The Summer of ’82

EPILOGUE

PREFACE

Mondo Rock had a song called ‘Summer of ’81’. I’d always hated Mondo Rock. Well, hate is a strong word, and I was quite fond of that song ‘Cool World’. It was just that Fiona Rossiter said they were rubbish, and we all nodded our heads in agreement.

Fiona was the coolest girl in school. She seemed more sophisticated than the average Mitcham High girl: she wore her skirts long, knew stuff about British bands and called some of the teachers by their first names. ‘Hi, Tess,’ she’d say nonchalantly. ‘Oh, hello, Fiona,’ Mrs Berthelson would reply. Fiona also had a very friendly mum and – more importantly – two sisters, so we would always find a way to drop around to her house. ‘Hi, Fiona – we found this bin out the front of your house. Is it yours?’

But this is not a book about Fiona Rossiter; this is a book about the summer of 1982. Yeah, I know the song’s called ‘Summer of ’81’, but there’s no song about the summer of ’82 so it will have to do.

Besides, after doing a bit of research using a thing called Google – which we didn’t have in 1982 – I’ve realised that I’ve been mishearing the Mondo Rock song for the last thirty-five years. We all thought it was a song about lining up to get into The Underground, but apparently it was about the end of the world. It turns out it had nothing at all to do with the iconic Melbourne nightclub, which was in the CBD and was strongly associated with drunken footy players.

These days you would say The Underground was ‘a bit bogan’; back then we just thought it was crap. And we couldn’t get past the front door. No surprises there. The bouncer always used the same line: ‘Sorry, boys, you can’t come in – it’s members’ night tonight. Unless, of course, you’ve got your names on the door?’ To which I would reply, ‘Yeah, I’m Push, and this is my mate Bankcard – see you in there!’ They never laughed once.

You see, in 1982 we just heard songs as we heard them. The closest thing to the internet was the local library. And you couldn’t wander into the Nunawading Library and say, ‘Excuse me, my mates and I were just having an argument about this song. Have you got any books on Mondo Rock?’

So let’s forget Mondo Rock – they’ve had more than enough mentions already. And remember, we hated them. We were seventeen, and that meant we were very passionate about our music. Every band we liked was unreal and all the rest were shit – and so were the people who liked them. That pretty much led my mates and me to being quite a small gang of kids. And that’s what this book is about. More specifically, it’s about me and that one summer.

Now, before you start thumbing through the pages for that scene where I ‘lose it’, Porky’s-style, you can forget it – that didn’t happen till much later. Put it this way: if the book of my young life was Lord of the Rings, you want to go straight to that bit where the hobbit throws the ring into the big fire. Yeah, about book eight.

It was in the summer of ’82 that I finished my final year at high school, and then waited ten weeks for my HSC results. It was like limbo: would I get into uni or would I have to get that trade my dad had always banged on about? A lot happened in those ten weeks. I fell in love not once but twice. I started a band, I got my licence and I got arrested. I went on the dole and I got a job. Friends broke up with me, girls broke up with me, my brothers tortured me and my parents went away a lot.

I like to think that the summer of ’82 was the time I became a man … Well, almost.

SCHOOL’S OUT!

The band Madness had a song called ‘Baggy Trousers’ that my mates and I used to love because it talked about smoking and bending all the rules at school … Actually, I think me mishearing lyrics might become a theme in this story, as I later discovered there is no mention at all of smoking in the song. Anyway, ‘Baggy Trousers’ seemed to have been written for teenage boys to jump up and down like maniacs to.

If I were a smart marketing man, I would say that every generation of pimply, testosterone-filled lads needs a band to pogo to. We had Madness, quickly followed by The Painters and Dockers, then TISM, then The Prodigy, then The Cat Empire, then our knees started to go.

Other themes of that Madness song rang true to us as well, especially playing football and riding pushbikes. They actually wrote the song as a response to Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’, in which the Floyd moaned about their tough time at school. But Roger Waters and his fellow Floydies had gone to posh private schools, while Suggs and his Madness mates, who had gone to London public schools, thought it laughable that they would write a song about their terrible experiences. ‘You reckon you had it bad, Roger,’ they were saying, ‘well, cop this.’

I hated Pink Floyd. We didn’t even need Fiona Rossiter to tell us that they were rubbish. They fell into the ‘boring older-brother music’ category, sitting there in his milk crate alongside Frampton Comes Alive! and Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells. How many Sunday afternoons had I wasted with my older brother Trevor and one of his stupid mates, sitting around on beanbags in the rumpus room and listening to The Dark Side of the Moon, pretending to be stoned? And I do mean pretending, because there were no drugs around. The only high we had was that lemon drink Saline, which used to fizz up and give you a kick. But a kick wasn’t a feeling that Pink Floyd fans like Trevor wanted. When he’d get really serious he’d plug in his precious headphones and listen intently, as there were many hidden messages in British prog rock of the ’70s – the main one being, ‘This is rubbish!’

Madness, on the other hand, were awesome. Just like them, we also hated private schools – not that we really knew anyone who went to one, and, let’s be honest, we all wanted to go out with a private schoolgirl. On the train they all looked so … nice.

In our part of suburban Melbourne there were three school choices: the high school, the tech school or the Catholic school. They all seemed to be pretty similar, except the tech boys all wore a brown uniform that led to many poo-based insults. I had campaigned hard to go to the high school, despite my dad wanting to send all his four sons to the tech. He was a trades teacher, and obsessed with us getting a trade too. ‘You should get a trade,’ he said at every opportunity he had. ‘It’s something to fall back on.’ He said it so much I thought a trade was some kind of mattress.

Most kids followed in their parents’ footsteps. If your dad was a plumber, it was then odds on you would be a plumber. Electricians produced electricians, teachers created teachers, and if your dad was a cop, you’d be encouraged to put on the uniform too. Occasionally a kid would stray and a family of plumbers would turn out a builder. ‘He’s getting a bit ahead of himself,’ his dad would say.

Luckily for me, one of my brothers, Mark, made Dad’s dream come true by becoming a Telecom technician. I simply tortured Dad by going to interviews for trades and giving the wrong answers. When I was interviewed for a job as an apprentice linesman at the State Electricity Commission, my interviewer asked, ‘Are you scared of heights, David?’

‘I get scared on the top of the slide,’ I answered.

It was early in the summer of ’82 that I rode my BMX through the front gates of Mitcham High for the last time. On this day I was completing my final exam – Legal Studies, to be precise. I hadn’t studied that much. My mum will tell you that I spent most of Year 12 riding my BMX in the street … Well, doing things like wheelies, bunny-hops and monos seemed important. Now that I think about it, I was perhaps a little old to be riding a BMX, but that was probably the attraction: I could finally do well in a sport, as my closest competitor was an underweight fourteen-year-old with calipers on one leg.

Unfortunately, the Legal Studies exam didn’t include any questions on the art of BMX riding. If only they had asked, ‘What is the name of the plastic wheels popular on BMX bikes in the early ’80s?’ (Tuffs.) No, I left the exam convinced I was going to fail. I had always been able to talk myself out of tricky questions in class, but doing it on paper was a different story. I wished I had the guts to go lateral on exam papers. We’d all heard the urban myth about the English exam that had just one question: ‘Why?’ Some kid wrote ‘Why not’ and got an A.

I knew I wasn’t going to get an A; I was aiming for a D, which was just a pass. You see, in 1982 at least a third of all students failed their HSC. It actually meant something to pass Year 12 back then. By our HSC year it seemed that our whole class had emptied out. We had started in Year 7 with over a hundred and fifty students; now we were down to about thirty. The school had an attrition rate like that troop in Saving Private Ryan. In a way, though, it was good, because all the tough kids had left to pursue a trade or a career at Coles or jail, so school was actually fun.

I joined my fellow students in a shelter shed to unlock my bike for the last time. The shelter sheds were essentially bike racks with roofs. They were always a magnet for the more dubious elements of the high school, being meeting places for those who wanted to smoke, pash or start a fight. Mitcham High was a sprawling suburban school. I’m sure they were all built to the same plan: two ovals, some shelter sheds, a hall that doubled as a gym and of course some portable classrooms. These were meant to be temporary but pretty quickly became permanent. Hot square boxes that were cold in winter and boiling in summer, they were just like the structures you see on telly when there’s been a disaster and temporary buildings are dropped in. There was nothing portable about our portables, which were concreted in; they’re probably still there today.

There was Drago, Noddy and Evan Marinos. Some still had exams, some had finished – it seemed our school careers were petering out. We all knew what that last day should be like, since it had been immortalised in American movies with kids making speeches, throwing things into the air, going to proms and parties and so on. But for us there was no fanfare.

‘What are we going to do now?’ I asked Noddy as he unlocked his racer, which had high-rise chopper-style handlebars, making it look quite cool.

‘I don’t know,’ said Noddy. ‘We could go to my house but my older brother will be there.’

That wouldn’t be good; he hated us. He’d once told us off for stealing his hair gel. Evan, the shortest but toughest guy in school – well, he lifted weights and had a KISS tattoo that he kept hidden from his mum – jumped on his bike and did a mono that went for at least ten metres.

‘Let’s go to the Ringwood skate bowl and do some tricks,’ he shouted.

‘We can do that any day,’ said Drago. ‘Today we need to celebrate.’

Drago was the smart kid among us. He swung his backpack confidently over his shoulders and started to pedal.

‘Where are we going?’ I yelled.

‘We’re going to the pub,’ Drago called back.

We rode our bikes in formation out of the school gates, like a squadron of World War II bombers going off to war. We didn’t look back – we had finished with this school, and we believed we were now men … men who were probably too big for BMX bikes. And where did men go? To the pub, of course.

We sat in a booth. The publican was onto us straight away. Maybe it was the fact that we arrived on pushbikes, maybe it was our schoolbags. Or maybe it was the giggling, or just that we looked really, really young. He actually walked out from behind the bar. He looked at us and went around the circle, pointing at each of us in turn. ‘No … no … no …’ He got to me, and probably because I was fatter than the rest said, ‘Yes – what do you want?’

‘I’ll have four beers, thanks, mate,’ I said.

As if – I said I’d have a Diet Coke.

‘This is 1982,’ he reminded me. ‘It hasn’t been invented yet.’

So I settled for a Tab, which was Coke’s poor sugar-free cousin, consumed only by diabetic uncles at barbecues. I drank it quickly, feeling bad for the others, who looked thirsty and unhappy.

We went outside and sat on our bikes. So that was that. This was our ‘schoolies’, which didn’t exist back then. For us there was no end-of-an-era trip to Surfers Paradise, Byron Bay or even Lorne. The cliché said it should have been one of the best days of our lives, but it was actually a non-event.

Then Noddy had a genius idea. He put on his Stackhat with purpose, looked towards the suburb of Ringwood and made a bold statement. It was like Burke and Wills heading off to cross the Australian continent. ‘Let’s go register for the dole.’

Why not? After all, we were now officially unemployed.

UB40 sang about unemployment in a song called ‘One in Ten’, which made the point that ten per cent of people in the UK at the time were unemployed. They made unemployment sound so dreary and depressing. We found it quite enjoyable, and certainly more profitable than working at the local Tuckerbag, the forgotten supermarket chain whose spokesperson was a paper bag puppet called Tucker who spoke in a moronic voice. ‘Where do you get it?’ was his catchphrase. Sadly, the writing was on the wall for Tuckerbag when plastic bags were introduced. In a beautiful piece of irony, Tucker appeared printed on the side of the plastic shopping bags, somehow endorsing his own demise.

Anyway, UB40 were socialists who had come from the dole queues of Birmingham. They had decided to run their band as a socialist paradise, with all songwriting profits shared equally among the seven members, no matter who actually wrote the song. And as in all good socialist countries, this utopian system eventually fell apart, with the lead singer, Ali Campbell, leaving after thirty years because – guess what – he wrote most the songs and was pissed off at not getting the money. I remember he said he could never be replaced, or the band would fall apart. And – guess what – they replaced him with his brother and no one noticed. Maybe he should have stayed on the dole.

To us, it was money for jam. In 1982 we didn’t have the wonderful Centrelink – we had the CES and the DSS. First you had to go and register at the Commonwealth Employment Service, and then you would go to the Department of Social Security to claim your benefits.

Now, the CES was a wonderful place. They actually employed people who seemed to care about you, and who would try very hard to get you a job. There were women in long, flowing dresses and men with shaggy hair and headbands. They called you ‘man’ and said things like, ‘That’s a bit of a drag.’ It was like hanging out with Shaggy from Scooby-Doo.

I was convinced that everyone who worked there had themselves been plucked from the ranks of the long-term unemployed. I had this fantasy that, one day, they’d say to me, ‘Dave, half the staff haven’t turned up today, and you seem to know the ropes, so why don’t you come around this side of the counter?’

We got to the Ringwood CES and locked up our bikes, then wandered inside and told them we wanted to register for the dole. My hippy counsellor, Greg, sat me down. He had long hair, round glasses and smelt like oregano or some other herb. His office was a beautiful brown; in fact, the whole place seemed a light shade of brown. It was earthy and comforting. There was music playing in the background – it was The Doobie Brothers. I was so distracted I didn’t hear the first question.

‘David … David?’

‘Oh, sorry – what?’

‘When did you finish school, David?’ Greg asked again.

‘Is that The Doobie Brothers you’re playing?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, listening. ‘We have the radio on here.’

‘That’s pretty cool,’ I replied, nodding and smiling.

He smiled back and I knew he was a Doobies fan, like my brother Trev. I hated them but I wasn’t going to tell Greg that.

‘Yeah, the Doobies, they’re grouse,’ I enthused.

This was a typical CES conversation, gentle, meandering and non-confrontational.

‘So, when did you leave school?’ he asked for a third time.

I looked at my digital Casio watch, bought at the Shell service station, and my mind started to wander again. It was the same servo that sold crates of Loy’s soft drinks. Who would buy them there when you could get them home-delivered? Concentrate, David.

‘About an hour ago,’ I replied.

‘Geez, you haven’t wasted much time.’

Well, we had stopped at the pub. Even with his hippy demeanour, Greg seemed quite shocked.

‘I’m keen to work, man,’ I said, doing my best to speak the language of the hippies.

‘What sort of work are you interested in?’ he asked.

None, I thought. I was, however, keen for that sweet dole cash.

‘I’m thinking about working in the music industry,’ I said, hoping to play to his interests.