Personality-wise, the exception to the mediocre rule was a man called Bob Hawke, leader of the Australian ‘Labor Party’ and Prime Minister (leader) of our country from 1983. Bob Hawke. That rarest of all Australian creatures: the Charismatic Politician. And Australia is full of charismatic people. They just don’t get into politics and if they do apparently don’t last long.
At its worst, what our Labor Party does best is in-fighting — the traditional fatal preoccupation of Socialist-based organisations. Bob Hawke brought the warring factions of the Labor Party together, rendering it a highly decent government while its longest-serving Prime Minister, the guiding threads he seemed to weave being genuine ‘consensus’ and ‘accord’.
To this day the Labor Party still falls down whenever its key players can only verbalise their key focus and loyalty as to ‘The Party’, to me this habit bearing the faintest but unmistakable ring of Stalinism. Such blinker-visioned souls are easily recognisable in TV interviews as they constantly say ‘The Party’ and never ‘The People of Australia’, the latter being the very reason they’re on TV at all as our democratically-elected representatives. Bob Hawke, by contrast, seemed to say ‘The People of Australia’ at least once per TV appearance. And even if he was doing this in a calculated way, at least it made us, the People of Australia, feel that our leader remembered why he was in the job. For us.
Though a Rhodes Scholar and the son of a church minister, Hawke certainly didn’t sound like it: The broadest of our accents is called the ‘Australian Drawl’; it’s drawn-out, rustic, emphatic. Hawke took it to new levels: When in serious mode his voice was like a surreally elongated call of a crow speaking English. When in high spirits it was that same crow being crazily whacked from side to side between two trees. He wasn’t a handsome man, not even ruggedly handsome. He was, however, to women, ruggedly irresistible. In late middle-age, his hair a combed-down wavy silver, to me his eyes always suited his surname; his stare like a raptor-bird’s though with a larrikin twinkle.
A world-record-breaking drinker, legend has it he stayed sober for his 9-year term in office as Prime Minister. He was an agnostic and told us why. He loved power, though worked for the greater good and when he spoke in that remarkable voice of his he could gain and maintain the respect of the Queen of England or of a disgruntled street sweeper. He shed tears on TV when things truly moved him, on one occasion tears of joy…
In his first year as our Prime Minister, Australia reached the one-on-one final against America in the America’s Cup yacht race and the Australian yacht, with its revolutionary and top-secret ‘winged keel’, was on the verge of winning — except on the very verge of it every day for a week: Poised to break the longest winning streak in sports history as held by the Americans, the Australian yacht was clearly dominant but every day though Australia should have won the race fair and square there was some victory-robbing technicality thrown up by the Americans, as if by ‘America’s Cup’ they meant America’s cup, not Yours. The phrase at the time was ‘Australia rules the waves, America waves the rules’ and everyone in Australia, unless they were dead, was on the edge of their seats every morning following the live agony. Every day on the bus to school then all day the talk was of little else until finally the morning came when America had run out of technicalities and my darling mum said I could be late for school so we could just maybe watch the great moment together on TV. We held our breaths as on the steely-grey water our beautiful white yacht approached the invisible finish line beside the race-marshal’s boat, the cannon went off, the smoke, the spectator boat horns, and we had won.
When I finally got to school, our normal classes had been abandoned, TVs wheeled in so we could watch the replays of the winning moment and the celebrations unfolding live.
And there was our Prime Minister.
Perched on an armchair in the tacky team logo blazer of our victorious yacht crew, his face all creased with laugh-lines, people in jubilation all around him, TV reporters cheering and laughing instead of reporting, things falling over, cans of beer being opened with bits of spray landing on everyone including the Prime Minister and he was loving it. A moment of purest joy, of happy chaos, of the national pride of the underdog who had just won even though the big dog wouldn’t play fair.
Were those droplets of beer on his cheeks or his characteristic tears when (in a moment now famous in our nation’s history) our Prime Minister yelled out, ‘I reckon any boss who sacks anyone for not comin’ in to work today is a BUM! ’
Pandemonium.
Around the Commander-in-Chief of a First World Country.
Who was also a man of the People.
The Cruelest of the Cruel
* * *
Hello?’
‘Uh, hello. Look, uh, my name’s Justin Sheedy and
I’m wondering if it’d be alright if I could speak to Emma. If it’s not too late for me to be phoning, that is…’
‘To our dear Emma?’
‘Yes… Emma St. John.’
‘Might I by happy chance be addressing a demon rollerskater?’
‘I do skate, sir…’
‘Ha! Justin, this is Doug St. John, I’m Emma’s father.’
‘… Professor Douglas St. John?’
‘You’re the one who skates down Tambourine Bay Road, aren’t you!’
‘Guilty as charged, I’m afraid, sir…’
‘I’ve passed you on a few occasions, dear boy; when I drop our youngest down to the school. We’re the white Mercedes which gives you a wide berth. Our Peter, well, I think you’ve got a bit of a fan there, Justin.’
‘Poor kid — I don’t think I’ve met him.’
‘Well he knows you… He’s a few years below you, of course. Anyhow, you’d like to speak to our Emma. That’s splendid. Well here she is. And all the best to you, my friend…’
‘…Hello?’
‘Hello, Emma?’
‘Yes…’
‘Emma, it’s Justin. Justin Sheedy. We met at the Palm Sunday march.’
‘Yes, I know. Great, wasn’t it.’
‘Yes, it was lovely meeting you.’
‘I meant the march.’
‘Yeah, sure was! And look, Emma, well, I was just wondering if you might like to, well, maybe come out with me some time…’
‘…You mean… on a date?’
‘Well, yes, if you’d like…’
‘Why do you think I’d want to?’
‘…Well… I sing in a band… You could tell me about… about your favourite music…’
‘Justin, you rollerskate to school. Look I have to go right now. Oh, and please don’t tell anyone you called me.’
‘…Justin. …Justin Sheedy, are you still there? It’s Doug St. John here again.’
‘Yes I am, sir.’
‘Look, dear boy, I think I can gather what went on just there… But look, y’shouldn’t take it too hard and I can tell you why…’
‘Afraid I don’t see how, doctor…’
‘Justin, can I offer you a bit of advice, man to man?’
‘Yes please.’
‘Look, my boy, girls, at this age, well, they’re a bit of a hard lot. They can be, well, they can be cruel.’
‘It certainly seems that way, sir.’
‘And do you know why they’re cruel?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Because at this age they’re just, well, they’re just so afraid. So they bite. It took courage for you to call here tonight. And though girls like our dear Emma may not want you right now, they’ll want you down the track, I can promise you. I can promise you that. Blokes exactly like you…’
The show goes on
* * *
That year the Voodoo Rockets were invited to play not one but two Riverview school socials at the Chatswood Town Hall to where the girls of our ‘sister school’, Loreto Normanhurst, were invited. These were pretty rocking occasions but the best was an ‘informal’ organised by the Boarding House of our year with the girl
s of Monte Sant Angelo. How far I had come since my first year at Riverview four years earlier when the boarders seemed to me a single-bodied, multi-headed, ten-tacle-armed Creature from the Planet Dubbo. Now they wanted me to entertain them…
I designed and printed the invitation poster for this gig which was then circulated at Monte Sant Angelo, North Sydney, an all-girls convent run by a most fearsome order of nuns. Proclaiming a gig to be played by Riverview’s Voodoo Rockets, my poster featured a black-and-white Newsweek image of a group of men in gasmasks standing in a circle around a very small, blackened piece of wreckage, my superimposed text: All that remains of their Last gig.
As to our band ‘look’, having settled on any hairstyle being preferable to the wiry fuzz my hair grew into if let go to any length, I now had it cut short but ‘Modish’, which went with my outfit: a black thin-lapelled suit jacket I’d picked up for $4 at the Epping Saint Vincent de Paul shop, white collared shirt, blue-black stove-piped jeans with square silver ‘pirate’ style belt buckle and black leather ‘winkle-picker’ boots. Tony was the consummate ‘rocker’ of course in his black leather jacket, black shirt and stove-pipes with James Dean-style buckle and 50s leopard print ‘brothel creepers’. Steve now with near shoulder-length wavy hair wore a faded blue denim jacket over a 1960s original candy-striped t-shirt, stove-piped jeans with pirate buckle and winkle-pickers, Joe Wong in a purple paisley shirt from Steve’s collection. Yes, in vehement denial of the 1980s all around us, in front of those Riverview boys and Monte Sant Angelo girls we blasted into the mighty ascending power chords of Stepping Stone by The Monkees and took that room of 1980s boys and girls right with us.
Our next gig was another 21st birthday party of one of my brother’s crowd who were hyped and ready for us and we weren’t nervous anymore; we knew we were good. We had worked hard to be and that night turned on Force-10 good-time rock and roll like a light. That gig in that concrete rumpus room at the bottom of a house in Epping was probably the best gig I have ever played; 100% relished by both audience and band. Look up ‘Purest Frenzied Fun’ in the dictionary, it’s got a snapshot of that night.
It was in fact the 21st birthday of a delightful young man by the name of Peter Raad, older brother of the dusky Sofia Raad, my childhood unrequited sweetheart as described in Goodbye Crackernight. I’d lost contact with Sofia since the end of primary school, she had grown from Cleopatra at age 10 into a very beautiful 16-year-old indeed and after we’d done our encores she made a beeline for Tony Basara. She had a friend, however, Judy, who made a beeline for me, was blonde, also, as it turned out, highly ‘experienced’ and more than willing to share the benefit of her experience with a 16-year-old rock singer. After our ‘walk’ as suggested by her, I technically remained a virgin but now had some ‘experience’ of my own. Also a smile that I had trouble wiping off my face for the next few weeks. And despite being pretty solidly interested in older and more experienced boys than myself, she’d told me I was a good kisser. Which, for a boy with a mild facial skin condition, was something just so very uplifting to be told.
Yet it is so traditionally the way of rock and roll for wonderful things to end with a whimper not a bang and the case of The Voodoo Rockets was classic. Eagerly booked to play yet another 21st birthday of my brother’s uni crowd, this one promised to be the mother of all parties: It was for a boy affectionately known by one and all as ‘Mad-Dog’ for his wild partying ways including working himself into a trance-like state while dancing. Two days before the party I got an acute sore throat and we had to cancel. Mad-Dog was our number one fan and we hoped against hope right up to the very last minute that I might be able to perform and that the likely night of our lives might go ahead. Yet I simply could not sing. I was heart-broken.
A few weeks later we were booked to play the 16th birthday party of a Loreto girl and on the night Tony had an awful stomach bug. Still he was determined to play. As he was too sick to drive his Chevrolet, my father drove Tony and his gear to the party in our very 1980s white Volvo while I went in another car with other gear. My own stomach was in knots at the prospect of my handle-like-a-bomb conservative father being in close proximity to Tony for anything longer than a nano-second; my father considered me a juvenile delinquent for not liking Cricket! In terms of respect for his elders and all they upheld, Tony, by contrast to me, was the Devil himself. Yet, to my immense relief on arrival at the party in West Lindfield, my father and Tony seemed to have driven the whole way together without atomic melt-down incident.
We played just as always. The crowd, however, kids of our own age, were unlike my brother’s crowd. Radically unlike. They did not dance. They did not move. They did not smile. A boy with black lipstick and eye makeup on (the first ‘Gothic’ I had ever seen) looked insulted, even outraged that we might induce him to have a good time and so lose his composure. Or worse, mess his gelled, dyed black hair on which he had spent simply hours!
Like the consummate rock professional that he was, Tony played the whole gig immaculately then walked off stage to a side room where he promptly threw up all over the birthday girl’s carpet. A bright pink gunge. I apologised to the girl but she was a social-climber and never spoke to me again.
Rock And Roll.
Tony and I were never close friends, never even very good friends despite spending so much time so close together. He had the talent of the other three of us combined, and then some. He was awesome. And, I discovered, had a secret life…
He looked after a mentally disabled kid. And not an easy one to look after, either; the boy used to soil himself on a regular basis and Tony would have to clean him up. He did so cheerfully though one day showed me one of the countless routine reports he submitted to the boy’s family after his regular time with their son. It read: ‘Again today.’
Some time later my father confided in me that he’d been ‘really impressed’ by the boy he’d driven to the party.
The Worst Job in the World
* * *
There was a ‘careers day’ at Riverview, towards the end of which I’d exhausted all the available options of any interest to me: Communications, Journalism, Television, Advertising… In desperation I’d even attended an information session on a ‘Bachelor of Arts’ degree, the ‘B.A.’ regarded as in truth standing for ‘Bugger All’ and a career path under no circumstances to be contemplated. Yet finally came the bottom of the barrel: With one last session for the day compulsory to attend, I found myself at a presentation on The Australian Public Service — along with all the other boys who had run out of choices yet who still had to have their bum on a seat. What I am about to describe is, I swear, no exaggeration…
The presenter, a youngish man in a pale blue three-piece suit, stood up uncertainly from his chair. Tallish but slight of frame, his hippy-afro hair only enhanced the suit’s ‘rented’ look. But he had a determined beard, 1970s librarian glasses, also a white plastic disposable cup in one hand. An empty, as yet unused plastic cup.
‘Boys,’ he began rather emphatically, ‘a lot of people think that in the Public Service we do nothing all day except use a lot of these.’ He proffered the plastic cup, his hopeful grin already infected with failure. ‘Yet I assure you… we, in the Public Service, do more than drink coffee.’ He faltered, peered out the window. ‘…A lot,’ he returned. As he squinted at the empty plastic cup, perhaps to draw some inspiration from it, I wondered whether he’d brought this stunning object with him all the way from Canberra (our nation’s public service capital) as his so powerfully meaningful prop for this talk. Maybe he’d just happened upon the cup in the Riverview staff room and was at this moment wildly improvising!
I had never before seen a person’s serious attempt at a public address collapse into itself. I do not know how he achieved it but what he achieved was literally so bad that it was good. And we would have laughed or ventured, ‘So, you drink TEA as well?!’ if not for the fact that what was unfolding before us was so pathetic. The young man sidled this way and tha
t, took off his glasses for emphasis, replaced them, half qualified points he hadn’t made. He redefined ‘Inept’. Next to the word in the dictionary is his out-of-focus picture, squinting through his glasses into the flash of an insta-matic.
Sitting to one side of the presentation room, a smart-suited female presenter from some previous session tried and failed to quell her look of sharp pity for this young man who was single-handedly confirming Australia’s national perception of its Public Service as the career choice of people with no other choice. But more than that: He was living proof of an organisation so incompetent that it would send THIS unfortunate young man as its ambassador. I wondered whether this was just a one-off task for him or whether THIS was his job in the Public Service, his shiningly incompetent role in travelling recruitment.
Perhaps it was all intentional! The Public Service was full and they were actively trying NOT to recruit us via a strategy of deliberate dissuasion. If so, THIS was the young man for the job.
‘And in conclusion,’ he flailed, ‘…I thank you,’ and sidled to his seat, which he nearly fell off.
‘O God,’ I silently prayed, ‘please, in Your infinite goodness, please spare me from that.’
The Priest Who Shot the Cow
* * *
It was 1985. I had just entered my second-last year of high school, the beginning of the make-or-break-the-rest-of-my-life pointy end of my school education. It would all conclude with my Higher School Certificate exams (HSC), the end result of which would be my career-defining mark out of 500. To enter a Communications degree at Sydney’s University of Technology and a happy future somewhere in The Media, I needed a mark of around 430. The pressure was fucking intense.
Memoirs of a Go-Go Dancer Page 6
