Cracker Night,
Simpson Park St Peters
November 23, 2015
There is randomness to the topics proffered in social settings like the many formal dinners I attend. Usually an individual leads with words or more formal comments seeking response, connection and even reinforcement about something of interest, a recent event or a shared experience. Sometimes this offers up a chance reference which triggers the deepest of memories and they come flooding back. This happened to me at a recent dinner, the trigger being a reference to cracker night and bungers.
I was immediately transported to Simpson Park down the end of St Peters St, St Peters (hard to say, even harder to forget), and the late 60s.
After arrving in Australia, our first two years were spent in St Peters sharing a 2 up 2 down with my grandparents and 8 uncles. We then moved to Earlwood, up the road and up the hill. It was certainly not exclusive but considered a significant step up from the Inner City.
But I was always drawn back to St Peters, to my uncles, to the people, to the community, to the personalities. It is this childhood that came flooding back as I remembered cracker night. It is an almost glamorised reminiscence which is not reflected in the rare photos from the time of early migration, overcrowding and poverty. Funny thing is that being poor was a label applied by others, we were just being.
Like many communities in the late 60s cracker night was the event. We didn’t care about its origins nor Guy Fawkes for that matter. Oddly it was the Queen’s birthday weekend. Weeks before locals of all backgrounds brought their unwanted wares; old tyres, furniture, mattresses, banana crates, everything was welcome. We watched it grow for days and from the perspective of a child its size dwarfed everything around it.
Simpson Park was a green (but in reality mostly brown) space in amongst high density working men’s terraces. It was basically an area of open and grassed field. The play equipment of one set of swings, a slippery dip, monkey bars and giant stride stood as thin bones on a barren landscape. A few concrete and wood benches the only enticement to spending time there. I only later found out its name, for us it was and always will be just ‘the park’.
As soon as fireworks came on sale my uncle Mario (2 years older) and I would start putting together our stash. The mainstay was the red penny bungers; big enough to be significant and on the edge of risk. Not so the tuppenny bungers (aka double bungers), which we prized but feared. Then came the thunders, po-has and tom thumbs which we would light with bravado and hold in our fingers as each small paper packed tube of gun powder exploded. The set was completed by roman candles and the most innocuous of all, throw downs.
It was all about technique which went like this:
Take out the bunger from the paper pack coloured a red which I do not think I have seen matched and the smell of which still fills my nostrils;
Get a second person with matches to light the now loosened wick (throw away lighters would now have made this a one boy job);
Hold the bunger and watch the wick burn and then just at the precise second whip your arm and release the cracker into the air.
The objective was to have it explode in the air. If you threw too early it would fall to the ground and you would need to be prepared for the abuse that would follow especially if it fell near other scarier kids. Too late and the force of the explosion would hit your hand like six of the best from the most feared Christian Brother’s leather strap.
The pain was unspeakable, the heat, the throbbing, the immediate thickness of the flesh. Yes you were hurt and you could cry out but not cry. Tears were allowed but not sobbing. St Peters was a tough place.
It was also a safe place, relatively speaking. The Panzarino brothers (my uncles) were the bomb, feared for their street cunning and fighting skills, but loyal as hell. The types you wanted on your side not the other; Jar (Gennaro) and Passy (Pasquale) not yet men but certainly grown enough to be feared.
There was a certain cache around my relationship to them and a shield of protection followed, but even so there were other locals you took heed of, and were warned about: the Florence Street Fenechs.
St Peters was the working class suburb, a King Street walk away from Newton, the Coles cafeteria, the record shop I bought my first Beatle EP and Brennans the iconic men’s clothing store. It was industrial with row houses interspersed with warehouses, truck yards, small factories. Up the road past the Town & Country and across the railway bridge towards Enmore was the Vickers textile factory, the employer of high number of migrant labour from the local area, across day and night shifts. I remember not seeing my mother for days at a time.
The local field was Camdenville Oval the home of the St Peters football team and where I spent time playing and watching my uncles play in the St Peters A Grade teams, while on the unprotected hill feeling the cold from deep Winter winds and me in my shorts and sort sleeved shirt. My skin bumps and I shiver just thinking about it. Big games were at Henson Park where I had access to the dressing rooms, the cold, the damp and the penetrating smell of linament.
Everyone knew where you belonged. The family names are still remembered so many years on. The Blacks’ the Trevinas, the Mannixs and the Kalaches who used to run the hamburger shop on Princes Highway. I still remember them from the hundreds of times I watched the meat patties spatula squashed to the required thinness and timed with the onions and the buns toasting to come together just right, of course no beetroot just tomato, lettuce and tomato sauce.
The day leading in to cracker night saw the last stage of the bon fire’s construction. The tradition was not to have a scarecrow but a talisman locally known as Fred Bushells. I never knew why, and thinking back I never asked, it was just what was. The top of the pyre held a chair and on that chair a mannequin now resided dressed as Fred with a hat as the finishing touch.
The night came on and we collected in the Park’s West side near Unwin’s Bridge Road to witness the lighting and to start our play.
The park was normally the home of ‘force-em-back’ a kicking game played with a rugby league ball in which two sides try to force the opposing team back via the distance achieved by the kick. On cracker night the football was replaced by our bungers, carried in easily accessible pouches my uncles used during the day to carry their nails and washers as gyprock fixers.
The nights themselves were a blur, but as always I was warned against engaging with the Fenech’s especially Godfrey Fenech who later became newsworthy in 1986 for his conviction for the murder of his alleged homosexual lover.
You needed your wits about you and all senses on alert. You looked constantly for the sparkle of light moving through the night skies, needing to be aware of where the bunger landed and making sure it was far enough from you not to injure or burn. Intense time passed this way until we were either called back home or the stash ran out.
All through our melees the bon fire raged and as it climbed to engulf Fred the crowd would refocus and let out a cheer as the flames engulfed his legs, his body, his arms, the chair around him an finally the hat. Perhaps the fire was a catharsis for the daily drudge and disappointments; a metaphor for renewal much like the Roman tradition of throwing old furniture out of apartment windows on to the Roman streets on New Year’s night. No, what I am saying this was a different St Peters and not nearly as glamorous.
The dawn was our reconvention to stoke the last embers of the fire and to relive the battles and the near misses of the night before and if you were unlucky with a bandaged hand and probably a good whack for being so stupid from parents or older siblings.
My memories of this time are visceral in which the body expected pain and regularly received it is in some form or another.
I am not sure when the bon fires of Simpson Park ended, but I remember them with fondness and not a small portion of belonging to something that was unique to its time and place of which I was a part.
I now sometimes drive past the Park along Campbell Street to get to the airport the back way and change and time is marked. The Park is leafy with safety compliant park equipment of bright colours and soft fall materials. The now mature trees would make it impossible to kick a ball the distances of our memories. It is the picture of gentrification.
I think myself lucky; lucky that I didn’t have to grow up at a time of protectionism and the almost total removal of risk.
Some days when it was cold and the wind strong at No. 5 St Peters St, St Peters I could hear the metal rings at the end of thick chains hitting against the central metal post of the Giant Stride*sounding the parks presence through its sonorous and penetrating clang. It was calling to us.
