The Azerbaijanis

The Azerbaijanis are on the move. Gold teeth glowing in the blue and yellow lights of the courtyard.

Flash, dubious personas for the men, like a dodgy gathering of The Usual Suspects: a pin-stripe suit on a five o'clock shadow; a vinyl black jacket on a bushy moustache; a fur, oblong hat perched jauntily on wily grey eyes.

As for the women, my god! They're big, busty and brazen, broad-arsed as barns and loud-voiced enough to fill one or even two of them, with dark-ringed eyes and a no-shit readiness to do business day or night so shoo! The women wear grey cotton raincoats and black scarves in sloppy deference to Islamic dress codes, but there's a Western trashiness to them that won't be suppressed: a polka dot handbag, a splash of peroxide blonde hair and red, red lips, a whole way of walking that suggests these women shop to kill and it's best you stay out of their goddamned, hotsie totsie way.

The women also know a special whisper that makes all the hotel cats come to them. But they don't give the cats anything when they arrive. Still they whisper and seduce them, time and again. What bitches!

Loud as foghorns, jolly as a trading fleet, the Azerbaijanis converse across the hotel courtyard by yelling. Yelling from flat to flat, yelling from upstairs to downstairs, yelling to each other at their tables over chai. Their communication verily eats the word 'hearty'. Manifests the adjective 'beefy'. Not talking, yelling. Always bellowing, the hotel reincarnated as their import-export factory, booming to mercantile actions and the law of being heard.

Around the courtyard are their spoils. Thousands of plastic coat hangers wrapped in bundles man-high and higher - mostly red in colour, followed by a little orange, and some luxury stock in a rare baby blue. Boxes of something marked 'whitener' that is probably bleach. Giant-size, lumpy sacks of cloth and cotton for clothes-makers. And a few large electric heaters for the exclusive warmth of limited purchasers back home.

Every night a bus arrives. Every night a bus departs. With different communities of Azerbaijanis, mobs of shopkeepers who all seem to know each other and bargain with each other and help each other out. After a few weeks you notice a rotating pattern of personalities, of familiar faces yelling their way back into your world.

They load their booty onto the hired buses for their return trip. Night after night, out front the Hotel Gilano on Ferdosi Street in Tehran. The pavement is chock-full with their boxes and sacks and human industry, everything squeezed onto the vehicle, till the people ferret and push their own way in like human plugs. A job well done.

Among them I have been given one friend. The man in the sharkskin suit.
He always has a cigarette loosely at hand. Eager, hurt, dark eyes, straining, hinting at an intelligence that evaporates into the open bafflement he expresses about his life.

'You are from Australia? I have a brother in Toronto.'

Toronto is in Canada.

'Yes, yes, yes,' he says, like there's no difference. 'He is a dentist.' And then he whispers. 'But I have much trouble getting a visa. My brother try for me.'

There's an implication I can help. But I just nod sympathetically. I feel embarrassed and ashamed. Again and again on our travels through India, Turkey and Iran, we encounter people who ask why it is so easy for us to visit them, and so hard for them to visit us.

Visa. That magic, dirty word: 'visa'.

One obvious reason why they can't get an Australian visa is their desperation to get out of here-and run like hell into the Promised Land. Wherever the hell it is. But even the rich or the studious,
the genuine holiday makers, find it very difficult to leave these countries. You feel privileged, elitist, to be standing in their home when they cannot visit yours.

'Yes, I have trouble with my visa.'

I act mystified. Put the blame on strange, contrary, distant Canada. 'Hmmm...'

'When do you go to Istanbul?' he asks. 'I go to Istanbul soon.'

The inference is that perhaps we will meet there. But I just go 'Hmmm…' again. I'm a real sphinx tonight.

And then Sharkskin shakes my hand passionately. 'Australia is a good country!' And that's where our conversation ends, more or less, because it seems to be all the English he knows. This is tragic for me. Because we have the same conversation, pretty much word for word, every night. Till I dread the sight of him.

The dentist brother. The visa. The conflation of Toronto, Canada and Sydney, Australia - anywhere out of here will do, he seems to be trying to say. Istanbul. When are you going to Istanbul? His curiousity is frightening and urgent.

His greetings to me are always happy, keen, wishing me all the best. I start to feel like a brother, like his brother - but also as if I am a man already in another country, even while I'm still in his country - and that he can only watch me helplessly, a fool of fate from behind some invisible window pane between us.

One night he finally varies the content a little. I get the feeling he has been studying his book of English phrases. Out of the blue, he turns and says to me, 'Azerbaijanian people are very stupid,' and waves his hand dismissively at the rest of his group. Then more sadly he adds, 'They are very poor.'

At the next table a big woman prepares snacks for her typically moustached husband: bread, pickles, tuna in a can. Perfect food for a cat, perhaps, but not today - nor any other day. They offer for us to join them in the meal. And we accept.

I now realize why every single garbage bin outside every single room is knocked over and spilled around the halls of the hotel. As if drunks have been upending rubbish constantly around the premises every night.

Each evening the Azerbaijanis put their finished snack tins out. And each night the cats go absolutely mental, teased into fury already by the whispers of women.

You would think this might invoke some change in the system. But the Azerbaijanis still have their pickles and tunas every night. And the hotel still has their plastic bins set outside their rooms. And the rubbish-strewn morning still comes, stinking of fish.

The funny thing about Sharkskin is how cheerily he greets those people he has whispered to me, or tried to suggest to me, he is somehow apart from. He greets them with love. Heartily. In a big loud voice that tells me he is definitely one of them. He laughs with them as they approach the table we have now joined. And calls out across the courtyard. And loads up the buses busily. And dreams and schemes secretly like each of them. Melancholy and aware of the world's bad luck, its short straws, but still getting on with what has to be done here: the talking, the eating, the working, the bus. Part of a dark-eyed Azerbaijanian mystery, a rhythm, a commerce.

But that's all philosophy and speculation and maybe a little romantic bullshit from me too. Sitting here among them with a tuna and pickle roll. All of a sudden I sneeze like a cat - 'tchew!' - and a woman says, I think, whatever the Azerbaijanian word is for 'bless you'. Then another woman at the next table starts quietly laughing-and laughing - and laughing - which makes her husband laugh, till he throws up his hands because he can't stop. I sneeze again and pretty soon the entire courtyard of Azerbaijanis is laughing and I get the feeling sneezing is like farting. By the time I sneeze a third time, people are almost falling from their chairs with laughter, and we have joined them, roaring with tears.

- Mark Mordue

* Extracted from Dastgah: Diary of a Headtrip. Photo taken at an early 20th century fruit market in Urmia Persia. Image retrieved from US Library of Congress via Wikipedia http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/ggbain/13000/13061v.jpg

The Atticus Rosary

“Star more.” “New town.” “Donal town!” “Ray fern.” “Sendral.”

My son Atticus recites the names of railway stations as we move through Sydney’s inner west towards Central’s Platform 19. At two and a half years of age he’s still too young to get them perfectly right, but he catches the carriage announcements in his ear, looks up and purses his lips with the sweetest calligraphy God ever gave breath to.

I realize we’re at the beginning of a ritual, a train journey to the city from our new home in Lewisham that he will make, back and forth, as he grows older. For some reason I start to imagine him as a young man, the stations carved into him as firmly as the recitative steps of a rosary. His places. His way into the world and back home again. Come back, my son, I find myself whispering, as if I am already in some future life watching him from above, come back, my son, to me.

I remember how important this journey was when I first moved from Newcastle to Sydney in my early 20s, to live in somewhat crazed inner city share-houses around Redfern, Newtown, Stanmore and Petersham. The same rail line coincidentally (or perhaps not) that we are travelling now.

Macdonaldtown Station always held the most power over me: bare and windswept and open, with horizon views that seemed to go all the way to the city’s smudged end. Here was a place where great dramas must have happened. Like a stage for Shakespeare and all his openness to elemental turbulence, a perfect setting for an avant garde production of The Tempest that I’d love to direct myself.

At night, of course, this bereft-looking station could be a scary and lonely place, where it felt as if the whole dark world was watching, much as you might have felt you were watching that same world once upon a time in the day. How vulnerable and glad I would feel when a city-bound train swept me into its stale, bright lights and shunted me away from the emptiness.

Not everyone found Macdonaldtown to be so grand or beautiful or imminent with stories. Someone tried to paint the whole station pink in the mid 80s, a brave effort that was 90% completed before security officers forced “the vandals” to scuttle. Something in me is still inspired by the noble whimsicality behind this action, that peculiar way people have of using an absurdist protest to colour our sense of community (in this case quite literally).

I must add I’m not alone in this affection for Macdonaldtown Station. Not that long ago I opened the pages of the Sydney Morning Herald to see a letter from a Martin Stott of Petersham. Under the heading ‘A timetable marked by years, not minutes’ (SMH Letters, 30.0.5.06), Stott wrote with feeling about the plane trees he’d watched grow from saplings amid the gravel, sleepers and graders. The fact they’d recently been bulldozed away prompted him to write, “I know my life was happier for 20 years watching those trees live and grow, not by seeing how quickly I got to work.”

Those made of sterner or more practical stuff might find such sentiments laughable, but the fact Stott found time to mourn the loss of the trees indicates something valuable and worthwhile at work in his sense of what a city can be - and what we can be within it when we get lucky and find ourselves an anchor or two of unexpected beauty to identify with.

So yes, the trees are gone. But the wonderful thing is that Martin Stott holds them alive inside of him. And isn’t that what our lives are so often about?

Think of the way we can’t go to certain places without feeling the ghost presence of who we once were. Who we kissed, the arguments we had, the moments of revelry, our old selves traced into familiar territory and still, to this day, standing there waiting like a photograph on our heart as we revisit our hometown or find ourselves on a street where we used to live.

In moments like these the past is stronger than the present – indeed, it can be so strong it overwhelms us with feeling, and even drives us away from where we stand. What’s that great Bob Dylan line? “I’m branded on my feet…”

Place names can be a little like this too. All of us know of places that aren’t designated on any map, yet are spoken of freely in the common parlance of a community. Lovers’ lanes, surf hangs, local bars… their official or non-existent names often melt into our daily conversations, our more intimate histories and take new shape.

My home bus stop back in Newcastle, for instance, was known as ‘the Gully Line’ when I was a boy. The name was a hangover from the days of the tramlines, which were closed down decades before in the 1940s. And yet my grandmother practically tattooed the phrase ‘Gully Line’ onto me every time I walked out the door. No chance of me ever not knowing where I lived or getting the wrong bus. Back then you could still see old tram tracks right where I jumped off, poking through the bitumen. The name itself is gone now - like those vestigial tram tracks too - with only a few locals like me aware of its traces hidden beneath the smooth black tar of the present.

All this makes me think of the way home is not so much a place, as a map of how we move and relate to things around us. A few years ago I was reminded of this in a conversation with the Australian historian, Peter Read. We had been talking about the significance of ‘the road’ in Australian culture, how certain roads follow Aboriginal movement patterns, and how repeated travel along these ‘paths’ can have unconscious corollaries to the Dreaming movements that once inspired them.

Making too much of this unconscious force would have been foolish, and certainly hard to prove - much as the idea of a metaphysical hum beneath the road, beneath the land wherever we are, appealed to my sense of healing and identity about who we might be or become in Australia.

Read preferred to focus on something more ‘solid’, if that’s the right word. Something as simple as a family road trip to explain his own thinking about place and movement and belonging: “It’s clearest for kids,” he told me, as he spoke of ritual journeys and how they shape us. “This is where you smell the holiday place for the first time as you get nearer to it, this is where you stop for lunch, this is where you say hello to a statue, the little bumps along the road you thought you’d forgotten, where you have a milkshake… it’s the way-stations along the journey, like jewels on a necklace.”

It is in this often humble way that stories of place rise up before our eyes and beneath us, and make their deeper claims upon us. The German film director Wim Wenders has a lot to say about this in terms of how we actually go about telling stories today, and more critically the manner in which Hollywood transplants stories onto places with little regard, in the main, for the resident culture - let alone the physical truths of the landscape it is colonizing with its ‘dreams’.

Wenders spoke about these notions in a talk entitled In Defence of Place at the Museum of Contemporary Art here back in 2003. The lecture launched an exhibition of his photography, stunning five-metre panoramas of car yards, deserts, Buddhist priests, cowboys and stone. As slide-show images flashed behind him Wenders discussed his love of landscape and his appreciation for the power of journeying – as well as a willingness to improvise scripts and grow his films out of these dual energies in everything from Kings of the Road to Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire, Until the End of the World and Buena Vista Social Club.

“We all suffer, in this 21st century, from an insane amount of exchangeable images and exchangeable stories, and a terrible withdrawal from first-hand experience,” he said. “It leads, slowly but steadily, to an ongoing loss of reality, and to the loss of belief once more, in the story-telling capacity of places[his emphasis]. According to the indigenous people of Australia places die if they are not kept alive, and so do we, along with them. In my book, they're damn right.”

It’s why we’re so lucky to have poets like Robert Adamson so lyrically connected to the Hawkesbury River north of Sydney, Tim Winton summoning up the beaches and fishing towns of Western Australia, the Aboriginal art phenomenon of the Northern Territory pulsating with desert energy, the Hill End painting movement still calling to us after all this time and somehow marking us with a sense of history, our cinematographers and their very particular sense of light in the world, musicians like Paul Kelly, Tex, Don and Charlie, and Powderfinger all painting the country and our lives in songs, even the urban heat and night force that somehow crackles out of a wild Dirty Three instrumental and feels utterly Australian. These artists seem to know our stories of place as well as how to ‘create’ or call them up – not just for us, but amazingly enough, in us.

In Aboriginal mythology, the Dreaming ancestors called the world into being by singing out names. I’ve always thought it promising that such thinking means we are living in a country, a landscape, quite literally woven out of stories and song. There’s an obvious parallel in the Bible, in John 1: 1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the word was God.”

Whatever you believe, it’s a fact we make our world up all the time, every day we pass through it. And that it too creates us as we respond to it. Understanding this reciprocal sense of place and why it matters feeds who we are. If we also feed it, name it, acknowledge it. As seems to be the case today. Here now. With my son. Rattling towards the city, looking out the wide windows of a grubby silver train, calling out the prayer of motion and connection: “Star more.” “New town.” “Donal town!” “Ray Fern.” “Sendral.” Home.

- Mark Mordue

* Story first published in Sydney Morning Herald Summer Herald January 5th, 2007

Richard Clapton Live

Richard Clapton
Country Club Resort,
Launceston, 2006


It’s a sit down show. “I just called to say I love you” is sprinkled from the ceiling tannoy like numbing confetti. Patrons at the door joke about Englebert Humperdinck making an appearance. But club schmaltz and mid-life ironies do not negate an excitement in the room. For two hundred people, a full house, something important is about to go down.

Richard Clapton walks on stage, backed by a young acoustic guitarist called Danny Spencer. The singer is wearing the same impenetrable penny-eyed sunglasses he seems to have had on his face for four decades. Black t-shirt, jeans, barrel-chested, bit of a belly, but almost like his old self.

“Janie see how good the sky looks today…” and he’s off, singing ‘Blue Bay Blues’, his classic ode to Byron Bay and a hippie love affair that floats on sunny air. Now, as then, it has the echo of time passing to it, a feeling temporary and beautiful at once. Time has enlarged this sweet-sad feeling, especially for those who first heard the song back in 1975 - and no doubt for Clapton too. Oh god, I feel like I might cry as he sings it. What is this feeling about? Reliving the past? Or is the past still alive in me now? The song tastes like salt, it’s that strong and most everyone here seems swept away.

By the time Clapton and Spencer are doing ‘Get Back to the Shelter’ something great is occurring. It’s to do with Clapton’s songs, the way he was our most articulate poet of Australian coastal life throughout the 1970s. He’s bringing it back to life, making the present dissolve and an era appear.

Then things begin to change. The rest of Clapton’s group joins him for ‘Capricorn Dancer’, and the Spencer’s acoustic nuances are forsaken for a less spacious sound. Clapton’s self effacing personality, his between song jests with the boys in the band, the mock jive poses and vocal affectations - burbling scats, off mike shouts - all take on an accumulated weight. After a while it feels as if Clapton is lost somewhere just outside of his own songs; that his moments of greatness are a mystery he can’t get back to except in glimpses.

The band comes alive for a new song called ‘Liberty Bell’, dedicated to “evil King John Howard”. Clapton is generous with the young players behind him, letting them loose, but from the title itself to the generalised working man lyrics and the steady chug of the melody, a faceless American FM rock competence is mostly what you get. An older song like ‘Ace of Hearts’ and the more recent ‘Diamond Mine’ show what a naturally wonderful voice Clapton has for soul funk – for the deep notes and cat-like cries that once used to see him match it with the likes of Renee Geyer on stage. But they also reveal what a dead end this has been for his talents an Australian balladeer, for sustaining a voice rooted in a sense of time and place he could call his own.

‘Deep Water’ and ‘Down in the Lucky Country’ seem to return an authority to the performance, but the playing is rushed and heavy handed. More critically Clapton himself undercuts things through an inability to keep faith with the high drama of the songs as they were originally expressed. It’s as if we’ve been banished to perusing some musical photo-album of how we used to be with Clapton, laughing at the way we danced, what we wore, what we believed in and did.

‘The Best Years of Our Lives’ restores the show to something truly special just when it all seems lost, accentuating a riff of sadness throughout the room and Clapton’s own divided performance as he calls and cries “don’t waste time, these are the best years of our lives, oh don’t waste time…” We all sing along in a hush-a-bye way.

The show ends after what feels like a strangely perfunctory one hour set, before Clapton returns for ‘Girls on the Avenue’ and ‘Goodbye Tiger’, both delivered with the same contrary blend of immersion and inability to give what’s ultimately required. He takes the latter song out on a devotional vocal spiral that invokes the prayerful intensities of Van Morrison - but Clapton never goes all the way, descending into scat mimicry rather than ecstasy, muttering something about life being “as mean as shit” and blessing us with a wish to “take good care of ourselves.”

A few slugs straight from a bottle of vodka during these final songs is less like the act of a rock ‘n’ roll wild man than someone drinking a cup of tea - the difference, you feel, between abandonment and resignation. Of course it’s no surprise Clapton finds it so hard to enter the mystery of his greatest songs some thirty years on - and yet their greatness still shines in spite of him, and sometimes because of him too. You can’t help but want him try harder, to believe in who he was. To not waste this time.


- Mark Mordue

* Performance took place some time in 2006. Review never published. Above image of Clapton from a Festival Records photo shoot in 1973.

Black Water Blues

The great Australian journey is almost always characterised by a trip inland. But what about the call of the coast in shaping our national identity? MARK MORDUE speaks to an artist, a musician, a filmmaker and a poet about our Pacific dreaming and how it connects us.





Whenever we talk about discovering Australia the big stories are almost always about heading inland to find something authentic, even spiritual. For some reason the coast gets left behind in any serious discussion of our national identity, and with it one of our most powerful and common experiences, a trek along the Pacific Highway.

There’s a suggestion in all this that there’s something inferior about the coast and what it means to us. That as the central character in Patrick White’s magisterial novel Voss (based on the nineteenth century German explorer Ludwig Leichhardt) says, “It’s a pity you huddle.” Explorers and missionaries, bushrangers and pioneers, these were the people who paved the way for us, ideologically as much as literally. These were also the people who created the mythology of our nation, its journey into being - and their life stories usually determine how we relate to the landscape and how we define what might be called ‘Australianness’. Our artists, musicians, filmmakers and poets often beat a similar path into the dust today.

The painter Ian Smith takes a very different tack. “Highway One is becoming my subject,” he says. “And the scenes from that road are my landscape. But I’m not like a farmer who sits and knows the landscape he’s in, I’m more a passing-by character. And the road is my moving standpoint. I’m an artist of people in landscape - where the towns breakdown into the landscape really. It’s a shantytown thing I guess.

“I’m not looking at a desert obviously. It’s something closer to home,” he says. “Painting those things people think they know – an empty billboard, that bend in the road – and finding something strange or magical in that banal world. I’ve always thought common experiences have a lot of grandeur about them; the things people see every day. People have always felt the mythology of the outback and the bush, but they still think they don’t need it in their own backyard or street corner.”

Smith says that when “I’m on Highway One I follow the same path and yet I always find something new. But it’s not just a matter of finding something new; it’s about knowing something better. So I don’t see the road as a journey into the continent, I see it as something that runs along the edge. Highway One connects a lot of people who are where they’re at rather than people who are starting off and going somewhere. I like that. They’re mostly not making journeys to unfamiliar places. When you drive up and down that highway you know you aren’t in that voyager-explorer thing. You’re revisiting the known and building on it somehow. And there’s a growth in that. I guess I’m just saying some people find something new, others find something better.”

Certainly the coast roads have their own energy, their own special place in our make-up, an odd mix of the hedonistic and the regretful as much as the more obviously secure, familiar or settled. Classic Australian bands like Cold Chisel, Midnight Oil, INXS and The Cruel Sea have all made their mark touring the coast roads and building up support among the communities beaded along them. For someone so increasingly countrified and parched in his own musical interests, former Cold Chisel songwriter and solo musician Don Walker still professes a fascination for what he describes as a Pacific sound, “something that connects Chet Baker, Jane’s Addiction, The Doors, Dragon… there’s a real similarity there, this demonic, exotic sea children vibe that I like in all of them.”

This liberty – and the libertine streak that underwrites it – is easily left behind in our youth, much as it might be intrinsic to what could be called our spiritual physique on the coast. Perhaps it fits our ‘nature’ as a young western democracy trying to grow up that this coastal vitality should keep calling to us in its coarsely material and hedonistic as well as naturally beautiful way. For all our aspirations to maturity and seriousness as a culture, there’s always a highly physical pleasure principle at work that we both relish and somehow seek to rise above (if only to find we have lost something along the way).

It’s something of a curiousity that on Sydney’s north shore people still have ritual parties based around Richard Clapton’s Goodbye Tiger to recall the experiences of growing up and partying by the coast in the 70s, singing along, only half-obliviously, to songs of loss like ‘Deep Water’: “Sitting out on the Palm Beach Road, I’m so drunk and the car wont go. And my crazy eyes keep looking out to sea. The Sunday drivers are cruising around. I wish they’d all go back to town. What do they expect to find? Sure as hell ain’t peace of mind…”

The world renowned surf filmmaker Albert Falzon, whose Morning of the Earth revolutionized the local cinema scene when it first emerged here in 1972, says ideals about the coast roads were crucial to the feel of his groundbreaking documentary and the counter-cultural spirit of the time. “Surfers are great explorers, it’s part of the whole culture they’re a part of,” he says. “That feeling that just over the hill is a perfect wave. It’s almost a mystical thing - that search mentality inside them. When we made Morning of the Earth we took the journey from the north coast of New South Wales all the way up into Bali, which no one had ever heard [back] then. It was a very heightened experience for everybody and it opened the road to Asia for surfers and then for the tourists that followed. Whether that was good or bad in the longer run, I don’t know.”

“Unfortunately surfing is so commercialized now. It’s also much easier to get from point A to point B; everything is so accessible,” Falzon says regretfully. “I think the road these days is like the mall for kids. They’re just saturated by the commercial side of surfing; it’s ingrained. So the road is the newsagents, video games, surfing stores. Not the real experience of pulling in to a beach and sleeping in your car. Twenty years ago when surfers went to these locations up and down the coast, a lot of them never went back on the road. They just said this suits me and put their rucksack down and never left. You drive from Sydney to Byron, turn off anywhere, and you will still find these beautiful little fishing villages, these great beaches. It’s still only a step away.

“The funny thing is I’m still on the road. It’s just that it’s a small triangle of driving ten minutes every day. There are about half a dozen other local cars that I pass when I head off to the coast from my little farm in the morning, and every one of the drivers knows me, and waves when I pass. I can still pull up to a beach with no houses. I actually follow a little dirt road that runs along the coast for about 10 kilometres that takes in about six beaches, all absolutely pristine. Maybe I meditate on the beach. Maybe I just stop to look at the empty horizon.

“When you jump off the land and paddle into the water – whether you recognize it or not – you’re letting go, you’re no longer attached to land. It’s subconscious. Maybe this letting go flows into the lifestyle of surfers. There’s more trappings now but it’s still there I think. Back when I made Morning of the Earth it was just easier to get to. You know, I was born in Redfern. I had no desire to see the world. It wasn’t till I started surfing and let go of the land that I got ‘on the road’ in every sense - and when that happened the world was my oyster.”

The poet Robert Adamson is a coastal creature of another kind. He tells me he first took to the road with his girlfriend when he was 17, travelling up the coast in a 1948 Ford Mercury. “We shot through to Queensland with child welfare in pursuit. She was under-age at the time, just under 16. She didn’t look it though. She looked older than me. We lived in that car for about six weeks. I ended up getting arrested for carnal knowledge. When I tell that story I always forget to say how old I was. I’m 58 now. People say why did you go to prison Bob? And I say carnal knowledge and they look at me funny.”

“When I was taken to court the judge said I wasn’t showing enough regret for what I had done. I said why would I your honour, I’m in love with her. But this is a carnal knowledge charge he said. I said its knowledge, but there’s nothing carnal about it. He said one more thing out of you and I will have you in contempt! I said haven’t you ever been in love your honour? And that was it. They took me away,” he laughs.

“I used to be really embarrassed about my past you know. All the artists I knew were university educated or art school trained. They were successful from school on. They hadn’t fucked up their lives like me. The first time I left home was when I was 14. I just lived on the road. It was always like that for me. Cars became my version of a house. That’s why I always had an extravagant car. In the ’70s when cars were seen as a symbol of capitalism and American materialism, I had this big Ford Mustang. I was really proud of it too. A uni friend said, ‘I didn’t realize you were a bogan at heart Bob’. I said, ‘What’s wrong with that?’

“To be honest, before I became a poet, I wanted to be an ornithologist. When I discovered I couldn’t do that, I wanted to be a racing car driver. David Malouf tells this great story about me driving him across the Harbour Bridge. He always says I almost killed him. I was just showing him how fast the car could go! I had Bob Dylan on the stereo and Malouf beside me looking calm, I thought. I didn’t know he was terrified.”

“That whole open road myth really helped launch me. I live by the Hawkesbury now and have my own boat and do a lot of fishing, but the river and the open road are similar things to me. Go out on the Hawkesbury River at night and it’s just a big winding road when you are on it. I called my last book of poetry Black Water because of that. It’s just like this big, curvy highway heading out into the abyss, the Pacific.”


- Mark Mordue



* Story unpublished. Love this piece but never been able to get anyone to run with it. It's a couple of years old now but still hasn't dated at all in my opinion.