toddler in a wet disposable was pulling a Wilderness Society poster off the wall.
Without the slightest tinge of guilt, I stuck the Pacific Pastoral file under my arm and nicked out the back door. The wretched of the earth could wait, at least until tomorrow.
Off Sydney Road the traffic was quieter. The streets were lined with weatherboard bungalows, single-storey terraces and, here and there, the saw-toothed roofs of small factories. This was Labor heartland, the safest seats in the country— Calwell, Batman, Lalor, Coburg, Brunswick. Electorates whose names resonated with certainty in the ears of backroom psephologists from Spring Street to Canberra. In some booths here we outpolled the Libs three to one. Made you wonder who the one was.
Red’s school lay halfway between the office and home, a slate-roofed state primary. For its first hundred years it had specialised in producing ruckmen, armed robbers and apprentices to the hairdressing trade. Now it had a library wing and ran programs in two community languages. I found Redmond in after-school care with the other dozen or so second and third graders, Matildas, Dylans and Toulas left behind when the proper parents swooped at three-thirty. They were cutting the heads off models in K-Mart catalogues. Red flung his schoolbag on top of the insulation batts and we drove home.
Home was a sixty-year-old weatherboard still in its first coat of paint, one of a spec tract built cheaply in the twenties. Wendy and I had bought it soon after Red came along. The sign had read ‘Promises Ample Renovation Opportunity for Imaginative First Home Buyer’, meaning it was all we could afford. We were both at the Labor Resource Centre at that point, getting paid a pittance to crank out discussion papers. Workforce segmentation in the footwear sector. Industrial democracy in the electricity generation industry. Not the most lucrative of postings.
So far, Ample Renovation had consisted of Wendy planting a native garden and spending a small fortune on House and Garden while I did as much as a man can do using only hand tools and y-chromosomes. All up, the Opportunity had been greater than either of us was capable of rising to. The set of architect’s plans pinned to the kitchen wall, token of our future there together, had long since turned yellow and begun curling at the corners.
Still, Red and I were making a pretty good fist of domesticity. Not that this was immediately apparent to the untrained eye. On the superficial indices of good housekeeping we probably rated fairly low. But we were comfortable and basic hygiene was maintained. And I doggedly persisted in addressing some of the more ongoing infrastructure issues. My objective that afternoon was to maximise our energy efficiency. First I dredged a knife out of the scrap heap in the sink and made two peanut butter sandwiches, folded not cut. ‘Now do your homework,’ I growled.
The kid rolled his eyes. ‘I don’t have homework, Dad. I’m only in Grade Two.’
‘‘Then you can watch TV, as long as it’s something educational.’
We repeated this corny dialogue word-for-word every afternoon. It was as much a part of our routine as tinned tomato soup on Sunday nights and always being late for school. Red was the best accident I had ever had. He was clever, biddable, undemanding company, and more mature than his baby face and mop of angelic curls suggested. He had missed Wendy a lot at first and still stacked on the occasional turn, but all in all he had adapted pretty well to our bachelor-boy existence.
He took his sandwiches into the lounge room and turned on the television. I use the term lounge room in its generic sense. It might be better described as a cave with floorboards. It had long come to terms with the fact that it would never be a sunny, north-facing, energy-efficient, entertainment/ kitchen area with stylish black and white checkerboard titles.
While Red watched the Road Runner, I changed into overalls, ran
Without the slightest tinge of guilt, I stuck the Pacific Pastoral file under my arm and nicked out the back door. The wretched of the earth could wait, at least until tomorrow.
Off Sydney Road the traffic was quieter. The streets were lined with weatherboard bungalows, single-storey terraces and, here and there, the saw-toothed roofs of small factories. This was Labor heartland, the safest seats in the country— Calwell, Batman, Lalor, Coburg, Brunswick. Electorates whose names resonated with certainty in the ears of backroom psephologists from Spring Street to Canberra. In some booths here we outpolled the Libs three to one. Made you wonder who the one was.
Red’s school lay halfway between the office and home, a slate-roofed state primary. For its first hundred years it had specialised in producing ruckmen, armed robbers and apprentices to the hairdressing trade. Now it had a library wing and ran programs in two community languages. I found Redmond in after-school care with the other dozen or so second and third graders, Matildas, Dylans and Toulas left behind when the proper parents swooped at three-thirty. They were cutting the heads off models in K-Mart catalogues. Red flung his schoolbag on top of the insulation batts and we drove home.
Home was a sixty-year-old weatherboard still in its first coat of paint, one of a spec tract built cheaply in the twenties. Wendy and I had bought it soon after Red came along. The sign had read ‘Promises Ample Renovation Opportunity for Imaginative First Home Buyer’, meaning it was all we could afford. We were both at the Labor Resource Centre at that point, getting paid a pittance to crank out discussion papers. Workforce segmentation in the footwear sector. Industrial democracy in the electricity generation industry. Not the most lucrative of postings.
So far, Ample Renovation had consisted of Wendy planting a native garden and spending a small fortune on House and Garden while I did as much as a man can do using only hand tools and y-chromosomes. All up, the Opportunity had been greater than either of us was capable of rising to. The set of architect’s plans pinned to the kitchen wall, token of our future there together, had long since turned yellow and begun curling at the corners.
Still, Red and I were making a pretty good fist of domesticity. Not that this was immediately apparent to the untrained eye. On the superficial indices of good housekeeping we probably rated fairly low. But we were comfortable and basic hygiene was maintained. And I doggedly persisted in addressing some of the more ongoing infrastructure issues. My objective that afternoon was to maximise our energy efficiency. First I dredged a knife out of the scrap heap in the sink and made two peanut butter sandwiches, folded not cut. ‘Now do your homework,’ I growled.
The kid rolled his eyes. ‘I don’t have homework, Dad. I’m only in Grade Two.’
‘‘Then you can watch TV, as long as it’s something educational.’
We repeated this corny dialogue word-for-word every afternoon. It was as much a part of our routine as tinned tomato soup on Sunday nights and always being late for school. Red was the best accident I had ever had. He was clever, biddable, undemanding company, and more mature than his baby face and mop of angelic curls suggested. He had missed Wendy a lot at first and still stacked on the occasional turn, but all in all he had adapted pretty well to our bachelor-boy existence.
He took his sandwiches into the lounge room and turned on the television. I use the term lounge room in its generic sense. It might be better described as a cave with floorboards. It had long come to terms with the fact that it would never be a sunny, north-facing, energy-efficient, entertainment/ kitchen area with stylish black and white checkerboard titles.
While Red watched the Road Runner, I changed into overalls, ran
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