My Dad, Joe

My Dad, Joe, was an only child. He was born in 1925 in a small private hospital in Campbell Street, Wollongong, less than 600m up the road, and just across Corrimal Street, from where he grew up.

He was a sickly young child – no doubt a result of his father contracting malaria in the Jordan Valley during the Great War. Nana would take Dad on a steam train once a week for quite some months to see a specialist in Sydney, in a effort to make him better. Grandfather’s malaria apparently meant Dad was rare. It may have been the reason he was an only child. Or it may have been that Nana didn't really like sex. She and Grandfather slept in separate rooms.

But Dad got better. And grew. And when he was a strapping teenager-about-town, he met my Mum, Dulcie Irene, and wanted to step out with her.

Mum’s mum said no. She said Dad should make himself scarce until Mum was older, and had a career of her own – which he did. He regularly holidayed in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney with other hormone-driven young people, until he was allowed to marry Mum in the early 1950s. Grandma Georgina Bunt, Mum's mum, took no emotional prisoners.

I always remembered the father of my childhood being a forthright man. He didn’t drink, smoke or swear (at home, anyway, around us kids or Mum), but was quick to snap if temper got the better of him. To me as a child, he was a mountain of steely sinew and muscle, to be feared as much as respected. His growing up an only child also meant he had little understanding of a functioning family – although he became better at it as the years rolled by, and my sister, brother and I ceased to be young, helpless individuals. Mum would often sheet things home to his being an only child, with a hint that somehow it had been his fault.

I look at him now, a man in his early 80s, and I remember clearly how frightened I’d be of being disciplined by this man mountain. Now he’s frailer, greyer and not so seemingly tall. He's mellower, and weathered by the years. I look into his eyes, not up at them as I did back then. Like countless other kids of our generation, I well remember the phrase Mum used often: “Just wait until your father gets home . . ." Except that unlike many kids, I genuinely feared his inflicted corporal pain.

Dad didn’t just smack once, or just with his hand on a leg or hand or arm. He’d often hit with a belt. He’d hit to inflict pain. And he’d do it repeatedly. Even his open hand carried the weight, power and pain of a moulded piece of steel. Mum, while disagreeing with his prolonging of punishment, only ever openly complained if Dad struck us around the ears. Dad said that if it was good enough for the Christian Brothers when he was growing up, it should be good enough for him. Mum always bitterly disagreed. She didn't like Christian Brothers. I always imagined them as black, silent and sinister.

When Dad snapped his temper at work, workmates automatically ducked to avoid heavy flying, potentially lethal tools. This measure was apparently well understood by those who worked with Joe. If he snapped, you ducked, for safety's sake, behind the nearest piece of shielding machinery or wall.

I remember well a sense of dread that sometimes descended when I knew Dad would soon be home from work. It wasn't often, but it was enough to bite deep. I would be enjoying Mum's warm company when I'd feel this cold seeping all about me. My heart would brace itself as I heard his purposeful steps coming up the side path to the back of the house. Some afternoons, it would take some time to become used to having Dad at home. It was as though his residual loathing of his job had sullenly followed him from Port Kembla, slouching off the afternoon workers' train at Corrimal station, and shadowing him closely to our back door, nipping at his tired heels. I didn't realise it for years, but Mum also stiffened often when he stepped throughout our back screen door.

Another thing I clearly remember about Dad was his smell. He always smelt of copper when he got home from work. His work overalls and shirts always smelt of copper soaked in lubricants and of metal shavings well past their use-by dates. The smell oozed from him, and no doubt was a result of him working at Metal Manufactures as a maintenance fitter. His leather gladstone work bag also smelt strongly of grease and old oil. But a small frayed side pocket of this bag always held a packet of sweet Juicy Fruit chewing gum. As I'd lever out a tablet of gum, and start chewing, I was instantly aware of the other, sweet smell of my father.

I could be immensely proud and frightened and protected by this man, all through my primary school years.

Everything about my father was big and strong. His hands, his fingernails, his feet, his broad back, his face . . . His teeth were big and white too. But his understanding of young children wasn’t big. Looking back, I have the distinct impression of Mum often gathering us small children under her wing, like a mother duck, any time a Brooding Dad steamed into earshot.

My father was also good with his hands. He made his own cane fishing rods and fishing tackle, and made them better and more lovingly than anything you could buy. While he was steady with his own, though, he was impatient with our hands; he never really had time or patience to show my brother and I how to master the steel tools he’d made himself. It may have been the result of him hating his own hands-on job. It may have been the result of him being alone as a child. One of his workmates told me many years later that while Dad loathed his job, he was good and respected at it. If you wanted something done properly, you always asked Joe Heininger.

But Dad really loved growing things. Vegetables, flowers and shrubs, native ferns in bark-lined wire baskets. And he mowed our lawns and clipped their edges meticulously - always in shorts and singlets. The front yard flowerbeds and back yard veggie patches were his retreat from cold steel, copper and over-used workshop oil. They were always a picture when in full bloom. And when he’d finished cutting the summer grass, and he’d filled our old steel barrow – one with a steel wheel while everyone else in the neighbourhood had rubber wheels – with pungent piles of this steaming green material, he’d gently lift me up, and pop me on top. Then he’d purposefully stride to the nearby vacant block on the corner of Collins and Cross Streets where he’d dump the clippings. I’d hang onto the sides of the barrow, my bare toes curled around the front lip, listening to the front of the barrow scraping against the wheel, Listening to Dad whistling gently behind me.

I wasn’t frightened of him then, on these warm, slow-moving Saturday afternoons, when he was at peace with everything around him. Long before any of us knew about Zen, Dad had his growing things. The smell of freshly clipped grass still equates to peace for me.

Later, when we’d bought a car for the first time, when I was in late primary school, Mum would drive us out to the end of Darcy Road, Port Kembla. We'd hang off the wind-swept, flaking steel gates at the front of Metal Manufactures waiting for Dad to knock off. In those days, when tens of thousands of men worked in Port Kembla industry, and Five Islands Road was a three-shift-every-24-hours traffic jam, it was always hard initially to make his face out in the bobbing crowd of faces heading steadily up the works roadway towards the gate. These men would stream around the side of one of the corrugated industrial buildings half way along the roadway, like blue and white and brown lava, and it was usually only when the flow was less than 100m away from us that we could pick Dad out of the faces. He nearly always smiled broadly, and beamed ‘Hello!’ at us before we all slumped into our large American sedan Mum had parked on the rutted, sandy vacant lot opposite the gates. Dad would always smell of copper . . . And Mum would almost always drive home to Corrimal, through the stop-start traffic, Dad next to her, us kids spread across the large leather back seat. We'd all banter all the way back to Corrimal.

At the end of my last primary school year, as another summer rolled into eastern Australia again, Dad was mowing our front lawn on one of his rostered days off. When I got to the front gate, he stopped to ask how I’d gone at school that day. I told him I had six A passes for my final exams for the year. I felt invincibly happy. And Dad looked so proud and pleased, standing there in his rolled khaki shorts and white singlet, this huge smile splitting his face and perspiration wetting his chest. I told him I was ready for high school.

I’m not sure when Dad stopped punishing me, but I don’t remember anything much past that day, late in 1966.

My Mum's mother, Georgina

Mum’s mother, Grandma Georgina Bunt, was a working woman. I never knew Mum’s father – he died when I was only a baby – and Grandma brought up my Mother, Dulcie Irene (the eldest) and her brothers, Jimmy and Kevin. From all reports – and from evidence of dismembered cars and other boys’ detritus at the rear of Grandma’s weatherboard house in Banks Street, South Wollongong – Jimmy and Kevin could sometimes be a tear-away handful. Mum also played a part in trying to rear them, as Grandma earned hard livings as a chef in various service clubs around the city.

Grandma Bunt's life had always been hard. After travelling the country with her husband during the Great Depression - settling briefly among the night-time razor gangs in gritty, down-trodden Balmain with my mother as a very young child before moving onto Wollongong - she had to cope with his death. Grandpa died slowly, painfully, having fallen into a deep, unlit manhole on the nightshift at the Steelworks.

I distinctly remember Grandma’s smart work uniforms and her sensible, black lace-up work shoes – the ones with the chunky War-Time heels and matronly rounded toes. I also remember walking through her various commercial kitchens, in tow behind Mum, with my brother, John, and sister, Mary, when we’d visit her at work.

The heat was always intense, and you could almost cut the thick, humid, oily air with a cleaver. The red ceramic tiled floors were always slippery, no doubt the result of endless renderings of one type of meat or another, or the always steaming bins of hearty soups or vegetables. Grandma always smelt of strong commercial cleaning agents and a kaleidoscope of pungent dishes. But she was always pleased to see us kids, smiling through her gleaming perspiration

Her workmates, also hardworking, hearty types, were always happy to see different faces in their kitchens, using these interludes as perfect excuses to duck out the back screen doors for a smoke . . .

Grandma had a good friend called Elva, who (along with her daughter) took me to Sydney one fine Saturday to ride the downtown trams and to go shopping. It must have been 1959, as all I can remember is hopping on and off unfamiliar Toast-Rack trams with two women loaded down with mysterious packages.

After she retired, Grandma sold her Evans Street weatherboard, and moved into a tiny Housing Commission studio flat in Warrawong, just over the hill from the Port Kembla steelworks. The things I most remember were the unit’s small size, and the fact that Grandma insisted on keeping tomato sauce in the fridge.

Grandma was always happy. I never saw her angry. However, when it came time for her to die, she did so quickly and relatively quietly. By then I was in my mid 20s. I was shocked to look into her squirming, fear-filled eyes as she lay those last few days in Bulli Hospital. Grandma knew she was dying, easing into oblivion, but could not put none of that knowing into words. She just squeezed my hand when I visited, knowing full well who I was.

Grandma’s funeral service was held in the frugal Warrawong Catholic Church, high on the hill overlooking the steelworks. We then laid her to rest deep in the headstone forest of Wollongong cemetery, not more than 500m from where she’d reared her kids. Mum sobbed gently as Grandma’s tired body was lowered into the ground. Doubtless Mum was all too aware of her own mortality.

Grandma died not owning much. We kids – and those of our uncles, Jimmy and Kevin – were each given envelopes containing a few dollars. Giving thanks as best I could, I gave mine to the Salvation Army collector working my local pub that night . . .