Part 6 (1/2)

Bob Orr I called down the unending roadsteads to Motutapu & Rakino Islands, back behind the wave screen at Okahu Bay to Freemans and St Marys Bay. And as I called into the Schooner Tavern & sought the drear interior of the Wynyard Tavern & the sailors talk told me you had fitted and trimmed your craft against every dire prediction to set sail on that other sea, Bob, the one that has no name & no horizon & is drowning you.

Dave Spencer

lived his life like barbed-wire is what an old girlfriend said, man of the river. But then, life finished you off bit-by-bit though couldnt pluck out your dingo-bright eyes. Lets face it, you were pretty much an a.r.s.e-hole to those who knew you. Most of us just bash the trees without seeing the kangaroos.

You saw living mostly for what it is, a part-time job with b.u.g.g.e.r all security; the occasional softness of a woman, maybe, and of course grog by the bucketful.

What was it you saw at the last, Dave, when pa.s.sing through the ripped canvas of a thunderstorm, lightning flas.h.i.+ng down the Hawkesbury, a good belt of rain after?

You Dont Remember Dying

least, thats what the Old Londoner told me who didnt learn to relax till well past fifty, seated alongside his two mates: a Norwegian: Youre not the same person now as you were ten years ago.

And the Irishman: I like the music its the noise I cant stand. Each one, orphaned & aphoristic, deep into his sixties.

NZ born and much younger, I offered: Youre not the same person tomorrow as you were today. And then, To your arrival in Melbourne, they singly toasted.

(Great-grandfather, MacCormack, arrived here in 1851 & 26 years later, in 1877, set sail for Dunedin aboard the Ringarooma).

So our tale of the two cities unfolded: Sydney is get what you can. Melbourne, what have you got to offer & are we really interested. The afternoon floated by as did the trams with dry, asthmatic rush in this mellow town of bungalows & bra.s.s.

Graham Clifford

After THE DUKE HOTELs demolition, (opp. Perretts Corner) one last joke: one DB beer bottle ringed by ten green cabbages

as roseate or wreath for an empty lot. Close by, the mad bucketing fountain of Cuba Mall played on. Meanwhile, at his Manners street

studio above the music shop, Graham Clifford, renowned for his Figaro, ululated profoundly through the scales. A window framed

trolley-bus poles that, tacking, flared bluely along the wire. The maestros voice floated over harbour & city, capital & far-flung country,

far from Covent Garden. A 1930s London partied on amongst black & white photographs plastered to the wall above a battered Steinway.

On Brooklyn hills toi toi waved war plumes to the southerly gusts with unceasing applause.

Through a hundred, sunblown wintry afternoons

he coached opera singers, actors, newsreaders, plucked notes off the yellow stained keys: he guided, rolled golden vowels, before them.

Bruno Lawrence

Bruno, do you remember the Me and Gus stories, way before Barry Crump got keen, when a cow c.o.c.ky was a b.a.s.t.a.r.d you met on gravelly roads? Recall the nights playing community halls, and days making a few records, only to break a few more? Ricky Mays Jazz Combo, Max Merritt & The Meteors,

Quincy Conserve, plus, the all-stars-road-show Blerta1, travelling Aotearoa, through khaki paddocks, down thistle blown highways in that diesel bus t seasonal rhythms you doubtless gathered, drummer extraordinaire, on your final journeying off Cape Reinga, the spirit freed to ride the rain you backed

the loner to the last, death the bottom line to stave off cancer. Bruno, you did that thing. R & B, jazzman, film star (didnt Jack Nicholson say get on over to Hollywood?) but you preferred back blocks, sought small towns, river s.h.i.+ngle, the hollows of the land, and a home around Waimarama in the Hawkes Bay.

A s.h.i.+fting romantic, hoon & hangman, a real joker you played yourself sans bulls.h.i.+t in a heap of movies; The Wild Man, Ute, you leapt from life to art without a hitch; A Bridge To Nowhere, The Quiet Earth, how you loved women, warmth by the bus load, produced that cla.s.sic my 12 inch, record of the blues.