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Dedicated to Pam.
Without her support and patience, I couldn’t have done this.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to:
Greg Quill for rescuing the book from my desk drawer.
Chris Stockley for providing photos and memorabilia.
Kerryn Tolhurst for jogging my memory and giving advice on an earlier manuscript.
Broderick Smith for photos and encouragement.
Kevin MacLean for photos.
To all living Dingoes for allowing this yarn to bear their names.
John Lee, if you’re listening, for your groove.
Donna Verdier for early editorial advice.
Janice Azrak, Philip Morris and Andrew Chapman for photos.
Duncan Kimball for putting two chapters on his ‘Milesago’ website.
John Tait for reading those chapters and wanting to read more.
Brian Wise for asking me to read them on his 3RRR radio show.
Jenny Darling and John Tait for their work in finding a home for the book.
Anne Tait for pre-editing.
Philip Quirk for the iconic cover shot.
Adolfo Aranjuez for his editorial perception.
David Tenenbaum for taking a chance on the band and the book.
Everybody for turning up at the 2010 Dingoes tour.
Foreword
I knew John Bois when he couldn’t talk his way out of a paper bag, let alone write a work of such infectious whimsy and great cultural import as The Dingoes’ Lament.
Boisy was the glue that held my band, Country Radio, together for about four years back in the early 1970s. He was the best bass player I’ve ever worked with. Great timing, intuitive sense of feel, melodic and punchy all at once.
He was a quiet guy, not much of a talker, but never unhappy. He never seemed to have much ambition, no big dreams beyond the next gig down the road. But he always delivere … sometimes a little ragged around the edges, sometimes without shoes, sometimes in need of deodorant, sometimes with an entourage of dubious followers in tow …
It was one particular gaggle of Boisy’s friends I was thinking about when out of the blue I heard his voice on the phone around 1997. He just wanted to catch up, he said. He’d been drinking some classy Australian shiraz, got a bit homesick, and wanted to share the afterglow with an old mate. We were both exiles, lost abroad, me in Toronto writing for a big newspaper, Boisy in Maryland teaching high school science.
My mind immediately reeled back to sometime in 1972, when Country Radio was at the height of its meager powers, following the unplanned success of our single, Gypsy Queen, to which Boisy and drummer Tony Bolton had contributed a powerful and unique rhythm arrangement.
He probably doesn’t remember the night, a few months later, when we had the opportunity to stay — at long last, and after years of infested, infected digs — in a real, high-class hotel, somewhere in Sydney’s Potts Point area. Around one in the morning, the door flew open and in lurched Boisy, smelling like jet fuel.
‘I’ve brought some friends,’ he blurted. ‘They don’t have anywhere to stay tonight, so I said they could sleep in our lounge room!’
He beckoned, and out of the corridor gloom stepped half a dozen grizzled battlers, all scars, scabs, bloody knuckles and bleary eyes. Feral dudes with shaky hands and itchy grins.
‘I met them in the park,’ Boisy explained, his tongue suspiciously thick. ‘They are very nice men who’ve fallen on hard times. They have so little, and we have so much!’
Needless to say, Boisy’s new mates were repelled, and in an indignant show of solidarity, our bass player departed with them, to spend what remained of the night in their company under the stars. It was a typical Boisy stunt: well-intentioned and potentially catastrophic.
Forty-odd years later, I still see flashes of that irrepressible free spirit whenever we meet. And it infuses this fantastic account of the Dingoes’ almost mythical rise and fall — and I mean that in the literal sense, because The Dingoes’ Lament is partly a coded fantasy, partly chaotic catharsis, in the best Australian yarn-spinning tradition, inhabited by real characters and circumscribed by actual events.
No-one in either The Dingoes or Country Radio saw this coming, this canny, funny, loving and self-deprecating account of an odyssey undertaken in the late 1970s by a band almost prophetically doomed from the start.
I had no idea he’d written a book. I confess I would not have thought this happy-go-lucky rambler was up to it. Yet, not long after that 1997 phone call, chapters started arriving, one a week, in my email inbox, without comment or explanation. I was captivated, mesmerised. I couldn’t wait for the next installment.
It wasn’t just the story. It was the quality of John’s storytelling that grabbed me, and his uncanny ability to focus in on the idiosyncratic qualities and foibles of characters I knew so well, on the very sound of their voices, on the unique language and eccentric culture that musicians develop when they spend so much time together in isolation.
This was not a sterile diary, not a collection of war stories, not a self-aggrandising we coulda been heroes reverie. This was literature, its standards as noble as those The Dingoes had practised in their art. I can’t think of a rock’n’roll yarn that’s as convincing, as absorbing, as The Dingoes’ Lament.
In the decade since I first read it, bits and pieces of the book have been passed around like totem fragments among fans of The Dingoes. The band’s induction into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2009 — a well-deserved testament to their indelible contributions to the shape and substance of Australian music — prompted huge interest in a story that had never been, and was, indeed, long forgotten.
By very deliberately and very unsentimentally embracing the Australian vernacular, laying bare the austere, reckless and unhappy experience of life in the Lucky Country, conjuring up the harshness of the Australian landscape, and wrapping it all in an appealing and somehow familiar musical package that bridged rock, country music and R&B, The Dingoes were ahead of their time. But they were destined to be misunderstood — in their own country and in America — as a damned hot pub band.
They were that, but they were so much more. And underlying the ribald stories and richly drawn characters in The Dingoes’ Lament is the sad sound of a wreck down the line. Boisy heard it long before it happened, and started paying close attention to what was going on around him … gathering
