The Delinquents Read online

  DEIRDRE CASH (writing as Criena Rohan) was born in Melbourne in 1924 to Leo Cash, poet and entrepreneur, and Valerie Walsh, operetta principal. After her parents’ divorce, a young Cash and her brother were cared for by relatives in South Australia and Melbourne. Cash began to write while boarding at the Convent of Mercy in Mornington. She later studied at the Conservatorium of Music.

  Cash first married in 1948 and gave birth to a son, Michael Blackall, later that year. The marriage did not last, and Cash worked as a torch-singer and ballroom-dancing teacher to support herself. In 1953 she met the ‘love of her life’—merchant seaman Otto Olsen. They married soon after, and their daughter Leonie was born the following year.

  Cash’s health started to deteriorate and she was hospitalised in Geraldton, Western Australia, with suspected tuberculosis. This four-month stay resulted in her first novel, The Delinquents. Rejected by several Australian publishers, The Delinquents was published in London in 1962, to acclaim. It was made into a cult film, starring Kylie Minogue, in 1989.

  Eventually diagnosed with cancer, Cash wrote her second novel, Down by the Dockside (1963), while in and out of hospital, writing the last pages wearing an oxygen mask. Cash reportedly also completed a third novel, The House with the Golden Door, but no manuscript has ever been found.

  Deirdre Cash died in Melbourne in 1963, aged thirty-eight.

  NICK EARLS is the author of thirteen novels for adults and teenagers, three collections of short fiction and the Word Hunters series for children. Most of his books are set in or near Brisbane. Five of his novels have been adapted for theatre and two have become feature films.

  ALSO BY CRIENA ROHAN

  Down by the Dockside

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © The estate of Criena Rohan, 1962

  Introduction copyright © Nick Earls 2014

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by Victor Gollancz Ltd, London 1962

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2014

  Cover design by W. H. Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetting

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004

  Environmental Management System printer

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922182142

  Ebook ISBN: 9781925095142

  Author: Rohan, Criena, 1924–1963.

  Title: The delinquents / by Criena Rohan; introduced by Nick Earls.

  Series: Text classics.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Good Old, Sweet Old, Wholesome, Pure Little Brisbane

  by Nick Earls

  The Delinquents

  Good Old, Sweet Old, Wholesome, Pure Little Brisbane

  by Nick Earls

  IN 1989, nearly thirty years after the publication of Criena Rohan’s first novel, The Delinquents, Brisbane was on the cusp of change. Tony Fitzgerald had laid bare police corruption; an election was looming and the National Party was, for the first time in a generation, doomed to lose office. Meanwhile, at the Park Royal Hotel, my girlfriend played in the piano bar and Kylie Minogue was stuck, like a shorter-haired Rapunzel, many floors above, grappling with the onslaught of fame and, by day, attempting to film the screen adaptation of The Delinquents.

  Kylie, with her famous eighties perm loosened a little for the fifties setting, played the feisty Lola, who gets knocked down repeatedly but keeps dragging herself back up, and who often doesn’t know where her next quid is coming from. I later read that Kylie made $13 million that year. In her own way, though, she was being buffeted by her circumstances: staying in the hotel under an assumed name, having jeans brought in when she needed a pair because it was no longer feasible for her to shop, trying to manage a private life while being pulled in all directions publicly. There must have been times when, despite her good fortune, she wondered if and when her life might start to make sense again.

  Kylie was twenty at the start of production—the same age as Lola at the end of The Delinquents—and she turned twenty-one during the shoot. I hung around the fringes of the birthday party that the cast and crew threw for her in the hotel, before she flew to her official twenty-first in Melbourne.

  At some point during my time on the periphery of the production, desperate to connect with any kind of writing community and to soak up what I could about the film business, I asked one of the producers why they’d chosen to film in Brisbane. He told me, wearily, that I wasn’t the first person in town to wonder. And he told me that The Delinquents was a Brisbane novel.

  Why did it take a multi-million-dollar film and the presence of Kylie Minogue to teach me that?

  Brisbane was not then in the habit of celebrating its literature. It was a place writers left, and wrote disparagingly about from exile. If that’s not entirely true, it’s often how it felt. Thea Astley, David Malouf, Thomas Shapcott, Rodney Hall—the list goes on. David Malouf’s Johnno had arrived in the mid-seventies, and was immediately taught in the classroom next to mine by a daring young English teacher who went on to lead the Democrats in the Senate. But where was The Delinquents?

  Criena Rohan had died in 1963, a year after the book’s publication. She was not, in my years growing up in Brisbane, known as one of the city’s writers in exile. She wasn’t even from there. But her eye for the place, and her feel for its breezes and smells and seaminess, are true. The Delinquents is a landmark piece of Brisbane fiction that should stand beside Johnno as an account of life in the city in the mid-twentieth century.

  A landmark, but not an edifice. One of the book’s strengths is its connection with the details of the troubled lives within it, and its pursuit of the stories of characters whom the civic leaders of the time would have wished to keep invisible. Lola and Brownie are two outsiders who find each other in their teens and who remain determined to be together, despite their families, society and the law continuing to find ways to pull them apart. In some respects The Delinquents feels less like a shelfmate to Johnno and more like Brisbane’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, with its Spring Hill scenes of sailors and sex workers and run-ins with the cops. Hubert Selby Jr’s novel was published two years after The Delinquents, and like Rohan’s pulls no punches in depicting the rough lives of those on the margins of urban life.

  The Delinquents refutes the nostalgia for a benign place where men wore hats to drive and everybody thanked the bus driver. It exposes the gap between the law and domestic conduct, and shows neighbours’ backs turning on violence within families. It reveals the horrors of pregnancy termination conducted outside the law yet alongside the proper lives in Queen Street, as the black Humber arrives to take the young woman to the pitiless room where the procedure is performed.

  Lola and Brownie show us the everyday dishonesty, double standards and cruelty that lurked behind the brighter images of Brisbane in the fifties. It wasn’t all milk bars, big skirts and dances at Cloudland. Hugh Lunn’s 1989 memoir of the era, Over the Top with Jim, drew readers in their hundreds of thousands; The Delinquents shows a different Brisbane only streets away from the Lunns’ Annerley Junction bakery.

&n
bsp; It also hints at the Queensland to come—the Queensland of the seventies and eighties, with the civil strife and the rottenness that Fitzgerald and others would drag into the light. ‘“If you ask me, all Brisbane’s full of coppers and all of them bastards,” [Lola] said, expressing in one concise sentence the full theory of central government of the sunshine state.’

  The police are brutal enforcers in The Delinquents, and Lola and Brownie have grown up with targets on their backs. When they are caught in a pub, Brownie’s fined for underage drinking and bound not to contact Lola for twelve months, while she’s treated as a vagrant—a criminal offence—and put in Jacaranda Flats Girls’ Corrective School.

  Later, stuck in the stifling care of Auntie Westbury, at tea with one of her successfully reformed young women, Lola bristles against the tedium of suburban convention:

  Lola drank her tea and looked through the kitchen window. The success and Auntie went on to discuss the success’s kitchen garden, which, it appeared, was doing ‘real well’, but was much plagued by the snails, so the success was going to get a couple of those, what do they call them? Muscovy ducks to eat them up. And the success was knitting harelip a lovely fair-isle jumper, and Auntie became quite animated at the mention of fair-isle. On and on it went. All the old and beautiful arts of cooking and sewing and making a home swamped in a sea of banality that was too cloying to be quite real, even taking into account the two protagonists. It was unbelievable. It sounded like a programme to teach New Australian women English.

  Twenty years on, the Saints would be roaming the same inner-suburban streets as Lola and Brownie had, crafting hard, fast music that found its place at the vanguard of punk, daubing ‘(I’m) Stranded’ on the dirty wall over the broken fireplace of an abandoned terrace house and performing community-hall shows until police arrived to shut them down. The Saints’ music would have come as a shock—and not a pleasant one—to Lola and Brownie, but propelling it is a dis-affectedness and disenchantment that they would have recognised all too well.

  How Brooklyn has changed since Hubert Selby Jr’s novel. How Brisbane has changed since The Delinquents—but there’s still a thread linking the troubled misfit characters of these books to the present. Though some details of their lives are different, these characters are still here. Even when the system tries to be more benign, there are people in our suburbs still falling foul of it, still having to look over their shoulders.

  Reviewers in the UK and Australia praised The Delinquents upon its publication in 1962. Yet its author was already dying. Criena Rohan was on an oxygen machine when she finished her second novel, Down by the Dockside, and didn’t live to see the book published. She pushed on and wrote the now-lost manuscript The House with the Golden Door, determined to keep developing as a writer though her time was limited. Her early death cut short a significant literary career.

  The Delinquents dropped from sight for most of us, but it keeps resurfacing. A new edition was published in 1986, just as film development was underway, and the following year David Bowie observed that the novel would make a good movie. That film might have pushed Lola and Brownie back into public consciousness in a lasting way, but it wasn’t to be.

  It was no failure domestically, grossing $3 million—a figure most current Australian productions can only dream of—but other films came along and we talked about them more, and for longer. Ben Mendelsohn, who would have made a brilliant Brownie, was apparently let go in the hope that an American lead would open up the American market. The role went to Charlie Schlatter, but the film was never released in the US. It’s Lola and Brownie’s story writ large—high hopes, big dreams, battlers against the tide.

  Lola and Brownie and their world are too real and too compelling for us to relinquish. Every place and time needs stories of its outsiders, its rule breakers, people the establishment contrives to civilise or crush. It’s the business of novelists to give these people a voice and, in The Delinquents, Criena Rohan’s writing does that now as well as it ever did.

  The Delinquents

  Every character in this book is entirely

  fictitious and no reference whatever is

  intended to any living person.

  One morning when Brownie was sixteen he put a pound (his only pound) in his money belt, kissed his mother goodbye and went off to sea. On the tram into the city he had to crack the pound to pay his fare. He went aboard the Dalton at eight o’clock and she sailed straight away. He was disappointed to learn that they were bound for Sydney; he had hoped for Rio de Janeiro, or at least San Francisco, and he was sea-sick as soon as they got outside Moreton Bay. Nevertheless he was happy—he was learning to be a sailor, he had got away from his mother, he was off on his search to find Lola. The sea-sickness would soon pass; the bosun assured him so.

  ‘Work it off, that’s the best thing,’ he said.

  So Brownie spent the day cleaning out the scuppers and thinking about Lola.

  ‘Perhaps she’ll be in Sydney anyway,’ he told himself.

  He had looked for her all over Brisbane, but he had not seen her since the day, twelve months before, when he had stood between two detectives on the Maryborough Station and watched her through the train window. She had stopped crying but there were tears on her cheeks, and she looked straight ahead ignoring the policewoman who sat beside her.

  When the detectives had taken him back to Bundaberg his mother wept all over him and said she forgave him. The senior detective had talked to him and said he was a lucky boy to have such a good home and understanding mother. The next morning he had gone around to the hotel where Lola and her mother lived, but he was told they had left town. Only Paddy Murphy, the useful, had taken pity on him.

  ‘Lola will be all right,’ he said. ‘Her mother’s taking her to Brisbane to get rid of the kid.’

  Brownie walked away and a little later found he was leaning against a wall weeping tears of anger and fear—anger because Lola had not wanted to get rid of the baby, fear because he knew nothing of abortion; it was just something deadly dangerous, something to be spoken of with hushed breath. Dozens of women died that way and that was all he knew.

  ‘We’ll be happy,’ Lola had said. ‘We’ll get a wedding-ring and anyone would take you for old enough to be married, you’re nearly six feet tall.’

  That seemed a long time ago. Since the detectives and the policewoman had caught up with them on the Maryborough Station he had not been happy at all. Sometimes it had surprised him that a human being could exist in such bleak and uncompromising misery, and then, suddenly, ancestral memory showed him his means of escape, the refuge of generations of Hansen men—he would go to sea. From then on he became impervious to his mother. He would sit listening to her endless counsel and warnings without a word of argument, his mind busy with some cloudlike future in which he would find Lola and they would be together always. He would be captain of his own ship. That part of the dream never varied. Lola’s role demanded more versatility. Sometimes she was a weeping bride being forced into a wealthy marriage by her mother. He would bear her away from the altar steps. Sometimes she was a rich widow who had never found love in her marriage: ‘I never forgot you, Brownie…’ Sometimes (and this was his favourite dream) she was in direst distress and poverty. He would arrive just in time to prevent some awful tragedy. But when he came back to real-life thinking he knew that he could not wait till he was Captain Hansen. He must find her quickly.

  ‘Perhaps she’ll be here in Sydney,’ he thought as they sailed past North Head. ‘She always said she wanted to see Sydney.’ But he did not find her.

  There is no sadder business than wandering around a strange town looking for a lost love, telling yourself, ‘Perhaps she will be at this corner; perhaps when I turn into that street I’ll find her. Perhaps she will be eating in this café. Perhaps she went past in that taxi.’

  Going into shops and telling your pitiful lies.

  ‘I’m looking for a girl who used to live in this street.’ (For some
streets exercised a terrible compulsion on him: ‘She lives here,’ they would cry. ‘Ask for her here or you will never find her again.’) ‘I forget what number she lived at, but her name is Lola Lovell. She has long black hair and a scar on her right wrist.’

  Then the shopkeeper shakes her head.

  ‘No one like that round here, I’m afraid. Of course, I don’t take notice of everyone who comes in. Just know the regulars.’

  Sometimes they became suspicious of a boy in a leather jacket and blue jeans, and asked:

  ‘Why don’t you go to the police?’

  The first time Brownie was asked that question he went out into the streets and laughed.

  He became moody and had his backside kicked for it several times, for moodiness is not encouraged in deck boys. He bought the leather jacket in Sydney and the jackknife in Melbourne, and always wore them when he went ashore. Big Emil the Norske said he had the makings of a good seaman. He kept so quiet when they spoke of women that his shipmates decided that he must be a virgin, loath to reveal his ignorance. Virginity is fraught with dangers aboard ship, so the first night back in Brisbane they decided to buy him a woman. He remembered drinking in a round of hotels, and in some lounge or other they collected the woman—a real old sailor’s sweetheart dating from the time of Lord Nelson. They put her into a taxi with Brownie and packed them off.

  ‘Don’t let him get away,’ they said.

  He was too drunk to care very much, and once alone with the woman it was a case of noblesse oblige—after all his mates had paid her. When he awoke sober and saw her in the daylight he rose and dressed and went back to the ship without waking her. She slept on in the tumbled bed, her face blotchy and obscene against the pillows.

  Coming along the dock in the cleanness of the dawn, Brownie prayed: ‘Oh God, if You are there and if You are listening, please let me find her soon, and let her be happy. Wherever she is, let her be happy.’