Free Mug Shots by Barry Oakley

were dutiful Catholics at the time. Every Sunday we endured the pulpit polemics of Father Carroll, tall, bony and intense. ‘Get this into your Catholic heads,’ he’d bellow. ‘While we fish and we swim and we go on drives, the Communists are taking over the unions.’
    He came to the school to give Religious Instruction, and locked onto me. He called on us one night, dispensed with the civilities, and said he wanted to form a study group for the professional men of the town. I knew what was coming. ‘A united front, that’s what we need.’ Calling on my years of dialectical experience with the Campion Society, I told him I was against united fronts.
    â€˜Ah,’ he said, ‘you’re one of these individualists.’
    â€˜And intend to remain so.’
    â€˜I’m disappointed. You could be a great help to us.’ I knew what he meant by that ‘us’. It was a Movement word, a Santamaria word. For us or against us. He refused another beer and left. Never one to waste an experience, I based a piece of fiction on it later which went, via Southerly , into The Oxford Book of Australian Short Stories .
    Teaching was closing in on me. The principal, the egregiously misnamed Mr Witty, decided it was time I took some responsibility and put me in charge of the bike racks, and I had to address the assembly regularly on the state of them. There were also staff meetings, to thrash out such matters as whether teachers should have to shut the windows after school, and whether qualifications should be added to names of staff listed in the school magazine.

    Newly married, at Mildura Technical College, 1957. (I’m the happy one in the middle, top row.)
    Escape! Attempts to do so by applying for positions in Manila and Japan failed. My first novel—inevitably about a teacher in a country town—was rejected, with red wine stains on some of my purplest passages. It was sent off twice more, and back it came each time, by now on the point of disintegration.
    With pathways to literature and travel blocked, I applied to return to Melbourne. The Education Department had a way of dealing with those desperate to get back to the city. They’d be sent to the toughest schools: Collingwood, South Melbourne, Richmond. I was given Richmond, and the hardest year of my life.

Don’t be nice
    On my first day at Richmond Technical School, as we came down the stairs to the quadrangle, the kids booed. ‘You can forget about your Diploma of Education,’ said the head of the English Department. ‘It’s war, and you have to win it. Have you got a strap?’ I said I hadn’t. ‘Get one from the office,’ he said, as we lined up in front of the still-booing kids. ‘Don’t be nice.’
    I hadn’t mastered not being nice, and had to use other means. The toughest class was 3CD—forty leather-jacketed adolescents who didn’t want to be there. They didn’t want Dickens or Wordsworth, so I read from John O’Grady’s They’re a Weird Mob . If this was English literature they liked it, revelling in Jeez and bludge and ‘flat as Aunt Maude’s chest’. Things were okay as long as they were entertained, so in the football season I told them to buy the Sporting Globe . They were all Richmond supporters. Every Monday we’d read and discuss the prose of the hacks who described Richmond’s match. They soon learned what clichés meant, and developed a skill in spotting them. Language badly used can be as instructive as its opposite.
    In the classroom across the corridor, the war was being lost. The teacher, Livio, a gloomy Italian with an unwise moustache, spent the time either shouting at the class or riding the waves of noise that followed, with the noise eventually winning. ‘I cannot go on like this,’ he said. He didn’t, and left.
    Further along the corridor was the opposite: a totally silent