this was david's first online site and features the award winning 16mm movie from the late 1970s.
he connected up with anna, an old friend, when he moved back to Melbourne and they started working on videos. 'Snodgrassish' is david's nom de plume. Otherwise known to his close friends as 'Snoddo the Pom'. But whichever way it's cut . . . 'a very good bloke'.
Life in God’s Test Tube # 2
I was born in 1949 above my ole man’s Aquarist’s shop in between Liverpool and Manchester on the River Mersey, the dirtiest river in England. It was black with floating brown foam. No one in Warrington would have read Burrough’s ‘Junkie’ or any other Beat stuff, it was strictly a ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’ town. Only a few Teddy-boys and the occasional invasion of Gypsies broke the dirty, drab, cloth-cap monotony. Sometimes I’d see a Tramp. They always intrigued me. Where did they come from and where were they going? Dirty and free. Homeless and happy – they always looked happy.
‘My mother she was orange and my father he was green’.
They were petit bourgeoisie/aspiring middle class. My father’s father was an Irish Catholic who ran a big pub opposite the station. It had four bars and a Billiard room with two full size tables called The Prince of Wales. I had my first drink there when I was about eight years old. A shot of rum, served by grandfather much to my mother’s vociferous objections. (“Don’t be ridiculous, woman. It’s good for the boy!”) That was also the year I started smoking. I’d crawl into my parent’s bedroom just after dawn and pull a cigarette out of the pack on the bedside table next to the ole man’s head. The noise of a cigarette grinding against the cardboard pack as it’s slowly pulled out is deafening at that time of day. Then I’d go down and smoke in the cupboard under the stairs. If there were only a couple left I had to go without – too obvious.
My mother was an English Methodist. Her father was an engineer/wire-rope boffin. He was also a part-time conjurer performing at vaudevillian halls and clubs. He taught me tricks and how to walk on six foot high stilts.
The Persil factory was just down the road. Every week, whale blubber would come up river and the neighbourhood would stink for a couple of days as it was rendered down into fat for soap. Warrington was Oliver Cromwell territory. The Battle of Preston Moor was fought a few miles away. In the middle of town was a huge black statue of Ollie, hands on hips, standing on Charles 1st’s severed head. I was fascinated by that statue. I thought Ollie was a hero; the leader of the first revolution.
The queen-mother came for a visit. We were in the crowd, cheering, waving Union Jacks and I noticed Ollie had been covered by a huge tarpaulin. I asked my ole man why, he said, “You know that head he’s standing on? That’s the head of her great-great-great-great grandfather. They’ve covered it so she won’t see it.” I thought, fuck! If she’s the queen’s mother surely she already knows it’s there? Besides, the tarp stood out like dog’s balls! Across the road was a double story, thatched roofed Tudor house with ‘Oliver Cromwell slept here’ plastered on it.
In the 1920s my grandfather had a wire rope gig in Spain and the family (12 of them) lived the good life there for years in a big mansion replete with servants until Franco banished all the Brits in the 30’s. I could never figure out why some of my aunts looked like Mediterranean mommas. My grandma’s maiden name was Hill. I concluded that grandad must have been rooting the servants and that even my mother was one of his bastard children they had obviously adopted, what else could account for my olive skin? My ole man’s mother was Welsh! I discovered years later, during a Sherry session with my mum that her mother’s mother was indeed Spanish (it’s the kind of thing one didn’t admit to). I knew I had a bit of The Moor in me!
It must have been a big shock for them landing back in dirty old Warrington and then came the second world war. My father survived the Normandy Invasion. He only copped two broken legs, not from the enemy - an English jeep broke its ropes in the landing barge and ran over him! He never made it to the beach. Evidently most of his company was wiped out. He spent the rest of the war in the Honourable Anti-Aircraft Corps in Scotland.
The ole man could do anything, he sang, played sax and clarinet in his own jazz band, he was a qualified butcher, a boxer, a French-polisher, he bought and sold cars, ran his own taxi company, second-hand furniture shop, tobacconist, bred Cocker Spaniels and drove coaches full of ‘Ee Bah Gum’ stiffs to Blackpool at week-ends (sometimes I’d ride shotgun). On the way home the passengers would continue their drink-a-thon and have a sing-a-long. It was bizarre, careering through the night with fifty drunken men and women in the back yelling ‘Roll Out The Barrel’ and ‘I’ve Got A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts’. The ole man would pull over every half an hour for a piss stop. (“Ladies to the left, Gents to the right please.”) He was also the President of the Warrington Aquarist’s Society. He bought a Mark Four Jaguar Sports Saloon, an ex R.A.F. staff car painted battleship grey. I used to sit on his lap and steer it, peering through the gigantic steering wheel covered in chrome switches. The headlights were as big as dinner plates and they made a powerful ‘fumph’ sound when they were turned on. One and a half litre, four on the floor and man, could that thing fly!
For some reason my ole man sold the shop. No more fish, snakes, lizards, tortoises, axolotls, frogs and mice for snake food. He bred Siamese Fighters (for looks not fighting). The males had to be kept apart but occasionally one would jump out of its solitary confinement slot and attack the one next door. Unable to be separated, I’d watch in morbid fascination as these amazingly coloured, elegant fish, fins like The Dance of the Seven Veils, ripped each other to shreds until one or both died. I always had an aquarium in my bedroom with some kind of breeding program in progress.
We moved out of town into a house opposite The Manchester Ship Canal. Huge cargo ships sailed past my bedroom window from exotic places like Genoa, Panama and Iberia. I spent hours gawking at the ships, yelling at the crew. What a life, sailing around the world! I later discovered the crew never left the ship except in home port. When a ship came along me and my mate Colin would torch the nettle bushes along the embankment. They went up like napalm in thick black smoke covering the whole ship. Scavenged fluorescent tubes were launched as torpedos exploding in a cloud of white dust when they hit the hull. Radio valves and light bulbs made good hand grenades. We’d climb under the nearby steel-arch swing-bridge and ride it across the water as it opened to let ships through. We were stricken by fear, excitement, terror and awe simultaneously, lying on our stomachs, clinging to that riveted steel girder under the road. Imagine falling into that giant network of greasy cogs grinding around or the murky water sixty feet below. We couldn’t get off even if we wanted to until it closed again. Sometimes three ships would go through at once so we’d be up there for twenty minutes. It was too long, every feeling dissipated except fear.
My mother’s parents had died, my ole man’s mother had died and he’d had a tremendous blue with his ole man (my mum’s non-Catholic heathenism was mentioned) culminating in grandad declaring, “You won’t get a penny out of me. Young David will get the lot!” I thought, good one grandad.
Years later he remarried and his new wife got the lot.
The ole man scored a prestigious Aquarist gig at the Melbourne Zoological Gardens, designing, installing and managing their planned aquarium complex. All bets were off! We’re emigrating to Australia at the end of the year by ship. Poor Colin fell off the bridge and drowned in the canal not long after I left. One year later I’m aboard the S.S. Fairsea with five thousand other ten pound poms, packed like sardines (there were fourteen men and boys in my cabin) heading for the bottom of the world. I’m sure no one on board would have read Burrough’s ‘Naked Lunch.’ The Suez Canal was surreal. Standing in the middle of the ship it looked like it was sailing through the sand. Now, I was aboard ship yelling at them land lubbers. They wore turbans and Fezzes and rode camels and donkeys.
The first dead body I ever saw was my grandma, laid out in the front room. My mother made me kiss her goodbye. I didn’t want to. Her cheek was cold but she looked like she was asleep. I cried for a long time over that. The second was in Aden. An old stiff had been stabbed and an enterprising young Arab was making a few bucks showing tourists the grisly art object. The ole man, who had hooked up with some young Irish guys from the ship, whilst the girls went shopping, said I was too young to handle it but eventually caved in to my protestations and let me tag along (“Don’t tell your mother”). I was pretty impressed by the realism of the huge knife sticking out of the guy’s chest and all the blood on the floor but he just looked like he was asleep. I was more impressed with the local administration for suppling wire cages full of straw mattresses spread around the city for the beggars to sleep on at night. How thoughtful, I thought.
♣
Finally, we arrived in Melbourne. It was January, about 100 degrees in the shade with blow flies the size of lobsters. A priest from the Catholic Immigration Board met us at the old, creaking wooden wharf and drove us through the poor inner city suburbs of Port Melbourne, South Melbourne, Fitzroy and Collingwood to our new home in Clifton Hill. Not this desperate, little, peeling, weatherboard terrace house with the rusty corrugated tin roof? We must have gone back in time! I’d never seen so much rusty Victorian wrought iron-work. I’d never even seen a house with a corrugated tin roof before. I went to the toilet but there wasn’t one. Just a stinking can full of shit and flies in a shed at the bottom of the back yard. I told my ole man but he didn’t believe me. He checked it out, came back and said to my mum, “He’s right, love. There’s no sewerage.” My mother broke down (“Oh my God! What have we done?”) She cried for two weeks. When the ole man was out and about scouting, mum, my two younger sisters and I spent most of the time traipsing around the city ‘sight-seeing’ until we moved to East St Kilda. A brick house with a real roof and a bathroom, not far from the beach and there were even palms in the middle of the road. My mother finally stopped crying.
Surprisingly, the ole man, straight off the boat, got shafted on the zoo gig. Something about a low starting salary then later on…maybe more. He told them to shove it - he could make more money driving a fucking truck! A week later he was and did for a few years until he started up his own Aquarist business in Prahran. He also sold rock pythons and carpet snakes. I’d waltz down Chapel Street, Prahran with a 14 foot carpet snake with a head as big as a man’s fist draped around my neck. That snake was so docile I could do anything with him.
I was enrolled at the local Catholic boy’s school. In his wisdom the headmaster decided that the Australian education system was far superior to the English and put me down a grade. I felt swindled getting an extra year added onto my school sentence but it was a blessing in disguise. Suddenly, I was a star pupil, third in the class then first. I was in the top six of the class for four years running. I’d done all the work before in England. The only subject I had to study was ‘Social Studies’ which was an amalgam of Australian history and geography. It was a pretty thin book. I spent most of my time drawing under the desk in a sketch book on my lap and learning how to speak Strine.
There were only two kinds of aliens at my school, Dagos and Pommy Bastards and with my thick Lancashire accent I was definitely one of the latter. I worked out a technique losing all the vowels except two, soften them, elongate them, then run all your words together. I rehearsed and listened to the other kids and never opened my mouth until I’d gone over the pronunciation in my head. Within two years I was speaking perfect Strine and no longer an object of ridicule except when performing for the class. My favourite trick was drawing a characterization of the next period’s teacher, in chalk on the black-board. It was always a winner, until I got sprung by the actual teacher. Brother Corrish whose nick-name ‘Cork-head’ (he had bad acne scars on his face) I’d emblazoned it across the board. He gave me six cuts for it but even Cork-head found it slightly amusing. I was the class clown but I was still getting good marks and my French and Latin were excellent. They were the only subjects I needed to study – still! Then I won a scholarship to Christian Brothers College, St. Kilda. This meant five more years added onto my school sentence then another four at University. More time than I had already done, all up, in two countries.
I did Mechanical Drawing on the premise that I wanted to be an Architect. I just wanted to work with pencils, paper, rubbers, compasses and all that other stationary but what I really wanted to do was just leave. I had already counted off the days till I could be legally released.
There were other ways out. I toyed with the idea of joining The Cloth and become a priest. Cut out the middle man. Therefore one becomes closer to God, gets a presbytery to live in with a house-maid and a car. Blesses people with incense and holy water, wears vestments, speaks Latin and drinks wine on the altar/stage and then stands in the pulpit for hours raving on - nobody walks out during a sermon. I could have been a Monsignor by now.
We had these ‘Holy Days of Obligation” which meant a day off school in order to engage in church rituals. The day before each of these ‘Days’, in which one had to be in a state of grace, the form master would enquire if anyone wanted to go to confession at the church. Of course we wanted to go to confession in the church! This was time out of school work. We’d make bets with each other on how long we could stay in the confessional. The priest would always want exact details (“And how many times did you do this and etc?”). I was in there for half an hour one day bullshitting on. I got over an hours penance and made two bob. Returning to class at three o’clock the master attacked, “Shepherd, where have you been?” “Doing penance Brother.” “Very good then, sit down.”
I investigated the Navy but it seemed too much like being in gaol, in the middle of the ocean, taking orders, no thanks, Sir.
I liked riding horses and I thought about becoming a jockey. Right size but not at 4am every morning. I got the sack from my gig as an altar-boy after being late for 7.00am Mass 5 out of 7 days during my first and only week.
I could get an apprenticeship but what? If only I’d known then about demolition, people actually getting paid for blowing up buildings.
Of course the whole idea of ‘throwing away my scholarship’ was anathema to my parents who had sacrificed everything to give their children a good education. I eventually bribed my parents into letting me go to work when I was 16 on the proviso that I continued to study at night school.
♣
I did a 180 degree turn, cut my hair short like some of my mates and became a Sharpie. Melbourne in the mid sixties was the only place in Australia and the rest of the world where the Sharpie phenomena existed. Gangs of youths dressed in fine Italian knitwear, hand made Italian chisel-toed, suede, Cuban heeled shoes, tailor-made wide pants or imported Lee jeans with an ironed crease in them. I used to get my haircut every Friday night then go out marauding with the boys. We’d fight gangs from other suburbs, go to dances and start fights, go to the footy and start fights, bash guys with long hair, engage in random acts of vandalism and roll drunks. One night a member of the gang lost it at the South Yarra station and caved a guy’s head in with a spade. There was blood everywhere. That was the last straw for me. I didn’t like the ultra-violence, bashing drunks or anyone else for that matter. Besides, all the music we were listening to was made by guys with long hair. I did the 180 degree turn back and so did some of my mates. We became Mods. ‘The Who’ was our ideal cool. The violence was in the music not in the streets. I tried to emulate Pete Townsend’s hairstyle for years.
When I turned 16 I went to work in a clothing factory where I’d been working after school, on week-ends and during holidays for a year or more. The owners were South African Jews from Durban. Although incredibly racist they introduced me to Bagels, rye bread, Roll Mops, baked cheesecake, Kosher food and Yiddish humour. The Schmuck, the Schlemiel and the Schlimazel gave The Marx Brothers, The 3 Stooges, Jack Benny and even Lenny Bruce another dimension. I’d never realized there was a complete philosophy about humour. I filed it for later use. Sadly, I had to keep my side of the night school bargain with my parents. I went to Taylors College in Flinders Lane and my boss paid for it. Across the road was The Star Theatrette and I found a way of getting in through the toilets at the back. It was the only cinema in Melbourne that showed 16mm European films with subtitles continuously. Needless to say I spent more time at The Star, for free, than Taylors. I never finished night school but learned much about French and Italian New Wave films. I filed it for later use.
I worked my arse off at the factory for about 2 years. 10 sometimes 12 hour days but only till 3pm on Fridays on account of the Sabbath but to offset that I’d work on Saturdays till 2pm. The boss called me a little Kaffir and I was. One long weekend on the piss I got into work a day late and the boss had a go at me so I had a go back. I ended up calling him a cunt in front of 120 Greek female machinists. It was too much for him in front of ‘them’ and he gave me the sack. I told him to stick his factory up his arse and joined the Public Service where my girlfriend and a few mates worked. Nobody got the sack from the Public Service. Coming to almost a dead stop after working like a maniac for years was so boring I only lasted 6 months. When a friend of the ole man offered me a job assisting him at his Lithographic Plate-making firm I jumped at it. After about 12 months I was Camera-operating, working in the dark room, re-touching photos and burning plates. It was always busy but I liked it. He went broke and handed the business and me over to one of his debtors. Now I was working for a big printing firm with state of the art dark room and plate-making facilities. Eventually, I was managing the plate-making department but I couldn’t handle whipping the workers and demanding they work overtime to meet ridiculous deadlines. I asked to be demoted and was. I definitely wasn’t manager material.
Six of us moved into an old house in Carlton across from the University. It was just up the road from The Prince Alfred hotel which was ‘our’ pub. Every night after the pub closed it would be back to our place to continue drinking. I’d wake up with a hang-over the next day, vomit then go to work. At week-ends we’d start on Friday after work and drink until Sunday. The only real drugs we took were Purple Hearts or Bennies which enabled us to stay awake and drink even more. There was a core group of about 10–15 of us. We weren’t Hippies but we listened to The Fugs (first time I’d ever heard of Ginsberg), The Mothers of Invention, Velvet Underground, Jefferson Airplane and Hendrix etc. Then, in 1970, we went to Australia’s first Outdoor Music Festival at Ourimbah in New South Wales and smoked dope. This was a monumental turning point which probably saved my liver and my life. If one smoked dope - one didn’t drink. Only juice freaks did that and drinking was very very uncool. I went to Launching Place (Vic), Wallacia (N.S.W.) and Myponga (S.A.) where I met a whole new crew and we dropped acid and started shooting up Morphine.
♣
I fell in love with Rae, a young cocaine blonde with blue kaleidoscope eyes but I’d previously arranged to go to England with a couple of the old crew to see the bands we’d never see in Oz and my departure couldn’t be postponed any longer. I had to say goodbye to my lover/best friend. I spent 12 months in the U.K. When I wasn’t travelling I lived in London then discovered Oxford. I saw 100’s of bands and took various drugs in between working on the Leyland assembly line spitting out Morris Marinas. When I had enough cash I flew straight back to Rae in Melbourne instead of doing the Hippy trail through India which had been the original plan. Within a week I was back at my old plate-making gig. Just a little over 9 months later (we calculated it as a particular lunch-hour quickie) we had a baby, Zoë. I went to my first poetry reading in Fitzroy one night and someone read ‘Howl’ It blew me away. It was the first time a poem had done that to me and I started writing.
I read ’Naked Lunch’ more times than I care to remember in the bluestone winter of 1975. I was freezing to death in the ‘D’ Division yards of Pentridge prison doing cold turkey waiting to be classified to somewhere or other to begin serving an 18 month sentence for breaking into a few chemist shops and stealing their narcotics. Enough to last for months. If I’d known then that ‘Naked Lunch’ was randomly edited it might have made it a little easier to read! At that time there weren’t many junkies in prison and the few there, were treated like paedophiles. It was shear masochism reading and rereading a book about drugs but I figured for an old, queer, junkie probably the same age as my ole man this guy was cool. When I got out I read ’Junkie’ and ‘Nova Express’ and some Jean Genet stuff and it just vindicated my lifestyle. If The Stones and Bob Dylan and Burroughs are using it, it must be a cool drug obviously conductive to creativity. Even Edgar Allen Poe was a laudanum addict! I started writing and burning poetry with a vengeance.
Before my incarceration I had been a ‘client’ of a drug referral centre in Carlton called Buoyancy. It was more of a meeting place for junkies and other deadbeats. A place where transients could have their mail sent to, see the doctor or get legal advice. It operated on the pretext that drug addiction was a medical problem and that crime was just a side effect. June Bryant ran the place and she got to hear so many humorous anecdotes and stories she posed the idea of making a film about our nefarious activities in the Melbourne narcotics scene. A friend of mine, John Hooper, whose sister was married to film director Bert Deeling, got him interested. John and I wrote the whole story, based on fact, in 3 days. Bert liked it, submitted it to the A.F.I. (Australian Film Institute) for a development grant and the cult classic ’Pure Shit’ was born. We went to The Pram Factory and La Mama in Carlton to see plays and eyeball actors. We saw ‘In the Year of Lacertis’, a play directed by Phil Motherwell, at La Mama and almost the whole cast were junkies! We’d hit pay dirt! Gallagher was in the play but we didn’t use him – we wanted real junkies who would take real drugs in the movie!
I met people like Lindzee Smith and Barry Dickens and Helen Garner whose book ‘Monkey Grip’ was written during and about that period. I discovered a whole new world of people who were, to my mind, real bohemians. Many in the Carlton scene used junk and were in the film (some wish they hadn’t been now!) The title was banned by the censors and was released as Pure S***! We thought that was pretty ridiculous but good publicity. I worked on the film from script to mix. I was enthralled by the film-making process and wanted to make more movies so I applied for a place in the most avant guard art school in Melbourne at the time (and for ever after), Preston Institute. I got in on the strength of a poem and my involvement in ‘Pure Shit’. Bert was the new film lecturer! Motherwell and Gallagher were already there as ‘mature age students.’ Carlton/Fitzroy was the centre of the universe back then. Theatre, music, writing, painting & drugs - the joint was really pumping! I figured it was the new Melbourne rendition of the old beat generation.
I had just finished the script for a short 16mm experimental film, ‘The Edge’ which was going to be my directorial debut. Instead, I got the 18 month sentence on the morning of my first production meeting. On account of my dark room experience I was classified directly to the Print Shop in ‘A’ Division developing and printing mug shots. It was arguably the best job in Pentridge. When that red light was on not even the Governor himself could enter MY dark room! After another court case I got 4 years with an 18 month minimum which wasn’t bad for a stick-up. With good behaviour and remission I was out in 2 years and back at Art School with a brand new script, ‘Mike’s Blood,’ the story of a guy who goes to bed one night and wakes up next morning as a woman. It was based on my bizarre gaol experience of becoming a sex object (I WAS only 26 and a damn fine looking young man at that).
Then, I directed ‘Terror Lostralis’ which was nominated for best short film in the 1980 A.F.I. Film Awards. Mitchell Faircloth who wrote the script and acted in it along with Tracey Harvey, Simon Thorpe and Gary Adams were members of a satirical C&W band/act known as The Whittle Family. Mitchell and I created a cabaret act called ‘Dr Cloth, The Most Intelligent Man On Earth and Douglas, The Living Experiment.’ I played Douglas and made a 10 minute, 16mm doco showing the Doctor assembling me from bits and pieces of body parts scavenged from medical school and bringing me to life with a little electricity and the spinal cord of a dog. It was supposed to be a tacky magic show with tricks you could see through like mind reading. The grand finale was sawing him in half to sever his spinal cord. His death would therefore prove his theory that the spinal cord is the centre of the life force not the brain! When I pulled him out latex guts and intestines would plop out. It was completely different from anything anyone else was doing. We were even on ‘The Mike Walsh Show” and ‘Night-Moves’ I started a stand-up comedy routine, a character called Yonny Stone, a knockabout crim, just out of gaol who spoke in rhyming slang. Then a group of us formed ‘Punter 2 Punter’ a comedy racing/tipping radio show on 3RRR. We were the top rating show for years then we got snapped up by 3XY where we actually made MONEY! We did Melbourne Cup Specials on A.B.C. 2 for a few years.
♣
Then in more recent years I made some small films/videos for a one man show I directed for Tony Rickards at the Universal Theatre. I was also acting in plays with Motherwell and Lindzee Smith and doing lights and sound for cabaret shows, plays, and bands. I was still writing poetry (and burning most of it) and film scripts that would never be made. I gave up comedy and read poetry instead.
I travelled around India for 12 months in the mid 90s which completely changed my life. Back in Melbourne I was offered a job as a Disability Tutor at a technical college for about 8 years (unqualified but bullshitted my way through). Then on visit north in 2003 I met and I fell in love with a bush-babe in northern N.S.W. I moved up there and lived for a while in a tent, then a caravan, then a granny flat, then, finally, for 3 amazing years a Crow Tee Pee in the rainforest. Now 2010, I’m back in Melbourne. My daughter, Zoë has her own daughter, Lily which makes me a gramme-pah.
