Memoirs of a Go-Go Dancer

by Justin Sheedy

  I put Wake In Fright to the test: Is this film of the same calibre of Hitchcock’s best work? Does it consistently match the standards of the grand master’s craft, levels which even the greatest films fall narrowly short of? In my opinion, it is, and it does.

  And I was flat-out saying so in 1989.

  In 2009 projector reel film tins containing the only known copy of Wake In Fright were discovered in a dark and dusty corner of an obscure warehouse — along with the Ark of the Covenant, presumably — the film then being restored and re-released to massive acclaim.

  It has since been celebrated as one of the best films ever made in Australia.

  And The Wall came tumbling down

  * * *

  1989. As a direct result of Soviet leader Gorbachev’s historic reforms of the Communist system, his Soviet Union collapsed, its member states seeking independence, Russian nuclear missile submarines being tied up at their docks to sit and rust. As testament to the revolution he had fathered, Gorbachev’s 1987 Time Magazine ‘Man of the Year’ title was upgraded in 1989 to ‘Man of the Decade’ and for the first time in my life I felt all around me a comfortably better-than-even chance of not being blown up tomorrow. Yet the defining symbol of the moment, the symbol of the blessed end of an era which had just come to pass, was the fall of The Wall.

  In 1961 my parents, newly married and based in London, were on holidays with their two baby daughters in Austria. From that very holiday, there is a Kodachrome photograph of my Mum reclining in the back of a rowing boat on Austria’s Lake Wörthersee, my older sister, Bridget, then tiny, on Mum’s lap. It’s a golden afternoon, the surface of the lake behind Mum a shimmering blue, and Mum is young and smiling and beautiful — just as I described in Goodbye Crackernight, like a cross between Grace Kelly and the girl next door. That night, according to the news over the radio in their hotel room, ‘The Berlin Wall’ went up. European borders were closed between the post-World War Two-defined ‘West’ and ‘East’, forming a barrier right down the middle of Europe which Winston Churchill would soon christen the ‘Iron Curtain’. Austria, though a country of the Western bloc, was way EAST. And with no historical precedence for such an enforced impenetrable barrier, none at all, that night Mum and Dad thought they and their babies might never get home. Trapped where they were forever.

  All over Europe, families were cut down the middle. In Berlin, lovers waved to each other from apartment block windows now on either side of The Wall. Set up by the forces of the Communist East to stop East Germans fleeing in droves from their brand-new shit-hole totalitarian state to freedom in the West, The Wall remained firmly in place for the next 28 years.

  My parents did get home, firstly to London, then soon back out to Australia, where they had me and here I was in 1989, in Manning Bar the TV screen showing live footage of West and East Berliners smashing down The Wall with sledgehammers, some standing on its crumbling top, some shaking hands right through it. Foreign-accented men soon appeared in Manning Bar with suitcases full of ‘authentic Wall rubble’, so they claimed, for ready sale along with Russian and East-German Army gold-braided officers’ caps. ‘Ya, iss pissez of Wall, I just come from there,’ one assured me. ‘You want to buy? To you, my friend, special price.’

  Sitting in Manning Bar, looking around me at all the student faces, I was amazed; there were no smiles. No air of celebration. No outpouring of relief that, as of today, for the first time in our young lives there would definitely be a tomorrow.

  ‘What’s wrong with everybody?’ I put to Steve in the armchair beside mine.

  Steve shrugged, and put on his very best ‘Boris Badenov’ voice: ‘Iz defeat for The Left, comrade…’ He looked back to the TV screen. ‘…Cold War iz over. And Socialism just lost. Verkers and Students Unite. After all this time… Iz kaput.’

  An Enemy of the State

  * * *

  Radio Supremo Dorian having since disappeared who- knows-where, one Saturday night as I panelled and presented the 2RSR-FM indie music ‘What’s On’ show the studio telephone rang. It was the excellent Ian of the Sydney Uni Student Union.

  ‘Best thing on the radio, mate,’ he said down the line. ‘Well done.’

  ‘Just glad you think so, my friend. Thanks.’

  ‘Hey, we’ve got some awesome gigs coming up at Manning Bar, can you give us a plug?’

  ‘My pleasure, Ian.’

  ‘Cheers, mate. Manning is proud of you. Even Fritz Von!’

  ‘Good old Fritz,’ I smiled, looking up at the studio clock. ‘Ian, gotta run, mate; we’re back on the air…’

  ‘Later, mate.’

  And back to our live broadcast I went, after initial fuck-ups now smoothly confident with the at first mind-boggling array of buttons, dials, sliders and lights of the broadcast panel desk before me, Steve facing me on the other side of it: as the weeks went by my regular on-air guest. Each with a live microphone we comically bounced off each other, Steve serving as our local indie music scene commentator, being by this time a pretty fine musician in his own right. His other role was as our resident self-proclaimed ‘Street Cred Consultant and Infallible Authority’. Though fully competent on-air now, my nerves were still there, every night, but I knew that was a good thing as it gave me an ‘edge’ on-air in this pioneering medium of mass communication that still hadn’t lost its magic. People actually complimented me now and then on our ‘comic timing’ — we even got fan mail, one woman writing that I ‘could talk to anyone’ though I religiously listened to tape recordings of every show we did so as to try and improve and also to make sure, as our show evolved, that we still sounded like ‘us’.

  ‘Whatcha think of Julian?’ Steve put to me across the desk as the next record played. This was the guitarist I’d recently met in Manning Bar, a First Year student I’d invited to try out for our new band: ‘Atlantic Moose’.

  ‘Well it was one hell of an audition,’ I returned. ‘First guitarist I’ve ever seen play it with their teeth…’

  ‘Yeah, he’s an awesome player. Great feel.’ Steve smiled. ‘We should have asked old Dorian to try out…’

  I goggled. ‘Dorian has a guitar?!’

  ‘Yeah. An electric one. He brought into Manning the other week…’

  ‘Yeah? What kind?’

  ‘Les Paul copy. “This guitar is an Enemy of the State” written on it.’

  ‘Oh, STICK it to The Man…’

  Steve chuckled insanely. ‘Funny thing about it was that he couldn’t really play it. …I saw him not being able to.’

  ‘What the fuck went wrong with that bloke?’ I squinted. ‘I tell ya, he was the kind of person I always hoped to meet at uni. You know, ‘interesting’ people. At university. I thought we’d be good friends.’

  ‘Juz,’ said Steve, his mirth subsiding, ‘there are two types of people who turn up to university: those who can bring a friend or two from school, and those who can’t. Who arrive at uni with the desperate need to “reinvent” themselves. Guess which one Dorian was.’

  ‘Why’d he piss off?’

  ‘Because he hates you.’

  ‘God, WHY?’

  Steve looked at me straight. ‘Because you know who you are.’

  I fully gawked at my best friend. ‘…I DO?!’

  Steve smiled his usual. ‘If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have been a threat to him, and he’d still be here. Juz, I am the god of Street Cred. And I have spoken.’

  It’s up to YOU, New-town, New-town…

  * * *

  I had just turned 21. For my birthday present, my parents went away for the weekend. This was in order that our home at Howard Place, North Epping, would be free for a blow-out of a 21st birthday party. Just before evacuating for the weekend, as a lovely nod to my childhood, Mum made a huge platter of ‘fairy bread’, that cherished Australian childhood party delicacy of buttered triangles of white sliced bread topped with sweet, multi-coloured candy sprinkles called ‘hundreds and thousands’. On the night, people came from al
l over Sydney, the first arrivals richly appreciating Mum’s homage to the childhood we’d all shared before gobbling the fairy bread platter in a flash.

  As to the party that then took place on the one-time site of the Howard and Sons Fireworks factory, there wasn’t just mad dancing that night, I didn’t just get laid, there were people on the roof. Somehow I managed to turn the disaster area back into a house before my parents’ return on Sunday afternoon, yet I knew I had already outgrown my cradle.

  Steve’s Newtown sharehouse had recently broken up, he’d just found a new one, and asked if I might like to move into it with him. I said sure thing.

  It was at 35 Gibbes Street, Newtown, a narrow two-storey terrace house at the end of a long line of them at the bottom of a downward-sloping street. And though a terrace, it wasn’t of the classic English iron-lacework type; to my eye it was more of a ‘Dutch’ shape: a triple-paned front room ‘bay’ window beside the front door, above this a faux ‘parapet’, the upper floor an inward-sloping windowed ‘attic’. After we’d moved in, uni friends would come over to check out our new digs: On arrival they would walk down the entrance hallway past the upper floor stairway which was basically a ladder, step down into the lounge room, stop, look up, and say, (one after the other) ‘Gee, this place has got a good feeling about it!’ This happened so identically and so often that we would mouth the words as each first-time guest came out with it.

  Being at the end of a street and somehow below the lie of the land surrounding, this tiny terrace was an actual haven of peace and quiet though just a stone’s throw from Newtown Train Station with the massively busy line there and this was before the 3rd Runway flightpath into Sydney airport went directly overhead as it does now. So even though King Street Newtown just up the hill could be going five types of berserk, here for us was a nook of tranquillity.

  My parents’ old friend Stan La Salle turned up with Dad one Saturday morning to cast his experienced eye over our brand-new den of iniquity. Having been a dynamic czar of inner-city Sydney bohemia in his own student days some 20 years earlier, the venerable Stan stood there with me on the front path, looked up at the place, took it in, and said the following to me…

  ‘Justin, let give you a word of advice, old bean… My first place was just like this. And this one’s a goodie. Good vibe about it.’ He peered to make sure Dad was out of earshot, then turned back to me. ‘But back in the day I had some flatmates who got into the habit, instead of going to lectures, of sitting round in the living room all day smoking dope. Pulling bongs… And d’y’know what?’

  ‘What?’ I squinted to him.

  ‘They’re still there.’

  The Oxford

  * * *

  The Oxford Hotel on King Street wasn’t just the social melting pot in the heart of Newtown; it WAS the heart of Newtown. This pub was the home (and sometimes throne) of eccentrics as the rule not the exception. And in The Oxford all different types mixed together: punks, skinheads, hippies, gothics, students, gays, ferals, assorted misfits of colour and musos especially (in which group I could now technically be included). The smell of patchouli oil was intense but it was safety in numbers. And I never saw one incident of late-night alcohol-fuelled violence, not one; everybody was too poor to get too drunk. The place was owned and run by middle-aged identical twin brothers (rumoured to be ex-featherweight box-ers) who were always quietly cheerful though with an apparent policy of hiring legendarily grumpy female bar staff. Yet this policy only balanced out the otherwise friendly mood of the place.

  One of the most iconic things about The Oxford was its ancient blue carpet floor. It was sticky. So sticky you could feel it gripping the heels and soles of your boots. You didn’t dare sit down on it; you might never get up again. You certainly didn’t touch it — unless you fancied chemically-induced hallucinations walking down King Street later on. We revered that old carpet as ‘the glue’ of the social fabric of Newtown. It wouldn’t be cleaned; it refused to be. And from the fateful day when it was finally ripped up and wholly transported to the Tempe Tip on the back of a truck, crowd numbers and bar takings at The Oxford Hotel went into a decline from which it never recovered.

  It was in The Oxford that I had become friends with a young man of Aboriginal descent by the name of Malcolm. Though The Oxford set through whom I met him were card-carrying ferals, Malcolm was no eccentric (or at least, less of an eccentric than everyone around him), his pale hazel eyes ever wide open and, though friendly, ever slyly hip to whatever was going down.

  He was originally from the Central Coast area just north of Sydney and in our usual quiet alcove of the crowded pub we got to talking late one night about Lake Macquarie and the spooky fields of Morisset that I had once experienced on its shores. Indeed I shared with him my impression of the area from way back in my second-last year at school and how the place had so unsettled me. I tried to describe for him the strange certainty I’d felt pressing down upon me there: the certainty which I could not explain but which told me I should not, should not BE there.

  One of Malcolm’s eyes opened a bit wider than usual as he put, ‘Y’felt something there, didja?’

  ‘Yes, I think I did,’ I replied, and asked him whether the area might be, I dunno, an Aboriginal ‘sacred site’, or something… A site maybe of some strong ‘memory’.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he returned instantly and with unmistakable clarity. ‘Yes, it’s a very important area to us.’

  I’ll never be completely certain whether he then saw in my eyes my wordless, ‘What, where something terrible happened?’ but I’ll always remember the look in his…

  The look in his eyes that said, ‘Yes. It did.’

  Rock And Roll

  * * *

  On my way through the uni campus one day I bumped into Joe Wong, one-time drummer for Riverview’s mighty ‘Voodoo Rockets’. He was doing okay at Dentistry, he said as we walked. But he wasn’t enjoying it. In fact, he didn’t like it at all. It had always been expected of him that he should go into his father’s profession. What he’d really like to do, he said, was open a restaurant.

  ‘What, a Chinese one?’ I put to him.

  ‘No, French.’

  ‘Hell, maybe you’d like to play drums again,’ I sided to him with a grin.

  I don’t think I had ever really seen Joe Wong smile before. But I saw him smile now: He actually stopped on the uni sidewalk. And smiled at me most fully.

  And so the line-up of ‘Atlantic Moose’ was complete with Steve on bass, Julian on guitar, Joe on drums, me on vocals and ready to start rehearsals, which we did in my bedroom at 35 Gibbes Street. How we didn’t cause the hundred-year-old terrace house masonry to crumble and shatter in a domino-effect disaster right up the street I’ll never know. Perhaps our being the bottom house on the street rather than the top was what saved us. In any case we soon moved to an actual rehearsal studio just up the street at the Troy Horse Studios on King Street itself. There we found our ‘sound’ — think a cross between Wild Thing and The Pink Panther — and began to look for gigs with the rock-hallowed Sandringham Hotel only a stone’s throw up King Street in our sights.

  Our first gig, though, was at a brand-new ‘underground’ venue called ‘The Tomb’ at the bottom end of Glebe and, on its opening night, we were the first ever band to play there. Literally underground, The Tomb was inside one of the walled-in brick archways of the antique railway viaduct now used by Sydney’s inner-city ‘Light Rail’ trams as they skirt Jubilee Park and Sydney Harbour’s Black Wattle Bay.

  The Tomb was the brainchild of a redundant railways worker by the name of Mark Burns. I use his real name here as this guy, wherever he is now, deserves a serious Rock and Roll Honour: With no education or advantage in life and eking out a living on the modest income of a taxi driver, he founded and ran The Tomb (including all necessary P.A. equipment hire) at his own expense. He did so for the love of it, never taking a penny from the crowds who derived from his rocking spirit so much joy. In any case, no mo
ney could change hands and heaven help you if it did as Sydney’s venue ‘licensing police’ at the time worked for Tony Soprano. Such eccentric venues as The Tomb existed only in Melbourne where (surprise, surprise) the civic culture actively encouraged them. The Sydney licensing police must have been scratching their heads about ‘Doing-it-for-the-LOVE-of-it’ Mark Burns…

  With serious, dark brown eyes, a slightly thinning Beatle mop and only sinew on his bones, he was a bit older than us guys in the bands he championed. He loved Rock and Roll, his reward: that it reigned, and maybe a rare thank you from the young musos to whom he gave their first ever live gigs.

  Inside The Tomb it was an arched vault from floor to ceiling to floor, in pride of place at the wall’s highest point a framed black-and-white poster of Bella Lugosi, a few flashing lights, the space just big enough to ride a bicycle around inside before it filled up with people. On the verge of going on stage that first time, I was greeted by no less than a member of the Psychotic Turnbuckles dressed up as a spectral ghoul of the Rock and Roll Underworld complete with skull-face mask, skeletal hands, a Dick Turpin hat and buckled boots…

  ‘Are you prepared?’ he hissed to me with the gravitas of a theatre professional, then took to the stage, prophesying to the crowd of the rock-demonic revolution about to be born and Atlantic Moose hit it, playing our first ever song: Eric Burdon’s version of Paint It Black by the Rolling Stones and, chucka-chucka-chucka-BLAM, that crowd rocked. Thanks to Mark Burns.

  A man who didn’t have Street Cred; he WAS Street Cred. Incarnate. Period. Look up ‘Street Credibility’ in the dictionary, there’s a picture of Him with his serious eyes and shy grin.