideas from the TV.’

  There was silence. It seemed they now had all the info they needed.

  ‘Listen, boys,’ Detective Warrenson said eventually. ‘We could arrest you and charge you for this, but Constable Dewey has informed me that you are both from good homes and that this incident was an anomaly. So we’ve decided to let you off with a warning.’

  I exhaled a big gush of air. Had I been holding my breath the whole time?

  Detective Warrenson continued. ‘But I don’t want to see you boys back at this station.’ He leant closer to us to make his point. ‘There are two paths you can go down. One involves doing stuff like this, getting into trouble and going to jail. I’ve seen this before. It always starts with something petty and then escalates into something more serious. One day you’re nicking a Polly Waffle from Coles, the next day you’re holding up an Armaguard van.’

  That all sounded a bit dramatic, I thought, but I was nodding intently.

  ‘Or you can go down the other path: finish school, get a job and not worry about who you’re sharing a cell with or who’s going to knife you in the shower.’

  He was really painting a picture.

  ‘So, boys, it’s up to you. I hope you’ll do the right thing.’ He got up and left the room.

  Inspector Rajeed bowed at us, and I bowed back. Constable Darren Dewey came and ushered us out. Dad thanked him. ‘We’ll see you in better times,’ he added.

  Things were pretty frosty back in the car with Dad. ‘So what did the detective say to you?’ he asked eventually.

  I knew Dad had been watching the whole thing through the two-way window, and he wanted to hear some remorse from us.

  But Noddy was having none of it. ‘Oh, you know, Kev, the usual “Don’t become a crim” bullshit. “We’re going to let you off but you’ve got to promise to be a good little boy.” ’

  I started to snigger.

  Dad stopped the car. ‘Get out,’ he said.

  ‘Dad, I’ve learnt my lesson,’ I pleaded.

  ‘Get out, and take your wanker mate with you!’

  I could tell Dad was furious so I got out, and Noddy followed. Dad drove off and left us on the side of the road. We were nowhere near a railway station or bus stop, but just outside the Fussy Furniture Fellow.

  As I mentioned earlier, Dad had form in dumping his children on the side of the road. Nothing would make him angrier than a Sunday drive with the family. Mum and Dad would be in the front, with one child on the bench seat between them and three more in the back. There was no air-con so it was usually sweltering in the car. The three boys in the back would be bickering and Mum would say, ‘A bit of peace and quiet for your father – he has to concentrate on the driving.’

  I remember one time we were going to some far-flung place like Kangaroo Ground, probably to look at a block of land that one of Mum’s relatives had bought. This was quite the day out in the 1970s. We’d drive to the block of land, get out and walk around as Dad said stuff like, ‘Oh, they’ve got the water on.’ On this day Trev was being particularly irritating, repeating whatever anyone said – a classic annoying activity that should be banned under the Geneva Convention (along with wearing your sibling’s jacket without permission and crossing over to his side of the bedroom).

  We started to protest. ‘Mum, Trevor is saying everything we say —’

  ‘Mum, Trevor is saying everything we say,’ Trev said in an annoying voice.

  ‘Tell him to shut up!’

  ‘Tell him to shut up,’ mimicked Trev.

  Dad had had enough. ‘Trevor, pull your bloody head in!’

  There was a brief pause, then: ‘Trevor, pull your bloody head in.’ Trev had put all his money on black.

  The other three brothers all went, ‘Oooh.’

  Dad pulled the car over immediately. ‘Get out.’

  ‘Dad, we’re in the middle of nowhere,’ Trev protested. Suddenly he had dropped the annoying voice. And Trev was right – we were somewhere in the bush, with nothing but gumtrees to be seen.

  ‘I don’t care, get out.’

  Trev got o
ut and we drove off to look at the block of land. Naturally enough, Mum seemed a bit panicked. Her eldest child was now fending for himself in the Australian bush like the Bush Tucker Man.

  After a while we drove back to the spot where we had dumped Trevor but he was nowhere to be seen. It turned out he had climbed up a tree and was hiding. Mum had to coax him down with a peanut butter sandwich. These days you’d get arrested for that. (Giving your child a peanut butter sandwich, I mean.)

  Stranded outside the Fussy Furniture Fellow, Noddy and I had no choice but to walk home. When we got to my place Mum had some news for us. ‘Your father has organised a job interview for you at the tile factory this afternoon. They’re looking to fill several positions, so you can take your friends with you.’

  Oh, God – I knew it was going to be bad, but not the tile factory. Making bathroom tiles would have been bad enough, but this place made roof tiles. Dirty, heavy and sharp-edged roof tiles.

  Noddy said he wasn’t interested and quickly made himself scarce. I called Drago and he was keen, as he wanted to save some money and buy his brother’s car, a funky yellow Celica.

  So that afternoon we rode our bikes down to the tile factory. Although Mitcham was a suburban paradise, there were still pockets of industrial areas. The factory was off Mitcham Road and down a long driveway, and looked like it came straight out of the early years of the Industrial Revolution. Massive tile kilns as big as several houses sat next to squat buildings. A haze of red dust surrounded the whole place, which had a post-nuclear apocalyptic feel to it. We were ushered into the office of the foreman, who was a large Eastern European man. He was sweating, stressed and studying the forms we had filled in.

  ‘Dragovic? Are you Yugoslavian?’ he shouted.

  ‘Yeah,’ Drago said tentatively.

  I knew this was a loaded question. What he was really asking was: ‘Are you Croatian or Serbian?’ I knew Serbs and Croats at school, and so I understood very well that they didn’t always get along.