Marty's Camera

This is the suit I wore to the formal but I'm not dressed up for that here. What I'm trying to do is take a newspaper photo of myself for my photography folio. I put a flouro desk lamp to one side (I thought it was blasting) set Dad's Pentax to its most punishing light reception, used the flash and then under exposed in the darkroom. I wanted it to look like front page news. Kind of worked.

What I'd wanted was a black OR white photo. The greyless drama of the megaflash on suit and tie always said big news to me: rock star tours, prime ministerial dismissals. Taking a photo like this (ended up trying it for days) was important to me at the time as I was doing a photography semester for Art at school and this was the only idea I'd had that was remotely signature. I was no better at expressing anything with a camera than I was with oil paint and canvas. It wasn't just a matter of skill. There was something deeper going on.

In the end with both the painting and the photography I had to admit to myself that I had nothing to say through them. The admission was a difficult one. Almost all my life to date had been recorded visually. There wasn't just Dad's photography or super-8-ing but my drawing. All my family draws well but only a few of us persisted with it beyond childhood. For me it was a way of representing the phases and days emotionally, sublimating them into scenes that covered the entire sketchpad page, even between the wire coils of the binding. Each one was a newly designed space, a walk in memory. The subject matter was usually from a European historical period (most often 18th century) but its emotional content took me straight back to the motivation for the drawing. See? Something to say and a medium. Simple.

This need went numb and left me on the way to seventeen. Once there I was concentrating more on music, having taken it up as a school subject and gained more or less continued access to my brother Greg's old electric Maton Flamingo and his 15 watt Coronet transistor amp. Add a really nifty fuzz box by Companion to that and drawing as an emotional outlet starts looking like macramé.

Still, oil paint loomed large as a possible means of lifting myself into something that might be supported by lifestyle. But it was a dead end. Without a well defined motive, my creative work suffers from impatience. Oil paint takes a long time to dry in Florence. In Townsville's constant gluey humidity it takes twice as long as that. The other thing I didn't get was colour. My chief weapon in drawing was the line. You don't have to rely on line to draw with pencil but I liked it. Not just the line but the scission of it, I left gaps where the light would forbid a clear line in real light (something I do to this day).

What this means is that not only did I have to cope with a slimy, squashy medium in oil paint but I had to learn a lot of new skills so I could suggest depth and the effects of light. I only just passed the subject at school and put my oils away, never to look at them again.

Here's why:

And then there was photography.

The one thing I discovered about photography was that if I did it well I could achieve the thing I liked about pencil drawing: I could suggest a line rather than burden a picture with too much definition. Which brings us to the picture above. That's me trying to do a pencil drawing with a camera. Here are some more.

I can't remember if I asked Jo to dance like that. Maybe I just lucked out with some unusual movement and hit the shutter. Whatever, when I saw it emerge from the whiteness of the sheet in the developer I knew I'd got something good. It might not be obvious.

Because Jo is doing something flamboyant Darren is looking down, not at her feet but away from my camera which he knows is with me on the branch of the tree overhead. He's not shy. He's cool.










Minutes later. Darren is telling Jo to ignore me but she's laughing.

I knew at the time that these were not presentation photographs. Nor were they so characterful that they transcended all the mistakes I made in taking and processing them. But to me they recorded things I knew about the people in them, their personality, their style.

To me it was something I could never achieve with pencil and paper, a kind of life drawing.






But that's the extent of it. I took a fair few more character studies of friends and also the kids who played sport on the oval at lunch time. The latter was a kind of protest against .... I'm trying to recall that but I think it was just a stand against physical culture. Well, that's what I was like. Anyway, if you look at those pictures you'll really only just see people, in the refectory, looking out of windows, or teams of them following a football in the noonday glare.

My problem is that, along with the painting (oh, dig that setup in my photo of an oil painting I was attempting:   something ironic in the portrait of an imaginary conformist, the failed clay bust and the empty half bottle of Bundy in the foreground in case you missed how bohemian I was)...along with the painting and the drawing and anything that wasn't easy like music, I had almost nothing to say. This is before you get to any of the poetry I was writing at the time, having discovered the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning and T.S. Eliot. I'll spare you that, here at least.

But the memory of it gave me Marty's key. I said below that it was "failure" and that's true but as Gail's arc has to do with her control, Marty's must be about his willingness to confront his limits. I tried a few things for this. One involved killing a baby but I don't need that much now. I already had his camera around his neck when I thought of that; a pretty clear case of ignoring the props you've already put on stage.

The year ended and I did alright in the photography semester. Those who did better had put the work in, in their presentation and by paying attention to what they needed to do to take decent photographs. After school I took a few rolls in colour but didn't even bother to have them developed. If they are still in my antiquary they are probably as sticky as ripe tamarinds.

Failed Gails

An eminent Melburnian comicist swears that cartoonists really just draw themselves over and over. They could be depicting a character of the other sex, any other species or even geologically at odds with themselves but in the end it's just them in a pebble suit or whatever. I've never bought that. Even when I have to admit to styling some instances after my own physiognomy most characters I draw don't look like me at all. 

So when it came to drawing Gail I was stumped. The other three of the central cast are all based mostly on individuals I knew (Marty, is pretty much me, for example). Not only is Gail pretty much pure invention but in creating her for the original I didn't spend as much as a syllable describing her physically. It was a thing I had about allowing the reader to do all that and avoid all that nasty paternalistic cultural imposition so beloved of the dead white male world of letters.

Anyway, when it came to shaping the central character of my story so that people would want to follow her through it and listen to her version of it, I had no idea. So I started with someone I wanted to look at.

This girl is fine. Really, she looks nice. If she had lived and walked when I was her age I would have approached her at a party without a second thought. We would have talked about something interesting until the sense that my libido was being slowly deflated beneath her great golden radiating goodness. She would listen to whatever garbled message I had about the future of punk rock and the spirit of revolution in the youth o' the day. Eventually, someone would take her  to another part of the room where people could speak in tidy snippets whose message was itself, a warming anodyne proof of their connection to the great circuit board of the world. Whereas Gail would've laughed.

Too nice.

Too nice by a holy bloody nautical kilometre.

Here she is in contrast to  her boon companion, Ruth. (Oh these aren't necessarily in the order that I drew them. Gail here has her hat and sunnies which took a while to get to her head.) Anyway, here with Ruth.

Ruth looks a lot like her real life model. Here she has made a friend who keeps the cigarette on her lip when she speaks to let you know how important you are when she speaks to you.

I remember a moment from just before I left Townsville that I used for this depiction. I was coming back from the shop and the real life Ruth and her best friend were at the lights in Ruth's white Triumph sports. 

Roof down. Sunnies on. Laughing about something I wouldn't even guess at. Holy Christ I wanted to high jump on to the seat between them like in a flavoured milk commercial and go wherever they were going. They sped off with the green light before I could call out and were gone. Last time I saw either of them. But I walked back home lighter with an idiot grin so strong that I let it have have me. The pure enlivening energy of the two girls in their freedom mobile was like a shot of something surgical and expensive.

So the attitude is all there but things are still awry. Is it the hair?

Not in this case. The sharper nose and pout are what I see here. 

The attitude is probably too harsh. Maybe it was time to take her back to an environment where she wasn't in such complete control.

Hmm. A little too far back.

She is correctly unimpressed by whatever the others are reacting to but it's probably getting a little too Daria (love Daria but it's not what I need).

Harder.

Too hard. 

I was probably thinking of someone who did present herself to the world this way. Same old story there; everyone wrote her off as an ice queen but there was a nasty history behind it.

Gail is not an oppressed juvenile, she's from privilege and comfort and control. The point of her story is to have all that challenged. If she starts too low we've all had it.

Well ... not you...

Sure. 

You could discern something acerbic in her dagwood shuffle if there was a little more dialogue or story to anchor it on. The sunnies work because no one at school wore them. The choice would have involved a kind of sardonic approach to style. 

But Gail is an alpha chick. Whatever she might be able to do to in the way of mass manipulation of scale she is still bound by the terms. There would have to be an affected target who wore the sunnies to improve his or her commerce. Attacking the cultural tide is not for leaders but for all those lesser Canutes whose best magic couldn't get them noticed.

So maybe I need at least a speech balloon.

Ok, sunnies, hat, ciggy and tanktop in place and even as much humour as I could come up with in the teabreak I spent drawing this.

I'm almost there.

This wasn't intended as a scene from the story. It really was a character sketch, in two senses (no sense in ignoring that one). It was at a time when the cataclysm at the centre of the story involved a seamonster. 

The other thing I increasingly needed to steer clear of, speaking of monsters, was Joss Whedon. I was a Buffy and Angel fan and probably would be again if I sat down in front of them. This story could easily be told in dialogue of sharp but unlikely constant wit but as with the issue of the lack of adolescent patois (mentioned below) I needed to keep the thread as clear as I could.

I think I'm trying to normalise the face of the Gail with Ruth above. It's nice and urbane but kind of  ... bimboish.

Still I found this one this afternoon and there's no other way it's going to be seen by anyone.

So, here it is.

And, apart from anything else, she needs to be able to react to the things I'm going to put in front of her.

I don't know what's happening here but I started needing to draw crises around the characters even if I hadn't planned them.

I see I couldn't sustain the sunglasses for this expression.

The bun survived a lot of alterations, even going through a kind of weird bun in back and Jennifer Anniston seagull wings in front.

But the bun makes her hair too long. No running through the scrub with strawberry golden mane flowing on behind.

Gail is still being designed but everything is settling. She has her floppy hat, sunnies, tanktop, army shorts, thongs, buxomness of scale, socially lethal frown, reputation-killing smirk but now she doesn't just keep the sunnies on all the time and isn't only ever sarcastic or superior or as snooty as everyone found her when she was just a cluster of paragraphs. She's finding it a lot easier to walk through the weather and landscape, ready to narrate this bloody story. 

Soon ....

Oh, one last thing. Very sketchy but still an idea for a scene is the following. Thought I'd pop it in here in case this is as far as it gets:

The Original

The original Monsoons was written so I could become a famous movie maker. John Huston had started his career through writing. He only had a few megatons more personal drive than I did. So ...

This was in Brisbane, in the first share house after uni. It was a good time. We didn't so much get on as get into the discovery of each other which really worked for a while. We even knew our neighbours, a trio of girls our age. It was like a sitcom.

Anyway, it was after uni and my band had disintegrated over the summer break so I had to put my mind to other things like get back into reading things other than Cahiers du cinema (not that I had been), building up my record collection to reflect a few influences I'd got back into while in the band (medieval and eastern ... should be a genre by itself). And it occurred to me that becoming a film director was a lot less probable than I wanted it to be. Even great conductors of orchestras get to their purposeful flailing through a lot of education and discipline. One way to attain the standing of a major new voice in the cinema of the late twentieth century was to start making tea and running messages on the sets of tv ads until my break came one day when the director was run over by the catering truck and I happened to be on the scene. I think I just never liked the idea of putting the hours in.

Writing stories didn't seem like work. I began by a few experimental pieces. In Requiem (I'd bought Colin Davis' recording of Mozart's) an old woman narrates her final days as though moving through the phases of the mass. In Marmalade Ghost an office worker is troubled by a flash of memory and follows it until he realises it was something he saw as the son of a concentration camp commandant (got that from Sophie's Choice). In Easy Listening, a woman tries to block out the fact of her daughter's kidnapping by absorbing the sounds around her. That kind of thing. And then they started ... changing...

I wrote a piece directly from one of my own memories, something I didn't fully grasp but felt strongly. In the memory I'm on the beach at Pallarenda, playing in the sand. My sister Anita is sitting by Mum who is reading. We're alone on the whole beach. And then we aren't. There's a man. He's black, not Aboriginal, and I remember thinking he was American. I stare at him. He nods and I go back to my sand sculpting as though a teacher or older brother has allowed me to. Suddenly Mum gets up and gathers our things and calls me over. We're going. We only just got there. She and Anita wonder loudly if Grandad Harry and the others have caught any fish. I ask them what they're talking about and they shush me. They are smiling.

Talking about it much later with Mum I learned that the stranger was more like an Islander, was dressed in meatworkers' whites (I remembered naval fatigues) and gumboots. She had been afraid. He was arrested not long after for rape.

I masked all that back to fiction, imagining a mysterious figure that the younger Marty and his friend would follow when they went to the beach. I called it after its setting: Pallarenda. (I eventually won a competition with a redraft of that story and bought a futon with the prize money: my back now thanks a beach in Townsville.) Then I read Dubliners.

Dubliners is a book of short stories by James Joyce. He links them by the setting but also by the progressive age of the characters, going from a boy wondering at an old man's death to The Dead, a story about a mature man revisiting his home town after success overseas. It's an extraordinary book and a good idea which I imposed on what became a project.

In mine (no, not called Townsvillites) I limit the common characters to a boy and a girl and go from 1971  when Gail wonders at the power of Cyclone Althea to 1979 when Marty and Gail  face approaching adulthood among friends at a holiday on Magnetic Island.

It was called The Monsoons and ended with a novella-length story of that title which also served for the title of the last chapter and the final words.

To thieve from Tolstoy: all happy households are alike but all unhappy households are unhappy in their own fashion. Not strictly true as the things that break up share houses are always the same things: love and money. As there was no love left all we had to fight about was money and so it went. I eventually moved out to a different city and when I did I took my big bursting manuscript with me and typed it out, saving future publishers the trouble of hiring a pharmacist to read it. And I sought my fortune in cooler climes.

Well, yes and no. I started frisbee-ing short stories around to any outlet I could send an envelope to and set about writing the introduction for the big book. But when I did ...

The Monsoons goes like this: Gail waits on the jetty for her boyfriend to turn up on the next boat. He doesn't. She goes back humiliated to her friends. They sympathise. Eighty pages later, after even more vaguely described adventures, it ends.

So I started redrafting. And redrafting. Between starting the project and all this rewriting I'd read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and a good third of Finnegans Wake (assisted by the exegetic bliss of Anthony Burgess) and, quite seriously considered myself a Joycean writer carrying the flame of literary innovation into the late twentieth century. So every redraft turned the pale and lean prose of the first into a mudbath that weighed more than France. If I'd chosen to be more influenced by Peter Carey (whose work I also admired) it might have been a lot easier for everyone.

Long story short the act of redrafting became an end in itself and I could go on about it for several rounds at any Fitzroy pub that would have me. Pints of Guinness and hours of stifling self promotion. Who needs to write when talking about it achieves the desired result and at a very real, local level. At some point I put it down and left it there.

Then, years later, cleaning out my studio I came across it again. I was having trouble finishing Hysteria #3 and needed something to clear my mind of its problems. I found the big bloated archfile with all the drafting and yellow typed pages of The Monsoons. I almost said aloud to this object: ok, you have one last chance -- if I don't like what I read now I'm throwing you in the bin.

Well, I didn't. The story itself was stilted and timidly told with a lead character I'd avoid in real life for sheer snootiness. But I liked the setting and some of the more fantastic elements only hinted at and started trying to draw it. That started working. For which see the previous post.

Lines against the enivronment

I'll often dither over how I want to draw a character. If they are to be the central character most of all. I drew Gail for years to my satisfaction, each time significantly different, more or less iconic here more realistic there. Characters in longer stories need to be repeatable and imaginable as though their environment (however stylised) has a third dimension. As apects of The Monsoons grew more serious the related book The Coast verged on horror the first thing I wanted to steer clear of was self conscious irony. Cute bunnies and mice hacking each other up is Jim Woodring's territory for starters. Plus, as a stand against blaringly obvious irony in all kinds of popular art I settled on making the characters more or less realistic. I needed to keep them more or less flexible as well as they had a lot of acting to do in the later chapters.

So, the more I drew Gail the more I wanted to draw something realistic but still cartoony enough. It got so I drew her differently each time and the result of all of them was a mass of incompatibility. Then I drew this:

Actually, what I drew was a pencil sketch. This is a tracing with pen and brush. It's the first sketch that gets everything right, mostly her character. She's listening to Marty ramble on about how their friends are grasping to false memories and she's about to give him a serve. At the same time she's watching her friends din past the beach in a speedboat. The noise is beating at her hangover. She's deciding if it would be cruel to  humiliate Marty, especially when he's right.

From that I got this sketch which is a flash forward to her one year on, facing something a lot nastier than she is above:

Oh, in case you're wondering why all these pictures are sketches rather than anything more finished it's because I want to keep this blog strictly about the process rather than the result. If I finish and publish we'll all have a hearty laugh of satisfaction at seeing the polished end.

Rosanna: a crush

See this?

It's a discovery from a great purge of old yellow paper that I've spent afternoons of my summer holidays eradicating. I scan what has value to what I'm doing now or anything that has a genuine documentary value. Some of it is too old and decayed for recycling and must break down in landfill. But before I handle it responsibly, I examine it for value and either set it aside to be scanned and binned or just binned.

This picture is from an old foolscap size page from an exercise pad. It's a sketch taken from a photo I took of the girl. Erring on the side of caution, I'll refer to her as Rosanna.

This has nothing to do with the repellent 80s hit by Toto but it is musically inspired. Years before I drew this a band called Sebastian Hardie released an instrumental called Rosanna. It had a simple and beautiful guitar riff which surfaced from swells of flavourless major key jazz rock. I can not only remember the riff but easily play it on any keyboard to this day, having only heard it about ten times on the radio. The band made no further impression on me but this was enough. The riff has such a cinematic ache to it that it zapped straight into my thirteen year old's central nervous system and struck me as the exact sound of longing, of love forever and devastatingly ripped from the grasp.

This sketch is more than nostalgia to me, though. It has a direct bearing on the story. First, the girl is not the model for Gail. No one is. Unlike the other three of the central quartet, Gail is pretty much all invention. Nor is this girl Meg, the spooked out relationship casualty who comes in in the third chapter. In fact this girl doesn't make any kind of appearence in the story. The relevance has to do with the character based on me, Marty.

That scrawl surrounding the visage of Rosanna is the draft of a poem I wrote in memory of her very soon after the most embarrassingly misfired declaration of love I have ever committed. New Year's Eve, 79/80. I'll get into that if I have to but first, Marty.

Martin Amis said that when he writes a character he identifies an aspect of himself and makes the character all that. What would then happen quite naturally is that the character, in having to act in some way, would need to pick up traits, knowledge and skills needed to get through the story. Marty is basically me but with some art direction, cleaner lines and a lot of motivation I didn't recognise in myself at the time.

Marty's key is failure. He tries a lot of things but has to stop trying because he's either no good at them or finds them too much like work. He sticks at two things, writing and photography. He's not particularly good at either but finds solace in both. That's the aspect of me that he is. At least that's his starting point.

I was doing ok at the time and stealing more than my share of fun. But I was and remain a poor poet. At the time I was enthusiastic about photography as well but my efforts were powerfully mediocre. The thing is that I considered myself the artist in the crew. I don't mean anything like a painter. Attempting oil on canvas was a humiliating embarrassment to me by the end of school. I got a superb and expensive set of Romney oils and paraphernalia for my birthday that year, tried a few big canvases with it which made me ashamed to be human and put the lot of it away (hoping that one of my more visually adept siblings would discover them with delight -- I think it was Mum who found them and binned them).

No, by artist I mean more that I wanted to be the one who had insights and formed quotable opinions. The type who knew how to wear a beret and drink a Manhattan while smoking something French through a long thin holder. Ok, I was thinking more beatnik but you get the idea, I meant myself to be the one who really took an experience in to save for a masterwork down the track. That, seriously, was how I perceived myself. I wouldn't have whispered a syllable of it even to an intimate but when I shaved, that's what I saw looking back.

Quick one on the Cintiq. Needed a pic

I just read that back and feel impelled to add some context. Scroll down and remind yourself of those university parties my sister and brother used to take me to. Those people I met there were genuinely stylish, had real wit that was both spontaneous and funny.  They were plugged in to politics and everything new. Their conversations were constructed from feed lines and expert ripostes. They quoted each other and staged biting satires which sold real tickets. Among them I was a cute dunce. But among my schoolie fellows I was Oscar Bloody Wilde. Well, that's Marty ... except he does a lot of failing.

So, if he plans a great photographic expose of life among teens in North Queensland or makes notes towards a novel intended to bring down governments you know how far he's going to get. And if he has a longing for a girl called Rosanna Marsden that he intends to pronounce as love on New Years Eve....

Of course he gets tested about this in a way that not even his prodigious imagination could envisage.

 

Why don't any of these teenagers say "Awesome"?

Because the only time anyone said awesome in the late 70s it was because they were awestruck. It's more than that, though and most of it has to do with a cultural shift that came much later. (I'll request here that any American readers of this post be patient; I'm really only recalling contemporary attitudes and recalling them with something like the present historical as it reads better that way.)

Gail in the pool. (Not her real line.)

We didn't say cool, either, except to comment on temperature. Cool was a daggy word in the 70s, Fonzie said it. If you did anything Fonzie did or said and you were over the age of 12 you probably also had a pet rock collection. Cool and cool talk was the previous generation's affectation. Like every generation that turns teen we needed to do it the right way.

It's like the forks, mentioned below. American culture was a big bag of dag. It was sitcoms and disaster movies. It was people being too obvious and loud. It was crassness and money and tropical shirts. It was wasteful military imposition. It was laughable anti-communism. No one cool was American. If we happened to like something or someone American (Talking Heads, The Ramones) they weren't American, they were good. There was a difference. America was The (hated and hateful) Eagles and all that west coast corporate tranquiliser music. And when it wasn't that it was yobbo garbage like KISS or mainstream drain clogger like Meatloaf or the soundtracks to Grease and Saturday Night Fever. Every new thing that came out of America felt out of touch and past it, like grandma lollies that had been bought with sixpences or shillings.

Also, Townsville was military. It had almost always been military. During World War II it was so military it had been overrun by Americans in uniform. My aunt married one and went off to the south where the hellish country music was made (unlike the feeble imitation of it we were proud to serve up locally).

They came over to visit when I was eleven. The first I saw of them was my aunt who had once been Australian. She stood arms akimbo in Nanna's living room with a big gold toothed smile (both my parents had a few gold teeth, too), hair up in a beehive. She saw us and said in a big friendly fanfare: "Well, hah, boys! How y'all doin'?" I think I'm making up the last bit but that was the impression. Venturing further into this place, running the hair tousling gauntlet, I saw a strange man at the table who looked like the then and almost eternal Queensland premier, Joh Bjelke Petersen at the table speaking American. He was telling us how he brought his own coffee and percolator with him because he was sure we didn't have them.

Anyway, looking still further I saw two kids of around my age, a boy and a girl. They were dressed and scrubbed to a museum finish, looked dazed to be there. And they were watching Andy Pandy. They were far too old for it but as was explained later they were just amazed that witnessing tv without commercials. I sat down and tried to engage them in conversation but the situation was too weird for all of us. We bartered a few mumbles a piece and let Andy do the rest.

We didn't thaw until thrown into the pool. At the moment of impact with water life crashed through and we were all kids again, splashing in a pool. My cousin Cherie called me something I can't remember but it was a friendly taunt. I remember it because it was so alien sounding. In moments like that the unity we'd all found with a little chlorinated water shattered and these new friends were transformed suddenly into beings that had broken through a tv screen into reality. It would all return to normal after a breath or to but those strange rips in reality became more frequent until it felt like the integrity of our biosphere was threatened.

One other thing separated us from childhood. As an eleven year old my swearing was quite self-consciously limited to archaisms like blazes or blasted. I'd also say things like good god or for god's sake. Cherie at one point asked (she was in the pool at the time): if you don't believe in god why are you always using his name. I said it was because he meant to little to me that he may as well have been a swear word.

Neither of us  was quite getting the meaning of profanity or atheism but the moment but there was a moment of silenec that I remember as eerie. I can't recall who else was there but I still feel a sense of unease. Her family were religious and mine was not, apart from mum, in any genuine way. I felt at the time that religion was as dead as short back and sides and needed only to drain fully from the rest of the world in time. I was wrong about a lot of things.

But my point in revisiting this is that it illustrated a fundamental difference between our cultures. At school the kids who professed any serious religion were considered freaks. America, by association, with its loony fundamentalists, eventually seemed like toddler with its finger on the nuke button.

We spoke without intercultural stock phrases. It was never stated as such but this was a way of keeping ourselves ourselves. No, so cool, awesome, dope, or whatever else that felt like bending over for the empire. We might have been the last crop that did so.

I have no problem with yerngstars around me saying comment-airy rather than comment-ree or pronouncing schedule as skedule. They can do what they like. If someone tries to correct me on anything like this they get a serve. But my seventeen year olds in The Monsoons need to sound middle class, non-American and aspirantly adult.

So there yuz farkin go.

The Title

Cane toad caviar. A monsoonal feature (no, no one eats it
and no one licks cane toads to get psychedelic either)

Townsville is in the dry tropics. For most of the year the city and environs are afflicted with a low hydration that none call drought. The winter, called so because it seems sad not to have one, is a time when the larger grassy expanses like school ovals turn yellow and knotty. What might look like a warm study by Millet of stubbled golden agriculture is really morbidly thirsty lawns. And then, when the nine month hot weather sentence yet again descends, the giant invisible sweaty palm of humidity presses down upon the coastal outpost and the stickiness returns.

So by the time I knew of it, the term the monsoons had long metamorphosed from a laconic joke to a barefaced description. It refers to the forty days and forty nights of drizzle that begins in January and continues to February, ensuring that bike tyre tread clogs to uselessness with clay and the larvae have stopped wriggling in order to launch themselves into the thick breath of the world in search of blood.

I always loved it, the pseudo flood. The grounds of the house I grew up in turned a deep overgrown green and served as any setting your imagination allowed. When I was small it was the Congo or Vietnam (a very dangerous place name in the seventies) or just some mossy undiscovered place good for taking a home made ice coffee and a book of ghost stories. In my teens it was a kind of administrative passage that included whatever Xmas brought that offered graduation towards grownupness and a time for review of the cultural turnover that would give one year its own character.

They were the monsoons, the life-wet changes. By the time I was the age of the characters in the story I'd re-appropriated the term as an ironic barb. It was again a smirking exaggeration made in accusation of the place I lived in on a charge of being un-tropical, undramatic, unexciting.

The mandatory cyclone warning tv and radio spots bolted out of the speakers with a nerve petrifying screech. I was scared of that sound. It was the ghost of a nightmare that could take to the air and freeze all human commerce. If for no better reason than the assurance that nothing can be entirely easy, the monsoons fun was sentenced to death by a thousand cuts with a sound as the execution device. It still amazes me that I was so frightened by a tiny repeated synthesised shriek. But it was so.

But change was the feeling of it. From one school year to the next, one year closer to the kind of adult sophistication so earnestly craved in adolescence, the sense of standing at the brink, of preparing to get into new things and to abandon others.

The shift from primary to high school involved the shedding of my fascination with war history and a near morbid wish to be transported back to the eighteenth century. As strong as they'd been they made no mental clamour when falling on top of the model aeroplanes and toy soldiers already in the bin. High school felt like growing up. When I got there and realised that insisting that my favourite rockstar was Mozart looked less like rugged individualism than wilful dickheadery, a few other things fell into the bin.

The monsoons in the story are the passage from comfort to the big bad world, involving reaching legal adulthood, school to university or work, living at home and moving out and for a fair few of us, being in tight little Townsville and leaving for bigger smoke; a graduating life change.

I had spent the previous two years partying a lot and studying little, thinking that as soon as I got into university I'd be able to leap into the world as a ready-made film auteur and/or rock star and/or playwright. Apart from performing well in the areas I just liked better (English, art, music) I neglected all other pursuits, some of which I'd elected only to placate the oldies. Like pretty much everything else in my privileged family environment, I effectively assumed that university could also be arranged if my marks weren't quite up to scratch. I never articulated that thought but the feeling of it was real. Still, the notion that it was pure fantasy swelled like a cyst until, beyond the point that it was fun to play with, it started hurting.

When the big yellow envelope kept failing to appear in the letter box toward the end of January and my absurd resentment over this cleared I had to admit that these monsoons were going to be a harsher change. While that resentment lingered I kept saying that I'd probably just join the army. Those who didn't find this screamingly funny were appalled and did their best to talk me out of it which, of course, had motivated it.

Their chief counter argument had to do with nonconformity and its punishment. I hadn't been bullied at school at any time but I'd witnessed it. If that had been saddening or frightening it was nothing to what a couple of regiments of yobs in uniform could achieve. All that time, I just assumed I'd join as an officer and they'd let me just walk around in a peaked cap telling other people to sweep that up or secure those ... barrack .... fittings. Well, my grandfather had been an officer why couldn't I?

That any of this was taken seriously at all had to do with the fact that Townsville houses one of the biggest army bases in Australia. They are among the first to be deployed in time of war or other action. Anyone who joined to walk around in a peaked cap would be facing the flamethrowers quick smart (even pushed to the front of the line out of sheer unbridled resentment). So the army idea faded.

My family are university goers and it was effortlessly expected of me that I too would enjoy a life on the open quad. What happened to ensure that is for another post (and maybe another blog as it is more relevant to the companion comic than this one).

Still, whatever happened in the coming year there was the rest of it to deal with. Luckily, most of that was enjoyable. A lot of parties, afternoon visits, movies (Life of Brian came out at this time) and an inter-decade New Year's Eve party. To all of those things their own posts but I'll share this last thing:

The dole seemed a good stop gap so I went to the Commonwealth Employment Service in the next block and glazed over at the job cards on the noticeboards for jackeroos, mechanics etc. This, I thought, is where everyone who does real work must come. My concept of that was a life long commitment to  a respected humility, becoming a figure appreciated but not loved who would leave a flat filled with the paraphernalia of some obscure hobby strewn on the floor beside the corpse surrounding his attacked heart.

My father hated the idea of any of us being on the dole. He referred to the old age pension as a reward for laziness and to him the dole was a crushing defeat. For me it was a way of being able to have my own income in contempt of his and a chance to capitalise on something small and emerge with some real effort as a star of terrifying and inaccessible power, a kind of undeclared arts grant.

Anyway, when I was there I saw a girl who'd dropped out of school. I can't remember her name so I'm going to call her Andrea. She was a little rough but seemed in control of her life. She asked about the kids like me who'd stayed till the end and I had nothing more than a few mumbled platitudes about how boring it was for us. Her boyfriend turned up. That's why she was there. He was probably about nineteen, dressed in that half hippy half bikie way, a downbeat mix of medieval peasant and wild west, that identified him straight away as a drug dealer. They made an ok couple. Neither affectionate nor too cool to be, they seemed to be at the point where their relations in public were unwelcomingly administrative. If one of them hasn't died in the meantime they are probably still together, their fortunes no worse or better, still functional, still exchanging one day for the next with neither thanks nor triumph.

Andrea waved a farewell with a brief smile and they went out into the glare of the afternoon. In that moment, watching their solid togetherness, their clear mutual support, I hoped to never be like that. I read a few more of the job cards but they stopped being funny and I left without making an appointment.

The Boat

Ok, look at this:

This was taken sometime in the 70s to the early 80s from the ferry on the way to Magnetic Island, where the Monsoons is set. My sister Marina sent me this photo. Between the ages of zero to twenty, I crossed the bay to the island an incalculable number of times and can never remember seeing such a thing. I would have remembered it. It would have delighted me. It  would have thrilled me so much I would have a clear and shivery memory of it now. Dolphins swimming along side the boat to my favourite place from childhood. The only thing better would have been sharks but you can't have everything. Actually, I have seen sharks in the water up north but I have never seen dolphins, ever, once. It gets worse.

This picture was offered as an aid to my imagining Magnetic Island. Not only does it depict something I have no memory of but it is taken not at but FROM something I can only remember with great difficulty, which is almost a character in the story and which it is very hard to find pictures of: the Hayles ferry!

Really? There are no pictures at all on the internet? I mean at all? Well, there are and there aren't. I can find any number of photos of a lot of different boats used to carry Townsvillites from shore to shore but most of them are pre world war one. A few are from the between war period, a further few from the late 70s. From what I can glean, the boat that would have taken me over was one of about five that served around that time or were decomissioned a little later (after they might have served other short sea routes). All of these are infuriatingly different from each other.

Still, if a drawing I do for The Monsoons can't be disproven by an internet search I'm not risking too much by taking what I can find and just making it up, am I? No. But here's the problem. It won't feel like the thing I knew.

My memory is mostly from childhood when everything was bigger and stays that way until cruel circumstance intervenes. I have a friend from my uni days who will attempt to contradict every definite statement I make. She got away with it a few times and it doesn't matter how many times the decision must be overturned by arbitration she still tries this on. All she ever does, apart from the odd occasion when she's actually right (it happens), is guess. What she tries to do is convince me that I'm guessing or under a misapprension. But the thing about the boat is that I know I'm wrong.

All I can be right about is how big the thing felt when I was a kid and then, as an adolescent like the characters in The Monsoons, how it would much smaller it would have felt. I can't even picture how big a seventeen year old (even a short one like my protagonist, Gail) would look at its rail or standing on its bow. I can't avoid having it there.

So what I'm going to have to do is draw it until it feels right and then that will be the boat: a construction that never existed but one which ought to be right.

Then I found this. It wasn't there before.

That's it.

Continue

Right, so this is me.

I'm seventeen. It's halfway through grade 12 and I'm giving the forks to the person taking the photograph (first name Sue, surname lost to me). It looks like it was taken in about 1902 but it's 1979 in the picture. Oh, the forks was what became the finger/the bird/whatever once the cultural exchange rate between Australia and the U.S. soared beyond parity and we started buying up on idioms, insults, pronunciation etc to render us virtually indistinguishable from them (I don't care that much about that - and I'm not whingeing - but I hate it when the fact of it goes unacknowledged). We used to be much more British culturally. Not even British people give the forks anymore. The finger uses less digits and so its users can allow themselves the happy sensation of winning.

Anyway....

So, I'm giving the forks to Sue who took the photo and developed and fixed it poorly so that it looks like it was taken a lot longer ago than it was. That's my school uniform. I went to a state school. My hair is probably only a few weeks away from its next stage of severity. I cut it shorter and shorter throughout that year until I eventually asked Dad to use the clippers on it and had the poste-punque short back 'n' sides known and loved throughout the following decade. Here, it's about right for a seventeen year old male in north Queensland because that's where it was taken, in Townsville, where I'm from.

I probably undid the buttons of the shirt to gain some toughness for the photo as however much we change and knuckle under when circumstances of fear, moral gravity, torment or loss grind us, photos march on as they were. Punk was only a few years old as a sensation but it had already been declared dead. That doesn't stop anyone in their teens who welcomed punk as the era's sole high point, cultural or otherwise. My copy of Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols was already well worn as this photo was being exposed. It was my most played album between 1977 and 1980, no contest. There were other punk albums and I had a few of them but none of them had that power.

Being into punk didn't mean you were tough. It meant you liked something that most people ridiculed. By extension you yourself were ridiculed along with all that rubbish you liked so much where people dressed from bins and couldn't play their instruments.

But don't get the idea that there was some big gang war over this. The majority sucked on the belches that Countdown told them to and took their music in the spirit of utility.And the majority always wins. Music was a social amenity, like alcohol, Brut 33, a driver's licence or a line that covers the lack of one. And the music of the triumphant majority was disco at a club, KISS for boys in a car without girls, Meatloaf for girls in a car without boys, and Hotel bloody California all bloody day long. The one song that everyone at school dug that wasn't from the mainstream (but that was debatable to one such as I) was the Boomtown Rats' only worldwide hit: I Don't Like Mondays.

Otherwise, if you were into punk you might as well have been into war comics and stamp collecting as far as most of the people you encountered could tell. And that was pretty much the story everywhere unless you were one of the very very few at one of the centres of it like London or Manchester. So on the one hand it was a kind of Mark of Cain by which others from the deep grey margins could distinguish you. Which brings me to the best bit of this memory...

My brother Greg was into hard rock music. He was a 1st generation Led Zep fan and played a fine loud 'lectric guitar. When I showed an interest in the latter he welcomed me in and we became as much friends as siblings. My sister Anita was going to the local uni. Those two knew a whole swag of people who, even very slightly older than I and my schoolie friends, threw the best parties in the world and who not only dug punk rock but could lecture on it or do wicked/meaty/insanely drunken deliveries on it. Going to their parties was like finding Narnia through the wardrobe: for nights at a time the whole boofheaded bullshit of school life lumbered harmlessly out in the dark. Of course the real bullshit was the university arena. What seemed so free and celebratory was only a heightened version of all the jungle-lawed warfare at school. Still, it felt a lot better and as freshfaced teens I and the few of my tribe who made it in liked what we found there.

That's why I happily had the DJ at the school formal play tracks off Never Mind the Bollocks. But that's also why no one raised an eyebrow when that happened. There was no rebellion here, just a kind of naughty-but-nice conformity that when regarded by the light of an oppressively tropical morning, looked like nothing so much as more training.

So when Sue asked to take my photo I said yes and gave her the forks.

Here begin

Hi,

I'm closing in on the writing and drawing of a graphic novel with the title The Monsoons. It has an autobiographical element to it which requires me to do some thinking both with and without nostalgia. I have little problem with nostalgia, however ill it is served by the graver commentators of our culture (it's a kind of weepy cousin at a family funeral). But I see a real value to it.

Nostalgia is memory filtered through consciousness to invoke a self-pleasing warmth. It's memory with art direction, music score and a script. What I'm about here is a kind of selective nostalgia whereby I'll pursue the feeling of a given occasion or phenomenon rather than attempt to reconstruct a stimulating fib. By this I hope to establish the kind of sensory bed to host the final draft of the novel.

I might start by nudging around a feeling and it might get a quite factually based superstructure. But there is awkwardness, pain and shame in the life of everyone by the time they are seventeen like the characters in the story. For those moments, if I dare reveal them, they will either be played from behind masks or omitted altogether. We'll see.

PJ