Boy On Fire

by Mark Mordue

  29Ed St John, press release, 2007 ARIA Hall of Fame, 28 October 2007.

  30Nick’s father, Colin Cave, was one of Australia’s leading scholars of Ned Kelly. See Colin F Cave, ‘Introduction’, Ned Kelly: Man and Myth, Cassell Australia, Melbourne, 1968.

  31‘Such is life’ are purported to be the last words of the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly before he was hanged on 11 November 1880. Peter Carey would write a Booker Prize–winning novel based on his life and exploits, True History of the Kelly Gang. As if to fulfil a generational prophecy dating back to the family history in Wangaratta, Nick Cave’s son Earl would grow up to play Ned’s younger brother, Dan Kelly, in the 2020 film translation of the book directed by Justin Kurzel.

  32AAP, ‘Cave enters ARIA Hall of Fame on his own terms’, The Age, 29 October 2007, available at www.theage.com.au/entertainment/cave-enters-aria-hall-of-fame-on-his-own-terms-20071029-ge65yv.html, accessed 19 September 2020.

  33Conflicts between Phill Calvert and Nick and Rowland Howard led to the drummer being ousted from The Birthday Party in 1982. Mick Harvey moved on to playing the drums. In the press, Rowland was disparaging of Phill’s ability to come up with beats that suited the music, but the real reasons boiled down to their personality conflicts. He admits that being sacked from The Birthday Party was something he found very hard to deal with: ‘We’d been together since we started high school.’ Tracy Pew maintained their friendship, sending him postcards. Phill joined The Psychedelic Furs, but he was not comfortable in such a mainstream band. After leaving The Psychedelic Furs in 1984, he returned to Australia and formed Blue Ruin, a key Australian band of the 1980s. In later years he moved into production and started his own record label, Behind the Beat, supporting young and independent artists, as well as working again with Mick Harvey.

  King and Country

  1‘Colin Francis Cave’, Inquisition, Wangaratta, Case No. F.360, Reference 790809, 21 May 1979.

  2Mary Brown, ‘Introduction – the 60s’, Centre History, The Centre for Continuing Education, Wangaratta, c. 2010, p. 5.

  3ibid.

  4Author interview with Chris Morris, Wangaratta, 25 March 2010.

  5Mary Brown, ‘Introduction – the 60s’, Centre History, The Centre for Continuing Education, Wangaratta, c. 2010, p. 7. Colin’s stained red hands likely inspired Nick’s song ‘Red Right Hand’.

  6Nick’s reflections on boating with Colin Cave at Lake Mulwala hint at the depth of meaning behind an album like The Boatman’s Call, an overt reference to Jesus and his Apostles, and a covert allusion to the influence of his father Colin’s life and death upon him.

  7Behind the scenes, Colin Cave held even grander visions, including the establishment of the state’s first regional university in Wangaratta, for which The Centre might be a foundation stone. The competing regional town of Geelong would steal away this dream with the advent of Deakin University in 1978.

  8In his definitive biography of Ned Kelly, the author and historian Ian Jones credits Colin Cave’s symposium with ‘prompting quantum leaps in my studies’. (Ian Jones, ‘Preface to the First Edition’, Ned Kelly: A Short Life, Hachette Australia, Sydney, 2008, p. viii.) The imprimatur of Manning Clark for the Ned Kelly symposium is another interesting element. Clark’s poetic writing style and focus on tragic individuals as a way of understanding the course of Australian history were obviously an influence on Colin Cave.

  9Colin F Cave, ‘Introduction’, Ned Kelly: Man and Myth, Cassell Australia, Melbourne, 1968, p. 8.

  10Tim Cave, interview with the author, Melbourne, 20 November 2010.

  11Colin F Cave, ‘Introduction’, Ned Kelly: Man and Myth, Cassell Australia, Melbourne, 1968, pp. 9–10.

  12Nick Cave would repeat the story of his father reading various literary passages to him, and how he saw his father transformed into a larger being in the process. It is almost certain that Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter, a rambling, often hilarious proto-republican document written as a justification for Kelly’s outlaw actions, was one of the causes of Colin Cave’s transformations. The novelist Peter Carey would note how ‘all the time there is this original voice – uneducated but intelligent, funny and then angry, and with a line of Irish invective that would have made Paul Keating envious. His language came in a great, furious rush.’ (Robert McCrum, ‘Reawakening Ned Kelly’, The Guardian/The Observer, United Kingdom, 7 January 2001.) Sidney Nolan’s paintings were also influenced by Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter and what the artist saw as ‘their blend of poetry and political engagement’. (A New Home for Ned Kelly – The Ned Kelly Series, National Gallery of Australia, https://nga.gov.au/nolan)

  13The presence of Joe Byrne’s body can be found in other songs by Nick Cave. The most significant is ‘Dead Joe’, his 1982 Christmas car-crash song (co-written with Anita Lane), with bizarrely personal resonances that connect it to Colin Cave’s accident. Nick’s later decision to read the work as poetry in 1992, however drolly, indicates how important that song was to him. This reading is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljdUNyaKsck (accessed 20 September 2020). The 1880 picture of Joe Byrne’s burnt and bullet-riddled body strung up against a wall – reputedly Australia’s first-ever press photograph – was used in a series of historical photographs at the beginning of The Proposition.

  14‘Somebody’s Watching’, The Boys Next Door, Door, Door, Mushroom Records, April 1979.

  15This description would stay with Nick, as noted in the documentary 20,000 Days on Earth, directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, Pulse Films, London, 2014. Dawn Cave remembers her husband coming home from the evening thrilled by his son’s performance. ‘He told me, “Nick’s a phenomenon!”’ (Dawn Cave, interview with the author, Melbourne, 24 October 2010.)

  16‘Colin Francis Cave’, Inquisition, Wangaratta, Case No. F.360, Reference 790809, 21 May 1979.

  17ibid.

  18ibid.

  19Adrian Twitt, interview with the author, Wangaratta, 25 March 2010.

  PART II: THE GOOD SON

  Man in the Moon

  1The Wimmera Mail-Times, ‘News’, 20 June 2008, p. 1.

  2Sculptors and stonemasons created the first wave of these icons in the early to mid-twentieth century, usually paying tribute to Australian Federation, Anzac soldiers, pioneers, explorers and major events. The craft involved often reflected the migrant history of Australia – in Rusconi’s case, his Swiss–Italian background and a wonderful skill with marble and bronze. Inspired by ‘Bullocky Bill’, the 1857 poem about a loyal dog that guards a drover’s tuckerbox (a cattle herder’s lunchbox), Rusconi’s monument was intimate and quirky, and would appear in a plethora of poems and songs. It helped memorialise an Australian folk symbol whose echoes reverberate all the way through to the Louis de Bernières novel Red Dog (2001) and the Kriv Stenders 2011 film of the same name. An offbeat obsession with roadside icons of a more regional nature – usually of a spectacularly oversized variety – would proliferate in the late twentieth century: the Big Banana (Coffs Harbour), the Big Pineapple (Nambour), the Big Merino (Goulburn), etc. Gestures of Australian nationalism had by then devolved into a kitsch folk art celebrating local produce, industry, quirks of history and shopping opportunities, in a manner that was increasingly epic in scale and absurdly minor in subject matter. Andy Warhol may have approved, though it is doubtful the creators would have heard of him. An attempt by adventure television pioneers The Leyland Brothers to create a small-scale ‘monumental’ Ayers Rock/Uluru out of a large hill of red-painted concrete failed as a tourist attraction.

  3The Wimmera Mail-Times, ‘News’, 23 June 2008, p. 2.

  4Dawn Cave, interview with the author, Melbourne, 27 March 2010.

  5Steve Packer, ‘Story of a Nag from a Warracknabeal Wag’, The Age, 18 December 2004, p. 18.

  6In a 2013 television interview with Angela Bishop, Cave was asked again about his statue plans and playfully insisted it was all still a possibility. When Bishop told him The Bee Gees’ Barry Gibb was getting one in Redcliff, his ol
d hometown, Cave paused, then asked, ‘How big?’ Bishop replied, ‘Oh huge, life size.’ Nick told her, ‘I’m going way bigger than life size. I’m talking about like The Big Pineapple or something.’ (Bish’s Biz – Entertainment News with Angel Bishop’, Ten News, Channel 10, 28 February 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQVzAAQJvss, accessed 20 September 2020.)

  7Corin Johnson, interview with the author, phone, 1 June 2011. In 2018 a group of citizens from Warracknabeal calling themselves The Cave Foundation attempted a crowdfunding campaign in support of Corin Johnson’s bronze statue, seeking $250,000 to make the statue a reality. Their campaign petered out at just $4210. It’s a little heartbreaking to see the goodwill and dreams of the town in a video for this appeal. What began half in jest has become something of a lifeline that they don’t plan to give up on. Johnson happily supported their effort and explained the unusual challenges in creating his sculpture in the same video (Nick Cave Statue, Chuffed, campaign completed 15 September 2018, https://chuffed.org/project/nick-cave-statue, accessed 17 August 2020). At a viewing of Johnson’s first attempt at a maquette for a statue, Nick had observed, ‘You’ve made me far too muscley . . . I’ve got a body like a chick.’ Johnson says, ‘So I remodelled the torso to make him more skinny and feminine.’ (Corin Johnson, email correspondence with the author, 5 July 2011.)

  8Anonymous, interview with the author, Wangaratta, 26 March 2010.

  9Steve Packer, ‘Story of a Nag from a Warracknabeal Wag’, The Age, 18 December 2004, p. 18. Cave’s exaggerations connect him to an Australian storytelling tradition rooted in Gothic atmospheres (and sometimes laced with a peculiar strain of black humour). It’s a quality detectable in everything from Henry Lawson’s iconic short story ‘The Drover’s Wife’, through to the hallucinogenic fringes of Patrick White’s and Peter Carey’s novels. Songs by Australian bands such as The Triffids and The Moodists would evoke similarly disturbed states of mind on taking the road to nowhere, a kind of six-cylinder dreaming to match the suicidal melancholy of the nation’s informal national anthem, ‘Waltzing Matilda’ (interpreted on record by Tom Waits and The Pogues, among others). Ted Kotcheff’s landmark film Wake in Fright (1971) – based on Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel of the same name – serves this up in the archetypal Australian tale of a man becoming lost in a landscape that feels like a bad dream. Ironically enough, the central character, John Grant, is a middle-class teacher posted against his will to an outback town. Colin Cave may well have sympathised with Grant’s employment predicament, though not with his loss of self-command; his son Nick was certainly inspired by the film’s sweaty evocation of a nightmare unfolding in infinite and overpowering sunlight – a vision he would adapt to his own purposes in the script for The Proposition.

  10Dawn Cave, interview with the author, Melbourne, 21 November 2010.

  11ibid.

  12Frank Cave also ventured into making early mini-documentaries for cinema screenings that focused on travel in Australia and ended with his mellifluous voiceover, ‘Things go better with Shell.’

  13Frank Landvoigt was born on 26 November 1898. He changed his name to Frank Jason Cave by deed poll on 8 July 1940. ‘Jason’ was a middle name he’d been using since the war for no other reason than that he liked the sound of it.

  14Dawn Cave, interview with the author, Melbourne, 21 November 2010.

  15The precise cause of death for Mary Jane Treadwell is not known.

  16Dawn Cave, interview with the author, Melbourne, 27 March 2010.

  17Stories of blind Edward Treadwell may have added to Nick’s fascination for John Milton and his epic masterwork Paradise Lost, created after the seventeenth-century English poet had gone blind. Nick’s memories of singing with an almost blind Johnny Cash likewise have an intensity to them that goes beyond meeting a hero. Nick’s lyrical obsession with stars may be part of this: we see their light long after they have blackened and died.

  18Julie and Dawn Cave, interview with author, Melbourne, 23 November 2010.

  19ibid.

  20Nick Cave to journalist Jessamy CaIkin in 1981: ‘I want to write songs that are so sad, the kind of sad where you take someone’s finger and break it in three places.’ (Ian Johnston, Bad Seed: The Biography of Nick Cave, Abacus, London, 1995, p. 91.) Jessamy Calkin told me the same story in London during an interview on 29 June 2010. She explained that it was part of an overheard conversation between Nick and Lydia Lunch: ‘I never forgot it.’

  21Dawn Cave, interview with the author, Melbourne, 23 March 2010. Nick got his mother to play violin on a cover of the Phil Rosenthal song ‘Muddy Water’ on his album Kicking Against the Pricks, Mute Records, 1986. Johnny Cash had done a memorable interpretation of ‘Muddy Water’ in 1979. It had stayed with Nick, stirring up boyhood connections to watching The Johnny Cash Show on television and the Ovens River in Wangaratta.

  22Dawn Cave, interview with the author, Melbourne, 23 March 2010.

  23Rope was written by the British playwright Patrick Hamilton in 1929. Based on the Leopold and Loeb murder case earlier in the decade, it features a corpse hidden inside a chest, on which a meal is then served at a party. Alfred Hitchcock would make a famous film adaptation starring Jimmy Stewart in 1948. A version of the play would also be included in the Shell Presents series made for ABC TV in 1959, highlighting the theme of two friends killing someone for fun.

  24Dawn Cave, interview with the author, Melbourne, 27 March 2010.

  25ibid.

  Down by the River

  1Mary Brown, ‘Introduction – The 60s’, Centre History, The Centre for Continuing Education, Wangaratta, c. 2010, p. 1.

  2Holy Trinity Cathedral Wangaratta – A Short History and Guide, published by Friends of the Holy Trinity Cathedral, Wangaratta, 2004.

  3Colin Cave’s satirical poem appeared in the Wangaratta Chronicle, credited as ‘A Reader Writes . . .’ Photocopy supplied by Dawn Cave; 1967 given as likely year of publication. The subject matter of a slaughterhouse and its stench, and the verse it inspired, might be seen as a precursor to Nick Cave’s 2004 song ‘Abattoir Blues’. The mixture of disgust, revenge and humour in the words also suggests a tone of voice passed on from father to son.

  4‘Red Right Hand’. Lyrics by Nick Cave. Published by Mute Song Limited. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Reproduced by kind permission.

  5Bryan Wellington, interview with the author, phone, 16 November 2011.

  6Mrs Baumgarten also relished singing ‘Popeye the Sailor Man’ at the Mothers’ Union, which her daughter Anne says Dawn Cave was also a member of. ‘It had special status in class-conscious Wangaratta.’ (Anne Shannon [née Baumgarten], correspondence with the author, email, 23 August 2020.)

  7Myxomatosis was a viral disease artificially introduced into Australia in the 1950s to help control the rabbit plague. Rabbits had been first introduced into the country by a wealthy grazier in 1859, but within a few decades were running rampant in their millions, competing with livestock for feed and damaging the environment. In many places not a single blade of grass was left on the ground. A Brazilian virologist by the name of Aragao suggested myxomatosis as a solution in the early twentieth century. Scepticism and unease about it delayed action. By the 1950s desperation over the rabbit plague led to the introduction of myxomatosis, which was spread by mosquitoes and rabbit fleas. Its effects include swelling of the head and face, discharges, lethargy and slowing of movement, and what is called ‘sleepy eyes’, as well as blindness in many rabbits. Over time the rabbits have become immune to its effects.

  8Anne Shannon (née Baumgarten), interview with author, phone, 8 March 2012.

  9In the unreleased song ‘Give Us a Kiss’, caught during the recording of Push the Sky Away for the 20,000 Days on Earth documentary, it is possible to see one of the most tender singing performances of Nick’s career, evoking his boyhood dreaming places of Wangaratta and the sweet-sad yearnings of a first great love. The lyrics echo the map of the town that Nick’s paints almost word for word in ‘R
ed Right Hand’.

  10Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate was a surprisingly successful album for the singer in Australia, reaching number eight on the national album charts in 1971. Its complex and poetic content, dealing in courtly love, suicide and addiction – along with Paul Buckmaster’s bleak orchestrations and Cohen’s strangely confident assertion of his raspy storyteller’s voice (always an acquired taste) – almost sank him as an artist of interest in the United States. Nick would enjoy discovering that the recording sessions for it began on the same date as his thirteenth birthday.

  11Discussing ‘Avalanche’, Nick would say, ‘This song seemed like a true kind of confessional song. It just seemed to be so open and kind of honest in some way. Whether it is or not, I don’t really know. It just had that effect on me and really changed the way I looked at things.’ Leonard Cohen would be impressed: ‘I guess you could say Nick Cave butchered my song “Avalanche”, and if that’s the case, let there be more butchers like that.’ (Christof Graf, Cohenpedia, http://blog.leonardcohen.de/?p=14090)

  12Chris Morris, interview with the author, Wangaratta, 25 March 2010.

  13Adrian Twitt, interview with the author, Wangaratta, 25 March 2010.

  14ibid.

  15Bryan Wellington, interview with the author, 16 November 2011.

  16‘Man in the Moon’. Lyrics by Nick Cave. Published by Mute Song Limited. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Reproduced by kind permission.

  17Anne Shannon (née Baumgarten), correspondence with the author, email, 23 August 2020.