Free Mug Shots by Barry Oakley Page A

class, ruled by a Mr Trevaskis. Mr Trevaskis was short but solid, and gave off a whispery menace, to such effect that he’d sometimes walk out and leave the class, and still there’d be quiet. I once witnessed a strapping when passing his room. He ran at his victims, to gain extra momentum. It happened only rarely.
    My classes veered between order and chaos, with occasional recourse to the strap. Like the offender, I found this deeply unpleasant, but the problem was eventually solved for me. Someone had used their break-and-enter skills to get into my locked desk. The strap, each time I used it, seemed slightly shorter—it was done subtly, a couple of centimetres at a time. After a few weeks, my defensive armament was a harmless little leather flap.
    There was only one strategy left. I collected a stack of Walkabout travel magazines from the library, and at difficult times gave them out. Suddenly, they’d go quiet. The search was on, I soon realised, for tribal articles that showed bare-breasted women. If erotica couldn’t be found, the kids were happy to supply it. I thought they were busy taking notes, but what they were in fact doing was decorating almost every photograph—of man, woman, kangaroo, even aeroplane—with outsize male genitalia.
    At Richmond I met my first genuine bohemian (if that’s not a contradiction in terms). Jason Gurney taught art at the school, and he’d throw lumps of wet plaster at troublemakers instead of using the strap. Gurney was a large man who wore a shabby corduroy jacket and matching trousers. He had long greying hair, a goatee, a black beret and purple bags under his eyes. In profile he looked like Paul Gauguin.
    I used to have morning tea with Gurney in his little office (he despised the other teachers) until I grew tired of being told that Melbourne was a provincial outpost, and that next year, as soon as he’d saved the money, he’d be back in Paris, London or New York. But if he’d had successful exhibitions in these places, if he knew Dylan Thomas and Ezra Pound, what was he doing here, under the plaster apples, with his Gauloises and airmailed copies of New Statesman ? The answer, I eventually realised, was that he needed insularity, it was where he showed up best—where would he be in Paris with his beret and beard?
    I went to one of his parties, in his studio, a converted stable behind St Kilda Road. He greeted guests in a red roar of a waistcoat and paint-flecked pants. He’d assembled a crowd of painters, phonies and poseurs, and looking down on them were his paintings, vacuous abstracts, blank and banal.
    Jason Gurney wasn’t very good, and this was why I witnessed one of the greatest snubs of all time. One afternoon, when I was having a drink with him after school, he noticed someone, a dark, handsome, bearded man, across the counter in the saloon bar. ‘That’s Clem Meadmore,’ he said, ‘you must meet him.’ He called out to him, in a voice more and more plaintive—‘Clem—Clem—Clem …’ Clem kept his eyes down as he got his drink. ‘Clem!’ There was as much steel in Clem as there was in his chairs, and he paid for his drink and turned away as if he were stone deaf.
    By the middle of this exhausting year, when Carmel was pregnant, we’d extricated ourselves from my mother’s house. (‘Go on, take a flat. Your father’s never here and Gavan’s on the other side of the world, but I’ll manage.’) We moved into a place in Caulfield, where we could begin proper married life, and which Carmel furnished with a table, buffet and chairs in the new Scandinavian style. Melbourne was taking the first steps towards civilisation, and so were we. Every afternoon after work, pale and tired, I’d change into bottle-green corduroy trousers, settle into a Fler chair, and sip a Coonawarra claret.
    We’d had a hectoring cleric in Mildura, and now