Here be Beasts.

This is Jed. He was a Border Collie cross and whomever his sire may have been, t'was a beast of mythical proportions.
In this photo we have: suspicious stain, innocent puppy, my sister's record collection and a chair I never remember owning.

He was my dog and I was his couch/stick thrower/chef/adoring fan.

I still miss him.

Harbourside Glimpses.

Damn, I own some freakishly unflattering photos.

We first met on a date in the period of string ties and paisley shirts. She was a mathematical genius and I was a dippy artist.

As a couple we shared a common history of five and a half years, a tenure of turmoil, happiness and eventual indifference.

Our continued friendship faltered and then ended with her betrothal to one of my friends not too long enough after our breakup.

This photo was taken during a family holiday at a coastal caravan park where her stern matriarchal grandmother snored explosively in the same room with us every night. This may go some way to explain the lacklustre hair, or perhaps it was just another symptom of the eighties - corporate greed damning humankind to split ends and frizz.
The composition and layout all scream "mutley was here".

Brother-In-Style

Spider. My bluegrass redneck-lovin' Charlie Daniels Band brother-in-law and his hair.


During any occasion held at my sister's first house, small clumps of puffy-jacketed pod-women would congregate, all the while briskly rubbing their scratchy plastic sleeves with nubby little fists and comment on how cold the weather was. I assume they were local - from within our solar system - and were in some manner related to one another telepathically.

Front and center is the father of my eldest sister's sons, Spider. Refusing to acknowledge the existence of temperatures all together he disdained the use of shoes, no matter how inclement. He would soundly berate me for acknowledging the existence of music beyond a certain time period or geographic local, scoffing hairily at my Pixies cd collection.

We still have a very genial relationship, I get to laugh at his wig-like fulsomeness and he quaffs port, decrying my taste in music.

If you are going to linger unobtrusively in the background of a photo, take note that matching your environment to nigh on the almost exact same lumpen tone of brown is highly recommended.

Puberty Blues.

Scenario: A soft focus screen wipe.
Soundtrack: Embarassingly wistful sigh.


As a young, pimply teenager assaulted with the usual slew of rampaging hormones, I had the good fortune to be friends with a family of tall, loud and happily welcoming Dutch folk.
They had four strapping sons - a word I wouldn't normally use unless it successfully carried all the implied masculine trappings of a blacksmith's sweaty bicep - all of whom were handsome, bearded, athletic and intelligent.

For the sake of spending time in their company I forswore my naturally sulky teenage slothlike angst and learnt how to ski, surf, kneeboard, hike and go bowling.

These two are the oldest and youngest of the brothers. Here, I was idly swinging my gangly legs off the tray of the jeep after surfing Phillip Island in harshly chill weather, when we both drew our cameras simultaneously.

Crapulent Household Chores.

Freak memories of share household days spark my fear of an overly follicular planet.


These gentlemen here are part of a five-person household from when I first moved to Chippendale, a ramshackle suburb of Sydney. I shared a bathroom with them on the second floor of an enormous terraced house that was filled with an unholy array of comic-related paraphernalia. To my eternal disgust I would often step out of the shower to find myself covered in their hair, it being tightly wrapped around my throat, across my torso and curled lovingly around my groin and thighs.

No amount of yelling in abject horror would remove them.

For the sake of anonymity, let's call them Psimon and Psam.
Psimon was the "eternal stoner" of our household - of which there must always be one to maintain a share-house cliché. No matter what time of day or night it was his room burbled with the gentle rumble of a bong being drawn. In a scary moment of over exuberance one evening he spent some time jumping up and down in the kitchen. As he jumped and clapped and laughed he was stopped briefly mid-flight as his head went through the ceiling. When he fell to the floor, we were showered with crumbling plaster, dust and whatever decades old crud was trapped in the space between.

This wasn't solely his fault. Our "rock musician" flat mate had recently exploded our upstairs toilet, and left the repairs to a "friend" who had poured the remaining concrete excess down the drain in the center of the bathroom floor. The plumbing-related problems this caused us in future times were grotesque and manifold, such as the noticeable weakening of the kitchen ceiling plaster and a simultaneous regurgitation of the contents of all the drains in the the house of their old and rotting contents.

Psam, well, he was our "comics entrepreneur". His Gibson cyberpunk-inspired business acumen in comics was only exceeded by a debilitating naiveté in real world interactions. I have fond memories of talking him down only hours after he lost his virginity.
Despite having an iron and ironing board in his bedroom of mountainous calamity, he also possessed the largest collection of over-sized, blousy, wrinkled white shirts I have ever seen.

The Pension of Wrath.

The scene - a bar, with free drinks upon which this ladies club hath descended like harpies feasting upon the flesh of the battlefield dead.


Okay, this is another incidental image that plagues my collection. I cannot even remember if it was I who took the photo.
It appears to have been taken surreptitiously, the camera sneakily positioned between the two foreground objects. This is obviously to prevent the full attention of the luncheon club's wrath from pecking out the offending eyes of the photographer.

Unfortunately this has cropped out the conversation to the right, leaving only a gesture of bitter strangulation by the withered claw still in shot.

Painting the Town Pink.

To be accurate - this is not a photo of mine, but an inspired piece of early nineties propaganda that only Western Australian artist Matthew Jackson can truly attest to the goings-on within.


Which, in turn makes my annotation brief.
What can I say? - I was taken with the era-specific colours, postural composition and abundance of hair.

A Follicular Vacation.

A shining beacon to amateur home photography containing an accomplished example of unbrushed hair.


Who are these people?
Why are they playing chess?
Was there nothing more interesting on the nearby television?
How did the mysterious photographer manage to include Flaring, Blur, Over-exposure and Ugly Insipid Content all in one single extraordinary image?

I know not who these people are, nor the aswers to the above questions or to the multitudes further posed by this photograph.

Party Etiquette.

Who takes a camera to a House party?
Surely it's a criminal offence to one's pupils.

Of the people in this photo, I know only the girl in the center front. For a short while she flatted with me, as did the long string of boyfriends she had.
Being quite sweet and very blonde, I have nothing but relatively fond memories of her.

The same cannot be said of the guy to her left - of whom I have no memory at all.

It is the tableau in the background that truly caught my attention here. I believe we have unwittingly captured the young lady to the right in full-flight talking about her most favourite subject.
Herself.

Fiendish Denizens of the Comfortable Couch.

The demon on the left is a very old friend, giving a reluctant sanguine glower for the camera.

The guy on the right. Well... that's me.
While at the time I was certain I'd executed a passable job of ghoulish fiend, I see now that I actually bear a more than uncanny resemblance to the Bride of Frankenstein. And - good grief - that's all my own hair.

My mother chose to photograph us in a setting that truly befit our hellish origins.
Her lounge room.
Note the many shades of floral beige that bedeck this unseemly demonic plane.

Be home before Midnight.

Yikes!

This was prior to going a ball, possibly seconds before the taxi arrived. I suspect that I was heavily addicted to balls, as I went to quite a few while I was at university.

The young lady in the photo, despite her demure posture, is having the time of her life. Never one to mar her features with a grin, she would signal her giddy excitement through a complex ritual of lip-pursing and eye-squinting.
She eventually married a man by the name of Leonard Pickles.

The gentleman on the phone was my most boring friend ever - a coveted status still unchallenged.
When my first girlfriend and I eventually broke up, he suddenly married her, leaving me guilt-free to adopt a hedonistic lifestyle of interesting people and gay bars.

In the Era of Big Big Hair.

Oh god, my 21st birthday.


This is of two couples, twin brothers and their girlfriends - also sisters.

These boys were the skinniest people I've ever met, with faces like thin wedges of unfortunate pie, served with a huge dollop of hair.
Apparently I went to school with these lads, but according to an ancient heirarchically established schoolyard pecking order even nerdy losers like myself didn't recognise the possible existence of überübernerdy losers.

Through some exciting quirk of fate they both ended up dating sisters of an ex of mine, therefore, bafflingly, becoming acquaintances by proxy. We had absolutely nothing to say to each other, ever.
The universe sometimes works in painfully mysterious ways.

Snapshots from the Abyss.

In a fit of spring cleaning pique I recently raided my photo albums and edited them cruelly. Later, I retrieved several of the worst photos I had thrown out and reinterpreted them in a manner more fitting.


The girl in the back had hair. A veritable motherlode of hair.
We dated a couple of times, the very last time I escorted her to a university ball where I got really stoned with a mate and accidentally left her alone for several hours while I tried to find my way back into the building. Unsurprisingly, I performed my fair share of "being a brainless dickhead" when I was younger.

Her brother is seated in front of her. He was quite handsome, but suffered from a certain denseness I've only yet encountered in Engineering students.
The most amazing feat of student engineering I've ever heard involved a group of them getting pissed by the Yarra River, strip off and climb over each other to make an arsehole pyramid four people high. There is no irony in that statement.

Seated next to him is a guy that had the worst blonde hair frosting this side of the eighties. He barely registers as a blip on my memory radar, except that he used to futilely lust after the engineers sister. His shoes were bloody filthy.

Standing to the right is another victim of my selective memory. Whoever you are, thanks for bringing the beer.

In the foreground is a man whom appears to be retching up a furball onto a pillow.