A short story by David Cox

Our Flats.

The perception camera glides across a gravel strewn driveway. An early 60s design block of flats with beige coloured bricks is at camera left. Looking up we see the building - three levels, two balconies.

At night the tram stopping just outside my window made all the cool sounds D class trams make. All hisses, brass bells, the ‘thugga thugga’ of the flywheel which supplies energy to a pump which in turn builds pressure for the brakes. The lights from the thing threw shadows across my wall in strips going up to the ceiling, with spark flashes quick and sudden. For two years I fell asleep to that sound, dreaming of my life and friends in the country I left behind. Even then it was uncool to from the UK. The dreams stopped after a while.

Flats in the daytime. A vague smell of... cardomen or curry powder. Or both. Something. Televisions are on in each flat. Each door is open as it is hot. Night comes again. Electric blueness flickers behind Venetian blinds and the sounds of “League Teams” comes in stereo from two flats about 40 yards apart.

“Hutton’s footy franks are best! Don’t argue!”

You can mix your own soundtrack from the television audio as you move up and down the stairs and along the length of the block. Us kids are playing games - chasey, yo yos.
Around the back of the flats is where I once saw a kid blow up one of those plastic Commonwealth savings combination lock toy safes with a firecracker, but not before trapping a five inch lizard inside.The resulting mess was met with absolute glee. I can see that kid’s face now, giggling maniacally through the cordite smoke.

The kid kept hamsters in a hutch outside the flat and I once saw a dog come and open that box of hamsters, playfully follow one around before grabbing it with his powerful jaws, killing it, then carrying it off. When the kid saw what had happened he screamed at me for not stopping the dog. I told him there was nothing I could do. That was probably untrue, but I had stood there unlocking my bike, fascinated by what I was seeing. I still remember that with absolute clarity. Like it was this morning.

The Whitlam election rally was held at the Brighton Road town hall and you could hear the
”Its Time” singing from our balcony, and see the balloons and hundreds of people milling around there. That famous footage of Whitlam beaming and next to him Hawke doing the twist with his mutton chops sideys and think hornrim glasses was filmed on that night.

Within months of our arrival on these beautiful troubled shores, a reformist socialist government was elected to office after decades of stagnant conservatism. This was what I remember from my first impressions of Australia and hold these feelings deep within me. No Liberal Party stooge or his kids ever lived life like this.

We were kids in St Kilda in the early seventies. We ran and rode bikes and skateboarded through what are now sanitised gentrified theme parks wet within and merely based on the original St Kilda. Acland street - Cavanagh Street - Fitzroy St, Luna Park, the beach, the arcades, sleazy motels. The place was seriously down at heel in those days and all the more fun for it, for kids at least. Yes there were kids around in St Kilda once.

My best mate’s brother came back from Vietnam and would drink himself into a stupor every night. We never knew why, but he always told us we would never want to see what a land mine could do to a bloke when we watched our war movies and cheered at depictions of that. We’d watch films like “The Battle of the Bulge” and compare our model kits of tanks and planes to the ones on the telly. The guy (who came back from Saigon) tried to make those kits himself but always made a mess of it. He tried a lot of things but was pretty much fucked up for life.

They spray painted those flats pink about 10 years ago with industrial spray cans, covering the windows with black tarps. Then they put green wooden trellises on the whole place and a hideous brass plaque out the front. History swept aside like smoke. Like the place had never even been a block of flats. All that is solid melts into air. Our flats (as we used to call them affectionately) were about five minutes walk from Luna Park. Yuppies don’t have memories, just good investment advice.

Just for Fun

For $2 in 1973 you could entertain yourself all afternoon. A packet of Black and White smokes cost 40 cents. A chico roll was also 40 cents. Chips were 20 cents, (sauce 2c extra). Can of coke was 15 cents. Blocks of flats and carparks therein where we used to go skateboarding and riding bikes.

I’ve replaced the memory film in the Perception Camera and it now slow tilts up to the Big Dipper tracks. Can’t miss shots like these from the past..Screams from behind the mechanical life size King of Fun rocking on his throne.  He presided over the Fun Palace. All old turn of the century amusement technology - all of it a bit aggressive. These rides and things were always inside timber structures with old painted stuff on them - but the paintings had been done about 50 years prior so they were peeling and faded. Faces happy, faces alarmed - all kind of mock comic book style.

The place was a museum, even then. The amusements were antique electro magnetic devices with brass plaques announcing the name and manufacturer - they had been hand made by firms who probably also made vending machines, pinballs and juke boxes. One was a ‘drop the coin from the bomber onto the submarine’ where your own 2c (converted from old penny sized slots) would become the ‘bomb’ with which you attacked this solid steel sub, “floating” in a painted theatrical set of “the sea”. The sky was beautifully painted in watercolours and little fading lights lit the whole thing. The pulleys and gearage were all visible and were oily, little screw gears turning camshafts. It must have weight a ton on its steel base. That object was so cool. And the thing would be in a wooden cabinet. You would look through a 12 inch by  six inch pane of glass framed by brass. Lights would come on and off and there would be the hum of an old transformer as the thing came to life.

If you really looked around on the ground at Luna Park you could find the romeod blue and red tickets to rides which parents, eager to get their nauseated kids out of the place had just dropped, or stuffed into holes in the cyclone fence. I think also looking back some of the groovier attendants would turn a blind eye to us grabbing them from the turnstile holes. If you went behind the off limits areas, you’d find them.

Those turnstiles were solid steel - British made, with the name of the manufacture in relief lettering 1/8th of an inch thick. The whole of Luna Park was Edwardian Brighton, England transposed to the colonies.

They knew we were local kids and we made the place our playground, staying there on Saturday night until it was dark, and all the coloured lights would come on and the teenage girlfriends and boyfriends would come, drunk and lusty.  You had to watch out for the St Moritz skins though. We were chased by them several times and if they caught you, they could seriously hurt you. They smoked Marlboroughs, listened to the Skyhooks on cheap cassette players and wore roller skates. They always moved around in groups of about six.

Some of our more adventurous sorties in Luna Park took us to places like the area where they kept the big dipper cars. It was very very dark and scary and the whole of the ride would make this awesome rumble which got louder and louder as the cars came down those dips and back up. The rattle of the cars on the tracks would mix in with the yells of the people riding, only you could see almost nothing. Just the smell of oil and wood and then the roar of the cars as they came past us in the dark like a train from hell.

A mate and I once let off a gas cylinder near Caulfield. We burned a plastic aeroplane and put a
CO2 cylinder in it which we had taken from a soda siphon. - the satisfyingly loud explosion, and rocketing casing (with blue flame from out the back!) scared these old Jewish blokes who came out demanding “you have gun?!? you have gun?!?” Poor buggers. They must have been ex concentration camp victims to whom a loud sudden bang could only mean one thing.
Stealing 8 balls from pool halls and using them for bike bombing runs on milk bottles set up like skittles. Listening to music in blocks of flats. “Venus and Mars”, “Bat out of Hell”, We were kids. We didn’t know. We were bored. Not much money.

At the pier - trying to catch fish, but getting fishing hook caught on the struts holding up the pier (which was still entirely wooden then). You could buy lemon squash at the kiosk at the end of the pier. The guy would reach into this stainless steel well and ladle out a tall glass of the stuff. It tasted fantastic. There was this telescope which you could put 40 cents into and look out across to the Palais, along the Esplanade, then out to the bay. And this huge wall sized map of the world from the 1940s. All the red bits were British empire colonies we were told. We’d nod and drink our lemonade and scan the bay. The sun would peer behind massive clouds as it slowly went down. Then we’d get all our stuff together and run home to watch telly and eat our tea.
 
 
 
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