The Guildford Banjo Jamboree

A banjo virtuoso cuts off two of his plucking fingers in an accident but pioneers the three-finger roll to whoop his rival at a famous jamboree.

Shortly before the frolicking crush of 1862, and only a matter of years after Curly Hayband laid the firm foundations, Earl of the Meadows finger-rolled his way into banjo history at the inaugural Guildford Banjo Jamboree. Tassy Corns was there, strumming below the eucalypts, along with Dusty Quid and the Marauders, and so was Italian slide wizard Mario of the Mountains with his Misty Mountain Boys. Enthusiasts arrived in dribs and drabs until the train pulled in from Castlemaine and suddenly a hundred eager pluckers pitched their tents along the empty creek bed or rented rye-grass shanties on the brown loams the mining men of former times had labeled Lester's Flats. The hotel, only recently renamed the 'Duck's Nuts' because of the Prince Alfred scandal, was making a roaring trade. Harmonica legend Mozart McGill arrived on the second day almost upstaging (The Immortal) Tonsils Johnson who sang like a buzzard and gave one stirring rendition of Beryl, You're As Saucy As Your Cousin Mary-Lou, an anthem for the older generation. Late in the evening, as the stars did their best to offer up forgiveness, local diva Cumquat May was yodeling through her nose followed by the publican's son Wombat O'Connell who arpeggiated all his feelings, lost in sawmill minor, for an Appalachian lady he wished he never knew. The Trickledown Creek Presbyterian Old-Time Ensemble played The Mineholes of Kilkenny with Slim Curry on washboard and went thoroughly acoustic when the judges made it clear they loved a sad lament. They were trying out a fifth string capo, improvising with a railroad spike someone souvenired from the bridge collapse of '58. Then, country heart-throb Sassy Blonde Noelene almost stole a tear strumming ukulele, singing Blue, Blue Prosperine, while Dick Frisky & the Penetentials pleased the crowd with Sailor May I Break Your Heavin’ Heart. It was on the third morning of competition that Earl jammed his fingers in the back tray of a bright yellow ute with silver wheel trims and a clever bumpersticker about the ozone layer, severing the digits, and a kelpie named Dobro made off with them for breakfast. Ingratiously, his rival, Neville of the Backblocks, boasted that he had the competition in the bag.

"Its a lonesome road," said the organiser, Snuffy Shackleton, six foot three and a firestorm on a busy mandolin.

"It hurts like hell," Earl confessed, nursing his stumps. He explained that he was too preoccupied with slogans for the ozone to be watching what he did. The tray slammed shut and - knobbly sausage! - two whole fingers fell away and Dobro didn't waste a second. They called St John's Ambulance Brigade and the Australian Kelpie Federation, but nothing could be done.

"At least its not like losing a leg in the Civil War like in the song Ferrets in the Graveyard," said Snuffy, trying to see the bright side.

"No, its more like losing two fingers to a hungry brown farm dog," said Earl and remembered how the body would be risen into wholesome glory like in the song Great Will Be the Day.

"Just one moment's inattention. How life is rearranged!" said Snuffy, philosophical, "Like in the song The Twenty Dollar Donkey."

"I guess I’II just adjust, as soon as the bleeding stops," said Earl, "Like in the song None But My Sweet Darlene." 

Snuffy was reminded of an old tune sometimes called Wiser by the Minute which was recorded by Jackson Healy and his Toetappers under the title Lambing Time. It was full of ironics and sanguine refractions of longing like in the Bobby Monroe classic Terrible Mistake. All Earl could think of was Todd Haggard's version of I Live With Regret which he learnt by ear from a dusty 78. Missing both fingers, he wrapped his knuckles up in Chinese linen and swigged upon a whiskey for the pain. He was three times banjo champion of the southern Ozarks, twice times picker of the year, four times Scruggs-Master of the Hilldale Bluegrass Pick-along and had busked his way from Esperance to New South Wales and back again. He had a reputation as a soulful player with a strong technique best known for his cheeky blue interpretation of Trouble Will Follow You There, a lilting waltz he had made his own.

"Reduced to beatin' on a tamborine," said Snuffy, fearing for the worst.  

Wombat O'Connel came over and rolled him a cigarette. He too had bad news.

"Have you heard Neville's rendition of Aunt Hagar Went A'Roamin'?" he asked.

Earl said he hadn't.

"The judges looked mighty impressed," said the Wombat. "A five-finger roll with one of those curly thumb slides on the G-string. Then he pulled out the clawhammer for Don't Burn the Sugar Mrs Lee."

Earl looked out over the hills which nudged together and were browning with the breath of warm November. Alas. Alas. The cruel fate of an incautious dawn. He spent the morning in the Duck's Nuts drinking bucket loads of ale drowning off his sorrows and humming bars of The Lord Forgives (So I Understand).

The animosity with Neville went back at least a decade and at the heart of it - sure enough - was the attention of a loving lass named Melissa of the Pines. Neville stole her hot affections leaving Earl to doodle on a twelve-string and write the bitter ballad Yackandada Floosey. It was thus such a great blow that Earl had lost his fingers. The jamboree was supposed to be the show-down. Neville rarely ventured from the backblocks but when he heard that Earl was playing Guildford he packed his kit and made the journey down. Earl, for his part, said that Neville was a hairy Scottish git but they'll duel with banjos like gentlemen and settle the matter once and for all.

Word had gone around that the two maestros would be competing - two desperate legends banjo-bashing over a fond heart just like in the song Parson Goes to Ho-down. (The Immortal) Tonsils Johnson was supposed to be the draw-card - and many in the crowd had come to see him - but the truly dedicated banjoids knew that Earl and Neville would be the real attraction. There were workshops on tidy banjo care, a chance for autographs, a massive sing-along of Will the Circle Be Unbroken and Cumquat May was promoting her new CD. But all ears were turned to the pluck-offs - three hefty sessions of blistering virtuosity ajudged by seven experts with the winner taking all and no second prize. The crowd was dismayed to hear of the freak accident at the back of the bright yellow ute. "Just like in the song Silver on the Mountain!" everybody said. Lopped off in his prime. Ruined at his peak. Dismembered on a long weekend. A young guitarist from Coorangamite took the tune of Nelson Town and quickly penned an ode called A Brown Dog Ate My Fingers, a mournful ditty and sorry tale of woe in the best of long traditions.

Yet Neville of the Backblocks continued unrelenting. "This be a wee toon aboot da ganglees n ach horns ick loovely rooden culled Tanner's Mool," he said in Scottish highland and broke into a ferocious version of the competition piece Tanner's Mule, a compulsory number for all contestants somewhere in their set. Soon he had the front row stomping and the judges jigging in their seats. The crystalline bells of his five-string pearl-head rang along the creek bed and could be heard in Guildford General Store. He had once scandalized the purists by going commercial - "haggis rock" they called it - but in recent years had gone back to his roots. "A bode eez geet da root ter mek a looven," he said in his defense, claiming all he sought to do was loosen up the genre.

His disdain for Earl was as Biblical as the waters of Babylon. He held a grudge as only a Scotsman can. "Der Meedows air too gude fer da leeksa heem," he said and spat into the dust through his rugged grey beard. He was twice Banjo King of Glasgow, runner-up in the third biannual Bluegrass Stomp of Aberdeen and had studied with the Kirks of Kentucky learning classics like Rarely Now Do I Recall. "Eev geet der moosik ach lin steerin fer ya sool," he would always say, which explained his authentic sound and perfect pitch. The banjo was his mistress, other than Melissa of the Pines. He concluded the session with Hazelnut Tidings and a medley of backblocks songs he knew the judges would enjoy.

As night fell Mozart McGill brought accordion to the camp-fires and the skinny saw-flies came out from their muddy abode, natural in their darting ways but with a sting like sin. Wafts of birch scented the air and city folks went to the Store for icecreams. Just by accident the motorcycle gang the Highwaymen rumbled into town and hearing of the music settled down a while. Their leader Beefheart Sweeney - "The Beef" to his friends - was a noted banjo connoisseur. His sister dated several of the Penetentials and he claimed his uncle Joel had made a banjo from plum pudding tins back in the olden days. Despite his rough attire he had a PhD in petrochemical microscopy but preferred to work ripping the heads off chickens. His favorite tune was The Lord He Spake To Moses in steely tempo and a back-beat as if it was a song that Johnny Cash might sing. He found Earl in a puddle of broken dreams sitting at the rear as a hootenanny stirred and the Duck's Nuts filled with Highwaymen in leather.

"I hear a kelpie made off with your fingers," he said, compassionate. "Like in the song Whatever Happened To the Light." He had a friend, he related, who had lost his testicles to a dingo. He would have bought Earl another beer but the banjoman was already sozzled beyond all recognition - like in the song Down That Mine Again - so instead he told him an encouraging tale. There was once a member of the Highwaymen, he said, who parked his bike by a billabong under the shade of a coolabah tree. Then, just as he was roasting this lamb he had found, the Central Victorian Road Patrol arrived to check upon his registration. The biker quickly jumped onto his chopper and roared straight into the black water, vowing never to be seen again. It was a tale of courage in adversity, loyalty, lamb chops and British road bikes. Earl just sat and listened, like in the song Say No More Before You Go.

When the fire trucks left the morning after and what remained of the hotel smoldered in the dawning mists, rumors said that Earl had gone back to the Meadows or that he'd joined the Highwaymen as an honorary member forsaking the banjo forever. The pub had run out of beer at about 2 AM leaving bikers and musicians drinking Creme de Ménthe and lemonades. The blaze began when a feral chick from Alice Springs was demonstrating fire-breathing with a dijireedoo full of methylated spirits. The flames leapt from her dreadlocks to the curtains and from the curtains to the bar. Only the Presbyterians from Trickledown Creek were sober enough to notice. Most importantly, they salvaged the winner's trophy, yet unclaimed, and the next day it sat upon the stage as the jamboree reassembled and the sun rose over Guildford for the final day of competition. Neville came out in his kilt and was expecting to be unopposed.

It was at this juncture, however, just as the judges were tallying their scores, that three-fingered Earl strode among the music fans and declared himself to still be a contender. He was conscious again and the bleeding had stopped and he claimed he'd heard the biker from the black billabong in the middle of the night. "Bring me my banjo," he announced. "There's one more session to go!" And as he sat it on his knee and wriggled up before the microphone he dedicated his performance to Melissa and winked unto the Scotsman watching stunned near the drink machine where a family of well-wishers cheered. Taking up his instrument he positioned it awkward in his lap, for where he would usually hold it steady with his pinky which acted as a fulcrum he had to find a balance on his leg and twist his wrist against its natural inclinations. He strummed the strings. Open G. Then he burst into a version of Its Best You Set Things Right coyly sliding up the scale and building up a head of steam in the key of C. When he finished that it was Frogs in the Swamp, the old Matty Ryan classic, followed by an original The Murumbigee Tailor. Every break was filled with whoops and hollas and a woman in her gumboots whistling with her lips. "Yeee Haaa!" yelled Dusty Quid and the Marauders. "Here," said Earl, "is an old Yiddish tune called Rabbi's Got His Ways..." and the judges gave him points for innovation.

It was just like in the song Dawn is the Joy of my Eye. The disadvantaged hero out-picked the ill-tempered Glaswegian until the judges all agreed. Snuffy Shackleton took it all back. He couldn't believe his eyes. It was as if those phantom fingers were playing all the while. But in fact Earl had found a new modality adapted to such standards as Wedding Under Willows and  Quince Rabbit Stew. Finally the crowd joined him for a chorus of A Kiss Before a Slice-a Pie and he took an encore or two.

Thus it was that Earl of the Meadows  invented the smooth-flowing three-finger style that banjo afficienados have treasured ever since. The younger players there that day went home and taped up their two unneeded fingers so as to play that way. It became known as "Earl-ling" and it revolutionized the music of the day. To "earl" is to pick the strings with barely three fingers as if the other two were eaten by a brown dog for breakfast. It is also known among the experts as the "Guildford tickle". It became consolidated at subsequent jamborees and spread even to the highlands when Neville took it for his repertoire and acknowledged that the course of banjo music had been moved like a great river shifting on a sand bar. Tassy Corns was there, strumming below the eucalypts, and he says that, flattered though she was, Melissa went off with the Highwaymen and lost her passion for the banjo, though she had inspired men who shook the firm foundations, the hill-billy's muse, like in the song Mary, Mary, Mary (Where Ya Been)? or that other gem of lonesome homage Who Will Tend The Rosebush Upon My Mother's Grave? 

Windermere's Paperback Saloon

The narrator remembers the golden age of Melbourne's bookstores.

No violent thrill or transport of exaltation can compare to the gentle pleasure of sifting through the musty stacks in Windemere's Paperback Saloon back before the industry succumbed to vulgarity from abroad. Nestled between a hotel and a modest skyscraper, Windemere's was the epitome of a lost time, an era when Melbourne bristled with bookstores, pedestrian and esoteric. The Enchanted Mole, the curliest children's book supplier in the southern hemisphere, was perhaps the most famous, but Windemere's was, for those with a sense of adventure, unmatched. The manager, Terry, a pimply apparition in flared pinstripes, but with a prodigous knowledge of non-fiction imprints, could prance across the torqioise shag-pile. "Have we got a treasure for you this time!" he'd say, clutching you by the arm, complete with the lisp of authenticity, and dragging you off behind the floral curtain to a copy of Fran Bossinger-Pringle's greatly misunderstood expose of ninenteenth century rose breeders, the limited edition. "Probably the only copy in the country," he'd say. Or he might surprise you with a bombshell, like Tony Crispwind's saucy life of Lenin. These were new arrivals. But the stock on the shelves was just as good. Old Mrs Windemere was an enthusiast but had faulty business sense. Over the years she had filled the store with dusty obscura, precious volumes little known. Its said that her son, Rusty, who managed all the money, and once played football for Essendon, would have sold it all without a hesitation if he hadn't feared her fierce repraisals. It was in fact her hobby. When she was taken to her bed, never to recover, she appointed the begoggled Mrs Churlyburg, an ex-librarian, to hold the fort. She, however, suddenly confronted the bottom-line and had to hold a sale. Fantastic authors - Jan Spanner, H.P. Lovesong, Nigel of the Nile, John Fosdyke - thick ones! went for a spare coin, just to clear the hallways of the accumulated debris. But even this was to no avail. Mrs Windemere's legacy lingered on. Years after she'd gone you could still amble in from the Flinders Street entrance, avoiding the rabble at the hotel door, and pick up a long-lost thriller over lunch. The crime section was outstanding. Everything from Aaron Alexander to Zygorvski's trilogy of grisly homocides set against a background of adultery and double-dealing among international financiers in Prague. They once had a book signing with D. P. Harold, author of 'The Cyprus Parchment' and other gripping mysteries. You could shake his hand and ask him if his characters were really based on members of the Royal family, as they said in the reviews. They also scheduled Penny Holmes (who never showed), six months before it was revealed she was a man. There was a famous skirmish with her publisher. Terry was just an assistant at the time, but Mrs Churlyburg was on leave visiting her sister in New Zealand. The publisher's representative, Perry Simplesmith, who advocated American methods, threatened to revoke their 'Sale or Return'. In response Terry threatened to boycott their other titles. The stand-off made the news. Eventually, Rusty intervened, considering the impasse a bloody nuisance. There was an apology in writing. Terry taped it to the window for the customers to see.

Second-best after Winderemere's was without any question the Mid-city Book Emporium, popularly the MBE. This tiny little oasis of good taste, jammed between a sandwich shop and a shoe store at the far end of the arcade, couldn't compare when it came to the fast genres, but for idle purchases, like a cookbook, it was just the place. The only surprise was the penchant of the proprieter, Malcolm Straightways, for early travel books and tales of British conquest. The British campaigns in Hindustan were his speciality. There was a handsome glass class of treasured titles in the bottom corner. On rainy days you could sit on the bench provided and ask Mal for a careful peruse of Langley's classic, "Road to Bangalore", blackbound on rice paper with copious engravings. Poor Mal would be carried off with customers looking for a book on puddings; he would have preferred taking you through the full history of the Raj, with asides about the exploits of his Uncle Clive, the second Clive of India, as he'd say. Often, at lunchtimes, women would attempt to bring their big blue baby-strollers in and the browsers at the back would find themselves trapped with nowhere to go but Reference. Mal would have to stand up on a crate and call for attention. "Excuse me ladies! Please! I know its an inconvenience, but could you leave your strollers outside the store!" Some women would object. The truth is, Mal had packed more juicy titles into his tiny nook of the arcade than the space could reasonably handle. The best time to drop in was early morning. It was less crowded. Then you could appreciate the depth and breadth of the selection. It was possible, some mornings, to find three or four titles you thought you'd never see except in surface-mail catalogues from Canada.

For spiritual nourishment, the place to go in that era was the Candlemas Bible Repository beneath the Masonic Hall on the hill in Little Collins. The building has since been demolished and the Presbytereans have sold the remnants of what was once a thriving business to an on-line magazine distributor from Asia. Walking bye now you have no idea of the original architecture, nor of the parade of quite famous people - scholars, bishops, poets - who would take advantage of the Repository's quiet below-street ambience and its fascinating array of diverse Judeo-Christian literature. All denominations were represented, except Catholics. It was a place of meditation and sometimes of intellectual ferment. It is said that the once influential right-wing Southern Christian Alliance - what would today be called a "think-tank" - started as a heated debate in the "Just Released" section, when a bloc of prominent Anglican customers, each of whom just happened to be there that day, took issue with Edmund Fudgewent's pioneering book on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Others report that the infamous Archbishop Long - the "Pirate of St. Philips" - who resigned for reasons of "ill-health" in a scandal in 1949, shocking his flock, was "given the finger" when confronted by Church accountants in the Pauline Epistle Room. Ecclesiastical wits larked that Long had taken refuge in Paul's doctrine of freedom from the Law. For many years the MCB was run by Stephen Wilde, a retired army veteran and lay preacher, and consequently, during his reign, it specialized in historical works, biographies and the like, on the Australian army chaplaincy. Following Wilde's death, the store was managed by a husband and wife team, Gordon and Lidia Greystains, with a background of missionary work in New Guinea. The tenor of the store changed. It became more outlooking, more cosmopolitan, more conscious of the wider world, the Churches' mission to the common man. The Greystains installed a whole wall of the Everyman Library, a personal favourite, and a lavish selection of sacred writ in the vernacular tongue. The store began to deteriorate after an incident in 1974 when a large, inquisitive labrador followed a customer in and set off a new fire sprinkler system causing extensive water damage. The stock was underinsured and the enterprise was scaled back to a mediocre selection of devotional works, audio-cassettes and greeting cards.

For fine works, an open fire and the highest standard of service - though at a price beyond the range of most - you could also drop in to Lora Cousin's on the second floor of the Smith Building on Elizabeth Street. This was a store with old world ostentation, announced by the ornate brass doorknobs. Before the war they had served sherry to their clientele, but later they merely provided leather chairs, free newspapers and occasionally a lunch-time violinist. It was an old establishment, but not well-known beyond its own class of person. It is said that D.H. Lawrence berated the store in a three-page letter still unpublished. The writer's wife Freda, during their brief visit to Australia, claimed the store "gyped" her of two pounds twenty. The supposed letter, rumour says, remains in the possession of the Cousin's family, although they no longer have anything to do with the store. Sometimes you could find a bargain. Every six months or so a new shipment of quite inexpensive editions of Hardy and Dickens might arrive, or the novels of Florence Sedge. Every now and then you might pick up volumes of verse, beautifully bound, for somewhat less than you expected. In any case, the demeanor of the staff always left you feeling that it is quite inappropriate to quibble over pennies. There was no visible register or even a cash drawer. To make a purchase you presented the book, along with ample notes, and made no mention of price. At length the assistant returned from a backroom with change and receipt and talk of the splendid volume now in your possession.

A more democratic readership was to be found just around the corner at Randal's. This was a sub-newsagency and so catered for punters after daily race guides, but further from the street you encountered a good display of popular works. The real pleasure here, though, was as a place to bump into people you knew. The area around the fiction shelves, further defined by a row of Penguins, functioned as a popular standing room where you could meet other avid readers and chat about a new release or the sorry state of the weather. Faces would reappear day after day. The same gentleman in the brown coat. The short banker. The woman with the argumentative hair-do. Eventually, either you or they would say hello, and then a week later offer an exchange of names. Then, some days, as you walked in, it would be nods of "Afternoon. Afternoon. Afternoon." to a dozen familiar faces and one would come over and say "I see you like Dennis Prentice. He's got a new one out, you know..." Strange to relate, several years ago, there was a radio programme on the BBC on how wedded couples had met, and a happy couple rang in to explain that their paths had first crossed at Randal's, Melbourne, Australia, twenty years before, standing by the "Authors A to Z". They joked that they were both looking for Romance on the wrong side of the shelf. Before the television bands were extended, when the written word still lubricated the social mind, Randal's was as much a part of the hum and crush of the windy streets as the Marathon Capaccino House or, in an earlier time, the bar at the King Edward Hotel.

Apart from these lingering establishments, the period also saw a generous variety of excellent but short-lived undertakings that filled the gaps and catered to arcane tastes. You could mingle with the avante guard at "Both Ends Books"that had as its emblem a candle burning from two wicks. The concept was for a bookshop that would open late and satisfy the city's community of night-owls. Or you could overhear cryptic conversations full of verbal paradoxes about Matisse and D. P. Milkwood's plays for voices, at the "Beyond the Pale" where the assistant wore a top hat and spoke in urgent whispers. For collectables and such like you could visit, for a time, Miss Green's on upper Russell, and spend an hour among the coin catalogues or the supporting tomes of history, ancient and modern. For classics you could go to "Father Pliny's" on Flinders Lane where even the subject categories and notices to customers were written in Virgil's Latin. These speciality stores came and went, like the city's first legal purveyors of erotica, the "Hill of Consent", not far from Parliament House.

Needless to say, this era has ended. The creamy brown brickwork is largely replaced with glass and steel. It is as if a whole epoch of history has intervened. The check-outs came and more and more the shelves were filled with non-book items. Young people turned to the music stores, old people to the lottery; Windermere's was absorbed by a large cartel, Terry got a job in Sydney, Florence Sedge disappeared into obscurity, the crowds in Randal's moved on, Malcolm, like Milkwood, died of ale, and it transpired that Edmund Fudgewent had, after all, written his archaeological reports without once leaving his office at Oxford. Now there are impressive skyscrapers, actually scraping the sky, as the grey clouds and brown haze hang low together, and bright orange advertising signs that, even as you fly into Tullamarine for the first time in thirty years, seem three dimensional, visible marks of an eagerness to be new. "It looks just like Ohio," says the businessman next to you. "From the air." He points to the new bridge, an arch of lights. The construction company almost bought his range of safety gear.

But you'd rather not make conversation. In your hands is an old, tattered copy of Boris Charlesworth's Captives of Rage, a saga built around Crimea. Charlesworth was a journalist with a florid but engaging style. It is the warmth of its pages, you want, though. The feel of the paper on your fingers, not its tangled narrative of ambitious captains and their belles. You found it on the bottom of a stack in Windermere's on a bitter winter's day, a day it hailed like golfballs throughout the afternoon. You took it home, reading it on the tram as highschool girls jostled for a seat, and at home you read it by the coal heater until nodding off to sleep, absorbed in the lush panorma of history. It sold well in its day, and won favourable reviews, but in fact, as the plane hits the tarmac, you think of the weakness of the characters, and the transparent imitations of Turgenev, and decide its not as compelling as you recall. But at the instant its the weight of the book in the hand that is important. On the inside cover is "Windermere's Paperback Saloon" and the price, imperial, and a phone number that is just a recorded message. 

Mad Cumulus Agenda

The demise of a famous weather sensitive.

Down by the wild cape of the south they tell a blustering tale of weatherman Tornado Lane. An amateur with refractive passions, he flipped his buttons in his later years, and when his wife Heather left him for a lifeguard, he lost his blithe arrangements and couldn't tell his ozone from a burst of drizzle. This was after a meritorious career. Every dawn for forty years he siphoned off the isobars and checked out the viscosity of the troposphere. "I were a self-appointed hydrograph," he loved to quote, "and did my duty like a guardian of rain drops!"

He was the first man to see the low-front roaring in where Sealer's Cove turns to rocky knolls and the fisherman spot mackerel. He developed a new barometer, tuned to the Appleton layer, and predicted Cyclone Sally Sue-Anne by throwing knuckle-bones in the air. One year he correctly forecast a hot day in December and postulated lunar effervescence until the autumn rains. In the heyday, he once featured on the cover of Climatologists Galore, bathed in allatropic handsomeness, and was renowned among the coastal towns as the man who installed air-conditioning at the race-track. Quiet, unassuming, pacific as an ocean, a worn-faced Welshman with a professional set of gum-boots, he could be seen sniffing out the gurgles of the salty foam, drawing on his powers as a world-class weather sensitive. If that failed, he consulted ant-hills or looked it up in the newspaper.

Meterologists were his passion. He'd met a couple of them and was awed by their aneroidic prepossession, their lightning observations and the wavey lines of their maps. He met Whirlwind Bob Spitz - the famous American - and even shared his binoculars. In 1948 he attended a conference on how sticky humidity is in Brisbane, representing his State. On a chilly night in1961, three degrees below the monthly average, he won the Golden Rain Guage for his tireless millilitres, year in, year out. A man of science, he made a contribution and defined his life with sunny prognostications.

Poignant then is how he fudged his willy-nillies and lost his wits in a sworl of black, throbbing cumulus, a mere breeze of his former namesake. "Morning! How's the weather?" you'd say, and he'd say, "A curse of stormy banging on all sub Jove!" You'd say, "Nice day," and he'd say, "Awaft! Awaft! The inclement day is coming!" Mostly he'd say, "Build ye ventilation shafts, me boys, for a storm-cloud lives in the sea!"

Some nights, as the wind howled through the tea-tree and the dune reclamation signs whistled like a low-pressure trough, he could be heard on the sandy tracks calling to his brother Bluey - lost in a three inch downpour that swept away Miller's Bridge -  and whenever sheets of sky-light struck, peeling and shaking the shoreline, old Tornado, deranged in his yellow mac, climbed onto his roof and shook his fistings at Elijah.

"Harmless," was the local concensus, "but a tragic waste of a good weather forecaster."

Then, one day - about thirty-two celsius with a nice blue breeze, eight or nine knotts, followed by a mild day and a brief change late Saturday -  they noticed that his guage was full but he was nowhere to be seen. His neighbour Crayfish Ray found his prognostications all astray. They searched the sand-hills. They hired a hovercraft. They rang Heather: she was still in bed. They searched his misty haunts and tried to smell him in the wind. For three long days he was gone. The man at the State Emergency Service - mumbling about budgetary restraints - said if he's not back by Monday afternoon they'd send out a runabout and a team with eagle eyes.

"Have you seen ol' Tornado?" people wondered.

"Not since the gusty south-south-westers," people replied.

Then, high-tide on Sunday evening, risen from the dead, defying Davey Jones, he suddenly stood upon a sand-bar, wet and crusty, his beard grey in the sunset, eyes like Al Nino undercurrents, lightning rod in hand. He looked like a smelly oracle bleached with salt and raging against the looming nightfall.

"There he is!" they said, and the entire town rushed down to the beach to see.

He was flailing in the updraughts, calculating the tug of the moon. He looked like Uncle Neptune's worrisome dream, shaking his fists at the pelicans, denouncing the land crabs,  raising his eyes to the swirling sky, sodium-soaked and demented in the froth.

"For forty years," he cried, "I have watched the heady squalls. For forty years I have judged the steamy wonders of the long horizon. For forty years I have ruled over fisher-fleets and bar-b-ques and beach parties and all manner of outdoor activities. Those with ears, let them hear! I tell you, there, there in the sea-bowels" - he pointed - "live the storms of bleak tomorrow!"

"Rubbish!" they said, "The forecast is clear until next Thursday."

Then in their folly the skeptics trembled. Aghast, they watched, and the sand-hills shook, and the waters, folding over and causing great bubbles of fog, burped, spluttered, foamed with oxygen, curled over like a huge aquatic claw and dragged the hatted weatherman down with a single curve into the dreary depths. He was there, standing on the rocks, then he was gone. Just like Gregory Peck in Moby Dick, but without the whale. A big splinter of static cracked from the sky and followed him. Sea-gulls cried and flew away in reckless, panicked circles. Clouds jelled on the spot and then were wispy. It happened in a moment. Without warning, a new generation of weathermen looked on helpless as the needles dropped, turbulent curds of hydrogen swelled up out of nowhere, and an unexpected king tide, ferocious in its undertow, carried off the abalone boats and the jetty at the mouth to Parson's Inlet, leaving all in ruin. Messy clogs of seaweed hung from the rafters.  Fish wriggled on the roadside. Briney agitations swept along the whole unprotected coast.

They never reckoned on Mother Nature's grimace. They never found his body. In his journals they found the ravings of a low depression coming in over the Bight. In his garden they found a wind-chime and a neat patch of tomatos tended by a gentle hand of vegetative insight, and the rain-guage, full to the brim. In his shed they found a legacy of rabbits' feet and charms to still a roving wind, amulets and spells, talismans inscribed with isobars and theurgic appeals for a clear blue day. And in his big black box they found the cumulus agenda. After much deliberation they hoisted it upon the deck of the SS Kitty Maree which ceremoniously carried it far beyond the sudden ledge of Devil's Reef and left it for the hammerheads and squid to figure out.

The tale is still told of those men who lost their all and failed to batten down the patches of their lives and who took a look inside the ocean's menacing reserve. Half the town's fleet was swept off towards white Antarctica never to return. Some men never went fishing again. The sewage overflow was damaged and turned the oysters green. It is said that, near the bridge, or on the angles of the Cape, or by the lighthouse, or in among the sand-bars where the pounding surf holds all the keys, the misty eyes of Tornado Lane still linger. Go down to the Pearly Seabit Inn, order an ale and sample their crumbed whiting and lime side-salad, and ask the locals where all will shake their heads and say, "Poor bugger." They say - though who knows if its true - that his shape is aeriform and subject to the slip and shod of moons, that his barometers are stuck on the foulest settings - that the lifeguard left Heather for a bimbo in bikinis - and that the wild cape of the south, protruding into the sea like a rude finger in a traffic snarl, suffers still from the lightning rod he drowned with when a cold front moves in from past the Twelve Apostles and the weather takes another turn for worse.

Toadzilla Spoons With Paris Hilton

 A group of old friends meet to discuss photos of their schoolyard enemy, Toadzilla, spooning Paris Hilton.

I hadn't seen Max the Tank for five full years, at least since the last day of school exams. Someone said he went to Iraq to teach Saddam Hussein some manners and came back none the wiser. But I knew exactly what he wanted the day he wandered into the shop, a frown as wide as a ripe banana right across his stupid brow.

"You've seen it then?" I said, no need for introductions.

"Amazing!" said the Tank. "I couldn't believe it! What are we going to do?"

"I don't know," I replied, "but Ronnie and Lonnie and Todd want to get together tonight to discuss it. Are you free? And I think Alistair might be there too."

The Tank was aptly named. Five foot tall, as burly as a rubber wellington full of walnuts, his gait resembled a panzer in a mud-bog on the Western Front. Even if you didn't know him, your first impression was always, "My God! That guy looks like a tank!" even down to the way his thin turret of a nose prodded out from his wide, expressionless face.

"Sure," he said. "We've got to get to the bottom of this!"

So we agreed to meet the others at nine down at Yuri's Salsa Zone, an unsuccessful club in Bringles Lane once owned by a man who claimed to be Boris Yeltsin's lovechild. Lonnie and Ronnie drank there all the time. Alistair - popularly called "Me Bucko" - drank there never and Todd the Saliva King - who used to amaze us with his feats of long-distance spitting - would only go there on quiet nights wearing dark sunglasses and a wig. As for me, it was the first time I'd ever bothered.

"What do you mean you don't drink?" Lonnie asked me, incredulous.

"I just don't," I said. "Not my thing."

"Not since he married that Muslim girl," said Alistair, filling them in. "Isn't that right, Me Bucko?"

"So whatever happened to her?" Ronnie wanted to know.

I didn't care to answer.

"Visa fraud," said Alistair. "Six months in the country and she shot through to Queensland with a kebab salesman, never to be seen again. Isn't that the case, Me Bucko?"

Everyone was "Me Bucko" to Alistair who, unaccountably, had picked up a serious pirate fantasy in Year 8 and just never quite grew out of it. And still hadn't, it seemed.

Somehow, even though I hadn't seen him for five full years either, Alistair knew more about my business than I did. I, for instance, thought the alleged "kebab salesman" ran a halal hot-dog stand but Alistair assured me it wasn't so.

"And this means you don't drink?" said Lonnie.

"Right," I said.

"So what'll it be?" asked Todd, standing up to go to the bar.

I ordered a coke - no ice - and remained resolutely free  of the lager bug that had held its grip on the others - Lonnie and Ronnie at least - undiminished since Year 11 summer camp and the stomach-pump debacle at Stinky Reid's twenty-first.

"Suckin' coke for Allah?" asked Lonnie, typical.

"Right," I said again.

"So, anyhoo," broke in the Saliva King, "What do you guys make of these photographs? It can't be for real can it?"

"Stranger things have happened, Me Bucko," said Alistair.

"Name one," said Max.

Silence. No one could quite think of a stranger instance just at that moment, but Alistair maintained that there must have been one. "The world's a bloody weird place, Me Bucko," he insisted. "What about that bloke born with a penis where his nose was supposed to be? Did you see that?"

"That's not true," said Ronnie, sipping his ale.

"It is! I saw it on Youtube."

"Its an urban myth," said Todd.

"And he had two testicles under his chin..." said Alistair continuing, demonstrating how the poor soul looked half-man-half-turkey, but marveling that he had been married for twenty years, worked as a public relations consultant for a major white goods manufacturer, and had seven kids.

"Sure," said Ronnie, skeptical. "And his wife has a mouth that runs vertical instead of horizontal. I've heard that one before!"

"So, anyhoo," broke in the Saliva King again, trying to concentrate, "What about these pictures of Toadzilla?" He was clearly perturbed. He needed his questions answered.

He threw a couple of polaroids onto the table - the same snap-shots that all of us had received in the mail.

There he was - the notorious Toadzilla in gory technicolour apparently spooning - cuddling - carooning next to - none other than Paris Hilton, she half-naked and clearly having fun.

Toadzilla himself was unmistakable. A massive red-haired ball of ugly, with jowls, warts, a huge-lipped mouth-hole just made for catching flies, and two beady black eyes positioned awkwardly on the bulging sides of his bloated head. Six foot three with a slimy complexion and the personality of an unhappy scum-dweller who can't help belching every time he finds his own jokes amusing.

This same creature had been our sworn enemy over six long years of high school - Craig McNamara - Toadzilla, a specimen you'd be only too happy to pity if he wasn't so objectionably oozing with a grotesque self-love and an altogether amphibious disdain for every other.

In the early years - coinciding with puberty, presumably - he would chase unfortunate damsels all around the playground and if he caught them would belch in their face which, he thought, was enormously funny. In later years he'd come to school wearing a tee-shirt depicting two copulating ducks with the slogan 'Fly United!' and, lolling out his tongue like a horny tree-frog, would publicly boast about his obsessions with oral sex. Everyone - especially the entire female gender - found him utterly revolting.

"I think you're just over-compensating for low self-esteem," I told him once, trying to be kind.

He responded by describing the taste of my mother's "lovejuices" and - putting on a phony African-American accident - told me I should "get me some of that!"

"You really are disgusting, aren't you Toadzilla?" I said.

He responded with a triumphant double-barreled  simultaneous belch-and-fart-in-one that he claimed was his "special weapon" for "winning over the ladies."

His most notorious exploit was sexually assaulting our first-year music teacher, Miss Carrol, a tender rooky in a mini-skirt with a studied predilection for Johanne Sebastian Bach.  In the third movement of the Matthew Passion, as she walked up and down the aisles, vainly trying to convince us adolescents that this and not Led Zepplin was the music of the gods, Toadzilla dropped his pencil as she stepped past his desk. She turned around at exactly the moment he bent down to pick it up. He sat up. She jumped. Regrettably, this turn of events resulted in Toadzilla's big boof-head being stuck right up her skirt, his warty frog-mouth pressed directly against the moist spot on her panties. The Matthew Passion reached a crescendo as the luckless Miss Carrol squealed in flayling panic and started thumping Toadzilla on the back in wild, manic, hysterical horror. The more she tried to free herself, though, the more he managed to lift her off her feet appearing, to all of us there that day, to be riding on his head complete with ecstatic wiggles.

"Yummy!" was all he could say when she finally succeeded in getting free. Pale and sickly, she looked at the class aghast. There was a moment's silence. The Matthew Passion ended, a miracle of polyphony. Then the class erupted into spontaneous applause and the unfortunate Miss Carrol ran from the room never to return to teaching again.

"I would have given her the famous Toadzilla tickle," said Toadzilla that lunchtime, flicking his tongue in and out, "But she was on her rags...."

And yet here, five years on, was polaroid evidence of the same obnoxious being in a tender embrace with a smiling Paris Hilton. It filled us all with outrage.

"That slimy bastard!" said the Tank, speaking for us all.

"It must be phony," said Ronnie, shaking his head. "It must be photoshopped or something."

"Nope," said the Saliva King, "I had my cousin Arnie test them out - he's a detective - and he assures me they're for real."

"They can't be!" protested Ronnie. "Seriously, how would Toadzilla even get that near to Paris Hilton? Its beyond all credibility!"

"It is," Lonnie agreed. "Even taking into account the fact that Paris Hilton has never been known to be that fussy, I just can't see her snuggled up with Toadzilla. Not in a million years!"

"And yet," said Max, fingering the polaroids, "Here she is... unbelievable!"

"And I can't believe," said the Todd, "That the bastard had the temerity to mail us all copies!"

"The Toadzilla ... one of nature's cruelest jokes..." said Lonnie.

"And Paris Hilton... what a honey!" said Ronnie, finishing the thought.

"She's not that hot," I said, taking a swig of coke.

"You see," said Ronnie. "That's what giving up alcohol does to you. You lose your perspective."

"There's no justice in the world!" said Todd, protesting. "Look at me! Look at any of us. We're not bad looking blokes. Are we? But do we get to lay the Paris Hiltons of the world? Not a chance!" He was genuinely enraged. "I just won't have this! It is an affront to the entire natural order! I've lost my faith in the cosmos, damn it!"

That indeed was how it struck us all. It was as if the Great Chain of Being had come unstuck at both ends. It was as if the Delphic Oracle had suddenly declared an ugly old pederast like Socrates wisest and most just. Something was wrong in the universe. The spiraling gyres had lost their roll. The Kali Yuga had descended. Some hideous beauty was slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. Such a disjuncture in the natural array might convince a pious man that there is no Righteous Hand guiding all creation after all. How could we allow it? How could we sit by and watch our standards and our expectations crumble all around us? A truly awful thing.

Since school Ronnie - supercilious and undeserving - had made a small fortune selling corn chips to bowling alleys, but it didn't get him any women. Lonnie - handsome and happy-go-lucky - was as lonely as a telephone box in Bristol. Alistair's brother had accidentally shot his sweetheart during an annual ferret drive leaving her wheel-chair ridden and legally vexatious. Todd didn't find his soul-mate on a P & O Cruise to exotic Fiji as he had expected. And Max looked like a tank. Then there was my Malaysian misadventure and the kebab salesman. There are always injustices woven into the fabric of life. In truth, life sucks every bit as much as they reckon. But some injustices are an affront to every fair notion of proportion. And the idea of Toadzilla getting himself a piece of Paris Hilton was one of them. How could it happen? How could any just God in Heaven allow it to be? All those years of teasing Toadzilla, and now he gets his revenge. What events had transpired to place him in Paris Hilton's arms?

"Well it seems, Me Buckos," said Alistair - fount of all information - "that our Toadziller got himself a job as a security guard a few years ago and one night, on her recent trip, Paris Hilton hired him as her personal security man. And... I don't know... He got lucky. I guess she got frightened during the night and wanted a cuddle... That's the best I can do." He shrugged his shoulders.

"She must have been heavily sedated," Todd surmised.

"Look at this," said Ronnie. He passed around another photograph.

"Oh my God! What is that?" asked the Tank, genuinely irked.

"That," said Ronnie, "is Donna. Donna is the only female who's come within cooey of me in the last twelve months. Am I really that unattractive? I ask you guys. You're my friends. Be straight with me. Surely I can do better than Donna? Well?"

It was true. Donna - on the evidence supplied - was anything but a looker.

"I don't know," said Todd. "Don't be so shallow. Looks aren't everything. Maybe she's got a nice personality..."

"No, a complete nutjob," said Ronnie, matter-of-factly. "She's doing six months jail for coming after me with a tomahawk last New Year's Eve..." He had the scar on his left upper arm to prove it.

"Oh," we all said together, suddenly comprehending. Most of us had been there before.

"So, anyhoo," said the Saliva King again, "What do we do about Toadzilla?"

He just couldn't get over it. He looked at the photos again.

"What can we do?" I wanted to know, implying nothing much.

"Well, I'm going out to find the best-looking whore money can buy!" said Max resolutely.

"Don't be such a loser, Me Bucko," Alistair retorted. He'd tried that and found no satisfaction. He said he was only interested  in the "real thing." From time to time he glanced at his mobile phone and told us that he was waiting for an important text from a very hot young lady named Josephine and warned us that he might have to leave in a sudden so that they could rendezvous.

"How many women have you been with since school Tank?" asked Ronnie.

Tank offered to buy the next round of beers in order to avoid the question. Ronnie put him on the spot.

"Let me ask you Tank? You have had sex, haven't you?"

"What? You mean with other people?"

"Yeah. Preferably a female."

"Well sure."

"How many?"

"Females? Five or six."

That seemed like a reasonable outcome, especially for someone who looked like a Tank.

"What about you Alistair?" Ronnie continued.

"So, what is this Me Bucko?" he replied . "Kiss and tell?"

I tried to change the topic.

"What can we do? I think all we can do is sit here and commiserate with one another," I opined. "It seems like its true. Toadzilla spooned with Paris Hilton."

"So what are those Malay chicks like anyway?" Lonnie wanted to know.

I wasn't inclined to tell him.

"Did you get her by mail order or something?" asked the Tank, oblivious to how insulting the question was. He genuinely wanted to know. "I was thinking of getting one of them Russian chicks. You know, I got this email a while back and..."

"They're all scams, Max," said Todd, bursting his bubble.

"Well, apparently this Malaysian wife was. She shot through on a visa fraud, and..."

"Can we change the subject?" I insisted. "I don't care to be reminded about my marriage."

"Why don't we sign up Toadzilla to one of those mail order bride scams and..."

"He doesn't need one. He's sleeping with Paris Hilton!"

"Oh yeah."

"And we're not. That's the issue."

"And how did this state of affairs come to be? is the question" I added.

Because it was certainly not how any of us had calculated life after school. By our reckoning, we should have all gone off, married wealthy, gorgeous super-models while Toadziller wallowed at the bottom of his pond, bitter and alone until his warts consumed him. What had gone wrong? Had we all taken a wrong turn? Made some terrible error? Or was life just being unspeakably cruel?

"Where did I screw up?" cried the Todd.

As he and the others consumed more beer this question became increasingly compelling. Where did we all screw up? None of us - with the possible exception of Tank - were hideous looking  and all of us - with the possible exception of Lonnie - had reasonable habits of personal hygiene. So what perverse twist of fate had kept us all single and wishing while the likes of Toadzilla got the babes?

"I'm twenty-six years old," Todd demanded, getting distraught, "and tired of playing with myself in public toilets...!"

This remark - as the reader might imagine - was a conversation stopper, but he fixed it by hastening to add that he was merely being metaphorical, just to make the point, and we shouldn't take him literally. On this note, nevertheless, Alistair took a few minutes out to stand in the corner and text his love-interest, saying he couldn't understand why she hadn't called. "She's crazy about me, Me Buckos," he insisted.

"I know what you mean, though," said Lonnie, agreeing with the Todd. "My own sister bought me an inflatable lady for Christmas... It's demoralizing."

"Tell 'em about the cod," Ronnie said.

"Naaa."

"Go on. Tell 'em."

"Naaa."

"What cod?" we wanted to know.

"Well, alright. I had this girlfriend, Philippa, and she... she wanted me to spank her with a piece of smoked cod."

"What!!?"

"Why!!!?"

"Spank her with a fish?"

"Not just any fish. It had to be smoked cod."

"What the...!!!?"

"Exactly. Weee-ird."

"I went out with a bird for three months and every time I tried to kiss her she started sobbing and singing the Greek national anthem!" said Ronnie, not to be out-done.

"So what's she like?" the Tank asked.

"Who?"

He was talking to Lonnie.

"Your inflatable lady."

"At least she puts out..." Alistair surmised, returning.

"Her name's Cindy," Ronnie reported, "and she's blonde. A true blonde. And she's a total floosey."

"Let's leave Cindy out of this," said Lonnie, offended.

"I don't think I'd care to spend the night with Paris Hilton anyway," I conjectured, finally.

Ronnie once more put this down to alcohol depravation and made it clear he felt sorry for the likes of me.

"Is it true," asked the Saliva King, "that you Muslims can have four wives?"

"And all the concubines you want?" Alistair threw in.

"Apparently," I said, "But I haven't got even one wife, let alone four."

Somehow, this re-established some perspective and for the next ten minutes everyone concentrated on drowning their sorrows and talking football. Otherwise, all we had managed to do throughout the entire tete-a-tete was to confirm what we all suspected - namely that we were a bunch of miserable, resentful desperadoes.

When it was getting late Alistair - seeking to shift the tone of gloom - proposed a toast, raising his beer up high.

"Here's to Toadzilla, Me Buckos. Good luck to the ugly apparition. May he catch whatever Paris Hilton's got, may his balls drop off and may he never bother us again!"

This seemed like a reasonable summary, so I raised my coke and drank the toast along with the rest of them.

Just before midnight Me Bucko received a message from his Josephine. It was short and to the point, "Leave me alone, or I'II call the police!" it said.

As we were leaving, there was a pretty, petite brunette girl in the crowd who caught Lonnie's wandering eye.

"Hey sweetheart!" he called, beery and hopeful.

She turned around and looked at him. Then, with her stunning dark eyes, she cast a glance  over all of us together. When we looked again there on her arm was an obese bespectacled gorilla with an acne infestation that had spread from his forehead to his massive double-chin.

"You creeps!" she sneered at us, and she and her man made off for the bar.

Reduced to an uncomprehending silence, we stepped out into the chill night air and the dim glow of the lane lights more thoroughly confused than ever.