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.

Lessons learned

Me with my little sister Cathy in Toronto 1953

The following piece of my memoir writing appeared in the Katharine Susannah Prichard Past Tense Anthology in June 2016

Lessons Learned

It was a day of firsts – the first snowfall of winter, my first experience of snow, and my first day of school in Canada. I was only five and a half in that winter of 1953. My Canadian mother had brought us all the way from our home in Sydney, Australia to spend nine months with our Nana Mollie in Toronto. My mother had married an Australian and she left Canada to move to Sydney, in 1946. She always felt guilty about leaving her newly-bereaved mother behind and when Nana sent the money for the ocean voyage across the Pacific, she jumped at the opportunity. Dad had to remain behind in Sydney, because of his work. I would be attending the local school in Toronto over the winter term with my older sister Pat.

Lambton Park Primary School was within walking distance from Nana's house, but mother decided to drive us on our first day. I climbed into the back seat of the Austin, rugged up like a rolly-polly doll with my nose pressed to the frosty window. The neighbourhood gardens were covered in snow, like a dusting of fine icing sugar.

'Do you think we'll be playing in the snow Mummy?'
'Yes darling, most probably.'
'Will I make new friends there?'
'Yes of course, you'll be fine.' She reassured us.

Mother dropped us off at the front entrance of the school. I stepped out of the car and anxiously scanned the scene. A long path led up to the front portico of the two-storey brick building. On either side of the path, groups of boys lurked behind the trees. I swung back to the road to call for my mother, but her car had already moved away.

Pat held out a confident hand and we hoisted our school cases and marched at a steady pace towards the front entrance. We were half way down the path when I noticed a boy's head dart out from behind the trees. Then snowballs started flying. I moved behind Pat, but a something like a hard rock hit my arm with a painful whack.

'Ouch!'
A blonde boy laughed. 'Gotcha!'
I bent down to grab a handful of snow, but Pat yanked on my arm. 'No time! Quick, make a run for it!'

We ducked and weaved between the icy missiles, our shoes slipping in the snow, eyes fixed on the entrance up ahead. Other children fled, screeching with us, until we reached the safety of the front door and threw ourselves inside.

The rest of that first day is a blur to me now and it probably passed uneventfully. We had learned our first lesson of survival in the Canadian winter schoolyard. There was a trick to making snowballs and if you didn't know how, you'd better duck for cover. Over that winter we worked hard at perfecting our snowball skills. Although we tried, adding layer upon layer, until the snow turned to ice in our bare hands, we could never quite match it with the local children.

We had other adventures and mishaps in those months in Canada. One bitterly cold day, Pat and I went skating on a makeshift outdoor ice pond at the school. We had been dropped off and were to walk home, a distance of a half mile or so. Later, our hands blue with cold, we could not untie our skates and were alone in the darkening gloom of the afternoon. The other children had somehow vanished. We had to clomp down the street with in our skates still on our feet, and clamber up the stairs of a stranger's house to call for help. It was a moment of lasting embarrassment for my responsible older sister – and another lesson in winter survival.

Before long, we were on the ship sailing across the Pacific, back home to Sydney. Dad was waiting on the wharf to welcome us with big hugs. The summer heat blazed through the car window on the hot drive home through the western suburbs. When we arrived we were greeted by a deafening buzz coming from the backyard trees. The local boys were up there, perched on a branch, collecting cicadas. How did they manage that feat? Our next lesson awaited us. In due course, the dreams of ice and snow melted away.

Remember Henty

Henty B&B. Photo by OZinOH on Flickr 

The following piece about my father Bede James Smith appeared originally in the Katharine Susannah Prichard Past Tense Anthology in June 2016

Remember Henty

Bede woke to the sound of rain pelting on his tin roof. He pulled up the window and leaned out to sniff the air. A plume of steam was rising from the earth, giving off a pungent smell of  eucalyptus. Somewhere from the centre of town he heard voices cheering, so he quickly dressed and dashed down the road to investigate. The sudden downpour had taken everyone by surprise and a group of wild-eyed locals were whooping it up, dancing barefoot in the main street. It was March 1939 in the New South Wales town of Henty. The drought had finally broken. Rain continued all morning and by lunchtime floodwaters were lapping the bridges of nearby Yerong Creek, washing away grim memories of the dry.

My father, Bede, was 29 at the time. He had been in Henty for three years, having bought his first dental practice there. Bede spent his boyhood in the neighbouring Riverina district, so Henty was familiar ground. He was sweet on a girl called Moira, the local teacher and his best mate, Frank, worked for the Commonwealth Savings Bank. Henty had a lively social scene in those days with Bede and Frank at the centre of it. They organised mystery dances for the Henty Younger Set, played tennis and golf and starred in amateur theatre productions at the School of Arts. Bede was captain of the Henty Cricket Team – the tall all-rounder could be relied upon to knock up a classy innings with the bat and take wickets with his medium-pace bowling. He could have remained in Henty, married his sweetheart and lived out his days as a country town dentist. Instead, he was lured to opportunities elsewhere and set sail for Canada in September 1939, breaking at least one heart on the way out.

There were 12 other Australian dentists on the Pacific crossing, all of them venturing overseas to take a postgraduate degree at the University of Toronto. Bede planned to return to Sydney after his studies and start a dental practice there. But two things intervened to alter his best-laid plans – war and love. While the ship was mid-ocean, Prime Minster Robert Menzies declared his "melancholy duty" and committed Australia to the war in Europe. The ship sailed on to North America regardless; there was no point turning back.

In Canada, Bede fell in love with a Toronto girl, my mother Marg Baggs. After finishing his studies he stayed on in Toronto and married Marg in 1941. Their first child, my sister Pat, was born in 1943. Bede enlisted with the Canadian Dental Corps and was posted to the wilds of Northern Ontario before serving overseas from 1943 to 1945, with the Allied Invasion of Europe. After the war he brought his Canadian wife and daughter back to Sydney and by 1950 they had three children.

The war changed Bede. When friends invited the family to go boating on the George's River, he found excuses to stay home. Marg pleaded with him to socialise, but he preferred to potter around the garden or listen to his opera recordings. And the last thing he wanted to do was take the children camping. His three years in the Canadian Army, were enough to put him off camping for life. Yet Bede always had time for his Henty mate Frank and the two reconnected in Sydney in the 1950s with their wives and children. They shared a passion for classical music, cricket and Henty.

On one occasion Frank came around to visit, with his newest LP record.

'What have you brought this time?' Bede asked.

'It's my latest, a recording of Heifetz doing the Beethoven Violin.'

Like a treasure hunter uncovering gold, Bede took the vinyl record out of its paper sleeve. Holding it carefully around the edges, he placed it on the turntable, pressed the start button and lowered the stylus onto the rotating disc. There was a small crackle before the opening beats of the timpani, then the woodwinds, and finally the strings took control. The two friends settled back on the lounge for a session of Beethoven.

In summer, Bede and Frank often made their way to the Sydney Cricket Ground, with wives and children in tow. The men retreated to the hallowed ground of the Members' Pavilion to watch their hero Richie Benaud, leaving the women to spend the day in the Ladies' Stand, chasing after bored and restless children. Later on in the evening after a few beers, the conversation inevitably circled back to that small NSW town.

'Remember Henty!'

'Ah yes, what about the time ...?'

At this point the women rolled their eyes. 'There they go again.'

As children we thought it a huge joke. We were sophisticated city kids. What was so special about some one-horse country town we had never even seen?

Those days are long gone. Bede and Frank have passed into history. Looking back I can see that remembering Henty became a shared folklore between two mates, a testament to good times and bachelor days. Bede and Frank didn't have a men's shed to escape the travails of life, but they did have Henty and those memories sustained them for many a year. In the 1960s we moved to Perth, many miles away from the charms of Henty. We never did go camping.

Dixcove, Ghana 1973

The following piece originally appeared in the Katharine Susannah Prichard (KSP) Past Tense Anthology in June 2016 

Dixcove Fort, Ghana 1973

Words of Wisdom

We had been staying in the fishing village of Dixcove for over a week and had settled into a comfortable routine of ambling down to the beach each morning, and waiting by the boats to inspect the day's fishing catch in the afternoon.

On Saturday evening, we heard there was to be a local funeral and were eager to stay around for the experience. As darkness fell, villagers gathered in the dusty square, below the imposing stone walls of the Dixcove fort. Shops around the square were lit by kerosene lamps and some food sellers were hunched over smoky braziers, roasting cobs of corn.

From a side street, drums started up and a group of dancers approached the square. The mood was contagious, with locals joining in, and I felt a child's clammy hand grabbing mine, pulling me into the throng. I did my best to follow the confident dance moves of the local kids, swirling hips to the rhythm of the beat, until I spun out to take a break with my friends.

At this point an African gentleman approached us. His thick-framed spectacles gave him the look of a professor, marking him out from the other villagers.

'Good evening my friends, you are most welcome to Ghana. May I invite you to my house, to share my hospitality.'

We followed him several hundred metres out of town, until we reached a brightly lit house. The entrance was up a tiled staircase and through a porch, leading to a spacious lounge room. His house, with its fluorescent globes blazing, was in sharp contrast to the darkness outside. We were amazed – this was 1973 and no one in rural Ghana had electricity. This gentleman must be a person of some wealth and status, to have his own generator.

His wife brought us cake and cordial while we made ourselves comfortable on their vinyl upholstered chairs. After a few moments of polite chat the gentleman went to his book case and retrieved a small black book.

'Do you know this book?' He held the book with reverence, opening the front cover.

'It is called "The Axioms of Kwame Nkrumah". We known it as "the little black book". It contains words of wisdom from our former leader.'

He gestured to a framed black and white photo on the wall showing a distinguished Nkrumah wearing the traditional Ghanaian Kente cloth robe, draped across his shoulder. We nodded and politely sipped the sweet cordial. After a suitable interval of exchanging pleasantries, we thanked him and took our leave.

The following day I left Dixcove and continued travelling along the coast of Ghana to the capital Accra. I never discovered the identify of our mysterious African gentleman, but he had planted a seed, prompting me to find out more about his hero Nkrumah. Kwame Nkrumah was Ghana's first Prime Minister after the country gained independence from Britain. He was a freedom fighter who had a grand vision for a pan-African future, free from the bonds of colonialism and tribalism. In 1966, while on a state visit to North Vietnam, Nkrumah was overthrown in a coup. At that time his government was aligned with the Eastern Bloc. After Nkrumah's overthrow, Ghana shifted to align itself with the West. Kwame Nkrumah never returned to Ghana and spent his last years in exile, where he wrote his little black book. Much later it was claimed that the American CIA were behind the coup to overthrow him.

What had started out that night in Dixcove as a quest for an African cultural experience, lead to something much more, giving me an insight into Ghana's tortured history and politics. Today Nkrumah is revered in Ghana and in the year 2000 he was described by the BBC World Service an "International symbol of freedom as the leader of the first black African country to shake off the chains of colonial rule". Now, I am left wondering about western interference in Africa and whether colonialism has really ended.