fairfield

It turns out that we leave Warrnambool in 1958 when I am seven because my father and his brother fall out. They are partners in an accounting practice in Kepler Street. Owen, my uncle, is having an affair with their secretary. My father demands it stop or he’s out. Noel, the secretary, eventually becomes my step-aunt, but I never meet her.

We arrive in Melbourne while my grandparents are away. Each year they leave 551 Heidelberg Road in Alphington and sit at the captain’s table on tramp steamers like the SS Eastern Argosy and the SS Nellore. They visit Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai to haggle with the Asiatics.

I remember trips to the docks—South Wharf and Victoria Pier—to pick up my grand-parents on arrival home and the awful trinkets they distribute to their grand-children in the huge dark sitting-room at 551. Tinkling musical pagodas and clay pigs-head pencil sharpeners put me off Asia forever.

My grand-parents’ house is a rambling weatherboard. A cypress hedge protects it from the hum of Heidelberg Road. A circular path encompasses a large palm tree and roses line the path. The back yard goes forever and has room for several sheds containing big black Buick and Plymouth automobiles, an orchard, and a billiard room.

My father plays billiards against his brother Johnnie or his Uncle Owen. I move the sliders on the scoring rack and hand them blues to chalk their cues. Boxes of Lucky Strikes—booty from the Orient—occupy the benches lining the walls. Everyone smokes: my grand-parents, my parents, Uncle Owen, Johnnie and his wife, my Aunty Helen. You can tell she used to be a looker.

Uncle Owen is in fact my great-uncle. His wife, Aunty Vi, is a chiropodist. They live next door and have a boarder, a single mother from Holland named Hilda. Sometimes Hilda babysits and I sleep over. I walk to school along the disused Australian Paper Mills railway siding with Hilda’s daughter Glenda. She’s slightly older than I am and stirs my nascent sexual juices.

Alphington is Collingwood territory. Their captain, Murray Weideman, owns the milk bar across Heidelberg Road from 551. Every kid in grade 2 at Fairfield State School barracks for Collingwood. I don’t so much as know the name of another VFL team.

“I’m going to barrack for Collingwood,” I tell my father.

“You are not,” he replies, and disappears into the dark forbidding bedroom I’m too scared to enter. He returns with a framed photo of a footballer in lace-up jerkin and knee-length knickerbockers. “This is Uncle Charlie,” he says. “Charlie Hammond. He played for Carlton. We barrack for Carlton.”

Indeed we do. Charlie Hammond, Uncle Charlie, played in five Carlton premiership teams—1906, 1907 and 1908, and 1914 and 1915. No Carlton player has bettered his record.

My grand-parents arrive home from Indochina and after three months at 551, we move to the other side of town, to Bentleigh.

          

Rock on.