Brother Fish by Bryce Courtenay Read Free Book Online Page A

came to what he believed to be our rights. I guess, in one way or another, he’d been at war all his life and didn’t scare as easily as we did. In fact, the presence created by his huge blackness and deep basso
profundo voice seemed to intimidate Mao’s little yellow soldiers, who usually modified their high-pitched yapping when they attempted to interrogate him and generally treated him with more circumspection than they did the rest of us. If we were all foreign devils then Jimmy was the devil wrought bigger, darker and more dangerous than the rest of us. In any man’s army he would have been the bloke you’d want beside you when the shit hit the fan. But, despite his humour and his calm strength, I sensed that underneath Jimmy was a loner. I guess I wanted him to feel I was the one bloke he could trust.
    Make no mistake, by proffering my friendship I wasn’t offering Jimmy Oldcorn any big deal. I’ve scrubbed up a fair bit over the ensuing years, mostly from reading widely and having a good ear and better-than-average memory, which, to my advantage, some people have mistaken for intelligence. To this has been added a good tailor, and a penchant for silk ties and handmade shoes. Most of these phoney appurtenances I’ve picked up from wealthy conservative Hong Kong Chinese with whom we do a lot of business and who have a preference for bespoke English tailoring, French linen and Italian leather. While it may be different today, in most of the boardrooms I’ve frequented in life, it was important how you dressed. The American CEO of a large corporation once told me that a gold Rolex on your wrist would generally get you over the line in an important interview, though diamonds around the perimeter would immediately disqualify an applicant. Anyway, over a period of time my grammar corrected itself, a process inadvertently started earlier in my life by our town librarian.
    But, when I first met Jimmy I was a pretty knockabout sort of bloke, your regular ocker who didn’t amount to much and who might well be expected to spend the rest of his life on a fishing trawler. Fortuitously circumstances changed for me and I found myself mixing in elevated business circles, which, in turn, led to being accepted at a social level requiring some semblance of culture. A few quid in the bank and the status that goes with it does a whole heap to tune up your vowels while allowing people to see you for what you ain’t. I make no apology for this, I was poor a long time and I’ve never tried to conceal my background. On the other hand, I haven’t, as some do, felt the need to announce my common-as-dirt beginnings with every word that comes out of my mouth sounding as if it’s been fashioned with a pair of tin snippers.
    That’s what being Australian is all about. You can stay put and nobody thinks any worse of you, or you can have a go and, if you’ve got the determination and are prepared to work you can be what you want to be, rise to any level in life without being prevented from doing so because you happen to come from a working-class family. Although today, with so many Australian families on some form of welfare it’s a lot harder for the bottom to rise to the top.
    My family were fisherfolk and when I was a kid on the island, ‘fisherman’ was very close to being a dirty word. Fishermen were on the bottom rung, and the sea was one of the last frontiers where you could hunt for food you didn’t need to pay for. Access to the sea is free to those willing to take the risks involved. The way things were, we seemed never to have fully recovered from the Great Depression.
    There wasn’t a lot of work about other than on a fishing trawler or a cray boat – a hard, dirty and dangerous way to make a crust. The interior of the island’s Anglican and Catholic churches boasted almost as many memorial plaques carrying the names of fishermen who had disappeared