The summers of my youth were long and slow. The seven weeks between break-up and the new school year drifted slowly with the heat. When I was a teenager, my parents didn’t have the money for a holiday away – let alone a meal out with a movie.
There was nothing particularly impoverished about our family. We lived on a public housing estate in inner Melbourne and I knew of no other kid who went away for the summer season. We spent most of our time on the banks of the Birrarung (Yarra) River, swimming, smoking and revelling in the enjoyment of lazily doing nothing. While days were for the water, our nights were spent on the rooftop of our block of flats. It was where we came to understand that we mattered.
During the day the women from our block commanded the rooftop, where the laundries and clotheslines were located. My mother would join other women on the roof, sharing rich gossip and cigarettes while doing the washing and drying. The women were gone by mid-afternoon, returning to kitchens and afternoon shifts at local factories. Before the sun went down for the day, a few teenagers would begin to climb flights of stairs and gather on the roof – initially. By the time the night sky fully revealed itself, up to 50 of us might be sharing the roof space.
Music and stories were our main forms of entertainment. In the decades before digital technologies and the solitary experience offered by earphones, the radio ruled. We would arrive on the roof with a musical offering, from small transistor radios to the parent of the boombox – large portable radios that required up to six large batteries – all protected by a leather case. Each radio would be tuned to the same station, with the Sunday night pop chart countdown a feature event. The resulting polyphonic performance would be blasted across the estate and beyond. We had little interest in the tired argument that pitted the Beatles against the Rolling Stones and yawned through the monotony of a guitar solo. We wanted glam. We wanted Marc Bolan, David Bowie and, a little later, Suzi Quatro; the idol of so many teenage girls.
Later in the night, the younger teenagers would be called home by a parent who would simply stick a head out of a window and scream the child’s name. We renegades who stayed behind on the roof would then be ordered to turn the music off, usually by one of the more intimidating fathers. The beauty and fear of the ritual that followed has never left me. Those of us who remained would climb on to the laundry roof and lie on our backs, with boys and girls sharing the androgynous fashion of cutdown denim and white singlets.
While our anxious parents downstairs worried about unplanned sex and teen pregnancies, we occupied ourselves with matters more profound without fully realising it at the time. It was the glittering night sky that opened our hearts and minds to each other, with the seemingly endless number of stars creating such magic that we could feel it in our bodies, as if a shared charge of electricity had passed through us. The stars above humbled us, sometimes frightening us in the knowledge that, even as a particular star winked at us, it could be long dead, as each of us would be one day.
The atmosphere created on the roof on summer nights freed us of our emotional, rather than sexual, inhibitions. We talked openly with each other about subjects that would have otherwise remained unspoken. One of us would inevitably raise the taboo of family violence. The discussion would end with the same bewildered question. Why would a parent physically harm a mother or child they supposedly loved? Not one of us ever had the answer to that question.
I have never forgotten one of the toughest of girls living on a tough estate. Her younger brother had been hit by a car a year earlier and she cried openly for the first time since his death. None of us were embarrassed for her or ourselves. Without the language to articulate the circumstances we’d found ourselves in I realise now that we, a mob of marginalised working-class teenagers, had created a place where we could empower ourselves to be.
After climbing down from the roof of a night and returning to the family flat I would lie in bed and consider the shared experience of that night. I might think about a girl I had a crush on. Or I’d be struck by the directness of a friend who wouldn’t dare whisper the word love during the daylight hours but could speak of it fearlessly and openly up on the roof.
Tony Birch is the author of the novels Women and Children, The White Girl, Ghost River and Blood
