There was always one sure sign the wet season was beginning in Darwin. In the backyard of my parent’s house it would happen every year after the first good rain finished and the sun came out. The lawn seems to start dancing, twisted and wriggling it’s way towards the sky. The movement is like a blanket of white noise, constant and unceasing. You’re drawn closer to find out how the lawn can do that, what’s happening?

As you look down at your feet in the writhing mass, you see something is walking amongst the short grass. It’s not clear what it is, so you drop down to one knee to have a closer look. Just in time to see a small head emerge from the ground and pull its body slowly out. It’s a moth. It’s a thousand moths. The ground is swarming with them as they emerge and move around to dry their wings. They are very docile when they first emerge, you can pick one up with no struggle and put it down somewhere else to continue its meanderings. After a while they seem to gain energy and confidence and spread their wings to dry them more quickly, slowly moving them in the light breeze.

From this level, as you look across the yard, there’s now a new layer of moths gently floating above the lawn, flying lazily in random directions; getting used to their new wings. It’s like a strange dream as you reach out to them and they sometimes land on your hand when you hold it still. Then out of the corner of my eye I see something larger moving on the lawn. I turn to watch a small skink strutting along, picking up a fresh moth and gobbling it down. I turn my head around the lawn and notice other lizards gathering to the feast.

From skinks that are barely twice the size of the moths, to a young monitor lizard the length of my forearm, they are taking full advantage of the sudden bounty. Each of them moves in short, sharp burst to seize another moth; whilst still keeping a careful eye on the other lizards. They move to cover and watch over patches of the lawn, but there are so many moths that no fighting is necessary. The larger lizards raise their heads and turn them carefully to survey the area as they slowly gulp down each delicious insect.

I’m not sure how long this has been going on now, I’ve just been lost in the moment, watching the scene unfold in levels of amazement. An ibis suddenly flutters down from the sky and starts pecking at the insect feast as well. This causes some smaller skinks to slowly back away from the bird and the larger ones maintain their watch more carefully. I’m watching the gently wafting mass of moths that have become airborne and are now drifting past the fence and out into the street. There are enough to fill the space to about a metre above the ground, even though they are being eaten at a prodigious rate by the lizards and birds; another ibis has discovered the sudden food supply and lands to take advantage.

Just as I’m wondering why the smaller skinks are worried about the ibis (I’m sure they only eat insects) there is a burst of frenzied activity. The two birds leap into the air and seem to explode in different directions. A moment later a kitehawk swoops across the lawn and snatches one of the skinks, flying away with it’s meal in its beak. I cannot believe I’m watching this happen in my backyard. I feel like I should be recording it somehow, to make some kind of documentary. I somehow expect David Attenborough to walk through the front gate with a few cameramen to catch this amazing scene.

I turn back to watch the larger lizards moving to more sheltered places on the lawn and the ibis return quickly to keep eating. I look up to see if more birds are coming to join us for lunch. I’m just in time to see another kitehawk swoop across the lawn and pick up a skink. Now I begin to wonder what would come and eat the kitehawk, or if the hawk will get bored of the lizards and try an ibis for main course. That’s when I realise that I am the only real predator a kitehawk has. Caught up in the feeding frenzy, I begin to think I should complete the chain by catching a hawk. In a moment I understand how living for survival might feel. Take any opportunity you find. If you dont catch it, you dont eat. A simple driver to push us forward and live. Live at all costs.

I can feel the bloodrush coming over me, but then I look down at the lawn again and notice it isn’t dancing anymore. The madness drains away with the remaining moths drifting on the breeze. The skinks disappear into the undergrowth. The larger lizards regard each other more warily before walking steadily away too. The ibis pick at the ground for a little longer before also jumping up onto the fence and then flying into the blue sky.

Only I remain. Walking along the lawn wondering what just happened. I walk inside with an idea to tell someone about it, but there’s no-one else at home. The clock on the microwave tells me it’s been fifteen minutes since I walked outside to fuel up the lawnmower. All of that life happened in a moment while the rest of the world turned oblivious. Cutting the lawn. Wow. I’m glad I didn’t start that earlier, would I have destroyed this magical scene? I walk around the lawn once more to make sure the explosion of nature is complete and I feel like I complete the cycle as I trim the grass. The wet season has truly begun.

One sunny Sunday afternoon in Melbourne, I’m out hanging up some clothes on my backyard hills hoist at my house in Preston. My neighbour, Marco, is doing the same thing and he stops for a minute to turn to me and say,
“Hey, man… I’m thinking of having a bit of an event here, setup a stage in the backyard, get some of our mates to play and then finish with a Riptis Joint gig. Whaddya reckon?”
I consider the idea as I hang up a few more shirts and find myself nodding my head.
“Where are you going to put the stage exactly?”
“Not sure yet, probably down the end of my yard there, we can use sand from that sandpit to level it out and put down some rostra.”
“Yeah right. If you did that, then maybe I can hire an adult jumping castle and put it in my backyard facing the stage. So the audience can jump and skank at the same time.”
“Yeah right. That’d be fuckin awesome man.”
“We can have a two house party and fuckin tell everyone….hang on…three house party, Grant’s place can be the chill zone.”
“Yeah, man…if you want. I’m gonna concentrate on getting the stage setup here.”
“No worries mate, we’ll have a chat in a week or two as things are coming together.”
“Yeah, cool.”
And thus began one of the crazier parties I’ve helped organize.

So let’s back up a minute to set the scene a bit more, like how exactly I was thinking of using three houses in one street for the party.. Firstly Don and I moved in to the middle house. The landlords were a Croatian – Australian couple who were moving out of town and were looking to make a bit of money renting it out. They told us to just walk across the disused carpark between our house and the next one to visit their aging parents. If he wasn’t around, we could chat with her brother and his wife in the house next to us that shared a central wall. Her father acted as a caretaker for us and we got on very well with the crazy old bugger. He was a character to live next to and deal with at anytime. It seems that his people had fought with the Germans in the Second World War, not because they liked them, but because they seriously hate the Russians. His Slavic accent in a deep, rolling voice and clipped English words added a certain extra madness to his words.
“Some people didn’t like it. Some people did. Some people get burned. But what can you do?”
Don and I often had a hard time keeping a straight face, but you knew he wasn’t talking about being burned in a metaphorical sense. He saved that for the Albanians,
“Never shake hands with an Albanian. If you do it, then you should check how many fingers you have left afterwards.”
He’d hold up his hand with a finger folded down for effect and laugh openly. We did try to explore this with him once and asked how he got on with Albanians in Australia and if it was different.
“No, always the same, those bastards always do this to my people.”
“But surely over here it’s different, you’ve got a second generation of children growing up here without so many problems.”
“After one hundred and twenty generations, a watermelon is still a watermelon.”

So we lived there for a year or so and then Ivan, the father, came over to ask me if I knew anyone who might like to move into the house sharing the centre wall with mine. I said I’d ask around and soon enough Marco and Angela had taken up residence. Now Marco was the central organizer and lead singer of a Ska band called Ripdis Joint. So it was fairly common for all the band members and their friends to be spread between our two houses. It was pretty common for a group of people to wander next door to find out who was hanging around. After a short while we removed the gate that was between the two backyards to make this easier. Around the same time Don, being a professional cabler, ran a cable between the two houses with proper network ports in both houses. This meant we shared the cost of the broadband access we had installed. Two houses for the price of one. So things were grooving along swimmingly with the occasional encounter with Ivan to spice things up when one day the news came from him.

“My wife and I are moving up to be close to our daughter and her husband to help look after their baby. Do you know anyone who would want to rent our house?”
I said I thought I did and within a few weeks a very old friend of mine, Grant, had moved in to give us three houses in a row in the street. Now this street used to connect to a huge main road, but that access had been removed years ago and the street was blocked off. So we were at the end of that street, on the other side of Marco’s house was a carpark and a medical centre. All three houses backed onto what used to be Preston hospital. It had been converted into cheap student accommodation and a budget hotel. So what I’m saying is we had no neighbours, well none that mattered. So if we wanted to have a ragingly loud and crazy party across two houses and backyards, with Grant’s place added as a chillout zone, then the stage was set.

On the day, my adult jumping castle arrived first around eleven in the morning and started the setup work. The guy who was renting it to us set it up and I just provided the extension cord. It was huge and filled up just about all of the backyard, we had to take the top off the hills hoist to fit it in. We then wrapped thick foam around the pole for health and safety reasons. Marco’s work crew arrived, led by the inimical Dmac. Daniel MacIntyre, Dsmack, or ‘hey you monkeyboy!’. Sand got shifted, the yard got leveled, a scaffold frame appeared next to the back door to host the control box. Later a twenty metre long, five metre wide roofing tarpaulin was strung between the back of the stage and the scaffold. If it rained, the show would go on. Finally rostra were moved to create the stage area itself and then the instruments and sound equipment appeared for installation.

In the meantime, I was at work with a couple of people in our house setting up a new shisha zone. We had a seven foot tall cyclone fence gate across our driveway that we closed to form one end of the zone. Six couches, two shishas, two braziers, some coffee tables and pot plants completed the picture. Then we drilled a couple of holes into the brick wall to anchor a milk crate to the wall about two metres above the ground. Into that we placed a video projector and ran a cable along the roof and inside to the second stereo and DVD player. We placed two speakers that I borrowed from Marco either side of the video screen we hung off a string running from the roof to the two metre high fence. Inside my house we cleared the loungeroom for a second dancefloor; the psychedelic trance zone. We had a psytrance DJ coming along later who’d play for a couple of hours, apart from that we’d wing it with our house collection. At Grant’s house we setup a brazier in the backyard at the centre of another sitting zone with quiet music and candlelight as a refuge spot if things got too hectic.

Once again, I’m wishing I’d owned a camera at the time, recording this madness would have been brilliant. I’m sure pictures exist, I just don’t have them. I think the first live music happened about eight or nine and there would have been quite a few people hanging out by then. Plenty didn’t want to move from the couches to the next yard. I think things were hectic by ten. People were moving in mobs between the houses, I didn’t know a lot of them, so we made everyone enter and exit through Marco’s backyard so they could keep an eye out. The live music came in waves with single musicians and a couple of different bands playing sets to a loving crowd leaping on the jumping castle or dancing in front of the stage. There were eskies of booze scattered around the place, there were cocktails being mixed randomly and the pills were kicking in. We figured out the next day that around midnight almost all of the forty or fifty people there were on ecstasy. One of those nights when the eccy angel smiles and everyone surges together in a spasm of sudden carefree lust for life.

There are too many moments blurred together in the night, so I can only offer some good ones that I still remmeber…

Around one in the morning the receptionist from the hotel turned up asking us when we’d shut down the live music as they were fielding complaints from their residents. We asked if they’d like to come join the party. Apparently unconnected to that statement, half an hour later a group of about ten locksmiths, who were staying at the hotel for a conference, gathered on their side of the fence asking if they could join the party. We let them climb over and become a part of the madness. Other groups of people from the hotel do the same after we shut down the live music. At this stage, most of the party moves to my backyard and there’s a constantly changing group around the fire in Grant’s backyard as well. People are leaving and arriving in groups the whole night, we have guys finishing work at two, three and four in the morning come to join us. One couple arrive after nine in the morning – they’ve been out all night in the city.

Around three in the morning a guy climbs to the top of the cyclone fence gateway and meets the barbed wire that Don had strung across the top. He yelled incoherently at us for a while, then informed us he lived three streets away and had been listening to our music since ten. Apparently he was tired now. Around four in the morning the police arrived at my door to suggest that playing the music in my backyard at this time was probably pulling the piss. They’d been receiving complaints since before midnight, but hadn’t bothered to come until now. I shut down the music on the stereo outside and turned up the one inside. You could only hear it in our yard. At one point someone returned from a walk in a highly stressed state. Apparently he’d decided he wanted a drink from the Subway shop nearby. The fact that it had been closed for hours was of no consequence to him. The alarm going off was of some consequence as this is what caused him to run like a scared rabbit back to the party. We talked him down over a beer and cigarette and the world turned gently into sunrise.

The aftermath was gentle and blissful, made smoother by that couple arriving in the morning with a bag of weed. I can’t say it really finished until the evening, inbetween packing up, cleaning up and finding the odd beer filled esky. The look on the face of the guy picking up the jumping castle was worthwhile… he saw the whole setup for the first time and with a huge smile on his face says,
“Had a bit of a party here last night did we?”
I look around at the two yards and the people still tipping back cold beers for lunch.
“Yeah. You could say that mate.”

It’s 2001, I’ve been living in Melbourne for less than a year and life is just getting more interesting.  I’ve spent some time writing a script for a short film and my plan is to film it this weekend.  This poses a few problems; paramount among them is that I don’t even own a still camera, let alone a video.  Fortunately my friend, Ray, has one and is happy to work with me on the weekend to make the film.  So it’s about a guy who suffers from a very curious psychological condition.  His world is split into left and right, but he is largely unaware of everything on his left side.  I’d read about this condition in an amazing book called ‘The man who mistook his wife for a hat’, by Oliver Sachs.  In the story from the book this person would eat everything on the right hand side of a plate and leave everything on the left – it was invisible to her.  Oliver teaches her to turn the plate to make the rest of the food visible and she was always surprised when more food suddenly appeared as she turned the plate.  I thought a short film about such a person would make pretty fascinating viewing.

So the main character, to be played by myself, manifests this disorder in a number of ways, but the most obvious is that his right hand side is cared for and dressed as a corporate professional, but the left hand side is always unkempt and shabby.  The most startling manifestation is that the left hand side of his face is dominated by a large, red beard, whilst the right hand side is clean shaven.  The hair on the left side of his head is long and ratty, on the right it’s kept very short in keeping with the professional appearance.  So it just so happens that at this point in time I have a huge beard that reaches to the centre of my chest and I have long hair a couple of inches past my shoulders.  The first thing I have to do, then, is shave off half my beard and heavily trim the right hand side of my head.

In a delightfully random coincidence an old friend of mine, Andrew, will be staying with me on Friday night while he visits Melbourne for the weekend.  Now Andrew is a very conservative type, his job involves legal financial consulting for fairly large companies.  He also spent most of his youth in Darwin, we met at high school, so there’s still a degree of larrikin spirit alive and well, hiding behind the corporate exterior.  Which is why his smile becomes large and mischievous when he walks in the door, fresh from the airport, and I hand him some electric hair clippers and say,
“Ah Andrew, glad you’re here, can you shave half of my head for me please.”
He takes to the task with a delightful, but responsible, glee – making sure to understand what is required and executing it to perfection.

Standing in the mirror I’m finding it hard to reconcile the image with myself.  Your eyes travel one side of my face to explore the shaggy beard and hair and just can’t stop swapping back and forth to see the smooth shaven other side.  As though continually checking it, will make one or the other turn into an illusion and disappear.  I decide the effect will be marvellous.  In an unusual fit of responsibility, I’m determined to have an early night.  The next two days will involve about five hours of filming each day, during which I’ll have to be running the show to make everything happen.  We settle down with a couple of friends to have some beers and laughs together.  I’m in bed by one in the morning filled with enthusiasm about the weekend.  It takes me a while to get settled, however, because I’m amazed by the new sensation of lying with the shaved side of my head on the pillow.  I’ve had a beard for about four years now and this is now the kind of new, weird sensation I always crave.

The house is awake about eleven and we bid Andrew farewell as he goes to meet his girlfriend and Don and I go to meet Ray on Brunswick Street, Fitzroy.  This weekend also happens to be the Brunswick Street festival.  The famous stretch of road is closed to traffic for the weekend as all the artists, freaks and undercultures of Melbourne gather for a party.  One of the highlights is the street parade, which is happening this afternoon.  This involves a large number of groups displaying their passions openly and proudly for the world to enjoy.  The street is packed and we find ourselves a spot to watch the parade.  Even while we’re doing that, people keep grabbing me to have a photo taken with this half-shaved lunatic.  The reason we’re particularly interested in the parade is that Ray is in it.  He’ll be riding the custom hot rod bicycle he’s spent a couple of months preparing for today.  He’s a part of a group of people who love to build and ride these amazing creations and when they come in view we step forward to cheer extra loudly.  Ray spots us and cracks up at my new hairstyle, then calls out for me to join the parade.  It’s about the fifth time someone has asked me to do that, but this time I join them.  So I find myself walking down the street with the hot rodders having my picture taken a thousand times.

The parade comes to an end and we repair quickly to our chosen pub to catch up and plan the filming.  There’s only one problem, Ray’s forgotten to bring the video camera and we’re all enjoying ourselves too much in the festival atmosphere to deal with it.  We discuss going to fetch it, but suddenly it’s nine o’clock at night and Don and I are meant to be at a house party in Kew.  We’ve been invited by a local friend of ours to come join a costume party with a bunch of her friends from university.  Now Maria is an accountant and busily studying to become a chartered accountant.  So Don and I are highly amused by the idea of two larrikins from Darwin turning up to push the party level up a few notches.  Don’s also kind of interested in Maria, so that result seems inevitable in the course of proceedings.  The pair of us buy some takeaway beer and jump a taxi to Kew.

We arrive at the point in the party where most people are wearing some kind of costume, but nobody’s had enough to drink to really relax into it.  With about eight years history in Darwin performing on stage in comedy and musical shows, I’m quite prepared to go nuts for the cause.  On our arrival, Maria introduces us to the one guy who lives in the house with three girls.  It takes thirty seconds for someone to reveal he’s the twenty-six year old virgin and everyone starts giving him hassle.  He does, however, proudly show me a 1.5 litre bottle of Grolsch beer that he has in the fridge.  He seems to think that’s somehow astonishing and praiseworthy, I ask if we can have some.  He looks horrified and moves it to the back of the fridge explaining it’s not for tonight.  Apparently it’s just so he can boast about being all international and worldly with his beer.  Moving as one, Don and I open one of our own beers each, share a ‘cheers’ and head to the backyard.

So what follows is hours of random party moments.  Everyone wants to know what my costume is exactly, so I ask them what they think it is and then agree wholeheartedly – telling them they’re very clever for working it out.  So I’m a biker trying to please his mum, a failed catholic priest, a corporate executive trying to break out, an Irish dancer who changes side to do the men’s and woman’s parts and a serial killer.  One guy asks if I can stand side on to him while I’m talking, as he’s finding it impossible to concentrate as his eyes keep wandering back and forward across my disjointed face.  I do so, but change which side every couple of minutes to keep him on his toes.  He actually comments that he wants to talk to me differently based on which side he sees; corporate or hippie.

At some point the singing starts and I get into it a lot.  All that practice at university left me with a crazy strong voice that I enjoy using for fun.  Our twenty six year old virgin appears to ask me to quiet down a bit, since it’s so late.  I agree and end up talking to some young guy about how to learn to sing.  I suggest I can teach him enough in five minutes for him to come back in and give it a burl for everyone and we disappear into the backyard.  I run him through some exercises and ideas on singing and get him to choose a song he likes so we can practice it.  He picks ‘stand by me’ and I do the backing bass line as he falters through the lead.  For some reason I decide he needs more confidence and I try to teach him the Haka I learned during my theatre days as a way to develop that stage presence.

By the time that’s all over, I wander back into the house to find Don and Maria have disappeared.  I’m a bit annoyed, since I was hoping for a lift home, and wander around deciding what to do.  The only reasonable thing is to lift that 1.5 litre bottle of beer from the fridge and hide it in the shadows of the brick fence in the front yard.  I do so and call a taxi to come and find me, noticing it’s now after four in the morning.  I don’t even want the beer, I really don’t like Grolsch, but the idea of messing with the twenty six year old virgin is irresistible.  He appears filled with accusations that I’ve stolen his beer.  I ask him where it is and bend over the fence so he can search me.  Amusingly I bend over exactly the part of the fence that is concealing the bottle.  He gives up and goes to find his younger brother, who apparently is in possession of a pair of testicles.

This guy yells at me for a while, demanding the bottle and asking why I drank it.  I keep checking the time to see when the taxi should appear and make the same offer to him to search me.
“Why do you think I have it?”
“My brother told me to get it off you.”
“How does he know I have it?”
“Umm….he just does”
“So where is it?”, I ask holding my hands above my head making it clear I have no bags and nothing in my pockets.
“You’ve put it somewhere.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because you want to drink it later.”
“Mate, I’ve got a fridge full of beer at home, why would I waste my time with this Grolsch crap?  I don’t even like it.  I ask again, what makes you think I have it?”
“My brother told me.”
“So you have no evidence, you have no idea and you’re now acting as your brother’s bitch.  Do you have to do this for him often?  Maybe he just doesn’t like that all those girls were talking to me and not him.”
“Fuck you, where is it?”
“It’s BEHIND you”, I offer pantomime style.
Amusingly, he turns around to look.  It actually is behind him, but hidden in shadows.  A minute before the taxi arrives he notices the bottle next to the fence and seizes it glaring at me.
“I’ll accept your apology now, mate”, I offer generously.
He snarls and prowls back into the house and I find my way home wondering how I’m going to make this video in one afternoon.

I shamble out of my room and into the shower around about three in the afternoon, then give Don plenty of hassle for ditching me at the party.  It’s just on principle really, I don’t actually care and soon discover that he had some fun.  So we head back to Brunswick Street for the second day of the festival.  There’s stalls all down the road now and we spend some time meandering through them on the way to meet Ray in the pub.  We arrive after four and settle in to discuss the filming.  Ray does have the camera this time, but the chief problem is that all of us were on the piss until after four and are largely too hungover to handle much more than having a beer and some greasy food.  It seems the grand plan is slipping away minute by minute and I don’t seem to care.  We hang out until after ten, when Ray heads off and Don and I have a couple more beers up the road in another fine establishment.  Don heads off a bit before midnight and I find myself wandering up Brunswick Street in the aftermath of the weekend festival action.

The street itself is mostly empty, but groups of people are still strolling in every direction – heading for the next party location.  There’s a dance party happening in a side street with the music coming from a second floor apartment driving about a hundred people in the throws of anarchistic pleasure.  You don’t get to do this in the city at any other time.  I notice a stack of empty ten litre steel barrels of olive oil in front of an Italian restaurant, they’ve had a good weekend.  I’m thinking of just getting up to Alexandra parade and finding a taxi when I notice a small group of people playing drums in a circle on the side of the road.  Well, they’re holding a great rhythm, but those aren’t drums.  They’re making use of those empty oil cans, plastic containers and anything else they can find to make the music.  There’s some people sitting on the corrugated steel canopy covering the pavement above a restaurant playing djembes with them.  They live in the apartment above the restaurant and have climbed out their window to join the festival.  There’s only one thing I can possibly do.  I go back and grab an oil can and sit down with the group.

I’m welcomed by smiles from everyone and I find myself supporting the main bass line to help keep everyone in time.  For a while the group gets bigger and smaller as we play, enjoying our time sharing music together.  People take turns leading new rhythms and the music carries us through the night with shared smiles and random happiness.  I don’t exactly know when or how it happens, but I look up from the drum to see about a hundred people gathered around us dancing.  There’s now about ten of us supplying the music and, as I’m looking around, two women start dancing with large single colour flags in each hand – making them turn and swirl with the beat.  I look down for a while and then glance up to discover some fire dancers have found us and now four or five are putting on a show for everyone.  The crowd grows with people watching on both sides of the street as we take over the festival and bring life to its dying hours.

There’s love shared amongst this crazy group of festival people.  We have nothing but a will to enjoy our lives and to share that joy with everyone around us.  We create music on whatever we have at hand and other people have come to share the sudden flame of passionate living with us.  The feeling lasts an infinite time and no time at all.  I don’t know when I first look up to see the line of eight police officers spread across the road and wielding nightsticks, walking towards us.  The outskirts of our group melt into the night as the threatening line of uniforms approaches.  Behind them is one of the armoured personnel carriers the Melbourne police use to move themselves around to deal with riot situations.  I glance around and fail to find any kind of riot, just people enjoying the festival night.  As the police get closer, more and more people move to the sides of the road, but do not leave.  You can feel the mob anger building.  We did nothing wrong, nobody is being hurt, there is no problem.  Why are the police here?

I keep playing my oil can drum until the line is less than a metre from me.  Someone from behind me takes the drum suddenly and says in my ear,
“Mate, lets just get out of the way, it’s not worth it.”
My hands play three more beats in the air before I emerge from the music trance to look up at a female office wielding a nightstick with intent at me.  I feel arms under my shoulders, lifting me up and I come to life, moving to the side of the street.  The mob anger is growing by the second.  There was no problem and now the police are on the verge of causing a riot.  The mob lets the line pass, then converges on the amoured personnel carrier.  Things move quickly, the situation is out of control.  There’s people yelling at the officers, at the driver.  There’s a surge in the crowd and I find myself a part of the mob of well over a hundred people surrounding the vehicle and the eight officers outside it.

The uniforms look tense now and gather at the back of the amoured vehicle ordering everyone to disperse.
“There was no problem until you came”, one guy calls out strongly, facing off with the apparent leader.
“We have to clear the street, the party’s over”, comes the reply.
“If you waited another half hour it would’ve been over anyway, then there’s no problem.  But you just have to get your cocks out and make trouble don’t you?”
“Disperse now if you don’t want to spend the night in the lockup.”
There’s a flurry of action as two officers seize the guy who called out.  Another man steps forward and starts asking for the names and badge numbers of every officer present; noting them down in a notebook he has.  The guy who’s been seized struggles and starts tearing off his clothes.  A third guy steps forward with a digital camera and starts taking photos of this guy and the officers.  This causes a standoff, the two officers trying to get the guy into the back of the armoured carrier let him go.  They all know how this will look in court; not good for them.

The guy finishes removing all his clothes and stands naked for a photo session.  The guy with the notebook calls out loudly for everyone to hear,
“Now we know exactly what condition he was in before you took him into custody.  If there’s one fucking bruise or mark on him, you will be responsible.”
He finishes the sentence pointing at the senior officer while stepping backwards into the protective embrace of the crowd.  The officers look confused now.  The senior officer points to the naked man and announces,
“Lock him up and anyone else who resists our lawful order to disperse.”
I can’t believe I’m in the middle of this.  I’m standing calm and still one metre from the senior officer and the naked man.  The seven other officers surge into action and pile three people into the back of the carrier as the crowd surges around them.  More cameras appear, two video cameras appear.
“Why the fuck are you cunts here to ruin the night?”, demands one angry woman.
There’s no answer, but the mob gives way and moves to the side of the street.

I’m dumbfounded.  I’d heard Melbourne police were thugs, but this proves the point beyond all doubt for me.  For no reason they surge through and cause the problem.  If they’d waited a short time, the group would’ve dispersed and nothing would have happened.  I find my taxi home and I end up getting Don to shave the rest of my hair off and trim my beard.  I lay awake for a long time pondering what just happened to my weekend.  Eventually I notice the time is almost four in the morning and realise in just five hours I will have to be back at my job working as an IT professional for the federal public service.

It turns out that this was the last Brunswick street festival ever held.  I was proud to be a part of the parade and stayed with it right until the end.  I still regret that I have absolutely no photos of myself and I never made that short film.  It still amuses me to think how many other people at the festival that day must have pictures of me, either in the parade or standing with my arm around them.  The time lives on in those pictures and the hearts of everyone who loved the weekend of the last Brunswick Street festival.

So what’s it like to work at the Bureau of Meteorology I hear absolutely nobody ask me.  So I’m going to answer it in advance, to avoid the inevitable deluge of questions.  The short answer would be pretty fascinating and stimulating most of the time.  On an average day you tend to chat with guys who have a degree or three, possibly a PhD already or one on the way.  Working with a large group of people with brains the size of a planet always presents fascinating distractions.  Whilst the average employee is fairly absorbed in their work, they have other interests that they’re always happy to chat to you about.  Music, radio controlled aircraft, model trains, English literature from three centuries ago and, of course, photography are just a few.  Generally these guys are more than passionate amateurs in these fields, in some cases it does form a second profession.

It’s still the federal public service and as such I think it forms a repository of the sheltered workshop mentality.  Once someone gets permanency there, they’ll never leave – especially if their competency level is low.  It’s not because you can’t be sacked, three formal warnings is enough.  The problem is that the majority of people in management positions have no desire to manage anybody.  This is either because it would get in the way of what they’re really interested in doing, the person is a mate of theirs, or because they themselves are living the Peter principle; they have been promoted just beyond their level of capability.  So given this, nobody is willing to rock the boat by actually sacking someone for incompetence; the hypocrisy is just too much for them.  This means you get some interesting characters hanging around the office doing absolutely nothing and less if possible.

For one character I couldn’t find any evidence of productive work being performed for about fifteen years.  He was basically waiting to retire.  So what’s the killer strategy that makes this possible?  When given a task he would begin to ‘research’ it.  This involved acquiring or downloading and printing out absolutely anything that has ever been written about the task at hand.  This meant that his entire desk area was covered in stacks of paper about thirty centimetres tall.  These expanded into stacks on the floor and boxes of papers dating back over ten years. Having gathered all this information, he would proceed to ‘read’ it.  This ‘reading’ never resulted in a single piece of information entering his mind.  You could watch him read a simple page of information and ask questions about it and he simply wouldn’t know or understand.  If you asked what he thought the sentence with the answer in it meant, he would shrug his shoulders and say,
“It’s hard to say.”
A master of passive resistance, he had managed to avoid actually doing anything for over fifteen years by simply ‘researching’ it instead.

I spoke to one guy who had the dubious honour of identifying every piece of computer equipment that was stored in the server room in terms of what it did, how critical it was to operations and who was maintaining it.  Now this server room was unique for me in more than one way, firstly there’s a supercomputer sitting in it.  A real, live one, used for producing forecasting models daily and shared with the CSIRO.  The second thing is that on benches around the two rooms involved there was an amazing array of hardware from every manufacturer who ever made anything since about 1985.  The vast majority was still operational and a lot critical.  What happened is that a scientist or engineer would work there for five-ten years developing something.  They’d then move on to work in another group or outside the Bureau.  This meant nobody really understood how the whole thing worked, but they knew what it did and kept it running.  After sending out numerous emails and interviewing people from every section in the building, our man had created a list identifying about 90% of the equipment in the room.  With no clear idea how to continue he decided the best plan would be to simply turn them off one at a time and wait in the server room for someone to arrive.  It worked, and caused no end of heated arguments as some researcher, engineer, scientist or random individual would turn up to see what was wrong.  Apparently it never took more than an hour for someone to surface.  So in true class for an organization dedicated to understanding the most chaotic systems we deal with, they are themselves a chaotic system.

A healthy sense of humour about weather prediction can be found pretty well everywhere.  I remember the director of one region proudly telling a senator’s assistant,
“It was only in 2000 that we finally managed to continually beat persistence forecasting in north Australia.”
“What’s persistence?”, asked the confused woman.
“Forecast for tomorrow what happened today.”
“And we’ve only just managed to be better than that?”
“Yes.”
“So what exactly has the weather bureau been doing here for the last hundred years?”
“Watching cyclones.”
She wandered off amidst stifled giggles from all the engineers gathered around.  The forecasting centres in the states I visited all had a collection of cartoons essentially sending up the weather bureau displayed prominently in somewhere in the office.

I remember another time walking into the forecasting centre and noticed for the first time that a huge mass of storm clouds had gathered in the early afternoon.  When I’d been outside at lunch the sky was blue and clear in every direction, so it came as a shock.  I found myself staring at the black storm front saying,
“Wow, where did that come from?”
“The north-east at about 15 knots”, came the impish reply.
“I knew I shouldn’t have said anything”, I mumbled, rolling my eyes.
“Always happy to answer questions from the viewing public”, he continued.
I decided leaving was the best answer.

At the observation centre at Darwin airport they keep a chocolate wheel in the manager’s office.  It has all the possible forecasts on it, so they can just spin the wheel and see if they can do better than the meteorologists.  If you ever see a forecast for Darwin for ‘lava showers’ or ‘blizzards’, you’ll know where it really came from.  At the same place they also keep a crystal ball to aid with the prediction process.  Okay, so the ball sits on a piece of photographic paper to record sunlight intensity and daylight hours, but it’s fun to stare into and predict stuff.  The observers are a curious group generally, the airports around the country are where they launch the hydrogen weather balloons every four hours to record atmospheric conditions.  Those weather balloons also came in handy as a greeting for a new local manager.  They got a fresh one and poured a couple of kilos of flour into it before placing it in the centre of his office and inflating it with an air pump.  The operation took a while, but the end result was that when the manager opened the door to the office, it burst the balloon and spread flour evenly over every surface – especially his face.  After a year there was still traces of flour in his office; on books, in the carpet and on top of picture frames.  Love their work.

It’s 1992, you’re in Darwin and it’s after four o’clock on Sunday morning.  You’re still going after a night on the piss in town and there’s a few friends with you.  There’s two possible places you could be.  One is in Squire’s Tavern on Edmunds St right in the city centre.  It’s a classic dodgy pub; home to Darwin city’s lowest clientele and too many university students.  It’s been there forever and is open 23 hours a day.  Well, they have to clean it sometime.  The other place is where I am right now and that’s Uncle Sam’s.  It’s a 24hr food stop, placed carefully at the corner you have to pass to leave the city going down the highway.  Taxis hang around here, because very late on a Friday and Saturday night it’s a standard gathering ground to find something greasy to eat before making the long journey home.  Well…it’s Darwin, the longest journey is going to be under twenty minutes in a Taxi, but it never feels that way when you’re there.  There’s one last thing you will find here at this time, in fact at most times, and that’s the Uncle Sam’s dude.

Nobody can remember having Uncle Sam’s without him.  He’s a fixture you look for and feel somehow reassured when you see his heavily tanned, wrinkled, aged body hunched against the wall, sitting on the ground outside.  He’s not begging.  He’s not busking.  He doesn’t want anything from you at all.  He’s just there.  Over time we’ve chatted to the staff at ‘Scams, as Uncle Sam’s is affectionately known, and discovered he’s an old homeless guy who has a few kangaroos loose in the top paddock.  One night we discover he speaks German and his name is Rudi.  This came after another session of listening to him talking randomly at the world.  He sits quite calmly talking to nobody with varying levels of volume and passion about…about….well….we never really understand.  His voice is deep and carries the accent strongly, but a rational train of thought never becomes clear – unless he’s ordering a coffee from inside or you ask him the time.

In fact, asking him the time becomes a kind of ritual for a small group of us.  You ask, and then he spends about a minute withdrawing a broken, bandless wristwatch from the small, black bag he carries with him everywhere.  His deep, sonorous voice is like an announcement from the highest authority just for your benefit. 
“It’s a quarter to two”, said in his voice, becomes a catchphrase in the group to refer to those moments when you’re drunk and heading for ‘Scams – or as a standard answer when someone asks you the time.  Occasionally the staff let us know he’s run out of money and was asking for a coffee – and they’ve already given him a couple.  We always find him one.  He’s crazy, homeless, harmless and a part of our lives now.  Of course we’ll help him out.

Everyone who lived in Darwin at the time knows the Uncle Sam’s dude.  And everyone was equally horrified when a group of dumb bogans took it upon themselves to beat him up and put him in hospital.  I’m guessing after watching one too many American TV shows, they decided this was somehow appropriate.  There were dozens of big guys who wanted to find the ones responsible and put them in hospital next.  Rudi must have been in his fifties or sixties, was definitely out of his head, but utterly harmless.  Beating him up was an act of sheer cowardice that assaults any Australian’s sense of fairness.  It made the local paper.  We got the full story from the ‘Scams staff; who had tried to break it up, called the police and helped make some arrests.  They also started a collection to help him pay for his treatment and they even visited him a couple of times to make sure he was being looked after. 

I don’t remember when I stopped seeing the Uncle Sam’s dude around town.  He did return after he recovered, but I don’t know what happened to him later.  Given his age, he’s probably passed on now to go hang around the great ‘Scams in the sky.  Rest in Peace Rudi.  We remember you.