Tamam Shud Read Free Page A

stage and then could be quickly tailored to the figure. The sort of thing which might be bought by someone who wasn’t staying long in port, but was willing to pay a high price for a beautifully made, hand-finished suit. From which he then removed the label.
    Somerton Man also had very snazzy taste in nightwear. His pyjamas and gown are brightly coloured, and his felt slippers are red. My father’s taste also tended to the bright. I have a Hawaiian shirt of his that can onlybe viewed through dark glasses. Such things were a mark of a free spirit. Men of the time might have considered these garments to be outrageous, even effeminate. That is another thing we will never know.
    It is interesting that there was sand in the cuffs of the trousers in the suitcase. Unfortunately, although its presence was noted, the sand was not examined or analysed. In the same cuffs were stumps of barley grass, which is the stuff that grabs any passing cloth and screws itself into the weave. (It has to be cut out of cat’s fur and children’s hair, because it’s as adhesive as bubble gum.) Everyone always assumes that Somerton Man had just arrived in Adelaide on the day he died but the sand in the cuffs might mean that he had been to Somerton Beach before he arrived at the station and maybe changed his clothes afterwards. Or was he landed, perhaps, with his suitcase, on another beach, brought ashore by dinghy from a ship, walking the last little way across the sand and hoping – successfully, as it happens – to avoid notice? After which, a snappy dresser might have folded those trousers into his suitcase, still with sand in the cuffs, and put on fresh ones.
    Somerton Man’s shoes were clean, however, and looked to have been recently polished. He can’t have walked ashore in them. Seawater does very nasty things to leather shoes. Did he tippytoe barefoot through the waves with his shoes in his hand? Did he put them onwhen his feet dried and stop at the shoeshine stand near the station, after he had his wash and checked his suitcase? My father said that the Central Station shoeshine man did a wonderful job, even on army boots. If so, Somerton Man must have paid him with his very last tuppence in the world.
    Last but not least, my father, drawing on his experience as a wharfie, told me that the stencilling brush, the modified knife, the screwdriver, pencils and the scissors found in Somerton Man’s suitcase were all part of a cargo master’s equipment – the stencilling brush for marking cargo and the other items for cutting or replacing seals. Cargoes were more fun back in those days. Instead of containers, which are anonymous and boring, balanced for weight, there were bales and sacks and boxes and crates, all carried by men out of ships and along gangplanks. Hard labour.
    My father always said that 120 pounds of grain was a lot easier to carry than 90 pounds of potatoes. I couldn’t carry 120 pounds (or 50 kilos) of grain if my life depended on it but they did, for eight hours, up and down and along, from the hold to the deck to the truck or railway flatbed. Sometimes the bales and sacks and boxes and crates were taken up to the deck and swung out on cargo nets. That’s why wharfies had cargo hooks, formidable little hand weapons, used for handling cargo, cleaning fingernails and settling differences of opinion.Working on the docks was called ‘being under the hook’ because another hook was holding up those nets, attached to a derrick, or crane, and handled with extreme care and delicacy.
    There were some lovely cargoes. My favourite was the circus. One day a monkey stole Mickey Bower’s woolly hat and had to be bribed with a hastily acquired banana to give it back. Thereafter, Mickey’s gang was always of the opinion that the hat had looked better on the chimp. Most of the circus animals were in stout iron cages that could be swung down gently to the dock but the elephants