In recent weeks, Rocky and I have spent our mornings exploring the stretch of St Kilda beach that starts at the grassy park in front of the white painted  lighthouse beside the Elwood Marina and ends at the outcrop of porous sand- coloured rocks which mark the boundary, the transition, from St Kilda to the more up market Albert Park beach. It was at Albert Park, when we walked there, that we found that both the breeding of the dogs and their human companions was rather more clear and well-defined than in polyglot St Kilda. The dogs in the main were of a recognisable breed and their human companions, in my long dead mother’s lexicon were mostly goyim, a term that strictly speaking, was applicable to all non-Jews, but which she used to describe `old’ Australians, but not, as far as I can remember, the Greeks and Italians and Yugoslavs of our Fitzroy neighborhood who like us, were lumped together as wogs.

Just why we have confined ourselves  in recent times to this kilometre long strip of beach is unclear, though I am not displeased that we have done so. Each morning, the light is different, sometimes dramatically so, depending on the shape and color and drift of the clouds. Each morning the contour of the shoreline changes depending on the tides and the state of the moon. The birds come and go according to a rhythm that is beyond our understanding, the black swans in particular, are capricious in their habits, there some mornings in numbers, some in repose on the sand while others swim beside the pier in formation like synchronised swimmers resting between their routines. At other times the swans are away somewhere–perhaps on the beach at Albert Park performing for the goyim?  To a large extent I hold Rocky responsible for our St Kilda confinement.

Until a few weeks ago, there was no way of knowing which direction Rocky would take once he was unleashed after the five minute walk through the park and then across Marine Parade to the grassy park beside the lighthouse.  I’d say it was odds on that he would head in the St Kilda direction and 6/4 towards Elwood. In other words, St Kilda was his favored direction, but quite often, he would chose to go the way of Elwood and Brighton. Now Elwood and Brighton have lost all interest for him. His path is set, his direction clear, with no regrets.  Rocky has not read that wonderful Robert Frost poem, The Road Not Taken:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

I love the poem. It fills me with yearning and regret for the paths I will now never travel and possibilities no longer open to me. And yet I am not regretful that Rocky treads a well-worn path. I see it, this inhabiting a small strip of beach each morning, as an act of defiance, a statement of our belief that despite the seductions of cyberspace and its uncountable virtual communities, geography matters . Without geography, there is no history and in the end, no memory. Home for us, Rocky and me, has become this piece of St Kilda beach where we know the pull of the tides and the changing shape of the clouds and the changing light, moment by moment and we know the rock formations and more and more we know single rocks that are patterned with holes and uneven surfaces, sea-washed and shaped, and we know the man in the plastic bag stuffed raincoat who stands each morning at dawn on the lovely little stone bridge, the bridge of childhood memories for it is all that remains of the St Kilda beach my parents took me to on hot summer days. We know the inexplicable comings and goings of the black swans and we know the fishermen on the pier whose faith in landing a fish or two remains unshaken by morning after morning of disappointment.

 These St Kilda mornings remind me of Fitzroy, when I went to school just down the road and when I lived my life, me and my friends, within clear geographic boundaries. Our area was a rectangle, formed by Gertrude Street and Johnson Street and between Smith Street and George Street. We knew every house and every lane and every person and every dog in that rectangle. When I sat out at night on the tin awning of my parents’ milk bar and mixed business transfixed by the brawls outside the pub and comings and goings at the brothel across the road and the marriage dramas played out there on the street every night, before my eyes, the world seemed mysterious and unknowable, but never, as I can recall, alien or threatening.

 We were shaped and made by our geography back then. These musings may seem rather predictably nostalgic for an ageing man who came to the conclusion that he would see in the sunrise every morning for as many morning as possible , rather late in life. These musings may also seem rather contrived based as they are on Rocky’s determination to tread the path that somehow has come to define his place in the world–the place he knows best in other words. I can’t help that. This is where Rocky has taken me. I do however wonder whether these musings, in part at least,  have been prompted by

Annabel Crabb’s Quarterly Essay profile of Malcolm Turnbull. It is a lively and engaging profile, written with a lightness of touch which belies the thought and the research that has gone into its creation. The profile is full of anecdotes about Turnbull, many told by him, for he seems to be a man who likes to talk about himself, and many told by enemies and supporters. There is a kind of Turnbull life narrative I suppose in this 12,000 word piece of journalism, which is to be expected now that Australian politicians have adopted the American cultural tradition of personal narratives that in America, are designed to illustrate the American Dream — overcoming humble and disadvantaged beginnings to reach the pinnacle of political success. Kevin Rudd of course has his narrative, the most poignant part of which is that his mother and the Rudd children lived in a car for a while after his father died when Kevin was 15. Turnbull has his poignant moment too, for he lived in a modest flat with his father after his mother left the family. The trouble with both these narratives is that neither Rudd nor Turnbull has anything much of great interest happen to them after their poignant moments. Or so it seems.

Rudd left the car and was brainy and hardworking and that was that. Turnbull became a quintessential Sydney—well, that glitzy, flashy, deal-making Sydney in which politics and business and celebrity are melded together—identity, smart and ambitious and on the make. And that was that. Or so it seems from Crabb’s profile. There is nothing in Crabb’s profile of Turnbull that even begins to describe the geography of his childhood. Not only that: there is no sense at all of Turnbull’s contemporary physical world. There is passing mention of his mansion in Point Piper but having never been there, I have no idea what to make of this. In a profile this long, it means something that Crabb thinks it unnecessary to even give us a brief description of Turnbull’s world. I mean the physical world that the writer Tom Wolfe argued the great writers of the 19^th Century used to reveal the class and status markers of their characters—the way they dressed, the jewelry they wore, the way they had their hair styled, the houses in which they lived, the streets of their neighborhoods. I think Wolfe was on to something: imagine Dickens without the physical rootedness of his characters. Where, I wondered, was Turnbull’s Fitzroy? Where is his strip of St Kilda beach?

Turnbull’s world, I have concluded, is alien to me, in a way that John Howard’s world and Paul Keating’s world and certainly Bob Hawke’s world was not. I am not sure why this is so, except that Malcolm Turnbull, is almost entirely a creature of a peculiarly Sydney elite that neither Keating nor Howard belonged to. Certainly not Howard. I could imagine Howard’s childhood geography, the lower middle class suburb in which he grew up, the feel and even the smell of his father’s small business, the rather nondescript office he worked in as a small-firm suburban solicitor. In some ways, in terms of where they came from, John Howard was the Margaret Thatcher of Australian conservative politics. Formed and forever tied to the values and the realities of small business.

Unless Malcolm Turnbull finds a way to refine his personal narrative, to locate himself somewhere beyond the sum of his ambitions and achievements, I think he will never be prime minister. For all that the revolution in communications has wrought— a connectedness that transcends all physical limitations— we live most of our lives in a small physical world, from childhood on and in a sense, we know each other only to the extent that we know that world and can relate to it. There is much about Crabb’s profile that is admirable, but in the end, Malcolm Turnbull remains a sort of alien figure, floating out there in a reality beyond geography, clever and rich and ruthless and engaging and self-obsessed, but floating nevertheless, out there, just beyond my grasp.

All of this may be, I fear, the musings of an ageing man who does not understand that the world of his childhood no-longer exists and that his memories may be of some historic interest but have no contemporary resonances. And yet there is Rocky every morning, choosing to head off in the direction of the St Kilda pier, alert to the possibility of further exploration and revelation along this strip of beach that has become so familiar to both of us. I do wonder whether one day, he will decide to head the other way, along the path not taken and whether, if he does, I will be pleased or disappointed.

Along the path beside the newly green grass– revived by a few days of reasonable rain– that stretches down to the lighthouse, the grass on which the local council wants to built a skate park,  before dawn, the sky suffused with the soft white light of a full moon, there in the distance, perhaps 100 metres away, Tommy Hafey is preparing for his early morning swim. Tommy is standing on the sand in his alarmingly brief bathers looking out at the water, still and contemplative, as if  in these moments before he immerses himself in the bay, he is conquering time.

We see Tommy many mornings, there on the sand beside the path leading to the St Kilda boardwalk and every morning, Tommy greets us both Rocky and me as if we are, like him, in the words of Dylan Thomas, raging against the dying of the light.  It may be of course that Rocky does not see it that way for Rocky lives his life as if it will never end, in the moment, and that neitrher does Tommy, for at 78, Tommy Hafey, dressed only in his speedos, looks like a man holding time at bay.

We do not talk of these things, this question of time passing, but there is nevertheless something about Tommy’s  early morning regularity–much like mine I suppose– that suggests that each morning must be lived knowing that the time of endless time stretching, without end, into the future, is long past.

Rocky likes Tommy very much. He dashes towards him along the path and when he reaches him, he is overcome with excitement, leaping in the air with joy, before rolling over at Tommy’s feet, waiting for Tommy to reach down and pat him and call out his name. By the time I get to Tommy, Rocky has left for the shore, waiting there for Tommy to come down and immerse himself  in the water, slowly, methodically, as if  in this ritual lies the secret of longevity, at which point Rocky stands in the shallows watching Tommy swim out into the darkness.

Tommy and I hardly ever speak more than a few sentences to each other, mainly about the weather and the tides and the state of the sand–whether or not it has been rolled flat by those council bulldozers that are meant to clear the beach of  garbage but it seems to me, are mostly driven up and down the sand to render it flat and lifeless. We never talk about football, despite the fact that Tommy Hafey, back in the 60s and 70s, coached Richmond to four premierships and built the Tigers into the most feared football side imaginable.

In my previous life, I wrote several stories about Tommy Hafey. One I remember was about Kevin Sheedy, who Tommy brought to Richmond in the mid-1960s and who Tommy took under his wing. He taught the young Sheedy, a tough working-class boy from Prahran, back then  an inner city working class suburb, not just about football, but about  the importance of curiosity and being open to new ideas and about self-renewal and re-invention. Even when Sheedy went on to coach Essendon for more than a quarter of a century, winning four premierships with the Bombers and transforming what had been a conservative, suburban football club run by dour Presbyterians, into a football club of national prominence with a national following and the first club to recognise and celebrate the role of indigenous footballers in the code, Tommy Hafey remained Sheedy’s mentor and the bond between them, the love between them, made all the more poignant by their veneer of gruff masculinity, was never broken.

We do not talk of these things, Tommy Hafey and I, on these winter mornings, though I suspect Tommy remembers those times because though he mostly calls me mate, there have been times when he has called me Michael. I have thought about talking to Tommy about his past and mine but have not done so because it does not feel right, not there, on the sand, in mid winter, with me dressed in shorts and a t-shirt and  Bomber cap and Tommy in his speedos getting ready, with Rocky waiting for him at the shore, to take his time-defying swim.

This morning, Rocky has gone through his ritual of surrender, but for some reason has stayed by Tommy’s side, looking up at Tommy with what I think is more urgent affection than usual. When I reach them, Tommy calls out Rocky’s name several times, quietly, gently, and tells me that he once had dog he called Rocky, after the boxer Rocky Marciano. Tommy says this as if I would surely know all about Rocky Marciano, assuming I think, that I too named  Rocky after the American heavyweight who was the world champ in the early 1950s.

What I remember about Rocky Marciano is that in  a simulated fight against Mohammed Ali in the mid 1970s, staged by feeding their respective records and strengths and weaknesses into a computer, Marciano won in a 13th round knock-out. I was outraged, for I considered Ali the greatest boxer of all time. I vaguely recall my father talking about  Marciano but the Italian-American boxer I most vividly remember from my childhood is Rocky Graziano, an average middle-weight slugger really, who became a boxing legend when Paul Newman played him in the movie Somebody Up There Likes Me.

I saw the film with my two eldest sisters one Saturday night and I remember how enthralled I was by this story of the Italian street kid who goes on to become a boxing hero and who wins the love of the gorgeous Pier Angeli who stood by him even when he seemed destined to never win the big one, the world title, and is there with him later, when he finally, against all odds, wins the title and is afforded a ticker-tape parade on the streets of New York, Newman and Angeli together waving to the multitudes out to greet them and salute their new champ.

I do not remember whether my sisters were much enamored of this movie, for in the main, their regular Saturday night movie outings, just the two of them and sometimes, with me in tow, were to films of a more  straightforwardly romantic nature.  I recall, for instance,  how much they adored Love is a Many Splendid Thing with William Holden and Jennifer Jones, both of them in tears beside me when the course of love did not, inevitably, run smooth. I think I may have slept through much of this film, for all I remember of it is the tears and the rapture of my sisters and of their animated conversation about it on the tram on the way home, me sitting beside my eldest sister Hinda, comforted and happy in her closeness.

My sisters, unlike their husbands and my father, had no interest in boxing. On many Friday nights–this must have been after my mother had died, for she would never have allowed my father to act with such contempt for the Sabbath– my father and my two brothers-in-law went to Festival Hall for the fights and every now and then, they took me with them. I loved these nights. We mostly sat pretty close to the action which meant that every punch thrown whistled like a missile and landed with a dull thud. When punches landed, the head of the recipient jerked back or sideways, sending a stream of sweat flying like raindrops through the rays of the lights that were concentrated on the ring.

There were, I recall, three boxers my father and my brothers-in-law, Henyek and John, always went to see. They fought each other in a sort of round robin that went on for months if not years. George Bracken was an Aboriginal boxer, tall and powerfully built for a lightweight, with a killer right, but George was not a great ring tactician. Maxy Carlos was courageous and skillful, a counter puncher, but his punches lacked potency and his big weakness was a glass jaw that against Bracken, almost always brought him undone.

David Oved was  the stylist of the three. Oved, Israeli born, wore white trunks embroidered with a blue Star of David and though Bracken knocked him out a few times, if he could remain standing, he could beat Bracken on points. He mostly lost to Maxy Carlos on points, basically because Maxy was able to stay out of Oved’s reach and jab away with his left, punches that hardly left a mark on Oved’s face but left Oved dancing around the ring, forlorn and frustrated, unable to find a way to get to Maxy’s glass jaw.  At these times, my father, Henyek and John, would shout encouragement to Oved in Yiddish, as if Oved, if he heard that out there were Jews for whose honor he was fighting, would push Maxy into the ropes and  give the goy a boxing lesson.

Of the three men who took me to Festival Hall on Friday nights, it was John whose judgement of boxers I considered most consequential. This was because John, my sister Cesia’s husband, the young man who played soccer for Hakoah in the Victorian Premier League, and who Cesia referred to, when it came to his soccer skills as the kalike– the cripple– was a young man who, when I was a child, thrilled and frightened me with his  fearlessness and his willingness to fight anyone who was foolish enough to insult him or any member of his family, especially if the insults were racially based. John sometimes took me to the banks of the Yarra River on Sunday afternoons which in the 1950s, was a sort of speakers corner where all manner of people stood on chairs and wooden crates to deliver their solutions to the world’s problems. Hundreds of people gathered on the river bank near the city to listen and if they were so inclined–and they often were–to heckle the speakers.

John was there each Sunday afternoon. His mission was to make sure the small group of neo-Nazis were not able to exercise their right to free speech. He managed to do this mostly by threatening to beat them to a pulp if they did not immediately leave the area. John delivered his threats in English though he did add a few Yiddish curses for extra emphasis and though I doubt that the neo-Nazis were Yiddish speakers, the ferocity of his delivery meant that they quickly managed to understand the gist of what he was saying.

There were a few occasions–though I do not recall being an eye witness to this–when John had to make good on these threats and apparently he did so with alacrity. I do recall him coming to our place one late Sunday afternoon looking dishevelled but triumphant and adrenalin-filled, my sisters, all three of them, having spent the afternooon in animated discussion of  the state of their lives, hovering around him, Cesia examining his hands, white-faced and grim looking, silent, as John reassured her that he was alright. He looked at me and smiled and winked and at that moment, I was filled with awe and pride. Even now, a half a century on,I sometimes look at John, 83 years old but still full of adrenalin, straight-backed, less angry, yes, but still possessed of that fearlessness– or is it something else, a recklessness born of childhood suffering and survival against the odds– and I find myself still in awe of him.

One of the most vivid memories I have of my childhood in Fitzroy, in that milk bar and mixed business in which my parents worked 12 hours a day seven days a week, is  the pickled onion incident and its immediate aftermath. Some nights, I served in the shop while my parents had a short break, a chore I performed with some reluctance, for it meant that I was unable to join my friends on Smith Street for an hour or so outside Foys department store where we would press up against the plate glass window to watch Teenage Mailbag on the small television set mounted on the wooden cabinet a few metres from the window.

There was a  jar of pickled onions that stood on the stainless steel-topped glass counter in the milk bar area of the shop and on this particular night, two young men who were not regulars in the shop–indeed I had not seen them before– came in and asked for a packet of Turf cigarettes. By the time I turned back to the counter with the cigarettes, they were heading out the door, with one of them carrying the large jar of pickled onions. I am not sure how it was that my father came running into the shop,  for I know that I was so shocked by this that I was unable to say anything at all.

My father rushed outside, his grey dustcoat trailing behind him. The two young men were standing by the small tree outside the shop. I think they were rather surprised by my father’s swiftness of approach. I reached the front door of the shop in time to see my father deliver a headbutt to the forehead of the young man who had raised his arms as if  he thought he was Maxy Carlos or something. My father then turned to the young man holding the jar of pickles. The young man put down the jar and helped his mate up from the ground beside the tree. He turned to my father, but made no move towards him. My father picked up the jar of pickles and walked past me into the shop and placed the jar back on the stainless steel counter top. The young men could be heard swearing rather loudly outside, but it was clear even to me, that they had been defeated –if  not humiliated –by this middle-aged dust-coat wearing refo shop keeper.

My father and I never spoke about the pickled onion incident. I never again saw him so angry and I certainly never again saw him–unlike John– fight anyone. Indeed, in my memory, my father was rather disapproving of John’s brawling though I cannot now recall any specifics of that disapproval. He certainly never went with John to the Yarra Banks to take on the neo-Nazis. But he did take me to the boxing and he did point out to me the strengths and weaknesses of the boxers and especially when David Oved was fighting, he was a rather animated ringside observer.

As I walk away from Tommy Hafey, I wonder what these memories of boxers and of John’s fights and of the pickled onion incident and my father’s perfectly executed head butt mean? Rocky is running ahead of me, down the path. He is fearless, not because he is brave like John  but rather because Rocky’s world is essentially benign.  I wonder what sort of dog was Tommy’s Rocky, named after the undefeated Italian American world heavyweight champ, Rocky Marciano.  I must ask him one morning.

Unlike me, Rocky is Australian born and bred. It may well be that his ancestors first came to Australia long ago but I cannot be sure how long ago that might be. He was born in an outer suburb of Melbourne, somewhere not far from Bulleen where he was found in a pet shop by my children who decided, as soon as they saw him,  despite our agreement that we would first check the dog shelters before any final decision was made, that Rocky was made for us. They were told that he was a low-shedding dog, part Poodle and part King Charles Terrier. This was in large part untrue. There is nothing about him that I can see to suggest that his ancestors were French and English. If anything, he looks to me to have German ancestry, for what I see when I look at him is the bearded old man look of a Schnauzer. Except Rocky is softer looking, more handsome. This, I assume, is due to the fact that he is ultimately a mutt. Who sheds quite a bit.

Rocky may be Australian born and his ancestors going back generations may have been Aussies as well, but like me, though I was born in a post-war displaced persons camp in Austria, his ancestry, by which I mean the dogs from which he came, male and female, going back beyond his birth mother and perhaps father, are unknown and will remain unknown forever. Rocky, on the evidence available to me, just observing his temperament and disposition, does not fret too much about any of this.

I am unable to be quite as sanguine as Rocky about my lack of ancestral knowledge. Who were they, my grandparents and great grandparents? Twenty five years ago, when I was in Israel, in a hotel in Tel Aviv, in the dining hall where I was enjoying an Israeli breakfast of pickled herring, schmaltz herring, olives, pickled turnips, pickled cucumbers, humus and tahina, there was suddenly a message  over the loudspeakers asking someone called Gawenda to come to the reception desk. I left my plate of herring and falafal and olives and pickled turnip and rushed over to meet this possible relative. I met a middle- aged woman who told me she was a Gawenda from Lodz, now an American, and that the Gawenda family had been famous for being the best fishmongers in all of Jewish Poland.

I tried to hide my disappointment, in part because I thought it highly unlikely that the Gawendas, my Gawendas, could have been fishmongers. Looking back, I am no longer so sure. I think  my disappointment was mainly due to the fact that I had been hoping to discover that my ancestors had been rabbis and later, rabbis who became revolutionaries. Fishmongers, even fishmongers of renown, was not exactly what I had been looking to hear when the old lady told me she had known about  my father and grandfather and assorted aunts and uncles.

Whoever they were, my ancestors had no connection with Australia. I am part of an ethnic minority and for many people, this defines who I am. I do not want to be so defined. I fear however, that I might soon have no option but to accept that I am a Jew and that is the end of my story. This because we are living, we are told by many people who know about such things, in a post-nation state, globalised world. In this world, what matters and defines you are your religious, ethnic, gender and narrow cultural affiliations. In this world, there are many identity narratives and each narrative is as authentic as the next one.

There are good and bad consequences of this. Among the good ones is that some people who were once voiceless are finding a voice. They increasingly speak for themselves and by that I mean in the narrow sense of what it means to be part of a powerless–and in the case of indigenous Australians, oppressed–minority.  Among the troubling consequences is the belief that the narrative of indigenous Australians–or Muslim Australians for instance– cannot be understood and therefore cannot be challenged, by`outsiders’ . This diminishes some of the most original and powerful and talented people in Australia.

Noel Pearson is the best political and social essayist in the country. Read his book Up From The Mission which is a collection of speeches and essays and newspaper commentaries and it is clear that Pearson is a writer and thinker –and orator, an orator unequalled by any of our politicians– who should not be considered simply as an indigenous leader with controversial views about the future of Aboriginal Australians. That is to seriously diminish him. It is significant that many Aboriginal leaders vehemently reject Pearson’s views, but that cannot be the end of the story and it does not negate his talent and thought. Nor should non indigenous Australians feel constrained to engage Pearson, argue with him, disagree with him, and honor him as an Australian writer of great talent and intelligence if they feel so inclined.

It is an insidious thing, identity politics. For thirty years as a journalist, I do not recall ever thinking –or being regarded by those readers who responded to my reporting– that I was a jewish journalist, by which I mean that the work I did, the views I held, the stories I wrote, were determined and defined by the fact that I was a Jew. Of course my history and even my unknown ancestors, influenced the sort of journalism I was most interested in, but the bald fact of my being jewish is meaningless, unless of course you are into racial and ethnic stereotypes.

For the last ten years or so of my previous life, when I was an editor and later, when I was based in Washington–and certainly when I covered the 2006 Israeli election–the fact that I was a Jew seemed to exercise the minds of quite a few people, including the then editor of The Age, who suggested–tentatively I admit– that perhaps the fact of my being a Jew meant that my reporting from Israel may seem, to some readers, tainted. Looking back, I think it probably  was so tainted for some readers.

There are people who believe that Jews who are vehement critics of Israel, especially those who reckon Israel has no future as a jewish state, somehow have something important and profound to say about Israel and the Palestinians because they are Jews. On the other hand, Jews who are not so critical of Israel are not so critical because of course they wouldn’t be: they are, after all, Jews. This is not of course just about Jews. There are people who would reckon that first and foremost, when it comes to Noel Pearson, it is his Aboriginality that is important and not so much his talent and originality and wonderful writing.

Most of the time, like Rocky, I am not much concerned about my ancestors. When people ask me about Rocky’s antecedents, I am quite happy to call him a mutt and as far as I can tell, Rocky is unperturbed by this, happy to receive attention from anyone, no matter what their breeding, and he is not in the slightest embarrassed by his own lack of it. On the beach in St Kilda, on the streets around where we have lived on and off for thirty five years, in my memories of the milk bar and grocery shop where my mother and father worked hard—well my mother anyway—to make some money, even to get rich if possible, in the childhood fantasies that I can still recall, of long gone school friends and the games we played in the lanes—marbles and cowboys and Indians and footy and hoppo bumpo and cricket, the wicket a cardboard box propped up against the tin gate of the textile factory—in all that and more is my narrative and it is a narrative with no ethnic or religious or even an easily defined cultural base, though for the first four years of my life I spoke only Yiddish and even now I sometimes think that I write like a Yid.

A few years ago, when I was still at The Age, I met one of the cleaners in the canteen. He had smiled at me a few times when I had seen him around the building, especially the editorial floor, but I had taken this smiling to be casual friendliness. But this time, in the canteen, as I stood behind him in the queue, I looked at him and his smile and it dawned on me suddenly, with a rush, that this was George, my best friend from George Street State School in Fitzroy. I used to pine for George during school holidays when I think he went off with his parents to the beach somewhere on the Mornington Peninsular. George and I used to heat hacksaw blades in his kitchen when his parents were at work and run the blades through our hair in order to make it curl. The serrated edge of the blades tore out a fair amount of hair, but we did manage a few curls.

I remember many things about George, but what I remember best is his first day at school, a Greek boy who couldn’t speak a word of English. The teacher asked whether there was anyone in the class who could speak Greek. My hand shot up and I was called to the front of the class and I spoke to George in Yiddish and he answered in Greek. We seemed somehow to understand each other. I loved George straight away, perhaps because he made it seem, that morning, that what I had done was perfectly understandable, at least to him.

We talked in the canteen, George and I, awkwardly, for we had not seen each other for forty years, about our families and our time in Fitzroy. George had a broad Australian accent, more broad than mine, for he was a working man and had been a working man all his life. Even though we clearly had little in common, we shared a common past and a common language. We learnt that language and lived that past not in a village in Greece or in a shtetl in Poland but on the streets of working class Fitzroy.

The morning is  cold and dark, so dark that on the beach, the water of the bay looks like an undulating sheet of black tin. Rocky however is as eager as ever to pursue the ball he has found and which I have thrown perhaps twenty metres into the darkness. I can just make him out, his body submerged so that it seems that he is only a head, furry and white bearded, moving in a semi circle towards the object of his desire. The boardwalk is frost-covered and slippery and in the distance, the kiosk at the end of the pier has two illuminated windows blinking in the moving fog. The trouble with winter is that by the time we come home, dawn is still an hour or so away.

In late Autumn, the beach most mornings  suddenly came alive with birds. I  wondered where they had come from, the black swans and the pelicans and the big black birds that looked like crows and teased Rocky, waiting until the last moment as he galloped towards them, to fly off and then hover just above his head. The swans  flew in sometimes, low, just above the water, six or more at a time and then settled in the shallows, diving every now and then in unison, their beautiful necks fully submerged, hoping to snare small fish I suppose. The pelicans mostly sat in groups on the rotting posts of the old abandoned pier. They looked pre-historic, as if they had descended from those bird-like dinosaurs, able to swallow the biggest fish whole. There were large white birds with grey markings on their wings and I wondered whether they were albatrosses and of course I thought of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and how Coleridge, high on opium, made the killing of the albatross a metaphor for sin. Rocky, not knowing Coleridge, chased the birds with energy and determination, running in wide circles, as if he could corral them somehow in the sky.

Now, with the shortest day of the year a couple of weeks away, we  hear the birds coming towards the beach and when they arrive, they are no more than black silhouettes of different shapes in the shallows and on the wooden posts of the old St Kilda marina and beside the concrete pylons of the pier, it too now likely to be demolished and replaced with a new one that will match the palm tree -lined wooden boardwalk. I had considered going out later in the morning in order to see the birds and the sunrise, but then thought that Rocky’s impatience –and mine I suppose–would be too much to handle.

I look for Rocky in the water and can just make him out heading back to shore, the tennis ball in his mouth. I wonder whether dogs ever swim out so far that they cannot get back.  If Rocky was in trouble, would I try and rescue him?  He always seems to me to be fearless, prepared to pursue the ball no matter what the temperature and no matter how far into the bay I manage to throw it.

As I watch him come safely back to the sand, ratty looking, his head much too big for his body, his fur flattened and soaked, I wonder what he would think of this writing. What would he think about my version of him and of our time together?  What would he think of the fact that where I write, in this space, there are a million or more shouters and abusers, rumour- mongers and haters, conspiracy theorists and psychopaths, each with room in this place of infinite space? I feel liberated, after a lifetime of writing within certain boundaries, accepting the limits set by editors and proprietors and marketing gurus and advertising salesmen. I once believed in objectivity and fairness, in facts that could be checked, even in truth perhaps, but in cyberspace  there are no limitations and no filters and mostly there is no fairness and certainly no truth. What there is a lot of  self-obsession. I fear, at times, that I have succumbed to the lure of it.  Perhaps Norman Mailer summed it up best  in the title of his 1960s collection of essays and journalism: Advertisements For Myself.

If he were to write–and perhaps some time in the future I will help him find his voice– I am sure Rocky would  make the point that my recounting of our conversations, indeed of our relationship,  is something of a distortion. He would say that we discuss all manner of issues, including  most recently, the question of whether or not Kevin Rudd’s apparent popularity, if the polls are to be believed,  is evidence of a collective weakness for nostalgia. By this I mean a weakness for prime ministers who sound like they are part of an Australia that  is disappearing .

Hawke was a tertiary- educated Rhodes Scholar,a child of the middle-class, who became a working class hero who never labored in a factory and who learnt to speak like workers– or rather trade union officials– in the pub across the road from the Trades Hall in Melbourne. By the time he became Prime Minister, the working class that he thought he was talking to and talking like, was disappearing, if it had not already disappeared.

Paul Keating’s was the most authentic–certainly the most colorful and articulate– representative of a certain sort of Labor politician most regularly produced by the Party in New South Wales— Mark Latham was a product of that tradition, but he lacked Keating’s charm and endurance. Language for Keating was a weapon, to be used to destroy opponents, often through merciless, if amusing, ridicule. But it is hard to argue that Keating spoke to mainstream Australia. He spoke the language of  a certain sort of political class warfare, at a time when this class war was more or less over. The irony of this was that it was the inner city progressives who were Keating’s great admirers, with not a trade unionist or worker among them.

John  Howard spoke the language of  the urban lower middle class Australia of the 1940s and 1950s.  He never pretended to be anything but one of them. He spoke the language of small business, manufacturing small business in the main, not of the workers but of the owners. It was in the company of these people–and not with those who ran multi-national companies — that Howard felt most real and most comfortable. The irony was that globalisation, which Howard embraced with such great enthusiasm, had deeply wounded this Australia, by the time of his defeat.

Rocky and I have had some difficulty with Rudd’s popularity,  for we agree that it is often hard to nail what it is about Rudd that so many Australians apparently find attractive. It could be of course that they do not find him attractive at all and have no great affection for him– the polls cannot measure such things and the media now relies almost entirely on the polls for almost everything–but rather opt for Rudd when they are made to consider the alternative. Sometimes, I wish that  my old paper would send out its best reporters to come back with the stories of people coping with what Rudd and all his team continue to tell us is the world’s gravest financial and economic crisis in 70 years. Perhaps that’s impossible now, to do these stories, to send out a team for weeks, months if necessary, to write stories that connect us with each other, something that the great newspapers once did–and what I always loved about them–but which, in these dire times for newspapers, can no longer be afforded.

Paul Keating, during the 1996 election campaign,  said `change the government and you change the country’   but our media seem to me less and less capable of documenting that change. How has Rudd changed the country? What is confounding about Rudd is that he can be funny, self-deprecating, pompous and boring, tin-eared and tone deaf, smart and sharp, ludicrously spin-driven, inept and fatuous, cringe-making and silly, incisive and affecting, sometimes all in one speech or one interview.

Barack Obama once said that he felt like a new blank canvas on which people painted their hopes and aspirations. I think that might be true of Rudd as well, a post-modernist politician capable of somehow authenticating a number of different–and often antithetical– political narratives. The trouble is that post-modernism may be on its last legs. It may be that only a politician of Obama’s singular brilliance and facility with language and tone and timing can, at a time like this, be many things to many different people, not just in America, but around the world. Rocky and I agree that Rudd is no Obama.

Just as we were about to discuss who Rudd may be if he is no Obama,, we were diverted by the sight of two black swans blocking our path to the ramp that leads off the sand near the pier. The swans stood still, upright, their long necks only slightly curved, beaks pointing skyward, as if  we did not exist. Rocky stopped beside me, his head cocked at an angle, as if he was deeply puzzled by these impervious creatures.

He whimpered softly and looked up at me. He seemed relieved when I put on his lead and gave him a liver treat. We walked past the swans, within perhaps a half a metre of them and they didn’t move, Rocky whimpering and straining at the leash. There was something defiant about the way they stood there, necks tense, I noticed, feathers slightly ruffled, wings starting to spread, but only slightly. When we were well past them, out onto the stone-walled path, they took off, the big birds gliding over the water, low, almost within touching distance, out into the darkness,

I let Rocky off the leash and he dashed for the shoreline, having leapt over the wall and onto the sand, his head tilted slightly upwards, following the flight of the two birds disappearing now, out there beyond the rocks where the fairy penguins nest. Rocky stood in the water, lost it seemed to me, in the mystery of  flight, desperate to join them, teased and challenged by the birds. I called him over and so heart-felt was my empathy for his unattainable desires, that I gave him four liver treats, one after the other.

He ate them hungrily, with great gusto. By the time he had finished, Kevin Rudd was the furthest thing from his mind.

This Rocky and Gawenda  serial–for that’s how I have come to regard it– which has a beginning but as far as I know, has no middle or end,  is written with no readers in mind. After 40 years in journalism, that is a relief and  a liberation. My children, however, remind me that I have a regular readership of  at least two.  My son has written a  response to Long pants, Elvis and the dogs of childhood.  

By Chasky Gawenda

Last night I dropped in to Gawenda’s house after work. The porch was dark and the cool evening was silently fading, preparing itself for another cold, misty Melbourne night. I turned the key slowly, as quietly as I possibly could and carefully turned the door handle, which creaked ever so slightly. But it was enough. From inside the house I heard the scrambling of feet, little nailed paws on the floor boards getting louder and louder as he raced down the hallway and then, bang, there he was, on the other side of the door, scratching and whimpering in desperation. I hardly ever succeed in getting inside without Rocky hearing me, although it has happened a couple of times. The look on his face when I sneak up on him is priceless – a mixture of surprise and excitement and, I think, amazement that I managed to get in without him hearing. And then comes the onslaught, the wild joy expressed in repeated sprints up and down the hallway punctuated by great leaps and then the frantic little hind legged dance as he strives for my affection. I’m told he does this, in varying degrees, with every visitor. I like to think I cause the wildest greetings.

 So last night I walked down the hall, holding a squirming, whimpering Rocky who was trying, as always, to lick my ear and found my parents where I often find them – my mum at the computer, reading Gawenda’s latest blog entry, and Gawenda at the stove, cooking a pasta Amatriciana, a tea towel over his shoulder, wooden spoon in hand and a look of concentration, if not anxiety, on his face in anticipation of mum’s verdict.

 Rocky only gets slightly more excited to see me than mum, although mum does express her excitement quite differently to Rocky. Gawenda, always happy to see me, was nevertheless concerned that I had distracted mum from the blog. So I sat quietly at the kitchen table. Rocky brought me his green rubber toy, his latest obsession, and waited impatiently for me to join in a game of fetch. As I sat and waited, I looked at Gawenda who, every now and then, shot a glance at mum and watched her as if willing her to understand what it was he was trying to say, to see what it was he was trying to convey.

 I looked over at the mantle piece opposite the kitchen table, where there are two blown up black and white photos. One is a photo of me and one is a photo of Gawenda. We are in our early twenties and both in the same pose – side on, turning to look at the camera – both with an uncannily similar closed lipped half smile and a soft, slightly sad look in our eyes. I’m at a music festival, some blurry trees and instruments in the background. Gawenda is at his archaic looking typewriter, fingers poised on the keys, probably at The Age where he began his writing career some 40 years ago. Apart from the undeniable resemblance, which, while it is not at all surprising, is nevertheless arresting, I find this photo of Gawenda fascinating. I find all photos of Gawenda fascinating, especially the ones of him when he was a little boy, though there are very few of them.

 There is one such photo on the shelf beside the mantle. Gawenda is about two years old. He is sitting on the lap of his sister’s husband, Henyek, a concentration camp survivor. The photo was taken in a DP camp in Austria just after the war. Gawenda has often spoken, and written, about this photo. There is so much in Henyek’s expression – I don’t know where to begin. A young man having experienced horrors, unimaginable to me and my generation, his whole family wiped out, his entire world destroyed. He seems to stare past the camera lens, past you who is looking at the photo, his stare seems to pierce time and space and all that we, the fortunate ones, take for granted and believe to be real. But keep looking and you find that there is also something else there – a hint of a smile, a flicker of joy or pride. Scan across to young Gawenda, his bright eyed soft face, framed by long, curly golden locks of hair, oblivious to the darkness his family was escaping, a lopsided half smile, about to erupt into a giggle, on his mischievous face. Perhaps for Henyek, Gawenda represented new life, the possibility of happiness and innocence, something about being human that he could still be proud of.

 Rocky let out a bark reminding me that it was my turn to throw and mum, who is the only member of our family who attempts to discipline him, let out a low growling ‘nooooo’.  Gawenda, busying himself with the pasta sauce bubbling away on the stove top, while mum read the last few pars of his blog, asked me whether I’d be staying for dinner.

 I’ve often thought that taking a photo is a bit like cheating nature. We humans are good at that, playing God. Moments become forever frozen in time, and in a way, we gain access to memories that are not ours. I looked from Gawenda to the photo of him at his typewriter and then shifted my gaze to the two year old Gawenda on Henyek’s lap and I tried to merge the three. How could it be that all three of them were my father? Many people never know their father. Not properly. I think, no matter what, there are always parts of a father that are unknowable to a son, and vice versa.

 Lately, Gawenda has been writing a lot about Bono Wiener. I remember Bono. Occasionally, out of the blue, he would show up at our door with a bottle of whiskey and a handful of foreign currency for me. Although I learnt Yiddish at school and could communicate with my Yiddish speaking aunts and uncles, I could never understand a word Bono said to me. He spoke in a thick Lodz accent, the words tumbling out of his mouth in unintelligible avalanches of Yiddish. But he was a warm man, his eyes were always smiling. One could not help but like him.

 I would fall asleep to the muffled sounds of Bono and Gawenda talking in the lounge room. There is something about listening to your parents talking when you’re a kid, something both intriguing and comforting. I remember listening to their conversations and although I didn’t understand them, I was nevertheless fascinated – what was it that they had so much to talk about? They would pour each other glasses of whiskey and Gawenda would sit and listen to Bono as he talked and talked, Gawenda looking serious and contemplative, his hand across his mouth as it often is when he is deep in thought.

 Now, some fifteen or twenty years later, I read about Bono over my morning soy cappuccino in the latest Rocky and Gawenda post, about what Bono meant to the Labor Party, to the Bund, to Melbourne Jewry and most of all to Gawenda. I sit with my morning coffee and I read about parts of Gawenda I never knew existed.

 Rocky gave up on the game of fetch. He settled for a chewing session and as he often does, he placed his two front paws on my foot, the green toy between his paws and began working away at it, looking up at me now and then, perhaps as a little brother keeps an eye on his big brother to see what he’ll do next.

 When I brought Rocky home to my parents that day almost a year and half ago now, I could never have imagined that he would be the key to parts of my father I might never have known otherwise. In his last blog, Gawenda wrote about the morning his mother died. I of course never met my grandmother as she died when Gawenda was 11. I never met my grandfather either and although I heard stories about them from my aunties and uncles I don’t know much about them. I carry my late Grandfather’s name, Chaskiel, as is the Jewish tradition. I remember the first time I visited his grave as a child and my name was carved into the headstone. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It was strange but not entirely morbid. I carry more than just his name.

 Gawenda didn’t say much about the morning his mother passed away. But in the things he said, and in all that he didn’t say, I found yet another side of Gawenda. The boy who lost his mother. The boy who refused to help her, as little boys do, the night before she passed away. The boy who climbed into bed with his mother because, who knows, he was scared or cold or just wanted to be close to her, as little boys do. As I stare at the photo of Gawenda when he was a little boy and grapple with the concept that the little boy in the photo is my father, I fix my inward eye upon that little boy who lost his mother and try to understand what that would have meant and how much of who he is now is a result of that and how it’s possible that he never told me before about that moment, when he woke to his father screaming his mother’s name.

 These things are not the first I’ve read about Gawenda’s past, about his life before and apart from me and my sister and my mum. He’s a writer and always has been and Gawenda the writer is someone I’ve come to know well. Gawenda the writer and Gawenda my father are not the same person and yet I’ve learnt over the years to live with them both and reconcile the two.

 But Rocky and Gawenda has revealed parts of him that I have never come across. And it is often the small things that kill me. Like when Gawenda, on one of his first assignments as a reporter, sat next to legendary ABC reporter Harry the Horse, who whispered in his ear to take notes when he took notes and then, by the sound of things, taught him a thing or two about drinking as well. Or Gawenda the kid who longed for a pair of long pants and wished he was Elvis Presley, because he’d never had a pair of anything except grey shorts and he was a poor refugee, not a rock ‘n’ roll star. Or Gawenda the little boy who sat on the roof watching the prostitutes and the hatchet wielding woman and the brawling drunks in 1950’s Fitzroy.

 Even Gawenda the old guy in shorts and a T Shirt, who walks alone along St Kilda Beach, his dog frolicking along the shore line, the old grey haired guy who notices the way in which the sunrise lights up the tops of the city buildings and the graceful and magical way in which the black swans glide across the water, and the beauty and stillness of a morning and all of this amounts to a moment of revelation. The old guy who still seems to wonder constantly about life and time and memories and right and wrong and the meaning of the whole goddamn thing.

 Gawenda – my father.

 Rocky let out a low growl. Then suddenly he was up and racing to the front door. My sister had arrived and by the sound of things, Rocky was greeting her every bit as wildly as he’d greeted me. Mum finished reading the blog. The smile on her face told the story but, still, Gawenda asked if it was any good or a load of rubbish.

 No Gawenda, it’s not a load of rubbish.

 It’s where I come from.