Waking far too early, perhaps from residual effects of the steaming black brews from last night’s effort to stay focussed on work, I was dreaming of younger days and how they have followed me through this life.
It was the latter part of the seventies and I was full of energy, tired of the compulsory team sports and searching for soul, I stumbled across the liquid glass of the Pacific Ocean and embraced a lifestyle that would shape my life in many ways.
Music and surf films glued this mosaic with venues like the Kerb and Gutter, Whores and Piss, The Antler, Doyalson, The Bayview and The Family, hosting bands like Oz Crawl, The Church, Chisels, The Angels, “Dick Clap”, The Radiators, Flowers and The Oils.
We shuffled chairs at Collaroy to the Opera House to watch Tubular Swells, Storm Riders, Morning of the Earth and many other moving pictures.
Being “Westies”, we played on Parramatta Road, Brickies and Big Chiefs and somehow made it through all this lot in pretty much one piece.
We raged ripped with “the rats” at Gladesville, we climbed bridges at night to watch the world and always found something going on.
I guess in among all this I found a truth in the wildness and anti-establishment of the energy and lyrics of Midnight Oil.
I’d smelt the frangipani, caught that bus to Bondi, was part of this play, I’d jumped in the air to see over the wall, I lived where concrete caverns caught the sky and held the stars to ransom, so Koala Sprint was my world really.
It’s a long way down from the Exxon Building to Mr Pink Batt.
It’s how life changes and how such things tear at my guts.
I mean he’s probably a good bloke and all, but out the other side it remains a point of wonder for me.
Now I’ve voted all colours over the years, depending who I calculated paid the best lip service deal for all Australians at the time, and now we have a Mc Green and Red government in Tassie who seem to have slipped from Uni to the top job with some vague notion of life as the masses know it.
It’s a perception that feeds about the community, enhanced by the meeja and to a large degree, by the leather shiners themselves.
Yes Minister mockeries such as, “we understand and will look into it”, “we share your concerns”, “we support working families” and “we have made the hard decisions”, roll as easily from the tongue as money flows from the treasury.
I saw a “funny” doing the email rounds the other day with a picture of a cove that has made some headlines in the press lately and the caption was, “finally, someone in the Labor Party who can organise a root in a brothel”.
As Sir Humphrey would say, “very droll…..”
I’ve always enjoyed stuff that takes the piss.
I digress.
What we endure is a cycle of faceless, forgetful “bla” that endlessly spews forth from any politician, of any colour at any time.
They are trustees of our hard earned, but treat it with no respect and like spoiled children they indulge in wild and unfettered fantasies, completely detached from the real world and completely unaccountable for their actions.
Perhaps my view of close to home and the world at large is old fashioned these days, but I’m forever fifteen in my heart and still living in those heady child like soul surfing days when it was all about each other.
Even that has changed now with “big is better” and the sheer enjoyment of laying back in a two-foot shore dump tube has been replaced by body mangling Ship Sterns or the black face of Teahupoo.
Thanks for the vent and I’d like to finish with some lyrics from G Wayne Thomas that comes from a tune from Alby Falzon’s Morning of the Earth.
“Love is just a simple word whose truth is easily lost”.
See wonderful pictures on Dave’s blog, A Digital Photographer, here
