FROM ABOVE

We boys skip-walk-skip down busy Denham Street to keep up with Mum’s bouncing polka-dot skirt. It’s 1961, I’m seven with a brother two years either side, and I’m thinking what a bright and blowy Saturday morning it is when I’m suddenly pinned to the footpath beneath a crushing length of something fallen from above. ‘Get it off, please-please get it off,’ I croak with the last breath I might ever take. Adults turn to stare but none rush to help; some smile. Now my brothers crouch over me to lift either end of the object, which, with mighty groans and stagger-steps, they lower to the footpath. When I spring to my feet, Mum swats each of us over the head and snaps, ‘No more Capricorn jokes!’ She’s right, of course: we’ve been in Rockhampton far too long to still be getting flattened by rogue Tropic of Capricorn dashes dropping from the sky. Especially when they’re just pretend ones on a map.

Later, when Dad comes out of his manager’s office at the Wintergarden Cinema, where we’ve met for morning tea, he finds us boys gawking at the big wall photo of downtown Rocky, taken from the sky. ‘Just like an Asian shantytown from above, boys,’ he booms in his white sports coat and bow tie. ‘Block after bloody block of rusty tin roofs!’ And he’d know, because before Rocky we were in Singapore. That’s where we boys were born, not that I remember much except for smells, tastes, and words like ah-ma and the one we still use for a pee, si-si. That’s for a boy pee, at least. And one of my only picture memories is of splashing around in our water-ski enclosure, Mum helping us boys take turns to swim underwater through her legs by reaching down with a shove. Then I was eating an apple in the shallows and saying it tasted salty but okay, and that was my picture-thinking finished till Rocky.

Today, instead of the usual weekend matinee at the Wintergarden, there’s a charity fashion show, with Mum as top model. That was her old job in her Sydney catwalk days with a lady called June Dally-Watkins. Dad’s on the mic to spruik the models, whatever that means. And soon he’ll say his favourite line that makes people laugh for some reason: ‘There, but for the god of grace, go I!’ Whenever the models take a break behind the curtains, we boys do a few quick laps of the stage in sailors’ suits or the latest smart corduroy overalls, or even the lemon satin pyjamas with monogrammed pockets we wear to bed.

‘Were Daddy’s Singapore bosses famous runners?’ is a question my mother says — for the love of Michael! — she is sick and tired of hearing.

‘No, darling, I’ve already told you, their names only made them sound like runners,’ she tells my younger brother from the stove. ‘Maybe they got those silly names so they’d never be called Rick.’ Run Run Shaw and Runme Shaw were Chinese squillionaire brothers who started Asia’s biggest cinema chain, Shaw Brothers, and it was Dad’s job as marketing director to get people to their Hollywood movies. It’s also why our lounge-room walls are covered in framed photos of my parents lounging and dancing with Elizabeth Taylor, John Wayne, and Ava Gardner; famous actors were always flying in to help Dad do his job. He picked them up at the airport in our Borgward cabriolet, made sure they turned up on time and not too drunk for the galas he organised, and a few days later returned them to the airport.

When visitors ask how on earth my five-foot-ten dad and the six-foot-three John Wayne posed level with arms on each other’s shoulders in those photos, my mother sniggers, ‘He stood on a box, that’s how!’ to make them laugh. That’s when Dad’s hands go up like he’s under arrest and he protests, ‘Don’t look at me: the duke said it’d make a better photo if we were level, so he left the room and came back with that crate. Champion fella!’

Why we left film-star Singapore for shantytown Rocky can start fights. ‘We’d still be there if you hadn’t called their bluff on that last pay rise,’ is how Mum explains it to Dad. And he says back that he was promised an even better job in Sydney, but by the time we arrived, those Sydney bosses only had Rocky left. ‘There’s your burned bridges for you,’ is usually her last word. But to our Friday party regulars tonight, between the jokes, savouries, and drinks, Mum doesn’t even mention the pay-rise business. She tells them instead that we left because of the world-famous race riots when Singapore wanted to become its own country. ‘Terrible times,’ she tut-tuts. ‘Cars on fire, the odd crazy man running around with a machete; we didn’t know if we’d be alive next week, and the boys were terrified.’ Now she reminds her friends why we’re still in Rocky: ‘At least country people don’t pretend to be something they’re not!’ before using a handy silence to return to the story about her film-star girlfriend whose photo she’s pulled from the wall. ‘As … I was saying, this one was definitely your pillow of society,’ when suddenly everyone’s doing that body-snapping cough-laugh that party people do.

Dad’s name is Ashley, but he’s been Gary from the day he became Australia’s youngest cinema manager at nineteen, because he’s supposed to look like the actor Gary Cooper. ‘Sure, from the hairline up,’ Mum always snaps, ‘though I think he’s more William Holden around the eyes and Adolf around the chops.’ And Mum herself is meant to be the spitting image of Virginia McKenna, which is why she’s showing off a framed contract to double for Virginia in A Town like Alice. ‘This piece of paper’s made me a household name in our kitchen, at least,’ she sighs. More laughs.

Tonight’s party is a Latin Night, and there’s been lots of terrible music. Arriving men had to dip their fingers in a can labelled ‘axle grease’ and run them through their hair, though it’s really just a mix of Vaseline and Californian Poppy. You won’t hear Elvis Presley or Johnnie Ray on Latin Night, just this other stuff of ladies whisper-singing and running their words together fast, which Mum calls bossa nova. When I go over and tap her elbow to ask what language they’re singing in, she says, ‘Foreign, darling,’ before Dad butts in with, ‘Quadruple Dutch,’ the chuckling man next to him, ‘All Greek to me,’ another, ‘The port-you-grease,’ until almost everyone has a turn, the haw-haws louder with each guess. Now West Side Story is playing, and the volume’s turned up when Mum disappears before shuffle-stepping back in a side-split skirt, shaking maracas above her head and swinging her hips with sharp half-steps for tassels to jump everywhere. She’s singing along, ‘I like to leeeve in Amer-ica,’ and repeats it a few times, her final effort keeping America’s last ‘a’ going so long it squeals, followed by yips of ‘oi, oi’. Now a man shuffles across to follow her, grabbing her hips. A lady latches on to him likewise, my father behind her, and soon the whole room’s weaving around with those maracas waving high up front like centipede antennas, everyone still shuffling, hip-swinging, and oi-oi-ing, until we boys are told by Mum when she passes, ‘If you can’t stop gawking, go to bed.’

We Coopers are down from the great Lord Shaftesbury who freed all the kids from the coal mines in olden-days England, and Dad would have been the latest Lord if not for some family skulduggery. I’m told all this has nothing to do with us boys being called ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy’ when we’re fussy with dinner, or makan, as we still call it; and that’s after we’ve been called to the table by Mum shrieking, ‘Mari sini bunya.’ (Whenever Dad’s finished eating, he leans back, rubs his tummy, and groans, ‘Sudah habis.’)

•

My silver medal in the Central Queensland under-eight freestyle championship proves I’m the second best for my age in this part of Australia.

We joined the swimming club last season because we water ski on weekends and need to be strong swimmers. On our first club night, Dad let us shake hands with the captains, Peter Hunt and Marilyn Stock, and then their bodies were left floating around inside my head forever because they seemed so perfect. As we waited for our first races behind the blocks, floodlights sent pointy shadows between our legs onto the concrete, and you could grow them long and skinny or short and fat by how far your legs were apart. Or you could keep them going between fat-pointy and long-pointy by bouncing on the spot.

Whenever my father changes into his cossies, which he can’t call anything but ‘trunks’, he reaches down their front to make sure his tossle is pointing to the ground. As his hand dives in for the double tuck, his knees bend in sharp concertina movements, and for a second or two he’s one of those little corkscrew men you pop wine corks with. When he swims before club, he never goes far or fast but you can tell he’s supposed to be good by the tilt of his head and the bend of his elbows, and when he breathes he’ll wink at you. Other times he’ll dive to the bottom of the deep end with one of us on his back, which is scary but fun because we know he’ll run out of air before we do.

Our two ski boats wait all week on trailers under the house like varnished upside-down eagle beaks. Both have 100-horsepower Evinrudes clamped to their transoms, and their own names of Ski-Daddle and Ski-Malaya stencilled on the bow. I’m still on two skis, but my older brother has moved on to one, which is much harder; I tried my very first single last weekend and lasted five seconds. The best skiers launch through the air from floating ramps in the middle of the Fitzroy River, or go barefoot.

I’m glad we’ll be skiing at Yeppoon on the coast soon, because I hate missing our landing pontoon to end up lost in reeds on the downstream banks. And last week I circled so wide that I hit the shore and tumbled into somebody’s picnic, bruising my chest on a tent peg. People say the Fitzroy’s full of crocs and sharks because of the meatworks upriver, but Dad says you don’t get sharks in rivers. That only leaves crocs. And you always see bloated cow guts snagged on low branches overhanging the mystery swirls at the far bank, where boat drivers make a wide pass to scare you into falling off. When you come off your skis in the middle of the river, you spear down into the brown can’t-see-a-thing below, and when you surface you see one of your skis drifting ten yards to the right, and the other, ten to the left. This is suddenly the world’s biggest problem when you don’t know which to swim for first, since you just might choose the one where your hand brushes something solid below. Luckily I’ve swum for the correct one every time, quickly pulling it beneath for a guard while I paddle to the other. Then I put both skis back on lightning quick and hunch over to make them into a special shield while I wait for the boat to circle back, the tow rope dragging behind with its wooden bar skidding and flipping along the surface like some maniac fin. When the driver slows right down for you to grab that passing bar, you never miss, because you know you’d die of just waiting for another slow circle.

Rivers and pools are different. Unlike the mud-flavoured river, pool water looks and tastes of nothing much, but Dad says it’s up to your swimming arms to turn it into something by pulling deep and hard. In a pool, you’re the total boss of your body, but in the river you’re just this dumb lump of struggling meat watched from below.

Our first weekend at Yeppoon is spent not skiing, but helping to finish the new ski clubhouse and pouring concrete for our own shack’s downstairs toilet and shower, or ‘ab-looo-shuns’ as Dad yodels it. After lunch upstairs, he drops onto the lounge and groans, ‘Wake me in an hour, boys.’

‘How long’s an hour, Dad?’

‘Forty winks!’ is how long an hour is.

We can’t find Mum, so to use up winks we wander the Causeway Park shore, discover a dinghy, and row it onto the bay. We’re wondering how many winks are left when it starts to rain and we turn back. But as we circle, my oar’s jerked from my hands when the blade catches on chop, and by the time I’m back on my seat it’s slipped out of its bracket and is drifting out to sea. We try rowing with one oar; my older brother and I stroke and stroke until the boat completes a part circle, when we place it on the other side to pull hard there, repeating this for a while in increasing drizzle. Now we’ve lost sight of the shore because it’s suddenly raining cats and dogs and a wind’s come up. As my brother wonders out loud what’s the point in rowing when we might be heading out to sea a half-circle at a time, we hear one of the ski-club boats roar close by in the rain, and somehow they’ve seen us, because they’ve turned back to pull alongside. After we’re helped aboard, the men attach a rope to the dinghy, and we’re the happiest boys ever to be speeding for shore.

‘You’re lucky I don’t spiflicate you all,’ Mum shrieks, running down from our shack as the boat pulls in. I’ve never seen her so cross, but she won’t spiflicate us or even slap legs in front of our rescuers, and we follow her back. ‘You can count your lucky stars your father’s not here, is all I can say,’ is all she can say when we’re back inside, so I’m glad all this has taken much longer than forty winks and that it’s such a big day for lucky stars.

•

A few Sundays later, we’ve had to stop skiing while the boats give joy rides to underprivileged kids for the Capricorn Festival, where the town’s main streets are clogged with floats, streamers, and banners. It’s been fun to sit with the squealing kids as they grip the inside rails of what they call the speedboat and squint fierce X-rays into the spray. Dad’s also set up a stage near shore for the odd singer to sing and a DJ to play records, and where the mayor and a priest are climbing up to speak. After the priest steps down, Dad says it’s nothing but a complete coincidence that the very next song the DJ plays is ‘Ring of Fire’ by Johnny Cash. ‘Down, down, down, and the flames get higher,’ Dad belts out into a pretend microphone, as if he’s the one up on stage.

Later, Mum tells us boys to watch the causeway bridge for her brother Uncle Martyn, who himself is almost a priest, and who’s driven all the way from Sydney in his new red Mini. He’s on his way further north, but will stay an hour to say hello. We’re already sick of watching after three cars go past and still no red Mini with an almost-priest at the wheel, and decide to play marbles on the ground instead. Soon we’re looking up and being introduced to this Uncle Martyn, before getting stuck straight back into our game. But he stays and sits on an old drum to watch us fire off our shots, chuckling whenever we call the odd marble thissy and thatty. ‘Where did you get those wonderful words, boys?’ he asks. I like it that Uncle Martyn thinks thissy and thatty so funny, but we can’t tell him where they came from until my younger brother says, ‘Maybe from the marbles themselves.’

‘For goodness sake,’ he roars, ‘from the very marbles themselves!’ before we boys look at each other and can’t help laughing along too. Seconds later, the only grown-up to have ever noticed our thissies and thatties is gone.

Heading home in the dark, we’ve just taken a high bend when the car gets a jolt from nowhere, and suddenly we’re being chased by a sparkler where the boat trailer’s right wheel used to be. Cursing those underprivileged, but now ‘smart-arse’, joy-ride kids as if they’re to blame, Dad hits the brakes, and the missing wheel bounds past before dropping over the black hillside. Fifteen minutes later, all of us still searching with only cigarette lighters and the moon to see with, there’s a round gleam in a gully and that’s our wheel. Dad rolls it back up to the trailer, but the missing axle pin which let the wheel come off still needs replacing, and he asks, ‘Is a man supposed to go around with a spare pin in his trunks all day?’ When he eventually finds a loose nail in the boot, he hammers it with a rock as far as it can go into an axle hole too small for it. ‘Touch wood, boys,’ he says, driving off slowly. Waking up later in the back seat, we boys cheer to see the boat’s made it home.

•

Next day at school, we’ve started our first class upstairs after playing tag downstairs right till the bell, when the teacher growls something I don’t understand, about me — Cooper to him — looking like ‘a dog’s breakfast’. I wonder why he’d say this, because our wire-haired Foxie at home never has breakfast. But when I’m snapped at again, this time to tuck my shirt in, I suddenly get that I’m a mess from all that running around. We’re soon reciting the usual am-are-is-was-were, when the headmaster suddenly speaks over our teacher from the old grey box on the wall above his head. Again, it’s my name I’m hearing, the only eight-year-old name to have made the school swim team, now being told to take itself immediately to the headmaster’s office to learn more about next week’s carnival, and suddenly a Cooper has gone from dog food to being famous enough to walk out of class.

•

Waiting to leave for the next ski day, we’re playing with our neighbours the Cox boys in their front yard when the oldest, Jim, asks which Cooper wants to be lassoed; the Coxes will lasso anything for fun because they’re always roping cows in the cattle trucks their dad drives. I instantly yell ‘ME’, and shoot across their lawn for our yard. Next thing, I’m trying to breathe through nostrils full of our rose-garden soil, with my brothers shaking me and shouting, ‘Wake up, wake up, he got you clean around the ankles.’

A few seconds later, Dad pulls up outside in our new Holden with boat and trailer in tow, and we’re soon heading for Yeppoon, my parents discussing last night’s ski-club meeting, when it’s ‘by-laws’ this and ‘minutes’ that, ‘the Department of Harbours and Marine’ and ‘permission blah blah’, with Mum getting off so many blah blahs between her cigarette puffs that the car feels set to explode. Maybe I’m still not right from being knocked out, and when I say I feel sick from the blah blahs and smoke, Dad orders all windows down. This blows Mum’s hot cigarette ash over the back, before she flicks what’s left of her Craven ‘A’ Cork-Tip out the window with an angry ‘Thanks very much, everyone.’ And I’m everyone.

When the fresh air has me feeling better, I tell Dad he should have asked last night’s club meeting to buy beautiful, coal-black outboards like the Mercuries on the other club’s boats to replace our plain white Evinrudes, and he promises we’ll be using them over his dead body. ‘They’re full of rust’ is all he seems to know about Mercuries.

•

A bunny’s the shape we see in a bright full moon heading for Yeppoon at dawn, but it’s also the front name of our swimming coach, Bunny Williams, at the warm Memorial Pool, with its two life-sized toy cannons outside aimed over the heads of invading customers. His family skis with us for free, in a swap for free swimming coaching, though Mum says we Coopers come out ahead because Bunny keeps tossing the odd shilling into my younger brother’s lessons to help him go the extra yard.

And last weekend, even my older brother’s schoolteacher Miss Spengler came skiing. Dad said we ‘abso-loot-ely insisted’ on giving her free lessons to return the favour of her taking my brother to church. Which was odd, since Dad usually can’t stand god-botherers. (It was the first time any of us boys had been to Sunday school.) Miss Spengler had told my parents that every child deserved at least one day of their lives in church, and last week it deserved my brother. When she didn’t turn up for school on Monday following the skiing lessons, Dad said she was clearly suffering a bad case of the rooster-rushes: all first-time skiers get the rushes because they can’t balance without crouching right down on their haunches, where a rooster tail of spray shoots up between their skis all day, resulting in diarrhoea. ‘Let’s pray for her speedy recovery,’ he kept saying.

The only other god-botherers we know are the McFarlys, our neighbours in Lane Street before we moved to North Rocky, and Mum and us boys still visit them. They’re a special type of god-botherer Dad calls harmless crackpots. One day I was playing in their front yard when a tiny white box containing a silver medallion tumbled from the sky, stopping right at my feet. The McFarly girls recognised it instantly as a gift straight down from God and said I was blessed to have been chosen. ‘I’ll say,’ I said; to be the only one chosen for a God medal had to beat winning a medal just for swimming. When I told everyone over dinner, Dad said it was an old trick of the McFarlys to toss those boxes from their front window near unsuspecting kids. Then he asked, ‘I don’t suppose you still have God’s medal on you now?’ and I suddenly realised I’d lost track of it after the oldest McFarly girl opened the box to show me. ‘I rest my case,’ he said. Mum told me to ignore him: ‘You’re lucky God’s always in the McFarly neighbourhood looking for deserving children.’

She said it didn’t matter anyway, since we boys were now proper Catholics. ‘When we took our long holiday at Nanna’s in Sydney last year without your father, Uncle Martyn had you all confirmed.’ Martyn was in the seminary then, and he reminded her it would be her sin if we boys were never allowed into heaven. I don’t remember the confirmation, only the great toys Nanna gave us; my favourite was a black plastic gun holster, but I’m a sucker for black and shiny.

The only other bit of that Sydney visit still in my head — besides waking early most mornings to the smell of toast, and the sight of Nanna in the kitchen in her bottle-thick glasses, dressing gown, and bandaid-coloured horseshoe of a hearing aid and on her second pot of tea or sucking ice — is being in a Kogarah phone box one dark afternoon with Mum. When I asked who she was ringing, she covered the mouthpiece and shout-whispered down, ‘I’m calling about a job.’ Then I asked how much jobs cost and couldn’t believe it when she hissed back, ‘Jobs don’t cost money, they give it.’ Obviously I didn’t know much about jobs, money, or owning things back then, because when I pocketed a stone from the roadside, I wondered if that meant I owned it. But I threw it back anyway when I saw how many more I could take or own any time I liked; I could come back with a wheelbarrow. And now I remember one more good thing about our special Kogarah holiday: the shop on the hill, smelling of a hundred years of lollies, biscuits, and spotlessness.

Mum says my God medal changed me, since I keep telling people that what we see is not always what it seems. Take the clouds: sitting on our front step yesterday after the Cox boys chopped their chooks’ heads off to eat their bodies for lunch (that is, once those flapping fountains stopped crashing around the yard, maybe watched by heads still on the stump) when there seemed nothing left to do but stare at the sky with my younger brother, I told him that even though clouds drift so slowly, you might find they were speeding if you were actually up there. He didn’t answer, but maybe his head was still full of chooks’ heads seeing their bodies run off. And with us boys dressed in whites and being driven to the YMCA today, we’re passing an ugly old house in a gully, covered in vines and flaking paint. ‘That old shack might be nice on the inside,’ I announce. No reply. But after a pause, a much older boy we’ve given a lift to says, ‘Shush, so your father can concentrate on driving.’

‘There’s no two ways about that,’ Dad calls back.