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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.