Our teachers at Pembroke went on strike repeatedly. When they weren’t on strike, they were educating us about left-wing politics. Inspired by them, I started sharing my thoughts at home. Mum and Dad, conservative Liberal Party voters, were horrified. Overnight, Kathy and I were moved back to Vermont High, where Mum could keep an eye on us and I could play cello in the school orchestra again.
My first day back, I almost collided with Katie O’Connell. I was surprised to find I wasn’t scared of her at all. ‘Look who’s back,’ I said to her, smiling.
‘Fuck,’ said Katie, and walked away. She never came near me again.
One night in 1976, a year after going back to Vermont, Angela invited Kathy and me to go to a dance at Pembroke High. Through flashing coloured lights, I glimpsed John McAll in the crowd. He was talking to a beautiful blonde, Rebecca Barnard, who had the puzzling nickname of ‘Chook’. (Only later did I work it out: Barnard-Barnyard-Chook.) I assumed John and Chook were a couple. In the year or two since I had seen him, John had grown taller, his blond curly hair had grown long. His faded denim jacket made his blue eyes look even more intense. He was smiling and laughing, something I had never seen him do before. Out of nowhere, my heart was pierced with the first stinging dart of adolescent love. To me, John was an angel fallen to earth. Come to think of it, his profile was reminiscent of a sketch I had seen of Frédéric Chopin.
I knew absolutely nothing about him, except that he came from a large family. Years earlier, while my mother and I drove home from the local shops, John and his big sister Pip, two little sisters Kate and Sophie, and two little brothers Barney and Julian were walking along the road. The girls were all pretty, with shiny dark hair, and the boys were all handsome. My mother gasped. ‘What an adorable family!’
I looked at them through the car window, vaguely recognising Kate from primary school, a quiet, intelligent girl with a sweet nature, one year younger than me. ‘That’s the McAlls,’ I told Mum.
Now I couldn’t get John out of my mind. I started doodling his name on my chest of drawers, which was like a mini graffiti wall next to my bed. Shortly afterwards, Kathy was entertaining a new boyfriend, who happened to see my graffiti. He knew John and told him all about my crush. The next day there was a knock on our front door. There was John, with a couple of friends.
‘I heard you like me,’ he said with a sheepish smile. It was appalling and embarrassing, but also incredibly exciting. John McAll was here, in my house! Oh my God. When he got me alone for a few seconds he kissed me. He tasted like Juicy Fruit chewing gum. Later he showed me a wound on his arm: it was a fresh tattoo of a star.
‘Why did you get that?’ I asked. My mother had raised me to believe that only criminals got themselves tattooed.
He explained that he was going to get the initials of another girl tattooed (not Rebecca Barnard, who turned out to be a close family friend), but they had just broken up, and then he heard about me liking him, so he decided on a star at the last minute.
The following weekend John took me on our first official date. We caught the train to the Caulfield Cup. John (who, at age sixteen, somehow had his own TAB phone account) showed me how to place a bet. He lost all his money and I had to pay for lunch and our fare back to Mooroolbark. From that day on we were together.
John had an enormous influence on me. While my parents voted for the Liberal Party, his parents were socialists. John would often challenge me about whether I agreed with my parents’ opinions. He turned me into a vegetarian and a Labor voter. He taught me about jazz and blues. He was a self-taught pianist who loved to play while his older sister Pip, along with Rebecca (the daughter of the jazz drummer Lenny Barnard), sang blues songs in the style of Bessie Smith and Pearl Bailey. Both Pip and Rebecca had wonderful voices and dreamed of singing professionally when they grew up.
John had very little interest in school and often didn’t bother going. His rebellious nature made him even more attractive. I had always been such a good girl; he challenged me to break a few rules every now and then. He loved watching me practise my classical piano pieces (although he later confessed he was just watching my bum wiggle on the piano stool) and eventually decided to take formal piano lessons, which he raced through. We inspired and loved each other, and talked for hours about everything under the sun. We would lie together in a single bed in the red-and-black flat listening to hit songs on the radio, or John would tune in to his favourite late-night jazz show, ‘Music to Midnight’. I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect first love.
When my brother Greg met John’s older sister Pip, he fell for her. She had long, glossy black hair and big brown eyes with thick dark eyelashes. She didn’t need to wear make-up; she glowed naturally. She was funny and smart and kind. She taught Greg how to cook. He went back to playing his guitar so she could sing with him. They became boyfriend and girlfriend and we all hung out together. Even our parents befriended each other.
6
A photograph has edges the world does not.
STEPHEN SHORE
I had sex for the first time on Tuesday, 16 August 1977, the day Elvis Presley died. All the radio stations were playing his music. John and I loved each other, and it seemed the right time. We had been going out for nearly a year. It was a perfect first time. I decided to go on the pill. A couple of girls at school had fallen pregnant and I did not want to be next. Being under eighteen, however, I couldn’t get a prescription for the pill without a parent’s consent. Although Mum had always warned me not to have sex until I was married, I decided to talk to Mum and Dad about it as if it was no big deal.
I marched into their room on the following Sunday morning. They were having coffee and toast in bed and reading the newspapers.
‘Mum, Dad,’ I began, my voice croaky with nerves. ‘I need to discuss something.’
‘What is it, darling?’ asked Mum. Dad kept reading. It was hard to get his attention when he was reading.
‘Umm, I want to go on the pill.’
Mum’s eyes widened. She put down her newspaper. ‘No. You and John are both too young.’
‘We’re both sixteen,’ I argued. ‘I am about to turn seventeen.’
‘That’s too young!’ said Mum.
Dad was still reading, pretending he couldn’t hear.
‘Why don’t you wait another six months and really think about if you’re ready?’ said Mum.
‘It’s too late,’ I blurted. ‘We’ve already done it.’
Dad slowly raised his newspaper in front of his face. Now he definitely did not want to be part of the conversation.
‘Oh,’ said Mum. ‘I’ll make an appointment with the doctor.’
When John came to visit later that day, I told him about the conversation. He was mortified. He wanted to leave, but Mum called us both downstairs. She had a camera.
‘I want to take a picture of the two of you,’ she said in a solemn voice. She made us stand together out the front of the house. John was visibly uncomfortable. Mum took a few pictures, then put her camera down. ‘There. Now I can remember today,’ she said.
‘Why does your mum want a photo of us?’ asked John, when we were alone.
‘Dunno. Maybe to have a record of the boy who deflowered me?’
John kept away for a few days. When he did return he was reluctant to make eye contact with my parents. Somewhere in the Moorhouse family archives, there is a photo of John and me, looking confused and embarrassed.
A few days later, Greg and I were walking down Pine Road, heading for the McAll house.
‘You don’t have to marry him, you know,’ Greg said out of the blue.
‘What?’ I laughed. ‘I’m not marrying anyone for a long time.’
‘Yeah, but I know you, Joss,’ he said. ‘You’re in this weird Christian phase. You probably think you committed a sin by sleeping with him…’
My ‘weird Christian phase’ was actually my Jesus Christ Superstar phase, when I listened obsessively to the soundtrack and then entert
ained a brief fascination with religion. Greg had taken advantage of this by ordering me to make toasted sandwiches and cups of tea for him and his friends. ‘If you are a true Christian, Joss, you will serve me, because you love all mankind.’ His friends thought it was hilarious. I was his slave until Mum overhead him taunting me and told him he was reprehensible. The phase ended when I discovered Tommy.
‘I do not think I have to marry him,’ I said to Greg, ‘just because I had sex with him.’
‘Well, my advice,’ said Greg, unconvinced, ‘is don’t marry the first man you sleep with.’
When I got home that night, Mum took me into the backyard for a private chat. ‘I just want to make sure, darling,’ she said. ‘You do enjoy sex, don’t you?’
Mortifying. ‘Yes,’ I replied, wanting to flee. Talking about sex with my mother and brother was definitely taking all the magic out of it.
‘Because you shouldn’t be doing it just because John wants it.’
‘I’m not,’ I insisted. ‘I like it.’
Mum’s face changed. Now she wanted to end the conversation. ‘Okay!’ she said in an artificial tone, then abruptly walked off to turn on a lawn sprinkler. It seemed that the loss of my virginity had sent shockwaves throughout the family.
The year 1977 was also when I fell in love with photographic images. Vermont High School taught Media Studies. Our teacher, Miss O’Connor, introduced us to the work of great photographers like Diane Arbus and André Kertész. We learned about composing an image. Working with black-and-white film, we learned about using light for dramatic effect. We were also taught how to develop our own negatives and print our own photos in the school darkroom.
I fell in love with photography. I did arty portraits of my family. I created absurdist group scenes involving Kathy tangled in her own hair, or Angela posing as Patty Hearst with a fake rifle. I converted the upstairs bathroom into a darkroom. I screwed a red bulb into the socket and blocked out the windows with towels. The bathroom smelled of chemicals for the next two years.
Mum and Dad bought me a second-hand enlarger (a device that projects the image from the negative onto the photographic paper) for my seventeenth birthday. Mum must have been reminded of her own father, Archie, and his photographic business. I wonder if she ever visited him in his darkroom. Did the vinegary scent of developing chemicals in our bathroom take her back to her childhood? My parents never grumbled when I begged them to buy me more photographic supplies. They were proud of me. I decided to do photography as part of my Art portfolio in my final year of school.
We also studied filmmaking. Miss O’Connor gave us pages of blank rectangles and said, ‘Draw some images that could make a visual story.’ It didn’t matter what the images were. We were to think not only of narrative but of rhythm, movement and visual impact. She was teaching us to do what is officially termed storyboarding. The next step was to film live action versions of the storyboards, using the school’s Super 8 cameras, and assess how the images flowed together on screen. I loved this process of conjuring an image, then creating it through the camera. I still love it, all these years later. It never gets old.
I already loved the movies I had seen in black and white on TV: Carol Reed’s The Third Man, David Lean’s Great Expectations and Michael Cacoyannis’s Zorba The Greek. They got under my skin. Harry Lime’s fingers slipping through a steel grate. Tragic, decaying Miss Haversham, her cobwebby bridal gown engulfed by flames. Madame Hortense watching the villagers try to steal her few possessions, as if she were already dead. But Miss O’Connor gave us a crash course in Australian film history.
We learned about Australia’s first full-length feature film, The Kelly Gang. We also studied Ken G. Hall and Raymond Longford. And she exposed us to the new wave of Australian filmmakers: Fred Schepisi (The Devil’s Playground and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith) and Peter Weir, who had just made his extraordinary Picnic at Hanging Rock. Gillian Armstrong was yet to break into what seemed like a male domain, but in my heart I already knew directing movies had nothing to do with gender. Interestingly, in film studies we were never taught about the fabulous filmmaker sisters from the 1920s, the McDonagh sisters, in one of whose silent movies, Those Who Love, my great-aunts Nellie and Lou had been given small roles. Paulette McDonagh was Australia’s first woman director. With her sisters, Phyllis and Isabella, she made four feature films, as well as a handful of documentaries, between 1928 and 1933. Her films were successful and the sisters were courted by Hollywood, but decided to stay in Australia. Only fragments of their films exist today, preserved at the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra.
Angela and Kathy starred in the first movie I directed, The Clown. I shot it on Mum’s Super 8 camera, and it had no sound. Angela played a disturbed, menacing mime who stalked another woman, played by Kathy. A lot of the film takes place at Melbourne’s Luna Park, a faded amusement park on St Kilda Beach, where my parents had taken us on our birthdays.
I had a love/hate relationship with Luna Park. I loved the entrance, the big creepy mouth. I loved the dodgem cars, and most of all I loved the River Caves. I would have been happy to spend all day floating past the magical scenes in my little boat (my favourite was the mermaids). Greg thought the River Caves ride was dumb. He lobbied for more kinetic entertainment, like the vomit-inducing Rotor, and the rollercoasters, which terrified Kathy and me.
As a compromise we usually ended up in the Giggle Palace, a large hall with lots of attractions, including the tall, bumpy slides that Greg loved to slither down. Next to the Wonky Walk Way was the Barrel-o’-laughs, scene of my first humiliating panic attack. It was my eleventh birthday. Kathy and Greg ducked through in a matter of seconds, their smiling faces emerging on the other side of the slowly spinning barrel. ‘Do it, Jossy!’ they shouted. I held my breath and hurled myself into the spinning vortex. Within seconds my body was drawn upwards, then dropped back onto the rotating floor, only to be drawn up the side again. I couldn’t move forward or backwards. I was in a never-ending torture chamber. Other kids were scrambling past me.
I could hear Kathy and Greg laughing: ‘Come on, Jossy! It’s easy to get through.’ It was not easy. It was not even possible. I was inside a spinning hell. A boy tripped over me and somehow his foot got stuck briefly in my underpants. I panicked and started screaming. There were no more kids in the barrel. I was rolling and scrambling and sobbing, alone. The barrel was trying to kill me.
Finally it stopped. I crawled out, still crying, into Grandma Wood’s arms. Mum had asked someone to turn off the barrel. Everyone was staring, including Kathy and Greg. Mum came over and hugged me. We avoided the Giggle Palace on all future visits to Luna Park.
By 1977 Luna Park was a shadow of its former self. The paint was peeling and the wooden rollercoaster looked lethal. The River Caves were being renovated the day we filmed: it was all big chunks of concrete, tangled steel rods and the odd crumbling plaster mermaid—the exact look of apocalyptic dystopia that film students aim for. I didn’t think to ask anyone’s permission to shoot my movie there. The story was to climax in a bloody confrontation between the mime stalker and her victim. Unfortunately, we ran out of daylight so we shot the end of the film in the Borellis’ cow paddock. In the final scene, based on one of my dreams, Kathy confronted Angela and shoved her to the ground, where she remained, bleeding, her face paint smeared. The blood was fake, of course, handmade by me. I had visceral dreams in my teenage years, and Super 8 became the medium I used to give them artistic expression.
When I had finished editing this first strange little film, I needed an audience. Mum invited all the neighbours, and I invited my friends, and I had my first ever film premiere in the lounge room at Moonfleet. We didn’t have a screen, so we pinned a white bedsheet to the wall, just like Mum’s slide nights in Lae. At the end, my audience applauded politely and told me they looked forward to my next movie. One old bloke said he hoped I was grateful to my parents for paying for all the Super 8 film stock. I didn’t let his disapp
roval discourage me.
Super 8 film wasn’t cheap, but thankfully Mum and Dad were prepared to invest in my movie-making obsession. It was a slow process. Kodak provided bright yellow envelopes with their Super 8 film cartridges, which I purchased from the local chemist shop. I popped my cassette of exposed film into one of these envelopes and mailed it off to Kodak. A few weeks later, Kodak posted back the developed reel. I used to check the letterbox daily. My heart always gave a happy leap when I spied the bright yellow envelope. First I would view my footage with Kathy, Angela and Mum. We had a projector that was always overheating, and once or twice melted my precious footage. Mum taught me how to use her cement splicer to cut the shots together. I was learning a new language, the language of cinema.
At eighteen, I discovered a new cinematic hero, the British director Nicolas Roeg. I had loved his early film Walkabout, made in Australia, and in 1978 I saw The Man Who Fell to Earth, a science-fiction thriller. I went to the film because by now Angela had converted me into a passionate fan of David Bowie, who had a starring role. Seeing that movie was a life-changing experience. I connected with the way Roeg used a dreamlike language of the emotions. He spoke through the camera; it was as if I could see his voice. His images were like music, appealing to the unconscious. The way he edited images, music and performance together was a revelation to me.
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How can a sentient person of the modern age mistake photography for reality?...Photographs economise the truth; they are always moments more or less illusorily abducted from time’s continuum.
Unconditional Love Page 6