Fibula now started!

Now see here!  Part 1. Snow Fall  Wanna picture? Click the link!

Now that this is on track I'm free again to pursue The Monsoons. It's been a big wait for me but one good thing to emerge from it is that it now feels quite natural to use the Cintiq for original work and that I'll be starting in on those ol' northern landscapes in a few weeks when the annual leave that my injury prolonged starts.

Thanks to everyone who has wished well or just been patient. It's happening .... again ;)

Peter Jetnikoff

Sojourn

Had a few queries about this blog and its raison d'etre. Still on it in theory but read on...

I broke my left fibula on Bastille Day 2012. This gave me about two months of time spent confined to my home. Wow! All that time for working on the Monsoons! You'd finish it. But, no, a lot of the time was spent managing pain and learning how to do things that I used to take for granted (like getting a hot drink from one room to another, showering, cooking etc etc). Every time I tried to think of and develop The Monsoons I mentally looked the other way. How to get out of this?

I began by noticing that, while I was telling people what had happened to me I was applying a formal narrative structure to it. Next stop, I started to draw some sequences and before I knew it I had the makings of a comic. This will be called FIBULA and I'm putting it on another blog. If I can find an elegant and user friendly way of reading this better than the one I am imagining I'll do it. Meantime, keep your eye on this space and this one as well. The closer I am to finishing this the sooner I get back to this. Thank you, thank you for your kind attention.

Soundtrack album

 I said in an earlier post that I didn't want a soundtrack associated with this project because it would distract from the story. I did make up a cd with the following tracks and drew scenes from the story as the cover art and I'd put it on while I was getting the studio ready for work. But like pencil, ink, paper and sable brushes, I eventually abandoned the cd. I use a Cintiq tablet and listen to anything from my entire record collection, reformatted as flacs on the laptop attached to the Cintiq.

Anyway, I've been getting requests to at least know what was on the playlist. Well, I dug the cd out and had a look at it and put it on and just enjoyed the hits 'n' memories. One caveat (at least about my motivation here) is that I remember the year on radio as being, like any other year on radio, mostly indigestible garbage but that the good bits were really good. They do still write 'em like this and not just to copy them ...  it just doesn't happen all in one year anymore. Anyway the songs .. with a few cd extras as I think of them:
 

Please Don't Go - K.C. and the Sunshine Band:I knew plenty of people who said they didn't like this big spacey love song and all of them were liars. In that sense it was the late 70s' More Than a Feeling.

Cars - Gary Numan:Ice cold proto-synth pop showed the way of the near future. I heard huge torchlight rallies in this that Gazza never intended. In 1979 the vid was also very future-now.

Egyptian Reggae - Jothanon Richman and the Modern Lovers:Simple guitar figure instrumental that no one would get away with now.

Olivers Army - Elvis Costello and the Attractions: Elvis Costello had already been dazzling with a number of short and deadly singles that had sharp and spiky videos to go with them. Oliver's Army had a kind of nouveau nostalgia look and sound which was instantly appealing but also still very sneery. First artist whose lyrics I cared about (and then only made out about half the words)

Uncontrollable Urge - Devo:Nervy energy and pointy rock music and one of the best call and response choruses ever.

The Banana Splits - The Dickies:Best version ever. From the look and sound I was flabbergasted to find out they were American

R U Receiving Me? - XTC:Gnu wave that even my older brother liked. Great vid!

I Need to Know - Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers:Great forceful rock song where the indecipherable verse is there for the modal tune and the bulk of the song is in the chorus.

Pop Muzik - M:First white rap song? First international hit rap song? The term wasn't in the parlance until a few years later. I just took this as a kind of talking blues. Sounds like a toned down Fall to me now. You could NOT go to anyone's party in the late stages of 1979 without hearing this played about seventy-two times.

Girls Talk - Dave Edmunds: Irresistable and superior remake of Elvis Costello song with cinematic vid.

Who Killed Bambi - The Sex Pistols: Two ex Pistols albums came out in 78/79: the first PIL album and the ragtag soundtrack to The Great Rock n Roll Swindle. At first I preferred the latter to the former but PIL started making friends with me soon enough. This track, the final one on GRRS, followed me around for weeks.

CD extras:

I Say When- Lene Lovich: Odd mix of 50's rock and new wave flash.

Shadow Boxer - The Angels: I had almost finished my imaginary band's concept album (a rip off of the idea of Lou Reed's Berlin) with a big heavy buzzsaw guitar anthem called Depression. That was on a Sunday afternoon. I went over to my brother's place and played it to him. He loved it. Then we saw The Angels do it on Countdown that evening. Well, I didn't have their middle 8.

Birdsong - Lene Lovich: Video and song were a perfect match of horror movie atmosphere. This would soon be known as goth.

I Don't Like Mondays - The Boomtown Rats: No one who went to school at the time felt anything but love for this song.

Influenca: Jonestown, Kabul, London Munich, Everybody talk about Pop Musik

 

I remember hearing the reports back from the horrors of the People's Temple mass suicide. Some I saw on tv but most poignantly I remember hearing the reports from the morning news in Dad's car as he drove me to school. The ABC voice, clipped and authortitative, a voice dressed in pinstripes, was like the sound of history to me. No one talks on the radio like that anymore. It would sound affected and fake. On those mornings, as that voice delivered fresh details the same way and time we got the morning bread and milk, I learned piece by piece about something that sounded like it was done by time travellers.

918 men, women and children died at a thing called the People's Temple run by someone with the roll call name of Jim Jones. Almost all of these deaths were suicides. The guy with the plain Jane name got them to do it. The developing picture revealed some mighty stresses placed upon the colony (which enlightened me on the existance and position of Guyana) and offered some motivation for Jones's command. But the thing missing, the shivery little whisper I heard whenever I heard anything about this event was why all those people killed themselves because they were asked nicely.

I knew of forced labour camps and worse where the victims outnumbered the guards but while saddened by it I had no real trouble understanding that no one among the victims wanted to step forward and be the next one shot. But this was different. People were poisoning their children and it wasn't just because they were afraid of being shot.

You can google the facts yourself and read it all but I'm posting about it here because in 1978 I, as a teen who considered himself cynical and worldly was terrified by it. I wasn't scared that 918 zombies would rise from their jungle graves and invade Australia. I was scared that such a thing could happen in the name of religion in that day and age. It was as though the population of medieval Paris had travelled through time and found itself surrounded by Saracens. It belonged to fiction yet the smell of the putresence of the corpses seem to waft from each new report.

At home, late 70s Townsville, this kind of thing was inconceivable. There were Mormons in white short sleeves and ties but they were jokes that no one let past the flyscreen. Anyone displaying more than an inherited reflex action religiosity was treated with suspicion as a possible fanatic. If it was too hot for sport it was too hot for that old fairy tale. The only church goer in my family, and an infrequent one at that, was my Mum. I never questioned her about her persistent faith because I just wasn't interested.

My point is that religion seemed old fashioned and quaint, like a bakelite radio with long passed stations identified on its dial. And over the waves somewhere with a name that sounded like it was somewhere else, almost a thousand people had killed themselves and their children for beliefs I thought were on the verge of extinction. That genuinely frightened me. It reminded me of the stories I heard of one apocalyptic branch of one of the many cults of Christianity who allegedly sold everything they had and waited on the sand of the sea on a particular day to be swept up by god. You were meant to find that story funny. I didn't. It made me think of Hitler and Stalin and Red China. It made me think of the fictional horror stories I used to read against my own advice.

But it got worse. The Shah of Iran was deposed after months of stormy civil unrest and mass action that exploded into revolution. The result? The modernising monarchy (not pure as the driven snow, mind you) lay in shards and discarded wrappers in the gutters while the country hurtled back toward the dark ages. Why? Religion. Violent religion. Great monolithic nightmare religion as creepy as the Jonestown flavour exploding like a squid's sperm sac over the land, lodging into the spinal cords of a people who had been well on the way to the kind of intellectual tolerance I had taken for granted where I was all my life. Well, at least it wasn't more oafish political hegemony. Vietnam has taught the whole world a thing or two.




December 1979, the Soviet army rolls into Afghanistan (admittedly at the resquest of the Afghan government). They will be there for ten years, brutal, ineffective and hated. Good thing we had that lesson otherwise it would only happen again.

The Apocalypse was around the corner and everything was going backwards. The seventeen year olds in The Monsoons are about to step up to their legal adulthood and greet a world that will not seem worth fighting for. Same as their real life counterparts. You didn't have to hang around uni students like I did to feel any of this, it was there in every news report. The default assumption was that we were among the last of the human race. This went unspoken but was a shared feeling.

It was remembering this feeling that gave me the middle act of The Monsoons. It's a kind of apocalypse by neglect, as though humanity cared so little for itself that it would bilthely vanish overnight. I felt anger over this but also resignation. I wished for the death of every ideologue and religious leader on the face of the earth and death to all who would take their places, wishing as agonisingly as for that one still-warm smile from an early ex girlfriend. And of course the more I wanted it the more remote it became.

We knew we would be heading into study or jobs. And then there was the strain of us that smiled knowingly and headed to the margins to live out whatever fell upon us. Those were our first careerists, the eco farmers, self-taught and self-sufficent connoisseurs of THC, the ones who dressed low but lived high while we shook hands with the Society Men of the Sunshine State. Want to see the end of the world? Watch it from the penthouse. Well, not quite but by comparision that's how it would have looked regardless of how alt we were with our George Orwell haircuts and op shop suits.

And, of course, it didn't happen. Everything just went on, including all the political tension, military action. The religion ebbed (but of course would flow freely a couple of decades later). And we just handed our assignments in or drew our pay.

But on the brink of all of that, the electoral roll, r-rated movies, drinking and hedonism that didn't have to be stolen, we didn't know it was just going to drone on. We thought we were going to inherit a cinderblock. We sang with M:

"Fix me a molotov, I'm on the hitline."

Influenca: Contamination Grey of the Old UK

Something is happening. A small girl with a face made of marzipan and a thick straight fringe interrupts her piano practice by playing some note perfect Rachmaninov with a stare that could pierce reinforced concrete. Her mother rushes into the room just in time for the cherub to instantly resume clunking through The Ash Grove. Everything is normal but the sweet little dear's expressionless face looks knowingly into the middle distance as she nods. Outside the cloud cover seems eternal. Even when the sun shines it feels like its filtered through mist. The soundtrack beyond the dialogue and all the foley work and fx library stock, is a thickly layered synthesiser wash, sweeping from one huge melancholy chord to the next. It never quite fits in. It never just sits under the action like a normal orchestral score does. You always notice it. It pulses with alien energy and the kind of crushing sadness that everyone is familiar with from facing an unpleasant inevitability. Overhead the clouds move so slowly it's barely noticeable. Something is always happening and it's almost never good.

As a child I was fascinated by the apparently endless supply of intriguing and often unsettling young audience tv that came from Britain. Production values were so low by today's standards that they are due for an ironic revival after everyone gets sick of the found footage boogaloo. But this only added to the atmosphere. There was a place in the white noise that found a foothold in the broadcast channels and invaded fullscale around the May and August holidays that was forever cold, grey and worrying. Even the advent of colour in the mid 70s (my family were and are early adopters of tech) did nothing to warm this chill. Here the troubles of the daily round weren't fighting over whose turn it was to take the bins out but how to stop the bins from communicating invasion schedules to the lawnmower. No one cared about the rained-on look as their imaginations were too busy coping with the ideas. And whoever wrote these six part torments for children knew about imagination and all its many uses.

British TV is not like this anymore. Some of the comedy is easily on par with the classic stuff but the weird fascinating sci-fi that could give you massive symphonic nightmares just before dawn has gone. Dr Who offers occasional glimpses of it (its spinoff, Torchwood offers more) and the occasional triumph like Life on Mars (which significantly harks back to the 70s I longingly evoked above) comes out but it's not the norm. There is still good writing and the performances of UK casts seems to be of a superhumanly high standard. But the things over your shoulder, the elemental spirits or radiant boys from distant star systems, have all blown away.

Maybe they should have. Things should change. But the feeling never has too. My favourite John Carpenter film Prince of Darkness is one that even his fans find a little too goofy but for me it's J.C.'s love letter to that vintage  Brit sci-fi/horror. He even wrote it under the pseudonym Martin Quatermass after the scientist hero of one of the UK Tv's golden era mindblowers, Nigel Kneale. And it plays out like a Kneale story with a cavalry charge of ideas storming into the viewer's imagination at a gallop. And, despite its Californian setting it seems as grey and icy as a Yorkshire moor.

I've forgotten the plots and most of the titles of these but the atmosphere remains, forever a mix of homely tidiness and offscreen disorder all seen through the gluey haze of old video. The icy synthesiser score shimmered on. To this day if I find myself outside on a cold and overcast day I look around and almost expect to see something, just a detail, out of sorts, a speck of chaos in the order, on the road or the footpath, something wrong.

Beyond all of this rainy day press there is a silent clarity where, like the urgent crushing universe a reach away from the stratosphere, there is only silence and non-being, neither god nor intergalactic alien, just the silence of nothing.

This is what I feel in every frame of The Monsoons where there is more white than line.

Influenca: CLANCY OF THE OVERBLOW

I loved Clancy.

I still do.

So, I'll say it that way.

I love Clancy.

When I say Clancy, I don't mean Liza Goddard.

This is Liza Goddard. She got the Skippy gig when her family moved o'er from the UK in the sixties. She moved back after Skippy and had a respectable acting career in Blighty. By that time this is what she thought of Skippy. I hope she now lives a happy life as a nanna growing cumquats and roses in a cottage garden in ..... Surrey. But I wasn't talking about her. She's a real person. Clancy is better than that; she's an imaginary one.

Skippy was finished already on a loop when I first saw it. See also Get Smart, Gilligan's Island, Lost in Space and my favourite, The Bucaneers. But Skippy was ours, looked and sounded like us.

I can't remember how old I was when I was dispatched with a handful of siblings and cousins to see Skippy and the Intruders. The cinema was packed. In one scene a chest was opened to reveal gold bars. A kid in the row behind mine responded with a highly audible: G-g-gold. It almost had a speech balloon around it. I didn't turn and look but laughed easily with everyone else who'd heard it. This was an under-ten aspirant adult, a wannabe, a collaborator with the adult occupying forces, the type whose doughy cynicism always sounded like the kind of indoctrinating instruction suffered by children in dictatorships (or even our own in Queensland). He was nevertheless, for all our sniggering, experiencing  this movie the way it was intended.

To watch Skippy was to walk around inside it, to be resting, gumnut baby style, on a eucalypt leaf or one of the deadly rotors of the Waratah's chopper. If I was ever lodged in one of my loungeroom's 70s chic beanbags I was also there in the endless light of Skippy's paradise. And there, too, was Clancy.

I'm not going to go into the memory of a prepubescent near sex experience (those who know me personally would be in counselling for months). An instant nuclear grade sexual attraction was in effect every time she was onscreen but that's not my point. When Clancy entered the screen she walked into my imagination, strolling lightly among the Lost in Space set of red dangling bioforms that I imagined my brain to be, touching, here and there a stray hanging tongue-like protuberance from either idle curiosity or hard fascination.

On screen she might have had her foot caught the muck under the rising tide as Sonny provided her with ever longer improvised straws to use as snorkels (a real episode) or joining in some goofily choreographed fighting in the mud with a rock band dressed as the Kelly Gang (another real episode) -- actually, both of those examples are getting me all hot and bothered so I'll close up the thought with: on screen she might well have been the good looking female prop around which action took place (unlike the good looking male props like Ken James or Tony Bonner who usually came in to act directly after Sonny and Skippy had solved the mystery and needed variously adult and human assistance). ANYWAY, that's what she might have been on screen but as I watched she was in the room with me watching and being, sipping from the same family-size bottle of Coke that I was (and could never finish by myself so it would go like all the others into the fridge to flatten and be forgotten), selecting petite sized twisties from my packet and watching Skippy.

She was an odd (ie exciting ) mix of demure and cheerful and even to my still forming sexuality seemed to drive all the boys around her to hard competitive action. Skippy him/herself was meant to do this but not if you were male and around nine years old. It was her, it was Clancy doing all that. She wasn't in many scenes per episode but didn't have to be. All the action returned to her magnetic centre. Well, that's what happened when I watched it!

All the world loved Skippy. It was translated for Cuban and Conquistador alike, into Czech for the other side of the iron curtain. Carthage might have fallen for Skippy. Only Sweden resisted. The show was deemed irresponsible for depicting an animal capable of doing so much (eg. operating speed boats and literally disarming villains but, curiously, never mowing the lawn).  But I loved Clancy more. As soon as I was old enough for a girlfriend it would be she. I imagined this done by Royal Decree. We would receive a white envelope at our Aitkenvale home. It bore the blobby red seal of The House of Windsor and contained a card with guilded borders which, when opened, was thus inscribed: It is our pleasure to command that Clarissa Merrick hereafter called Clancy be the sole companion of one Peter James Jetnikoff of Aitkenvale, Townsville, North Queensland, Australia. The Queen. I'm filling out the language there, but that's how I saw it. I didn't call it fantasy then. Didn't have to. At nine, who does?

But the world of Skippy was as real as Mr Squiggle (I'll get to him later and explain that). We even had things in our kitchen from his home (no, not the kangaroo paw bottle opener). Waratah Cheddar was a kind of dairy flavoured pliable plastic that came in a package the same shape as a pack of Golden Crumpets (fellow entries in the greater Australian electoral roll, this is how you ruin a toaster). It was very salty, just the kind of cheese that would keep you going through days of being lost i' the bush. There it was, as close as the fridge.

But Clancy remains central to me as I write and draw this story of mine. Because if Gail ever did resemble someone it was she. Liza Goddard was too old to be Gail and too young to be her mum. Big sister subtracts too much from the concept. So it's Clancy, Clancy as an Irish Queenslander (Gail's name is Byrne) from the manager classes, but really Clancy all the same, grown up and aware of the powers of her physicality, Clancy whose backchat and frowning observations were those of a teenager who had to compete with an entire family good at both, a Clancy who would get sick of the boys running at windmills of solutions and do something more practical.

It's Clancy, demure but developing, who gets what she wants, sharp minded and boxing gloved like Liza Goddard against all the bullshit she's known so far and all the bullshit that is to come. It's Clancy in the big, haunted silence of the final scene with Meg and the weirding events of the middle act. Clancy in an episode of Skippy so serious and challenging that even the kangaroo wranglers refused to step forward. She won't need those gloves. Skippy won't be there. This is the episode of Clancy: Monster Hunter, Ghost Caller, Conqueror of Chaos. Only her name's Gail.

Influenca: KILL THE ENEMY: war comics

This is the cover of the first war comic I ever bought. I would have been about nine or ten. Mum ridiculed the title but that's what made me pick it out at the newsagent. The cover and the title formed a kind of concentrate. My first war comic had to be full flavoured and lasting. This one promised magnificent violence and in machine-like hatred. Win!

I think it's particularly apt, then to begin this subseries of posts about direct influences over the look, feel and content of The Monsoons with what was a huge formative influence o'er my life for about three years, either side of eleven.

The story of Kill the Enemy, in fact, was about a soldier twisted with a personal hatred. Fuelled by vendetta and propaganda, he was ready to go out in a blaze as long as he took a few beastly boche with him. Eventually, he was brought around by his fellow soldiers because it's all bad and puts everyone's life in danger when they could fight more coldly and kill a whole host more of the deadly hun. Well, not quite, there was in fact a quite effective anti-war message to this which I grew to quite enjoy. No contradiction here, I liked the war story and liked being invited to join in and condemn war: I take one in and get to feel superior (yea, verily unto myself). Then everything rebooted for the next one.

This was a War Picture Library comic. It was British. The other British war comic to get was Commando. These were black and white, mostly without tones and varied little but noticeably in style. They had to move quickly and be very authentic with their military hardware and landscape. Something I always noticed about the stories set in the desert campaigns was that they captured the effect of glare through very sparse use of line. You could put tones galore on the North Sea,the roof of New Guinea or the beaches of Normandy but the desert was all line, thin line against white that looked blisteringly hot.

The American war comics were coloured and heroic but it was easier to get the antiwar messages from them. If you didn't notice that the circle drawn around the words THE END in the last panel of each story itself contained a phrase like MAKE WAR NO MORE then you were choosing not to look. Sgt. Rock was chief among these (it was the one with the end messages) had some intriguing stories, sometimes verging on the kind of sci fi nazi of eighties cult cinema. They'd also tack on shorter stories from different eras of warfare. One was set during a Roman campaign. Blood flowed from the title panel and poured into a centurion's cup as red wine. That really zapped me.

The UK ones never went anywhere near there. They were the solid universe replaying over and over as I reread and reread them until the pulpy beige pages disintegrated in my hands. However, as a reader the two strands, fantastical and adventuresome, I conflated them into a World War II of clean lines and phantasmagoria. War movies, by contrast were always drab by comparison, either too jolly and heroic or as everyday as the war machines I could see just by looking up at the sound of a jet engine in my town of soldiers, sailors and flyboys.

The stark line of the desert comics is the same as the one I'm using for the piercing glare of the tropics in The Monsoons. The esoterica (well, near enough) of Sgt. Rock weaves in between the hard edged line and the wandering white of the Commando blaze. I cannot stress too strongly the effect that these comics had on me. It was to the cost of any super hero fare and even horror pieces that my elder siblings left in their wardrobes under their old paisley jackets and cadet's slouch hats.

Perhaps they also fired, I doubt it not, the young imagination of Magnetic Island's most infamous or famous son, Julian Assange (will I put him in?) who, at the age of eight during the The Monsoon's timeline, would, just like me and all of us, have looked up at the sound of a jet engine to see the hardware of the state, a Mirage or a Phantom fighter, tearing at the clouds, or gaze into the waves in case he saw not stingers, nor sharks, but an Oberon Class submarine rise huge and awesome from the jade green waves of Cleveland Bay. That's what I was looking for.

Marty profile

Best recent take on Marty done on my Lenovo tablet.

PALLARENDA

For details of what this is, check the note.

PALLARENDA

I think Lacey was born in the sour house across the road. That would have been him. Its noises of hurling objects and shouting traded time with a silence thicker than the dust of the road shoulder. My yard was bound by a thick crimson hedge which didn’t let anything but sound in. By day and hour that house by its sounds came into my yard, leapt, sprang or wafted over the leaves and landed there where I was. But no sound ever left. The garden, rich and fruited, couldn’t bear the loss of a single raspberry.

Lacey and I both liked the beach at Pallarenda. It was big, wide and empty. The sea was always quiet there. The beach’s bank was high and barred all sight of the nearby houses just as well as if you held a hand up to your eyes against them. Pallarenda’s bright sand was blown by a wind that could clean the worst of things. And the sea had a whisper. It told me that I never had to make a sound when I was there. Lacey was happy enough with the space. It put a little zap in his eyes. There was nothing fat about him on the beach, this beach so far from town. Across the water, Magnetic Island hulked big and blueblack. And at the end of the long thin curve of bay shimmered a little Townsville, season in season out, bright and tiny, far away.

But it wasn’t just the whisper of the sea. And it wasn’t just the space. We could’ve dreamed those up in a laundry. There was more. Something that you would never dream up. Something you would never think to want.

We called him the Watcher.

He must’ve lived around there or Rowes Bay. He was always there when we were there. Not old. Not young. Forty or so. His clothes were wrinkled and brown, same as his face. His hair was long and stringy and went crazy when the wind blew. Black fire.

We called him the Watcher because that’s what he did. He watched. He sat on the sand and gazed out to sea. He was always alone and didn't move. If you didn’t know him he could have been dead. you could look and think that but then suddenly he would move. Just changing position,  and only very tinily but he’d move, sudden as a snake.

Lacey and I would go to the beach at Pallarenda every three or so days and he was always there. Mum would take us after school. Mum liked Pallarenda as much as we did. She had her own reasons. Two we all had were the facts that almost no one else was ever there on a week day and that the fish shop’s chips were perfect. And the flake was always crumbed and juicy. And prawns, huge king prawns that smelt and tasted of the cold and salty deep. We always took something, toting hot paper parcels big with dripping prawns, and a beading bottle of sars and go and sit by the sea. Mostly, we went down to the old swimming baths, a huge semicircle of rusting iron girders that rose from the shallows and flaked, brown, back into the sea and gurgled with the good fresh stink of seaweed. It was good for shells and coins. And palm sized lozenges of beerbottle glass that the sea had tongued smooth. You held them to the light and saw amber.

But the beach is no place for swimming. It is a feeding ground. Someone put a shark in the baths once. It sliced through the water in circles, a big, silent gloom that lived and moved. And there they all were at the edge of the water, gawping or going to push someone in. I stared at it, same as them, another meaty bit that hadn’t yet been thrown in. And all the time the thing went round and round, whipping and slashing when a rock or a fish was thrown at it. Who did that? Who did that? That’s how you learn about the sea. We didn’t swim. We ate. We’d eat our fish and chips, ploughing the sand with our heels. Or we’d take our shoes off and run to the far end where the pink rock hill was and where the Watcher was.

I can’t remember when we first saw him but it was at a distance. And we were hooked, even at a distance, by the way he stared, head forward, never leaning back. Alone. Concentrating. Reading the sea. Or waiting, maybe. Lacey said it must’ve been someone he knew who had drowned and he was just waiting for the ghost. Would the ghost have owed him money, maybe? But Lacey didn’t laugh. He went and kicked some sand in the air and, when it came back in his face, looked away. What about a pirate, then? A pirate? A pirate, a pirate, a pirate? Where was his sash, if he was such a pirate? And his earring? How about a sword for a little pirate? If he was a pirate where was his ship? Marooned. Marooned? What’s the point of that? A marooned pirate may as well be a marooned roll monitor for all the good it was going to do him there. Besides I’d seen him smile once and he had all his teeth.

I said he could’ve been waiting for the end of the world like that doomsday lot. It happened when I was four. I’d read about it. Everyone had. Everyone knew about it. They stood on the beaches of the world and waited for the end. And when they saw it wasn’t going to happen, when they all went home to dinner and took back all the things they’d given away, there were some who suddenly wished it had blown to smithereens. Maybe they went back to the beach. Maybe the Watcher had never left. Perhaps he had more hope.

Whatever, that’s how it was. You only had to look at him. He was Hitler at Calais, the Island for Britain. He was a wizard calling to the spirit of the sharks whose spells were not for the ears of anyone else. As an ancient king he waited for his ally’s boats whose load of armoured soldiers were ready to die for the return of his crown. As General MacArthur he squinted into a world of water that touched the Japanese fleet. Moses and the Devil. All you had to do was look and see.

I said I saw him smile once and that’s true. I was up on the pink rock hill at the end of the beach and spying on him, hiding like a commando. Just one move and... He turned. He was looking straight at me. I crouched even lower. He was grinning when I looked back up. And then back down. I couldn’t look at him. He’d never done that before. He grinned, wide as the bay. Never once before. But I had seen, and I had spied with my little eye that there were all his teeth.

And one time...Well...

Lacey and me were making sand sculptures.

Sand sculptures. Sand sculptures sand sculptures. I have never seen a sand castle outside of a TV screen. But sand sculptures? We made the things of the world from sand. We were normally there late afternoon but there was no reason why it couldn’t have been the dawn. Remember Hitler, the waiting king and General Mack? Pallarenda was all of history. The best thing to do in that situation, for my money, is to begin as close to the start as you can and work from there. All history may well begin with gases bashing into each other but it wasn’t gases I was interested in making out there with the stuff to make anything of my choice. It was the animal kingdom. Fat cane toads, coiled snakes, the sides of horses sunken into the sand. Mostly it was people. Here, with the stuff of creation itself we could make the people we wanted. A sand castle will only ever be a toy you can’t keep.

But people? People are meant to waste away. That’s what ours did. We’d make them near the edge of the surf close enough to see them go. And they went, staring stiff at the sky as they were eaten by the sea. All history could be done this way. Lacey? Lacey thought it was fun and wanted to stick to toads and tigers. And then I persuaded him about the people. I told him we were at the beginning of all time. Where we stood, I said, was new. There had been no wars, no gods, no cars, sharks or record players. It was up to us and us alone to begin all the goodies of the world to come, here and now.

We made things of many different kinds. And then a man. Lacey was happy enough to keep on doing this, he even wanted to make soldiers. That stopped me for a moment from saying what I wanted. But when I did there was no more talk of soldiers. There was just one mission. That was my doing. Pallarenda on a weekday afternoon was where I was everything. In any case we made a lot of things down there at the water. Down where the water wasn’t blue at all but clear and filmed with biting froth.

The last time we ever made sand sculptures was on a chilly Wednesday after school. For practice we’d already made a range of things. A robot, a lion, a shark, and our principal’s head. It was cold with the winter seawind on our backs, dry and smelling of saltshakers. The first robot, the first lion, the first shark, the first principal’s head. All that had been taken care of. All that had been done. Now the work had grown special. Secret, careful, concentrated, serious as a cat.

Not without error. That’s only to be expected. Many of our prototypes lay around us, drying, lumpish failures. Proportions. The sizes of things. Trial and error. Nevertheless our labour was divided. Lacey worked the legs which I left to him. He never really whinged when I changed what he’d done, especially since I had it over him. My skill with the face had me at the top every time. That’s what I was doing. And then noticed he was squinting at it. I let him squint.

“Muller,” he said.

“What?”

“It’s gotta be long hair.”

“Doesn’t.”

“Yes it duuuuhs.”

“Lacey...whose car did we come in?”

“Maaahrk.”

“Whose car?”

“It’s gotta be long.”

“Lacey...”

He went back to his legs. I made it short. There were plenty of girls at school with short hair. And plenty in the world. In any case he was the one who kept making one leg longer than the other, a lot longer. And now he was starting on the thing. Mum was out of range so it didn’t matter. But, of course, it did.

“Watch how you do that,” I said.

“Why?”

“Just is.”

Then his face shadowed over. And he was looking up with a big gawp, his mouth open and his big groper’s eyes made bigger. And I had to twist my head to see. And I saw.

He was tall and looked a long way down. He had a smell of old, a smell of clothes kept in wardrobes, a smell of stale biscuits. Strings of black hair trailed down around his eyes and, windblown, curled and swung in dark wormy threads. And his eyes were as blue as the bay, strong and steady in tanned and wrinkled pouches. He was smiling.

“Good morning, boys,” he said. It was late afternoon.

I smiled a fushy grin for a second and tried to answer but my throat was dry and only let a small rasp out into the wind. His voice did not fit. It was deep and rich as chocolate cake, and though made flat by the wind, it came through big and strong. And there were his teeth, chipped and sharp and brown as dull brass.

“Uh...Mohr...” nothinged Lacey. He wasn’t looking at Lacey.

“What have we got here?” he asked me.

“Girl, “ I said.

“A girl,” he said. He drew the word out long like bubblegum. Gurrrrrrrrlll.

He looked at our sandgirl longways and sideways. And laughed quietly.

“No no no,” he said. “Like this.”

He went to the legs, edging Lacey quietly aside, and crouched over our sandgirl, letting out a big breath. And with a bony finger drew a thick furrow there between them.

I was red with shame.

The Watcher stood again with a cracking in his knees, and rose up to full length. And, winking at the sky, he smiled. And then he looked back down.

We stared up at him and he stared back down at us for some long, fat seconds. My eyes were bulging. Did I look like a fish? Lacey did. And then Lacey croaked half a word and the Watcher smiled. I looked at Lacey. He looked back at me. I mumbled that Mum would be getting worried. The Watcher looked back down, not smiling. Lacey and I rose slowly and stepped back. And more. And more until we were walking backwards. The Watcher watched. We turned and walked fast as we could without running. And then we ran.

And when I turned to look back Lacey went on running. And when I looked back I saw the Watcher dancing. But when I looked harder I saw he wasn’t dancing. He was kicking.

And our sandgirl broke in easy pieces under the force of his feet, sods that leapt away like frogs or sprays that flashed golden in the air, were slapped by the wind, fanned for tiny seconds and then fell.

I turned and caught up to Lacey.

“You left that out, you scum,” I hissed at him.

“What?”

“That detail, scum! The thing!...Scum.”

Lacey gawped at the sand.

I stopped Lacey saying a word to Mum by singing whenever he spoke. Mum stopped me and that stopped Lacey. Why waste something like that on your parents? I’ve seen the fuss of grown ups over kids crossing roads or playing with plastic bags. It’s a lot of noise. It’s a lot of ignorance and forgetfulness. It is something I do not like the world for. At that time I was not going to loose any more stupidity into the world.

Mum didn’t know about the Watcher because I kept Lacey quiet on the spot, right there on the beach, right there where the wind blew all the time and smelled of fish and chips. And there he kept quiet, quieter than the engine of Mum’s car. But the quad at school had no breeze and it smelled of sausage rolls and day old milk splatted on to the bitumen by the milk boys who liked doing things like that. This was where Lacey lived. He didn’t live at home. There was nothing there but form guides, mess and ashtrays. It was school. That’s where he lived. And he was good at it. Better than me.

And so when I heard with the rest of them for the first time how I’d run faster than I ever done at school, half a mile past where Mum was,   from the weirdo on the beach, I leaned back against a post and smiled and looked into the air. I knew that even if, as on that day, he put the flat jokes of all the boys in the class between us so that my loudest bark would not get through, Lacey knew that he was going to get a pie somehow. Some things have to be put up with. He could do all that and know I wouldn’t even whisper. He would play his part, do what he was told, do what a fat boy’s godda do, play his cards right and play ‘em to the end, and ride out into the setting sun on his trusty pie. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I stared into the air and let him get on with it, that living of his, his stardom, and kept my mouth shut.

And then it was Sunday.

It was Sunday morning. Early Sunday morning. The whole beach was pink under an orange sky. Dad took us fishing a Pallarenda on Sunday mornings. If Lacey was up and around my place early enough he’d come, too. He was always up early and around my place. Mum went to mass on Sunday.

But Sunday morning. No matter what time of year it was the beach on early Sunday morning was frisky fresh. The seawind slapped you awake, and if that didn’t work it dug its fingernails into your cheeks until you opened your eyes properly.

But then you were awake and had to look. Sundays at Pallarenda didn’t leave you alone. There was the thing, the scene. All along the line of the shore were kids and dads, dads dads dads - and uncles, I don’t doubt - lined up at the water’s edge. At the edge of the surf where the sea’s salty tongue licked long the north-hard feet that felt it not nor knew it. With rods and nets they spread out in writhing messes, or stalked straight up or bent back on their own and lowered and lifted bending rods which they played with at their bellies, making clicky, tearing whinges with the reels.                                                                                                                                                                        

As usual Dad had brought his yabby pump along and was showing off with it, sucking yabbies from the sand. Other kids liked watching this but I didn’t care for it too much. Dad said that yabbies were great bait but I couldn’t stand them. The sight of them -  greenish black midget lobsters, monsters that bit. I hated them. But bait, of course, is, after all, just between ourselves, all things considered, bait. There, there’s an end to the matter!

Sunday morning’s breakfast was never fish for anybody except sharks. We had pastries and coffee at nine or so when we came back from the beach and Mum came back from Mass.

But even with the rest of them there Pallarenda was good. The beach was pink and the sky was orange. Magnetic Island came up out of the sea in a black Loch Ness hump. It ignored the little jigglers across the bay and waited for its own breakfast of pleasure boats and the ferry, and all that lay in the bellies of those things. A big breakfast day, Sunday.

And Dad mined yabbies with a big brass pump, surrounded by little rubbernecks. And the pump sucked big sludgy cores that splurted out sluggish, wet, yabbyless piles that spread and rolled into wet, sluggish sleep on the sand.

So I never fished.

Lacey and me left Dad and the pump and ran to the pink rock hill.

We stopped at a small crowd to see. And saw. It was a stingray. Someone had caught it in a net and left it there. It had almost finished moving, only flapping the tips of its useless wings, and had begun to stink. It twitched on the sand, maybe hearing the voices that came from above, saying what a bewdy never seen one big as that will you look at that sting dangerous bastards those....

Lacey tugged my shoulder and sniggered, pointing. A boy a bit older than us, probably a grade sixer, was touching the ray’s wings with a rod and getting a little spasm from them. A girl, younger than us, with a beach hat on and a big gob of yellow hair falling from it over most of her eyes, giggled fittishly with each stingray twitch. Her father squeezed her shoulder. She punched his hand. All she could do. They watched the poking boy. The rest watched and watched, hands on hips or fiddling with reels or fishingline or car keys, silent. They began to look the same when I looked around the circle. Same noses, eyes, hair, same dripping gawp. They were a family. This was their Sunday. Lacey looked at me full on and grinned. A card.

I walked off and he followed. “Don’t be a scum,” I told him. He gazed into the sand as we walked on. But then we remembered where we’d been headed and we began to run. I didn’t have to tell him to run.

We ran further down the beach towards the pink rock hill. It was a good way off but the wind was dry and chilly and made you want to run. It felt good on the skin and made you want more. We got more, too much, enough for a Sunday. We ran on and on. And then we found the Watcher.

He could only been seen up close, snug behind a dune. And this time, even though we came up to him and not the other way round he said nothing.

He wasn’t watching. He was covered in blood and his clothes were torn and you could actually see where the knife had gone in and there were spots and splats of brownish red on the sand where his blood had been spilled and he was dead.

He lay face up. His arms and legs were straight as though someone had set them there like that, tidied up. His face was plain and calm. When he’d stood that time I’d seen ridges in his skin around his mouth that cracked into wrinkles when he smiled. Now his skin was plain and draped from his face to his neck where it gathered in a full, smooth curve. And his mouth was closed and his lips were pressed together over his teeth, pulled into a flat, unsmiling line. And his eyes were closed, resting blue behind their tightened pouches. Resting and resting and resting. And a small string of hair ran across his forehead, raising up its wormy pointed head and shivering when the wind teased it. That wasn’t resting.

I looked back to the circle around the stingray. They were tiny and far away.

Lacey and me stared at the Watcher and let the wind blow sand in our hair. The sea smelled strong.

“Dare you to touch him,” Lacey said.

“Dare you ,” I said.

“Go on...touch him.”

“No,” I said.

The sea smelled strong.

I walked around the Watcher very carefully, almost on tiptoe, and went on the last few yards to the pink rock hill. And I began to climb. It was hard to do at first, my hands weren’t gripping too well. But when I heard Lacey’s huge feet pounding the sand towards me my grip came back like Lassie. I had almost cleared my own height when he reached the spot.

“Hey,” he hissed. “Hey...dare you to touch him.”

I kept climbing.

He grabbed my ankle, following me up. Then I had to turn. He was a good climber, I’ll have to give him that. He was almost where I was.  I nudged his head with my foot. No? I kicked his shoulder. One hard shoving kick. And then he fell. There! King of the castle!

“Go and tell the others or something,” I murmured to him and sat at the top. “Go on, find some pies or something...somewhere else.”

He gawped for a moment and stood still. A few seconds there. Pure silence, sight and sound. But then he grinned and swung around and ran towards the stingray family.

I watched him for a while but then turned and looked at the sea. And I thought of seaweed and sharks, stingers, stonefish, starfish, coral, reefs, sandbars, froth and drowning. I even thought of dragging the Watcher into the water and letting the things he knew about, and who would’ve known him well enough, take him somewhere better than where he was now. But Lacey, pudge regardless, was running like the wind. Pies and fish and chips and burgers galore from the family Nose. He was racing. They would all come back much faster. Fairly distant but impossible not to see was a  fourwheel drive, needlessly huge, parked with its big thick jaw duhring over the edge of the bank. That would come in handy, surely. Rrm rrm rrm, here I am, now all of you stand back, I am blonde and bronze. Dare ya dare ya dare ya.

So I looked away. I looked into the sea. The sea smelled strong.

Sunday. The day had begun to lose its pink. Sunday. It was Sunday and I thought about breakfast. Fresh crusty rolls with butter melting in their innards. Cakes, omelettes, coffee, cream and pumpkin scones. And jam. Strawberry, cherry, marmalade. Dare you to touch him. Dare ya dare ya dare ya.

From now on Sunday morning would be quiet. I’d read or something. I would look forward to something like that. Omelettes, pastries, whatnot. My mother had blue eyes. My father’s were brown. I’d have to look at them looking at me. Why should a pair of eyes make icing sugar and jam taste like pencil rubbers? For the moment the sea glittered, winked a thousand times at once, smelling good and strong. I watched it. I opened and closed my eyes and saw it winking. Mother eyes, father eyes. I would have to talk. Dare ya dare ya dare ya. The time had come for me to talk.

Peter Jetnikoff

Cutaway idea

Trying a couple of things here. First, I wanted to quickly look at the mix of pencil and ink wash (nice but not what I wanted). Second, I wanted a plotty line of dialogue to be suddenly followed by a very still moment (this, I did like)

Meg comes up with her tagline

More unused scenes and tries

Aspect Ratio

I'm a film buff. At one point I was going to draw every frame of The Monsoons 

as a cinema ratio. Here's a test scene with all the major ones from 4x3 to scope. The

scene was drawn entirely for this purpose and never intended to be part of the rool thing.

Scrapbook bits

I'm working on the thing rather than writing about it lately so here's some filler, some character studies that won't appear in the book but might be good to see after reading all that background:

RUTH

I've said a bit about her but haven't shown.
Well, this is a median sketch but she isn't
much changed from this.

MARTY

A touch too Nick Cave for my purposes

but you get the idea.

FAILED GAIL 

rear view 

GAIL and House

Done more for the dialogue and 

house by night than anything else.

Fragment with group

The boy in the bandana is Joshua. I've said nothing 

about him here yet but he's one of the four.

Anyway, back to it.

Where the Indigo Melts

Having established my team support of great Australian poetry in the previous post I thought I might give this one the chance to undo it. My summer purge of old an unread paper turned up a lot of beige pages of attempted poetry. The only one I thought I'd save to at least type out properly was this short story from Grade 12, the year The Monsoons is set and the year the previous post talked about. I handed this in as an English assignment, partly as a pisstake but partly because I wanted to plead the cause of writers we weren't studying like William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut and Anthony Burgess. Mr Kneipp laughed in his hip to be square way, and got it completely wrong by saying it was like something out of Mad Magazine. It was ABSURDIST! Alright, my sister gave me that term but I knew what it meant. Anyway ....

I've corrected a very little punctuation where it might have misled and some spelling which might, even at my ethereal height, have embarrassed me. So .... (Oh, by the way, the scrawl in the column is a sign of the times, it's the address of a party and I think even I remember whose it was.)

Where the Indigo Melts

"Hello!" shouted James T. Eggyolk to the crisp blue policeman beside him. Well, that was his job (someone had to do it) and he did it well. The policeman sighed and picked out five soiled notes.

"Thanks," smile the policeman wearily and handed the notes to James. "James," he said shyly.

"Yes?"

"Would you ... I mean, after all, I've got nobody to love after my kids went on strike and..."

James frowned a little. He knew what was coming. No cop needed what he wanted and if James Eggyolk was going to do it he would make the cop suffer.

"Double the price," he said firmly.

"James!" pleaded the cop. But James was a hard man and, striking kids or no, he was going to get double the price.

The cop broke down. "Alright," he sobbed, "alright. You'll get your pound of flesh." The cop hastily fumbled in his pockets and threw ten soiled notes  at him. Satisfied, James shouted, "Hello again!" and quickly walked away from the suffering policeman and down the street.

Seeing someone he didn't like the look of James smashed him against a brick wall. "So what if my name's Eggyolk!" he screamed at the bewildered  prime minister. "It's not my fault!" He released the prime minister, who had started sneezing, and went on his way.

"Life's not meant to be easy," said a dog telepathically. James, who hated smart dogs, frowned and kicked it in the ribs.

Already he was home. He shuffled in and shuffled sourly up the slimy stairs, singing songs of stupidity in a sleepy voice. "Number seventeen," scowled the door blankly. James told it to shut up and pounded it open.

His flat was kept nicely neat in a natural way. Everything was where it should be and no mistake there was. Corned Beef, his pet aardvark, was trying to sing. James grinned for awhile but, bored by this, became very serious indeed. "One day," he frowned, "you're going to sing Blue Suede Shoes in Spanish." Corned  Beef looked back in shame and hid his hairy hog eyes with his broken tennis racquet.

James shook his head. "Something's got to give," he sighed and sulkily removed his coat. If Corned Beef couldn't sing in two week there would be no life left to live. It was a fact he had to face and his revolver was always ready.

Yes, life was boring for James Tomato Eggyolk, and he was the first to admit it. He was bored with saying hello to policemen for money. He paid his nightly visit to the refrigerator and all that was there was a rotten lettuce with its yellow leaves grinning at him.

Furious, he threw it out the window whence it fell into the mouth of a large grey criminal. "I didn't do it, honest!" screamed the criminal through his newly acquired rotten lettuce and scurried swiftly away.

The aardvark tried to say, "what's the matter," but it came out as, "rrrrrrrrg!" James laughed loudly but it turned into a silent and sarcastic smirk as he read the words, "dream your sleep to self," behind his eyes. But he could not. Sleep, that is.

It always reminded him of the cat. "Meow," the cat had said, waiting for milk, but, having no milk, James gave it a bullet instead. Right between the eyes but the cat liked it and came back for some more.

"Dream you sleep to self," read the sign behind his eyes and James, for the first time since he knew he was born, slept. It was very dark inside his skull for awhile. Then, all of a sudden, he saw an angel. The type that never die but just fade away.

"Hey, you," snarled the angel. "Yeah you! Your purpose in life is to say hello to policemen and if you don't like it -- tough!"

"Get lost!" said James.

"Oh no!" screamed the ethereal figure. " You don't get rid of me like that. And anyway I'm going to tell you my grievances."

This was getting boring so James pushed the dream out of his eyes and awoke. It was morning. Corned Beef woke him by scratching his arm lightly.

He crashed out of bed still in his smart new suit and screamed tearfully, "this is useless. You're never going to sing . Something had to give."

And it did. He raced to the cupboard, snatched his revolver and ran down, down, down to the street where a small red statue said, "telephone." He ran in, called the police department and shouted, "Hello! Pay me by mail!" He then raised the pistol to his heart and pulled the trigger.

Click!

It was empty. For the first time in his happy existence he cried.

Prayer for Those in a Coma: Bruce Dawe and my teenage nervous system

By the age of seventeen the only heroes I had were literary. I know that sounds like I'm making it up as an adult but it's true. Still a child, I'd lost myself in the complete many volumes of Dickens at the top of the white shelf in the library at home. They were old commemorative editions with beautiful yellowed plates of the masterful illustrations of  Phiz and Gillray. Then it was Jules Verne. I knew his name for the steampunk before their time films of Journey to the Centre of the Earth, From Earth to the Moon and Twenty Thousand Leauges Under the Sea. But the first novel of his I read was Drama in Livonia, a Russian-influenced whodunnit. I can still remember the breathless empathy I felt with the nameless figure of the opening who ran for his life through a dark and frozen landscape. My brother was into cricket, often listening a wall away, to the micro hurricane howls of short wave radio of the games at Lords deep into the night. I didn't see the point in that. If you gave everyone of them a ball they wouldn't have to fight over it. No, the imagined realm was where I walked when I wasn't walking here.

Soon enough all this turned to sterner stuff and out came the Orwell, Gore Vidal, Anthony Burgess and Kurt Vonnegut. This world was populated with victims that felt pain when injured, met the hostility of the world around them with wit or a sense of the absurd and knew that the currency of language, gold standard of ideas. These authors I trusted as seasoned guides. They cast light upon the shadows beyond the influence of my cloak of middle class comfort, warned me of the dangers of being conspicuously alive and the worse ones or feigning death among the living. As to poetry I found it as threatening as that James Joyce person that Nanna was always on about who seemed to offer nothing but more mystery. And then I read a poem called Hopeless Bloody Hopeless.

It was in a Secondary School English reader that had belonged to one of my siblings and included page after page of extracts of novels, journalism and poetry that first arrested and then hooked me. Hopeless Bloody Hopeless came one step closer to me than anything else in that already bold congregation: it was in Australian. It's a list of despairing images taken from life and filtered through Dawe's poetics and is deceptively plain spoken until a zinger breaks the surface here and there. The illustration was a photo of a beauty queen appearing for charity with a spastic child. The juxtaposition of this intentionally heartwarming image and the scabrous verse beside it sent me into the same kind of dizzy horror as when I saw my brother's Frank Zappa album covers or a lot of the sleeve art to come once punk rewrote the book. I felt guilty for looking but weak for not looking, self-hating for pushing anything remotely corrective like pity, and lastly worried in that cold and blubbery worry that once it's found you is with you for life. Because of a poem.

As luck would have it we had a volume of Dawe's called Condolences of the Season which I read the way I listened to new albums by bands I loved, carefully, in awe and several times a day.

So that when we got to choose an elective for English I went for Australian poetry without even looking at the others. And it didn't occur to me to care about what anyone else thought about it. I needed to know things.

Mr Handicott took it: Contemporary Australian Poetry. He was a published poet himself, a practicing Christian who once put a small play I'd written at the top of the class but forbade us performing it as it took the lord's name in vain (I would have done a rewrite if I'd known, fer Chrissakes!) He also had a huge Victorian explorer's beard which might have been an heirloom as its rust red was at embarrassing odds with the mild chaos of straw exploding from his skull (his case was the first I knew of to be called cheese and tomato). In another class he'd read out one of his own pieces about wining and dining a woman who then turned cold at the sight of his former lover through "the window of my wallet". Might sound naff described so but it had both comedy and sadness blended well and was judiciously chosen by a teacher wary of his students' imagining of his life beyond the quad. Anyway, he took the modern Australian poetry elective and offered us a feast.

We got the Judith Wrights, Kath Walkers and Kenneth Slessors in normal English class but here we got the good stuff, the fresh, the poetry published that year, that month. He showed us the short, fat journals emblazoned with cartoons of mafia funerals or barbarian hordes, all refering to the fact and act of the current poetry of the wide brown land. I couldn't believe it but I didn't have time to as Roneo-ed sheet after purple sheet landed on the desk including, with its pleasantly rummy fumes, the breath of fire.

One I wish I remembered better was by Rae Desmond Jones. It was a narrative. A woman from the upper middle world gets out of her Merc and happens to walk down a laneway  between factories where she is attacked and spread over the bonnet of the Merc and sprayed with gold paint. Her attackers kneel and pray to her "but the machines do not stop".

It sent shivers down my spine just to think of it and I had trouble re-reading it the same way I couldn't bring myself to look at the full page photo of the dying victim of Buchenwald in the big World War II history book in the library. So poetry was what I wanted to do from then on.

....

But whenever I tried it nothing came out. Nothing worth anything. Seriously, without false modesty, I tried my hand at poetry but bullshit bullshit bullshit was all that I could fashion. But then, on some grey predawn back there late in the year, I stopped chopping up the lines like lettuce and allowed them to join until they had to end and what I had was dowdy ol' prose, country cousin to the rarefied verse.

First thing I did was write a play. It was a Pinter ripoff -- my sister was studying him at uni and there was a production of The Homecoming which really put the hook in me -- but it was an ok Pinter ripoff with just enough Goodies and Python in there to make it seem like I'd given the ripoff process a little thought. Oh, the other influence was Look Back in Anger which ranted with the anger of an adolescent who'd watched some movies and read some books beyond his years. I'm not trying to diminish John Osborne, there, but giving you the self-flattering reason for my admiration of it. My play was called A Tinful of Potholes. It got one reading with my sister and a few actors she had indulgently invited around. It would embarrass me now. I haven't kept a copy but I remember feeling proud of it. Why not? I knew very few others of my age who'd attempted anything like it and none of them had finished theirs.

That was almost it for plays. There were a few others but it wasn't until much later that I had anything performed. Besides, something else happened. Back in the normal English class, Mr Cooke took us through the dramatic monologue, particularly Browning's My Last Duchess and Eliot's Journey of the Magi. That last one sold me and I kept a copy of Eliot's selected works handy. Really, it was in my port along with the vegemite sandwiches and Web of Life. So I wrote an exercise book of Eliotesque drivel. One piece from that did work, though and I revisited it many times since was initially called the Patrol. Eventually, needing material for the last Cubist Cigars show I redrafted it as The Soldier's Story and performed it at 45 Downstairs in February 2009. So something came of that.

But it ran its course. No, I couldn't write like TS Eliot but I could at least sound like Bruce Dawe. Bruce Dawe whose work was Biblical and vernacular, worldwise and sentimental and very, very Australian. I had a copy of the anthology Condolences of the Season. I've still got it. The spine has gone but my sister's name and address are clearly biro-ed on the title page for all the honest world to see. I couldn't write like Bruce Dawe either. Well, not poetry. He helped me with my prose, though. Even after the maelstrom of James Joyce's influence it's Dawes that still kids me that I can do something with these memories. He wrote the poem that finally turned me from claims at poetry and the resignation that I was better folding that into what I could do with prose. Prayer for Those in a Coma describes the comatose as sailors who are drifting in dark waters following a submarine attack. It ends with these words and they steady me to this day:

"Lord, whom our coma helps us not to see,
these men are tired and weary of the sea..."