Boy On Fire

by Mark Mordue

  Nick was in second form. Dawn says, ‘He was made to go round with a conduct card in his pocket all the time. Every class, the teacher had to sign it to say he was good. And he had to wait outside at the end of each class to have it signed. I’d go to the staffroom and teachers would always be saying, “I’ve just had your son.” Eventually one night one of the teachers I was friends with, Joy Star, was driving me home. I must have sat with her in the car outside our house for two hours while she persuaded me to get Nick to leave Wangaratta. She felt he had much more to offer, that he was too bright. “But he loves the reputation he is getting,” she said, “and he is going from bad to worse. For heaven’s sake, get him out!”’ Something about this story coats Dawn’s eyes with tears that don’t fall. ‘I can still see us sitting there in the car as it got darker and darker,’ she says, ‘till there was no daylight at all. She really cared.’22

  ‘I do remember Joy Star,’ Nick says, though he never knew she played such a crucial hand in changing his life. ‘She passed me on my Tea Making Badge at Cub Scouts even though the cup I made her was cold and horrible. I didn’t boil the kettle long enough. You make someone a cup of tea and if they think you have done it successfully you get the badge. I just remember doing a botched job of it and Joy saying, “Don’t worry, Nicky boy, you’ll get your badge.”’

  Something else was beginning to make its appeal felt to Nick: a mix of music, landscape and literature stirring up a new sense of language within him. ‘The first book that I read where I felt a real quickening of the heart in regard to language was when I was ten years old, when I was reading a Tarzan novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs – and it described a lion resting in the jungle and “spasmodically” moving its tail. I remember very clearly getting a physical charge from that word – loving it but not knowing what it meant,’ he says.

  Nick had a makeshift bedroom arrangement, sleeping in what was effectively a sunroom. ‘It was the room you went through on the way to the toilet. Where I lay, I had my head right beside this old boiler.’ An adjoining room functioned as Julie’s bedroom. She’d cry out, ‘Nick, tell me a story.’ And he would relish the opportunity almost every night. The deal they brokered was that Julie would make him a hot chocolate each morning in exchange for a tale. Julie recalls Nick had to ‘almost shout the stories out to me. Or speak quite loudly, anyway.’23 They both refer to what Nick calls ‘a favourite one’ about a deep-sea diver ‘going down deep into the water looking for gold’. At various moments during the dive, sharks and other forms of danger approach. Nick would provoke shrieks of fear in Julie. Eventually the diver finds the bar of gold he is seeking and comes to the surface. ‘And it turns out it is just a little kid in the bath with a block of soap, imagining it all.’ Nick looks a little sheepish when he retells the story now. ‘I was only twelve!’ he adds defensively. In fact, Julie is not sure Nick actually came up with the story on his own, or if he absorbed it from somewhere and forgot its origins. Not that it mattered. He developed a litany of horror stories and scary tales, delighting in Julie’s terror. ‘Yeah, I cut my teeth on her,’ he says, smiling.

  ‘One of my favourite contemporary authors is the crime writer James Lee Burke,’ says Nick, ‘who writes the most beautiful descriptive prose about the town of New Iberia in Louisiana: Spanish moss, the Bayou Teche, antebellum houses, purple mists, rattling lightning, et cetera, et cetera . . . I loved the way he wrote about it so much I went there on my honeymoon with Susie. We drove around Arizona, Colorado, through Texas and down South – saw New Iberia on the map and headed there, all the way me telling Susie how beautiful this place would be because of what I had read in his twenty or so novels. When we arrived, it was actually full of Burger Kings and McDonald’s and all the rest of the shit that American small towns consist of these days, but beneath it, deep down, you could sense Burke’s ghosted vision of his home town rising up – it was a deeply selective representation and all about memory and its spirits; and so it is with me and Wangaratta. James Lee Burke says, “I have come to learn that memory and presence are inextricably connected and should never be seen as separate entities.” This is so true. The past is always there, calling to us, whether it be Ned Kelly rising from the fog or my father crunching down the garden path late at night or the spirits of our absent friends reminding us that there is still much to know and much to learn.

  ‘In my memory Wangaratta is a magical place, where only good things ever happened. The swinging rope, the willow trees, the railway bridge, the pylons, the roots of half-submerged trees rising out of the muddy water – all that stuff – it’s there in “Bluebird”, “Carry Me”, “Sad Waters”, “Your Funeral . . . My Trial”, “Where the Wild Roses Grow” . . . if a song has a river in it, it’s that spot in Wangaratta just under the train tracks where we used to go as kids,’ he says. ‘It’s an idyllic substructure that sorrowful tales of corrupted innocence can rest upon. I wouldn’t trade all that for anything.

  ‘I was both terrified and excited when I left, but I remember feeling deep down that I was being sent away. I was always under the impression that I was asked to leave Wangaratta High School, but now I wonder if that’s true. Mum says she sent me to Melbourne to “save me from Wang”, but I remember it as being kicked out of high school. Whatever the reason, I certainly felt at the time that I was being sent to Melbourne because I was in too much trouble. That’s not to say I felt like my mum and dad didn’t love me. I always felt that, I always felt supported by them and that they had a special place in their hearts for me. The “trouble” thing was supported by the fact that at the first class I was in at Caulfield Grammar School, the teacher came into the classroom, pointed straight at me and said, “Sit down, Cave. We’ve heard all about you!” I felt this comment very deeply because it supported the notion that I had left Wangaratta under a cloud of strife – and as I knew no-one there, I felt very isolated. So I felt ashamed and lonely, but also I remember feeling angry, like, “Who the fuck are you? You don’t know anything about me.”

  ‘So, like I say, Wang represents a childhood ideal – the river, the ghost gums, magpies, the ranges, the swimming pool, the paper run, my bike, the mighty trees we would climb, the footpaths that would fry our bare feet hard, storm drains, yabbie dams, the high bridges we jumped off, swim holes, vast star-filled skies, the living moon, the smell of a storm coming in the dust, the stench of the abattoir as you came into town from the Glenrowan end, the nests of red-backs [spiders] out in the compost, snakes, the wool mills – they’re all symbols of my childhood that come up repeatedly in my song writing and that connect to a sense of childish wonder that was lost or at least changed when I left to go to boarding school in Melbourne at age thirteen. I caught the train to Melbourne and the world changed into something different, complicated and ultimately adversarial for me. It would never be the same again.’

  PART III

  SONNY’S BURNING

  The Word

  MELBOURNE

  1971–75

  The fields of Caulfield Grammar School stretched out in the early summer morning like a burning lake, the sun igniting the dew. Nick walked the green edges on his way to class, still thunderstruck to be there. Founded in 1881 as ‘a thoroughly Christian’ school, the Anglican college took as its motto the Latin phrase Labora ut requiescas: ‘Work hard that you may rest content.’

  Despite this familiar Protestant ethic, and the school’s reputation for progressive teaching in the arts, Nick felt no contentment on the horizon. Instead, he sensed the geometry of a prison, the brute hierarchies of a boys’ boarding school closing in around him from the very first day. Skinny and awkward, like some goofy fallen bird, he must have looked an easy mark for bullying. Closer examination would have revealed broad shoulders, a country boy’s sinewy strength and dauntingly large hands that were as good as clubs when he formed them into fists. Cave had something else, too, in his favour when it came to defending himself: what might be called a killer instinct, a way of never giving up no matte
r what odds were stacked against him.

  His future bandmates in The Boys Next Door and The Birthday Party, Mick Harvey and Phill Calvert, had also started at Caulfield Grammar. The three would slowly become friends, forming what would be their own little clique inside the school’s Art House. Mick and Phill managed to avoid the periodic fights and bullying that broke out; Nick drew this bad energy to him like a magnet. ‘Trouble seemed to be part of my DNA,’ Nick says. ‘I don’t know why.’

  He arrived to repeat second form in 1971, his reputation from Wangaratta High School trailing after him. Both Mick and Phill recall early sightings of Nick on the sports fields enmeshed in fights, often against older or bigger boys who had targeted him or found his smart-arse comments insufferable. The pecking order could be ruthless, exacerbated by conflicts between the boarders and ‘day boys’ like Mick and Phill, who lived in the surrounding suburbs. An encounter with one of Caulfield Grammar’s more intimidating figures, the almost comic-book-sounding ‘Beaver’ Mills, was typical of what happened in a brawl. ‘Nick’s incredible under adverse conditions,’ says Phill Calvert. ‘He has incredible strength when he is under duress. It’s this absolute driven, animal-type strength. I just could not believe it when the teacher broke it up: Nick was winning, he was on top and he was gonna kill Beaver.’1

  Nick may have ‘looked like an Art House wimp’, to use Calvert’s words, but to see him in a fight was, Mick Harvey agreed, ‘quite scary’.2 When Nick returned home to Wangaratta for the holidays, his old friend Bryan Wellington sensed the changes. Nick told him about it, how he had to fight. ‘How unhappy it made him. There was no violence in our growing-up time in Wang; Nick was not a toughie or an aggressive personality,’ Wellington insists. ‘With Nick I saw how that came into his life later, when he was forced to leave and go down to Melbourne. I often think it wasn’t Wang so much that influenced him, it was leaving Wang.’3

  The gaps between each visit home were growing longer. When Nick did come back to town, Wellington says, ‘we used to spend a lot of time writing out the lyrics to songs. I remember that being an important activity for us. Leonard Cohen, Dylan, John Lennon . . . just listening and writing down all the words.’4

  On one of these visits, Nick stayed with Bryan for a weekend. He brought with him from Melbourne a copy of Fillmore East – June 1971, a live album by Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention. Nick and Bryan blasted out the track ‘Bwana Dik’ on the record player again and again, partly to aggravate Wellington’s father. Both boys thought the song’s double entendres to be the height of wit. The absurdist jazz mania of the music, and the vocals – alternately cartoonish, operatic, orated or yelled – impressed them greatly: a compound of avant-garde style and crude humour cast in the mock form of a seduction taking place between a rock star and a groupie. ‘Each time we played it Nick turned it up a little louder. I took great delight [in that],’ says Bryan.5

  The weekend over, Nick caught the train back to Melbourne. Bryan says he and Eddie had in the meantime ‘became better friends after Nick left town, as it was then that the wagging, drinking, smoking and porn began at another friend’s garage’. The duo would later fall out, arguing over a local girl. When she died unexpectedly of cancer, the rift became something deeper. Bryan Wellington was only sixteen when he fled from his ‘anti-intellectual’ father to live with his uncle and aunt in Wangaratta so that he could finish high school. Eddie Baumgarten signed on to join the navy at age fifteen. Bryan says that ‘Eddie was sent away’, but Anne remembers her brother being an adventurer and ‘a pretty charismatic kid who drew people to him. That was how he and Nick connected. When Ed came back from the navy he had all these amazing stories about his trips around Asia. Bryan was a bit of an outsider. A nice kid, but not particularly cool and not in any group.’6

  Bryan followed Nick’s career from afar as he dealt with his own profound feelings of exile, then similar problems of addiction. After a long patch away from the town, he would end up back at the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Wangaratta, finding accommodation there as a groundsman and listening to rehearsals by the various boys’ choirs as he went about his work over the years.

  Asked what he most identifies with in Nick’s lyrics, Bryan Wellington can only respond with jet-black humour: ‘Maybe the drug-induced, not-caring attitude.’ A little more genuinely, he adds, ‘All this stuff is really hard to talk about.’ The songs he can relate to most are like a dream of what it was like to be young: a dream of never being able to go back, or never really leaving. ‘Music,’ says Wellington, ‘was always our escape from Wangaratta.’

  He would obsess over Nick’s ‘The Hammer Song’ as a key to something that happened to Nick in particular, and to all of them in some broader way. But when Bryan discusses why the song is so important, he is elusive and imprecise, suggesting its meaning without wanting to fully state what he feels privy to behind the lyrics. ‘That is very autobiographical if you know the story,’ he says. ‘Nick talks about the hammer coming down and how it squashed all dreams. But it made no sound! It means a secret. To me the song is about Nick being sent off to boarding school. He’s had a dream life and his tortured life began. It’s Nick’s idea of a bit of a joke, too. He likes to say things are true that no-one can say are true. There’s a mystery to it. Failure is what it’s about. A major failure in his eyes. The hammer coming down could be a God reference, but I don’t think Nick means it that way.’7

  It was during his first year as a boarder at Caulfield Grammar that Nick was summoned to his father’s study after provoking Colin’s ire yet again on a weekend visit home. Nick would write about this experience in his 1996 BBC radio essay ‘The Flesh Made Word’, in which he describes his father confronting him as a twelve-year-old and asking him what he had done to make the world a better place or improve the lot of his fellow man. Fairly obviously, Nick felt strange about this, and rather confused. He was just a kid. Unable to answer, he threw the question back at his father a little defiantly. Colin cited a few short stories he had written and pulled out the journals they appeared in. There was a moment of reconciliation between father and son as they shared in what they meant. But Nick could see the publications were at least a decade old, and any promise in them of something greater had long ago faded.8

  Nick later described these stories as ‘light and comic, the kind of thing you get in Reader’s Digest. One was this humorous, quirky tale about a lady in a hat shop. It was clever and funny and quite lightweight. The other was a rewrite of Snow White. An adult rewrite,’ he adds with a curious emphasis.

  ‘My father and I became quite competitive as I got older,’ Nick says. ‘It was in some ways just me needing to assert myself against this giant personality my father had. So I actively sought out areas of knowledge he didn’t have. And began reading things like Alfred Jarry. My father would usually have a withering reply about that kind of thing. I was also getting into painters, and that was not his area. I still remember telling him, “I’ve just been looking at Mondrain.” He looked up and said, “It’s Mon-dri-an.” Then I backed out of the room.’

  Despite this competition, there is no doubt that father and son shared a profound love of literature. ‘With Lolita, my father actually sat me down and read the first chapter to me out loud – I think he knew it by heart, actually. He unlocked the words for me, explained why it was such a forceful first chapter, taught me what alliteration was, the way the opening chapter drew you in. He saw it as the greatest novel of the twentieth century. He also recommended I read the murder of the pawnbroker scene in Crime and Punishment, which I later studied in final-year English Lit, and that had a huge impact on me. He got me to read The Old Man and the Sea – Hemingway – that was cool – short and sweet! Also Lord of the Flies . . .

  ‘I can still remember the things he would say where he placed an emphasis on the importance of style. Style over content. I’m the same now. I’ve always been a style-over-content man, really. It’s not so much the content that interests me as t
he way it is said. Anyway, when Dad first read me Lolita he was excited by the sheer use of language, not what it was about. In some respects, it’s very inappropriate to turn a twelve-year-old boy on to Lolita. It’s an adult book. But my father would say there is more benefit than harm in it.’

  Cave’s friend and English writer Will Self would hear of this childhood encounter with Lolita via a journalist in 2010. One would expect Self, a master of hyper-grotesque satires, to be a relatively unshockable figure, but the idea of introducing a young boy to Lolita seemed to do the trick. When Nick heard of this misconception, he had to call Self personally and explain, ‘No, my father wasn’t grooming me, as the journalist might have implied! It was only the first chapter that Dad concentrated on when he read to me. My father saw it as a brief lecture on the art of the English language. I did go and look up what “loins” meant in the dictionary, though.’

  After his father’s first-chapter-only briefing on Lolita, Nick recalls ‘reading a murder mystery novel of some kind. I must have been fourteen by then . . . My dad said, “If you’re looking for blood and guts, read this,” and tossed me Titus Andronicus. “Huge body count!” At a stretch my songs “O’Malley’s Bar” and “The Curse of Millhaven” could be seen as responses to Titus for the ridiculously high, comic, horror-show death ratio. Just trying to please my old man, is all!’

  In the wake of these experiences Cave admitted later, ‘I will sit down together with my sons now and watch a hugely inappropriate film, usually some kind of horror story. They love it. They love having the shit scared out of them9 . . . I can still remember an experience like that myself in that house in Caulfield North, when I was old enough to have graduated from sitting on the carpet to the big brown armchair. I sat there one night watching Division 4 with my parents. It was all about a dead hooker. At the end there was this deathly silence, then all this uncomfortable shifting around from my father and mother. Finally Dad says, “I guess you’re happy we let you watch that one.”’