Rambling memories part 3: Moon Safari

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyGF4pvTwW4_GYk3jSZy4IGXT7hW1PkdB

Douglas has music on constantly. He also has slight hearing loss, so I had to make him put his phone underneath the pillow each night because the music playing from it was too loud for me to sleep. I have long since lost count of how many nights I feel asleep to Moon Safari. Air are really a band for all occasions. They do dinner parties, relaxing, dance, sex … although these days, they are so strongly associated with happy times with Douglas, they also make me cry.

In his early 20s, Douglas had long red hair. I have a massive thing for men with long red hair. Did you know that only 1.5% of the population have red hair? Then half that for the number of men, then think about how many men have long hair … ok, it’s a specialist field. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t know Douglas then. He and Natasha moved into Natimuk at pretty much the same time Jason and I did. Douglas’s hair was still long, but he wasn’t dying it anymore. Does dyed red hair count? I never got the chance to find out anyway. That was 20 years ago.

Natimuk being Natimuk, we went climbing, we socialised and Douglas and Natasha demonstrated some fine outfits. I should add a nudity warning here. There may be a bit of Douglas flesh in these photos. Of course, Douglas being Douglas, you’ve probably seen it all before. If it wasn’t some skimpy costume, skinny dipping or life modelling, you may have caught a glimpse of the time he and Natasha road the tandem naked to the fire dam for a swim.

Douglas followed me up the delightful Power without Glory once. That’s the squeeze chimney, off width roof thing with a skull and crossbones on it at Black Ian’s. Despite that experience, he still fell in love with me 10 or so years later. Maybe that’s how long it takes to forget what you are getting yourself in for.

Thus at some point in time, we found ourselves on a climbing trip to Flinders Island.  It was very impromptu. Douglas rang me from the island to talk me into flying down in 2 days’ time. And who am I to say no to random adventures? It turned out to be a rare week of idyllic weather in Bass Straight, and well, what do you expect to happen between 2 people skinny dipping on stunning isolated beaches in between dying of terror on rarely repeated routes of mediocre gear and friable rock? Or maybe Douglas was overcome by the undeniable attraction of a future filled with thrutching.

So we went as friends and returned as lovers.  But it wasn’t until a month or 2 later, when I came home to find Douglas washing my dishes attired only in my 1950s style frilly apron that I decided I really was in love with him. Fortunately for you all, I don’t have a photo of that outfit. But I did find this one to fill in the gap. I mean, you can see how irresistible he could be …. Ok , again, I have specialist tastes.

Somewhere in those heady early days, I left a pair of shoes at the top of a route at Barbican Wall. I warned Douglas that it was worst rock you’d ever encounter on a 2 star Grampian route, plus the track in was overgrown with spikey hakeas. Douglas later said in the haze of early love, he’d have eaten cat food if I said it as a good idea. So even though I admitted it was a bad idea, he came to rescue my shoes with me, but declared it was the most scared he’s ever been on second.

The relationship was full of fun and adventures. Buffalo, Moonarie, Frog, Hook Island, Nowra, Blueys, Tasmania. In the years before we got together, Douglas had lost his way a little. Been tempted away from the straight and narrow by the vices of making art and making money. These things were separate, as any artist will know. Douglas’s art was well received despite the lack of financial gain, winning several prizes over the years.

As a result of art and work though, he had done little climbing in the preceding 5 years. I fixed that. Back in those long red headed days, Douglas was a climbing machine.  At least his break from climbing meant I wasn’t being left behind. The adventures continued – Townsville, Kakadu, Red River Gorge, Indian Creek.

But really, it must have been the trenches that did it for Douglas – how else did we end up on The Ogive 

or doing the til then unrepeated Citizen Kane, an overhanging gnarly crack in Townsville? It doesn’t take much to turn a natural climber back into a climbing machine though and this is an incredibly excited Douglas having just sent Citizen Kane, his first 27 about 10 years.

Douglas’s glory in the Ogive was more in his outfit however

One of the things I loved about being with Douglas was the way conversations would just start from something random and escalate into a world of silly. We started one of those just before a day’s climbing with Ben, and by the time Ben was there to pick us up, Douglas was all kitted up, a bag of props and costume changes ready and Ben was thrown unwittingly into some low grade film making.

Douglas started our relationship owning 1 pair of hotpants. I have lost track of how many he owned by the end of it. Hell, there are probably even more now.

Douglas was responsible for my decent into decadence. Fancy wine. Fancy cheese. Fancy beer. Fancy places to stay. Fancy places to eat out. Gradually he wore down my decades of dirtbagging. For my part, I dragged him to off widths and made him bash through the wilderness for weeks on end. 

He made me stay in beachside bed and breakfasts.I  suspect I got the better end of that exchange. He did make me look at birds a lot though.  I spent evenings wistfully staring at the tent roof whilst Douglas was lost in the bird app. Turn around to see where he was on the trail to find he had turned his pack upside down to find the binoculars because there was some small brown bird to identify.

I would spend all my money on climbing gear and survive on scummy old electronic devices. Douglas was the reverse. His rack still looked like the early 90s, whilst he had the latest apple gadgets. I gave Douglas decent climbing gear and he gave me electronic toys and we made each other drink champagne. Actually, Douglas’s rack seemed to miraculously disappear and mine went out even when climbing without me. He was also responsible for my addiction to dishwashers, air conditioners and cleaners. He got me hooked on snorkelling, modern board games and an assortment of trashy computer games.

I don’t have any regrets about any of these addictions really. But despite all his best efforts, he failed to convert me to birdwatching. I doubt he has given up hope though.

Of course, we all know Douglas became incredibly ill in there as well.  Life was pretty bloody hard for both of us in there. There were many times when we’d both just end up on the floor crying. I’m not going to dwell on it, because I’m not the dwelling on shit kinda person. Instead I’m going to dwell over how silly he is. How much laughing we did together. Remember instead sitting on the couch crying with laughter over Bill Wither’s singing “Hot, hot”. The cheesy breathiness of it had us in fits of laughter. I guess you probably had to be there .. but I still laugh everytime I hear it, in the way that many memories of Douglas make me laugh.

I really wanted Douglas’s illness to be psychiatric. It didn’t make it any less hard going, but at least there was hope for a cure. In some ways, I still can’t believe it is a terminal illness, because, well, I don’t want to. I can’t imagine losing an old friend and lover this young. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have a rapidly degenerating illness. I imagine all of us struggle to imagine coming to terms with hearing a diagnosis like that. I want a world where Douglas and I get to finish projecting the Ogive together in outrageous outfits. 

At least Douglas can still wear outrageous outfits, and I will happily push him in his wheelchair in whatever set of hotpants takes his fancy. In fact, I found him the finest hotpants that Horsham could provide. 

                                                                                                                                            

More rambling memories inspired by music - Bat out of Hell

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QGMCSCFoKA

I fucking hate this song. I didn't listen to that link, and feel free not to yourself. However, this song is an integral part of my housesharing with Ken. I think it may have been the only tape (yes, tape, that's how long ago this was) he owned. He used to play it particularly loud when he was pissed off with me. Which was usually because the house was a mess. When the kitchen was a mess, he would bring home a massive steak and stink the kitchen out with in it revenge. I was a staunch vegetarian at the time. That I can't stand this song is sort of appropriate, because Ken and I vacillate between adoring each other and driving each other insane.  I would come home at times to find Ken in the lounge ensconced in porn videos (yes, actual videos that he hired from the sex shop in Katoomba. That is showing our age). He didn't have a VHS player in his room. I'm pretty sure he come home once to catch Jason and I having sex in the lounge, so I suppose we are even.

I loved sharehousing in my 20s. We lived our own version of He Died with a Felafal in his Hand, but I also formed lifelong friendships from it. It's so often mad and chaotic and messy and loud and intrusive but it's also fun and caring and like your own weird family. Moving out of home in suburban Adelaide and into inner city Sydney share housing was quite the step. There was the house where the upstairs bath tub crashed through the floor with someone in it. The flatmate who broke a rib and was sent home ED with panadiene forte, then cracked open a bottle of red, so by the time I came home, he was a grinning idiot unable to move on the couch. I confiscated the wine and threw a blanket over him. He later moved out because he had to go to London to start the Marxist revolution. I'm still waiting for that revolution. The one whom we found dead in her room. That story is rather sad. Another who developed a speed habit, then moved her boyfriend in and painted her room purple whilst I was away on a climbing trip, then just disappeared. John and I spent hours painting the room back to rose pink to get our bond back. That incident did lead me to moving in with Bili and Corisse, so all worked out well.

Ken and I met out of the Mt when I was 17. Apparently he had a massive crush on me, but I was oblivious to that at the time. We were both into climbing cracks, so we set out on a mission to do Boy Racer. We simulclimbed up to the ledge on Syrinx, got rained on, got swooped by birds and stared trepidously at the route. I magnanimously said Ken could go first. He said, oh, no, you can. No really, I mean it, you can have this one. No, no, you can. I made an attempt and bailed off, a gibbering wreck and sent Ken up to save the day. He disappeared out of sight into deadly silence until finally I hear a pitiful sounding "safe". Normally Ken bellows. I battle up after him and as I pop into his sight, he asks if I had cried under that roof, because he had been.

Ken and I have been through rocky rides together in both of our lives. He knew me through my reckless younger years, and my messy 20s coming to terms with trauma. His deep depression in his 40s. I think I may have been the only person he saw outside of his work for a few years there, because I would just turn up from Victoria on his doorstep and insist we go climbing. Until he didn't have the head for climbing anymore and we would just do dinner.

We were both around for many random adventures. He has enough Wendy stories to dine out on for years, as I do Ken stories. He was renowned for getting his kit off. I discovered he has a bald triangle on his perineum courtesy of a day when he decided he would just climb naked. You can't help but notice these things when he is bridging above you. And then every climber on Serenity Crack the day we did it knows all about Ken's adventures in the sex clubs of San Francisco. He doesn't have a quiet voice when he's excited. There was the day when he was guiding a group in Sydney for the Mardi Gras through a canyon, and he cut the arse cheeks out of his wetsuit for the occasion. He made more in tips than his wage that day. We had a party that he couldn't make not long after that, and so we made an alter to Ken out of his wetsuit. Ken has always been a lot of fun and loving in his awkward backhanded fashioned when he's not being a grumpy fucked up bastard (his words!). He's a total contrast of outrageous and blokey, and a soft gooey centre that he's done a lot of work to get in touch with in recent years. I do adore him, and it is fun to talk back to the outrageous and blokey. We have been continually playfighting for nearly 30 years.

Last winter, I finally got Ken back climbing with Bili and Shaun from our old circle from the 90s after his years of exile. It was also the first time I'd seen Shaun in about 15 years. Our day at the cliff was straight back to the old days. The same old bad jokes. The sun was shining, we were laughing, climbing was happening and the world was great.

I may have destroyed the Bat Out of Hell tape in a fit of pique. Ken's mostly forgiven me.

Rambling memories inspired by music: The Clouds

Much as I am tempted to keep writing about covid 19, I am diversifying before it drives all of us insane. You're not out of the warzone however, I might yet start ranting about the police state! In the meanwhile, I am moving onto another highly popular internet theme that I've always found rather annoying, which is chain posting of "10 albums that changed your life" or "10 photos" or "10 books", no words, no explanation. The thing that annoys me about them, is that these things are interesting for the stories behind them. What makes them meaningful? What memories do they stir? How did they change your life?  I don't want to just see an album cover. I want to hear about it's context. So strap in, I'm about to verbosely write all about some music that always takes me back to certain places, people, times in my life, starting with the Clouds.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA247F35B040D7533









The Clouds exemplify a genre of music that I call "Kylie music". Kylie and I have known each other for 32 years now. Fuck that seems like a long time. I had a very mobile childhood, with my father being in the RAAF, and as a result, I don't have those lifelong friends from primary school that most people have. Kylie is my oldest friend. We met briefly when we were both in Venturers, before I became on off the rails teenager, then when I got back on the rails again, we reconnected through Adelaide Uni Mountain Club. We were both very young to be at Uni, and came from the ill reputed north eastern suburbs of Adelaide where university was a whole different world.  Uni really was a lifechanging experience.

Those years at Adelaide Uni really  made me who I am today (you can thank them or curse them).  I started a suburban bogan with little perspective on the world and left a radical, post modern feminist climbing bum. I still remember the lecturer who explained the difference between Freud and Lacan by acting out how Freud worshipped the giant penis up on a pedestal, whilst Lacan actually though he was a giant penis and she danced around the lectern with her arms shaped above her head as a phallus to demonstrate this.

In those days, student activism was still a big thing. We had street protests, rallies and strikes. We had a strong student union and a vibrant community of all sorts of clubs and societies, from the Society for Creative Anachronisms beating each other up in medieval costumes in the courtyard, to feminist, anarchist and antiracist groups plotting in cellars on how to change the world, and of course, the Mountain Club.  We were a funny group of social oddities now I look back at us, but we became each others network in a way our course mates never did. This was the vehicle by which I became an obsessed climber, there were endless adventures and parties and I nearly dropped out of uni entirely just to climb. Instead I started picking my subjects based around how much climbing time they would afford me. Much as I acknowledge we were dodgy as fuck at times, we all survived and we loved it. It's amazing feeling young and immortal! I still don't advocate learning to climb the way I did though.

In those days of social irresponsibility, the Uni Bar served us all, including still 17 year old Kylie and me, and Friday nights were inevitably spent seeing live bands there. Hence where we discovered the Clouds.  It was a great venue, and even my dodgy long term memory takes me back to the crowded, smokey dance floor, dim lighting tinged with red, the black and purple cloak that I virtually lived in then (I still have it, I can't bear to throw it away), and Kylie's A line mini skirts. I still have a crotchet top of hers that she gave me when she moved overseas for a few years. It also is impossible to throw out. Uni social clubs had lock in parties, where you paid your $20 entry and could drink all the beer you wanted or tricycle relays with compulsory beer sculling before you could hand over the baton. So problematic in hindsight, but such good times!

I'm sad that the radicalism of our universities has disappeared. Voluntary student unionism, HECS, a general return to conservatism in the world and the pressure of rising costs of housing all fed a change to university being a mechanism to earn money, rather than a place of learning, exploration and growth. Students became focused on getting a job that would repay their mammoth HECS debts and their mammoth mortgage. There was no space for radicalism anymore. I am loving seeing young people out on the streets protesting again now. It's like young people tried to play the capitalist game we are told to play for more than a decade there, but now they are looking at the world and realising that it's a game they can never win. Here I am, feeling like a doting aging activist, nodding approvingly at the climate strikes, at slut walk, and the gun violence protests in the States, all of which young people of have been integral to. I love the young adult fiction showing rebellion against the conservative regimes that take control after the apocalypse. Maybe popular culture will become the hotbed of modern radicalism in the ways that higher education once was.

Kylie and I are such different women in some ways. But here we are all these years later. Probably I have Kylie to thank for it. She is always incredibly good at keeping in touch. We haven't lived near each other since the mid 90s, but through all that she checks in on me, she makes time to visit, she welcomes me to stay, she invites me on trips. History is important to Kylie, and despite all the changes in our lives, we have history. Kylie became a librarian, and the seeds of it were there all along. She has diary entries and photos all ordered and accessible to remind us of events in our lives, not to mention a far better memory than I have. About this time last year, she sent me a photo of  me in the Pines in 1999 wishing me a happy 20 year anniversary of living in Nati. Of course, I had been unable to remember even if it was 98, 99 or 2000 that I moved to Nati. Kylie knew down to the month. This, she told me was our last trip camping at the Mt before I moved into Natimuk. I look so young! The gear and the tent so old! The pines so empty of people, but also so full of trees.

Music has always been a big thing for Kylie. She was over visiting for Invasion Day long weekend this year, and made me listen to the Triple J hottest 100, which she follows obsessively each year. I don't think I knew a single song on it, until they played an excerpt of the 1999 Hottest 100 which they were going to revisit on Double J. Those songs, I remember well. Maybe it's because the 90s were really my formative years, and the connection of music to memories are stronger for it. They were fun and amazing but also tumultuous and traumatic years, and I wouldn't live them again if you paid me!

Kylie is the epitomy of nice. I mean that in a genuinely lovely way. I feel terribly cantankerous and impatient in comparison. It's hard to imagine Kylie ever hurting a fly.  She's devoted to her friends and family, and to her community work such as the Climbing Club of SA and Amnesty International. On the outside, she can appear to be a sweet and respectable product of an all girl Catholic school, but I know the wild Kylie as well. In someways, she's a bit like the music I associate with her. Sweet female vocals over grunge guitar. Whilst Kylie is The Clouds, I am more like Bikini Kill. Outright swearing and rebellion against the world. But I love her to bits and we'll still be sharing our lives in another 32 years.