Richmond 1976(ish)

Okay, let's take a step back for a moment.

The trouble of course with pitching an idea in a hurry about a script that you've read one-and-a-half times is that it's a classic cart-before-the-equine-quadruped situation. Inevitably, you impose stuff from the outside and then spend the rest of the time trying to make those choices work. It's easy to say, 'Oh, let's move the action of the play to Australia and set in the 70s,' but is that a legitimate transposition?

Graham and Ray's world is Heathcote Williams' London of the 60s. Not swinging London, not Carnaby Street or Drury Lane or Abbey Road - all that cool, hipster, oh-so-mythologised snowglobe of an era is very much off to one side, casting a distant, lurid sidelight across the dull streets that our lads prowl about in.

This is a world of dingy flats, buildings greyed out by the grime of age. The streets aren't so much mean, as grubby and stupefyingly ordinary. Graham and Ray dive into the calculated uncertainties of the dog track and confected celebrity gossip like an escape tunnel from anonymity.

Funny, when you search the net for pics of that era, you mostly get celebrities and protestors. Google 'London pub 60s' you get quite a lot of pictures of Mick and Keith. Nevertheless, I imagine a less glamorous perspective looked like this:

It's a world of humdrum pubs filled with the same people having the same drink at the same table at the same time, day after day. It's the cheap excitement of the dog track, the betting shop, the form guide folded in the pocket. Unsurprisingly, none of it quite satisfies.

So. . . . . does it have an Australian equivalent? Let's simplify.

WORKING CLASS INNER CITY + GREYHOUNDS + PUBS = ?

Well, Melbourne in the 70s may well provide a pretty interesting echo. Turns out the dogs were a popular night out back then. A betting ring was built for greyhound meetings held at Arden St (North Melbourne Football Club's home ground) in the 50s and served until a £50,000 investment by the Melbourne Greyhound Racing Association saw it moved to a redeveloped Olympic Park in 1962, where 6000 punters braved the cold for the first meeting. In 1973, a new $6m 2200 seat grandstand was built for greyhounds, soccer and rugby. The new facilities provided the basis for the dishlickers' halcyon days which lasted until the 1980s.

And of course, just across Punt Rd from the Olympic Park precinct is Melbourne's own struggletown. . . Richmond. Forget the boutiques, cafes, antique stores and bourgeois townhouses that since the 1990s have made it another yuppie poster suburb. Richmond in the 70s was seedy. And a little bit dangerous.

And while Richmond feels lighter, more carefree than London, where the weight of hierarchies can bear down as heavily as the weight of centuries, Australia (particularly in the 60s and 70s) is equally oppressive in its cultural isolation, a sense of being becalmed in a regressive backwater, where to get tickets on yourself, stick your head up, is an invitation to have it knocked off.

What's more, Bendigo Street in Richmond was famous as the home of the Channel 9 studios. With some of the posher homes on Richmond Hill and across the Yarra in nearby Hawthorn and Kew, it seems entirely feasible that Graham and Ray could stumble across, and even keep regular tabs on, a whole bunch of minor celebs.

Am I making the case yet?

Something else. I lived in Richmond in the 90s, renting a little terraced house with an outdoor dunny in the shadows of the Lennox St housing trust flats. The house was at that time unrenovated but, judging by the explosions of post-modern interventions that were happening in the streets around us even then, I doubt it stayed that way. The All Nations Pub was our local, where you could get a T-bone that hung off the side of the plate, and Molly Meldrum lived a street away.

I lived there for two years but, funnily, the memories of Richmond that stay with me the most are someone else's. . . 

Des was a roof plumber that I worked for. He was Richmond born and bred, working class, intelligent, and very widely read. He was also as canny as they come and gave the impression that in his younger days he had rubbed shoulders with people at both ends of the social spectrum. He had also kept company with a set that you would comfortably class as criminals, who were part and parcel of Richmond's underbelly. Des clearly felt uncomfortable about those associations. He would often have one eye over his shoulder and spoke on a few occasions about having to avoid certain Tigers supporters who he would catch sight of at the footy. Des was both close-mouthed and loquacious and in a year or so of sitting next to him in the ute, I got enough fragments to put together a picture of an earlier life that probably put him within a whisker of prison.

One story always stayed me as emblematic of the dark side of Richmond. One night, Des was selected to go for a drive with one of the local leaders. He was 17 at the time and pretty sure that there was some sort of 'initiation' planned for him. They headed to a local footy oval, drove out to the middle and stopped there with the lights on. Before long, a second car arrived and parked opposite, so that the two sets of headlights illuminated the grass between them. More cars turned up, each one filling in the spaces until there was a circle of them, lighting up an arena between them with their headlights. The last couple of cars were crammed full of girls. Des was told to stand by the bonnet of his car, where a nervous young woman was sent over to him. She had no interest in him, nor he in her particularly, but they both knew what was expected of them, and along with everyone else, they did it on the bonnet in that floodlit circle. Afterwards, they all went to the pub and got hammered.

I haven't mentioned Sharon so far. She's Ray's girlfriend. Well, presumably. Although she never appears, she's mentioned three times in ways that are vast with implication. This is the first:

GRAHAM

Sharon.....she coming round.....bringing any food?

RAY

I didn’t ask her to. I didn’t give her any money.

GRAHAM

I never pay for sex, Ray, because Jesus Christ

paid for our sins.

I wonder if Sharon and Graham and Ray may have all found themselves on some footy oval, barely out of childhood, pressed into an act implicit with the suggestion of reward and punishment. I wonder if, at the onset of their adult lives, they had some part of their feelings for themselves and others erased. And I wonder if they went to the pub afterwards and got hammered.