The Fairvale High students boycotted their classes and went on a number of protest marches. They carried banners proclaiming ALL STUDENTS ARE EQUAL and EQUAL EDUCATION FOR ALL.
One day they arranged to have a joint meeting with Wentworth High, the only other senior school in Wentworth. Both groups were due to meet at Fairvale, but as they were marching towards the school grounds the police ordered them to stop and turn back.
Before anyone could react the police fired tear gas. The students immediately took cover where they could. One group, including Robert, ran into a nearby clinic. The police chased after them and fired tear gas into the clinic, killing a three-week-old baby.
Robert was appalled. He was deeply upset and angered about the police response and the death of the baby, but still he did not know where to channel his fury.
His father’s anger, on the other hand, had always maintained a precisely articulated focus. Derrick despised whites. He made this quite clear to his son, and repeated over and over as if it were a litany, ‘Never trust a white man. I have never come across an honest white man in my life.’
By this time Derrick had opened his own welding business and he expected Robert to devote all his spare time after school to helping him in the workshop. Derrick was obsessive as always, and now that he devoted his manic energy to his work he required Robert to show the same dedication. Prevented from exercising authority in the wider world, Derrick imposed himself dogmatically at home.
At first, Robert adored being involved in all his father’s projects. They were often seen as they drove around the potholed streets of Wentworth to make deliveries. Robert’s Aunt Girly remembers, ‘Even when Robby was a boy his father used to discuss work with him like an adult.’
Father and son had always spent a lot of time together. On Sundays they invariably rose at five a.m. and drove down to the nearby Treasure Beach to run with the family’s three dogs, Fonzie, Striker and Chunky, before going to collect the Sunday newspapers. They also enjoyed playing chess.
Robert admired his father’s intransigence. He remembers going with his father to cost a job for a British immigrant called Campbell, who called Derrick ‘boy’. Derrick told the man that he must not call him that as he was old enough to be his father.
‘What do you expect me to call you?’ asked Campbell. ‘Sir?’
‘Just call me Mister,’ said Derrick, knowing he would inevitably lose the contract.
He impressed upon the quiet boy his own stark philosophy: ‘You have enemies and friends, nothing in between. Most are friends, but those that aren’t are enemies. If you can’t avoid them, then hit back at them hard. Go right in and … whap!’
Robert had always been considered a fairly passive character but gradually he became more confident and assertive. At school he took up boxing. Aged seventeen he was tall, quite bulky, and extremely fit. As a boxer he was a junior heavyweight, but among his contemporaries they couldn’t find anyone big or strong enough for him to fight, so instead he trained on a punchbag, pounding the inanimate adversary for hours with a solitary intensity.
His incoherent anger made him increasingly aggressive. He stopped avoiding confrontations, and sometimes even deliberately picked routes where he knew he would have to deal with a hostile group.
One afternoon he accompanied his sister Bronwyn, who ran for her school, to a track meeting. ‘As we went down,’ he said, ‘there was a big group of guys. I was walking behind Bonny, one guy grabbed her and began pawing her. He was big, and much older, about twenty-eight. They were laughing at me because I was so much younger, but they let us pass to the Ogle Road sports ground.
‘There, I took one of the stakes out of the ground to go back with. Instead of picking another path home, I deliberately went back the same way and that guy was still there with his friends. He came straight for me and threw a punch. I ducked away and struck him with the stake – it broke and I began stabbing him. I yelled at Bonny to run, and when she was clear I ran after her and we got clean away. But it paid off, hitting back. Later, that gang leader came and apologised to me. It made me lots more self-assured.’
Robert increasingly resented Derrick’s demands on his time. There was considerable tension between them and frequent rows, but Robert still did not dare to defy his father openly. Derrick expected him to put in a spell at the workshop every day although Robert was studying for his final school exams. Robert was exhausted, and when swotting he often stood on a chair to keep himself awake. It particularly riled him that he often had to sacrifice playing in rugby matches on Saturdays because Derrick insisted he help out at the workshop.
When Robert finally tried to confront his father with these feelings, Derrick immediately offered to pay him for his work. This only exacerbated Robert’s indignation. He regarded this as a bribe, and privately he began to blame his father for robbing him of his childhood.
‘The difficulties between us were mostly about me not having enough time for myself,’ said Robert. ‘Father was obsessed with making money and becoming a successful businessman. His rationale was that he wanted us all to succeed. But he was not successful – he tried too many things and didn’t concentrate his energies. And he’d battled so hard to get those premises and set himself up.’
Robert’s youthful rivalry with his father was agitated by the fact that they both recognised a singular affinity in character and outlook. Robert admired his father intensely, and although this respect was reciprocated, he was not yet sufficiently mature to break away and assert his independence.
Even so, they could act in complete harmony. Once, standing in the yard at home they witnessed two policemen, Swarts and Tiflin, arrest a well-known gangster, but the next moment the gangster had wrested the guns from both policemen. Without a word, Derrick and Robert vaulted over their fence and disarmed him.
Another time, just after midnight, there was a fire at the Manuels’ house at the end of the road. Quite a crowd had collected outside by the time Derrick and Robert arrived, and rafters were already collapsing. Somebody shouted, ‘There are people in there.’
All the doors were locked and windows securely bolted. Derrick kicked in the burglar guard and Robert slithered through to open the front door from inside. They couldn’t see much for the smoke and the heat was ferocious. Eventually Robert came across the unconscious bodies of Mr Manuel and his two-year-old son, while in another room Derrick located the asphyxiated Mrs Manuel, and together they carried the three of them out.
Father and son were also regularly forced to defend themselves against Wentworth’s marauding street gangs. Then Derrick was especially pugnacious and sometimes even delighted in hitting back. One evening when Robert was a teenager, he came home flustered and told his father that a large local gang had been hassling him.
Derrick jumped up and said, ‘Right, let’s go and get them.’ They picked up sticks and went out. At the end of the lampless street they saw a large group coming towards them. As the gang emerged from the shadows, Derrick saw there were at least a dozen hoodlums.
He whispered, ‘Don’t run, that will be the end of us.’ As the gang approached, Derrick said loudly, ‘We are looking for some sailors who insulted our sister.’ As the group parted, and before they could resist, Derrick and Robert laid about them with their sticks and then ran off as fast as they could.
Robert, however, was left in no doubt as to who was the real enemy. Derrick drummed it home again and again: it was the white man.
There were many similarities between the two male McBrides, but Derrick was an unforgiving taskmaster. He was determined that his son should succeed where he had been foiled.
As Robert grew older, Doris saw how strongly he resented his father’s obsessive demands upon him, and she frequently wondered if Robert would ever stand up to his father and assert himself.
Then, when the son finally rebelled, it seemed like