Mug Shots by Barry Oakley Page A

became unsettling. Hours of shouts, thumps and howlings—and then, by eight o’clock, after the last story had been told, the last warning issued, silence. We’d sit with a glass of what was still called claret and at about half past ten open the door, creep down the hallways to the front bedroom, lie there and wait for sleep, knowing that when it came it was preparing to leave at least one of the children.

    Married life in Carnegie.
    We had twelve years of broken nights, an endless catacomb of cryings and coughings, that focused particularly on what we called the red room. It had cheap red lino and a red night-light, and when going in there to a child trapped in a dream-terror, you seemed caught up in it too—the glow of ambulances and brothels, the nightmare redness in the heart of the dark. They might have been the swinging sixties for some. For us, they were the sleepless ones.
    There is a scene in Pride and Prejudice where the wealthy and eligible Mr Bingley is seen unexpectedly approaching on his horse, sending the Bennet family running around in crazed circles. Our own reaction, when our leisure was precious, was similar. Is it Uncle Len from Newcastle? Auntie Gladys from Shepparton? Max the mad Fitzroy poet? At an unexpected knock, we’d shepherd the brood into the laundry and hide.
    One lonely bachelor friend—we always had one lonely bachelor friend—used to outwit us by coming round the back, so we put a dustbin against the side gate as an early warning system. Once we heard it move, five little children had to be hidden and hushed. Finally the problem solved itself. One of the kids peeped out a window just as he was looking in, and he went away for good.
    Every weekend, our boisterous household was rivalled by our next-door neighbours—an elderly couple and their middle-aged son. They lived in a state of passive alcoholism during the week and broke out on Saturday, pursuing one another from room to room while roaring insults. Next to them was another middle-aged misfit son who lived with his mother and went on peeping expeditions on summer nights. And next to them again lived a large, sullen Slavonic man who stared out at the world from his front gate and rarely went beyond it. One night he shuffled in his slippers to the railway line at the end of the street and was killed at the pedestrian crossing. Carnegie was not as characterless as I first thought.

Responsibility avoided again
    In 1960 Brian Kiernan, absurdly youthful and freshly graduated MA from the University of Melbourne, arrived at Caulfield and we found much in common. It was a friendship built on books and a lunchtime beer.
    Brian and his partner Suzanne moved into an Italianate mansion called Labassa. It has since been taken over by the National Trust, but was then divided into grand but shabby apartments. Theirs took in a drawing room and ballroom, and sometimes we had dinner there. We’d dine on the ballroom’s podium, with a distant fire burning in the baronial grate, flickering highlights in the wallpaper’s gold.
    To add to its decaying glamour, Joe Lynch, the alcoholic subject of Kenneth Slessor’s Five Bells , once lived in Labassa’s tower:
    Everything had been stowed
    Into this room—500 books all shapes
    And colours dealt across the floor
    And over sills and on the laps of chairs.
    During the sixties, Brian’s essays on such canonical novelists as Joseph Furphy, Xavier Herbert, Christina Stead and Patrick White rescued them from the benign prison of the democratic nationalist tradition, locating them within the vivifying currents of European and American fiction instead.
    These essays, when collected into a book, also rescued Brian himself. They led to a lectureship in English at the University of Sydney, which made the Kiernans pioneers in what later became a minor exodus—the Careys, Williamsons, Oakleys and a number of others leaving Melbourne for sybaritic Sydney.
    Just