Recorded 13 April 2018
Before we Start
[GM: As the title suggests, this was the fourth of 24 recordings done at our kitchen bench in Kensington, Western Australia. As part of the preparation for putting it on this website, in February 2022, I asked our friend Helen to read through this transcript and the one from 7 June 2018. Below you will find some of Helen’s comments interspersed. My thanks to Helen for doing that.]
GM: OK, so it’s the 13th of April 2018, Black Friday. Tren, you were talking about South Perth yesterday.
THM: Oh, yes. I was giving you a breakdown of what the place looked like, to my memory, also the neighbourhood.
There were still a lot of small, red brick houses built before 1950, or around 1950, and apartment blocks that would have been built in the 60s. It was not a place that was as wealthy as it is today in 2018.
A bus, the number 34 bus used to run along Mill Point Road up onto the Narrows Bridge. And it would come to and fro. It was very handy for us because we could get into the city very quickly, and come home quickly.
In later years the bus route stopped going that way up onto the bridge, because at the Judd Street intersection of Mill Point Road in the early 80s, or late 70s an overpass was built. And that’s the way the bus went.
But, nevertheless, Helen and I moved into this super, grand, house. [Helen: This was in about May or June 1975.] Helen had her dog Zabby, and Zabby was pregnant at the time. We had watched her, or, in fact had caught her in the act of having sex with one of the many dogs that came around. She’d never been sterilised.
We had seen her having sex, and she was stuck together with a mongrel dog that looked like it had a bit of a husky and a bit of long haired golden retriever. Zabby was a mongrel Kelpie.
So later on we had a mixture of blonde and black puppies born. That would be not long after we moved in.
I got the front room of the house. I don’t know why. It was a large room and I guess it was a bit creepy because it was so large.
As I said, it had French doors that went out to a sleepout, and then the door out, so you got a lot of bugs that came in. So someone could easily get into those rooms. The windows weren’t secure, they didn’t lock properly.
Helen had the room next to me that was adjacent to my room. [Helen: I’m not sure why Tren got the front big room, but I know I wouldn’t have been dominant enough personality wise (Tren was always more assertive than me, a trait I should have adopted as I went into life as it might have prevented me making stupid decisions….) I know I ended up moving to the very back room of the house once Bob and I were more established and he had moved in.]
Initially there were just the two of us. She had a boyfriend, Don, whom she had met whilst at Swanleigh. Helen had carried on with school after leaving Craig House, and when she was boarding at Swanleigh I think she mixed with a lot of people from the country. Their lives and livelihood appealed to her.
Partly, I’ll confirm this with her, because there were no people who seemed to have too much trauma in their life. They were just farm kids who had to come to the city to go to school and they needed somewhere to stay.
Unlike when we lived at Craig House every child was there because they had had a family death, and it was usually their father, but often the mother had died as well. So there were children who were grieving.
Some had management of anger issues, some had trouble with the police, but by and large we had a good crop of kids who were doing ok.
I think it was at Swanleigh that Helen developed her love of the country. She wasn’t a good student. She went on to what was then called 5th year to do her Leaving Certificate.
The curriculum had changed when we went to high school. The education system had changed and we were the first of a new group of students who were doing the Achievement Certificate which you got at the end of third year.
That altered in fourth and fifth years where you did your Leaving Certificate. Helen didn’t do particularly well, and I don’t think she passed her Leaving.
She had friends there, but all of them were pretty much Australian country kids. I had, after losing touch with my friends, which was partly forced on me, but partly a decision by me, to try and start anew.
My new friends were mainly a variety of people from different countries, from when I had lived in Bey Apartments.
Bey Apartments and Lots of Boys
Bey Apartments had once been used, because it was in Goderich Street in East Perth [near Royal Perth Hospital], it had been used for the nurses who were training.
To become a nurse in those days you didn’t have formal University training, you learnt on the job. They would live there. Then it became apartments generally for overseas students.
There were a lot of people from Thailand. Students from Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia and we’d befriended the guys [GM: In this context by “we” Trenna meant herself and the people she lived with in Bey Apartments, Rose and others.] . In the midst of that there was also a group of guys who played soccer.
In those days you formed teams affiliated to a country your family came from, like the Greeks and Macedonians. They played under the Macedonian banner. They also had Asian boys playing with them too. I don’t know how they were selected.
But what it meant was we met two lots of separate groups who were brought together by a couple of the guys who lived in Bey Apartments.
So we knew a lot of mixed cultures [GM: which was quite unusual in Perth at that time.]. Also, the girls I left GFS with to live in Bey Apartments were Aboriginal girls, and I had lived with girls who were a mix of Japanese and indigenous Aboriginal men, and their families.
Anyway, my point is that Helen had been very used to only hanging out with white average Australians. I had deliberately not given my address to people, but Bob Lee did know my sister and brother-in-law, he knew Alan. Alan was Burmese, and they had befriended each other at some point.
Bob
He rang them at one stage and they told him where we lived. We didn’t have a telephone. We had to use the telephone booth up the road, but Alan gave the address and one day Bob turned up.
Bob was a Chinese Malaysian. He came from Melaka, and he was a funny guy. He was older than the rest of us, but he would never give his age away, and he did have quite a baby face.
He was goofy, and he loved playing pranks. And he loved fruit including some strange fruit that he was brought up on, like dried sour plums, which were something you had to like.
He also loved fresh cherries. He would always bring cherries whenever he came to see us when we were at Bey Apartments [before I reconnected with Helen]. He rocked up to 19 Mill Point Road one day, and I was so embarrassed, because Helen was there with her boyfriend Don.
I wondered what they would make of him, because he was Malaysian, and there was still a very strong white Anglo Saxon culture. However Helen took to him as a goofy guy. She didn’t fancy him.
Bob had fancied me in the past but I made it clear to him that he was a friend, and not a boyfriend, and it was never going to be a relationship like that. But he missed hanging out with me because we were good fun. We always had fun together.
The Asian Guys
He wanted to tell the other guys where we lived. I was uncertain about that, but in the end gave into a few of those requests. They weren’t so much the Asian guys for some reason or other, I don’t know why.
But I did give in to him bringing over one of the guys who came from South Africa. He was a white South African, and two of the Macedonian boys.
They came over and Helen soon realised that Don was extremely boring and she dropped him. She became interested in my strange group of friends.
So then I gave in because I knew she would be very interested in the guys who were from the pub. The guys from the pub were the Asian guys, and they were all singers, as was Bob.
Bob played the guitar and sang various songs by James Taylor, and those types of harmony ballad songs. Middle of the road stuff.
I think our first outing was to Beethoven’s [nightclub] where we were going to go and see, it was actually Ray Burgess, who was new. He was a new singer being promoted by Molly Meldrum for Countdown. We didn’t particularly like him, but also JOK. Johnny O’Keefe was going to do a gig.
We knew that that’s where the Asian guys hung out because there were definitely women who flocked over them because they were handsome and very conscious about their clothing. And they just seemed far more sophisticated than white Australian guys.
So off we went there, dressed up to the nines, and we rocked up there. Helen met the twins, who were Peter and Simon, and they were Malaysian boys who had the look of a band that was popular at the time, Hush. The band was called Hush, and their guitarist was Les Gock.
These guys were just like the guys in Hush. They had a similar haircut to Les Gock, and the groovy platform shoes, and flares, and wild crazy jackets, and they were so good, and charismatic, and charming, and spoke good English, just with an accent.
And they could sing, and they definitely flirted with women. Helen was taken in by charismatic men who’d say the right things. Me on the other hand, I will take the piss of them, and they thought I was just so funny and Aussie that I would see through them.
Nevertheless, we got along fine. They liked that I got what they were doing but didn’t mind.
They had a term for when they would be heading off with a girl to hopefully have sex with her, and it was that they were “off to have a cup of tea”. They would say to people “are you going to have a cup of tea?” And he’d repy “well I hope so. I’ll try my best to have a cup of tea”. I knew that joke but kept it to myself, later spilling the beans to Helen.
Also, another term was used because they played soccer. It was the term “what time was kick off time?” So they would say “do you want to kick off”, “you gonna kick off”, “are we going to kick off”. For a long time we never knew what that meant. But it did mean they were going to go off and smoke some dope.
Dope was something we never got into. I was a heavy cigarette smoker, but I just couldn’t bear the smell of marijuana. I felt that it smelled like cow shit basically. I did try it many years later but couldn’t see the point.
I was quite happy to drink alcohol and have my cigarettes to keep me company. I’m sure they kept me healthy all through my twenties! I had more of that than I did food, I think. Well real food, the rest was from packets of various things.
So, Helen met for the first time Baba, a tall Jimi Hendrix physique, haired type man with oodles of charisma, and way, way sophisticated. He was so cool that girls would just be so hanging out to talk to him.
He left even the gorgeous boys as… well, boys, they just weren’t him. He was the Charles Manson [NOT in a violent way] of the group. Baba was to me, clearly a man to stay away from. He was unintentionally harmful.
He did not mean to be of any harm, but he had zero relationships that were related to forming monogamous relationships. He was there to have sex with as many good-looking women as he could.
If he did want to just have fun we would go on a picnic somewhere, and hopefully pick up another good-looking woman while he was strolling around Yanchep or something like that. [GM: In 2022 Helen told me “Actually Baba is a petite guy… very quiet. It was the Chinese guy Peter and another one called Francis who were the Casanovas.”]
But his main priority in life was music. He loved funk music, and he loved women. And when he met Helen, a good looking blonde, perfect Australian figure there was definitely going to be a relationship.
She flirted with him, but she was drawn in like a fish on a hook. Just baited without any bait – she was his.
He at the time was living at Bey Apartments, but he wasn’t living at Bey Apartments when I lived there. He came later, so I guess he was the next load of students, or people who went to places they knew other guys from their country or thereabouts hung out.
I never knew whether he had a job. That wasn’t something we were interested in.
[GM: Helen has a slightly different recollection. In 2022 she told me “The first time we met Baba and gang was at Pinocchios Night Club where Dave and the Diamonds were playing. I was interested in a Chinese guy named Peter, as were most of the girls hanging out there. There was a quiet man, small in stature, called Baba sitting on a chair in the corner who started talking to me. At this time I was still with Don who was studying in the country at Muresk Agricultural College. After meeting Baba I wrote Don a letter and broke off our relationship. As yet, I had not met Bob. He visited after the few weeks of connection I had with Baba ended. Then I started seeing Bob”.
Helen also said, in regards to the twins “The twins were Simon and Alan. They were from Indonesia. We didn’t meet these guys until after I started with Bob and he took us to the Charles Hotel Sunday Session and then we saw all the Asian guys there. Tren was in love with Alan, one of the twins, but he had no idea as we were too shy.]
“We lived the life of Riley as far as we were concerned. We’d catch the bus into the city and hang out in the Hay Street Mall. We’d meet up with friends. We were always going to a coffee shop“
Both Helen and I were unemployed. It was a time of high unemployment in Australia, but not like in future years, where unemployment could have devastating consequences.
I was semi-unemployed for 3 months and that was considered outrageous. Mind you, I never tried to get a job until it got to a point where we had to get a job for the money.
We were happy to live on the dole. It paid for our rent, which I think was about $30 a week. We got about $36 a week from the dole, so that was $72 a fortnight. [Helen got the same.]
We did have to catch a bus once a fortnight, on a Wednesday, to go and pick up our dole cheque. It wasn’t sent to us, we had to go into the CES [Commonwealth Employment Service]. It was a building at the West end of Hay, or Murray Street.
We had to front up. I don’t know what questions we were asked but we pretty well just went and got our cheque, and that would do us for the next fortnight. [Helen: Tren gave up fags quickly as she couldn’t afford them. I remember we spent $5 each a week on groceries and God knows what we did with the rest.]
We lived the life of Riley as far as we were concerned. We’d catch the bus into the city and hang out in the Hay Street Mall. We’d meet up with friends.
“It was the middle of the day when this woman arrived at our place. We’d been drinking all night. I was smoking. There were … ashtrays … overflowing, with probably days of cigarette butts.”
We were always going to a coffee shop, which I know the name of, but has slipped my mind, but it made very fancy, or we thought were fancy, club sandwiches. [Helen: It was called Arabella’s Cafe. It had booths and we loved it. It was in the Hay Street Mall, probably opposite the Aherns Department Store.] They were so exotic to us. We always had them, and they were expensive. But we always had a club sandwich, and then we would hang out and wait for our friends.
We just hung around, doing nothing but having a good time, and that was our day.
Then we would catch the bus home, and we would write poetry. I would write songs with Bob – he would put my lyrics to music. The same with the guys who came over that we would meet up with. We’d all sit on the floor, because we had no chairs.
Well Spoken and Kind
Actually, we did get some furniture. I had a visit when I turned 18 from Child Welfare. A very timid, what I would call a daggy, Christian looking woman.
She was so meek, who arrived at about noon to find me in my bright pink dressing gown, which I had got from Child Welfare when I left Craig House. I had been given a one off $50 allowance to buy clothes to wear to Business College, and among other things I had got a pink chenille dressing gown.
It was the middle of the day when this woman arrived at our place. We’d been drinking all night. I was smoking. There were the typical green and yellow and orange ashtrays that everybody had in their houses. They were identical, overflowing, with probably days of cigarette butts.
Whoever had come and put their cigarette butts out in them, or they were in cans that were still on the floor, with cigarette butts. She had come to look at how we were living, and saw that we were living by sleeping on the floors.
She said that she could take us to get us some beds and cupboards. Well, for me anyway, not for Helen, and then I would no longer be under “the care” of Child Welfare.
Having spoken to her, I remember her parting words saying “I wish all my customers were as good as you. You are so well spoken and kind, and you look like you’re making a go of it”. We laughed, and laughed at it because here we were, looking dreadful in our dressing gowns in the middle of the day, cigarette butts everywhere, stinking of cigarettes, sleeping on the floor.
I guess maybe my still slightly posher English-like accent allowed me to articulate what I wanted and what I didn’t want. But that was interesting.
Anyway, South Perth became a bit of “party central”. Helen went off with Baba the night they met. She went to Bey Apartments with him.
I got a bit angry because she didn’t tell me she was going to spend the night, so I was worried that she had got lost somewhere along the way. She was aloof and way too cool for me now, because it was Baba who she had got together with.
Unfortunately I knew that wouldn’t have meant much to Baba. When Baba hadn’t contacted her in a few days Helen couldn’t believe it. She thought he must be sick and insisted that she go alone, to see him.
I had recommended against it because I had said “Helen, he’s not like a boyfriend”, and she said “no, we got along really well, you know, he told me how gorgeous I am. Tren, you’re wrong about that”. Of course, she came back in tears and saying “he couldn’t even remember my name, and just said well, you might see me around and we might do it again, one time.”
[GM: I asked Helen in 2022 about this. She replied “I was just totally besotted with Baba but didn’t think I was too good for Tren. I only met Bob after the Baba incident, which had only lasted a few weeks. Remember in those days we didn’t have mobile phones, we didn’t even have a land line. So I think after 2 dates with Baba I turned up at his apartment at Bey Appartments, knocking on his door to see what was going on. He was very polite and said he would be in touch, but of course he wasn’t. He was married to Leanne about a month later.”
She was so distressed about this relationship that three weeks later Bob moved into her bedroom. I said to Helen “what the hell” and told her that she was just so not right for Bob, it wouldn’t work.
We had a bit of a falling out because she thought I was trying to come between them as a couple. I knew this was a rebound thing. I knew it was to make Baba jealous. I knew it wouldn’t work. Bob was a really nice guy and he would treat Helen right, but Helen would be bored to death with Bob and they just weren’t a good match.
[Helen: Tren was right about that, but Bob represented stability, and he kept turning up all the time. I wasn’t attracted to him but saw he was a decent man.”]
[GM: Spoiler Alert! Helen and Bob were later married and had 3 lovely children together, but the marriage ended in divorce.]
However, partying continued. I don’t recall if they had started before Bob and Helen were an item, but they became a regular thing, both with the band at the back and with just the guys. Simon and Peter would come along. Bob and I would sing.
Then I re-met up with Gee. A Thai guy who was a sweet young guy, handsome guy in a pretty way.
He’d come to Australia to do architecture, and his family were very well to do. They had some station associated with the King of Thailand.
He talked about his times of when they would go tiger hunting with the royal family. I had mocked and made fun of him, saying “tiger hunting! That’s terrible!”, and he got very upset about it because he felt I had mocked his king and his country.
I realised he was such a strangely different person from me. We had started to sleep together but the relationship was really superficial. I was his girlfriend in a way, but not really.
“He did have a very cute little arse. … We would often have guessing games to guess if it was his body in an advertisement or not.“
He wasn’t my type. He was pretty, and he had an allowance from his parents, but when they found out that he had stopped studying architecture they refused to send him money. And he would not be allowed to stay in Australia unless he married somebody.
Then I realised that clearly our relationship was all about that. He started to tell me that he loved me, and I knew he didn’t. I knew I was potentially a wife for him.
He was running out of money and took up any work he could get. As he was a pretty boy one of the jobs he took up was as a jocks [underpants] model so there would just be photos which showed his body. You would only see the side and from the belly button down, with him in the jocks.
He did have a very cute little arse. He would just be in side-advertising in newspapers, not in glossy magazines, they were just newspapers and throw away papers. We would often have guessing games to guess if it was his body in an advertisement or not. It soon became quite easy to pick his body.
I made it clear to him that I understood he was with me purely to be a wife for him, so he could stay in Australia. He admitted it and said that he would promise to get a divorce as soon as possible and blahdy blah, and give me some money. I was just completely uninterested in that.
He stayed on living with us, I think mainly because it suited him, but he did stop eating the food that we tried to serve him because it was mainly Vesta meals, which came out of a box.
There was chilli con carne, all out of a box, macaroni cheese, fried rice, goulash. I can’t even bear to think what they all were.
But speaking of macaroni cheese, that was our favourite boxed meal, because my sister Barb had invented – God knows how, but I have to give her credit for it – a meal which consisted of a can of braised steak and onions, which was globulus stuff in a can that represented braised steak and onions.
There were onions in it. I have no idea what else was in it, but it was just a slurry of brown stuff.
But she discovered there were two versions made by Kraft, the flash version of macaroni cheese, and the cheaper version of macaroni cheese. We bought the cheaper version which we actually thought was the better, which contained macaroni and a sachet of cheese, and a sachet of something that you put with milk and, voila!, in a few minutes, and this was pre-microwave days, so we did it on the cooktop, we had macaroni cheese.
However, the piece de resistance was we up-ended a can of braised steak and onions into it which became a large pot of beige, gluggy, indescribable … stuff, which, if you added quarters of toast to, became our favourite meal. We loved that meal.
But Gee, in the end said he had to eat fresh food, and he started to buy yoghurt – why? why would you do that?!, and cereal!, and he always had salads! – which to us we’re just rabbit food.
When I had turned 16 my sister Nancy had bought both Barb and I a Southeast Asian cookbook which was on the market written by Charmaine Solomon. I learnt to make curries from that.
One curry I particularly learnt, I thought it came from my sister Barb, although she doesn’t think so. It may be a combination of a curry from that book and from Alan, her husband who was Burmese.
I made it in my own way and that was considered real food.
It was made with chuck steak and potato and Keen’s curry powder, dry powdered ginger and there may have been dried garlic. There was dried turmeric, salt and pepper, onions and rice and it was truly Heavenly.
And today, in 2018 it’s still on our menu. It’s called Tren’s Original Curry. It’s really not the original because I don’t use dried ginger, and I don’t use Keen’s curry, and I have changed the meat. It’s a little bit more sophisticated now, although it’s still what I would call comfort food – so it’s a basic meat and potato curry.
[ This transcript is dedicated to Bob Lee 2/5/1948 – 27/5/2020 ]
Above is Trenna’s iPad copy of a more modernised version than that cooked in South Perth. The different colours of text represent some of the changes made as Trenna tries to continually improve it. Eventually I will publish on this website a collection of Trenna’s recipes.