Press Escape

by Shaun Carney

  The next panel, running across the bottom of page seven, shows a view of Earth from space, with a multitude of people streaming, as if fired from a gigantic water pistol, from the east coast of North America (where else?) to some undisclosed otherworldly place. The caption—contained inside an explanatory box at the top of the panel—reads: ‘THEN, AT A GESTURE FROM THE MONARCH OF ASGARD’S HAND, THE VERY FABRIC OF TIME ITSELF STANDS STILL, AS THE ENTIRE HUMAN RACE, UNDER AN IRRESISTIBLE SPELL, IS INSTANTLY TRANSPORTED TO A DIMENSION BEYOND THE KEN OF THE HUMAN MIND!’

  Reading this reset my life. There was the time before, when there was colour in words, and the rest of my life, when the colours would always seem vastly more vivid and full of infinite possibilities. That caption is a single sentence. It is not a perfect sentence. The first word is redundant. There is no need for the third comma. Perhaps ‘instantly’ is unnecessary, although it does add a sense of speed. The sentence is soaked in melodrama. At forty words, it is long—too long for newspapers, for sure, with too many clauses. Despite its imperfections, it transported me as quickly and effectively as Odin transported the human race. I must have read it hundreds of times by now but it has never seemed too long, not for what it conveyed. It contains four commas, which separate the sentence’s five elements. There is the initial gesture, then the thing that is being transformed (time itself—pretty ambitious), then humanity in its entirety, then the manner in which humanity is being controlled, and finally humanity’s transportation. And it is being transported to where? This is where the yarn-spinner’s most obvious but often most effective trick is parlayed: he can’t tell you, because you are not capable of comprehending such a place. You see, it is beyond ‘the ken’ of the human mind. That’s how big it is.

  If you can sell such things to readers, get them to subscribe fully to such a preposterous series of suggestions, then most of your work is done. People want to believe. They especially want to believe in powers much greater than theirs and places that are unfathomable, so far-flung and magnificent that they are beyond their imagining. How else, for example, do we explain religion? And I was to learn that there was something biblical about a good deal of the storytelling in the Marvel comics in the genre’s so-called Silver Age of the 1960s. It was all about grand struggles and men—pretty much always men—having to draw on some inner strength to overcome the weaknesses of their own personalities, their self-doubt or their arrogance or tendency towards self-pity. This was particularly evident in the work of writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby, who were responsible for this Thor story, with that caption that affected me so profoundly. Kirby had what appeared to be a limitless imagination. He didn’t just draw, he invented the characters, and came up with the plots and bits of dialogue. If it’s possible for there to be a genius in superhero comic books, Kirby was it. Lee was as much a huckster as a writer but there was an aspirational overtone—he never worked in undertones—to everything he did. For all of the brilliance of the artwork in the Marvel comics that I consumed, I bought them for the words and the way that they drove stories and played on emotions, and hammered on the themes of courage and motivation. If not for my exposure to that story, would I have led the life I’ve led? I cannot say for sure. What I do know is that nothing else I have ever read has hit me with such a jolt and made me comprehend the potential that exists inside words when they are selected and arranged in just the right way.

  _______________

  Thus began two years of devotion to Marvel comics, rounding off my childhood and delivering me to the cusp of adolescence. Some people get into comics and never come out. They keep buying them and follow the characters through the fake deaths, real deaths, reboots, changes of artist, alternate versions, disposals of alter egos, line-up changes. They go to comics conventions and form the basis of the characters in the TV show The Big Bang Theory. They care about the contemporary film versions of these characters. I was never going to be like that. I enjoyed these comics, took what they had to give me—a far deeper understanding of the impact of direct, colloquial expression, especially when it’s delivered in a conversational style—and when I hit twelve I stopped reading them and moved on to the next thing.

  That next thing was the other interest I developed in my Freedom Summer of 1967–68: rock music. My Aunty Molly not only inadvertently steered me towards the power of words through the Wham! Annual, she planted the seeds of my abiding devotion to popular music—the other great influence on my writing and my life in journalism. This was not because she was a pop music fan but because she sent her son, my nineteen-year old cousin Kevin, to stay with us. Kevin had much more of the Irish fun-loving gene that dominated my father than I possessed. He drove a black Volkswagen Beetle, smoked and enjoyed meeting ‘birds’. He’d been educated by the Christian Brothers at Parade College in East Melbourne and was a junior salesman with the Swedish home appliance company Electrolux. Kevin was tall and broad-shouldered, with strong features. He’d been a handy footballer and had been a regular in Collingwood’s under-nineteen side. He even played a couple of games with the club’s reserves side. In his playing days he was friendly with Collingwood’s Graeme ‘Jerker’ Jenkin, whose place in Australian football history is guaranteed by his involvement in the legendary mark taken by Carlton’s Alex Jesaulenko in the 1970 grand final. Jesaulenko used Jenkin’s back to rise to the heavens and seize the ball, which prompted TV commentator Mike Williamson to shout, ‘Jesaulenko, you beauty!’ during his call. Kevin would arrive at our house on a Saturday morning, drop his bag and take off for the beach at Mount Eliza just south of Frankston, where he would go skindiving and try to catch fish with a spear gun. Then he’d return to our place, have a shower, throw on a bit of Old Spice and tip an extra shake of Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder into his new-fangled coloured Jockey briefs, and head off into Frankston to attend a dance where he would ‘chat up’ the ‘birds’. After sleeping off a bit of a hangover on our couch the next morning caused by one too many Brandy Crustas, he would come to our little kitchen table, with its pink laminate top and wooden legs painted in a white gloss, and tell us of the goings-on of the previous night. He would then head down to our local beach and often take me, along with his transistor radio.

  Kevin’s favourites were the two stations every Melburnian under twenty-one tuned into: 3UZ, home to the king of pop broadcasters Stan Rofe; and 3AK, which branded its disc jockeys ‘the Good Guys’. Both were the city’s Top 40 stations. The programming format was straightforward, playing the forty bestselling singles on rotation, interspersed by the occasional hit from the past three or four years and some groovy banter from the DJs. Each week, three or four singles on the list would fall out, replaced by new tracks. For the first time, I heard the soundtrack of the psychedelic 1960s. Every song seemed good. ‘Summer Rain’ by Johnny Rivers. ‘The Letter’ by The Box Tops. A version of Joe South’s ‘Hush’ by Somebody’s Image from Melbourne, with Russell Morris on vocals. ‘Sunshine and I Feel Fine’ by the Ram Jam Big Band. The Beatles’ ‘Hello, Goodbye’. The Monkees’ tale of a party thrown for them by The Beatles (‘the four kings of EMI’) in London, ‘Randy Scouse Git’. Nancy Sinatra’s sinuous, reverb-soaked Bond theme, ‘You Only Live Twice’. ‘In and Out of Love’ by Diana Ross and the Supremes, the first Motown track I really listened to for its propulsive rhythm, powered first by congas and then drums mixed upfront, all driven by excited, perambulating basswork. My favourite, the Small Faces’ story about an LSD-soaked visit to a local meadow, ‘Itchycoo Park’, full of whooshing, phased drums and Steve Marriott’s soulful vocals. Every song sounded full of light and hopefulness. They were ebullient and joyful, not restrained and self-consciously adult like the pop songs that my mother’s station 3DB tended to play. Again, I was being put in touch with a new realm of expression, a place where thoughts and emotions could be combined to take the listener to somewhere unexpected. These songs are old now, pieces of audio furniture that we take for granted and hear as wallpaper on Hits and Memories radio,
with an emphasis on the ‘memories’ part. But then they were the newest of the new and little bit by little bit broke new ground in popular entertainment. I had no older brother or sister to steer me in any musical direction, so Kevin’s accidental introduction to the Top 40 in a very good year had a big effect.

  In the same way you could hope an appreciation of fine literature might develop from a love of comics, I would like to be able to report that in the coming year or so this led me to the Doors, Led Zeppelin, Neil Young and other acts with high credibility, but it did not. Instead I chose bubblegum. In 1968, the Monkees toured Australia just as my parents shelled out for a nifty portable stereo from Brashs—they’d decided that it was time they bought some records—and I judged that as a fan of their not-very-funny but highly kinetic TV show, I should buy their first single ‘Last Train to Clarksville’ as my first single. Over the following eighteen months, through my own purchases and via Christmas and birthday gifts, I managed to amass five albums and eleven singles, all by the Monkees. I became a Monkees completist before I segued to The Beatles, just as they broke up upon the release of Abbey Road. And then I became a Beatles obsessive. But more lastingly, I changed my reading material, ditching the comics and taking up music magazines. The weekly Melbourne pop magazine Go-Set was a must. It bought in material from the English music mags Melody Maker and New Musical Express, and on a few occasions the most storied American rock title Rolling Stone. And it had its own reporters, a columnist called Ian Meldrum and album reviews by Ed Nimmervoll, a former architecture student who really tried to grapple with what the artists were trying to achieve. This was sophisticated stuff as far as I was concerned, treating the music seriously. I had resisted the temptation to become a comics nerd but I could not fight against the lure of being a music nerd. This led to a period in my subsequent, formative years in which I subscribed heavily to the emotion-free prog-rock noodlings of Yes and Genesis for far too long, and spent many, many hours in my bedroom working out how to play their songs, including some truly ridiculous guitar runs. But I adhere to the view that it is not the stumble but how you pick yourself up that matters.

  9

  I WANT TO BE A REPORTER

  THE PINES HOUSING estate in Frankston North was only two kilometres away from my home, but prior to catching the bus there on my first day as a high school student I had never been there. The estate was so named because it was on the site of a former Victorian government pine plantation, established to supply various arms of the state with timber. The plantation was decommissioned in the mid-1950s and in its place rose a large public housing estate, created to provide homes chiefly for the thousands of UK families that were migrating to Melbourne to work in its factories. In 1966, the estate’s own secondary school, Monterey High, named after a type of pine, took its first students. My time there began in 1969. Then, there was no choice for parents and students when it came to the state schools they would attend. I lived in Monterey’s zone and that was that. Nor was there any burning desire to send children to non-government schools. From my Grade Six class, only one boy went to a private school, Peninsula School in Mount Eliza, on a scholarship. To say that I found the Pines a culture shock would be to understate its effect. My local neighbourhood, separated from the Pines by the railway line, the bypass road and the main road to Dandenong, was almost exclusively Australian-born, Anglo-Celtic and beach-loving. Its inhabitants were football-obsessed almost without exception. The Pines, by contrast, was a social jumble, and the feeling at the school was of discomfort and mild unhappiness. Half of the kids in my Form One class hated living in Australia and pined, if you will excuse the unintentional pun, for the places they had left in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. To them, football was the round ball stuff, the beach meant nothing and this awful country that their parents had taken them to was a cultural desert. What I found frustrating when I got into discussions with them at lunchtimes, as I chewed through the starchy fig jam sandwiches that my mother liked to pack for me, was that on this last point they were possibly right.

  The community supplying the student cohort was relentlessly working class and overwhelmingly blue collar. Barely a student in my Form One intake of 120 boys and girls would have had a parent with a tertiary qualification. Hardly any of us came from homes in which the previous generation had even matriculated. The housing in the Pines was standard state-owned domestic building stock: basic, unadorned, with bare landscaping and wire mesh fencing. But it was new and clean and the families in the homes were intact. The school, also being new, did not have a history of failure or success. It was strictly run, with tight rules governing the wearing of uniforms. In a series of boys’ assemblies—as well as a general assembly every Monday, there were also boys’ and girls’ assemblies each week, and I always wondered if the girls had a more interesting time at theirs than I had at ours—early in my time at Monterey, the deputy principal harangued the boys for wearing coloured t-shirts underneath their school shirts. These colours are visible just below the neck! For God’s sake, if you wear t-shirts under a shirt, you’ll stink! Wear singlets! Haven’t you got singlets? What’s wrong with you? As for your hair, it can’t grow over your collar. We’ll tell you if you need to get a haircut and by golly we’ll be checking on you on the following Monday morning! This teacher was a competent educator—later I played football with his son, a gentle, unassuming kid—but because he had a slightly twisted mouth and prominent teeth, the boys referred to him as Dog. It was a tough, unforgiving environment built on the imposition of discipline from above, a vestige of a more formal education system and a more structured and self-conscious society—a society where even young people knew and understood their place and obeyed the rules. But it was not to last. Inside the six years that I attended high school I saw that paradigm, which had operated for most of the twentieth century, crumble away quickly. By the time I left Monterey at the end of 1974, the uniform rules were mere guidelines, students spoke to teachers in a much less formal way and 90 per cent of the boys had haircuts that would have easily qualified them to join Mott the Hoople or The Sweet.