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.