Robert and Shara; Part one

As I said I met Shara at a party at Jackie Chris's, better known to Wayne than I who knew him only by sight. Oddly I met him again at Bunnings a year or so ago when he recognised me. Bunnings is certainly the new village well. Only last week I met Gabriel Carven, mother of Claudia and once co-proprietor of Arthurs night club on Victoria street Kings Cross . A couple of minutes later I encountered Dick Waite another old time friend of ours and was able to put them together. Moments after my best mate Walter appeared and when I pointed out the opportunity he declined. I agreed that some accidental reunions are better avoided unless you have some official capacity like shop attendant. Back to the meeting at Jackie Chris's, in the bathroom as I recall, where we spent the whole party as I recall, most likely to the distress of other guests but we were falling and didn't notice. I took her home on the Honda she asked me in and seduced me with entreaties to massage ever more remarkable parts of the body in which to expect aches. I woke the next morning on her lounge floor where we had spent the night in this flat she shared on the corner of Oxford and Queen behind a delicatessen with a practising witch called Margaret Almichi. Inauspicious many would say but we sort of lasted thirteen years which was better than any other relationship I've managed.

She soon moved to my place where she demanded window covering and spoilt my dawn waking but I was consoled. Not much later we were offered an opportunity by Bob Milligan to take his place in what was to become Edge City which he was finding too much responsibility. Now we moved her belongings including a fridge from her old flat leaving no hiding place for the thousands of cockroaches encouraged by the proximity of the delicatessen. I swear that as we moved the fridge the cockroaches so reluctant to lose their old home caused it to float across the floor and eventually without hiding places they were impossible not to tread on as they scampered in panic.

Edge City on Edgecliff road opposite Wellington street was the best place I ever lived and could in fact have been the best place in the world to live in those days. Probably once a grand house, by our time it had been converted into seven or eight flats which with sublets accommodated a diverse group of alternatives. Top floor accommodated artist Andy Nott who was to become lifelong friend and Some early women's libber whose name escapes me. My floor was occupied by Shara and I in a flat most recently abandoned by Kerry White a screen printer and left it to Bob who left it to us. Next door was Harley Gale who I had met in 1960 in Surfers Paradise and who would go on to be my oldest friend in another story. On the other side was Wally or Wallace Randolph, or simply Randolph depending when you met him. He was Wally when I met him and the day before I met him I saw him on Television trying to explain his art that I could see when I stood on my back porch (yes I had a back porch) and look through his window. Mike Brown a very talented, now deseased Melbourne artist lived in Wally's kitchen and Jenny Coopes who was to become a Wakley awarded cartoonist lived with others down the hall. Downstairs lived the yet to become filmmaker James Riketson and Kim Hilder, artist, sculptor and spawn of Grandfather famous watercolourist JJ Hilder and father sculptor Bim.

Here I fancy Shara and I presided in a manner that as I stretch my imagination for an adjective I can do no better than minor royally. It's not comfortable to say this but under the auspices of Shara my already tentatively established penchant for dandyism only flourished. Spending our first hours in a bathroom should have sounded alarms but of course I was not listening. Shara never left home without having spent at least two hours in the bathroom pampering and preparing. No one but me ever saw Shara bereft of makeup and in those days hair pieces.

Ours was a delightfully placed flat with windows along the eastern wall of the generous living room looking out over the garden. No ordinary garden this. From well before ours and the surrounding buildings were built there was a plan for an Eastern Rail link to Bondi which nowadays has become a reality at least as far as Bondi Junction. On this plan a train emerged from a tunnel in the backyard of the 'Hair house' (I'll explain later) on our northern boundary, paused at a station to serve Woollahra and Double Bay smack bang in our back yard and disappeared underground once more in our south eastern neighbours back yard. It's not for nothing that ours was called Edgecliff Road.

Now this steep wonderland that I call our backyard, combined with adjacent wilderness was big enough for a small farm and as it had always been designated as railway had never been built on with anything more substantial than tennis courts one built into the hillside and cantilevered into space. These had long since passed their use by date and whilst the upright props of their wire fencing still stood the wire itself had long since succumbed to the weight of Ivy and Morning Glory and now hung like upside down arches fit for the fairy life herein. The other dominant feature of this 'garden' were seven giant Morton Bay Figs whose shady branches hung to the ground ensuring that nothing much grew here other than the afore mentioned creepers.

Along a steep path from house to this wilderness Mike Brown had painted small stones with bright almost aboriginal patterns to delight or at least calm the fairies who others had often sighted and some claimed to have photographed. If fairies were to be found anywhere it would be here. I often looked out at dawn before bed to find photographers with their models sneaking around.

I should make clear that during this Edge City faze I worked as a Taxi Driver, if I worked at all, doing night shift which began at three PM and usually went till dawn. When not working our late night drug habits and Shara's insistence on keeping the east facing bedroom window double blanketed saw us rarely up before midday. Marihuana and occasional Acid were the drugs of choice though red wine, oh yes Sothern Comfort, and under the auspices of Randolph, Mandrax were making inroads. Revolution was chanted to the accompaniment of Exiles on Main Street late in to the night but we were never up early enough to foment any. Moratoriums were attended, at one of which I recall Randolph and I having a hoot, under the influence of his Mandrax probably, trying to persuade shop girls to leave work and march or at the very least give away the stock of their capitalist pig bosses.

Another saw Shara and I along with thousands of others arrested in the reign of Bob Askin, then Premier of NSW who saw the police force as his own private gang. "Run over the bastards" he told the limo driver when protesters looked like upsetting the party he had planned for Lyndon Baines Johnston. We were found guilty of disrupting his continence or something and given fines we never paid. Years later when American authorities were checking our um, files, Shara was found to have committed this heinous crime but my sheet was clean. No computers then let alone iris recognition.

There are many fine recollections of life in this house where owing to the age and disposition of the tenants parties started like spot fires and often needed to be doused. I recall Harleys Hi-Fi a formidable piece of furniture that would baulk modern roadies being lugged upstairs and dropped down without missing a beat. I recall spaghetti like power cords trailing from double adaptor to double adaptor forever increasing the load at its prime source. I recall Kym along with Jack Myer and others performing as 'The Slime Men' for hours below my window despite their knowing only two chords. Of course it was the sixties and I was there so there is a great deal I do not remember.

A similarly grand house, our northern neighbour never broken into flats was 'the Hair House'. Here the cast of that seminal musical lived a 'Hair' like existence perpetuating their stage roles. Marcia Hines and the Male imported black lead Jimmy I believe (later to fall to his death of a mountain in New Zealand) were the lord and lady here but our kingdoms didn't mix much.

I paid $25 a week rent on this kingdom and eventually fell so far behind that the agents sent bully boys who removed my front door. Very effective really and you should remember it in case you ever have trouble with your tenants. This failure to pay rent wasn't primarily driven by lack of funds, no there was a philosophy underpinning this action best explained in a blog I here re-present.
Edge City earned its name from this type of petty urban guerrilla action. My flat cost $25:00 a week, unimaginable now. Still it seemed to great a price to pay to greedy capitalist pigs. The gas company was our first target. When we failed to pay their bill they cut us off by placing a tin cap in the line into the meter to stop supply. Gimmy strength we simply removed the cap and re connected. Next they removed the section of supply pipe so we replaced it with hose. Now they came and dug up the street, removed a section of pipe and re filled the hole. We dug it back out but assessed that it would be too arduous to fit a bodgy connection and that we could survive electrically without the threat of explosions in the neighbourhood. We weren’t mad.
Electricity individually metered was the next target. When mine was disconnected owing to failure to pay bills I came up with an ingenious idea. Taking an extension lead and replacing the female socket with another male, I plugged an end into one of my dead power points, threw the cable out my window into Harleys and plugged the other end into one of his live ones. Viola! All my power points now were powered as long as Harley kept me switched on and he never failed me. Of course this extra load placed a strain on the fuses which we found we could fortify with ever increasing diameters of wire right up to the classic nails. When the day arrived, as it had too, when Harley’s power too was disconnected, your favourite innovator said "no worries" and proceeded with another cable downstairs to James Ricketson’s place (he always paid his bills) and finding him out I didn’t even have to ask permission to plug into his supply. Now years before the internal stair between mine and James floors had been removed necessitating a walk the long way around the building to reach James’s pad directly under mine. By the time I made it back, maybe a minute or more, everywhere I looked around my flat the large skirting boards carrying the power lines were smoking. Well I’m no fool, I recognized a dangerous situation and made haste back to James’s pad where at great personal risk I reefed the hot, sticky, melting cable from its socket. Yes in hindsight it sounds a little senseless to me too but adolescent brains do not fully format till early twenties and back at the intersection of the sixties and seventies it took longer still especially if they had already been damaged by drugs.

Shara and I were moving on anyway through the then largely forgotten or ignored institution of marriage to a more stable future. Inspired it seems by that old adage "something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue" I wore a black suit borrowed from a musician friend and my old, once white Swedish clogs sans socks to the endless amusement of guests behind during the kneeling portion of these proceedings. Shara wore a fitted synthetic crepe mushroom (at the blue end of red in the spectrum) dress bought for the ocasion from 'Cue' thus covering all these requirements. John did the honours at St Canises in Elisabeth Bay and we along with all guests, mine and Shara's immediate available families, and Shara's friends; astrologer Margaret Park and bridesmaid Pam Luxford celebrated at the then Australia Hotel in Clarence Street, with a wedding banquet of pork chops. As if all of this weren't strange enough our wedding coincided with the departure of the Pope from our town and a reception (whatever) at the same hostelry in a large room with gallery to which we had access. Here assembled were the largest group of cocktail swilling cassocked and biretta or zucchetto wearing cardinals, bishops and monsignors in scarlet, violet, and crimson velvet, trimmed with ermine, this side of a Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. Not even my hand painted and sequined tie found under a bed somewhere or Sharas three tier hair pieces bound with a lime band could compete with this.

Married life commenced in Harris St. Paddington, effectively a dead end at the steps leading to the lower level across from the Lord Dudley. Here we rented from an Italianate bloke who much later would turn up on TV as a cooking or astrology show host, an attached room separated from wilderness that was Paddington's long abandoned tip by a roofed and fenced outdoor "entertaining" area. I built a loft bed to create more floor space and here Shara's cat deposited her new born litter for us to care for, abandoning them for a life on the streets from which she never returned. Here also my mum and dad sprung a disastrous, unannounced 11.00 AM Sunday visit to find Shara I and a litter of kittens in the loft comfortably sleeping. Not what they expected of newly married life I'm certain and they were careful thereafter to host all family get togethers announced and at their place.

We were soon on the road to our next flat in a block of four on William Street Double Bay. Another exceptional spot with the best part of a paddock around it. Down a leafy drive with houses on each side our north facing flats appeared along the back fence with a row of garages to the right. the small paddock in front of these garages returning across the front of the flats was surrounded by mature trees, mostly Camphor laurel. One of these grew so close to our front balcony that we could pick leaves and crush them to smell the sharp camphor scent. From the twin balcony of the adjacent flat we were greeted on our first day here by a bright blonde English girl named Val who waved a baby at us and said "this is Daniel'

Val and her Irish red haired husband Paddy (of course) along with Daniel were to become firm friends who in those 'heady' days would become our first new 'straight' friends. Now this will take some explaining and I'm not sure I'm up to it but here goes. In those days we who participated in the drug culture based around Marijuana, including Hash and Acid, and lurching into speed, mescaline, smack or whatever came around in this increasingly criminal industry were 'Heads' who like our derivative Beatnik generation were 'hip' and 'cool'. Those not of this culture had somehow evolved from the Beatnik's 'square' into 'straight'. Why they were always described in geometric terms you shall have to decide for yourself but it might help to know that geometrically we were bent.

Of course Shara and I had straight friends and family but not new ones. Val and Paddy were significant in that our friendship pointed to the possibility of life beyond one of potentially suffocating dead bent heads. I remember once when Paddy was with us when we were stopped by plain clothes police in Jersey road Woollahra. They searched the car of these obvious hippies and their hitch hiker. I'm not sure if they asked permission and I did not then know that without such they needed a warrant. It amused me to ask what they might want and if I could help as I knew what it was and that they would not find it. Paddy of course was terrified and protested that he was Patrick of Patrick's Restaurant nearby, a fact that neither I nor the police ever substantiated. I tried to console him as I was entertained by one cop who snapped and thrust dried Lantana from the boot quite violently into his nose. I was equally entertained when they were done with us and attempted to explain their overzealous inspection as being on behalf of a call they had gotten about barefoot blokes who had offended the law in the vicinity. I didn't bother to ask how they had noticed we were barefoot before pulling us up. Always happy to see the local constabulary doing their job

Out the back door and through a conveniently missing panel of back fence, mutually beneficial to the flats behind us on Cross Street, as easy access to the harbour beach on the other side of our William Street, were the Double bay Shops still then the most exclusive in Sydney. Along with this back door and a virtually unused front door with internal stairs this flat featured a large living room, bedroom and bath with adequate kitchen and afore mentioned private balcony. All this space under high ceilings ignited a creative period of life for me where studded leather work and Geta Clog design and manufacture flourished and eventually the Snibbo was born.

The Studded leather (belts bags and general adornments) was a natural progression from beads and baubles including a cloche cap and breast plates of aluminium disk off cuts from my old workplace at AWA, threaded together late at night and under the influence, for sale at Paddy's Friday markets. I recall after one night carving butterflies from cardboard on an acid trip finding my hand in pain that did not subside for months. Soon most of the studded leather was cleaned out by Frank Elgart a swish patron who became a regular Friday evening visitor.

The Geta Clogs were inspired by a developing fashionista interest in things Japanese and the seemingly insatiable lust of females for something new, different and high on their feet. Embarrassingly primitive now and eventually even then these brightly coloured things had a brief and spectacular fame way beyond my potential for control. This fame was chiefly created by Gerry Cashell an associate of Shara's who owned the boutique called UFO in an arcade off King Street where Shara was a shop girl. With my limited production techniques I could barely keep up with Gerry's demand. Then when her friend who was the editor of the then new pop girl magazine Dolly needed something bright and new to plump up her mag and gave Geta the front page and four page centrefold as well, the walls of the old brick laundry at William street threatened to collapse under the strain I put them to as part of my gluing press. A month later I received a letter from the Dai Nippon Trading Company inquiring as to the scale of my market and wondering where there might be a place for them. Not long after the shoe fad girls were distracted by Mr. Christian's or Andrew Hertzfeld's much more experienced and possibly safer (if that ever mattered in female shoe fashions) offerings.

Snibbos had yet to be invented but here is their story. Ken Beatty an Architecture drop out I had met had found what would become his life time obsession in the plastic inflatable structures company he called Plosions. He had found a backer and was making furniture when I met him. Mostly dough nut shaped seats and assorted pool type beds and furniture. He rented an eight sided glass pagoda like shop in Double Bay where I became the shopkeeper. Around this same time his brother Grahame who worked with Ken when not driving taxis, began turning off cuts into tubes and immersing parts of them in hot water during inflation to create effects that looked like snakes bulging and bent with swallowed prey. A short leap from these 1.2M off cuts he discovered the 0.6M ideal length tube that when heat treated at the ends to reinforce the welds, one to a greater extent than the other for aesthetic effect, created a short baseball bat like harmless club that produced a wonderfully sharp sound effect when struck.

Now here was a product I could identify with and it, like I, needed identity. Cooped in this glass birdcage without privacy and most times; customers I sometimes 'let off steam' by thrashing the glass walls with this inoffensive weapon and thus gradually becoming aware of its qualities and marketability. Soon we rented a stall at the then Friday Paddy's Market where I would spruik, demonstrate and sell these items for a dollar each.

When Ken's patron ,Terry Clune, abandoned Plosions for some other worthy project, perhaps The Yellow House Ken found Terry Bourke who guilt ridden by a fortune made in real estate backed him in a project to market pool domes that turned your outdoor into a virtually indoor pool. These did not run out the door but once more in possession of many meters of off cut Snibbos were produced for Friday markets. I should explain now that the trade name Snibbo, was not our invention but was borrowed from Spike Milligan; the comedian and author of the Goon Shows, who invented it as the universal product name be it laundry detergent or laxative. I hope he saw it as laudatory and not theft.

Snibbos would be influential in my life for a number of years now and for this reason I should explain more about their nature and effect on me. Physically they were similar to the inflatable plastic tubes one often now sees people clapping with at outdoor sports events. The major differences between these and Snibbos is that the Snibbo was made from thicker plastic and was heat treated for structural and aesthetic effect. It was also sold machine inflated to a much greater degree than could be achieved by breath as the modern sport clapper is. It came then in both an American and Australian flag design or barbers pole and polka dot for non nationalists. These were Kens designs, and he, the designer with the machine of manufacture, along with his brother who had developed the product were equal partners with I who had developed the application and market for it.

This worked well while we operated at Paddys Market and all received varying wages under the auspices of a patron who of course had no knowledge of nor earned anything from snibbo. I was always the driving force though and for me it meant more in respect of my weekly earnings in relation to work output and it helped me save for the coming overseas travels. When I and Shara set out on these travels, Snibbo sales ceased but I took half a dozen samples with me.

Six or more months later I reached Hong Kong and with the Yellow Pages in one hand and a Snibbo sample in the other I began to bus and taxi around the island looking for manufacturers. On my third or fourth call I lucked into a production company wherein the chairman entertained me with a Coke in his display room while one of his lackeys took my sample and reappeared some twenty minutes later with a dozen or so freshly made samples. I pored over these and pointed out flaws I would like corrected and ten minutes later was presented with a sample as good as I could produce in Sydney. It's worth noting here that we had sought manufacturers in Australia and Dri-Glo, the only company with the machinery of manufacture took six months to come up with a quote in the vicinity of 50 cents per Item. Now the president of the Sun Tai Shan Plastic Manufacturing and Trading Company took a calculator from his pocket and in less than a minute with a cross check on the abacus presented me with the price of 9.7 cents Australian per item landed in Australia all freight and duty paid, minimum order 10,000 items. $1,000 for $10,000 worth of product seemed like the right price to me and I was soon on the phone waking my partners from their Australian slumber.

Now I've gotten way ahead of myself so I must leave the Snibbo story here and return to it later. I know I had the green 55 Chev when I lived here so I suspect it was during this phase that we went to Gympie. Sort of a holiday but also to check out the proposal put to us by a builder lady friend of Val's who was building a motel at Rainbow Beach. The Chev was the best car I ever owned and solid as a rock but unfortunately owing to my bad habit of overloading the roof racks with form ply stolen from the Eastern Suburbs Rail construction site in Wooloomooloo, it had fractured gutters and during heavy bouts of rain it would become moist inside. Gympie turned out to be very wet that season and as we were using the car for accommodation as well as transport we began to mould. A friend of the builder loaned us his big old army tent with a mattress up on pallets out of the damp and we were very grateful. I remember the magical rainbow sand and driving the builders old Land Rover miles up the beach till we were forced to reverse half a mile to turn around. In those days it was common to find the hulks of cars in the surf where they were caught by the incoming tide. Eventually the relentless rain turned us back to Sydney and away from what might have proved a change of career.

On our return we took a side trip from Murwillumbah to Nimbin along ancestral song lines. For the sake of putting my foot on Nimbin's abandoned earth I went to the pub to relieve myself and was surprised to find within, two others with hair as long as mine in discussion about access roads with a local. I imagined they were planning a dope plantation which I had always imagined could provide rebirth to this area with its dying dairy industry. It was not until months later that I heard of the Aquarius Festival. I continued on past Coffee Camp famous to me for its school which had floated past my home in the big flood depositing school desks, cans of ruined film and even a piano about our farm. Down West Nimbin Road which in spite of my song line had turned into Boyle Road, apparently needing this lyric change to fit better with my ancestry. On to the old homestead which I admired from the road, but stopped at Dickies to explore the creek paddock where I remembered 'poisonous' mushrooms from my youth that looked very like Gold Tops which since then I had learnt to love so much.

Curious cows appraised these colourful strangers in that nonchalant manner that only true cud chewers can assume, as we collected a still damp pillow case full of Goldies and continued on. I pointed out to Shara the interrogation chamber dip and various McNamara spreads as we crested the now much smaller McNamara Hill. I may have rambled on about the time Leo and I discovered that if we aimed our horses directly at a log at full gallop they naturally jumped them just as in the movies. I probably reminisced about the church and altar boy duties, the adjacent bridge and spitting competitions but Shara was not much into country boy things and probably wasn't listening and it didn't matter for a joint we'd had was kicking the mushies along and the car felt soft and clingy on the rubber band road.

On through Lismore and out to Byron where on a crest where you first witness this magnificent coastline we parked and relaxed on the most comfortable rock throne that could I once more find it I would patent and put into manufacture. From here we returned to Surfers where we stayed the night at Pam's mothers boyfriends place. You remember Pam from her brides maid duties at our wedding. A tragic, beautiful, 150K (at her prime) prostitute. Born and raised in Pots Point her taxi driving father kissed her goodbye one still sub teen morning and set out for his shift but decided instead to gas himself in the cab. She married a brute who died soon after in a motor accident whilst at work. Workers compensation and life insurance policy should have made her rich but she allowed unscrupulous lawyers to take all bar a couple of grand. (Libran always ready to admit the other side's argument) Had a child, Mischelle who died within days of birth but was so determined that she was born again on the same day a year later.

Next day we three set out late once the ladies had finished their beauty regimes and chose the New England Highway via Casino from Tenterfield. Sustained by Mushrooms the wheat fields swaying in the warm night breeze reflected the full moon and imitated oceans. Somewhere up on the tableland the old valve radio in the Chev picked up the best blues music programme ever and we cruised as if blessed till we lost top gear. No not that imbecilic Pommie franchised rev head programme rather the highest of the Chev's then manual three speed gear box. Not too tragic considering our top of the mountain position from where I could let the car glide dangerously in neutral. As landfall levelled though, after Lithgow, I found I could for a time hold it in top gear by leaning on the column shift but soon this too failed and along with it second gear. On the outskirts of Newcastle at dawn it took us till early afternoon to arrive back exhausted in first gear to Double Bay.

Along with my creative commercial pursuits and the odd taxi shift I had begun my building career with a small add in the Wentworth Courier suggesting my handyman abilities. This small investment turned out to be quiet lucrative as I taught myself to reglaze windows, replace sash cords, hang doors and fit locks at the clients expense. I accidently discovered sales ploys like adding ten percent to some quotes that could then be magnanimously removed as a discount. I learnt this when quoting a window reglazing for a nice Jewish lady, let's call her Mrs. Symonds, of double Bay who wanted to haggle. I reflected that here I was with nothing else to do that morning than this ladies' job and that if I earned ten percent less at least I earned something. She was delighted to have a young, educated, English speaking handyman who also understood her cultural need to successfully haggle. Never a week went by from then on that I did not do a job for her or one of her hundreds of relatives or friends who would always alert me to the deal on introducing themselves as friend/cousin/neighbour of Mrs. Symonds.

I know I'm not alone when I say that just like the frog in the slowly warming saucepan I did not notice that the second half of the sixties and the first half of the seventies were the easiest of times when we were having a ball. Some of my friends were launching themselves into house buying and without exception I think all lost them in some mid to late seventies credit squeeze. Credit had been so loose that they would borrow and buy a dump, commence renovations; pull up a floor or rip off a wall, refinance and buy another. When the squeeze came it all fell down but at least they'd had a heady experience. I didn't consider this option as I had plans to somehow live overseas. Even as I set out on this project dumb luck was beside me. At someone's urging I changed all my money into US dollar travellers cheques before leaving. Eight weeks into travels we met an Australian couple in Singapore and had a night out with them. Next morning we woke to the news that Australia had floated the dollar and their travel money in Aussie dollars lost at least a quarter of its value whilst ours remained the same.

We kept on bumping into this interesting couple in Bangkok and again in Vientiane. She was an attractive Aussie blond and he was a tall fire red head with aspirations in writing or journalism. He met up with some Yank with similar aspirations in Laos and the two of them set out on a voyage of discovery down the Mekong and never came back. It was extremely dangerous to travel overland in Laos in those days of the Vietnam war and everyone knew they were pushing fate. We met the girl again in Bangkok where she was trying to interest the Australians in a search party. The Yanks were interested in their man but the Aussies adopted their default position which "Nino Culotta", from "There a Weird Mob" knew so well as 'yeron yerone mate'. Years later I saw the story in the Women's Weekly where the blond was still trying to garnish interest. More years later I read that the intrepid Yanks had found their mans remains, but no sign of the Aussie.

In the last exciting year or so before departure, in May 1973 I think, for our big adventure we had to accelerate our earnings far enough beyond outgoings to accumulate a nest egg. Saving might have worked if I had ever understood how to do it. I chose dope dealing, or rather it chose me. My friend Katie introduced me to George who rode his 750cc Kawasaki from the central coast at my whim it seemed with a garbage bag half full of grass occy strapped to the pillion seat. Whatever its cost it could be tripled at least by breaking to so called ounce bags and reselling to anxious customers who always multiplied and called or popped in any time of day or night. Now this type of retail is best left to convenience stores like that run by Apu in The Simpsons who have endless tolerance for the foibles of freaks who have no recollection of conventional civilian behaviour. This short stint turned me off retail for life and it is only now at Bunnings that I with far greater maturity and under duress have become capable of a return.

Yes I became a nasty drug peddler and was destined to be a smuggler if such value judgments are worthwhile. I should like to ask those "Australians" who still think that death by hanging or the firing squad is not good enough for these low life (Alan Jones) what they hold back for corrupt politicians, lawyers, bankers, estate agents, developers and their pornographic paedophile kin dealing sanctimoniously in other folks money. Dealers and Smugglers don't hide behind social institutions, they just try to hide.

By this time we were living in Fletcher Street Woollahra above Cooper park in an old weather board house with Lucy our whippet and Penumbra the small black cat she loved. Lucy had a sweet tooth and would steal chocolates if they weren't hung from the ceiling or otherwise made inaccessible. She was the most intelligent and craftiest dog I've ever known. You had to count the chocs as she left no sign of her theft and would even re close the box before retreating to a safe place to unwrap and delight in her morsel with the delicacy of a well bred lady from Jane Austen. Butter too pleased her palate but would not have melted in her mouth, a saying my mum was wont to spruik.

She accompanied me wherever I went happily curling up in the car which she understood was where I would always return. She came to the most outrageous parties, greeting her many friends socially before finding a comfortable hide where she would not be trod on. Settling seemingly to sleep but always with an eye cracked or ear cocked to any sign that I and Shara might be moving on. She and Penumbra would Tear up and down the seagrass matting in the open plan living room in a game of chasings that always ended with Penumbra's delicate head completely inside Lucy's mouth purring like a diesel tractor. When we went overseas we left Lucy with Mike, a Yank who had her brother, and she taught him, the brother every trick she had learned with butter and sweets till eventually bored with only dog company she left and was never seen by us again. One time as Mike was leaving he realised that he had left his wallet and rolled back down the steep street only to catch Lucy atop the six foot side paling gate whereupon seeing him she gracefully pirouetted and jumped back inside.

I'm sorry to bang on but she was the closest to a child that Shara and I ever shared. Shara had been so frightened of dogs that around them she behaved like a cat with her hackles up. Lucy was her cure. When she went on heat we were careful to keep her inside and she wanted nothing to do with dogs anyway at least until when visiting Katie, across the street from Randolph whose black mongrel Ben she had a soft spot for appeared. Someone left the door open for just a moment and that was all it took. So she had a litter of delicate looking 'labrokelpiepts' all of whom were readily adopted by friends to find their own lives some as far away as Kuranda.

Shara had always had cats, Puboly and Boobly when I met her. Puboly was a spaded boy and a very stoned cat who would follow a joint around the room. Once I saw him so stoned he stretched and rolled in the sun on his window sill perch and fell two stories into the back yard. More than once I saw him with unlit cigarettes in his mouth, just as if he was smoking. Puboly had wandered away by the time we were at Edge City and Boobly was the fussy queen when Penumbra came and waged a night long battle to be admitted. Half Boobly's size she won and became the favourite.

Now reading the last few paragraphs I can see that it's time to publish and post least I send you all away to 'The Christian Science Monitor' or 'The Watchtower' which are surely racier than recollections of Robert and Shara's child substitute pets. Good Night

Parable

THE PRODIGAL FOOT (A modern parable)



It’s the story of a man who gave his feet a new pair of shoes so that together they could all enjoy their upcoming overseas holidays. Not just any shoes mind, these were walkers and well branded. The type of shoes favoured by active ex prime ministers, men of steel some would say. They were not multi coloured as was the fashion in those days; they were black, plain black, monotone black. There was nothing revolutionary about this; they were in fact exactly the same brand, colour and style as the previous pair which they were replacing and therein lies the kernel of the tragedy that was to come.

You see the man paid serious attention to what he wore. He was proud, some would even say dandyish but there’s no fault in that. There are many who would regard it as a virtue. He had seen shoes on another man, and he lusted for them. Also monotone black and well branded their appeal was their simple line. Not a lot of swirling patchwork like his regular brand. He went searching for them and his search took him all over the town following leads. He lost a great deal of time and with holiday looming was forced to abandon the quest and purchase the tried swirling patchwork product.

With only days to go all seemed well, even his avarice for simple lines had passed, and then on the last day before departure he noticed it. The shoes had begun to feel different, or so it seemed. The right was not so cushiony comfortable as the left. He studied them closely and found that the tongues were sewn in differently. He compared them to the old pair and discovered that the left tongue was aberrant, at least in this small sample. But the left was the more comfortable so this provided scant satisfaction.

With so little time left he had to decide wether to take them back and this question was complicated by their source, the shop of a relative where already they were the subject of a generous discount. In this quandary he made his first mistake, he questioned the evidence presented by the right foot. Even worse he began to adopt an attitude to this foot, henceforth to be known as the ‘right’. ‘Get over it’ he began to say and of course the obedient right did not respond except along nerve pathways, its only form of expression.

Moving forward a couple of weeks we find this man and his feet somewhere in Italy, probably Tuscany, possibly Luca He and his feet have walked many kilometres across the likes of London, Galway, Paris and Venice, often carrying heavy backpacks and towing wheelie luggage. This luggage wheels well except when confronted by stairs, many of which are to be found in the Paris metro. ‘Right’ has by now become adept at sending messages through the nervous system. It has campaigned strongly for support, gained the attention of calf, shin and knee and is looking toward the back for what it sees as the mainstream support. ‘Left’ wants no part of this, is disdainful and encourages the man to believe that ‘right’ is just a reactionary whinger and bludger too boot (his left has a way with words). In a perfect world swapping the shoes would have been a perfect solution to settling the fight between the feet (”walk a mile in my shoes”)* but this is not a perfect world.

Throughout all this the man who probably feels guilty and compromised for having precipitated this friction with his procrastination and subsequent late purchase, oscillates in support between the two. Never quite comfortable to blame the shoes which are after all man made, he looks for scapegoats; pre existing conditions, right handedness, all that hefting of luggage, awkward sleeping positions, long air flights all get a guernsey but none are convincing in themselves

Three weeks later this trinity is home with the back now well and truly engaged on the side of the ‘right’. Anxious for some resolve, between the factions, and if possible from the nervous system’s now heavy traffic, the man begins to wear the old shoes. No miracle is forthcoming and raw nerves continue to prevail modified only by rest and an absolute void of luggage hefting.

Two week later the empirically minded man conducts the experiment of wearing once more the so called faulty shoes and his senses, though not capable of measurement, record a very distinct feeling of wrongness about the right as contradictory as that might sound. Thus encouraged and with the cooperation of the relative he returned the faulty pair exchanging them for a new pair. He would like to see the faulty go back to the manufacturer’s laboratory for an autopsy and receive in return a point by point description of the dissection along with relevant weights and measures. Unfortunately he too works in retail and fully comprehends the unlikeliness of such an outcome.

One week later and after exclusively wearing only the replacement pair at work and play the man recognises what he needs no scientist to explain. The steadying of traffic along the overwrought nervous system and the evenness of feeling from right and left adequately filled any remaining holes in the argument that the alleged faulty shoes were indeed guilty. All that’s left was the sensitive issue of an apology to ‘right’ for ever having doubted what it obviously knew from the beginning, but was not articulate enough to communicate. That the man, and mankind itself had failed it in its’ time of greatest need. That pride, envy and lust combined with blind faith in MANufacture could have combined to torture, imprison and defame an innocent; sounds to me like a parable for our times.

ANON


“Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them and you have their shoes.”

Jack Handley

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Erick's Apple Green MGA

The Donnellys lived like country folk at Cheltenham Rd Burwood. Old Eric was a retired builder and his wife the matron and owner of a nearby convalescent home. Their house was a large single story with a real pantry wherein could be found gross packages of breakfast cereal and whole rounds of cheese. The back yard was home to Jeddah, an ageing Alsatian, and a Cockatoo who was reputed to be over a hundred years old, had few feathers and occupied its time digging vast holes which we suspected were potential graves.

In a typical side drive to garage at the back were a constant row of cars whose ownership though nominally allocated to different members of family seemed overall to be common property. The abiding rule seemed that if you needed one you took the last one in avoiding disruptive re-movements. Thus it was possible that Eric junior, my mate, might be driving any of up to five or six cars amongst which I recall the Fiat, the ute and especially the MGA which had been tuned to race by his brother Wall but was now abandoned in favour of a Turner You quickly learned not to park your own car in this drive where the best you could expect was to be blocked in, the worst might see it go missing for a week as it sorted its way through trips and parkings till once more it turned up as first off the rank and you were there to witness it.

Eric was a great friend to me at university where my Studio Attendant job in the Faculty of Architecture kept me back till nine PM each night. Eric would while away the hours pretending to study but mostly playing Chess in the round house where often he’d be joined by Dave Reynolds, Richard McEvoy, Duch and others who all seemed loathe returning to their family homes. When I joined them we would drive in convoy to the Donnelly home to sit, drink tea and yarn in the big kitchen eating grilled cheese on toast by the loaf

Most often it was in the apple green MGA that we took part in this convoy come race back to Burwood. Bored out, head shaved, port and polished with race cam it was a punk amongst cars. I well recall tearing along Gardner’s Road from Kingsford on a quiet week night through the sharp left right into Rickety Street which I travel through now on my way to work. Sometimes I change down to relive the grunting traction Eric loved to feel as he changed down and up and down again thrusting as fast as possible through these sharp bends but its not the same in the front wheel drive Daihatsu with no a tail to wag. Little compromise was shown for the back streets of St Peters and Marrickville as he proceeded to give this beast its head and it’s a real wonder that we and those around us survived. I was lucky to have this good friend’s benevolence and he and I were lucky that I had long since resigned myself to an early death and possessed no active adrenal gland to prevent me being the best passenger.

Low revolutions (idling) were an anathema to this ironically green beast. For a brief period after its closure as a stately department store, Anthony Hordern’s, Brickfield Hill, was turned into a ‘sow’s ear’ of multi level parking station. I’ll never forget leaving from the fifth floor, at peak hour when the process of winding from floor to floor took about twenty minutes of roaring and revving in this enclosed space through an exhaust system that, you guessed it, was also race trimmed. The problem it seemed was to keep the plugs from oiling and this was only possible with revolutions over 5000 and the accompanying crashing crackling din accompanied by sporadic backfires.

Eric kept a dinner suit in the leaky boot of the apple green MGA. Just like a legion of James Bonds then beginning to turn up at our cinemas he knew that a man should be prepared for any occasion. The occasion was a ‘Ball’, an event that differed from today’s rage or dance party only in the formality of dress. No the suit wasn’t in a suit case; it was just there with the jack, wheel brace, quart of primer and a rusty pliers. Eric paid as much respect to his suit as we did to the concept of the ball. Balls with their genesis in the parties of the privileged class were once the occasion for so much protocol, etiquette and formality that participants could be either the darling or outcast for the least slight or facial tic. By our time ‘balls’ were much more like dressed up bacchanals. Some were in fact called Bacchanals and all the dress up required was a sheet. I recall going once dressed in a pillow case that reached only to the lower end of the panty line and for a special effect strung two oranges framing a cucumber just below this line.

The university Union and various faculties would put on balls at the Round House that in their conception seemed to enshrine many of polite society’s protocols to the extent that even a pastoralist mum could be proud that her daughter was invited. An hour later, two at the outside it would be a frenzy of grog dancing and passion that might be mistaken for a port full of pirates. No slight was possible for slight would require memory and all memory of these events was certainly fiction. One night Eric suggested that rather than go home we should crash a ball and very soon wearing his dinner suit, he the bottom shirt and tie, me the top with hand tied crepe paper bow tie over the semblance of white shirt, maybe a napkin, were climbing over the upstairs balcony looking for doors left open by snoggers. Security pursued us for a while but in those days when we still had a white Australia policy and Pacific Islanders were certainly not white, security was probably a few rugby boys who would soon have succumbed to drunkenness themselves.

Fine memories of the apple green MGA, melted cheese on toast impossible to remember balls and the good friendship of Eric who used to leave this sign about the place, one of which has turned up recently on the side of a house in Stanmore.. ,

Editors Note:

As I mentioned at the beginning of the previous entry, it is becoming increasingly difficult to clearly remember in a A. B. Facey way, a chronologically accurate flow of events. In fact most memories seem to have strings attached that lead forever away and in different directions from the perceived path. I have resolved therefore to abandon this style of reverie in favour of what might best be called mini vignettes which may also be more comprehensible to you my readers. Here following please find the first of these little stories.

Responsibility: taken or left

Preface:

I have found it much more difficult to drag out this phase of memoir not just because I enter the period described by Paul Kantner of ‘The Jefferson Airplane’ in his famous quote “if you remember anything about the sixties, you weren’t really there” but also as I here enter adulthood when choices and actions become ones own cringe worthy responsibility. Unlike the would be millionaire I cannot phone a friend or ask the audience when confused or embarrassed. Instead I will be dependant on these three ever reliable questions. Who was I with? Where did I live? What was I driving? And take the answers on the chin.

My first year of university was devoted to a delicate balance between my job as night studio attendant in the Faculty of Architecture and my daytime pursuit of a doctorate of alcoholism at the nearby Regent Hotel. These major pursuits, sometimes interrupted by lectures and tutorials in the subjects of English, Drama, Philosophy and Scientific Thought (later renamed The History and Philosophy of Science) that I had paid to study though never to the degree of distraction, would define this year. Many people, myself included, would not understand how one, who witnesses claimed had preformed a complete hambone (drunken male striptease) atop a table at the Regent, to the accompaniment of Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones, for a schooner reward, at one in the afternoon, could reliably have taken charge of all office and reception duties in such a prestigious a faculty only hours later. I can only put it down to the fact that I was much loved by the students into whose hands I was happy to entrust the expensive equipment in my care, and whose late submissions I was always glad to sneak into the yet unread stack in lecturers offices. No less loved by Professor Anderson for whom I would purchase three packs of Craven A for Friday nights lecture, that’s sixty fags in three hours but at least there was no air conditioning. Nor by other lecturers who deluded by my hip appearance would seek my advice on how to mark Mick Glasheen, Jack Myer and their clique who had submitted their own Bucky Fuller fantasy work totally unrelated to the question though of obvious high quality. I guess the real answer to this mystery is that university employment was a direct and even slacker extension of the public service I previously described.

At the end of this year having moved away from home to a share house in Barker Street Kensington with Jim Underwood a mathematics tutor with Dylanesque locks I achieved passes in Drama and HPS, failures in Philosophy from which I’d dropped out mid year in angst over “knowing and believing” and English. In English, remarkably, I was encouraged to repeat by none other than Leonie Kramer, then head of the school. Others who had passed were warned not to attempt a second stage and most failures were told to go away. I was twenty years old, thought drugs were aspirin though I’d heard of speed, and most humiliating had no girlfriend.

Over the long Christmas break I found work in the Darling Harbour Railway Goods Yard where I continued my education in; the use and abuse of wool hooks, where to get and how to prepare a pair of Levis, commenced studies in mesothelioma and contracted my first bout, er bouts of what we trivialise as hay fever. I conducted experiments in self torture with the granddaddy of alarm clocks, two massive gongs on top that would have woken a platoon and the enemy, with a clever ten minute repeat function. I go on record for ignoring and eventually sleeping through this sadism for some four hours. It was also during this break that I discovered Whittie’s Wine Bar at Taylor Square one Saturday evening where my schoolmate Bob McGowan had morphed into a guitar legend and had already been tagged as the local slow-hand. This was my first encounter with a live version of blues music which would become an enduring love. I was particularly enamoured with ‘Starving Wild Dogs Piano Band’ and The Foreday Riders, who still play today.

Back at Uni and studding I don’t know what though I’m pretty sure Psychology was what prompted the half year decision, based on the logic that most Arts graduates were either School Teachers or Taxi Drivers and that I didn’t want to be a School Teacher and Taxi Drivers didn’t need a Arts Degree, to drop out and became a Taxi Driver. Now to any of you that may want to suggest that this was a pretty lame rationale I have to ask ‘where were you’ and I’m not accepting ‘I wasn’t born’ as an excuse.

About here there is some confusion and I shall have to ask the millionaire questions (MQ’s) for clarification. I was now the proud owner of the khaki ute as the late Bob Milligan referred to it and I was living back at Strathfield, tail between my legs if you must see it that way, so transition from Uni student to Taxi Driver was not as direct as I claimed. With the ute and the local paper I was able to reinvent myself as a ‘rubbish removalist’ when rubbish removalists were IT nerds. Too strong? I guess so. Lets just say that in those days Jim had not been born let alone thought of mowing as a franchise and rubbish removal was pioneering stuff just waiting for entrepreneurs like I was not. The khaki ute also revolutionised my sex life which sounds a little too grandiose so let me bring you back to earth.
In the Sydney in which I was brought up the lack of transport equalled a lack of life, be it sexual or otherwise. Without personal transport one was dependant on mates with cars so mates and car types were thus a defining model for many social structures. A mate with a bus would always have mates but a mate with a sports car that may accommodate only one other was a best mate. A mate with a ute was a much better mate when furniture had to be moved than a mate with a sports car though a sports car mate would always to be able to produce a ute mate easier than a ute mate a sports car mate. Is this making sense? Of course you make do with what you’ve got as I made do with my ute and when I got lucky the canopy covered, mattress comforted tray provided a welcome home away from home that could be shared. I know I seem to be harping and in circles but I can’t over emphasise the relevance of a vehicle on social life in those times.

So in the second half of 66, I had for the first time something of the lifestyle I desired. With mum as my answer machine my small ad produced enough work to keep me financial without a boss or structured work regime and I had my own wheels. I spent a large portion of each week in indolence comfortably confident that there would be no end of year exam. My friends and I had a delightful weekend crash pad at Clareville beach from whence we launched night-time water skiing forays on Pitwater, or more often drinking forays at the Newport Arms. All weekends were long, sometimes they seemed to take all week so it may confound you as it does me that in the new year I leapt at the opportunity to move out again, this time permanently as it turned out.

In Dutruck Street Randwick I would start the next phase of life leaving behind the westie Strathfield sport car cult to try my fit with the Eastern uni arty theatrical cult. Much the same people ultimately though with different obsessions and I will pause here with your indulgence and at the risk of disrupting this enthralling stream, to reflect on what was becoming evident in my character. I had played lip service to car obsessed Strathfield for the sake of camaraderie. I cared little for cars for any other than their proletarian potential to provide transport, warmth and comfort. Driving was an activity from which I derived little of the joy that I noted in my friends and I was always happy to pass the driving duties to another and get on with the pleasures of the passenger. Likewise I was not much in awe of Brecht or Ibsen and have never desired the spotlight. I think that if I had any obsession it was probably similar that portrayed in Richard Lester’s 1965 film called ‘The Knack…and how to get it’ in which a young man seeks to learn the skills of attraction from his naturally gifted peer. Psyche students asked to identify this behaviour might come up with the term ‘self obsession’ and I feel now that that would be a fair appraisal. I can’t think of a time in my life when I was not conscious of my presentation and of its potential effect on peers. Where from and why such an obsession derived is I suppose no less mysterious than is that of Robbie Campbell, another resident at Dutruck Street, who has spent his life acquiring motor vehicles, dismantling them and hiding the parts so that the likelihood of their ever getting back together was made remote.

Along with Robbie at Dutruc Street, Dave (Elfick) and Joe (Horinek) were members of the uni dramatic society (Dramsoc). Bob Milligan who I had met at the urinal in the Round House during Orientation Week the previous year, drunkenly singing M-I-LL-I-GAN spells Milligan, a parody of an Irish tune I easily recognised, was literate as well as being responsible for my placement here. Other housemates included Greg (Mead) and his umbilically attached and striking girlfriend Bev and Ann (Thiemeyer) the single civilising female influence. All were completing various degrees upon my arrival and I had to be careful not to distract them too often with my needy attention seeking and boozing. Car obsession was well represented again, Dave and Greg had old and experimentally hand painted Rileys, Joe a similar vintage Citroen and Robbie a 32 Ford Coupe, in pieces of course. Robbie Dave and Bob were all taxi drivers and I soon joined them.

Sometime during this year my lifestyle turned an abrupt corner when I was arrested for DUI though that sounds too mild and I prefer now, not then, to call it drunk driving as I had no recollection of anything till my friend Duch, who bailed me with his twenty first birthday present (money), reminded me that I was expected in court the next morning. I had strayed, that weekend, away from my uni mates back to an earlier gang who spent a lot of their mornings at Whale Beach working on a thirst to be quenched come afternoon at the Newport Arms. The Arms was like a second home in those days and none the less that afternoon when both Hugh and John along with Danny (Lyons) were in attendance. Early evening it seemed a grand idea to go back to town to collect other friends missing the fun but our mission was aborted by the police in the vicinity of the Roseville Bridge. Loosing my licence and along with it my Taxi driving profession that next day along with the arrival back from India of one of Dutruck Street’s buddies with my first ever taste of Hash, triggered a major turning point.

Without licence or profession I was lucky to find work in nearby Centennial Park where I spent the boring days working in preparation for the evenings stoned, raving and coming to terms with the munchies. Around this time The Beatles, Stones, Bob Dylan, Jimmi Hendricks, Janice Joplin and The Doors along with many others, moved in to share their lives and music with us. Not long after and with wonderful synchronicity The Beatles released Sergeant Peppers Lonely Heart Club Band and I had my first Acid Trip. Now before anyone springs to conclusions about marijuana leading to harder drugs let me assure you that Acid in its pure form, as it was then, is the antithesis of hard drugs. It merely had poor PR from its christening. Had it been called ‘rose bud’ or ‘honey drip’ it might have received much better press. At the risk of labouring a point I might also say that these drugs had already led me away from alcohol, up there with the hardest.

In these ‘heady’ early days of drug consumption in my environment there was an ethical process of almost religious intensity. All drugs were shared to a degree that later it became difficult and embarrassing to refuse. This sharing gradually permeated our lives and some of us became what we now and then called hippies sharing all food, shelter, clothing and body fluids. Manuals and prayer books like the Tibetan Book of the Dead instructed us in the proper use of drugs which soon became de facto sacraments. Whole earth catalogues extended this culture which became the foundation of alternative (green) environmentalism. LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) or Acid came with manuals compiled by or under the supervision of the great Timothy Leary who conducted experiments with his own body. In these early days alcohol described as a depressant was lumped together with barbiturates and tranquilisers in complete contrast to the psychedelic acid and marijuana. Such was the environment in which I found it not at all difficult to give up alcohol which up to then I had consumed with adolescent zeal.

Having no use for my ute I was approached by Wally Mulic the base player in The Sons of Armageddon which featured my old school mate Bob McGowan with a proposition to lease it to Paul Kelly their manager. Had I not been so green I would have recognised that the Kelly’s had a long history of banditry in Australia, but no, a price was negotiated, a first payment taken and I spent the next three months trying to collect either car or payment. Mulic and McGowan both pleaded the case of Kelly who had suffered a severe and convenient nervous breakdown and was hospitalised beyond rational contact. Eventually I got it back and as I recall sold it to Mulic for a ridiculously low price and I only bring it up now to warn others to watch out for Kellys, Mulics and even McGowans for they are all potentially thieves or the sons and daughters of the same.

My next vehicle was the most remarkable Honda 90 motorcycle. After the three months suspension for my mild transgression I was handed back my Taxi Licence and once more earning money was persuaded by Robbie one afternoon to accompany him to Wahroonga where we would each buy these very affordable new motorcycles. Always a good follower I took his lead and very shortly found myself astride this puny 90CC machine which in the hands of a novice could stand up on its back wheel if the clutch was dropped too suddenly in the right gear at the right revs. Thus did I learn in peak hour traffic and classic upper north shore showers, on a ride from Wahroongah to Randwick, how to ride a motor bike. A few weeks later after a ride to Woolongong through the National Park one balmy evening we realised the potential of these machines and resolved to embark on a trip to Melbourne. The Sydney to Melbourne leg of this trip was achieved without incident other than Robbie getting his wheel stuck in a tram track and dropping his mount at low speed and in early morning hours when not much traffic was about. The return trip though was not such a cakewalk when it commenced to rain at Seymour and continued to do so quite heavily till Mittagong. Ill equipped or experienced for such conditions we spent most of this night trip slipstreaming semitrailers where it was dryer and we had some vision though of what value was the four meters of view to the back of a semi at 110K I’m not sure. The only stops we made were at roadhouses where discomfort and cold had purged any remnant self-consciousness from two who were convinced they would die that night. We calmly removed all clothing down to underpants in front of heaters, or fires if we were lucky, ringing buckets of water out and hanging them on chairs which we moved uncompromisingly close to the heat. Remarkably no one protested this behaviour, in fact they seemed not to notice. As the sky became light and dry that morning with the glow of Sydney on the horizon we truly felt a sensation of rebirth that now helps me to understand born again Christians and their ilk.

These little bikes were never meant for anything other than inner city commuting and we thought after this trip, when we simply ran at full throttle all the way, that they were well advanced to their use by date. Some months later I traded up to a Honda 250 which seemed enough to me and enjoyed motorcycling trips for a couple more years. Some three or more years later a mate who was downsizing from his E-type Jag to consolidate his finances for a overseas trip with his true love, approached me to help him choose one of those “white Honda 90’s you used to have” to serve as interim transport. There were probably fifty or more advertised this particular Saturday morning and eventually realising we must just go and look at some we went to Mosman where the closest was located. As we approached the address we found it outside and I recognised something peculiarly familiar, the number plate. On close inspection I recognised that it had undergone no repairs, the chain was as loose as when I traded it. Gavin bought and rode it with his beloved, all their 130-40 kilos, for six more months and who knows what after. Now there’s an endorsement.

Now linking this bike to ‘who was I with?’ and ‘where was I at?’ I come up with Margaret Holloway and Wellington street Bondi to which many of us from Dutruck street had migrated in early 1968. Here Robbie, Bob and I teamed with Romy and Tony (pommie art students) and assorted blow inns in the Presbyterian Minister’s Manse now abandoned by the minister just as his church was by his flock. Here almost on the corner of Bondi road and directly across from the Catholic Church also loosing flock, myself long since among them, we had our own religious experiences. Most notable amongst these was a séance conducted primarily as entertainment by Romy one evening that turned into a very spooky affair where the glass danced across the board with only limited participatory touch announcing homecoming arrivals and protesting of a life so short there had been no time to learn to dance.

It was to here that Margaret Holloway would come on her Honda Step through at about nine AM when she ought have been arriving at university, to seek knowledge from Professor Robert and his peers who, only a few years older, and male , were really no match for her already well developed female wisdom. We would waste the day, mostly in bed, before either I was due to drive a cab shift or she could find no further excuse for not returning to the family home in Strathfield where she still lived. Later that year she would start sharing rent along with July Bird and her cousin Nannette on a flat at Paddington where she rarely stayed except for orchestrated parental visit events.

Memorable during this period was my first ever one night stand and infidelity when at the end of a night out at the Here Disco in North Sydney, Karl Wellander, second principal with the Australian Ballet Company due to his limited height, prompted me to say hi to that certain girl who needed little more encouragement to share my bed for the night. Karl’s skills with women helped to make up for his height afflicted prospects with the ballet and he would have made a perfect mentor in my quest for the Knack had it not been for his residency being in Melbourne. As it was I spent a few anxious minutes bundling this Jewish princess into a cab before the expected early arrival of Margaret and suffered surprisingly little guilt at my infidelity, perhaps a sign of the lightness of the bond between us.

Around this time things get murky and the Who was I with? Margaret. What was I driving? Honda 90 Questions offer no clues as to where I was living or in what order was I living there. The fact is that Margaret and I lived for what must have been a very short time in Kellet lane Kings Cross. The only memory I have of this address which appears to be my first effort at independence is of a disastrous attempt at redecoration. You see the walls were wallpapered up to a plate rail with a gloomy regency print not in the least in keeping with my idea of the swinging sixties. No worries to one as clever as I then was, just down the street they were selling this super cheap white paint just like that with which David Warner, the ape costumed lead character in ‘Morgan, a suitable case for treatment’ was painting his pad in Chelsea from top to toe. A quick rip around with the roller on Saturday morning was easy but the wallpaper pattern was still bleeding through. Well no worries another coat will cover that and I bet I can do it by mid arvo with plenty of time to settle this love nest before sundown. Mmm still bleeding but not much, one more coat will kill it. As I commenced this third coat with no consideration for the instructions on the can to wait twenty four hours between coats the now saturated wallpaper began to slide down the wall like sets of waves at Bondi leaving behind the cracked lead chromate painted plaster that would be the devil to cover with my milky cheap paint. If that weren’t enough the saturated and sticky paper had first to be rolled up into cartable capsules and disposed of outside. I have no recollection of how I resolved any or all of these problems and were I a patient and you my reader a psychiatrist I think you should be very interested in this mental block and why indeed I can remember so little of this first independent nesting endeavour.

Sometime before or after this poorly recalled disaster I went to live in Riley Street East Sydney in a tiny terrace around the corner from the now famous Stanley Street cafe row. David, who was now setting up the Sydney office of Go Set, bought this terrace and Robby and I moved in to pay rent. Robby immediately set about his own redecorations which were even more disastrous than mine. It was the fashion of the day to remove the old lime mortar plaster, especially in these old terraces to expose the convict made sandstock bricks. Trouble was that it is a filthy business and once he got started he never knew when too stop till the whole house was stripped. I don’t recall how long we lived in this sandy limey environment which could never be totally cleaned out as the bricks and mortar once exposed continued to erode forever. Robby got the idea that he could seal these with some colourless painted preparation and to speed the process that he would apply it by spray. Someone, probably his girlfriend Michelle, came home in time to call an ambulance to get him to St Vincent’s, just before the last square centimetre of his lungs were terminally coated. It’s always a struggle to make it through youth.

It was exciting to live here only a walk across Hyde Park to the city and on the corner of the lane where the original No Names, which really had no name, was phenomenally cheap if you could live on pasta, bread and orange cordial. Nearby on William street was famous Italian restaurant where I tasted and fell in love with my first Veal Marsala. At the Oxford Street End of Riley was the Indian restaurant where I experienced my baptism of curried fire. I really thought I might suffer terminal organ failure after each mouthful of curry in this semi underground red flock walled room where I hallucinated fire. Macho pride in front of bigwig peers from the Melbourne Go Set office who had flown from Melbourne that afternoon because it was impossible to get a good curry there (how times have changed) compelled me to survive and finish this meal.

Here courtesy of Go Set we also had access to the latest music and entree to clubs, most notably Here at North Sydney where Max Merritt and The Meteors were in residence. Pop stars or wan’abees dropped in and my pilgrimages to Melbourne continued. I recall going there in a Double Decker buss in which I rode shotgun to tram power lines, in Robbie’s 36 Chevy bread van which he rolled on the return trip crushing his hand and with Margaret and Michelle in Michelle’s Triumph Herald Coupe which developed a half wheel turn of play in the steering owing to Triumph’s innovative crash and crumple protection which featured a fibreglass sleeve in the steering rod attached by cotter pins that had come loose. Return trips varied from air lines to hitch hikes and most notably with Gavin Anderson in his Triumph TR4 trailed or led by The Party Machine, featuring Rosses Wilson and Hannaford, yet to become Daddy Cool, whom Gavin, ex-drummer with The Loved Ones was managing. The lead in this disproportionate race in which a Bongo Van, or ancestor, with four band members and gear were pitted against TR4 with two potential drivers was in direct proportion to the amount of Ritalin Gavin and I consumed from my taxi drivers stash. Sometimes we travelled at over 100 miles an hour, mmm 160 KPH I think, at others I would look back after a long and interesting conversation or monologue to note a stream of traffic and a speedo registering 25 MPH. It took a long time to get to sleep after that.

Sometime about then, 69 I recon Margaret’s friend Juli moved with others including her boyfriend and my old mate Duch to a lovely old free standing house in Darley Road Randwick opposite Centennial Park. Along with this move went Margaret’s official address, followed by Margaret and of course like a rat to cheese , me. I have covered events at this house substantially in my blog ‘Me and Margaret’ and shall not repeat myself here. Instead I shall continue with my story from the point of break up when I left this address and took up loggings with Wayne Oastler in Underwood Paddington.

I clearly remember the exhilaration of my early days here with only a bag of clothes and nothing to put over the window where sunlight woke me at dawn to explore a new emotionally free day. I met but did not like Michael Driscoll who was to go on to cuckold Bret Whitley. Wayne taught me to make Mummy Food, a yummy concoction of dates figs and corn meal stewed and served with cream and banana for breakfast which had been revealed through Edgar Casey a psychic medium. It was from Wayne that I was to hear of a party in Kingsford at the home of Jackie Chris where I met Shara and commenced my next phase of life all too soon some might say and I might agree.