More visions of thylacines float through Lindsay Arnold’s imagined Tasmania where the elusive marsupial was adopted by the colonists, becoming a many-talented and often mythical beast. Here more thylacines emerge from the fog of the past in guises possibly probable and patently not.
Lindsay Arnold recalls a rowdy performance (audio above) still remembered by many Australian spectators of the local jazz scene which was fortunately captured on tape:
This recording from Joe Lane’s cassette recorder at a pub in Port Melbourne in 1992 has a notorious reputation among musicians who’ve heard it.
Lindsay Arnold recalls a rowdy performance still remembered by many Australian spectators of the local jazz scene which was fortunately captured on tape:
This recording from Joe Lane’s cassette recorder at a pub in Port Melbourne in 1992 has a notorious reputation among musicians who’ve heard it.
I was just ‘sitting in’ on drums with old pals Joe ‘Bop’ Lane (vocal) and Serge Ermoll (piano) on tour from Sydney, Mark Simmonds (tenor sax), all now ‘late’ and Jeff Kluke (bass).
After the first tune, Serge, a Russian maniac full of mind-altering substances including vodka, decided to give the audience a jazz history lesson — after one of my finest spontaneous solo efforts — and this became edgy ‘street theatre’ when a woman in the audience dared to heckle him, so we retaliated with Miles Davis’ “So What.”
Yea verily, a piece of Oz Jazz History, which Joe explained at the end that I was a part of. It could even be seen or heard as a precursor of hup hap hop pip. Half the audience left before the end.
And here’s a YouTube video of a Joe Lane performance in Sydney; while the quality’s not the best (these were the early days of camcorders) Joe’s genius shines right through:
Old-fashioned music with an old-fashioned twist as Cappy Crepuscule and his Rhythm Boys reprise a classic old Australian song in their uniquely idiosyncratic ‘Like it or not and see if we give a hoot’ fashion, with illustrations by Emile Mercier, Sydney’s most popular cartoonist from the 1940s to the 1980s, together with paintings and drawings by Linzee Nold and Michael Armstrong.
The Thylacine (or the Tasmanian Tiger) was Tasmania’s top predator but it was hunted to extinction with the last known of the species dying at the Hobart Zoo in 1936, seen here in this photo from the Australian National Museum. Its passing came about through farmers’ suspicions that it preyed on livestock and bounty hunters were authorised.
But what if, wonders Lindsay Arnold, instead of exterminating we’d succeeded in domesticating? Here’s the first series of moments showing the elusive marsupial in the wild and in its imagined role as a desirable companion animal. Many more to come as Lindsay Arnold’s thylacine dreamworld moves between the possible and the outright weird.
Keith’s story takes two hundred and fifty pages. It starts with a symbolic childhood memory, involving the gift of a small drum from a mysterious uncle Stan, who he never sees again, but he is abruptly reminded of him in middle age when at the zoo a Komodo Dragon stares at him. He thinks he is getting cosmic messages. He needs help. His life is a mess. He is on the skids. Then a rhinoceros charges him, damaging the bars. He goes to water. What does it mean? He is puzzled and distracted, unsure where to turn.
After a few pages he visits a ‘cousin’, Cuthbert, who knew his uncle Stan, and in fact claims to be Stan’s grandson. Keith is sure he’s being contacted by Stan on the astral plane, messages about animals that he just can’t quite grip. Cuthbert distracts him with stories of Stan and his legendary work in circuses. This Stan Field could hypnotise rhinoceroses, and even once made one disappear. He was Showbiz Royalty in his time, so his cousin Cuthbert tells Keith. This first tedious intrusion of the doubtlessly figmentatious Uncle Stan is about 30 pages long, and features Errol Flynn.
It is on just such another astral impulse, with no reason to continue his miserable existence, homeless and unemployed, destitute in the big city, and with nothing to stop him, that Keith quixotically quits the concrete jungle and heads for the tropical north. This real jungle idyll turns out to be a continual struggle to survive in basic conditions, marked by constant encounters with species of wild Nature nothing like those depicted in tourist brochures. Despite this, he stays living there for want of choice. His basic needs are met; it is a languid life. It takes many months and about 60 pages for him to leave. It is possible that he comes to realise that no creatures are specifically hunting him for food or sport. He just happens to be there while they carry on their normal lives, something that he does not have. They still scare him. He abandons his quest for answers from animals, and drives back to town.
He goes almost straight back to the zoo. The same Komodo Dragon singles him out from the crowd to stare hungrily at him. He rushes again to tell Cuthbert about it, and thence ensues another intrusion of Stan’s showbiz stories, albeit only a short one, which however explains a lot to Keith about dragons, just as he’d learnt about rhinoceroses from Stan’s experience. Be that as it may, it does bring the book to the end of its first part, about the halfway mark.
The whole second half of the story is about a dog. Readers should not succumb to trepidation or expectations of boredom at this blunt statement. Neither is this dog a plain ordinary pooch, nor is its story immune from penetration by Uncle Stan, who fetches up at the heel of the hunt as the motivatory spark and resolution of the entire tale from beginning to end. Everything falls into place. The “drum” is, In fact, according to information mystically conveyed to Keith, that Stan has been pretending to be Cuthbert all along, and is actually Keith’s father! Figure that out.
Keith’s luck serendipitously turns in the city. He is housed comfortably, and employed in his chosen craft. It happens almost so smoothly It does not seem natural. The unsought reality of an intimate relationship — with Charlie, the huge dog that is foisted upon him — lifts him from his delusional condition, so that he is able to repudiate the continued Cosmic interference of his mythical uncle, and he can perhaps settle down contentedly, almost like a real person in a real world, a civilian. References to the Church of the SubGenius, chapter and verse, indicate exactly where this plot has come from and where it is going. Life is, after all, an Enigma. Ask the animals.
Emile Mercier was possibly Australia’s best-loved cartoon humourist.
He created many satirical characters and parodies of comic heroes of the period, all presented in his unique Australian colloquial style.
His serialised stories ran through such a diversity of comic book titles from wartime through the 1940s that it seems unlikely that many readers could have followed every episode.
The collections in these books are a partial attempt to redress this, and perhaps help to rescue some of Mercier’s work from the unjustified oblivion which ensnares so much of our “popular culture”.
Five complete big serials from the 1940s
ISBN 9780648099642
Six big stories from the 1940s
ISBN 9780648099659
Welcome to Baznold. It is about comics.
My own graphic work shown here, beginning with the two Empanelled compilations, was initially made into books so that I could see it all in one place. I have since added further books of my own, and now that of others:
Three books reproducing most of Emile Mercier’s comic strip work are now available for the first time here. A taste is given of the contents of each, a total of 668 pages. Please see the Mercier page.
The complete 1940s ‘Professor Bluntbrain’ series by Tasmanian artist Des Conrades, in 8 episodes, from Pacific Pictorial comics.
This is part of an ongoing attempt to save some of our important cultural heritage from the obscurity in which it has languished too long. Is that not what collecting is, or should be about?
Slipping Through the Cracks tells a late friend’s inspiring story of homelessness in 1950s Sydney, an apposite tale to be told and heard in today’s uneasy world. Glossy Colour Hardback. 168 pages.
The Quest for Gremlins is a 120-page uncategorisable shiny fantasy regarding the mental state of a cartoonist named Nold who is haunted by his own creations.
My recently completed handsome big 264p. hardback full colour book will also be available soon: Keith’s Confederacy of Critters. It embraces elements of “Keith”s questionable biography involving his legendary Uncle Stan, a large dog and the Church of the SubGenius. Is that not enough?
A visual interpretation of a stolen childhood. With over 100 images, Lindsay Arnold has drawn intense scrutiny to the unjust emotional and physical suffering of a sensitive boy trapped in the cruel thrall of a heartless social zeitgeist which prevailed throughout mid 20th century Australia.
No mere moral fable, this is unvarnished social history, and a cautionary tale for future generations.
What is happening here? Why did these bizarre events take place?
Continue reading Slipping Through the Cracks
