Boy On Fire Page 4
And now he has made it, the belated pat on the back. That is how it seems to him. Onya, mate! ‘Foreigners!’ Can you believe that? Nick re-examines his attitude from every side, the good and the bad of it, as he sits stuck here in Bleddyn’s Mercedes a few hours before the ceremony. Yet it is obvious the coming evening means a great deal to him precisely because it is much-longed-for recognition from home, the one place his Australianness can at last be understood. ‘We’re an Australian band making Australian music,’ he will say of The Bad Seeds at the ARIAs. All Nick’s emotions centre on these simple words as he puts pen to paper in the car and jots them down.
Bleddyn brakes suddenly, almost rear-ending the truck in front, flinging everyone forward for a moment. ‘Sorry,’ he says. Tram bells ring once more. The traffic finally moves. And Nick Cave is released from Fitzroy Street, St Kilda, and all his thinking at last.
Fuck them all.
That night in Sydney, Nick’s attention is drawn to the press release that has gone out prior to the induction. Ed St John, chairman of the ARIA Awards Committee, is quoted fulsomely: ‘Nick Cave has enjoyed – and continues to enjoy – one of the most extraordinary careers in the annals of popular music. His contribution over the past thirty years was never limited by geography or nationality and nor could it ever be described in terms of hit records, chart positions or radio airplay. He is an Australian artist like Sidney Nolan is an Australian artist – beyond comparison, beyond genre, beyond dispute. As an industry we should be immensely proud and humbled by Nick Cave’s achievements; I know I speak for the ARIA Board when I say it’s a real pleasure to be inducting this artist into the Hall of Fame.’29
The comparison to Nolan strikes a chord in Cave’s heart just before he strides out to accept the honour and receive a standing ovation. He feels surprised, even overwhelmed, which is not what he expected after brewing over the event all day back in Melbourne. Ed St John must have known Nick nursed ambitions to be a painter. Cave’s biggest living hero as a teenager was actually the flamboyant wunderkind of Australian art, Brett Whiteley. But Sidney Nolan, eh? The reference is oddly more on point. Whiteley flamed out on heroin; Nolan grew old and grand and endured. Cave’s almost at the microphone, and those phenomenal Ned Kelly paintings by Sidney Nolan rise up like phantoms in his mind.30
Oh well, here I am, he thinks. Centre stage right. The ARIA gallows! Such is life.31 But there’s something brash to Nick Cave’s manner as he begins to speak, something overly theatrical and forced about his speech. ‘I cannot really accept this until we get a few things straight,’ he says.32 He then wonders loudly – too loudly, it seems – why The Birthday Party and The Bad Seeds are not included in the Hall of Fame. And he takes it upon himself to induct them all along with him, one by one – but leaving out The Birthday Party’s vital original drummer, Phill Calvert. Despite Cave’s insistence on giving due credit to his bandmates, the exclusion of Calvert will leave a less-generous impression in the minds of some of those who saw both The Boys Next Door and The Birthday Party in their flaming heyday. Had Nick just forgotten Phill, as he would later claim, or was it true that even thirty years after a rupture, the singer could not bring himself to thank an old comrade?33 Oh yeah, people will tell you, Nick really knows how to hold a grudge. Don’t be fooled by the charm. Wait till he cuts you down, they warn; everybody gets their turn.
Despite the praise that will be heaped upon Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!! in reviews, Nick Cave tends to hear the compromises that were made between him and Warren Ellis and Mick Harvey during the recording process. Mick would turn things down when mixing in the studio, seeking out subtlety and depth; but, when he left, Nick and Warren would turn them back up, wanting power and dynamism. It got a little childish. The tensions with Mick are only going to grow.
Nick loves Daniel Miller and Mute but he thinks they underestimated Grinderman as a side project, and it has been ‘a bit of a lost opportunity’. His homecoming to Melbourne, the ARIAs in Sydney, the exhibition about his life, turning fifty a few weeks earlier – all reinforce a deep unease rather than any sense of achievement. Nick leaves the triangular-shaped award behind on his mother’s mantelpiece. ‘ARIA ICONS: HALL OF FAME’ it reads on a plaque at the base, above his name and the date, ‘28 October 2007’. He will wonder about it as he departs for the United Kingdom a few weeks later. How hard it was to maintain a hold on what was occurring as he stepped up to the microphone with his trophy and the stage seemed to skew away from him. ‘As if I had somehow stumbled into the wrong movie,’ Nick says, ‘and I was playing the wrong part.’
King and Country
DOCKERS PLAINS
1979
As he passes through Mount Buffalo National Park, then drops out of the coolness of the high country altogether, descending into the valley below, the heat becomes hard to take. It’s in the high thirties out there, a stinker of a day, the sky a pale, hurtful blue that loses its colour in the glare. His tired eyes are as grey and mineralised as the road ahead; he blinks to water them. The time is headed towards 4 pm on Sunday, 7 January 1979, and he is in a hurry to get home. His white Ford Fairmont is not fitted with air-conditioning. He keeps winding the window up then down, an oven-temperature breeze offering little relief.
A former English teacher and amateur director for the Malvern Theatre in Melbourne, Colin Cave can reel off entire stretches of the Bard, a little Dostoyevsky, and Nabokov too, as a moment may demand. There is a lot preying on his mind this afternoon. The weekend’s triumphs are fading, and the troublesome question of Nick is coming back into view. Most immediately, what to do about the police charges that look like being laid against his youngest son? A bandaged cut on Colin’s right thumb irritates him as he grips the wheel.1
Colin takes consolation in the words of Vladimir Nabokov. A line from Lolita about life being like a work of art, its moments gathering together obscurely and strangely to form something greater that we can’t quite see because the work is still unfinished. Yes, there is plenty ahead for him and Nicky, and for the whole family yet. A passionately held philosophy of ‘continuing education’, in both life and work, connects these thoughts with the Russian author’s vaguely ironic words. Fate versus will: it’s an interesting theme to consider.
The bitumen continues to waver before him, transforming what should be a three-hour return to Melbourne into what feels like one long drive into a heavy dream. The land around here is parched. On the horizon a few wispy rain clouds are struggling to form.
Colin is not far outside the town of Wangaratta, where he and his wife, Dawn, and their four young children – Tim, Peter, Nick and Julie – lived from late 1959 till the end of 1971. He doesn’t push on into Wang. Instead Colin tears off the bitumen and onto the dirt of the Dockers Road, wrenching the steering wheel out of a gravel slide as he lead-foots the accelerator. Dust trails behind him and he disappears.
Seven years may have passed since he lived here, but this is an old, familiar realm. Later, questions will be nonetheless asked about what he was doing on these hazy excuses for roads. Visiting a thirty-acre block of land the family had purchased as a holiday place and was yet to build on? Going to see someone on an impulse? A look at the map suggests Colin Cave may have been taking a short cut, but the story of his movements will become as faint as the legend of these roads.
Summer always made for a difficult start to the year when he worked out here in the 1960s. Trying to keep students alert in the drowsing heat. As an English teacher in Wangaratta, he had enjoyed playing with the roots of language, striding into his first classes and chalking ‘CAVE’ then ‘COLIN’ side by side on the blackboard, then ‘cave’ and ‘canem’ below it, ‘Latin for “beware” and “dog”!’2
His friend Bill O’Callaghan, the former mayor, recalls that ‘like many teachers there was a bit of the thespian in him. Students . . . never knew what to expect’.3 A flamboyant, boom-voiced lover of literature with memorably bushy eyebrows – and ‘nostrils that flared like a thoroughbred when he
was excited’4 – Colin Cave would not just recite The Merchant of Venice for his class, he would act it out, almost weeping the lines ‘the quality of mercy is not strained’. Thirty years later his students would not only remember these displays vividly, they would describe them as life-changing.
It was as a galvanising and sometimes over-the-top highschool teacher, then as the founding chief executive officer of the town’s new adult education centre, that Cave would make an impression – with enough energy left over to be both the director and sometime star of The Wangaratta Players. He also wrote the high-school anthem and submitted satirical verse to the local newspaper. Dawn Cave recalls how ‘Colin really loved to shake things up wherever he went’, but there was a faint feeling among his children that sometimes Dad had enough energy for everything except a family.
Because it was the first attempt of its kind outside Melbourne, the Wangaratta Centre for Continuing Education was used as a test case for the expansion of adult education across the entire state. Colin Cave was not unaware of this significance, or of the commitment needed to make it work. The caretaker who lived nearby remembers hearing the door frequently bang shut at 10 pm as Cave ended his day. His hands would be stained red and blue from the inks of the spirit duplicator he was forced to wrestle with so that the secretary could copy his furious output of letters and reports.5
Son Nick would inherit this obsessive work ethic. He would also soak up other influences that came through his father’s agency. In the refurbished old school that became known as ‘The Centre’, Colin oversaw courses, talks, screenings of European films and exhibitions that took in such unlikely subject matter as ‘Mexican Popular Art’ and ‘American Psychodelic [sic] Posters’. As a boy, Nick treated The Centre like a second home, wandering through the rooms and events almost at will.
Colin Cave rehearsing Dinner with Family with The Wangaratta Players, 1966. A classic Cave pose. (courtesy of the Centre for Continuing Education, Wangaratta)
It was here that Colin set up a workshop for the construction of small fibreglass boats known as Mirror-class dinghies. Locals loved to sail them of a weekend on the nearby, artificial Lake Mulwala. Colin even made one for Nick, the son who seemed to feel his father’s absences and lack of attention the most. Nick proudly notes that Colin built it ‘all by himself. He painted it bright yellow and named it Caprice.’
Nick was too young to make much use of it, and not particularly interested in sailing. ‘I just hung around on the foreshore of the lake,’ Nick says. ‘Got a crush on a girl there, though, a skinny thing called Libby Meek – mostly because she wore a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt.’ He would end up spending hours, either alone or in his mother’s company, watching his father and his older brothers and younger sister on the water calling out to each other. Years later, Nick Cave would say, ‘Dad loved that boat.’6
When Colin Cave announced his imminent departure from Wangaratta in 1971 to become Director of the Council for Adult Education (CAE) in Melbourne, many locals were saddened. He had only recently been named Wangaratta’s 1970 Citizen of the Year.
Colin suggested another local teacher, Adrian Twitt, as an appropriate successor at The Centre. Unfortunately, Victoria’s rigidly conservative Liberal premier, Henry Bolte, sought to overturn this nomination. Twitt’s face had been recognised from an old newspaper photo that showed him leading a moratorium march against the Vietnam War in Melbourne. Colin opposed the premier and fought to see his colleague given the job on merit. As always, Colin Cave proved a very hard man to resist. To many people’s amazement, Colin got his way and Twitt was approved.
A full-page photo of Colin Cave was duly published in the 1971 Report from the Wangaratta Centre for Continuing Education, with these words printed boldly underneath to mark the end of an era: ‘The King is Dead – Long Live the King!’
Cave’s promotion to Director of the CAE was an acknowledgement of his determination and abilities. It has led him to spend most of the 1970s cultivating a blossoming network of centres across the state, all based on what has become known as ‘the Wangaratta model’, part of a revolution in community education he helped set in motion.7 On the first weekend of January 1979 he is typically hard at it, the year barely started. A classical-music ‘song camp’ has been organised in the hill town of Harrietville. For a man of Cave’s dynamism, the long drive from Melbourne to launch its debut is no obstacle. That Harrietville is a satellite of Wangaratta only adds to his interest.
Tourism brochures refer to the region he passes through on his drive home as ‘Kelly Country’. A sign back on the Hume Highway entices visitors with the slogan ‘Legends, Wine and High Country’. Colin Cave has long been fascinated by the convergence of myth and fact in the life of Ned Kelly, the rebel hero who formed out of this frontier and continued to ride on through history as an apparition of everything from Australian Republican sentiments to something eternally independent and anti-authoritarian in the national consciousness. Back in the Easter of 1967 Colin organised a national symposium in Wangaratta that would affect perspectives on the outlaw in everything from historical writings through to art, film and literature. Comparisons were made to Robin Hood, William Tell and Jesse James. The great Australian historian Manning Clark gave the keynote address.8
Something of a frustrated storyteller, Colin Cave wrote a florid introduction to a book that came out of that weekend, entitled Ned Kelly: Man and Myth. It is one of the best and most entertaining things in the collection. Colin highlights the moment Kelly was captured wearing the homemade armour he had forged out of melted iron ploughshares. A bizarre vision protected from gunfire, Kelly was shot in the leg and downed while searching for his younger brother outside the Glenrowan Inn at the height of the siege, his gang burned out and brutally slaughtered in a melee that saw some 15,000 bullets rained down upon them. The bodies of Steve Hart and Dan Kelly were found scorched almost beyond recognition inside the Glenrowan Inn. Fellow gang member Joe Byrne, Ned Kelly’s second in command, was in good enough condition to be dragged outside and strung up against a wall like a marionette for press photographs.
Colin Cave likens this series of events to a western by the American director John Ford.9 And he writes about it in a similar spirit of high-plains drama and regal fatality. Colin’s eldest son, Tim, would later caution against reading too much into a performance on the page that was as much about ‘Dad’s passion for theatrically expressing himself’10 as any inner obsession being revealed. It is a son’s subtle distinction between public performance and the private man. But it is undeniably true that you hear a highly excited voice stirring out of what would normally be a more sober historical appreciation, a voice distinguished by a rush of exclamation marks and a zeal for bloody fantasies of crime and murder that borders on the unseemly as Colin Cave enthuses over all things Ned Kelly from start to finish:
There is something in us which makes us forgive a man his sins so long as he is chivalrous. Moreover, Kelly rode a horse. This makes a man ten feet high, something to look up to, something quick to come and go, something with that air of mystery and mastery which stirs us all . . .
But above all, Kelly was clad in armour. Here is the impregnable disguise for which the civilized soul yearns . . . In the imagination of all who think of Kelly stirs that faceless thing in iron, like Sidney Nolan’s image of Kelly, Iron with Eyes. What reckless jaunts, what romantic exploits, what criminal escapades would we indulge in if only we could be unrecognized! What would we not do if only we had some armour to climb into which would hide us, disguise us and protect us?11
You could hardly call this assessment ‘subdued’. In hearing that voice you are immediately struck by just how much these rhetorical qualities – and the attraction to masks, as well as violent or chivalrous freedoms – would resound in the songs of his son.12 Nick, then nine years old, never forgot seeing the suit of armour on display at his father’s symposium: the presence of the breastplate; the headpiece that looked like an upturned billycan or a welder�
�s visor; the iron that Kelly had beaten into shape for his last showdown at Glenrowan. Dented by bullets. ‘It really made quite an impact on me,’ Nick says. So too the photograph of dead Joe Byrne, disfigured and blackened by flames, his body held up with guy-ropes, the gruesome historical precursor to Nick’s song ‘Sonny’s Burning’ and other works.13
When he became an art student in Melbourne, Nick could truly appreciate why Sidney Nolan had made such a mysterious icon of Ned Kelly in his paintings, as if the outlaw were a medieval knight adrift in a colonial Australian Dreamtime. The connections become even more vivid when Nick speaks of his youth wandering the countryside around Wangaratta: ‘It would be fair to say that, unlike much nature I have experienced, the Australian bush has always felt haunted to me, and the ghosts of its bloody past felt ever-present and still speaking to us and had yet to be laid to rest. The enduring image of Ned rising from the mist in his armour was a powerful symbol in our household, and I was often told that story by my father when I was a boy.’
Inevitably, Colin Cave’s book and the stories it contained would assume their own ghostly presence in Nick’s library. Footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece that Nick would try to bring together in the mock-heroic title of an Australian tour that marked his first ever steps onto the stage as a solo artist in the summer of 1983–84: ‘Nick Cave – Man or Myth’.