53. North of the Bridge
I’m sixteen years old. It’s past midnight and I’m waiting for a bus home from Narrabeen alone after a house party. I was but am no longer drunk. The normally traffic-heavy road now sees a car pass through every ten minutes at most, while pedestrians are even rarer. Silence envelops, save for the whistling swoosh of wind through casuarina trees. A lone plover squawks from its vigil over a nesting site.
There are no guarantees a bus will even show, let alone on time; they often don’t around here. Soon, someone else arrives at the stop. The figure wasn’t at the party but could’ve been, based on his age; it’s hard to discern much through his raised hood.
He slides up to me on the bench and leans in, “Oi, are you from Avalon?” My heart rate quickens as I look for his eyes with mine and formulate an answer. I know that what happens next will go one of two ways. Only one of those will mean I get on the bus I’ve been waiting on for the best part of an hour.
I tell him, no.
“Whadda ya think about Avalon?” he continues.
I tell him, “I fucking hate that place and those cunts.”
He pulls off his hood with a grin, “Fuck yeah, bro! So do I.” He throws out his hand and I jump back in shock before I realise he wants to slap five. I settle in my seat and oblige, shaking his hand with a couple of swaggy flourishes. “What’s your name?” he asks. When I tell him my name is Henry, he becomes even more enthused, “Bro, that’s my name, too! But in Samoan, it’s pronounced, ‘Henare’’.”
Immediately, I realise who I’ve been talking to. I realise, also, how lucky I am to have answered the way I did. I relax. After an energetic conversation that mostly centres on how shit we think Avalon is, in which my interlocutor bounces about erratically between seating positions, I say goodbye to Henare.
Through the window as the bus pulls away, I watch him, hood returned to head as he slides over to a new arrival at the bus stop, no doubt to ask the same question he asked me; I can only wonder what the outcome of that interaction is, as the L90 crawls away and across the lagoon.
Henare was a name with folkloric status. He had ties to the Narrabeen Lads. They were largely of lower socio-economic status than the majority of the Northern Beaches, particularly in comparison to the deep North. Their uniform was short tennis shorts, Nike TNs and ankle socks, bumbags, sports caps tipped back at an angle that provided little of their intended shade, and polo shirts from brands like Ralph Lauren, Lacoste, and Nautica, all of which were generally shoplifted. This was before hipsters co-opted the same regalia. Moreover, it sat in sharp contrast to the surf-branded style of the Northern Beaches. There were stories about the Narrabeen Lads, most of them probably made up, perhaps by the Lads themselves. The result was that they were feared, whether they were respected or not. One story involved a convoy, riled up and heading by the carload to Avalon. They’d gotten word of a party taking place there. The event was to be full of so-called ‘Av Cats’ another youth gang from the Northern Beaches, with notoriety solidified after being name-dropped in The Manly Daily. I use the word ‘gang’ here lightly, with a degree of irony that is beyond the scope of The Daily. Rather than the organised crime one generally associates with the term, these youths formed ‘gangs’ for the sake of little more than petty tomfoolery – graffiti and general vandalism, loitering, underage drinking, maybe some low-level drug dealing.
On Scotland Island, we had our own ‘gang’, one we called ‘S.I.K’ or ‘Scotland Island Krew’, the ‘K’ being perceived as more street and the ‘S’ often stylised as a dollar sign. It was all meant as a joke, but also deadly serious. We did little in the way of crime besides loitering, being only five or so members confined to a small, bush-covered island where everyone knew us and would tell our mothers if they saw us being too rowdy. So we loitered, and threw up a smattering of graffiti. Alex carved ‘$.I.K’ into his arm with a nail; his mother had a lot to say about that. Jacob drew a sketch in the school bathrooms in permanent marker depicting The Island beneath a Japanese-style rising sun and the words: $.I.K. So fuck you dick nose!
Anyway, the convoy from Narrabeen made it far along Barrenjoey Road and through the Bilgola Bends, arriving outside that Avalon house party as planned. The two ‘gangs’ met in an all-in brawl on the streets. The fight was brought to a close after Henare was taken to the ground, an Av Cat taking this opportunity to slam a garden paver into the boy’s skull. Henare was put in hospital and into a coma.
He became a household name among local teenagers after that, the peninsula echoing with murmurs about this episode. I’m not sure what happened to the paver-wielding kid. I reckon probably nothing.
* * *
When I moved to Sydney’s Inner West, there was a running joke that half the people you meet are actually from the Northern Beaches. I can’t speak for Gen-Z, but I’d say, as far as my fellow Millennials are concerned, the statement checks out. Privilege of movement, effects of gentrification, etcetera.
From here, the first question one might ask is why you’d leave somewhere as Home and Away idyllic as the Northern Beaches. More curious than what all these Northern Beaches folk are doing on the wrong side of the harbour is how they respond to questions about where they’re from. I myself often answer such questions vaguely: ‘North of the Bridge’, I’ll say, or still more sparingly, ‘North’. Sometimes I prefer to answer as specifically as possible, with the less-known and more romanticised ‘Scotland Island’.
People who aren’t from the Northern Beaches might assume that this attempt to squirm out of geographic pigeonholing is because the area is known for snobbery. It is indeed an affluent, largely white community often referred to as ‘The Insular Peninsula’. There’s no train line and, while improved bus routes have made the lower and central suburbs of the Northern Beaches slightly more accessible, plans to extend these routes further north have been met with fierce protest from locals and subsequently scrapped. Resistance has often hidden itself behind the guise of avoiding the overdevelopment of better-connected suburbs like Dee Why. Yet there are other reasons that won’t find their way into news reports.
Dee Why isn’t just ‘overdeveloped’. Along with neighbouring suburbs like Cromer, it’s also one of the few ethnically diverse parts of the Northern Beaches. From Dee Why, the further you go up the peninsula, the worse the public transport gets, and the whiter and more well-off it becomes. Long story short: by keeping access to those select areas poor, locals ensure that the poor and undesirable will be kept out.
By contrast to their northern coastal cousins, those in Sutherland Shire do have a clear trainline in and out. It runs between these beaches and the working-class and diverse West. The Northern Beaches doesn’t want to end up like The Shire: well-connected and overrun by ‘Westies’. That train line was a key site for the tensions that boiled over in the infamous Cronulla race riots of 2005. During the chaos, white rioters stormed a carriage to beat up an ethnic passenger. Those riots have been a black spot on the history of Cronulla-Sutherland ever since. The Northern Beaches doesn’t want to end up like The Shire in that regard either: exposed for its bigotry in scandalous newspaper headlines.
* * *
Money – or the accoutrements it afforded – was one of several unspoken elements that promoted you up the social hierarchy as a Northern Beaches kid. Other elements were looks, surfing prowess, and a propensity towards fighting.
I never lived near a beach, although all my non-Island (or ‘mainlander’) friends surfed. Generally, I just sat on the beach watching them between swims and bong rips, minding the towels and hoping they’d get bored of the waves soon, so we could do more bong rips.
I wasn’t much of a fighter either. I did taekwondo for a year or two, but was more excited by the outfit and ceremony than the actual combat. The older boys would sometimes make us box in the park, which was meant to be fun and which I pretended was but secretly hated; why would I want to engage in a scenario where I had to punch a friend in the head to avoid being punched in the head myself by said friend?
Despite my pacifist nature, I couldn’t help but fall into the fighting trap, like so many others. Coming home after a house party – a weekly occurrence on Friday and Saturday nights – you were more surprised not to have seen someone getting bashed or bottled than by witnessing these acts. Nonetheless, it always seemed to take me by surprise. And not wanting to be left out, I, like so many people my age, continued to attend these parties.
Concentrations of teenagers binge-drinking through the hot Australian summer was one reason behind the prevalent fighting. Authorities loved to lean on this explanation, ‘alcohol-fuelled violence’ the chosen phrase. This was a partial truth, but it put the onus on individuals and not on a system that continued to produce them.
Beyond alcohol, another contributing layer was a surf culture and imagined superiority among upper classes that seemingly entitled ‘locals’ to beaches and their surrounding suburbs, to the exclusion of all others. While it might’ve been largely middle-aged residents and retirees who resisted the extension of the B-Line bus route past Mona Vale, that possessive spirit flowed through every age and demographic.
Why people would want to lay claim to land like that makes a lot of sense. The combination of craggy headlands jutting out of bush into curling waves, over reefs that surface through the tide as though alive, sunbathing on sandy shores. Intoxicating, is one way you could describe it.
The original owners, the Guringai, were massacred and driven out of this stunning country, their Country, which has since been claimed by an increasingly upper class that perceives itself with the same grandeur as they do the land itself. And a lot of them ride surfboards.
People who didn’t grow up on the coast might imagine surfers to be all #VanLyf and Palo Santo, sunrise yoga and homemade bracelets. But the reality on the Northern Beaches back then smelt less like sandalwood and more like Lynx Africa. It might seem comically inapposite that those enjoying such affluence and lifestyle could be so generically hostile. Yet it was common for fights to break out in the surf. Boards between legs, locals from, say, Newport, would throw punches at those from a neighbouring beach. ‘Kooks’ (or those who didn’t surf) and ‘boogers’ (or those who rode bodyboards) were referred to by some as ‘speed bumps’ if ever they strayed too close to the surf breaks, rendering them fit for running over by those standing on fibreglass spears with plastic blades attached to the bottom. This was one of the reasons I was too anxious to ever properly commit to learning to surf, sticking to the safety of my stoned towel-minding.
The imagined entitlement of surfer yuppie to the beach was generations in the making, fuelled in later years by films like Bra Boys, narrated by Russell Crowe, and Lords of Dogtown, starring Heath Ledger, with its unofficial slogan: ‘Locals only’. The Newport Boys, another ‘gang’ that was not a gang, took it upon themselves to keep their beach unpolluted by out-of-towners or ‘blow-ins’.
They weren’t as reputed as the Av Cats or Narrabeen Lads, but the Newport Boys repped the suburbs postcode with similarly moronic pride. Jed or ‘Peg Leg’, as he was nicknamed, was a year younger than me and born with one leg. He had 2106 tattooed on his knuckles and was perhaps the most avid and arbitrary fighter in the suburb. The older Newport Boys loved to fire him up and set him on people like a junkyard dog. There was a pack of them who would go around picking people out for no reason and punching them in the face or ‘chicken winging’ them to the ground to kick them while they were down, in Jed’s case with a plastic leg that was not unlike a police baton. “Get outta Newport!” they’d yell as they attacked. I was fortunate never to have this directed at me, as I knew a lot of these kids from attending Newport Primary School, and I spent a lot of time in the suburb. This didn’t necessarily guarantee safe passage through Newport’s teenaged night, but it did in my case.
Tom was a rangy boy who was not so lucky. I knew him from Newport Primary as well, and we’d been close at points in our childhood, drifting apart in our later teens. He was tall and masculine, fraternising with a boy like him called Lez who did martial arts performatively and was likewise tall. Tom’s mere existence as that sort of male meant that people like the Newport Boys targeted him. Time and again, they’d come for him and Lez, yelling “Get outta Newport!” before swarming the pair in a losing fight. If Tom responded, “I’m from Newport”, that would be perceived as antagonistic or insolent. If he didn’t say anything, then that could confirm their reason for attack, or be seen as weak or disrespectful. So, he was doomed to fight and fight he did, in a cycle that continued for years, one that meant Tom could never really feel safe in his own home suburb.
* * *
The youth of the Northern Beaches back then were frustrated. There was little in the way of youth clubs or proper music venues, art galleries, or poetry slams on that cultural wasteland lined with Norfolk Island Pines. Once the sun had gone down and the beach was no longer an option, the space for wholesome activity went away with it. Kids had to make their own fun.
Even for those over eighteen, the options were few. The only real sites for connection were the local RSL club or hyper-renovated venues taking the name of whatever suburb they were situated within. These were not places of imagination, intellectual stimulation, or ambition, but monotony, excess, and ego. Behind their walls, the same nihilistic activity that took place in parks and house parties was repackaged with a thin, pseudo-adult veneer. Everyone was bottlenecked into the same places and pastimes. The result of all this, oftentimes, was violence.
The aggressive culture of the Northern Beaches probably wasn’t helped by the fact that the most popular music at that time amongst young males was American gangsta rap. The reality of marginalised African-American youths trying to survive in a ghetto amongst gang violence and police brutality couldn’t be further from the reality of rich kids riding surfboards on the Northern Beaches. However, the latter group could relate to the bravado, the camaraderie between rappers and their homies, the glamour of making money and toting guns. Unfortunately for those Northern Beaches posers, while lots of them had money, none of us had guns. This was compensated for with fists and enhanced aggression that it only took nightfall and a couple of beers to justify.
Beyond violence, another commonality between gangsta rap and Northern Beaches culture of the same period was homophobia. Indeed, while I was at school there wasn’t a single openly queer person in any grade, despite many of us coming out after leaving. Most of the time, homophobia was more of an understanding than something that was ever freely admitted to.
It manifested in comments such as that of a friend while ordering McDonald’s before seeing the 50 Cent movie at the cinemas, Get Rich or Die Tryin’. The kid at the cash register was around our age – maybe sixteen – smiley while he took our order before putting an extra burger in the bag. We didn’t know him, so some of the boys joked that the burger was a gift because he had a crush on Alex, who was the best-looking among us and the best dressed, that night in green skinny jeans that were the fashion. Alex was uncomfortable, perhaps wanting to resist with homophobic slurs yet not wanting to fully commit. “I don’t give a fuck if he’s gay,” he said, “as long as he doesn’t fucking touch me.”
That same year, I was given a digital camera for my birthday, a present I was ecstatic about as it gave me the means to populate my MySpace with photos of me doing cool stuff. That same weekend, I brought it out with me while doing such cool stuff, namely, picking at a case of beer with my friends in a park. We took photos of ourselves orbiting the case, leaving empty bottles in our wake, exhausting options for performative, obnoxious poses and making short work of the beer. So, we travelled to Mona Vale in search of a house party.
We didn’t find one, but we found another group of kids loitering near the Woolworths. The atmosphere felt warm, so much so that I put a friendly arm around one of the boys we didn’t know, who was wearing tennis shorts and running shoes, his cap pushed back far on his head.
That was all the invitation he needed, “Get off me, faggot!” he yelled before punching me in the face. I dropped to the footpath and he kicked me in the side of the head, sending my camera, which had taken his photo only a moment ago, flying across the road. He ran over to pick it up and disappeared into the darkness.
My friend Jack helped me stand. I noticed that the impact of a sneaker slamming my inner cheek into my teeth had split it open, forming the shape of a higgeldy-piggeldy ninja star.
I never got my camera back; Mum was pretty upset about that.
* * *
Beside Pittwater Place shopping centre in Mona Vale there is a park. This park is a large, grassy expanse fringed by native trees, a children’s playground, and some concrete platforms landscaped like giant steps on which to lounge. You’d find kids there from the late afternoon to the wee hours of weekend mornings. Often, this would ramp up around that time, midnight descending like the witching hour upon that park and its surrounds. I can’t even count the number of horrific acts of violence I witnessed there.
Arguably the most famous of these incidents took place during broad daylight, when two young girls in full Pittwater High uniforms engaged in what must’ve been a planned fight beside the playground. A group of kids in the same uniform were gathered around to cheer, as one girl, my friend’s blonde-haired little sister, took a dominant position in the fight, which was ended when she launched, from a standing position, a kick to the other girl’s head, held steady by a fistful of brunette hair.
The collision was filmed in pixelated haze on a now outmoded camera phone like a Sony Ericsson or Motorola Razor. Despite the terrible quality, this footage made it all the way to Channel 7. The report was so widely viewed that the news station went on to clip the scene into their introductory montage. For a long time, when the narrator uttered the line, “When news breaks–”, that blonde girl’s sneaker smacked into the brunette’s face with a loud crunch, as though this were the centrepiece and most pressing issue of the time, before the narrator continued, “–we’re there!” and the images moved on to shots of bushfires and armed conflict.
* * *
My problems with Jarrod first arose when I was fifteen at an Avalon house party, surrounded by his Avalon mates, despite his being from Mona Vale. There, he and his friends would hiss at me – literally, like snakes – or give me the finger if ever we ran into each other. I lost track of exactly why this all began, but there is some lore to get into.
One of these Avalon friends had a crush on a girl who I also had a crush on, something we were both aware of. It had been made public on MySpace. While no fights took place that night in Avalon, I was surrounded, told to leave the party, and shoved down the driveway. The kid with the crush kept saying, “Man’s honour, man’s honour,” which he meant as, ‘I saw her first!‘ and which I thought was all pretty absurd, but I wasn’t in a position to argue.
One of the other boys jostling me down the driveway was Jarrod. He would punch me in the face for the first time soon after that incident, on the dancefloor of a mutual friend’s birthday party. From here, Jarrod and I were locked in a toing-and-froing for several years. One weekend, we were fine, making up or sharing a pleasant night together with mutual friends. The next, he’d be assaulting me for reasons that ranged from ridiculous to nonexistent.
I think what it came down to was that Jarrod got into his head that I was a fighter. So I was fair game. While I can confidently say I never started these altercations or even threw a punch, I will admit that I would never walk away when Jarrod confronted me. I was too stubborn to allow someone to, in my perception, ‘walk all over me’. Beyond that, I was in the midst of a self-destructive phase, troubled by my home life and seeking an escape. So, when Jarrod would invade my personal space with a raised voice, my response wasn’t to walk away or try to de-escalate the situation. Instead, I’d push back, either physically or with some kind of cutting comment that was probably true but completely unhelpful. When the situation between us finally reached its climax, though, there was little I could’ve done to prevent it.
* * *
I’m freshly eighteen and at my friend Al’s house on a Saturday night. Al is a handsome surfer boy from Newport whose home is a safehouse for bong smoking. We hear there’s a house party in Newport that’s been broken up near the petrol station. Al’s keen to go down and check out what’s happening. So we do.
A congregation has developed beside the road and we go from person to person saying hello. Most are from our school, but there are a few people from Mater Maria, the nearby catholic private school. Like Jarrod.
We shake hands and I ask how he’s going. Jarrod tells me good, and asks how I am. I tell him good, then proceed to say hello to others. Everything feels fine, normal, like any other night on any other weekend.
My back is turned when a half-full goon sack (a cask wine bladder liberated from its box) sails past my head and onto the main road. It’s a strange sight, the gelatinous flight of the silver sack, and I only compute what it is as it begins a downward trajectory.
Before I have time to think, I’m tackled to the ground. I assume the intention behind this is boisterous, drunken wrestling. Then, in one swift movement, while I’m still piecing together what’s happening, the other person stands up. I only realise that it’s Jarrod when he’s barking profanities at me while swinging his boot into my face, repeatedly. It happens so quickly, I don’t feel anything besides a shudder as each blow lands. After four or five swings he tuckers out and pulls back into the darkness.
Somehow, I’m still conscious and able to stand. I walk off down the street. Most others stand around in shock, not knowing what to do, but several follow me. One is from my rugby team and pleads with me to go back so that we can fight Jarrod and get even. The other is Al.
“I just want to go home and smoke a bong,” I tell them.
“Fuck, Henry. I don’t know if you’re gonna be able to do that,” Al says. “I think you need to go to hospital.”
Blood pours in a steady stream from a gash in my right cheek. When we arrive at Mona Vale Hospital emergency, there’s a long queue. It’s hours before I can see a nurse. The light is piercing in the triage room. I feel uncomfortable and exposed, although all physical pain is quelled by shock. While we wait, someone bursts in looking to fight someone else who had sought refuge in the hospital, the first someone being escorted out by security before the second someone is as well.
When my face is finally stitched up, my cheek has swollen so much that one nurse has to press and hold each side of the gash together while another stitches it closed. They do so casually, as emotionally detached as you might be in wrapping a sandwich.
My face, with its jagged, stitched-up gash, remains swollen and bruised for weeks after that. I avoid going outside, as the looks I inevitably receive from passersby make me feel self-conscious, freakish.
Friends of friends discover that Jarrod claims the reason for his kicking me in the face was because I supposedly kicked his friend while he was being beaten up by a group at a house party. Despite being told this never happened from several mutual friends, Jarrod maintains that his reason is legitimate, that what he says occurred, did occur. I think he needs to tell himself that.
* * *
I could continue to detail all the incidents I witnessed or was involved in throughout my teenhood on the Northern Beaches. This could probably fill an entire essay collection, in and of itself. Yet when it comes down to it, these events – while they might have causes like toxic masculinity, territorialism, classism, alcohol abuse, and bigotry – were, at their core, senseless. I’m just grateful I made it through to adulthood, something I’m surprised the majority achieved as well.
One who was not so lucky was Daniel Christie. Daniel was punched in the face by a man with UFC training who was unknown to him in a random, unprovoked assault. Although this took place in Kings Cross, it makes me think of all the times I was struck in the head in comparable incidents throughout my teens and all of those I witnessed, where the only fortunate thing that could be said about it was that the victim didn’t die or endure a serious injury. There’s a photo of me at Kings Cross when I was eighteen that I’ve since hidden on Facebook. It was taken a few weeks after getting scarred for life by Jarrod, my face finally back to normal, bar visible stitches in my face, which are weeping blood as I pose with a friend.
Daniel was only eighteen. In photos of him published by the media, he looks every bit a child: boyish, optimistic, glowing with naïve promise. By contrast, his twenty-five-year-old attacker looks like an ogre, not the endearing Shrekish kind, but jacked from the gym and perhaps inflated by steroids, covered in ostentatious tattoos. He, too, was a child really, but of a different ilk: foolish, reckless, arrogant on his own perceived bulletproofing. Daniel was one of twenty-eight people who were killed between 2000 and 2014 by ‘king hits’ in NSW – the state with the highest number of such incidents. Daniel’s family would reframe the act as a ‘coward punch’, a title so apt it has remained as the noun for such assaults ever since.
Another result of the violence that plagued Sydney during those zenith years was the recently revoked ‘lockout laws’. Among other measures, these restrictions imposed a 1:30 a.m. entry deadline for pubs and clubs as well as 3:00 a.m. closing times for all venues within the Sydney CBD, Kings Cross, and Manly. Whether you were in favour of lockouts or not, the inclusion of Manly as the only suburban area in this list demonstrates how commonplace extreme, alcohol-related, and arbitrary violence was on the Northern Beaches.
Lockout laws have been blamed for the knee-capping of Sydney’s once vigorous nightlife. While most have welcomed the retraction of these laws as the city seeks to recover from the economic impacts of the pandemic, it’s important to remember that they didn’t occur in a vacuum. Violence was normal, part of the culture – and this had a cost to people that was, in too many cases, their lives. That said, alcohol abuse was only one part of this complicated equation, and heavier policing of venues was never going to remedy the issue. All it did was suck the nocturnal life out of the Kings Cross, paving the way for gentrification, while the issue that was its impetus continued to fester elsewhere. Today, fancy wine bars reign supreme, while monied queers and young working professionals abound. Here, you’ll find the highest density of Art Deco architecture in Australia. You can see why the powers that be wanted to gentrify this place.
I live around the corner in Potts Point now. I enjoy the leafy streets and their historic undertones below the inner-city thrum. I love meeting the skyline by night and clocking that Coca-Cola sign right by my front door, a short walk from the harbour. Pentimenti of the old Cross survives – Sydney’s redlight district immortalised across Australian media, in movies like Two Hands. I love all that as well. The social housing tenants and the needle clinic patrons, the backpackers smoking raucous joints, the tattoo parlours, the last vestiges of strip clubs. It’s confronting at times, but it’s real. Whether or not the lockout laws were what did it, I’m glad to be free of violence as I go about my life here.
* * *
By fourteen, I was attempting to shed the innocence I’d arrived at high school with. I desperately wanted to have sex before it was supposedly ‘legal’. Drugs and alcohol had become objects of perverse fascination. I’d heard older friends brag about their exploits on weekends, punches they’d thrown, fights they’d won, and I’d bought into this false, masculine superiority complex. Always hungry for acceptance, I figured my time would come to participate in this coming-of-age ritual. I just hoped I’d come out on top.
As we grew older, schoolyard bickering and bullying and jockism had morphed into something more pronounced, more destructive, free from the limitations of a supervised environment, intensified by the pubescent body, confused by youthful inexperience, spiked with drugs and alcohol. I didn’t understand it properly yet, but the stakes were now so much higher when it came to interpersonal conflict. This was no longer some theatrical exhibition between two classmates surrounded by kids chanting ‘Fight, Fight, Fight!’ The consequences weren’t detention and a blackeye – they could be manifold and they could be brutal.
It’s New Year’s Eve, the first one on which I’m allowed out on my own with my friends. We pass around a bottle of vodka until it’s empty. Then, we catch the bus into Mona Vale and begin the walk to Bayview. There, we’re to watch the yearly fireworks with the crowd gathered in the waterside dog park.
As we walk, we fall in with others from our school. They are, in essence, the bad boys of the grade, the bullies, the ones who will drop out in the coming years, as soon as the law permits them to do so. My memory is patchy at this point, my gait wobbly.
Amongst this miasma, I recall Harry walking along behind me a few paces. I recall turning around to see him trying to run past me, an oblivious smile on his face as he goes to join someone. I contrive that he’s going to speak to my girlfriend, who I barely speak to myself, yet feel I should be protective of because that is the sort of thing that I imagine ‘men’ do. I’ve found, in my vodka-soaked delusion, my reason.
My fist slams into his face and he’s thrown onto his back. I jump on him. The air around us is black, as though someone has edited out all the light. An oil spill suffocating all other visual detail. The emotion, too, is of a singular dimension. I remember being angry, so angry, for no apparent reason. If my friends hadn’t pulled me off, I’m not sure what I would’ve done.
Mere moments after, Harry and I are standing up. He’s crying and I’m suddenly and bizarrely calm. I realise what I’ve done and feel immediate remorse for what you might call a dissociative brain-snap. I tell him I’m sorry and he accepts through his tears, sniffling as we shake hands.
But he doesn’t really accept. Now, he and his friends have their reason.
Later that evening, I’m tackled to the ground so that Harry and his friends can beat me with sticks they’ve found in the bushy nature strip, gum branches maybe, or casuarina. I’m back in that black thicket of my mind again, lying on the ground, not resisting nor trying to get up, as the sticks rise and fall across my body, without feeling, wasted, waiting for them to tire out.
I’m superstitious around events like New Year’s Eve. I half believe that the way you transition into the year is how you’ll spend the one to come. In the case of that particular New Year, it wasn’t just the twelve months ahead that I had typified, but the next five years.
I could never have seen the big picture in that moment. With that impact, I didn’t realise that I was altering the trajectory of the rest of my childhood, irredeemably. The action was far more violent than that of a karmic butterfly’s flutter, and there was a reaction not equal but greater. The scar from Harry’s braces is still visible on my middle-right knuckle, almost twenty years later. But a darker mark, an amorphous stain, was left on me that evening, from that coward punch I threw.
I don’t buy it when I hear people say they have ‘no regrets’, as though it’s a virtue, like something to aspire to. #Yolo, #NoRegrets, blah. I personally have a lot of regrets, much of them steeped in a great deal of shame. I have to believe, also, that all those people who aggressed me – hit me, kicked me on the ground, wanted me hurt – feel similarly now. I hope that they, too, are ashamed. And for every one of those people, there were countless others attacking someone else, somewhere on the Northern Beaches. What is there to take away from such actions if not regret and shame? The alternative is sadism, psychopathy, villainy like something from a comic book yet too perverse for children to engage with.
There’s a lot about that time and those people and the Northern Beaches that still perplexes me. At least now I can go for a swim in Collaroy pool without feeling an overwhelming dread, or catch up with an old friend over a beer at Mona Vale bowlo without having to look over my shoulder.
I think, to an extent, people tend to resent the place they’re from when they’re old enough to leave it, a feeling that eases as they age and develop perspective. This process has been a slow one for me. In any case, I can feel that the process, one of acceptance and reconciliation, is gradually taking place.
In the end, escaping to the Inner West is what made this possible. Escape: that’s what brought so many now-grown-up kids like me to the other side of the bridge.
Henry Chase Richards is an Eora-based amphibian who runs the literary project and small press Fondue and is a former editor of Soft Stir magazine. Right now, they are in the final stages of a doctorate in literature and creative writing at Western Sydney University. Henry was a recipient of the Varuna Whitlam Essay Residency Fellowship for 2025, and is also the lead copywriter for The Grifter Brewing Co. as well as the (unofficial) poet laureate of Australian rugby league.