Memoirs of a Go-Go Dancer

by Justin Sheedy

  ‘Just a Second Year student,’ said Steve. ‘Y’can volunteer to do ‘Contact’: handing out advice to First Years, idealogical crisis counselling… free condoms…’

  ‘Looks like an interesting bloke.’

  Steve winked as we went. ‘He certainly thinks so…’

  Crossing the first floor of Manning House, at its far end down a stairway then straight up one again we were now at the entrance to ‘Manning Bar’.

  It was a long, rectangular-shaped room, bar down the left side, high curtained windows down the right, a well-worn, patterned carpet across its rather cosy width, also low, maroon vinyl armchairs. And though these looked to me vintage 1958, the students reclined upon them this day in 1987 looked as one with them as they chatted and languidly smoked. While Steve ordered us an espresso each from the bar, as I looked around me from my seat the place had the hint of a private club about it, albeit a bohemian one. Yet now Steve brought our coffees, and handed me mine.

  ‘Y’know who used to come here, don’t you,’ he said as he sat.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Well, Clive James for one…’

  I looked around me once more. ‘Right here…?’ I had recently read Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs, featuring his time at Sydney Uni in the early 60s, to this day possibly the funniest thing I have ever read.

  ‘Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes too,’ said Steve. ‘Probably sat where you are right now.’

  ‘STEVO,’ hailed a voice on approach. I saw a strikingly tall and thin young man with long pale brown hair and goatee beard striding towards us.

  ‘Ian, my man,’ beamed Steve and put out his hand palm-up. ‘Put it there…’

  The tall young man slapped Steve’s palm and landed in a spare chair with a vinyl hiss and smiling eyes. After friendly introductions I gathered from their conversation that Ian was a Psychology student but also worked for the university’s ‘Student Union’ which put on extra-curricular events and activities for the student body, their offices upstairs here at Manning House.

  ‘So, Justin,’ Ian turned to me. ‘You studying anything, mate?’

  I winced. And explained my recent ‘drop out’.

  ‘Ah, that’s tough,’ he concluded. ‘Still, you can always drop back in here.’ He nodded. ‘You’d be welcome.’

  After thanking this most impressive young man, I took our empty coffee cups back to the bar, where I was greeted by its ginger-haired bartender, a man in his mid-20s in a pale green Bonds t-shirt named Phil the Barman, Steve had said, and famed for his well-sculpted sideburns. Which, at first viewing, were indeed world class.

  ‘You’re the go-go dancer, aren’t you,’ he said.

  My brow must have lifted a whole foot. ‘…Howdidja —’

  He grinned. ‘We read the papers, mate…’

  15 Minutes of Fame

  * * *

  Legend has it Andy Warhol once prophesied that everybody in the world would one day enjoy ‘15 minutes of fame’.

  I think I got about 3 seconds.

  TV air-time, that is…

  For one following night at the club, a TV camera crew from Channel 7 rocked up, filming all corners of the club including me in my cage. Filming up at me with a spotlight from the dance floor directly in front of my cage podium, the camera operator, sound man, ‘director’ and ‘assistant’ were surrounded and fairly jostled by people go-go dancing. I thought I gave the camera a bit of a blistering performance too; the song had been Fire by Jimi Hendrix — perhaps the most outstandingly go-go danceable song of all time; a thing of the most powerful urgency and shifting go-go dynamics.

  At the end of the song, as another one began I saw the director motion ‘Cut’, the camera’s light doused, the director shouting something in the ear of his assistant, who approached my cage. I knelt down within it to see what the lady wanted…

  ‘Can you ask the DJ to play that song again?’ she hollered. ‘We want to film another take…’

  ‘Okay,’ I replied, climbed out of my cage, and did as requested.

  ‘Impossible. We already played that song,’ said the DJ.

  I returned to the dance floor, and relayed my boss’s words to the TV director’s assistant.

  Who promptly abused the crap out of me as if I was personally responsible for denying them what they wanted when it was within my power to give them what they wanted and all they were asking for was for a simple bloody song to be played which really wasn’t too much to ask, was it, considering ALL they were doing for US…

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ I returned, and relayed her sentiments to my boss, so inspired was I by the high level of Media Professionalism in which I’d just been sandwiched. Fire by Jimi Hendrix was replayed. As was my performance to it.

  Rock And Roll.

  The footage went to air the next week on a Channel 7 morning ‘news magazine’ program, as a result there being really only one word to describe the atmosphere in The Plastic Inevitable the following Friday night.

  Ballistic.

  Emma’s List

  * * *

  It was my mother who, in my absence, took the phone call and dutifully took down all the names. About fifteen of them…

  One brilliant perk of my job at the club was that I was allowed to put my friends’ names on the club’s ‘door list’ thus granting them free entry, and as many as I liked as often as I liked as the club was doing such good business. In addition, if I happened to be by the door as a friend appeared outside I could get them in without their having to wait for ages on the very long entry line up the block. And it truly was my pleasure to be able to provide such special treatment for dear friends such as Steve and Max and others, also for my brother Pat and all his old uni friends, the whole crowd I’d once played for and felt so connected with: the charming Peter Raad, ‘Mad-Dog’ the trance-dancer and the delectable Eleanor Tripp (married) whose ‘Mwah, darling’ on arrival still gave me a thrill as I still adored her. In a nutshell, I just LOVED being able to make these people feel special. VIP status. Yay. As that’s what each of them was to me to say the very least: a ‘Very Important Person’.

  And so it was to my surprise, on getting home from call centre work one Friday evening before getting ready and heading back out to the club, that Mum alerted me to the list of names that had been phoned through by one of Emma St. John’s identical friends for inclusion on the club’s door list for that very night.

  The train trip from Epping in to Sydney’s Central Station was a long one as the Northern Line went via Saturn. A long trip, and I thought about Emma’s list the whole way. I thought about it long and hard.

  On my arrival at the club, Trish behind the counter enquired as usual: ‘Anyone on the door tonight, Juz?’

  ‘…Hm?’ I returned. ‘Nope.’

  Do YOU know this boy?

  * * *

  My first moment of 1988 was fireworks.

  A New Year’s Eve party at Kirribilli, the house was a bit back from the harbour but with a brilliant view of the pyrotechnical magnificence put on, as ever, by the Howard and Sons fireworks company whose factory had once occupied the site of my childhood street in North Epping and given Howard Place its name.

  Watching the display, I remembered a New Year’s Eve eight years earlier, for 1980, the last ever New Year’s Eve of my grandmother, Josie. And now here I was, the young man my darling Josie lamented she’d never see. Now that I was, I wondered what she’d make of me.

  Tonight’s party was at the home of Steve’s latest girlfriend, an ex-Monte Sant Angelo girl whose younger brother, in his final year at Riverview, turned out to be best friends with one Peter St. John whom it was a delight to see once again. He seemed so happy, flanked as he was by a group of clearly excellent young guys who, to my surprise, seemed not only happy to see me but to know who I was…

  Peter’s career ambition now very firmly to get in to NIDA, the National Institute of Dramatic Art and Australia’s foremost drama school, he and his circle of friends had app
arently been following my career, such as it was…

  ‘That fabulous photo of you!’ he glowed. ‘It was up on the school noticeboard for months! “Do YOU know this boy?” it said… We demand, we demand, Juz, that you show us some dance moves! Fabulous ones. This night!’

  And fabulous dancing there did ensue. Though I ended the night talking with Max Van Cleef until the early hours. Sipping tepid champagne as we talked, it was quieter now, people starting to crash, some already asleep.

  ‘I dropped out,’ Max said.

  I nearly sprayed my mouthful of champagne. The smartest boy in the school, a ‘drop-out’ like me?! I did my best to whisper. ‘Out of Medicine?!’

  ‘Yep. It wasn’t for me.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘The Law,’ he said. ‘Going to the Law. Like my dad. At Sydney Uni. Arts-Law, in fact. I’m going to study African languages.’

  ‘How come?’

  His eyes narrowed at me. ‘D’y’know how bad AIDS is in Africa right now?’

  I smiled at my friend. ‘You’ll be awesome, mate.’

  ‘I’ll have to be awesome, won’t I,’ he winked. ‘If I wanna get in to International Law at Cambridge, I will…’

  ‘Wow,’ I breathed. ‘Max Van Cleef, Cambridge don.’

  ‘Well here’s hoping, my son; the entry requirements list awesomeness as the minimum requirement. Minimum. What about you, dear Juz?’

  ‘Arts, I think. At Sydney. Fine Arts.’

  ‘Now that’s awesome,’ said Max. ‘And we’ll be together. Awesome together.’

  ‘I just hope,’ I strained, ‘that B.A. doesn’t stand for Bugger All.’

  ‘It will stand for what you make it stand for.’

  ‘Here’s to that,’ I returned.

  Max emptied the bottle into our glasses, and spoke quietly as he did. ‘You still scared?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘So am I, my son,’ he smiled. ‘So am I.’

  From Goodbye Crackernight…

  Arm in arm on Uncle Gabe’s balcony, Josie and I watched the Sydney Harbour fireworks in the distance.

  ‘This will be an important decade for you,’ she said. ‘You’ll turn twenty-one. You’ll be a young man.’

  I squeezed her arm in mine. ‘Love you, Jose.’

  ‘I love you too, Juddy. You know how much I love you, don’t you.’

  ‘Aren’t the fireworks beautiful…’

  ‘Yes, they are.’

  Bicentennial!

  * * *

  Whack-o-the-diddle-o and Hooray for Everything! 1988 — ‘Celebrayshurn orva Nay-shurn…’ — marked Australia’s 200th or ‘bicentennary’ year since white settlement. Or white invasion, depending on your point of view. For it was in 1788 that Captain Arthur Phillip of the British Royal Navy had sailed into Sydney Harbour with the 11 ships of the so called ‘First Fleet’ and white-settled the continent. It was indeed convenient that the continent, though settled for the previous 40-thousand years by its Aboriginal peoples, was considered by the Brits as ‘Terra Nullius’. In Latin, this meant ‘Land Belonging to No One’ so the place was up for grabs. So nerr.

  In any case, 1988 was to be our ‘Bicentennial’, the year ahead promising to be dead-set chockas with commemorative events including a ‘tall ship’ re-enactment of the arrival of the First Fleet in Sydney Harbour. This would take place on January 25th, the date of the historic landing and ever since our annual ‘Australia Day’. Or, as those of Aboriginal descent might refer to it, ‘White Australia Day’. Out of respect for them and for their ancestors, our Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, declined government funding for the tall ship re-enactment. (Nice one, Bob.)

  The first item on the Bicentennial program, however, took place on New Year’s Night: an internationally-broadcast 4-hour TV special called Australia Live. Though with multiple celebrity hosts, the show was studio-anchored by our ruggedly charming Clive James who, in the role, suggested himself as perhaps representative of the new ‘1980s breed’ of sex symbol, the new ‘middle-aged and virilely balding’ type as per Time Magazine’s 1987 ‘man of the year’, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

  Via a technologically ground-breaking series of satellite link-ups across Australia and overseas, Australia Live portrayed a ‘typical day-in-the-life’ of Australians both famous and typical. And the ensuing broadcast contained for me one of the funniest moments I have ever witnessed on television…

  One of the satellite link-ups was to the Australian ‘Davis Station’ in Antarctica, for humans the harshest natural environment on Earth. This segment opened with an outdoors face-to-camera shot of a member of the Australian Antarctic team speaking rather blandly to the camera, behind him the Antarctic ‘middle of the night’ appearing bright afternoon in the permanent light of the South Pole summer, the weather clear and still though revealed ‘live’ as minus-14 degrees Celcius. At which point three pale-skinned dudes sauntered past in the background from right to left of screen wearing nothing but swimming ‘Speedos’, zinc cream, thongs and a bath-towel each ‘on their way down to the beach’. With casual acknowledgment of the camera, one had a pair of rubber flippers slung over his shoulder, possibly a shower-cap, one holding a transistor radio to his ear, the interviewee blandly continuing to the TV camera as if the surreal scene unfolding behind him was completely normal. It was closely followed, of course, by a non-posed scene before the camera, an actual ‘real’ one of the Australian Antarctic team, a group shot, the whole gang mid-party and beaming intelligent hilariousness.

  The off-screen interviewer focused on one of them seemingly at random: a spectacled, academic type in a sloppy joe who turned out to be a senior scientific officer of Davis Station, ‘And what’s your name?’ opening the interviewer. ‘Keith,’ came the reply, the man’s tone suggesting though he might be capable of rocket science he was unaccustomed to TV cameras. ‘And what do you do here in Antarctica?’ posed the interviewer to the spontaneous mirth of all present, one of the group immediately following with, ‘Yeah, what DO you do here, Keith?!’, at which point several arms tipped the man giggling sideways off his stool.

  And with this I knew I’d just witnessed a real-life portrait of some of the best minds in Australia: all slightly crazy as they had to be to request posting to Antarctica, and all so intelligent as to be capable of their leading scientific work while remaining a harmonious group of people in the toughest, most isolated environment on the planet short of leaving it for The Moon. To see such a brilliant bunch not taking themselves too seriously, it was a moment of live TV beaming via satellite to the world that made me feel proud to be an Australian, albeit a moment as if Antarctically isolated from our tragic colonial history.

  Watching the long (and monumental) Australia Live broadcast, I couldn’t help but feel proud, too, to have our Clive James as its host and example to the world of a ‘leading Australian’. Clive James: From his suburban then bohemian roots in early 60s Australia, a journalist, author and TV presenter whose arresting clarity of description of the world around him made the rest of us take the world less seriously. A rabid lover of women, if not what you’d call ‘ruggedly handsome’ he was at least ‘beadily-eyed handsome’ for in truth his eyes were his dominant physical feature: peepers somehow aggressively perceptive, the end-result of his perception being a turn of phrase that could capture a whole dark little corner of the human experience in half a sentence.

  Yet I think what truly made us proud of Clive James as a leading example of ‘Us’ was that, though a leading Australian, he considered his nationality worthy of an affectionate giggle. And that’s what we, as Australians, are most proud of about ourselves: that we’re too sane to take ourselves too seriously.

  Also, Clive’s role on Australia Live personified another key aspect of our Australian ‘national identity’: His international showbiz success was living proof to us of our national identity being so very profoundly…

  A Foreign Affair

  * * *

  In 1988 (asi
de from Dame Edna Everidge) Clive James was our most prominent ‘Expat’ and international ‘Export’. To his fellow Australians, aside from his razor wit, our Clive was famous (even infamous) for ‘making it overseas’ but then never coming home.

  Why would he? I ask…

  The Kid from Kogarah’s key achievement was to get the fuck out of Kogarah. This he did by making the world risk serious internal injury trying to stifle laughter on public transport whilst reading his accounts of what it is to be Australian. And he showed us that key to being Australian is the unique perspective on The World which you can only get from being born of and shaped by a Sydney suburb like Kogarah. Because Kogarah is ‘The Opposite’ of The World.

  Clive was proof for us that Australian ‘identity’ is born in Australia but lives overseas. This is due to a few factors but chiefly to our continent’s stunning geographic isolation from the rest of the planet, an isolation that defines us: Since our (white) history began, we have had to express ourselves, become ourselves, show ourselves, BE ourselves by escaping Australia. Apt it is that modern Australia was founded in 1788 as a penal colony. The key to all real estate being ‘location, location, location’, ours was the Bottom of the Planet: as our American cousins refer to us, ‘Down Under’.

  What a tragic human irony it is that, the world over, the best way we know to claim, assert and prove national identity is to die for it. Going to war in the name of our countries we are promptly killed and so hold nationality no further unless ghosts wave flags but at least future generations can use us as their inspiration to do exactly the same thing. Sort of a suicidal ‘pass the parcel’ from one generation to the next. And here you might think that Australians, being so safely isolated from the rest of the world, might avoid this tragedy of history as we’re too far away to have enemies, so no one to fight so no reason to go to war. Indeed you might think it but you’d be dead wrong. It’s a quandry alright but we Australians have a fool-proof way of getting around it…