How I Clawed My Way to the Middle by John Wood

Author:John Wood [Wood, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760144609
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia

I was lured back to the stage to play Hamlet at the Playbox Theatre – hard to resist. Although in the end I realised I was just playing another bolshie university student.

HEROIN HEAD

Around the time Hamlet finished, Leslie was quite heavily pregnant. We had by now moved again, in need of more space, although again just further down St Marks Road. This time to a three-storey terrace backing onto Glebe Gully. We had by now acquired a few cats, and many more would appear out of that undergrowth. Until I saw Rome, I had always believed Sydney to be the stray-cat capital of the world; we ended up looking after about twenty-three.

Anyway, Leslie and I were in Melbourne, and we’d been invited over for morning tea by Matthew Burton, a mate I’d been at NIDA with. Originally from Brighton, Matt had chosen to come back to Melbourne to work for the MTC, alongside Joanna MacCallum. Matt lived in a sharehouse in Fitzroy, I believe, but it could equally have been Richmond – somewhere rather shabby and affordable in 1971, but probably prohibitively expensive now. Very like our long-disbanded sharehouse in Armadale. He shared with the artist Joel Elenberg, and occasionally Brett Whiteley was a house guest. I vaguely remember that Jennifer Claire lived there, an MTC regular. Perhaps it was, in fact, her place.

On this occasion Matt alone was there to entertain us, his Sydney guests. He ushered us into the living room and gestured expansively to the overstuffed and ancient furniture. We took a seat while he headed to the kitchen to make a pot of tea.

We were remarking on the niceness of the house when I suddenly realised that we were surrounded by a score of perspex cases, all of them containing dead foetuses. Given Leslie was pregnant I was utterly mortified, and I think she was too. Realising our discomfiture, on his return Matt quickly explained that they were Whiteley’s and that he was using them to teach himself anatomy.

We also saw some amazing drawings of monkeys. Great black scrawls on large white sheets of paper of rather angry apes. Or perhaps they were a bit distressed, as was I a little, given their proximity to all these dead babies. I’ve since seen those drawings again in exhibitions all over the country. They are probably worth thousands. Back then, on that particular day, I doubt I’d have given two bob for them.

Matt showed us the rest of the house, which was festooned, as many artists’ houses are, with artworks, their own and other people’s. I have no particular memory of any of them except for an object in an upstairs hallway. A bloke sitting on a chair. I wondered why he hadn’t put in an appearance for a moment, but quickly realised it was a sculpture – he had a massively huge head. Bulbous and with veins pulsating on the surface of the mighty skull, and into one of these veins a needle was grotesquely jammed. This guy wasn’t going anywhere.

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