gig

Six weeks ago my colleague Sasha tells me the Kate Miller-Heidke is playing Adelaide when we’re in town for our national project officers meeting. We use a clip of Kate singing Caught in the crowd as part of an MM professional learning workshops. In the spirit of adventure I buy a ticket.

Until I saw the clip I’d not heard of Kate Miller-Heidke. The song tears me up, and I can be a dead callous bastard. Sometimes. I’ve suggested to our manager that we ask Kate to be our (celebrity) patron. All we have to do is ask. Anyway, turns out that my Queensland colleague Olivia is a good friend of Kate’s.

 

I quit my hotel room on the eighth floor, traverse Adelaide in a taxi for a pub called The Gov in Hindmarsh. I’m not into music, pubs or live performance, but I’ve parted with $50. I intend to have my adventure.

I’m with four work colleagues half my age and less. Michael asks when I last went to a gig. I fathom the depths of memory—Tangerine Dream, 1974. He’s speechless. The other three were not born then.

The venue is dark, no seats. I stand for three hours, left leg numb, lower back aching. The Beards, four dudes with long lush beards, support the main act, their repertoire entirely about beards. They’re fun.

Kate Miller-Heidke trained for opera, chose pop, writes autobiographical songs. I hear about five per cent of the lyrics. The drums punch my vital organs, though I’m ten-deep from the stage. Guitar solos and the Kate’s soprano make my ears bleed. My colleagues lap it up. Good on ‘em.

I count off twenty songs, hoping each will be the last. The compulsory encore completes my misery.

Sasha and Alex hang in the foyer settle for autographs. Sasha snaps Alex cheek to cheek with Kate. Olivia and Michael opt for the beer garden to meet Kate and the band. I cross the road to check the timetable for Adelaide’s only tram which semi-circles the city from The Gov’s door to Glenelg.

My night’s adventure is riding that tram, listening to Sasha and Alex complaining about the bitter cold. We alight at one in the morning and go straight to our rooms.

Rock on. 

drivers

I quit the office at 4:30, exit the building. I approach the taxi’s passenger door. The driver asks my name through the part-open window. Yes, that’s me, I say, plonk my airport bag on the back seat, open the front door, slide my laptop bag between my calves and the seat.

“I thought you will be Asian,” he says, shows the docket with Lee on it. “How you spell?” I give him the English spelling of my name. He pulls out and we make for the airport through early peak hour traffic. I ask every taxi driver where he hails from. Italy.

As his story unfolds I calculate he’s my age, though he looks years older, belly bigger, jowls, blotched skin. He came here in 1969 to avoid the army, married a German to his family’s chagrin. I tell him my own story of rejecting conscription, my day in court as a pacifist. We agree that politicians should fight each other hand to hand, not send boys to war.

He’s from Abruzzo, a mountainous region east of Rome on the Adriatic. At 16 he leapt up a rocky mountain like a goat, got himself stranded, no way down. Out of the blue a shepherd he can’t see yells at him, tells him he’s a silly cunt to get stuck like that. He must trust the shepherd’s guiding voice: where to put his feet, when and in which direction to jump. We laugh.

He drops me at Qantas’s door. I wish him luck.

My driver in Adelaide is Raja. I ask if he is Indian as we pull out of the terminal. Pakistani, he says. So you hate Indians, I venture. Yes, indeed, he does. I ask about the Pakistan cricket team. He doesn’t like them either: too many players are cheats and bribe-takers. He likes Australian cricketers: they’re honest. I tell him I don’t like them: honest, sure, but they bully opponents.

I ask why India and Pakistan can’t produce decent soccer teams with a billion people to choose from. He gives me ten minutes of demographics, sporting and cultural history, mentions of doctors and engineers. Mercy: the trip is short.

My driver back to the airport three days later is Thanh, middle-aged Vietnamese, long greying pony-tail, sharp as cut glass, a finger at six o’clock on the wheel his only movement. Viv and I debrief after our three-day national project officers’ meeting. Thanh listens, laughs, comments in precise unaccented English.

My driver from Tulla to Croydon is Indian. I sit silent as he races through the suburbs, Olympics on the radio. My curiosity has limits.

Rock on.   

belair

Early June 1979. Rock’s partner Kate chucks me out of our communal house at Littlehampton. Marilyn has retreated to Melbourne for the sake of our baby, due 9 or 10 July. We have planned a home birth but have no home.

I am builder’s labouring for Stuart and pregnant Vivienne, their home birth due a month before ours. Marilyn returns and we stay in their barn while Stuart and Vivienne visit family in NSW. When they return we move into an empty tin shed at the top of their 19 acres. Our situation is desperate.

Muni, a Rajneeshi and lab technician at Vivienne’s university, rents us a large downstairs room in his house at Belair, perched on the edge of the Adelaide Hills. A huge window overlooks the city below. Adelaide lights the night sky.

Stuart and Vivienne’s home birth ends in Adelaide’s Flinders Medical Centre after complications. Marilyn and I ferry macrobiotic meals to them in the family unit. First Vivienne then Stuart lose their minds to major psychoses. Vivienne goes home to their barn, throws their possessions into the dam.

Marilyn and I nest in our winter sunlit room. I read Lord of the rings to her and our unborn child. We drive down the hill in the Kombi, buy macrobiotic staples, spend hour after hour in Muni’s kitchen exploring a new way to cook and eat.

Rajneeshis are known as Orange People. Muni’s clothes are orange, his lab coat, washing machine, toilet seat, all orange. His two-storey stone house has a spiral staircase to his upstairs quarters. Weird clay figurines Muni has crafted lurk in the garden under ivy and rambling shrubs.

On the evening of 9 July we entertain a friend of Marilyn’s. They did midwifery together during their nursing studies. As if the baby knows a midwife is in the house, the first contraction happens at ten o’clock. The longest night of my life begins.

Mid-morning on 10 July our real midwife and her apprentice arrive, then our doctor. After a 19-hour labour our son is born in the late afternoon, the cat Mister Id on one windowsill, Grogan the dog peering through the window on the other side. Muni lights a candle in a darkened stairwell.

For six weeks we live in that room in Belair. Marilyn’s mother comes for a week from NSW, then my mother from Melbourne. I finish reading Lord of the rings to Marilyn and the baby. My twenty-eighth birthday passes. A subdued Rock comes to tea one night. He and Kate have split. Mister Id disappears.

Slowly we pack the Kombi with all our possessions ready to quit South Australia after six months. Only one thing good has come of our stay here: a son.

A friend offers us refuge in a spacious old farmhouse at Greta in north-east Victoria. Adieu Adelaide.  

Rock on. 

central

My MM colleague Sasha and I stand outside toilets at Sydney airport fruitlessly cajoling our smartphones to direct us to our hotel. Later we pick an exit, any exit from Central Station and I promise to find the hotel by wandering in the right direction with my wits about me.

We obey traffic lights, cross several roads, and manage a fairly direct path to our destination, only to find a subway direct to Central Station at the hotel door. We eat lunch in the sun on a balcony outside our conference room which looks up George Street right into the heart of the CDB.

As a Melburnian, my default setting for Sydney is to bag the place. But my 24 hours in central Sydney produce nothing to criticise and plenty to like. Neither the straight-line grid of Melbourne nor the flat sprawl of Adelaide can match Hobart’s feel of history. Sydney has it too in its higgledy-piggledy centre.

Just after six this morning Tracy and Cathy and I walk through the Haymarket to Pyrmont Bridge and back to the hotel. Central Sydney is a bewildering spaghetti of stairways, paved terraces and criss-crossing pathways. We walk along Darling Harbour with buses on a flyover miles overhead that disappears into the sixth storey of the surrounding buildings.

A marvellous historic pigeon-spotted plinth sits at the end of the Pyrmont bridge, a set of utilitarian concrete stairs leading off one way and a glossy glass walkway in the other direction. Such an incongruous, jangling mix of architecture, yet in Sydney it just doesn’t seem to matter.

The traffic has a different character here. Horns are honked, as in Asia, for no apparent reason: it’s just noise-making; no one is going anywhere. If honked in Melbourne, you’ve caused offence: it’s the aural equivalent of a fist through the windscreen.

The Melbourne-Sydney similarity is the Asianisation of the inner city: Chatswood, Box Hill, central Sydney at night, the Melbourne CBD. The majority in George Street is Asian.

Chinese girls in mini-skirts stride by with money on their minds. Young Asians suck slurpees on the Lilydale train.

A time long ago I worked a summer job carting an importer’s bills of lading to shipping and stevedoring companies before lodging them at the Harbour Trust. I walked and knew Melbourne. Much of it has grown foreign to me, but it quickly becomes familiar as I travel to the inner suburbs to do my job.

I am an observer of Sydney. It is no part of me.

Rock on.