Memoirs of a Go-Go Dancer

by Justin Sheedy

  On and off-air Dorian spoke a lot about ‘street credibility’. It was the first time I had ever heard the term. It was his personal favourite, his level of inner-city sophistication allowing him to abbreviate it to ‘street cred’. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out what it was. Except that it was something spoken a lot about, esteemed and aspired to by ex-private school kids now at uni though still living with their parents in the richest suburbs of Sydney and desperate for all those around them at uni not to know they were ex-private school kids still living with their parents in the richest suburbs of Sydney. Me, sure, I’d been to a private school and still lived with my parents but I certainly wasn’t ‘rich’ and even if I had been it wouldn’t have been who I ‘was’ so I wouldn’t have been ashamed of it. In any case, as a concept ‘street cred’ seemed to me the nouveau-socialist ‘nothing’ that Gen X rich kids felt safely linked them with Karl Marx and aptly too as he never worked a day in his life.

  Dorian was consistent, I’ll grant him that, never not wearing his red star Mao cap. Also patchouli oil. Never not. For those who’ve never smelt it (be grateful), patchouli oil is an applied fragrance (or ‘scent’, more accurately) which, of mystical Eastern provenance, smells ‘sweetly dirty’. That or ‘dirtily sweet’. Whichever the case, it was considered by those who wore it to be ‘earthily alluring’. And they wore it instead of Deodorant. In radio studios. Cramped ones in shoe-string budget community radio stations where the air-conditioning for the sound-proof (air-tight) studio is often on the blink.

  Yet all these things were chased from my mind; I was here to learn ‘Radio Broadcasting’ and it was stomach butterfly freak-out exciting: going ‘Live’, talking on the microphone to a thousand people I couldn’t see but hoped were somewhere out there listening and enjoying, every second hoping against hope I wouldn’t fuck up which was SO easy to do — press the wrong switch, slide the wrong fader, stutter, stammer, ‘Omigod, DON’T PRESS THAT BUTTON! ’ and for God’s sake don’t announce the show as coming to you live from the wrong radio station entirely (which is exactly what I did as my first ever words on radio). It was fucking Terrifying. But, MAN, did I know I was alive. And I was existing to communicate. Over the Air Waves! Over The Ether!! And maybe, just maybe, to find my feet, find control, find my voice and become the voice coming out of a radio in someone’s bathroom, kitchen, living room or car that made them think, ‘My God, there is intelligent life out there…’

  The show on which I was doing my radio apprenticeship with Dorian was an early-Saturday evening ‘what’s on’ program publicising live music gigs in inner city Sydney. Which was lucky because Dorian was an expert on the local live music scene, which he referred to with coolly religious fervour as the ‘Indie (independent) Scene’. It was equally lucky that he was an expert on all aspects of live music performance from the musician’s point of view, a remarkable achievement given that he’d never been in a band.

  Being a ‘community’ (volunteer-run) radio station, though its technical equipment functioned soundly, Radio Skid Row was unkempt, dusty and crumbling, but mainly it was small, especially inside its sound-proof broadcasting studio. Given the nature of our program, I thought to mention to Dorian that I myself had been in a gigging band some time back and was thinking of forming another, with a view, hopefully, to contributing to his beloved ‘Indie’ live scene. The moment I did mention it, I felt the tiny studio we shared get even smaller.

  ‘One thing we don’t want here,’ he pronounced towards me across the broadcast panel desk as a record played, ‘is light-weights. They don’t last here. We don’t want show ponies either.’

  I happened to be staring at his double reflection in the studio’s double-glass sound-proof window. I was still staring at it as I replied: ‘The minute I see either, Dorian… I’ll let them know.’

  ‘…So,’ he raised an eyebrow, ‘am I gathering you’ll be back next week then?’

  Beyond his reflections only the deserted radio station, I now looked back at his face.

  ‘You are, Dorian.’

  May I have this dance?

  * * *

  Sophie Da Silva was a dancer. A real one. A working professional.

  Yes, I got paid for my go-go dancing (I’d have done it for nothing) but Sophie did it for a living. And her living was her passion, her ultimate joy. A ‘chorus line’ dancer (and singer), she worked in the great touring musicals when they played a season in Sydney, provided, of course, that she got past the massive audition for each show as flocked to by every ‘show girl’ just like her in Sydney. She assured me that the way to land a job, just like in her favourite film, A Chorus Line, which she screened for me on video, was to perform in perfect sync with the other auditioning dancers, never to stand out as if a ‘principal’ or starring dancer, though it was her dream to one day land a ‘principal’ part. And she assured me there were show ‘boys’ too.

  I’d met Sophie at The Plastic Inevitable’s new venue, ‘The Freezer’, downstairs off Oxford Street, Paddington, just down the street from where Berkelouw Books is today. Her face ever on the edge of a curious smile, she had big, round eyes, straight, brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and, in a black leotard, the body of a cat set to pounce.

  I have never run a marathon, but by the end of 1988 I had danced a few: I was by now fairly sure I knew what marathon runners meant by ‘hitting the wall’, the wall of physical exhaustion which they hit and then somehow — God knows how — break right through and keep going. In my raised dancing cage, each awesome song inspired me like switching on a light to give ALL of myself, song after song until I hit my own wall of utter exhaustion, the point at which I would say to myself, ‘I CANNOT go on anymore. I MUST take a break,’ and then one of my all-time favourite songs would come on and I would be physically born again on the spot. My go-go dancing job had been a dream come true — wages? I’d have paid for the privilege — though I did feel just about ready to step down from my go-go cage for the last time, particularly as my wages were now barely covering my taxi fare home all the way from Paddington to North Epping in the early hours.

  It was one night around my final night, shortly before closing time, the dance floor having thinned out and the DJ playing a ‘cool-down’ level dance song, when Sophie, from the dance floor in front of my cage, motioned me to step down out of it and join her for a 1-on-1 dance with her on the floor. I did so, she grabbed my hands in hers, whispered in my ear, ‘ Dance with me, Juz,’ then let go of my hands and we were ON. If you’ll forgive the gender reversal, I felt like Ginger Rogers opposite Fred Astaire when, according to showbiz legend, he would say to her: ‘ Come on, kid. Show me what you can do.’ I intended to but then, after mere moments sparring closely opposite Sophie, the most delicious sensation and realisation flowed into me…

  Matching each other’s go-go (ad lib) moves, inspiring moves in each other, in instant and perfect sync with each other, though not touching each other it felt as if we were physically bonded together as we danced. And my realisation was this: I could tell, I could see, I could feel from her movements off mine and mine off hers and from her subtle smile that she was saying to me, without words, ‘I am a professional dancer. And you, Juz, have got what it takes to dance with ME. I’m a Pro. And, believe me, kid, YOU could have been one too.’

  Honours

  * * *

  Direct to you from NEW YORK via Harvard, Berkeley and the UCLA Film School, Dr Myrin Gollishenko was a cross between Elvis Costello and a 6-foot-2 Woody Allen. Reigning head of the Sydney Uni Fine Arts ‘Film Studies’ department, the good doctor’s deeply personal passion — nay, religion — was Animation, for the way it rendered the impossible possible. In his lectures, anything and everything that ever left his lips was a deeply personal matter and we loved him.

  ‘This word “Self-Indulgent”,’ he opened one lecture in his Woody Allen tones except a few tones deeper, ‘ why is it a pejorative? Whaht, I assk you, is wrong with being “Self-Indulgent”?! I would ha
ve thought it a practical necessity; like, who’s gonna indulge me if not myself? YOU?!’

  This was the beginning of 1989 and for the first time in a long time I was happy and buoyed by success: I had finished my first year with a Credit and two Distinctions. (With results published in the Herald, on my first day back after the Christmas holidays, I shit you not, there was actually a ‘Chinese whisper’ buzz in Manning Bar about how well I’d apparently done.) Yet the bottom line was that the results I’d achieved in my first year now got me into the Sydney Uni Fine Arts Honours course. At this point, once again, I wish that the ancient Greek god of Common Sense had descended and commanded, ‘Justin, switch to Communications at the University of Technology. Do it NOW. It’s what you always wanted. And now you’ll get IN.’ Alas he did not. Also, after 12 first days of the year back to school, I experienced my first ever on a blissful high, having actually looked forward to the end of the Christmas holidays and the beginning of another academic year. Such unprecedented happiness made where I currently was feel meant-to-be and that kept me there.

  For, boy-oh-boy, what a sustaining thing it is to know you’re actually doing wel at something: Dr Gollishenko’s opening lecture to us had been on the importance of being an effective writer in order to be able to get our ideas across and, apparently, I had found my niche, my film studies tutor in due course smiling to me how he always looked forward to reading my essays. Countless hours I spent toiling away on them in the Fine Arts library while in through the window, from across the oval, wafted the strains of bands playing lunchtime gigs in Manning Bar to cheering crowds. Yet for me it was a labour of love. I wrote a paper on Batman, one on The Banana Splits, one on The Roadrunner, narrowly missing a High Distinction for an essay on the Peter Sellers classic, The Party, as a ‘silent’ film, though my best effort of all was for a paper on, in my opinion at the time, one of the best films ever made in Australia…

  Wake In Fright

  * * *

  It was a film which had haunted me since a child. Though by my 21st year it was a little-known film, and one, to my knowledge at the time, that had never been so much as mentioned in the whole world of Australian art academia — a community in 1989 quite fixated on a quest for an Australian national ‘identity’ as portrayed via an all-pervading notion of ‘the Australian Landscape’ in Australian art and film. The leading published academics at the time went on ad nauseam about a string of films they saw as embodying this ‘identity’, a list stretching all the way from the cinematic gem Picnic at Hanging Rock to Mad Max and Sunday Too Far Away to such rotten tomatoes as They’re a Weird Mob…

  My essay was on a film they had completely missed. And that, indeed, was the singular, foaming-at-the-mouth point of my essay. It wasn’t the world’s best essay (I wasn’t the world’s best student) but it made its point. After handing it in with a copy of the film I’d videoed off a rare TV screening, my tutor said he couldn’t understand why it was the first time he’d read about it either. The film, from 1970, was called Wake In Fright. Though I didn’t know it at the time, the Sydney Uni Fine Arts Department could hardly be blamed for never having caught on to Wake In Fright. It had been LOST!

  Though nominated for the Golden Palm award at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, Wake In Fright had not done well at the Australian box office nor, it would seem, internationally. Evidently Australian audiences ran screaming from it, so confronting was the giant mirror it held up to them. Hence, since 1970, it was never reproduced in film format or released on video, only ever to my knowledge being shown on TV every now and then until the mid-80s by Australian film presenter par excellence, Bill Collins.

  Wake In Fright is the story of John Grant, an intelligent and ambitious young man dissatisfied with his lot in life: He is the lone schoolteacher at the one-room schoolhouse of the two-building outback town of Tiboonda, an all-but-deserted outpost of the larger country mining town of Bundanyabba. By John’s own admission, his one desire is, at the beginning of the six week Christmas school holidays, to escape Tiboonda, escape teaching, escape Bundanyabba for Sydney, where resides his girlfriend, then escape Sydney for London, where, in John’s mind, resides ‘civilisation’. However, on the eve of his air departure from Bundanyabba, he makes a fatal mistake, one which Bill Collins once called a wrong turn at a fork in the road for which John is going to pay, and pay, and pay — possibly for the rest of his life.

  Cinematically, Wake In Fright is stunning from its opening shot: From an elevated camera point of view, we see a lone building in the mid-distance. All around it and beyond it to the horizon lies the flat, infertile nothingness of the Australian Outback. To the eerie early synthesizer strains of film music composer John Scott, the shot then pans very slowly to the right. Taking a full minute, the camera pans through a full 360 degrees of this desolate nothingness, finally coming to rest on the town’s second building by the first, and the train-line running between them. Not unfittingly was the film entitled Outback for its initial U.S. release.

  One word describes this film. Harrowing. Not harrowing as in the harrowing physical violence and terror of the excellent Australian film Wolf Creek (2005), but harrowing in its portrayal of the baseness of human behaviour and in the truths revealed, firstly, about the rough mining town locals John Grant finds himself surrounded by or, more accurately, seduced by: the false hope they offer him, their fickle hospitality, the offer of a light for his desperate cigarette being from a cigarette lighter flame just a shade off a blow-torch. Secondly, harrowing in the truths revealed to John about himself. My description of the film so far may make it sound reminiscent of the classic Deliverance. In my opinion, Wake In Fright puts Deliverance in the shade.

  The peculiar brand of Australian ‘mateship’ and social goodwill of the outback town locals is exposed in another of the film’s opening scenes: John boards a one-carriage train from his schoolhouse outpost bound for the country centre of Bundanyabba, affectionately known by its residents as ‘The Yabba’. Making his way up the train carriage, he passes through a clutch of rowdy but ostensibly friendly local men who try to press a can of beer into his hand. John declines it, moving up the aisle and taking his seat at the vacant end of the carriage. Sitting down, he notices across the aisle from him an old Aboriginal man sitting silently and alone, as if segregated, tacitly excluded from the ‘white’ end of the carriage. The old man sits with quiet dignity, nothing else to do but accept his ‘place’ within the carriage: To the whites in the carriage, he isn’t there. Clearly, the old man has accepted his place (or lack of it) on the margins of their society. His Australia is their Terra Nullius — the Land of Nothing.

  But most of all, Wake In Fright is a film about beer. On his first night in The Yabba, John experiences the town eccentric, ‘Doc’ Tydon, drinking beer while standing on his head. Mid-sip, Tydon (played by Donald Pleasence) explains that beer gets to the stomach not due to gravity but due to Peristalsis: For the town drunk and performing clown is, by his own admission to John, actually a medical doctor, also a tramp and alcoholic whose condition prevents him from working as a doctor in Sydney though in The Yabba it is not even noticed.

  Based closely on the novel Wake in Fright by Kenneth Cook, the title is taken from an ancient curse, ‘May you dream of the Devil and wake in fright.’ During one scene of booze madness, though John has just fallen off his chair unconscious, Doc Tydon debunks John’s idea of ‘civilisation’ as ‘a vanity born of fear’. But most centrally, Wake In Fright debunks a particular Australian myth that we long held so dear as expressed by a young Jack Thompson in his role as Yabba mine-worker: ‘She’ll be right, mate… Darn worry. Drink ya beer.’ Wake In Fright portrays the appalling truth of human nature, the truth being that ‘she won’t be right’. At all.

  The film’s all-pervading soundtrack is unforgettable. Early in the film, the music evokes the moment of John’s exquisite rush of hope, of possible escape and personal victory. Though the moment is conspicuous within the film, for the musical tone is chiefl
y one of eerie desolation. At key points, the soundtrack is nothing short of manic, especially when accompanying the film’s montage sequences — rapid-fire image assaults portraying John’s mental descent. These sequences verge on the psychedelic — though their mode is one of the very worst trip indeed.

  To me, Wake In Fright possesses a ‘realness’ about it like no other Australian film, or any other film I can think of: Now legendary is the film’s epic kangaroo hunt, where real animals are slaughtered on film, and not just one like in Apocalypse Now. Seemingly real is the violent, alcohol-fuelled mania of cast members including Jack Thompson and particularly Donald Pleasence. The doomed daughter, Janette, also the ghoulish, automaton-like motel clerk, these performances must be seen to be believed, not to mention those by actor John Meillon. Then there is the ‘realness’ of the withered old man on the Mainstreet Yabba bench beside which John Grant finds himself sitting in utter defeat: the silent, knotted gaze from the old man that says to the young man, ‘I was once you. You will be me.’ And when I say ‘realness’, I mean it literally: Unless I’m mistaken, this withered old man on the bench is no actor. He is a withered old man of Broken Hill, the Austrlian country town where Wake In Fright was filmed.

  For me, Wake In Fright is reminiscent of many things. It

  seems influenced by the aesthetic of Australian Outback painter, Russell Drysdale, his human forms reduced to the wasted physicality of the harsh, unforgiving landscape they must inhabit. It’s reminiscent too of the films of Alfred Hitchcock in mood and atmosphere: Just like Hitchcock, Wake In Fright’s Canadian director Ted Kotcheff exposes that which is fearful, twisted and desperate just beneath the surface of ‘the ordinary’, just as Kotcheff went on to do in First Blood, the first of the ‘Rambo’ films in 1982.