TRAUMA TOWN PART 2: “Humour is the precision tool of the monkey mind, the invisible energy, flowing through our cities, a way of prodding and asking, opening doors, says Philip Bull as he continues with part 2 of his series of responses to the eternal conflicts that inflame the world of planning in this new column.
Let’s start with my grandmothers and responsible parents.
My parents did a good enough job. They were not remote, they seemed busy. Mum wanted to get somewhere, and Dad wanted to be someone.
There was a constant struggle. Dad did fancy himself as something of the Papa Francois figure – he wanted a stay-at-home trophy wife. But was the 1960s, shacked up with a WWII chaos migrant (who got about in a two-piece BTW) where you find that?
In the late 60s, after two children, mum thought it might be about time to go back to Europe for a few rounds of Cinzanos. Dad was struggling with the women’s movement: as all he could cook was lamb roast. He loved mum’s French stuff. He had tried various strategies to keep her busy.
Social isolation. “I am not a clubby man, let’s move to a new suburb”, Dad would say. Mum was sitting in their in Northbridge renter in 1962 reading Paris Match thinking, “I thought I was in a new suburb?”
Trying to make a virtue out of his social uncomfortableness was Dad’s thing. Mum always used to think Paddington looked nice. Dad had no real Sydney compass; we were buying in the right place sell at the wrong time people. But he did fancy a bit of mid-century design and mum liked that stuff too. First, a Pettit & Sevitt jobbie in Engadine – mum thought the bush was scary and the ceiling too low.
Then he bought a block of land in Killarney Heights, a recently created suburb on Middle Harbour on the way to the Northern Beaches. It would have been marketed as Blacktown with harbour views and no railway station.
Dad went full on Sydney School, which was a local form of architecture sprouting on escapements at the time. The motto of the Sydney School was the best architecture is no architecture. It was modernism made for sloppy Sydney bush sites with a DIY feel. Misson brown weatherboards, raw materials in general and a split level, here or there. Follow the typography, might have been another motto.
Dad got the bricks from a DMR (Department of Main Roads) demolition sale in Glebe. They were man-made sandstock bricks; one of them had a cat’s paw print on the face of the brick. The bricks were from an Askin era freeway scheme that never happened. The DMR would warm the place up for the freeway by spot demolishing a few houses in the corridor. Dad fell in love with those bricks. He found a good architect and told him exactly what to do.
My Twin and I were born to this place. I liked it as we got there before urbanisation really destroyed everything. There was stuff left for us to destroy. Frogs with a weird speckle that you could squish with a stick, creeks that had wildlife and a strange Boo Radley couple that lived in the bush in a sandstone under croft. The couple were Croatian, never fitted in and lived in an old midden. The floor was fine shell, drained dry and the bit they partitioned off was invisible, as were they. And the reality of that couple was more sad than frightening, they were hiding from a world they did not fit into and was slowly coming to them.
The various building sites in a new suburb were more fun. I pity a child that has not climbed a scaffold, got to the top and then tipped over the bucket of nails left there.
Dad moved onto other projects; a pool and a BBQ made from sandstone from what was then Callan Park mental hospital. Mum was busy with the kids.
My father was a practising psychiatrist with an interest in landscaping. He had his own practice but still did visiting medical officer stuff in hospitals. He worked part-time at Callan Park Mental Hospital in Rozelle till it closed to our people in 1976.
One thing I realised now about my father was that he didn’t have a lot of close friends outside of Mum and some old mates from medical school. Curiosity explained the diverse group of people that my father associated with. We would hang with his leftie social worker friends – they introduced the Twin and I to pastizzis early in life, and they wanted to empty the asylum.
Some social workers were breaking down the walls of Callan Park and releasing mental patients into the wild. Dad signed off on the releases which he was a bit worried about. Dad was a realist and sensed this was a movement. They had a ceremony in front of the sandstone wall where they literally broke down some of it and then had a BBQ. I almost expected them to release a patient or two, Hunger Games style, but they didn’t.
As a child, a small part of me thought, surely, they needed some sort of approval to knock that old wall down. Dad was old school; he saw a stone BBQ. He called it “discrete borrowing” as he backed the Holden station wagon next to the rubble. He went look out as the Twin, and I loaded the more rectangular bits into the back of the wagon.
Dad just wanted to do stuff, mum was more interested in getting back to Europe and not being a housewife. When the Twin and I went to school she sneaked off to do art classes in The Rocks. We used to go there quite a bit on the school holidays; the hobos sleeping in the newspaper on the sandstone reminded mum of Europe.
Mum always felt restless. As a compromise, the family went to New Caledonia for a holiday in the mid-70s. The Twin and I thought Club Med was great. I had never seen a proper hotel breakfast buffet before. Club Med was so much better than the cheesy place we went to at Surfers the year before the rebates and Medicare licked off.
New Caledonia broke dad down a bit too. We had to get a car and explore the inland. We arrived mid-afternoon in a highland hamlet. Dad tried to negotiate an out-of-service lunch for the family, and a bottle of Vin ordinaire (Dad focused his French vocabulary on emergency words). Dad and the innkeeper, two dogs barking, no one listening. Mum intervened, in her soft Geneva accent, and an omelette, drinks and extra cheese emerged. She made Dad look like a bit of amateur.
Next week Mum tells Dad where to go.
