Rough Justice

David, Kibbutznik at Red Sea 1974

This piece of my travel memoir writing was originally published in Harvest, the 2017 Anthology of  the  Past Tense Group at Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers' Centre, Greenmount, Western Australia

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Rough Justice

I look up from my breakfast in the kibbutz dining room to hear Ruth, one of the community leaders, addressing me.
'I read your account of the Sinai excursion in the newsletter. Goodness me, how gruesome! I'm glad you're all safe.'
'Thanks, Ruth. We're still recovering from the shock. Very glad to be back.'

In the winter of 1974, a year after the October War in the Middle East, the atmosphere in Israel is uneasy. I've volunteered at Kibbutz Ayelet HaShahar, nestled in the fertile Hula Valley, 35 kilometres south of the Lebanese border. The idyllic landscape of orange groves and snow-capped mountains, belies the danger of the place. Walking past the kibbutz kindergarten, I can hear the deafening screech of fighter jets overhead, flying north towards Lebanon. The children continue to play hide and seek, not even looking up. These sorties have become a regular occurrence, but no one explains why.

We volunteers, who have decided to stay for the winter season, are offered a four-day excursion to the Sinai Peninsula. The plan is to cross Israel from north to south and back again. Our final destination is the ancient monastery of Santa Katerina at the foot of Mount Sinai, where Moses is said to have received the Ten Commandments. Along the way, we'll explore the Red Sea coastline and the inland oases of this sparsely-populated region. Our group consists of fourteen kibbutz volunteers and David, the kibbutznik, who will be bus driver and guide. David is a tall, friendly Yemeni man with dark bushy eyebrows and a long black beard. He's never been to the Sinai either and is keen to explore the area.

On the first day, we leave Upper Galilee and head south through the Jordan Valley to Jericho, Jerusalem, Hebron and Be'er Sheva – names steeped in Biblical history. By nightfall we reach the desert town of Eilat, located at the top of the Gulf of Aqaba. The lights of Eilat's twin town, Aqaba, twinkle a semaphore greeting from across the border in Jordan – a world away. We pitch our tents on the beach to the sound of lapping waves, and inhale the pungent aroma of barbecued fish. The crescent moon rising behind the Jordanian mountains evokes romantic images of Lawrence of Arabia with his band of Arabs, crossing desert and mountain range to seize Aqaba from the Ottoman Turks in 1917.

At dawn on the following day, we are up early and continue south, following the Red Sea coastline. To our left in the distance, across the Gulf of Aqaba, stand the stark red mountains of Saudi Arabia. The beaches of the gulf are pristine, white and deserted. From the bus we glimpse our first nomadic Bedouin – a man in a long-flowing garment, kneeling on his prayer mat, laid out on the beach.

The next day our path takes us inland into unknown territory. Israel has a tenuous hold on the Sinai, which it occupied after the Six Day War of 1967. David's tone is serious as he imparts our instructions for the day:
'We'll be stopping at several spots before we reach the Santa Katerina Monastery. Please stay with the group and don't go wandering off. We don't know much about these parts.'

The road takes us along the main pilgrim route from North Africa to Mecca and past a deserted quarantine station. Further along we reach the green Wadi Fir'an – a pleasant oasis of date palms, fragrant vines and crops, which springs unexpectedly from the rocky landscape.

Our bus stops again for afternoon tea. In the narrow valley behind us, several hundred metres away, there's a small village shadowed by rugged, stony mountains. Two men in long robes are crossing the valley floor, making their way towards the village. We keep our distance. David pulls out a stack of camp chairs and we find a spot near a thorny acacia tree and unpack thermoses of tea and slices of sweet-smelling lemon cake. A light dusting of snow covers the mountain tops. The air is dry and sharp. I sit in a reverie with the sun warming my back, while a lone eagle circles overhead, lifting high on the thermals.

David stands up, stretches and looks around to do a head count.
'Hey! Two people are missing. Did anyone see them leave?'
The Bedouins we saw earlier have vanished into the landscape.
'I'll go and search in the village over there,' David says. 'Wait here.'

Just at this moment the two volunteers appear in the distance, like tumble grass blowing across the rocky terrain. By the time they reach us, they're sweating profusely, wide-eyed and gasping for breath. They stop in front of David, bent with the exertion, their blue jeans dusted in red.
'Oh God! Something horrible! A dead man!'
'What?'
'A body hanging in the tree – a rope around his neck.'
'Where?'
'Over there, behind the rocks, at the edge of the village.'
'Quick!' David says. 'Pack up! We need to leave.'

Grabbing our bags and half-eaten cake we pile back into the bus and take off in a cloud of dust. Our friends relate a garbled description of the grisly scene – a bare-footed young man, fully clothed, swinging from a tree with a thick hemp rope around his neck.
'Who would have done this?' We ask David.
His brow furrows as he looks out the bus window. 'I don't know. It could be some sort of tribal feud.'

Later that day, when we reach the Santa Katerina Monastery, David makes enquiries about our shocking discovery. The Orthodox monks maintain good relations with the local Bedouins and sometimes step in to assist in resolving conflicts. The Bedouins have their own system of justice, they explain. Decisions of law are made by the village elders, according to honour codes. In this case, the dead man had probably committed a capital crime and therefore paid with his life. To us it seems like rough justice.

In 1979, after the Camp David peace agreement, Israel handed back the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. In the intervening years the region we traversed has opened up to tourism and the tribal justice systems and traditional ways are disappearing. The brutal death we stumbled upon in 1975, cast a pall over our remaining travels in the Sinai Peninsula and the memory lingers still.

Bedouin children Sinai 1974

The Raid

This piece of my memoir writing was originally published in 2017 in  Harvest, the Anthology of the Past Tense Group at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Wrters' Centre in Greenmount, Western Australia

The Raid

Viewed from the front, there was nothing unusual about my grandparents' house in Strathfield, but to me as a seven-year-old, around the back was a place of intrigue and mystery. A towering brick wall formed the boundary fence between their house and the row of shops beyond. Shards of broken glass had been cemented along the top of the wall, like a row of sharp brown fangs to scare off intruders.

'Why are there broken bottles on the wall, Gran?' I asked.
'Because they don't want people climbing over.' She folded her arms across her bony chest and stood tall.

Curiously, the window of the room above the shops had been plastered over with brown paper.

'Do people live over the shops, Gran?'
She shrugged and turned to go inside. 'I'm not sure.'

But Gran was dodging my question. Sometime later, I discovered that my grandparents often heard shouting, late into the night, behind the browned-out window.

Most of the days when I visited, I spent the time in my grandparents' bedroom at the front of the house, playing with my little sister. While Gran toiled in the kitchen, preparing her famous coconut-ice, we would be getting into mischief, bouncing up and down on their big old iron-frame bed. We'd crawl under the bed and explode into fits of giggles at the large porcelain chamber pot, hidden there. I don't know why they kept a chamber pot, because they did possess an indoor toilet. Maybe because they were country people at heart and old habits die hard?

Grandpa was semi-retired and spent his leisure time growing vegetables in a garden bed along the side of the house. We'd trail behind while he pulled up a fresh crop and couldn't wait to sink our teeth into the juicy sweet carrots, still smelling of earth. During the school week, I took the train to Strathfield Station and dropped in to see Gran and Grandpa on the way to school.

The peace of my grandparents' suburban life was shattered late one night when they were rudely woken from their slumber by a sharp knock at the front door. Grandpa stepped into his felt slippers, pulled on his chequed, woollen dressing gown and, still half-asleep, shuffled to the front door. Gran padded after him, gathering a shawl over her tall frame. They turned on the veranda light and cautiously opened the door, peering out into the gloom. Standing there on the front veranda was a uniformed policeman. The light caught his sandy-coloured mustache as he smiled reassuringly. Behind him, in the dim light of the front path, were several more policemen, one of whom held a long wooden ladder under his arm.

'Sir, we're sorry to disturb you at this late hour, but we need to cross over your backyard to gain access to the shops behind you.'

Grandpa led the way down the driveway and the men tramped behind him, their black leather boots leaving deep imprints in the garden soil and squashing the precious carrots. Gran retreated into the house and emerged at the back door in time to witness events from a safe distance.

The police propped up the ladder and scaled the fence, avoiding the spikes of glass. They climbed to the covered window, and tried to force it open. When it wouldn't budge they took a mallet and crashed through the glass.

My grandparents couldn't see inside the upstairs room, but they heard the commotion and voices shouting: 'police raid!' – followed by the muffled footsteps clomping down the timber staircase as men were being frog marched out. And so, that night, another Sydney Two-up school was busted.

Over the next few days Gran pored over the morning newspapers, searching for juicy details of the late-night raid. Shoppers at the local butcher shop winnowed through the husks of the story, searching for the precious grains of truth. It transpired that more than a dozen men had been apprehended at the Two-up school above the shops. They were taken to Strathfield Police Station and charged with being found in a common gaming house. The mystery behind the backyard fortress was revealed. The next time I visited Gran on my way to school, she regaled me with the whole thrilling saga.
In the postwar years, Two-up schools were common across Sydney. From Kirribilli to Surrey Hills, if you were keen for a flutter, the local taxi driver knew where to find the action. Usually a man, known as the cockatoo, would stand guard to warn of an imminent raid. On the night of the Strathfield raid, the hapless cockatoo, like the guns defending Singapore, must have been facing the wrong way.
Law enforcement never did stamp out the evil of Two-up and eventually they surrendered the fight. By 1954, the era of clubs and pokies had already begun. In the 1990s, the New South Wales government legalised Two-up and in so doing, eliminated a long standing element of Australia's larrikin tradition. My grandparents dined out on the story of the Strathfield Two-up raid for several years, until they moved away from the neighbourhood in the 1960s.

Harvest Past Tense Group Anthology 2017

Our writing group recently published an anthology of members' writing. The title is Harvest:  Anthology of the Past Tense Writing Group at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers' Centre. Below is one of my memoir pieces that appeared in Harvest.

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Visits to Labrador

Our visits to Labrador are always on a Sunday when no one else is around. On these occasions, Dad drives into town and parks opposite in the grounds of the colonial hospital. Labrador – a strange name for a building. Mum says it's also the name of a dog that lives on a rocky island off the coast of Canada. But my Labrador is the four-storey terrace building where Dad has his dental surgery.

Sometimes, we see a scruffy old lady with a pile of canvas bags, camped outside Labrador. Dressed in sand shoes, a full-length dark coat and a green tennis shade, she scares me, especially when she shouts out strange words.

'She's speaking Shakespeare,' Dad says. 'She went to the university and lost her marbles.'

I hold my breath as I run past her, to avoid breathing in her smelly old socks.

The building has an old-fashioned cage lift of ornate iron work. After we press the black metal button, the lift comes clanging down from the top floor and shudders to a stop at the ground floor. You pull down on the iron door handle and step inside an open cage that ascends slowly, past all the other tenants, their doors locked on Sunday.

Once inside the surgery, we always make a circuit around the benches, picking up the tiny brown pottery jars and fingering the neatly laid out rows of spikey instruments. Dad lets us mix the amalgam for the fillings, putting the liquid mercury into a china bowl and crushing it with the pestle. The mercury breaks into tiny little droplets that dance around the bottom of the bowl, until he adds some extra ingredient to form a silvery lump.

I climb into the dentist's chair, like queen of the realm, while my sister pumps the foot pedal to send me upwards. The drill has a shrill, noisy motor and Dad ties a ball of cotton wool onto the rotating wire and tell us to 'watch the rabbit going around'. One Sunday I need a filling and Dad asks me to be the guinea pig to try out his new drill. He has just acquired a thrilling new-fangled model that makes a fast whizzing noise and sprays water at the same time. It's all over so quickly. I am always encouraged to be very brave and to this day my dentist can't believe how calm I am in the chair.

Then, one day Dad breaks the news that Labrador has been bought by the bank and is to be bulldozed. In 1958, the site was subsumed for a massive commercial development in the heart of Sydney. Out of the rubble of old Labrador, rose the headquarters of the Reserve Bank of Australia at the corner of Macquarie Street and Martin Place. The eccentric old lady we used to see outside the building, turned out to be the well-known eccentric, Bea Miles, whose life was depicted by Kate Grenville in her novel, Lilian's Story.