Biota Street
I remember the first time I got my hair cut. It was the old male standard – short back and sides – and I was nine years old at the time.
My family and I were living in the worker’s paradise of Inala in the south western suburbs of Brisbane where Old School Aussies, Murris, and the newer migrants lived with varying degrees of mutual indifference towards one another. I was born Old School and Australia’s role in that dark comedy known as the Vietnam War had been over for the past ten years and the first of the boat people seeking a better life had been making their way into Australia since the mid-70s. They were coming into the cheap government housing that had sprung up around Inala, Darra and Goodna after the Second World War.
As a toddler I stole the cup for a baby contest from one of these South Asians and as the years progressed they would become a common sight and I suppose this is multiculturalism at work. But we had not reached that point yet, and many members of the old tribe had greeted the newcomers with disdain. The ‘Banjo’ in his dispatches from the Boer War noted this tendency in Australians with their indifference to the other men of the old empire. And many a time I have indulged this aspect of my culture. The style of haircut I was to receive had been predetermined by the crusty barber and my mum. Up till that time my hair had always been long and she would take to it with a pair of scissors every now and then to keep it respectable.
I have always believed my hair was kept long because of an ancestral memory in my mother about not cutting a boy’s hair before a certain age because of an Irish folk belief about fairies stealing them.
Being blonde and curly haired I would have been a prime candidate for a kidnapping from one of these nasty critters. The barbershop was a hangout for a lot of the diggers who fought the war against the Japanese, and these chocolate soldiers lined the wall opposite the window like wizen monkeys. I was to be one of the last victims of the day and I looked out the window as grumpy-bum shaved the neck of one of the diggers, the street lights flickering into life as magic hour approached like a chi. In the early 80s there were still a lot of these men around driving FJ’s, holding up bars and raising children and grandchildren, and Anzac Day was a large and sombre affair without the tribalism that it has now come to represent, because the history of that war was still wrapped in human flesh who would laugh at the shock-jocks and their skewered understanding of the actions they participated in.
Family legend was the true tree of knowledge for us. Stories about a great uncle who took up with a Jewess in Jerusalem and ran away with her at the intense displeasure of the Second AIF and her rabbinical father, another member of the mob who spent Christmas in the stockade in Bethlehem for going to a Salvos service with a Protestant mate, and a grandfather who when he got back from the hellish campaign in New Guinea jumped ship. For us, these were the real stories (wrapped in irreverence) – these were the stories that bind. Finally, The butche… I mean barber got to me and it was my turn to stare at myself admiringly in the mirror as the old men sat behind me encouraging the butcher to take it all off. They ribbed me good-naturedly throughout the ordeal as I laughed along with them. It is one of those things about these men that never got into the official history books: they were good with kids.
‘So, what do you want me to do, missus?’ the barber asked my mother.
‘Short back and sides,’ she responded.
The barber nodded his approval. It was the appropriate choice for a little Australian man his first time at the crease. Everyone in the barbershop was having a good time except my mum who feared they would turn me into a US Marine. But, they did not, and that was when we saw him, a baby refo looking in at us from the outside of the shop. We stopped our tribal initiation and looked back at him, the bantering dropping to the ground like the hair cream and my blonde locks, and we all watched the little boat boy intently, who stood just on the outer of our sacred circle because of the benevolence of a conservative prime minister. He was Vietnamese and about my age and may have even went to the same state school as me, although I never recognised him on the playground.
He just stood there with his terrible little bowl haircut and almond shaped eyes and watched us like an anthropologist and then he pulled up stumps and he was out of there. We all sat there looking at the space he occupied on Biota Street thinking about what he may or may not represent, and then after a moment or two the sound came back into the little barbershop with a ruffling of papers and a clearing of throats. My mum looked at me and smiled and even at that young age I knew it had changed. I think about him sometimes and I think about the tremendous capacity this nation has for bringing new people to its shores and giving them something better than what they had experienced before.