Wayne Carey's life fearing a violent father

In his book, The Truth Hurts, WAYNE CAREY reveals grim details of his dysfunctional childhood.

In his book, The Truth Hurts, WAYNE CAREY reveals grim details of his dysfunctional childhood.

``NO one in, no one out''. That was Dad's favourite saying.

It meant the five of us kids Dick, Sharon, Karen, me and Sam couldn't go out of the house, and any friends we had were not allowed in. That was the cast-iron rule.

But what I remember most about those early days is the fear. The fear and the violence.

Dad was into tough love. In his case, that meant a lot of tough and not much love or not love that most families would recognise anyway.

He was a violent man whose brutality was fuelled by his drinking.

I was a shy and timid kid or so Mum and my older brothers and sisters tell me who used to cry a lot.

If someone looked at me threateningly, I'd dissolve into tears.

I drank milk out of a baby's bottle till I was five years old and carried around with me this old blanket called Browny.

It was a lightish colour when I first got it but after a few years Browny became a pretty apt nickname: it was filthy. That became my security against the mayhem going on around me.

Dad cast his shadow over every part of our lives. Even when he was asleep we'd creep around the house, knowing that if any of us were stupid enough to wake him, there `d be hell to pay.

Yet those times when he was having a kip, it was blessedly peaceful. A calm descended on the house.

When he finally woke up, you never knew what sort of mood he'd be in. Whether he'd playfully ruffle your hair as you walked past, or whether he'd catch you looking at him and say: ``What are you looking at, you useless long-necked pizzle c---?''

That language sounds tough, I know, but they are exactly the words he would use. It was psychological terror as much as anything.

But the physical threat was what worried us most. When he came home from the pub in one of his black moods, we kids knew to take cover.

Usually it was Mum who took the brunt of his anger and we'd be cowering in our beds as the blows landed and her screams pierced our small fibro house on Bolger Ave.

One night Dad put a serrated knife into Mum's nose and slit her nostril open. The wound left a scar which she still carries today. Another time he broke her cheekbone with a punch. Yet another time he smeared her face with her own blood after a fierce belting and got our five-year-old sister, Karen, out of her bed to witness the damage.

Why he did that, I don't know.

Once he had Mum on the ground in the back yard and turned the hose on full bore and forced it into her mouth. Only the shouts of a neighbour from over the fence caused my father to stop the torture.

I also have a strong memory that day of Dick holding the dog-s--- shovel and getting ready to belt Dad over the head with it just before he stopped hurting Mum.

During another rage, Dad held a rifle to Mum's head. She jerked her head away just before he pulled the trigger and sent a bullet clattering into the ceiling. The hole was never fixed.

Mum never reported the beatings Dad gave her to the police, except once, after he cut her nose open.

Although some justice came from this in the end, as my dad was eventually charged with assault, at the time, the local constable made my mum feel small and trivialised the event by pointing out to her that she wasn't actually that badly injured.

Feeling helpless and alone, she became desperate. Things came to a head in 1977 when Mum and Dick, who was 16 at the time, hatched a plan to stop the beatings. They decided to kill Dad.

Because they were only 17 years apart, Dick and Mum were the best of friends. As he grew up, Dick became increasingly protective of her. The two of them would walk the dogs together and it was then, on some isolated back road or on the banks of the river, that they'd talk about all these crazy plans to finish Dad off.

That's when they came up with this idea to shoot Dad.

Life had become so unbearable for Mum, the future so bleak, that the two of them got a gun one of many in the house, a .22 rifle and waited for Dad to return from the pub one night.

They were going to end their misery by shooting him then and there, in cold blood. Mum hadn't thought as far ahead as to what to do with the body.

Her mind was in such a mess, she knew only that she wanted to do one thing: get rid of this person who had ruined her life, and to hell with the consequences.

Desperate people do desperate things, as she was to say later.

Dick waited behind the front door with the gun loaded. He was only a boy but he'd seen Mum beaten too often and he'd seen me aged 18 months picked up out of my high chair by the hair and flung across the room for not sitting still while having a haircut.

But Dad didn't come home that night. He stayed with his girlfriend of the time, a local Aboriginal woman. It proved one of the wisest moves he'd ever made.

So while we loved Dad and were forever seeking his acclaim, the good times were rare. We never went for a holiday or a family drive. The first time I saw the sea was many years later when I arrived in Adelaide as a 13-year-old and was taken down past Glenelg Beach.

Because we had such an itinerant life, making friends was hard.

Dad's rules about having no friends around to play, and not being allowed out ourselves, made it even more difficult.

And his reputation meant that we were hardly on other families' must-invite-over lists.

I know that friends of mine at school got told not to hang out with us, that we were Kevin Carey's boys and that meant we were trouble.

As a result, we had to find ways to amuse ourselves at home. I hate to think how many hours we spent in our bedrooms - the three boys in one bunk room, the two girls in another - or out in the back yard with the dogs, ducks, ferrets and Hills Hoist for company.

Dad and I didn't ever really do anything together as father and son.

Occasionally he'd get Sam and me in the back yard and give us a few sparring lessons, and discuss the art of self-defence. He wanted his boys to be able to look after themselves. I've never forgotten his boxing mantra: Hit straight and hit hard.

Very occasionally Dad would say to Sam and me: ``C'mon, let's go yabbying.'' The two of us would belt around getting our yabbying gear in great excitement. We were going on an outing with Dad.

On the way to the dam, we'd shoot a couple of galahs or cockatoos and chop them up in the yabby pots for bait.

Then, just when we thought we'd spend the day having a family get-together, Dad would drop us off at a dam probably on someone else's property where we would almost certainly have been trespassing and say he'd be back to pick us up later.

I can recall the sense of deflation. We were going to be left alone again. My memory is of spending full days out at these dams in the middle of summer, wearing no hat and no suncream, with barely a tree around for shade, waiting for Dad to get back from the pub.

And of being so hot sometimes that we'd jump in the dams to cool off, only to emerge a bit later covered in leeches, Sam and me pointing at each other and laughing at how many of the creepy black things were hanging off us.

Then one day the unbelievable happened. Dad announced we were all going down to the Murrumbidgee for a picnic. The whole family.

Well, the whole family minus Mum who was not around at the time, as I'll go on to explain. We looked at each other wondering if this was some kind of bad joke.

But, no, Dad and his girlfriend at the time, Bev, got the picnic rug packed in the car, and the cold roast chook and cordial, and off we set on a drive about 20 minutes outside Wagga.

Sam and I could barely contain ourselves. The place we stopped at was a scenic campsite and barbecue area on the riverbank.

A family a dad, his wife and sons played cricket nearby.

You can't imagine the excitement we felt. At last, we were a normal family, doing a normal family Sunday thing.

This was too good to be true. Surely it couldn't last.

As we rolled out the rug and got ready for our lunch, a leather cricket ball sailed over from the nearby family and lobbed in the middle of us. Dad wasn't happy.

He stood up and this was the ironic bit shouted out to them: ``If you hurt any of the kids, there'll be trouble.'' And he threw the ball back.

Not five minutes later, the ball sailed over again towards our little gathering and skimmed past one of the girls.

This time, Dad was furious. ``I thought I'd warned them about hurting my kids,'' he said. He got up and strode over to the cricket family and, soon enough, was standing toe to toe with the other father and punching on.

I must have been seven or eight. I'd heard stories about Dad being a demon fighter, so I watched the set-to with interest.

The other father could go a bit himself and I think he might have even knocked Dad over at one stage.

But I knew Dad would wear him down. And so he did, handing out a terrible hiding in the end.

Then, just when we thought our picnic couldn't get any worse, Bev and the man's wife started mouthing off at each other.

In no time the two of them were also trading punches. It was an astonishing scene. Karen and Sam and I were just looking on, open-mouthed.

That was the end of the picnic. We never unpacked the cold chicken or poured the cordial. We never had our family lunch by the river.

We simply loaded everything up into the car in silence and went home.
 

An edited extract from Wayne Carey's book, The Truth Hurts, published by Macmillan Australia, on sale from Tuesday