My father said the camps weren’t like that at all, that it was an American idea, and anyone who’d behaved like the King Rat character wouldn’t have lasted. What he meant by not lasting he didn’t say. It was the first time I ever really knew anything about the camps and my father. When I asked if he had been at Changi, he said not really, which was true as he had only passed through it en route to the Death Railway. No one had heard of the Death Railway in those days. Even then my father’s world was not the real world which, it was evident from all the advertising around the Hollywood film, was that of a Hollywood film. My father despised King Rat. It was an American story. His was not.

  His story was otherwise: we were told that on the Death Railway there was a POW camp of English not far from the Australians’ camp at Hintok where my father was, and there the English divided on class lines, the officers not working, keeping the small stipend the Japanese inexplicably paid imprisoned officers for themselves and surviving, the enlisted men labouring and starving and in consequence dying like flies. His words. The Australians, he told us, held together as one, the officers being compelled to pool their stipend to buy drugs and food for the sick on the black market, and working in the camp hospital and kitchen to help the group. Together they survived—or at least far more of them than the English.

  That was his story and that much we knew growing up. You went under alone but together you could survive. When someone was down you helped, not out of altruism, but an enlightened selfishness: this way we all have a chance. The measure of the strongest was also the only guarantee of ongoing strength: their capacity to help the weakest. Mateship wasn’t a code of friendship. It was a code of survivors. It demanded you help those who are not your friends but who are your mates. It demanded you sacrifice for the group. Is that a convict idea? Is it an Indigenous idea? Is it both things merged? It’s not a European or an American idea. It is, though, a deeply old, serious idea of humanity.

  A book on the Death Railway, an oral history, names my father. A survivor recalled how at the height of the dreaded Speedo—when the monsoon and cholera reigned, exhaustion was a prelude to death, and the Japanese demanded the starving POWs work up to sixteen hours a day, seven days a week—Japanese trucks would sometimes of a night become bogged on the treacherous jungle tracks. The prison guards would demand a man from each tent come to help push the trucks the last few kilometres to the camp, men who were already exhausted by their relentless labouring. As a sergeant, it was my father’s task to choose which man from his tent went. He always chose himself.

  King Rat was, I only discovered many years later, written by an Australian named James Clavell who had been a POW in Changi. Clavell’s tale was published after a post-war career in English and then American movies. Written during a Hollywood writers’ strike in 1960 it seems to have been composed with a keen eye for an American market and sensibility and was an immediate bestseller. Perhaps it was Clavell’s experience, or perhaps it wasn’t, or perhaps he took those parts he felt would meld with American individualism and made of it a great commercial success.

  When I asked my father about the story of him choosing a man from his tent to push the trucks of a night and my father choosing himself, he was annoyed. He said the author had it wrong and that the story was untrue. Yet previously he had told me it was a good book, and a reliable one. It was as though something in the story—beyond its veracity or otherwise—offended him deeply.

  6

  One day my father visited me and he noticed my bookcases. Do you need all these books? he asked. Doesn’t the library have them? It was a gently put query as if the bookcases baffled him, which perhaps they did. But it was also in his way an admonishment. Ever since, I have always felt slightly ashamed of my books for I sensed they—and me with them—had somehow disappointed him. I saw them for the first time through his eyes: a vulgar display of possession. When my father died I met a tall African man at his funeral, a recent migrant to Australia. No one in the family knew who he was. He had come to pay his respects, he said. My father had paid his family’s power bill for the last five years.

  ‘Money,’ my father would say, ‘is like shit. Pile it up and it stinks. Spread it around and you can grow things.’

  When as a child I petitioned my parents to let me have a newspaper run like other kids, they demurred. I heard them talking—my mother, my grandmother, my father. They disliked the way that cash was claiming even a child. For them it bordered on offensive. That a child might work was one thing—but money, money they saw as a force that was inherently outside of human control, a force that sought to subjugate everyone it met. Any relationship that became a transaction founded on money was to be mistrusted, as were people who did things for money, who acted only for money, who set the needs of money above the needs of life.

  My parents were frugal not simply because they had to be careful, but because they saw little reason for making life about money. The notion of any relationship being what is now termed transactional, the idea of monetising aspects of your very life, would have seemed to them like some sort of emotional sickness or mental illness.

  Along with money, ambition was seen to be dangerous. My mother hoped I would make a good plumber. It was that sort of world. Not an excellent plumber or a successful plumber, both adjectives implying some sort of excess of pride, or presumption, that might rent the all-consuming ties of family and duty or destroy a life with the hubris it might invoke. Work was a means, careers were something Americans talked about. Freed of ambition or expectation I was free to do whatever I wished.

  I don’t mean to suggest that they were stupid about money. Money was good, as the old joke ran, if only for financial reasons. It was an aspect of the world but not the point of it. They were realists, not idealists. ‘You don’t need possessions,’ my father once said, ‘but you do need whitegoods that work.’ They didn’t confuse money with life or wish for it to become life.

  Near the end of his time, my father, who liked keeping some cash at hand in an envelope in his desk drawer, realised money was routinely going missing. He suspected a young woman who came to clean. Believing she had more need of it than him, he made no attempt to hide the envelope and once a week had my sister refresh its contents.

  7

  Perhaps at the heart of it all was a fear that came out of something far older. Tasmania was full of the descendants of machine breakers, swing labourers, Luddites, Chartists, trade unionists, slave revolt leaders and Māori chieftans exiled to Van Diemen’s Land, as the island was known, the gulag of the British Empire—people united in their various failed efforts to give shape to the revolt against the enclosing capitalism reshaping the world and them with it.

  My grandmother on my mother’s side, known to all as Mate, once told me of how in her childhood the old people would talk of Ireland during the Famine and how they had witnessed the men of English absentee landlords evicting tenant farmers and their families and burning their homes down in front of them. The story seemed unrelated to our family; she was proud to the point of insistence that she was descended from free settlers and not convicts.

  Yet one day she began telling me about the man traps that were set for the escaping convicts; her grandfather had seen them in his work as a constable. She spoke with a surprising lack of elaboration about his experience as a policeman, elaboration normally her way. But no, her memory was solely of the cruelty of a man trap, a giant sort of rabbit trap, a gaping shark’s mouth of two iron-teethed jaws rising to thigh height hidden in the bush along the routes favoured by escaping convicts. Covered with bracken and tree litter, the man trap would snap shut when its tensed iron was sprung, ripping through the thigh or calf of the convict as if it were no more than a poor rabbit’s leg, tearing flesh apart and crushing bone. The victim would lie in agony until found, sometimes dead, sometimes alive, destined to live as a cripple or to die of infection.

  Undone by emotion, Mate said that her grandfather had once discovered a man caught in a man trap down the peninsula and her eyes teared up. Emotional display was not Mate’s way: even as a child it struck me as unusual.

  Her grandfather’s name was Edward Green. She knew him as a child. Mate was ashamed of Mad Ned, as she called him. She said he used bad language and was vulgar. Near the end of her life Mate told me that she thought Mad Ned was possibly a convict. On checking the archival record it was discovered that he never had been a constable. He had been a convict, found guilty along with three others of beating a man with a stick in Westmeath, Ireland, and transported to Van Diemen’s Land for life. Irish papers of the time reported that he and three others had been transported for being Whiteboys.

  The Whiteboys was a secret sect whose members would of a night whiten their faces, don white blouses and ride out to defend the rural poor from enclosure, tithes, low wages and evictions, burning out landlords and occasionally killing them and policemen. Their violence had consequences, limiting the worst excesses of absentee landlordism. But it also met with considerable state violence. Acts were passed to ban the Whiteboys and they were brutally repressed, many being hanged.4

  When presented with this information Mate stiffened. She denied all knowledge and said it couldn’t be so and that he never was. Her mind had clearly been wandering, she said, when she had told me such things.

  There is no fineness in violence; it metastasises and spreads. And in my family it was passed down through my grandmother, who was for a time cruel, and through some of her sisters, who were notorious for beating their children for no reason.

  And I thought back then on how when Mate had told me the story of the man trap she had started crying about the cruelty of it, perhaps perplexed by what life was and the long shadows that still shaped her, by the questions she could not resolve, while I, an eleven-year-old both bewildered and alert to something I could not yet understand, kept staring at my grandmother who never cried.

  8

  Years later an aged family relative, Aunty Blossom, described Mate’s family coming into the village of Sorell in their dray and the baker’s children walking behind chanting ‘Crawlers . . . crawlers’.

  Crawler. The old convict word for a convict.

  Mate’s aged brothers and sisters would sometimes arrive at our home and the talk would be of the landed families as if we were one when in reality we were nothing. Great-uncle Babes, who used to play the piano in Ma Dwyer’s celebrated Salamanca brothel, the Blue House, would talk of them, the true free settlers—the V—s and the B—s and the C—s, the idiot issue of the English gentry gifted the kangaroo hunting plains stolen from the massacred Aboriginal people for their immense sheep farms along with the gangs of convict slave labourers to work them and make the free settlers obscenely rich—as though they were personal friends when, as one of my brothers observed, they wouldn’t have pissed on us if we were on fire.

  On this point Blossom was interesting: Mate’s family had to invent themselves, she told me. What else could they do? I admired them, Blossom said. They were nothing and so they had to pretend to be something until they were.

  As she was dying Mate had recurrent dreams of the dray coming to her across the fields and on it were all the old people asking her to come with them. My mother, who loyally sat with Mate those last long weeks, urged her to go with them. But Mate would not. Every night they returned, and now the drayman was a fine-looking young man whom she recognised as Tom, my elder sister’s son, not yet eight months old but on the dray he was grown-up and handsome. Finally Mate went away with Tom and the dray. Two weeks after Mate’s death Tom died of SIDS.

  9

  Mate sat in the dray, eyes averted from the dust kicking up behind it and the baker’s children running alongside. She sat in the dray, she sits in the dray, and even now, long after her death, she is sitting there still, straight, looking past them and towards the future, reinventing herself by reinventing her past, not knowing the past stays with us, that what was, is and shall be, as the bakers’ children’s chant, Crawlers . . . crawlers, through time and space haunting her and haunting Tom and haunting us all, unable to be unheard: Crawlers . . . crawlers . . . crawlers.

  10

  Mate was meant to die in 1956 when she had a severe stroke. It was said everyone in our large clan prayed for her to survive, back when she seemed so old but was only middle-aged, younger than me writing this now, that it was a miracle she lived, but perhaps it would have been better, my father later said, if we hadn’t prayed. He was unsure about God but sure about prayer, about the power of communal wishing. Yes, he said, perhaps it would have been better for her if she had died back then. That was her time. The rest was just waiting, forty years of it. It would have been better for her to have died, but she didn’t or wouldn’t, as if some shared love that was also perhaps some insidious vengeance, some dark thing that was love and also wasn’t, kept her soul here.

  She lied about her age until the end, saying she was ninety-eight and not ninety-nine, to keep the long-lost shame from rising back up, to cover up the sin of having conceived out of wedlock by muddling her age; she would have got the telegram from the Queen and claimed the palace had it wrong, but perhaps to save herself the argument she died and so many years after I still think of her.

  Near the end, she moved into a nursing home where she shared a room with Mrs B—. I never learnt her first name. She was an even smaller woman than Mate, with a round face and eyes that bulged, always smiling, a smile so permanent the rest of her face had slowly fallen into place around it, like a mildewy tent sagging on broken poles.

  Mate became fast friends with Mrs B—, and then Mrs B— died and another woman took her bed across from my grandmother and Mate made friends with her too, and she died, and another woman came, and this time Mate didn’t bother making friends with her because they all died, death was the rule, friends were about living. Mate had the survivor’s curse.

  At some point her sisters and brothers began dying also, her sisters and brothers the only ones who understood the absurdity of her life and their lives and the only ones I ever saw her laugh with, they all died and she was doomed to outlive two of her sons and most of her siblings, they all died and they were all waiting to die. Perhaps she wondered why God had answered their prayers that she might live when she had her stroke in 1956. Was it God’s punishment? Because they all kept dying and she kept living.

  Perhaps that was what she thought in her heart of hearts, because the closer she came to death the more I sometimes think she feared God saw everything about her, that God had chosen her out of all the others to punish with life, until even that bedroom was no refuge.

  11

  I see Mate, red tartan mohair shawl draped over her bony shoulders, day after year after decade playing Patience on her bed table, a weary piece of musk-coloured Masonite with worn wood borders and dulling steel tube legs.

  Her smell—an amalgam of ammonia, cheap scent, the soap of her hard scrubbed flesh and the naphthalene of her carefully preserved clothes—repelled me, as she did each morning when she would make her way to the toilet on her stick-like legs, hunched like an aged plover, bearing the chamberpot she kept under her bed, a towel over its indignity. Above all, I silently resented the way she lorded it over our poor mother.

  Yet I was Mate’s favourite. I don’t know why. It was clear that religion, which in her old age mattered greatly, was of no interest to me. Nor was I a remarkable child in any sense. Among her numerous grandchildren—I have over fifty first cousins—many were far more vivacious, attractive, charming, clever, athletic and interesting. But when she told me things I listened.

  Each morning one or another of us would have to run breakfast into her bedroom—she was the only person in the house allowed their own bedroom—and put on that bed table her tiny one-cup aluminium teapot with its faux hammer-beaten belly and anodised blue lid, along with a plate of toast: two slices, pale but not anaemic, warm but not cold, and no trace of charring tolerated. These were tight parameters to achieve success within on a busy morning. For any misdemeanours the little hand bell kept next to her bed on a chest of drawers would be heard to tinkle, and in the kitchen remnant grandchildren would look away or scarper, hoping not to be singled out by our mother and told to go see what Mate wanted.

  In her bed, propped up on pillows, Mate would sit, bony shoulders shawled, proffering the plate with two uneaten or slightly gnawed pieces of toast along with the curt dismissal: tell Helen the toast was a bit punky. Or: tell Helen the toast was burnt. Our mother was her mother’s servant.

  We would take the toast back down the narrow dark corridor to the kitchen and our mother. Mate says it’s punky. Our mother would then give the cold toast to us to eat or eat it herself and make some more. I refused to eat Mate’s toast, to swallow some essential indignity that I couldn’t understand.

  The whole absurd edifice of Mate’s authority and, allied with it and contingent on it, the Church’s ludicrous power and sanctity over every aspect of our lives, rested finally with our father’s acceptance of both. Only as an adult did it occur to us what Mate was: a widow, a single, penniless, powerless woman, who was to outlive her husband by almost half a century, still receiving letters to her end addressed to Mrs Jack L—, condemned to surviving on her children’s charity. In my mother’s case that charity was, in the way of those times, necessarily founded on the agreement of our family’s sole breadwinner, our father, and in the hierarchy of the times, its head. And through the decades she lived with us, I never once heard him speak of her with anything other than complete respect.

  12