1983 – A Watershed Year
My attention got a bit stuck on 1983 in the early hours of this morning. I wasn’t able to sleep very well due to pains in my legs from sciatica and other muscular aches and pains.
Maybe it is because I am spending time with “A”, maybe it could simply be coincidence. 1983 was a transition year for me. Much the same as 1975, 1995, 2012, 2000, well they are the years that stand out.
My attention didn’t go onto 1983 until the early hours of the morning after a lucid and vivid dream which featured my old Boss from Myer, Jim O’Donaghue involving art, design, confidence, architecture, placement, old age, all melded together in a very weird dream.
1983 was a year of change. In mid February Victoria had 2 major disasters. On Wednesday February 9 a huge dust storm dumped dust all over Melbourne then a week later the state caught fire, we watched a cloud of smoke come toward us while we sat on the sand at Port Phillip Bay in the early evening of Wednesday February 16. In March the Labour Party won the Federal Election, Bob Hawke became our Prime Minister which led to the Australian dollar being floated in December. America invaded Grenada, I had never heard of the island until then and Michael Jackson released “Thriller”.
The year began with me still on staff at The Church of Scientology which was then located in Russell St in Melbourne’s C.B.D. Paul was 3 and “A” was 1. I was in a dilemma about life, commitment, money, loyalties and had become incredibly disillusioned about what I was doing with my life. We started the year living in Highfield Rd, Hartwell in a little dark brick house that we rented. We had a pet goat in our back yard. By now we had started selling our block mounted Japanese prints at The Victoria Market on Sundays and at Monash Uni on Fridays. Melanie was 24 and I was 31. We both worked so hard and I worked such long hours. I was simultaneously working 2 full time jobs, balancing responsibilities, work, fatherhood, sleep and doing the best I could to create some sort of foundation to move forward from. I don’t think I ever looked upon life as being hard, but it was. I’m pretty certain that I had about 2 hours sleep on Thursday nights and pretty much zero sleep each Saturday night after working all night to prepare for the Vic Market. I really have no idea how we juggled our time and responsibilities because there was so much going on. I caught the train into the city each morning and back again in the afternoons/early evening often falling asleep and missing my station. I had already decided that my tenure as an “executive” at Melbourne’s Church of Scientology was going to end as soon as I could work out how to pull it off without rocking the boat too much.
Melanie had already gone through her own “staff” nightmare in 1981 when she was pregnant with Allissa and was now being a full time Mum, amongst other things.
The people from Sydney’s Sea Org loomed large over our lives in what I realize now was obviously a very militant manner. The two people that stood out were a serious old woman named Phil Stevens and her nasty son, Steve. If any two people ever had a negative effect on my life and happiness it was these two guys. She’s dead now and I have no idea and do not want to know whatever happened to him. They were one of those Scientology families that had their own rules, power and autonomy.
I have no idea what month it was when I finally left “staff” at the Church, it might have been May. The divorce was painful but that’s another story for another time. By now we had transcended our little single brick garage in Hartwell where we had produced all of our block mounted prints and we had rented a strange garage space in a back alley in Ormond. We had no toilet so our staff had to walk down to Ormond Station to use the public toilet. We packed all of our equipment into a very small space, sawdust all over the floor, folding chairs to sit in the alley to eat our lunch. We had two full time staff, a partially deaf girl named Maxine and a young guy named Gary Conley. There may have been others but I don’t clearly recall.
Sometime during this period Melanie booked a holiday to Bali for us. I had been on a plane once before, possibly in 1980 when we were coerced into going to Sydney to visit the Sea Org headquarters. None of that matters because going to Bali was one of those moments when life transformed from black and white into colour. It was so exotic. Bali was in its first stages of international tourism. We had no idea what to expect and were not disappointed by anything that we experienced. We spent time in Kuta, Ubud and Sanur. We stayed at the Hotel Tjampuan in Ubud which is a hop, skip and a jump from where Villa Tusk is now, almost 40 years later. Ubud is the location that stood out for me above all else.
I am pretty certain that this trip was a monumental moment in our lives as a family. If I recall, it must have been winter in Melbourne so it was probably sometime around June.
The funny thing about memories is that you don’t always get the sequence right which is a good reason to keep a diary or a journal or even to consult somebody else who was there which I will do sometime later with Melanie.
Other notable moments in 1983 were trips to Sydney for what was known as a Comm Ev. Looking back now I recall feeling like a political prisoner being tried for treason. The outcome was pre-ordained. We could have just left out all of the pomp and circumstance and cut to the chase.
There were two other significant events in 1983, both happened toward the end of the year. I’m not sure which happened first but they seemed to be happening simultaneously from where I stand now. The first one was our decision to expand our business and to rent a factory in Hawthorn. We found a huge space in Burwood Rd, moved in and started growing our business which was at this stage pretty much wholesale except for our Market sales. This was a pivotal moment which profoundly influenced the next four decades of both of our lives.
The other important event probably happened around November. I had always had a dream to live in the Dandenong Ranges. There was something about the outer east of Melbourne that really appealed to me even dating back to my childhood when I went on school excursions to One Tree Hill in the Dandenongs and Badger Creek at Healesville. Then there were my “hippy” connections from the early 70s. One Sunday we went for a family drive to the hills and even though we had no intention of buying a house we happened upon a stone cottage in Tecoma that was for sale. Being impulsive must have always been part and parcel of my personality so without too much thought we found ourselves at the Real Estate office in Tecoma writing out a cheque for a deposit to buy the house. The hilarious thing is that we didn’t have the money to back up the cheque so we made an impromptu appointment with our bank Manager, a guy named Foley, on Monday morning and miraculously pulled of a loan for the house.
What started as an unhappy year ended up as what felt like a moment of glory to me. We had a business, we had two kids, we were buying our own house in the hills and we had discovered the exoticism of overseas travel.
So that was 1983 in a nutshell. Lots more happened in that watershed year but these are the main points that stand out for me.
