The Summer of ’82 Read online

  ‘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. Maybe he could get me a job lugging amps for the Doobies.

  But at this point Greg went a bit official on me. ‘The music industry is very hard to get into,’ he said sternly. ‘Look, why don’t I put down “retail” – maybe you could get a job at Brashs or Allans if you like music?’

  He wrote a few notes on the form in front of him, told me to check the job boards and said, ‘Keep in touch.’

  Such a positive experience for a first-time unemployed youth like myself! If I had to get a job, I thought, I wouldn’t mind working at Brashs – that store was a magnet for alternative teenagers like me. I could get a job there and talk about Duran Duran all day to new wave girls. It would be just like a nightclub but the girls would have to talk to me because they’d be buying records from me. My first day of unemployment was looking promising already.

  Sadly, the CES has now been replaced by private job placement agencies. The biggest one is the Salvation Army – but how many tambourine players does the world need?

  From the CES it was a short bike ride to the DSS – and yes, there were plenty of jokes about Nazis. Because the DSS did appear to employ a different type of person. They seemed angry and upset that you were getting money from the government for doing nothing, while they themselves were trapped behind counters dealing with drug-affected people who would scream at them if their payment had not come through. An average day at the DSS was like Saturday night in a hospital emergency ward – during a full moon. People would yell abuse like ‘Where’s me fuggin’ money?’ and then throw a chair around just to make their point. The constant insults had definitely jaded the staff.

  (A few years later, by the way, my mates and I were living together in a share house. The DSS commandant looked at my file and said, ‘There’s five of you guys on the dole in that house – are you having a good time? Having fun, are we?’ I hesitated a moment and then replied, ‘Yes … yes, we are.’)

  The DSS offices were painted in a stark white. We had to have another interview, and this time we were separated. It was as if we were being interrogated by the police, except we had no lawyer. This time there was no Doobie Brothers, no smells of doobies, and no long hair at all. Just a bitter public servant who started the conversation with these words: ‘So you left school to become a dole bludger, didn’t you?’

  Was that a question or a statement? It all seemed very Mike Willesee. This guy was going in hard, but I knew I had done my learning and now I was applying for the unemployment benefits that I was entitled to. And I’d only left school because I ran out of years – I would have stayed longer if I could.

  ‘Well, you’re going to have to wait six weeks for your first payment,’ the DSS man snapped. ‘But hopefully my friends at the CES will find you a job by then. There’s regular openings at the fibreglass factory in Bayswater. Could see you fitting in there. And they haven’t had a fire for a while.’

  If he was trying to scare me, he was going about it the right way. ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘Greg at the CES thought I could get a job at Brashs.’

  The guy snorted. ‘Son,’ he said, ‘when was the last time you saw a bloke like you working at Brashs? They employ attractive young girls there. And the occasional poof.’

  How did he know I wasn’t gay? I should have worn my Bronski Beat T-shirt just to confuse him. Boy, this post-school real world was pretty harsh – I’d been out two hours and already I was facing discrimination.

  I filled out a few more forms and was told to go. As I left I thought I heard the guy say, ‘You sicken me.’

  It turned out six weeks was the standard waiting period for the dole. Still, even if we got into uni, we’d have that magic four weeks of payment. But if we failed the HSC we’d be seriously unemployed and would actually need that money.

  Oh well – not to worry. Apparently there were plenty of jobs at the fibreglass factory. And there hadn’t been a fire for a while. Bonus.

  SUBURBAN BOY

  Let’s take a moment to consider what 1982 was like. The early ’80s were very much like the 1970s – just because we changed decades it didn’t mean people automatically threw out their flared trousers or cleansed their record collections of all things Zeppelin-like. The ’70s hung on for ages.

  In 1982 we were still sporting bowl/mullet hybrid hairdos that covered the ears. Our local hairdresser flat-out refused to cut above the ears. ‘If you want that,’ she would say, ‘go to the barber.’ But the barber was an old guy who had learnt to cut hair in the Korean War, so he only did crew cuts.

  It took a long time for things to change, especially in the outer suburbs. By 1982 punk was just reaching us in dribs and drabs. In fact, everything went in dribs and drabs. For a start, there weren’t as many cars on the road. Most families had one car, and the dad took that to work. We were considered fortunate as Dad had given Mum his old car. Some mums worked but a lot didn’t – or, like my mum, they did it part-time so they could be home for their children. Mum worked a series of retail jobs that allowed her the flexibility to get home at three p.m. and have that plate of delicious (they weren’t) rock cakes waiting for us after school.

  Everyone knew the kids whose parents both worked full-time – they were known as ‘latchkey kids’. That was a term which was always being used on A Current Affair. ‘Are latchkey kids destroying the world?’ Mike Willesee would ask, looking earnestly into the camera. I can answer that question, Mike: no, they were just destroying their own homes. We always wanted to go to the latchkey kids’ houses, because it was party central. The TV was always on, junk food was on the table and teenagers would be playing spin the bottle or strip poker.

  My family lived in the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne but it could have been anywhere in suburban Australia. Our suburb, Mitcham, had been settled by young families in the 1950s. People like my parents were escaping from the ‘slums’ of the inner city for the greenery of the outer east. It was described in the paper as a ‘classic lower-middle-class’ suburb, full of teachers, nurses and tradies. They may have seen it as paradise but we saw it as the middle of nowhere.

  On the railway station someone had graffitied ‘Mitcham the town of action – ha ha’. I say ‘someone’ but in fact I recognised the handwriting – it was my older brother Mark’s. There were four boys in the O’Neil family and by 1982 just about the only thing we all agreed on was that Mitcham was a dump.

  It hadn’t always seemed that way. When we were young children it was brilliant. There was plenty of bush to play in, drains to go down – hell, we even used to go yabbying in the local dam. We were practically Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.

  Now that we were all young adults, though, we wanted out. Trev had fled for New Zealand, where he’d formed a band called The Hip Singles. Even playing dodgy pubs in Kaukapakapa was superior to hanging around Mitcham. So the rest of us were firmly stuck in outer suburbia. I had to hang around to get my HSC results to see what my future held. I couldn’t really go househunting and write in the ‘Employment’ s
ection: ‘Waiting for my results but have applied for the dole as a back-up. And Greg at the CES thought I could get a job at Brashs, man.’ Landlords didn’t really go for that kind of tenant.

  The house we lived in was the classic three-bedroom brick veneer, with a rumpus room added on sometime in the 1970s. It had one heater, one toilet, one TV, one phone and no air-con. We shared bedrooms, lined up for the shower and fought over what to watch on telly. It was a life of bunk-beds, bean-bags and dinners of chops and three veg.

  So we were all squashed into this small house, but it was surrounded by a large backyard and a decent front yard. The backyard contained Dad’s greatest construction effort: a Clark Rubber above-ground octagonal four-foot pool. He’d forgone the aid of professionals and put it up himself.

  We loved that pool – so many bombs, horsies and whirlpools every summer. On hot days our pool was a magnet for the neighbourhood kids, so we had plenty of what we called ‘summer friends’. Kids would just turn up in their bathers with their towels around their necks. No wonder Dad’s construction buckled in the summer of ’89 … The collapsed pool flooded our next-door neighbour’s vegie patch, but by then it had done its job and we had all moved out.

  Anyway, I woke up on my first day of freedom and had my usual breakfast of Coco Pops and peanut butter on toast. The benefits of a nutritious breakfast had yet to hit the O’Neil household. Mum did go through a stage where she sprinkled All-Bran on top of our Coco Pops, but that didn’t last long. For a while we even went to Choco Crunch, which was like Coco Pops on steroids – big puffed-wheat things flavoured with chocolate. They had a pirate on the box, which seemed slightly more adult than the monkey on the Coco Pops.

  Mum hurried about the kitchen that morning, making breakfast, packing lunches, probably even getting dinner started. Joyce O’Neil was a powerhouse in the cooking department. (I remember Dad cooking once, when Mum was sick, and it was horrible. Raw onion with barely cooked eggs and some baked beans.) Mum was also big on talking, her nickname being ‘Joyce the Voice’. She had dedicated her life to her four boys and she loved being involved in our lives. She had catchphrases that she would throw around, little pearls of wisdom such as, ‘Courting couples should always sit on the couch.’ My favourite was, ‘No one likes a girl who sleeps around.’ To this I always replied, ‘Well, someone must have liked her.’

  ‘So what are you boys up to now that school’s finished?’ Mum asked.

  ‘I’m very busy,’ my brother Glenn said. ‘I have to go to the school and finalise the last student newspaper, and I have to hand over my student council papers to Melanie Waters.’

  I haven’t mentioned Glenn yet. Glenn was my twin brother and a model student. In fact, he was a model citizen of Australia, even the world. Yes, he was the good twin and I was the bad twin.

  Glenn was the kind of kid who helped out in the school library at lunchtime. He was on our school’s student council and seemed to have the ear of the principal, Mrs Worledge. It was not uncommon for him to say something like, ‘I was speaking to Mrs Worledge the other day about the student exchange program, and we decided …’

  You see, with twins, one is always labelled the smart one and the other is the … not-so-smart one. Glenn was given the desk in our room to do his homework, while I had to use the billiard table in the rumpus room. Actually I preferred to do my homework on my lap while watching quality TV, such as Prisoner or The Brady Bunch. I was a bit safer there from the stray billiard balls that were liable to fly around.

  ‘David, what are your plans for today?’ Mum asked.

  ‘I might see what Noddy is doing,’ I replied with no confidence at all. ‘And maybe I’ll go down to Brashs and see if there are any jobs.’

  ‘I don’t think your father would be happy with you just wandering the streets. You should do something constructive, like collect cans for money.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Glenn chimed in. ‘It’s called cash-a-can, Mum. You can make good money.’

  ‘You can not,’ I said. ‘Remember how Noddy collected that huge sack of cans? It took him weeks and he only got $3.60.’

  ‘That’s because the guy found out he put rocks in the cans to make them weigh more,’ Glenn added.

  ‘Honesty is the best policy,’ Mum said. Another pearl of wisdom.

  ‘I’m not doing that,’ I said angrily. ‘You’re better off going down the creek near the Box Hill Golf Club and collecting the golf balls to sell them back to the golfers.’

  ‘That’s illegal,’ said Glenn. ‘And dangerous.’

  Ignoring my brother, I made my plea to Mum. ‘Look, I just finished school – I worked hard and I need a bit of holiday.’

  ‘Worked hard?’ Glenn snitched. ‘You didn’t even read the books for English Lit.’

  ‘Yeah, but I read the study guides. I know Huck Finn is about a kid on a raft.’

  ‘Reading Cliffs Notes is not the answer.’

  ‘Okay, boys, settle down. Just remember you were in the womb together, so no matter what you think, you are best friends.’

  This coming from the same mother who once told me, ‘Remember that you’re born alone and you die alone.’ Forgetting that I was in fact a twin.

  But I was best friends with Glenn. How could I not be? We shared a room, we used to wear the same clothes, so we didn’t really have a say in it. Still, I got sick of being identified as one of a matching pair. Whenever Siamese twins are interviewed, they always say, ‘I never want to be separated from my twin.’ Yeah, I’m calling bullshit on that. That is the number-one thing they would like, even if it were for just one day. Well, I was breaking out from the twin label: I was forging my own path, I was going up to the school to finalise the last student newspaper … no, hang on, that was Glenn. I was going to do something important, something crucial – I just didn’t know what it was yet.

  So what to do? These were the days before mobiles, texting and Facebook. How did we live like that? Quite easily – we had this thing called a landline. For those who don’t remember, that was a phone with a cord attached to it.

  Before texting, we had a method we called ‘Give the phone a couple of rings’. If you needed to be picked up from the train station you rang home from a payphone and let the phone ring a couple of times, then you would hang up. You’d save your twenty cents and Dad would know it was you needing to be picked up. For my dad this was the perfect way to use the phone – quick and with no cost. When the phone would ring, he’d yell, ‘Don’t pick it up! It’s your mother at the station! Don’t pick it up!’ Just to annoy Dad, one of us would pick it up. ‘Oh, hi, Mum … okay. Dad! Mum needs to be picked up from the station.’ Nothing would make him angrier.

  Actually there was one thing that would make him angrier, and that was when someone would ring the house during dinner. He would slam his cutlery down and yell, ‘There it is, the bloody six o’clock phone call! Every bloody night!’

  Dad was also obsessed about us making any calls. Whenever we were on the phone he would walk past and say, ‘Keep it quick – I’ve got an important call coming through!’ As if. No one rang Dad, and if they ever did it would be one of us giving him a couple of rings from the station.

  The phone, being our only form of communication with the outside world, became more and more important in our household as we kids grew older. When Mark became a Telecom technician he hooked up another phone in Mum and Dad’s bedroom, and we used to have our more private conversations there. These became more frequent as we boys turned into men and needed to talk to girls on the phone. But the bedroom phone was on the same line as the other phone. It was not unknown for Dad to pick up the lounge-room phone and yell, ‘Wind it up!’ while you were mid-conversation.

  The other big annoyance, when you were talking to a girl, was your brother picking up the other phone to listen in. You’d hear a tell-tale click followed by some breathing. ‘Hang on a minute, Sandra,’ you’d say, then you’d cover the mouthpiece with your hand and shout, ‘Mum! Mark’s listening in
! Tell him to put the phone down!’

  On that day I decided to forgo the phone and head out on my bike, like Clint Eastwood in Pale Rider, to start whatever it was that was so important. My mates and I didn’t really have a meet-up place to hang out at – there was no milk bar where we would all sit around in a booth, Happy Days-style. There was, however, the bike shop, and the staff there seemed to put up with us. We generally spent a lot of time looking at expensive bikes and then maybe buying one new pad for our BMX handlebars.

  Bikes were so important to us: they were the closest thing we had to a motorbike or a car. And the arrival of the BMX had made them so much cooler and more fun. At the bike shop there were rows and rows of Mongooses, Torkers and Redlines, and a repair area where Jeff the bike mechanic would be working. Sure, we were getting a bit old for BMXs, but at our age we might actually win a few competitions because we were bigger and stronger than anyone else.

  Noddy was already at the bike shop. Now, Noddy was like my new best friend, since my twin had turned into such a model citizen over the last couple of years. Noddy and I were what you might call geographical friends, in that he lived about eight houses away. Apart from BMX riding, we didn’t have much in common. In fact, in primary school he had been the tough kid I was scared of. You know, the one who would smoke, wag school and draw homemade tattoos on his arm.

  I have a clear memory of our last day of primary school that always makes me laugh. These days, kids have a graduation dinner when they finish Year 6; at my kid’s school, every child has to make a speech about another kid in the graduating class, saying nice things about them. Well, on my last day at primary school Noddy came up to me, punched me on the arm and said, ‘See you at high school, cockhead!’

  But it was actually at high school that we bonded. There were only a few kids who went from Heatherdale Primary School to Mitcham High, and Noddy and I were two of them. Because we lived nearby we would ride our bikes to school together.

  Noddy turned out to be a god in high school. He was fearless when it came to standing up to teachers, doing pranks and having fun. I used to come up with the ideas and he would make them happen. There was one genius prank where we gradually stole all the pot plants from the library without the librarians noticing. I didn’t have the guts to pick up a fern and drop it out an open window to someone waiting below, but Noddy did. One day the librarians finally realised that all their precious plants were gone. It was like a very slow flora prison break. At this point we decided to deliver ransom notes asking for ridiculous demands: ‘The library must get two copies of every Tintin book …’ In the end we got caught, and I’m pretty sure it was Glenn who tipped them off. Noddy would even drive his mum’s car around without a licence … like I said, he was fearless.