mobiltown

I don't know if I ever showed you this picture I took about 50 years ago of Mobiltown station. I remember going there to see it because it was in the Gregory's (street directory) and I was just intrigued. I have mentioned this to you previously but I don't think you have seen the picture. So, what this tells me, piecing it together like Guy Pearce in Memento, is that I was the kind of kid who was entirely happy to wander out into the world on my own and take trains to obscure industrial parts of Melbourne, and I had film in the camera and I got there and I was like, 'I have to record this place, no-one will ever believe me otherwise', and did so, and kept the photograph, loose, for almost half a century. I found it a few days ago and I don't know that there's really any point in keeping it for anything, although I might consider putting it on Wikipedia. 

Although there is one thing I do legitimately remember. As I told you in 2010, I really did get surrounded by bikies on the station platform, or rather, they rode their bikes around me but they didn't stop or say anything to me. I guess they were riding in a group down Kororoit Creek Road and they saw a kid on the station platform and decided amongst themselves but wordlessly to terrorise him a bit so it was just kind of, mildly threatening behaviour but I guess they didn't know where to take it. Then they left, and after a while a train came, I got on it and went back to the city and then I suppose I went home. 

It was a nothing station. It didn't have any buildings on it or anything. It was just, as you see, an asphalt platform (on the left you can see one fuel storage structure, I don't know what they're called). It's weird that the train even stopped there every time. I have tended to assume, there being no date on the photograph, that it was 1978 that I went there, but I can't be certain about that. That date is just arrived at through knowing that 12 (1977) is too young for me to be travelling around by myself and by 14 (1979) I just wasn't so into this kind of foray. The Wikipedia entry I linked to above mentions that VicRail or whomsoever was responsible for this, had expressed its intention to close the station down in 1977, which I don't remember being aware of when I went there but it's possible. If there had been an announcement in the newspaper, I probably would have seen it. As far as I can tell, there was really only one mention of Mobiltown in any article in the Age in the 1970s, and it was a non sequitur in this article about people who'd been relocated from Darwin to the Wiltona hostel after Cyclone Tracey: 

The article is by John Larkin and without any further information I can only assume that this 'Mobiltown?' is a call for common sense along the lines of 'There's a Mobiltown!? Wtf is Mobiltown?'* 

My sense is not that I went there because I thought 'I have to record Mobiltown station quickly because they're about to close it!' more like, 'I have to experience what on earth exists at Mobiltown station because my imagination just doesn't stretch to comprehending what on earth could possibly be there.' 

I note that the photograph has a weird, I'm going to call it a stain, on it, that looks a little bit like a sack tied with a drawstring. Pretty sure that is something on the surface of the print, not part of the image captured by the camera. I cannot imagine what might have made that stain but I guess it could be any one of a massive range of things, as I said, this photograph has been floating around, loose, in my stuff, for many decades. It's extraordinary it still exists, espectially considering what doesn't, anymore. There are a few surface abrasions on it. Down the bottom right hand corner, there is a bit of glare from me taking a photograph of the photograph with my phone a few days ago. 

If I took more than one photograph, I don't seem to have any others anywhere, but then I would have said I didn't have any at all before I came across this one. 

*John Larkin, '"Little Darwin" of the south' Melbourne Age 12 February 1975 p. 9

guy pearce he's

In 1991 I was editor and main writer of a terrible magazine called Star. Or perhaps Star! Anyway, this is a layout page with various copy edits, apparently printed out exactly 32 years ago. Sorry no Guy Pearce pics.  I think I have posted a version of this so-called interview (what else would you call it?) previously. I hope you're not allergic to exclamation marks. Or obscenely huge and malformed possessive apostrophes.

This was on the back of that. 

exclusive! guy pearce interview!

Not that exclusive actually. It seems like I sent this to Idols, the celebrity photograph agency, on 2 August 1991 to provide editorial to go with photographs of Guy Pearce. I suppose this was the few months of my life when I was trying to be a freelance writer of some description and using the very few contacts I had, mostly via Smash Hits, to achieve that not-very-dear dream. Is this interesting? I can't know. 

I have always liked Guy Pearce so it's nice to have done this, I don't remember doing it at all. It's almost possible that I cobbled this together out of other people's interviews with him but more likely I spent ten minutes with him on the phone and he delivered these goods. This was the time just after Neighbours when he did a quick small role on Home and Away and was also working with the director Frank Howson who was wasting no time at all putting together a bunch of Guy Pearce films, all of which eventually came out to limited success. Heaven Tonight is the one that has a particular fame as a funny 80s (though of course it's 90s) old-pop-star-vs-young-pop-star 'just gotta do my thing' movie. But there were others, Young Flynn came out some years later as Flynn (IMDB lists it as something else entirely - My Forgotten Man if you can believe that!) and if GP actually did write the soundtrack for Friday on my Mind, well... I don't know what to say. 

 

Perhaps you'll be interested to see what this was all printed out on the back of - it's layouts from Smash Hits at the time, waste paper I guess, probably printed out to be proofed (hence the deletion symbol on the dash below). 

I also really liked Betty Boo and in fact I bought her Boomania LP a few years ago but couldn't play it because it was scratched to bits. Anyway it checks out that Smash Hits would have been getting her to review the singles at this time because she toured Australia in July 1991 and indeed this was the time of the infamous incident where she was revealed to be miming to a record at a Frankston nightclub appearance. Big deal! She was good. Look at the singles she go to review! A lot of well-known artists but I can summon barely any of these tracks to mind, although 'Make Out All Right' is a title I recognise  - that and 'Rush You'. 

Still amazing to think we had pen pals, but at least by this stage (due to a complaint from a parent on entirely justified grounds) we stopped printing our readers' addresses and instead had some poor moderator to filter letters. 

And finally... the page that the printer always created whenever you turned it on. 

Now, having shown you these pages, I'm going to put them in the recycling.