Chapter 23: Sweet and Sour

Teaching The Takeaways

April - July, 1984

There was more going on in our lives that Lisa and I trying to make babies, lecturing, and playing gigs; we had been asked by Tracy to help with the new TV series that she would be starring in. “Sweet and Sour” was being produced by the ABC, and would follow the efforts of a fictional band, ‘The Takeaways’, trying to break into the Sydney music scene. The ‘group’ consisted of Tracy, their vocalist and guitarist, David Reyne, guitarist, Arky Michael, on bass and Sandra Lillingston, on sax. We met with the creators and writers, Tim Gooding and Johanna Piggott, and help refine some of the plot lines that seemed a little unrealistic.

As well, we coached the ‘musicians’; not that Tracy needed a lot of coaching. She wasn’t accustomed to working with a guitar though. We played the music for what would be their first ‘hit song’ – ‘Sweet and Sour’ – while they pretended to sing and play. Tracy and David weren’t too bad, but the other two needed some serious coaching before they would look convincing.

“Don’t wave your sax all over the place when you are playing, Sandra,” Mandy said to her. “Remember, there’s a fixed microphone in front of you – you guys aren’t successful enough yet to have a bell mounted wireless mike. I know it’s hard not to move around to the music, but if you keep moving the bell of your sax away from the mike, then your sound levels will be all over the place.”

“When we film, there will be musicians playing the actual recorded soundtrack,” Tim said. “So it won’t matter what Sandra does, we won’t be recording any sound from her saxophone.”

“But it won’t look right,” I said. “I assume you’re wanting our advice on how to make them look convincing as musicians, which is what we’re trying to do.”

It was a little bit ‘challenging’ working on this project; the two writers felt that they knew all about the music industry, as did some of the actors. Tracy, at least, had real ‘on stage’ experience, not just as an actor, but as a musician, and she understood that we all ‘knew our shit’ as she put it. The others ... well, being polite, they felt they didn’t need any help. I think there was also resentment, mainly from David Reyne, that there would be other musicians behind the scenes dubbing their actual performance.

Garry spent time with Tracy, coaching her in how to ‘look convincing’ on the guitar. Like many people playing guitar for the first time, she tended to strum her right hand from the elbow, rather than just from the wrist.

“If you move your whole forearm as well as your wrist,” he said, “not only is it more tiring, but you can’t strum as fast, or with the same control. Just use your wrist.”

He demonstrated, and then told Tracy to try again. He held her arm steady at her elbow, and she seemed to get the idea.

At least after a few sessions with them, we had them looking reasonably good. We would play the songs, and they would be at the front of the stage, miming as if they were performing. The music wasn’t really our style, it was far too ‘poppy’, but I guess that’s what the producers were aiming for, something to appeal to the teenage market.

Just after Easter, right when Lisa had predicted, her period started. We were both a little depressed, that meant that she wasn’t pregnant.

“I guess it was being a little too optimistic to expect results from the first time we seriously tried,” she said. “Oh well, the next ovulation should be on May 8th. We can try again then.”

She was right, I guess I had been somewhat unrealistic to expect that she would get pregnant on our first serious attempt.

“At least we can continue to have fun trying,” I said.

A few days earlier, on the 19th, the Federal Government had announced that ‘Advance Australia Fair’ would henceforth be the national anthem of Australia. Effectively, that made ‘official’ the decision by the Whitlam Government in 1974 that ‘Advance Australia Fair’ replace ‘God Save the Queen’ as the anthem. Fraser overturned that decision almost as soon as he was in power; the decision to make it the official anthem reflected the outcome of the referendum in 1977. Of course, various conservative groups, including the RSL, were upset at what they called ‘thumbing our collective noses at the Monarchy and our proud British heritage’, but they were very much in the minority.

We had our ‘second round’ of impregnation attempting early in May, we tried the same thing; when I got home from work, after the night lectures, Lisa had arranged our bedroom; we made love several times over the next few days, each time hoping that this would be the one to result in pregnancy.

The following week was what we all thought was a pretty momentous occasion, the NSW State Parliament passed legislation decriminalising homosexual activities between consenting adults. Neville Wran had proposed a ‘private members bill’, which passed both houses of State Parliament. However, in the legislation, the age of consent for homosexual acts was 18, as opposed to 16 for heterosexual acts. Of course, the politician and Festival of (b)Light director, Fred Nile was vehemently opposed to the changes; describing homosexuality as a ‘mental disorder’, a ‘lifestyle choice’ that is ‘immoral, unnatural and abnormal’. He was pretty much ignored by most of the media outlets.

“Nice to know that what we are doing is no longer illegal,” Ange said. “But knowing that it was breaking the law ... somehow made it a little more exciting.”

“I’ve been sleeping with a bunch of criminals!” I exclaimed. “Just as well no one discovered!”

“Seriously, it could have cost me my teaching career,” Ange said. “There hasn’t been any teacher fired for ‘immoral conduct’, not in many years, but the regulations are still on the books. I guess they will remove them now.”

“Seriously?” Lisa asked.

“Uh huh. A public school teacher has to exhibit the highest standard of morals and character, and cannot be suspected of ‘moral turpitude’, whatever that is,” Ange explained. “One can’t have us corrupting delicate young minds, now, can we?”

“One of the last carryovers of the Victorian era,” I said. “At least you’ll be safe now from the Puritans!”

“Don’t bet on it,” Ange said. “There are still those in the senior ranks of the Education Department that long for the days when they could sack a single woman teacher if she was seen frequenting public bars, encouraging attention from men. And there are still members of the public that campaign against teachers who exhibit ‘loose morals’. That’s why Allison and Sandra have to be so careful with their relationship, to make sure none of the genteel matrons of the upper northern beaches isn’t affronted by two women living together.”

“Maybe we are starting to see society take a turn for the better?” Merry said. “All the do-gooders will leave the rest of us alone!”

“I wouldn’t hold my breath while we wait for that,” I said.

With the mid-semester break almost finished, I looked back at how classes had gone this semester. The new accommodation arrangements in our area on the third floor were working well, and a solution had been worked out for some additional terminal labs. As one of us had suggested, we would use some rooms in the old Student Health demountable buildings; they would be refurbished over the mid-year break. An Ethernet cable would be run to connect them to our network, and that would give us almost fifty additional terminals. It was just a temporary solution, in the longer term a new building would be constructed on the other side of the Mechanical Engineering building for what would become the ‘School of Computer Science Engineering’. That was at least ten years away, though.

I was pleased that the four students who had assisted me right after the shooting last year were all doing well in Computing IIA this year. I felt they all should get at least a distinction, if not high distinction. In my Computing I class, Debra had confirmed my initial gut feeling, she showed the best potential in my tutorial class; she had an aptitude for problem-solving and program design. I hope that she would take advantage of the ‘programming clinic’ we would run during second semester. We had a meeting with Greg and all of the Computing I tutors on the Friday afternoon before mid-semester break, to discuss areas of the course we felt students were having the most difficulty with, identifying those students who we felt were at risk of failing the subject, and those who we felt had ‘potential’ for doing particularly well in the overall computer science course.

The five students in my thesis group were going well, I felt that all of them would get a good result with their work. Kishore’s TCP/IP stack was working, while there were still some performance issues and reliability problems, we had been able to test it with some of the IBM Personal Computers in the microelectronics lab. He had found a modified version of a terminal program and we were able to use that to connect a telnet session to several of the host computers here. I had contacted Alonzo, he had promised to send a FTP client program for PC/Dos for us to try as well. Randy’s printer interface unit was slowly progressing; using a standard Z80 development board meant we could get the Ethernet interface working quickly, and the Centronics interface and driver was also readily available. He was now tying them together, and working on the configuration program.

The other two – Sarah and Michael – were both making progress, Sarah had made some good improvements to my original program, as well as adding various network types to the simulation process. I felt all five of them were approaching their thesis project in a well-organized, methodical manner; I guess it was the techniques that Alonzo had initially instilled in me when I did my original B.Sc. thesis, and Dr Maxwell had refined during my Ph.D. work. I wasn’t going to take credit for how well they were doing with their theses; I had just passed on some techniques that I had been told.

The last Saturday in May was the annual Commodore’s Ball at the sailing club; it was much like the previous ones. Lisa and I sat at the ‘Koolong’ table, Don received a number of trophies, we won the Quartet Bowl again, and runner up in both the Retriever Trophy and Archina Trophy series. Those wins were at least on ‘scratch’, handicap wise, we didn’t fare quite as well; I think the club handicapper had got our measure, and while ever Lisa was on the helm, we would take a big ding on our corrected times. But that meant other boats had a chance at winning some of the trophies.

After the prize giving, we danced together – as before they played some of the Roberttones live albums, and I sang softly to Lisa as we danced. She rested her head on my shoulder, holding my tightly against her.

“You know, if we had our own boat, I would get you to take me there right now, and make love to me,” she whispered in my ear. “What would you think about us getting our own boat, Will?”

“I think that might be fun; we would have to work out what sort of boat we would want, either a pure racing one, like ‘Koolong’, or one we could take cruising. There’s one that I’ve been reading about, a New Zealand design, which combines both.”

“Would we be able to sail it with just the two of us, if we wanted to go up Broken Bay, or with the cruising group?” she asked.

“Yeah, it would. For racing, we might need a few others crewing with us. It’s called a ‘Young 88’, the ‘88’ because it’s just under 9 metres in length. A decent sized cabin below, stove, head, separate master cabin at the bow.”

“Sounds like that could be ideal for us,” she said. “We should start planning now for it, I guess.”

“A baby and a boat?” I replied.

“Why not? By the sound of that boat, we could have a young child on it with us.”

The big event happening in June was my brother’s wedding, Ian and Shane were getting married on June 23rd. He had asked me to be his best man, and Shane was having her sister, Allison, as her ‘maid of honour’. The ceremony was to be a civil one at the Royal Motor Yacht Club, with the reception in the function room there. Our group would be providing the music, of course, and since I was partnered with Allison, apart from the first official dance, we would be free to dance with our ‘significant others’.

Somehow I found time with all the end of semester and exam preparations to organize a ‘buck’s night’ for Ian; I was under strict instructions from Shane not to allow him to ‘misbehave’, whatever that meant. But we settled for a rather sedate meal at the ‘Black Stump’ at Frenchs Forest; there were about twelve of us, the others were all friends of his from school or college. Still, the food was good, we spent the evening joking at Ian’s expense, everyone had a good time, and I was able to get him home to Shane sober, and without him ‘misbehaving’.

The wedding went well, I managed to embarrass Ian with my speech, and I got to dance with Allison and Shane. In between when I had to be on stage, Lisa and I had several dances. After the wedding, they were flying up to Cairns, spending a week on a Great Barrier Reef cruise.

Both Robyn and Sally were in the final month of their pregnancies; Sally in particular looked like she was going to pop at any moment. Because of that, we hadn’t planned any gigs over the mid-year break, since we didn’t know if Paul or Phil – or both of them – would be called away at a moment’s notice. Instead, we were all in the studio, working on some new songs that had been written for us, when Andrew, Mandy, Bruce and Rachel said they all had announcements to make. I wasn’t surprised with they said both Mandy and Rachel were pregnant; due in late November / early December. We all congratulated them, asking them how they were coping with pregnancy, morning sickness and the like. I wondered to myself just how long they had been trying, Lisa and I were now up to four months with still no pregnancy.

We had planned a big party for Monday, July 2nd for the first episode of ‘Sweet and Sour’, there were going to be twenty episodes, and would be broadcast Monday to Thursday nights, right after the 7:00 p.m. evening news. Tracy wouldn’t be with us, as (quite understandably) she would be with all of the cast for a screening party. I was rather impressed with the first episode; there was a scene where Tracy is traveling to Sydney from Melbourne on the train, and she’s looking wistfully out of the train window as the inner southern suburbs of Sydney pass by. I wondered if she was thinking about the time she and I returned from Melbourne by train, after the evening of role play. We had been told to expect to see a cameo in every episode of a well-known person from the Australian music scene, and we spotted the singer Renee Geyer as the train hostess.

The next three nights I didn’t get to watch the recording – I had set up the VCR to record every episode – since it was Lisa’s fertile time, and we were otherwise occupied; but I caught up with episodes two to four on the weekend. As the series progressed, the band starts to take shape. The actor who played ‘Christine’s’ father – Sandra Lillington, the sax player – looked vaguely familiar; it was the actor Martin Vaughan, who played the lead role in the TV mini-series ‘Power without Glory’. At least that’s what Chris said, and everyone agreed with him.

“I can’t see Tracy – or any woman with any bit of self-respect – being remotely interested in that Martin character,” Merry said. “Talk about an A-Grade jerk!”

“And that George, he wouldn’t last more than a week in a real group, he’s clearly not really interested in music,” Andrew said. “Despite all my coaching, he doesn’t look comfortable at all holding a bass guitar.”

“They are just characters, all artificial, but they have to have something there to generate conflict, that’s how plotlines work,” Mary Beth said. “We all know it’s just a story, they make the plot simple, so people who aren’t in the music industry can believe it, and accept it as real.”

“Or at least possible,” I said. “Suspension of disbelief, and all that.”

“Still, I thought it wasn’t too bad,” Lisa said.

“Their music is too ‘poppy’,” Ange said. “Teeny-bopper stuff!”

“But that’s the market they are aiming for with the show,” Merry said.

Right on time, on the evening of Friday 13th (an inauspicious date), both Robyn and Sally went into labour. We didn’t expect to hear anything until sometime on the Saturday morning; we had a sweepstakes on when each baby would be born. I went for 10:00 a.m. for Paul and Sally’s baby, and 10:30 a.m. for Phil and Robyn’s. I was way off, lunchtime came and went without any baby making an appearance; it wasn’t until 5:30 for each of them before they were born. Paul and Sally had a girl; who they christened ‘Jillian Louise’, in memory of Paul’s sister. Phil and Robyn had a son, ‘Simon Francis’, named after the two grandfathers. Sunday morning we went up to Royal North Shore to see both sets of mothers and babies; the two mothers looked tired, but very happy. Paul and Phil were both proud fathers, and we said there would be a big celebration at Banksia Lodge.

Back home, Lisa told me that she had spoken to both Sally and Robyn, and asked them how long it had taken them to actually get pregnant. Each had said it was just over a year from when they started seriously trying to get pregnant.

“That’s the same as Mandy and Rachel said, too,” Lisa added. “I guess we are just beginning to try.”

On the Monday morning, I had a call from Georgina, wanting to talk with me about my foreign capital investments. The value of my US dollars had increased considerably over the last few months; after the initial excitement over the floating of the Australian Dollar, it had now dropped in value, so each US dollar was now worth eighty cents Australian. My initial investment of $20,000 had now climbed in value to just over $25,000.

“A little bird has told me that the Federal Government is going to deregulate the Australian banking industry at the start of next month,” she said. “I expect that will make the Aussie Dollar attractive again, as foreign investors want to get into the local banks. So now would be a good time to liquidate your holdings of US dollars.”

What she said made sense to me, so I told her to sell almost all of my holdings in US dollars – leaving a small amount, to at least keep my investment account alive. She said she would to that, in tranches of four thousand dollars over the next week. She didn’t want to sell everything at once, that way she could constantly monitor the market.

“You’ve done fairly well out of that,” she said. “Of course, you’ll need to keep records for income tax purposes, but we’ll send a statement before the end of next June.”

“You don’t need to give my account password to you, just to verify my identity?” I asked.

“Will, this is me you are talking to. Of course I know your identity!”

“Damn, I just wanted to be able to say the word ‘callipygous’ to someone who I know has ‘beautiful buttocks’.”

“Now don’t be rude, and start getting me all worked up here!”

“Imagine what I could be doing with your beautiful buttocks, Georgina...”

“STOP THAT, WILL!” she yelled at me down the phone. “Okay, I’m hanging up now, some of us have work to do!”

I laughed to myself as I headed back upstairs, Lisa asked me what was so funny, and I told her how I had teased Georgina.

“She told me Ross isn’t into that,” Lisa said. “I think she misses the ‘back door’ action you gave her. She is Greek, after all!”

By the time the second semester started, we had seen three weeks of ‘Sweet and Sour’; the members of the ‘Takeaways’ seem to get into a string of complicated problems as they slowly improve as a group, performing gigs and starting to make a name for themselves. I recognised Kirk Pengilly and Ignatius Jones as two of the guest stars, along with the actress Amanda Muggleton, and musician Marc Hunter. I guess one thing the writers did get right was how the different expectations of the various group members can be rather destructive on the group as a whole. That was something that we had never had to deal with in our group, maybe because there was no one person with a huge ego that had to be in the centre of attention. We all were on the same page, not just musically, but with how we saw the group progressing, and how we didn’t expect it to become the core of our lives. It had always been a hobby, a part time involvement for each of us; we had never intended to make music our careers.

Building Renovations

August - October, 1984

The seven of us were seated around the dining room table, as Ian and Celia described their plans for the upstairs addition to the house. Well, technically, it was restoring the original upstairs rooms. Georgina had drawn some representations, perspective views from across the road, showing the roof details. Paul and Chris Ramos were asking questions, mainly engineering questions about loading, sizes of main bearers and other construction issues. Ian pointed out where some of the main floor bearers would need to be replaced to take the extra weight of the upstairs rooms and roof structure.

“Rather than using four by twelve beams,” Paul said, “we could go with a composite beam, like RSJ, but out of wood. We used those when we did the basement.”

“Okay, let me run through the proposal for you, Will and Lisa,” Ian said. “You can see at the top of the stairs, there’s a closet on either side. Now to give the ceiling height we need, there’s a little hip roof bumped out over the stairs. A hallway runs across the place, with doors off to each bedroom, and a small bathroom with a shower and water closet at the end. There’s a matching small hip roof over that, too; which works out well, part of the art nouveau design is a symmetry with the roof shape. Complex, with the dormers, finials, and various gables and hips, but still symmetrical about the main centre axis.

“The two bedrooms at the front have the matching ‘Juliet’ balconies; a pair of French doors open onto them. They are only large enough for someone to stand on, not with a chair or table.”

“So, I could stand on a balcony,” Lisa said, “hold my hand to my forehead, and recite:

‘O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.’

“We don’t want a repetition of that play,” I said. “Everyone dies a rather grisly death!”

“Okay ... back to the plan,” Ian said. “Along the sides of each of the four bedrooms, there are two small dormer windows in each room, and between them, along the outside wall, a padded bench, with storage underneath. The two back rooms share a large, walk in closet, with sliding doors. Plus, there’s access from one room to the other through the closet.”

“Hmm, if we have a kid in each, then they will work out how to sneak from one room to the other!” Lisa said.

“The bathroom – well, in the original design, that would have been a small servant’s bedroom – there weren’t any internal bathrooms. I’m suggesting a pocket door leading from the bathroom to the hallway. And to add to giving kids places to explore, there would be access into the roof space above the kitchen, laundry and back bedroom from the rear of that walk in closet. By code, there has to be access to all roof spaces.”

“There will be the standard red terra cotta tiles on the roof, with these wave pattern style ridge caps. At these two locations at the front, we would have fancy finials; you can get ones like big kookaburras, they were very common in houses of the era,” Celia said, pointing to the two locations on the front elevation drawing.

“You’re going with terra cotta for the tiles?” Chris said. “I can’t see that affecting the load on the roof joists and beams. Where are you recommending we source the tiles?”

“Terra cotta is period correct,” Ian said. “It wasn’t until much later, with material shortages after the war that cement tiles became popular. Mashman’s make the ridge capping tiles and have a good selection of finials, plus they make the traditional shaped tiles, too.”

“They are pretty reliable, fair prices too,” Paul said. “We’ve worked with them before, no worries.”

“Okay, what we would want to do is run at least four phone extensions up there, one in each room,” I said. “I can coordinate that. Chris, will Frank need to see if anything needs adding to the security system?”

“Another smoke detector, at least,” Chris said. “And intrusion detectors on those two balcony doors, to be doing things properly. I’ll work with him on that.”

“No other questions?” Ian asked.

We were all quiet, I was pretty impressed with the plans they had come up with. Of course, having Georgina’s drawings made the rather plain plans come to life; the place looked just how I had imagined it would be when we were first talking about the additions with Ian and Celia.

“Great; we’ll start on the paperwork for the council building approval. I can’t see any issues with the heritage committee; if you look at this old photo from 1910, showing the house as it was back then, we’ve pretty much copied the design. So we can say that we are restoring the house to its original configuration. I can get you guys the detailed blueprints and all of that, so you can work out a bill of materials.”

“Sounds great,” Paul said. He scribbled some figures on his notepad, showed them to Chris, who nodded. “Now, this is just a rough, ballpark estimate; we’ll have to sit down and do a proper costing once Ian gets me the full plans. But how does something around one-fifty thousand work for you, Will? That will vary, based on finishes, just how detailed you want some of the woodwork, floor coverings, and all that, but ... That should give you a general cost to work with.”

“Sounds good to me, Mate,” I said. “And I know it’s just a first estimate, I know it’s likely to go up once we get into the detailed design. But it doesn’t scare me.”

“Now, I have some materials that I want to see if we can work into the job,” Lisa said.

Over the last few months she had been frequenting some of the architectural salvage places around the inner West. She had collected a range of material, period light switches, solid wood doors, lights, various bits of trim, and an old style pedestal vanity sink and wall cupboard that would be perfect for the upstairs bathroom. We all headed out to where she had stored them in the garage; Ian and Celia believe they would all work in the design.

“We can’t use switches like that in the bathroom,” Paul said. “They aren’t approved for wet areas, too big a risk of someone getting an electric shock. But we can get modern ones that will fit with the style, and still be compliant.”

“Those doors look good; solid wood too,” Chris said. “Those door knobs are good.”

“What are these, Lisa?” Paul asked, looking behind the doors.

“Some stained glass transoms,” Lisa said. “There should be six of them.”

Paul, Chris and Ian moved the doors out of the way, and inspected the transoms.

“These would look great above each bedroom door,” Ian said. “Can you guys fabricate a replacement control rod to open and close them?”

“Not a problem; we might even be able to find some suitable metal rods around somewhere,” Paul said.

“Let me just measure the size of those transoms,” Ian said. “I’ll modify the plans to include them over each bedroom door.”

Ian took some measurements, writing them down on a notepad. He would get started on the council approvals tomorrow, and all going well, we should be able to start work with the demolition of the old roof in about three weeks’ time. Paul had said it would take about a week to remove the old roof tiles, the rafters and other structural elements. Once they had everything cleared, it would be maybe two weeks work to have all the new framing and roof tiling done, then they would concentrate on the interior fitout.

Back at Uni for the second semester, my timetable was almost identical to the first semester. The only difference was where I had Computing IIA lectures and tutorials to run, it was now Data Bases and Networks. For my MA course, ‘Philosophy and Methodology of Science’ was replaced by 62.709G, The Scientific Community. That looked the wankiest of the subjects I had to do for the degree – ‘A sociological analysis of the pure science community, which establishes the characteristics of this subgroup of society by examining its internal and external relations.’ Anyway, I would approach it with an open mind. One thing doing those Science, Technology and Society subjects had done was to improve my writing skills.

Grammar had never been one of my strong points – although I did knows some basic rules (a preposition is something you should not end a sentence with... ). I had written a number of technical papers; contributing to Internet ‘Request for Comments’, my two thesis reports, and other articles. However, the sort of writing required for an MA degrees was quite a different beast, it was all about proposing an argument, and writing material to justify and support that premise. It wasn’t a mere ‘statement of facts’, like a technical journal article tended to be; but an exposition of ideas, backed up by evidence. The article actually had to CONVICE the reader that what I was saying was correct, or at least reasonable. That required a certain structure, a methodology to how my thoughts and arguments unfolded. And while grammar wasn’t the main emphasis of the subject, I had to avoid any glaring grammatical errors, lest they distracted the reader from the content of what they were reading.