The Big Chill: why The Monsoons doesn't have a jukebox soundtrack

I moved to Melbourne halfway through the eighties. A friend from Uni, Margot, got a job with the La Trobe Uni SRC and I got out of Brisbane and moved in with her. I was new in town and had a mild depression which made me lethargic and clingy. So my social life for the first year was mainly hers (we weren't intimately involved, by the way) and that meant a lot of other people who worked in student admin.

In the north the various campus unions did all that but down here it was the Student Representative Councils, roses by another name. The movement was under threat at the time and fragmenting into ever softer factions and subparties. So when I tagged along with Margot to Party/party central there was a lot of talk I, using a complete lack of interest, only vaguely understood.

Otherwise these folk were good enough eggs. I knew by then that people who work in the same higher-purpose-heavy area tend to ditch their sense of humour in favour of laughing acknowledgement of cynical comments about their co-workers or common foes (same thing). They are not humourless as such but when they are handed a joke delivered for its own sake, an absurdist throwaway, you might find them rewarding it with a surprised laugh as though they were recalling something they once liked.

One night I went round to watch The Big Chill. One of them had his own copy of the VHS (unusual at the time but I got the idea that it was an unreturned rental). There was a group of them assembled and as the film got under way I felt a rising sense that everyone but I had seen the film many, many times. They were anticipating the gags and murmuring along to the dialogue. This film, a comedy which in its own way confronts baby boomers' nostalgia for the hippy era including its activism, was important to them. In its sadness about the loss of a friend (who, through very little stretching, stood for the idealism of the era) they took a sobering message visible through the feelgood comedy sheen of the surface. They were punk era but the theme applied across the gap. But there was something else.

The film uses period pop music, wall to wall, but it's not from the eighties, it's from the sixties, the era of the characters' nostalgia. The opening credits play out over Heard it Through the Grapevine. The funeral cortege progresses to the strains of the Stones' You Can't Always Get What You Want. A gag is given the equivalent of a snare drum hit with the opening riff to Credence's Bad Moon Rising. And at one point one of the characters is shown lowering the needle on to a record that blasts out the Temptations' Ain't Too Proud to Beg. The scene this plays over is iconic - the ol' gang clean up after the big meal while grooving to the soul - and made its effortless way into a few tv ad campaigns.

This borrowed nostalgia performed the same function as the chemicals in cigarettes, it was a delivery device. By nostalgia, I'm not talking about the hits 'n' memories music of the film but the political naivete that it served up as worldly maturity. The songs were the gravy that sold the meal. But maybe it was the other way around. The Big Chill soundtrack album, bursting with hits 'n' memories appealed to fans of the film and fans of the sixties who were in epidemic in the eighties.

I saw the film again not long after. Same. The next time Margot invited me to go and see it yet again I declined. Two things about this: a mainstream movie had become a genuine cult item within a very few years of its release but it was also the backdrop for more politicking. Centre but backdrop. Function, not art or entertainment.

This didn't surprise me so much. As with almost everyone heavily involved in something like politics; be they ever so hard-liningly radical in their politics they are usually naive when it comes to culture, as though the two things had no business with each other. I think I would have been a doomed Trotskyite in the Russian Revolution (actually, I would have been fleeing for my life like my grandparents but that's neither here nor there). It's the big roosterish humourless alphas who call culture in this environment and it always seems to end up with something like Stalin's social realism (ie I understand it at first sight or you, Mr Filmmaker, explain it from your hut in the gulag). It's the same with all political colours, this is just being told from my experience.

Still, it makes me smile to this day how when I pointed out how naff Midnight Oil were with their big loud yobbo sledgehammer choruses I got a stoney silence in response. The idea that the independent music scene had more anti-establishment qualities by rejecting the conventional market as well as aesthetics. Ok, I had my own naivete, but at least I understood that just changing the muscle only changed the muscle and if you wanted permanent dynamic change you had to change the playground too.

But whether it's Midnight Oil's bumper sticker rock or The Big Chill's ersatz nostalgia, using borrowed cultural moments to carry messages tends to allow those messages to be flimsy. All you have in the end is a cultural stock cube in a sealed package on a shelf. The Big Chill was nowhere near the first film to wallpaper its soundtrack with sourced music but it was the significant first to do so with such cynicism and its many, many, many imitators helped to make the eighties the most gormlessly bumfaced decade of modern mainstream cinema. But then in the nineties Tarantino and his entourage shifted the nostalgia effect to a further abstraction by appealing to audiences' understanding of vintage cinema, allowing them at the same time to believe they were into something new:  the post-modern boogie. There's been a return to sorts lately with things like Mad Men using period pop music for irony as much as authenticity. Honourable mention should also go to Underbelly Razor for dressing classic oz rock tunes in jazz age arrangements digetically (ie performed as part of the scenes), a weak dramatic effort with a strong musical idea. Anyway...

While I've been at comics for about fifteen years my first point of call when conceiving of a story is cinema. The Monsoons began with just such a sourced score, however imaginary. I even put a cd together with late seventies hits 'n' memories to help me envisage it. My intention (still might do it) was to replace that with a soundtrack album of my own music as I went. What has happened is that I remembered things like the story this post began with and how repellent I find this lazy shortcut to atmosphere which was dumped the more I developed the story that has become the comic. There is one reference to a contemporary pop song, KC's Please Don't Go. It's in there because Meg uses it as a lifeline and because everybody, hip new wavers like Marty, self-pleasing alphas like Joshua, severely sensible types like Ruth and embittered, anti-sentimental, recently dumped people like Gail all love it. It was the More Than a Feeling of the end of the seventies (ie anyone who said they didn't like it was lying). Apart from that the music I hear when I draw or write these characters sounds like the nearby surf or, at worst, a tinny radio in another room.

The Mackay Girls

This article had to come and I've been dreading writing it. It needs to be written, though, as the influence of the event over my characters is something that they will not mention, however haunted by it they might be. It's a story of two sisters and the faceless monster that devoured them and then spat them out into a ditch, defiled and murdered. It is a story that I'll provide links to rather than source by those links because while the facts of the case are important it is the emotional impact that lingers. I'm telling most of it from memory.

They were blow-ins, probably the kids of an industrial specialist working a finite contract that would either end with him buying local or moving on. The girls were called Judith and Susan and were close in age. One was in my class but I can't remember which. They kept each other company at lunchtime but that's because they were new, not disliked. One or both had puddling bowl haircuts.

Mum took some of us on a holiday outside of the school schedule. We went to her side of the family in Bundaberg but I can't remember why. I do remember having a sip of stout and pretending to be roaring drunk. I rolled around on a bed, singing obnoxiously, trying to get that cawing sound of drunks in the street. I also remember talking to a cop about the Mackay girls. He wanted to know if I knew anything about them. At all. Anything. I was frightened of him and his seriousness. He also looked sad which also frightened me.

After he left I was told that the Mackay girls had gone missing on their way to school and then found, days later in a ditch, stabbed to death. The killer was still out in the dark.

Bundaberg is a small town but it has delights for children. There's a big bronze head of the famous aviator Bert Hinkler, a native of the town, rising from the earth with a smile. He's still in his leather helmet and goggles. Probably wouldn't know it was him without them. We go to a cinema and see a Flintstones movie. Everything is bright during the day. There are paths cutting through the sugar cane. One of them leads to a milk bar that sells peanut shaped chewy caramels coated in chocolate. It's like a tropical version of an enchanted forest. Once you're on the path you can see nothing but ahead and behind and the sky is framed by two rows of wavering cane. It smells of plant. A green smell. I feel no danger. I'm a kid.

I feel no danger on the way to school either. If my bike needs repair or I just feel like walking I leave home, stroll along Patrick Street, turn right at Elizabeth, cross Ross River Road and there I am at school. I'm about as far away from home as Judith and Susan Mackay were. Supposedly they took the bus there. Maybe they were just too small and vulnerable or just protected. But if they missed the bus they'd probably just walk because even for a kid the school is not far away by shoe. When I got back from holidays, mum drove me to school. All the mums did. Two blocks in maternal custody for about three minutes which is about how long it takes to walk and I was safe at school.

In 1998 Arthur Stanley Brown was arrested for a number of murders including the Mackay sisters. I saw this on the news and everything around me disappeared for a few seconds. There was no sound. Over the next few months I followed the story as completely as I could, even reading the sensationalist nonsense in the tabloids because the disgust in them was like scratching eczema. He was dobbed in by a female relative whom he'd abused. It wasn't just her. Every younger female relative in his extended sway fell prey to him. And then he moved out of the circle and started picking it fresh from the tree. He boasted about it. He had been questioned and released by the police several times. Now, finally, after decades of being the scariest land monster in the north, he was, a quavering old man with the big wide stare of dementia.

He was a carpenter whose trouser creases were pressed to a knife edge. He was referred to as the Scarlet Pimpernel as he was quick to respond to work requests. Any time. Anywhere. He supervised himself. He was working as a carpenter at the school at the time. I always used to wonder what he'd said, how he'd got them into the car. Neither sister had reached ten years old. All adults have authority. They'd seen him working.

I don't remember him from school. As a male, I wasn't in danger from him. But I and everyone else who wasn't one of his victims lived under the night sky of his influence. There are no stars in that sky. The jungle of the ground beneath sits in silence. No curlews whistle there. No mossies sing. Not even cane toads call and belch. The mould and slime of the tropical night huddle to its surfaces, clinging in stillness lest they should be noticed and consumed by something. The word doesn't meet the air but it wants release, even as a whisper: murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder murder....

But there's only silence and mould.

No one talked much about the sisters and their murder. The conversation lifted without thought and was allowed to fall back to the floor, unengaged, like a ripple at low tide. It's unsolved. There's no solution. There's no one there when we go looking. The door is still open and he's still there. He's out there, walks among us, gets his milk and bread from our shops and his meat from the butcher, feeds his car with the same petrol we do, shakes our hands and waves as we meet him, looks at us, our sisters and daughters, with a gaze both hungry and careful. We don't talk about him. We think about him. He's always there. There is a breath we drew that we are still holding. We will hold it all our lives.

The evidence against him in court was applied with a shovel. It was him. But something happened in the jury room and something happened on the bench. He was judged unfit for trial because of his dementia. It's possible that by this stage he was unaware of what he had done. The accidental obsolesence of his organs and reason kicked in and set him free even from his memory. He died soon after, ostracised by his own family and hated by the people he moved among, but in a quietude of sorts, fed porridge in the morning and ice cream at night in a nursing home in the shade of mango leaves, as vulnerable as each of his victims had been when he invaded them, and if his death was witnessed someone, a nurse perhaps, held him warmly while his mouth stretched, wide and dry over the gums, until his life softly extinguished and he was free.

Read about the case.

That Incredible Summer: what The Monsoons isn't

I hate coming of age stories. Too negative? Alright, the ones I like, the exceptions, are the ones that know how much damage life's lessons can bring. No better? Ok, my problem with coming-of-agers is that they sentimentalise the process. However honestly they might treat the issues the notion that the crises of the young are just passing trifles annoys me. Some trifles are forever. Some of them slowly poison.

Also, the assumption that life lessons are taken on board and nourish the young receptor is rubbish. An adolescent ego will do everything it can to resist any information that dares to challenge it. It's in the job description. Initial sexual experiences, for example, are poor teachers. Almost all first times are nasty. It's like assuming a natural virtuosity on a musical instrument and then producing nothing but room-emptying noise once you touch the real thing. That stops no one. Biology is a party animal.

Coming of age, if such there is, is only knowable in maturity and cannot be depicted during adolescence without a lot of spin. By that stage it's a sentimental and time-consuming waste of thought. My point in depicting these characters at seventeen is that it means that they are between adolesence and adulthood by decree of the laws of their tribe, something so distant and abstract it may as well be a set of runes.

The spectre of imposed adulthood is what haunts these characters: responsibilities that only the dull are ready for, the imperative to escape that wrestles with the pleasure of being loved and fed which has been good enough so far no matter how bratty we've been. Who among them is going to care if they've come of age?

The other thing that The Monsoons isn't is nostalgic. You'll hear tell of a few cultural and historical points here and there but the setting is as it is for reasons mentioned in earlier posts (the plainer language of the teens at that time which was adopted in reaction to the cool talk of the previous generation/the change of decade/me writing about a time that I lived through at that age/etc) and that it can be easily transported to now.

Also, almost in opposition to that, there are facts of contemporary technology that would sink plot points in the 70s before I got to them. They're on an island. No blog, no phones, no Facebook friends, not a single luxury. Of course I could contrive plot points to eradicate these but then I'd have to write contemporary teenagers and I'm not going to intrude on them with a lot of goof talk. So, it's 1979.

So, it's 1979, that incredible summer when I saw for the first time that even the strongest of us could cry and that love could turn with an evil face, when I tasted the first drops of the nectar of ... Actually that's the kind of blerg I used to write in the name of free verse (ie poetry for those who can't tell the difference between literary discpline and bullying). Now, I'm not damning nostalgia. It plays a vital role in our self esteem and capability to grasp life. I just don't like it when it is the purpose rather than the paint box of a story.

The holiday I had just after school on Magnetic Island was brief (less than a week for me) and was fun. A couple of things I noticed gave me the idea that I should record them. One thing really sent shivers and not  good ones.

There were about five of us at the house for that time but plenty of people dropped in.They were a real mix. One girl had boyfriend drama and seethed at the point of implosion all day long. A sporty thug who banged on the door and forced us to come with him and either (if female) join him in his speedboat or on the skis it dragged or (if male) watch. There were others and a lot of them were like this and hurtled into their fun with the sense that school had been good and never had to end even if there were no teachers 'n' stuff. They didn't just remember nicknames and dead reputations, they enforced them with an almost audible scream of terror under every breath.

I really liked my schooldays but more and more I had been enjoying the life I led outside it, the gigs and uni student parties etc. When it ended I felt relief. I suppose that means I coped well with rather than liked my schooldays but I'll take that over the ticking bomb of denial that some of these people were hosting. No, it wasn't just youthful fervour, it was a wish that everything they had won in the classroom, quad, refectory and oval was theirs for life and they demanded a kind of cultural superannuation whereas we who had struggled with less driven hatred would be condemned to a kind of young age pension and a life of slowburning derision ... kind of worked out that way for a fair few, actually. Anyway... It chilled me to see this walling off of the future but it warmed me to hear one acquaintance who had been an inveterate bully tell me he wanted a career in customs to fight fauna smuggling. I don't know if he got that. Hope so.

The other thing I felt was fear. My own of course, but that of everyone else as well. Current models can stay at home without shame until their thirties, claiming research. At that time everyone wanted to get out of the family home as soon as possible and live like grown ups. Yes, that phrasing does suggest a kind of paradox but the feeling was there and it was accompanied by the gut-clearing fear as constant as the ring of tinnitus, that they'd leap from the nest and fall to the ground and break their wings and be eaten by a ... uh ... cat.

Tearing to get out and terrified of what was outside. The big black Oceanic night thickened outside the window. You could see it through the flyscreens. There was nothing and everything in it. Black the lack. Black the most popular hue in the cosmos. Out among the canetoad choruses, the rain and on dry, moonless nights the lost-soul whistling of curlews. All the worst fantasms we made in the dark when Nana told us bedtime stories came back. We thought we'd controlled them all that time. We thought again.

As for me I remember one thing before anything else. It's a horror and it has no shape.

I'm standing in front of the artificial waterfall on the strand. I've just parted company with Fiona, a friend who had already started to struggle and was patching up all the flaky bits with commercial measures of hedonism. We'd met for a drink, I think. No one met for coffee in a tropical summer.

Anyway, I'm looking up at the waterfall which has been switched off and don't feel like going back home yet. It's January and nothing's happened the way I wanted. I light a cigarette but can't take the first drag because something bad is happening. Suddenly, I'm feeling a kind of swelling nausea. It starts in my stomach and expands pushing in every direction. I drop my cigarette and can do nothing but stare at the waterfall. I don't know if I'll be able to keep standing. I think I'm going to die. I'm wearing sunglasses but the glare is eating through them. It's well over 30 degrees Celsius but I feel ice spreading from my centre outwards. I have the feeling that nothing I can do can change this. Nothing I am or could be can change this. This is how the end of the world will feel. This is how it does feel. This is it.

A beat later, I scrape the cigarette butt into the gravel and light another one. I head off to my bus stop and wonder if anyone's called while I've been out.

To this day I have no idea what did this. Some bad things were happening but really they were mostly exaggerated annoyances which I'd forget about as soon as something else happened. This was a depth of fear I had never known before, scarier as it seemed to have no cause. I have a nagging feeling that there was something that triggered it but I've never been able to work it out. That leads to even scarier thoughts that I've been keeping something nasty behind a screen. It's still there when I remember. The details fade but the feeling is unforgettable. It doesn't lurk but I can't shake the fact that even for only a few seconds I was possessed by it.

I didn't approach it with any courage in the written version of The Monsoons. Too close in time. But as soon as I started drawing the comic version of the opening chapter where Gail is waiting on the PIcnic Bay Jetty for the boat, I saw what I'd been trying to put there. I felt it come back. And then I had the real monster.

Seamonsters

Aunt Peggy had a dog called Suzy which Mum described as neurotic. So I knew that word before I was ten. Suzy was a small black yapping thing. She was touchy but there was a kind of incurable darkness beneath that tip that worried me. Peggy was Matron of Nurses at the Townsville General Hospital but also owned a house at Bingil Bay. We went there for a few Easters in a row and maybe some May holidays. It was magic.

I mean that, magic by crown standard. Things happened at Bingil Bay or on the way there that seemed to be from a weirder world than the controlled settlement in Townsville. My brother Greg saved a boy from sharks while surfing. My sister Rina was chased through the forest by cassowaries. Out there in the dark of the copse of pines that obscured the house from view by anyone on the road, spoken of but never seen, was a giant moth. And once, there was a seamonster. It was on the news.

I heard Dad tell someone that Bingil Bay was only a few hours drive from Townsville. I still don't know if that's true but the stretch applied to all time and distance by a child turned it into a day's journey. It was probably a few memories compounded. Anyway, I clearly remember stopping by the beach and lighting a campfire on the sand. Dad saw me finishing a can of softdrink and told me to throw it into the fire. If we waited only a little we'd see it turn molten red like lava.

The seamonster had been reported on the radio. The real one. The ABC. The woman reading the story mentioned pictures in small local papers. It had been sighted off the North Queensland coast between Airlie Beach and Mission Beach. That's where we were. I listened from my usual position driving in the car at night, curled up in a blanket in the back, staring through the window at the clouds and the stars as they raced above. The  newsreader had the cooling voice of a kind teacher. She must have been right.

I pictured the monster as an unhelpful black and white photo in a newspaper. A mess of tentacles burst out in a tangle from a helmet like head. It had an angry face, dead or even still alive it glared pure hatred at whichever red faced idiot fisherman had stolen it from its home. It was a king. The fisherman was a thief.

I never saw the picture but didn't need to. Dad talked about a great ray that had lived from the time of the ancient kingdoms and was so powerful that nothing could damage or injure it. So it just kept living. Living and living and living until it was no longer like the other sea creatures which had long become the dirt of the ocean floor but a modern monstrosity, moving as a great destroying shadow just below the surface of the clear blue Pacific.That same Pacific hissed and whispered behind us in the dark, a lightless black expanse of unknowable hungry evil. I fell asleep before the softdrink tin turned red. My dreams were black and white, smothering like waves and sounding like a huge distant roar.

Everyone was talking about the monster at the Bingil Bay house. Some of us were scared. Dad loudly told Mum he thought it must have been a dugong seen by a drunk at midnight. Lots of laughter. But I know that I went out to the cliff and looked.

A fairly recent version of The Monsoons featured a literal seamonster, heralded by an axe-bearing trawlerman (who was real but I got to the Island after his appearance). But the more I thought of it the more I remembered how I preferred not seeing the picture of the monster of the northern coast.

The sea of the bay was shining from the moonlight and the cold air of Easter was pleasing and fresh. I looked into water that rippled all the way to the edge of the world and knew that under it lurked a power that if it chose could break the surface, climb the rocks and the slime of the red mud cliff and wrap its angry tentacles around our hearts each and every one, gasping in our sleep until the end when there would be no more sound and we would be the sea.