Purple Prose by Liz Byrski

charged them just like in the war with bayonets. It’s true!’
    â€˜That was nineteen thirty …?’
    â€˜Nineteen thirty-four.’
    â€˜Was that the same year as the Kristallnacht? You know, the night of the breaking glass, with the Nazis …?’
    â€˜Nah, nah that was a few years later.’
    â€˜Oh. Okay.’
    â€˜Yeah well. There was other blokes see? Good blokes. My father was a violent man. You wouldn’t know it from looking at me buthe was. Oh, but he was a violent bastard. Anyway, so that night, he got his twenty-two out the bloody corner behind the kitchen door and a packet of cartridges out the cupboard, I can see it now. Like it was the other night. I didn’t know he was gonna go out and find this Ding though and bring the poor bastard home, see? His best mate from up on the mine. So he brings him home and hides him under his bed for two days and two nights. I didn’t even know he was there. Two days he hid him. I’ll bet that’d open your eyes, hey?
    â€˜I tell you what, the people who were there, there’s no one left alive now. My mates are all dead. One of my mates said afterwards, “You couldn’t find any young men between sixteen and twenty in Kal after that. They’d all bolted!” ’
    â€˜Right. So you reckon men between sixteen and twenty were the ones who were burning and –’
    â€˜Oh yeah. All over the world, it’s the same age, no bloody brains …’ He laughed then and I could see the tension of the story leave him for a moment. ‘I was six, you see? Six. And I can remember that bloke saying to my mum, “We’re gonna give those Dings some hurry up tonight, Mum.”
    â€˜There was another bloke too. Everyone reckoned he was getting slingbacks from the Dings so they burnt his house down too that night. And while they were burning his house down, he was trying to put it out with his garden hose and someone chopped off his hose with a bloody axe. That’s the truth. But of course it goes back a lot further than that. Hoover, the bastard. He sacked all the Aussies from the mines and kept the Dings and Slavs on. Bloody well cut their wages and increased their hours! It’d been bothering the Aussies for a long, long time. Twenty years. You know how that is?’
    â€˜Mmm. Yeah, I get that … hang on, hang on: Hoover?’
    â€˜Yep, took off and became president of the United States, didn’t he. Left all that bloody trouble behind. Jesus Christ, that’s the truth. It’d open your bloody eyes, eh?’
    He finished up at this point, took off his glasses, wiped his eyes and put his glasses back on. I turned off the recorder.
    Then he said, ‘You know, two days later me and my mum were looking out the front window at these Italian women walking down the road, in the middle of the road they were, with wheelbarrows full of tents and cooking pots and clothes and water bottles and things. Those women’s faces were as black as the clothes they wore … from the soot, you know, from sorting through their burnt out houses. Me and Mum was watching the women, and I remember her crying. Mum had tears streaming down her cheeks.’
    None the wiser about the Great Southern pigeon racing fraternity that day, I drove home with Ray’s book about pigeons and some rather chaotic thoughts. Kalgoorlie Race Riots? Hoover? Pigeon lung? I kept thinking about those homeless women walking with all their worldly possessions,
their faces as black as the clothes they wore
, to the outskirts of Kalgoorlie where they set up a refugee camp by themselves.

    Not long after talking to Ray, I was to have an unexpected interview with a third pigeon fancier, during a trip to Bali.
    In a small room off Hanoman Street, Ubud, the tattooist pauses his needle from my foot and looks at me.
    â€˜You alright, sista?’
    I nod but he had already felt my leg twitching as his gun hit