Boy On Fire Read online

  Out on what has become the Dockers Road, Colin Cave drives on alone towards the Glenrowan tourist site and the Hume Highway that will take him back to Melbourne. Many will remark later that he always liked to flatten the accelerator. Tunnels of dust fly from the wheels behind him, sheep graze in the sparse shade of the gum trees. Colin hopes the charges against his youngest son – drunkenness, vandalism and petty theft – will be dismissed as nothing more than youthful tomfoolery before they are ever brought to court. They have shaken him as a parent. Always trouble with Nick, now twenty-one, so much trouble, starting from when he was a boy. It was why they had to send him away from Wangaratta to a boarding school in Melbourne when he was thirteen. If only juvenile pranks and unruliness were the issues confronting Colin and Dawn today. He hurries the car along. Getting back to Melbourne has begun to feel imperative, with the police pursuing their enquiries into Nick’s behaviour.

  Two images of Nick performing with The Boys Next Door linger in Colin’s mind. The first from when he snuck along to watch them on New Year’s Eve in 1977. A host of young bands had set up on Faraday Street in Carlton and started performing without any permission. As he was arriving, they were already playing. It took him a while, though, to see where his son was. It turned out Nick was rolling round in the gutter, groaning about somebody watching him.14 There were teenagers drunk everywhere. The most awful noise. ‘Punk Gunk’ they had called the night. The scene was chaos. Colin departed, unimpressed. Nick had only to leave The Boys Next Door’s set list on the kitchen table to prompt further reservations: ‘Sex Crimes’, ‘Masturbation Generation’ . . . Despite this coarseness, Colin decided to take another look. The boys were playing at the Tiger Room, where they’d got themselves a residency. They’d been given a record contract. It was all becoming more serious. When a surprised Nick saw his father mingling with the crowd, Colin Cave gave him an encouraging smile. As this happened, Nick, wearing a white shirt, was hit by the spotlight. Colin later told Nick, ‘You looked like an angel up there,’15 surprising his son, perhaps reminding him of something better within.

  He has lost count of the number of times he has tried to tell Nick it was beauty that would save the world – ‘education and beauty, Nicky’. He hoped the message might stick. Nick had always been a fine drawer. But he had dropped out of art school and got caught up with the band. He still thought his son’s interest in art might lead him to become a writer and illustrator of children’s books one day.

  Colin Cave is even deeper now in a network of country back roads. The far-off Warby Ranges, where the Kelly Gang once rode into hiding, are clothed in a smoky blur. The car slips again on the gravel. He rights the wheel. Just by Bobinawarrah Memorial Hall someone comes driving towards him out of nowhere. Their dust consumes him in a cloud. Then he is out the other side of it and on into the silence again.

  Some dead trees arch over the road just ahead. Countless small, brightly plumed parrots are gathered in the roadside ditches, flocks of musk lorikeets fluttering upwards and away as his car approaches. The road is long and straight.

  A local farmer is out repairing a fence near the edge of his property when he sees a strange cloud starting to spread. Fearing a bushfire, Michael Conroy heads down towards it, only to discover it is just dust dispersing. Then he sees a badly damaged vehicle that appears to have come off the road and overturned before rolling back onto its wheels. The passenger looks seriously injured. Conroy rushes back home to call the police. ‘That’s all I can tell.’16

  Senior Constable Brian Erskine receives the call at nearby Whitfield. ‘From something I was told I believed it to be a fatal accident.’17 A heavy and surprising burst of afternoon rain forces the police vehicle to slow on the Dockers Road as the officer rushes to get there. At the scene of the accident Erskine notices a fallen branch on the gravel and wheel marks that indicate the car might have swerved, losing control and running off the road.18 He sees a logo for the Council of Adult Education on the buckled door, an owl with a folded wing and a sprig of leaves beside it. The roof is badly crushed. It’s clear the man behind the wheel is deceased. The officer finds a metal ID tag hanging from a chain around the driver’s neck. Unable to locate his family in Melbourne despite repeated phone calls, Senior Constable Erskine summons Adrian Twitt to the hospital in Wangaratta. Twitt formally identifies the body as ‘Colin Francis Cave’, relationship ‘friend’.

  ‘There was nothing to show that anything had happened to him at all, apart from a bandage around his head,’ Twitt says. ‘You’d think he was just asleep, there was not another mark on him.’19

  A coroner finds that Colin Cave was killed on impact. Colleagues use phrases such as ‘the prime of his life’ and ‘the peak of his career’ to express their dismay at his death. Descriptions such as ‘meticulous’, ‘hard working’ and ‘man with a vision’ are also used. The formalities behind such words sound clichéd, but his presence was so vital that Adrian Twitt is stunned to be told Colin Cave was fifty-three; Twitt presumed him to be a decade younger, as most local people did. ‘I never would have thought he was that old,’ Twitt says, ‘not even close!’

  Eventually, a room will be set aside at The Centre and renamed The Colin Cave Gallery to honour a figure who still looms large in the town today, even as his name fades with the lives and memories of a generation who knew him as the dynamo who changed their world and the shape of adult education across the state.

  The gallery was opened by Dawn Cave in 1994. Tim drove her to Wangaratta for the occasion. Peter and Julie were bound by work commitments in Melbourne. Nick was overseas and also unable to attend the ceremony.

  Inside the gallery there is nothing much to show today but a bare foldout meeting table, stacked rows of plastic chairs pushed against a wall, and a large black-and-white photo of Colin Cave, framed and tucked into a seemingly neglected corner.

  PART II

  THE GOOD SON

  Man in the Moon

  WARRACKNABEAL

  2008, 1957–59

  ‘I was climbing up over the fence of the chicken coop to try to have a look at the chooks,’ says Nick. ‘That’s my first memory, really. Next thing I was falling. I cracked my head open. There was blood everywhere, apparently. Whenever people ask me about Warracknabeal, that’s all I can remember. I must have been about three. Ask Mum, she’ll know.’

  In 2008 it appeared Nick Cave had descended upon the town of his birth, Warracknabeal (pronounced ‘Warrick-na-beal’), in far north-western Victoria, merely to torment it: a larger-than-life figure making his crooked way homewards, as if out of one of his own dementedly fabulous songs. Those inclined towards a less-fancy prose style put it rather differently: he was just an arsehole making fun of a country town going through a drought.

  In any case, the Wimmera Mail-Times – ‘the voice of Wimmera since 1873’ – was alight with a front-page story by Michelle Dryburgh for its weekend edition dated Friday, 20 June 2008. It ran with a sharp one-two headline punch to the eyes: ‘I’m serious.’ Pictures of actor Russell Crowe and a heavily ‘blinged’ hip-hop musician called Snoop Dogg featured above the headline. Nick Cave had commissioned a statue of himself and hoped to place it somewhere in the town for an official unveiling. ‘Russell Crowe, my mate, has promised to attend,’ he said. ‘Snoop Dogg . . . says he’ll come if they let him into the country.’

  Thanks to the wonders of Photoshop, a life-size image of Cave dressed in nothing but a loincloth and seated atop a rearing horse was shown in a mock setup outside the Warracknabeal Library. It was surrounded by gravel and clumps of cosmetically arranged spinifex grass. The image was drawn from a maquette designed by English sculptor Corin Johnson, best known for his work on the Princess Diana memorial in London. That the model existed at all suggested a grain of truth to the story, which Cave had been flirting with as a possibility in various interviews since at least 2001. The rumours had made their way to the Warracknabeal town mayor, who finally asked the local paper to investigate.

 
; Cave was happy to oblige with their enquiries via email. He admitted to the Wimmera Mail-Times that the rumour was true, and that things had progressed more than anyone might realise, though he had ‘probably jumped the gun’ by inviting famous friends along before the plan was complete. He revealed that it would cost $60,000 to cast a ‘ten-feet high’ version of this horse-and-rider in bronze.1 Nick would then need to ship Corin Johnson’s work from the United Kingdom to the port of Melbourne, from where a U-Haul truck would take it by road to Warracknabeal, so the costs were becoming personally prohibitive. He was now ‘looking for a wealthy benefactor who would be interested in investing in an historical monument that will make Frank Rusconi’s Dog on the Tuckerbox pale by comparison’. The off-the-cuff reference to Frank Rusconi was itself impressive: here was a man who knew his Australian roadside icons and their creators by heart.2

  As if to incite sympathy for the project among the men of Warracknabeal, Cave told the reporter: ‘Kylie Minogue said she wouldn’t miss it for the world; she even promised to wear her gold lamé hot pants.’ A photo on the front page from her ‘Spinning Around’ video whetted appetites further as she leaned back provocatively in high heels on a cocktail bar. A headshot of Cave also appeared, his dark, thinning hair swept back, a broad moustache above a somewhat crooked smile: here was the kind of B-movie villain you would expect to tie sweet Kylie to some railroad tracks. And this guy had sung with her? Was even rumoured to have got it on with her? No way.

  Maquette for ‘Homecoming’, Warracknabeal statue of Nick Cave, by Corin Johnson (courtesy of the artist)

  A series of vox pops indicated that most townsfolk thought Cave should pay for this thing himself, but he was welcome to put it up – and a concert would be a great way to say thank you. A number of citizens preferred, though, that the statue be located ‘somewhere more quiet’ than the location proposed in the newspaper. Jono Price was one of the few locals keen on the statue appearing anywhere: ‘He is a legend and a great songwriter.’ Jamie Sevenich saw the upside of down: ‘It’s a good idea because this town is dead.’3

  The Age in Melbourne picked up the story, as did the Sydney Morning Herald and a number of international publications. Talkback radio in Melbourne also saw the statue proposal gain further amplification, much of it critical. This Nick Cave character was just making fun of a country town experiencing hard times. Who the hell did he think he was? Dawn Cave got on the blower from Melbourne to her son in the United Kingdom. ‘You’ve got to put a stop to this, Nick. It’s getting out of hand.’4 Nick promised he would do something about it. He had honestly not known about the drought affecting the Wimmera region when he’d told the journalist of his extravagant plans and star-studded guest list. And so the very next day Nick contacted Michelle Dryburgh to set the record straight.

  For a start, he told her, he had never intended to imply that the town should pay for the statue. The economics of it would be entirely his concern. After a few other points of clarification, Cave received some breaking news from Dryburgh – the local council was now considering a monument with an indigenous theme – a dingo and her pups – to be situated at a roundabout on Scott Street, effectively gazumping the only free site that might suit his memorial plans. Cave seemed to grow irate in his reply. Displaced by a dingo and her pups! ‘I ask you,’ he said, ‘what could be more indigenous to Warracknabeal than me? I was bloody born there.’

  He then apologised for all the misunderstandings he had created. Kylie would not appear wearing her gold lamé hot pants, as he had hoped, but she would certainly come along to the unveiling as he had promised. Snoop Dogg, however, was indeed likely to have visa problems entering Australia, and this sadly made him a no-show. ‘But fear not, I’ve heard from my friend Mike Tyson and he is willing to organise some bare-knuckle boxing matches in the centre of Lions Park . . .’

  And on it went. Cave smiles when he tells his monumental yarn later. The issues of the Wimmera Mail-Times in his library are precious. He grins and folds the papers away with an air of satisfaction and says, ‘I just couldn’t help myself.’

  Does all this then mean that his plans for a statue in Warracknabeal were just some elaborate practical joke or twisted fantasy? No. Cave still has hopes of doing something about his statue, though he remains vague about when and how. Like some proverbial ghost rider, Nick’s dream of himself immortalised on horseback has ridden on for another decade since, rearing up periodically then disappearing into the sunset again. As he first told The Age when they asked what was really happening, ‘I’m an Australian – even we don’t know when we’re joking and when we’re not.’5 In the same news story he insisted that if Warracknabeal were to refuse his statue a place on their streets, he would ‘drive it out into the desert and dump it somewhere, Planet of the Apes-style’.6

  Nick’s old artistic hero, the painter Sidney Nolan, might have sympathised with this gesture. He’d been posted to another part of the Wimmera region as an army conscript back in the 1940s. Isolated and miserable, Nolan began painting a series of self-portraits inspired by tribal masks, scarification and indigenous art of the Pacific. Eventually Nolan became a deserter and fled the area. But the experience and the self-portraits were a step on the road to what became his iconic Ned Kelly series. Nolan’s psycho-geography and artistic obsessions prefigured Colin Cave’s own movements from Warracknabeal to Wangaratta. By the time Nick Cave was contemplating his own grand return to the Wimmera region, the stories of the outlaw and the painter, the teacher and his son, overlapped as if by cosmic design. All that the sculptor Corin Johnson first remembers when he began making a model for a statue is Nick wanting the maquette to look like a bushranger from a film he was writing: ‘Aussie cowboy but a bit sad.’7

  There are many descriptions of Warracknabeal. ‘A whole lotta nothing’ and ‘flat as a pancake’ are two of the more notable. ‘Very flat’ is another.

  A former local, preferring to remain anonymous, explains it more subtly. ‘Everything changes slowly out there. Because farming is ninety per cent of everything, so it’s natural everything would change slowly. To weather the storm, to deal with a few bad years of drought, you gotta be able to take it. And put things in a bigger arc of time . . . There’s this saying about a nation that takes over another nation – which is what we white Europeans did a long time back to the Aboriginals – that it becomes like the original nation within three generations. I really think there is something to that when you look at the people out there.’8

  Around the time Nick Cave was developing an outback Australian western with the director John Hillcoat, which they would eventually call The Proposition (2005), his birthplace of Warracknabeal came up in early interviews as an inspiration. There was an implication Cave had arisen out of a frontier land himself. It was a notion fuelled by Nick, who fancifully described Warracknabeal as ‘a re-housing town for ex-cons who want to go straight, only nobody has gone straight, and it’s turned into this strange, lawless place’.9

  Located on the bone-dry banks of the Yarriambiack Creek, approximately 330 kilometres north-west of Melbourne, the ‘strange’ and ‘lawless’ Warracknabeal has a relatively crime-free population of 3300 people. It functions as a service centre for a spread-out wheat-farming district that survives on the moisture-holding grey soils that run in a thin strip through the arid red landscape of the Mallee scrub region.

  An ambitious young high-school teacher, Colin Cave arrived here in early 1957 with all the zeal of a pioneer. Accompanying him were his pregnant wife, Dawn, and their two sons, Tim and Peter, then aged five and three, respectively. Nick would be born later that first year in Warracknabeal, and Julie, the Caves’ only daughter, in 1959.

  The family took up residence at 72 Jamouneau Street, where Dawn was housebound looking after Nick, then Julie as well, while Tim and Peter attended primary school. ‘It was a housing-commission area,’ Dawn recalls glumly, ‘with all the streets given these unbelievable French names – it was so incongruous.’ Feelings of
stir-craziness would set in. ‘You would go for a drive,’ she says, ‘but the landscape never changed. You’d be in the car and you’d wonder what you were doing and where you were going.’10

  In summer the temperature could reach well into the forties. In winter it just got ‘very cold’, especially at night, when the place could feel as barren as a moonscape. Colin’s father, Frank Cave, dubbed the town ‘Warrackna-bloody-beal’, a name that would catch on in family parlance. Known to one and all as ‘Poppa’, Frank was a formidable presence. Nick says, ‘Mum always had to call his beloved wife [Colin’s mother] “Mrs Cave”, never Imogen. He used to make Mum feel so uncomfortable with things like that.’

  Dawn Cave confesses: ‘I’d get in such a lather when he and his wife, Imogen, were coming [from Melbourne]. She was very intelligent, one of the first women to get into the Victorian College of Pharmacy in Melbourne. I really respected her. But it was very hard to relax with him.’ As if still sensing Frank’s disapproval of her domestic abilities to this very day, she says, ‘They would never stay the night with us, never. You should have seen the hotel they preferred to stay at, too; it was such a dump.’11

  Frank Cave was a First World War veteran, and later became head of public relations for Shell, the petroleum corporation. His position had led to his own Sunday-night radio show in Melbourne during the 1940s, ‘The Shell Show’. Frank played popular tunes and interviewed international guests – most famously, in Cave family lore, the British comedy musician George Formby. Formby’s risqué songs on the banjo ukulele greatly amused Frank, who relished Formby’s double entendres and inane catchphrase, ‘It’s turned out nice again, hasn’t it!’ The first man in Australia to broadcast live-to-air music on radio, Frank would round out his show by telling a ghost story every week, amusing or frightening listeners.12 Dawn Cave thinks it’s through Frank, then Colin, that Nick inherited ‘the showman thing’.