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.