Goodbye Crackernight

by Justin Sheedy

  The Easter Show!

  Another highlight of every year was being taken to the Royal Easter Show.

  In the seventies, the show was held at the Sydney Showgrounds, on the site of what became Fox Studios. It had evidently been put on there since the year dot as my grandmother would annually lament that ‘show bags’ had once been called ‘sample bags’ and had been handed out for free, though she’d delightedly part with her pension money to buy me some, God bless her. They were made of thick paper and brimmed with enough artificial preservative-laden goodies to keep you happily gobbling for the next week. Things like ‘Wing-Dings’, ‘Sherbet’, ‘Chokitos’, ‘Choo Choo Bars’ and ‘Sunnyboys’, which were a triangular, stickless iceblock in waxed cardboard. And all in that brief pre-pubescent window of freedom from acne.

  On my first visit to the show, Mum suggested we should see the woodchopping. This didn’t sound too exciting to me, though I went along with it, only to find it absolutely excellent. A gun went off and ten giant men went berserk with axes, luckily at giant logs, not each other. The frenzy, the noise like popcorn popping at a thousand watts, the loudspeakered voice rising with the crowd, one man drawing in front then another, the voice, the crowd, the one, the other, until one log broke and one man was Bull of the Woods! Mum had thrilled to this as a little girl and knew what a little boy might enjoy. It was lovely that she passed it on to me. My brother Patrick knew what to do also and took me on the chairlifts which carried you right from one side of the show to the other and back, spitting on the people below all the way.

  Ah, the wonderful displays, pavilion after pavilion. My senses boggled at the giant collages of fruit, the farm animals, the futuristic gadgets, even the word ‘pavilion’ seemed exotic to me! But all paled before the crowning event of the night, the Main Arena Pageant, where the Holden Precision Driving Team would astound, but not before a team of cyclists had ridden through a fiery wall of death. Yes, we’d done some pretty damned heroic things on our bikes at home, but these cats performed our ultimate fantasies right smack-bang in front of us. Their bikes weren’t even second-hand!

  One year there was a theatrical tribute to the glories of American history which, at the time, held no air at all of utter inappropriateness at the Australian Royal Easter Show. In hindsight, it was as if a public events organiser had been commissioned to devise a show for the Texas State Fair and shipped it to the wrong country by mistake.

  Another year, there was a ‘Visions of the Future’ spectacular capped off by a man flying around the arena with a jet pack on his back. A few years ago, one of my all-time favourite Australian comedians, Anthony Morgan, lamented that this tantalising technological promise had failed to deliver. He said, ‘Okay, this is the future. Now, where’s my bloody jet pack?’

  Every year, the main arena display and my annual trip to the Easter Show climaxed with what Howard Place had once produced: the fireworks.

  Not having grown up in a war zone, these were quite simply the loudest sounds that had ever entered my ears, also the biggest, brightest, most magnificent things I had ever seen. In a whistling myriad of silver and blue, the stars came down from the heavens for the evening and were exploding directly above my head. Ironically though, to me the most exhilarating sound of the whole thundering symphony was that of five thousand people all around me going, ‘Awwwhhh …!’ The sound of mass, shared wonderment, the sigh of a vast crowd of people gazing up at something marvellous, in a moment when all was right with the world.

  The year Juliette came to the show with us was memorable for her constant complaining about the smell of animal poo. Then she not only trod in a cow pat but did it in white patent leather shoes. When she said she was going to be sick at the smell, her mother took her mind off it by making her stick a Chiko Roll up under her nose. Juliette was clearly a suburban girl, not a country one. This raises the question of how a country mother might have remedied her child complaining about the smell of the Chiko Rolls (?)

  One of my favourite parts of the show involved Dale Buggins and his motorbike. Dale Buggins! Australia’s home-grown answer to Evel Knievel. Every year, Buggins would amaze us with his Main Arena performance, most memorably with his highwire act. This death-defying feat consisted of a girl in a leotard hanging from a metal frame beneath Buggins’ bike as he rode it across a wire. Then Buggins and his beautiful assistant would start to revolve around the wire, sparks flying off each of them as they went.

  Indeed, Dale Buggins’ star burned brightly for a while, then it seemed to fade and we only heard his name in the news again a few years later. Our childhood champion had committed suicide. I didn’t register the details surrounding his passing. Just that our local hero was gone. I think it’s true to say he’d personified the single archetype that we, as kids, most aspired to.

  Dale Buggins. Daredevil.

  Chapter Seven

  The Thunderbirds on a Saturday Morning!

  'Thunderbirds are go!’

  If anyone grew up in 1970s Australia and doesn’t have fond memories of The Thunderbirds, I’ve yet to meet them. All those wonderful spacecraft! Such style! Such design! Such Supermarionation! And all with a strangely exotic look. We didn’t know it at the time, but this wasn’t a seventies aesthetic; these were super-slick ‘mod’ puppets of the 1960s! I’m a lifelong fan of the comedy of Dudley Moore and Peter Cook who seem to sum up the experience best: ‘Virgil?’

  ‘What is it, Dad?’

  ‘Your strings are showing.’

  As it was on at 6 o’clock in the morning, I’d set my alarm for 5.45, guaranteeing I’d be in front of the telly on time and with a cup of tea. Of course I’d be the only one up, so, if particularly sleepy, I’d get up, watch it then go back to bed at seven.

  No wonder The Thunderbirds was so appealing to us; it was toys come to life. I only found out years later that the show’s creators came up with most of those weird and wonderful spaceships simply by taking a whole bunch of plastic model-aeroplane kits, mixing up the parts and sticking them all together. Okay, so Leonardo Da Vinci and Howard Hughes worked on some of the sticking … In fact, the show’s creators did about six other similar shows using the same technique, and puppets for all of them for the simple reason that they couldn’t afford actors. It seems that only by the time they made UFO in 1968 and Space 1999 in 1970 did they have the budget for humans in front of the camera.

  The Saturday morning fun didn’t stop there though, no fear. Then Giant Robot came on. This was a Bushido version of The Thunderbirds featuring a small Japanese boy and his special friendship with ‘Giant Robot-san’. It was really cool, the robot’s fingers were giant destructo-rockets – you get the picture – and my brother and I were mortified when the show didn’t come on at the appointed time one Saturday morning. The Phantom Agents came on instead. ‘Banzaiii!’

  Our lives were changed forever.

  The Phantom Agents featured a bunch of Japanese kids who trained as destructo-soldier-ninjas with machine guns and samurai swords, very Bushido and quite deep philosophically. Imagine the Japanese trying to win back World War Two except on TV. In fact, the show was actually based on a real-life training school for boy-ninja-agents during the war. The Ninja-star throwing fervour behind The Phantom Agents was, to us, exquisite. To the Americans, it was, I suspect, the reason they hadn’t been so keen on invading the Japanese mainland. One show, however, I had a strange aversion to: Gigantor. Retaining little visual memory of this cartoon, its theme music made a deep impression on me; it had the oddest jarring quality about it, a vocal harmony of impossibly deep bass voices all going, ‘Gigaaantorrr … Gigaaa-a-aantorrr …’ ‘Grotesque’ wasn’t quite the word for it. It just sounded, well, wrong. When my brother wanted to get his way over something, he’d run up and down the hall bellowing out the song until the point when I was prepared to agree to absolutely anything. This cartoon was another Japanese production, in Japan called Tetsujin 28-go, or Iron Man 28. Why 28?

  There was something magical
about watching those shows, so hyper-early, before the adults were awake. In the dim of the early morning rainy light and the blue of the box, the moment was divinely ‘ours’.

  The ‘blue’ of the box? We had a black-and-white TV back then, and black-and-white TVs put out an unmistakable bluish glow in a low-lit room, even though Batman proclaimed to be ‘IN COLOR!’ Our ‘set’, as TVs were called, was the same ultramodern model as featured in Ranger Headquarters on Skippy. One night, my whole family was utterly transfixed by Kung Fu, a show which had all these long, mystical, silent bits. Though the set was putting out a God-awful buzz the whole way through it, no one seemed to notice – the show was just too good.

  My brother and I also watched the World Championship Wrestling every Saturday morning. The day the tube blew on the TV, we just listened to it instead.

  That’s when it happened. Later that morning, Dad went down to Rowe Street, Eastwood, and brought home our first colour TV. It was plugged in, switched on, and it came to pass that the first colour TV image I ever saw was Freddie Mercury of Queen playing the opening piano notes to Bohemian Rhapsody on Donny Sutherland’s Sounds Unlimited program. The gleam of Mercury’s light-blue satin jumpsuit was indeed a fitting introduction to the new technology.

  Sport, Sport and More Sport

  During the winters of my childhood, Sunday nights in Howard Place meant Seven’s Big League with Rex Mossop. I know this makes me completely un-Australian, but I have always preferred darning socks to watching Rugby League. Alas, my father and brother would have pan-fried their own eyeballs rather than miss a game. Oddly, the musical theme to Seven’s Big League was the theme to Shaft by the brilliant Isaac Hayes, now the voice of ‘Chef’ on South Park. It’s a great piece of music, sure, but these days every time I hear it I involuntarily leave the room.

  Though a football-free zone, even Sunday nights over at Steve’s house were a little depressing. Sunday night meant the weekend was over, and we had to start thinking about school the next day. There was always The Leyland Brothers to watch, an excellent documentary show featuring Mike and Mal, two intrepid nerds with a knack for finding something interesting in the most boring country town, usually some yokel who glued seashells together. ‘No visit to Nowheresville would be complete without popping in to the picturesque service station. Be sure to sample the remarkable arts and crafts in the gift shop where Bert’s wife, Kay, is only too pleased to serve her celebrated tea and scones.’ We loved watching it together, but it only staved off the inevitable a short while.

  Fortunately, after the footy, Sunday nights at home also presented the choice between The Six Million Dollar Man and The Norman Gunston Show. As Norman Gunston, Garry McDonald showed 1970s Australia how culturally retarded a lot of it was, offering his international star guests a Chiko Roll or a pineapple donut dipped in lime cordial. McDonald had just come from The Aunty Jack Show, a trail-blazingly eccentric comedy series of the early seventies starring Grahame Bond as an irascible boxing-gloved transvestite. With Aunty Jack disappeared the last vestiges of the psychedelic era in Australia.

  In contrast to me, Juliette was a mad-keen footy fan, like anyone who ever came from Victoria, where Aussie Rules is more important to the population than oxygen. Having outgrown her Sleeping Beauty book, her new favourite things in the whole world were her footballs. She had two – one plastic, one leather. Whenever she got them out I’d run for cover. Pretend I wasn’t feeling well or something. She was by now obsessed with the local Rugby League as well as her native Aussie Rules and traded ‘footy cards’ in a complicated barter system with local kids as well as competing to see who had the toughest feet. Kicking the plastic ball with bare feet stung way more than kicking the leather one. In bare feet or boots, I couldn’t kick a football to save my life.

  Now, if you think that’s un-Australian, the only thing I find less interesting than Rugby League is the bloody cricket. My lifelong recurring nightmare is being stuck in Howard Place with forty degree heat in the shade and cricket on every channel.

  Another odd choice of music, the signature theme to the Channel 9 cricket was the theme to an early seventies Australian cop show called Bluey. You may have seen this show hilariously overdubbed by Tony Martin and The D-Generation team under the title of Barge Arse, some of my favourite comedy ever.

  Aussie Cop Shows!

  This was the seventies, the golden age of cop shows requiring only one title to stand up, with wonderful Australian productions like Matlock Police, Division 4, Homicide, and many others, and each show with a killer theme song. As they were all filmed in Melbourne, half the thrill of riding down the alleyways of Prahran with Juliette had been the promise they held that, around any corner, you might bump into Homicide’s Leonard Teale or George Mallaby in hot pursuit of a baddie! The Homicide theme was too hard for me to hum as I peddled, but the Division 4 one sure wasn’t: ‘Dah-da-dahh … Dah-da-dahh …’

  Can you honestly hum the themes to any current cop shows? Ever since Hill Street Blues, instead of theme music, they’ve had insipid Kenny G saxophone wailings instead.

  Elevator music!

  Cop shows back then were about cops and baddies, not cops and their intensely soulful and searching interpersonal relationship crap. And these days, the shows of my childhood would need to have two titles instead of one each, wouldn’t they: Matlock Police – Special Victims Unit. Division 4 – Murderous Intent. Homicide – Life on the Streets. Hey, hold on, there is one called that … And they’d all feature acronyms, wouldn’t they: Matlock Police – SVU. D4 – MI. Homicide – LOTS. Sometimes I wish the current nightly American tripefests would feature their complete scripts in acronym format. They’d be much slicker and over much quicker that way. By the time the opening credits were finished, so would be the program. As it is, the opening credits to Law and Order or CSI only last half the length of the show. If you didn’t understand English, you’d think they were subtitles for the hearing impaired. Better still, I say speed up these American low-lit bumpy-cam pieces of shit into fast motion. Imagine! Tonight at 8.30: The Keystone Cops – Frenzy of Forensics! Program starts. Over in three minutes. Phew. Perhaps, in my lifetime, with the pace of technology being what it is, the speed of light will have been attained and these shows will be over before they have started.

  The Midday Movie

  nother keystone of my childhood, and lifeboat of my school holidays sanity, was the midday movie. I was saved from misery unspeakable – the cricket – by Bill Collins’ Golden Years of Hollywood. I adored his presentation of the midday movie as, firstly, I seem to have been born fascinated by classic movies (Mum must have watched one every day she was pregnant with me), and secondly, Collins was so insightful in his comments on them, providing a true education in film.

  It was during one of these middays that Frances explained to me the trial scene of To Kill a Mockingbird and the significance of the rabid dog throughout the rest of the film. Films such as this, Wake In Fright, The Admirable Crichton and many others were a major influence on my childhood development. Even at the time, I knew they were building something within me, something I would much later call ‘societal awareness’.

  Incidentally, a ‘period’ feature of these classic films was that women in them used fans. Not electric ones, but the handheld type with which they manually fanned air on themselves. Well, it seems my childhood was such a long time ago that my grandmother and her ilk were still using them. Indeed, it was such a long time ago that people actually used to clap at the ends of pictures at the cinema, and not just on a film’s opening night but every time.

  Summer Feet

  When I wasn’t watching the midday movie, for me and Steve school holidays meant ‘Summer Feet’. These were what we got when we didn’t wear shoes over the whole of summer and built a tough layer of skin on the soles of our feet.

  In Summer Feet I could walk across a hot asphalt road and not get burnt, run around in the bush barefoot or impress Genevieve Guerlain by jumping up and down on
our gravel driveway and only wincing a little bit.

  It was in Summer Feet that I gained my first notion of ‘personal liberty’. Granted, I’d already had my Afternoon Tea Epiphany. Time was now a precious thing to me and Cartoon Corner symbolised an hour of sacred personal freedom every afternoon. But summer school holidays meant a giant, six-week block of this freedom, a freedom rendered all the more precious to me for the fact that poor Juliette was denied it; her father used to devise school holiday homework for her. The bastard! Here, I’d love to say, ‘Yes, I had my revenge on Juliette from time to time,’ but cannot as I pitied her on this point, and bitterly so. I could not understand how she could possibly bear it, for Juliette’s holidays constituted my own idea of personal hell: deprivation of that most integral of all personal freedoms – freedom from school.

  I did enjoy early school, but while there, I felt weighed down by a sense of my time never quite being ‘my own’. For at the heart of the experience lay one great big essential negative: it was compulsory. As was every single aspect of its regime: Go to bed at a certain time, get up at a certain time, instead of play-clothes put on a uniform and shoes that gave you blisters. Don’t be late, don’t miss the bus, don’t miss the bell, don’t talk, put your hand up, speak when spoken to, walk don’t run, do your homework and do this day after day after day. I would have gone mad without time-out from such a routine. Okay, so Juliette was up to the holiday homework, her father recognised the fact, and it probably did her no end of good academically. I, personally, would have left home.