Illywhacker

And it does not matter that she sold the Morris Farman for one hundred pounds and used the money to buy a dress for the Arts Ball in Sydney in 1924. Nor is it of any importance that she spent the rest of her life putting all her wiles and energies into being kept, cared for, loved or that the love she gave in return was of such a brittle quality that Annette Davidson would finally take her own life rather than endure its cutting edges.

It is of no importance that she would reveal herself to be self-indulgent, selfish, admiring herself like a budgie in a cage.

She was a liar, but who cares? The poem was made, set hard, could never be dismantled or unravelled, although on that dreadful night in September 1923 I did not understand, and battled against its timbers with an axe, howling more loudly than my terrified son. I did not guess how long I was destined to live with it.

Book 2

1

In a moment I must tell you how, competing with my son for the affection of a woman, I misused the valuable art I had learned from Goon Tse Ying and brought misfortune on my daughter. I would rather not repeat it. It is bad enough to have done it and I would as soon tear it up, wipe my arse with it, hide it under my lumpy mattress or feed it to my neighbour, the three-legged goanna with bad breath.

Yet, I see, I can postpone it a moment. For first I must tell you how I learned the art itself. I refer to the ability to become invisible, and you may wonder, if I really did possess such an unlikely power, why I should not have already used it to my own advantage.

To explain this I must go back to the days when my father's horses had to be shot at the bottom of the Punt Road Hill and I, a self-appointed orphan, was living, thin, half wild, cunning as a shit-house rat amidst the crates and spoiled vegetables at the back of the Eastern Market. I cannot have lived there for more than a week, but it seems like months that I lay amidst that stinking refuse, making tunnels and nests for myself at night, lying sleepless listening to the rats, shivering amidst the smell of bad cabbage in the early morning, peering through gaps at the family of Chinese whose stall was next to my midden heap. They knew I was there. They left me a bowl of milk on the first day but I would not touch it. I was my father's son. My head was full of stories about John Chinaman: opium, slavery, how they ate the hands of Christian babies.

In the end, hunger might have broken the impasse, but certainly the Wongs, whose stall it was, would never have. They were nervous, polite and law-abiding. Their cousin Goon, however, was a different man and it was he who strode right in, knocking crates aside with his gold-capped stick, who grabbed me by the scruff of my dirty neck and lifted me, screaming and kicking, into the air: pale, skinny, hatchet-faced with hunger. I bit his hand and made it bleed. He laughed out loud, this giant in a butterfly collar and gold-rimmed glasses. I wet myself in terror.

I sometimes wonder if Goon would have taken me in if I had displayed less terror, if his compulsion to prove his benign intentions was not what any human will feel when confronted with a petrified wild animal one wishes to help – the mistaken terror is an insult to our good motives, a goad to greater efforts. But Goon, in any case, was a man driven by a desire to prove himself civilized to the English he despised. He adopted their dress when it suited him and spoke their language without a trace of accent. He was a giant of a man, not in the sense that he might tower over you, my long-limbed reader. Oh, he was large for a Chinese, but that is not the point – he towered over every man I ever met in the size of his spirit, his indignation, his energy, his laugh, and his ability to drink a tumbler of rough brandy in a single gulp.

He was not one of the Chinese who wrote to the legislature: "Dear kind sirs, we the Chinese miners do beg you to treat us fairly as we most respectfully beg you to do. We work hard and mean no harm…"or words to that effect.

For these Chinese, Goon had nothing but scorn.

"Roll up," he would taunt them, "roll up."

When he became an old man with a successful business in Grafton, these facts about his younger days would cause him embarrassment and he would deny it all. He joined Chinese-Australian associations and had grandchildren with names like Heather and Walter. He ate chops and sausages, roast beef on Sundays, and the only invisibility he would acknowledge was that which comes from dressing like everyone else.