Highway to Hell

by Clinton Walker

  Inspired though he was, Bon knew it was still going to be a long way to the top, but he was prepared to give everything he had. For the old man, as his new young cohorts called him, it would be third time lucky.

  (Graeme Webber/Australian Rock Folio)

  High Street, Kirriemuir, in the late 1940s.

  2. SCOTLAND

  An Arctic wind whips across the Roods on the upper side of the small Scottish town of Kirriemuir, where Bon Scott spent the first six years of his life.

  Kirriemuir nestles in the foothills of the Grampians, low in the highlands in the county of Angus, in southeast Scotland. Known as the “gateway to the glens,” it is today a town of barely 5,000 inhabitants—a quaint, rustic, tiny network of narrow streets and lanes onto which red-stone buildings crowd for frontage.

  Kirriemuir grew up around its sole industry, jute-spinning (jute is a flax-like fiber used in canvas manufacture). In the eighteenth century, with the arrival of the loom, the town was thriving. But by now, Kirriemuir has outlived its usefulness. It is notable only as the birthplace of J.M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan. Bon doesn’t get a look in.

  It’s a little more sheltered down in town, on Bank Street, where Bon’s father Chick worked with his brother George in the bakery owned by their father, Alec. Alexander Scott had started the business in 1920, two years after Charles, to give Chick his proper name, was born.

  It was warm in the floury air of the bakehouse, where the men worked long and hard. But the days seem short when you get up in the middle of the night to start baking for dawn, when dawn itself is late and sunset early, and you’re a young man who likes a bit of a lark. Chick had wanted to go to sea with his friend Angus, but his parents wouldn’t allow it. Instead, he served an apprenticeship at the bakery, and joined the local territorial Citizen Military Forces (CMF).

  When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Chick was one of the first to go. He was 22. He served in the army as a baker, in France initially and then Ireland, North Africa and Italy.

  Before he was sent to France, Chick was stationed in Kirkcaldy, a seaport just across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh, and it was there that he met Bon’s mother, Isa. Isobelle Cunningham Mitchell was one of the four daughters of George Mitchell. Her family was, as she put it, just “ordinary folk, workin’ folk.” She was lean and small, a pretty girl with strong bones and sharp eyes. Chick was a bit of a wag, with tattoos on his forearms and a gaunt handsomeness.

  Isa and Chick both enjoyed music. “I met him at the dancing,” Isa remembers fondly.

  Music has always been common ground in Scotland, a country otherwise almost schizophrenic in character. With the sort of puritanical religious heritage that can only be divisive, Scotland is governed by tensions. The tension between arrogance and modesty, material poverty and cultural wealth; between dependence and a rebel streak, stoicism and wild release; between those who drink too much and those who don’t touch a drop—and worst of all, between getting drunk and getting sober. Scotland still has more deaths due to drinking than just about anywhere else in the Western world—and just as many wowsers to shake a finger at the fact.

  Chick and Isa Scott maintain their own balance. Isa, who disapproves of drink, buzzes with nervous energy, chattering incessantly. Chick is more reserved, laconic. As a youngster, he admits, “I just liked to get out and have a good time, be a bit of a delinquent.”

  Music ran through life in Scotland after radio and before TV, and so it did through both Chick and Isa’s families. Chick’s father used to do a bit of singing, and his mother, Jayne Belford Nielson, encouraged musical activity. Five years Chick’s senior, his brother George played piano in local bands, and George’s children would go on to play various instruments as well. Chick had taken lessons on piano and fiddle, but he never stuck at it.

  Isa’s family was musical too: “We just loved music. Mum would play the piano. Dad played the piano, and the organ, had a lovely operatic voice.”

  Scotland was little affected by the war and life for Isa went on as usual in Kirkcaldy. Just no lights at night time. And the fact that her man was away fighting.

  Chick and Isa married in 1941 on one of his leaves from Ireland. Chick’s mother didn’t exactly approve of the marriage—she felt Isa’s social station was beneath the Scotts’—but Chick was determined. In 1943, Isa gave birth to a son, Sandy. He died nine months later. Chick never saw him.

  LEFT: Bon at one, with Isa. Chick in the background. Kirriemuir, July 1947.

  RIGHT: The young Ron: “He was into everything.” (courtesy the Scott family)

  Chick was demobbed on the very last day of 1945 and he and Isa moved to Kirriemuir. Chick’s father bought the couple the house in the Roods, which Isa named Raymondscraig after a park she used to visit in Kirkcaldy. It was a small terraced house, but it was plenty for frugal people.

  Chick and Isa would go out to the dancing. Isa would go to church on Sundays. Chick was a member of the local amateur light opera company (Gilbert and Sullivan), and played drums in the Kirriemuir Pipe Band.

  ISA: “There was a pipe band nearly every week, every Saturday night, marching through the square.”

  So the world that Bon entered as Ronald Belford Scott, on July 9, 1946, was a happy one. The war was over and, as Chick recalls, “I was in business with my father, and my brother, so we hadnae money troubles or anything.”

  The young Bon, or Ron, as his mother still calls him, was a typical tyke: “He was into everything. A mind of his own. He went walking himself, I never had to do anything, he just walked in one day.”

  By the time Bon started school he was already displaying errant traits.

  ISA: “He used to never come home from school. He’d just go off with some of his little mates, and never think of comin’ up the hill. I used to have to go chase him. So it started young!

  “He was mischievous, I would say, more than anything. Not naughty. He just had a mind of his own and if he wanted to do something, that was it.”

  He had also started to display an early musical bent.

  ISA: “Mad on drums, he was, mad on drums. Played on a biscuit tin. Or the bread board, he could practice on a bread board. He loved it. People heard him practicing, and they knew.”

  And so when the pipe band marched through the town square every Saturday night, the peeling of the pipes rising into the Scottish sky, silver in the summer’s twilight, “Ron,” Isa still huffs exasperatedly, “had to get and march up and down with them.”

  Life was steady for the Scotts. Isa had given birth to another son, Derek, in 1949. But, as Chick says, “You get a bit unsettled after six years in the army.”

  Scotland has long seen its sons and daughters migrate to greener climes, and never more so than in the fifties and sixties. If there was a postwar boom going on, it certainly wasn’t happening in Scotland. It was happening in places like America, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. This was a time when the New World was encouraging migrants from its British forebear, when it needed people to build a future. Australia was offering assisted passages, which meant British families could travel, by boat, for a mere ten pounds. And Scotland was never going to get any warmer.

  ISA: “My sister lived in Melbourne; they migrated about a year before us, her with her husband and her little girl, June, and that put us on edge then. We thought, Oh, I’d love to go out there too.”

  Australia was a new frontier in the 1950s, a huge underpopulated continent bursting with potential wealth. Since it had escaped the war relatively unscathed, the emphasis was not so much on rebuilding as on simply building. But even before the war Australia had believed, as then prime minister Billy Hughes put it, that it had to “populate or perish” in the face of Asia’s teeming millions. So in 1947 Australia embarked on a massive immigration program.

  Of course, it was based on the so-called White Australia Policy. Australia’s ideal migrant was exclusively European, and preferably British. Australia offered a fresh start, a sunny, open vista
for those prepared to take the plunge—and thousands of Britons were happy to leave behind their gray, wartorn homeland.

  The number of British migrants fell short of expectations, however—mainly because there weren’t enough ships to transport them—and Australia, still in need of people, then opened up to refugees from camps in Southern Europe. By 1951, these displaced people comprised half of the migrant intake.

  By 1955, Australia—a country with a prewar population of barely seven million—welcomed its millionth migrant. If “welcomed” is the right word. “Wogs” and “dagoes” were openly resented. Not even the English were unreservedly accepted; Australians could never quite shake their suspicion of “whingeing Poms.” They liked to pour scorn on the Irish, too, but for various reasons the Scots were embraced unqualifiedly.

  Australia and the Celts generally have much in common. Australia’s roots, as a British penal colony, are as Irish as they are English, after all. And just as Ireland and Scotland have long been downtrodden by England, so too has Australia. Australia shares with the Celts a rebel streak and a wry, laconic sense of humor, not to mention a terrific thirst. But while Australians felt threatened by the Catholicism of the Irish, they could readily identify with the Scots and their Protestant heritage.

  It’s unlikely, then, that the young Ronald Scott ever suffered racial taunts in Australia. And if he did, well, he was a tough little nut, who could always stand up for himself with a belligerence that belied his small stature.

  The Scotts arrived in Australia in 1952. Bon was six.

  ISA: “Coming out on the boat I used to sing to Ron, I used to learn him tunes, all the words. Just singing them over. He picked them up good.”

  They landed in Melbourne, and moved in with Isa’s sister, who lived in Sunshine, a suburb in Melbourne’s industrial west. Then they got their own house at the bottom of the street. Sunshine is situated next door to Footscray, helping to form the wrong-side-of-the-tracks enclave that is western Melbourne. In the early fifties, the area was a haven for migrants—Italian and Greek as well as British—who lived in rows of terraced houses and worked in local factories.

  Life in Sunshine was rough and tumble, but in an era of full employment, few went without the necessities. Chick got a job as window-framer. The future was wide open.

  Bon was enrolled in Sunshine Primary School.

  ISA: “He even played on little drums when he went to the first school at Sunshine. The kids used to march to school and Ron was at the end of the line playing the drums. It kept everybody in step.

  “I used to go to church on a pushbike in Sunshine. Ron used to like going to church. Not that there was anything in it, he just liked the singing. But that was as far as it went. Oh, they all went to Sunday school when we first came out here, until they got old enough to say, Oh, I’m not going back there.”

  In 1953, a fourth son, Graeme, was born, a baby brother for Bon and Derek. The red-haired, freckle-faced Bon was in grade one at the time.

  ISA: “Ron loved music. He started off in school with a recorder. He wanted to learn piano, we had a beautiful piano, he was seven years old at the time, but he wouldnae go to the lessons. So after a while, he wanted an accordion. So what did we do, we sold the piano and bought an accordion, and he went to lessons for that. That lasted a while. Ah, but he wanted to play the drums. We sold the accordion and he got his first drum set. Of course, he picked that up himself then. You never had to tell him to do that, it was just natural to him.”

  At the same time, Bon’s tearaway spirit was starting to take flight.

  ISA: “He used to go to Footscray baths, and come home and tell me he’d been jumping from the highest diving board. That’s just the kind of person he was. You wouldnae have to dare him to do it.”

  When Bon learnt to swim, he was extremely pleased with himself. He liked the feeling of weightlessness, of drive, as if he could break away from all earthly bonds. But of course, that wasn’t enough. He had to scale the high-diving board. He would properly fly now.

  Everybody would be watching, all the girls as well as the boys, and they would have to be impressed by anyone so brave. So Bon climbed the tower, and standing up there, on the end of the board where it’s springy and slippery, he might have felt a twinge of fear if he wasn’t already consumed by his own performance, aware that all eyes were upon him. From way up above, he could see the other kids standing around the pool’s edge, teeth chattering in the cold, but transfixed by him. And then the lifeguard noticed, and shouted, Hey, come on now, you come down from there this instant; and that was all the encouragement Bon needed. It was then and only then that he commenced his descent. He paused for the beat—an early indication of his natural sense of timing—and then he leapt. And as he flew through the air, he felt a rush of blood through his small tensile frame and he felt more alive than he ever had in his short life.

  He hit the water with a belly-flopping splash. His flapping around as he broke the surface was equaled only by that of the lifeguards at poolside. He climbed out of the water, and now he maybe even felt more alive, as his body reverberated and he was at once chided by the adults and had all the kids wide-eyed and open-mouthed. The boys were full of admiration and envy; the girls, fear and wonder.

  Bon had just taken his first curtain call, and he liked it. It was the sort of high he would spend the rest of his life chasing.

  In 1956, Graeme was diagnosed with asthma and the family moved to Perth, 1700 miles away. The doctors said the hot dry climate of the west would be better for him.

  Bon was going on ten. Rock’n’roll had just hit. The world would never be the same again. Bon’s world was about to change, too—for that reason as well as others.

  Scotland’s Fife Free Press reported in 1962: “One of the side drummers in the Fremantle Pipe Band, who played at the opening ceremony of the Empire Games in Perth, was Ronald Scott, son of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Scott, who formerly resided in Roods, Kirriemuir.” (courtesy the Scott family)

  3. FREMANTLE

  Standing at the mouth of the Swan River, some 12 miles south of Perth, the port town of Fremantle has a sandy, windswept beach front typical of the Western Australian coastline. Established in 1829, Fremantle remained a busy port until after the Second World War, when the wharfing tradition worldwide went into slow decline due to the effects of containerization. Fremantle was nonetheless still the docklands, the dangerous, bustling stamping ground of sailors, spivs, prostitutes and all manner of hard men.

  In the fifties, the town was boosted by the construction of the Kwinana industrial complex some 15 miles to the south. People started to make their homes in Fremantle, among them the Scotts.

  Chick went ahead of the rest of the family. He had a job lined up with the same firm he’d worked for in Melbourne. Chick would find a place for the family to live, while Isa packed up house in Sunshine. He signed a short lease on a house in South Fremantle, before he found one to buy on the other side of the river.

  ISA: “North Fremantle was a nice place when they were growing up, it used to be like a country town.”

  The Scotts’ home, on Harvest Road, was a big red-brick Federation house that stood on the peak of a rise overlooking the river.

  ISA: “I joined a Scottish club in Fremantle, and my husband joined the Caledonian Society, and that’s why we got to know people.”

  Chick also joined the Scots pipe band which was a good part of the pride of Fremantle. Bon tagged along with his father, and joined the band too, as a side-drummer.

  “Before TV, we used to sit around and listen to the radio,” said Bon’s youngest brother Graeme. “My dad and Ron used to go out to practice for the pipe band, drumming. It was a big occasion when the bands played, the whole family used to go out, put on their kilts, strap the drums on. Me and Derek would follow behind. Those were the big occasions, Scottish things.”

  Bon and Derek attended North Fremantle Primary. Bon was never greatly enamoured of school, but he got by, and didn’t get i
nto any more trouble than most headstrong boys.

  Chick and Isa were dedicated parents. They pretty much allowed the three boys the run of the house, but when they did say jump, they meant jump! The boys, in turn, respected their parents’ authority, and didn’t push them. It was this upbringing that taught Bon the good manners that never deserted him.

  Outside school, Bon had his musical pursuits, and the river was nearby.

  ISA: “You never needed to worry where they were, they were always down the river. All the time. They’d just walk down—didn’t need a car, we didn’t have a car at that time, it was just two minutes away—so then they’d come home for something to eat, then they’d go down again . . . Derek was a quiet kid. Ron was more outgoing, he had a lot of friends.”

  Bon appeared on stage for the first time at North Fremantle Town Hall, when he played a recorder duet with a friend in a school concert.

  In 1959, aged 12, Bon started secondary school at John Curtin High. He also started to get into the more serious sort of mischief that boys of that age will. As his adulthood friend Pat Pickett put it, “When you’re a kid, there’s always one guy who did it when he was 12, you know—Bon was that guy.”

  Rock’n’roll was also starting to set a bead on Bon’s mind.

  Australia’s first baby-boom teenagers were knocked for six, as they would have put it themselves, when in 1956 they saw The Blackboard Jungle, the film that sported Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” as its theme. It was the first rock’n’roll song Australia had heard.