Chapter 4
A Peculiar Boy
As an adult, Michael Anthony Guider would boast a photographic memory. Yet he would have almost no recall of his few short preschool years on the shores of Victoria’s Port Phillip Bay and none at all of his biological father.
He was born in the industrial beachside suburb of South Melbourne on 20 October 1950. By his own reckoning, it was a bright spring Friday morning around 8 a.m.1 His 22-year-old mother, Ruth, was one of 20 000 locally employed process workers. She was also a compulsive gambler and a blossoming schizophrenic.2
Guider would nominate as his earliest recollection being subdued by an air hostess with a packet of Pascal Fruit Bon Bons when they moved to Sydney in 1954 with baby brother Tim in tow. Destitute, they took up residence in the harbour city at a Salvation Army hostel for single mums in La Perouse on the northern rim of Botany Bay. Spectacularly overlooking the scene of James Cook’s historic landing in 1770, the stately premises now house a public museum.
Despite the circumstances of their arrival, Guider instantly revelled in the sweeping new surrounds. According to his own writings on the subject, he delighted in the freedom of running barefoot through nearby paddocks of clover and watching the sun climb above the Pacific horizon like a huge orange beach ball. At dusk, he marvelled at local Aboriginal men as they launched boomerangs into the coastal sky, and on Sundays witnessed the fearless Cann brothers handle deadly vipers at their famous snake pit show on Anzac Parade.3
Behind the scenes, though, the first cracks of a dysfunctional life were starting to emerge.
As infants go, Tim was quite sickly, and Ruth began affording him extra attention. Guider deeply resented the fact and, instead of suffering an isolated tantrum and getting over it, deliberately set about tipping the scales of motherly affection back in his own favour. In a somewhat disturbing glimpse of things to come, he reverted to a kind of calculated, albeit clumsy, hostility in order to get his own way. On one occasion, Tim’s pram, with him still inside, mysteriously toppled into the surf, and on another a washing machine happened to fall on top of him.
‘He had a few accidents as a result of my ill feelings toward him,’ Guider light-heartedly conceded years later.4
Yet when it eventually suited him to dispense with euphemism and come clean, he would bitterly declare of his brother, ‘I hated him. I wanted it to be just my mother and me. I didn’t want him around and tried to kill him.’5
At the same time this was happening, Ruth was battling her own demons. Her mental disorder had begun to demand inpatient psychiatric care and, without support, she was forced to leave the boys in welfare homes. Several times, she delivered them in person to Bondi’s Scarba House, run by the Benevolent Society of New South Wales, before taking herself off to hospital.
‘I love you,’ she would tell them both before turning her back and walking away.6
Guider remembered feeling especially isolated. During one separation, he contracted chicken pox and had to dab calamine lotion on the contagious, angry blisters while quarantined under a Moreton Bay Fig tree.
***
A major change in the boys’ lives came with the arrival of a stepfather, Kevin, in late 1955. He’d been an army cook in Bougainville and Papua New Guinea during World War Two and was also a sometimes violent alcoholic. When not off binging or in the grip of a drunken rage, though, his presence seemed to counterbalance Ruth’s bouts of instability.
Around this time, the family moved 18 kilometres southwest from the city to Herne Bay, now called Riverwood. The area had previously been the site of Australia’s largest military hospital, known as the 118th. During the war, the facility had consisted of 490 timber barracks filled with more than 4000 beds, but in 1946 it passed to the state government, which converted the huts to ease a major housing shortage. Two and sometimes three families crammed into each dwelling, and the suburb soon developed an unwanted reputation for poverty, overcrowding and unruliness, hence the name change.7
No doubt some of the trouble on the estate was linked to Frank and Molly’s, an SP gambling shop run out of an old laundry.
Ruth would often send Guider down to place her bets and he became friendly with some of the men who kept watch outside, known as ‘cockatoos’. More than once, he’d heard their whistles go up and watched the shutters come down as panicked punters scrambled for cover before the coppers arrived. Afterwards, he and a few of the more enterprising kids would crawl under the surrounding boardwalks to collect dropped coins that had spilled between the cracks.
From the fifties on, public apartment blocks began replacing most of the former hospital buildings on the northern side of the railway line. The southern sector was left to undergo private redevelopment.
In the meantime, the Guiders bunked next door to the Saunders family, whose dad, Reg, had been the first Aboriginal commissioned officer in the Australian Army. They got on well and Ruth often sent the boys in with sweets and bikkies she’d baked on her old green and cream Kooka stove. Guider complied but didn’t particularly like the idea of sharing, especially when it involved his favourite, banana cake.
Captain Saunders was something of a neighbourhood hero. A veteran of both Korea and World War Two, he’d later be awarded an MBE. He was also president of the Herne Bay RSL and skippered its cricket team.8
Guider loved the unspoiled local environs and spent most of his afternoons and weekends exploring nearby Salt Pan Creek. Native trees, birds and animals enthralled him and, along with Aboriginal culture and history, would become a life-long obsession.
At school, he did well despite boyishly testing the nuns’ patience by dropping lizards on their desks and releasing Christmas beetles down the girls’ backs. He attended newly founded St Joseph’s Catholic Primary a few blocks away from his home, in Thurley Street.
The walk to and from school only took a few minutes but it was far enough to be deadly. One afternoon he was crossing the road with a classmate, Billy, when the two six-year-olds were struck by a speeding car. They’d apparently been holding hands as Guider left the gutter.
‘I took the first step forward,’ he would later recall. Yet it was his best friend, who took the full impact.
‘I was thrown to the roadside alive but little Billy died instantly.’
Almost half a century on, Guider would hold a distastefully egocentric view of the devastating incident. ‘Tragedy struck my life for the first time on the way home from school,’ he would declare. ‘I often wondered why I survived and if his mother ever wished it could have been me who died instead.’9
Some might question whether she had any reason to.
Soon after the accident, Ruth and Kevin accepted a new housing commission placement in Kirk Street, South Granville. The green L-shaped residence was next to a corner park and just a few streets from the Rothmans Pall Mall cigarette plant, where Ruth found work. As well as the extra quids, which came in handy, the deal included two free cartons of smokes every week, and with another SP bookmaker just down the road, she was in her element. In fact, the bookie had a runner who used to pedal door-to-door on a pushbike, taking wagers. Of course, Guider was soon given the job of standing out front waiting for him.
Over the back fence was the boys’ new school, Blaxcell Street Public. It was much larger than St Joseph’s but Guider especially liked it and settled in quickly. With Ruth’s encouragement, he came into his own academically and they struck a deal: a special reward at the end of the year for topping the class. When he achieved this with flying colours, she bought him his first camera. Come morning, however, the 35mm Bakelite Argus C3 was gone, pawned by Kevin to buy grog. The following year the same happened when he scored a new watch.10
Kevin’s relentless pursuit of beer money had also prompted Ruth to hide cash around the house. The only problem was she kept forgetting where she’d stashed it. The boys were forever turning up two-pound notes shoved behind the toilet cistern, pinned to the inside of the curtains or slipped into a random shoe. They’d hand them back to her and the farce would usually start all over again.
The one time Ruth noticed them with one of the recovered notes before they returned it, things ended badly. Probably incited by schizoid paranoia, she accused Guider of stealing the money from her purse. He tried to explain but she refused to listen and, in a fit of resentment, he lashed out and struck her with his fist, knocking her to the ground. When Kevin found out, he exploded with fury.
Grabbing Guider by the shirt scruff, he dragged him outside, tore a paling from the fence, splintered it over his knee and proceeded to belt the boy across the rump. ‘Don’t you ever hit a woman again,’ he roared.11
Had the circumstances been different, Guider would have naturally run to his mother, but her unwillingness to believe him had stung more than the thrashing. He was too young to be aware of Ruth’s mental fragilities and incapable of allowing for them even if he hadn’t been. Without anyone else to turn to, he withdrew, and set off in search of a new special place in which to take refuge, another Salt Pan Creek.
What he found was a local tributary of the Parramatta River, known as Duck Creek, and he began spending long hours along its banks in and around nearby Auburn, scooping up tadpoles, chasing lizards and looking for yabbie holes.
***
On and off, Ruth continued to require treatment. In her absence, Kevin ran the house but had to do it on a shoestring because his usual practice had been to drink his own wage and leave Ruth to pay all the bills. Without her income, he’d slap meals together from whatever he could find so that he could still afford to go to the bottle-o. One memorable feast consisted of an apple scavenged from a bin cooked up with some wild chokos on a metho stove because the household electricity had been cut off. Guider didn’t mind making do so much but found it embarrassing when Kevin sent him to buy low-grade off-cuts from the butcher shop. Kevin would use the so-called dog’s meat to make enough stew to last several days and bake what was sold to them as cat’s meat into an offal pie. Of course, the butcher knew who the scraps were really for and always gave them a bit extra. ‘Mucky sandwiches’ – better known during the Great Depression of the 1930s as bread and dripping – were also consumed with fairly regular monotony.12
When Ruth lobbed home well enough to pick up the pieces, they’d start afresh and eventually regain a semblance of domestic normality, but it never lasted. It was probably 1958 – around the time they bought a TV set from H.G. Palmers on hire purchase – that she suffered her first full-blown episode. After arguing heatedly with Kevin, she stormed off and told the police he was trying to kidnap the boys. When they arrived back at the house, Kevin locked the door and a standoff ensued. Curiosity got the better of Guider, who peeked out from one of the windows. Obviously delusional, Ruth screamed out, ‘There’s the bastard’, and hurled a spare house brick directly at him through the glass. Kevin yanked him away as the missile came crashing into the lounge room.
A fortnight later, after another course of treatment and respite, she waltzed back into their lives again as though nothing had happened.13
Midway through 1959, Guider was called up to see the school principal, Mr Moodie. But when he got to the office, the police were waiting to take him by paddy wagon to Granville station to meet Ruth. She told him she and Kevin had been fighting again and that she’d decided it was time to leave him.
They spent the next two weeks staying with her old SP friends, Frank and Molly, at their home in Lalor Park, before the next reconciliation. It would be the last time they would get back together and the family would never again return to South Granville or, for that matter, to anywhere ‘nice’.