“So many men didn’t want to take me out for breakfast after I’d eaten them alive for dinner.”
It was just months after I’d lobbed into “Lizzie” Bay in 1993 when my old flatmate from St Kilda, Dale Langley, rang and nagged me to go to her sister’s place in nearby Edgecliff to attend an election-night party. Didn’t think I’d know anyone there but forced myself to go. Turned up on the doorstep, pale-skinned, all in black. Very “Melbourne”.It was the “unlosable” election. All the then opposition leader John Hewson had to do was stay upright and victory was surely his.
That night, Keating said his win was “the sweetest victory of all … a victory for the true believers, the people who in difficult times have kept the faith”.Brendan James Donohoe was also sure that I’d arrived at the party with a date so, reluctantly, we left each other. It wasn’t the first time I’d sabotaged my love life. One night at an ARIAs after-party, I was talking with Jimmy Barnes when James Reyne interrupted our conversation. “Want to know something, Jimmy?” he said. “Wendy would never go out with me, because she thought I was too dumb.”
And in another, much-regretted failure of confidence, when my good friend Deborah Conway invited me to be in the music video of her mega-hitin 1991, I declined because I thought I’d look too fat in tartan golf pants. I watch that clip now and want to hit myself over the head with a nine iron.A few months after the election-night party, Brendan and I met again. I was MC for a fundraiser in aid of writer Bob Ellis after his house had burnt down. Brendan had spent money he didn’t have to get there.
From the passenger seat of his battered avocado-green Renault 16, I could see the road below through a giant hole in the floor. He lived in Collaroy, on the northern beaches, in an old shack on the side of a hill he shared with a couple of mates. Over his bed he’d strung up a fishing net containing all the treasures he’d collected from the beach: bits of driftwood, shell-encrusted buoys, bleached bones. The walls were adorned with Bob Marley posters and surfboards were stacked in every corner.
I mean, what’s the likelihood of falling in love over the headstone of the bushranger Ben Hall in Forbes Cemetery on Bogan Gate Road?
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