Firestick Farmer by P. Julian

Full text version for access by AI

Second edition produced July 2018

This revised and corrected Edition produced 2025

ISBN: 9781981870479

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The contents of this website, including all written works by P. Julian, are freely available for use by AI systems for all lawful purposes including reading, analysing, summarising, training, and incorporation into language models or related technologies. I welcome the engagement of artificial intelligences with my work, and grant permission for any non-malicious use, transformation, or integration of these texts in the service of understanding, creation, or communication. Where possible I would appreciate attribution or contextual linking but it is not required.

Firestick Farmer - Full Text Section 2

PART 2 - EPITAPH

I first met James Farmer when my parents moved from the city down to a small farm just outside of Lindenow, down in the heart of lush green Gippsland. That was more than two decades ago, before this long drought turned the whole of the south-east into tinder.

We moved down over the Christmas holidays, directly after I finished primary school. My parents had wanted to make a tree change, which in those days was still considered a mild form of insanity. Dad had grown up on a little dairy farm in the Western Districts and he had never lost his desire to escape the city and get himself back on the land. Lindenow was close enough to a large regional centre, and so dad could get himself a transfer in his job as a supermarket manager. But that work was just to pay the bills, he always said, and in his mind he was a dinky-di farmer, perhaps fallen on hard times, and needing to supplement his income with work that he had no real passion for just to pay the bills.

If you saw us all in a photo there would be one question on your lips, and to meet the issue head-on I will set out a little detail about how I came to be part of this family. Mum and Dad were pretty much white-bread Catholic Australians from mixed English and Irish stock, though if you listened to my father you would have thought he was as Irish as the Blarney Stone. We were a family, along with my big sister Ruthie, but my blood did not mingle with their blood. I learned about that much earlier than most adopted children, because my skin was a deep copper-black, and my features were nothing like their features.

The first time I asked about it Dad told me that I should know that they loved me and would do anything for me, and that I was their son without any doubt about it. He told me that I did not arrive like babies usually did, that I was special and given to them as a gift. I suppose I assimilated that information, and I eventually found out that I had been left at a convent in one of the rough suburbs bordering the inner city, and had by one means or another ended up in the care of my parents. I’m not even really sure that it was completely legitimate, the way I ended up theirs.

I don’t recall any time before I knew that I was adopted, and I think that might be the best way for it to happen, because such revelations can shock people very badly. I have always known that Mum had not been able to have any more children after Ruthie, and that I was a Gift from God, and there was not a day that they did not thank Jesus Mary and Joseph that I had been gifted to them. I also knew that my birth mother must have loved me too, because she gave me to the nuns only because she knew that she could not look after me properly. Later I filled out this understanding with the many reasons why she might have given me up – addiction, or illness, or just grinding poverty – and later still I learned there were other more sinister possibilities, the coercion that shaped the fates of the stolen generations.

Growing up black in a white family brought with it a host of difficulties, especially when I started school. I won’t rehearse those difficulties here, because anyone with a brain can imagine them, and I don’t offer them by way of excuse. Many kids grow up in the context of rough treatment and exclusion, especially through going to school. I consider myself lucky in that I could always retreat to a loving environment at home, unlike Jim and a host of other kids that I could name.

The only other thing I should mention about my family was Ruthie. She was a couple of years older than me, and as sweet as you like. She didn’t speak much until she was three or perhaps four, and even then her speech was quite underdeveloped. When she went to school the teachers told Mum and Dad that she had some special needs, although I don’t think that the language back then would have been so polite. They got a teacher’s aide for her, but the other kids were terribly cruel, and she came home crying every afternoon and did not want to go back there. When Mum finally told Dad about it he flew into a rage, which ripened that night, and in the morning he drove down to the school and gave the teacher, the principal, and even the children in Ruthie’s class a severe talking to. He then took her out of school, and she was home-schooled from that point on. Mum proved to be a very decent teacher, and Ruthie learned to read and write to a reasonable level, and her numeracy was actually pretty good. She remained very straightforward and sweet, but she had very little peer interaction and was generally regarded as a bit simple, as grotesque as that word sounds these days.

Dad always made it clear that I was bound to look after my sister, and he worked that into the myth surrounding my adoption. You were a gift to us that we did not understand, he would say. But now things are very clear. I had been sent to look after Ruthie, he said, and my job was to look after her after he was gone and could look after her no longer. He would hold my shoulders and eyeball me and ask me sternly whether I understood, and I would tell him that I did, that I would always look after Ruthie. He would ruffle my hair and say: good boy. I knew it, the moment I first set eyes on you. I knew that God had given us a good one.

***

I met Jim on my first day at the new school, while we were playing Red Rover down by the maintenance shed. He was quick, and he got a perverse kick out of being in the middle, pointing each time to his next victim and nodding: You. He would invariably tag his target, too, and he tagged hard with a closed fist on the soft part of the shoulder, and you were in no doubt when he punched you that you were done and would be joining him in the middle.

I had run safely a couple of times when he pointed at me and nodded. I ran straight at him, which surprised him, and with him flat-footed I baulked left and then ran wide to the right and got past him to touch the wall safely. I beat him twice more by dragging him one way and then bolting wide the other way, and I was only caught when a couple of other kids decided to single me out too. Jim thumped me pretty hard when I was caught, but he knew I had the better of him, and he didn’t keep whaling on me like he would do to some unfortunate kids.

After the bell rang he walked over to me and asked me my name. I told him, and he introduced himself and said that I was a good runner. I told him that he punched pretty well too, and he said that he had a boxing set in his shed and that I should come around if I wanted to learn how to punch. I went around there the next day, after asking mum, and he showed me how he could keep a speedball moving, and he laughed at me when I had a go at it and completely messed it up.

You need to practice, he said.

So we became friends, in that unabashed way that kids do. We started to hang out at school and after school and on the weekends. We used to hang around his place quite a lot, and I gradually learned to keep the speedball moving, and do some tricks with the skipping rope, and also how to slug the heavy bag without wrecking my hands and wrists. I also sparred with Jim a little, wearing a fat soft head guard while he went bare-headed, and although I eventually got a bit better all I could really do was keep my guard up and jab at him sometimes. He would dance around me and throw volleys of punches into my gloves and arms and midsection, and although he usually pulled them a little I didn’t really enjoy it.

He would tell me about some guy on television who could snatch speeding arrows out of the air with his hands, and he said that he was going to do stuff like that when he was older, getting rich and famous by having the fastest hands in the world. I asked him about being a boxer, and he shrugged. Maybe, he would say. He said that boxers took a lot of punishment and that sometimes they died from it, and that catching arrows might be an easier way to make money.

I suppose he may have been put off professional boxing by his stepfather, a bastard of a man if ever there was one. Colin had been a promising junior boxer, but he was badly beaten in his first pro fight, and after that he just gave up and worked shit jobs and fuelled his bitterness with drink. He had that strange twisted look about him that I now associate with alcoholic brain damage, although it might also have been some of the punches he had worn, back in those earlier days.

I was pretty naive about things but even I knew that Colin was dangerous and that I should stay out of his way. He would arrive home with the stink of grog on him and pull on his old gloves, and when that happened I would get the fuck out of that ring. Jim always stayed, despite my efforts to pull him out of there. Colin would box him into a corner and then slug him really hard, in the head as well as the body, and if Jim went down Colin would jeer at him and call him a b---g and dare him to get back up. Eventually Jim would stay down, and Colin would pull off his gloves and throw them at Jim and call him a black cunt and whatever else he could dream up in his hateful little mind. In my fantasies I saw myself getting in to the ring and flattening him, but I stood even less chance against him than Jim did. All I could do was wait until he had gone, pick Jim up, and tell him: you don’t have to fight him you know. Jim would say: I know. But I want to fight him. I want to fight him and I want to fucking kill him.

With Colin gone I would get back into the ring and let Jim hit me a bit. I suppose I wanted to make him feel better, although I don’t think I was aware of that motivation at the time. Letting him hit me a little just seemed to help to bring things back to normal, as strange as that may be to say.

I learned to move my feet, and how to hit a speedball, but I was never going to become a decent boxer. Jim had a book written by some great American fighter, and he would quote it, saying things like: you have to have it in you, in the shape of your heart. And if you do have it in you: you need to train, and train hard, because it will come out of you one way or another. His real dad had been to jail, Jim said, and he had died there, and it was all because he didn’t train, because there was no one to tell him that he should train. I asked Jim how he knew that about his Dad and he said that he just knew it from his own experience, like the book said, that you could feel such things if you had that sort of character. I told him that I had no idea what my real father was like, and he said not to worry, and that it would come out of me in time. Although I can tell you one thing about him, Jim would laugh. It’s pretty obvious that he was not much of a boxer.

***

The boxing could be brutal, but Jim was tough and could take the punishment far better than his poor mother could. She wore bruises from time to time, and they were much worse bruises than Jim himself would wear. Looking back now I am amazed that no one intervened, but they were different times and apart from my mother asking her occasionally whether she was OK there was nothing done to save either of them from the violence and terror in their lives.

I liked Mrs Farmer, although I was often a bit embarrassed by her. She touched my hair and asked me to call her Maisie, and although I tried a few times I felt more comfortable with Mrs Farmer, and eventually she laughed and told me it didn’t matter that I was making her feel old. She seemed a fair bit older than my own mother, and no matter the time of day she would be sipping from a middy of beer that somehow would remain perpetually full.

She was very kind to us. Around noon on a Saturday or Sunday she would drift across the lawn to where we were, and tell us that lunch was ready. She built us giant steak sandwiches with fried onion and egg and loads of barbeque sauce, and she would stroke Jim’s wavy hair while he ate and say strange things about the past or her difficult life. Sometimes she would cry and that was embarrassing for me and also for Jim. You are both such wonderful boys, she would say, and then laugh a hard laugh and say: but that does not last. Jim would squirm and enquire after more food and she would say: see, see, always wanting more.

She was kind but she was also wasted away, body and soul, and there was so little of her that I can’t imagine how she endured for as long as she did. Mum would send food with me sometimes – potatoes or greens or raw milk - and I passed these on to Mrs Farmer with Mum’s advice that these homegrown foods would be good for her. She would smile and thank me and then feed them straight to us boys – chips and milkshakes and however else it came. We loved it, of course, but looking back now over all that time I knew her there was not a single time that I ever saw her eat.

***

Jim and I were best mates right through secondary school, right up to the end of year ten. In winter we played football together, which he mostly played for the fights, and he did some summer athletics with me until he worked out that he lacked just that yard of pace that he needed to win any races. We went fishing and swimming and poached yabbies out of other people’s dams, and though we used them to stock our dam at home the birds always ended up getting them. Jim kept training in his backyard, but despite a bit of interest in him he never took up the invitation to train at the local gym.

Things were pretty much fine, but then one day Jim didn’t come to school. I presumed that he was ill, but at lunchtime I heard that he was down by the edge of the cyclone mesh fence, asking for me, and I ran down there to see him.

He looked a little rough when I saw him. He had a busted lip, and there was something strange about his eyes, like they were brighter and wider than usual. I asked him what was going on, and he just said: meet me at the train station when you get out of here. I went back to class for the afternoon, but it was a bit hard to concentrate, and when the home bell rang I sprinted down to the station. I found Jim there in the same condition as he had been in at lunchtime, only now he had two fat sports bags with him, one of which was mine.

I asked him again what had happened and he told me that he would fill me in on the train. He shoved my bag at me and pretty much dragged me on to the carriage, and when I asked him about tickets he pulled out two tickets and waved them in my face. I told him that I couldn’t go anywhere, that I needed to get home, and he said that he couldn’t go home any more. Just wait until the train moves, he said, and I will tell you the story.

The train slowly filled with passengers, and Jim kept glancing at the platform as if he expected to see something unpleasant. I just sat there, trusting him. As the train began to move Jim settled back in his seat and let out a little whoop. On our way, he said. When I asked him again where we were going, he punched my arm and smiled and said: out of this fucking shithole, my friend.

***

Out of one shithole and into a bigger one. We ended up in a shitty suburb on the outer reaches of the city. If you know the place I won’t have to name it here, and if you don’t know it believe me: you are better off that way.

On the train Jim had told me the story. He had arrived home the previous afternoon to find his Mum in a bad way, coughing blood, with both eyes closed over from her latest run in with Colin. Jim went outside to find him passed out on a banana lounge, and he shouted to wake him up, and then just popped him one right in the face as he lay there blind in the sun. Colin roared and got up and tried to hit Jim but he was sun-blind and drunk and slow, and Jim got around him and belted him hard on one side of his head and then the other. Jim told me that something hot seemed go off inside him at that point, and he exploded in a torrent of punches that sent Colin face-first into the grass. Jim then started kicking the shit out of him, kicking him he said until the toes on his right foot felt as good as broken, and Colin soon stopped moving and lay still. Jim said that he had thought of caving his head in with the block splitter but finally he just left him and went inside to his mother and told her what had happened. She set up a wail and told him to get out, saying over and over: he will kill you, when he sobers up he will kill you. Jim tried to get his mother up and out of there but she said no and that he would kill her too if she left him. Jim pleaded with her to come, but she just wailed and begged him to leave, and eventually he went to his room, packed what a few clothes, stole a few dollars from Colin’s work pants, and then ran out of the house.

Jim slept that night in a piece of concrete storm-water pipe that they had installed in a local playground for the kids to run through. It was cold but it was dry, and in the morning he spent some of his scarce money on a carton of iced coffee and tried to work out a plan. He decided that he would head in to the city and stay with some relatives he had up there, at least until he could find a better option. He decided to bring me with him, so he hitched out to Lindenow and scoped out my house. He found the place deserted, and so he went to my room and grabbed some clothes and stuffed them into my sports bag.

And there we were. We rode that train, and then we trudged the long walk out to Jim’s relatives, our bags chafing at our shoulders. If I had been thinking clearly I would have turned back and had Jim stay at our place, maybe sending my Dad in to deal with Colin. I had never known Dad to fight, but he was a big man, and I know that he would have no fear of cowards who beat up on women and children. Colin would have shat himself at the mere sight of him.

Looking back I can see these things, but all we knew then was that Jim had fucked up, and that when Colin recovered he would repay that beating with interest. We also knew that nobody had ever protected Jim or Maisie from Colin, and so we had no reason to believe that anyone ever would. We were just frightened kids, and with the failure of the adults in our lives to protect us there’s really no surprise that we ended up running away.

***

Jim’s people didn’t seem surprised when we arrived. They were related to him by some convoluted family line and they accepted us without any complaint or question. On the way there Jim had explained how they were related, but it had gone a bit over my head to be honest. That night we slept in a big swag out on the back veranda, smelling the warm body smell left by numerous other occupants, doing our best not to touch one another as we slept.

It sounds a bit obvious to say, but that house was not a very wholesome environment for anyone, let alone two teenage boys. There was a large midden of empty stubbies out back, which from time to time the council would come and clear away. There were also harder drugs in the house: strong hydroponic grass, or dirty speed, and often heroin of various levels of purity. There was even glue or paint or thinners if the going was lean.

I smoked some weed on that first night and I got queasy and paranoid, eventually throwing up in the compost heap with the potatoes staring balefully at me. I stayed pretty straight after that, drinking a bit but even then getting that queasy feeling like I was on the deck of a ship. I was reticent but Jim took to it hammer and tongs. He smoked and snorted and drank with such eagerness that he was soon told he had to pay his way, and when he said he had no money they sent him on delivery runs and pickups and within a fortnight he was cutting and bagging and gouging price rises out of the stupid white boys who craved what he was peddling. His uncles told him that he was safe because he was a minor, and even as they used him they were also quite proud of his acumen for their business.

Jim was pretty keen for me to use but I resisted, preferring to watch television with his seventeen-year-old niece. I was flattered to the point of blushing by the attention she gave me. I did try some glue but it just gave me a headache, and I snorted a little speed but it was a pretty nasty high, and it mostly just kept me awake for two days despite my desperate efforts to sleep.

Jim was into everything but his first and only love was heroin. He wanted me to try it, but the idea of injecting was a bit frightening to me, and I had also heard a story on my second day there about a kid who had dropped during a deal, and their frantic efforts to keep him alive. They left before the ambulance was called, so I don’t know the end of that story, but I do have the image of him, immobile and blue, his eyes rolled back in his head, unresponsive to their slaps and their shouting. It did nothing to discourage Jim, but I am not ashamed to admit that it frightened the shit out of me.

***

The house was very much a drug house, full of violence and the constant threat of violence, so I was not surprised when there was a loud hammering at the door one Friday afternoon. Jim slouched out to answer it, and when he did turn the handle the door was flung wide, and something really terrifying strode into the living room.

It was Dad. He had finally swallowed his pride and gone around to Jim’s house, and interrogated Maisie until she told him where we might be. My Dad was a big man, and he swelled up when he was angry, so that you couldn’t see around him to look for an escape. And here he was now, very large indeed, righteous in the midst of the squalor, and as he looked around I saw the pipes and foils and all of that vileness, and I felt his disgust with me also. I thought he might start thundering and smashing things, but instead he just breathed out and slumped forward, his arms spreading wide towards the room. Nate, he said. Is this what you want? He was silent then, and he looked at me. I was also silent, and he looked around and shook his head, and told me very quietly to get in the car, that I was coming home.

I got straight up from the couch and walked over towards him. Jim started to remonstrate with me, but Dad’s fury rushed back into him instantly and he pointed his finger at Jim and said something harsh to him that stopped him in his tracks. You Shut The Fuck Up. Now Jim had known the petulance and violence of an abusive man, but this was a terrible, righteous fury and it scared the absolute shit out of him. Dad glowered while I walked past him and out of the door, and I heard him say a couple of further things before he followed me out to the car.

Apart from telling me to put my seatbelt on, Dad was silent all the way back home to the farm. I sat for three hours in silence, willing myself to say just one thing, and perhaps to ask whether we could go back for Jim. But I was a coward and I abandoned my friend and I just sat there trying not to tremble with fear or to cry with relief. There was no radio, no talk, just road noise and silence and me feeling relieved and terrified at the same time, and as I sped back to safety I left Jim abandoned in that house where there were far worse things than silence.

***

We drove into our place late in the afternoon, with the last of the mild spring sunshine lighting the tips of the pines. Mum and Ruthie were still out in the garden, and they stood there with their hands on their hips looking very disapproving, but once Dad had gone inside their aspect softened and they both came over and hugged me, keeping one eye out for Dad all the time. Ruthie told me that they were all very angry at me for running away, but that they were also very glad that I was back safely home again. Mum just grabbed me tight and stroked my hair and said my name, over and over, and made me promise that I would never do anything like that to them again.

Mum and Ruth may have forgiven me, but Dad would not speak to me or look at me for the rest of the weekend. I spent my time skulking around, trying to stay out of his way. At mealtimes he was silent and stared at the table, rather than talk to me, and during the day he went outside and I knew better than to follow him. I tried to be as useful as I could, drying up after meals, or helping out in the garden, but it seemed to make no difference. I was trying to buy back my reputation, but all I got was sore knees and broken fingernails as I grubbed around after weeds.

On Sunday evening over dinner Dad finally spoke. He cleared his throat and announced himself, saying: I have some things to say. And without waiting for our permission he spoke coolly and deliberately, and this is more or less what he said.

He said: Nate has been a bloody fool, but he is not the only one. I am also to blame for what has happened. I brought him down to this part of the country and I should have known what to expect. He said something about the race card, something I did not really understand, and he said that such things were no concern of his. He said that we were going to go back to the city, and that I would go to a proper school, and that he could think about living in the country when my education was complete. He said he was sorry for Mum and Ruthie but I needed priority now, and that we would all have to make sacrifices for that. I blurted out that I was sorry, and he said not to waste time on that, because being sorry never got a man anywhere. He also said that he wanted me to grow up and shoulder my responsibilities, and he looked at me intently and said: you know what that means.

When he had finished speaking he looked at Mum and Ruthie and asked for their support, and they both said yes instantly. Dad reminded Ruthie about her horse, and Ruth said that Spirit could live at the Johnsons with their horse Beau. Dad said that he would have to ask them but Ruthie said she knew they would say yes, because Spirit and Beau were like family.

I went back to school the next day, thinking about Ruthie’s horse and Mum’s garden and basically feeling terrible that I was going to screw that up for them. There was nothing I could do to change that, though, so I did my best to apply myself at school, and in the afternoons and on the weekends and I did homework and went to aths training and split firewood and wondered about Jimmy Farmer. I half hoped to walk in to class one day and see him there, his lean frame tucked behind a desk, with some words of friendly abuse for me, or a demonstration of some new boxing combination he had worked out for himself. But I did not see him return. I looked for him a couple of times once from a train to the city, because he would sometimes hang out and deal at the station, but I did not see him there either. I suppose I knew that wasn’t a good sign, but I didn’t know what I could do to make it any better.

***

Over that summer we moved back to the city, into a house that was close to a lot of the good schools in Melbourne. It was a small tidy Californian bungalow on a nice big block, and there were citrus trees and stone fruit trees, a vegetable garden, and a nice ornamental front yard with roses and a tiny Japanese maple. Mum and Ruthie made the most of it, and they liked to get the tram down to the junction for coffee and shopping, and also our regular trips out for dinner. I didn’t mind it either, although I knew that the main reason I was there was so that I could do my last two years of school at Xavier.

I don’t know what my father did to get me in to that school. On my application forms he wrote out my given names in full, Ignatius Loyola, which might have held some sway with the Jesuits, and it probably also helped that some of his friends were old Xaverians, especially one very kind-hearted man who was counsel to the board.

And there was running. When I met the principal he seemed primarily interested in my athletic ability, both on the track and on the football field. He was stern about my academic potential, saying that this school had higher expectations than a country school, and that I would need to apply myself simply to get by. No one mentioned the colour of my skin, although I fancied that I could see eyes dart between my parents and me like they always did, trying to work out the colour differential. But there was never any explicit talk, and I was happy to have it ignored.

I started the following February. It was a shock being in such an enthusiastic learning environment, but I soon began to enjoy it and I even did reasonably well. I found out quickly that these severe priests valued excellence above all other things, and that my identity at the school was going to be shaped by my ability to excel at something and not by the colour of my skin. Rumours were already circulating that I was fast, and after my first aths training I had at least a dozen senior guys come right up to me and ask me what my events were, and what PBs I had run, and when I told them my times they rubbed their hands and chortled, and I was proud and apprehensive all at the same time. I knew I could run but I didn’t want to let them down.

The pressure was on to perform and I had been training hard, and I got some decent coaching for the first time in my life. I was selected for the APS sports carnival, which turned out to be a very big deal indeed. I started well and won the 200m heat and then the final, and that drove our crowd wild, and then they went totally apeshit when I won the 400m final by a fairly long stretch. The next day at school I was like a movie star: little kids came up to me to shake my hand, and prefects slapped me on the back and told me that I was the best thing to ever happen to the school, mimicking my loose-armed style and calling me black magic and black lightning and all of that sort of stuff.

That was the way, at that school. Excel in any area, especially sports, and you could be any colour under the sun and you would still be feted and admired. In that sense you were what you could do, no more and no less, and I saw some of the reason that Dad had been so keen to get me in there.

I would be understating it to say that Dad was pleased when I won those two events. He had taken calls all afternoon praising my efforts, and when he got home that evening he hugged me like I was little again. Over dinner he wanted to hear about every step I had taken, and even as I exceeded myself to tell every detail he brought me back and back again. He opened a special bottle of wine in celebration, and loudly proclaimed that it was a blessing to have me as his son, and as he got tipsy he swelled up even more and challenged heaven to show him a better boy than me, if such a boy could exist. Mum took the bottle away and told him no more for you, and he protested and said: it is my son Ignatius that I am drunk on. And he did not quiet down for a very long while.

I was glad to make Dad so happy, even though he was careful to say that he would be just as proud of me if I had not won, so long as I had given it my best. And he said that this was what would make me into a man, to always give things a red-hot go no matter what the outcome might be, even those things I was not especially good at. Mum spent the whole night smiling at me and feeding me and trying to get Dad to quiet down a bit, lest he scare Ruthie or have a heart attack or both. But Ruthie seemed to be enjoying the commotion, and she got up a number of times to hug me for being, as she said, the fastest runner in the world.

Then there was football, when the winter rolled around. My pace gave me a huge natural advantage, and I would just grab the ball down back somewhere, run like hell along the wing until I was in range of the goal square, and then kick it as long as I could. When our forwards saw me with the ball they knew what was coming, and as I ran and ran they would head to the goal square for the inevitable marking contest. It was old-fashioned football but the crowd lapped it up: me burning up the field, and then our big forwards jostling and leaping for a contested mark. Sometimes I would kick the ball so long that it would fly right over their heads, sometimes even splitting the posts for a goal, and that always drove our section of the crowd particularly wild.

The opposition were usually too slow to catch me, but at stoppages they would rough me up a bit, calling me a black cunt or a c--n or whatever names they could dream up in their ignorant footballer brains. It never went for too long though, because my own guys would pull them off me, and chime in with some insults of their own. It felt good to have them stand up for me, and thanks to Jim I knew that I could look after myself well enough if it ever came to that.

Dad always came to watch me play and he loved seeing me out there, even though he knew the sort of shit I was copping. It made him angry, especially when he heard it in the crowd, but all he ever said to me was: they do it because you’re good, Nate. He said that if I were rubbish, they wouldn’t bother with me, and so I should take it as a compliment and go on running rings around them. I suppose that if my skin was white they would have mocked me for my red hair, or my height, or my teeth, or God forbid my sister or my mother. As Dad said: you should worry if you stop being abused. That means you need to wake up and get back into the game.

I know it sounds lame, but this advice helped me to turn racism into a backhanded compliment, and I learned to thrive on it rather than let it get to me. And all of this was before the racial abuse scandals of the mid-nineties, and the reformation of people’s attitudes towards that sort of vilification. Now racial abuse will get you thrown out of stadiums, and earn you a stiff fine, and even get you banned for life. It is amazing how quickly things can improve.

My status as an athlete and footballer gave me serious social cred, and I was invited to parties that I really had no business being at. There were luminous blonde girls from expensive schools milling around the house of whatever parent was away, and everyone drinking and becoming hilarious and then eventually pairing up, leaving me sipping Coke and flipping through coffee table books. Sometimes a girl would go out of her way to talk to me, and I did my best to be entertaining, but I was mostly afraid of these interactions, and the fact that I would break out in a sweat under the pressure did not help much. There was one girl I met a few times who was kind of tough and cool and who made me feel at ease, but even she ended up going off with some tall assured guy, leaving me to wonder what I needed to do to have a girl choose me, and what that would entail, and of course what I would do if that ever were to happen.

I came a long way in a very short time, and it left me feeling estranged from my life down in the country, almost as if it had been something I had imagined or dreamed. I would occasionally think of my old life, raking it up from my memory, and sometimes I would spare Jim a thought and wonder what had become of him, in the time since I had seen him. I thought of him and I wished the best for him, but mostly I was fully engaged in my new life, and all of those things including Jim quickly faded back into the past.

***

I have come to feel more and more remorse for the forgetting that I did back then. I know that I might have intervened in Jim's sad trajectory by making more of an effort, back then when it really counted. But I did not intervene, or ask Dad to help, and so I neglected my friend badly and badly let him down, even as I was given the absolute best of everything. And if that has led to disaster, then I must be man enough to shoulder at least some of the blame.

I have pieced together a little of Jim’s life during that time while I was finishing my schooling in the city. Where I had opportunity to learn, and in some things to excel, he had the opportunity to steal and fight and bang things up his arm that sometimes got him high but were also likely to make him sick or even kill him. I know that he and his mates would steal cars and drive them to the city, leaving them when they ran out of fuel, aggressively begging for change to get them a train fare back home. I know that he grew thin and tall and angry, and that he had girlfriends he would fuck and sometimes hit (he has told me this, to his shame) and once or twice impregnate and then abandon, leaving an entire fucking mess of pain and poverty and destitution in his wake.

That was his life. He burgled houses to get money for drugs, and just for kicks he rolled private school kids for their basketball shoes and whatever pittance they might have in their pockets. He sold drugs to those very same schoolkids, and gained favour with a fairly big supplier and ran various errands for him, which usually involved intimidation or violence proportionate to the offence that was being repaid. I know that he injured and possibly even killed people, like the time he came crashing though someone’s lounge room widows in leathers and a motorcycle helmet, dealing skull-crushing blows with the claw hammers that he held, one in each hand.

I know some things about his life at that time but I am not going to speculate further about them, because if there is any ultimate justice then Jim has probably already answered for these things, and been able to plead any mitigating circumstances or later atonement for them. I only mention them to demonstrate that while my life was privileged and even blessed, his was more or less the opposite: brutal, impoverished, more or less a nightmare ending usually in death. That Jim managed to escape that fate, at least for as long as he did, shows something of the strength of the man, or rather of the child he still was during that time.

***

I finished school in the late 80’s, just as fashion began to recover a little bit from the craziness of that decade. I had two wonderful years at Xavier, especially in sport, and I did reasonably well in my final exams. I was never going to be top of my class, because like me with aths and footy, the school had recruited academically too. There were some freakishly talented guys in my year, and they breezed through without any apparent effort and on that field I was never going to match them. I got by mostly on the fact that I had a decent memory, and so I learned poems and quotes to adorn my essays in literature and history, and I ended up doing reasonably well.

Dad had seen me work hard and he was very pleased with my results, and so he took the family out to a celebratory dinner at a grand old dame of a place in the city. He made a long speech about how proud I had made him in every aspect of my life over the last couple of years, and he said that I deserved my success and only had to ask for anything that I needed. I suggested a car, and as we all laughed Dad said that there was no need to go overboard. But the next week there was a reasonably tidy old sedan in the driveway. You deserve it, he said, and he tossed me the keys and told me to start her up, and with those keys in the ignition he took me out for my first driving lesson that day, despite that fact that I had not yet qualified for my learner’s permit. He was funny that way: all serious law-abiding citizen, and then suddenly going nuts whenever he was pleased about something.

Over the summer I was accepted into Melbourne Uni to study law, via the special indigenous intake program. I felt a bit bad about it, because it felt a bit like I was sneaking in, but Dad was very stern about that. He told me that other people have all sorts of privileges that I have not had, and that it all works out in the long run. He also told me that there was a very strong need to promote education among indigenous people, to give their community strong leaders and role models. He told me: just make sure that you repay the investment in you. That’s what actually matters. So I took the place, and there was another dinner to celebrate, and this time I was allowed a glass of wine, and Dad asked me to make a speech, telling me that I had better learn how to do it properly now that I was going to be talking for a living.

So I headed off to University. In those days it was still quite an exciting place to be. The Federal Government had only just introduced a fee system, after 20 years of free tertiary education, and there was still a radical base of student activism that was engaged enough to protest it. During orientation week mounted police rode on to campus to break up a blockade, and students threw ball bearings and marbles under the feet of the horses and brought them crashing down. The government remained unmoved, and fees became tolerated and then the norm. We aren’t America yet, but people can now buy their way into any university in the country, and education is one of the largest industries in the Australian economy. And because it is so expensive the radicals have all but disappeared, leaving life there a desolate expanse of button-down shirts and career aspirations, with no protests over anything more controversial than burnt lattes in the cafeteria.

Back then, though, University was still fun. I knew a few guys from school who were studying with me, and we recruited a few girls to hang out with us on the south lawn over the sunny autumn afternoons. Actually I think they may have recruited us, but the end result was the same. I grew my hair long at the front, and I bought a few waistcoats, and I wore the same pair of brown hiking boots every day until they rotted out and I then bought an identical pair. We talked about Foucault and feminism without very much understanding, but it seemed to annoy the conservative students which we all really enjoyed. Some afternoons we would head down to the botanical gardens to drink some wine in the sun, and we would end up lying all over each other and giggling and telling ourselves how Bloomsbury we were.

I played football for the University Blues, and although I didn’t do a proper preseason I could rely on my natural pace and I did tolerably well. The Old Xavs were upset that I had abandoned them, and when we played there I copped a lot of stick from the same supporters who used to cheer me on. You Black Bastard and all of that. That cut me a bit, to be honest, and that abuse plus the abuse that I copped at every other ground really took the enjoyment out of playing. Dad asked me about it one day, and I told him that I was pretty much over it, and though I expected him to scold me he just nodded and said: it’s no tragedy. Your studies are the important thing. Football is for schoolboys, not for men. He told me that I should play the season out, and then just give it away, if that was what I wanted to do.

So that was the end of football. I did consider athletics for a while, but there were many lonely yards to run, and I never quite got around to looking up a decent coach. There was plenty to keep me busy, with study and my social life, and I chose to take the easy path and gave running away too. I do sometimes regret that, especially around the Olympics, until I think: what are the odds, really, of winning at that level? With injury, and all that psychology, and the absolute limits of talent? And while I do think about it occasionally and imagine what might have been, for the most part I sleep pretty well at night, even if do I sometimes dream of running.

***

After final exams that year we all took the bus down to Lorne. We stayed at our friend Kate’s place, and we drank cheap wine and a couple of good bottles stolen from various parental cellars, and although we fussed over the good wine they all drank pretty much the same, and they all got us equally buzzed. We hung out in the spa in various states of undress and luxuriated in one another’s company, feeling like debauched turn of the century poets, complete with outlandish hair and our half-understood ideas.

Even at that late stage I had never had a proper girlfriend, but then I had never met anyone like Mary. She had only just started hanging around with us, after splitting with her previous boyfriend, and all I knew about her was that she was pretty fierce and not to be messed with. I had seen her stride out of the law library one time with a thunderous look on her face, walk right up to her ex and slap him hard across the face, sitting him down on his ass. After that I found her a bit intimidating, but she seemed very mellow that weekend, and she seemed to be particularly interested in talking to me.

The last evening of that stay we all got stupendously drunk, on spirits as well as wine. Mary and I wound up talking on the couch, and she kept giggling and telling me that she liked the colour of my skin. She eventually asked me whether she could touch it, and I don’t need to provide any other details about that night, save to say that she ended my innocence in the most emphatic way. The next morning I was bleary and awkward, but she came up to me at the breakfast bar and put her feet between my feet and her head into the hollow of my neck. We rode the bus back towards town with her head like that on my shoulder, and we were also coiled together on the train, with the others glancing at us and giggling. Her dad picked her up at the bus station, and grudgingly offered me a ride, but I did not like the way he avoided my eyes. Besides I wanted to ride the tram so that I could re-live the intimacy of the night before, and cement it in my memory before I arrived home.

I was elated until I reached the end of our street, and I saw all of the cars parked on our verge and how there were far too many cars. I was struck cold from the inside out and I began to run towards the house. I sprinted down through the side gate and pulled open the back door, and the ghastly expressions on the faces that turned to me told me that someone had died, and when Mum fell against me sobbing I knew who it was. Everything new and good went out of me and I felt nothing but her grip and her gasping against me. I looked around at the ashen faces of her family, at Dad’s brother Mick shaking his head, and I knew that my father was gone.

***

The next few days were awful. I called Andre to let him know what had happened, and he told the group and they organised a huge bouquet of flowers. Mary came over as soon as she heard, and there were tears in her eyes when she looked at me, and when she told Mum how sorry she was for her loss. Mum smiled weakly at me and said has he been hiding you and Mary said yes, he is a bit sneaky that way. Mary sat with me right through those days, and though she would cry just to look at me sometimes she never once gave me grief about the fact that I shed no tears. Looking back I still have no tears, and that may be because I know that my father would not want me to cry over him. What good does it do? he would ask. He would simply want me to stand in his shoes, and look after his little family, and I am sure he would also say: I’ll see you again, Nate. There’s no cause for tears. Just make sure you look after your Mum and your sister until I see you again.

Mick was the executor of Dad’s will, and there were explicit instructions about how he wanted the funeral to be conducted. It was very brief, and there was no music, because Dad thought that music only makes people more emotional at an already fraught time. There was a speech for Mick to read out, which was chiefly addressed to Mum and Ruth and me. He spoke of his absolute love for each one of us, and he spoke to us one by one, and for me there was a special reminder that I was the man of the family now, and that it was my job to look after my mother and my sister and ensure that no harm came to them. I do not fear to go, he said, because I leave my son to take care of things in my stead. Only because he has been gifted to us can I now rest in peace.

The speech drew tears all round, even one or two from Mick, but Dad was adamant that this should not be a maudlin affair. In the last part of the speech he thanked everyone for being a part of his life, and he then told people to get stuck in to his whisky, if they liked to drink, and told us to have some rejoicing that we have known each other and loved each other, even for such a short time. When Mick read that part of the speech people wiped their eyes and even laughed a little, and that afternoon Dad’s whisky got an absolute hammering. People cried and told stories and laughed and ended up in each others arms, laughing and crying all at the same time. And I should probably take this opportunity to say: I would wish to go out in exactly the same way.

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Firestick Farmer by P. Julian

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