The Feel-Good Hit of the Year Read online

  FOR ARDIAN

  They speak of my drinking,

  but never think of my thirst.

  – SCOTTISH PROVERB

  1

  I was born on stage. To be precise, a stage in the music room of Labassa, a derelict manor house in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs. I was born by the bay windows, where beams of light punched through the stained glass to make a century’s worth of dust dance. My parents had decided I would be delivered there because the stage had the best light in the dim room, which had been designed for concerts, not childbirth, and my dad needed all the help he could get.

  My parents had engaged the services of a midwife, a member of my mother’s feminist collective, but she hadn’t turned up. They had called her when Mum went into labour, waking her. After promising to call a doctor and come around soon, the midwife passed out again, leaving my young parents holding the ball. Mine was to be a homebirth, because, according to Dad, he and Mum wanted my ‘welcome into the world to be done in a gentle and loving manner’.

  In practice, when Mum started pushing with no midwife handy, my parents did what any inexperienced hippies would have and freaked out. My mum screamed and clutched at Dad, who was doing his best under the circumstances. Dad didn’t know how to deliver a baby: this was 1984, he couldn’t google it. He’d seen it done once before, five years earlier, when my brother Ardian had been born in the room next door, delivered with stern efficiency by the preferred doctor of Mum’s collective. Dad was a quick study, though, and safely brought me, squalling, into the gentle and loving world.

  Labassa is a sprawling 35-room manor that was remodelled in 1890 by Alexander Robertson, one of the transport magnates behind Cobb & Co., who sunk his fortune into property. It was built as a family home, and, more than that, to show off Robertson’s unbelievable wealth. In the centre of 15 acres of parkland, Labassa was all ostentation: ballrooms, grand halls, parquetry and marble statuary. It was magnificent – the ultimate in nineteenth-century flamboyance, from the embossed wallpaper to a three-storey tower that loomed over the manor and its grounds. Later the parkland was sold off for housing and the manor itself was crudely subdivided with fibro and wood into flats, and then gradually declined into something a little more slum-ish.

  By the time I was born, Labassa was a palimpsest of the lives herded through there by the fickle twentieth century. The walls of the grand entrance hall and front rooms were stained with cigar smoke from the twenties. In the forties it was bought by an émigré businessman, a Polish Jew who’d fled Nazi persecution, and it went through a string of Jewish owners who sponsored refugee families. In the fifties it housed many Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, who pieced their lives back together as best they could, kosher-butchering their poultry in the upstairs bathroom, where two decades later hippies would take acid and lie back to relax as the Victorian murals turned into Magic Eye puzzles. A wave of drug-addled beatniks then moved in, and throughout the sixties and seventies the place was frequently raided by the cops, until the beatniks were finally driven out and replaced by a group of more restrained, cerebral bohemians, including my family, and then, in 1984, me.

  Mum had moved into flat 2 in 1976, taking over the lease from her older sister and brother-in-law, who’d had enough of hippies for one lifetime and shifted to the country to build a farmhouse out of mudbricks. Dad met her two years later and within three months he’d moved in too. They paid $17 a week for a pretty majestic piece of real estate.

  Our flat comprised four rooms: the music room, designed for chamber orchestras, with its finely tuned acoustics that bounced sound off high ceilings and mahogany pillars; a billiard room, with chandeliers and gold-filigree wallpaper; a cramped annex retrofitted with a tiny kitchen and bathroom; and a dirty white smoking room that my folks called ‘the Winter Palace’, as it was the only room in the place you could successfully heat. We lived nomadically within the flat – we’d move from room to room, depending on the season, to make the most of the heat that leached out through the big bay windows.

  It always seemed to be next to freezing. If you were in the flat for more than a few hours, the chill crept under your corduroy trousers and cable-knit jumper, wrapped itself around your bones and drew out your warmth until you rang cold and hollow. Everyone who lived there was sick eight months out of the year. I would sleep in the music room, with the fire burning, but in the night mist would seep in through the windows. By morning a thick fog hung near the ceiling, veiling the frescoes and sending tendrils creeping down the walls to the floor.

  Apart from my family, most other residents were young artists and tradies, often both, but a long way off from starting families. There were only a couple of small children in the house during the eighties, apart from my brother and myself, but the place was always lousy with them – visitors often brought their kids around to play in the gardens or race up and down the grand staircase. As an adult I listen to friends from more privileged backgrounds talk blithely about their childhood visits to Paris and New York and think, I hate you, you gilded cunt, until I remember that I was raised in the fog-bound ruins of a gothic castle.

  When I tell people I grew up in a house full of hippies, their first, slightly offensive question is whether my dad is really my dad. They were bohemian, sure, but it wasn’t a sixties-style commune with everybody jumping in and out of each other’s futons. They were all a bit too square for that. My parents got together in Australia in the late seventies: the White Australia policy had ended only a few years before, whaling was still an industry, Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser was carefully dismantling the public sector, and unemployment levels were soaring. Melbourne might have missed out on a San Francisco–style summer of love, but it was about ready for the world’s biggest scummy share house.

  At a basic level, Labassa was a place where people who cared about music, art and culture could live and pursue those things for not much money. It was kind of an artists’ colony for broke snobs – a refuge in a beige suburban desert. Over the years a menagerie of students, artists, writers and musicians had moved in, hung around for a while, drunk wine and pretended to be Oscar Wilde, then hooked up, shacked up and moved out, to be replaced by younger models.

  Mum was part of a separatist feminist collective that ran a safe space for battered women. This was before the term ‘safe space’ had been co-opted by terrible poetry circles, back when it meant a place where at-risk women could go without being, you know, murdered. As the location had to be kept secret, the collective used to come together for outreach meetings in places on neutral ground – such as our flat. When they came around Dad had to make himself scarce, lurking in the music room like a pallid, vegetarian phantom.

  I slept in a cot by my parents’ bed, and whenever there was a special occasion, a party or concert or reading, they would push all our possessions into a corner and let the hippies through. It made sense, I suppose – the room’s stage and acoustics lent themselves to performance. The trickle of money that events like that brought in helped as well. They were always broke.

  Mum and Dad worked odd jobs in factories and shops, bringing in just enough cash to pursue what they really cared about – he studied literature during the day and wrote plays at night, while Mum painted and practised yoga in front of the TV. To make ends meet, they would sublet part of our flat to those passing through. An artist called Jack Cash lived in the Winter Palace for a while. He was talented, charming and eccentric, but over time his behaviour became stranger and stranger. He started bringing home roadkill so he could study the anatomy to further his sketching. When he decided to keep a dead cat in the fridge, my folks had a conundrum. On the one hand they were all about open-mindedness and letting your freak
flag fly. On the other, they were vegetarians, and keeping a cat next to the tofu weirded them out. In the end they asked Jack to leave.

  There were more than a few at Labassa who suffered from mental illness. The kind of people the place attracted – young, bright outcasts – is a population at high risk of developing psychological disorders, and some of them tipped over the edge while they were living there. Drugs were everywhere. The wisdom of the time was that weed was a harmless alternative to alcohol. Joints were passed around like Carlos Castaneda novels. People took acid to expand their minds. At least, they said that’s why they did it. I’ve always found that hippies take acid to make other hippies interesting. This was before anyone knew that LSD and cannabis could trigger schizophrenic episodes. When people with a predisposition towards psychosis went into a trip and never came out, that was just part of the experience. If someone wanted to keep a dead cat in the fridge, that was their business.

  My parents tried their hardest to ignore the expectations of the world outside the house, but those norms encroached on them. They’d had my older brother, Ardian, in 1979, and then, under pressure from their families, got married the following year. It was a simple ceremony, held in the music room, with just immediate family and a friend each backing up the bride and groom. My grandmas catered with food and flowers, and the couple exchanged vows on the stage. There was a reading from a yoga text called Wings of Power. Mum and Dad both wore suits, his with a sky-blue tie with a clip shaped like a guitar.

  They married to make their families happy, but it only half worked. My maternal grandmother worried aloud whether a ceremony outside of a Catholic church counted as a wedding. My paternal grandfather was a little more forgiving. He picked up Ardian and held him, saying, ‘I can finally hold you now because you’re no longer a bastard.’

  Mum’s sister – my eldest aunt – stared daggers at my dad throughout the ceremony because a week earlier her husband’s brother had warned him that Dad was a junkie and begged her not to let him into the family. Dad wasn’t a junkie – indeed, he’d never even seen smack – but he did love his weed, and he looked like Easy Rider dressed as John Lennon for Halloween.

  The ceremony had its detractors inside the house as well. Love was precious, sure, but marriage was awfully conformist, bourgeois even. People were starting to whisper. By the time I was born, my parents were feeling out of place. The citizens of Labassa wanted to explore an alternative lifestyle, and while one baby was a karmic blessing, two looked like selling out.

  Pressure was mounting inside Labassa and out. In 1980 the house had been put up for auction for the first time in decades, and the media took an interest. A local priest railed against the ‘hippies of Labassa’, denigrating the inhabitants in his sermons and the papers, which was unfair because their presence was the only thing keeping at bay the slimy property developers who were eyeing off the land, constantly creeping about in their white sandshoes, leaving business cards under the door in the night.

  The long-term residents had saved the house from ruin and condemnation. People moved in for decades at a time and treated Labassa as if it were their own: tradies repaired leaky roofs and plumbing, the artists did their best to preserve the manor’s murals and frescoes. In the end the National Trust bought the house, with the aim of preserving it, and slowly started squeezing out the residents. The rent went up to $32 and then $50 a week.

  Around the time the Trust bought the building, a play Dad had written back in high school was getting a run with a little theatre company a few blocks over. In it, a swami (Dad had been reading a lot of One Hand Clapping–esque titles at the time) faces eviction from his mountain and needs to make some quick cash. He sends an envoy to the States, where he starts a cult that teaches locals how to be blissfully happy while giving up their possessions. He comes into conflict with an archetypal American villain named ‘Ronald Raygun’, and hilarity ensues. It’s worth noting that this was all written nearly a decade before Reagan became president, so the moral of the story is that if you take enough acid, you really can see through time.

  The production got some press, and an Age journalist came by to profile the family. Mum, Dad and Ardian were featured in a two-page spread with a series of photographs capturing the lives of the hippies in the big old mansion, and then suddenly the place was overrun with tourists.

  The Trust started to hold open days, when they ushered sight​seers through the grand entrance hall and ballroom. On these days we had to pack up all our shit from the front rooms of the flat and move it into the adjoining room, where we would be very quiet while the Trust led the blue-rinse set through our living room. It was like the world’s most ostentatious pre-sale house inspection, where the renters have to make their lives look desirable and then disappear. While we hid in the far end of the flat, history buffs would come through and steal whatever they could – bits of woodwork, ornate tiles, scraps of wallpaper. Every time one of those open days ended we would return to find our apartment a little less grand. It was like a time-lapse video of gentrification, and it was ruining our home.

  In 1986 Mum and Dad decided they needed to give us kids an opportunity to have a place to call our own, a backyard and independence from other people. They wanted to establish themselves as a family, not just tenants in a strange experiment. By then, Labassa was not a great place for kids to be. The vibe had changed. Money started going missing from wallets and from under mattresses, and Dad’s bike vanished from outside the door one day. The air from the buoyant feeling of community was being slowly let out. The experiment may still have been magical, but it wasn’t for us any more. My parents hung on as long as they could, but the camel’s back was broken when another of the mothers in the house awoke to find a mark on her baby – a perfect imprint of a set of adult teeth. It was time to go.

  2

  My family moved into a two-bedroom weatherboard cottage in Oakleigh, a suburb 12 kilometres across town that at the time was the Greekest place outside of Athens. It was an area full of factory-job retirees who had moved there for the affordable houses with huge backyards, in which they drank coffee and grew grapevines for homemade retsina and yelled at my brother and me.

  Suburban life was hard on my parents. Deep down they hadn’t wanted to leave Labassa and so they had trouble adjusting to life outside it. Even now they miss their old life of bohemian fuck-aroundery. They never really got over it in the long run, and in the short term things got very hard, very quickly.

  Having first balanced the books and worked out that they could just manage payments on the Oakleigh house, my parents bought it. Not long after they signed the papers, the recession hit and interest rates shot up to 17.5 per cent, leaving them with a mortgage they could barely service. With no pool of hippies to look after the kids and no money to hire babysitters, Mum and Dad’s world shrunk. There were no more poetry readings or plays or feminist collectives or long nights spent smoking weed and jamming to Paul Simon.Where there was once experimental art and philosophical exploration, there were now dirty laundry and meals for fussy children and utility disconnection notices.

  Mum was working at a family planning clinic and Dad was stacking shelves at a supermarket by night while struggling to finish his arts degree at Monash University by day. Then Mum fell pregnant with my little brother Hamish, and we were, for the foreseeable future, fucked.

  Since we had no money, Mum used to bring home odds and ends for us to play with from a hospital she pulled cleaning shifts at sometimes. There were bandages for when we wanted to be Egyptian mummies and huge spinal-tap syringes that we used as water guns, which was neat since we weren’t allowed to play with toy guns, because of Vietnam. One of my favourite playthings was a promotional paperweight from the clinic, a packet of birth-control pills encased in resin, which I would prop up below the TV and pretend was the control panel for a starship. We made our own fun.

  Ardian used to roam the streets collecting aluminium cans, for which a local recycling centre would p
ay him one cent apiece. He’d carry them in a huge hessian sack that he dragged behind him like a Dickensian-era Pooh Bear. Charismatic and inventive, even as a pre-teen, he petitioned neighbourhood bars and alcoholics to store up their empties and hand them over to him in bulk. Once he’d collected several thousand cans, he cashed them in and bought an Atari, then passed the gig on to me.

  Endless bills, no sleep and less money took their toll. After Hamish was born in 1989, Mum sank into postnatal depression, which in turn sent Dad into a funk. When I think back to my early childhood, there were a lot of dark Roald Dahl novels and art-house movies, a lot of time spent listening to classical guitar or walking along wintry, windswept beaches. The whole family had a melancholic streak.

  Dad had it the worst. He was wise but had been blasted by life, just like Gandalf the White in the stories he would read me at bedtime. Sometimes he’d take us fishing, which was always a special time for my brothers and me, each of us throwing a line into the water and staring moodily out over the waves. He encouraged me to express myself through music. I would rush home from piano lessons on the weekend to play heart-rending, con dolore renditions of ‘The Entertainer’ and the Pink Panther theme song.

  Before I could even really comprehend the world, I had inherited his world view. I was a sad, thoughtful kid. Dad taught me to appreciate the transient beauty in life. One time a butterfly landed on his hand and he held it out to show me the patterns on its wings. ‘Look how beautiful it is. Look at the colours, their majesty. It will only live for a few hours,’ he told me. ‘A few hours of flight, of magnificence, after a lifetime of crawling on its belly.’

  My parents never fought while they lived at Labassa. Now it was all they did. They fought about money, about each other, about school fees and clothing and food and us. In fits of rage they would scream and wail, punch holes in walls, threaten each other, threaten to leave.