1980@40

January 1980. 17 and hungover, I was staring down the failure of my Year 12 and my driving test. I had joked probably once too often and angrily about joining the army because my sister pleaded successfully with my Mum to pack me off to Hubbards for another tilt at Uni. Well, I didn't know anyone there so all the parties and crap I'd been doing instead of studying were off the table. If I could keep my head down for just one year.

I knew I'd done this to myself but I was still 17 so I blamed them for not telling me sooner. Still, I had a way out. So, Off I went on the great silver bird to Brisbane. My brother Michael picked me up from the airport and drove me, along with his wife and tiny child along the scenic route to Auchenflower where I'd call home for the next four and a bit years. Brisbane felt like a city. I liked how I could hear the people next door and how the streets were all undulating as though someone had come in and squeezed them into hills and valleys to make room for the new houses. Michael and Honora had visitors from overseas that afternoon. We had tea and cake and it felt grown up. Then, after the visitors left, Honora picked a fight with Michael which had such a ringing emotional violence to it I could only stand and gape. That happened almost every day I shared that house with them. 

Monday and admissions. Mum had again shown that she was better with the idea and the gesture than the admin so I had to work it out with the Principal, the wiry and wonderful Doc Squire. So I mostly brooded and smoked in the study room as the sounds of the classes murmured from the hallway of the dusty second floor of the old brick clump in Charlotte Street that Hubbards was. And I pondered all the wrong that I'd faced, all the smug academic monsters who succeeded at my expense who would regret every beaming smile once I rose in force with .... Oh that's the other thing, talented and trammelled, friendless in a new place and feeling my best stab at identity was through contrarianism I started calling myself a fascist. No, really.

Apart from the pure obscenity of it, here's what was wrong with that: I had no agenda. Nothing, that is, beyond a sense that I deserved the adoration of the despot. Gets sillier. At no time did I give up my disgust at the Bjelke Petersen regime in Queensland which was, with its politicised police force, all but a fascist state already. Nor did I give up any part of the fantasy that I would soon be a rock star (which was diametrically opposite to any goosestepping daydreams I was having). Also, the only way of becoming a fascist leader of any kind is to have a following and the only way of getting that is to appeal to the types who would do all the biffing necessary for the start of such a career and the only way of getting any of that sorted was to deal with such people in such a way that wouldn't end with my being binned in seconds of the attempt. Non-success at being a fascist is a failure I'll take any day. A year later I was comfortably absorbing the ways of the left which is where I have remained. In any case all that became moot. I got a social life and the blackshirt line was just a conversation starter, then a joke, then kind of nothing.

At the other end of it I had so successfully self-isolated that I had become a decent sort of student and was able to accommodate both books and parties. It was actually a pretty good life for a year. Then again, I was living with the most unsettled marriage I have ever experienced. When Honora wasn't tearing at my brother for having constant affairs (her imagination from what was probably a single slip-up on his part) she was targetting me for supposedly never doing any cleaning. She didn't do much herself but I figured if I took the worst job and did it perfectly on a weekly basis she'd fuck off and it worked. Every Saturday afternoon I'd clean the bathroom free of spots while Sounds played in the next room. If a song was good I'd stop scrubbing the loo and go and look. I had no player and all my records were back in Townsville. But there was 4ZZZ. And Night Moves was on the weekend for when I had to stay home and there was always something good on that. And that was the next thing I liked about 1980, the music was really good.

Because I've been doing the albums separately I'll just call the singles here.

The Vapors' Turning Japanese was a clever take on teenage angst that (despite the literal images of the vid was not about its title or chorus) while Major Matchbox's Rockabilly Rebel matched a slinky verse with an embarrassing football hooligan chorus, Split Enz kept their Neil Finn winning streak going with I Got You while Queen pleasantly surprised with their understated rockabilly Crazy Little Thing Called Love, John Lennon sounded like an old uncle with glory days stories in Starting Over and in Coming Up Paul MacCartney sounded like his cousin, John Foxx turned the aircon down to Arctic for Underpass with a video that looked like Ballardian sci-fi, I rolled the dial of all the stations in the study room downstairs to hear Ashes to Ashes again and almost got it on a personal rotation while swatting for exams, see also Psycho Chicken by the Fools which I can't listen to now but thought was hilarious then, like Xanadu Can't Stop the Music was put into the water supply and I wanted both boiled into the ether but Brass in Pocket by the Pretenders was fresh and bright and Space Invaders was the ugliest earworm of the year, He's my Number One was a song I only knew by the chorus because that's all I ever saw on Countdown when they'd play a little bit in the top ten montage but masterproggers Pink Floyd actually had a big hit with their stern ditty about school Another Brick in the Wall while Ghengis Khan thought Moscow was a place where every night night night there was laughter and every night night night there was love, while Blondie yelled out a banger about love for sale with Call Me from the movie American Gigolo which might well have been set in Funky Town, according to Lipps Inc but wasn't where you'd take a Holiday in Cambodia (that was schoolies week and HiC was one of the anthems of that particular fortnight) and Flowers did as much with We Can Get Together and before that with the intriguing and still strong I Can't Help Myself which was what U2 might have been thinking when they sang I Will Follow over one of the decades biggest and best guitar riffs and not to be outdone in the brightness stakes Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark mixed '50s kitsch with the atomic bomb in Enola Gay which was a B29 while the later model B52s dazzled with the whirling Private Idaho which is a state that might have had forests but they weren't anything like the forest in the Cure's A Forest while Siouxsie and the Banshees Happy House might have been in its very dark centre and if Madness plinked and cranked about school days in Baggy Trousers Talking Heads rose with the big spooky epic Once in a Lifetime and Joy Division chilled us all down with a whistling keyboard riff and a cry from the grave with Love Will Tear Us Apart.

And then there were exams in November. They were held in Cloudland, a big spring loaded ballroom where everyone from Glenn Miller to The Clash had or would play. And on the day of the last exam I crunched over the hail in the gutter as Mark pulled up in his car to ask if I needed a lift down to the Coast for Schoolies. Thumbs up and see ya later. Whatever that exam was I could only think of the end of the day. After a self-treat of a long neck of something beery I packed a bag in time for Mark to drop by and we headed for the freeway. The big leggo blocks of Surfers Paradise rose in the dusk in invitation.

We got to his family unit on the somethingth floor of a high rise on Broadbeach. We made pasta for dinner and I ogled the flats of the buildings across the road, open living rooms and money. We went out for a drink later just because. Not a rage but a start. The next days were parties in canal-land, the flat the girls were staying at, beach bonfires, walking through the streets of Mermaid Beach after Friday the 13th at the cinema as the news of the Balaclava Killer seeped into the airwaves. So much. I will never eat another Chiko roll but I will always remember Kaylene (but I'm meant to say that). 

Mark dropped by the flat to pick me up. I didn't want to go but my plane was that day. We drove back to Brisbane in the rain with Flowers and Tubeway Army on cassette. There was a card on my dresser. It was from a friend back in Townsville. Her common law husband had been shot. The front of the card was a cute watercolour of a wombat. The news and this picture drew a rising swell of nausea in me like that one drink too many after midnight when you're rolling around the lawn in the dark. It was Rik. I knew him well and liked him a lot. Dead. Not just dead. Murdered. I showered and tumbled into bed and slept till noon. 

Michael tried to get out of giving me a lift to the airport but I prevailed. The flight was easy. Mum picked me up at the airport and it was good to hear her chirping mundanity. Dad had built this thing and new people had moved into the rental house with my brother Greg (his former flatmates had kept their rent, which was meant to be paying me my allowance which meant that I really did go without food for a week) and Nita moved into Nanna's old place etc. etc. I threw my bags into my old room, went to the kitchen to fix a lemonade and vermouth, collapsed into a banana lounge by the pool and heard the song So Long by Fischer Z play from somewhere nearby. It wasn't the words, just the feel of the song. It got to me. I sipped, closed my eyes and wept for a few minutes. Parties. Home. Parties. At the end of January my little brother ran through the rain to fetch a big yellow envelope from the letterbox. It was for me. I'd got in to Griffith Uni. Summer.