Shots

Don Walker

• Publisher: Black Inc.
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781921866715
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This extraordinary memoir begins with Don Walker's early life in rural Australia and goes up to the late '80s. In mesmerising prose, Walker evokes childhood and youth, wild times in the '70s, life on the road and in Kings Cross, music-making and much more. Shots is a stunningly original book, a set of word pictures - shots - that conjure up the lowlife and backroads of Australia.'The book shines with its descriptive sense of place. Shots carries the reader along for the ride … from the bush to Melbourne and Kings Cross and on to Europe.' —the Age 'Each sentence is precision-engineered: Walker's every memory a shot out of a barrel.' — Big Issue ' Shots is … better than good. Most of the time it is brilliant.' — Australian Book Review 'A singular, strong and beguiling book..' — Sydney Morning Herald Don Walker is one of Australia's leading songwriters - first with Cold Chisel and now as a solo performer and with Tex, Don & Charlie. Shots is his first book.

THE MOUNTAINS

IN THE NEW YEAR I MOVE UP THERE FOR REAL, BOOKED into a college two days early with three others from the coastal towns, the numbers we nailed having slung us well above our social station, shivering in jeans and T-shirts and surf or fishing jackets, welcomed to the junior common room with the kind of pre-dinner sweet sherry drunk only by winos and English paedophiles, our host and college master the ex-Cambridge authority on Japanese antiquities sneering conspiratorially through ashtray spectacles and nicotined teeth how lucky we are to have transcended our beginnings to be allowed into this idiot bastard farflung parody of an English public school and college monastery to rub shoulders with the future leaders of, well, this imperial outpost. We treat the prick like the hilarious shit beetle that he is and later get to partake of the weekly formal dinners, everyone gowned and roosting like black and green bats along the medieval mess benches pointing down the hall to high table where the aforementioned shit beetle and the predatory tutors and guests hoot and roll like a last-supper burlesque tableau on boiled corn beef and watery mash and bad red. We feast on the same below before retiring to the common room, drunken speeches, limerick competitions featuring anal functions and Chaucer ian sex as a single-cylinder operation all fuelled on rotten port bought in by the gallon. The college is filled to guzzling with the sons of graziers, squatters with their moleskins and rugby union bullet heads and little eyes and the heirs of Melbourne money smart enough to get through Geelong Grammar but too stupid to make it to Oxford or to not wear a cravat.

Jane and Michael fall in with a newer crowd, for whom higher education is internal, the welling of Sphinxian wisdom in unfired youth out of no more than the contemplation of cold galaxies on mountain evenings, subsistence feasting, the thrust of wispy Ho beards like heroes in a Soviet poster towards a new world they’re gonna build in the sky, kissing away parental love, God as she is portrayed, the obsessive concentration on personal hygiene typical of western man of the sundered spirituality, embracing the honesty of decay – there’s a smell of Crowley sliding in there undetected.

Closed with a half-dozen companions in a bare room high above the mathematics faculty with our man Lush whose eagle mind leads us deeper and deeper, fanning out and gliding like Henry Green’s owls over the snowbound topology of the soul, all eyes still, unseeing Zen stare fixed inward, smiling in wonder as he wheels our flock toward this or that feature or suddenly down the tube face of a heart-stopping singularity and through to somewhere else that don’t exist. A dozen times this might happen till he pulls us home for a perfect landing at the end of the hour, the end of the lecture, and we leave the room like kids disembarking from the Octopus or some other show-ride not that many years ago.

Midday, all pressure’s off. Maths and science lectures run through the morning and my schedule is now my own. The university refectory is filling with Arts students smoking, tanking up on coffee, marshalling toddlers, furiously scribbling overdue assignments in green biro for the history, psychology, literature and classics lectures that stretch ahead through the afternoon. The social changes that have boiled through universities across America and Europe are replicated here five years later, just as surely as every campus in the world must now have a couple of Bob Dylans and a Che Guevara or two. Several tables away Toumey presides over a shifting court of seekers, layabouts, self-styled shamen and the girlfriends, ex-boyfriends and passed-on children of the above. He’s either as brilliant as they all say he is or he’s an addled flake, or maybe he’s both, but he ain’t boring. They still talk about him last year, hauling a Strat round the stage clanging out a noise like a sheet-metal factory breaking down caterwauling free association poetry at a pop-band competition. I haven’t made up my mind and what I think isn’t important anyway, stretching out in the winter sun, wondering how long of the afternoon I can waste.

The squatter boys back down in the college are into grooming with a capital G – you know, two hairbrushes with etched silver backs that great-uncle Percival Double-Barrel looted off a dead Boer hard by the wall of Bloemfontein etc. For this lumpen aristocracy life is only rugby, rowing, drinking and preparing The Right Kinda Gel (cashmere, pearls, riding boots on the sideline, Fiat 124 provided by Daddy) to perpetuate the Family Name, tranquilised for breeding by Cat Stevens or Neil Diamond’s Hot August Night.

Meanwhile I’m onto something else, and I somehow got tickets and Tone’s got a car and we drive to Gosford on the day and catch a train to the city and get lost in the dark and arrive late at the Capitol Theatre, ushered down the aisle of a packed house and there they are, Cootie Williams, Russell Procope, Paul Gonsalves, Harry Carney, not Jeep, who died the year before, the huge Rolls-Royce sound turning over while the Duke patrols the front of the stage chewing gum, hair hauled back in a club at the nape of his immaculate collar, introducing “Satin Doll” for a lady he knows – the Duke don’t know girls – who’s “ just as smooth on the inside as she is on the out”, and Rufus Jones idles the huge sound along on all twelve cylinders with just a drive on a ride as wide as a poker table and thick as a silver dollar, and the Duke punctuates a couple of the perfect holes with a single gunshot note or a belt from the bottom end of the piano bigger than a hearse, bringing in “Sophisticated Lady”, saying “this one’s for someone out there who knows that I know she knows who she is tonight.”

Hitchhiking a thousand miles, choosing a staging point out of town to eliminate locals, well back from the highway speed-limit sign, somewhere with a wide gravel verge, a bag small enough to swing under the feet, they won’t stop if there’s no bag at all, stand alert, don’t beg, it’ll come. I used to average fifty miles an hour out on the road when I was young, takin’ on anyone.

One such day I’m hitching the five hundred miles down to Sydney and two guys pick me up in a little old beaten-up cream Austin. They’re sitting in the front and they don’t say much and they’ve both got buzz crew-cuts when the whole world’s got hair so I think “army”. Underneath my feet there’s a bundle long and hard wrapped in a sheet of canvas and another up behind the seat by my head. The first I know something’s up is when they spot a highway-side watermelon stand and stop and one of them switches off with a fork with one of the prongs bent back and I say nothing and sit tight. Down past Macksville we’re going through these mountain bends and suddenly the Macksville coppers are on our tail and pull us over into a truck rest in the forest. This copper leans in the window – “You crossed the double lines back there” – and sees these two and whips out the service revolver and it’s outa the car legs apart hands on the roof the other copper’s radioing for help and I can hear the fear and these two confirm I’m just a hitcher and I’m stood off to one side and one copper’s got these two covered and the other searches the Austin and under where my feet were there’s a high-powered rifle and up behind the seat is the same with a mountable telescopic sight and the boot’s full of gelignite, one of these guys says it’s for blowing fish and the copper says I’ve blown some fish in my time but that’s more geli than I ever seen in my whole life. I’m told get your suitcase out on that highway and start thumbing and if you’re still there in five minutes you’re going in and I do that, catch myself a semi. Later on I read two escapees from Boggo Road, armed and dangerous, do not approach, recaptured south of Macksville – anytime you like the screen between you and a bargaining chip or a shallow grave off the highway is powder thin.

*

UNIVERSITY FINISHES EACH YEAR IN A TERRIFYING THREE weeks of examinations, like staggered executions and resurrections, with three days between each. I keep my nose down because I still can’t believe I got to be here. The results won’t be available for some time, but those who teach and monitor and judge arrange a unique place for me at the Parkes radio telescope for the summer months. It’s beautiful to get flown somewhere, and I begin to feel I’d be a fool if I didn’t relax a bit, that this kind of situation comes by what I am, not by what I necessarily need to get up in the morning and do.

In Parkes I’m under the wing of John Bolton, who runs the place. He invented the first radio telescope: a receiver built into a fruit box and strung out over a vaguely parabolic cove in coastal Sydney to find some kind of focal sweet spot back in the forties. Across the world now and here in Parkes that basic arrangement has been replicated in a giant dish and antenna that can be rotated and tilted at the heavens, gathering a fifty-yard-wide whisper of radio information from the stars and far galaxies beyond, amplifying it into fields of numbers, patterns that John and his colleagues can read.

The paddocks pan out from the dish and the squat scientific buildings around for 360 degrees, flat red soil, brown tussocks and gum trees, a sheep every now and then. The Newell Highway runs north-south a couple of miles away, north to Peak Hill, south to town. It’s real hot here, but to look up at night is to peer into a bottomless ocean, not a flat jewelled mat but layer behind layer of suns, aggregations of suns, galaxies, nebulae and whirls of gas a thousand galaxies across. They say the energy gathered from out of those depths by the big dish in its decades of existence would barely lift a mosquito two centimetres. This thread of information is fed into amplifiers, peeled out of the massive seams of noise in which it’s embedded and analysed by a Japanese mainframe computer. I’ve been asked to find matches between radio signal sources and the dusting of celestial objects in photographs of star fields from a visual telescope high in the Andes, but each day draws me closer to the circuit designs on file in the electronics shop, soldering components, hoping to return to university with the mother of all piano amplifiers.

Back at uni there’s a young drummer fresh up from Sydney, just a big innocent kid barely seventeen, still getting to know everyone. He doesn’t have a kit yet but night and day wears a pair of drumsticks in a back pocket. News around the refectory is there was a party last night, and he was discovered comatose on the bathroom floor with a needle in his arm, his first hit they say. Everyone panicked about calling an ambulance, so they dragged him to the steps of the hospital and ran away rather than ring the bell, and that’s where he was found hours later, stiff as a piece of timber with the cold sun.

Drowsy as a bastard, skipping a lecture, sitting in the refectory thinking about putting a band together. I’m watching The Count, a boulevardier twelve thousand miles and fifteen years away from where that makes any sense, white suit, gold chains watch and fillings, painted blond hair and tan c’mon, does this really work somewhere? Trolling for chicks among the rancid pierced barefoot speed and tofu hippie girls? He just sits like a jewelled spider the far side of forty all cologne and talced-up socks drinking campari. Down the other end Toumey stands outside in his emaciated body, rolling his eyes like a Christ or St Stephen honking out moratory for an hour straight no notes Castro or Kim Il Sung-style, firing the enlightened few who care about what’s being done in Vietnam.

Some weekends I hitchhike back down the mountain to what used to be home. It takes an afternoon and half the night, and it’s easy to get stuck in the freezing town halfway. In the same little stucco house behind the racecourse I can sit in my old room with the piano and watch the neighbours walking their greyhounds out to the edge of town. The girl I loved at school has moved to the city. Frank moved to the city too, but he burned all the tendons in his fret hand in an electrical fire, and they say he’ll never play again.

*

WALK DOWN THE HILL TO THE ROAD SIDE OF THE COUNTRY station building then through, two or three families, sleepy passengers with nesting hair deformed to one side, swing an old port off the platform in the carriage door, walkin’ down the corridor up one side of the carriage, blinds pulled on most compartments if it’s late, lookin’ in on compartments as I’m lookin’ for mine, find the one, slide the door and lump in the port, half a rack space and swing and push it up, relax back on the hard vinyl, eye contact and nod with those that are open, curious male and wary women, wait the five then the long pull and the platform just by the windowsill begins the slow glide back. Outside light falls behind bar the sleeping country-town streets, then speed picks up and the black cut-outs of trees in the starlight pinwheel past, spinning round that point so far out there, straight through the horizon, out beyond the constellations, a universe away, does that point move the same speed as the train or is it still, and we rotate with the trees, only the other way.

The trains come draining down the lines of a state-wide catchment to Sydney like rusted snakes, inside swaying and clacking the rural poor, aboriginals and students, itinerant musicians, hippie girls and babies, brown-suited pensioners on concession rates for whom rail was always the leisuredclass way to travel who just haven’t looked around for thirty years, for whom Sydney is always Anzac Day or the Royal Easter Show, ladies with British and Irish faces at the tea urn, they stagger down to the dining car where the white linen service is now a cheerful gum-chewie counter girl who’ll nuke a pie or a sausage roll and toss ya little bricks of tomato sauce or scalding watery coffee in wax and cardboard cups that barbecue the fingers on the roll back through the carriages and still manage to arrive cold. I piss down the stainless steel cistern, watch the blur of sleepers and gravel out the bottom of the pipe and the impotent flush then bounce down the carriage corridor, window to compartment door. Speculation on the likelihood of sex with some stranger similarly turned on by the sway and jolt, time rolls and my eyes drag across even the most unlikely prey, barefoot girls with beer-bottle thighs and rank fauxEastern perfume, others, mothers, grandmothers, chewing, chattering, dreaming out the window, hairstyles whisper “small town”, reading checkout magazines picked up on a platform, low candle-watt charisma, cheezels and a diet coke, even the almost graceful slightly warped by physical and natal labour.

Down in the dining car is all the chance there is for communal travel in the old red trains where all seats are in compartments with the corridor goin’ down the side of the carriage, and that’s polluted always by a north-coast hippie with an old acoustic guitar peddling his reedy bent imitation of Tim Buckley or Rodriguez to what he hopes will be the seed of his vast market, the fired few who heard the word on the iron road to Sydney and carried the news of this new talent, star, no, Messiah to all men and women of good will in all nations, so that when this hippie stands with hands outstretched above some vast square in the new century, his millennium, among the crowd will be these score or so, maybe only a dozen, twelve’d be good, sorta biblical, yeah twelve carriers of the word who heard the news in this humble old rail carriage on this day and carried the contagion in a jihad that swept all nations, all mankind, proclaiming the new god, the hippie from the north coast, uh, can you pack another chillum Beazul I got the runs again, I’ll be back in twenty minutes, can I borrow ya paper, which bits have ya read.

Jane ever hungry and restless and ill fitting the rural hippie scene is doing weekend trips to Sydney sampling what she can of darker cultures: underground gay clubs, deconazi bands and vampire fashions, harder drugs and harder contacts. She and McGuinness on one of these junkets find early Sydney acid and lie in the Botanical Gardens watching the Bridge twist and metamorphose above the harbour. Back in the mountains the vicious plods in the local copshop somehow fluke a bust on a dealer somewhere down the chain so someone has to mount a defence and buy a tie and pay a fine and everyone surfaces out of their stoned wrestle with exhausted kids to join hands and organise a benefit. Toumey brings his band down from the hills, him on acoustic, Fingle on goatskin drums, a few others, and they run it like a ritual, specially woven matting laid down, specially fired lamps in the corners, musicians kneeling, two girls dancing a long raga that begins with a whisper and enters ecstatic plateau two hours later, winding down with a long expulsion of breath at 2 a.m. as mute couples load sleeping kids into ancient vans for the long moonlit country lanes home.

Bundled on a vinyl bench cross-tracks wise under a railway blanket and who knows what time it may be, anytime from one to five, jolted and pulled first headlong then feet, the motion is wrong for sleep but that’s alright. All around is the slumber and breached privacy of strangers as only their family and lovers get to see them. I lie entombed and busting for a leak and crawl out bouncing side to side down the corridor over half a mile and irrigate half a mile more again of track and stagger back but sleep don’t come, drifting through the years to the roof of the world, a two-man compartment climbing the high deserted passes Beijing to Ulan Bator, dreaming about a card I carried from the FritzLang girl featuring a confused and useless young exile who loses himself however many thousand miles from home, and the hours crawl on till I wake on a glide, no rattle, sneakin’ in sleepy outer suburbs of Sydney, pull upright and stare round the musty eyes and dry messed hair of the other three or four sitting staring themselves out the window still half asleep, still half wrapped in a railway cotton blanket. I throw mine off a skin of caked sweat and go searching out a railway tea, mud-coloured, thin and microwaved to scalding, nurse it and watch the lines multiply, the glide slower still, one or two stops in a widening delta of tracks then into the platform, heave the bags free and haul ’em down what seems to be half a mile by the still and steaming carriages into Central.

I alight behind an old Digger, follow him in on account of his luggage that leaves no room to pass. He’s short and thin and dried-up, there’s only bristle coming out of every hole, bones and stringy muscles and skin and gristle driven on only by pride and contempt to left and right. Hanging off him’s this 1947 brown suit with a faint pinstripe and fourinch-wide lapels, one of two fitted by a country tailor on a young battle-hardened country man, thick lifetime cloth pressed however many times and packed and hung by a young wife with all the homespun tricks to preserve such a thing through Sunday morning sun and winter Sunday rain. He’ll always look good by a country steeple, but put him in Pitt Street against this decade’s light cuts on lawyers and city workers half his age and he’s out of a horror movie, a funeral suit from a previous century, and he knows all that but it’s all part of the contempt – it ain’t this decade’s fashion or these young shits’ willingness to eat anything, put up with even city living to be for them at the right place at the right time it’s the man within, it ain’t style like they’d perceive, his nails are clean and these manicured sheep’ll never know the air so sharp, the creek still as a mirror, what it’s like to throw a line into the pre-dawn sky.

The world by now has lost all grace, all cool, the ideal attitude and pose born in the soft impressionable clay of late childhood and held in the soul is abroad no more, lost with the beach-hall creatures of ten years before and the Bodgies from the foothills to the west, cars, guns and music, Johnny Cash and Elvis, speech modulated to beat poetry and rhyming slang, jewellery, quiffs and eyelashes, murderous skill, reeling in the snake girls with just a rock and a roll, beautiful lawless youth, nihil and pills under a rural moon, back-seat passion Roy Orbison late-night radio cane fields burning something breaking the black surface of the creek, who knows what’s dislocating the ten-year-old mind into dreams of the ideal now, however many generations behind.

College, 10 p.m., looking at work set weeks ago now due in eleven hours sitting in a pile I dumped earlier in the day on top of other stacks from other days. I’m thinking I’ll just wander down and watch the card school, and do that. The usual four or five are playing poker for low stakes, flaying each other and anyone who wanders in stupid enough to open their mouth with the kind of languid verbal wit that cuts a soul to confetti. I move on round the corridor, other open doors, circling back to my room thinking work now, leave the building instead and cross the courtyard and climb the stairs to a darkened common room, fold the covers back from the piano and send an hour of aimless meanderings chiming softly across thirty feet of empty parquetry in the cool as time ticks on, finally torn away by guilt and another night lost, back to my door, the piles of raw lecture notes untouched, set the alarm for 5 a.m. and crash.

*

IN ITS DAY THE BEAST WAS GREEN, GOING BY THE surviving flecks still lodging in the rusted hull, but now shimmering in the petrol fumes of a Moree smash-repair bowser she has attained a new magnificence, sucking down the 42-degree heat beating on the iron and belting us down the Newell Highway to Narrabri then west, chasing Wee Waa farm labour in the sump of the NSW penal system, a thousand square miles of scrub flattened by California planters to cotton fi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Carrs Creek
• Town
• The Mountains
• Adelaide
• Melbourne
• Kings Cross
• The Road
• Paris
• Broome
• Siberia
• Home