Memoirs of a Go-Go Dancer

by Justin Sheedy

  WE fight Other People’s wars.

  Officially becoming a nation in 1901, Australians just couldn’t wait until then to go to war, just couldn’t wait and so crossed the planet to fight for Great Britain in the Boxer Rebellion and Boer War as early as 1899. Yet in 1914, with passports finally, we got a real war, a ‘Great War’ in fact, crossed the planet again, this time as part of the ‘Australian and New Zealand Army Corps’ (ANZAC) to fight for Britain again against the Turks at a place called Gallipoli. Due to the whole plan handed us by the Brits being utter bollocks, the Gallipoli campaign was nothing but a long and tragic defeat. To this day we consider it our ‘birth’ as a nation (only in Australia, proud identity from utter defeat) possibly as it showed us as Australians how important we are to each other: young people from a young nation looking after each other in the worst situation imaginable. This spirit we celebrate every year on ‘Anzac Day’.

  Yet then it was off to Europe and the trenches of the Western Front where by war’s end in 1918 we had lost over 60-thousand young Australians for no good reason other than us looking out for each other once again. We had only just become a nation and the French and Belgians, on whose soil we had just fought, erected signs in school classrooms and playgrounds, great big signs which are STILL THERE a hundred years later.

  The signs say ‘Do Not Forget Australia’.

  Thus by 1918 we had ‘made it’ overseas, though have ever since felt the need to keep proving it, to this day fighting other people’s wars. But that’s another story.

  Celebrayshurn orva Nay-shurn

  * * *

  So sang the massed chorus in the 1988 TV commercial encouraging Australians to enter into the spirit of the Bicentennial. Filmed somewhere most Australians never go, our inland desert or as we call it, ‘The Outback’ (in Aboriginal tradition the ‘Never Never’), the ad featured a heavingly positive ensemble of semi-famous identities from the Australian entertainment industry who as one were encouraging us via their writhing togetherness and appalling 80s fashion sense that ’88 would be a bigger unified celebration than… well, than a great big Unified thing. As it happened, the Bicentennial year began a bit differently to the script…

  Australia Day 1988 arrived, the day on Sydney Harbour undeniably spectacular with the tall sailing ships and pleasure craft of all kinds so crowding the harbour that a person could cross it without getting wet. The night was spectacular too — okay, I’m a sucker for fireworks — yet the next day turned out to be one of the most resonant of the whole Bicentennial year…

  Tuesday 26th of January 1988 saw a public demonstration of more than 40-thousand people marching through the streets of Sydney led by Aboriginal people, leaders and political activists from right across Australia. Their chant, their demand was for Aboriginal ‘land rights’: for legal rights to the LAND of which they had been custodians and owners for 40-thousand years before the fateful day some well-spoken toffs in wigs had stepped ashore and said, ‘I say, would you chaps mind awfully, well, clearing orff as we’re claiming this bit of turf as Ours; it’s Terra Nullius dontcha know and’ll make a spiffing jail for us to dump the Irish… So, there’s good chaps, toodooloo and please do accept from us this parting gift of Smallpox.’

  Indeed, possibly the most powerful symbol of the entire Bicentennial year turned out to be a major new artwork that toured our important galleries called the ‘Aboriginal Memorial’. At first sight it was a vast side-by-side grouping of vertical wooden poles, 200 of them in fact, each one painted in the ancient ‘earth’ colours of Indigenous Australians — red, ochre, black, tan, lined and dotted white — in the patterns of their ancient story-telling symbol language. Conceived by an Indigenous art historian by the name of Djon Mundine, the Memorial had been worked on by a whole team of artists from ‘outback’ Aboriginal communities in Australia’s wild and remote Northern Territory. Though at first sight reminiscent of American Indian ‘totem poles’, the important thing, the staggering thing about the Aboriginal Memorial was what it wasn’t: It wasn’t poles.

  It was 200 hollow log ‘coffins’.

  One for each year of white settlement in Australia.

  Hons

  * * *

  Beginning them as I did in the opening months of 1988, the first thing apparent to me in Fine Arts lectures was that Sydney Uni Fine Arts lecturers didn’t talk about ‘Art’. They talked about the way they talked about Art. It also felt as if I’d just signed up for Advanced Feminism by mistake. I had expected, too, that my introduction to a tertiary level Arts subject might include one or two ‘elementary concepts’ about that subject before progressing to masterclass-level discussion. The lecturers of the Sydney Uni Fine Arts Department, however, apparently had one goal: to fry my brain.

  In an enormous, packed lecture theatre designed in the late 1950s, my first ever Arts lecturer was a man dressed in black motorbike leathers with closely-cropped grey hair and moustache and bulbous, dark-tinted spectacles. Peering up at us through them like a slightly cross-eyed hedgehog, his first words to us, pronounced in a (nearly) incomprehensible working-class English accent, were as follows: ‘DOUBT everything you read.’

  The second hour of the lecture was delivered by a young woman on the subject of ‘The Patriarchy and Sexism in Architectural Structures’. Projecting onto the theatre’s enormous screen a photographic slide of one of Sydney Harbour’s iconic landmarks, the Macquarie Lighthouse on the very ocean cliffs of our city, she brought the house down in the giant lecture theatre with her description of the monument as nothing but an enormous, white ‘phallic symbol’ complete with a ‘ball’ on each side of its base as it endlessly ‘ejaculated’ beams of white light out to sea.

  I had enrolled at the University of Sydney in ‘B.A. (Hons)’, standing for a Bachelor of Arts (Honours Course). I had opted for this stream as, if I was to do a shameful ‘B.A.’, I felt at least it should be a good one. Steve had impressed upon me that the important thing was to get within the Australian tertiary education system, ensure you did well within it, then you could move around within it to your best advantage. And to do well was my dearest hope, with Fine Arts as my ‘major’. As the constitution of the Fine Arts Department required a student to be fluent in either French or Italian in order to be accepted for the Honours course, I also enrolled in French, French having earnt me my highest HSC mark at school with +80%, plus in the Italian beginners’ course. In addition, to be accepted for Honours one also needed to achieve a ‘Credit Average’ at the end of one’s first year.

  Though enrolling as a potential Honours student at the outset of an academic discipline in which I was an utter virgin may seem a tad ‘brave’ (if not wildly illogical), the option was presented to me so I took it. And the academic institution in which I now virginally wandered seemed to have faith in me…

  My ‘student card’ read ‘Justin Sheedy — B.A. (Hons)’.

  It turned out the young woman who had delivered the Phallic Symbol lecture was to be my ‘tutor’…

  ‘So, Justin,’ she began our tutorial the next day, ‘how did you find your first lecture?’

  ‘Well, enjoyable,’ I replied. ‘Challenging, certainly…’ I grinned: ‘Though I think I’ll need a new brain.’

  ‘Hah!’ she tossed back her head in laughter. ‘This is what we want! It has been the long-held dream of this department to see flocks of pearl-wearing blonde yuppies running screaming from the lecture theatre!’

  ‘Ah-ha,’ I returned. ‘That first lecturer was hard to understand though. Damn hard.’

  My tutor winked, and said it quietly: ‘Genius sometimes is.’

  Radio Skid Row

  * * *

  I thought, given Sydney Uni’s long tradition of eccentric extra-curricular ‘clubs and societies’, that I might join one. Though everybody was rabidly joining everything, the word sweeping Manning Bar held the greatest prestige of all as attached to membership of the ‘Anarchist Go-Kart Club’. Apparently the result of a highly logical merger between t
he Anarchist Club and the Go-Kart Club, induction into the AGKC was the ‘holy grail’ of Sydney Uni social achievement, at least in Manning Bar circles, the club’s prestige in direct proportion to its ‘enigma’ status: Indeed, nobody knew what the club actually did when it met, where it met or whom to approach regarding potential membership or at least no one was willing to tell, if indeed they knew. Determining the club’s mythical exclusivity as due to the club being, in fact, a myth, I shopped around for alternate options…

  These included SUNS, the Sydney Uni Nudist Society, there was SPAM, the Sydney (Monty) Python Appreciation Movement (also its arch-rival club, the Judean People’s Front) and a host of others. Max Van Cleef joined SUJS, the Sydney University Jewish Society, and though being from one of Sydney’s most prominent Roman Catholic families, was warmly welcomed in.

  I settled on one called SURBS, the Sydney University Radio Broadcasting Society, and, relieved to find it did in fact exist, attended its first meeting for academic year 1988…

  Held in an antique ‘meeting room’ on the upper floor of Manning House, the SURBS meeting was standing room only. It was in due course called to order, the society’s president being a tall young man I’d seen a few times already in Manning Bar: Indeed he was highly visible on campus, possibly as he was never known to sit, always as if surveying the crowded room over the shoulder of whoever he talked to. Though now for the first time I heard him speak, his voice a measured ‘radio broadcast’ bass-baritone just low enough that you had to make a conscious effort to follow what he was saying, which wasn’t any sort of ‘welcome’ to the huge turn-out of newcomers to SURBS but as if some vital continuation of the sensitive business of the society’s previous meeting: basically covering about five different levels of political issues between the Society, the Student Union and the board and administration of the local community radio station, ‘Radio Skid Row’, from which SURBS members actually broadcast radio shows. The meeting adjourning at long last without the slightest mention of where the studios of Radio Skid Row might actually be found, I determined to solve the mystery for myself.

  Enquiring at the Contact booth, a girl handed me a slip of paper with the home phone number of the radio society President written upon it. That night when I phoned the number I was advised he wasn’t at home so left a message with the young man’s flatmate and waited for the President to return my call.

  I’m still waiting.

  Roy & H.G.

  * * *

  It was to be a mid-week evening event at Manning Bar and Steve said I most definitely should not miss it. They were large-screening the live TV broadcast of something called the ‘State of Origin’. Which I knew meant football. Rugby League. I hated Rugby League. Steve knew this. Was he on drugs? I went along, if anything, out of concern for my best friend having taken leave of his good senses and just a bit put-out that my maiden cultural event at a place as oh-so ‘alternative’ as a university was to be a lousy bloody football match!

  On entering it, I saw Manning Bar wasn’t just packed; it was jumping. With a few minutes to go yet before kick-off, Phil the Barman (‘Go, the sideburns!’) slid me a beer with a smile across the bar, the big screen at the far end of the room not switched on yet but two male voices already blaring over Manning Bar’s excellent sound system: one brusque and emphatic, one smooth and resonant. They were the voices of ‘Roy and H.G.’.

  This pair I knew from the ABC Triple-J radio program This Sporting Life on Saturday afternoons, where ‘improv’ comic geniuses John Doyle and Greig Pickhaver played their alter egos ‘Rampaging Roy Slaven’ and ‘H.G. Nelson’ in their riotously funny satire on our Australian national obsession with Sport, the motto of the show being ‘When too much sport is barely enough’. Their characters were based on the hyper-opinionated ‘retired sports stars-turned-sports commentators’ from Australian TV and radio of the pre-politically correct 1970s such as the appalling yet eminently entertaining Rex ‘The Moose’ Mossop.

  I had first heard Roy and H.G. a few years earlier when my brother Pat, while on an extended business stay in Tokyo, had taken to mailing the comic duo Japanese newspaper clippings on the local Sumo Wrestling. Roy and H.G.’s ignorance of even the basic principles of Sumo was of course no obstacle to their ensuing ‘expert’ commentary on the sport’s current stars and they fully embraced my brother’s ‘Sumo reports’, christening him ‘Sheeds’, their ‘Tokyo correspondent’.

  Yet now in Manning Bar the big screen switched on and the nature of tonight’s festival became clear to me: It was a ‘simulcast’, a new phenomenon in the 80s where the sound from a live TV broadcast was turned off and substituted with an audio broadcast from live radio. Such a simulcast typically featured a live music performance on TV with its sound simultaneously broadcast in high-quality stereo via one of the new FM radio stations (this being 20 years before ‘stereo’ existed on TV). But tonight it wasn’t music being enhanced; it was ‘big game’ live commentary being replaced. Replaced with something that, given Roy and H.G.’s style, would be outrageously divergent from the ‘official’ commentary. The first time I had witnessed it in simulcast, as far as I knew Roy and H.G. were the first to do it anywhere.

  In Australia, a ‘State of Origin’ game of football really is a ‘big game’ in the classic sense, pitting against each other two representative teams from our major Rugby League-playing states, Queensland and New South Wales, in a North versus South clash of titans. Each side is a hand-picked best-of-the-best from our National Rugby League competition in a game where the highest levels of football skill and regional rivalry make for an annual contest of unparalleled excitement. And on that night in 1988 Roy and H.G. transformed such a spectacle (LIVE) into one of the funniest things I had ever seen.

  In perfect parody of the larger-than-life 1970s player-commentators, Roy and H.G.’s ‘commentary’ on the live game blended their actual expertise on the sport with comic rants that would make a Fascist blush. As if commenting on the very fickleness of Australian ‘mateship’, they lightning-switched between hero worship and all-out character assassination of any one of the supreme sportsmen on the field who should make the slightest error in this, one of the world’s toughest physical sports — Think American football without helmets. Roy and H.G. spared none, their put-downs of young men worthy of the gladiatorial arena as a ‘JOKE!’ or a ‘GOOSE!’ having since become the stuff of Australian legend.

  Legendary also were the nicknames with which they christened prolific players: One they called ‘The Personality’ as he had a moustache, endowing upon him therefore the greatest ‘personality’ on the field. Due to Roy and H.G.’s naming of one player, 20 years after his football career a current Australian politician is known by the Australian public as ‘The Brick With Eyes’.

  Given the violent nature of the game, of course Roy and H.G. satirised the Australian cult of violence at the heart of Rugby League, insisting that its players quite simply ‘LIKE being punched.’ Also legion were their euphemisms for the less savoury physical practices by which unscrupulous players gained advantage over their opponents, ‘the Squirrel Grip’ being the tactic whereby one player grabbed another’s testicles. And where Roy and H.G. verged on ‘the coarse’, even on ‘the obscene’ in their suggestions, they did it so cleverly that they always got away with it without causing offence to their enormous and devoted audience.

  Some comedians, whether in TV, Radio or Stand-Up, are funny because they try very hard to be and enrich our lives as a result. Some, by contrast, ‘breathe’ comedy. It just comes out. They simply cannot contain their natural state of being funny. This was Roy and H.G.

  And whether the huge crowd was there on that Manning Bar night in 1988 to see the State of Origin or to see what Roy & H.G. did to the State of Origin, to this day I’ll never be certain. Though if there was ever proof that in Australia our national religion is in fact Sport, Roy and H.G. were that proof. But most importantly, their magic wasn’t simply in making the game seem funny; they s
howed us that it was funny. That we were funny. And that so was our national culture and identity. We were celebrating who we were by laughing at ourselves. And not all countries can do that.

  But we could and if anyone ever showed us we could it was Roy and H.G.

  Live! IN the Studio!

  * * *

  Radio Skid Row 88.9FM, it turned out, was located in the basement of Sydney Uni’s Wentworth Building, just down the steps off busy City Road, Darlington, which is where I headed the next Saturday night. There I found, broadcasting live, none other than the red star ‘Mao’ capped young man I had passed on my first visit to Manning the previous year. His name, he impressed upon me, was Dorian.

  Though it didn’t seem physically possible, he spoke in a ‘radio voice’ even deeper than the radio society’s enigmatic President. And this became even more resonantly authoritative when the microphone went live. In the glow of the ‘ON AIR’ red light in the studio, sometimes I wondered whether, maybe when talking in his sleep, he had a ‘real’ voice like me. For Dorian’s was at all times a ‘radio voice’, and, yes, I could have put on one of my own but it seemed to me that the best way (just maybe) to engage thousands of radio listeners was by talking over the microphone as if to ‘one’ person, and the best voice in which to do that was your own.

  Sometimes to me Dorian seemed the only member of the Sydney Uni Radio Broadcasting Society. Despite the huge turn-out for the society’s ‘welcome’ meeting, the only student I ever saw share a Radio Skid Row studio with Dorian was myself. Only me. And I suspected from the outset that was one too many for Dorian.