You may find something to love about the bar that says Killian’s Red above the door. It is not on a main street, it isn’t ablaze with neon lights, there isn’t music disturbing the neighbours or men spilling out onto the concrete at closing. It is not in Lonely Planet or any tourist guides. It is, somewhat hidden to but the most deserving. It is a place that exists without your knowledge. It doesn’t need you. You, if the need arises, will need it.
In the fading and peeling paint of the maroon letters of Killian’s bar there may be a message to be found. Often people could be seen standing under the letters doing nothing much, speaking with murmurs or with polite nods. Often someone would say ‘this place needs a good coat of paint, do ya reckon?’ Followed by more murmurs and nods of agreement. Yet year by year the fading sign became a beacon for those who don’t belong. The simple pub wasn’t bright, or full of modern luxuries (some regulars would avoid using the bathroom no matter the desire) but you could wake from a long sleep in one of the rooms off the main hallway and know no one would ask you to leave or to lend them money.
Each room is the same. A single bed. Tan wall paper. A single bed side table with a lamp that was dull even with the brightest new light blub. The one window doesn’t open- don’t bother trying. Rusted shut. The south facing windows allow for a glancing vision of the creek that has settled aside the lane way that leads towards the town square. If you were lucky to get a room facing north- usually reserved for the regulars- the window gave the occupant views of the tree tops that gather searching for light. This small yard and feeble attempt at a garden is enclosed by a small brick wall; the grass is mowed daily by two sheep that have lingered in the yard since before the kitchen extensions in ’22.
If you are looking for room service or freshly changed sheets, Killian’s Rest isn’t for you. After a while the lumps in the pillow and the mattress that droops in the centre would become rustic features, all apart of the experience. It would be around this time that the resident mutt (kelpie and border collie with a bit of German Sheppard thrown in) would be found curled at the foot of your bed, or present itself by the back kitchen door at the precise time scraps would be flung in the general direction of the garbage bins. You’ll pat the dog under the chin each morning, and throw the ball in the yard at lunch, and listen to it sheppard the sheep around at dusk.
One good Sunday, recalled as a good year saw the start of the recruitment march for the local mounted rifles for the first war. The men gathered in the dawn of summer, to cheers and shouts from the bar. They walked together, slowly gathering men and pace before setting out for Cravenscliff full of food from the kitchen and the best wishes of those too old and too young. Those who finally returned still sit in the bar, time and again by the framed portraits of famed blacksmiths, larrikin butchers and bread makers who are only remembered for the life they no longer live. This was the quiet corner to new arrivals. Each Remembrance Day was bounded in those men with lopsided smiles and professional crew cuts. Young men still stood transfixed by the frames on the wall, thinking of the rabble growing old beneath the cleaned daily photographs and hope they never have to march on foreign soil to shoot at fellow men.
The days of rain you may find the mould growing before your eyes. Everyone would slowly arrive in the lounge, taking stools from the bar and perching themselves around the tiny tables that would soon be overflowing with half full glasses and Scrabble boards with incomplete games. Generally you were lucky if you got a room that didn’t leak. One guy after finding his last clean shirt ruined by a leak above his bed left and was never heard of again.
But it was the endless sunshine from May to August that saw the busiest time. Killian’s Rest wouldn’t rest. If you arrived any later than the first day of summer you wouldn’t get a room. You’d arrive to see bicycles of all shapes and sizes lined the wall of the garden. The bar would be more than bustling. There would always one or two people at the bar, more sitting upon the grass in the yard. The mutt would find a shadow and follow it around the clock until the air cooled and it could sit outside the kitchen. You’d find it hard to not be seen as you left your room, or as you struggled to pass someone on the stairs, the life of the place would seem vivid, lustful.
From the attic (full of moulding collections of Joyce, Dickens and the like), through the creaking floor boards and leaking roofs of the second storey, into the main bar and the lounge, the steaming and boiling kitchen and to the subterranean cellar everyone has a place in Killian’s Rest.
She had come to be another Mc in a country of Mc’s. She had come from what was really a country town trying to be a city with suburbs. The bus had only one stop in the town, outside the bar on McCloud Street. Above the bar, the only visible sign of an attic was a triangular window with thick fogged glass. This would have to be home.
She had made sure heaters were on during her 9 o’clock break, but the room was still cold. Her washing from the previous fortnight- a two week rain period- hung from every vantage point in some feeble attempt to dry. She sat watching the clothes dry, a knitted blanket wrapped around her shoulders, the duck feathered eiderdown across her legs. She had a pair of navy rugby socks that the owner told her were the colours of the Scots. She knew little of rugby, but they were slowly warming her fingers after another night serving the last drinks. That morning, hours ago, she had worried about the mice shit that inhabited her sole tea cup, now she worried she wouldn’t be able to feel her toes again and the possibility of her nose falling off in her sleep. But she knew the mice, too, would be freezing in the frigid cold of the attic above the bar.
She doesn’t need luxuries. A tv, a wooden box with a curved screen that made the newsreader’s head disfigured, sat in a corner. Its knobs, in some kind of failed attempt at striking for higher pay and warmer climate didn’t work, instead the volume and channel stayed static. The permanent cloud cover outside matched the dots of speckled grey covering the weather man’s cheap suit. Hours before, blankets of light drizzling rain had another twin, that of the smoke that drifted from table to table, bar stool to bar stool. Across the bar forming a constant weather front that made her clothes, hair and every pore of her skin smell like the bar.
It is not the end of the earth, her mother’s voice reverberated around her head, to be replaced with her father’s, no that ferry to that island, over there, would take her to the end of the earth.
“The year started with a crush. Not like those crushes of the early teens- on his first art teacher, or the waitress who served his dad coffee on Saturday mornings. Instead, it was an artist caught in this work a day world where art and creativity and expression and doing things for pleasure are about as valued as health insurance.
They listened to David Bowie. No not the greatest hits, but LP’s a little worn and aged, like Bowie himself. They didn’t listen for the hits, but for songs that their friends wouldn’t know, songs that the radio wouldn’t play.
The crush had found a man with an accent and a car and a fellowship at a sandstone university. For him, uni was over.
Job applications didn’t lead to interviews and a cubicle by the harbour side window, his father’s contacts dried up before autumn had flourished. The extra year of study didn’t seem to make any difference; he was now just a year older than the rest of the applicants. He returned from the city unit his dad had subsidised, to a flat behind his mother’s house in a suburb with full frontal views of neighbours’ close lines and postage stamps of greenery, neatly mown each weekend.
The factory across from his old high school couldn’t take him on; they were barely keeping enough staff to get through the financial year, let alone the next Christmas. He moved from the flat into the house, to be closer to the TV and his mother’s dinners. Her new boyfriend didn’t seem to mind, a nod and grunt, depending on the time of the day.”
They are not little tuffs of hair, grouped together, like some kind of hair apartheid, but lonely single lines, assimilated with the rest of the population, to my eye standing out like second place getters at long lost school carnivals. Really, they only look confident as they are exact opposite of the darkish extremes of the rest of the bunch. One day, a single one caught the eye in the mirror, and no, five more didn’t come to the funeral of that silver thread of hair. That’s when the ritual started, a monthly search of the hair for the grey ones. It did turn, quickly, with a strain of paranoia, into a weekly event. I avoided mirrors, easily confused of course, as I soon found more as I shaved the spines of hair from my face. I once confessed that I wouldn’t mind going grey, as long as the pimples stopped. I didn’t mind ageing, but I would burst out in pimples, more like a teen than a 20 something.
The first time I remember travelling north, the road was single laned, with a cigarette paper thin imaginary line between south bound and north bound. I remember the trees being close enough to touch from the car, in those days of windows down, pre-air con clammy trips. We’d start in the early afternoon; sleep in the car, a cocooned oven, heated by late teenager farts, pizza breath and fizzy drinks mixed with Jim Beam. Someone- other than me- would be in charge of mixed tapes to play along the way. We’d get to each stretch of country charm coastal towns and villages and turn the music down low as the sleepy truck drivers and Sydney to Brisbane buses stopped to pause. We’d be out of touch with the daily grind. A tent, sometimes, a onsite caravan, with electricity $2 per day.
For some reason, the last time I paced the car along the same road- with a different name and concrete barriers and dividers and multinational service stations with no service and the ipod on shuffle and the air con drying my lips, windows hugged tight and the external thermostat on the dash reading 37 degrees- I don’t remember the trees or the towns now conveniently by-passed.
And now we stay in a hotel with a lobby with wireless.
The first time Maree told me she loved me I was half asleep and half awake. That late night phone call was when she was drunk, laying next to a man she had loved earlier and as she whispered so he wouldn’t hear she told me she could hear a man she had loved, loving someone else.
Maree had only just got the telephone connected at the bookshop when she first confessed her love to me. What does one do if someone pleads guilty to love? How should I have reacted? It is the ancient dilemma of the male half of our race. What is the answer? What is the right response? Give everything, profess enduring love, declare the deepest desires, make sure you don’t confuse lust with love, like a Shakespearean tragic, and be overwhelmed with guilt and greed and guile? I hadn’t learnt anything from Romeo, or Hamlet or Othello or Macbeth. Their pursuit of the love of women led to only one conclusion.
One day you will have someone tell you they love you and you will not know what to say or do. That is a good thing. That is normal. Males have been caught like that- a stunned rabbit in the headlights of a car- for centuries. Really, you will be continuing a tradition.
Maree whispered down the line that she had just done something she already regretted and that she hoped that her next words would be something she wouldn’t regret. Seconds after she told be that she loved me and that she couldn’t help that, I rolled over and held another woman around the waist; I slept and woke next to someone else. Maree slept and woke next to someone else.
I wouldn’t mind my daughter being like you. I often vacuum in front of her, mockingly telling her All Men Vacuum, Don’t Forget That. I cut my steak into small pieces and wrap it in lettuce. I chew on carrots and drink from the carton only when she isn’t looking. After all, she is a little sponge. I set up the Scrabble board and make her moves for her. I finally found someone I can beat, she just happens to have a vocab of a four month old. I let my dogs lick her feet, just so she giggles. I have a small piano accordion, but I make noise that makes her cry. I hide the ipod from her, but I let her see the ancient and new records, LP’s that rattle and hum. The teevee isn’t a babysitter; black and white films come across lucid. I like it when we both read on Saturday mornings, staying in our PJ’s, while the world travels. I try to trace her finger across maps, places I’ve been, places she’ll go one day, but she never follows the path I want. Which is good, isn’t it?
I usually write fiction. Or a better description might be, I usually write about things that have happened, just not exactly how they happened. Does that make sense?
I was recently asked the question:
What can we do to change how things are with Aboriginal people?
It was within a wider discussion of Australia, Australians, education and my role as Indigenous Education Coordinator at a large coastal school.
It is a good question. I am puzzled, do we have a single answer to this question? The school I am currently working with has a wonderful reputation, wonderful standardised testing results, high retention, positive learning occuring in most areas. Yet we have never had a student who identitfies as Aboriginal or Torres Strait complete the HSC. Sure, the students may have moved into TAFE or employment or other further educational fields, and been successful. But no students with Indigenous heritage have completed the HSC.
Of course, education is a key element of any answer to that question. But what else?
Money? Attitudes? Students or teachers or community, if so, which ones first? Change teachers and student attitudes might come, alter community and you may influence students and teachers. Change students and you might have a flow on effect into teachers and community.
I have a simple idea: What is good for Indigenous students is good for all students. I would like Indigenous education to be for all students, staff and community at our school. That instead of one off art or cultural days, or NAIDOC week celebrations that look more like Australiana days (http://leparcaustralien.free.fr/), that Indigenous ideas, perspectives and community are welcomed, actively sort out and embraced to help our students learn about ancient and contemporary Australia. I would like Indigenous education to become normal. Just another thing we do well.
So my answer to the question:
What can we do to change how things are with Aboriginal people?
Of course, came in a question:
What can you do to change how things are with Aboriginal people?
“His once strong and loyal hands were the first to go. He would hold them in his lap, curled up like balls of socks, trying to bring them to life. After a close shave at work he didn’t feel the top of his thump come free, holding on by a thread. The blood alerted him to the pain he should have felt. Worse, while watching the nurse pierce his leather jacket skin, he didn’t feel a thing. With each twist and turn of the needle his body only shuddered at the thought of not feeling what he was entitled to. Of not feeling warm sand between his fingers. Of not feeling the bitter frost on his car door handle. Of not holding his fishing rod with a forefinger on the line as if it was a vein holding a pulse. He would feel again, he would feel the numbness of knowing what was lost.
He seems to be ageing.”
See you around Pop…05/09
