Big Blue Sky Read online

  Spotted by the federal police walking over a bridge that crossed Sullivans Creek, which separated the colleges and the university, Bradbury chose the superhero option, leaping off the bridge and into the creek. He then scrambled up the bank with the police in hot pursuit and, dripping wet and covered in muddy reeds, scampered into Burgmann. David Griffin refused the police entry and the college provided a safe hiding place for the fugitive until things quietened down.

  The university colleges also provided a bolthole for those students avoiding conscription. These were the brave ones, hanging in the shadows and moving on each night to avoid arrest.

  …

  In search of something outside the norm I enrolled in a new subject called Man (women weren’t part of it in those days) and the Environment, a brave attempt at cross-disciplinary studies, combining sociology and ecology. The subject’s intellectual enquiry stirred up my dormant interest in the way the world worked. It focused on the intersection between the planet’s physical processes, such as weather, geography and climate, and the way people acted in relation to nature informed by their values.

  It is usually assumed that economic drivers help to explain the impact that human society has had on the environment. It makes sense that people act rationally by always seeking to maximise the use of resources, even if the end point is to deplete the resource stock, like a fish species, to the point of extinction. But this is not the full picture and fails to account for other factors—social, spiritual, political—that might influence behaviour. Some thinkers believed then that modern man and woman were suffering alienation, a sense of separation from the outside world. If this was the case, what did that mean for their relationship with nature? And, importantly, what did it mean for the emerging awareness that there was now palpable damage happening to the environment in many corners of the earth—and what were we to do about it? The subject was discontinued after a year but the questions it raised lingered in the back of my mind, only to resurface years later.

  Apart from occasional flashes of interest provided by diversions like this, student life outside lectures was my main focus. There were multiple enjoyable distractions, and I was easily distracted.

  If I didn’t have a casual job going we’d while away the daytime hours playing volleyball and table tennis, ride our pushbikes across the campus to catch up with friends or just hang out in each other’s rooms. I’d bought a cheap motorbike to get further afield, and would skip classes and set out with my mate Doddo for boys’ own adventures. We’d head around the lake to the open space that surrounded Government House at Yarralumla and weave through the trees, chasing each other like kids playing hide-and-seek in a big garden. Yet no one in uniform materialised to quiz us about why we were fanging around in broad daylight on noisy motorbikes just over the fence from the nation’s nominal head of state.

  One of the popular books doing the rounds was called Be Here Now by the Buddhist author Ram Dass. It was a basic primer on non-attachment and valuing compassion, and a ready partner to the general ‘do what you want to do, be what you want to be’ ethos that was considered the way of the moment. I wasn’t so influenced by the bracing unorthodoxy that I dropped out and headed for the hills like some friends, but I carried a bit of hippie sentiment with me. It was a kind of Christianity with a small ‘c’, plus marijuana. While the hippie culture was derailed by hard drugs and furry thinking later on, in the beginning there was a peaceful, take-it-easy feeling I liked that was in stark contrast to the competitive, blokey atmosphere that characterised many colleges and social settings.

  The regular rites of binge-drinking prevalent in nearby colleges were, to my mind, an unfathomable part of Australian culture and of university life. Perhaps I’d already spent too much time in close quarters with alcohol, serving drinks to all and sundry—from my parents’ parties to the pub in Young and now the bar at college—but these boorish vomit-ridden escapades with their deadly hangovers and ritual humiliations looked like a macabre joke to me.

  This antipathy probably explains why a handful of longhairs trying herbal alternatives—dope, mushrooms, tea leaves even—would still be skipping about in the early hours while our fellow students slept off an evening’s hard drinking. In the dead of night we’d jump on our motorbikes, kick over the engines and ride to the top of nearby Mount Ainslie, which overlooked the Australian War Memorial and the avenues leading to Parliament House. There we’d take a deep breath, and then tear down the hill as fast as the bikes, engines squealing, would go, screaming at the top of our lungs.

  We didn’t see the sun come up through bloodshot eyes; instead, we hungered to explore the world taking shape in our heads as the night wound down and we’d sit till dawn, talking, listening to music, hanging out with our girlfriends of the time. On quiet nights I’d lie on the floor of my tiny room on my back with a speaker next to each ear—luckily my closest neighbours, including Doddo on one side, shared my taste—and listen to whatever the album of the week happened to be, over and over again. I could probably play the drums and sing every track on Neil Young’s Harvest today, if called on.

  Sport entered the scene too, as Burgmann had to field sporting teams for the existing college competitions, even though we mainly comprised first-year students, and so I ended up playing everything for a while. We were easily beaten in rugby league, although we fared better in table tennis due to my years of playing in primitive conditions at home and at Barker. The presence of students from Victoria meant that Australian Rules was highly popular. I was tall and could catch and kick a ball and so was drafted to play, despite knowing little about the game. I loved it, although after years of rugby I could never work out how to get in the right position to make an impact. A visit with friends to see a game in Melbourne turned me into a lifelong fan. Unlike the Sydney rugby crowds, which mainly consisted of men from roughly the same background, this crowd was surprisingly diverse, ranging from little kids to grannies, and all sorts in between, from all walks of life. The spectacle was great to see but the atmosphere was even better; I was hooked.

  …

  Music was the other great distraction from studies and sport, and there was plenty around. Towards the end of the week crowds would congregate in the student union bar where the resident band, Wally and the Wombats, were starting their career. We’d hang out, drink cheap cider and, in my case, listen hard. The more I listened, the more I wanted to be a part of the alchemy that was happening between long-haired guys wielding guitars and massaging drums, making a wondrous noise together on a small stage only metres away—but how?

  Whenever somebody was playing, I jumped at the opportunity to go and listen. An early highlight was a visit from blues legend Muddy Waters and his band. They played in a circus tent out in the burbs. Western Australian band Chain, who knew their way around a twelve-bar and were at the peak of their form, supported. It was a stand-out night.

  For starters there was the smell of sawdust, a galaxy of childhood memories to mull over. The tent resembled a big, brightly lit cave and was sound heaven. The canvas walls softened the pings and echoes that erupt when amplified music hits hard surfaces like concrete or glass. It was muted and warm, perfect for bluesy rock. Muddy came onto the stage grinning from ear to ear. We’d worked our way to the front, and were so close to the stage we could see the wild patterns on his socks and the sweat breaking out on his forehead. Within minutes he was cooking with a red-hot band. When he shouted ‘I got my mojo working!’, you believed.

  Maybe the promoter was holding on to their return tickets. I’m guessing they were as far away from Chicago as they’d ever been. Maybe this was what they did every night. One thing was for sure: they played like their lives depended on it—the only way to play. The drummer anchored a beat, which the bass player reinforced and then stretched, like a lace stocking sliding up the long leg of a beautiful girl, when it suited. The guitars were human voices: murmuring, pleading, screaming. The mouth harp punched out phrases like a cheeky gatecrasher, p
ushing the sound up into the roof where the circus trapezes were tethered. It was like listening to a fit, well-oiled, highly tuned part-animal, part-machine mow down everything in its path.

  I’m getting the shudders just writing about it. The only performance that ever came close in my experience was one by the Sufi mystic singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, whom I saw at a WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance) concert in Adelaide twenty years later. Both performers were able to keep building the song so that it continually lifted to a higher level, washing over you in waves of supercharged intensity, and both were over forty years of age.

  The song ‘Eagle Rock’ was on its way to becoming a household anthem when Melbourne band Daddy Cool showed up and played the Aquarius Festival, one of the first outdoor music festivals Canberra had seen. Held on the lawns in front of the student union building, it was chockers, the space not big enough to accommodate a crowd that had gone hippie overnight. A pall of dope smoke hung in the air and most of the crowd, including me, were wearing regulation San Francisco garb—tie-dyed T-shirts, jeans, sandals and shoulder bags—and giving off a general feeling of bliss and laidback calm.

  I stood at the back but could hardly hear. After Muddy Waters and the intimate, in-your-face experience of the circus tent, it seemed tame and lite. Not because the band couldn’t cut it—far from it—but because the amplification wasn’t up to the task. I made a mental note then about the importance of sound. Music is best enjoyed loud, and this was too wimpy by far.

  Bands were constantly turning up at the uni, and when Split Enz and, a week later, Renee Geyer came through, they both left a big impression.

  Split Enz, fresh from New Zealand, were light years away from anything I’d so far seen or heard. Dressed like harlequins, they produced a choreographed performance of broody, jerking melodic rock. With singer Tim Finn conducting the moves, it was eye-popping, the music an unpredictable excursion—M.C. Escher wired up to amps and drums.

  Renee Geyer’s band featured the cream of local jazz-rock players who seemed freakishly comfortable with their instruments. The music was more soul than jazz. Unlike a lot of jazz players, they didn’t waste many notes, and Renee’s timing was impeccable. It didn’t cater to my taste, but she was, and still is, a great soul singer. Again I was mesmerised—more alchemy.

  The surprise gig of the year, though, was the appearance of one of my first discoveries as a fifteen-year-old, John Mayall & the Blues-breakers. I’d pored over their records for years, brought the albums with me to Burgmann and driven my neighbours mad playing them endlessly—and here they were, in person, in Canberra. Who would have believed it?

  They played the Albert Hall—Canberra’s version—and things took a turn for the better when Mayall announced during the show that he and the band would be doing a music workshop the next day at the same venue. They must have had a day off, but it was still unheard of for an international band to hang around and share their tricks with the local proles. Clearly one glance out the window of their motel would have told them there wasn’t much going on in downtown Canberra and some wise member of the outfit had decided they might as well stay occupied.

  There would have been no more than thirty people when I arrived at the hall the next morning eager to learn; a smattering of stickybeak fans and local musicians listened intently as the band, which included some of the best-credentialled black players around, showed us the ropes. As with Muddy Waters before him and countless others, Mayall was working in a time-honoured musical tradition that stemmed from America’s slave past. This was music based on Negro spirituals and gospel hymns. It was the music of people working for scraps in the fields, living in shanties, identified and condemned by the colour of their skin. Early black troubadours then worked this music up into popular songs of the time. The crying out of a people in chains became the blues: the humming tunes of prisoners marching to be free.

  Modern rock music fed off and stole the music of these same blues pioneers: Robert Johnson, Lead Belly, Howlin’ Wolf, Bessie Smith, Champion Jack Dupree, Mississippi John Hurt . . . the rollcall of greats is a long one. When Muddy sang ‘The blues had a baby and they named it rock and roll’, he was calling it, naming the state of the game. The Stones and Beatles supped at the table, Led Zeppelin too, and got rich beyond imagining along the way, but they weren’t the only ones—just listen to the Black Keys. This isn’t necessarily a crime; all art is imitation and borrowing. The artist is like a bowerbird picking at baubles left lying on the ground after the party’s moved on. It depends on what they do with the jewels they uncover or, in the case of the blues, rediscover. Here was Mayall, a white English guy, playing the blues and it sounded right. But he had an ace band made up of great musicians steeped in the tradition, and they were the ones making it work, holding it down.

  The main thing I took from this memorable day was that it wasn’t the number of notes or chords played. In the blues it’s usually only a three-chord progression with variations. Dead simple. It was how it was played that counted. You needed to feel it, not think it. It happened in your gut, not in your head. It was a groove you furrowed, and you needed to play with soul.

  I left the hall with my head spinning. It sounded straightforward enough, but though I could think it out, I couldn’t always feel it. I spent years trying to reach that still point where the notes and the rhythms exit your brain and lodge in your gizzards.

  …

  As well as checking out as many bands as possible, I’d signed up with my gentle, I’m-up-for-it mate Doddo to train as an announcer for Radio ANU, a new university radio station, which later became 2XX—more sounds, more songs.

  The decision to go on air came so quickly that within a few days of learning the basics of operating a small radio console we were broadcasting across the campus. The infant station had few resources so volunteer student announcers brought along records they owned or had borrowed for their shows. People played whatever they wanted, and we drew heavily on friends who’d amassed collections by mail order, picking albums that featured in Rolling Stone or the English music mag New Musical Express.

  The era was post-Beatles and early Stones but pre-punk. Songs were getting longer, the listeners were more likely to be stoned; albums were meant to be listened to over and over, not just three-minute pop songs. The field was full of talent: Bob Dylan; Neil Young; Joni Mitchell; Taj Mahal; B.B. King; Crosby, Stills & Nash; the Band; the Mamas & the Papas; the Byrds; Jefferson Airplane. And from the other side of the Atlantic there were Van Morrison, Pink Floyd, mid-period Who and the Kinks, Family, Fairport Convention, Traffic. Australian free-wheelers Tamam Shud and Spectrum—and their alter ego Indelible Murtceps—and country rock band, The Dingoes, also got a run.

  At times it tended towards dozy, but the best songs made the hair on the back of your neck stand up. There were pungent attacks on the military mood of the time, ear-twisting excursions into soundscapes, gritty blues, soaring pop and lots more in between. We were drenching ourselves in music, as young people do, and it washed us up on a distant shore.

  My friend Andy Richardson was a year older and part of the motorbike crew at Burgmann. They rode big, grunting bikes quite unlike the little chaff cutter I was pushing around town. Andy was out of the Melbourne establishment, had been to the right schools and his father was one of Sir Robert Menzies’ best friends. A stellar career in business or law would have been expected of him.

  Early one morning he disappeared into town, re-emerging a couple of hours later clutching a peculiar-looking silver metal stick which, on closer inspection, turned out to be a flute. It was hardly the stuff of rock’n’roll. He had no idea how to hold, let alone play, the delicate instrument. Forty years later, with thousands of performances and scores of albums under his belt as Howlin’ Wind, he still approaches his instrument with the same fierce fervour.

  …

  I was relishing student life, so primed were my senses on all fronts, when a year after I’d left for Canberra, my father had one of
his recurring asthma attacks at home. I’d come back to Lindfield to visit, not knowing anything was amiss. Mum and I, along with a relative who was staying over, had rushed into my old bedroom where Dad had holed up, when he called out shortly before 11 p.m. He was in trouble, and we grew more worried as his breaths became shorter and shorter, until each one was a drawn-out, horrendous struggle.

  By the time the ambulance reached the emergency department at Royal North Shore Hospital, a twenty-five-minute drive away, he was dead.

  I was devastated but at the same time not shocked. In the last few years we weren’t so close that I felt I’d lost a friend. He had travelled a lot, and when he was at home he was often unwell. I’d got used to his downhill slide to the point where it almost seemed normal, and from a young age had taken up more responsibilities as the eldest, helping out when I was around. The thing I missed most was the smiling, dignified presence of the old dad I’d grown up with.

  There wasn’t much in the way of savings and no gold watch in the mail from the company he’d given his all to, an effort that had impacted on his health. It was a sacrifice he’d made so his family could enjoy the kind of life he had missed out on. Dad had been a popular boss, and the women who worked in the office and came to his funeral were inconsolable, the senior management cool and reserved.

  I wasn’t sure how my mum would manage but expected she’d pull through. She was strong, with a decent job and, most importantly, a good circle of friends. I’d bought an old Peugeot 403, nicknamed Bess, and having a car meant I could get up to town to see her a bit more.

  My father’s death was a reminder of the fragility of life. For a while I was content to enjoy the unfettered existence of the young student, as I zoomed around the campus with like-minded comrades. One moment at an experimental film festival starting at midnight in the city, the next, skipping lectures to picnic down by the lake. The colours were bright, the air a sweet vapour, and on the surface it probably appeared that I didn’t have a care in the world. Yet deep down I had an inkling that something had to give. It wasn’t a fully formed feeling and I doubt I could have given voice to the sensation if someone had asked. There was plenty going on, lots of hanging around, watching, laughter and listening. But actually doing something, something real and new? That was yet to come.