Monthly Archives: Mar 2026

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The Eighth Caller Through: The Cars, Neil Young, and Goanna

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Aside from Derek and Clive, Caddyshack, and late capitalism, old mucker Lukey and I natter and laugh about music. He played drums in 90’s Adelaide bands Imelda’s Shoes and Fuge. I remember my late-night excitement at hearing him keeping time on a song Richard Kingsmill introduced on Triple J. At 10pm on a Tuesday, it was fame by association.

Last Christmas, Lukey dropped off a stack of old vinyl — hefty, musty, and packed with sentimental promise.

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The Cars – Greatest Hits

I recall Shake It Up as a mood-lifter, and I’m sure the Grand Prix night of 1986 when Chrisso, Lukey, and I were in Nick’s unhinged Honda on the Freeling straight, there was plenty of brotherly love. Doubtless, The Cars roared out the open windows of that hatch-back as we hurtled past the darkened barley.

Can you imagine how many Triple Tracks of The Cars were rolled out on SA-FM across the 80s? If I had an icy-cold can of coke for each one then, well, I’d be diabetic and dead. I connect this Boston band with adolescent summers and oddly enough being in cars — like Nick’s Honda — rushing to the cricket, the drive-in, the beach at Port Willunga.

The songs are mostly upbeat with guitars and robotic Roland synths. Although I’ve made no deep investigation, the lyrics were the usual love’s good or love might be good or love’s a mess formula. Yes, mostly empty but we were nineteen, music didn’t need to be apocalyptic and Dylanesque. Solemn examinations of the human condition optional.

Uh well dance all night and whirl your hair
Make the night cats stop and stare
Dance all night go to work
Do the move with quirky jerk

Given The Cars drove, err, in a tight lane, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s all the same song, but I like Just What I Needed, You Might Think, and My Best Friend’s Girl.

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Comes A Time – Neil Young

The muted tone of the sleeve triggers a memory of a TDK C-90 tape, though I can’t remember who dubbed it for me. I was fourteen — an age when life arrives without notice. Side 2 could’ve been Glass Houses by Billy Joel. How does music find us?

Unlike his noise-guitar work with Crazy Horse, this is mostly quiet — occasionally country, but entirely Sunday afternoon.

Lotta Love is a favourite song from it. He sings in a fragile, upper-register voice that threatens to fray into a whine. But doesn’t. Nicolette Larson provides harmony vocals on it and across the album. She covered it soon after and it became her signature song. Melburnian Courtney Barnett did a worthy version too.

The title track, Peace Of Mind, and Four Strong Winds are other standouts.

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Spirit Of Place – Goanna

Arriving during the summer I turned sixteen, whenever I flick across my car radio at the lights and the urgent drums of Solid Rock pound through the speakers, I’m instantly back in hot and hilly Kapunda.

It was among the first pricks to my conscience regarding the harm caused to Australia’s original inhabitants. The satirical use of marketplace warned me that money could be more important than people.

Out here nothin’ changes
Not in a hurry anyway
You can feel the endlessness
With the comin’ of the light of day
You’re talkin’ ’bout a chosen place
You wanna sell it in a marketplace, well
Well, just a minute now

I haven’t dropped the needle on it since I had nut-brown hair, so I’m gladly startled by its warmth. Burnt country and ragged outsiders hang in the melodies. I partly expected it to feel dated, but the songs and the storytelling are timeless. Shane Howard’s vocals are gracefully commanding, all woodsmoke and Kimberley sunsets.

Razor’s Edge, On the Platform, and Four Weeks Gone are my top picks.

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Thanks, Lukey, for rocketing by in the DeLorean/ Black Thunder to drop off my prize pack. I must’ve been the eighth caller through to Vinny and Cameron on SA-FM’s Morning Zoo. Vinyl isn’t just a nostalgia machine — the needle, the hiss and crackle come first, and then the music — and for a heartbeat, it isn’t the past at all. It’s right now — the way it found us in the first place.

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Waiting Under the Bucket

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Steering away from Becks Bakehouse, my bland sausage roll begins its sluggish transit. I turn up the Mississippi bluesman, Elmore James, so Max and I can hear the chugging genius of Dust My Broom

I’m gon’ get up in the morning
I believe I’ll dust my broom.
I’m gonna get up in the morning
I believe I’ll dust my broom.

Our trip to Victor Harbor had begun.

It was time to talk against the rhythm of (hopefully) agreeable activity, to gently explore Max’s inner and outer worlds, to scrutinise his present and point an encouraging telescope towards his future. We go nowhere new. Sometimes the best excursions are to known places.

Granite Island is everybody’s favourite isle and we’ve circumnavigated it often. On the ocean-side I realise I’ve not looked at the rolling waves, rocky cliffs, or blue sky, extending above us. I am immersed. We are talking and walking.

We stop at a gnarly tree, years ago its horizontal trunk the setting when Alex slipped while climbing. His tumbling then straddling generated much hot grief. Max and I laugh at the image.

Our holiday cabin is agreeably spartan, so we sling in our stuff and venture to the waterslides. Hopping out of the pool, I point to the big bucket, tilting slowly, thrillingly on its hinge. ‘It’s been a while since we stood under a bucket,’ I say. ‘Let’s go.’ Max follows me there.

I can see him there as a five-year-old — smaller, impatient, bouncing with limitless energy. We step underneath it now. There’s no one else waiting. The mechanism teeters as it fills. It takes longer than I remember. ‘It’s going to go,’ Max says. But it doesn’t. Not yet. Then it does — all at once — a hard, cold weight of water, and I let out a yelp I didn’t mean to make.

A late afternoon drive to Goolwa wharf and its bars and cafes. Max remembered a school excursion here to ride on the old paddlewheel ship, the Oscar W. A riverfront German bar is selling litre steins of beer for $25 each. The straggly-bearded bartender asked, ‘Can I get you one?’ I decline and later say to Max, ‘One of those bad boys and I couldn’t drive home!’

We pulled up outside the Port Elliot townhouse which hosts my annual writing retreat. I wanted to remind Max of life’s possibilities. Then a lap of Horseshoe Bay. The swimmers had all gone. The short jetty we’d leapt from that cold January day was empty. Max said, ‘I like this beach.’ I smiled, ‘Me too.’

With shadows stretching by the games room and the camp kitchen we hit the ignite button and barbecued our dinner. Park dwellers scurry past us. We devour the meat and token salad.

In our cabin Eminem rapped as we scanned the rules of backgammon. Max likes chess, so I thought another strategic, quietly played pastime might suit us both. Accompanied by the regular percussion of rattling dice, we enjoy a couple of lingering games. Neither he nor I is especially competitive and so we play kindly, even cooperatively. The scoreline is 1-1.

Throughout there’s easy talk about cars, footy, travel. Max asks, ‘Would you go to Berlin or Munich?’ I offer what I can. He nods, carefully. I fear he’ll soon be in Germany.

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Running along the esplanade in the windless dawn, I feel a melancholic gratitude. Max is asleep back at the cabin. We’ve had a sparkling series of chats against this coastal backdrop.

Parenting, though, guarantees a background anxiety. I try to picture the next time Max and I might escape like this, just the two of us. But I wonder how many chances we’ll have to huddle under a tipping, giant bucket.

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A Brief History of the Triple Jump and Human Suffering

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Today I made a return to Sports Day. Some things have changed. Others absolutely have not.

The digital watch had just struck ten when the first vomiting incident was reported. A technicolour hula-hoop on the freshly mown turf. He’d not over-exerted nor breathed in his body-volume in energy drinks. Just an early morning vommie. To open proceedings.

I wandered to the fundraising BBQ. This year it was burnt by the Art Faculty. Disappointingly, I could buy no Picasso Chicken Patties or Last Supper Sausages.

In a relaxed corner, under some trees, there were games for those who find traditional sports unappealing. These included Giant Jenga and Connect Four. These are, of course, London beer-garden pursuits and should be encouraged as they develop essential life skills.

Meanwhile the resident DJ played Eminem, who would appreciate the irony. I imagine he has little truck with athletes and enthusiastically despises them. Even if some now sport Mum’s spaghetti on their singlets — courtesy of an early morning puke.

Much of my day was officiating the triple jump or as it’s variously known: the hop, step and jump, or in certain depraved circles, the hop, skip and jump. For most, it’s an exercise in assured humiliation as the poor souls approach the take-off mat with halting trepidation, their adolescent eyes wide with fright.

Often, instead of the triple jump, they then perform a sad sequence of biomechanical accidents borrowing from John Cleese’s Ministry of Silly Walks, a little boot-scootin’, and the dying buffalo in Apocalypse Now. Participants have three attempts but while I was on rake and tape measure duties, it was mostly one and done.

They fled the triple jump as if a spitting cobra was loose.

There must’ve been an Ancient Greek who drunkenly happened across this, in dusty Athens, following much ancient vino.

Christos: Watch this, Aristotle. I call it the triple jump.
Aristotle: Why not simply run from Point Alpha to Point Beta?
Christos: Too sensible. My invention will inflict psychological suffering on schoolchildren for millennia.

Christos then invited others to try it. Some thoughtlessly agreed and inexplicably, it caught on. Hereinafter was set loose centuries of global misery which continues unchecked to this day.

I love many sports and am sympathetic to many athletic pursuits. Running, jumping and throwing all have worldly value. But the triple jump, unlike other physical disciplines, is utterly non-transferable to real life. It may be the most futile human endeavour imaginable. If a ravenous beast — real or mythical — were on your Hellenic tail, who would break into a hop, skip and jump?

I enjoyed Sports Day. Congratulations to all who won a blue ribbon.

Thus, the ancient suffering continues.