The Italian connection

Leigh was undoing his shoelaces, with the arthritic machinations of a bloke who has seriously extended himself. I, for one, was not going anywhere near mine, for the simple reason that a) I couldn't feel my feet anymore, and b) it would have been asking the impossible for me to bend any further than it took to pull a beer out of the esky beside me.

We'd just done a marathon hike into a place called "God Knows Where", by way of a canyon called "Fuck Me, You Must be Kidding" and along a mountain trail named "If You Get Through This Alive, You're Doing Well", a graveyard littered with the dessicated bones of unfortunate Germans and Japanese who had unwittingly read Fahrenheit for Celsius.

At least, this is my recollection. I can't be entirely certain, because I'd begun hallucinating by the time we'd tramped about fifteen miles through venomous scrub over rocks that resembled razor-sharp hand-grenades which exploded underfoot.

"Loz," gasped Leigh as he drank his sixth bottle of water for the day, "I'm having a great time!"

He giggled for a while, then collapsed on the ground, heaving.

Remembering that fortune favours the brave, we opted for cowardice, and bid a strategic retreat through the fields of blood to a camp-ground that at least afforded a decent burial in the case of a misadventure like slicing one's wrist whilst opening a coldy.

Of course, it was a tribute to our erstwhile enemies that they'd attempted the trek at all. Back in camp, we were comforted by a group of Italians who had pitched a tent next to us, and, rather than face the vagaries of wind and sun, had very sensibly decided to cavort in the resort's swimming pool all day, only to return to their campsite in order to quaff ice-cold chianti and graze on a variety of superlative Mediterranean foodstuffs.

I know all of this, because Leigh invited us over to their camp in order to, as he said, "determine that none of their victuals were poisonous."

They were from Florence - a mildly respectable centre of culture, that Leigh (who is a traveller of distinction), reckons is on a par with Cessnock or Heddon-Greta. "The trouble with Florence, Loz," he said with the air of the world-weary, "is that it doesn't have a smash-em-up car derby track like Heddon-Greta. Couple of good paintings and statues, though. Keeps the locals contented, although I reckon they could use a good Hoyts multiplex and a Henny Penny or two." Fortunately our Italian companions knew not a word of English, and if they did, were sufficiently familiar with irony to ignore the Barbarian Australian who was refined enough to know the value of fine wine. Besides, it's not difficult to tell when Leigh is joking. He begins to chuckle before telling you his story, breaks into giggles between sentences, then falls about laughing at himself at the end. His humour is completely infectious, and it wasn't long before the Florentines and we had become firm friends.

The following day we took them to Sacred Canyon, a tiny (by Flinders Ranges standards) cleft in granite cliffs, some twenty k from Wilpena. A dry, rocky creek bed led us, a kilometre or so, to walls of granite in pinks, reds and greys. And on those walls were hundreds of beautifuly engraved circles, animal prints, and campfire motifs. We were looking back in time - thirty to forty thousand years of it, in fact, at a civilisation that had used this little gorge, a place in the absolute middle of nowhere, as a meeting place, campfire and rest spot along a trade route that extended up into the Northern Territory and across to Cape York. These blokes must have been seriously good navigators, because this part of the country is so homogeneous that you can get lost just by looking over your shoulder.

The people of this area, the Adnyamathnha, or "hill people", inscribed these rock engravings with pieces of granite. We wandered around the gorge, inspecting everything, including a beautiful, big python that had serenely lain up in a crevice about four feet off the ground. Our friends were captivated by its sparkling green and yellow diamonds, and spent minutes studying and photographing it. To our chagrin, they were one pair of foreigners we were unable to scare silly with snake stories. When Leigh began to describe the rising panic one could expect in a victim were she suddenly pounced upon and wrapped in the python's vice-like coils, Eleanorae coolly looked down her nose at him and said "Their diet consists wholly of small marsupials and birds' eggs. We are not prey." Italians 1, Barbarians 0.

Sitting on a rock, staring up at the engravings, I began to ponder the sort of minds responsible for these at once ritualistic and practical symbols. What did they think of their world? They were, quite obviously, well beyond the simple "hunter-gatherer" stereotype our colonial ancestors ignorantly ascribed them. This was not some paleolithic graffiti. The engravings were works of great care; their draughtsmanship marvellous, and there were obvious signs that many of them marked out routes, waterholes, and food sources. This was the ancient equivalent of sat-nav and A Brief History of Time in one - a testament to intelligence, skill and tradition. Eleanorae and I sat together, enthralled. Eventually, she took my hand, briefly, and said very seriously "Laurie, you and your countrymen are very lucky." I could not but agree.

Humbled by our encounter with serious time, we returned to camp, where modernity returned with a rush in the form of several grey nomads who had parked their lurid behemoths all around our tent-site, and were busily erecting satellite dishes so that they would not miss the next episode of The Young and the Restless. Eleanorae, Rafael and we decided that culture was best promoted, instead, by that which draws the hearts of our two countries closest together - wine, and plenty of it!

From the ashes emerges a grub

The "Pastor" of some tin-pot joint called "Catch the Fire Ministries", a certain Danny Nalliah, today blamed Victoria's new, more liberal abortion laws on the fires that have killed 173 people in the State (and counting.)

This cunt says he "woke with a flash from the Spirit of God: that His conditional protection has been removed from the nation of Australia, in particular Victoria, for approving the slaughter of innocent children in the womb."

The only thing I have to say about this, is that it would be a just and fitting irony for the clubhouse of "Catch the Fire Ministries" to catch fire itself, preferably with Pastor Danny trapped inside, on his knees, his pants around his ankles, with the flaming sword of Gideon lodged firmly up his criminal arse.

Bull's eye

As I've said before, the Great Ocean Road is a driver's joy. Hundreds of kilometres of sinuous and beautifully realised roadway afford the motorist every pleasure, such as coming up behind a sluggard mobile home and overtaking it with the mighty power of the Volvo's 2.5 litre, turbo-charged engine, and narrowly avoiding the Audi doing exactly the same thing from the opposite direction. A rough calculation of vectors alerted me to the fact that a combined impact speed of about 300 kph would have probably set off the Volvo's air-bags.

"Jesus, Loz!" ejaculated Leigh - "I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my Grandad - not screaming in horror like his passengers!"

We were in a rather more subdued frame of mind as we rolled into Apollo Bay, a combined fishing village and red-hot tourist mecca for cashed-up Melburnians, many of whom were to be seen promenading their pomeranians along the main drag as we dawdled through town. To be fair, Apollo Bay is paradise on a stick; a long, curving beach winds its way up to a boat harbour where the fishing fleet rests, and the ocean front is admirably bedecked with wide, rambling parkland. We pulled up outside (guess where) the Apollo Bay Hotel, and decided that drink was, for the moment, the better part of valour. After all, we were still shaking from a close encounter of the luxury German vehicle kind.

"Thought I was about to become an historical Australian figure, back there, Loz," mumbled Leigh as he poured schooner number three into himself.

"Get a grip, you big girl's blouse," I responded, "after all of your shenanigans in the Hawkesbury, you'd be lucky to have a statue erected of a size that just one pigeon would have the room to shit on."

It was time to find a camping ground, and, without any trouble at all, we drove into a neat little area that had several tent sites by a creek that fed into the ocean just a couple of hundred yards away. Having set our camp, and it being about 6 p.m., the call of food was unmistakeable, so we ambled back into the hotel to see what was on offer. (And, I must say, southern ocean lobsters are delectable, but please don't tell my wife.)

By about eight o'clock the place was getting jam-packed. Leigh and I decided that a game of pool was in order, and it wasn't long before two local fishos and we were having a rather merry time buying each other beer as we won and lost, and having a very fulfilling conversation about the vicissitudes of the fishing industry. Leigh had opted for the red wine option, and, when he didn't have a pool cue in his hands, was presented with the stimulating dilemma of a very large glass of red in his right, and an even bigger one of beer in his left. Naturally, he chose to be ambidextrous, and, after a couple of hours, became somewhat verbillaceous as well.

"Loz," he intoned rather conspiratorially, "I want to live here for the rest of my life."

"You keep pluggin' away at that lot," I pointed to the two glasses he held in his hands, "and that could be all of about four hours, pal."

At that point the doors of the pub burst open, and in marched three young women of the Vietnamese persuasion, followed by an older bloke who may as well have had the word "Pimp" tattoed on his forehead. The girls were wearing extremely short mini-skirts and equally extreme low-cut singlets; so extreme, in fact, that one had to wonder how those acres of exposed epidermis could actually be contained within the outside of a human body, if you get my meaning.

They turned out to be a trio of working girls down from Melbourne with their boss for a spot of R&R. They were, I have to say, for all their dainty charm, just about the toughest bunch of women I've ever encountered. They immediately commandered the pool table, and looked over the four of us, no doubt determining which would be the easiest to beat. Fortunately, I was overlooked by the selection committee, and retreated to the safety of the bar. The oldest, and toughest, of the three picked Leigh.

"Rack 'em up, sunshine," she commanded Leigh, who, by this stage of the evening, was starting to become unfamiliar with the English language, let alone that variety of it spoken by a tiny Vietnamese woman with a prepossessing snake tattoed across her sumptuous and extensive decolletage. Nevertheless, he valiantly attempted to assemble the balls in the little wooden triangle, overlooking the fact that the white ball didn't belong there. Having one ball, the black, left over from his assemblage, he bemusedly rolled it up to the cue line. The girls looked at each other with looks that said "How good is this?", and the snake lady strutted along the length of the table, pushed Leigh out of the way, and with a dismissive shrug, rearranged the balls correctly. She decided to break, and said to Leigh "You know about 'Pants down run around'?" - referring to an intriguing custom whereby the loser of a game is obliged, if he has sunk no balls in his defeat, to remove his lower garments and parade around the pool table.

Thus potentially relieved of what would be the last vestiges of his dignity, Leigh propped himself on a pool cue while the snake lady leant over the table, revealing a pair of red satin knickers under her mini-skirt with a black bull's-eye strategically embroidered, and belted the fuck out of the break. After a considerable time, the balls stopped careening off the cushions, and, to my amazement, and in seeming defiance of the laws of physics or probability, not one of them had found its way into a pocket.

When Leigh's eyes stopped rolling after he'd vainly attempted to follow the balls around the velvet, and finally appraising that it was his turn, he turned to the snake woman, smiled broadly and said "Tough break, darlin'."

Now, conventional medical science has it that alcohol inhibits various brain functions, including motor skills, calculation, and reasoning. The game of pool requires a tremendous degree of control over all of these faculties, and Leigh had had enough of the stuff to theoretically make it rather difficult for him to stick his pool cue in a bath-tub, let alone bring it close enough to a two-inch pool ball to actually make contact with it.

Leigh decided to throw caution to the wind, and lined up the most difficult long-shot on the table. The girls were tittering with scorn, when Leigh cracked the thirteen ball straight into the corner pocket, leaving the cue ball motionless, and perfectly positioned for an easy pot of the eleven into the side. "Lucky shot," exclaimed the snake lady.

Leigh ignored the easy pot, and lined up a ball that was resting on the cushion at the other end of the table. Gently, delicately, he rolled the cue ball onto the twelve, causing it to run faultlessly into the bottom pocket. The looks of scorn began to dissipate on the ladies' faces, to be replaced with an evident and rising anxiety. The snake lady looked cautiously at the hundred dollar bill that - with the confidence of the consumnate punter - she had previously lain on the end of the table. 

Meanwhile, Leigh had smashed another ball cleanly into the side pocket, and was calmly assessing the angle of a particularly tough double into the bottom corner. The ball slid into the pocket without a murmur of complaint. Jack, one of the fishos standing beside me, spat half a schooner onto his mate, and started doing a little jig on the spot. "Fuck me - I don't believe this!" he exclaimed.

By this stage a sizeable crowd had assembled around the table, no doubt attracted by the combination of Leigh's effortless prowess and the ridiculous impersonation of an Irish kick-dancer he affected between shots. Dancing around the table, giggling for all he was worth, he smacked two more balls into their pockets with the sound of a whip-crack. Only the black ball was left. Leigh addressed it. It hit the back of the pocket and rolled down the tube with a sound like hollow laughter.

The crowd erupted. Leigh nonchalantly picked the hundred off the end of the table and walked over to the snake lady. "I can't take your money off you, darlin'," he said as he pressed the note into her hand, "but I believe it's your turn." I have to say this for the snake lady - she was a good sport, and dutifully and deftly removed the mini-skirt and bull's-eye knickers and jogged around the table two or three times. But in her profession, I suppose, such behaviour was fairly run-of-the-mill.

Of course, Leigh's sensational win was the occasion for another several rounds of drinks, and Leigh and I chatted for a while with the girls from Melbourne and a few locals. Or I should say I chatted - Leigh was somewhat more voluble, and mixed a loud discourse on the beneficial effects of red wine on the neurological apparatus with several triple forte choruses of "Proud Mary".

Eventually, the miracle of modern medical science and I staggered drunkenly back to our camp-site, where Leigh got half way inside his tent, and was still on his knees with his head and shoulders on the ground, before he went into a perfect, dreamless sleep. As a parting shot, I got a texta out of the glove box of the Volvo and drew three concentric circles on his backside, which was conveniently protruding from the tent.

"Bull's eye, indeed, old mate," I whispered.

Footy, funerals and fish.

Leigh was keen to catch some fish. He'd even bought a little fishing rod in Sale, Victoria - where we'd stopped for a breather before we drove into a hurricane on Wilson's Promontory. As we cruised down the coast from the Prom, dodging trees and pieces of peoples' houses littering the roads, Leigh waxed lyrical about our good fortune.

"See, Loz - the fates were with us. Nothing bad happened to us at the Prom. Granted, the tree that crushed your tent while you were up having a leak put the wind up me a bit, 'cause, quite frankly, I didn't know how I was gonna explain to your lovely wife why, after your demise, I'd continued on to the Flinders Ranges in her Volvo. I would have given you a decent burial, though.

"No, the only bummer at the Prom was that it was too wild to have a fish. But we'll sort that out at Sorrento tonight, Loz  - I'll go and get a few whiting, then I'll cook them up with some ginger, lime and chili: perfect." 

He dozed off, no doubt dreaming about the culinary delights attendant upon fish hunting, while I drove through a town called Fish Creek that had the singularly weirdest street sign I have ever seen: "Caution - Funeral in Progress." I had to reverse up to it to assure myself that I was not hallucinating, but there it was, fixed to a metal pole concreted into the ground, and obviously rather old. I drove on, wondering whether Fish Creek was some doppelganger of the fictional Midsomer, with a murder a week de rigeur. Whatever, it was a peculiarity that bespoke much of the odd proclivities of Victorians.

One other of these is the enthusiasm - no, the psychopathology - Victorians exhibit for AFL football, possibly the most idiotic game ever to waste valuable parkland. We pitched our tents in a very odd little camp-ground at Sorrento, and Leigh ran off to the beach with his rod and a bag of prawns, and the gradually muted cries of "Come here you little fishy bastards", or something. I decided to reconnoitre the famous Sorrento Hotel instead.

Inside, I fetched the inevitable pot of beer and sat down to take in the ambience. Around the perimeter of the room, where walls met ceilings, was an array of television sets all screening different games of AFL. I nodded to a fellow drinker who was looking rapturously at one of the screens, and asked "Who's playing?"

"Oh, it's a repeat of the 1978 grand final," he replied quite seriously.

"What about the games on the other sets?" I asked, with a kind of urbane nonchalance that masked a rising panic.

"Arr, that one's 1982 quarter-final between Essendon and Hawthorn, that's the 1990 G.F. The other one's live, but I'll watch that on replay later."

Yeah, in about 2035, I thought, wondering whether the publican was some kind of time lord.

I very quickly finished my beer and hurried out before the Daleks came on for the change of shift, and finally met up with Leigh at the beach, who was still fishing, and chuckling at the same time.

"Any luck, mate?" I enquired.

"Not yet, Loz." I asked if he'd had any bites yet, and got the same response.  I was just about to suggest that we pack it in and get a pizza when he hooted with laughter and said "I've run out of bait, anyway."

"Then why is your line still in the water?"

"Cause this is brilliant, Loz. I love fishing."

Eventually I coaxed him to reel it in, and we set off for the township of Sorrento, where, I must say, the pizzas were delicious. Leigh was keen to visit the hotel himself, so we ambled in again. The place was packed to the rafters, it being about 8p.m., with the assembled locals having a very jolly, noisy time, every one of them watching a replay of the 1972 grand final.

The following day we set off for the Great Ocean Road. But first, of course, we had to pay a visit to the beach where a former prime minister, one Harold Holt, had drowned while in office. To many people, the idea of the leader of a nation ambling down to the beach by himself on a Sunday morning, then throwing himself into a gigantic surf, only to never reappear, is strikingly odd. Where were his bodyguards, his minders? Well, the simple fact is that in 1968 no-one in Australia thought it odd at all. After all, he was just bloke who happened to have a fairly high-falutin' job. But, apart from that, his day off was his own business.

So Harold, who was in his late sixties at the time, decided to test the waters at Cheviot Beach. Leigh and I were making some breakfast by the beach, while waves of a similar stature to those that were the undoing of Harold came booming in at the shore.

"Loz, I reckon that there must be somethin' left of old Harold out there still. I might go out for a look." So saying, Leigh donned his blue boardshorts, paddled into the surf, and was, in fairly short order, obscured from view by fifteen-foot waves. I didn't see this as too much of a problem, at first. After all, he wasn't a prime minister, and, secondly, I hadn't finished my avocado on toast. Leigh was a reasonable swimmer, and although he hadn't taken his floaties with him as usual, I was sure he'd be alright. I settled down for a post-prandial snooze.

I was awoken by the sound of a helicopter's rotors beating a dull ostinato above the surf. I looked up to see a rescue worker, dangling from the helicopter, fighting to get what appeared to be a draft horse collar around a small, red-haired figure in the water. I could just hear the strident voice of my mate floating across the waves.

"Piss off, you idiot - I'm just waitin' for the next set to come along. Leave me alone. What right have you got to interfere with a bloke's freedom to have a bit of a surf?" He went on and on, all the while trying to belt the rescuer, whose natural concern was to pull what was obviously a raving lunatic out of mountainous, shark-infested seas.

Eventually, the rescuer subdued him, and Leigh was dutifully hauled into the cabin of the chopper. By the time it got back to the beach, he was barking mad and in no mood to party. I opened the Esky. "Here, mate, calm down and have a beer."

His mood changed immediately. "Aw, that's very good of you, Loz - did you see what these kill-joys were doin'? I just reckon they don't want me to discover the truth about Holt's disappearance. I got to the bottom, Loz, and I tell you, there's bits of submarine with Chinese writing on it down there."

As the rescue helicopter's crew were obviously looking as though strait-jackets would be the next phase in the rescue mission, I piled Leigh into the Volvo and we took off at high speed. 

Somewhat further down the road, as Leigh was rubbing his neck, which was beginning to show some ominous bruising from the horse collar, he said "Jesus, Loz, there were some good fish out there. I should've taken my rod."

What's important?

The biggest shopping centre in the southern hemisphere is about fifteen kilometres down the road from my place. It is an emporium on a vast, Mephistophelian scale. It has a sign at its entrance (which, symbolically, is directly across the road from the biggest crematorium in the southern hemisphere), that proclaims "You haven't lived until you've shopped here".

It is impossible to overestimate the level of pride I have in my countrymen's perspicacity when I see, as I'm driving past, thousands of cars turning into the place and making a beeline for the gargantuan underground car-parks, from which their occupants will emerge to stroll along the leafy boulevardes of the centre, which is hermetically-sealed, of course, and capable of withstanding any of nature's challenges ... er, like rain.

So dauntingly impressive is the sheer physical scale of this place that it has its own postcode - it is a suburb all to itself. I forget the figures I read about it in the local rag, an organ of biblically slavish regard for the god of mammon, but there are something like five billion acres  under one roof, two or three billion separate shops, etc. etc. You get the picture. It seems we have inherited the Texan philosophy of "bigger equals better".

Now, I must disclaim that I have not, myself, personally, under my volition, actually entered this sumptuous pleasure-dome, but just the sight of it on the horizon, as I drive past on my way to a gig, fills me with a Coleridgean longing. 

Through twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers girdled 'round...

Apart from the hugely satisfying architectural splendours of this behemoth, apparently one can, if one is so inclined, purchase every single appurtenance necessary to the maintenance of the modern lifestyle at this one place. That's so gratifying a concept that I am at a loss as to why I have not, myself, personally, set foot inside the joint. I will never know the pleasure of using the labour-saving "travellators" that effortlessly shunt the shopper through the emporium without the need to use any muscles in the body except those that are required to shove ice-creams made from pig-fat into the mouth as one gawks and marvels at the cornucopia of earthly delights on offer.

Leigh and I were pondering this place as we drove out of the crematorium after attending the funeral of Leigh's sister-in-law, and my friend, Rosalie, last Thursday. Rosie was a woman that everyone would have been proud to call a friend. Strong, but gracious; intelligent and funny, she had come across this world and become a child of it. She and her husband, John, had not so much built a place at Misty Mountain, out in the Colo wilderness, as grown it. Their little house was lovingly assembled, mainly from the natural features of the landscape. Rosie had made gardens, sandstone walls that would make a mason weep with joy, paths and tracks through the bush, places of solitude and contemplation.

Rosie existed on tea and happiness. She was the exact opposite of the shopping dullard - fit, energetic and completely satisfied with simplicity. "Things" meant nothing to her. Her greatest extravagance was to go to the Bluesfest every year with us, where she and John would spend five days revelling in wonderful music. Like the damsel with a dulcimer, she was the true Coleridgean. Nature, with its beauties and fascinations, was the world; a butterfly landing on her shoulder in the glow of early morning, up there at Misty Mountain, was a day's worth of pleasure.

As we drove from the crematorium and passed the shopping centre, I wondered what Rosie would have made of the sign over its entrance. I think I know.

A cautionary tale

Years ago, as a young feller, I'd have the occasional puff of a joint. Marijuana, in those days, was stuff you'd go and pick from shrubs on the banks of the Hunter River near Newcastle, where I lived. It was there because, in the nineteenth century, hemp was an important part of any economy. It was a versatile fibre used for making rope, fabric and even paper. When the hemp industry fell into disrepute thanks to the propaganda of the emergent plastics industry in the 1930s, all that survived were wild stands of the stuff skirting the river systems. By the time I came along, of course, it was an illegal "drug", and was considered by the establishment to be the cause of a myriad of evils, including mental retardation and abandoned licentiousness. I don't know about the first, but it always produced an effect that made me think of sex as a decidedly bizarre affair.

Thus disabused of the idea that my parents' generation had the faintest notion of what they were talking about, my friends and I happily puffed away on our pickings for a number of years. Eventually, though, my interest in it waned to the point where a joint or two per year was about as big a drug habit as I had (discounting the copious amounts of Tooheys Old that I'd begun to consume. But alcohol is a good drug that had the establishment's seal of approval, of course.)

I hadn't even had a puff for several years. It was about 1990, and I was playing in a fairly large ensemble whose raison d'etre was to make as much money as possible for all concerned. It was a very well-organised band whose methodology was described to me by Phil, the band leader, as "play the thirty most famous and popular rock songs ever released." Which is what we did. It was a cornucopia, an alphabet of pop: we did everything from Abba to ZZ Top, cranking out note-perfect renditions of all of the greats. My job was to learn, and play, exact replicas of all the famous guitar solos, perfectly, night after night.

Now, the interesting thing about this band is that it was all about the vocals. We had three very good female singers, a great male lead vocalist, and the other four blokes in the band able to hold a tune. And, without being immodest, we were pretty fucking good at it. As well, we had a synthesiser system triggered by a computer, so on top of the guitar, keyboards, bass and drums, we had all sorts of other sounds - more keyboards, horn sections, strings, percussion, and the like - belting through a gigantic, and very beautifully mixed, sound system. The computerisation of the band meant that we all had to wear little "in-ear" monitoring systems which would give us the click track from the computer so we could start the songs at the right moment and remain in time with the synthesised sounds. This is an almost universal phenomenon with professional bands these days, but in 1990 it was a technology still in its infancy.

We were doing one show at a very big club in Sydney. Just our regular set, which we'd played hundreds of times before, and which had got to be so robotic as to be like any other production line work. We really had to be conscious of making a performance out of it - once you've played the solo to "Stairway to Heaven" exactly the same way a hundred times, you're over it.

On this night, we had a new sound engineer. He was a very competent operator, and our sound-check had gone smoothly. We'd played our first set of two to an audience of about five hundred people. We had a twenty minute break, and the sound guy came over to me in the dressing room and said "Hey Laurie - you look like a bloke that might enjoy a smoke."

Without thinking - probably bored senseless - I replied "Sure, let's go." We went out to his car, where he proceeded to get out a bag of pot, and load it into an evil-looking bong. I'd never had much of an association with these devices, and had always considered them slightly anti-social, but what the heck - I was just getting stoned.

"This is really good stuff," he informed me. "Durban Poison - I grew it myself; it'll get you nicely stoned, mate."

He offered me the thing, and I sucked as hard as I could on it while he lit it up. It nearly killed me going down, I can tell you. "Thanks," I said at the end of it, spluttering and gasping for air. "Your turn, mate."

"Oh no," he said, "if I have one of these I'll be ratshit. I just thought you might enjoy playing after one."  Oh fuck, I thought to myself, what have I done?

We walked back into the club. It was time to go on stage again, so I walked on, strapped my guitar on, checked my tuning, turned around to face the audience, and thought I was going to die. I had, suddenly and completely, entered a world of trouble with a capital T, short for tetra-hydro-cannabinol. I was fucked. I had walked into paranoia city, and had the instantaneous fear that I wasn't walking out of it in a hurry.

I looked down at the set-list gaffer-taped to the floor, and saw that we were about to launch into the Doobie Brothers' Long Train Runnin'. I'd played this song hundreds of times; I could play it in my sleep, but I had an almost overpowering urge to throw my guitar away and run like buggery.

I didn't, though, because I heard the count-in in my earpiece, and it was me who had to start the song: da-da-da, da-da-da-do, da-da-da, and so-on. I was playing it, and it seemed OK. The bass was next to come in, and, as he did, I realised that he was a semi-tone away from the key I was playing in. The drums rolled, the keyboards played a riff, and I very quickly changed to the key that the song was now in (F sharp minor, to be precise). I kept playing as the intro unfolded, but then I started thinking "Hang on, this is in G minor - it has to be; we've always played it in G. The computer doesn't change; the synthesiser should be in G, but it's not - it's in F sharp! But that's impossible. Oh, no - maybe it has always been in F sharp. No - couldn't be; I've always played it in G. Aaaaaaaaahhhh - I'm going mad; what the fuck is happening???"

I kept playing; I had no choice. We got to the solo section, where I had to play a harmonica solo. I whipped the harp out of its pouch on my guitar strap, and there on the top of the harp was the key for the instrument engraved on it : "B flat". I was right! It was in G minor! But - I couldn't play my solo, because the song was now in a different key. I had the very morbid feeling that the establishment had actually got it right - marijuana does, indeed, cause brain damage. I looked around at the other band members, who seemed to be happily and unconcernedly playing away. The harmonica was useless, so I played the solo on guitar in the new key - becoming increasingly aware that the guitar strings had taken on an appearance like furry spider legs, and the sound coming from my amp had ceased to resemble a Stratocaster and had taken on the characteristics of Chip n Dale having an orgy.

I played through the rest of the set, trying to overcome a bizarre feeling of sinking into the stage. I had to keep lifting my feet, one after the other, to keep on top of the quicksand the stage had become. And as for singing - forget it; I was afraid that any sound that issued from my mouth would just be a throttled scream.

The last song of the night was the abominable Hotel California, wherein it was my duty to play the solo that everyone knows by heart. I started with the right notes, but it quickly devolved into Chip n Dale having a Sorcerer's Apprentice battle. I felt like Harding in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - "I'm talking about form, I'm talking about content, God, the Devil, Heaven, Hell.." Folks, I was seriously off the planet.

Mercifully, the gig ended. I let my guitar slide off me and crash into its stand, and bolted for the dressing-room, where I sat in a cold sweat wondering if I might eventually come down, say before I was eighty. 

Phil and the rest of the band all marched into the dressing-room, giggling and pointing at me. The paranoia meter went completely off the scale. Phil came over and said

"Man, you played some seriously weird shit out there." And then he winked at me and said "It was good, though, it was damn good. I'll keep you in mind as the guitarist in any experimental music bands I want to put together." 

"Oh, and sorry about Long Train. I took it down a semi-tone - I forgot to tell ya."

Drugs are bad, 'kay?

Here comes Santa's claws

Graham the Barbarian and his lovely wife Maria are our closest neighbours. They live in a rather large house which I helped to build. It wasn't so large when they first moved in; "shoe-box" comes to mind. They'd invited us for Christmas lunch; the turkey would be at their place, then we'd all (two couples and five kids) repair to our place, about a mile down the road and into the bush, for dessert and an afternoon by the pool. A peaceful and comfortable way to spend Christmas Day.

Maria and Graham had laid on a feast fit for a king: in Australia, more and more, Christmas dinner is a salad affair. Prawns, cold meats and lots of good things from our combined vegetable gardens went down superbly with a couple of beers each for Graham and I, and some bubbly for the girls. A warm westerly breeze was blowing.

We were all preparing to come back to my place, and as Graham and I were loading his kids' brand-new bikes in the back of his ute, he asked "Do you smell that, Loz?"

The breeze had become a fairly stiff wind, and on it I could detect the unmistakeable, and quite pleasant, aroma of eucalyptus burning. We wandered around to his gate, and, looking westward, saw a haze of blue-grey smoke drifting over the escarpment, the series of hills that identify the most easterly throes of the Great Divide, about ten kilometres away.

"Not good, Graham. I think we'd better go for a drive."

Heading out along the ridge, into a clearer vantage point, we could see that a fire was burning way off on the top of the escarpment. We decided to go to the fire shed, and, when we arrived, a flurry of activity was happening. I could see a neighbour, Eric, who was captain of the volunteer service, barking orders at groups of guys busy with their fire-trucks, reels of hose and a few water-tankers that had just driven in. I jumped out of the ute.

"What do you reckon, Eric?", I asked.

"Could be crook, Laurie - we've got a real bad weather report comin' in - forty degrees and 100k westerlies. We're going out along Cedar Ridge, cause it looks like if that fire comes over the hill, it'll blow straight through here. I'd get home and start gettin' ready, if I were you."

"OK mate - what about your place?" He just looked at me with the glum determination of a bloke who knows that, while he's out saving other people's homes, his own might just be burning down.

"If you get a chance, you know what to do, Loz."

"Sure thing." But we both knew that, if it did get bad, it could get very bad for all of us.

We got back to Graham's and decided to get his place as ready as possible, then head down to mine. Graham was in the reasonably fortunate position that there was plenty of cleared area around his house - especially towards the west from where the fire would inevitably come. The idea would be that we would get my place secure, wait for the fire and deal with it, then get back up to his to do the same. (As things turned out, our plans were totally demolished by the speed and severity of the fire when it did come.)

The lot of us drove to my place. Chris got on the phone to another mate, Greg, to get him to bring his pump and hoses over. (Out here, everyone has this sort of gear - you're mad if you don't.) Greg's place was in a relatively safe suburban area, and he was under no threat, really, so he got some things together and was on his way.

Now, my place is in a lovely little valley surrounded by ridges on three sides and about two hundred acres of virgin bushland. Tall eucalypts are abundant, and our house is in the middle of this green oasis of forest. Idyllic, except on a forty degree day with huge, hot winds. And they were really starting to blow.

From the house we could now see, beyond the western ridge, a massive and growing pall of smoke, extending about two thousand metres into the sky. It was action time.

The kids got every bucket and container they could find and filled them, placing them around the outside of the house. The bath was filled; I plugged the gutters and ran the sprinkler on top of the roof to fill them. Graham and Miles, my son, ran firehoses to various points, and made sure that they were all working from the five thousand gallon tank on top of the hill. Greg and his eighteen year old son Matt arrived, and immediately got his pump on the swimming pool, trailing hoses along the front side of the house. Izzy, my daughter, insisted that her horse be led up from the paddock to the shelter of the house.

The plan was to meet the fire at the interface of the clearing with the bush, about forty metres from the house, and divert it around the house and yard. In a previous fire, we'd done just that pretty successfully. But we had no idea that what we were about to face was going to make that blaze look like a sparkler at a kid's birthday party.

It was three o'clock in the afternoon, and by this stage the wind was beginning to blow ferociously. Graham took off back up the ridge to get some bearings, and arrived back, breathlessly, a few minutes later.

"It's comin', mate - and it's real fast. We ought to get things wetted down."

We began throwing great quantities of water all over everything we could. The house was drenched, as were the gardens and the shed that holds our generators and solar-electricity set-up. But the wind was so hot and strong that the water was evaporating nearly as quickly as it was delivered.

I heard a noise, and looked up. The fire was coming over the ridge-line, directly towards us, and it was in the crowns of the trees. I shuddered.

Crown-fire: the worst kind of bushfire. The last fire had, more or less, gently come down over the hill at scrub level, and, even though there was some fairly energetic activity for an hour or so, it had been reasonably easy to draw it away from the house, and pretty safe, as well.

This was different. I had to make a split-second decision. I ran into the house, and screamed at Chris and Maria to get the three little kids and take off out the back way and get back to the ridge and relative safety. They scrambled, and within a minute were gone, with hugs and some frightened tears all round. They knew we were putting ourselves in some real danger by staying, but Graham, Greg and I were buggered if we were going to lay down without a fight. I'm not saying this out of bravado; I and my mates were just too obstinate to see twenty years' work (Greg and Graham had had a big hand in building my place) go up in flames.

I told Izzy to get her horse "inside the house - now!". For months afterwards the story of her putting a horse in the downstairs lounge-room was told, with great hilarity, all over the neighbourhood.

We all lined up on the perimeter with our hoses going full-pelt. The huge gums along the hillside glowed white, and then, one by one, exploded into flame. Limbs of trees as thick as an arm came hurling through the air like incendiary bombs, often crashing onto the roof of the house. I hoped like hell the sprinkler up there was still working, but we had no time to go back as the fire came storming back up the rise towards the house with the most unforgettable sound I've ever heard: a roar like a hundred express-trains.

Miles and I were standing beside each other when the sound of an enormous explosion came from the top of the hill. The concrete water tank had simply exploded from the heat of the fire. Suddenly, the pressure in our hoses dropped to nothing. Graham and Greg were still pumping from the swimming pool, but we were left with no defence at all.

"Run," I screamed at Miles. We got around to the eastern, lee-side of the house and lay on the ground as the fireball exploded over and around us. Sheets of blue flame whistled past us where the vapor-laden air was igniting. We jumped inside through Miles' bed-room window, and raced up the stairs, where we were greeted with the sight of huge flames belting down both verandahs, melting the fly screens, frames and all, on the windows. The heat was intense and suffocating, but the adrenalin was coursing through us so voluminously that we were both shaking with energy. It was time to do some bucket work.

For the next half an hour we ran around with buckets, re-filling from the pool and throwing them on the parts of the house that had caught alight. Greg and Graham continued to blast away at the northern side of the house, standing in the middle of the yard with flames singeing their overalls. I've never seen anything as brave. 

At one stage I was running down the stairs into the lounge room. There was Izzy, holding the bridle of her horse, which was unconcernedly chomping away at its nose-bag. Tears were streaming down her face.

"Are we going to be all right, Dad?" she cried, with a look of abject terror.

At that point I should have stopped, given her a cuddle, and reassured her.

Instead, I yelled (you had to; the noise of the fire was still deafening) "We might be if you let that fucking horse go and grab a bucket!"

She and Matt took the upstairs south verandah; by this time the firefront was past, and it was a little safer to venture out. I don't know who, if anyone, could have been given the most credit for saving the house. One thing I'm fairly sure of is that if we'd been only five, instead of six, we might have lost the house, and possibly our lives, as well.

After about an hour's more work, I was assured that the house was in no danger. (Well, technically, it was, because the air was still full of burning embers.) But Greg and the kids could look after that, so Graham and I jumped in his ute (it and Greg's car were the only vehicles that hadn't been burnt to the ground) and left for his place.

We couldn't get out the top road, as several trees had come down over it, so we doubled back and fought our way through the bottom track with the aid of a chain-saw onto the ridge road. Even so, it took a good half an hour to navigate our way to his place. 

We drove in, under some power lines that were swinging precariously on burnt-out poles, looked at the house, and both cracked up. It was absolutely untouched. It must have been the adrenalin come-down, but we sat their for a few minutes just giggling. Then reality hit. Graham looked over at his tool-shed - a forty foot shipping container that held all the tools of his trade - tools that were not only valuable in money terms, but that had acquired a significance in the life of this professional tradesman; any tradesperson will understand what I'm saying. There was smoke coming from it. By the time we ran over to it, we could tell that the inside was not going to be pretty.

Graham got the door open; a huge cloud of black, toxic smoke billowed from the container. It was obvious that everything inside was gone. We hung our heads.

Then Graham said something that I'm not likely to forget in a hurry. He smiled at me and said "Loz - it's just stuff. Just things. Our homes are here; we're here. That's all I need."

The fire claimed twenty homes in our area, countless sheds, out-buildings, fences, tractors and other vehicles. Everyone in the community pitched in and fought it for a week. Eric's house was safe. I got a wonderful Christmas present: one of the best friends a bloke could ever have.