The Palace Accords

“Do you boys actually talk to each other when you hang out?”. Mum asks sarcastically, as my

hung-over eyes adjust to the dazzling Sydney sun. She’s smiling, but I sense a note of true

frustration in her voice. I have returned, yet again, from a night out with my oldest and closest

friend without establishing one significant detail about his life.

“He’s just… doing his own thing”. Seeing that my answer is unsatisfactory, I reiterate the

scraps of information I know about Alex, adding speculation to fill in the gaps. “He’s finished

with the International Relations degree now. I’m sure he’s looking for something in a think tank

or an advisory… Why don’t you ask him yourself? He’s coming over later.”

My deflection from the question raises a decent point. From our first day of school in

year one, Alex has blown into our place like the Jacaranda leaves the Southerlies deliver down

the drive. Mum’s annoyance at our lack of small talk belies the fact that she also has ample time

to glean these supposedly essential updates. Alex is my best mate, and we’re both back in Sydney for my sister’s wedding. 

We’d flown in the night before; me from Wellington and Alex

from Hobart. After gifting our fleeting salutations to our respective families, who remind us how

dearly they miss their wayward sons, we set about the real work: ensuring the trading standards

of our favourite inner-city haunts had not entered decline in the intervening months.

It was not, as my mother accused, that we didn’t talk to each other on these ventures.

Rather, our conversations always had an uncanny ability to pick up directly from our last

meeting upon our return. So immediate is the reemergence of those same six-year-olds who once

fenced with the felled sticks of a Eucalypt, that the machinations of our lives beyond our

respective straits seem abstract and unimportant.

We were at the Palace Hotel in Haymarket; a pub that we had latched on to in our early

days of drinking as our chosen oasis, despite, or perhaps because of, its absolute mundanity.

Back then, we were drawn in by the promise of twelve-dollar jugs of Tiger Ale - a watery and

insipid import - but that offer had long since rescinded. Her purpose to us negated, the draw of

memories still brought us beneath The Palace’s unattractive awning. One might think that her

construction in 1877 would lend, at least, an air of historical interest, but her chintzy repainted

sandstone and mouldings are far less visually appealing than her federation-era contemporaries

in The Rocks precinct. Her sign seemed to be dropping letters at a rate of one per year, such that

it now read ‘The Pal e’. A pale imitation of her former glory she was, and yet Alex and I

marvelled at her familiar form as we sat sipping full-priced Tiger Ale.

“Any developments in the war?” Alex asked finally, vacuuming up what pathetic little head the

plastic glass allowed. “The accords seem to be holding.”

Given our frequent discussions of politics and Alex’s formal education in international

relations, an observer might wonder which war he was asking about. Gaza? Iran? Ukraine? I

knew exactly to which conflict he referred.

“Tentative”, I reply immediately. “Occasionally someone runs across the demilitarized

zone, but otherwise it's a frozen conflict.” We laughed.

We referred, of course, to the great Jannali-Como Civil War, a fictional battle between

our neighbouring suburbs that sprung from our imaginations at some point in Primary School.

The details of this dark, solemn and completely made up moment in our local history are mostly

lost to time; written in the backs of exercise books or recounted only through the oral tradition.

Some details were established. The smaller suburb of Como, Alex’s home, had declared

independence from my own Jannali, prompting an unending period of gruelling guerilla warfare.

The Jannalians were backed by Sutherland, their adjacent suburb and home to the Sutherland

Shire Local Council - so naturally the seat of authoritarian imperial power. The Comite

separatists were fighting for ‘a Georges River free’. This was occasionally the source of

arguments, as Alex and I both wanted our suburbs to be the freedom fighters, but Alex’s family

come from Ireland and have links to the IRA, so I had to admit he was better suited for the part.

We would rush back to his house after school, either sitting in his bedroom or motoring his tinnie

around the mangroves of the George’s River, excitedly birthing this mirror world from the

recesses of our boyish imaginations. We recited the ballads of the Comite revolution and the

Jannali resistance, mostly consisting of slightly cruel references to our neighbours (who were

naturally belligerents in the conflict): ‘The fiercest soldier on the Como side, Mrs Tusley was a-

ten foot wide!’. Over the years our percussive stomping and screaming became open-chord

strumming on acoustic guitars. Alex has gone on to become quite good, and I’ve heard from

others that he plays the occasional pub gig down in Hobart. I’ve carried on the storytelling, but

I’ve left the music to him.

****

“How’s Graham doing?” I ask as I attempt to remove something winged and struggling from my

Tiger Ale. “Been through another bicycle, has he?”

“Yeah, he was over when I got home. They were about to let him on the balcony, but

luckily I got there first”.

Graham remains a particularly frequent recurring character in our storybook version of

our lives. Graham is a stocky, ruddy bald bloke who I have never seen wear anything but a

singlet, and certainly never shoes. He was the sort of bloke who once built his own aqueduct to

spite the council in some manor, but I can’t remember how that one played out. He would appear

in Alex’s house on occasion, seemingly unannounced. On one long and boring primary school

athletics carnival, we decided that Graham only eats things beginning with the letter B. Later,

this evolved to an assertion that Graham will eat anything beginning with the letter B. This put

him in a state of constant agony, as his son was named Benny. On one occasion, Graham

borrowed their family’s boat and sank it. The official explanation was that Graham had tried to

take the small vessel into the ocean, and the waves had crashed over the bow - but we knew the

truth.

****

While we were never violent lads, it does seem that replicating the horrors of warfare occupied a

large part of our childhood. In our early days, we shared a deep appreciation for the most

versatile and delightful toy mother nature left unsupervised on the floor of her playground: the

stick. When Alex came over to my house on that first day of year one, he picked up a large stick,

assumed a pose I knew only as ‘the little tea pot’, and yelled “En garde!”. I didn’t know what

that meant, so I picked up another and mimicked his theatrics, and was quite put out when he

started swashbuckling; prodding and slashing the branch in my general direction. I cowered

behind my weedy sapling and tried to block his attacks, until I realised that he didn’t actually

mean to hit me at all. With new found confidence I responded by trying my best to batter him for

real, but he was skillful enough to parry. Mum watched in horror from the balcony, but she could

tell from our screams and laughter that I had found a friend, and if we didn’t maim each other too

severely, we might be something far more rare: best mates.

The next day, Alex returned with a bow and arrow that he had made from bamboo and

rubber bands, complete with sharpened arrows. He’d made us one each. Mum banned it from our

house, a decision that proved to be wise several years later when Finlay Padman shot and killed a

possum and had to go and see a specialist.

Our love of the humble stick came to an unfortunate end when Alex’s brother Ronan

scratched my face with a frustrated swipe. It was only a small glance to the cheek, but Alex ran

from the bush to our picnicking parents screaming “Ronan’s taken Matt’s eye out!”. Dad still

won’t let him forget the panic that settled in his stomach at that moment.

Both sets of parents wisely invested in Nerf guns; plastic projectiles of foam bullets. Alex

and I would turn the two storeys of his house into a hard-wood floored Somme. His younger

brothers Ronan and Tadhg would station themselves up the stairs and attempt to encroach on our

territory, which comprised the PlayStation and was constantly under siege. They would

occasionally stick their heads around the balustrade, and we would pop up from behind the couch

and rain an almighty shower of foam upon them. The middle brother, Ronan, struggled to

regulate his temper, and once threw the gun itself at my head, putting a hole in the wall that was

still unconvincingly puttied over last time I was there. He was forcibly marched across the

Jannali-Como Joint Security Area to apologise on my doorstep, but I didn’t mind. All was fair in

love and war.

Despite the wild nature of our games, Alex and I have always been very, very strict in following

the rules. This is not to say we didn’t harbour a deep love of mischief, but Alex and I discovered

early that it is far more fun to create mischief within the rules. This began when we joined ‘The

Green Team’, an initiative started by a well-meaning teacher to foster a love of

environmentalism within Como West Public. Weekly assembly had been allotted as the time to

clear the school’s wastepaper bins. We found that if we ran between the classrooms, we could

shift all the school’s paper by the time the other students were belting out the last discordant

notes of Advance Australia Fair. This left us with forty-five minutes to kick the footy on the

oval, all within our mandate as Green Team representatives. Occasionally a sadly uneducated

teacher would slander us by suggesting we were truanting, (also, Alex’s dad Paul once saw us on

the oval and yelled at us over the fence), so we learned to slow down the rubbish collection, and

crucially, spend at least half an hour jumping on boxes in the skip.

The Green Team carried us through our primary school days, but our transfer to Port

Hacking High School required us to find new avenues of authorised naughtiness. We found our

opportunities here less frequent and more ad-hoc, which was quite alright because we both

actually did enjoy being in class. But on occasion, when a staff member couldn’t be bothered

organising the textbooks in the storeroom, or when ‘two strong boys’ were needed to shift tables

and chairs across the building, we would selflessly answer the call. Anything to secure that most

coveted of documents: the Permission Slip. The Yanks have their Bill of Rights; the Poms have

the Magna Carta. Our freedoms were vested in us by the Permission Slip, and with it we could

glide through the school with impunity.

****

There comes a time when one cannot, in good conscience, follow the rules of an

oppressive system - as any great revolutionary from Cork to Como will tell you. In about year

nine, a new principal, Mr Hearne, swept into power on a radical anti-litter platform. As dedicated

members of the Green Team, a program which had carried on into secondary school, we had no

problem with his reforms. However, his crackdowns on our God given use of the Permission Slip

made him an oppressive power to which we had no choice but to rebel. On one occasion we were

given an afterschool detention, the most draconian and shameful of punishments at Port, for

kicking a Sherrin on the field during class time. This represented a grave miscarriage of justice.

Not only did we have a Permission Slip, but we had been told by Ms Vasey that we could help

the groundskeeper toss old, obsolete overhead projectors in the skip for ‘as long as it takes’. We

felt that our case was airtight; it wasn’t our fault that Ms Vasey didn’t know how long it would

take two teenage boys to throw about thirty overhead projectors in the skip - and the subjective

nature of the objective usually provided us the legal wiggle room we required. But Hearne had a

point to prove, and we did hard time for the first and only stint of our respective educations. To

make matters worse, we were unceremoniously stripped of our Green Team credentials. Our

hands were tied; a counterattack was necessary.

In the halls of Port Hacking High School, one of the most familiar and joyous sights was

a sticky note on the classroom door that would read some variant of PERIOD 4 - GO TO 501.

Room Five-Oh-One was a detached computer room at the far end of the school; beyond the

quadrangle and the basketball courts and band rooms and the library. It was overseen by Mrs

Harvey, a broad and outwardly severe IST teacher about whom most students spoke in hushed

whispers. She once told us that she had been the CEO of a high-pressure shipping and logistics

company before God called upon her to shape young minds. This must have represented quite

the personal and ecclesiastical schism, as she didn’t seem to possess any particular liking for

teenagers whatsoever. Between classes, Mrs Harvey would sit in her office enraptured by a

pulsing nerve centre of screens and humming computer towers. For most of their secondary

education, the majority of students would never meet her directly; but would know her wrath

when they inevitably attempted to install games on the school computers. Within seconds, the

desktop icon for Minecraft or Happy Wheels or Club Penguin would be deleted, replaced by an

empty folder entitled NO GAMES - MY OFFICE. Despite her given backstory, rumours spread

that she had previously worked for ASIO.

Despite the prickly nature of 501’s sentinel, those directional sticky notes were a sight for

saw eyes. Not only did they suggest that the class’s usual teacher was away, it signaled that the

TV would most likely be wheeled in for the period. With most students not possessed with our

knowledge of class avoidance (as opposed to class evasion), a trip down to 501 represented a

brief reprieve in the bleak lives of many of our cohort. We decided that we should bring the

experience to the masses.

In total, it took four pads of sticky notes to write one for almost every classroom in the

school. We might have got away with less, but we needed to diversify the colour of the note for

authenticity, as well as the handwriting, writing instrument and exact phrasing. We threw in the

occasional note on printer paper or a scrap from a lined exercise book. It wasn’t uncommon for

multiple classes to be sent down to 501 together; illnesses tended to spread amongst staff of the

same faculty before breaking containment, but there were some halls where we couldn’t push our

luck.

The bell rang and all nine hundred students trudged back inside. Alex and I were due to

attend Mrs Harvey’s IST class - officially in room 501. The first students came from the

neighbouring woodwork block. They argued with our class about who was to use the room. Alex

and I smiled at each other. Then came the drama students, then the PE classes in their gym

clothes. Then, there was a wave of noise as the maths block exploded with students like it was

the last day of term. Of all the subjects, maths was never called off. While the humanities could

justify throwing on the CIA-animated Animal Farm for a period, Pythagoras ceased his theories

for no absence. The students excitedly streamed out of the stuffy demountable, not wanting to

consider if it was really true.

The next arrivals were unexpected; the teachers. Although many were just trying to

regain control of the flock, others were striding down to 501, papers under their arms, every bit

as convinced as the teachers. Alex and I were laughing so hard that we had to separate ourselves

from the melee.

“GO BACK”. By the time that the History, English, Geography, Art and Home Ec.

classes were marching down the hill, Mr Hearne was shouting into a loudspeaker, “RETURN TO

YOUR CLASSES.” We didn’t get every class; some diligent teachers actually made it to their

rooms before their pupils. However, by the end hundreds of happy students and panicked

teachers had gathered around 501, and the event was the topic of every conversation for the

weeks that followed. Alex and I swore to secrecy, but in one IST class soon after, Mrs Harvey

addressed the chaos.

“Whoever did that…” I could feel her all-seeing eyes settle on us in the front row, “I have

to say, that was well played. Nothing damaged, no one hurt. Pretty good”. What fun can be had

(mostly) within the rules of a flawed system.

****

Alex and I have a series of long running and ironclad pacts. An early one was that we would

never reveal the identity of the man who lost Alex’s tinnie’s ore lock into the muddy shallows of

the George’s River. Another is triggered only if we both find ourselves divorced at age forty. In

this eventuality, we have sworn that we will become hermits and take off into the bush. But

perhaps our most strict and enduring concordat is our agreement to never again smile in a

photograph. We both dreaded photos, and the circulation of the first smartphones made them

impossible to avoid. In protest, we adopted exaggerated downturned frowns that made us

somewhat resemble pimply toads.

Unlike our other escapades that were generally, at least, tolerated by the adults around us,

our insistent frowning seemed to bring them quite close to madness. Perhaps their frustration

stemmed from a misappropriation of our grimaces as ungratefulness for whatever event they had

treated us to. For us, our frowning faces were just the outward expression of our sprawling world

of inside jokes, and the harmless mischief they seemed to cause was an extension of our code.

Regardless of their relation to us, the photographer would emerge from behind their camera with

a scowl. They regaled us with exasperated assurances that we would look back on photos and

regret their childishness. Although we never discussed it, we knew the only regrets would come

if we ever looked back and found that we’d grown up.

So Mum is right. Alex and I don’t talk about careers, or Uni or girlfriends under the rusted

façade of The Palace Hotel. We have far too many threads to pull from the beautiful tapestry we

have woven through a lifetime of silliness, cheek and immaturity. 

Besides, there’s a war on.