~ lucas aid

Though I may have crystallised my brain in the aftermath, Thursday’s show came off pretty well. Perhaps there weren’t quite enough people there to deal entirely with Steve Lucas’s chronic back, but it was fulsome nevertheless. Every time I saw him, Lucas lay entirely prone on in one of the upstairs band rooms, his voice growly with painkillers, barely lifting his head as he pursued quiet conversation with his girlfriend, the singer of Dollsquad, who like the couch on which he lay was clothed head to toe in black vinyl. How he made it up the Geidi Prime-style industrial stairs to get there, I cannot imagine.

It was good to play a grungy down-to-earth gig. Morgen and Jane were there, and Nurin and Chrissie ... but there were lots of faces who haven’t seen us yet, in this latter day incarnation. Like every one of these new Ears shows it was ridiculously enjoyable, liberating, soul-lifting ... someone in the band-room pinned a badge on me that read ‘Music is Love’. It is love indeed, despite an occasional world shattering 120K hum on stage

And we got some of the most interesting reactions. Someone, it may have been Charlie Owen, said that when he arrived, during the Ears set, his interest was piqued by what he thought was some young interesting new band - that was until he saw the grey hair. Someone else excused the Nick Cave influence in my stage movements when he realised that everyone must have moved like that back then. Someone said we sounded like Muse but without the annoying whine. Even the enigmatic ‘Donald’ said he was ‘surprised’ and that he ‘didn’t mean it as an insult’. Kerry (Simpson), who has been filling in when Cathy McQuade can’t make it down from Sydney to do vocals, also got some really good reports.

Ashton Davey, who organised the show, deserves a word too.

My head feels full of cotton wool and I’m going to give up trying to string words together. A final thanks to Simon Polinski who during these past week has finished the masters of The Ears and Beargarden material now available for download on Bandcamp. It’s a satisfying feeling, a sense of resolution, making that music available again. It’s no longer orphaned, half-forgotten. And it’s about time The Ears released an album.

Below is a picture of me 'fixing up' some vocals at Simon's place. On Thursday someone actually asked me if I use botox! People say the weirdest things.

~ pressure release

I realised the other day - perhaps belatedly - why I’m seeing so many old-fashioned cigarette cases, particularly in the hands of women. It’s the images of diseased flesh, of course, which the arbiters of social control place with good intent on the commercial packaging, Evidently, some have begun to weary of carrying about with them, on open display, these increasingly nasty, glutinous, decomposing visions of a possible future.

On a lighter note, my legal situation continues to look brighter. It’s strange that every single person I’ve told about my conundrums has said ‘you won’t lose your house, not for that’ - while the lawyers and the law itself said - if I was found guilty it would mandatorily be seized No discretion. Well my friends were right. The house appears safe. I can garden again. I can make it nice. I can get Robert to fix things without the horrible possibility looming that it would be torn from my hands.

Yesterday, in the County Court, I pled guilty to cultivation and possession, in exchange for a nullification of the trafficking and commercial supply charges. Now my friends are telling me I won’t go to jail. I hope they’re right. There’s still a fight to be had.

I’ve been obsessing over the re-lease of old material of late, and over music generally. The old Beargarden album ‘All That Fall’ is available, for better or worse, on Bandcamp.com and will spread to the other digital outlets. I was interviewed by some eighties aficionados the other day in my lounge room and they were terribly excited. Typically, the little black cat captured and tortured and consumed a skink in the background while we were talking. For those interested in Beargarden, there’s a bits and bobs album - The Word That Refers To The Word That Refers to Walt Disney - becoming available in the same place this week. It’s better than the other one, I think.

With the help of the redoubtable Simon Polinski, and his tremendous hospitality, we’ve been collecting up and mastering the Ears record (Dogs in Space). It looks like 16 tracks now and it also will also appear on Bandcamp within days.

We’re on the bill at Lucasaid. Thursday the 2nd December - one week from today

~ a sacred kingfisher

Here's Cathy and I after the Ding Dong show. If I've ever had more fun on stage, I can't remember it.


First off, thanks to Amanda for getting me back to this blog. Obviously, I've fallen out of the habit of updating it, though not of writing generally - of course. Ambergris, the play I've mentioned often over time, needs just a little polishing before it's complete, and I've been working on a couple of novelettes which will soon be in need of publishing.

But first things first. I was walking Polly to rainbow guides this afternoon when I saw a flash of colour in someone's driveway. Colour and movement. Now, being somewhat of a birder, and having a pretty good knowledge of the birdlife around here, I was astounded to see an absolutely gorgeous male sacred kingfisher, flopping about on the concrete, unable to fly, presumably injured. Polly helped me capture it and we brought it home, boxed and watered it. Thankfully, it is not the kind of bird that drops dead from shock. Rather the opposite. As you'll notice from the picture, it has a reasonable amount of fight left in it.

It's presence in Mt Waverley is really quite a mystery. Polly, strangely, named it The King of Switzerland.

Next, for anyone interested in the long delayed re-release of the Beargarden album, let me raise your hopes once more. Bruce Butler and I had another meeting today. We have sworn to a schedule and both the Beargarden and Ears albums will be available well before the end of the year. Nothing will stop us this time, though they are likely to be online releases initially.

I'm just dipping my toe in the water today, so that's all for now.

* 4 july 1981 saturday

Things are moving in a satisfactory manner. The casting agent, Victoria Holt, seems very impressed with me. She tells me I have some kind of mystique and has offered to find me more work in the vein of the Ovaltine ad, if I agree to have her as my personal manager. She is drawing up some kind of contract.

I’ve been a strikingly efficient being of late. The general lassitude in the group is bothering me, but we are sounding good. Six songs now, one an instrumental.

I had a dream last night in which there were seven layers of existence. I lived in the second, but found a way into the first where dwelled ‘the ennobled horses”.

Carol is completely slack. I’ll look for another house later this week. I’ll have the money.

I’ve been drinking less and feel as if it’s doing me good. Victoria Holt rang Philippa yesterday to try out for something, but she slept through the call. She was very depressed when I arrived yesterday afternoon, but we had a good night. I like Philippa, but …

I must do this. I must do this … But I’ll probably do that

*

That offer by Victoria Holt was a bit of a cusp point for me. I understood that she was quite influential in her industry, and that I might have had some kind of career there, but after I let her know that music would always be my priority, her enthusiasm waned.

Often, in these latter days, I think of myself as being a complete slackarse in my youth, but perhaps I’m a little hard on myself. From these diary entries, I seem to be quite driven, quite determined. Whether my actions conformed to my resolutions is another matter, I guess. I had my venal urges to contend with and they were truly a force to be reckoned with.

Five days out from the show now. Hair: growing. Clothes: undecided. Body: firming. Brain: whirring. Heart: tremulous.

In a dream last night there were so many people at the show that I had to use a helicopter to get to the bandroom ..

I saw Watchmen again yesterday on video …

“Every day the future looks a little bit darker, but the past, even the grimy parts of it, keep on getting brighter …

Diaries - 1981

* June 14 1981 Sunday 8.00pm

I’m auditioning for an Ovaltine ad. Small Kate arranged this. There are photos tomorrow.

On Friday, after coming back from Franca’s and the most potent trip I’ve ever experienced, I took heroin and went to the Seaview. Afterwards, I went back to Kate S---‘s.

The following night I passed out at Phillipa White’s house. Our first practice is tomorrow.

I’m still very determined.

*

A laconic yet evocative entry.

First, the Ovaltine ad. I wouldn’t want to upstage any later posts, but it’s safe to say that the exact product was Ovaltine flavoured milk in a carton, that the ad had a ‘Blitz’ theme, and that I got the part.

I recall going to Franca’s. I was with Gus, at his place in Punt Rd across from The Office Hotel. His friend Simon dropped by driving a taxi and proceeded to flatter me on my talents as a frontman. This taxi-driving sycophant turned out to be Simon Polinski, who wound up joining Beargarden on bass, and ultimately became a legendary, Aria-winning producer/engineer.

Franca lived in the hills, in a place called The Patch. I can’t remember why we wanted to go there - surely it wasn't for the mushrooms - but I’ll never forget how astonished I was that Simon happily drove us in his Taxi and then went back to work. It must have been fifty kilometres, at least.

And the first practice? This was the band that would become Beargarden, though I don’t think we had the name yet. There was still a chance that we might have called it something else … that we wouldn’t make that fateful decision.

~ a fragile beauty in the compost bin

It’s been one of those weeks when things work nicely to plan.

I’ve finished a short play – The Goitre Birds – which will be performed (by myself and the estimable Francis McMahon [He Died With A Falafel in His Hand, The Rage in Placid Lake]) as part of Snatches on Friday May 15 in RMIT’s Kaleide Theatre in Swanston St.

Snatches is the brainchild of my beloved colleague Lynne Ellis, who is Director-in-Residence at RMIT. It’s a gallimaufry of short works stapled together with Lynne’s customary wit and charm. The quality of the performances and the writing range from prime to abysmal, but it’s almost always interesting to behold – and if something’s boring, that’s okay, whatever it is will not last more than ten minutes.

I’ve also completed - at last, just this minute - my liner notes for the Beargarden CD release. We had our meeting – Bruce Butler, Andrew Till and I – and we plotted out what remains to be done. The cover/booklet design is pretty much it. We’re spending the next fortnight trawling for photos, posters etc. Also, we’re going to set up the obligatory My Space page and post all the videos we can find to You Tube. (If you happen to possess anything along these lines, we’d be very grateful to hear from you.)

With my wife away, Polly and I have been thoroughly in each other’s hair. Over the weekend, I was chafing at the bit in the role of daddy, particularly on Saturday afternoon when we played host to one of Polly’s school friends. The house, which I’ve worked so hard to keep tidy, was magically reduced to squalor in what seemed an instant. This week, however, has been a father’s dream. We’re loving each other’s company. There’s been little sign of whinging. Scarcely any procrastination at bedtime. If only family life was always so ideal.

There have been all manner of lesser duties and commitments to be confronted – some of them onerous and connected to the troubles I’ve alluded to in previous posts. Stressful, confusing, but they’re behind me now.

And today a gift was bestowed me from the mysterious unknown.

After noticing a putrid smell in the laundry, I recalled that the compost been building up for at least a fortnight. Every day I mean to move it, but the cold puts me off, or I’m not wearing shoes, or … whatever. This morning, at last, I lugged the heavy bucket of decomposing scraps out back to the compost bin, lifted the lid and was presented with a vision of splendour.



Of all the curious moulds and fungi I’ve encountered, this has to be one of the most sublime. Like hoar-frost crystallising on the decaying vegetable matter, pristine white, almost luminous in the gloom of the green plastic bin, like something from a fairy dell, or from a child’s dream of Christmas.

* 7 June 1981 Sunday 7.30pm

I stayed with Tobsha last night. We shared a bottle of champagne. I enjoyed spending time with her, at her fine little house.

I read some of her writing. She is a terrible speller and seems obsessed by the genital organs.

Why am I speaking in such a detached tone? Is it because I am unsure of my feelings towards her? At a party last night, she made some disturbing suggestions, the exact nature of which I cannot properly recall.

She has the makings of a fine friend, but a lover? Perhaps not for me.

The single remained at nine on the RRR charts this week

*

Yes, I’ve reopened the tattered old green book. Not that stimulating an entry, unless, perhaps, you’re a fan of Tobsha’s work, in which case I suspect the genital obsession will make plenty of sense.

I recall being kind of condescending, and kind of jealous when she told me she’d been writing. She was a sculptor, not a writer, and besides how could you be any sort of writer if you couldn’t spell? I was yet to learn that W B Yeats, one of my literary idols, couldn’t spell to save his life.

And, over the years since, Tobsha has produced a far more successful body of work from her pen than I from mine. Who was I kidding?

Those of you interested in the Beargarden release: we’re having a meeting next Sunday which should produce a very swift timeline.

* 6 June 1981 Saturday 2.00pm

I am in the bath feeling strange. Listening to the football. St Kilda is winning. I think that by remaining in hot baths you must sweat out a lot of weight … also by picking your nose, I suppose …

The Ears broke up. Last night was the final performance. A very touching evening. Later I found myself at Debbie’s place, with Ned. I was very drunk. For better or for worse. I woke up with a bruise on the end of my cock.


I finally went to George’s Philosophy School this week. It was interesting, but creepy.

I’m on the verge of starting a new band with Frizz. He’s an ugly bastard, but a good bass-player.

Last Saturday, there were punks marauding outside the Seaview with knives, attempting to recover a stolen elk’s head.

Well, so long to the Ears. This is turning into a book of epitaphs

*

I was at least a little anorexic in those days; anyone who incorporates the removal of dried nasal mucus into his weight plan has to be anorexic, by definition … but it never reached a life-threatening point. (I had plenty of other lifestyle choices doing that.) I occasionally induced vomiting for cosmetic reasons … it’s just that, you see, at the time – and to the present day – the thinner your body, the cooler your band. A proposition set in stone, if ever there was. Just ask The Mighty Boosh.

George’s Philosophy School turned out to be a cult. You may remember the ads they used to - may still - run in Saturday’s Age, always titled with the word ‘Philosophy’ in bold print. They were a queer bunch; the women had to wear long drab-coloured skirts, the men suits, and they addressed each other as Sir or Madam. They always had hard uncomfortable wooden chairs at their meetings. The purpose, I was told, was to sharpen your attention, but basically they eschewed pleasure of all kinds, including upholstery. One particular fool willed them the mansion on the corner of Robe and Acland Sts, where they held weekend programmes. Like many cults, they practised sleep-deprivation in order to soften the will. George’s rotund old Lithuanian mum somehow got herself involved in one of these events, at which all she did for nineteen hours a day was housework … The School of Philosophy has a rich and invidious history. It originated in England and I’m certain there’s plenty of lurid exposition on the web, if one cares to look.

For the life of me, I cannot remember Frizz. Probably wise that I didn’t take that road. Those punks outside the Seaview? As much a mystery now as then.

Because the Beargarden album is creeping towards release, I’m going to open a new diary thread beginning a few years later. I won’t double the frequency of diary posts, but I’ll try to increase them.

~ the wad

It came to me at the bottom of a cold dark well. I would write a fantasy novel. In fact three, a trilogy, something as surreal and rabelaisian as China Mieville, but which would sell like Terry Pratchett.

A month later and I haven’t yet got bored of the idea. In fact it’s going rather well. Slow, but well. I can’t imagine how I will ever complete it, but I’m not letting that get in the way. I’m going to send some finished chapters around the place and get some reaction, then I’ll either bite the bullet and write the whole thing, or do something else.

The novel is set in two interconnected worlds: Nonesuch, dominated by a planet-girdling forest called (at this stage) The Weald, and Telesium, the spirit world, accessible by Séance, by the herb sleither, and by rites of the shrouded Velleity. So far, I’ve spent most of the time building the universe, naming the plants and animals, the seasons, the rules of Nature, the history of human civilisation … making a map, the all-important map. Though, as is my way, I still waste time with intricate, richly textured details that may never see the light of print, I have been uncharacteristically strict with myself. I have a believable world, three or four chapters in draft and one polished off.

At present I’m worried about the name of the male protagonist, Lamarc. It’s not bad, but it’s not of the rank of, say, Alsace, his father, or Teasel, his mother, or Tetany, the evil queen. If you’ve got any suggestions? The victim of the recent light plane crash in Moorabbin had a beautiful name: Akash Ananth. Either would be better than Lamarc, I think. But I’m not sure. Perhaps too sub-continental …

Anyway, here’s a snippet ... Unknowingly drawn by the mysterious discorporate entity Almathea, the child Lamarc is venturing perilously into the phantasmagoric Weald …

*

Deeper in the wildness, in close musty pockets where the sun scarcely penetrated, he had observed a very curious and poorly understood creature - or perhaps part of creature, or perhaps plant - known as the wad. It was a cube roughly the size of a human head, composed of a moist translucent meat-like substance, veined with something blackish that could be seen to flow and packed with pebble-sized organelles in pale shades of red, blue and grey. Behaviourally, the wad was elementary. It fell; unexpectedly and from on high - from no visible resting place or eyrie, seeming to materialize in mid-air. It would slap into the earth, scattering leaves and mulch, then proceed to decay in natural order, offering its stored minerals and energy to the Weald. No doubt the wad could kill, if one was caught beneath it, but to Lamarc’s knowledge no one had yet had such tremendous bad luck.

The wad was a very strange thing, but it was a useful reminder that everything to do with the Weald was fundamentally strange. If Lamarc was ever in danger of acclimatising to the outlandishness of life in the forest, the wad was always there to pull him up. A queer thing in its essence. No apparent rhyme or reason. Brute strangeness.

In these congested areas, he could feel the Weald in everything. It transfused from soil to air, from leaf to root to thallus, from rain to tongue; everything swollen and heated with the workings of the ecome.

*

Some other news … The re-release of the Beargarden album All That Fall is looming. The delay has been my fault. I’ve insisted on writing liner notes that contain a potted history of the band, and since I’ve been hiding under a rock until recently, nothing has got done. Now I’m working again and the biography is almost ready. It’s long and full of dirt.

We’ve been spurred to action by word of movement regarding the long awaited Dogs in Space DVD release. We want to release an Ears album around the same time, but, according to our schedule, we can’t do that until the Beargarden is done and dusted.

Apparently, commentary tracks are being prepared for the DVD, so Mick Lewis (Ears guitarist) and I have decided to our services to R. Lowenstein. We’re so excited about it, we may do it whether it’s included or not.

~ a time of seething

After a period of stability, say four days or longer, a tension begins to form in the air - like a charge of static electricity that will continue to build unless it is released. The simplest release involves drugs, a sudden abandonment of discipline that results in a slow build back to stability.

I sense her thoughts, whispering, cycling in her head. It is the only recourse she knows. The only thing she can imagine that will free her of the horror of the day-to-day, from her entrapment here, in this ordinary house - albeit for merely a day, and despite the peripheral damage on family and friends.

It’s a vicious circle, driven partly by her and, as things go, partly by me ...

Of course, I am making a serious effort to repair our world, even as it is being destroyed. I am alert for Spore incursions. I have total and permanent charge of finances. I try to organise my time so that no one will complain…

Yet I have so little energy. The Spasmo-Nemigron holds me steady as it eats my soul - deliberately, slowly, as if with a cocktail fork. I can feel the Slammerkin larvae making a chaos of my liver, and slowly I droop under long and wasting exposure to the winds of Quinquagisma…

I do what I can, but I have to do it at my own pace, to my own logic – otherwise, I know I will slash back and make the whole thing worse.

Yet her frustration must find an outlet – and for want of something better, I have become that outlet. When I spend a day cleaning and organising, I am criticised for not playing with Polly. When I spend the day with Polly, I am criticised for not cleaning. I fall foul, regardless of what I do.

It’s worse in those first hours after noon, when the Spasmo-Dromoran curdles her fluids, makes her dangerous to be near.

I’ve always been sensitive to personal criticism – but never deaf to it. And it’s worse when that criticism comes off a casually poisonous tongue. I cannot respond, for that would force an escalation. She is sensitive, a raw nerve and, were I to return fire, she would simply collapse. I’m told she’s been like this since a child, bursting into tears at the mildest of scoldings. At this late stage, I see that she is one of the worst cases of depression I have known.

But my reaction is perhaps the deadliest factor. l seethe. It’s a physical thing. I feel it in my blood, in my temples, a shuddering weakness in my sides. If it is bad enough, I take valium. Worse, it lingers, sometimes for days, and my only answer is to try to act normally, politely, until the causes are forgotten.

But lately these seething episodes have been compounding, one upon the other, and I am tasting bitterness on my tongue…



I spent the afternoon with Lynne and Polly, lounging around the pool at Bruce’s place, watching his two year old daughter – Madelaine – swim like a pearl diver. It was the perfect antidote to the nerve-racking morning during which I wrote the above paragraphs. Bruce keeps a reliably excellent bar. I tried some agwa, a marginally legal liqueur made from coca leaf. It’s okay, but yesterday I stuck to the chartreuse…

There’s been a lot of talk about the past lately. Last year, a specialty label in the US put forward the idea of re-releasing the Beargarden album All that Fall. Now, after much delay, the compilation of a bonus album, a re-mastering from the vinyl by the redoubtable Simon Polinski, it’s near ready.

At the time, for me, it was a grave disappointment. We were saddled with a couple of old school producers who seemed intent on sucking the blood from our music. The project went massively over-budget with the help of shadowy entries for cocaine and Japanese food [something I only learned of years later], and the whole thing – the fights, the tension, the firing of bass-players – became the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was so naïve at the time; I let something that I’d spent years working towards be swept out from under my feet.

A few months later the band was gone. Virgin Records abandoned the project [despite their massive investment] and All That Fall was quietly released on our manager’s private label, Chase. For a long time after that, I took no pleasure in music, [despite singing in a band called Index which disintegrated as quickly as it formed]. I went overseas for a while and then became a writer …

So it’s strange revisiting that time. I listened to the material this morning, free of all those emotional associations. It sounds surprisingly good. Very eighties, of course, but worth making available again …

We’re talking about compiling an Ears album next and that I would get behind …

*

When we arrived home, the pall had risen from the house. Everything felt clear. The woman I live with was smiling and apparently at peace with herself …

* 21 February 1981, 11.13am

The following appears to have been written under the influence of amphetamines – therefore I’ve made an editorial judgment to amend some of the crazed grammar that fizzed from my young mind.

Speed was then amphetamine sulphate, not the methamphetamine we have today. Traditionally, it came in small translucent red capsules worth twenty dollars. Heroin came in half clear/half red capsules referred to as double oh’s. The caps were sourced, I think, from a cold medicine and if the smack was not served up in a double oh, it was instantly suspect. Later, foil and paper folds came into fashion. Later still, balloons. In 1981 a ‘cap’ was fifty dollars – and, unless things have changed just recently, the price remains the same.

*

I went off to the Crystal Ballroom last night, though I can remember little of it. Afterwards, we visited Constance at his petrol station, and some friends came over to Milton St. – Jane, Leia & Cathy [a visitor from Adelaide]. We drank a huge amount of vodka and wound up being very sick. At about 9.00 we awoke from our stupor …

The Ballroom was full of friends. Even Warren Coleman was there - he dropped by with [Paul] Storm at four yesterday morning and yapped… and yapped …

I found myself in a very lurid mood. The girl Tobsha was giving me the eye, I’m sure, and I was returning it. My recollections of the night are full of skirt-filled flashes … Sometimes I’m like that; most of the time in fact, but never wholeheartedly. When I think of Christine, I lose any active interest.

I am on speed and have not slept a wink.

It was probably a foolish thing to do, taking it, but it was kind of fun.

There’s a lot I have to say, but I’ve little inclination to say it. I’m experiencing that dreadful speed state in which you are forever teetering on the edge of a ghastly chasm*, waiting for your life to crumble around you…

Somebody asked me to write a story for a magazine last night… Mmm … perhaps ... It will feature a pallbearer and be called ‘The Pallbearer’.

Christine is going to live here for a month, she thinks, before she moves in with Craig Elrick. In my paranoid state I can’t help being worried about that… We may be going to Adelaide. That visitor I mentioned, Cathy, she would be arranging it.

Wally is sweeping the path outside. A slow fly is on this book. Christine is in bed, awake, and probably grumpy….

*

Paul Storm, a school friend, was living around the corner around this time. I remember running to borrow money off him for a cab, after cops – called by my mother - came to my door and alerted me to my father’s terrible stroke. It was only a few months previous to this diary that he died.

I see Paul often these days. He has a daughter Polly’s age, Caitlyn, and as we’re all Sainters, we catch quite a few games together.

1982 beargarden

Constance working at a petrol station … I believe he would die if he knew this information was publicly available. He’s a serious [and I think successful] visual artist now - whom I last encountered at Troy’s wake.

Warren Coleman was another school friend. He was one of the boys in The Devil’s Playground and a co-writer, I understand, of Happy Feet. I don’t know much of what fell between, but we used to share very similar tastes and it was he who came to school with an Aladdin Sane haircut and he who introduced me to The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and thence to Philip K Dick … My parents hated him, blamed him for the incident when I took Bowie’s Young Americans record cover to the hairdresser and asked them to duplicate it. [The Gitane I could arrange myself.]

And Tobsha. Hmmn… A strange game of sexual chess stretched for years before burning out sans consummation. Then a VCA sculptress living at the end of the street, now she lives in LA and writes erotic novels with names like Quiver and Tremble and The Witch of Cologne. I’ve always been jealous of her success, principally because once I was far superior at spelling.

* Wasn’t someone teetering on a brink in my last post? I wonder how often I use that metaphor? Possibly a lot – I always seems to be treading the edge of some abyss or chasm or whatnot ...

Diary of 1981 - index

~ the smiling ghosts

My regular visits to Queensland began during the early 1980s when my band began touring. The first thing I found there was Nikki Lambert. She worked for CBS records, decorating record shop windows with posters and album artwork - though she also painted beautiful lavish canvases of her pets, and led a secret life of crime.

She was older than me, but looked sixteen. She was tan and lithe and spirited, and spoke with the broadest strine I had ever heard from a woman. She became my window into the outlandish northern regions, and remains so twenty-five years later.

Her house in Mullet St, Kenmore was a tumbledown queenslander, haunted by lazy, smiling ghosts and held together with pink-flowering bougainvillea. You could lie in bed there and watch the coming and goings of paper wasps from their nest in the ruin of the ceiling. Downstairs there was a gargantuan children’s python in the bathroom walls. Called Clancy [of The Overflow], sections of it were always visible, here and there, among wires and pipes and beams, but never its head. The toilet cistern had a broken lid and in it lived green tree frogs - sometimes, on entering, you would see as many as three lined along the front, forelegs hooked over the rim, their sweet eyes delving.

Mullet St was an idyll, but it’s all suburban now. It evaporated with the inexorable expansion of Brisbane.

Nikki became a solid friend and occasional lover. In time, she was to descend into various hells, but ultimately floated to the surface on Stradbroke Island with her daughter Sidonie. In the years I’ve known her, I have never seen her less than enthusiastic about anything - except drudgery - and she is a genuine seer through of projects. Nikki will almost always ignore a person’s given name and replace it with one of her own devising. In her company I have met Dead Tom, Snapper, Kaptain Kronk, Graderhead, Twenny, Brasso, Lizard, ad infinitum … As you enter her universe, you are renamed, as Adam did the beasts.

Nikki is also the author of one of my favourite quotes - “There’s something deeply relaxing about chickens, don‘t you think?”

As I write, in her yard on the island, there are at least four full-grown hens with a dozen chicks scrabbling in the mulch, clucking peaceably to themselves. Nikki will never be without chickens - or, indeed, a menagerie of dogs, cats, horses, birds, guinea pigs… In that past she has told me she judges people by their interactions with animals.

I have a lovely table beneath a blazing poinsettia tree at which to work. The drums of doom are fading already, the fear abates, the paranoia withers into the breeze. I just hope I have enough time here to really reset my spirit … before I lurch once more into the breach.