Chapter one: The ghetto
Wam! I recoiled as my friend Michael's fist rammed into my stomach, sucker punching me. I had not been expecting that for a second. What an absolute betrayal. Worst still, Michael's mother, a single mom, with only one child, was waiting across the road with the engine running for Michael to conveniently make his escape after his one punch attack. My crime: not saying thank you to Michael's mother after she gave me a ride once or twice from a swimming pool in the neighbourhood. Now the crime had been avenged and Michael and his single mom with no other kids sped off in their trashy Datsun used car. As common a sight on Australian roads in the mid 1980s, the time of this occurrence.
I would have been around ten years old however I'll have to check my elementary school photos to verify that. The lanes Michael ran across to stalk and then run from his prey were a well planned part of the ghetto, developed most likely in the early 1970s. Two lanes in one direction, and two lanes in the other. A study in urban planning, a generous three or four yard wide garden of grass elevated by a few inches from the well maintained roads divided each direction of travel, driving on the left as in England, in contradistinction to Continental Europe and the United States. Well guttered and plumbed roads. Da Vinci himself could not have faulted the roads in their planning, the roads rarely potholing. Gigantic roundabouts, well planned, where your friends, when old enough to drive legally, could flirt with death at a hundred kilometres per hour then slam into one of numerous above ground telegraph poles carrying electricity and phone lines.
To stalk his prey Michael ran up our ubiquitous Australian front yard, perhaps fifteen yards or so wide facing the busy road that was a tremendously long major artery of the ghetto. A cement sidewalk a metre wide separated a nature strip of grass immediately next to the road and its gutter from our front yard which ran slightly down hill. My father kept a photo of the same front yard before the grass had even been laid when the neighbourhood was probably first being built around the 1970s. After I was born in Penrith in 1976, on the extreme western outskirt of Sydney, at the base of the Blue Mountains, my destiny from the very first days of life, was right by this front yard that Michael stepped up, knocking on the front door,
"Is Ben home?" I could hear Michael ask sweetly with affected and false kindness as my father opened the front door for him.
"Ben your friend is here to see you," my father reported to me. He never seemed to have a problem with me spending time with anyone and generally kept his highly opinionated opinions to himself when it came to my pre teenage year friendships in the main part. The friendships I cultivated in the ghetto were all independent from my mother and father as they didn't socialise with my friends or their parents, and generally kept to themselves, having very few friends, mostly folks from the Old Country that they rarely saw.
"Can you come over here for a moment, there's something I want to tell you about?" Michael spoke evenly and calmly when I approached the door. Nothing untoward had ever happened between us prior to that so I wasn't expecting anything unpleasant.
After stepping down three steps or so from our leafy front patio to the top of the driveway which described an elevation of two metres or so above the aforementioned roads below.
"The other day my mother gave you a ride home from Rooty Hill swimming pool," Michael started explaining, perhaps angrily. I wasn't really great at spotting emotions throughout my childhood unless they were extremely overt. I noticed behind him about thirty yards away his mother waiting across the road in her car. Had I accidentally taken his swimming goggles? Was that what this was about?
"You didn't even say thank you, after my mom gave you a ride." Bam! Michael's fist slammed into my stomach slightly winding me. Michael's etiquette lesson over, he ran back to mommy. Probably not for the last time. What a couple. The ghetto was absolutely littered with them from top to bottom: single mothers whose boyfriends had perhaps beaten the crap out of them and left them because they couldn't say dean instead of teen when counting between twelve and twenty in the correct authentic dinkum Australian way (furdean Neanderthals, fawdean Neanderthals, fifthdean Neanderthals, look mom, I can count!). Perhaps the baby was screaming too loudly so dad needed a broom to break across mom's back. I know from stories from my relatives that similar things had happened between my own parents, although I never saw them as they'd cleaned up their act a little by the time I came along. Certainly Michael could have used a dad, even a stepfather, or an uncle or 'pop' as the Australian folks said referring to their grandfathers. I never knew Michael to have any of those.
The scenario that Michael's mom ran to escape ubiquitous domestic violence in Australia in the form of Michael's biological father was a real possibility. On the other hand, the kind of woman that encouraged her son to punch his ten year old friend in the gut for not saying thank you for a ride from the swimming pool, wouldn't be the kind of woman necessarily worth sticking around for from Michael's biological father's perspective, no doubt. Ghetto life.
"What's the matter?" My father asked me. More adept at reading people than myself, Anthony saw something was wrong after his son walked inside after briefly talking to his friend outside.
Almost a spring chicken, really, at age forty three approximately, Anthony insistently asked his ten year old son again, "what happened with your friend Michael?"
I was reluctant to rat Michael out and turning the other cheek, to quote the old Christian chestnut, most certainly seemed the best way to go.
Five years earlier, a real spring chicken of five years old, give or take, I myself had slammed my fist into one of the neighbourhood girls' noses, this nose belonging to the beautiful and lovely blonde Laura, a sweet five year old girl my youthful five year old mind remembers with nothing but admiration and respect. Why did I uncharacteristically punch Laura in the nose in the early 1980s, bloody-ing it? It was certainly nothing Laura had done, beyond being brave enough to jump into the deep end of the Olympic size swimming pool, approximately two metres deep. I was nothing but a 'big old coward' as a Southern State American would say. Too afraid at five years old to even be dragged near the pool, like a horse inflamed with irrational fear. Five year old Laura's jumping into the pool bravely wasn't annoying to me but some of the older kids in the neighbourhood, friends with my sister, five years older than me herself, were mocking me for my cowardice and Laura's braveness. Poor Laura would surely have to pay the price, it was the five year old way.
And perhaps Michael's father had beaten him and his mother until one day she had to run away, and punching me in the stomach ended the problem, the same way I solved the humiliating problem punching Laura in the nose five years earlier.
"You shouldn't have punched Laura in the nose," my father remonstrated with me. I could sense the emotion of mortification that my father and my sister Pat were broadcasting through their personal atmospheres after the fallout from punching Laura in the nose. Still my father wasn't one to use corporal punishment with Pat or I so the moment passed unpunished and it was most likely left to Laura's mother to dry the blood from her nose and wipe her tears. Truly I was a little bastard as I cared naught for Laura's pain.
Not everyone in the western Sydney ghetto was white trash. Michael's mother's parking spot across the road as she waited for Michael to take care of business was immediately outside the Bolt household. Chris Bolt was one of my kindergarten year classmates and an Australian with a pedigree predating the 'national anthem' by millenia. Kind Christine, I never remember a blip of resentment or mean spiritedness from her or any of her family, actually. Around the time I myself was my father Anthony's age when he was quizzing me about Michael's actions near our front door, around age forty two, Christine Bolt's father or uncle's wallet turned up missing at a nearby ghetto gas station and convenience store, I took it upon myself to return it. Christine's father or uncle was outside their latest home in the ghetto, still staying out of trouble and bucking every negative stereotype attributed to their community.
"Christine's at work now, brotha, she works at Costco Marsden Park," Christine's father or uncle thanked me for returning the wallet and good naturedly updated me, while attending to his lawnmower (which could have just been looking at it making sure noone was stealing it, as the ghetto was full of thieves) on Christine's life in the years between 1980 when she was my kindergarten classmate and the thirty something years since. Basically she had gotten a job at Costco. Truly some things never changed. It was good to see the Bolts seemed happy and grounded and Christine was working hard in an honest job. Their front garden certainly looked nice. They were like a postcard First Australian family.
But the ghetto was growing exponentially along with Australia's population, from around sixteen million or less when I was born to around twenty four million or so when I found the Bolts' missing wallet at the worldwide chain, 7/11. That meant Australia has grown by 150% since I was born, to that point. Truly the ghetto was a bellwether for all these changes. Adding new suburb after new suburb. New churches, new schools, new roads, new amenities, to its inherent ghetto folds.
However the ghetto's culture of low academic success would not easily dovetail with my bookish nature. Just as the Bolts had managed to buck the negative stereotypes and trends regarding their inherent Australian-ness, dating back so many centuries and millenia sure to boil the blood of the English race that wished to usurp their very identity as Australian; the ghetto's extremely lacklustre academic track record would not dictate the result of my future academic pursuits. If I failed it would be on me.
Some of the issues of the ghetto remained within the ghetto and many Australians from the middle and upper classes, in the very same metropolis, lived better educated and wealthier lives, happily oblivious to the very oblivion of the ghetto. Indeed elements of the ghetto were transnational so that I could travel to a ghetto in New York City and hear continuous and condescending recorded announcements over a Subway PA system reminding people of some idiotic thing neverendingly, as if the local population were without democracy like the poor folks in China.
Or like similar ghettos in Los Angeles where violence prevailed and folks could still remember looting a television with a laugh and a smile just a few years after my 'friend' Michael, punched me in the gut. The LA riots.
Indeed in Europe it seemed that where homogeneous non immigrant populations abided in the ghetto, their shared history and culture saved them somehow from some of the bleaker more upsetting and violent elements of the ghetto. Still working class ghettos with single mothers and low incomes were a staple of numerous democracies, whether in a young national population like Australia or California or elsewhere in Europe.
"What happened with your friend Michael?" My father insisted sternly, back in the mid 1980s.
"He punched me in the gut," I meekly confessed. I didn't really want to tell him about it.
My father was certainly an ambitious man, in his own way, cut from a different cloth than me. He had already graduated college, something I had failed to do even by age fifty, not at all liking Australia's tertiary education system in large part. He'd graduated college back in Europe in the Old Country before emigrating to Australia in 1971 with his wife like 'ten pound poms' (ie., like emigrants from England with only forty dollars in their pockets). She too had graduated college with a degree in horticulture or something along those lines back in the same Old Country. In Australia in non ghetto parts of Sydney the two of them tried their hands at entry level jobs in the early 1970s, before removing to the ghetto around early 1976, failing to make much progress materially. Still my father Anthony was happy in his career and became an electrical engineer with a diploma from an Australian community college, less prestigious or weighty than a university degree. My mother gave up on having a job and even driving a car and withdrew from society to the life of an insular hermet. Eschewing contact with folks in general.
"Where does your friend live?" My father growled angrily. I didn't like it. He was bullying me into ratting my friend out while I was still reeling from the shock of Michael's action (ie., treacherously and outrageously and even painfully punching me in the stomach). Still my father had a commanding personality, as he'd told me a million times commandingly since then, "if you don't like living here, go live somewhere else!" Or even, "go live somewhere else like the other one!" After my sister Pat had given up on the family and moved out as a teenager.
Michael lived nearby the same as us, the same as the Bolts, the same as my friend Shane, up a little further up the main arterial road, aforementioned, in government owned housing. We were poor and interest rates were sky high, sometimes twenty percent like in a communist country like Russia. Out of control. Shane had a dad and his dad still lived with Shane's mom, same as my parents were still ostensibly together. Sometimes Shane's father must have been incredibly annoyed with Shane's ascerbic, smart-alecky demeanour, which the ensuing years would illuminate for my childish mind also. One time, I went to visit Shane, most likely after the one trip up the same road I took with my father to Michael's townhouse that fateful gut punching day. Shane's eyes were red from crying and he despondently announced he wasn't allowed out to play. I surmised his father had kicked his ass for being a 'smartass' as his mother Vivian was forever calling him. Perhaps Shane's father's name was Ted, I can't even recall.
Bang, bang, bang, bang. My father's fist pounded on Michael and his mother's front door about twenty minutes or so after the sucker punch. My father hadn't wasted any time getting to his target. I noticed a curtain jiggle around upstairs as Michael and his single mom with no other kids to speak of surveyed her newly minted etiquette school environment. Perhaps she'd tried calling the cops up there and they turned up a few hours later to do nothing, I really don't know. My father never did any lasting damage to their front door or adjoining paraphernalia that I could see. He was just hot-headed and upset. After a minute or so of banging away like an angry German Shepherd he growled at me to return home with him. He'd done some yelling at Michael's mom but she kept mum the entire time.
Far scarier in all, including Michael's punch, was the time I left the ghetto for a long walk with one of the boys in the neighbourhood to faraway south creek in Llandilo, various miles walk. Llandilo was north of the ghetto and not a ghetto but a sprawling and large collection of farmstead homes with expansive properties various acres large. Some with horses and hobby farming paraphernalia. Decidedly wealthier than the white trash ghetto and infinitely less dense regarding urban population density. Being a little boy, on a mission to a little quaint country corner store in Llandilo, nearest to the south creek swimming site, I saw an angry looking black and shaggy actual German Shepherd dog, pacing its fence line menacingly. The fences in Llandilo weren't provided by the government and taxpayer to the aid of the poor immigrant Queenslanders from Ipswich like my friend Shane and his family, aforementioned. Or my own or whomsoevers'. Rather the farmhouses were privately owned in the manner of actual capitalism. Being a child I lacked the wisdom to correctly gauge the utility of the wirey farmhouse quaint little fence said menacing German Shepherd paced behind. I immediately proceeded to mercilessly mock the dog with my voice, "what a stupid dog! You're a stupid dog! Ha ha! What a stupid dog you are!" I waxed more and more pompous and high and mighty at the dog's obviously inferior status to my own. The dog, like my father and his 'affection' for Michael and his mother, responded first by angrily barking at me to shut up. But I doubled down, "ha, ha! Aren't you stupid! Stupid dog!" This dog must have had a PhD in English language studies as there was absolutely no way it could misunderstand my disdain for it. Furthermore it had a tremendous memory, like a PhD student, seeming to remember a convenient gap in the wirey, hitherto quaint fence. I watched in absolute dismay and disbelief as the dog jumped through the fence, quite elegantly really, about ten yards away and sped towards me. Children in Australia are routinely albeit seldomly killed by neighbourhood dogs, even today in 2025, how much more so in the 1980s? Instinct kicked in and I raised both hands straight up and together above my head, out of the dog's angry reach. The dog proceeded to bare its fangs and bark menacingly just a few inches from my face where previously the quaint little wirey fence seemed to protect me. I could practically smell the dog's hot and rancid breath menacingly puff against my face as its jaws snapped again and again like the Australian sheep shearing ballad, 'click goes the shears', that I would probably be singing a few days later in the cottony comfort of elementary school, again with Shane and Michael around. Although Michael's mother didn't delay long in moving out of the neighbourhood after my father's angry barking spray at her front door. Nor did I ever tarry to mock that German Shepherd dog ever again. Always passing as quickly as possible with absolute piety lest it unleash its hellish breath on me again. Click, click, click! Those white fangs absolutely snapped by my little white face with absolute menace. The minute or two or more I patiently waited for doggy to calm him or herself down and waddle off dragged into an olympic eternity of absolute terror. Actually it's pretty neat I never peed myself looking back. Finally I could drop my hands and move my legs. I returned to my buddy at the creek, keeping my story to myself, a keeper of secrets. A repository of secrets.
Speaking of friendships and betrayals, the entire motley crew of us, we school goers and cricket players, at times would organise a sanctioned fight between schoolboys. The fight would be one schoolboy against another, and the white trash parents would come out to watch in a circle. No-one would stop the fight. The boys could fight then go back to being friends. Actually pretty healthy. Shane, the immigrant from Ipswich Queensland, organised me to fight Steven one day. I never remember having any beef before or after the fight with Steven. The white trash parents that hated reading books came out to watch. Probably if a knife came out or things got out of hand a dad would have intervened. No-one would call the cops or anything like that. I put my dukes up and fought Steven, it was the ghetto way. Like samurais it was our duty, that was all. No fear, but a need to fight and protect your teeth. One time my father got too rude to a woman on a train leaving or approaching the ghetto and she brought her man the next day with knuckle busters and my father's jaw was broken, just like that. The ghetto had a code which was like an invisible passport that opened doors to ghettos around the world for me, really. Other areas of Sydney, folks could frolic around effeminately, strutting gaily, but not necessarily in this ghetto, in my ghetto, not forever. Someone would use a syringe as a weapon, perhaps, to stop them. At some point the ghetto became absurd in its espousal of violence and disregard for learning. Like a rock star too drunk to perform. Ridiculous.
It's difficult to say where poor ghetto culture meets and trumps childhood innocence. A different friend of mine, Ray, also in the main arterial road I lived on, closer than Michael's house, also had a single mother. Unlike Michael and his mother and other neighbourhood malcontents with a stubborn aversion to reading, Ray and his mother were gentle and kind, and Ray loved reading. Especially Dungeons and Dragons. One time, as his mother actually seemed to have a job and seemed to leave Ray home alone a lot, Ray took it upon himself to show me yet another secret. By Ray's mother's bedside table, top drawer, right at the back, a dildo. Perhaps a battery operated vibrator. Not a very big one as I recall it. Ray seemed to instinctively understand what it was and wanted to share his secret knowledge. I myself was not given to thinking about such matters, and like the fascination many boys my age had with spotting lizards out and about under the sun, I was not more interested in Ray's mother's bedside table nor its contents than those pesky lizards. Neither sunbathing lizards nor Ray's mom's special toy were of any interest. Ray maintained a relationship with his father, also a kind and gentle seeming man, like his mother. Ray's mother would put him on the train at our local train station, Mount Druitt, and Ray's father would be waiting a few stops away when the train pulled up about twenty minutes later. Ray benefitted from having a father but I couldn't see Michael up the road enjoying any of that. Ray's mother kept a neat and tidy home, very presentable. My own home was ugly and unpresentable and my mother barely spent any time on housework. Still I was happy to have Ray visit my home as a guest.
Many years later as my children settled into there own neighbourhood, less ghetto and gritty blue collar than my own, my youngest child struck up a friendship with a girl of interesting parentage. Her father had been raised initially as a young boy on an American military base in Germany, but his mother, a 'dinky di' (ie., dyed in the wool), white Australian had to flee the American military base as her husband, a white American chap, was a sore wife beater and the commanding officer at the American military base in Germany couldn't help her. So she took her two boys back to Sydney, finding her own ghetto amongst the Lebanese in Merrylands. She ended up working in Mt Druitt hospital, firmly within my own childhood ghetto, and even had to use tremendous physical domestic violence against her own two sons who had become pesky teenage brats without their father to keep them in line, from what I understood. My daughter's friend's father's story didn't surprise me. Back in the Old Country, after graduating high school in Australia, I made friends with a similarly aged lad of around nineteen or twenty years old. His grandfather had been a very high level general in the Old Country's Air Force, which itself would have received tremendous amounts of airplanes from Germany. Back in the ghetto in western Sydney, during world war two, many armaments like bombs were being stockpiled in the large open green spaces the ghetto afforded. The American air force would just leave their bombs for future use against the Japanese in the Pacific theatre lying stockpiled in the open, where now gigantic electrical towers carry thick lines of AC electricity. In those days, during world war two, the ghetto of Mt Druitt near Wilmot was not actually a ghetto but mostly farmland, like Llandilo. After my father gave up government owned housing and bought his first real estate in Australia, also in his beloved ghetto, the same as always, I began chatting one day with our new next door neighbour, an elderly woman of seventy or more years. She clearly loved to garden spending most of her day in her garden attending to it. Her block was around four times larger than an average suburban block. While leaning against her hoe and still with her protective long dress and hat, shielding her from the sometimes brutal sunlight, she described how much bigger her land was that she was standing on back in the 1960s before the government made her sell up, leaving her with a fraction of land. Clearly the government wanted to build a well planned suburbia and felt entitled to even private citizen's land.
Chapter 2: a Dean or eighteen
"I want you to take a look at this guy everyone, because this guy is a loser," the offended Anglo Saxon legal studies high school teacher wanted to honor me in front of his grade eleven high school class when I came in the room after completing the end of high school legal studies exam, to return my textbook. SAT in America, O level or A level in Britain, and something about dean or something in Australia. The Anglo Saxon legal studies high school teacher with the chip on his shoulder was probably getting revenge for the time I walked into one of his double period classes halfway through and quipped,
"better late than never."
This after he commented on my lateness. He was probably embarassed and offended that my classmates laughed. Still I scored higher than all those classmates excepting one, the swattiest girl in the class, and I finished a respectable top twenty percent in the State of New South Wales for end of high school legal studies. Not a bad result. I waited patiently and unflinchingly as the Anglo Saxon race enemy politely took return of the State's textbook from my Spanish little hands that had been on loan to me and signed off on it. I kept a poker face and let the angry Anglo Saxon dolt carry on muddling his language, probably the only one he could talk, saying dean instead of teen at the end of words like eighteen. What a dope.
Eighteen, I was legally an adult. It never really occurred to me to apply for University the following year however it was possibly the greatest town in Australia to do it: Newcastle. That summer some of my fellow Newcastle high schoolers in year nine or ten hit the big time with their global chart topping rock song, "Tomorrow."
They even went and played on the David Letterman show. I'm not sure how much Anglo Saxon DNA was on show there including Letterman but I suspect a good amount. Although I had only spent a year in Newcastle, focusing on my successful culmination of high school studies, I was deeply and positively impressed with the character of the city and its people. Possibly excepting aforementioned legal studies teacher of course. In the end I scored higher than eighty one percent of the State and slightly less than nineteen per cent of the State of New South Wales scored higher than me in their SATs or A/O levels, something about deans or whatever garble talk. My primary academic pursuits since beginning to read fluently around age nine or ten had not actually been the State's (NSWs) curriculum but my own. The State's curriculum came second to my own however I still took the State's curriculum seriously, although mostly only in final year high school.
Back in the ghetto I had spent a year or so in year ten (ie., third last year of high school) at an absolute shitty high school (we made it shitty, we the student body, I tried to help with disruptive and obnoxious behaviour where possible). I took note when one of the principle right of centre newspapers, the Daily Telegraph did a Ben's year twelve Anglo Saxon legal studies teacher on Mt Druitt high school, plastering a year photo on their front page with the headline: the year that failed. And in that they were much closer to the truth, academically speaking, than my Anglo Saxon legal studies teacher in Newcastle was. After all, I had only lost academically to a mere one legal studies competitor in the school. Plus I was still spending all kinds of time educating myself in various forms of philosophy in my free time that year. From books! Not only from cheap 'goon' bags of cheap wine or 'plonk' as per the colourful antipodeans' slang. Everyone in that Mt Druitt high school year photo had scored under fifty in their SATs or A/O levels or something about dean or something garble talk as the Australians would say.
So where was I going since I didn't apply to University? I decided to work a year, save money and go live in Spain. I had already spent half a year there and learned a ton of Spanish. I scored very highly in high school Spanish also. Coming top ten percent in English in the State also. The Anglo Saxons of New South Wales had their little sledges and would go on having them and still will until I die no doubt, against me, gratuitously. Showing me zero respect often enough. But the testing system for the high schoolers was sound enough. I wouldn't be able to say the same of Australia's universities later, given their dependence on money from communist China. But communist China in those days, the mid nineteen nineties, was still quite a poor country. Speaking of poor, my folks weren't exactly rich but the rent was cheap so I moved back in with them in the western Sydney ghetto and went to work, nine to five, as it were, Monday to Friday. Back in the city of Sydney, where male and female bitches thrived.
