Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to how to Avoid a Happy Life, the podcast. This podcast is a companion to how to Avoid a Happy A memoir by Julia Laurenson, published by Fremantle Press. But you don't need to have read her story to enjoy the podcast. This episode was recorded on Whadjuk Noongar Bujar and we acknowledge the continuing custodianship of this land and the great storytelling traditions of the Noongar people.
This episode is called the Opposite of Boredom. I'm Danae Gibson and before we start this podcast, I'm going to talk a little bit to Julia about why this topic.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: I wanted to explore one of the things that is probably, you could probably pick up from reading the memoir, but actually make it explicit that one of the things that drove me, you know, apart from trauma and, you know, all those kinds of things, was really just a sense of wanting to have an interesting life. And I still don't really know why I wanted it so much, except that everything boring to me seemed to just grate on my spirit and. And so I wanted to create something that was interesting and creative and I had no idea how I was gonna do it. Like, absolutely no idea how I was gonna do it. I got no guidance from the adults around me who wanted me to go into, you know, a 9 to 5 job and get married, have children and do all the traditional things. And from a very early age I just didn't wanna do any of it.
[00:01:47] Speaker A: Do you remember if school was interesting?
[00:01:52] Speaker B: Some aspects of school were interesting. I loved learning. But actually one of the things I found very difficult and continued to find difficult was just sitting still and being in a classroom. I think as an introverted person, in retrospect, that probably was one of the issues.
But yeah, I just wanted to. I want to be doing the exciting stuff all the time and I didn't have much patience for the stuff that didn't interest me.
[00:02:22] Speaker A: Exciting stuff. Did it have to be naughty sometimes?
[00:02:26] Speaker B: Look, if I would take the naughty stuff, if there was nothing else going, I was naughty, but if the teachers could engage me by creative stuff. So music was fantastic. So we had a fantastic music program at the primary school that I went to and I never missed a choir rehearsal. I never missed a performance. I was there, but everything else, bit dodgy.
[00:02:55] Speaker A: How to avoid a happy life. The opposite of boredom.
[00:03:07] Speaker C: The opposite of boredom.
From an early age, I railed against the idea of boredom.
I don't know if it was the quietness of outer suburban Perth, the quietness of a house with no other child in it or growing up in a world where the young were not yet a prime target for marketers or television producers. But something in me craved the extreme, the different.
I was taken by the idea, picked up from goodness knows where, that I should direct my energies toward making my life interesting. I wanted to travel Australia. I wanted to see snow. I wanted to write a book. It was a kind of craving to be seen and understood, though I was so far from seeing or understanding myself.
I got no truck from my parents in my quest for an interesting life.
My father, who grew up in an environment first of neglect in a northern English orphanage and then of cruelty in a northern English group home, wanted nothing more than a life undemanding and predictable.
My mother, whose restlessness I inherited, found herself on the receiving end of a belt whenever she stepped out of the narrowly confined expectations her parents held of her.
So I did not know what I should do with my impulse for excitement any more than my mother had known what to do with her own.
My attempts to find my way to an interesting life could be categorised by the impulses that drove them. There were impulses towards distraction and disruption on one hand and towards attempts at expression on the other.
Early on I understood that there was a distinction to be made between the disruptive and the connective. My first taste of the disruptive occurred when I was three, or perhaps four. I was with my cousin Nicholas outside our old house in Brookton Highway, Kelmscott. The adults were inside and we were outside standing in the driveway where my parents white Tarana was parked. Nicholas was the template for many a future relationship as well as the source of many childhood memories which I retained because of their surprising character. He was six months older than me, knew nothing of fear, and was possessed of a contagious delight at doing what he shouldn't.
I was told that when we were three, Nick once chased me around the lounge room with a hammer and another time was found trying to smother me with a pillow as I had an afternoon nap. My first memory of Nick is him climbing up a pile of milk crates stacked outside the back of the deli his parents ran in Kalamunda and then jumping on me. But there was nothing malicious in it. He just wanted to see if he could. He was hell bent on making life interesting no matter what the adults around him had to say about it.
So when we were four we were standing outside the driveway of my parents house. We were running around the cars playing chasey and then Nick picked up some gravel.
See if you can break the glass Nick said, pointing at the tarana. We're not allowed to, I said reasonably and accurately enough. But just see. Nick urged.
So I did.
Despite my future inability to throw anything with any degree of precision. The gravel I launched at the windscreen had immediate effect. There was a sound like a shot followed by tinkling as the unreinforced glass shattered into tiny blocks. I was thrilled that I was able to effect such a thing on the material world, and for a long time everything seemed to be suspended.
Nick stood next to me as we gazed in amazement. The sound of it had rent the regular world and sent us into someplace better and different. Nick was impressed, and I was pleased that I had impressed him.
And then I realised what I had done.
I fled to my room and dove under the bed. My mother didn't normally give me anything other than the odd smack on the behind, but I figured she might make an exception in this case.
When the adults discovered what had happened, they assumed, based on exactly 100% of their previous experience, that Nick was responsible, regardless of who had thrown the gravel. I owned up once I stopped sobbing, but it was too late. Nick copped the wooden spoon on my behalf. I was left with both the shame of having done something so monumentally naughty and the secret thrill it brought me every time I thought about it afterwards. I couldn't believe I'd done such a thing, and yet I had.
You could, it seemed, change things, even if you were a small child.
But I soon learned that there were other ways to make life exciting which did not attract opprobrium or engender guilt.
After arriving at my second primary school, I met Nobly, who had beaming brown eyes, a constant look of merriment on her face, and was smart, funny, and also free of the fear which I regularly found paralysing. For the next six years we were inseparable. We shared a love of abba, Doctor who and Little House on the Prairie books. We made up alternative versions of songs, parodies, which placed ourselves and our environments in the lyrics of the top 10. We made up our own dances to every ABBA song and staged our own plays based on the lives of the two ABBA couples, so far as we understood them from the prized pop magazines we procured from the local newsagent.
We learnt to knit solely so we could create Doctor who length scarves and always carried jelly babies in our pockets, brandishing them at random moments. We pretended that the temporary toilets at the BMX racing track in Kenwick were Tardises and attempted to whoosh away from the dustiness and stinkiness by locking ourselves in and imitating the TARDIS sound, much to the irritation of the full blooded boys waiting outside.
It was with Knobbly that I understood that the craving I had for the interesting could be met by creating things, worlds, songs, dances, books of poetry, stories of heroic adventures. We did not do these things for public consumptions. They were to amuse and entertain ourselves and our other friends if they would tolerate us.
As Nobli and I would regularly fall into fits of laughter caused by minute expressions, comments or reactions that only she and I noticed. It was most often the case that we were an audience of two.
When we reached our upper primary years, we found that you could combine these individual activities with group ones. We joined the Kelmscott Primary School Choir under the kind but disciplined hand of music teacher and choir mistress, Sally Christmas. Almost without us realising, she taught us harmony, diction, presentation and performance skills, and a love of the English folk song canon.
I was a soprano and Knobbly was an alto.
Whenever we could, Knobbly and I stood next to each other, the aisle between us. But as was the case in our regular classrooms, we were more often than not required to be separated due to our inability to stop making each other laugh.
In the Smugglers song, created around lyrics by Rudyard Kipling, we changed the line, watch thwarm, my darling, while the smugglers go by to watch. Wash the wall, my darling. And as soon as we heard each other's sibilant hiss, we were off.
The same happened during rehearsals of Mr. Sailorman by Alex Rowley. The song about a young man trying to get a sailor to buy rare commodities for his girlfriend contained the line, I like you, Mr. Sailorman, your face is big and brown, which by itself was odd enough, so Knobbly would render in a voice so low that only I could hear it at intervals, sufficient to be always surprising.
[00:12:17] Speaker A: I like you, Mr. Sailorman. Your face is big and brown and.
[00:12:25] Speaker C: Airy, causing me to weep with laughter every single time.
But in performance, we did not need any encouragement to be fully focused. We performed at the Concert hall with local celebrities like Jackie Love and Scottish pipers and medieval singers.
Knobbly and I were part of a small singing group who were chosen to be dressed up in period costume to do a Christmas special with the abc.
And we were in the recorder ensemble playing at assemblies.
My mother, Gwen, while inconsistent in her parenting in many respects, was always supportive of my creative endeavours, most particularly when it came to performance.
She made sure my choir dress and blouse were laundered, my shoes polished my hair neatly parted. I enjoyed the focus of her attention, which was otherwise aimed at things more pressing. She dropped me at school early every day for choir practice and drove endless hours to pick me up or drop me off for performances. It remained our consistent point of connection until she was no longer able to do such things.
When Nobli went to Perth Mod for high school, I was left to the rough and not infrequently violent environs at the local high school, Kelmscott.
Here I made new friends, still the arty, the dreamy and the theatrical, and found solace in Chemihai's one artistic program of note, its musical theatre program.
The musical for the first year I auditioned in year nine was Dracula Spectacular and I was an idiot. I was in my element. Me and my friends would leap about the stage pretending to be drunk and or demented, wearing thick pancake make up and white coats that I think were meant to be reminiscent of straitjackets. It also didn't hurt that I had a crush on the cross dressing girl who played Dracula. See page 73 of how to Avoid a Happy Life for further details.
When the season ended, I suffered acutely from the withdrawal of the opportunity to be myself by pretending to be somebody else.
In the time when I wasn't rehearsing, I leaned back into distraction and disruption.
I began to experiment with all the things one might expect to experiment with at a bogan school smoking, drinking, sex wagging schools and attempting to thwart my own nature so that I could dodge the threat of being beaten up at a school counsellors camp. At the beginning of year 10 I kept getting picked for leadership programs of various sorts. Although I could not understand, let alone value the qualities I displayed to attract such things. I remember looking up at the Point Perrin's sky and thinking to myself that I had a decision to make. Would I take the friendship overtures being offered to me by some semi tough girls or would I continue to be arty and over the top? I was convinced there was no middle path, but just when I'd chosen the former, I was saved by auditions for Bye Bye Birdie. Because I won the lead in the musical Marvel of Marvels, I felt I could go full throttle on my artiness. This was aided by my male lead Jamie, who veered between thinking he was bisexual and thinking he was gay and introduced me to a new way of being disruptive. By taking everything about us that was different and amping it up, Jamie managed to avoid the fate of fellow obviously queer males at school by being so outrageous and sharp tongued that boys who normally would have beaten him up gave him a wide berth.
Plus, we walked around the school arm in arm, both wearing makeup, occasionally ducking into a fake pash, which really confused people. When I walked around arm in arm with my bestie Kitty, or my other bestie, Esti, we were jeered at or propositioned with Jamie. Nobody knew what to say, so they said nothing.
My new overt theatricality led me to new places that promised relief from the suburban boredom that pressed in on me when I wasn't directly engaged in expressing it. Esti and I alone of all our high school became members of the Youth Theatre company, based at the Hole in the Wall Theatre in Subiaco and open only to public school students who passed the auditions.
We were exposed to new sorts of people in the day long rigorous rehearsal schedule, which attempted to transform us from raw material into polished performers.
This involved the kind of training you would expect, like voice and movement lessons, improv and other theatre skills.
We were channelled into performances that suited our particular brand of outrageousness. Est and I both ended up in a surrealist Yukio Mishima play about a talking pillow, which involved a lot of shrieking with directors who expanded our experience of adult conduct.
Our director was an acutely expressive long haired woman whose casual use of the word wh in conversation with our parents made us boggle with admiration.
She encouraged us to explore our feelings and bodies and the feelings and bodies of other performers, if that took our fancy. The male lead in the Mishima play ended the rehearsal period covered in love bites applied by US 15 year old thespians in one of our workshops as we demonstrated some extreme emotion or other. While the director praised us for the thoroughness with which we executed our task, it certainly didn't resemble anything that was likely to happen in a workshop in high school, which is probably just as well, given the removal of the statute of limitations in later years.
[00:18:48] Speaker B: To a person.
[00:18:50] Speaker C: The Mishima play and all that preceded it ruined its cast members for regular school life. All but one of us dropped out of formal education in the coming year, unable to readjust to classes in which exploration of anything except the syllabus attracted criticism.
My formal education ended when I turned up at school one Monday morning with my hair transformed into something akin to an orange echidna instead of the Annie Lennox look I was aiming for, courtesy of my apprentice hairdresser friend with more enthusiasm than skill. Despite the school being generally violent, school uniform infringements, including radical haircuts, were punishable by suspension, I was suspended but never went back.
As a high school dropout, I found myself doing jobs resulting in boredom of an intensity that I had not thought possible to endure.
Indeed, less than six months after my departure from school, I entered an adolescent psychiatric hospital. When I expressed to my psychiatrist how seriously I did not want to endure it without the twins of connection and purpose from performance, I did not know how I should live.
After months in hospital, it was my faith in the arts of what writing and music could give me that restored my enthusiasm for life.
I started reading again, writing again, writing on the typewriter in the hospital, transcribing my irritated observations of staff conduct or at the table at the camp we went to, transcribing dinner time into wittyscript, or so I hoped. I began learning guitar, having left clarinet behind at school.
I began hoping my way back into the world through creativity, which led me to search out people I could feel at home with over the coming years. I found them.
The happy accident of finding my people took a new turn after an actual accident involving a recalcitrant horse in the Victorian high country. At the beginning of 1993, when I was 23, I found a pair of acquaintances, Nicky and Sean, who happened to be looking for a roommate just as I was leaving hospital.
Nicky and Shaun became lifelong friends and we began a conversation about creativity that continues to this day.
And then one of them offered me a chance to regain the experiences of music and performance which had been so truncated by my truncated education.
I was in a wheelchair with spinal fractures and my lower leg in a cast, learning the new language of physical limitations and pain, which recalibrated my thinking as much as as the set of my bones. But one afternoon, Nicky came into my room and said, hey, Halls, I'm starting a singing group. Want to join in?
It is November 1995. Nicky, Judy and I are a trio called Viable Options. Nicky and Judy write the material. I write the grant applications. Together we perform everywhere from river cruises for vet nurses to the Sandover Medal and red faces.
We have put on a two act show at the Blue Room called Get yout Chops around this. The publicity stills featuring the three of us biting into latex meat products Nikki has crafted. We hire a professional cameraperson to take footage of our final show.
My mother, still years away from her disabling strokes, is in the front row of our full house with my stepfather, auntie and uncle.
She laughs the hardest at our most vulgar joke and outrageous stunts, such as when Judy drags a hapless man from the audience and forces him to marry her, standing in front of another man, lifting her leg and jutting her hips towards him, ordering him to take off her thigh high garter with his teeth. As she returns to the stage, Nicky and I call on the audience to get the groom to show the audience his penis after a wedding speech. Finally Judy bursts into tears and points to the groom and says, you're divorced and I get the house.
Not long after this, my life changes. I get pregnant by accident and my last performance takes place with the baby kicking against the guitar resting on my distended stomach.
My mother never babysits my daughter, although she reads all the books. I start publishing when my daughter is four and it is with my mother that I share the excitements of becoming a writer, a performer. In a different way, it keeps us together when everything in our relationship is difficult.
I still had the footage of my mother laughing and proud in the front row of our 1995 show.
It is the way I like to remember her, the way she would want me to remember her. I finally found enough excitement for us both.
How to Avoid a Happy Life the podcast was produced by Danae Gibson, who has my eternal gratitude, and recorded at RTR fm. Music was written by Late Night Shopping, Nicky Jones and Sean Salmon. The podcast includes voice work by Nicky Jones and Zoe Warrick. Thank you all for listening.
