Naturally, I have no recollection of this, but Mum told me I was born at the Royal Women’s Hospital in Paddington and I lived in Liverpool Street for only a month or two before she and my old man bundled me up, kicking and screaming, and we all went to live in the Housing Commission block in Camperdown. My first memory locks in when I was three in 1968 and I was attending pre-school down the road from where we lived. Other kids, kind teachers, big drawings on the walls, running wild in the playground, devon sandwiches and warm milk for lunch. My joy when Mum would come to collect me at three o’clock.
In my mind’s eye I can also see Mum coming home from her work as a cleaner at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Missenden Road, Camperdown. She also cleaned at the stock exchange in Sydney’s CBD. When I was toddling, and later, bouncing off the walls as I careened around that little flat, there was always Mum, my big brother and my little sister, and occasionally my dad. James and I shared one of the two bedrooms and Mum and Alison were in the other. My father slept with my mother when he was home, and Alison joined James and me in our room. I didn’t know where he was otherwise and no one told me. I know today that he was off doing the heavy drinking that would kill him, but I have no memory of the raised voices, slurred shouting and violence that would rage each time he returned, nor of James’s and my mother’s tears. Consequently, while I can be very pissed off at my father for the things I have heard he did to Mum and James, I can’t hate him like James does. He called me ‘Sunshine’. I liked the name and it is still my nickname of choice for a mate.
Mum was brave, kind and spoke beautifully. She always wore nice soft dresses. Can I tell you, her heart was made of gold. She taught all of us kids good manners and she was adamant that we use them at all times. I was so proud to go out walking on the streets of Camperdown, and later Woolloomooloo, with her. Once, Alison, James and I were strolling together along the footpath, possibly Pyrmont Bridge Road, possibly Broadway after we’d been to Grace Brothers, and a woman, a complete stranger, said to our mother, ‘Excuse me, but I simply have to tell you. You are so lucky to have such well-behaved children.’
Mum replied, ‘Luck has nothing to do with it.’
My mother was tough. By her example she showed me that no matter what stands in your way – an abusive and drunken husband, lack of money, your home a tiny flat in a terrible suburb, no connections, three young dependants – you can achieve. Maybe you cannot realise every dream, but you can nail the realistic ones. She taught me to never give up and so many times between then and now, when I’ve been on the verge of quitting, I’ve remembered her and knuckled down.
As kids, we really did make our own fun at Camperdown. We played in the sewer that ran all the way to Balmain. Big logs floated through the underground passages and we tried to jump onto them and ride them like surfboards. A downpour of rain and we could have drowned. In the grounds of the Children’s Hospital there was a huge mountain of coal to power the place, and we’d dive into a pile and come out with our clothes and skin coloured a black that defied Solvol, pumice stone or any other scrubbing agent in existence back then.
No factory was safe from us local kids. I can’t remember ever being defeated by a lock. We broke into the perfume factory. Bigger boys lifted me up and I climbed in through a narrow window, then opened it up from inside. We sold the bottles of perfume around Camperdown and those that we couldn’t sell we gave to our unwitting mothers, pretending that we’d saved up to buy them. Days later, Mum answered a knock on the door and was alarmed to find two police officers demanding to speak with her son. ‘James?’
‘No, Stephen.’
‘But he’s only five!’ Nevertheless I copped a stern warning.
We busted into Grace Brothers’ Missenden Road storage facility, and no establishment that smelled as delicious as the Weston Biscuits factory was going to escape a raid. I pulled that particular job solo. Slipping through a gate that someone had conveniently left open, I sneaked inside the depot to where the biscuits were stacked ready to be loaded into the delivery trucks and snaffled a big box of Wagon Wheels. I took them home and hid them in my wardrobe. Over the next few days I ate them. James slept in the same room as me, but neither he nor anyone else saw or suspected a thing until I started breaking out in hives. Big red hives. Wagon Wheels were James’s favourite treat. I’m fairly certain that I didn’t offer him one from my secret stash.
James was five years older than me, and hung out with his own mates around the streets of Camperdown or at the playground. He wasn’t keen on his little brother tagging along, and that suited me. I had an entrepreneurial streak (don’t ask me where it is today!) and made a little money picking up discarded soft drink bottles from the street and taking them to the corner stores for the five-cent cash refund they offered in those days. There’d be me, every afternoon after school, the kid who collects the bottles.
I was a climber since I could walk. I was strong, light on my feet, and could contort myself into impossible shapes to get me to that next hand-hold. On a rare outing to the zoo, Mum had to rescue me when I climbed up the bars of the bears’ cage. I was fearless. I just wanted to get that little bit closer.
My most notorious climb was to the top of our block of flats. I climbed up the outside drainpipe, no matter that it was only precariously attached to the bricks of the building, and sat on the edge of the roof, ten storeys up. Heights didn’t bother me. For all I cared I could have been standing on the ground. (Years later as a teenager I illegally climbed the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, suitably clad in a balaclava.) On the roof at Camperdown there was no guard rail, only a thin railing. I looked down and noticed a largish crowd of people pointing at me and yelling things, just what I don’t know because they were a long, long way below, and besides, there was a strong wind blowing. I decided I would entertain them by pretending to fall. I stumbled a bit and waved my arms, as though I was teetering and about to plummet to my death. Many of the onlookers laughed at my daring display.
James wasn’t so easily amused. He saw me up on the roof and came storming up and dragged me home, by the hair.
Oddly, when you think I later became a boxer, I got into very few fights when I was a boy, and this is all the more remarkable because we lived in a neighbourhood where it seemed that every sideways glance was answered by a smack in the mouth. Collecting bottles and breaking and entry were more my go.
James has a photographic memory of life in Camper-down. My memories are a bit hazier. I can remember my old man erupting at Mum or James, but rarely at me. Perhaps he spared me because I was smaller, perhaps because he saw something of himself in me.
There was an occasion that springs to mind: we were all having dinner, five of us squeezed around a small wooden Laminex-topped table. Mum or James said something that enraged my father and he brought both his fists crashing down on the table and food flew in all directions. Potatoes, peas, lamb chops hurtling all over the kitchen. Another time, he punched James because my brother was engrossed in a TV cartoon and James had the volume up too high. My old man had a short, short fuse.
In my younger days, Dad was a big, strong man, tanned and with distinctive angular jaw and nose. He could be charming when he wanted to be. I only learned his story later, and more from Mum’s brothers and sisters than from her or James. Dad was an Englishman who, aged around twenty, abandoned his wife and children and left his homeland to sail to Australia on a merchant ship. I was told he jumped ship in Sydney, and that he never became an Australian citizen despite living here for the rest of his life. He didn’t have a good singing voice yet he sang a lot when he was sober, funny English songs, and growing up in a family where there was a piano and everybody sang, he knew all the words. One of my aunts told me that his father died young and his mother was cruel to him, though it’s all long ago and hearsay so no one can know for sure.
At Christmas 1969, Dad, who had been drinking heavily, came back for a few days and was driving all of us west down Oxford Street. I was in the front passenger seat of his car and Mum, Alison and James were in the back. The old man thought he’d get to wherever we were going sooner if he drove in the buses-only lane. Naturally, we were cleaned up by a double-decker. The impact sent the car up onto the kerb by the Courthouse Hotel. Mum flew forward in those pre-seatbelt days and whacked her head on the back of the front seat. She was bleeding from the mouth. Despite our shock, James and I tried to staunch the blood. My father thought only of himself. He opened up his door and fled the scene, knowing he’d be busted for drink-driving.
I was five when my father left us. It was 1970.
Not long ago, my partner Hilary and I returned to Camperdown and went to the block of flats. We bumped into a woman I remembered as being one of our neighbours from back in the day. We talked of times passed, and specifically of the time from 1970 to 1973, when it was just Mum, James, Alison and me living in the flat. She had asked Mum where Jimmy was and Mum had not told her he’d deserted us. She would have been too ashamed to. Instead, she’d simply replied, ‘Oh, he’s gone away to work.’
One Saturday morning when I was five, I was playing in a kids’ rugby league comp at Moore Park. I had my jersey, shorts, socks and boots on and was sitting on the grass on the sideline waiting for our game to start. I felt a pat on my back. I took no notice, thinking some boy had brushed against me by mistake. Then another pat. I ignored that too. Now a third, heavier pat. I turned around angrily to see who was prodding me and it was Dad. I was so surprised I forgot that I was supposed to dislike him; instead I felt pure delight. He’d come to watch me play. He loved me after all. I just wrapped myself around his inside leg and looked up at him, saying, ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ As we got ready to run on I gave Dad a final squeeze and said, ‘Are you going to be here when the game’s over?’
‘Of course, Sunshine. Now just go and play.’
I ran proudly onto the field, determined to play the game of my life for my father. I assumed he’d watch the game and then we’d go home together. I played my heart out and scored a try and I looked across to see if he’d seen my mighty run to the line. He was gone. That broke my heart. He made me feel like I was nothing.
All week long I hoped and prayed that Dad would show up for my next game. On the morning of the match I got it into my head that he’d be walking to Moore Park where we were to play, and I walked there the whole way from Camperdown, down Missenden Road, into Carillon Avenue, left into City Road and right into Cleveland Street which runs all the way for some kilometres to Moore Park. I didn’t see him because he wasn’t coming.
My first fight was with my best friend of the time. I was seven, he was eight. His family was offered a Housing Commission terrace home in Woolloomooloo but turned it down because they thought it was too decrepit. Our family ended up taking it instead. My friend lived on the seventh floor of our block of flats in Camperdown. We were having a silly game in the lifts, pushing the doors open and closed. Somehow our game blew up. He punched me. Now I knew I was a better rugby league player than he was but I had always considered him a better fighter. Nevertheless, I hit him back. We got stuck into it, whacking each other there in the lift for all we were worth. I was surprised to find myself not only holding my own against him, but giving him a belting. And another thing, I’d always thought I’d be all emotional and upset if I got in a fight, but I was as cool as a spud. It was a moment of clarity I had: I enjoy hitting and being hit. There was nothing to be afraid of in a fight. His punches were heavy; they didn’t hurt me. I was coldly fixated on landing telling blows on his most vulnerable spots, and as he got scared and tired, he could not defend himself against me. Eventually James and my friend’s brothers separated us. One of them said, ‘Do you blokes want to punch on?’
I said, without hesitation, ‘ Yes!’
My friend said, ‘No way!’
I walked off with James and he put his arm around me.