The Best Australian Humorous Writing Read online

  “Gotcha!” I think.

  It’s not all as sweet as that, however. One of the Turks is accused of raping a girl in 3A–E. We never see the girl again. She is removed to a Catholic school where it is presumed she will be safe and I meet a policeman who warns me about the boy.

  “Now listen, luv,” he says, “don’t you worry. We’ve got him scared. He should be okay in the classroom. Any trouble, let me know.”

  “Yes, constable,” I say and feel as if I’m in a Carry On movie. But even though I’ve grown up in the western suburbs, the daughter of poor reffos, I’ve had a sheltered life. I’ve never come across situations like this before. I am both horrified by the boy and understanding, in a strange way. I hope the girl hasn’t been raped, but I can never be sure. I waver between crying for her and crying for the boy who comes to school looking like a whipped dog. I’m on a seesaw and I feel sick. Some days I wonder if I can face another day at this school.

  I have no choice but to get better. After Easter, I begin to teach art as well as English. This is decided when the art teacher leaves without warning. Something to do with despair, I should imagine, but I am excited by the art room which is astonishingly big and well equipped. I have also become the form-teacher of 3F–K which means I see them first thing every morning and that they come to me when they’re in trouble. When they’re in trouble! I don’t often get away from school until well after five, sometimes as late as seven when it is getting dark and the walk to the station becomes a bit of a nightmare. With the requisite tombstones, no less.

  The Maltese kid in 3F–K is my star art student. I’ve worried about him since the first day. He’s so obviously effeminate. I wonder that they haven’t done him over yet. The delicacy of his hands intrigues me. They are long, and the fingers seem to have no joints, like the fingers of Christ in a Byzantine icon. John helps me to set up the room before classes and we talk. His mother is widowed. Some factory accident, but I don’t go into it because I can see how John’s already pallid face drains of all colour when he mentions his father. John is fastidious. He arranges the brushes and the poster paints in long rows along the front table, explaining that it will be easier for students to see what they need, especially because he has graded the colours of the paints, put the blues near the greens and the reds near the yellows and the purples near the … it all looks like a cubist painting. Then it looks like a mess. Because the others storm in and grab anything they can lay their hands on, anything they can flick, anything they can poke with, anything they can splash on each other in the course of the lesson. It’s chaotic, but amazing things begin to happen in the chaos.

  There are some good artists in the class. Valentino Calluzzi is one of them. He is a stocky Italian with eyebrows that meet over his nose like Frida Kahlo’s. I tell him this and show him a picture of her with Diego Rivera. Valentino says Diego looks like his Uncle Paolo. I reckon Diego does look like someone’s Uncle Paolo and I say that Frida could have had someone more attractive. Valentino says that women often like ugly men. This is the most I’ve ever heard from Valentino. He is reputed to have a shocking temper and I am instinctively wary of him. With good cause.

  In the English class, I have the 3F–K boys working on an obscene magazine that is gradually becoming quite respectable. They’ve changed the name from Fuck Off to I Gotta Get Outta Here which I secretly like a lot but I keep telling them it’s awful so that they feel they’re winning a fight. By this stage, they have a nickname for me. It’s Dracula. Not surprising. I have long dark hair and I’m usually dressed in black. Something to do with ballet, I think. All that getting about in a black leotard. Or maybe, as my friends say, I’m just morbid. Just look at my choice of schools. The school near the cemetery, I ask you. Valentino has come up with a piece about racing cars for the magazine. We are sitting together at the back of the room going over it for spelling mistakes. “Ooaah! Sucking up to Drac!” wisecracks Roger who has left the bin for good and now sits at a table he drags out of the front line of tables at the beginning of each class.

  Suddenly Valentino is up on his feet. I spring to mine and throw myself between Valentino and Roger. Valentino is swinging a chair over his head. He throws it at Roger. It hits me in the shoulder and the corner of the back clips the side of my forehead. There is blood and confusion. Valentino stands white and shaking. I think the others are going to kill him. I don’t know how I do it, but I stay on my feet and calm things down. Wisecracks about blood and Dracula. A macabre song and dance. Anything for peace. When the others are sitting, I look at Valentino who is still standing and I take him by the arm and lead him outside. I don’t know what I am going to say to him. I’m angry. I see that he is about to cry.

  I take him by the shoulders. He is about my own height so I am looking directly into his eyes. “You are never,” I whisper hoarsely as the blood comes down my face in a steady trickle, “you are never to throw anything again. Never, never, never!” My throat is dry. I feel myself beginning to shake. I let the boy go. I cross the paddock to get to the staffroom. John runs after me.

  “Are you okay miss?”

  “Go back to the class, John. And don’t let anyone touch Valentino.”

  When I come back to the portable, they are all miraculously quiet, working away at I Gotta Get Outta Here. Only a few dare to sneak a look at me. A lot of them are flushed. We get through the class without a word and then they shuffle out of the classroom shame-faced, as if they had all thrown chairs at me. Valentino is at a loss. His eyebrow is a tight line over his red eyes.

  “Sorry miss,” he manages to whisper, as he stumbles out of the door.

  Later in the week I speak to the principal about Valentino. I do not tell him the whole story. I merely ask if the kid can have some help with controlling his temper. “He needs a good belting,” says the principal, and that’s that.

  The staff let off steam in the staffroom. There are no nice cafes, restaurants or pubs nearby. There are a few shops and a fish’n’chip place where you can get a standard ham and tomato sandwich on white bread, maybe with some lettuce and a slice of beetroot thrown in. So you go to the shops and take back your fish’n’chips or your sandwich to the staffroom where there is an enormous metal urn, a big tin of Maxwell House instant coffee and a bowl of tea bags. It’s a tech school. Up until recently, the staff was entirely male, and there is still the feeling that women don’t belong here. There is a big green snooker table at one end of the long rectangular room. There is smoke. Everyone smokes, except me. Much to the alarm of some of the more hard-bitten tradies, I take up snooker.

  There is some resistance, at first. You get the feeling that the wives of these blokes don’t do things like play snooker. From what I hear, they don’t do much except for domestic duties. They stay at home and give their hubbies a packed lunch to eat in the staffroom. It’s only a few of us who have to face the shops. I figure that if I don’t do something to bridge the gap between me and the tradies, I won’t ever be able to do much for the 3F–K boys in terms of a future except for keeping them moderately entertained during my allotted hours in their awful present. The phalanx of old hands—Les, Kevin, Col and the others whose names I can never remember—is the real powerhouse of the place. This group of men can make or break a kid. They can recommend him for an apprenticeship, they can develop his skills, they can keep him at school and out of the factory for a few more crucial years. I want them on my side, just in case. It’s not easy. I’m young. I’m straight from “the university” and I’m also a wog. Three strikes.

  It is incredible, but snooker and I obviously have a date with destiny. A bit like the 3F–K boys. Right from the beginning, I find I am a good player. At times, I am a fantastic player. I even show off, rather loudly for a stuck-up university graduate. The blokes stop sniggering and begin to take me seriously. It’s a deadly competitive spirit in the staffroom at the snooker table end and a winner is respected. Well, perhaps only a little in my case, but the little bit is just enough for me to
be able to ask for some favours for “my boys” when things get a little rough.

  Parent–teacher night. The police come to make sure the teachers can move safely from their cars into the building. Ex-students and the older siblings of the currently aggrieved have been known to show up and settle scores. I am dropped off outside the school gates by a friend who cannot believe where I have been going on my working days. “You must be crazy!” he says. I have been to a concert, I am wearing a black velvet suit and my hair is in a plait. I am a little bit nervous, like a ballet dancer about to step out onto the stage.

  “Dracula!” One of the Dragans has seen me arrive. The chant goes up. Ten, twenty, fifty voices, at least. And there is the sound of stamping.

  “Dracula! Dracula! Dracula!” I hear all around me. I know this is no threat, though the apprehensive looks of some of the staff who are still outside the hall make me realise that they are nervous and not brave enough to confront the mob on my behalf. But I do not need courage, theirs or mine. I have recognised the loud beat of what is really a loving welcome. This chant and the stamping are a kind of applause.

  I feel the tears in my eyes. I try to grin but my whole face appears to be quivering, especially my mouth which is jerking wildly at the corners. This is going to be a disaster. Dracula cannot be seen to be crying.

  “Are you okay miss?” John is by my side. Under the cover of darkness, he has taken my right hand into his own long smooth one. My heart is ready to burst. I can see it bursting out of my chest— blood gushing everywhere, a fountain of blood where my heart used to be.

  “I’m okay. John, I’m fine.” But I don’t let go of his hand.

  WENDY HARMER

  Torn between satay skewers and children as an endangered species

  Watching my children play over these summer holidays, I’ve come to the conclusion that the only present Santa should leave under the Christmas tree is other people’s children.

  Not everyone would agree. The American satirist Fran Lebowitz once observed that “hell is other people’s children”. But for me, the most hellish six words in the English language are: “Mum, will you play with me?”

  (Come on, I know I’m not alone on this one. I’m just brave or rude enough to admit it.)

  When other people’s children come to play with mine, it’s heaven. Then I can get on with things I would rather do—such as scrub the griller tray with steel wool, or poke out my eyes with a satay skewer.

  Call me selfish and lazy if you like, but it’s the mind-numbing tedium of “imaginative play” which has me screaming for the exits— the interminable sessions of Play Doh, the fiddly craft-making, the excruciating “let’s play shops” and dress ups—anything which looks like fun on Play School. I figure that’s why Play School was invented. They have to pay actors to do this stuff with your children. Meanwhile, you can hire other people’s children to do the same, at your place, for a cheese toastie and a lime ice-block.

  The demographers tell us that the number of families with children is steadily declining in Australian society; that childless, unmarried men and women will soon be the norm, and, if and when they do have children, it will be only one or two.

  I had two children late in life and I regret I didn’t have four. My children regret it, too. They look at photos of me and my three siblings and love to fantasise about what it would have been like to have two more live-in playmates, just as I look back at photos of my father’s seven brothers and sisters and like to imagine.

  I can hear the shudders of my generation that grew up with the ideology of zero population growth as a mantra. This idea has been given new life by the present generation of child-bearing age who believe it’s not environmentally responsible to have a large family. Or is it the fear that children can be a blunt instrument with the potential to bludgeon to death personal ambitions?

  It’s all very well for me to look back and fantasise about having a big family. I didn’t do it. However, there’s a lot to lose when suburbs become dominated by single young men and women living alone in flats. Arid landscapes where children are an endangered species.

  A recent family trip to Japan, where the birthrate is one of the world’s lowest, revealed a sad reality: playgrounds grown over with weeds and scattered with broken glass; swings and slides rusted and broken. We did not see children anywhere.

  Visits to dinky gift-shops sent the owners into a frenzy of anxiety. Children were an unwelcome, unruly intrusion into an ordered, adult, existence. Strangely, there were no children at Tokyo Disney, either. Every ride—from the tea-cup twirly-whirly to the roller coaster—was packed with giggling, infantilised thirty-somethings in Mickey Mouse ears.

  Finding an Australian street populated with children is becoming increasingly difficult. Perhaps it’s the families, not the elderly, who now need gated communities. A place where parents agree that the sound of children shrieking with laughter is what makes a neighbourhood. We have “wildlife corridors” where possums can meet and form gangs that romp on your roof. So, too, we could have paths where children can meet and have adventures.

  Remember when you and the children down the street would roam from dawn till dusk during the summer holidays? Where do children go these days? Judging by the sound coming from the backyard, they’re at my place.

  While some people place nesting boxes to lure fauna into their backyards, my husband and I have put in a lot of effort to make our yard “kid central”. We’re lucky to have a big block and a pool. We’ve strung up the hammock, the rope swings and the trapeze. We scored a trampoline on council clean-up day. Then we added the magic ingredients of ducks and baby chickens. Voila! Tribes of children appeared from every corner of the neighbourhood and our two disappeared.

  The Xbox and television have been abandoned. There are any number of commentators who bemoan that children these days suffer from “a lack of imagination”. No, what they suffer from is a lack of playmates. And with the best will in the world, a mum who specialises in jigsaw puzzles is a boring substitute.

  Observing three little girls spend a day making dollies out of ice-block sticks and pipe cleaners is enough to make a Bratz doll manufacturer blanch. Gangs of smallish boys still stage treasure hunts, sword fights with sticks and build cubby huts out of brooms and bits of corrugated iron. Baby chickens, alas, remain unco-operative circus animals. Some things, thankfully, never change.

  So by all means let’s make our cities environmentally sustainable, but not at the expense of family size. We need to encourage the next generation to have more children than we do now, and to have them earlier.

  Otherwise parents will have to play with their kids—and no one wants to be crawling into a cubby house with 50-year-old knees.

  Believe me, I know.

  DANNY KATZ

  Love is never saying sorry … so there

  You younger readers probably won’t know what I’m talking about here—anybody who wasn’t around in the 1970s and ’80s, that golden era of wonder and joy, when computers were only used for playing Frogger, peanuts hadn’t started killing children yet, and circumcised doodles were the cutting-edge of male pret-a-porter high-style fashion. In that glorious age of innocence, there was a famous cartoon series called “Love is …”, which featured a little naked boy and a little naked girl, cuddling and kissing each other, with a romantic caption underneath like “Love is … being able to say you are sorry” or “Love is … a picture of happiness”, and everyone adored these cartoons because back then, naked eight-year-olds getting it on was considered charming and sentimental. These days you look at cartoons like that, you can wind up doing 14 years in a Cambodian prison with Gary Glitter.

  Anyway, because it’s Valentine’s Day today, I thought it’d be a great opportunity to revive the “Love is …” cartoon series, but update it for the modern couple of 2008. So here are a few of my ideas for romantic captions—I haven’t got round to drawing the pictures yet, but just imagine a naked boy and a naked girl, loosely ba
sed on my beloved and me, so she’s looking svelte and leggy and cute, and he’s looking a bit lank and furry, like something a plumber yanked out of a shower drain at a caravan park in Lorne.

  “Love is … avoiding breaking wind in each other’s face.” I know it’s not always easy, but the message here is, make an effort to leave the room, or at least aim out a doorway. I’m so considerate, I actually go into the backyard, down the side of the house, and stand up against the fence so nobody will be offended or bothered— although Toshio, the Japanese lady next door, does keep calling AGL to report a leak.

  “Love is … tolerating each other’s idiotic idiosyncrasies.” Sometimes your partner can do things that are a bit grating—and in my beloved’s case, it’s her grating. She will cook a zucchini dish, and grate nine-tenths of the zucchini into the dish, then put the remaining tenth of the zucchini back in the fridge. WHY COULDN’T SHE JUST USE THAT LAST TENTH? WOULD THE DISH HAVE TASTED SO DIFFERENT WITH A TENTH MORE ZUCCHINI-FLAVOUR? AND NOW WHAT’S ANYONE SUPPOSED TO DO WITH A ZUCCHINI IN THE FRIDGE THAT IS MISSING NINE-TENTHS?

  “Love is … occasionally making like instead of making love.” Every couple knows those evenings when you’re both feeling schleppy and brain-vegetative and you flomp into bed, then the man makes a half-arsed arse-grab, and the woman gives an enticing flirty “must we?” look, then you both proceed to do something that looks like a couple of 150-year-old giant land tortoises mating in a Galapagos Island documentary.