Where the Indigo Melts

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

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

Where the Indigo Melts

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

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

"Yes?"

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

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

"Double the price," he said firmly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Get lost!" said James.

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

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

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

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

Click!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mackay Girls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But there's only silence and mould.

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

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

Read about the case.

That Incredible Summer: what The Monsoons isn't

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seamonsters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marty's Camera

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.