Irradiated in "The Lead Sheds!"

The Punk Poofy Cat is well known for howling, hissing, spitting and sometimes purring from his dumpster in a back-alley of cyber-city but I’m actually writing it from my social housing slum dungeon at ICE Central where I have lived out a laid-back life for thirty years fulfilling my creative dreams as I deliquesce into squalor via my penury.

At least starvation and ignominy has kept me punchy, I’ve got nothing to lose by being gutter-level out-front in my existential commentary and memories. I can’t help but cast back to the old days, when Sydney was vibrant with explosive new music, funky old architecture, grungy pubs and cafes that welcomed group conversation as well as juke boxes and pot smoking.

And I remembered a gig I put on in 1986 just down the street from where I live, The Graphic Arts Club, refurbished now into The Gaelic Club, just across the road from Central Railway Station. I had finished my 9 year ordeal of filming and cutting together a final print of my Super 8 meta-realist epic “Darling It Hurtz!” (Seven years in the Life of a Suburb and a Singer) and I hoped to premier it at The Graphic Arts Club. I hired the band-room, got onside some deadbeat bands including Paul Kelly and Some Colored Girls, got a few mentions in the press and got stuck into hand-printing 400 copies of a super fluorescent Punk-drunk silk-screen poster that I planned to stick on all the walls of Sydney.

The Lead Sheds Poster Workshop at Sydney University had long suffered my independent label, Toby Zoates, as a fringe-dweller to their “Dirtworks Collective.” They had cooperatively shown me how to make perfect, beautiful hand-printed posters using photographic stencils on silk-screens, and they encouraged my individual, original designs and tolerated my passionate social critiques and political causes, much of which they too supported. I paid for all my materials, cleaned up after myself, and helped them when they needed labor to put their own posters up on the drying racks. Promise, I would always be heartfelt grateful for their assistance.

Long before my “Darling it Hurtz!” poster, in 1978, I’d noticed cans of fluoro paints sitting idle in a dusty corner and asked who were using them, and was told, “Nobody, they are old ‘60s style fluorescent glow paint!” I recalled the fluorescent murals I’d seen in a hippie cafe in Bangalore, India, in 1973, of Alice in Wonderland in glowing colors against a black field, black-lights illuminating them into psychedelic mind-warps, and I’d been flabbergasted at how brilliantly the style could communicate visions.

Anti-Authoritarian Dance Poster 1978

I asked the workshop if I could use the unused cans of fluoros and, printing on waste computer print-out paper, I created my first fluoro poster, “The Anti-Authoritarian Dance” at Balmain Town Hall, with White Trash and A.W.O.L. bands playing and I must say the night was a rocking, roaring success.

Then I dreamed up my 1979 “Garibaldi’s Benefit” gig to raise money for the old Italian who ran the club in Darlinghurst and was going broke. I got the support of Cabaret Conspiracy with the drag greats Doris Fisch and Jackie Hyde, plus Simon Reptile and Fifi Lamour all doing their “Cabaret Conspiracy”. On the second night of the weekend I enlisted the aid of the rock bands “Tactics” and “XL Capris” and, again, it was a thumping rock night, and old Garibaldi really appreciated the assistance we gave him.

By 1981 I printed “No Future”, a giant fluoro triptych, supporting the release of my comic book “No Future”, a sci-fi tale about a mutant race using Uluru Rock as a storage facility for nuclear waste and worshiping the radioactive monolith as a colossal godhead warning the future as to its eternal poison. All the while I shot my Super 8 film around the inner-city, particularly in Darlinghurst, in and out of its architecture, following the life of a new-found friend, a working-class woman, a junkie prostitute schizophrenic but hopeful singing pop-star named Jinx who dreamed of making it in the music business. She sang a few of her songs for me while she wandered about the backstreets of Darlinghurst, bouncing around in back-lanes. I wove this in and out of shots of most of Sydney’s contemporaneous rock clubs, bands banging on within, the obvious subtext being “it’s a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll.”

I went to the govt. arts body whose responsibility it was to make sure important artistic/cultural/historical works get made, The Creative Development Branch of the Australian Film Commission and I asked them for funds to do more filming of the current music scene and environs and complete the film. 

NO FUTURE!

I got as my assessor an upstart who thought he was the final word in good-taste, obscure Super 8 film, and who in reality had taken over the Sydney Super 8 Film Group and kicked me out as he couldn’t stand my style and the competition to his obtuse glory that I represented.

Warnerbros knocked me back cold, me and my film about the Sydney inner-city music scene could go drop dead, (all that wondrous footage of the bands and the venues lost to history because of one fuckwit's small-mindedness!) I was furious at this dead-head’s nerve and his bigoted stupidity, a blatantly jealous scumbag-nature. Thus I wrote a poison-pen letter about him to the bureaucrats at the Film Commission, telling them Warnerbros was a twerp who didn’t have clue about cutting edge film. THEY asked me to come in and I was given a check under the table for $6000 to finish my film.

I cut it together with some wild animation and put three Darlo folkloric songs in as sound-track, “Living in Darlinghurst” by The The, “Darlinghurst” by The Celibate Rifles and “Darling it Hurts to See You Down in Darlinghurst Tonight” by Paul Kelly. Paul got this line for his famous song when he saw the graffiti and mural I did on the Darlo Squat wall in 1981 and he promised me that he would reciprocate the inspiration by letting me use his song and personally appearing for 7 seconds in the film.

So there I was in 1986, having miraculously finished my film “Darling It Hurtz!” over a few dead bodies, and I was midway through printing the silk-screen poster for the film’s premier gig at The Graphic Arts Club. Before I could get over to the Lead Sheds to keep going I noticed this huge lug of a man loitering outside my Pyrmont Squat cottage for hours, pacing back and forth and giving me the willies. I stupidly went out and said, “Hey mate, don’t hang around out here, there’s nothing for you here, the smack dealer’s gone out!”

Without much ado he yelled, “Shut your mouth cunt!” Then he leaped upon me, half my age, twice my weight, and beat the shit out of me, broke my right arm and left were-wolf claw marks across my face. I called the cops, and though I’d seen the brute run up the hill to Wayside Terrace Council Flats, I told the cops I didn’t see where he went. An ambulance was called and I was taken to Sydney Hospital where I was operated upon, a pin put in my arm and my face bandaged up. I was there for a few days and thus couldn’t finish my poster, the gig was only 10 days away, everything booked and ready to go, and no poster promotion was ready.

Therefore I asked a few of my daring mates to break into the Lead Sheds and finish the poster for me, it needed two more screens of color applied and after drying would be ready to go up on the walls of Sydney. They rushed off to follow my directions, got into the poster-workshop from an open back-window and were finishing the job in wonderful zealous fashion.

But then one of the Dirtworks Collective showed up and went into shock at the temerity of my gauche gutter mates breaking in to use their precious facilities and complete my work. She abused them roundly, "How dare you break in here and use the materials without our permission! This is not a free-for-all!" She harrumphed and grumbled and they couldn't get a word in until she took a breath. Finding a break in her tirade they tried to inform her of my terrible calamity and need for help. But she nagged on and on, "What guttersnipes are doing mischief here?" Finally they blurted out how I was in hospital undergoing surgery from an assault and had begged them to finish the poster in time for the film’s premier. They then pleaded with her to be allowed to finish the posters as the film premier gig was important to me. She begrudgingly acquiesced, otherwise she wouldn't want to incur "the Wrath of Toby Zoates!" She shut her gob and allowed them to continue and in later years declared herself to once have been a “Punk” but I’d like to argue the point.

The film premier went off like a joyful brain-burst, I did some stand-up comedy, with arm in sling and face claw-marked, about the crowd in the Club coming over to Pyrmont Squats with me and taking on the gang of wharfie rednecks who beat me up, but I got a glum response to that dark joke. I’m happy to say that over the years the film, “Darling It Hurtz!” has garnered quite a reputation and been viewed a lot on Youtube.

There was a time at The Lead Sheds, in 1988, when the Bi-centenary of the European Invasion of Australia was to be celebrated by the Powers-that-Be and the general gronk population. It was proposed by all the artists that we each do a poster critiquing those celebrations, as they are in fact a cover for the brutal colonization and murder of a whole Indigenous race and culture that had thrived in the land for 60,000 years. We decided it would be best if we each also found a Koori to work with us on the design and content of the poster as that would give the First Australians their rightful input as well.

I had already lined up my Koori mate and fellow artist, Malcolm, famous for creating the first Gay Indigenous float for the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, him dressed up as a black Captain Cook at the helm of a mocked-up ship on wheels. Just as we were all rubbing our hands in glee at the subversive thrill of sticking the finger to the Bi-Centenary Celebrations Board, via a flood of hot, maverick posters stuck on all the walls of Sydney, a damp blanket was thrown over affairs.

Cips MacSalty

Chips MacSalty, genius poster maker and unacknowledged Captain of the good ship Lead Sheds “Dirtworks” arrived to inform us that his mother had begged him not to go ahead and do the anti-celebrations poster project as it would cast a dark cloud over events and go down in history as infamously bad taste and an insult to good manners, much better to go quietly, lift the wine glass and intone like robots, “Three cheers for the Queen.” His mother happened to be on the Celebrations Organizing Committee, and she also happened to be the Vice-Chancellor of Sydney University, and thus the existence of the Lead Sheds Poster Workshop was somewhat beholden to her kind patronage and discretion. I whined, “But it’s a great chance to show the reality of Invasion, to produce great art and get Kooris involved!?” 

“Oh no, too provocative, too inappropriate! Too much expensive hard work for something not so necessarily glorious.” I wept bitterly, and my Koori friend Malcolm was mightily disappointed.

Whatever, the anti-invasion poster project was abandoned, to my dismay, and we went on to cry crocodile tears for the downtrodden and polluted. Chips soon moved on to Darwin where he has run a marvelous design business supporting Koori causes for many years and is considered a hero of the leftist-design schools, and good luck to him. I thought he was a good mate, always praising his work, but I noticed over the last 35 years I have been excluded from any of The Lead Shed Shows, wiped from the records where possible, (I’m still in the collection in the National Gallery Canberra as thankfully I signed my named on all my works), and am never noted in Acknowledgements in whatever catalogs etc Dirtworks put themselves and their mates in, as if I was a plague case best forgotten.

I tried to be a caring, generous good guy, I helped him with his own work, cleaned up with them and even gave him my best toy, a “sputnik” style ‘60s TV set for him to watch his favorite shows while he labored over his masterpieces, a white plastic sphere with inbuilt television screen I very much cherished. I really thought we were friends! WTF!!! All along he was the straight son of the Vice-Chancellor of Sydney University and the Master Poster Maker and I was the queer upstart from a working class social housing ghetto in West Heidelberg, Melbourne.

After seven years of toiling and creating brilliant posters in the Lead Sheds, even helping everyone else rack their hundreds of drying posters and helping them to clean up, I was never offered a paid job even once, chasing or dreaming up all my jobs myself. When finally a job came up "teaching silk-screen printing to Sydney University students" I applied for it, desperate for paid-work for I'd been unemployed for years, other than poster making. I got interviewed by "the cooperative", people I'd worked alongside of for several years, but they knocked me back cold, preferring instead a Greek macho prick who had walked in the door three weeks previously. Again, I was so pissed off with them, when one of them applied to be my Facebook friend after thirty years of my continued starvation, I firmly pressed the icon "IGNORE."

My bitching tales are my truths, this is how it went down, a bit of art history, honestly from my heart. I have just been reminiscing, about pseudo-fame, “collectives", the fun of abandoned dancing to real BAD-ARSE rock music, art gigs I put on, the race up the shit-heap of kudos in the “art-world”, the billionaire arms dealers investing in bullion art, and the artworks of mine that created waves I didn’t expect in the least. And I’m so fucking happy I did it “MY WAY!” Yet I got so irradiated at The Lead Sheds I passed into a shadow-world like The Invisible Man. 

Hmmmmm... life’s a blast, even in the middle of the gladiator battle, as the thumbs go in the eyes to gouge them out, it’s how quick you can weave and dance your way through the brutal attacks and thrusting knives that provides half the fun. Of course, I liked the helping hands better, they are the people that will shine in my memories.

 www.amazon.com/author/tobyzoates

If you liked, or were sympathetic to, my stories please go to the WEB address above and buy my book as you'll get the full tale of how I grew up and got driven into Freaksville.

I'm Dying to Put My Fist Through That Class Ceiling!

I know I’m always moaning and bitching, forgive me, but from being bombed in your home by arms dealers, stabbed on the street by a maniac, to being kicked in the arse by a jealous competitor, it’s a cruel world. I have often wondered why I can rarely get a break in the rigid class-bound society most of us live in and I can’t help but surmise part of it would be that I’m from a working class background and I’ve dared to try to get above my station.

I was at a rally to protest the funding cuts to the arts by our neo-liberal masters when I realized it was upper-middle class artists who were threatened with being dumped from the ARTS “gravy train”, the govt’s sink or swim policies having little effect on me as the twats running the arts bureaucracies hadn’t given me any funding since the 1980s. I thought this was due to the radical political/social critique of my work, even though I’d won world prizes for such, but a chance meeting with an old acquaintance gave me another clue.

I’d painted a mural around 1985 for a project in a social housing estate in Woolloomoolloo, “How Do You Feel?” It was a 20 foot high artwork on a pylon holding up the overhead railway-track to Bondi and was subversive of consumer capitalism, depicting the working people enslaved, trapped and beaten down within The System , and particularly scathing of the uranium industry and Australia’s subservient relationship with Ronnie Raygun’s America. Most of the other murals on the rest of the pylons were done by a middle-class intellectual, Mary Cloudsky, who was garnering many of the public artwork jobs about the city and getting paid plenty for it.

My work was up for a miraculous 25 years but was then taken down and destroyed by the City Council while Cloudsky’s faded, patchy history of the social housing history of Green Bans were left in place. When I confronted her with the fact that the destruction of my artistic critique was akin to the Nazis burning books and destroying "decadent art" she shrugged and said it wasn’t her decision, it’s just how things played out in our contemporary (chicken-shit) politically correct times.

But it brought to my mind the fact that we working class types are to be seen and not heard; uneducated and uncouth, it’s best left to our betters to speak for us, it’s their prerogative, they are born to the job of overseeing us underlings, there’s an industry of commenting upon our sorry condition and only the connected middle-classes are qualified to do it. Australia, for all the bullshit snow-jobbing of egalitarianism, is rigidly class bound, and us who actually live in social housing should keep our heads down and our bums up.

I know that since "Reagonomics" of the'80s, with deregulation of the banks and Wall Street, and massive reduction of taxes for the super-rich, that the middle classes have been squeezed out and sunk more towards the working poor, especially in America. But here in Australia there is still a substantial middle-class that act as guardians on the door to upward mobility, professions  such as doctors, dentists, lawyers, advertisers, arts curators etc as well as an army of Govt. bureaucrats, and they make dam sure they keep a tight fist on those well paid jobs for fear that they might too sink towards the "lucky to  be working" poor. I, as an unheralded artist, sank even further down into that human morass called the "lumpen proletariat", the Underworld of the no-hopers, vagabonds, layabouts and beggars,  never to get an even break. There's only so many places on the gravy train and, as in the dystopian movie "Snow-piercer", it's a cut-throat battle to get ahead.

Many years ago, the Hollywood actor Jimmie Stewart, touring the world to tout for his best mate Ronnie Raygun's second term as President, was guest presenter of Hitchcock's "Rear Window" at the Sydney Film Festival. As he got out of his limousine I couldn't stop my Tourettes and I heckled him, "Hey Jimmie, Ronnie's gonna lose! History will tell, and Ronnie will eventually lose out!" I was rewarded with a free ticket to the movie by a bouncer which I enjoyed thoroughly, and I was right about the future repercussions of the old movie villain's policies, America's rich are bathing in money while the middle classes are starving, begging for work at $10 an hour. This act, among others, surely did my non-career in.

Pyrmont Squats.

I’ve discovered the ruthless fight for position, money and kudos in other sites I’ve tried to break into. I made posters as an independent artist at the Tin Sheds Workshop at Sydney University but got written out of their history. I was too smart by half and my fellows didn’t seem to like the competition, as in the future I was generally shunned, not because I was a bastard, because I was a naive, cool cat and easy to fuck-over. There I was, a distillation of most of the under-class minorities our leftie intellectual elite champion, and they knifed me, out of sheer snootiness

And it goes on. Here in 2017 there is a "Dark Corporate" festival called “Livid” wherein “the connected” get to put on shows, especially in Kings Cross, my old hunting grounds. If you peruse these Blogs you’ll find many artworks and stories depicting the Cross, I’ve put on several shows there over the years, but the curators of “Vivid” have coldly excluded me. A mate of mine referred to me as “the poet of the streets” and this has possibly done me in as there are other writers in the area who feel they are the only geniuses deserving of such a title, I renounce the sobriquet, I am a piece of shrieking shit and I know it, and I bet if my name was mentioned as a potential Cross character worthy of inclusion there would be a quick, “No, not him!”

Another dickhead, Jay Fartz, is loudly braying about his "carefully curated show of fifty years of crazy cult Aussie films" in a Kings Cross pub, and even though I won Best Trash Film in the World Award in 1996 this dick has never deigned to show it.  ("Virgin Beasts", 1991, was about High Capitalism, Global Warming, arms dealing, destruction of the environment, male phallic paranoia and religious mania, with original animation and rock music, but nobody in Australia has ever shown it, except for 2 mates, Brett Garten for 2 days at the Chauvel Cinema and Jon Hewitt twisting the arm of the director of the Melbourne Underground Film Fest for one show only. Such is the censorship and upper-class closed shop here.) 

Jay Fartz has never produced a thing except lording it over arse-licking desperate film wannabes and when he’s dead he will be instantly forgotten; for all he’s gotten up the bums of the “Vivid” organizers he must be just plain jealous of what I, a poor guy from a housing estate, has managed, with no old boy network, committee climbing or family money. He showed trash movies in a pub in Anandale for many years and I once asked him politely to show my film but he politely declined. I even presented him with a few of my hand-made silkscreen posters for his Trash movie archives and I bet he sold them on as they are going for a $1000 from certain galleries and I didn't put them there. At that same rally I spoke of above I saw Jay Fartz with his fist raised like some low-rent Che Geuvera but when I went to say "hello" to him he turned his head away with his nose up in the air as if he'd smelt shit coming, and he did, only it was from his own arse. Dig it! What did I do to this crud except be a cool cat? Instead of being polite I should've heckled him on the spot, I'm tired of being the nice guy, next time I see the arsehole I'll give him an ear full!

Most of the people organizing this exclusive group masturbation are heterosexual couples and, for all the gay lib lip service, are secretly homophobes. I can just hear them in the privacy of their lounge rooms while they are getting pissed on cheap booze sniggering, “Oh, that Toby Z, what a nasty, presumptuous little fag he is!” If you, my suffering reader, ever get to read my book, “Vagabond Freak”, you’ll find out what a cruel obstacle course I’ve had to run, the kicks in the teeth and the doors slammed in my face, mostly from untalented, yellow with envy, snooty shit-head middle no-class people who are desperate for their few nano-seconds in the lime-light.

Of course, I did myself in when I created the nomme de geurre, Toby Zoates, as The System will have blackballed me outright from every public event, the name being so subversive. Only tonight I was watching television and an add for the famous breakfast cereal came up, in between that amazing anarchic movie “The Purge – Anarchy”, and I flashed that my years of outrageous artistic output, particularly my writing, will have the Upper Class dogs guarding "The Door" writhing in their skid-marked undies. But what can a poor boy, with a brain and guts, do? I have to be true to what ART should be doing, telling it how it is for us downtrodden, people, animals and the planet as a whole!

Just when I’m about to have an aneurysm, I let go of the tension over all this shit as I have no power over IT or THEM, it’s just the way this dickhead place is. Forget my forty years of hanging around that shithole once called The Cross, (it's soon to be named upmarket West Potts Point), I'd be too paranoid to have the locals beady eyes upon me. I'll have to get into my mantra, meditate and know I have no worries. I’ve had a great life, my films have shown everywhere, my Blogs have had 56000 hits from all around the world and my new book, “Vagabond Freak” is a beauty and will surely, over time, leave an awesome impression as a wild 21^st Century tale. So fuck you “Dirtworks” crew and Bug Swatter’s Gallery, my art will live on.

And up you, Jay Fartz cult film projections and Livid's boring raconteur’s booze-addled breath-bags, Johnny-come-latelys squeezing the last few drops of rancid juice from a gentrified Cross. After two weeks it will be over and you will be forgotten, while my forthcoming books, with forty years of Kings Cross stories, will shine like lights from the darkness as I put my fist through that homophobic, class ceiling.

www.amazon.com/author/tobyzoates

"Vagabond Freak" = Deadbeat Realism.

www.amazon.com/author/tobyzoates

After struggling with my trilogy, "The 7 Lives of the Punk Poofy Cat", for thirty-plus years, writing, rewriting, researching, reviewing, discussing it with friends, on and on, I've finally pulled my finger out and published it. In all those years I asked everyone I met if they could help me, hoping they would maybe have some idea or connection to a publisher. All of them mumbled, turned their heads away, kept their cards close to their chest, and said no, as if afraid I might outdo them or filch five bucks from their pocket.

Then this year I met a lovely chap named Coco at the Gay Mardi Gras parade who, after my asking him for advice, recommended an online service that helped with desktop publishing. You put your job on a worldwide bulletin board and people apply for your job, in my case asking for someone to help me format my book for Amazon Kindle, a complicated process that I tried once and it did my head in.

I found a guy in America who needed work and seemed experienced at Kindle books and he did a great job at a cheap rate and now, after all these years and toil, I have my hard-won book in existence, up for sale, to be read by the world. Now I want to tell you the story of how this writing came about.

 I've been writing since the age of 7, diaries of my daily experiences, short stories my teachers fussed over and read out to the class, precocious for my age. I also read every children's book I could get my hands on, "Noddy and Big Ears", "Famous Five", "Secret Seven", "Finn Family Moomintroll", "Treasure Island", and all the comic books from Marvel, DC and Disney. I should've tried to get published in my twenties but I was busy traveling, learning and laying about; as a late flowering achiever I knew I would get there in good time.

I enrolled in the Communications Course at the University of Technology, Sydney in 1983 with the goal of majoring in Writing and Text Studies and, doing it part-time, I achieved my B.A. in 1990. In that same year of 1983 I answered an add in a gay newspaper for short stories to be in an anthology, "Edge City", and I submitted my tale of growing up as a proto-sissy, until the age of 13, in a working class slum. It was called "Welcome to the Men's" and in it I described how my father nearly killed my mother by bashing her into the kitchen floor so that blood pooled around her on the linoleum. The editor raved how impressed he was by the image of the blood, and the next book of his short stories was called "Blood on the Lino", yet he never offered me a job again to submit any story for whatever he was putting together, par for the course in competitive, rat-race Australia.

That was my first iteration of my tale. The second happened two years later when a gay historian from Sydney University, Gary, approached me and told me how much he liked my story in "Edge City" and was thinking of putting together a similar anthology, of six gay men from different eras and different cities, telling what it was like to grow up gay: their family's response, their religion, the books they read, their schooling, their first loves etc etc, just as I'd written in my story.

I readily agreed and wrote an expanded version, taking my life up to 18 and calling it "Alec Farthing". The book, "Being Different", came out to much acclaim, except I was pissed off as the editor couldn't resist slipping his story in, taking the number of entries to 7 rather than the original 6, only he put his story before mine, pre-empting me, attempting to copy my style, especially my conclusion, of calling for equality in marriage, encouraging them to settle down with a partner, accepted by their families, relieving gays from the lonely desperate life of wandering dark parks and lurking in toilets. The trouble was Gary grew up in a comfortable middle-class household and his story was boring.

When the S & M Herald reviewed the book the astute critic wrote that most of the stories were dreary and badly written, except for Toby Zoates, whose tale was poignant and humorous, so I kind of got the last laugh. I got $50 for my life's story and when it went into a second reprint I got nothing. Gary the editor has dined out on his fame ever since and would simply excuse his ripping me off by saying he couldn't find me, but I'd say he didn't try very hard as he wanted all the glory, and he got it.

 I can't help thinking Australia is a very hard place for anyone, much less an artist, to succeed in. The small population means there's a tiny audience for anything, especially anything daring and radical; there's little money to go around and everyone is made to fight over the scraps; and media moguls/billionaires control Auz society with an iron fist, in league with the State which is put in place by those same oligarchies: everything has to be "State Sanctioned". 

Out of every seven people I met along the way I was lucky if one was willing to help me, mostly I was stabbed in the back, cheated, bad-mouthed, wiped from the record. I never did the same, I've tried to be a true civil libertarian, cooperative, caring, helping where I could, getting others employment. But this was rarely reciprocated, only deadbeats, flakes, conniving Machiavellians getting a leg-up, as if they're the ones that truly need it and I'm strong enough, brainy enough, to do it for myself. And thus I did, indeed, publish myself.

I've long leapfrogged the small, muddy pond that is Australia and got my work out into the wider world, as with my films and this Blog. As I said, I wrote and rewrote the volumes of "The 7 Lives of the Punk Poofy Cat" and here in 2017 have at last got the first book, "Vagabond Freak" up onto the world stage. My punchline for it is "Deadbeat Realism in the Queer Underworld." The other two are already written, the next is called "Punk Outsider" and tells of my misadventures in Sydney in the late '70s and '80s. Much of this writing was done in India, high in the Himalayas, from 1997 onward. There was no TV, movie-houses or night clubs to distract me, even books were scarce, all I could do to occupy myself was write, write, write into the night, every night, and the 3 books got done.

I am now going to go over every story on this Blog that is in "Vagabond Freak", (up to story number 34 = "Surviving Pan the Grand Seducer"), and delete most of them, just keeping the introductory paragraphs as a TeaZer and the pictures to lure you, dear reader, on. I will place the cover of my book, which is now on www.amazon.com/author/tobyzoates  in each of those deleted spaces to encourage you to go there and buy my book, read the tale from beginning to end in one place, and hopefully share the knowledge with your friends as it's a fucking good read.

1) Art Nearly Drowned As A Kitten.

 www.amazon.com/author/tobyzoates

These stories, that have been available on Blogspot for 10 years for free, will now only be available on Amazon at the address above. They are contained in “Vagabon Freak”, the 1^st volume of a trilogy titled “The 7 Lives of the Punk Poofy Cats”. I have been the archetypal starving artist in his garret, painting, drawing and writing, writing, writing as if I were some waif crying out in the wilderness. Now I need you, dear reader, to hear my cries and go to Amazon and buy a copy of my book and keep me alive. There you will find my complete tale, from beginning to end, in one place, for you to hold in your hot little hands. When you read it straight through, I assure you, it will blow your mind.

Below are introductory paragraphs to the story and some pictures that I still retain to illustrate those stories, hopefully to give you a come-on to get my book. Thanks for giving me a go, TZ.

In 1957, when Arthur was seven years old, he had what the beatniks of the time called a mini-satori, a flash about the kind of world he’d been born into and his place in it. He was lying on the concrete roof of the communal laundry out back of his Housing Commission apartment in the Olympic Village, West Heidelberg, Melbourne, staring into space, sunk within the deep blue of the sky as glowing white clouds slowly drifted past.

He imagined he saw in the cloud-formations mind-boggling structures, alluring and fearsome. At first the shape of a penis towered above him, exciting him mysteriously,  then it morphed into a foreboding mushroom cloud, dark, ugly, it seemed to crash down upon him.

Much later in life he would find that others had also had ominous cloud-gazing day dreams, as if his story was universal. John Rechy, famed sexual outlaw, publishing his autobiography in 1962, “City of Night”, discovered a vague self-awareness while getting spaced out cloud-gazing as a boy. And in Richard Linklaters’ movie, “Boyhood”, the twelve-year journey of growing up starts with the seven year old boy flat on his back watching clouds. For Arthur it was no artistic cliché, it actually happened, his blue eyes had expanded with comprehension.

As the threatening cloud broke up and drifted away, Arthur became aware that he was aware, and his consciousness was vast, Mind and sky had become one for timeless moments. The clouds drifted through him, he felt a languid ecstasy expand his sense of being and a quiet resolve to survive this harried world settled deep within him.

He was alive, a miraculous, glorious, awesome fact, and he knew it! He felt he could chase the life he dreamed of, no matter the obstacles, cruelties and sorrows. He would experience all that the world offered: a life jam-packed with adventure, achievement, knowledge and love, regardless of his low station among the poor and powerless. He flew like an angel, golden and warm of heart, smart, confident, compassionate, sweet and strong, a warrior if he had to be, a rebel if that’s what it took to be true to himself. Somehow he would stay alive and fulfill his dreams.

Then he fell out of the sky, brought back to reality by the realization that he still had a chore to complete, or there would be hell to pay. He leaped to the ground and ran up the path behind the block of flats, up the stairs to his family’s unit and into the kitchen where his father, Frank, was blathering on about his political obsessions to his glum-faced mother, Elaine, both of them swigging constantly from glasses of beer.