The Otto Bin Empire Read online

  ‘Don’t you worry about Rose, Betty,’ Eddie said expansively, ‘I’ll look after her. I got mob living in Redfern. Blackfellas’ paradise it is, right in the middle of Sydney, family just waiting to welcome us.’ He put his arm around Rose and hauled her in close. ‘And my Rose here’s gunna be a star.’

  He nuzzled his head into Rose’s neck, to her delight. She didn’t care about being a star. She didn’t want any of that. She just wanted to be with Eddie.

  Recognising the cause as a lost one, Betty gave up further argument. She knew Rose was unhappy at Eleanor Downs, hating the Young Boss the way she did, and why shouldn’t she, the bastard pig! But this wasn’t the way to escape – it was all wrong. Everything was moving too quick and Eddie was too smooth. Betty didn’t trust him.

  The girls hugged, holding each other closely and exchanging farewells in their own language.

  ‘Travel safe, little sister,’ Betty said. ‘I’ll miss you.’

  ‘I’ll miss you too, sister,’ Rose said, ‘but I take you with me in my heart.’

  Betty’s fears were justified. Eddie left Rose barely a year after their arrival in Sydney, and during that one short year he came close to breaking her spirit. He beat her regularly when he was drunk, which was often, and of a night when he wasn’t out with his young hooligan mates, joy-riding in stolen cars or thieving to score money for grog, he forced her to drink with him at home.

  ‘What’s the matter with you, woman? Drink with your man, for Christ’s sake! Where’s the companionship? A woman drinks with her man.’

  Rose gave in, developing a taste for alcohol she’d never had before, even allowing herself to believe it was a valid form of escape. He didn’t bash her up as much when they got drunk together.

  But it wasn’t the answer. He left her anyway, disappearing one day with a pretty girl from out near Wagga Wagga who’d just arrived in the city in search of adventure, which Eddie was only too willing to provide. Eddie liked them young and innocent.

  ‘We’re heading north,’ he announced, ‘Surfers Paradise.’

  And then he was gone, leaving Rose in the terrace house they’d been sharing in Eveleigh Street with a fluctuating population who came and went from the country and outback regions. The area on the western border of Redfern, known simply as ‘the Block’, offered low-cost housing that attracted Aboriginal people who’d gravitated to the city, many living on the poverty line and banding together to share accommodation, shacking up sometimes ten to a room.

  Fortunately for Rose, there was a strong code of honour among the longer-standing residents of the Block who’d settled in to their city life. Rose was family to them now and Eddie had done the wrong thing in deserting her.

  ‘You stay here with us, sister, we’ll look after you,’ Jimmy Gunnamurra and his wife, Bib, promised. And they stood by their promise, finding odd jobs for her via their many contacts and providing her with support. Rose’s Redfern brothers and sisters were the only reason she survived.

  Music continued to be the one pleasure in her life. She haunted the pubs around Redfern and Surry Hills where live bands were playing, standing out in the street if she didn’t have enough money to buy a beer, ignoring disapproving glances from passers-by as she swayed to the music or tapped to the beat, sometimes whispering along with a harmony of her own.

  Her favourite venue was the Labor Club. She wasn’t looked down on there the way she was in some of the pubs. She was eighteen now, just, legal age, but in a couple of the pubs they still treated her as if she shouldn’t be there. They didn’t do that at the Labor Club.

  The club was in Bourke Street, and had been established several years previously by the Surry Hills Branch of the Australian Labor Party. Ostensibly a venue where members could socialise and talk politics, in reality it served a far greater purpose opening its doors to the local constituents as it did. Surry Hills and the area’s neighbouring suburbs were home to traditional, working-class, inner-city communities that suffered from overcrowding, poor housing, unemployment and in some cases sheer poverty. The Labor Club offered the locals a popular and affordable venue, a home away from home with good cheap meals and a live show on Saturday nights. You could drop in to the bar after work and have a game of billiards or play the poker machines or simply listen to the jukebox.

  Rose didn’t play billiards and she didn’t play the pokies; she just stood in the corner by the jukebox, soaking up the music and singing along under her breath. She didn’t even need to waste her precious coins – others did it for her. The jukebox was always playing.

  Not as good as live music though, she thought wistfully, looking around at the posters on the walls. How she wished she could come to the concerts. They had real beaut entertainers at the Labor Club on a Saturday night, the very best. Crikey, Johnny O’Keefe had performed there just a while back! What Rose would have given to be in a room where JOK was performing. But live concerts cost money. So she just stuck to her corner by the jukebox.

  That was where Toby met her, in the corner of the Labor Club right by the jukebox. It was a Friday, early afternoon, not many around as yet, and he’d arrived to set up for his gig the following night. He’d only been in the country for a year, but he’d quickly found his feet. There were a lot of live performance venues around Sydney and he did quite a bit of work for the Labor Club. Good space, good gigs, good performers – he enjoyed his jobs there.

  Toby himself was as yet unaware, but it was through the musicians and entertainers at the Labor Club that word was spreading fast. The Irishman was a bloody good sound engineer, they all agreed.

  He saw the Aboriginal girl the moment he entered the club. She was standing all alone by the juke box grooving to ‘The Green, Green Grass of Home’ and singing along with Tom Jones. Not loudly, in fact he couldn’t hear her at all, but she was clearly mouthing the words. Her head was back, her eyes closed and she was pulsing to the rhythm of the song. Some might have presumed she was drunk, but Toby knew better. She was in another place altogether, giving herself up to the music.

  He put down his gear and quietly crossed to her. Lost in her world, she didn’t notice him though he stood right beside her. He leant in closely and listened, and as he listened, he was amazed. She was not only pitch perfect, she was singing a harmony, but not the obvious harmony line most would choose. This was something quite different, something that enriched the song, adding a poignancy and depth to both the melody and the lyric. She has to be a back-up singer, surely, he thought, and a bloody good one at that.

  ‘Yes they’ll all come to see me in the shade of that old oak tree

  As they lay me ’neath the green, green grass of home.’

  As the song came to an end, Rose opened her eyes and gave a startled gasp to find a man standing close beside her.

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ Toby said, stepping back a pace. ‘Didn’t mean to crowd you – just having a listen. You’re a singer, I take it?’

  Rose shook her head, mortified, wondering how loud she’d been singing. There’d been no-one nearby, so she hadn’t thought for one minute anyone would hear her.

  ‘Don’t worry, love,’ the man assured her, ‘nobody else was listening, just me, and if you’re not a professional singer then by God you should be. I’m Toby, by the way,’ he held out his hand, ‘Toby Manning. I’m the sound engineer around here. Well, on Saturdays when there’s a gig, anyway.’

  She shook his hand self-consciously, still unsure of herself. ‘I’m Rose, Rose Napangurrayi.’

  ‘Right you are.’ He winked. ‘I’ll just stick to the Rose part. You sure can sing, Rose. That was a grand piece of harmony that was.’

  The lilt of his accent was pleasing and his easy manner reassuring and Rose felt herself relax. He looks like someone from the music business, she thought, intrigued. She’d never met anyone from the music business herself, but she’d seen plenty of pictures. A bit on the skinny side and hair too long – He looks like one of the Beatles, she thought, John Lennon without the g
lasses or George Harrison, only not so good looking.

  ‘Where’re you from?’ Toby asked. He too was intrigued. She was the first Aboriginal person he’d ever met.

  ‘A long way away,’ she said. ‘The grasses aren’t green where I come from.’ They shared a smile. ‘Who’s singing tomorrow night?’ she couldn’t help asking.

  ‘Col Joye.’

  ‘Oh …’ Her expulsion of breath said everything.

  ‘You want to come? I can get you in for free.’

  Col Joye! Was he joking? Rose was speechless. She just nodded.

  She didn’t want to sit at a table down the front with people she didn’t know and where she obviously felt she’d be conspicuous, preferring instead to stand up the back against the far wall, which to Toby’s mind only made her all the more conspicuous. He couldn’t take his eyes off her the entire night. He could see her lips moving imperceptibly throughout each song. She knows every melody, he thought, and she knows every lyric. There’s a voice in her head that’s singing harmony with Col. Toby was riveted.

  The following week it was Judy Stone, another favourite performer of Rose’s, and things developed from there. Toby took Rose to every gig he worked on after that, not just at the Labor Club, but all over Sydney. Before long they were sleeping together. And then she moved in with him, into the old ramshackle house in Glebe that he shared with several musicians. And then they were inseparable.

  It was a bohemian existence. The Glebe house regularly served as Sydney lodgings for performers on tour and there were always people coming and going, smoking dope and downing beer and cheap wine. It reminded Rose of Redfern, but with one difference: there was always music in the house.

  Rose was happier than she remembered being in the whole of her life. The partying was fun certainly and she joined Toby and the others, smoking and drinking at times with abandon, but there was far more to her newfound happiness than partying. Never before had Rose felt more loved or more useful. She was Toby’s assistant these days, his ‘roadie’ he called her. She helped him set up before each gig and she helped him with the bump out after each show, and during rehearsals she fetched take-away coffees or made cups of tea for the singers and musicians.

  ‘You’re a Godsend, love, truly you are,’ Toby would tell her time and again, ‘don’t know how I ever managed without you, and that’s a fact.’ All shite of course, but something she needed to hear. Rose’s self-confidence had taken a beating somewhere down the track, Toby had sensed it right from the start. Poor Rosie’s damaged, he thought, anyone can see that.

  Over the ensuing months, in bits and pieces Toby teased Rose’s story from her, and the more he learnt of her past the more protective he became. He found it rather amusing himself that their relationship raised eyebrows. ‘My, my,’ he would say to people’s faces when he sensed a nudge or a whisper, ‘black girl, white man, tut tut, how shocking,’ and then he’d laugh at their embarrassment and the fact he’d caught them out. But if he sensed Rose was the specific target of their disapproval, he quickly sprang into action. ‘C’mon Rosie love, let’s go,’ he’d say, and taking her arm he’d whisk her away. He would far rather have challenged the offender, but knowing how Rose hated any form of confrontation he understood that a scene would only have added to her discomfort.

  Toby shielded Rose in every way he could, but there was one time when he made a rather bad mistake. It had, however, taught him a serious lesson about the woman he loved.

  They were in a rehearsal studio with a six-piece band called The Real Goodes, a group that Toby knew well and with whom he worked regularly. The band members were rehearsing for an upcoming gig at a popular venue in Paddo where they often performed, principally covers, but always throwing in a few numbers of their own. The three Goodes brothers, who’d started the band over two years previously, were talented, hard-working and ambitious. They recorded their songs and feted every radio disc jockey in town, determined to get a hit up and going, and Toby had no doubt they would. ‘It’s only a matter of time, fellas,’ he’d say encouragingly, ‘only a matter of time.’

  The atmosphere in the rehearsal studio was friendly and relaxed but unbeknownst to Rose a plan had been set in place. The band’s lead vocalist, Ray, the youngest of the Goodes, was normally backed up by two female singers as well as his brothers, but one of the girls had just quit. Toby had suggested they give Rose a try without her knowing she was being auditioned.

  ‘Don’t want to put any pressure on her,’ he’d said to the brothers. ‘She’ll be fine if she thinks she’s only helping out at rehearsal. And just you wait till you hear her!’

  Ray and his brothers and the other band members were only too happy to oblige – they all liked Rose, and if Toby said she was good then that was enough for them.

  ‘Rose’ll sing backup, she knows all the covers,’ Toby suggested, apparently struck by sudden inspiration at the next rehearsal.

  Rose stared blankly at him.

  ‘Go on, Rosie love.’ He ushered her over to the microphone where the other back-up singer was waiting. ‘Take your lead from Evelyn, you’ll be fine.’ She’ll hardly need any lead, he thought. Rose’d leave Evelyn for dead any day.

  Evelyn gave an obliging smile and as the band struck up the opening chords of ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’, she started clicking her fingers and nodding rhythmically at Rose in the obvious assumption that Rose needed counting in, which Toby found vaguely amusing.

  But seconds later, when it came time for the vocals, Rose wasn’t there. She wasn’t even making any attempt to be there. She was somewhere else, staring into another time, another place, and Toby knew immediately he’d done the wrong thing. It wasn’t that she didn’t know the song. Hell, Rosie knew every popular song on the charts. How many times had they performed ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’, along with every other Four Seasons hit, him on guitar, her singing the lyrics directly to him as if there were no-one else in the world, as if the song belonged purely to them? Rosie had a way of making every song special. And that was when the truth hit Toby: the truth that music, to Rose, was a private thing. He realised then and there that Rose sang for him, no-one else, just him.

  Rose herself was in a strangely distant state. Her thoughts had drifted off, but oddly enough they were not altogether dissimilar to Toby’s. She was remembering those times when she’d sung in public. First it had been with Betty, outside the pub in Alice Springs – but they’d been performing for each other really hadn’t they? Music had been what kept them going, her and Betty. Then there’d been Eddie. She’d never forget that afternoon they first met. Geez how she’d sung her heart out for Eddie! She’d sung for him during the early days in Sydney too; they’d been happy for a while, her and Eddie. She’d hated the way he’d made her sing in the streets with an empty ice cream carton for people to throw money in though. ‘It’s not begging,’ he’d said, ‘it’s busking,’ but she’d still felt humiliated. Hadn’t he realised she didn’t want to be on show? She didn’t want to sing for strangers: she wanted to sing for him. And he always chose the tourist areas, Circular Quay or the Town Hall or the Strand Arcade, where she knew that the passing parade of white people looked down on her. But those days were over – there was Toby now. She sang for Toby now. And they shared the music her and Toby. The music was something special …

  That was as far as Rose’s thoughts got, standing there beside Evelyn, who was clicking her fingers like a castanet and nodding with furious intensity, trying to shake the girl out of what was presumably stage fright.

  ‘Come on, love.’

  Rose felt Toby’s arm around her.

  ‘Sorry,’ he whispered as he shepherded her away from the microphone, ‘didn’t mean to be pushy.’

  He gave Ray and the brothers a wave. ‘Don’t worry, boys, I’ll have a back-up singer within the hour, there’re heaps of good ones just queuing up for a job.’

  As if the boys didn’t know that. ‘No worries, mate,’ Ray said.

  Toby and Rose lef
t, and the incident never once came up for discussion between them. Both knew there was no need.

  Barely eighteen months later, in mid-1970, two major events occurred more or less simultaneously, or at least they appeared to. The Real Goodes rocketed to fame, apparently overnight, and Rose discovered she was pregnant.

  The Goodes brothers, after working their guts out around the pubs and clubs of Sydney for well over three years and releasing several singles that had gone relatively unnoticed, finally had a hit on radio that was picked up nationally, and quickly followed by another. ‘Flash Annie’ and ‘Once is Not Enough’ took Australia by storm, and with two hits in the Top Ten the Real Goodes were heralded as the hottest new popular-rock sound in the country. At least they were by Lenny Benson, their astute new business manager.

  ‘Australia’s own Beatles and Four Seasons all wrapped up in one,’ Brian Henderson enthused when introducing The Real Goodes on Channel Nine’s ‘Bandstand’. The quote had come directly from Lenny’s publicity release, which had accompanied the band’s hastily produced brand new album.

  A ‘National Spring Tour’ was mounted with equal haste and heralded far and wide in order to cash in on the success of the band’s hit singles and promote the new album. The Real Goodes were to take to the road and perform all around the country for their growing legion of fans. Concerts and club gigs were arranged in every capital city and every major regional town where Lenny had managed to score a venue at relatively short notice, and he’d managed to score many. Some venues had even cancelled previous bookings, Lenny having convinced them they’d be missing out on the chance of a lifetime if they didn’t. Lenny was the consummate entrepreneur, pushy, persuasive and difficult to say no to.