- Email: [email protected]
The darker side of an Australian boyhood
DISSECTING ROOM
The darker side of an Australian boyhood The Shark Net Robert Drewe. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000. £9·99. Pp 368. ISBN: 0241140854. n common with many Australian authors, Robert Drewe’s prodigious talent and range are beginning to find an audience beyond his native shores. Widely acclaimed at home, he recreated the Ned Kelly myth in Our Sunshine, and his The Drowner, with its counsel upon water and faith, was heralded as the contemporary Australian novel. In The Shark Net, Drewe turns his sure touch and elegant prose upon his childhood and adolescence in Perth. What could have been, in the hands of a lesser talent, a trite coming of age is instead a memoir of considerable humour and insight with a firm sense of historical place. Cleverly interwoven with his narrative is a memoir of the darker places of humanity—of a notorious case of serial killings in Perth—which, together, create a haunting whole. The most isolated city on earth might not appear the most dramatic setting for such a story. Under Drewe’s tutelage, however, suburban Perth is transformed. Obsessed with the most ridiculous of fixations, a lush green lawn means the difference between neighbourhood envy and social
isolation, whilst houses built on unstable and encroaching dunes await ignominious collapse in the sliding sands. The inhabitants, or Sand People, paint their extremities a rainbow of protective colours, forever shedding their reddened skin in long strips to the sun and wind. “Boys bled if they smiled too fast”, Drewe tells us. Both currents of the book ultimately rest upon the author’s father, a Dunlop Rubber company man who rises to the exalted post of state manager. He nurtures his at times farcical devotion to rubber from the factories of a dreary, postwar England to the plantations of Malaya. Even the parental marriage is an entirely company affair. Incidences of brand loyalty—everything from cocktail swizzle sticks to ashtrays—crowd the house. All manner of rubber product humiliations are visited on the young Drewe, most memorably in the form of the Bumper Leisure Shoe. These yellow-soled monstrosities are even noted by a visiting sports hero who, when choosing his transport, lazily remarks, “I’ll go with Shoes.” Aside from this comic narration, his family is acutely observed as a microcosm of 1950s Australian suburbia. His father is not above ripping pages of naked breasts from the National Geographic magazine, nor burning the weekly tabloid after viewing the so-called filth for himself. Awake to his son’s unwitting efforts to join the youth league of the Communist Party, he is quick to declare a pre-emptive strike against their commo tricks. Yet, always ready to do as any number of ridiculous government schemes bids, he takes a reckless stand against the slaughter of sparrows—if only any could be found—during the Great Sparrow Panic, even at the risk of bringing western Australian agriculFestival of birds Carlos Mérida ture to its knees. The Dallas Museum of Art is showing the The sexual mores of the exhibition Modern Masters of Mexico era are caught in Drewe’s until Jan 28, 2001. exploits with the ubiquitous convent girl, steamed-up car windows, and his
I
1282
nervous charm with the opposite sex. This naivety is juxtaposed well with the hypocrisy of his elders. Drewe’s fall from grace—his teenage girlfriend becomes pregnant—colours the latter part of the book. Aware of the acute social embarrassment that will be visited upon their heads, a hasty marriage succeeds only to be trumped by Drewe’s mother as she banishes them to a far-flung suburb. Of his siblings, only his sister attends the wedding, young enough still to forget what she has seen. Drewe adroitly shifts between the tremulous wonder of childhood and the human mysteries of his parents as real characters upon this stage. The tender portrait of his elegant, typist mother, who smashes a mean backhand, and the awkward friendships of his father are an anchor against the catalogue of murder and violence which seeps into the book. As a cadet reporter, his pains to uncover a big story are entirely undone by these terrible, page-hungry crimes. His efforts to uncover an epic are crippled by croquet team captains, badminton scores, and his luckless pacing of suburban streets. Even his momentous tale of migrating sharks is itself dismembered and relegated to the inner pages as he is out-scooped by a colleague. Nor does friendship with a victim or affinity with the serial killer, an ex-Dunlop delivery man, win him any column space. Learning of his friend’s death, like everyone else, in the headlines he can only observe the murderer in the dock, trading winks and, on Drewe’s part, a reluctant sympathy for the disfigured father of seven soon to hang. All these years later, the ineptitude of the police who frame two suspects is faintly shocking. More so even than the disapproval directed at the first victim, a young and attractive divorcee, who had the temerity to sleep in the nude. It is this reluctant humour, present in so much of the book’s tragedy, that invites an uncomfortable laugh and survives well beyond the last page. The book ends with the author returning to the brighter lights of Melbourne to continue a flourishing career in journalism. In the intervening pages, Drewe has drawn a highly humorous and often disturbing portrait of a childhood and the social undercurrents that ultimately coloured it. He eloquently traces the suspended quality of those early years, trapped between the strictures of family and innocence and the burgeoning of independence in a darker, subterranean world. Robert Drewe has created a compelling, comic, and strangely adult read. Rebecca J Davies [email protected]
THE LANCET • Vol 356 • October 7, 2000
For personal use only. Not to be reproduced without permission of The Lancet.
The darker side of an Australian boyhood The Shark Net Robert Drewe. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000. £9·99. Pp 368. ISBN: 0241140854. n common with many Australian authors, Robert Drewe’s prodigious talent and range are beginning to find an audience beyond his native shores. Widely acclaimed at home, he recreated the Ned Kelly myth in Our Sunshine, and his The Drowner, with its counsel upon water and faith, was heralded as the contemporary Australian novel. In The Shark Net, Drewe turns his sure touch and elegant prose upon his childhood and adolescence in Perth. What could have been, in the hands of a lesser talent, a trite coming of age is instead a memoir of considerable humour and insight with a firm sense of historical place. Cleverly interwoven with his narrative is a memoir of the darker places of humanity—of a notorious case of serial killings in Perth—which, together, create a haunting whole. The most isolated city on earth might not appear the most dramatic setting for such a story. Under Drewe’s tutelage, however, suburban Perth is transformed. Obsessed with the most ridiculous of fixations, a lush green lawn means the difference between neighbourhood envy and social
isolation, whilst houses built on unstable and encroaching dunes await ignominious collapse in the sliding sands. The inhabitants, or Sand People, paint their extremities a rainbow of protective colours, forever shedding their reddened skin in long strips to the sun and wind. “Boys bled if they smiled too fast”, Drewe tells us. Both currents of the book ultimately rest upon the author’s father, a Dunlop Rubber company man who rises to the exalted post of state manager. He nurtures his at times farcical devotion to rubber from the factories of a dreary, postwar England to the plantations of Malaya. Even the parental marriage is an entirely company affair. Incidences of brand loyalty—everything from cocktail swizzle sticks to ashtrays—crowd the house. All manner of rubber product humiliations are visited on the young Drewe, most memorably in the form of the Bumper Leisure Shoe. These yellow-soled monstrosities are even noted by a visiting sports hero who, when choosing his transport, lazily remarks, “I’ll go with Shoes.” Aside from this comic narration, his family is acutely observed as a microcosm of 1950s Australian suburbia. His father is not above ripping pages of naked breasts from the National Geographic magazine, nor burning the weekly tabloid after viewing the so-called filth for himself. Awake to his son’s unwitting efforts to join the youth league of the Communist Party, he is quick to declare a pre-emptive strike against their commo tricks. Yet, always ready to do as any number of ridiculous government schemes bids, he takes a reckless stand against the slaughter of sparrows—if only any could be found—during the Great Sparrow Panic, even at the risk of bringing western Australian agriculFestival of birds Carlos Mérida ture to its knees. The Dallas Museum of Art is showing the The sexual mores of the exhibition Modern Masters of Mexico era are caught in Drewe’s until Jan 28, 2001. exploits with the ubiquitous convent girl, steamed-up car windows, and his
I
1282
nervous charm with the opposite sex. This naivety is juxtaposed well with the hypocrisy of his elders. Drewe’s fall from grace—his teenage girlfriend becomes pregnant—colours the latter part of the book. Aware of the acute social embarrassment that will be visited upon their heads, a hasty marriage succeeds only to be trumped by Drewe’s mother as she banishes them to a far-flung suburb. Of his siblings, only his sister attends the wedding, young enough still to forget what she has seen. Drewe adroitly shifts between the tremulous wonder of childhood and the human mysteries of his parents as real characters upon this stage. The tender portrait of his elegant, typist mother, who smashes a mean backhand, and the awkward friendships of his father are an anchor against the catalogue of murder and violence which seeps into the book. As a cadet reporter, his pains to uncover a big story are entirely undone by these terrible, page-hungry crimes. His efforts to uncover an epic are crippled by croquet team captains, badminton scores, and his luckless pacing of suburban streets. Even his momentous tale of migrating sharks is itself dismembered and relegated to the inner pages as he is out-scooped by a colleague. Nor does friendship with a victim or affinity with the serial killer, an ex-Dunlop delivery man, win him any column space. Learning of his friend’s death, like everyone else, in the headlines he can only observe the murderer in the dock, trading winks and, on Drewe’s part, a reluctant sympathy for the disfigured father of seven soon to hang. All these years later, the ineptitude of the police who frame two suspects is faintly shocking. More so even than the disapproval directed at the first victim, a young and attractive divorcee, who had the temerity to sleep in the nude. It is this reluctant humour, present in so much of the book’s tragedy, that invites an uncomfortable laugh and survives well beyond the last page. The book ends with the author returning to the brighter lights of Melbourne to continue a flourishing career in journalism. In the intervening pages, Drewe has drawn a highly humorous and often disturbing portrait of a childhood and the social undercurrents that ultimately coloured it. He eloquently traces the suspended quality of those early years, trapped between the strictures of family and innocence and the burgeoning of independence in a darker, subterranean world. Robert Drewe has created a compelling, comic, and strangely adult read. Rebecca J Davies [email protected]
THE LANCET • Vol 356 • October 7, 2000
For personal use only. Not to be reproduced without permission of The Lancet.