The Revenge of the Brevilles
The Breville Snack and Sandwich Maker. If ever there was an icon of the Great Australian Bland, ‘The Breville’ was it. The toasted sandwiches they churned out were filled with either of two exotic ingredients: cheese, or baked beans, though Juliette’s mum once made one for me with tinned spaghetti (!)
The Breville. Every suburban home had one. Until, as one brilliant Aussie comic noted, the eldest boy in the family left home. Not the eldest child; it was specifically the eldest boy as suburban boys couldn’t possibly be trusted by their mothers to be able to boil water – they’d never been taught how. So, in order that they wouldn’t die from starvation, eldest sons left home for the inner suburbs armed with The Breville. Even the toasted jaffle they produced was called a ‘Breville’. Thus, The Breville migrated en masse.
In time, these eldest sons went through uni, went overseas, became mechanics, plumbers, quantity surveyors, got married, whatever, and what happened to the family Breville? They’re all still sitting on any number of inner city St Vincent De Paul shop shelves to this very day. Nobody really seems to use that ubiquitous suburban appliance of the seventies anymore. But all those Brevilles are still out there. Thousands upon thousands of them. Neglected. Rejected.
But watching … waiting … in vast, silent concentrations in the inner city. Walk past your local Vinnies tomorrow and tremble!
For The Breville never went away.
Seventies Crazes
This was the time of crazes. My first notion of such things had been manic footage of a man wearing only white sneakers running away from the spotlight of a news camera chasing him down the street in the dark. The seventies was the era of the Streaker. There was even a pop song dedicated to them and deservedly so; streaking embodied the very spirit of the permissive seventies, the decade that asked the question, ‘Why not?’
There were, however, crazes of the 1970s that begged the question, ‘Why?’
‘String art’: In the long history of Man, he has come up with many wonderful inventions, useful innovations and social improvements for the purpose of bettering his quality of life. So, exactly what Man was thinking of the day he came up with string art buggers me. Moses comes down from Mount Sinai: ‘Hey, gang, I just saw this burning bush and I brought you these Ten Commandments stone thingies. Oh, and also this. I call it “string art”.’
Objets de string art were wall ornaments constructed of fluoro cord intricately wound between nails on black velvet boards, usually in the shape of something tasteful – glow-inthe-dark Spanish galleons abounded. It was from string art that I gained my first notion of kitsch and suspect its glorious reign, however brief, as the reason why the alien life forms so crowding the skies of the 1970s never actually bothered to get in touch with us.
The skies of my childhood seemed traffic-jammed with UFOs. Everyone was seeing them. No one you actually knew, of course, but someone you knew was related to someone who had. Joe Bashir’s second cousins’ ex-neighbours in Beirut, for example. In the seventies, aliens seemed to have hit upon Earth as a tourist destination just as attractive as Australia currently is to the Japanese. Maybe it was the exchange rate? Steven Spielberg’s alien contact epic Close Encounters of the Third Kind from 1977 bears witness to our obsession, the film remaining one of the most successful of all time.
Perhaps all the extraterrestrial activity was stimulated by the high level of radio traffic between earthlings at the time; CB radios were all the rage. This stood for ‘citizen band radio’, a craze that veritably swept the planet with everybody and his dog wanting to blab over the ether. ‘Breaker, breaker, C-Q, C-Q, this is the Rubber Duck seeking any Good Buddies out there, ten-four, ten-four …’
Alien spacecraft listening in at a hover: ‘Nope. No intelligent life down there.’
‘Pet Rocks’: Yet another reason why UFOs never bothered to land. If only they had. They’d have discovered the joys of beanbags!
These were overgrown vinyl cushions that, strewn around the floor, people could ‘bliss out’ on. So called for being stuffed with polystyrene pellets, or ‘beans’, they came in many lurid colours and were ‘a gas, man’. I learnt this term from Penny La Salle, eldest daughter of my parents’ nudist friends, a girl for whom things were often also ‘far out’, or at least ‘unreal’, pronounced ‘un-rool’.
This teenager truly held court with all the younger kids around her, the reason for this being her hippy status. She smoked cigarettes (coool!) and taught me how to make the ‘peace sign’. I was in genuine awe of her and inquired as to whether ‘far out’ was actually code for ‘fuck’ or something. Through a haze of strawberry incense, she considered me sagely and said, ‘It just means “far out”, man.’
On the subject of groovy seventies home decor, I think most young people considered the work of Mike Brady, father of the Brady Bunch, as the aesthetic zenith. Ah, Mike Brady, not only the ultimate architect but interior designer extraordinaire! Take his fabulous use of brown for a start! Was Mike ever an influence. In the seventies, brown was nothing short of omnipresent. Just as in the Brady Bunch home, any really stylish Australian kitchen was usually orange and brown, presumably to balance the bathroom being in avocado and lilac. But brown was king. You may recall that on the excellent seventies TV show, Welcome Back Kotter, Mr Kotter had no less that a great big, fat, brown ‘feature stripe’ running right down the middle of his apartment! Oh, and did I mention the hip shade for Valiants was lime green?
‘Kinetic furniture’: Think vinyl lounge-chairs with handbrakes. The ‘Jason Recliner’ expanded and contracted into an infinite number of super comfortable positions, meaning now you could watch TV flat on your back. And if lounge chairs didn’t recline, they at least swivelled through 360 degrees. I’m not sure what actual benefit this provided for adults, but us kids put them to brilliant use by being madly spun around on them. Though this made watching TV almost impossible.
‘Copper art’: The less said the better. Except to say that my parents had a huge copper-embossed Spanish-Italo-Etruscan knight on horseback up on the wall. Everyone did. It seems these metallic masterpieces were the hot property one year at the annual St Mary’s Art Show.
‘Mobiles’: Not mobile phones; these were hip works of hanging sculpture, a common sight in seventies homes though now extinct. Mrs White from next door went on The Great Temptation as a contestant and brought one home as a consolation prize! How I marvelled as its silver and pink fish shifted majestically in the breeze. But better than that, this sacred object had been touched by the very hand of the beautiful Barbie Rogers!
Another recurrent craze of the seventies was yoyos. I say ‘recurrent’ as there seemed to be a brand new yoyo craze every year. Being a total un-co, I could never get mine to work though I bought a Coca-Cola one every year anyway, just to be cool. Hell, I knew how to make the peace sign, didn’t I?
This brings us to ‘the Pepsi Challenge’, one of the key dichotomies and guiding principles of my childhood. The TV ad for the campaign featured a bunch of bleached Aussie teens goofing around a table set up at the beach. Before them on the table were two unmarked plastic cups, one containing Pepsi, one Coke. ‘Take the Pepsi Challenge, man, it’s un-rool!’ I wonder why there was never a ‘Tang Challenge’ versus Fanta. Presumably as the ad would have to have concluded: ‘So, there you have it. One hundred per cent of Australian kids not only prefer Fanta to Tang but vote to leave the jar of Tang unfinished and at the back of the pantry to be discarded at such time as the house is pulled down.’
Possibly the most influential ‘craze’ of the seventies was Disco, the whole phenomenon perhaps best exemplified by that classic ‘arm in the air’ pose struck by John Travolta in the movie Saturday Night Fever. It seemed a culture in itself, its philosophy: ‘No matter your age, you will always be young if you live for tonight.’ And people could; this was narrowly pre-AIDS. The bands were excellent, their music bold, brassy, and irrepressibly funky. There was Bony M, The Silver C
onvention, KC and the Sunshine Band, Donna Summer, Isaac Hayes, Gloria Gaynor and of course Abba to name but a few. In Howard Place, Sarah White and Genevieve Guerlain had put on Abba concerts in the garage, miming to Abba songs with hairbrushes for microphones. One was blonde, one was brunette – it was perfect. Compiling a comprehensive list of the great disco bands could take all day, there were so many, though I think the Bee Gees may just rise to the top of the brilliant bunch.
But more significant than the music of disco was the format in which it was played. Disco was the first time that, worldwide, nightclubs played prerecorded music exclusively; that is, they played records instead of live music. Back in the sixties, nightclubs had been called ‘discotheques’ and would usually have a house band. The band would play their one local hit, then spend the rest of the night playing the ‘top 40’, but at least musicians were kept in work.
By the late seventies, though any major city’s live music scene may still have been vibrant, disco had put hoards of professional musicians out of a job. I was told all this by my ‘cool’ Fifth Class teacher, Mr Curtin. He used to bring his electric guitar into class all the time and play it for us, encouraging us to join him in the battle cry of his ilk: ‘Say it with me, guys, “Disco is dead! Right on! Keep music live.” Say it loud!’
Clearly, his generation viewed Disco, just like so many pop crazes they had seen, as yet another passing fad. Indeed, they were optimistic about its demise, and why wouldn’t they be? Pop crazes had always come and gone. Why would this one be any different? There was no precedent to suggest to them that Disco was the passing fad that would never go away.
To this day, people dance in nightclubs to prerecorded music. Disco never died.
Seventies Fashions!
The fashions of the Disco era were glorious. This was the era of wide lapels, platform shoes, chunky jewellery, glitter, blue and green eyeshadow, and shiny satin. Naturally, by the eighties, we would look back on seventies style with shuddering embarrassment.
Fashion is, of course, something that goes in cycles, a fact clearer than ever by the nineties and into the present decade. With clockwork regularity, we go fifties, sixties, seventies – fifties, sixties, seventies; yet, conspicuously, never eighties. At their recurrent wits’ end for something new, the fashion houses have tried to inject eighties style into the cycle, but it never catches on properly. You’d think, with twenty years’ opportunity for it to have done so, there’d by now be enough distance between us and the fashions of Perfect Match for us to re-adopt them. Mmmm … permed hair, shoulder pads and stone-wash denim!
Alas, it would seem that if the eighties was the end of anything ‘new’ fashion-wise, the seventies was the last decade to invent anything worth repeating.
As a child of the seventies, Juliette wore flared jeans, but not only in blue denim, also in orange, purple and green corduroy. She also had purple and green ponchos crocheted by an aunt. Crochet! In the seventies, a whole generation of old ladies were evidently employed in a cottage industry on the cutting edge of fashion. (So, I have to put the question, given the millions they churned out, whatever happened to all those crochet bikinis?) Juliette also wore platform cork sandals and horizontally-striped knee-high socks with individually coloured toes. Yes, at the same time as wearing paisley skirts. But my all-time favourites? Her hotpants. They don’t make ‘em like that anymore! Not in electric pink and lime green, anyway …
Being devoid of even the slightest dress sense, Dad never saw anything hilarious about his enormous sideburns, let alone anything wrong with the stretch-polyester checkered slacks that he wore. Bridget did though …
‘Gohh, Dad, not the poofter pants again!’
‘What’s wrong with them? They fit, don’t they?’
‘My friends come over just to see you wearing them!’
‘Well, there you are, then.’
Similarly, in an age before public consciousness of animal cruelty, Mum never saw anything wrong with her mink fur coat either. I thought she looked beautiful in it. As she did in her many ‘maxiskirts’ and halter-neck tops.
Farrah Fawcett: This vivacious beauty could quite possibly stand as the icon of the decade. She was, after all, Farrah Fawcett Majors and thereby married to the Six Million Dollar Man himself. Those eyes, those pearly-whites, those amazing feathery curls of hers had even me feeling like a Californian dream-queen trapped in an eleven-year-old boy’s body.
Despite the TV ads promoting Woman’s Day articles on how to achieve Farrah’s hairdo, many ‘big girls’ in Epping had long, straight hair. And when I say long, I mean hair down to the bum and below. Up at the local milk bar, to these girls my brother and John Vandermark would call out, ‘Hey, Spunky!’ Of course, they weren’t referred to as ‘girls’ at the time, they were called ‘chicks’ due to the enormous influence of Happy Days on the telly every afternoon.
My brother and John were then wearing lumber jackets, Midford shirts, grey Levis, and ‘desert boots’. The footwear here was ironically something that had been a badge of identity for the beatniks and folkies back in the early sixties. In any case, these grey suede boots were so integral to my brother’s sense of identity that I remember him absolutely begging Mum to let him wear them to high school instead of the regulation black school shoes.
‘But Mum, please! Only nerds wear black shoes. Everyone wears DBs, honest! I even bought them with my own pocket money!’
He got around Mum’s dogged refusal by walking out the door each morning in regulation shoes, a big smile on his face, then taking his desert boots out of his bag at the bus stop, wearing them all day until switching back on the bus home.
Personally, I secretly craved a pair of Bata Scouts to wear to school; they left lion paw prints in the dust and you got a free plastic compass and safari map with every pair! I wonder why I never bothered asking for them.
In summer, both my brother and I wore pale flared jeans and ‘Moove Flavoured Milk’ T-shirts, an absolute must for the self-respecting groover. I had the ‘iced coffee’ one, Pat had ‘banana’. The Moove logo was a serious pop icon at the time and said to the chicks up at the North Epping milk bar just how cool you truly were. I’m not exactly sure what the wearing of these T-shirts was supposed to ‘say’, but it sure as hell felt as if they said something.
Our jeans were quite often adorned with brightly coloured patches, a major craze at the time. Not to cover up holes, just sewn on by Mum because they looked cool. I had a red ‘stop’ sign on one knee and a green ‘go’ on the other. Besides, I was absolutely convinced they would impress the chicks up the milk bar.
‘Hey, Spunky!’ I once tried.
‘Rack off, dickless!’
Seventies Spunks
My earliest memories of my second sister are painful.
Every Sunday morning, I had to sit next to Bridget on the back seat of the Valiant all the way to church. She wore hotpants and her newly shaved legs next to mine still in shorts felt like fibreglass. (How I’d loved my first pair of what we in the seventies called ‘slacks’! Mine were powder blue with a coordinating dark blue velour jumper, my brother’s cream to match chocolate brown!)
By contrast to me, Pat and Frances, Bridget was accepted as beautiful. At age seventeen and, naturally, wagging the first day of her final year of school, she was photographed in her bikini on Manly Beach. So what if it was a Daily Mirror photographer? So what if the afternoon edition’s page three would expose her crime to Mum and Dad, Mother Superior and the whole of the metropolitan area? Bridget couldn’t care less; she didn’t have to, she got the boys. That these boys were surfies was no mean feat as surfies could only ever accept blonde chicks and Bridget was brunette!
One of these young blokes, ‘spunkrats’ as Bridget’s ilk called them, was a car spray-painter from Dundas named Dwayne. Dwayne had long, blond hair, talked real slow and had a good heart. I didn’t quite understand what Mum meant when she said the paint fumes had got to him; I liked Dwayne. He would roar up Howard Plac
e on his motorbike, saunter in wearing jeans that laced at the crotch front and back and, if Bridget wasn’t home yet, would sit down with me to share afternoon tea and watch cartoons.
One day I heard his approach, opened the door for him and installed him in front of the telly, Mum appearing with more peanut butter sandwiches.
‘Bridget won’t be long now, Dwayne,’ I offered during a commercial. ‘Nahh, it’s cool,’ let out Dwayne. ‘Oi’m just hear t’see youse, an’ y’folks. ‘Ave afternoon tea with ya, y’know … s’real noice.’
Only later did I find out Bridget had dropped him. She knew no shortage of spunkrats, unlike Frances who only ever got the geeks, and Pat certainly never had a girlfriend.
Whereas Frances, Pat and I were fairly close and hardly fought, we certainly did with Bridget, evidently a throwback to a militant aunt. I might have understood the arm’s length at which she kept us if she’d called me Justin more times than ‘Rack off’. We had a saying at the time: ‘The Sheedy family – and Bridget’. In any case, she was too busy to care. She was loved. Though I think perhaps she most loved the bathroom mirror. I could tell this as, passing the bathroom, I would see her nose up against it as she whispered to it softly.
Despite landing the spunks, Bridget was never secure in her beauty, perhaps accounting for her constant need to check it was still there. She may have inherited this insecurity from Dad’s mother, who passed away shortly before I was born. Madge had never been happy with her looks. A young woman in the 1920s, with a polio-related limp, she founded a Victorian women’s bushwalking society which thrives to this day. With little school education, she became the editor of the children’s page of a major Melbourne newspaper. When the builders saw the plans she’d drawn for her house in West Lindfield, on Sydney’s North Shore, at first they didn’t believe she wasn’t an architect. It still stands. She went to China by herself in 1928. Though she could never see what everybody found so remarkable about that.
Goodbye Crackernight Page 14
