needed to turn up to indicate amusement. He positioned himself to break and pumped the cue vigorously. He thrashed the white ball and sent it ricocheting off the pack and bouncing off the table.
‘Okay, you blokes,’ whined the bartender as the ball bounced across the linoleum and smashed into the bar. ‘What do you think this is, cricket?’
‘Mind your own business,’ retorted Kerryn angrily. Then, instantly composed, ‘Sorry, mate. Can I try that again?’
‘Have at it,’ I said.
I had never seen Kerryn hit anyone, but I have often thought that he would be a good friend to have if things got rough. Perhaps his badly chipped front tooth gave that impression, or maybe it was his cocky stance and attitude. His posture and clothing bore a striking resemblance to the male dancer in Renoir’s Dance at Bougival. But Kerryn’s hair would not have fit under that gentleman’s hat. Kerryn, like the dancer, wore a beard, but his hair was long and frizzy and naturally assumed the shape of a toadstool. Apart from his hair, there was no extravagant sign of his driven creativity. For that you had to hear his songs.
No single reason for our success stood out. But Kerryn’s songs provided the intellectual justification for that success. We were praised in the rock press for charting new territory for Australian bands — we actually sang about Australia. To understand why this was so important you have to appreciate the unique history of Australia’s popular culture. Australian/European culture was only about a hundred years old before it was inundated by radio and, later, TV. The fully developed American and English popular cultures tended to wash aside any nascent local varieties. As a generation, we felt a keen sense of embarrassment at our lack of homegrown art forms. This embarrassment even had a name: the cultural cringe. Our songwriters avoided all mention of Australia in our popular songs.
But Kerryn found a voice. Though his music was heavily derivative of American blues, country and rock, his lyrics used Australian place names, situations, characters and language. This, in a serious tone, was new. Certainly, plenty of songs had been written about the outback, but they were novelty songs like the great The Pub with No Beer, and the not so great Red Back (spider) on the Toilet Seat. Now Kerryn had written a serious song about a man who went oil drilling in the western desert. It made the charts towards the end of 1973. In a later song, about people stuck in limbo, Waitin’ for the Tide to Turn, Kerryn put a woman’s plight in an Australian setting:
I know a girl livin’ way out west,
Havin’ trouble just keepin’ her head.
Home on the range in the kitchen — bitchin’
Cursin’ the day she was wed.
’Cos her man don’t seem to understand
That you can’t get nothin’ from a sunburnt land
Day after day, you know it’s gettin’ her down.
She knows she won’t even make it the long way around
Kerryn’s songs had wit, and for our fans — who gave us fierce loyalty in return — they validated a tentative nationalistic pride. The Dingoes’ songs could be seen as harbingers of a growing cultural confidence, among the first sedimentary islands to settle after the denuding cultural flood that emanated from wood, Bakelite and plastic boxes sitting in the corner of every Australian living room.
Kerryn had absolutely no airs or pretensions of greatness. He was strictly one of us. Nor did we feel he was superior in any way. Although he had the most to gain from any success we might have had, we would allow no leader to rise above the rest. I felt that Stockley, Kerryn and, to a lesser extent, Brod each thought they should exert more control over the band’s decisions. Whenever one of them complained about our lack of leadership it was tinged with regret that they had not taken charge themselves. Since I had come to the band last, and I was not the lead songwriter, the lead guitarist, the lead singer … the lead anything, I was not a contestant. But my judgment was well respected and I could have handed power to either of them had I wished. But I felt none of them had natural leadership qualities around which we could gather in admiration and respect.
Perhaps this conviction was affected by my own repressed hunger for power and envy of those who held it. I had had a miserable experience as a sixth-grader.
In a meteoric rise to power I was voted captain of the Chatham School football team. But immediately after my ascension, the team of eleven-year-olds refused to submit to my overambitious regimen of push-ups, jumping jacks and fifty-yard sprints. In any case, we were half the size of all our opponents and we went on to a completely scoreless season — in a game where a low score is thirty points.
The next year, I returned to brag to my teacher about my success in high school mathematics. He invited me into his classroom and said, ‘John Bois is going to show us how a mathematical wizard solves a problem.’
With that, he wrote one of his most convoluted word problems on the board. I choked. He asked one of the sixth-graders to solve the problem and she did it easily.
I must have looked crestfallen as I walked down the corridor. Another teacher stopped me and asked what had happened. After I told him, he explained that Mr Evans didn’t like me because he blamed me for our losing season last year. He said that he felt this was wrong because, while Mr Evans didn’t come to a single game, he had. And he thought I was a good captain.
This is a previously unexamined memory. And it’s only now that I realise how absurd it was to blame one person, me, for the performance of our hopelessly mismatched team. Yet it was Mr Evans’s judgment that I accepted. And until now it has stood there like a hazard sign whose simple message reached my subconscious: Remember the disaster that befell you the last time you went down this road — turn back!
Leadership was a recurring problem with The Dingoes. Stockley, Kerryn and Brod each had a valid claim to it, but they couldn’t step forward for certain knowledge that they would be knocked down again. And, since none could claim it, all denied it. This was often embarrassing. When an interviewer asked us who our leader was, we all froze for a revealing second. Then we blurted out that we were democratic. The interviewer looked at us as if to say, ‘I don’t care who the big chief is — I just want to know who to ask the question. Geez, guys! Get your act together.’
And so, when six o’clock came around, when we met in the lobby of the Sandy Beach Hotel, I was wincing from apprehension of the delicate tussle about to take place — who should make the call to America?
‘Well, then. Let’s do it,’ said Kerryn, as we stood around the lobby.
‘Who should ring?’ asked Stockley.
‘I don’t mind. Do you want to do it?’ said Kerryn.
‘No, mate,’ said Stockley. ‘You do it. You know Paul better than I do.’
Kerryn snatched the phone message from his own hand as if to say, Come on. Let’s not play one of these ridiculous games.
‘Come on,’ he said.
‘He’s a ratbag,’ said Stockley.
The issue was in the open but it was never addressed. I sometimes wondered what would have happened if one of us had said, ‘Look. We know power in this band is shared. No one of us is going to run off with all of the goods. Let’s just say that one of us, say me, is the leader. No leader gets everything his way. It’s usually no more
