adventures of bunyip

Melbourne Argus 28 October 1955
 

the policeman's ball

Here's anothery, since I have nothing else of great value to discuss atm. The notion here is someone stating that they crashed the policeman's ball disguised as a horse. Between you and me I went one step further into confusion here by making them actually a horse but wearing a horse mask. At least, that is what I was trying to convey. 

The subtleties of perspective have always eluded me - like a lot of things, I think a month's tuition fifty years ago (or some actually useful secondary schooling - fuck!) would have made a big fat difference to my capacities here. You will see at the very back of the room, behind the bar, there is a mirror. If I had genuine ability I might have done more with this but cram in some vague shapes (in fact, although I said 'you will see...' of course you didn't notice it until I told you and still might be having trouble figuring out what I'm talking about). But once I decided to fill in the mirror details - I had always intended it to be a mirror, but only imagined I would add in the bar staff vaguely - I realised that most of the figures I had populated the dance floor with were too short to be seen in the mirror anyway, or perhaps not even too short (though a lot of them are, possibly they are children?), but too low, because for some weird reason the floor kind of tips downward. 

I'm not saying I'm not really pleased with this drawing though, because I am. I particularly like the top part where you can see what I suppose are roof beams (I think I traced the room roughly from a picture of a big restaurant space) and some shabby streamers and a banner which I suppose says 'Balls Out'. For a split-second I was thinking, there should have been something like a DJ in the picture, and a buffet, and probably some other things besides, and then I remembered, when you go to a place, everything in the place is not instantly visible to you if you are facing in one direction, and if it was, you'd think 'this is weird'. Our faces are only made to point one way. This is how we do it. If a fish or a bird had drawn this picture, well, I suppose it would have been two pictures, facing each other, with no depiction of what was directly ahead. 

jet planes overhead

So I'm not 100% certain but I think I've completed the nine illustrations commissioned for a new book of poetry which I'll reveal more detail about closer to publication date. I don't know which one I'm happiest with, they're all good in their way (my least favourite is the one I did first - makes sense doesn't it - it took me a while to find my way with this). I like this one because the replicated drawing of the fighter jet has a kind of hipgnosis feel to it, something you'd get on the inner sleeve of a mid-70s Wings album maybe. As you will see when you buy the finished book, there's a whole bunch of recurring motifs throughout, though not in every picture. Anyway. I'm rather surprised that I came up with something I really don't hate. 

progress reports

Also in the mysteriously boxed stuff were ten of my school reports (of which, presumably, I once had 12, as they came twice a year I think). 

I have probably whinged here before how disgusting John Gardiner High School was to attend on a daily basis and how much I hated my time there 1977-1982. I am always surprised when I meet people - occasionally, and not necessarily dumb people - who think they peaked at secondary school and that was the best time of life. Similarly when it comes to JGHS I am genuinely surprised to find on fb a testimonial from one former teacher 'We had some wonderful times, spanning from the sublime to the ridiculous but at the heart of it was a dedicated band of educators. There were others too. I was privileged to have had that  time there with them.' I mean even pushing through the formalities of polite language there, seriously? So many of those people sucked so badly, not just as teachers but also at life, I would say, completely dysfunctional. Of course, looking at their pictures today (I'm thinking about the teachers at the moment) many of them were of course more than half the age I am now and about as equipped to live in the world as I was, and I was aged 14 or whatever, but still, wtf could anyone say they were dedicated to!? As for the students all cracking hearty on the fb page not quite 'best days of my life' (look, maybe some of them are saying that) but fuck's sake. It was so grotesque. 

It's forty years later though give or take and I think I seriously have to get a grip on how angry I continue to be about that poor education. The fact is, I can't really sue the Education Department; those who should (?) be punished are now dead anyway, and even if I was successful the end result would not be interpretable by society at large as yes! public education should be much better but either that was public education in the 70s/80s who gives a fuck or private education you pay a massive amount for is the only way to go. 

The other thing is that I might well have to face up to the two-way street that maybe I have, or had, some complicity in this. It was not necessarily my teachers' job to challenge me (or pander to me for that matter) at every juncture, and just because I had arcane interests at that stage doesn't mean I was particularly special. Clever little boys aren't the precious commodity they were brought up believing they are. It's arguably true that the jerks I had to share a classroom at school with, the ones who ended up going to jail a few years later or whatever, had no prospects or proper guidance outside that institution and possibly deserved some extra care (who knows if it did any good). 

Well, I could go on (and may at some time) but it's difficult sometimes to face up to the fact that you aren't as hard done by as you've worked yourself up to imagining you are, so I might have to brood on it for a little longer. 

PS I can't believe I kept these, and that was a six-year project obviously, to keep them, and to retain them. Certainly my parents wouldn't have filed them away and certainly no-one ever said 'go back and look at them again' or anything like that. So strange I still have them. 

snivellisation

Just over a year ago I mentioned how I was going to recalibrate a few old unfinished comic pages from the early 20th century as my second graphic novel. Well in one of the boxes previously mentioned I discovered a pretty decrepit copy of the comic book I had originally published this in. It was kind of the second-tier story to another (I have to say, pretty dark) story and I guess I was planning to progress them simultaneously under this banner:

I was really doing a lot of scene setting here and maybe sometime it would be worthwhile coming back to this as a story because there are some pretty rounded characters here, though none of them at all sympathetic it has to be said. I don't suppose you need sympathetic characters but on the other hand, if you don't have them then the reader wonders where you stand and why you hate everybody. I suppose it also reduces dramatic tension if everyone's a dick. 

This is the final spread of that comic book. The splattering is coffee or something I think and was not deliberate though it kind of 'works'. 

As I so often seem to be saying these days I have almost no recollection of what I was doing / thinking with this - like, surely the first step would have been to print five copies and take it to Sticky for instance - I'm absolutely sure I didn't do that. I am pretty certain actually I made almost no copies, and maybe gave a few away to a few friends, and that was it. 

dealing with stuff

I mean seriously I have always been this way, at least, since the early 70s. I accumulate stuff and I can't see how it is actually cumulatively detritus. Very probably my desire to accumulate stuff (which feels more like a desire to not get rid of stuff and/or to protect it) controlled my destiny eg I am a historian dedicated to physical (usually paper-based) sources and I comprehensively reject the idea that the whole story can come from digitised (mediated) materials. For me, even the extremely undeniable advantage of (for instance) streamed music in terms of storage is outweighed by the fact that I don't trust it to give me the full picture/experience/context. 

So, I am presently digging through some boxes retrieved from under-the-house at Lorraine. They are full of media (cassettes, videotapes, small print publications, letters etc) that go back up to 40 years, to my very early adulthood. A lot of things in here that at one stage formed major enthusiasms, things I pored over and adored, then stored. There are also a lot of things that I suppose I didn't process or value quite as much, so I filed them away ('filed' is too generous a word). Some examples: 

I have always loved the work of Al Larsen. His band Some Velvet Sidewalk are that most unusual beast, a group that just got better and better (from an excellent beginning) and then kind of blew up (OK I just looked at discogs, this tape/booklet combination has been sold once, for $30+. My booklet is a little water damaged so I suppose it's worth less. I don't want to sell it. All I then discovered was there's a whole other SVS album I didn't know about, from 1997. I could obtain a copy for $10 plus $40 postage, ha ha, funny but also true. Memo to self: the point here is not to continually add to my storage/acquisitions but to stop accumulating things, even records by bands I really like). 

Changing the subject entirely: in my last couple of years in Sydney so, early-to-mid 90s, I got to slightly know Robert Tilley. If I remember correctly, Robert was doing a PhD in Divinity? at the University of Sydney. Yes, I do remember correctly and here he is. I think we got on pretty well but I always got the sense he was on his own path and indeed he was. He had been a cartoonist in the upper-level alternative press (I'm thinking Nation Review but let's not push memory to its limits) and I am pretty sure, though I don't entirely recall, that I actually scored him $20 cartooning work in some dodgy teen magazine I was involved in in the 90s. His cartoons deserve more recognition than they get. I hope I find more of these Lord of the Cloudses.  

And then there are tons of this kind of thing. Like many up till - I don't know - 2005, 2006? I was in the habit of owning videotapes of 'keeper' stuff, and videotapes that were just on rotation as keep-until-watched-then-tape-over. This was one of those. There was no program called Nomad, I just made up titles for tapes because somehow it made it easier to remember what had what program on it. The tape inside this box at present is labelled 'Garry Shandling Show >March '99>'. I have quite a few videos of the Garry Shandling Show because it is of course one of my favourite shows of all time, but as I think I have observed previously hereabouts, I have the entire show on DVD now and haven't even watched it all lol. 

The one time I'm sort of pleased I did this was when I was living in London in 1986 and taped the debut of Neighbours. My glitchy tape has been on YouTube for ten years now and it's triply interesting firstly because it shows how intensely mind numbing British TV could be; it shows the original version of the debut of Neighbours with the extraordinary nightmare sequence part of which I gather has since become 'non-canon', if that makes sense; and thirdly it shows that there is a sub-sub-subset of geek who is just fascinated by whole sections of broadcast continuity (they have a word for it which I don't remember) of programs that are otherwise available in more pristine formats. That's crazy but I also get it.

But look I think it's time to bite the fucking bullet. It's too late to say I don't want to become a hoarder, I have been a hoarder of sorts for fortysomething years, and the extent of my hoarding is such that I don't even really recognise it as hoarding (and also, like extreme enablers of all kinds, I feel a stab to my heart when someone tells me they threw something arguably culturally valuable away, even worse if it's personally important*). I don't see the junk. I remember when moving to Lorraine Crescent however long ago I thought I can relax and just accumulate material, because I'll never have to move again.** And now here I am in another 'forever home' where I am arguably able to relax and just accumulate. It's a dangerous space to be in! I mean I'm not in whatever the 2020s version of the keeping-every-newspaper stage is, and I have absolutely no problem letting go of things like books which I know exist in libraries etc. 

I think what I need to do is find a way to communicate the pleasure I get from the randomness and potential richness of this stuff - videotapes of old tv shows with ads and news and stuff in them for instance, which is historically interesting because it conveys a time you hadn't thought about since you just generally accepted them in the understanding of 'this is now'. Does that make sense? I am thinking I might set up a website and just start to scan or digitise things and put them up there - then jettison them as I do so. It will be therapeutic I reckon. 

* Personally important to them. I mean, I should mind my own business. 

** Not the reason I wanted to buy a house, except I suppose its's part of having 'agency'. 

the adventures of bunyip

 

all is possibility

There is no such thing as an irrelevant picture of Nancy.

I think it's clear how much I love my house, partly because it keeps me interested, there are so many facets to it and problems eg the front room which is like this big box that doesn't know if it's a living room, a dining room or a really wide corridor to the stairs. 

As I may have mentioned it very weirdly has two bathrooms, which would really make no sense even if there was more than just me and two angry cats living here, and I have hatched a pretty stupid plan to make one of the bathrooms basically a studio - to record in and to do art in. What do you think? 

So I spent a bit of time today consolidating boxes (I even threw some things away, but it's OK, they were just really generic and replicable things, like a broken plastic box etc) I didn't really get too far with it but I have to take it slowly and get it right (I mean I was 'at work' today anyway). It is going to be a pretty tiny workspace and it will have a shower (and a cat litter tray, unless I can get Nancy and Helmi to share again, like they used to) in it, but on the whole it will be very New York sublet. 

Speaking of which I watched about 2/3 of Todd Haynes' Velvet Underground and saw some interesting footage I guess but no new information, I feel like they take up too much space in my head anyway, I don't need to think about them. John Cale's early life was pretty harrowing. Mo Tucker was minimised IMO and that's true also of Sterling Morrison. But you know it's all pretty dazzling and clearly TH had access to all kinds of stuff that had certainly never been brought together in such a bombastic way and I dig that. 

I don't have any Velvets records but I do have a few great records that cover them in interesting ways. I think the Subway Sect's version of 'Head Held High' for instance rules.  

magic, murder and the weather

So I don't know what happened to my Magazine albums, because I had all four (of the original version of the band's) LPs for a long time - I may even have bought a few of them when they came out* - and now I only have two, The Correct Use of Soap and Magic, Murder and the Weather. MMatW is the poor relation out of them all and generally considered to be not very good but actually I have listened to side two of it today about seven times and well actually it is really good, particularly the song 'Suburban Rhonda' but also the song that opens the side, 'The Great Man's Secrets'. I think probably the reason it's thought of as not a great record is that John McGeoch left after TCUoS and he was a golden boy, but they had other boys, of many glittering hues. 

I'm into Magazine today because after purchasing the Barry Adamson memoir a few weeks ago and having it sitting on my coffee table in the hope that guests would think I was interesting I realised I have basically no guests, well one, who thought I was interesting anyway without some British bass player's autobiography on the coffee table, so I figured, may as well read the thing. It's pretty good though I found it very odd that he claims he could not play the bass when he auditioned for Magazine he just played, like, one note and Howard Devoto decided he was ideal. That one note was what he played when he first heard 'Shot By Both Sides' and obviously by the time it was recorded, like a week later (exaggerating) he's doing a pretty remarkable job on it. Well, I don't mind. It's a decent book and I'm enjoying reading it. 

* Obviously this one's second hand because someone, Graeme Parker perhaps, has written Gram Parsons' initials on it. 

what's going on

I may well have said I wasn't going to obsess over it but OK. This post continues to be far and away the most popular post on this blog and has been for some weeks now (you may click on the link, whatever, you will add to the visits I guess, doesn't matter). It occurred to me maybe that somewhere somehow someone might think it displays some kind of implicit racism or something ('I think they might be turkish', as though that was a notable attribute in Broadmeadows, the suburb with the highest Turkish population in Melbourne if not Australia) when it was actually a reference to a media campaign at the time on the 'be alert - not alarmed' theme. So I concocted a bunch of mysterious observations about the neighbours (as I distantly recall, there was actually no one set of neighbours which fit this bill, though I was at this time or thereabouts resentful of neighbours who had, as far as I was aware, built a huge house on their block without planning permission; but this is just me mixing up ideas through a gaggle of half-remembered notions). 

So as mentioned my previous surmise was that someone had latched on to this blog post for no reason related to its content but instead it was being used as some kind of cypher or key to a code, but now I am wondering whether someone is using it as an example of, I don't know, anti-Turkish sentiment or something equally bizarre which is not in my nature. It was the very last months of the dog whistling Howard government of 2007 - you had to be there. 

the adventures of bunyip

 

chogm cameras

Who recalls the controversy that attended the announcement in late 1981 that (a) there would be CCTV cameras installed around the streets of Melbourne for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting and that (b) the cameras were going to stay after CHOGM was over? Well, me for one. Forty years ago. 

Age 12 October 1981 

 Age 17 November 1981

more

So a little while ago I released unto the world some recordings by myself, Dani Marich and Philip Clifford executed in I think 2019 and sort of fermented for a while. I had to think about it and just trust to the fact that Dani and Philip were really keen on it, to finally figure that I am also keen on it (also I wanted to feel I had the spare $$ lying around I could invest in this without worrying if it never came back). The really good bits on the record are where D&P had these long, loose instrumentals that they added to. People have described the album as being like Swell Maps, people independent of each other (obviously they are referring to the form of really long 'krautrock' - ugh I hate that term, sorry - tracks and some short songs).* I can deal with that comparison, in fact, it's a real compliment in my opinion. 

It was such a pleasure to work with those two, and I have admired things they've done for decades. How weird to think that I first saw Philip for instance on stage (so to speak) in some soon-to-be-demolished warehouse in Redfern playing with Madroom in, I guess, about 1984 and then 35 years later we made a record! Imagine if Marty McFly had come by to tell us that was going to happen. I guess I first saw Dani play, with Matrimony, four or five years later. Marty wasn't there either and just think! He could have invented riot grrl. 

Now I'm really keen to make a second More record** but you know, covid/lockdown etc. 

* Incidentally since I think you can read the song titles I just want to say that the song 'Don't Dye Your Hair' is a non-sequitur title from a random comment made by a close friend with very black hair that she was thinking of putting coloured? or lighter? bits in her hair, and my immediate response which was based (1) on knowing that she was just thinking out loud, not terribly vested in it (2) that she'd do what she wanted regardless of what I said (3) that I had no strong feelings about the whole enterprise. The truth is I personally don't care what people do with their damn hair. 

** We actually already have about 1/3 to half a second LP, the tracks that were left off this one not because they were in any way lesser, it was just that we didn't have room to fit them on this record. 

11 October 2001 (box of crap treasure # umpteen)

You may remember on 5 January I mentioned I had found a box of crap which included a 'diary' from 11 October, 2001. It was actually a little disingenuous/lying to call it a diary as it is actually only five pages, and all relating to only one day - 11 October, 2001. I thought about typing it out, but decided it was better for you to read it as written. This also means I don't have to read it (and I am not tempted to add or subtract anything). By the time you read this, these pages will have been recycled comprehensively into something useful. 

For a little context, Mia and I (and Andrew and Ellen) were heading off to the US to tour with our band Huon. Then September 11 'happened' and I guess we were uncertain about whether we would go at all, and then we decided we would, and we did. This must have been me recording activities leading up to that time, well obviously it was, but I mean it was because of that. I was very close to completing my PhD, I think. 

more spray-on british

I think I mentioned when I discussed my rabbit hole re the Instant Pressure Pak Spray-On British Show that I would be doing more research and in a manner of speaking I am but it will take a bit more real print media research to get any further I suspect (old TV Weeks or something). However, I did purchase cheap a couple of Marty Feldman books online* and they finally showed up this week. In his (extremely posthumously published) autobiography, eyE Marty, Feldman barely mentions Australia but does say:

'The live shows went really well in Australia and the people were lovely.

'We did a show for telly too, which included footage of me at the Sydney Zoo talking to the animals and fooling around. We planned to go back one day and see the whole country, get a bit of a far-off culture into us.' (p. 202). 

A few pictures accompany this infuriatingly unspecific text like the one above, uncaptioned and really unclear. 

* Apparently I was also interested in MF 13 years ago. I had forgotten this but that is why blogs R good

weird shit

I did actually have a big productive work day today, but nevertheless I didn't necessarily earn the right to spend hour upon hour watching Mr Inbetween and drawing. I think I am going to have to remove the person doing the toasting's teeth as they look too much like lips. That's probably because teeth don't actually follow the edges of one's mouth, but sit behind the mouth opening. Learn something new every day. 

In other news (I know I said I wouldn't obsess over viewing stats but seriously...) this is one of the most viewed of my blog entries this week. It must be for some other weird reason than its content, which is as meaningless now in 2021 as it was in 2007 or whenever I posted it. I am assuming it's something like - someone has a code book and they are given the URL for that post and some numbers that refer to words in the sentences and they put together a new sentence from the components, either the words themselves or letters perhaps in the words, which refer to other concepts. I DON'T KNOW! All I know is there is no reason why 20+ people would want to read that stupid blog post in the last couple of days. 

activity

So this is my latest lockdown project, although it would probably be a project anyway lockdown or no lockdown, a series of drawings for a book of poems by a hot new previously unpublished author who needed my help it would seem. Usual caveats apply re: my inability or ability when it comes to actually depicting stuff (and I have to say I feel like this picture is ridiculously unbalanced but I can't really say why). Anyway. When you see the actual poem, you will come to appreciate that this is not a crazy interpretation of it, although the distant city and the colossal fujiesque mountain are really just my own idea that I extrapolated from what I read. I am going to do 8 pictures, I have done this (obvs) and one other so far, the one other tbh I am not completely certain about (it's OK but really I did it mainly to test out my new purchase, an Art Tracer, which is kind of like an electronic periscope that projects images onto the wall where you have to trace them). There's nothing actually traced in this picture except the axe and logs which were part of a line drawing in an old newspaper, and I didn't use the Art Tracer I just used tracing paper. It feels a bit naughty tracing a drawing to make a drawing, but it was very freely interpreted. Anyway - I feel pretty good about these, I think this could be a really nice project. 

The other thing I did today aside from my usual swathe of previously-whinged-about meetings was finally send of the final corrections for my grandmother's memoir, which has been over two years in the making. She died almost twenty years ago but left a few big chunks of biographical writing and a travel diary, which my mother and I have been turning into a book to be privately published and not sold to anyone. It's as much work as a real book though, and satisfying as it is complicated. I certainly learnt a lot (about my grandmother obvs but also from trying to flesh out through newspaper research some of the people she mentions in her recollections of the 1930s). 

Hope you're well. 

adventures of bunyip

 

who the fuck wuz steve jobs (from ten years ago)

Pic of BJ stolen from The New Yorker 5/10/11

Sorry, but I am shocked by the amount of public grief over Steve Jobs today, 6 October 2011. I am so shocked I am not going to say anything about it on, f'rinstance, Facebook because it seems everybody loved him like a brother. Who was he, and who cares? I'm sorry, I just don't get it.

I am in Edinburgh - Bert Jansch's hometown - and he died today too. That seems more important to me, out of the two, though let's face it neither were personally known to me.

When this post comes to light, cancer will have been cured, so it will seem almost funny to talk about death from cancer (like, Houdini died of a cold or whatever it was).

I am terminally disoriented in Edinburgh but I like it well enough. It's rainy. I wish I had more time to do stuff here but I won't. I am sort of really tired anyway. Probably got cancer. What I do definitely have is a weird pain in my back-shoulder-neck which just isn't going away. It wakes me up in the morning and the only thing that improves it is getting up and doing things. Even then it hurts to sneeze or yawn. Suxs. Anyway, greetings from the past, I'm mortified Steve Jobz iz deadd (that was how we used to write in 2011).

rabbit rabbit

I saw them yesterday for the first time in months (extension to 15km on Wednesday) and we had some good times.