Tuesday, July 30, 2013

42) A Punk's Night Out in Auz.



Urban Guerilllas and Me, (the Queer), at The Grand Hotel 1979
Politics and rebellion were not the only things that motivated Arthur’s soul, music also propelled him forward, without it he wouldn’t want to keep living. This rave is him claiming a PHD in rock’n roll punting, the fan’s eye-view from the mosh pit. He’d been an avid fan since his early youth, first Ray Charles, then Sam Cooke, James Brown and Otis Redding capturing his heart as a boy in the '50s/’60s. From the mid ‘Sixties to the early ‘Seventies he shook his booty in Melbourne to "The Rolling Stones" at the Palais Theatre in St. Kilda in ‘66, "The Easybeats" at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl in ‘67 and “Pink Floyd” at Festival Hall in ‘70.

He had danced to the best of the Aussie bands such as "Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs", Lobby Loyde’s "Purple Hearts" and "Wild Cherries", “Max Merritt and the Meteors”, “Gerry Humphries and The Loved Ones”, "Python Lee Jackson" and "Jeff St. John and The Id" and "The Chelsea Set", at clubs like The Biting Eye, Catcher and The Thumping Tum. Towards 1970 it was “Tully” and “Wendy Saddington and The Chain” at festivals like Ourimbah, all very hippie but cutting edge nonetheless, long may Wendy be remembered. Then it was ghetto-blasted "Led Zeppelin" and "Stevie Wonder" in Kashmir on the houseboats of Dahl Lake in ’73; and when he pranced about on the beaches of Goa it was especially to "The Who", "La Belle" and "Neil Young" in ‘75. He was 17 in 1967, and 27 when he eventually washed up on the shores of Sydney in 1977. 


In Australia of the ‘Seventies and ‘Eighties rock music was a virtual religion for him; he sacrificed his youth on the altar of electric euphoria, chasing his favorite musicians from one end of New South Wales to the other, bands like “Died Pretty”, “Hunters and Collectors”, “Dragon”, “XL Capris”, “The Saints”, “The Angels”, “Box the Jesuit”, “The Nerve”, “Monroe’s Fur” and “Lubricated Goat”. But of them all, his biggest lust was for "The Divinyls", Chrissie Amphlet turning him on as no other woman ever could; he swirled his head and a fountain of joy spouted from his crown every time he danced with her and Mark McInty’s scintillating performance upon the stage. Musicians and he went together like honey and oats, like sex and love, they exploded at gigs like powder kegs, and sometimes he did the graphix to light the fuse.


When Punk hit Sydney in 1976/77 it had already blown itself out in London, like a hot wind, but in the antipodes it still smacked of the fresh breath of rebellion. With an irreverent iconoclasm towards the status quo Punks had the middle-classes wincing upon their comfortable sofas. Photos of the Queen with a safety pin through her nose declaring, “God save the Queen, she ain’t no human being”, at first horrified Arthur who was still hung up on the pseudo-love of the ‘Sixties peaceniks and he berated every Punk he met for their negative, violent approach to existence. But he was an Aussie Republican and soon saw the value of demystifying royalty, he resented the Queen as distant ruler of Australia, plus what quickly swung him over to Punks' bad-arse attitude was their radically déclassé, eye-clashing dress code, the subversive satire underpinning their outrageous promo imagery and the raw, explosive music, the Sex Pistols providing the knock-out punch. (The British connection with Auz was strong so it was Brit Punk Rock Artie fell for, the Americans such as The Stooges, Iggy Pop, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, the Ramones, Patti Smith et al came later in his musical thrill addiction.

As much as Punk was kind of a counter-cultural evolution from the Hippies of the 'Sixties, both sub-cults eschewing Straight Society's ethos of "obey, work, breed, consume, die", the 'flower children' got relegated to the stale, old has-been closet by Punks, deemed a failure for Utopian wanking on about dreams for the perfect, harmonious world and clouding their minds with irrational practices such as astrology and homeopathy. Hard drugs, hard cops, the cruel Vietnam war and its class-structure of nasty politics and even nastier religio-maniacs, such as Christian war-mongers and satanic murderers, all killed off the idealism of the alternative life-stylers, and sullied the innocence of 'Sixties pacifiers, many of the unwary reduced to drug zombies, whores or thieves to get their highs, communes only satisfactory for the brave, hardy few.

 Consumerism and money-power were the ruling ethos of the 'Seventies, the true God rampaging across the planet, and the Beast had to be tackled on its own ground, in the city ghettos, and somehow tamed, or spat upon, but sadly it was the Punks who ended up being tamed. The Beast always seems to win as everybody is conned into selling out, Money Rules. Arthur opined that the Punk cult got co-opted by middle-class fashionistas and wankers from art school like Malcolm McLaren, but in reality was created on the streets by true innovators like Johnny Rotten and his fellow disaffected, unemployed youth wailing from their crumbling housing estates, eager to "do it yourself" with black plastic garbage bags and garage bands.(Johnny Rotten devolved into a Farage/Brexit fan in old age, maybe his arteries atrophied, but he was totally funny, iconoclastic in his youth.)

Arthur fell for the culture of Punk, the look, the art, the music, and he took on the philosophy, seeing anarchism as an alternative political system to the exploitative high capitalist world that had dehumanized him. The Punks in general, Rotten included, seemed  to just want to put the finger to a straight-laced, class bound society that was relegating working class youth to the trash-heap. Being outlandish and disrespecting the sacredness of private property was their M.O. If asked about his own “punk nature” he would openly admit it was his "gayness" that led to his disaffection with the world. (Being tolerant Gay clubs were the rare spaces that hosted Punk gigs in the early days thus Gay outrageousness in dress and behaviour had some influence on the seditious nature of the working class youths.)

"Punk" for him didn't gain any extra cachet in Auz if it first erupted in Brisbane with The Saints single "Stranded", in1975 or in Melbourne according to a documentary by Dickie Lowerstain. There was even a laughable egotistical art-school wanker in Sydney boasting he started Punk in the early '70s with a few paintings in an art gallery! Arthur didn't give a shit about where it first took off, Iggy and The Stooges in New York actually being the first to make music that was rough, raw and challenging; he figured the early Auz style could also be considered as a progenitor of Punk, such as AC/DC carrying on the torch from those wild '60s bands such as Lobby Lloyd’s “Wild Cherries.” Anyway, Artie’s "punk's night out" was all about a street fag running for his cosmic electric-music fuck, not macho poseur rockers.
Early AC/DC

To Arthur Punks seemed to have a nihilistic heart that actually wanted the world destroyed so as to begin again. Nothing was sacred and to the dispossessed, cracked youth there seemed no future, the fleeting moment had to be torn apart and sucked dry, for you were dead at thirty. If poverty didn’t kill you then there was always the promise of nuclear war, global pandemic disease or environmental collapse to bump you off before your time, (mostly it ended up being gang warfare, car crashes or drug overdoses that did the young in early.) A complacent world of middle-class consumers was greeted with a punk snarl and a kick to the guts from an avant-garde wearing black fish-net T-shirts and torn, red-tartan pants. And for most of these alienated youth there WAS "no future", they remained slaves, breeders, consumers with limited potential, horizons and educations. The Beast, Mammon, the System steamrolled over everyone like Satan on ICE.
Art by Stu Spasm.

Always with an eye to where the most fun was to be had, Arthur caught the Punk fever, grabbing his chance to start afresh, forge a new identity and be a clown if he had to, anything to shine as an artist amid the pedestrian crowd. It was at a Punk party one night in Darlingurst that he overheard a gang of drunken teenagers raving in the kitchen, one telling the others that some day he would be the most famous musician in Australia, indeed he would be a household name. 
 
Arthur mused upon this idea, a household name was what he needed to push his art and have people take notice, otherwise he’d get forgotten in the rush. It had to be distinctly Australian and open for salacious, satirical triple-entendres. Being an information-junkie, he watched a lot of T.V. and had noticed a repetitive add for a famous Australian-made breakfast cereal. The announcer slurred his voice seductively when proselytizing the brand-name so that an 'S' became a 'Z', the penultimate letter for rebellion and sarcasm, as in Zorro, Zapata, Zippie the Pinhead, the Z list and Z-grade movies.

Thus Arthur sowed his wild oats and got high on the Z factor with his show-biz name, Toby Zoates, the Punk Poofy Cat, with endless commercials in all media extolling his nutritious virtues, while on the boob tube nubile youths swallowed muesli bars whole with phallic relish. The drunk teenager in the kitchen went on to become Danny Tumour, lead guitarist for one of Australia’s hottest ‘Nineties rock bands, “The Cruel Pee.” (Don’t mistake Artie’s piss-take, Danny was a friend of his since his first band at sixteen, “Secret Secret”, and so was Tex, and “The Cruel Sea were fabulously hot musicians in the ‘90s!)
The Punk Poofy Cat.

Those were the days when every street corner seemed to have a live music club on it and Sydney truly rocked. Some of the most exhilarating, heart-throbbing nights of Arthur’s life were spent in the seedy, punk-music clubs. He saw Nick Cave perform as a teenager in his first band “Boys Next Door” at “Rags” in the city center, (where Chequers nightclub uses to be), “Sekret Sekret” at "The Rock Garden" on William Street, “The Hunters and Collectors” at the “Trade Union Club” in Surry Hills, “Mu Mesons” at the "Annandale Pub" and “The Cure” at "The Bondi Tram” in Bondi Junction. At “Sellinas” in the Coogee Bay Hotel he heard all the best bands the world could offer, “The Butthole Surfers”, “The Cramps”, “Ministry”, “Primus”, “The Cult”, “Screaming Jay Hawkins”, “Iggy Pop”, so many he's now forgotten, his fore-brain having blown a fuse due to an overload of electricity. 

The Hopetoun Hotel
French’s Tavern on Oxford Street in Darlinghurst was the baddest of venues, painted black, grungy, open till three in the morning, a bar upstairs, the band-room in a dungeon below with a steep flight of stairs that many of us fell down in our blind inebriation. Like the Piccolo Café on Kings Cross, when there was nowhere else to go there was always French’s to find shelter from the stormy city, with music, a drink and Punks to keep you company.
No Fixed Address.
Arthur was there the night “Cold Chisel” played its first inner-city Sydney gig and a small rowdy Punk crowd heckled and spat on the complaining young lead singer, Jimmy Barnes. Arthur detested the spitting stupidity of the Punks also, often wrestling with them over their obnoxiousness, but he didn’t agree with Jimmy that they were just a bunch of Oxford Street trendies and the band was too wild for them, (there’s even a hint of homophobia in his slur, as if they were all vacuous poofs.) 
The Punks simply thought Chisel's music was daggy, hailing from Adelaide, the city of churches, Ocker rock with a country influence, old style and not resonating with the aesthetic of the times, raw, nasty, unslick, Punk such as “Radio Birdman” who themselves had previously played “trendy” Oxford Street gigs. 

Of course “Cold Chisel” came into their own from hard touring and living experience with classics such as “Breakfast at Sweethearts” and “Cheap Wine.” Their sound had become slicker with virtuoso performances from the guitarist, Ian Moss and the genius of pianist Don Walker, whose edgy song-writing caught the public’s fervid imagination. Even though Barnesy screeched like a cat thrown on the barbie they were attractive to big label record executives, whereas the Punks’ garage thrash went nowhere except into small indie labels such as Redeye and Blackeye, if they were lucky.

French’s Tavern had a giant fat bouncer named Ray, quite a gruff fellow for he had to handle mobs of unruly drunken youths and he eyeballed everybody closely as they went in to figure out if they might be the type to cause trouble but he never once gave Arthur a hard time. Artie often wondered how such an overweight guy could deal with any really tough company and sure enough there came the night he got stabbed by some brainless redneck. All the punters went into shock at the news, yet thankfully Ray quickly recovered and bounced back for many a year. He died in the Noughties an old beaten man, little realizing he would become a legend in rock’n’roll gig folklore.
French's Tavern

The Trade Union was Sydney’s other fun club, behind Central station in Fovaux Street, up a steep flight of stairs, two floors of bars and bands, where he saw so many great bands but he guessed most memorable was the night Bo Didley played and Arthur was with his horrible girlfriend, Sylvia Saliva; she had the ill manners to throw a beer can at the blues maestro and call him an old fart. The bouncers jumped her, twisted her arm to breaking point and dragged her down the stairs and flung her onto Fovaux Street, to be run over by the taxi cabs roaring out of their depot next door. 
The Trade Union Club.

Artie’s favorite Aussie band was “The Divinyls” and he deliriously jumped to their heart-stopping rock many times but their best gig, at which he experienced a meltdown, was maybe at “The Tivoli” on George Street in Sydney’s centre; Chrissie Amphlet was at the peak of her genius and in that small venue Artie was able to get up close to her growling soprano, whirling dervish, naughty school-girl Scottish fling.

He probably remembered it wrong, it was in his fevered brain that the “The Divinyls” first ever public gig was at The Trade Union Club in the early '80s, (later on he fund out they had an early residence at the Piccadilly Hotel on the Cross.)  Whatever, he got his nuts in a twist at Divinyls awesome promise of their future pop-rock conquest; he danced till his head hit the ceiling and must've surprised Chrissie no end at who the fool was jumping about like a maniac. But dancing punters are what get bands off or that's what Arthur always hoped; if nobody moved to the beat it sure would be boring for everyone concerned. The Trade Union was a fabulous club, the best of bands to get thumped to and easy floor space to be layabouts upon.
The Divinyls.

He saw “Midnight Soil” at the “Stage-door Tavern” near Central and hated them, the back-up band were cool but he'd seen epileptics perform better than the lead singer, the dildo Christian was no bad boy of rock, more like a politician growing wings in a cocoon who went on to find fame in the heart of pollie gronkland. Instead of “the beds are burning” his arse was burning at the thought of his future sell-out invading Aboriginal land and opening up a Uranium mine when he became the Labor party’s “Environment Minister.” The Pollies had enrolled him as their poster boy hoping he would lure the youth vote. Of course, he’s still got the gronks believing the bullshit, they’ve even put out a movie, “1984”, where he’s still pushing himself as a nuclear war savior.

But at the original, ultimate Punk pubs, “The Grand” at Central Railway and The Civic up the road in Pitt Street, Arthur truly got lobotomized by “The Rejex”, “Urban Guerillas”, “Suicide Squad”, “Bedhogs”, “The Kelpies” and “Soggy Porridge”, teenage garage bands that went nowhere except into Sydney Punk mythology and Artie's electro-heart. 

Urban Guerillas at the Grand Hotel.
Artie himself hired “Paul Kelly and the Coloured Girls” for a benefit gig for Radio Skidrow at The Graphic Arts Club where he premiered his Super 8 grunge musical documentary, ”Darling it Hurtz!” Then there were all the pubs that had live music, The Annandale, The Bald Stag at Leichardt, The Sandringham at Newtown, The Lord Roberts in Darlinghurst, The Piccadilly Hotel at the Cross, Kardomah Cafe and The Manzil Room on Kings Cross, and the Lansdowne off Broadway, Max's Inn at Petersham, many more his brain too boggled to recall,  all venues where Arthur wrestled in mosh pits getting a bloodied nose or a black eye from his exertions, laughing in intense euphoria, he felt life’s fun couldn’t be any better.


 In Dionysian furor he grappled and slam-danced with packs of electricity-maddened youths in front of riotous, thrashing garage-bands with sexy names like “Johnny Dole and the Scabs”, “The Thought Criminals”, “The Slug-fuckers”, “The Hard Ons”, “Candy Harlots”, “The Craven Fops”, “The Lipstick Killers”, “The Celibate Rifles”, “The Plug Uglies”, “Mi-Sex” and “Kiss My Poodle's Donkey.”

Such was the renaissance in music bursting from Sydney's seams in the late ‘70s and the ‘80s Arthur has forgotten many of the tidal wave of bands so he asks for their forgiveness if he has left many of them out in this reminiscing, his brain getting wiped several times from acid, pot, ecstasy and general anesthetic from surgery after getting bashed up or car-crashed up. But he did see most of them live, bands such as The Saints, Kim Salmon and the Surrealists, The Scientists, Pel Mel, Ayers Rock, Hudu Gurus, Spy vs. Spy, The Models, The Victims, Kevin Borich Express, The Radiators, Ward 13, The Numbers, Ratcat, Madroom, Tsk Tsk Tsk, The Dirty Three, The The, Kamikaze Kids. 

The Johnnys, The Church, Psycho Surgeons, The Reels, Feedtime, Flaming Hands, Salamander Jim, The Triffids, Sardine, Scribble, Painters and Dockers, The Sunny Boys, Ragadoll, Lime Spiders, Nunbait, The Choir Boys, Uncanny X-men, Iced Vo-vos, No Fixed Address, Us Mob, The Go-Betweens, Wendy and the Rocketts, Jimmy and The Boys, Frenzel Romp, I Spit on Your Gravy, Hang 'Em High, Public Hnaging, Orgasmatron and one of his smashing favorites that rocked his orgasm, Regurgitator, (from Brisbane.)


Some of the bands he first saw in this town of tough titties went on to get international renown, like ‘AC/DC’ at the Haymarket, ‘Severed Heads’ at the Phoenician Club, ‘Nick Cave and the Birthday Party’ at the Cell-block Theatre and ‘SPK’ at Sydney University. The jumping crowds were made delirious by guitar-static searing the eardrums and thrilling the brain, setting afire nerve-endings so that the dancer got stomped into atoms on the dance-floor, then snatched back up by a brotherly hand and thrown around in the meat-grinder music for yet more joyful bruising.

A lot has been written about this music scene in Sydney of the '70s and '80s from the point of view of the musicians themselves, such as in Bob Blunt's 2001 fanzine book "Blunt". While Artie put on a lot of gigs around the city, designed the posters and flyers for them and showed his grungy movies at them, in the main he was merely a punter, a die-hard fan and this is what he would always stress in a rave about the "scene", he was a rock'n roll addict. The bands that were his especial favorites, who he chased around to all the hot clubs, were Died Pretty, Nunbait, Sekret Sekret, XL Capris, The Scientists, X, Thug, Tactics, Monroe's Fur, Box the Jesuit and Lubricated Goat; many of them became his friends and he would never forget the electric orgasms they gave him, as well as the art jobs.



He hung around the meanest of venues praying for a musical jolt, as if he were an addict for electric shock treatment, dressed clownishly like a punk Zippie the Pinhead on acid and making no bones about the fact that he was gay. In 1978 Arthur was twenty-eight, ten years older than most of the crowd at the rock clubs and the nastiest of the punks harassed him mercilessly for his difference, forever spitting in his face, bashing him up in the mosh-pit, trampling him into the dance-floor. But he stuck to his enthusiasm, grappled with the best of them and shoved any over-excited ruffians on their arse, po-going on their heads if they didn’t let up.

He enraged the ignorant mob further by responding to their sneers with the information that the original meaning of the term “punk” was jail-house slang for someone who took it up the arse. He rarely met any 'gays' in the "rock'n roll scene", homophobia ruled; he was never closeted about his sexuality and copped lots of shit for it, often barred from 'straight' pubs, (such as The Civic whose manager took an instant dislike to him), excluded from inner circles, wiped from the record. For all the liberal lip-service, especially nowadays, back then fags just weren't liked, it was a supreme Het, macho scene, but he didn't give a shit, he was a warrior and he demanded respect by his very nerve.

It was while he was making his documentary film, “My Survival as a Deviant”, that Arthur finally got accepted into the Punk fold. He was interviewing raucous Punks outside their club, “Rags” on Goulbourn Street when a gang of rednecks from the Bee-Gees "Saturday Night Fever" Discotheque next door attacked them out of the blue, beating up any neon spike-haired Punks they could lay their hands on. Most of the brave, tough Punks ran back into their club, leaving one little fellow in his black-leather jacket, the very one who spat in Arthur’s face most often, to be massacred by the “staying alive” disco-brutes. 

Without thinking about it, Arthur put down his Super-eight camera and rushed over to the mob of arse-holes who were beating the kid into the gutter, jumping upon their backs and throwing punches indiscriminately, flailing about in a fury so that the rednecks backed off, stunned by his Tasmanian Devil-like presence. The Punk kid was able to extract himself from their clutches and escape with Arthur back to “Rags” where he cursed his fellows for their cowardice and announced that poofy, old Arthur was the only guy with guts in the whole crowd. Arthur had finally made it as a Punk.

He threw himself whole-heartedly into the Punk sub-cult, organizing gigs with Punk bands to raise money for nefarious projects, promoting it all with crass pamphlets. He wall-papered the city with his scurrilous, incandescent posters and screened his garage-movies at any Punk venue he could crash, doing a bad stand-up comedy routine between the acts if an M.C. was called for. He made offensive animated films and walked in and out of the projections singing a cracked diatribe against a society that had buggered him mercilessly, much to the sullen surprise of the assembled teenage Punks. 

He bleached his hair white and gelled it into horns on either side of his bald head and painted his face to look like Freddy Kreuger in drag, and he stepped on toes and got on nerves everywhere he went, even when he didn’t mean to. He was mad for his art, a fool for his times, a tawdry street-punk for his troubles and while he basked in his infamy, he didn’t give a shit what anybody thought. A wild life was all about shining as a character, not being a limp dish-rag.

He would run seven hundred miles for a hot, chaotic electric-music show, dash his brains against his own skull head-banging up a white-light orgasm to match the band’s ecstatic musical smash-up, the keening mob swaying, seething, jumping, pulsating like a monstrous blob of mindless protoplasm with a thousand squirming limbs. He rarely had money for the entrance fee to these gigs but as a die-hard Punk he figured "where there was a craving there was a hole in the wall" and no venue was able to keep him out, he would find the unlocked back-door, the break in the cyclone fence or the design for the door pass and forge a copy. 

Thus he rocked to all the great bands from “Radio Birdman” in a pool-room on Oxford Street to “The Divinyls” at a wet T-shirt Bar in Ballina on the North Coast, from “The Angels” at a football stadium in outer-suburbia to “MX War Headz” at the Tin Sheds Poster Workshop, “Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds” at the Roundhouse, New South Wales University to "Laughing Clowns" at The Trade Union Club, from “Box the Jesuit” at the Mandolin Cinema with soft porn movies on the wide screen behind them to “Monroe’s Fur” naked at the Hopetoun Hotel in Surry Hills. And believe it or not, he gave Tex Perkins his first gold-top mushroom and then they all went to The Evil Star Pub in Surry Hills tripping and jumped in a frenzy to Beasts of Bourbon. (Now that Tex is famous he might possibly deny it, but Artie couldn't give a fuck, they were all young and reckless then, now they're all old and fucked up.)
Thug.

He literally hit the ceiling again tripping on Goldtop mushrooms with Johnny Lydon and ‘Public Image’ at the old Tivoli Nightclub on George Street and he's sure Johnny appreciated his manic dancing, at one point in the gig The Punk Master asked him how he liked it and Artie could only respond by blowing in his pants. Artie also got his twat pumped orgasmic at the anarchic gigs in various Sydney Squats, “Real Fucking Idiots” and “The Dri-Horrors” at Pyrmont Squats, “The Nerve” at Jelly Headz Garage in Chippendale and “Lubricated Goat”, "Nunbait" and "Thug" at the Gunnery Squat in Woolloomoolloo, the ultimate in grunge venues.

It’s a miracle Arthur came out of the Sydney Punk scene with his sanity intact as he experienced too many delirious, frenzied romps to electrified guitars, crashing drums and amplified, melodic screaming. Some people lived for football or poker machines, Arthur lived for rock’n roll music no matter its evolution, chasing it as one of the great contemporary arts, alongside of film and literature. 
The Gunnery Squat - art by Jonno Driscoll.

Moshing in the pit with the electrified punters was a hazardous sport, Arthur occasionally getting bruises all over from the violent, abandoned dancing. Fights often broke out in the writhing crowd, because of a girlfriend getting touched up or a head stepped upon, and the band would bang on, punches landing on the beat, the fighting a fitting part of the wild, Punk dance movement. Punks were notoriously violent, as if their pleasure and pain wires had been crossed, they were the second wave of the Beat Generation and they loved nothing better than to have the shit beaten out of them to thrashing Punk music.


At a Punk gig, Side F/X, in the old Marist Brother’s School turned squat in Darlinghurst, a boy standing next to Arthur had a beer bottle broken over his head while innocently listening to his favorite thrash music. For years afterwards Arthur heard the echo of the piercing shriek of pain and betrayal the poor lad let off as the glass shattered resoundingly upon his skull. 


On another night, leaving yet another scene of musical electrocution, he must’ve given the sleazy eyeball to a Punk loitering in the street, for the drunken bastard unexpectedly jumped on him and wrestled him to the ground where they rolled for several minutes in a veritable fight to the death. Cars cruised past with yobs hanging out the window yelling, “Give it to the cunt!” while Arthur was being throttled in the gutter. The rabid Punk took pleasure in biting, scratching and trying to gouge his eyes out and Arthur had to call forth the last ounce of his strength to beat the lout off and stagger to his feet. Still the idiot clung to him, punching and tearing at his flesh, declaring he wanted to kill all poofters and would only be satisfied with Arthur’s total annihilation.

Arthur gave the prick the hardest kick in the nuts he had ever given anyone but the goon was so drunk he didn’t feel a thing and kept lurching forward to shred Arthur’s flesh again. Artie gave him a second swift boot, straight to the crotch, which caused the fool to halt for a second, allowing Artie to run for his very life, drunk Punks just too hard to knock out. As Arthur retreated he snickered with the small consolation that surely in the morning that little fucker’s balls would be black and blue. Like the rest of humanity, sometimes Punks were out and out arse-holes and Punk gigs an insult to one’s intelligence.


The worst Punk gig for violence he ever attended was at another glorious squat, Alpha House up on King Street, Newtown, one of those lawless, Utopian spaces where any dickhead was free to run amok. A bad-arse Punk band called “X” was playing in the basement of the old apartment block and the crowd was bouncing, eager and cool. Arthur was up the back and digging the scene when he noticed a gang of razor-faced Skinheads snake their way into the carefree, distracted audience. Suddenly he found himself surrounded by the bastards, the cold glint of murder in their eyes and he tried maneuvering himself out of their reach. 

Breaking into a cold sweat, he watched them focus upon a wimpy, new-wave type guy, hair nicely coiffed and dressed in the latest trend, blithely enjoying the volatile music. Like sharks on a feeding frenzy they rushed in for the attack, beating the poor fellow to a bloody pulp, his screams engulfed by the cacophonous music, other bystanders looking away, praying they wouldn’t be next. 

There were too many united, murderous neo-Nazis for any one brave lad to take on and no one had enough friends there to back them up if they were willing to fight back. The band ‘X’ crashed and wailed, ignorant of the horror unfolding up the back of the gig. Perhaps if someone had of informed them, the show would’ve been stopped and the sadists crushed, for the band was gutsy enough and could’ve united the crowd to retaliate. But chaos is chaos, the show roared on and it was every Punk for his/her self, survival the key note rather than community action.

Arthur heard flesh rend and bones crack, blood gushed and the victim screamed for help and everyone struggled to get away, pushing back into the unwitting crowd or into the dark recesses of the squat, hoping to escape the targeting eyes of the Skinheads. Leaving the boy unconscious on the floor they looked around for more easy prey and their piggy eyes narrowed on Arthur. He saw them coming, sly smiles on their cadaverous faces and his skin pricked as they formed a circle around him, lolling about as if they were just jolly punters out on a harmless lark.

Arthur was no fool, he knew he had been marked as the next sacrificial lamb, emanating homo sapience as he did. The ring of bloodthirsty fiends grew tight around him, their callous smiles chilling, he could see the claws bared, the sharp teeth flashing, and his eyes darted about looking for any crack he could squeeze through. The band erupted into a crashing crescendo, grabbing the attention of the pack of white-trash cannibals for a moment, and Arthur saw a space open up between two of the thugs. He sprinted into their midst and, before they could grab him, ducked under their arms and out and away into the crowd, pushing and shoving in a maddened fright, feeling their foul breath rancid upon the back of his neck. 


Other witnesses at the back were also struggling to find refuge in the darkness for the Skinhead devils were now lashing out ferociously at anyone within reach. Arthur grappled his way through the bleating music-lovers, the band “X” screeching like a choir in Hell down the front, the cacophony punctuated by the sounds of soft flesh yielding and stifled moans whimpering up the back of the dark, grotty room.

He tumbled through a shadowy doorway and up a dirty corridor, other terrified Punks scrambling past him, all of them looking for a corner to hide in, the monolithic squat crouching down upon them like a gigantic poisonous toad, providing no succor. Every wavering shadow looked like a drooling Skinhead and Arthur willed himself to be the Invisible Man, able to walk through walls. Tumbling through doors at random, he finally stumbled out onto King Street, the pained cries of innocent, fragile people left far behind and muted by the banality of the dull, fluorescent streetlights shining on the empty road. Beautiful, friendly, safe streetlights. He hurried across the deserted road and into spooky Victoria Park, his head turned backwards like the dead priest in “The Exorcist”, Skinhead ghouls imagined behind every tree. It’s all very nice to enjoy incendiary Punk music, not so nice being flogged and burned at the stake afterwards.



 Running back to the safety of his own no-man’s land squat in Pyrmont, he pondered upon the viciousness of skin-headed ape-men, their perverted orgasm of blood and his opposing mania for continuous sex-play, as if he were a dolphin-man. He wished he were a Bruce Lee type, able to take on a whole gang of bone-heads and beat the living nightlights out of them so they could never hurt again. But he wasn’t a hero, he didn’t even make it to movie star status. He was just a vulnerable, poofy little punk, with no posse, no connections and no wherewithal.
Box the Jesuit.

And all these rambunctious rock'n'roll hi-jinx didn't get him far in the staid Sydney art scene, all of them middle-class twats who never experienced abandoned, ecstatic dancing or got even one slap in the face; on meeting them wherever, they beamed jealousy from their beady, greedy eyes, their art was wallpaper and their souls upholstered with dollar notes, and they never gave him an even break.

Arthur had faced rampaging Skinheads before in his life and he didn’t let his fear of them rule his activities. He did the rounds of all the hard-hearted Punk clubs and slammed his way through every freak-out fracas and musical maelstrom available. The Skinheads had their own club, the Vulcan Hotel in Ultimo, and Arthur even dared venture there to their Sunday thrash gigs to get pummeled, trounced and wrestled to the dance floor.

Rolling about with these muscular morons, banging on each other’s skin, it was a bit like sex, a similar homo-eroticism oiled the body contact, but basically he hated Skinheads and wanted them castrated on sight. Not too many years later, Sydney got thoroughly sick of the Skinheads' depredations and beat the shit out of them every time they showed their ugly mugs, on the streets or in their clubs, till they faded away and disappeared. Who said “violence doesn’t work?”

It was the Punks who first took on these Neo-nazi types when they invaded their clubs, fighting hard and kicking them from all the Punks' free-spaces in many cities across the world. The Punk music aesthetic of gutsy, raw, anarchic, revolutionary, Do It Yourself creativity and critique of The System became the foundational philosophy of the future Anti-fa activists. 



Arthur long thought of Punks as endearing, spoiled brats turned alienated youth; they had cheek and art and verve and Arthur always reserved a place in his heart for that crazed “Sid Vicious” look: spiked-hair, curled lip, pale skin, torn tartan jeans,  a look that was so hot in its day that every style-conscious hipster aspired to it. Eventually Punk got whittled down to a fashion statement, posturing at anarchism whilst getting flogged from trendy boutiques at so many dollars a rip. And hard-nosed cynical Punk entrepreneurs laughed all the way to the cash register.

The Authorities weren’t going to let the Punks get too far off the ground anyway, property was sacred and property was what Punks loved to trash the most. The Pigs soon closed down every Punk club that mushroomed, in no matter what hidden crevice, citing the usual bugaboo of drugs and destruction, hounding them from community halls and shopping centers, office-building basements and Pub back-rooms, giving Punks nowhere to express their fandom. As well, the Yuppies took over the inner-city, gentrified their lovely town-houses, and then made noise complaints against the bands crashing from the Pub venues that existed on almost every corner. 
The loud bands moved to the outskirts of the city, the nice ones conformed and became politically correct, whispering folk ballads from back-lane wine-bars. Pigs raided the Punks’ crash-pads till no landlord would have them, scattering them to the suburbs like so many treeless gum-nut babies and the early Punk movement died out from sheer starvation with fish-net T-shirts and mohair jumpers being sold at bargain-basement prices from Woollies. 

But Punk/Grunge sure was BAD fun while it lasted.
Lubricated Goat.
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Saturday, July 27, 2013

41) Flirting With Jail-birds.

Robin Hood, Billy the Kid, Ned Kelly, Jean Genet, names that resonated in Arthur’s insubordinate soul, he was a sucker for the outlaw as romantic anti-hero. He fought resolutely for ‘Prisoners Rights’ along with his fellow artists from the Tin Sheds’ support network, printing and pasting up posters for sit-ins, blockades, marches and vigils, outside jails, state bureaucracies and union offices. They carried out campaigns to expose brutal jail practices, improve conditions or free certain inmates who were innocent or hard done by, such as Violet Roberts, incarcerated twenty years for killing a husband who’d bashed her senseless for much of her marriage.

One of their most effective accomplishments was the crusade to demolish “Katingal”, a notorious ‘isolation unit’ being constructed for troublesome inmates at Longbay Penitentiary. A band of determined activists, mainly ex-prisoners with their girlfriends, with alarmed artists in tow, actually broke into the prison, cutting through cyclone fencing to invade the half-constructed site and protest the continuation of the torture-house. They all got convictions for trespass added to their growing list of crimes, yet their notorious stunt got “Katingal” stopped in its tracks.

Arthur had hated the prison system since his first childhood sighting of Pentridge Jail in Melbourne, that monolithic, blue-stone monstrosity held as a threat over his head for any and all misdemeanors, including his very existence as a homosexual. In his mind prisons were like concentration camps built in suburbia’s midst, in a society where money was valued way above humanity and countless lives were destroyed as sacrifice to its luster. They were citadels of Hell created in the name of conformity and dedicated to the sanctity of property where a few owned everything worth possessing. Australia had a penal colony under-structure that it couldn’t outgrow: a fear of incarceration and punishment provided a constant undertow of hysteria in his society’s herd mentality, and Arthur hugely resented that life of continuous fear. He had a foolish fancy to knock down all jails. Thus he fell into the clutches of the Prisoners’ Action Group where he met several willful women who were to influence his malleable soul and even steal his heart for awhile.

Perhaps he was looking for his lost mother when he attached himself to warrior women throughout his adventures, there was always some Boadicea type urging him forward, inflaming his zealotry, whatever the issue. Arthur couldn’t avoid bumping into them, strong women stood out, especially in Auz, they had greater cause to rebel and were brave and smart in the way they went about it, not being afraid of men, leading them by the rings in their noses. Loud women had certain sensibilities that Arthur shared, a kind of rebellious fatigue against the penis. That’s how he came under the sway of a gang of gutsy feminists, rabidly anti-authoritarian and willing to tear down another Bastille at the head of a bread-riot. An anarcho-feminist named Wanda Bacon was the group’s guiding light and Arthur fell in love with her mesmerizing, spaced-out, blue eyes and would’ve walked through a gauntlet of baton-wielding pigs for her.

She was notorious for printing salacious material in a student newspaper ,when arrested for obscenity, she showed up at her court-case dressed as a pregnant nun. To test the waters of their situationist compact, the first stunt that Arthur joined her in also involved a religious costume drama. The anti-abortion “Right to Lifers” were having a rally in Hyde Park, lots of nice Christian families out for a church picnic with priests and nuns as chaperones, all shouting slogans vilifying abortion clinics and waving placards depicting bloody fetuses. Wanda and girlfriends pushed through the crowd dressed as pregnant nuns, huge bellies clearing a path, the Christians aghast. 

Arthur traipsed in their wake, looking saintly in a long black robe with white collar, for all the world a Catholic priest, only this one clutched a huge jar labelled “The Pill”. It was full of chocolate Smarties which he generously handed out to all the Christian kiddies who mobbed him with glee, squealing for the lollies, oblivious to their parents' dismay. The crowd of “turn the other cheekers” went wild, slavering and cursing, gnashing teeth, waving fists, tearing at the mock religious costumes, trying to shred the irreverent interlopers, screaming, “Kill, kill, kill the scum!” The Police then rushed in to rescue the frenzied Christian pack from the torments of the pranksters, punching and kicking the snot out of Wanda and her coven of witches with the occasional Christian mitt flying in and having a good claw.

The gang of sacrilegious deadbeats were all arrested for obscene behavior and creating a public nuisance, dragged into Paddy wagons, then dumped in a ragged heap at Central Police cells. Directly in front of the desk sergeant, who was slobbering like Jabba the Hutt, a square-headed Pig grabbed a blonde beauty called Pam, who stood out in her gutsy brazenness, and he walloped her a hard one across the face, snarling, “Let’s see you give lip now, you stupid fucking slut!” She mouthed filth as the Pig turned to Arthur, the only male in a gaggle of beat-up, stupefied women, and glared, “Well big man, what are you going to do about it?” A posse of overweight Pigs stood behind him, itching to jump the little fag and mince his Smartie smart-arse into flesh and blood. 

Arthur dithered and stared like a mesmerized chicken at the floor; he really wanted to commit a kamikaze and smash in a few noses before he went down but he wasn’t gonna get his guts caved in over one measly bitch-slap. Arthur knew what a real beating was and he wasn’t up for it again, for all the ideals in the world. He stood silent while Pam’s face turned red as she snarled in fury. Smirking in malevolent satisfaction the Pigs continued the humiliation by ordering Arthur to stand in front of Sergeant Jabba and drop his pants, for the redneck trolls to snigger over his shriveled genitalia and the crestfallen women to stare up his hairy arse. Arthur shouldered the shame and turned into the incredible shrinking man, reduced to nothing in everybody’s eyes. Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the dirt.

This left Arthur, as ever, trying to prove his worth, as a man and as a committed anarchist, and being enamored of Wanda and the Prisoners' Action Group, he’d do anything to impress them. On one of their many exploits they’d encircled Morriset Jail in speeding jalopies, shouting anti-prison diatribes through megaphones, incendiary invective drifting over the sandstone walls for all the inmates to hear and get riled up over. They were chased round and round the jail by siren-blaring screws in rickety jeeps like something out of the Keystone Cops and, when finally caught, it was Arthur who was the cheekiest wag in reply to their outraged interrogations, escaping from under their noses with dumbfounding bullshit.

And when Wanda decided they should barricade themselves into the Prison Officers’ Union building in the heart of the city in protest over prisoners being bashed by the screws, Arthur followed blindly. He marched in ahead of the gang and cleared-out the office-workers by breathlessly declaring there was a man bleeding to death outside on the stairway. When they scurried out to have a look, Wanda slammed the door and Arthur and co piled office furniture in front of it. The Cops axed their way in, as they loved to do, and Arthur made sure he stood between them and Wanda as they were escorted out the broken doors, for he didn’t want his suffragette idol to get the regulatory punch in the eye. When they were all dragged into court to defend their extreme actions, Wanda gave rousing speeches to protest the cruel punishment meted out to jail inmates and her side-kick, Judy Croissant, declared her contempt by walking up to the magistrate’s bench, snatching up his glass of water and throwing it in his face. 

This astounded Arthur, the enormous nerve they had, and he tried to emulate their courage, whining on about justice and the United Nations Human Rights Commission, to which the magistrate could only grunt in peeved bemusement and issue Arthur with the heftiest of fines. Good-looking, middle-class girls were rather thrilling and could get away with bad behavior that gutter fags like Arthur would be crucified for. He tried to keep this in mind as he got further mired in the Action Group’s prison-razing crusade.

Jail conditions in Auz harkened back to convict days, rotten food, no amenities, constant rapes, they truly were institutions for hardening criminals, like universities of crime. And ever gnawing away at the prison reformers’ sensitivities was the thrashing of the inmates by the screws as the traditional way of controlling them. Wanda and gang had zeroed in on one sorry convict who had written distressing letters to all and sundry testifying to his brutal treatment at the hands of the screws. The Group decided to champion this particular victim’s case as he had a harrowing story to recount, which demanded a compassionate hearing. 

At thirteen years of age Ray Penning had watched his mother burn herself alive from a pauper’s desperation and this drove him haywire. He got in incessant trouble with the authorities and spent most of his teens and early manhood in reformatories and jails. On reaching adulthood he’d become like a caged animal, one that thinks, and he wanted a real life, badly, so bad he’d do anything to escape. It was alleged that in an escape bid he murdered a screw by planting a screwdriver in his head, though Penning vociferously denied this, implicating his accomplice in the breakout as the true culprit. Convicted of the murder he got life imprisonment and eternal bastardization from every screw he came across, yet throughout all the torture he was able to articulate his objections and ruffle the feathers of all those concerned. His state of pain grew so noisome, his complaints so convincing, sympathetic reformers felt his story had to be investigated.

To lend succor to Penning’s charge of assault against the screws, Wanda piled a gang of her boldest cronies into a bombed-out car and hurtled them into the somnolent prison town of Grafton to attend the court hearing. Since he had accused her of elitism outside Sydney Central Courthouse for not intimating to him her ongoing plans for dismantling the Bastille, Wanda Bacon had decided to inculcate Arthur into the inner core of her radical coterie, bringing him to good old Grafton Town where he could only gush, giggle or gurgle, tongue-tied, overawed by the illustrious anarchists whose company he found himself in. Seated outside a Grafton pub in that hick, redneck jail-town, the cabal of urbane mutineers uttered witticisms and concise social critique that flew over Arthur’s head like ping-pong balls.

Ringleader and centerpiece was Wanda herself, expanded blue-eyes, cryptic smile, huge curves like some Celtic hearth mother, she had the charismatic brains to urge them all on. She studied Law and, because of her lawbreaking, libertarian pranks, was refused entry to the Bar, and Australia, on purpose, lost a great Criminal Lawyer who would’ve shaken up the cruel status-quo of the Justice system. She ended up devoting her hothead talents to journalism instead of Law and eventually found satisfaction through multi-media critique of an unjust society. Arthur really liked her, was in awe of her and hankered after her company, but he wasn’t radical enough for any of her coterie. Nor was he in the know about ‘Law’ and the esoteric gossip of the crime scene, and he didn't want to belong to any one gang anyway, thus he found himself in Wanda’s outer circle of groupies, the observant loner, the eternal drifter.

Most memorable of this gay gang was the ebullient, jocular Judy Croissant, always to be counted on for a wise-crack in any fracas with the Law, who later gained widespread fame as an ABC radio commentator and then a comedienne on ABC television. She was a real firebrand, afraid of nothing and no one, up for any act of civil disobedience and crazy situationist stunt to further the prison reform cause,  and Arthur admired her panache unreservedly. She had such a glib tongue with a microphone and television camera she even wooed News Ltd and got a job on commercial television with her anarchic humor, and every time her face appeared on the brain-wash box, acting the inane clown, Artie cringed. Fame is a drug, but still he loved her, she’d once led him on breathtaking escapades to undermine the Establishment, which he could never forget, and she got to lead the  Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras from a limousine in the far-flung future of 2013, that’s what Arthur called true stardom.

Next to her sat the leftist lawyer who was prosecuting the case for Penning, Virginia Gumball, who kicked on to become a respected judge later in her career, the diametric opposite of where Arthur ended up. He was in awe of her confident intelligence and legal expertise, she was sweet as candy, as heady as vodka, as smooth as ice. But not as cold, for there came a day when Artie himself would need her to rescue him from being crushed under the wheels of an inhuman Legal System and she made all the right connections for him. Slouching over her like a real bloke was her girlfriend, Ginny Hencoop, a hack cartoonist for the S & M Press, a big lug of a woman,  often looking upon Artie with an ogre’s face, possibly uptight because there was another punchy cartoonist in the gang, she made him feel like a third leg. She cracked endless gruff jokes that had Arthur pissing in his pants, she also terrified him, as if she’d beat him up with a lashing of her muscular tongue.


Nodding like a puppet on the fringe of the conversation was Denise Hairlip, a frumpish hanger-on, keen to be with the hot crowd, soon to claw her way up the arts bureaucracies. She forever had it in for Arthur over an old contretemps when she had ripped off the prisoners' fund-raising benefit money to spend on her own selfish blob of a body, after he and others had slaved their guts out to get it, him calling her a greedy fat dog. In return she probably spread nasty rumors about him being a drug addict to fuck his non-career as an artist; maybe it was just his paranoia but Sydney was a small town and could be cruel that way. There were other lesbians in the gang, like old red-haired Leslie, a mother of three, who’d left a brutal husband for another woman late in her life and was adamant in fighting for other abused women, especially those in prison like Violet Roberts. And blond Pam, a real Amazon, also resolute, the one who got her face slapped by a pig, she just snarled into his ugly mug, it didn't bring her down at all.

And shining like a zircon in their midst was a skinny little rake with bleached-blonde hair named Sascha Solitaire, the crazed Russian poofter poet. He was the dykes' darling, dripping sarcasm and droll invective, infamous for reading homo love verse to shocked families at an arts festival in Hyde Park. He was the only other gay male Arthur met on the prison reform front-line and there seemed to be some competition between them as to who was the most cutting-edge fag, as they never quite clicked as friends. Down the rutted track, when Arthur was framed for an armed robbery and in need of succor, all misunderstandings were forgotten and Sascha showed his hidden worth by being one of his few acquaintances who showed true empathy and attempted a rescue. Sadly he died in the ‘90s from AIDS, just before AZT therapy was discovered, and he’s been sorely missed ever since.

The Bacon gang patronized Arthur as some kind of new-age imbecile, giggles and gibberish being all that he could come up with in response to their ongoing intellectual satire. While Virginia went off to have her pre-trial interview with Penning at the jail, the rest of them went for a drive in the countryside, stopping off to frolic carefree at a waterfall. Judy bravely leaped naked into the water and gave Arthur a look that dared him to join her. Always the pagan nature worshiper, Arthur stripped and stood under the gushing cascade, luxuriating in the frothy water sliding down his muscular frame and pouring off his big cock, turning his body this way and that as if he were David modelling for Michelangelo. He suddenly stopped, looked up and took in the glaring eyes of the rest of the gang, all of them confirmed lesbians and all agitated by the very concept of dick; he got paranoid and wondered if he wasn’t some kind of worm in their apple.

Back at the Grafton Pub, just when they were enjoying a beer and looking forward to the trouncing of the screws in vindication of a just cause, busting them for assaulting Penning, Virginia, the ever-zealous lawyer, showed up in a kerfluffle, whispering earnest news into the big ears of Wanda and party. Gradually it got echoed back to Arthur, Penning had confessed to Virginia that he had lied about the specific bashing in his ‘Assault Charge’, he had set up the screws out of sheer hatred for them from a long life of abuse. They all yammered on about the “right approach in the light of recent disclosures”, but Arthur felt the cold wind of his ideals being blown away down the colonial-style Grafton street. He’d go through fire to heal the wounds of injustice but he wouldn’t support untruths, frame-ups or eye for an eye savagery.

That night they all checked into a Motel, anxiously awaiting procedures the next day, Arthur no longer keen and looking for a way out. He discovered he was to occupy an upstairs boudoir with hot lesbian Ms. Judy Croissant while the rest of them all bunked in one room directly below. As Judy pranced about on the double-bed wearing a sexy baby-doll night gown, Arthur wondered what on earth was expected of him, left alone in the room with her. What did she want? He suffered his usual fever of paranoid fantasies, most of them involving his fear of the hungry, emasculating vagina.

Had the sight of his lithe, yogi’s body driven her to some delusion that he might be the one male to please her? Or did she want secretly to be impregnated by a healthy male specimen and be a single mum like many of her best girlfriends? He imagined he could hear the sarcastic jokesters downstairs giggling and guffawing in derision as the pseudo-poof Arthur penetrated the virgin-dyke Judy, like it was some test to figure out who this dilletante fool was, maybe just a heterosexual oaf who secretly hoped to fuck hot, Amazonian lesbians.

He was already uptight over Penning’s nasty cat and mouse game played out in the nearby prison; he wanted to flee, as the last thing he needed was to tangle with an untamed pussy in a cat-house full of sniggering dykes. While Judy primped her nightie and bounced about on the bed cracking jokes, Arthur hurriedly packed his bags, then bid his fond farewells to her stunned gape and ran out the door to make the last train back to Sydney. Aroused from their crowded room, listening to Judy crack jokes about the chicken-shits of the world, the libertarian lezzos concluded Arthur was indeed a poofter, with a weak stomach and airy-fairy principles. He didn’t give a fleeting fuck what they thought, he was so relieved and happy to have escaped their anarchic rule and get back to the wilds of Sydney, to forget about gloomy Grafton and its monstrous prison-industry denizens.

His escape from the pussy riot didn’t fully eventuate as another warrior-woman stepped forward out of the mists to capture his fascinated gaze: a new, zealous member of the Prisoners' Action Group who would brook no compromise. Her name was Debbie Hamburger, she was from a wealthy Melbourne family, had gone to the best schools and was expected to do well as one of the cleverest of society ladies. On imbibing feminism, she turned into a ball-busting firebrand, red hair and self-defense muscles included. She was six foot tall with the face of a cute bull-terrier, kind of ugly yet compelling and weirdly attractive. Her brazen front and adamant views sent Arthur into a tizzy, he found himself doing silly stunts to impress her such as spray-painting  “Pigs” across a Police van while the Cops lounged on the other side of it. This so impressed Debbie that she set to hatching various daring and nefarious schemes to tear down the world of men, thinking Arthur some beleaguered poof on the rampage whose fury she could harness.

First up, to capitalize on his writing talents, she incited him to graffiti slanderous diatribes, “dickheads” being the main theme, across major public spaces throughout the city. He spray-painted her antagonistic cliches with such panache, under the very noses of security guards, she upgraded his commitment status to that of playing Baader to her Meinhoff in some wildly excessive plan to destroy the macho capitalist system. As she was born and bred into privilege, Arthur could only surmise she was perversely attracted to her opposite in class, slumming it like a princess in the underbelly of society. She was relentless in her vexatious desire to undermine Authority, any male authority, as if she were on a secret quest of revenge to fuck her rich father over as he apparently did her, dictating her life’s path with his money-power. Arthur accompanied her in several protest stunts for the Prisoners' Action Group that involved benign civil disobedience acts like blocking traffic and offensive behavior to Police, confirming he had a valorous heart, gutsy like a Weatherman. A street-smart wise-guy, he knew to keep a wary distance from thinking about acts of any real social damage; letting Debbie wank on about creating systemic havoc with orgasmic joy, he avoided agreeing to anything dangerously stupid.

To her chagrin he wimped out when it came to more violent action, she had the wrong guy, he was not her action man. He intuited that if they did emulate the Red Brigade, when eventually caught on their anarchic spree, she could buy her way out with daddy’s money while he would receive a pauper’s grave. She hung about his door for months, cajoling, arguing, inspiring, and got it into her head if she could fuck him she could turn him. Some nights she crawled into his bed, snuggled close and attempted caresses; his homosexuality a big challenge to her feminism, she crankily demanded to be told why he felt antipathy towards her genitalia. He spluttered nonsense about his love of cocks, to which she snapped, “You got brainwashed into being Gay! ‘They’ made you into a fairy, it makes you safe!” It all came to a head one stormy night when she insisted yet again that he fuck her in his seedy single bed; in a temper tantrum he threw her out into the rain declaring he needed a break from her impetuosity. She never forgave him and warned a few of her women friends who she saw getting close to him, “Watch him, he turns!”

The ardor of their turbulent relationship wore off, Clyde not so hot for Bonnie, deserting her for the boys in the back alleys who provided the more lascivious of illicit thrills. She foraged further afield for her ultimate gutter warrior and, when rallying to his cause, focused upon Ray Penning rotting in Grafton Jail. She visited him regularly, falling under his furious spell, the social debutante redeemed in the fire of his abject criminality. Across the gulf of the wire-meshed window in the visitors’ room they somehow contrived to have a love affair and Debbie was all starry-eyed and gung-ho over her convicted bank-robber and murderer beau, romanticizing him as a new-age Ned Kelly, much wronged by. She took Arthur with her on many jail visits and he also befriended the guy, so sad in his cage, so believable in his cry for mercy.

Penning was infamous as a brilliant escape artist as well as a screw-killer, and soon came the day he yet again managed to break-out, the first crim ever to make it from Grafton Maximum Security. He was on the run for months and for awhile was Australia’s number one public enemy and most wanted criminal. Arthur was poking about the backyard of his squat in Pyrmont one Sunday morning when up fronted Debbie with a big surprise, Ray Penning had come to call on a social visit. Arthur, still in the throes of imagining himself as a true-blue rebel, was thrilled and honored by the attention, and naively did not consider the implications.


They piled into Debbie’s crumpled Holden and careered off up the road on what Arthur saw as an exciting Sunday jaunt, lounging in the back, eating up every word that emanated from the diehards in the front. Debbie drove like a maniac while hardly taking her eyes off Ray, who forever scanned the highway back and front, a gun tucked into the back of his pants, ready to use it if confronted. They shot down to Wollongong to visit Ray’s sister and amidst a lot of conspiratorial whispering and tense eyeballing of the street through venetian blinds, Arthur blithely lived out his movie fantasy role of the bandit gang on the run, the cruel penal system confounded. He just didn’t think about the danger it put him in, it added frisson to the trip but didn’t seem real, serious dealings with the Law being outside Arthur’s ken.

Debbie alternated between goo-goo, lovie-dovie fondling and stern-faced, revolutionary gun-moll poses and was up for any act of bravado needed. They sojourned at an idyllic beach and talked about philosophy, life and hope, and Arthur saw Ray for the flawed, lost human he was. He tried to inspire the felon to give-up the life of smash and grab, hit and run, to use the money he had accumulated to truly escape, leave the penal island of Australia and see the world. Then he would have the chance to find who he really was, travel giving the questioning soul a great education. Ray listened sympathetically and seemed to make a resolve to change his fate, dreamy eyed in the face of a wide-open road. At the end of a glorious sunny day, without any deadly shootouts or megaphone sieges, they delivered Arthur back to the relative safety of his little squat. Glad to be a more simple soul, he breathed a sigh of relief as he watched them tear off into the distance to devour the few, short moments of pleasure freedom could give them.

Within weeks Debbie’s enthusiasm waned, a desperate criminal’s life was not her style; it was dis-empowering, especially with Ray’s uneducated, masculinist tendencies. She left him to his runaway-locomotive destiny and returned to her social agitations in Glebe where she found a quieter love with a more malleable ex-con, one with a heroin habit. This arrangement blew up in her face with crims busting down her doors and holding knives at her throat, encouraging her to flee back to Melbourne and the last Arthur heard of her, she was zealously overhauling the Social Welfare system, inexorably moving up the echelons of State bureaucratic power. She wasn’t a bad or mad person, she really cared, and she was fun on a challenging jaunt. He had fallen in “puppy love” with her, she was so smart, gutsy and principled, one of the great characters of his youth, she was more of a guru than a girlfriend. Arthur flashed that Debbie and her ilk represented the ‘female race’ to him and through them he tried to get to know what he could about women’s existential state. Women, and their sexuality, were territory he felt he could never explore, and thus he could never really ‘know’ them. Yet they were half the planet, and he desperately wanted the female touch in his life. Firebrand Debbie was just a bit too headstrong and emphatic for Arthur’s sense of independence and self-preservation, and he never did see her again.

(In later years, when he’d had a lot more time to contemplate and add up all the inconsistencies, he wondered if dear Debbie might not have been an ASIO plant, a spy. She had gone to an elite school and was thus the perfect conscript. She’d come to a city, Sydney, where no one really knew her and got quickly into the thick of things, always shit stirring as the most radical of rebels, ever ready to violate and implicate. Then she disappeared quickly and completely, back to Melbourne supposedly, maybe onto other postings. She certainly didn’t become the true friend that she promised to be. When she told Arthur she was dropping him, he actually cried, the dumb fairy; he didn’t want to fuck her but he did love her. He hoped he was just being his usual paranoid neurotic self, her sincerity was real, it seemed impossible to him that people could put on such a brave front, but cops are capable of any trick in their zealous need to bust punks.)

Ray Penning roamed at large, terrorizing the nation, for several more months, robbing banks at random and throwing the money around like confetti at his never to be wedding, for one of the shallow tarts he squandered his takings upon betrayed him to the police for the reward. Firmly enchained in the most draconian of prisons, he led a miserable existence of deadening, brutal routine and thwarted dreams. He had a few adoring female fans doting upon his needs but this seemed to have made the gulf between the imprisoned and the free yawn ever more fathomless, and he lost hope. In the cogs of the machine he was reduced to a numbered automaton with heroin as the only panacea that could assuage his horror. In the belly of the Beast, he was crushed and turned to jelly, ready to betray all his principles to stay on top, tranquilized and mollified. He ruthlessly distributed drugs and coldly maimed anyone who reneged on a deal, and to keep top dog status he evolved into an informer for the screws, much hated and alienated from his fellows.

After many years of agonizing incarceration he came to an invidious arrangement with the authorities whereby he got parole for the setting up and incrimination of a brother cellmate for some heinous crime that the Law had been busting its balls to get closure on. Obese and unsophisticated, he led his long dreamed of life of freedom in Sydney’s subterranean world of the criminal and the junkie. After only a few months of blissfully deranged liberation, he was found dead from a hotshot in a dilapidated terrace house in a back-lane of Paddington. Few mourned his passing, his front-page obituary in the yellow press labelled him an ‘animal’ and ‘a mad-dog’, and wished him sent straight to Hell. Arthur had met him before he’d transmogrified into a soul-less golem, before the Doctorate in Cruelty he’d got from the Prison Schools shook his humanity loose, and he seemed a genuine, sincerely hard-done by fellow.

He was always politely thankful for any attention and presented as a shy, gullible, contrite, eager and bright individual, optimistic that he would get a happy productive life if he could outmaneuver the system and win the sympathies of some movers and shakers. If he became a beast then he had some assistance in his formation, he was the handiwork of the prisons, shaped in a mold and broken on a hard surface. Arthur remembered him with sorrow for someone who got only bad luck, turned from a human to a devil, which only emphasized his frail humanity. He pictured Ray wandering lost as a pale, bloated ghost haunting the blue-stone fortress prisons of the Law, forever seeking redemption, making all who learn of his story cringe. It was life stories like this that caused Arthur to hate prisons to death.

His great denouement with the Prisoners’ Action Group occurred the night they held a fund-raiser at the Prisoners’ Halfway House in Glebe. Everyone was jolly and friendly, activists, ex-convicts and their families seated around mock-gambling tables, playing Poker for cheap stakes, all for a worthy cause. Suddenly, out of nowhere, the surly guy sitting next to Arthur snatched up a beer can and, shrieking a curse, slammed it hard as a hammer straight into his right eye. Arthur tumbled back in shock clutching at his face while the other crims dragged the psycho out into the backyard and gave him a severe thrashing.

As Arthur’s eye blackened and swelled shut, he received a lot of apologetic commiseration from the gathering, all tut-tutting and wondering what the attacker’s motive could possibly have been.  Artie surmised he was possibly being warned off any further involvement with the criminal world or getting payback for the night he’d stuck up for the Kooris at Radio Skidrow instead of the ex-cons. Whatever the reason, this event dampened his spirits, he lost his enthusiasm for prisoners’ rights, his efforts tailed off, he’d given of his best but someone didn’t like him and he didn’t need any more beatings in his punch-drunk career to convince him he was out of his depth. Other needy causes, less extreme, garnered his fond attentions.

At one of his benefit gigs for prison reform he had wine thrown in his face by some snooty middle-class bitch while Ginny Hencoop and her gang of girlfriends looked on and laughed. It stung his eyes painfully and broke his heart; they accused him of using important social issues to get some crappy artistic fame for himself. He stuck to his punk-attitude that fund-raising was part of his performance art; he knew befriending jailbirds was not going to make him famous, not in class-conscious convict heritage Australia. He definitely determined not to become a prisoner himself,  he had a working-class lad’s canny sense of caution and survival, he didn’t want to commit to anything too radical, like terrorism, for he knew he was up against a rigged race, it was the poor who always got it in the neck, and he was going nowhere except obscurity in the gutter.


He was resigned to ignominy, knowing he wasn’t infallible, painfully self-conscious of his sexual deviancy, full of his own freakiness, he left it to others to be upright, shining examples for society or revolutionary leaders, whatever their kick. He’d really put himself on the line for other people’s burning issues, like a tireless foot soldier, believing in their forthrightness. Most of his admired generals had been strident women, he was always trying to please them, as if he were trying to win back the mother he felt had abandoned him. He tried not to resent being sidelined by everyone else and their burgeoning careers, yet in spite of the faithful assistance he’d given these femme-fatales, ten years later, when he was in serious trouble with the Pigs, framed for an armed robbery and indicted as an incorrigible perp with a long history of criminal acts, very few would do anything for him.

There would come a day when he would wonder what on earth he thought he was doing, playing at revolution. Did he plan on building a barricade on George Street, outside the Entertainment Center, set up a guillotine for the rich and bring the city to a halt till his version of paradise was instituted? Maybe they were all looking for “the big cause” that would make them larger than life like their parents had with the Second World War, or the ‘Sixties had with Vietnam? The exploits of the European Situationists were legendary and the exhilaration of the ‘68 student riots of Paris hadn’t yet dissipated, French political activism was fashionably ‘IN’ with the Antipodean provincials. Like old beatniks they were overly impressed by the the avant-garde art-riots beloved of the Dadaists, the Surrealists and the Lettrists, the theories of Guy Debord filtering down to them as they sat watching TV, restless in their armchairs, sucked into the trend for new-wave revolution fueled by a seething, hip Europe.

Arthur himself was probably chasing his lost machismo, hoping to prove himself as a real man, a la Hemingway in “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” Street agitations, turning sacred cows arse-up via media viruses like video clips, pamphlets and posters, and roaming the city in intoxicated revelry, discovering architecture that comforted dissident layabouts, were Debordian ideas that Arthur found came naturally to him. The explosion of the Punk cult in the mid-seventies made anarchism fashionable, spitting in the face of the bovine System was all the rage and Arthur always aspired to be on the ‘hip’ front-line.

Though being young was all about fucking and rebelling, he could’ve done better by himself, become a doctor, made his fortune, instead he freaked out and dreamed of genius art and creating Utopia. No money, no fame, no power, only heart-racing experience and memories of what it was to have had an exhilarating life. And the Beast of the Modern Civilization rumbled on, growing larger and more untouchable with every year, and the activities of the few dissatisfied libertarians were like bedbug bites, at any time the Beast could roll on over and crush them.

They might as well have not existed, except their acts set precedents and became the common language of all later dissidence in Auz. They strengthened the equality of the sexes, saved heritage houses, reformed the prisons, stopped police verbals, banned uranium from Sydney, supported abortion clinics, warned of climate change and encouraged Aboriginal land-rights. They had voices and brains, and their youth insisted on exercising them by questioning all that seemed unjust. And as far as Arthur was concerned, every crazy stunt was juicy mince for the grinder of his non-career as a cutting artist.





If you enjoyed this story please go to the WEB address above and consider buying my book of tales about growing up anarcho-queer, rock and roll punter and mystic adventurer in Australia and India of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.