1 SUNSHINE and SHADOWS by Rowan Cahill

1 SUNSHINE AND SHADOWS by Rowan Cahill Extract from the manuscript draft that became “Sunshine and Shadows” in Michael Wilding and David Myers, editors, Confessions & Memoirs: Best Stories Under the Sun , Volume 3, Central Queensland University Press, 2006. Sometimes at night when the guns and searchlights of Sydney’s coastal batteries practised in post-war tensions, Dad would take me and my younger brother outside to listen to the clubbing gunfire and watch the powerful searchlight beams sweep the skies; and he would chill us with stories of the falling Asian dominoes, and the Yellow Peril. In spite of his reassurances about our saviour Menzies, on those nights I slept with a stick under my bed to ward off invaders. The invaders had a human face. Anti-Japanese feeling officially generated during the War to bolster the war-effort, was too powerful, too rooted in White Australia, to end with Peace in 1945. During the 1950s and early 1960s, paperback copies of Russell Braddon’s best seller The Naked Island (1952), and similar hate filled prisoner-of-war accounts of experiences in the hands of Japanese militarists, usually with graphic covers depicting torture or beheading, circulated in Primary and High school playgrounds; dog-eared, confronting pages of brutality and executions were part of schoolyard culture, devoured and recounted with a vicarious blend of fascination and horror. At home the dining room table assumed an icon status in my mind. According to my parents it had served as a makeshift shelter during 1942 following Japanese submarine attacks on Sydney in May, and later June, that year. With mattresses on top, and relocated to the hallway of their rented home in a harbourside suburb, it had been on hand for emergency, shelter for my parents, my sister, and the brother that I never met--he died in 1943 from peritonitis, and, as Mum explained years later, a wartime shortage of antibiotics. A memory here of post-war shortages: of walking to a corner shop in that suburb with my “big” sister, entrusted by Mum with the precious ration coupons; just what we had to buy I cannot recall, possibly butter or tea, since the rationing of these lasted until a few months after the election of the Menzies government in December 1949; for me the importance of the coupons, and Mum’s emphasis on the trust she was placing in us, remain. Somewhere along the line in my childhood mind, and I daresay for others of my generation, anti-Japanese sentiment transferred to Asians generally, specifically the aggressive, expansionist, militarist, cruel Chinese Communists. It was not a huge leap of the imagination. When the American comic book The Phantom Goes To War was published in Australia over four issues in 1950-51, the popular masked hero in purple tights was combating ‘Reds’. However the ‘Reds’ were drawn as Japanese- militarist stereotypes, while their uniforms and weaponry were also World War 2 vintage. Even the roundels on the ‘Red’ fighter aircraft, definitely more Zero than MiG, were the Rising Sun. Slightly doctored for a Korean War audience, the comic had originally been published in the US during 1942-43 as part of the anti-Japanese war effort. 2 ****** Ours was a back-to-front house block. The front yard dropped steeply into ferns, banksia, and eucalypts, before meeting the street below; apart from a path to the letter box, it remained in its natural state, give or take a few azaleas; the back yard served as the property’s practical entrance, backing onto an oval and an access track, and crowded with apple, lemon and orange trees, rhubarb and strawberry patches, ordered beds of tomato, potato, spinach, radish, carrot, lettuce, cucumber, pumpkin, sweet corn, and a corner fowl run. Passionfruit and grape vines jostled with honeysuckle and wisteria on the fence line; beans scrambled up trellises made from disposal store camouflage netting; Arthur Yates’ Garden Guide For The Home Gardener (25 th Edition, 1951) was the bible. A mere handful of miles from the business heart of Sydney Dad trapped rabbits for meat and skins, taught us about the eels and yabbies in the creeks, and we harvested billycan loads of blackberries which Mum turned into pies. Wallabies scampered over rocky bushland slopes not yet stained by leaking sewerage; aboriginal middens could be found on the upper reaches of Middle Harbour, an hour or so hike away. One and a half miles to the west were the shops, reached sometimes by a tenuous bus link, but mainly walked or negotiated on scooter or the push bikes Dad helped my brother and I construct from second hand parts. It was an adventurous pedestrian world. We were cut off from the older established part of our suburb by a gully spanned by a grumbling wooden road bridge and a pedestrian suspension bridge that swayed alarmingly in the merest of breezes. The suburban heart was village like in simplicity on either side of the two-lane Pacific Highway. At the southern end, imposingly positioned on a rise, was the sandstone and brick Church of England, an extension of an Edmund Thomas Blacket original, with its one acre cemetery of collapsed headstones, toppled angels, weeds and untamed roses; at the northern end the Public School, and opposite it the Council Chambers, Library, and War Memorial. Between these landmarks was the commercial centre, “the shops” as Mum referred to it: Grocer’s shop; two banks (the Bank of New South Wales, and the Commonwealth Savings Bank); Post Office; butcher; shoe shop and repairer (with a window display of Kiwi Boot Polish advertisements, faded crepe paper, and dead blow flies); haberdashery; odds and ends gift shop with a subscription lending library run by a couple of old ladies; fruit and vegetable shop which also stocked a range of sweets (lollies); newsagency; barber and tobacconist’s shop, complete with traditional red and white candy striped barber’s pole; chemist; fish and chip shop; and a bakery that conjured bread from fiery ovens, and home-delivered via horse and cart. There was a bit of money to be made by child entrepreneurs at “the shops”; the chip shop and the grocery store bought newspapers to wrap food in; stray soft drink bottles, eagerly scavenged, were exchanged for their deposit value; and the butcher bought bracken fern for display purposes. East, across the bridge that spanned the railway line and station, was the Bus Stop, and across the road from that a large dilapidated weatherboard shed, the garage and rank of the one-car taxi service, drenched with rapacious Morning Glory and Choko vines. South, past a vacant lot choked with more of the same and blackberry thickets, were a couple of blocks of dark brick pre-war flats, a Milk Bar and attached residence, more flats, and Kings Theatre- the cinema, generally known as ‘the pictures’, a substantial building with a red carpeted foyer, 3 and housing a pipe organ that had featured in ABC broadcasts from the theatre. Television was around the corner, and the organ would be sold to a church after 1956, following modernisation for Cinemascope, an interlude before the theatre’s demolition in 1963 in favour of home units. It was at ‘the pictures’, during late childhood, from the vantage of the cheap back stalls, that we imbibed a Saturday matinee diet of Jungle Jim and Tarzan, taming jungles with their brawn and knives, of B-Grade leather slapping, swaggering, manhandling western gunslingers and sanitary singing cowboys, facing a galaxy of mean faced, six o’clock shadowed villains and hordes of redskin savages, of stoic prune faced British World War 2 derring do and POW escapology that diverted attention from the post-war disintegration of the British Empire, of historical costume dramas and Christian sword and sandal epics with American accents: a clean cut world of goodies and baddies, sweetened by a couple of pennies’ worth of lollies. With no family car until the mid 1960s, it was not uncommon during the early fifties for Dad to take me and my younger brother on long Sunday afternoon treks, giving Mum a rest from our restless energies; the back ways of St. Ives, Pymble, Turramurra; the places of Dad’s childhood; a dying world of persimmons, loquats, china pears, and lilli pillies, where dairies and market gardens were in their declining years, colonial vestiges soon to be enclosed by developers and swallowed by the as yet un-named urban sprawl. For us the fifties was a world where the postman walked his round, perishable food was kept fresh in an ice-box and ice was regularly home-delivered by the ice-man, milk came in a billycan home-delivered morning via horse and cart, radio was king and we kids had crystal sets, and the early morning clatter of the sanitary carter (“sanny-man”) changing the toilet pan was a weekly event. Sometimes on our walks we would end up in Ku-ring-gai Avenue, Turramurra, which we did not mind because this was a trek usually rewarded with an ice cream cone from a milk bar on the nearby Pacific Highway. Our destination was Boongala , the expansive Depression era home of Eric Campbell, solicitor, former World War 1 army colonel, and 1930s leader of the flamboyant, paramilitary, conservative New Guard organisation. “That’s where the Colonel lived, son;” Dad reminding us for the umpteenth time, pointing across the fence and wide expanse of formal garden and trees. The Upper North Shore; New Guard country. Waitara Oval where I later trained for adolescent schoolboy athletics was where Dad claimed he had drilled with a .303 rifle, an adolescent New Guard trooper.

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