Adventures in Paradise

Adventures in Paradise

Adventures in Paradise

Near the end of the thirty-first year of my life
I find myself a bundle of sweaty neurones
under an umbrella shade in the courtyard
of the old Sydney University Union building.
What do I reckon has got me here and how?
I make a start on this autobiography.

Firstly, being a baby in baby powder
listening to Haydn and being fed
by an implement I think was called a pusher.
My grandmother wouldn’t let my mother
hold me up in the bath. Is this
psychology? I don’t remember much else.

Photographs give a few important clues:
the pattern of my father’s cardigan
when he stood holding me up on the gate
at Beaconsfield Parade, South Melbourne.
I must have been looking out straight
across the road to Port Phillip Bay.

Then I’m sitting in a fruit box in the yard
with a dog called Sandy whose bones
I used to share. The place was a guest house
owned by my grandmother. I talked before
I could walk. Crawled up the stairs.
A man called Len Lovell fell off the roof.

The famous jazz musician Johnny Sangster
was a bohemian who lived in a bungalow
out the back. Upstairs there was a gangster
– incognito – who later got shot on the pier
in broad daylight. His real name was Freddy
Harrison. He held me at the breakfast table.

A lady threw lollies into the yard from the flat
next door. In a photograph we had cracked lino
on the dining room table and floor
and a Metters Early Kooka. My grandmother
had the room with the balcony upstairs.
Mussel and seaweed smells came from the shore.
My parents moved to Clayton when I was four
(this sounds like a line out of twelve-bar blues).
Every few months a man would come in a truck
and give me a few shillings for the empty
booze bottles which Dad stacked behind the garage.
Grandpa got caught on the dunny by the dunnyman.

When we got there the street was all mud
deep enough to swallow a baby, too deep
for cars. But we didn’t have a car anyway
until Dad bought a 1957 Holden, but then
they’d almost made the road and all the market
gardens had all gone and I was at school.

There was a bakery near the station and one day
when Dad was sheltering from the rain
on the way back from work, a kid inside
called him a sour faced old bastard.
It got pulled down, became a wedding
reception room, then a hairdressing salon.

The doctor lived on the main street until
he moved around the corner. He thought I was smart.
My grandmother didn’t like Picasso – for her
the sole representative of “Modern Art”. I wanted
to be a veterinary surgeon and fix up animals
and live on a farm like my uncle and aunt.

I went to Clayton South Primary School;
half the yard was covered in pine trees,
the other half was open for football and cricket.
The bodgies used to build houses out of
pine needles and go down there to smoke.
The milk got rancid in the morning sun.

On holidays I went with Mum and Dad
to Bairnsdale on the “Gippslander” and caught
a bus up the Omeo highway. My uncle
and cousin drove up the back paddocks
in a 1928 Chev to fix the fences. Sometimes
we camped in a tent on the river bank.

A friend of my father’s I used to call Uncle Pat
lived around Footscray and worked in the abattoirs.
He was thin from being in a concentration
camp. I caught a tram to the meatworks
and a man cut out a sheep’s eye and stuck it
on a post. “That\'s to see you don’t get in trouble, Son.”

Another uncle worked in a recording studio
and my aunt had a program on the radio.
They got me to say a few things “over the air”
and gave me a free ticket to the Tarax Happy Show.
I was in a play in kindergarten in a chorus
of policemen and solo as a kangaroo.

Mum read me Shakespeare’s sonnets and Milton
before I could talk. I liked them
but I didn\'t like the poetry much at school.
I had to learn off something by John Masefield
about the sea that he wanted to sail a ship on,
heavily stressed. I thought all poets old and bald.

My fifth grade teacher thought the two best books
were the Bible and the Pilgrim’s Progress
but I was more interested in the dinosaur
and fighter aircraft of the second world war.
I had a great uncle who copied out passages
from Tennyson on greeting cards in tiny writing.

Apart from that I didn’t do very much.
I learned to ride a bike and went to high school
and got 27 for arithmetic in the second form.
I think I still wanted to be a Vet., though
cartography came next. I was in the Boy Scouts
and got wet sleeping under a picnic table.

I burst a blood vessel below the brain
and spent two months in the Alfred Hospital
reading the complete works of Ian Fleming
which I liked because he could make golf
interesting. Then I read Emile Zola
and started writing D.H. Lawrence imitations

in which young men full of spirit flung
themselves down on the earth and felt it breathe
and everything seemed complete. I wanted
to be a rock star, then a painter,
then a novelist, but I ended up writing poems
late in 1966, misunderstanding T.S. Eliot.

Next year I got into trouble for a satire
about Dame Zara Holt in the school magazine
that came out the week the Prime Minister
swam out to sea with his snorkel and wasn’t seen
again. Australia was all the way with L.B.J.
and the girl I loved loved someone in the Labor Club.

I raged at Monash in check pants and a black
roll neck jumper. This was the age of “progressive
rock”. Someone got into trouble for staging
a mock crucifixion outside the Union Caf.
The vice-chancellor sputtered about the disinterested
pursuit of knowledge. I stopped copying Keats

and started to copy William Carlos Williams:
the absurd sonnet turned into the stick poem.
Lots of grown up poets visited the university
and read to the Lit. Club, all pissed on flagon sherry.
Chris Wallace-Crabbe competed with billiards
near the billiard room and the billiards won.

Some of the other poetry was more fun,
like Robert King dancing to bongo drums
and ripping his shirt off, or when B.A. Breen
read concrete poems with repeated words and when
an old academic asked him his definition of verse
Rob Smyth chanted POETRY POETRY POETRY.

There were marbles under police horses’ hooves
on the fourth of July, and Colin and Margaret
stared at candle flames while Iron Butterfly
played “In-a-gadda-da-vida” and the doors
of perception opened wide. A weight ounce cost
twenty dollars. The “underground” lived in Carlton.

Sometimes we’d drive in with boots of lager
to La Mama to hear some situationist verse.
I wrote a Dransfield parody: Acid Fuck Raga,
and got told off by Geoff Egglestone
for not taking his work seriously. It was bad
but the Melbourne Uni. poets were worse,

writing about martyrdom in Parkville
on mornings before lectures with the shakes;
imagining themselves as William Blakes.
Not long after this the combination of dope
and footnotes in the work of Alexander Pope
convinced me the era of the Stooge Effect had begun.

It was the dawning of the age of Aquarius.
I visited Sydney and wanted to stay there;
went to the Canberra Arts Festival with
a headband, two scarves, long hair, three sets
of beads and an army jacket and read to an audience
for the first time without going blind with fear.

Next year I moved to Sydney and a room
upstairs in Crown St., Surry Hills
with Pam Brown, poet, and an American groupie
with a waterbed and the bass player
from Led Zeppelin. Albie Thoms was shooting
funny movies about light from the front window.

Labor came into power. I missed the ballot box
and took a trip on a piece of blotting paper
thinking the party lights on trees in a Petersham park
had something to do with the advent of Socialism.
The blue V.W. spluttered through Glebe
bringing the pages of Zap Comix to life:

The me decade had begun. The age of subsidies,
safari suits, sonnet sequences, and the death of art.
The houses in the Glebe estate got repainted,
rents went up, people were psychoanalysed,
but all this seemed to happen very slowly.
I had a job in a public library

stamping out books, taking too many sick
days, moving out of too many houses
to return as a tourist and watch them stripped to brick.
Poetry too was beginning to wear its tweed
jacket again, and speak in muted tones
about the spiritually edifying architecture of Florence.

Briefly – I fell in and out of love
and in and out and in and out some more,
swore off drugs and took them up again,
finished two books and started on a third:
was granted a modest place on the honours list
whenever two other Sydney poets got together, pissed.