by Tim Rogers
The sport was Australian Rules football and, though there were strong leagues in both Western Australia and South Australia, Melbourne was the focus of the modern game. Television footage of the grounds where it was played each weekend dazzled me far more than the war films that thrilled my school friends as we huddled over Cheezels and cordial. Although I joined the early afternoon viewings of The Dam Busters or Reach for the Sky, the highlight of my weekend would be 6 pm on a Sunday when presenter Drew Morphett would nasally introduce truncated replays of the games from the weekend’s VFL fixture on The Winners. We’d even say the name of the show with an excitable whoosh. From Elysian, sun-drenched WA, Melbourne through the lens of television looked perennially bleak. Crowds swathed in duffel coats and beanies, scarves and jumpers, hyperactive in their bid to somehow keep warm; the ovals churned up from boots and bodies thrown around, inky mud sharing the battlefield with streaks of defiantly green grass.
My first experience at the MCG was a cricket game, a one-dayer between Australia and England in 1983. My brother and sister and I were staying at my Aunty Rowena’s in Boronia, where the kids, uncharacteristically, had the run of the house. Sensing the laissez-faire environment and excited out of my mind to be going to the ’G with my sporting nut cousin Carey, I poured most of a bottle of Cottee’s chocolate topping into a tumbler and stirred in barely any milk – it was a kid’s dream and a parent’s nightmare cocktail. I threw up at every train stop from Boronia to Richmond and, in between heavings, I cursed myself for having blown the biggest day of my life.
But as we strode through the surrounding parklands towards the coliseum, and the foamy buzz of the crowd (over 80,000 that day) became a turbulent surge, my stomach settled. My mind just had no room to contemplate illness: my synapses were swamped with ecstatically received information. Rain interrupted the play and the overs were reduced, but when Dennis Lillee bowled Ian Botham with a ploy known as the ‘three card trick’, the thrill of seeing it live mixed with the roar of the crowd could have cured me of far greater maladies.
My grandmas outlived their husbands, and when we lived in WA we would barrel across the Nullarbor once or twice a year to visit them and meet up with our cousins. My nickname around this time was Stubbies, as I was never out of my blue shorts. With the cousins living in the outer-eastern suburbs, far from the city, our presence felt even more out of kilter with the character of the town, which was amplified the further you got out of the city.
My younger sister and I seemed cut from a flimsier cloth than our cousins; we were prone to theatrical flourishes – elaborate hand gestures and accents (a default whenever we were nervous or felt estranged) – and had none of the stoic pragmatism of Melburnians. Our cousins were generous, but we tried extra hard to be accepted. Never the monosyllabic teenagers, Gabrielle and I would perform little acts of fancy, or improvise theatre pieces to win their favour. I can still see myself on Bourke Street at the age of ten walking out of a screening of Herbie Goes Bananas into the afternoon cold, dressed in a blue-and-white floral Hawaiian shirt (thinking that I resembled Hawkeye Pierce from M*A*S*H) to be picked up by Aunty Ro. I was already feeling wildly uncomfortable, and freezing, in my sartorial blunder among the browns and greys and blacks of the city’s residents, and then Ro (who I loved dearly but who had a sharp tongue and a skill for comedic timing) looked me up and down. After a brief silence she cocked her head. ‘Nice shirt.’ Just a gentle jibe, but I wanted to be walking the Nullarbor for the rest of the afternoon.
That memory of a gentle dig from a loved aunty always surfaces whenever I feel overwhelmed by this city. The mix of adoration and intimidation has been folded into the weight of my family’s history. Though it isn’t a necessarily auspicious lineage, the characters that pop up in stories from the past are dramatis personae – from my Aunty Monica who ran the Australian Hotel on Collins Street and led some kind of ‘unconventional’ romantic life while delighting my mum with her boho ‘Auntie Mame Dennis’ chic, to the inky mob surrounding the SP bookie operation my dad was involved in, for years I’ve been straining to impress people who are, essentially, now ghosts.
As if a refraction of that fact, Melbourne always felt like the throbbing heart of all that was raw, tough and righteous about the music that enthralled me years later as a teenager in 1980s north-western Sydney.
My first tour experience was a trip to Melbourne in 1991 with Box the Jesuit. Goose and Susie had asked me to play guitar for a bunch of shows in Sydney and Melbourne, in suburbs like Kings Cross and St Kilda, which was as daunting as it was thrilling. Ordinarily a ten-hour drive, it took sixteen due to the requested stops at the op-shops of the towns that the Hume Highway used to pass through before its reconfiguration as a mind-numbing carriageway, and also because the nominated driver had twice nodded off at the wheel when the rest of us had laughed ourselves to an exhausted napping. Mercifully the impact on both occasions was minimal as the van slowed to a crawl before hitting anything, but it was enough to scare me off opiates for years. (My previous road trip to Melbourne while at uni two years earlier resembled an Enid Blyton adventure compared to this.)
We arrived in St Kilda in the early morning and lugged scant luggage and equipment into a large room at the Prince of Wales Hotel that I shared with two bandmates. A few hours’ sleep was a priority before the first show in Richmond that night, and I passed out musing how it was possible to be so tired from sitting on yer bum and laughing for hours at Goose’s recollections of early band mishaps and his later scrapes with figures in the Sydney music scene that at the time were as huge in my imagination as Musketeers or Minotaurs.
On waking around midday I became aware of another presence in the room – not the dozing Phillip or Stuart, but something watching over me. I opened my eyes and tried to focus. Directly above me, suspended a few centimetres off the high ceiling, was a slice of pizza, fixed, on closer inspection, by thick globs of coagulated cheese.
The Prince of Wales is now a boutique hotel as well as a venue, but my first stay at a hotel with a rock band has since prompted me to look ceiling-ward every time I enter a hotel room, twenty-six years and thousands of entrances later.
The three days in Melbourne were as thrilling as the times I used to visit as a kid, but this time the characters I mooched around with, while trying to suppress my wonder, walked like marionettes and dressed like Dickensian streetwalkers or the most malnourished of bikers. Couples argued in corners of pubs like Punch and Judy, and acquaintances of the band slouched backstage – their explosions of hair, reaching at all angles like pleas for mercy, were the only things rigid about them.
Still as prone to bouts of anxiety as ever, I clung to Susie’s side with a tightly held can of beer as a parade of headliners and bit players were generously introduced to me. I listened to conversations about lysergically injected apples, art installations of meat products, the latest lifestyle casualties and, of course, dozens of nascent musical projects, none of which used traditional instrumentation at all. After the shows, those who hadn’t peeled off for nocturnal pleasures rolled into Topolino’s Pizzeria to grab a long table in the back room, a high-ceilinged rococo salon. I’d scoff down a slice and listen to more decadent tales. The following afternoons I’d be taken to St Kilda’s thrift stores and vintage boutiques. Goose and Susie would push me to kit out in fake furs or velvet trousers, or urge me to buy cheap paperbacks by Hubert Selby Jr or Anaïs Nin in an ongoing attempt at education. Although I only stayed in the band for a year, that trip is tattooed on my memory and still gives my chest a little tickle.
A decade later, when You Am I was lucky enough to tour Melbourne five or six times a year, I’d seek out those musty boutiques and second-hand bookstores of St Kilda only to discover they had been replaced by franchises and convenience stores, as if it was all just my imagination.
But the ten-hour drive down the Hume was always a simple buckle in time before hitting Sydney Road, Coburg, place of palatial furniture and wedding gown stores, Mediterra
nean cafés and pastry shops – such an exotic gateway for three milquetoasts from north-western Sydney. Then we would land at our rumpus room away from home: the Diplomat Hotel, St Kilda. Five to a room and three-dollar longnecks of beer available from reception. Until the band got a reputation around ’94, we were told to book gigs in pubs either side of the Yarra River, which struck us as ridiculous as an apprentice being sent to the hardware store for a left-handed wrench.
The city was changing with the passing years but there was something primordial about the characters of the town, only evident to me through music scenes that left me floundering socially. I never felt more of a counterfeit than in Melbourne. The bands were tougher and grittier, and the players smarter and less flouncy, hanging out in woollen coats, jumpers and beanies, making my velvets and huge lapels look rightly ridiculous. And the conversations I’d latch onto would flit from the latest prurient graphic novels to rare punk records, from the despised Kennett Government to lessons on extracting amphetamine from legal medication. The chutzpah and the humour baffled me. Melbourne music folk didn’t do platitudes. Friendships were truly forged back at share houses either side of the river over speed, herb and beer. I was ridiculed loudly by a woman at the Palace club in St Kilda for ordering a VB. ‘It ain’t a fuckin VB!’ she shouted. ‘It’s a Vic!’ Rather than feel attacked, I made a mental note.
It was all the opinion of a tourist, of course. Every city in the country had enclaves of smart, tough, funny people and bands that seemed custom-built to give me a kick up the arse, but Melbourne bewitched me. Click your heels together, Timothy, and repeat after me: ‘I wanna make this my home . . . I wanna make this my home . . . I wanna make this my home.’
I’m alone in the office. My comrades have left for the evening – for children, stir-fries and a cheeky look at Friday night footy scores in ad breaks (or full quarters on pub TVs as they pop out for a second bottle of Tempranillo). Although I live a solitary day-to-day life, being alone in this space feels sacrosanct. Peter has left a bottle of red, sent from a client, on my desk with instructions to drink, but to drink here tonight without them is a betrayal. So I put on a record – a Peggy Lee collection – and play ‘Don’t Smoke in Bed’ a few times while looking out over the southern end of the CBD. The spire atop the Arts Centre alternates between red and white, affording it the image of a 162-metre syringe, pre and post fix. I let the office go dark, humming with the dusk. Without sound, the procession of trams up St Kilda Road have the composure of pelicans on a lake. The gentle comedy of the scene lies in knowing the undercarriage of both is working furiously to propel the fuselage with such grace.
There are dozens of wonderful shoehorn bars serving beer strained through the pantyhose of a locally raised deer, and cocktails of merciless detail, all within a two hundred metre radius, but after holding the south of Melbourne in my gaze like a benevolent dictator, I lunge towards Young & Jacksons. This pub, a landmark of the town, has survived one hundred and fifty years-plus of bluster and misunderstanding. It’s three storeys high and has five separate areas with a design aesthetic that urges a modicum of respect.
The second floor is home to Chloé, painted by the French artist Lefebvre in 1875. It is a standing nude, denounced by Presbyterians after being hung in the National Gallery soon after completion, but for a century and more it has been a totem of quiet adoration for denizen and tourist alike. My dad was the first person to introduce me to Young & Jacksons and Chloé. I was eighteen, on that road trip from university in Canberra, and he was in town for work. We settled at a window overlooking Swanston Street. Dad was wise and spare and I was skittish, embellishing tales from university for his approval. He wistfully recounted days of working as an engineer on Melbourne’s trams, specifically the classic W Class models with their timber frames, wooden bench-style seats and their paint of cream and green, a combination that immediately evokes an age of ‘six o’clock swills’ and cricket games with eight-ball overs.
Looking tonight for the hats, suits and elegant needlework of an era that I’d only seen in photographs from decades long past or episodes of The Sullivans, or in the paintings of John Brack, I see Swanston Street at the mouth of the city as it is now, bustling feverishly from dawn until long after dusk with commuters, tourists and swaying gangs of kids keenly eyeing off any situation that hints at excitement or harassment. The footy’s on, so florets of colour start emerging from the station. Browns and golds, then reds, whites and blues. Like clusters of blooming moonflowers. Despite my love of the scene, it’s a pocket of town that still encourages me, embarrassingly, to keep my hand on my wallet.
I look into Young & Jacksons and note tables of tourists cradling pots of draught, relieved to be out of the cyclonic hordes. After paying my respects to Chloe’s pale nipples, I settle onto a window stool and watch the crowds gather then disperse at the lights below. While waiting, many transfer their weight from one hip to the other, giddy at the prospect of getting home to a three-coil electric heater or a slutty bottle of red wine. I’m excited for their excitement. Is that the inverse of Schadenfreude?
The polytonality of the trams is still audible through Young & Jackson’s windows, their bells and lurches as evocative as a seagull’s caw at the beach. Just as the seagull announces the approaching shore, the confluence of tram sounds announces that you are, most definitely, in the city.
My reverie is interrupted by a swarthy gent who apologises – though his smirk betrays that he’s not at all sorry – for heckling at a show many years ago. I reply, because he doesn’t expect me to: ‘Hey, everyone does, buddy. Hope you got a good one in.’ For a few seconds he stares at me with his mouth slightly agape, unsure if I’ve insulted him in front of his five mates standing behind him. Then one of his cohorts turns to another and, like a blaring trumpet, shrieks ‘Yoummooooiiiiii!’
I reflexively let out a sigh.
I’m always surprised when a robust bloke or lady approaches us to pass positive comment. I consider our band, and always have, as too effete or affected to attract a wider audience than our fellow nerds and nerdettes, with not much but record collections and a love of making a racket. We throw ourselves around and bash and shout, but the ol’ familiar feeling of being a pale copy of the original persists.
The exchange loses any heat when the gent and I discover we’re originally from Western Australia, but as he takes a stool to join me, I excuse myself saying I’ve got to get to a rehearsal. And so I join the diaspora, and trundle up St Kilda Road for the hour walk home in a new rain so light it’s like caster sugar clapped onto a meringue.
The currents of older folks gussied-up for a performance at the Arts Centre, formal shoes clicking the pavement like the tut-tutting of a disapproving matriarch, give way to the silence outside the VCA music school. A young girl and a boy, both with cello cases on their backs, scurry out of a door, gesturing excitedly.
The trees along St Kilda Road are still and monastic, withholding the snatches of passing conversations that must float up among their foliage. The pristine cricket oval on my right whispers, ‘Jump the fence, come on in,’ and I crave to bowl a few down that perfectly flat pitch.
The rain never develops into anything more than patter, the streetlights are enhanced by a sultry soft focus, and the steady stream of traffic emits not one car horn. I could take a shortcut through the parklands around the lake but I feel drawn to walk with the traffic and the trams still ferrying people home late after work or a knock-off drink.
As St Kilda looms, I allow myself a little smirk of accomplishment. This is my walk, my trail, and I did it at my pace, a little wet, but unbowed. Turning into Fitzroy Street and past the bowling club, I contemplate a few beers, but I don’t want any chatter and, anyway, I’m in perpetual motion. Maybe Wednesday after footy practice. There’s shouting coming from the Gatwick again, an incomprehensible argument between two hoarse voices. A deal gone wrong or something believed stolen. Past the Prince of Wales, the regular blokes in the smoking corner a
re outside, Cal the Stoner not minding his long, blond hair getting a little wet. Not one bit.
I enter my little apartment, making a swift lunge to the free-standing heater with its busted wheels (resting on two wooden blocks pilfered from hard rubbish), adjust it to full blast, then assault the fridge, grateful for the five remaining cans of Vic. I settle in for a night of listening to records and staring out the window. Clowns – great punk kids from Melbourne – have put out an LP that is knocking me out. Won’t crank it too loud for the new baby downstairs but I give it a nudge, just enough to get me air-guitaring.
To the lower right of my eye line is the white cat, sitting pertly behind the window of the apartment opposite. He’s so startlingly luminous, his appearance can either seem like a divine warning of other-worldly bliss or one of ghostly terror. I love cats’ general air of insouciance (surprising for someone so desperate not to be disliked), but this snowy slip of snobbery stares in my direction for most of the day, like a conscience, or a miniature deity. He’s staring in my direction now. I catch, behind him, some movement of the human who shares the apartment, but it’s only an arm and a leg and a torso, adjusting an entertainment system. The white cat tips its head curiously to one side, as if to say, ‘And where the hell have you been?’