Boy On Fire Read online

  The town’s population had doubled in the fifteen years since the end of the Second World War. A bursting Wangaratta High School was relocated to a freshly built site, energising efforts to establish what would become the Centre for Continuing Education in the old school buildings just off the main street. Colin was in his element here, both as an English teacher at the newly expanded school and as a community dynamo behind the foundation of ‘The Centre’.

  Dawn Cave was much happier too, far less isolated socially and culturally than she had felt in Warracknabeal. When her children grew to school age, she was able to recommence work as a librarian at Wangaratta High in 1968. Colin continued to teach part-time while running The Centre, in between producing and directing seasons of amateur theatre for The Wangaratta Players. In private, Colin pursued his literary interests, writing short stories, which he unsuccessfully submitted to journals such as the Reader’s Digest, and satirical verse, some of which appeared in the local paper. Notable among these published verses was an anonymous piece entitled ‘Ode to the Evening Air’, an attack on the foul smells of the abattoir: ‘My only wish is those who / This nauseation every eve perpetrate / at eight / Should have themselves / immersed within sewers / Buried neck-high with various manures.’3

  The Cave family lived on the western side of town at 31 Mepunga Avenue. ‘When we lived there,’ says Nick, ‘there were constantly new houses being built, the foundations of which I loved climbing on and falling off. The local swimming pool was nearby, where many an hour was passed lying on the hot concrete. I was always practically black as a child and we never wore shoes. Next to the swimming pool there was a [sports] field we had to cross, where magpies would dive-bomb us and the grinderman would park his van to sharpen the neighbourhood knives.’

  If you were to ‘Take a little walk to the edge of town’ and ‘Go across the tracks / Where the viaduct looms like a bird of doom’ – as the song ‘Red Right Hand’ would later have it – ‘Past the square, past the bridge, past the mills, past the stacks’4 – then you might find yourself stumbling westwards and even down Mepunga Avenue itself. ‘So, yes,’ Cave admits, ‘“Red Right Hand” is set in a reconstructed version of Wangaratta.’ Not the real place, as he invariably emphasises, but still somewhere real enough for those lyrics to serve as a map that could guide you from one point to another with an eerie familiarity.

  Childhood friend Bryan Wellington refers to himself as ‘Nick’s first boy next door’. ‘I lived at number 27 Mepunga Avenue,’ he says proudly. ‘The street name actually has two different spellings at either end written on the signposts: “Mepunga” and “Mupenga”. It’s only a hundred metres long! The different spellings were a constant amusement to us as kids.’

  The feel of the surrounding area was – and still is – lower middle class, the lawns mown, the gardens well tended, a sedate, even bland oasis penetrated by the sounds of passing trains running every second hour. At the western end of Mepunga Avenue, where it intersects with Phillipson Street, the suburb starts to give way to warehouses, factories and the nearby racecourse and cattle saleyards. In the 1960s this was ‘the edge of town’. Bryan Wellington recalls the verandah of the Robinson brothers’ house down the road, where he and Nick would compete against them in lengthy table-tennis tournaments; the ‘necessary season tickets’ for the swimming pool; and climbing the massive pine trees in Wareena Park, where he, Nick and their friend Eddie Baumgarten forged a childhood gang that would ‘climb higher and higher to test ourselves’.

  Wellington’s view of Nick’s father, Colin, however, is less enchanted. ‘I don’t have fond memories of him personally. Nick’s mother was fantastic. Nick’s father may have been a great man, but he liked things to go his way. I thought he was an authoritarian in his own home. I dunno what Nick thinks of this, but I have often got the feeling his song “Red Right Hand” is about his dad, that it comes from being bent over and disciplined. Nick was scared of his dad, no doubt about that. Nick’s two older brothers, Tim and Pete, they toed the line where Nick didn’t. Nick was like . . . like a branch of Colin’s anger; they clashed. Colin was an enigma to me, when I look back. He could produce plays, he could teach and inspire people, but he could be a bully too.

  Nick riding Bryan Wellington’s horse in Wangaratta c. 1968 (photographer unknown; courtesy of Bryan Wellington)

  ‘I should say that my own father was not an educationalist, let’s put it that way. I had to leave home in order to finish high school at age sixteen. So, my father always tried to keep me away from Nick – because of the fact Nick’s parents were a teacher and a librarian and they had degrees. My dad found all that threatening, and he had great difficulty communicating with them. Alcohol was a big part of my family life, and it was a big part of Eddie Baumgarten’s family life too. That made it easy for my dad to talk to Eddie’s dad. Nick’s dad didn’t drink! But Eddie wasn’t brought up with the fear that I was; or the fear that I believe Nick was brought up with too. That thing of wanting to please, and not knowing how to . . .’ Wellington pauses at what seems like an inadequate summary. ‘It’s a very intricate situation to explain.’5

  Eddie Baumgarten lived a couple of blocks away from the Mepunga Avenue boys. Nick freely refers to him as his best friend when he was young. The Baumgarten family are writ so large in Nick’s tales of growing up in Wang they emerge like some childhood reminiscence out of a novel by Cormac McCarthy or Harper Lee. Dawn Cave remembers the family well: ‘Mrs Baumgarten had her own hairdressing salon. She was a very religious woman . . . She used to like singing “Popeye the Sailor Man” around her own home.6 Mr Baumgarten was nice too but there was something strange about him.’

  ‘Eddie’s dad was a wonderful, shambling man,’ Nick says fondly. Mr Baumgarten would take Nick and Eddie out on trips hunting rabbits. ‘He just drove us up to the Warby Ranges, gave us a shotgun each, some cartridges and a six-pack of beer, then went off somewhere and came back later on and picked us up,’ says Nick. ‘I was twelve or thirteen. Eddie and I would sit up there and talk about stuff, walk on the great hot boulders, shoot the myxo rabbits7, which you could actually walk right up to and blow away, executioner-style, or just clap your hands and watch them run blind and bash themselves on the trees. Awful, really . . .’ The sound of his clapping hand as Nick tells the story is as sharp as a rifle shot into the memory. ‘On the rare occasions Eddie and I would actually shoot a rabbit that was not diseased, Mrs Baumgarten, a tough, kind and generous woman, would skin it, remove the pellets and cook it. I would like to add that my mother knew nothing of these activities and would have been appalled if she did.

  ‘Eddie had a homemade sterno still in the backyard, where he boiled sugar and potato skins. It had a coiled clear plastic hose, the works . . . I can’t, in truth, remember ever drinking any of this, or whether the still he made was actually successful at all. It’s the thought that counts! Have I told you about the Triple A Club? It stood for Anti Alcoholics Anonymous. It was a Gentleman’s Club of two – just me and Eddie,’ Nick says proudly. ‘We’d pay taxi drivers to go buy us a bottle of Stone’s Green Ginger Wine or Marsala or some other godawful thing. We would meet in a shed somewhere between his place and mine that we had set up – I can’t recall where; it was almost falling down even then – and we’d play music there [on a radio] and drink ourselves sick. I remember throwing up green grenadine all over Mrs B’s carpet. She took it in her stride.’

  Anne, Eddie’s older sister, looks back at their friendship with Nick and is still surprised at how strong the connections proved to be. ‘My family were not nearly as high status as his family. But Nick seemed to like being around. My brother Eddie was a very charismatic kid, I guess; he was one of those people able to get away with things and make people laugh. He and Nick were alike in that way.

  ‘Nick was a pixie-looking little kid till he shot up tall when he was older. Nick used to have a lisp too when he was young; it made him even cuter. He was a great friend to have. Everyone else in town was
so boring. Nick was just out there, bizarre, and very intuitive. He could go off on any crazy tangent you liked. We’d play that card game Strip Jack Naked a lot, except we didn’t take our clothes off. We were only kids.

  ‘He used to be really affectionate with my mum. Nick’d put his arm around her and call her Mrs B. She loved that. She was a really eccentric woman, not everyone understood her: she’d grown up on Mount Buffalo and never saw another child till she was ten. Her family hosted well-known tourists who came to stay on the mountain. She’d met all these artists who used to go up there and paint, like Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts. Her mother was a writer and her aunt and an uncle were painters. Percy Grainger visited. Well-to-do tourists from Melbourne were attracted to the natural environment. I have photos of mum as a child with General Sir John Monash.

  ‘Dad had suffered a breakdown after his farm was burned out by bushfire in the early 1950s. The fire was started by a spark off an old tractor at a neighbouring farm. He and Mum had only been married six months. He never adjusted to life away from the land. He became an alcoholic. He was a lovely, gentle man. Nick was always very respectful to Dad.’8

  Anne describes how she, Eddie and Nick set up a special listening room out the back of the Baumgarten home after her mother decided her teenage daughter needed a space of her own. ‘We painted the ceiling black, and stapled netting to it. Then we got newspaper and stuck it to the wall with flour and water, and painted that all blue,’ says Anne. ‘We had an old second-hand record player and lounges and we’d sit around with the lights off and have candles and incense burning and turn up the music. My favourites were Bridge over Troubled Water and The Beatles’ Let It Be, and lots of Dylan; I was really into the lyrics of songs. Nick and I used to talk about Leonard Cohen. Just how there were so many different levels to his voice. I’d read that he said he wasn’t a very good singer, but we thought he was like Dylan, just the feeling he could get into a single word was amazing. I think Nick’s the same now as a singer when I listen to him. He can really get that feeling into one word. I think he’s a really great singer, just like they are.’9

  Nick says, ‘I spent a lot of time in the back room at Eddie’s wonderfully ramshackle house with his sister Anne, listening to music. This is where I first heard Leonard Cohen. Again, I must have been around twelve or thirteen. Songs of Love and Hate, still Leonard Cohen’s greatest record, in my opinion. Staring for hours at that most uncompromising of covers and listening to all the dark, violent and very beautiful songs. Anybody who tries to tell you Leonard Cohen is not depressing obviously hasn’t listened to Songs of Love and Hate.10 Anne Baumgarten was only a few years older than Eddie and me. What a gal! Owning that record in Wangaratta! The first track, “Avalanche”, was the most extraordinary lyric I’d ever heard – still is, really. For me, doing it as the first song on From Her to Eternity [Nick’s debut as a solo artist] was as much a calling forth of my childhood years in Wang as a tribute to the master poet–songwriter.11 Eddie died some years ago of cancer.’ When Anne called Dawn Cave in Melbourne in 2004 to pass on the news that Ed had died, Nick was home with his family, visiting his mother for Christmas. That was the last time Anne and Nick spoke.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Dawn Cave says, whenever the Baumgartens come up in conversation, ‘Anne and Eddie had quite an influence on Nick.’

  Below the railway bridge where Nick and his friends used to leap into the Ovens River, there is some graffiti scrawled on a viaduct archway: ‘You’ll Always Live and Rock in Our Hearts.’ It’s not meant for Nick Cave, and could be no more than a decade old, but he might sympathise with the tone of nostalgia and grief it announces as you walk by it and on down to the river of his past. There, the sheared-off tree trunks still jut out from the water. The sun still glitters on the green-brown surface, its depths and currents varying and deceptive. A constant hum of locusts gives the air a fullness of space. Birds clicking and whistling add to the atmosphere. The periodic sound of town traffic just a few blocks away, coming in gusts with the breeze, is the only thing to intrude on this secret world – though even that sound adds to a sense of this world being hidden away and separate.

  Directly above on Faithfull Street a boy rides his pushbike, hands free, his arms held lazily behind his head. You can cut down to the river here at the end of Faithfull Street, or walk up the gravel siding onto the railway line and over the bridge itself. The height of the bridge, once you are on it, is a shock. It is not just a big jump into the Ovens – it is a daunting one, some twenty metres perhaps. It is hard to believe anyone would take the plunge. Standing on the tracks, you can see quite a distance, the perspective dissolving into a smoky blue haze. Judging the spot where the depth of the river was deep enough to absorb your fall, and avoiding the tree trunks that open up below like savage mouths, must have been quite an art. So must the timing of the jump as a train approached.

  Anne Baumgarten and Nick Cave in Anne’s front yard, Wangaratta, 1972. Anne is holding her dog, Cindy; Nick has her cat, Woodrow Wilson, in his arms. (courtesy of Anne Shannon, née Baumgarten)

  Chris Morris, a high-school friend of Nick’s brother Tim, remembers how ‘jumping off the bridge was the “tough” thing to do. Just hearing that sound of the train before it came into view and feeling that rumble on the tracks beneath your bare feet.’ He says, ‘Nick back then was a little brat. We’d always be hearing about his exploits second-hand. Both his parents worked at the school, and they knew Nick was really bright. He’d get bored shitless after doing the work in five minutes, so he’d cause trouble. I think it’s harder for offspring when their parents are teachers at a school. The parents are harder on you, too – to make the point that you are being treated equally. Tim and I used to nick off for a few cigarettes; other than that, our behaviour was pretty tame. Their other brother, Peter, was into motorbikes and things. Nick was always more anti-authoritarian and out there than his brothers. Several times he got suspended at school. He had that very strong will of his father. Later on, when we heard about Nick in The Birthday Party, being off his head and falling over on stage, everyone in Wang thought, What a dickhead. But little by little the story started to change. A bit of awe crept into the way people started to speak about what Nick was up to.’12

  Schoolteacher Adrian Twitt concurs with Chris Morris. ‘You teach so many children, it gets hard to recall what members of any family you did or didn’t have in your classroom. But I can say with confidence that Nick was so bright he was almost unteachable!’13

  As for Nick’s bad reputation, Adrian Twitt relates it to a broader family scenario. ‘Nick was probably too much like his father, and I’m guessing they didn’t get on too well,’ he says. ‘I remember how there used be all these announcements over the school PA system by the principal’s secretary in this high-pitched, piercing voice. They’d come every five minutes sometimes. I taught in the classroom next to Colin. Apparently he had been in the middle of a soliloquy from Shakespeare when one of these announcements came over the PA yet again. We all watched from the classrooms as Colin stormed down to the principal’s office and ripped out all the leads in a fury. I think most of the staff were very glad he had done it. But Colin could be bombastic and put people offside without meaning to, particularly women. The way he would stride into the staff room and start making announcements. But there was an enthusiasm too, almost like a little boy sometimes, the way he would get so excited about things. Personally I never found Colin overpowering in his energy, maybe because we shared a lot of interests, like chess and amateur theatre. When I first came to town as a single man, he and Dawn made me feel very welcome in their home. I saw Dawn as a fairly sensitive person by comparison. She was the centrepiece of the family. Only a sensitive person can fulfil that role, I think. She was always calm, collected, some say quiet. The only two members of the household being openly extroverted were Colin and Nick.’14

  ‘My father believed to his core in the power of education to elevate lives, and thought it was nearly a divine ca
lling to be a teacher,’ Nick says. ‘There is a letter my father wrote to a friend – my mother has it – where he is talking about a theatrical production he is involved in. It goes on for three pages with incredible enthusiasm about the actors and the production. By the end, you realise that he is describing a student play he is putting on at the high school. It’s about love, really. And whether you’re writing a song or choosing curtains, it’s the same thing if that’s what you put into it.

  ‘Anything my father involved himself in he did obsessively. Except, possibly, child-rearing. Huge energy.’ The memories of his father tumble out as Nick looks not so much back to the events as inwards to something he can see. ‘He was a teetotaller who took “the Pledge” when he was in the army. Never found out why. For a treat, we used to stop at the pub and he would drink a cold glass of Solo lemonade at the bar. Hard thing to do in an Australian country town in the sixties. He was gutsy like that, and very much his own man.’

  Despite any authoritarian shadows that loom over such admiring family impressions, it is important to remember that Colin Cave was a product of the post-war 1950s. The stern patriarch and passionate arts lover, the domineering yet inspiring teacher, the ambitious bureaucrat and eccentric theatre lover are more a paradox than a contradiction. In a very black-and-white time, these character traits hinted at a man who was difficult to categorise, and perhaps difficult to know. Daughter Julie remembers her father teaching her how to read which way the wind was coming by watching the surface of the water as they sailed on Lake Malawa, and learning how to spell the word ‘biscuit’ by writing it on his back with her finger.

  Even Bryan Wellington acknowledges an innate poetry to the man that flowed into his children. Wellington tells a story about Nick arriving at his home one afternoon with a handful of photos of the Milky Way. Colin had given Nick a camera passed on from Frank ‘Poppa’ Cave. Father and son had spent ages in the backyard one evening as Colin taught Nick how to photograph the night sky on a slow shutter speed.15