1961: A peek behind the scenes

Although my debut novel 1961 is a work of fiction, elements in the narrative do derive from my own life experience, and I’m happy to share at least some of that background here.

The year 1961 has long held a special significance for me. Like young Spook, in 1961 I was wrenched away from a place and way of life I found congenial to one I liked a lot less. For reasons related to my clergyman father’s work, my parents, my two younger sisters and I moved from the comfortable, tree-lined suburb of Malvern (in Melbourne), to treeless, working class, and, to my eyes, absolutely awful Footscray.

I hated my new abode with a passion. I hated its hardness and uglines, the prevalence of asphalt, the absence of trees, the horrid smells that drifted from the nearby abbattoirs and tanning factory. If you’d asked me at the time, I would have declared I hated ‘everything’ about Footscray.

Only decades later, after a suggestion from a psychotherapist, did I realise that what I really loathed about ‘Footscray’ was not so much the place itself as a breakdown in intimacy that seems to have occurred between my mother and father around the time of that move after my mother discovered that my father had actually asked to be sent to ‘a more challenging parish’ without consulting her wishes at all. It would be another decade or more after that realisation before my mother conceded to me that she had been furious with my father at this time. I had not consciously understood any of this as a boy, but I now think it’s likely that I did register this new distance and unhappiness between my parents, and this may have lain behind many of the tears I shed that year.

I have tried writing directly about this period of my life once or twice, but whenever I’ve done so, I’ve ended up feeling like I’ve been standing next to a particle accelerator too long. My brain simply turns to mush. In 1961, I’ve been able to side-step that ‘mush’ effect somewhat by picking up elements of my real experience from that time, but adding others that are wholly fictional.

Anyone familiar with Melbourne’s northern suburbs would quickly recognise that ‘Glendale’, the novel’s nominal setting, is a fictionalised version of Glenroy. I got to know the topography and people of Glenroy a little in the early 1980s when I was driving taxis, but it’s not an area where I have ever lived.

Of the novel’s characters, Spook’s mother does strike me as uncannily familiar, but most of the others are invented, with the exception of a secondary figure to whom I wished to pay a personal homage, even to the extent of preserving that character’s actual name. Not too hard to figure out who that might be, I imagine.

The railway bridge that features so prominently came to me late in the writing. The content of 1961 actually started life as the backstory for a quite different novel that I was planning to write, about an inept man in his sixties who hoped to rekindle his relationship with an old flame he had tracked down to a seaside town. It took me some time to recognise that my back story was actually my main story. Once I had decided that Glenroy would make a plausible setting, I bought an old Collins street directory from the era, and it was there I discovered, in the middle of an enticingly blank area that occupied more than half a page, the creek and the railway bridge (known today as the Gowanbrae Rail Trestle Bridge) that would so fatefully attract Spook and his friends.

Like many kids from my era, I was no stranger to mucking around in a creek — in my own case, Gardiners Creek, near the Kooyong tennis courts. I’d seen Gardiners Creek in flood, and played at damming it up, and once or twice I and my friends had come upon an old ‘bomb car’ wrecked along the bank. It wasn’t hard for me to imagine that similar sights might have appeared along this other creek.

When, in the course of my rather dilatory researches, I visited the creek and rail bridge where I was planning to set my story, I was lucky enough to meet a local man who had lived in the area all his life. He confirmed that the land along that particular creek was, indeed, a much wilder place back in the early 1960s than it is today, and that young men did indeed sometimes hoon around down there in cars.

I was to glean much sadder intelligence about the Gowanbrae Rail Trestle Bridge more than a year later, when I had already written several drafts of my story. A friend of my wife’s was kind enough to ask me what my story was about, and when I told her, she explained to me that she had actually grown up in that area, and that decades earlier her own brother had taken his life by jumping off that bridge. Some large structures just seem to have the word ominous written all over them, it appears to me.

Although it is the character of Spook who most obviously serves as my own alter ego in 1961, I must confess there’s a fair bit of myself in the unpleasantly fastidious Theodore, too. Like me, Theodore was raised in a religious household. And just like me in those days, Theodore finds himself acutely embarrassed by his short-sightedness and its consequences, which in his case involve an unfortunate nickname he would do almost anything to get rid of.

In reality, I was never lumbered with a detestable nickname, but I did struggle desperately throughout our first year in Footscray to conceal my short-sightedness, and when I was, at last, found out and forced to wear glasses, I thought those horrid glass lenses, combined with my professed Christianity and my ‘brains’, must surely have made me one of the least attractive human specimens on this earth. Thickness, I’m sorry to say, is very much a scapegoat for my own shame.

One other thread running through 1961 that is clearly autobiographical is Spook’s nascent interest in electronics. Like Spook, I too owned a home-made crystal set as a boy. That primitive radio set, and the programs I heard on it, fascinated me intensely, and the little set itself carried many profound associations for me. My father had built that crystal set for me. He must have bought a soldering iron just for that purpose — and he showed great, and rather uncharacteristic, ingenuity in rigging up an antenna for it, too, in Malvern, attached to the top of our very high stink pole.

Just as important as my crystal set itself, though, were my father’s stories about a time before he became a clergyman, when his mother and father, unknowable figures who had died before I was born, were poor share farmers down near Colac. When my father was a boy in the 1920s, members of the family would take turns fiddling with the ‘cat’s whisker’ of the family crystal set to try to get a better signal on the headphones. Later, they bought a two valve radio that ran on batteries. One night, my father, listening on this radio, heard a station in New Zealand. Even later, in the Great Depression, my dad supported his ailing parents by soldering radios together in South Melbourne.

Even now, today, the thought of that little two valve radio sitting in a lonely, isolated farm house near Colac brings an ache to my heart. I still yearn, as hopelessly as when I was ten years old, to reach out and touch those people in the tiny sepia photographs who knew my dad when he was still young, before God got to him and did whatever God did to turn a man into a clergyman.

There never was a real Enrico in my life, but those Radio Television & Hobbies magazines that Enrico lends to Spook, they were very real, right down to the illustrated story on the back cover with Bills, bills, bills! I’ll have to earn more! and the regular column each month from the anonymous Serviceman.

From the age of ten, and on through my teen years, I built many radios, and for a long time I seriously wondered whether, if I did not become a clergyman, I should become a different kind of service man, one like Enrico, fixing radios and televisions.

As a new dad myself, I rekindled my interest to the extent of obtaining an amateur radio license, and for a while I communicated with others over long distances using morse code. I have just recently reactivated my amateur radio license for a second time, and have begun brushing up on my morse code again.

Call me silly, if you like, but for me, in this internet age, there’s nothing quite like the romance of picking out, through terrible static, dots and dashes emanating thousands of kilometres away, and decoding an intelligible message. But then, as a proponent of another ancient form of communication, the story, I would say that, wouldn’t I?