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.

The Title

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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