Caught at The Catcher.

 

When I was 16 in 1966 I was quite aware I was queer in a society that criminalised my sexuality, thus I was an outlaw, fringe-dweller, renegade, maverick, freak, outsider, stranger, I was alienated from the world of the time. I searched for somewhere to belong, my community, a sanctuary, and being pop music-mad I found such a place in a rock club. In the ‘60s music venues were called discotheques because they spun records of the latest hits in between the bands. My first rock club was called The Biting Eye, in Little Bourke Street Melbourne. I’d hung out the front with a gang of Sharpies, (Skinheads), threatening to bash the Mods inside. When the Mod boys came out to confront us I fell instantly in love with their long hair, paisley shirts and striped bell-bottomed trousers and quickly transformed into a Mod boy, growing my hair till it hung in my face, buying Carnaby Street gear and taking shelter inside that psychedelic rock’n’roll cavern.

The Biting Eye was managed by an Italian family who also ran a pizza parlour called “Papa’s Pizzas” and for the first time in our lives we partook of this delicious culinary delight, pizzas with olives and anchovies. Top bands of the time played there such as The Loved Ones, Jeff St. John and The Purple Hearts, it was funky way before funk became the style to reach for. But those were sexually conservative times, teenagers were restless, under the thrall of their parents, starting to break away from puritanical, suburban dreariness, and ever so ready to fuck. Two patrons of the club, teenage lovers, had been caught having sex by their parents, the police were called, they were sent to trial and convicted of carnal knowledge. I was already doing the homo beats and lived in terror of being caught in the “act of perversion.”

Early 1967, I turned 17 and word was out of a new club that had opened in Flinders Lane up towards Spencer Street Station. The Catcher, a converted blue-stone warehouse, with two floors, painted a gothic black. Two would-be rockers reported that when they approached the joint, rock music blaring so loud it could be heard a block away, they freaked out, considering it the dirtiest, creepiest shithole, telling each other, “I’m not going in there” and they turned back and went home, the wimps. The first night I attended the warehouse I marched straight in, I didn’t see the grunginess at all, if I did I approved of it, nor did I find it dangerous, on entry into the dark interior, immersed in ear-shattering electric guitars, I was in my element, home at last.

It was created and managed by a Primary School teacher, Graham Geddes, who was very hip, cool and ahead of his times, a visionary, creating the space to be a playground for teenagers, to get them off the streets and surfing pop culture. When the police accused him of sheltering three teenage escapees from penal institutions he replied, “I’d rather them inside having fun than outside getting into mischief.” The interior decor consisted of black walls with wrought iron beds and plastic mannequins hanging from them, a cafe with counter and chairs to the side, an office at the front, an upstairs room that was full of manky couches and mattresses strewn upon the floor. This dark room was known as the Gobble Room with much illicit teenage frolicking, not that I experienced any of it, shyness and shame of my sexuality was the only fear I experienced in the joint.

A photographer, Ron Eden, hung 12 inch photos of club members from the ceiling and the bands played from a waist-high stage at the back of the ground floor, with a raised platform behind the band upon which beautiful girls moved rhythmically to the beat of the music, the Tamla Dancers. The hottest, wildest, hardcore rock bands of the time played there. Gerry Humphries and The Loved Ones, Lobby Loyd and The Wild Cherries/The Purple Hearts, Malcolm McGee and Python Lee Jackson, Running Jumping Standing Still, Jeff St.John and the Yama, Doug Parkinson’s Focus, The Adderly Smith Blues Band and the house band who played nearly every night the club was open, Ray Petrie and The Chelsea Set. When Max Merrit and The Meteors played all the other bands in town would hurry to finish their sets and rush over to catch the rock/blues maestro as his band was considered the “band’s band.”

Because The Chelsea Set was the House Band they played every night the club was open and Sundays as well, with movie screenings as added attraction. We teens not only became friendly with them, we adored them, particularly their lead singer, Ray Petrie; he was iconic in our mindset, the epitome of style, grace and good looks. I for one fell in love with him from a distance, he was not only the ants’ pants, I wanted terribly to get into those pants. I was too shy and in awe to approach him, he had a mob of groupies always hanging off him, particularly some extremely handsome boys, who I didn’t feel I could compete with. The Catcher sometimes arranged outings for us, one was a Sunday trip to Mt. Kosciosko and the snow fields. Hoping to stand out in the crowd and earn Ray’s attention I flung myself into a bog of mud, then walked about looking like the Swamp Thing, and indeed Ray was highly amused, declaring I was a cheeky character and giving me a hug. I was chuffed, hoping possibly I was now a member of the “IN crowd.”

At times the police infiltrated the club to spy on the teenage shenanigans: on questioning the girls they concluded they were there for immoral purposes, at 3am they found them lounging about on the floors, making love in dark corners and asleep on the tables. Some were refugees from the Children’s Court, and their boyfriends were known teenage criminals. The cops reported some girls were as young as twelve and the average age of the crowd was seventeen, my age, a time when I was discovering freedom and independence. I had run away from my home in West Heidelberg with a sixteen year old, long-haired rock drummer and we rented a cheap flat in Richmond, finding jobs as clerks at the Victoria Barracks on St. Kilda Road. Not everyone enjoying the space was criminally minded or attracted to drugs, most had come for the music and the camaraderie, an outlaw edge merely providing an extra frisson.

“Fiendish drugs” such as methedrine and benzedrine pills were readily available, either pilfered from many a mother’s dieting medication or from forged prescriptions foisted upon naive chemists. I never got into speed in any big way, taking one or two pills for the night’s dancing while some of my friends took twenty at a time and got holes eaten into their brains. On a raid, Senior Constable Bruce Huxtable was shocked by all this debauchery, he was determined to stamp out teenage violence, there were fights inside the club and brawls outside. A number of arrests were made in the area for offensive behavior and indecent language. I myself got in a fight late one night when a gang of redneck thugs attacked us after they stumbled out of some illicit pub, drunk as punks. To scare them I picked up a traffic stanchion and waved it in their faces like a light-sabre causing them to run for their lives, much to my surprise.

The cops discovered that the mob of burly bouncers had criminal records for assault and offensive behavior, we couldn't care less, they were needed to keep the unruly, acting-out teenagers under control. This was an era when we truly felt a new world was dawning, we were proto-adults and could decide our own destinies, even if it was a destructive one. I was determined to get a life, to live out my dream of adventure and accomplishment and I wasn’t going to let drugs, the cops, the crims or the sex get in my way. Bisexuality was somewhat fashionable, a few boys dabbled, I was one of the few who came fully “out of the closet” yet I couldn’t crack onto any of the hot boys, even in The Gobble Room, as the very act of homosexuality was till taboo amongst that Mod set, for all their flamboyant mannerisms. Or maybe I was just too shy and paranoid.

The lead singer of The Chelsea Set, Ray Petrie, was gay, even though he had a girlfriend and had got her pregnant. Late in 1967 I had broken up with my sixteen year old boyfriend, who was straight, and I ended up living with an old queen, Ruby, in South Yarra. One night, while we were relaxing in the lounge-room, the door was flung open and in walked Ray with this old Greek man who had picked him up at a traffic light. I got quite a shock and so did Ray on seeing me. There was a horrible room in the house that all of Ruby’s friends used as a fuck room, with towel and lube ready to go. Ray and I got on like a nightclub on fire, talking about the Catcher and the gang, while the old Greek prick looked on and became angrier by the minute. He signaled to Ray to get going and my rock’n’roll hero regretfully went to the fuck room with him and for half an hour got fucked stupid.

When he came out he was red with embarrassment and I was red with annoyance, we arranged to meet at a pub the next day and I knew I could win my dream boy as a lover if I wanted. I sweated on it for a day, pissed off that Ray had the bad taste to go with that uptight mug, a fat arsehole who had sexually harassed me for months and who I had rebuffed every time. Contempt for the whole affair set in and by the time Ray rang me for the appointment I was seething with resentment and I got Ruby to answer the phone and tell him I’d gone out. I missed out on experiencing pleasure with a guy I admired and I regretted it for the rest of my life, (for Ray fled back to England in 1969 and worked for the fashion magazine, The Face, styling the male models. He instigated The Buffalo look, based on the "rude boys" of Jamaica which became the rage in London, Boy George being one its most famous proponents. Ray died of HIV in 1989 at the age of forty.) I do have self-respect and I wanted him to know I was no easy lay like the rest of the groupies who swarmed around him; still, I guess I was just an uptight fool.

Back to the Catcher, it was open all night and the bands were considered the “hardcore end” of the rock’n’roll spectrum though again I didn’t see it, it was simply the style of music I loved, fast, loud, growling voices, wailing guitars and thumping drums. The club became more notorious as the months wore on, as if it were a vampire’s lair situated in the dark, deserted, desolate end of Flinders Lane. A music reporter commented, “The surly, sociopathic element of the rock music crowd slouched around a bare room listening to the harder and wilder of the music scene; very Malcolm Maclarenesque Punk ten years early with a not so different soundtrack.” The Truth scandal rag had shock horror headlines for months claiming The Catcher attracted an anti-social clientele.

I met my best friend for life there on the dance floor, 16 year old Gel O’Reilly, she didn’t take drugs, smoke, was chaste, and didn’t even drink coffee, she was the favourite of everybody. She was the type that would walk up to a stranger, befriend them and natter on till she learnt their life story. She was friends with many of the bands, the boys all wanted to get their hands on this bright British virgin but she didn’t give herself to any of them, even the hottest rockers, she preferred to dance the night away with queer boy me, dancer extraordinaire. And it was Gel who filled me in on the intimate side of Graham Geddes, hanging out in his office with him and the IN Crowd, me being too shy to venture within that inner sanctum.

Mr. Geddes was married to a woman named Sandy and they had two kids, he was only in his late twenties or early thirties so not that much older than us mob. He lived in the Dandenongs, at Olinda, a long drive home. As a Primary School teacher it was quite risky for him to run this rock club, for those were the days when teachers had to swear an oath not to take on a second job, they were to be dedicated to teaching alone. In the morning, while many of us raucous teens had “mildew parties” in some punks’ flat to come down from our speed trips, Graham would offer to drive a few teenagers home if they lived along his route to the Dandenongs. Sometimes he would take a gang of them in his pick-up truck for breakfast, Gel included, to MacClures coffee lounge on St. Kilda Road.

Gel told me that not once, in any way, did she get the barest hint that Graham Geddes was sexually interested in the girls, he was not a predator, it was not his secret agenda; she was very canny about these things, talked to all the girls and none of them ever reported hanky panky from Graham. He was the real thing, a renegade, hip teacher, only concerned for the welfare of his teenage wards, to steer them from a life of crime or desperation towards a future of contributing to society, in a fun, creative way, whether through music, dance or fashion. He opened a fashion shop up near The Biting Eye which he named The Gobble Shop, a tiny premises which managed to contain a coffee lounge, hairdresser, poster designers’ workshop and small disco dance floor. It was a hang-out for budding fashion designers and, along with others, I would buy my materials from nearby warehouses and bring them to The Gobble to be made into shirts, suits and dresses by resident tailors while we raged to the latest hits from The Beatles, The Yardbirds, The Stones and Jimi Hendrix. It was total immersion in pop-culture, we even sang the latest hit song to each other, “To Sir With Love.”

Because of the scandalous headlines from rags like The Truth Gel’s mother decided to take a look at The Catcher one Sunday afternoon, bringing her nine-year old daughter Imelda with her. She was greeted at the door by a bouncer, Kerry, and when she told him the purpose of her visit Mr. Geddes came out and took her for a tour around the club, showing her everything. She was quite satisfied it was a safe and well maintained place for her daughter Gel to while away the night hours within and she left in high spirits. It was reported in The Truth that week that a mother was seen dragging her 12 year old daughter out of The Catcher in high dudgeon, to which Kitty O’Reilly wrote a letter of harsh criticism of the untruths the paper was spreading, her daughter was nine and she’d gone on an inspection tour and was satisfied it was a safe place of musical enjoyment for her 16 year old daughter to patronise. The Sunday of her visit had the usual film screening event, Hitchcock’s “Psycho” or “The Birds” with the house band, The Chelsea Set, also playing, and Kitty thought it was all lovely.

As the club tottered towards 1969 and into the early Seventies, the notoriety became too wearisome for smooth and easy management. The Masters Apprentices last concert with their original lead guitarist, Rick Morrisson, happened there, he passed out on stage because of his one lung disability, having lost the other in childhood, and was carried out on a stretcher, causing him to retire from rock music. Some of us moved on, to other clubs, other climes. I started training as a registered nurse and thus unable to get the times and days needed for discos. I became a hippie, hung around Carlton, helped build the first vegetarian restaurant, Shakahari, and forgot The Cathcer, having escaped with my health and sanity still intact. Others of my peers got into heroin and I lost sight of them but Gel and I have remained best buddies into our old age. The Catcher closed sometime in 1970, just as I was hitching off to Ourimbah rock festival in NSW. It seems Mr. Geddes was uptight with the troubles thrown his way just because he ran a haven for teenagers, he might’ve even lost his teaching job, and his marriage to Sandy fell apart, he became somewhat cantankerous in old age, yet managed to run a successful antique business in Malvern for the rest of his life.

As I noticed on the FaceBook site, “Sebastions, Berties, The Catcher and The Thumpin Tum”, many of us Catcher mob have managed to stay alive into old age, and fondly remember the club and era as one of the greatest of times, when Mods flourished and Soul ruled. We loved the friendship, the phenomenal bands, the dancing and yahooing, it was basically the beginning of the youth revolution, teenage independence and an Australian rock/pop music renaissance. It was such a joy to live through, it gave me the strength and confidence to go out into the world, handle anything that was thrown at me and achieve my life-goals. I slept on the streets and beaches of India for four years and then the squats of inner-city Sydney for 12 years, and you can’t get a wilder school of hard kicks in the teeth than that, and much of my education was caught at The Catcher.

77) The Never-Ending Suicide Note 3) The Artist Who Got Smoke Blown Up His Arse and Then His Guts Ripped Out.

The Never-Ending Suicide Note.

Part 3) The Artist Who Got Smoke Blown Up His Arse.

This is my "Fuck you!" to the uptight world of greedy, jealous, cruel and privileged desperadoes pushing and shoving for their place as they climb up the shitheap. Forgive me if you think my writing is rude or one long whine about poor me, the downtrodden artist, who got ripped off and fucked over. In between hard times I did experience exhilarating achievements and joy. 

But that's only a small part of the story I want to tell, the trammels and travails, the obstacles and enemies, the pitfalls and hidden agendas are what I'd like to unveil, expose, explore about being an artist; and to figure out what motivates artists, what's behind a lot of art, how every aspect of artistic endeavor relates to the human condition, good or bad.

Somewhere around June 2020 I was approached by a woman to participate in a project of putting art up in the windows of empty shops in King Street Newtown, to liven-up the place and make some kind of political statement. I was told I was free to paint what I wanted, even be as radical as my passionate nature desired, for Newtown was full of "alternative" types, hippies, anarchists, ferals, rebellious youth in general, and my outlandish cartoon style would go down a treat. In her application for the Sydney City Council grant she even photoshopped some of my famous poster work into shop windows as examples of how the art would look. Her shop mock-ups were extremely eye-catching and it's part of why she got $16,500 to pay eight of us, plus herself for organising it, i.e. $600  for each artist, $200 art materials each, and $10,000 for herself.

She didn't line up the shops before her application and had all hell to find any business willing to let her do it. All the real estate agents with empty shops on King Street either wanted too much money in rent or were too politically conservative to allow radical art on their premises. If she was really serious about the window exhibition she would have used a hunk of the $10,000 she paid herself to rent a pop-up shop for two or three months and an interesting, arresting show within it could have wickedly turned on the King Street alternative-set. It seems that wasn't her main agenda.

She got a few small windows in some cafes to put up a couple of innocuous, safe works, mine she said were too hardcore, offensive to timid restauranteurs, depicting critique of our conservative government, mining, the Hellsong cult and the police, and thus couldn't be placed anywhere. Luckily I had a Plan B, a small gallery attached to a skate-board shop in Darlinghurst, Pass-Port, were eager to exhibit my work, and I arranged a show there for October 2020. Her project didn't eventuate but my "Politics of Survival" installation went ahead confidently, with much hard work and support from my community. My sixteen panel "School for Scoundrels" visual diatribe that I had done for the King Street flop fitted marvelously upon one wall, while all of my anti-Scummo cartoons on adjoining walls completed the exhibition, providing the sharp renegade, anarcho-political flavour which I wanted so adamantly.

On two occasions during 2019 I was asked by the instigators of the SEDITION Festival to meet them at the Tropicana Cafe to discuss my participation in their supposed revolutionary art conclave. The year before, for the first iteration of their "rebellion", while two of my posters were hung in the "Paper Tigers" exhibit at the NAS, a third I had submitted was rejected, or perhaps it was stolen before it even got to the selection committee as I never did see it again. It's called "Garibaldis Bastille Day" and it celebrates the cabaret musical "Failing In Love Again", a melodrama dearly beloved by the feminists particularly. It supported the Violet Roberts and Ray Denning campaigns, two prisoners hard done by at that time and many were militating in their defence. Thus my missing poster was not only a good work of art but also an historical document and very valuable in my eyes. Nobody owned up to any knowledge of its existence and, for me, it proved criminal negligence if not downright dishonesty on the part of management, (and all this from a fucking Art School that had denied me admission in 1982!)

The first appointment with the SEDITION organisers was with the lovely Lesa Furfagin, only she stood me up, I waited for an hour but she had forgotten about me, that's how important I was in her mind. She later apologised profusely and on our next meeting told me of "the revolution", the world was in dire straights, we had to do some strenuous activism to help the planet survive, the clock was ticking, the end was nigh, "Heeeellllppppp!!!!" She waxed ecstatic about her scoring giant shop windows in World square on George Street in the city. "Think of it, your art in a prominent place, for all of Sydney to walk by and see!" I stupidly gulped in amazement, "Yes, those dastardly fascists, fucking us all over, let's go get 'em!"

She smiled primly, Boadicea with 2020 vision, and I would be her foot-soldier, waving my paint-brushes as weapons. Later in 2019 I was asked to have another meeting with her, this time I was to be promoted, I fancied, to major-sergeant. Oh, she couldn't make it, she was too busy, she sent her lieutenant along, Toby Crosswell, to talk turkey with me. I liked him, he was relaxed, up front, but there was nothing to talk about, just the same tripe, the giant shop windows in George Street, yeah, yeah, yeah. Then he tore his shirt open and showed me a giant scar running down his chest. He'd had a heart swap six months previously and was still kicking. I went into shock and felt great sympathy for him, I being an RN. I liked him, he was more down to earth than Lesa, I filled his ears with Rolling Stone gossip about rock stars and the music industry from my guttersnipe perspective. All was well with the revolution I thought, soon the barriers would be going up.

As we got closer to October sweet Lesa asked me if I would join my "Politics of Survival" show with her SEDITION. She wanted to put her logo in Pass-Port's shop window and promised I would get a lot of foot traffic from some "walk-about tour" she was arranging. I didn't see any harm in joining her, I was always willing to help out, and if it meant extra eyeballs on my work so much the better. She put "Toby Zoates SEDITION satellite show at Pass-Port Darlinghurst" in her brochure, and my name went on the list of participants on a big board, with much brou-ha-ha, in the George Street window, a guttersnipe amid all the rest of the "names" and "wannabe names."

 In my eyes some of these artists were "darlings of the Establishment", yet badly wanting to be declared the most edgy, the most happening; much of the art was obtuse, conceptual, bearing little resemblance to anything that could be called "seditious." They were cheeky yes, dour definitely, rocking the boat, hardly. The confidence rap from Lesa was as radical as the affair ever got, my eyes narrowed on seeing the list, things weren't looking good.

 I submitted my work which I hoped would go in the window, "Psychopath Inc.", basically a critique of the arms industry hovering over humanity like the sword of Damocles. When all was ready to go I went down to George Street to have a look, surprise, surprise, my large ink drawing wasn't there. An ugly piece of Mombasa's old crap took up one whole window, his brother's wife with a pink knitted cardigan and tea-pot doily was there among other cute biddy rubbish, but not poor little me. What the fuck!

 I rang up Furfagin and admonished her raucously about her elitism, saying her show was, "About as seditious as a Coles plastic shopping bag!" She wept miserably, saying she did her best, she wasn't even paid, (hmmm...) and she would quickly put my "Fukushima is Fucked" ink drawing up to be an eyesore amid all the nice, colourful bullshit she was lionising. She swore my "Psychopath Inc." had pride of place in the foyer at the Eternity Theatre down in Darlingurst and would be seen by hundreds of people. (I can imagine her cursing and thinking, "That fucking Toby Zoates, living up to his troublesome reputation!")

I rushed down to Darlinghurst and the Eternity Theatre, it was all locked up and dark. I peered longingly through the small, dusty windows but all I could see was a giant, red plastic locomotive from a happening Dutch-Asian wunderkind and no drawing by me. I rang her up again and abused the shit out of her and in despair she cried, "But I put it there myself!" Later on I discovered it was way, way inside, facing into the foyer, with its back to the windows, and I was promised on the night of the grand, (boring) concert hundreds of guests would see it. I gave up. I didn't go to the celebratory dinner at the opening, I didn't go to the (boring) rock music show, or the dreary discussion panel (Mambo's brother's wife talked about why her pink knitted cardigan was seditious), and I didn't see any of Lesa's throng of walkabout enthusiasts put their feet inside my show at Pass-Port as I was there every day keeping a look-out. Apparently very few went to any of her "revolution", it was all blow and no show.

The SEDITION logo in the window of Pass-Port Store and Gallery was quite ugly and the guy who worked there hated it and wanted it torn down. I told him of the hassles I'd had with the flaccid art rebellion and asked him, "Why did they bother to pull me into it in the first place?" He cynically replied, "To suck off your street cred!" Now this surprised me because I'm not that aware I have much of a reputation. After all, I live in social housing, in ignominy, in poverty. I am never written up in any of the respected art magazines or newsletters, never invited to participate in shows, give talks, join panels or toasted at art galleries' dinner parties, (thank NO fucking god!) But I have put in 45 years of pasting thousands of astounding posters on Sydney's walls, handing out subversive flyers, making videos, performing stories, showing my movies, writing books, drawing comics, painting murals, having solo art shows, participating in innumerable group shows, (thanks to Damien Minton, Pass-Port and The Gunnery.) So I should have some credibility, I just don't go around skiting or dining off it.

The denouement of this whole shitfest was Lesa Furfagin having the nerve to ask me if I would give her one of the flyers I created for my show, "The Politics of Survival", which she said she wanted to hand in to the Sydney City Council with the rest of her "end of project summary" so as to prove the festival really contributed interesting shit to the cultural life of Sydney and thus justifying her grant. Wanda, the woman who had flopped-out on the King Street, Newtown window parade, was pissed off with me for putting the SEDITION logo on my flyer. She complained that she also had to supply an "end of project summary" with paperwork, receipts and descriptions of the results to the Sydney City Council to prove what she'd spent the money on. I suggested she use my Pass-Port show as part of her summation as, after all, it was her who had inspired me to do my "School For Scoundrels" installation. "Oh no!" she snapped, "You've already given that to SEDITION, it can't be claimed twice." I don't know why she was so uptight, she'd achieved her real agenda, she wanted to go to America where she thought she'd make it big as an artist and she had the $10,000 to get there and live well for awhile. Everybody blew smoke and it was my ass that copped it.

Lesa Furfagin licked her lips as I handed her my Pass-Port flyer even though she didn't put one dollar into my show, I paid for it all from  my pension, and I bet she got thousands of dollars as a grant. I didn't get a cent in artist's fees for the one drawing she did take as part of "her" show, though I bet Mombasa and elite company didn't do the George street window display for free, (I asked her three times if she had paid them an artist's fee and each time she avoided the question and gaslighted me as if I was just being neurotic.) And, for all Furfagin's whining that she didn't get paid, I can't help wondering if  maybe she didn't cream off some of the money as it's not just prestige that gronks are after with any of their agendas but MONEY is almost always at the bottom of it.

A week or so after the finale she once again asked me to meet her at the Tropicana Cafe, (in her mind the place must represent some "IN" mecca of cognoscenti art, nobody seems to have told her those days are long gone.) As ever she was extremely sincere and concerned as to my "non-career." She asked me if she could be my manager, Damien Minton having seemingly dropped out of working with me. I asked her why she didn't go after the elite artists she favoured in SEDITION and she replied, "They have managers already." She assured me she could sell my sixteen panel work, "School For Scoundrels", she'd harangue the big galleries until they gave in. How much did I want for it? "At $500 for each panel I want $8000 in total." She asked for 40% of the sales price and I agreed to give it to her if she pulled it off as I was in dire need of money as always, like everybody else on a pension or the dole. "Give me a week," she said, "I will try my hardest and if I don't achieve it then it's not worth you taking me on as your manager."

I thought this was an awfully short time to accomplish such a difficult task as my art is highly political, critical of the Morriscum cabal and authoritarian state, and usually rich people were part and parcel of neo-capitalism and class oppression and wouldn't approve of my art. Suddenly she blurted, "I know what I'll do, I'll give you the $8000 straight up and then donate the works to one of the big State galleries, that'll get you in. I'll badger them until they take it, I'm sure they'll go for it!" I was stunned, in my mind it was a ludicrous proposal. 

"But why would you give $8000 of your precious money? It's sounds unbelievable to me," I exclaimed. Portentously she intoned, "Because I believe in your genius emphatically. I think you are going to be the next big thing and I want to be there for it, I will support you to get there!"

I was dumbfounded, nobody in my long life of toil and turmoil has offered such generosity. I blubbered, I spluttered, I kissed her hand, I hugged her affectionately as if she were a furry teddy-bear, dear Furfagin. As I walked away, three feet in the air, I waved back wistfully with tears in my eyes, and she flapped her own hand about like a trained seal. Wasn't life miraculous? 

And then I never heard from her again, the cone of silence descended, a void yawned before me and swallowed me whole, and her too it seemed. I waited weeks by the phone for her call and nothing came. "Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could..." was the Julie Andrews song I was reminded of and kept humming.

After 7 weeks I rang her and asked with much angst, "What Happened?" "Oh my mother is sick and I've been looking after her."

"Yeah yeah, the old sick relative routine, sure. Why, WHY did you bother telling me all that bullshit? I just don't get it. It's outrageous what you said to me, the $8000 and being my manager! You actually blew smoke up my arse and smiled while you were doing it!" "Oh I wouldn't say that, that's a bit harsh! You're imagining heinous motives where there aren't any. Stop it Toby, stop it! You're being unfair! I'm your friend!"

"Oh, gaslighting me again, it's all my fault, I'm mad yeah? You're a piece of work, you really are! I bet you're busily putting together another proposal for more money for next year's SEDITION, (she was), and planning to rope in some more greedy, establishment-sucking fame-whores to do your bidding!" Putting on a snooty, high class voice I intoned, " Oh, what a kooky art lover you are, a happening, brilliant supporter of those fabulous bohemian artists, you'll be the toast of the town and welcome at all the Art Gallery of New South Wales soirees." "Oh stop it Toby, stop it it! Boo hoo hoo!"

I hung up on her, seething with annoyance. This is the long and winding road trod by many an artist, meeting up with opportunistic wankers with hidden agendas that are a mystery to decipher but of course always involve money and kudos. Ignominy's hard to bare, so is starvation and humiliation, those fucking dicks who pretend to want to give you a leg up but in reality just want your leg to gnaw on. Yuk! No god save me from them. There are cool people of course, who really do help, selflessly, quietly, they don't beat drums, go for grants or wangle your art for free then sell it on for big money.

Here I am, at the end of my life, broke, no hope, notorious, wondering what next will sweep me along in the gutter. I made a movie once, "Virgin Beasts", that won a world prize and been shown all around the world yet Australia shut its door in my face, nobody would give it a go. If some upper-middle class brat from the National Art School had done it he/she would get a ticker-tape parade, but not a street artist; the masses are told brown streaks like arse-wipes on canvas are high art and that's what deserves recognition. Art about the destruction of the world by a fascistic elite is verboten, nailing the political criminals in their thieving maniacal acts, putting a name and a face to them, shock-horror, such an artist is to be killed off. 

My "Politics of Survival" show was radical, about real issues, unlike many of the "arts for arts sake" rubbish showing in most galleries: terrace houses, the Sydney Harbor, vases of flowers and cows under gum-trees, or abstract expressionism that has had its time back in the '40s and '50s... uggghhh! No god help us all!

Sorry for saying it but most artists are wankers, all cheesy smiles as if they're no god's gift to the planet. The gronks chugging on beer cans think any blob of color from their mate, the hot artist, is cool, especially if it doesn't make them think, they're so tired of thinking, they just want to get drunk and fuck. And stare into their smart phones at endless selfies of themselves and their drunken buddies and their possible good root. All the while the fascist criminals who have taken over are planning to cause a war because their thieving and raping is getting noticed, war will be their big distraction, probably a stupid conflagration with China, and as our youth are getting their balls shot off they'll wonder, "How did it come to this? Who blew smoke up my arse and told me this was a good thing to get involved in?" 

How many times did I get betrayed in my artist's life? Countless!  That Tin Shed crowd where I toiled for 7 years in their "community access" workshop never gave me one job that got rung in by groups wanting their political diatribes given the high art treatment, I didn't even get the gay lib promotions and I was the only poof within 700 yards of the joint. When I spotted the cans of fluero paint gathering dust in a corner I asked who was using them and I was told by one of the clique, Stony Bobbinson, "Nobody, they're too '60s hippie for our taste." It was 1978 and I did my "Anti-Authoritarian Dance poster in fluero pink, blue and yellow which ignited an explosive rock party in Balmain Town hall. In 1979 I did my "Garibaldis Benifit" poster with four screens of fluero acrylic against a heavy black field. For this one, everybody's eyeballs popped, "Oh what a fantastic poster!" they yammered. Within a year every gronk and their dog was making fluero coloured poster with heavy black, I got trampled in the rush. 

At a SEDITION panel of rabble-rousing verbal diarrhoea the same Stony Bobbinson chortled, "Oh yes, back in the '70s fluero became the happening thing, we all pioneered it, it was revolutionary!" Crap on some more ya boring careerist. When I was finishing my fluero "Thief of Sydney" poster with its uranium dragon wrapped around the Centrepoint Tower in a post-apocalyptic Sydney, then putting it on the racks, a Japanese guy came into the workshop, Rick Tanaka. His face lit up with excitement, "I do a Japanese pop music show on 2SER radio and that's the kind of poster I want to advertise it! Will you do me one like it?" "Umm, you'll have to ask the "Dirtworks Collective" permission first and I'll have a go if they let me," I hopefully replied. 

When he put it to the "Collective" explaining he wanted something similar to mine Michael Callaghan snapped up the job and did his fluero Godzilla attacking the Centrepoint Tower in a Sydney city-scape, which is ok but for the next umpteen years they drag his shit out and ballyhoo it in magazines and National Art gallery catalogues as a prime example of quintessential poster art, and I got to be an also ran, never mentioned, expunged from the record. (When I look for that particular Godzilla poster online it seems to have disappeared as if the Dirtworks clique heard about my bitching and have sequestered it in a closet somewhere.) My anti-uranium poster, with its elite-class critique was too nasty for the rulers of the art world. 

Good luck to Michael, he got hung in MCA down at the Quay, all his maneuvering come true. I don't mind him getting noticed, he was a great artist and did many fabulous works, I'm just fucked off that I got to eat his dust. But he also got liver cancer from breathing in the copious amounts of paint thinners he used and had a miserable life for his last ten years. I got poverty-stricken ignominy and a fantastic old age dancing on the beaches by the Arabian sea, riding elephants through the Indian jungles and eating organic munchies on the streets of Nimbin, in other words an ongoing wonderful life without fame or money.

 

After 7 years of toiling in the community open access poster work, (or that was the cooperative con at the time), and never offered a job, always going out and creating my own chance to make posters by throwing benefits for worthy causes, a job teaching silkscreen to Sydney University students came up and I applied for it. At the time two tight cows were running the Tin Sheds by then calling themselves the "JuicyToil Collective", Pam Devonham and Leonie Whatshername. A creepy guy walked in off the street and they gave the job to him, I got condemned to my unemployed dereliction in the squats and I was extremely PISSED OFF! He was a macho gronk and put the hard word on them continuously so after a few weeks they had to sack him.

That very poster that disappeared from SEDITION, "Bastille Day at Garibaldis" was in the archives at the Sheds, among many of my other works. Many of them got sold onto galleries and private collectors, I hardly got a cent for them. How would you feel if you got written out entirely from the history of art when you'd put in 45 years of practice, particularly poster art. What was the problem? Jealousy, competition, homophobia, middle-class snobbery, mundane life annoyance, personality clash?  When I recently looked at 'Search the Collection" at the National Gallery of Art Canberra I barely rate a mention.  What really shits me is some of my posters are given the wrong credit, such as my "Garibaldis Bastille Day." The NGA claims the artist is Cari Baldis!!! Fucking ridiculous. And it is part of the JuicyToil Collective's work! What a fucking nerve! The Director of the NGA, James Mollison, had purchased it for the Phillip Morris Arts Grant 1982 and then given as a gift to the NGA. IT WASN'T PURCHASED FROM ME! This is the treatment most "artists" get. I wish I'd never had the naive hope to become one of the wankers, the unconnected, poor ones just cop it up the arse.

I suppose that's what I get for being an "underground" anti-system punk anarchist, I didn't even sign some of my posters or hid my name deep within the graphic. I just wasn't a careerist or considered "high art" as a career, I didn't keep them for future gallery shows or posterity, I put nearly all of them up on the walls of Sydney, stupid fucker that I am. To quote Quentin Crisp, "Other people are a mistake." I cynically believe the default characteristic and basic M.O. of uncivilised humanity is unbridled ambition, uncontrollable greed and nasty BETRAYAL.

Oh well, I can breathe easy, here at the end I can say, "My work is done." I've nursed the dying and the dead, ( as a palliative care RN, that's a REAL job), traveled the world, won grand prizes, created fabulous art, had awesome adventures, loved beautiful friends and danced ecstatic and abandoned. As I lay dying, finally having swallowed a handful of opiate pills and cut my wrists, I'm at peace, happy to leave the braindead gronks to wallow in their muck, while the sound of crowds cheering, screaming and moaning fades from my awareness, while uplifting music plays, the planet dwindles to a miniscule dot and disappears into the cosmic dust, and I am set free.

The Never-Ending Suicide Note: 2) Virgin Beasts Fucked Over.

The Never-Ending Suicide Note: 2) Virgin Beasts Fucked Over.

This story has been burning a hole in MY heart for thirty years. To get it off my chest once and for all I'm telling it publicly so, if I should die tomorrow, I will leave a note behind, as if in a bottle, to tell anyone interested of the travails of an Australian artist who was not connected to any power-broker or from a private school.

Also this is an invitation to a rare show of my movie “Virgin Beasts” on July 31st 2021 at a warehouse called The Sky Palace in Alexandria, and I want to warm up anybody interested with the tale of how the film got made.

In 1982 I was refused entry to the National Arts School, going down the road I was accepted into the Communications Course at UTS where I majored in Writing and Text Studies. Back in the 1970s I did have an artist mentor who I apprenticed myself to, Murry "Latimer" Triggs, which for me is the traditional way of imbibing art, sitting at the feet of a Master.

I was privileged, as a trained palliative care nurse, to be with him as he died beside the Ganges River in the Himalayas in 1974, and I watched avidly as he drew pictures as good as Albrecht Durer and Diego Rivera, up until a week before he died. We threw his body into the Ganges, an honour reserved only for great yogis, and the only Australian ever to receive it. Thus I didn't exactly come from nowhere, I've been around, and through the mill a thousand times, and my art expresses this explosively.

I got it in my head, after the success of "The Thief of Sydney", that I was going to be in the movie business and possibly off to Hollywood. Always the naive fool, I just didn't get the facts of the game straight, movies required millions of dollars, only the elite with power-monger connections could participate, and a queer guttersnipe from social housing and government schooling such as me simply was not in the running, in fact I would be told, "Exit through the toilets!"

I wanted to make a feature film, anarchic, iconoclastic, subversive, thus I knew I would not be able to raise much money for such. I also wanted it to be science-fiction, a rock opera and musical burlesque, an animated fairy tale and a political drama. With all this lumped together the genre would have to be Trash, as I wouldn't be able to interest professional actors, the props would be tacky, the sets wobble and the cheap costumes scoured from thrift stores.

I had by then seen 5000 movies and, without realising it, had drunk in the art of editing, photography with lighting, narrative with dialogue and how the music soundtrack supported the story and action.

I dreamed up a fantastical story about a rich old arms dealer on his death bed who still thinks his money will allow him to live forever. As he's shot up with the best drugs he hallucinates his transmigration into a parallel universe where he is a dolphin in a post-apocalyptic, destroyed world. I saw it as a mash-up of myth and folklore, "Beauty meets the Beast at the Masque of the Red Death in Search of The Holy Grail to win Land Rights for Gay Whales." Much later when I thought about the various levels of meaning I changed the last part of the catch-phrase to "to Beat Brand Rights for Grey Males."

My literary references were: "Le Morte d'Arthur" (Sir Thomas Mallory); "Searching for the Feminine: The Women of the Holy Grail" (Teresa Marie Lopez); "Holy Blood Holy Grail" (Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, Henry Lincoln); The Feminine Mystique (Betty Friedan); "Masque of the Red Death" (Edgar Allen Poe); "Beauty and the Beast" (Charles Perrault); "Fathering the Unthinkable" (Brian Easlea); "The City of God" - ("Arion of Methymna, celebrated lute player, was thrown overboard and rescued on a dolphin's back and carried to shore" - Saint Augistine of Hippo); "Utopia" (Sir Thomas More); "The Alchemist" (Paul Coelho); "A Season in Hell" (Arthur Rimbaud.)

As a work in progress my script was first titled "No Love Lost" but that didn't seem to capture the gist of the story I was struggling towards. I was riding my bicycle one day thinking about "Beauty and the Beast", how the male beast himself remains an unfeeling virgin if he cannot provide sexual enjoyment for a woman, mainly because of the rough, uncaring way he "fucks", (as if fucking a piece of meat instead of a sensitive, aware woman), and never experiencing true orgasm because of it.

Also I thought about the holocaust the human race perpetrates against the animal kingdom, killing them cruelly for sport and food, maiming them out of sheer sadistic pleasure; and such animals are innocent, vulnerable, powerless, untouched by "civilisation" and thus are virgins as in virgin soil and virgin forests. So I changed my title to "Virgin Beasts", a kind of oxymoron of opposites fleshing out a holistic metaphor, as in Rimbaud's poetry.

I applied to the Australian Film Commission for script development with a rough, short story but they thought it too fanciful, and were dismayed by the sub-text of my last film, "The Thief of Sydney", and as one (American) assessor croaked, "We are not into funding subversives who want to burn the world down!" I replied, "Oh yeah, like Paul Newman setting the barn on fire at the end of 'The Long Hot Summer.' I'll make this movie over your dead body."

I continued working as a night nurse in the "homes" for the aged, witnessing death close up. Toiling from 10pm to 8am in the morning cleaning up shit and laying out bodies, in the wee hours when everyone was sleeping I drew my story board, kind of like a comic book revealing frame by frame the shots that would tell the story.

It contained costume designs, ideas for sets, animation effects and characters. My fellow staff members were nonplussed at my busy scribbling, especially as I disturbed them in their snoozing. When I told them I was going to be a great movie director they thought I was as demented as our senile "residents" and quite up myself.

After a year scrawling dolphin designs in the land of the dying my story-board lay-out of the movie was finished and I again approached the Australian Film Commission, this time to fund pre-production, all aspects covered in my submission. This involved interviewing and rehearsing actors, dancers and musicians; finding locations suitable for the drama; lining up the crew, director of photography, lighting, props-master, set dresser, assistant director, sound-recordist, costumer; where to rent equipment, camera, lights, cables; music recording studio, caterer, insurer; possible marketing and exhibition; building and decorating sets; animation desk and materials; editing facilities. All in all a mammoth task for me the producer and it needed funding to do a proper job.

But again, the assessors at the Film Commission couldn't envisage the story, theme or genre. They were certainly not interested in Trash cinema, they ever had their eye on "classic, high art" that would win international prizes, and I was a deviant Punk with a drug-fueled, hallucinatory vision and I was persona non grata to boot given my shenanigans with my last film, "The Thief", regardless that it had won Bronze at the most prestigious animation festival in the world, Krakow, Poland. They rejected the project for the second time.

These bureaucrats were paid big money to nurture and create interesting films both daring and of cultural significance. They should've put me with a producer and a script adviser as their job dictated, but no, they were too precious, nepotistic, (their acquaintances were definitely in with a chance), and deadhead towards wild creativity. That's why, in my mind, very few original movies get made in Australia, which is capable of so much more, (for $200 million, give $2 million each, without govt interference, to a hundred filmmakers and you'd assuredly get at least 50 interesting movies.)

But of course the scammers would rush in where there was already a plague of them. In a totalitarian State it's the way of most government bureaucrats to keep the money amongst their set, and play it safe, don't rock the boat and quash significant critique.

My determination was profound, I was 36, with unbounded energy and sharp wit. I went back to work as a night nurse and with the money I earned did the pre-production, lining up everything, sure that somehow I would make "Virgin Beasts." To fulfill one's dreams and achieve one's goals you have to be tenacious, hard working, single-pointed, extremely concentrated, studious, gregarious and not take "No!" for an answer. And allow nothing to distract you and waste your seed money, not drugs, chaos ( I was living in Pyrmont squats), beat-ups, sex, love or nay-saying powers, don't let anything get in your way, in my case ART was my addiction.

In 1987, with the production fully presented as a package, budget included, I approached the Film Commission yet again. For nobodies like me there is no alternative, no studio or production house that will back me, no private investment, no eager producer willing to carry half the burden, (they all had their own projects and kept their funding a closely guarded secret). No horde of dentists willing to invest some tooth-pulling money, only the government who say they back Australian stories but who in reality crush any political critique of the system, all must be jolly kitchen-sink melodramas.

Finally I got a sympathetic assessment panel, my "peers", a few of whom were impressed with "The Thief" and liked the rock music vision of the Beasts, seeing it as a possible cult favourite. I batted off every question like a champion cricketer and they agreed to give me $30,000 to get me to a rough cut that include the music recorded but not the animation painted and filmed. I was promised a further $30,000 down the track to complete the film, with animation, sound mix, final edit and print, all in 16mm film.

Of course I was very happy, my "Virgin Beasts" movie was now a strong possibility, all I needed to do was a vast amount of hard work with ingenuity, and parsimonious budgeting. A good thing I had grown up poor and knew how to live on the smell of an oily rag. I didn't want to buy a house, snort cocaine or rush off on a tour of Europe, I was resolved to make that damned movie.

I cut the finance into tiny slices, like Donald duck with one small sausage to eat among a gang of hungry hangers-on, and managed to pay EVERYONE; the cast and crew got union rates and they hired me their equipment cheaply; I found a low-rent tin shed to shoot most of the drama in, (The Slaughterhouse in Redfern); my costumer had a huge collection of rags she'd purloined from St.Vinnies; the insurer gave me a break; the props-master was a genius and created wonderful objects from rubbish; same goes for the sets, all discarded junk and left-over flats; I learned how to make rubber-latex objects, the masks for the mutant Beasts and the hearts for the heart swap surgery, lucky I lived in the squats and had no landlord to complain about the mess for I got paint and rubber-latex dripping from everything; Rachel Foster hospital rented me a proper hospital bed, and Sydney University lent me surgical equipment and an ECG machine.

I worked as a night-nurse right up to the one week's rehearsal and two week shoot, a good thing too as I was able to filch discarded appurtenances from the hospital's garbage dump for my heart surgery scene: catheters, drip bags and stands, old oxygen cylinders, a trolley, much of it dumped by the side of the road and which I snapped up as I drove out of the hospital every morning. I was working in the geriatric wards down the back of Callum Park and I noticed the ancient sandstone dungeons abandoned for a hundred years and was able to rent them for a few days for my torture-cell debacle.

After one weeks rehearsal we launched into the shoot. I had to do eight jobs as that's what my budget dictated. I was like an octopus, each arm dealing with a harried cast or crew member. I was director, producer, art director, choreographer, music director, writer, and actor. The set decorator couldn't set the table, I had to tell her where to put the salt and pepper shakers. The lead actress was a prima donna, she had to be driven to and fro like a human yo yo, taking up half the day with my precious production car. She also demanded several takes for her every move, when I could really only afford one take, we counted every inch of film stock and I fell behind with my daily ration.

We shot mostly at night to cut down on sound interference and disturbance but it caused most of my actors to fall asleep much of the time. And it was freezing cold so we set up a tin drum with an open fire in it to warm the cold storage shed, but it filled the studio with noxious smoke and everybody was coughing and blinded. I saw the film crew muttering together up the back and asked them what they were scowling about. They wanted to rebel, the smoke was too much, it was too cold, they demanded the whole production be moved to Paddington Town Hall video studios.

I said, "Oh yeah? Where's the money coming from to do it?" As the Producer/Director one has to be a bit of a martinet, strong about everything, for wimps bite the dust and no film gets made. They heard the determined captain's note in my voice and toed the line.

In the middle of filming a crew member rushed onto the set and wailed there was some strange woman in the garage having a drug-induced fit. I stopped the shoot and went to take a look. There she was, all scraggy-faced and hair awry, locked inside a car and screaming her tits off. Everybody ran around in a panic, like a stirred up ants nest. It was time for Nurse Ratshit to make an appearance.

I tapped on the car window and yelled, "Don't worry, dearie. We've called for an ambulance and they're on their way to give you a shot of Narcane. That will snap you out of it." She instantly went blank-faced and sat up straight. The car-door opened with alacrity and out she jumped. She gave me a smirk and growled, "No thanks! I'm outta here!" She quickly scampered out the garage door, never to be seen again. It turned out she was the caterer's girlfriend. Whew! Easily handled. Cecil B. de Mille took over and shouted, "The movie must go on!"

We continued our tawdry artistry, the sets did indeed wobble when we touched them, the rubber hearts refused to beat, the acting was wooden, one of my "pigs" whipped a slave too strenuously and I had to get him to do it in slow motion, softly.

In the Callum Park hospital dungeons everybody swore the horror-house was haunted and refused to stay there long enough for me to get the decent shots I required. The props-master flipped out from fatigue and frustration because the props, such as whips, rubber-heart trolley and blinking Christmas lights were all falling to bits. He ran around smashing everything he could lay his hands on and I had to make him go home and sleep. Luckily a good friend of mine, David Grove, very clever with his hands, took over the props department and got everything working beautifully.

Just as things were kind of limping along satisfactorily and we were about to take our midnight dinner break, the caterer/chef passed out from sniffing the whipped-cream cans and we really did have to send for an ambulance. I took over and served up the cold soup, much to the crowd's grumbling. That's show-biz for you.

Finally it was over, I vaguely had a very trashy movie in the can(s) with only a few missing pieces that I hoped I could do in pick-ups in post-production. With a thousand strips of celluloid film hanging from various racks I edited together a rough cut of 80 minutes, with dialogue and music soundtrack, just managing to to be able to call it a short feature.

With that rough-cut I went back to the Film Commission to get the last promised $30,000 to finish my grand movie. Somehow with that small amount of money I was going to do about thirty minutes of animation, creating 20,000 acetate cells, fifty backgrounds, film them a frame at a time under the camera Eddie had built for me, and get the film developed. I then had to do a sound mix, a final edit and a print of the finished film, including opticals, (superimpositions and dissolves), and credits rolling at the end to their own piece of music, kindly supplied by a hot band, "Monroes Fur." It was a task for Rumplestiltskin but with my eager, naive youth I felt up to it.

I again had to face an assessment panel but this time they stared at me glumly, they just couldn't see how the story unfolded, what it was about, the trash genre didn't impress them at all. Of course it was hard to envisage, there was no animation yet to connect the storyline, even though it was fully drawn and explained in the story board. It was now 1989, feminism had been the ruling political cause celebre, and all power to it, my own mother had been terribly brutalised and I very much wanted equality, freedom and advancement for women.

The Film Commission was mostly run by women, if your film was about women's issues you were in with a hope. But if you were a bloke, a queer, working class, punk anarchist, well lets' just say you were not flavour of the month. In fact, to the dyke mafia that controlled the AFC at the time, I was not a person of interest.

I was refused any further funding, my project was to be disbanded, I was banished to my squat-hovel to rot amid my film cans stacked to the crumbling ceiling. I was so depressed I considered suicide. Then I was told by a female friend who had applied for funding at the same time as me that she'd gotten the money for her now forgotten project because she'd fucked one of the lesbians on her assessment panel. I swear this was what she told me, I was furious, for this is how this damned world turns, on nepotism, money and sex. (I can hear the mafia hissing like Medusa now.)

One day not long after hearing the gossip from my girlfriend, I saw the boss of the Creative Development Branch, Ms. McMuffin, sitting in a cafe and I couldn't resist storming in and telling her of the outrageous corruption involved in the assessment process. All I got from the great feminist savior was a shocked, dumb stare. She herself had, while in the job, arranged funding for her next project, then left the job and six months later was given a million and a half dollars to make her high-art mistress-piece, "Pissing Under Water", about travelling into a woman's unconscious, her dream-world, via animation. Where had I heard that before?

Again, I support the women's struggle, I've been arrested protesting women's right to abortion, a blot on my criminal record, part of the ruination of my life, a stance she'd never taken, and here she was fucking with my future prospects just like the pigs had done.

For all of 1989 I went to every floor of the Australian Film Commission, all 7 of them, each floor responsible for a different department of filmmaking, and I begged the 7 managers, all women, to please continue the funding of my film as it was a terrible fate to have it destroyed halfway through production. Every one of the hard as nails bureaucrats refused to help me, word was out, "fuck him off."

I didn't give up, hope burned eternal in my heart, I was absolutely confident I was going to be a movie star, it was my destiny, every Hollywood movie assured me of this, the happy ending where the ingenue in rags gets the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. In the meantime I line-rehearsed my dolphin characters, drawing them and the whales over and over until I had instilled some character into them, much as Mickey Mouse finally got a personality after much drawing. But no one in power would help me, I was condemned to ignominy and death without a ripple in the social pond. Sydney is like that.

Then in 1990 I heard the AFC had got a new boss, Peter Sainesbury, a man brought in from the British Film industry to shake the joint up as the nepotism had gotten out of hand, millions had been given away to "friends" and not enough interesting films had gotten made. I rang his secretary but, like all dragons on the door, she told me he was busy and didn't have time for a nobody like me.

Somehow I got the phone number to his inner office and rang it. The man himself answered and in one minute I gave him a pitch about myself and my film and he invited me up for an interview. Remember, my motto is "Never Take No For An answer!"

I took him my rough-cut print and my story-board, told him my vision of animation with rock'n roll and he "got it." He asked me how much I needed to finish "Virgin Beasts." I'd already worked out a rough budget that would pay me and two other artists for a year to do all the animation, $104, 000. He said, "Are you sure that's enough?" I was shocked, I'm a poor boy from a very poor background, I'm not a businessman nor do I live to make a grab at as much money as I can get, so I hesitantly said, "$110, 000?" Now honestly, I could've said $150,000 and he would've given it to me, he knew my treatment had been unfair, my guardian angels hovering somewhere nearby had whispered the truth to him,(a few of the female bureaucrats were sympathetic friends and gave me a recommendation.)

Perhaps I could've got a 35mm print at the end of it with that extra money, but I knew it would end up on video so 16mm was sufficient and more easily handled. I'm not greedy, like Ms. McMuffin, and was satisfied he was giving me an amount I knew I could finish my movie on. I punched the air in victory as I walked away from him.

I toiled throughout 1990 and into 1991, painted and shot the animation myself with my new animation desk in my new Housing department flat, having been moved out of Pyrmont Squats. I paid a good artist friend to paint most of the cells, I drew everything and did a hunk of the painting, and I paid Eddie van der Madden to help with the backgrounds and the special effects which he created on an Amiga 500. I sat under hot lights and meticulously shot the thirty minutes of animation, frame by frame, many thousands of them, sliding backgrounds with two levels of cells, for hundreds of hours.

The AFC insisted I cut it down from 80 minutes to sixty minutes and I paid an editor to cut it to 67 minutes. I paid another friend to do the sound mix out at the Film and Television School, he got carried away and mixed his sound effects into the foreground and put the dialogue and music into the background which mightily disappointed me as it was a rock opera. Later on Troma of New York, who took on distribution, fixed the sound, improving the music, so I was somewhat mollified.

I can say, with all the various fuck-ups that fell upon the film, it ended up like swiss cheese with lots of holes, yet as I'd set out to make it absolutely in Trash style, it all worked perfectly and I had achieved that long held dream from childhood, to make a feature film and be the star of it. I arranged to show Peter the finished product at a cinema in North Sydney quite near the AFC building and every bureaucrat on every floor was invited, those very departments I had begged so earnestly for help, and not one, NOT ONE of the fuckers came to see what I had achieved, they were egregiously peeved, possibly jealous, that I had dared achieve it.

Peter laughed throughout the screening, much to my gratification as it is a comedy, and he shook my hand at the end of it, happy that I had lived up to my promise, which would've been a punch in the eye to all those brain-dead bureaucrats who had negated me, and him.

A few years later I met a few of those grey bureaucrats outside the Orpheum Cinema and they hissed at the mention of Peter's name. Of course they had ganged up and eventually gotten rid of him, and they snarled what a bastard he was, never taking their advice and never supporting their recommendations. I spat in a fury, "You lot have a nerve, you gave money to your friends for projects that were either bad or didn't eventuate at all, while I got fucked over by your fellow worker ants and your dear friend McMuffin. You all left me to rot among my stack of film cans to the point of considering suicide. He is a great guy and Australia needs more like him, maybe then we’d get some better films made." They politely shat their pants, they'd never been told off by a Punk before and coming from me it surprised them. That's the kind of nerve these dickheads have, they enable you getting fucked over and you're expected to bow down and say, "Fuck me some more, please!" Ha, not where I come from.

"Virgin Beasts" never did get accepted by conservative, gronk Australia but it did go on to be voted Best Trash Movie, along with a fantastic Japanese film, at Freakzone, the First International Festival of Trash, 1996, Lille, France. They flew me there for the Trash extravaganza and the French Punks went wild for the story, the animation and the rock'n roll and for 7 nano-seconds I was the IN thing. But that's another story to be told in the future, suffice it to say that it has shown all around the world, on television, cable, in festivals, in cinemas, on DVD and streaming.

But Australia slammed the door in my face; I applied to have it shown at the Sydney LGBTQI Mardi Gras, half the actors were queer, half the crew was queer, I was quintessentially QUEER, the film reeked of queer sensibility, but no, it wasn't about a GAY tearing out his hair and squawking about being gay, so it got rejected.

Even the fashionistas who ostensibly say they adore trash cinema have eschewed it, in 35 years I have never been invited to show it anywhere, perhaps it's too radical, too trashy, too outre, or I'm too declasse, deadbeat, queer, Punk. I think the tall poppy syndrome operated against me as it always does in Australia, and all those talentless, trend-followers are jealous that I, from the gutter, achieved what they never could.

I've had to go beg to get it shown, or put on the show myself, underground, which suits me fine, I prefer going under the radar, who wants to be public property anyway? But it would be nice for it to get some recognition. Oh well, Freaks like it. It's getting a rare outing in a Warehouse called The Sky Palace in Alexandria on Saturday July 31st 2021, if COVID allows.

I've done an act for many years, starting in 1978 at a squat in Darlinghurst called Side F/X, showing my animated films above me while I sing and tell stories, accompanied by musicians. Mostly I team up with a genius electric slide-guitar player, Paul Vassallo. I call us Deadbeat and Gronky and I call this show we're doing soon, "How to Become a Movie Star or Stunt Your Growth Trying." In it I tell the story of the making of "Virgin Beasts" and why I'm no longer a virgin, because I got FUCKED OVER!

Starring: Goose Pressley, Simon Reptile, Mathew Cooke, Mark Easton, Chris Donovan, Michele Granieri, Toby Zoates and Tex Perkins.

Music by: Box the Jesuit, Monroes Fur, Candy Harlots, Thug (Peter Reid and Tex Perkins), The Oasis Mob (Dorian Dowse), The Gunnery (Paul Vassallo and Peter Hartley), Toby Zoates.