THE KNIFE HAND

It’s always cold just before dawn no matter where you are, he’d heard it said. They were right, the wind sneaking up from the riverbank found the holes in his denim jacket and quickened his pace along the railway cutting. The random flare of sharply inhaled cigarettes and rustling of newspapers guided him across the gravel to the knot of figures clustered around the gatehouse. He unrolled his own paper and squatted on his heel, acknowledging no-one. A few glances in the gloom revealed the usual cross-section you find looking for casual work before the sun is up: sunken-chested brats with bum-fluffed chins from the poorer suburbs, older op-shop dressed wraiths smoking through cupped hands, toothless stringy-haired piss-pots in baggy tracksuits, and the odd bullneck in regulation prison tatts and beanie. All diligently poring over the Situations Vacant column for jobs they would never get around to applying for, and wouldn’t get if they did. He didn’t expect to “get put on” the first ...

A Rock’n’Roll Memoir

At the start of the Eighties I was sitting on my arse in Melbourne. My missus had left me, and my band had gone down the tubes.




I had been working as a night watchman at the local hospital, but after I’d sprung a couple of staff-members loading up their car from the back of the dispensary about 3am on a rainy morning, they threatened me, and I reported it. There were obviously bigger fish involved because I was subsequently hassled to the point where I chucked the job in. My only income then was the dole, and a pittance coming in from shifting a few bags of pot around the district to keep me in beer money.

I decided to leave town: a mate of mine had moved to Sydney and was working for a new music magazine that had just spread its wings from Melbourne. He told me to head on up and he’d put me up on the floor until I got sorted out. I knew the magazine’s owner socially, and when he...

I can’t remember the name and our paths only crossed once, but had a profound effect on me. It stays with me to this day. I left school at 15, jumping before I was pushed: I hadn’t been getting on with the powers that be at school. They were determined to get rid of me one way or another: my political activities in relation to Vietnam and the Springboks had made me a marked man. My parents were devastated, and offered to pay for me to go to Uni if I would stay on and bite my lip. I was having none of that; University was for rich kids back then and I wasn’t one of them bastards….I was going out to work. After about a year in the meat works and a couple of factories, my mother convinced me to sit for the Commonwealth Public Service exams. I passed, and was accepted. The purchase of some polyester garments soon followed, and I reported for duty. I was sent to a musty filing section in an old office block. There was lots of wood paneling, overhead fans, and creaking leather chairs; the...

DON’T DROP THE SOAP


I grew up in Queensland, so I’m no stranger to hot weather, but I was suffering on this trip. The coast road on the Mediterranean side of Spain passes through some very dry country, and hitching was a slow way to get around. It was high summer in the dying days of the Franco regime and the mood of the people was as sullen as the climate. I’d nearly been beaten up in a Madrid bar for chatting up a senorita, and fair-haired tourists didn’t seem too popular. The bullet-pocked walls in the villages and abundant half-repaired war damage left over from the thirties served as an obvious reminder of the excitability of the locals. I was going it alone.I had parted ways with my erstwhile English travelling companion when tensions had come to blows over a girl on the train to Valencia. He had a very idealistic view of thumbing around, and wasn’t at all impressed when he found out there was lots of sleeping out, and walking in the rain, involved. A bank-teller’s mix-u...