The Allen Brothers

It was while we were staying at Smithfield Migrant Hostel that I first met the Allen brothers, Michael and Richard, who hailed originally from Nottingham. Michael – tall, and solidly constructed, with a grimly sardonic smile almost permanently contorting his features - was eight, but seemed much older. He had already resolved, to his own satisfaction, most of the major philosophical and practical quandaries of life, and tended to be openly impatient, and at times scornful, of anyone with differing views. He found my self-proclaimed belief in God particularly preposterous, and spent much time endeavouring, without success, to disabuse me of it.

The younger brother, Richard, was not quite six, and he and I hit it off immediately. We shared the same vigorously questing imagination and exploratory zeal, and many a happy hour was spent pursuing and inflicting temporary captivity – or worse – on small, comparatively defenceless invertebrates, racing one another across the nearby scrubland or sheep paddocks, or acting out scenes from our favourite cartoons. Much smaller and wirier than his brother, Richard evinced a lithe fluidity of movement that put one in mind of a cat, but in almost every other respect – playful ebullience, sociability, desire to be liked – he was more akin to a puppy dog. Carrying both comparisons further, he was adept at anything requiring guile or subterfuge, but was also prone, at times, to over-estimating his own ability, and to thereby pushing himself beyond his limits. This particular weakness was something Michael was all too often able to exploit in ways which reinforced the brothers’ already glaringly lop-sided pecking order.

The Allens, it emerged, were going to be our near neighbours in Elizabeth West, and Richard would go on to be my longest and, although it was not a term I would have used at the time, closest Australian friend. As time went on, our interests and passions evolved and developed in almost perfect synch, sometimes in ways that made almost everybody else seem like aliens. In seven years, I cannot recall a single harsh world being exchanged between us. It was in all respects a friendship made – and ultimately obliterated – in heaven.

As for Michael, however, he would go on to become something quite other than a friend.