Monsoon Days

Where the Indigo Melts

2012-02-14T03:55:00.000-08:00

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 crispblue policeman beside him. Well, that was his job (someone had to do it) and hedid it well. The policeman sighed and picked out five soiled notes.

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

"Yes?"

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

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

"Double the price," he said firmly.

"James!" pleaded the cop. But James was a hard manand, 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 inhis pockets and threw ten soiled notes at him. Satisfied, James shouted, "Hello again!" and quicklywalked away from the suffering policeman and down the street.

Seeing someone he didn't like the look of James smashed himagainst a brick wall. "So what if my name's Eggyolk!" he screamed atthe bewildered prime minister. "It'snot 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 dogtelepathically. James, who hated smart dogs, frowned and kicked it in the ribs.

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

His flat was kept nicely neat in a natural way. Everythingwas 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 veryserious indeed. "One day," he frowned, "you're going to singBlue Suede Shoes in Spanish." Corned Beef looked back in shame and hid his hairy hog eyes with his brokentennis racquet.

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

Yes, life was boring for James Tomato Eggyolk, and he wasthe 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 arotten lettuce with its yellow leaves grinning at him.

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

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

It always reminded him of the cat. "Meow," the cathad said, waiting for milk, but, having no milk, James gave it a bulletinstead. Right between the eyes but the cat liked it and came back for somemore.

"Dream you sleep to self," read the sign behindhis eyes and James, for the first time since he knew he was born, slept. It wasvery 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. " Youdon't get rid of me like that. And anyway I'm going to tell you mygrievances."

This was getting boring so James pushed the dream out of hiseyes 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 andscreamed tearfully, "this is useless. You're never going to sing .Something had to give."

And it did. He raced to the cupboard, snatched his revolverand 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 andpulled the trigger.

Click!

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

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

2012-02-13T04:06:00.000-08:00

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..."

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

2012-01-26T19:56:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-08T14:19:00.001-08:00

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 an 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

2012-01-02T19:36:00.001-08:00

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

2012-01-02T14:08:00.000-08:00

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.

Marty's Camera

2011-12-28T13:43:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's why:

And then there was photography.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Failed Gails

2011-12-27T06:53:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

Too nice.

Too nice by a holy bloody nautical kilometre.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hmm. A little too far back.

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

Harder.

Too hard.

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

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

Well ... not you...

Sure.

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

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

So maybe I need at least a speech balloon.

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

I'm almost there.

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

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

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

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

So, here it is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soon ....

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

The Original

2011-12-22T13:45:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lines against the enivronment

2011-12-22T04:00:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

Rosanna: a crush

2011-12-21T07:12:00.000-08:00

See this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quick one on the Cintiq. Needed a pic

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

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

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

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

2011-12-18T18:29:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So there yuz farkin go.

The Title

2011-12-17T16:57:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Boat

2011-12-12T04:26:00.000-08:00

Ok, look at this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's it.

Continue

2011-12-11T22:03:00.000-08:00

Right, so this is me.

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

Anyway....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here begin

2011-12-11T20:52:00.000-08:00

Hi,

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

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

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

PJ