Crossing the Ditch Page 2

  I looked down at my keftethes sandwich and didn’t know what I’d done wrong. I felt lonely and completely embarrassed. Throwing my lunch in the bin, I ran to the toilets, locked myself in a cubicle and began to cry – although I made sure when someone came in to the urinal, I’d choke back my tears so they didn’t hear the sobbing. When the lunchtime bell went, I couldn’t muster the courage to leave the toilets. Eventually, though, one of the teachers coaxed me out and back to the classroom.

  Mum picked me up from school later on and asked how my day had been.

  “Alright,” I replied, fixing my gaze out the window.

  “Fine – be touchy,” said Mum, probably thinking I was just tired.

  After a couple of minutes I broke the silence. “Mum, what’s a wog boy?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked with her stomach churning.

  “Well, the other kids won’t play with me because they call me a wog boy and because of what I was eating for lunch.”

  “You poor thing,” Mum said tearfully as she pulled the car over to the side of the road and ran her fingers through my neatly parted hair.

  “Stop it, Mum, I’m fine,” I barked back with all the authority a six year old could muster. But then my face started to go red and tears began to stream. “Mum, I just want to be like all the other kids. Can’t you just make me Vegemite sandwiches for lunch on white bread from now on – I don’t want any more of that Greek stuff.”

  That only added to Mum’s tears.

  We were living in Sydney’s North Shore – a predominantly Anglo-Saxon neighbourhood. Wogs, gooks and Indians sometimes felt somewhat unwelcome. At that age, it seemed as if the key to being popular was to have a nice British name and plenty of Old Money.

  My grandparents had come to Australia around 1910. My grandpa began working in his uncle’s café at the age of eight before he was old enough to run his own. In 1919, he became the co-owner (with his brothers) of the Niagara Café in the small New South Wales town of Gundagai – just down the road from the Dog on the Tuckerbox. The café’s crowning moment was in 1942, when Prime Minister John Curtin popped in for steak and eggs on his way back to Canberra. Press clippings and photos of that magical day are still plastered proudly on the walls.

  That generation of Greeks worked so hard to set up life in a new country; then the second-generation Greeks in Australia – my parents’ era – grew up around the time of the wild years of the 1960s and 1970s. But they floated through this revolution blissfully unaware of the culture that seemed to define the era – ask my parents and their friends about “Purple Haze” by Jimi Hendrix, free love and psychedelic drugs and they have no idea what you’re talking about. Frank Sinatra was more their style. Dad has never been drunk in his life: and no, he’s not a priest – he’s a lawyer.

  My grandparents had no formal education, so it was a great honour for them to see their children receive a tertiary education. Success was very important – they defined it by a person’s level of education attained and material wealth.

  Adventure was not a word in my grandparents’ vocabulary. Sure, they’d heard of Edmund Hillary climbing Everest, and Neil Armstrong on the moon, but because they were fighting just to put food on the table for their families, the idea of them being inspired to emulate the great adventurers and explorers was almost laughable.

  As the second-generation Greeks started to establish themselves in Australia as hard-working professionals, they began to acquire wealth. The next generation, however – my generation – found ourselves in a situation where our lives seemed pre-defined and pre-established. There was a formula set out and we could see where our lives were heading – which freaked me out a bit.

  In my early years at primary school, I found the stuff in the classroom extraordinarily difficult to grasp, but sport came very easily to me. I wasn’t too bad at swimming, diving and rugby. The problem I had at school was the constant negative reinforcement my teachers gave me – none of them believed in me. Mum was always encouraging, but even she was occasionally frustrated.

  Trying to learn my nine times tables on my way to a diving lesson one day, she had to keep silencing my younger brother and sister for spitting out the answers. I just couldn’t do them (especially 9x4, for some reason). Exasperated, Mum pulled the car over and started smacking me.

  “I’m trying, Mum, I am. I just can’t remember them,” I pleaded.

  Poor Mum broke down into tears again and replied, “I know…I’m sorry.”

  As I bumbled through my primary school years in the lowest classes possible, Mum came home after one parent–teacher night with the words of my Year 5 teacher ringing in her ears. He’d told her: “Vivienne, I suggest you get James into the workforce as soon as possible. There’s no way he’s going to be able to finish school. I’ll be impressed if he doesn’t end up in jail.”

  These were harsh words for an 11-year-old kid, and my last parent–teacher interview in the public school system, as my parents moved me to a prestigious private school, Knox Grammar in nearby Wahroonga. Although Knox had a great academic reputation, it was the sport and extra-curricular opportunities that Mum and Dad thought would benefit me.

  I repeated Year 5 at Knox and right from day one my teacher Mr Bousie encouraged me, patting me on the back for that try I scored on the weekend, or that catch I’d taken at cricket. Then he masterfully directed that positive energy from the sporting field into the classroom. With a combination of the positive support and acknowledgement of what I was good at, and my realisation of the financial pressure Mum and Dad were under in sending me to a school like Knox, I began to perform.

  We never headed on overseas holidays when I was growing up – we didn’t have the money. Instead, my parents would bundle us into the family 4WD and we’d head off around Australia. We did heaps of desert trips to the Corner Country – outback New South Wales – my first proper taste of “expeditioning”.

  Typically, we’d go with four to six other families in 4WDs and spend weeks exploring the central Australian deserts on tracks. Right from those early trips, though (which I enjoyed immensely), I really thought we were bringing city life to the bush, rather than toughing it out and allowing nature to become a part of us. It’s difficult to connect with the land when you’re thrashing round in a V6 turbo-charged 4WD all day and surrounded by 12V fridges, tables, chairs and lanterns at night.

  Even so, these 4WDing trips awoke my adventurous spirit. I’d spend days staring out the window as we bounced along heavily corrugated roads and dirt tracks, dreaming of what Burke and Wills must have gone through. What was life like as an explorer? These outback holidays also gave us plenty of time to roll around in the dirt and just be kids, without all that other materialistic noise that would distract us back home: computer games and videos.

  These trips played a pivotal role in bringing Clary, Lil and me closer together. If there were a couple of rocks and sticks on the ground, we could amuse ourselves for hours. Being the oldest, I was the ringleader and they’d usually blindly follow me anywhere – into a creek, up a tree, or sneaking into the crazy neighbour’s back yard. If I went, they’d blindly come too (how times have changed!).

  Clary was always the more cautious one – the thinker. Often I’d attack things all guns blazing, without properly having thought things through. My brother was much more calculating. It’s funny that when Justin and I crossed the Tasman years later, Jonesy played a similar role to the one Clary did when I was a child: I was the natural leader, Justin the natural deputy.

  My first job as a kid was working at the local chicken shop for a measly $4.25 an hour. I was 14 and I’ll never forget working all the public holidays at Christmas time to pocket a little extra cash. When my payslip arrived, it wasn’t time-and-a-half as promised. Angrily, I brought it up with the owner, who basically replied, “Too bad.”

  I stormed home and decided to contact the Workplace Ombudsman. They offered advice that I could take the shop owner to court over the pay d
ispute or forget about it. Legal action was a little beyond a 14 year old. It taught me a valuable lesson, though. For as long as I was an employee, I was potentially going to be bullied. Right from a young age I vowed that I’d work to learn, not just for the money.

  This idealism was great, but the next summer my best mate Sammy and I wanted to buy a tinnie to go fishing. We had a couple of dollars in our Commonwealth Dollarmite savings account, but not enough to buy a boat. How could two 15 year olds earn that much cash in their summer holidays? We thought long and hard, until Sam suggested we go cotton chipping.

  It seemed like a great idea, and once we’d convinced our parents we jumped on a train to Young. I’d seen a few movies and read a couple of novels about what the American Negroes went through as slaves back in the 1800s: cotton chipping gave us a glimpse of what slavery was like.

  We were woken at 4am, when a bus would be waiting to take us to the fields. Starting before sunrise we’d bend over with our picks and remove the weeds that grew close to the stem of the cotton. As we walked in a line down these cotton fields, a tyrannical supervisor would march behind us, bellowing if we missed a weed. He was a big man, with a red face and a bloated beer gut. We’d be marched up and down these fields for 12 hours each day and return back to our tent completely shattered at night-time. After a couple of days, our hands bled, our noses peeled from sunburn and our lips were blistered by the wind. It was by far the hardest thing we had ever done – but it made us feel like men.

  Returning from this fairly brutal experience, we’d salvaged just enough cash to buy an old rusty trailer, a Quintrex tinnie and a 15-horsepower outboard. This was to be my first proper introduction to the water. Each weekend, one of our parents would drop us down at the closest waterway – the Apple Tree boat ramp down at Bobbin Head – where we’d launch our tinnie. We’d explore the area endlessly, quickly learning where all the best fishing spots and bays to surf recklessly on the back of the tinnie were. As our appetite grew, we pushed further downriver.

  Our first overnight experience without parents was quite memorable. Sam, our mate Big Nick (his name was Nick and he was big) and I planned on camping down at Jerusalem Bay, near the mouth of the Hawkesbury River – a whopping 8 kilometres from the boat ramp. On our way there, Big Nick suggested that we head all the way to Pittwater and pick up a case of beer. I thought we already had enough to worry about but quietly obliged. We puttered through the heads in our tinnie, picked up some grog and returned to the bay. We set up Dad’s tent on some beautifully flat grass just back from the mangroves and the river. Making a fire, we cooked dinner and drank a couple of cans of VB. We were stoked with ourselves, and, with no parents around, went to bed really late as an act of defiance – 11pm.

  So far, so good, but a couple of hours into our kip, the tent began to fill with water.

  “Holy shit,” Big Nick yelled, “we’re sinking.”

  As we peered out of the tent fly we realised that the tide had risen and was engulfing us, our precious fishing gear, and – worse still – Mum and Dad’s prized camping accessories (I knew they’d kill me). We waded through the knee-deep water in our pyjamas, trying to reposition our camp on higher ground as our gear drifted slowly down Jerusalem Bay.

  By morning, the tide had ebbed and we found our equipment strewn through the mangroves like cyclone debris. A small, but valuable lesson had been learnt: the sea was boss. Limping back to the boat ramp, with – fortunately – just a couple of saucers and my fishing hat having met a watery grave, we were too proud to tell our parents about the tidal disaster.

  Throughout high school, I had to work much harder than the other kids in my classes. It always seemed to take me twice as long as my classmates to do my homework and study, and I’d take five times as long as Jonesy to rote-learn poems for the HSC. At times it was frustrating, but deep down it was satisfying, knowing that while the other kids were technically “smarter”, I could match them regardless.

  I wasn’t a cool kid at school; nor was I a nerd. I seemed to be reasonably well liked and I got along with most people. Jonesy, on the other hand, was quite reclusive, shy and, well…fat. He pretty much hid in the boarding house.

  Justin was born in Hornsby Hospital on 20 June 1983. He popped into the world 15 months after me (although it never seemed to be grounds for respecting your elders). Soon after that, the family moved to Indonesia for his dad’s work as a geologist.

  Indonesia was where his parents had met. His mum, Chintra, grew up in a small fishing village, then left school in Year 10 and started work as a laboratory assistant on Bangka Island, where she met a young Australian scientist, Roderick Jones, who she’d later marry. From an early age, Chintra had been an entrepreneur. At the age of five, she started her first business – delivering cakes on her bicycle. After having three children, she started up some surfwear stores in Indonesia, which, before long, had expanded to 38 surf shops and three department stores. She now runs one of the top four retail outlets in her country. Not bad for an uneducated person from a fishing village.

  This success, coupled with being an expat family, brought with it an affluent upbringing for Justin. He lived in Lebong Tandi (a small village hours away from civilisation) with his parents, older brother Andrew and sister Louisa, till he was three. Their home was in a jungle and sometimes he’d wake up in the morning to find tiger footprints outside his bedroom window – it was slightly different from his future home on Sydney’s North Shore.

  When his family moved to Jakarta, Justin started at the British International School. The exact opposite to me, Jonesy topped all his classes – despite being energetic, loud and having an insatiable appetite for biting people – and loved to read “just for fun”. By the age of 11 he’d read Lord of the Rings and Bram Stoker’s Dracula…twice. In Sydney, I was still stuck on my nine times tables.

  Coming to Sydney as a boarder in Year 7 at The King’s School in Parramatta, though, his gregarious personality had been left in Indo. He was a bit embarrassed about his Asian background in a very white-bread school, he was underdeveloped physically and he was pretty woeful at sport.

  However, he enjoyed school life, instantly taking to the “frat system”; that’s where the younger boys have to do whatever the senior students bark at them. One day, some of the seniors told him to pour a bottle of rotten fish oil over Ed – one of the first XV rugby players – and not to return to the boarding house until he did it. Justin followed orders, executed the deed and ran back to safety, where he assumed the Year 12 boys who’d barked out his orders would protect him. He was wrong.

  Not long after, a couple of his Year 8 comrades approached him and said, “Ed wants to see you.” He walked slowly towards Ed’s room, to find the first XV player waiting for him with another bottle of fish oil.

  “Drink it,” said Ed, matter-of-factly.

  Poor Jonesy had no choice. He swallowed a couple of mouthfuls before running to the toilet and vomiting it all up.

  The Year 12 guys who put Justin up to this were extremely apologetic and even bought him a pizza to quell the fishy taste. For some reason, Justin loved this “bullying”, which he felt bonded the boarders and led to great comradeship.

  But Justin didn’t need any help from the Year 12s to get himself into trouble. Bored one day in a Year 9 science class, Jonesy spied two cases of wine left over from a staff Christmas party out of the corner of his eye. Together with two of his best mates, they decided that putting a top-secret covert operation together was in order. To cut a long story short, they broke into the lab at night-time and stole the wine. A week later, they got busted when a pair of bottles clinked at an inappropriate time, right in front of a boarding master. Suspension resulted, and his parents decided to pull him out of King’s and send him to Knox.

  When he arrived at Knox, Justin, a late developer physically, was shy and reserved. As a new boy, he had no friends – or pubes, he confesses; not that I was looking. It wasn’t till he was 15 that he started growing any hai
r other than on his head, which was bad news at an all-boys school with open showers.

  He got along well with my brother Clary, though, and they began to play sport together, soon becoming mates. Shortly after, we became Justin’s “home family” in Sydney – and that was when our friendship kicked off.

  His first year at Knox, he immersed himself in study and topped a few science subjects without receiving a science prize at speech day, due to a technicality (an injustice he still holds close to his heart!). This actually affected him deeply at the time and led to an attitude of “why bother?”, as studying soon dropped down his list of priorities.

  Justin started spending most weekends with us and coming on family holidays when he wasn’t going home to Indonesia. All through school he remained quiet and polite. It wasn’t until a couple of catalysts – university and the Murray River expedition – that he started to burst out of his shell.

  During our time at school, we were both carrying 25 kilograms more than we are nowadays, mostly around our waists. Voluptuous rolls hid our school belts as we sat studying for hours on end (well, Justin was often doing crosswords and Sudoku). The final two years at Knox were all about burying ourselves in books and forgetting the meaning of the word “exercise”.

  In my early high-school years I loved my sport; unfortunately, rugby left me with nine broken bones, with the final one resulting in a pretty serious operation where most of the cartilage in my left knee was removed. In the recovery ward, I’ll never forget the doc recommending that I never run again – thanks for the pick-me-up after the operation! Actually, the cautiousness he instilled resulted in me focusing my energy on studying, which wasn’t a bad thing.

  Nearing our final exams and the end of our school days, Justin and I were overweight, socially inept with girls and lacking self-confidence – not a great combination. Struggling to find our position in the world and what role we could play, like so many kids our age we began drinking. At the time it was a brilliant tool in lubricating our awkward social behaviour – especially with females.