The Whirl: Men, Music & Misadventures

Prologue

Adam was sitting under a mango tree in a garden that might have been Eden, wearing low-slung board shorts and playing a panpipe melody so lovely that a ribbon of musical notes was winding up through the leaves and rippling away over the rainforest. An emerald green parrot flew down from the sky and perched on a branch ripe with sweet-smelling fruit.

‘Hello,’ it said, bobbing. ‘I hope your journey was pleasant.’

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure pleasant is the word. Maybe try eventful.’

‘Okay,’ said the parrot.

A mango fell out of the tree, on to the grass and rolled until it hit my toes.

Was that the parrot speaking, or was it Adam? I’d just stepped off a motorised dinghy after six hours on the open ocean; I was disoriented. Adam was in his element. He had dreadlocks, a broad, bare chest and arms muscled from years of farming, fishing and whacking the giant bamboo thong-o-phone – a bass instrument played with a pair of rubber flip-flops. He was young, too young, but his smile was saying this didn’t matter.

Focus, I thought.

I’d come to this village at the remote southern end of Malaita Island, one of the larger islands in the Solomons archipelago, to write an article on an all-male bamboo band I’d met at the Womad festival in England. I’d been in this situation – this finding-myself-attracted-to-a-man-from-elsewhere situation – too many times before. Most of my adult life had been spent falling in and out of lust and love with Africans, African-Americans, British Jamaicans, Colombians, Cubans, Greeks, Turks and the occasional Englishman. Falling, getting back up, moving on. Did I really want to go there again?

It had been some journey, all of it soundtracked by extraordinary music from wherever I was, from everywhere. My job as a music writer had taken me all over the world. My interest in trance, ritual, religions and subcultures – Cuban salsa, Afro-Cuban Santeria, Congolese sapeurs in Paris, the New Age scene in Los Angeles – had taken me deeper. I’d been led by a love of adventure to the places I used to dream about as a kid growing up in Melbourne’s outer eastern suburbs. It was a journey without a straight line, or a neat arc.

Maybe I’d lived my life in dance steps. Left. Right. Over. Under. Through, back, cha-cha-cha. I’d made mistakes. Occasionally learned from them. Mostly I just kept going, collecting experiences, following the music. Going forwards in all directions.

And right now, with a dip and a spin, towards Adam.

Horses

I grew up in Mooroolbark doing all the dumb things: smoking bongs, drinking cask wine, losing my virginity in the Eastland Shopping Centre car park, in a panel van with a maroon-padded velvet interior and the artwork from Dark Side of the Moon along its side.

Men. I came to them late but I guess I’ve made up for it.

Mooroolbark had an Aboriginal name and a bogan demographic; out in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne the only non-white faces I saw were on TV or in the bookcase in the lounge: in the Encyclopedia Britannicas that were squished along the top shelf and in an anthology called Australian Bush Poetry, which had a drawing of some Aborigines standing behind a tree, holding spears and watching stockmen in cork hats driving cattle.

I was a late developer, part rebel, part nerd, the sort of kid who read under the blankets with a torch after lights out, taking off to Paris, the Congo and Guadalcanal, to Narnia and Middle Earth and Depression-era America, where the Okies were being evicted from their land and Scout Finch was beating up the boy who dissed her father, Atticus.

There were five of us crammed into a green weatherboard bungalow at the end of a court road opposite a footy oval, some public tennis courts and horse paddocks that ended up being subdivided and built on, even though I was always going over and yanking the surveyors’ pegs out.

Our house was called ‘Merryfield’, which had something to do with Salisbury Cathedral and England, where my mum’s mum was from. It had white finials sticking up either end of its roof and a rockery along the front that enemy kids sometimes knocked rocks off and which was always in need of weeding.

Wisteria curled in purple arabesques about the verandah, which had an uninterrupted view of Mount Dandenong that kept us stuck out in Mooroolbark, a suburb whose biggest claim to fame was the Five Ways roundabout, a feat of town planning that, admittedly, was years ahead of its time.

The rev of V8 engines and the bubble of homemade water pipes cut through the birdsong, lawnmower hum and the pock pock of balls on the red clay courts on the other side of the oval. Dad was always over there having a game; if it was getting dark and his dinner was drying out on top of the stove then Mum would stand on the verandah and flick the lights on and off, signalling for him to come home.

‘How’s that view,’ Dad would sigh whenever any of us joined him outside on the cream wrought-iron two-seater patio set. ‘You can’t beat a view like that.’

The mountain was either royal blue or dark grey, depending on what the weather was doing. It had a cluster of TV transmitter towers on its top and a bald stripe running straight down its middle as if someone had taken a razor to it.

Every so often a kangaroo would boing down off the firebreak and turn up on the footy oval, where it would be chased about by a pack of feral kids and dogs, including Biscuit, our Labrador–Cocker Spaniel cross, who’d leg it through a hole in the fence whenever my family was arguing, which was often.

Loads of us had horses: funny-looking beasts with bushy manes, sway backs and Roman noses. My horse was white with brown speckles and had huge ears that he’d flatten as soon as he saw me coming to catch him.

Sometimes I’d go riding up the firebreak and pretend I was trekking the Khyber Pass, or ascending to Machu Picchu in Peru, or up to the big white statue of Christ the Redeemer, spreading its arms out over Rio. Then I’d hit the water tower with the hairy penis graffitied on its side in black paint and come clopping back down along the road.

Music took me travelling, too. But I had to go out and find it first.

I was the eldest. My sister was eighteen months younger than me; I was seven when my brother arrived. I didn’t have any older siblings to point me in the direction of Bob Dylan, Tim Buckley or Captain Beefheart like Vanessa, my best friend at Tintern Girls Grammar. This was a posh school in East Ringwood, two stops from Mooroolbark train station, which had day girls as well as boarders from rural Victoria, some of who still believed in fairies.

Tintern had a swimming pool, hockey fields, a chapel and a farm for its Young Farmers club. Vanessa and me used to wag double maths and smoke joints in the eucalyptus forest next to the pigpens. We’d climb over the fence and give the piglets little Chinese burns so that they’d make high-pitched squeals, and then we’d stagger around holding onto each other in hysterics.

My parents felt forced into sending me to Tintern after I was bullied in my first year at Pembroke High, the local, rough-as-guts experimental school; first for being a smart-arse then for being a dobber and then just for being.

A gang of them came to the front door once. Mean girls, with big brothers and sisters. Standing on our verandah with lit Winnie Blues wedged between their fingers and purple streaks of Magic Silverwhite in their bangs.

‘Cornwell there?’ they said.

‘Go away.’ My mother’s voice trembled through the flywire. ‘You leave my daughter alone.’

Mum would play Bach and Debussy on the piano she’d inherited from her father, an Anglican minister, while we waited for Dad to get home from his job driving around the countryside in a Holden sedan company car, inspecting insurance claims.

We’d turn on the TV and watch Doctor Who with our dinner on trays on our laps, all of us screeching along to the dunga-da-dung woo-eee-ooo theme tune with mouths full of chops and three veg.

There was a pile of LPs on a shelf in a corner of the lounge, near the white brick fireplace with the brass fire irons, hanging horse brasses and tapestry-look fox-hunting scene on its fireguard. But the only records that ever got much rotation were those by square-jawed, big-voiced Australian soprano Joan Sutherland and a Greek singer called Nana Mouskouri, who wore daggy black-rimmed glasses and sounded like a tinkly waterfall.

Mum’s favourite album was by a panpipe player called Gheorghe Zamfir, who was from somewhere in Eastern Europe and had pointy ears just like the Greek god Pan. As a child I’d found this confusing.

‘Isn’t he handsome?’ Mum would hold up Gheorghe’s album cover.

‘Er,’ I’d say.

‘Not as handsome as your father,’ she’d say.

My parents loved each other but they argued a lot. I think when Mum was bored she’d have a go at Dad to spice things up, a trick that I perhaps absorbed and stored away for future use.

We were all a bit overdramatic. ‘Sock fight!’ Dad would yell, and we three kids would shut the doors along our tiny hallway and laugh and scream as we pelted each other and Dad as hard as we could with balls of rolled-up socks. We would get each other in headlocks like on World Championship Wrestling. ‘Ha, HA,’ the victor would yell, walking through the kitchen with the victim bent double, their arms flailing as they tried to grab a saucepan or other suitable weapon to conk them with.

When I was fourteen, a couple of years before my sister was twirling around to Kate Bush and my brother’s Bonham-style drum practice had me putting a dint in the plasterboard wall between his bedroom and the one me and my sister shared, I began hanging out at Eastland on Fridays with Debbie Barnett.

Debbie Barnett lived in a pink brick house next to the footy oval. She’d been a year above me at Pembroke High School but only picked on me sometimes; I had promised never to tell about the stack of Playboys and Penthouses that her dad, an electrician, kept under some oily rags in their garage.

Eastland was in Ringwood, which was three stops from Mooroolbark train station and the stop before Heatherdale, which was where you got off for Iceland, the rink where live bands played on Sundays: bogan legends like Hush, Supernaut, AC/DC. Sometimes there’d be a fight between gangs of sharpies and surfers on Heatherdale station afterwards: ‘That was grouse,’ Debbie Barnett would say. ‘Thommo and Davo nearly got their heads kicked in.’

Friday night at Eastland was late-night shopping. Me and Debbie Barnett would lean over the balcony of the mezzanine, watching the shoppers going in and out of Portmans and Sussans and Woolworths, but mainly checking out the long-haired surfer guys who’d be leaning on the railings opposite us in their striped Golden Breed T-shirts, V-knee cords and Treads moccasins with the multicoloured leather uppers and soles made from recycled car tyres.

Only a couple of these guys surfed, but all of them were spunks.

They always fancied Debbie Barnett, never me. I was gawky, sporadically spotty. I had bony shoulders that I rounded over the painful buds on my chest and I wore jeans that had been bought too big for me so I’d grow into them. I wore Treads as well, and a blue-and-white football beanie: the colours of North Melbourne, the Kangaroos, which was the footy club that me and Dad barracked for.

Debbie Barnett was blonde, button-nosed and blessed. Even when she fired a water pistol into the crowd below us, hitting a black-clad Italian nonna, it was me who got tapped on the shoulder and slapped across the face.

Life wasn’t fair. I got that.

The crack of the slap had rung out over the piped muzak. The surfer guys had reeled back from the balcony in shock and delight then folded themselves in two, their hair hanging in sheets over their faces as they held their sides and fell about as if this was the most hilarious thing they’d seen, like, ever.

I dropped my water pistol, a big orange plastic reloadable one that I hadn’t even fired, and ran into a nearby music store, where I hid behind a life-sized cardboard cut-out of the Captain and Tennille, trying not to cry.

‘Love Will Keep Us Together’ was zinging from the speakers. There was some sort of promotion on.

After what felt like ages I peered around under the peak of the Captain’s cap. The nonna had gone. Debbie Barnett was on the other side of the mezzanine talking to the surfer guys, offering around a pack of Juicy Fruit and giggling.

Stuff you, Debbie Barnett, you fricking two-faced mole, I thought.

I breathed in, deep. And out, long.

Then I broke cover, strolled over to the racks of vinyl and began flicking through them.

So began my music self-education.

There were loads of names in there that I already knew from the radio and TV: Rod Stewart; The Bee Gees; Peter Frampton, who played his electric guitar with a special wah-wah amplifier thingy inside his mouth, and whose poster was up on my bedroom wall on account of him being totally surfer-dude handsome.

I kept flicking. Wanting something new. A risk.

I paused at a cover with a misty blue-and-grey painting on it. Phaedra, it said. Tangerine Dream. I flipped it over to read the back.

‘Wanna hear it?’ An assistant with peroxided rat tails pointed at a listening booth. A pair of headphones dangled.

I put my hands over the phones as a galaxy of synth noises began swirling and glittering in trippy, knob-twiddling harmony. I shut my eyes, forgetting where I was, feeling as floaty and fluid as a blob inside a lava lamp.

When the LP finished I weaved over to the counter.

‘If you have it on cassette,’ I said, ‘then I’ll take it.’

Listening to music at Eastland on Fridays became a weekly ritual. I bought a tape a week with my allowance: Phoebe Snow, a singer with a voice like freshly ground coffee. A pianist called Keith Jarrett, who groaned and grunted as he invented long instrumentals that went from tender and pretty to difficult and jagged. Pavlov’s Dog: a prog rock group with catchy melodies and an emotional lead vocalist who might have been a mountain goat.

Then one week I found Patti Smith.

I’d been flicking through the ‘S’ racks with a practised ting of my left forefinger, when there she was: rangy, raven-haired, in jeans and a man’s oversized white shirt. She had a black blazer flung over her shoulder and a yeah-what-of-it look on her face.

Horses, the album was called, which was all it took. I bought it without listening to it first. As soon as I got home I stuck it into my portable tape deck. I played it over and over.

I’d stand on my bed with my legs planted on the single mattress and a microphone-hairbrush at my lips, staring out the window at Mount Dandenong and yelping and snarling along with Patti. The dog would avoid my eye, then sit at the door and scratch to be let out.

I saw them once, as vivid as anything: a herd of silver horses galloping down the firebreak with their tails in red-and-orange flames. Spreading out in a V-formation as they hit the footy oval then coming in all directions, right at me.

Climb on, they seemed to be saying. Hurry.

Fricking awesome, I thought, putting my bong back under my bed. It was a nice bong, made from purple glass, with a biggish bowl and long neck that meant you didn’t burn your throat when you pulled the smoke up.

Three years later I would leave it next to a cask of Coolibah and two plastic cups in the back of the panel van with the Pink Floyd mural, along with my virginity.

I was eighteen. Unlike most girls I knew, aside from the girls in the Christian gang at Tintern, I hadn’t gone all the way. This was just how it had turned out. I’d dabbled at parties, tongue-kissing Davo’s best mate Dazza and getting off with a small red-headed guy from Yarra Valley Boys Grammar School who’d stuck his hand inside my undies, freaking us both out. Luckily, just as my still being a virgin was getting embarrassing, I landed a boyfriend.

It was nice and cosy in the back, with all that padded velvet. The glow from the neon Eastland sign hummed along the top of the windscreen, contouring our faces with light and shadow, as if we were in a black-and-white movie.

‘This your first time?’ He was heavy on top of me, hot breathed. His eyes and their sockets were in darkness.

‘Nah,’ I lied, stroking the wall with my fingers.

Afterwards I felt comfortably numb.

‘All righty,’ I said.

We pulled our clothes back up and back down and climbed into the front. He looked at me and smiled; the whites of his eyes were stoner bloodshot.

‘I’ll drop you back at your folks.’ He flicked the ignition.

He was nineteen, an apprentice builder with rough hands and fingers that always had splinters. Like me he still lived at home but was building his own place on a block he’d bought out in Healesville, after which he wanted to get married and start a family, maybe think about buying a speedboat.

‘Whaddya reckon?’ he said.

‘About which bit?’ I said.

I hadn’t given marriage and children any thought, either together or separately. That sort of stuff was for thinking about way down the track, at which point I would see if I wanted to do them at all. First I needed to spread my wings. Set fire to my tail.

I wanted adventures like the ones I’d read about in Headhunting in the Solomon Islands, a hardback book that my mum was given as a girl. It was the true story of two young American women who’d set off for the South Seas in the 1930s, armed with a small tin of art supplies and the idea that one of them would paint portraits of the locals and sell the artworks for cash. They spent two years sailing from village to village, having escapades and overcoming all sorts of perils.

I kept the book by my bed, the corners of several pages turned down.

‘In the end we only regret the chances we didn’t take,’ I said to my dad as we sat outside looking at the View.

I’d seen this on a greeting card in the milk bar down at Five Ways shops.

‘Nothing wrong with getting a job in a bank,’ said Dad, who’d gone straight from Melbourne Grammar into the insurance business, which was a thing back then.

My mum came out to look at the View as well.

‘I sometimes wonder what my life might have been like without children,’ said Mum, who’d been an actress and a TAA air hostess and sailed down the Suez Canal in a P&O liner before she met Dad and moved out to Mooroolbark, where she taught toddler group in a kindergarten behind the service station.

I went to university and studied anthropology, finding politics and feminism along the way. I marched for Aboriginal land rights, and against apartheid in South Africa, and against tuition fees, since I couldn’t afford to go to uni if they came in.

I listened when feminism spoke to me, which was often.

‘You can have it all,’ said Feminism.

‘Wahey!’ I said.

I moved out of Mooroolbark and into a 1940s house opposite Elwood beach with Vanessa, who was studying economics at the same university. She would drive us to uni and back in her old blue Falcon with the tail fins and we’d sing along to Prince, James Brown and Sister Sledge with the windows down as the water in the bay sparkled and little fluffy clouds went scudding through the sky up above us.

I got another boyfriend, a handsome but vague artist who wore straw hats and patterned cotton trousers tied up with string. We went to Fiji and he built a raft and went floating off until he was a speck. Then he floated back and sat under a palm tree, sketching.

I enrolled in a Masters so that I could go to the Solomon Islands and do fieldwork, much of which would involve travelling from village to village, overcoming perils and having escapades. I gave myself a few months to save up for the airfare to Honiara, which is the capital of the Solomons. I figured that once I was there I would need only a canoe, my wits and a bit of shell money.

My life was transforming. The winds of change were blowing. I wanted to do something to mark it.

One Saturday arvo me and Vanessa were driving down Swan Street in Richmond with our mates Dina and Elspeth in the back seat when I spotted the little tattoo shop near the corner of Punt Road and the Melbourne Cricket Ground that had been there forever.

‘Pull over,’ I yelled.

Vanessa sent the Falcon bumping over the tram tracks and braked sharply to a stop in the gutter right outside the shop, making us all jolt forwards and back. We opened all four doors of the car at the same time and went inside together.

A guy was sitting in a chair reading Pet Sematary by Stephen King.

‘I want a winged silver horse,’ I patted the top of my left shoulder blade. ‘A galloping winged silver horse with its tail in flames.’

‘No worries,’ said the guy.

Vanessa, Dina and Elspeth watched as the needle whirred and blue, black, red and white–grey ink gradually blotted out my freckles. The pain was sensational, resonating in spirals; I hunched forward with my eyes rolled up into my head and drool spooling from my open jaw.

‘That red’s a nice colour,’ said Vanessa after a bit.

‘It’s blood.’ The guy covered the tattoo with a surgical dressing and patted it, making me hiss and swear loudly.

Dina and Elspeth came back to our place and we waited a couple of hours before unveiling my new tattoo in front of the mirror over the mantelpiece in our living room.

I was watching their faces in the glass.

Vanessa: the tallest, with her black hair, winged Nefertiti-style eyeliner and the diamanté nose piercing she got while backpacking around India by herself, living on cans of sweetened condensed milk and putting on two stone that took her ages to lose. Had a raucous cockatoo laugh that made people turn in her direction. Knew me better than anyone.

Dina: freckled, fair-skinned, pragmatic, loyal. Loved reading Great American Novels by writers like Don de Lillo and John Updike, which she would then pass on to me but I could never get into. Was always saving for overseas trips to unusual places like Zanzibar, Madagascar and Papua New Guinea; she’d go snorkelling in a T-shirt then sit in the shade with Thomas Pynchon. Could be grumpy.

Elspeth: weird-beautiful, with a wide mouth, cropped dark-brown hair and huge boggly brown eyes. Had the stud in her nose from when she was a kid, on account of her parents being Sri Lankan. Hated bras and didn’t wear them, letting her ginormous boobs hang unencumbered. Loud, funny, sometimes overly sensitive; was into Super 8 filmmaking, creative dressmaking and books on self-improvement.

There they were, the three of them, checking out my tattoo: frowning. Going hmm. Blowing air out the sides of their mouths.

‘It’s got a Roman nose,’ said Vanessa.

‘I think its legs are going the wrong way,’ said Dina.

‘Its wings are way too small,’ said Elspeth. ‘Never mind.’

I peered over my shoulder, checking out the reflection. My new tattoo looked a lot like one of the funny horses from the paddocks