Rose Boys, page 2
But there is nothing derisory about the circulation, proudly advertised to the right—‘495,133 daily sales’. Quaintly, beneath the masthead, there is a telephone number, with six digits. I want to ring it. I want to speak to someone there. Perhaps I would get through to a night editor, lighting another cigarette, waiting for a disaster. The front page, neatly clipped and stuck in the scrapbook, is eclectic and prompts reflections about 1974. Patty Hearst had just been kidnapped. Brandt and Brezhnev, Heath and Franco, Trudeau and Tito—all those fascists and bourgeois reactionaries we vilified at school—were in power. Richard Nixon hung on grimly after Watergate. Billy Snedden, incredibly, was Australia’s alternative prime minister.
The front page is dominated by a photograph of a white Volkswagen. It is a confronting image, for the car has been badly damaged, its front crushed. I don’t recognise the pale weatherboard house in the background. I wonder how the Volkswagen got there, who moved it. The car’s roof, like the numberplate, is missing. A caption tells me it was removed when they freed the driver. Both doors are open. I wonder if the radio is still playing, the horn wailing unstoppably. The lights are missing and the bumper bar lies buckled on the ground. It all reminds me of one of those expensive crumpled sculptures you see outside office towers.
The bonnet is stained with oil or paint from a passing truck. Bits of metal poke out dangerously. A man in short sleeves, posed by the anonymous photographer, stands by the passenger door. He peers into the car in a kind of stupor. Judging by his Brylcreemed hair, muscular arms and stern mien, he lives in the country. I wonder what he saw in the wreckage. I want to ask him what was left. Cigarette butts? The Ballarat racing guide? Myriad sporting pages? Crushed cans of soft drink, beer? A thin suede tie for formal occasions? A baby’s dummy, spat out during some weekend outing? Pizza containers? Pizza, even?
My eyes, blank as the short-sleeved witness’s, avoid the long accompanying report on the front page. I am not ready for that yet. But I note the weighting of the main headline and the awkward construction: ‘ROSE PARALYSED IN CAR ROLL’. It sounds almost contradictory, like a pratfall. There are three other smaller headings—‘Trapped for 90 minutes’, ‘At races’, ‘Sedation’—plus three photographs of the victim. In one, weedily moustached, he grins at the camera. In another, longer-haired, he cuts a cricket ball to the boundary. In the bottom one, taken during his schooldays, he kicks a football with an intensity that reminds me of a much earlier photograph. His young wife is there too, near my father, who looks away.
Next to this clipping is a front-page story from the Australian of the same day. This headline is blunt: ‘CRICKET, FOOTBALL STAR IS PARALYSED’. Subheadings tell me that Dad was hastening to join him and that sympathisers had already sent money. There are two photographs of Robert. In one he defends his wicket with a characteristically straight bat. The top one, much larger, is arresting. A handsome young man with fair hair and a five o’clock shadow stares at the camera. Lips parted, eyes wide open, he seems shocked to find himself in this company. So profound is his surprise I almost expect his prominent Adam’s apple to gulp.
But something is wrong—or should I say, more wrong? This is not the right face. It’s not the paralysed cricket and football star we know. He is not, in short, my brother. In their haste the sub-editors chose an image from the wrong photo file.
Nevertheless, I knew our startled interloper, Dennis O’Callaghan. He played football for Collingwood while Dad was coach. A quiet young man, he never expected to end up on a front page, headlined and paralysed.
It was the first mistake.
Not that Dennis O’Callaghan wasn’t accident-prone. I vividly remember one mishap at our house. This was after the 1970 grand final, in which Dennis played. I had often wondered how my parents’ new spindly olive-green Scandinavian Fler lounge suite would stand up to the weight of all those footballers. It seemed too fine, too chic. I fancied that we would find out that night, given the chaotic atmosphere.
My parents had arranged the party before the grand final. Everyone, even the knockers, expected it to be a celebration. Collingwood, coached by my father, had a superb team that year. After two narrow losses in recent grand finals, a premiership seemed inevitable. Carlton, under Ron Barassi, was no less talented, but Collingwood had beaten them three times that season, including the second semi-final.
Things went according to plan during the first half of the grand final. By half-time Collingwood led by almost eight goals. Peter McKenna already had five. But he had also collided with his bullish team-mate Des Tuddenham a few minutes before half-time. McKenna was seriously concussed and shouldn’t have played on. Tuddenham wasn’t untouched, either. Ron Barassi didn’t know this, of course, but he did have an idea. It was called handball, handball, handball.
Many furphies surround that most famous of grand finals. One has it that Collingwood started opening the champagne during half-time. Dad denies this. He was too worried about the injuries to his stars. Play resumed. The second half was calamitous and horrible to watch. Carlton surged forward and overwhelmed Dennis O’Callaghan and the other defenders. Barassi’s rejuvenated handballers snatched victory in the last few minutes. Collingwood, unbelievably, had lost.
After the game my mother and I fought our way through the despondent/triumphant mob to get to the rooms. Our progress was slow, for it was a record crowd—121,696 people. My brother wasn’t with us. A huge crowd had assembled outside the rooms. Later, George Harris, Carlton’s provocative president, damned the club by saying that its supporters heckled the players as they emerged. I very much doubt this. Everyone was too busy crying. I myself was devastated by the result. Apparently I became so upset during the final quarter, as Carlton overhauled Collingwood, that my maths teacher, who was sitting with us, became worried about me. He rang up later that night to find out how I was. I’m surprised that we heard the telephone above the din.
The atmosphere at the party was shaky at first. Most of the guests were in bad shape. A kind of collective shock had stunned people. No one remembers when the party got under way. Dad thinks we called at the club en route to our house in Lemana Crescent, but he can’t be sure. Peter McKenna doesn’t even recall playing in the second half, let alone the aftermath. When Martin Flanagan interviewed ‘Twiggy’ Dunne for his book 1970, Twiggy remembered playing billiards at my parents’ house. We didn’t own a billiard table.
Our small house was soon overflowing. I had never seen so many people seriously out of control. All of fifteen, I knew it was going to be a great party. The noise was impressive as people began to relax. They had dressed up. Several of the women were wearing lace-up hotpants with long leather boots. The players removed their official ties and blazers. A business acquaintance of my father chainsmoked in a corner, using our television as an ashtray. His wife, considerably younger and taller than he, wore a tight-fitting leopard-skin dress. She reminded me of Ava Gardner, of whom I had seen photographs in my movie magazines. She had long dark hair and a majestic throat. It takes a lot to turn footballers’ heads, especially when they have just lost a grand final in bitter circumstances, but the leopard skin seemed to work.
Well after midnight, my mother went into the kitchen and began mopping the floor, which was under several inches of champagne. ‘Christ, Elsie, you’re fussy!’ someone said. Meanwhile, a sophisticate in a little black dress sat on our gramophone and played Mum’s EP of Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ over and over again, as if it were the only record we owned. My brother, smoking and drinking on the balcony with his mates, must have been desperate to play Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix or the incomparable Cream.
The party lasted all night. It was still going in the morning when Dad left to appear on World of Sport, a mandatory Sunday morning commitment for coaches. Dad hadn’t slept at all. Nowadays, a tennis player, defeated so mortifyingly, would avoid such an interview, happily incurring a ten thousand dollar fine, but Dad felt he had to ‘front up’.
Just as the interview began, Lou Richards and Jack Dyer, two of the programme’s hosts, came up with an unsubtle mock-rendition of Collingwood’s theme song. They were off-camera but quite audible. ‘Good Old Collingwood for Never,’ they sang merrily. The interview went ahead, but when it was over Dad went looking for Lou, who had been his captain when Collingwood won the 1953 premiership. Dad, a former boxer, intended to confront his old team-mate. He went right through the television studio but couldn’t find Lou, who had disappeared.
That afternoon, when it was all over, we cleaned up. While Dad, Robert and I surveyed the heap of empty bottles and Scandinavian kindling, Mum polished the kitchen floor and tried to disguise the burn marks on the television. Domestic order swiftly regained, Mum knew she had to get Dad away from the media, and from himself. They packed a few things and drove around Victoria for several days, stopping at a different motel each night. One evening they found themselves in Gippsland and had dinner in a small timber town. The waitress recognised Dad but couldn’t think of his name. Perplexed, she kept asking him who he was. He didn’t enlighten her. Meanwhile Robert and I stayed at home with the dog. Years later, during an interview, Robert recalled that the house was like a morgue for days.
We thought it couldn’t get any worse than that. We thought it was one of those tragedies they write about so freely in the sporting pages. We wondered if Dad would recover from such a perverse loss.
But had he courted defeat? I remembered something he had said after the 1966 grand final, which Collingwood had lost by one point. Dad gave a press conference that night. During it he wondered aloud, in his self-deprecating way, if he was jinxed. He later regretted this speculation, for it stuck. By 1970, after three grand final defeats in bizarre circumstances, people were beginning to believe him.
Three decades later, studying Dennis O’Callaghan’s amazed and likeable face in Robert’s scrapbook, I can still picture him and a fellow backman crammed on the chic Fler sofa with their girlfriends. And I can still remember the sound it made when it collapsed, sending the four of them toppling onto the floor. People laughed at them and joked about the Rose jinx. The end, as Frank Sinatra repeatedly sang, was near. Everyone agreed it was ironic. Dennis and his mate, the dispirited defenders, were the quietest people at the party.
And I wonder what Dennis O’Callaghan’s mother thought that morning, four years later, when, alerted by some bewildered relative, she went out and bought the Australian and saw her son’s photograph beneath the brutal headline.
*
My father’s newspaper cuttings are even more voluminous. He began keeping them soon after leaving Nyah West in the Mallee to play football for Collingwood. That was in 1946, when he was seventeen. Collingwood’s coach in those days was Jock McHale, then in his seventies. He had been coach since the 1920s and had won eight premierships, four of them in succession. Dad was awed by the legendary old man in black knee-length shorts. He was just as impressed by McHale’s great ally John Wren, whom Frank Hardy wrote about in Power Without Glory, a novel of which Collingwood people still disapprove. As Dad’s career progressed he got to know Mr Wren, as he always called him. He was grateful for his patronage. When Dad played well, as he often did, Wren’s chauffeur-driven car would pull up outside my parents’ sports store on Johnston Street and Wren would give him ten guineas—a handsome sum in those days.
Jock McHale was just as imposing. My father still talks about the chilly reception the players got from him whenever Collingwood lost a game. As they trudged off the field, past the rueful spectators, McHale was waiting for them at the end of the race. He eyeballed each player, saying nothing, daring him to look away. Dad still gets a frisson thinking about that piercing gaze. He says it was a major incentive not to lose the following week.
At other times McHale, though naturally or tactically taciturn, was more encouraging. My father recalls an early turning point in his career when McHale said to him, ‘You’ll be all right, Rose’. To coach a football side you must know something about the vagaries of human nature and masculine pride. McHale doubtless sensed that my father was a needful and respectful youth. But McHale’s advice wasn’t always palatable. One day McHale asked Dad what he had for breakfast before a match. Disapproving of Dad’s preferred steak and eggs, he recommended tripe. Dad tried it once, disastrously. McHale also asked him if he kept a scrapbook. Dad told him that his mother kept a small one, up in Nyah West. McHale urged him to start one of his own, because he wouldn’t regret it. Dad took his advice.
I had never seen the earlier scrapbook until recently. Slim but compiled with great care, it covers Dad’s brief boxing career, which ended soon after he went to Melbourne. On the inside cover is a large photograph of Dad taken when he was about fifteen. He had learned to box in Harry Shaw’s gymnasium in Nyah West. He is bare-chested, smiling and ornately Brylcreemed. To accentuate his muscular physique, he keeps his hands behind his waist. Inside, several clippings anoint him ‘Best Boy of the Week’. Floral allusions begin to appear. ‘A new Rose was discovered on Saturday night, having come fresh from the “garden” of Harry Shaw. This Rose was in full bloom…It was a fistic Rose that Bendigo people saw, and they liked it.’
I like that ‘fistic Rose’. I must use it in a poem.
Not so long ago, during an interview, Dad said of his own scrapbook, ‘If there was a fire, that’s the thing I’d grab’.
The smallest scrapbook in my family is the one I treasure most. My mother gave it to me years ago, as though glad to be rid of it. She has never asked to look at it since. Her mother—known as Daisy—kept it in the 1940s when my mother was a singer. Daisy was a loving but haphazard archivist. Everything went higgledy-piggledy into the tiny Embassy memo book. Chronology was not her forte.
My mother has always been reticent about her childhood. (That can stand as the first understatement in this book, in which I prepare to violate old privacies.) She has never mentioned her father to me. The little I know about my grandfather I gleaned from others. To someone like me, a devotee of Henry James’s ‘temple of analysis’, unashamed of frankness, this reserve seems hard, too exacting for the curious and secretive alike. I do know that my mother grew up in the Goulburn Valley. (Douglas Nicholls—later ‘Pastor Doug’ and governor of South Australia—drove horse-drawn lorries for my grandfather and remained a devoted friend of Daisy and my mother. His autobiography tells me that he buried my grandfather.) My grandparents’ marriage ended when my mother was a child. Nan took her four children to Melbourne and settled in Brunswick. I don’t know how these domestic upheavals affected my mother. Lifelong silence is a kind of testimony. There was also the latent tension between her and Nan which troubled me as a child, my mother’s seeming frustration with something Nan had or hadn’t done—some old wound that haunted every conversation for her.
My mother rarely indulges in family anecdotes. One Christmas she surprised us by relating a story about her upbringing. My parents were talking about their childhood Christmases. Dad recalled being given a toy tank during the war. For Mum it was a boxed doll, given to her as a little girl. But she wasn’t allowed to remove it from the container. Nan said she would spoil it. A few days later, the doll vanished. ‘Knowing Nan, she probably gave it away,’ I blurted out, remembering her largesse. ‘Probably,’ Mum agreed with an air of resignation.
At the age of sixteen Mum joined the Ordnance Revue Company, based at Puckapunyal. Her two brothers were away with the Sixth Division. For three years she toured the camps with a concert party that entertained the troops. These were mixed troupes comprising vaudevillians, coloraturas, popular singers, instrumentalists and ‘the ballet’. Elsie was a croonette. Her repertoire included standards such as ‘Melancholy Baby’, ‘Embraceable You’ and ‘Pennies from Heaven’. Admirers still talk about her clear diction, her identification with the lyrics, the discernment of her phrasing, and a certain pathos. After the war, soldiers remembered her performances. Their printed tributes appear in the scrapbook. ‘Digger (Kew)’ wrote to Listener In: ‘Orchids to Elsie Rowlands…Having seen Elsie at quite a few camp shows, I, and thousands of other troops, think she is wonderful.’ ‘An Admirer (Heidelberg Military Hospital)’ is complimentary: ‘I wish this talented dark-eyed beauty all the success in the world’.
After the war Elsie began performing on Melbourne radio. There are winning photographs of her singing ardently into classic microphones belonging to 3AW and 3KZ. In one, the long-necked, wavy-haired young singer is accompanied by a bald violinist. In the adjoining box, ‘Pat “Bambi” Tuckwell (well-known model)’ leans over a wedding cake—not her own on this occasion. ‘Bambi’, now Lady Harewood, is sporting the power shoulders of the 1940s. Both are beautiful women, born in 1926, like Joan Sutherland and the Queen.
Elsie’s following grew during the next five years. ‘Orchids galore,’ writes one fan, adding, ‘Judy Garland must look to her laurels.’ Mum’s voice reached as far as the occupied empire, as ‘Back from Lotus Land’ attests: ‘In Japan I heard a recording of the first heat of the “P & A Parade” of 1946, in which croonette Elsie Rowlands appeared. On Sunday last I saw her in person at the Savoy Theatre, and was most impressed. Lotus blossoms and orchids to her.’
By then Elsie was appearing with vocalists such as Edwin Duff and Frank Wilson, and with ‘Nicky’, the doyen of Melbourne radio and Graham Kennedy’s mentor. She was appearing on 3XY when the actor Ronald Colman’s brother, Eric, made a guest appearance as an announcer. The imported American had golden tonsils and a drinking problem. One day this became so acute that Jack Davey, florid with rage, marched into the booth and completed the broadcast. Colman was never seen again.
