Missing in Action

It has been awhile since I last blogged (November 2009) but I have a good excuse.

I decided to abandon this blog and work on a Sharpie blog (closed and entries posted below), but I failed miserably keeping up with the blog. But I have an excellent excuse! I ended up writing a book instead

RAGE A Sharpie's Journal - Melbourne 1974-1980
Rampage with Julie Mac and the Sharpies on a grouse adventure as they fight, punch and kick through their turbulent teenage years on the unsuspecting streets of 1970s Melbourne. It was a time when bolting from the cops, stooging the ticket inspectors, drinking spewing, pashing and rooting where all in a nights work for this unique Australian sub-culture.

The first print run is currently available from
http://skinsnsharps.com/store

The book would not have been possible without the support from my Sharpies, friends and artistic fairy godfathers from Careless Navigator and Skinsnsharps, well maybe I should call them Tiki Godfathers, they probably wouldn't be comfortable in a pink tutu like our Bobby pictured here during ugly/happy hour on the Gold Coast.

I will attempt to blog regularly, but there are plenty of old posts here to trap new readers.

Or stay in touch via Facebook
Julie Mac or
Sharpies, Sharps and Skins a Melbourne 60-70s Subculture

Finding Jacko

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

When I was 13 the first real Sharpie I met was Jacko from the Box Hill Sharps. I met him out the front of Iceland one night and as hung out of his mates car, he shouted that he would meet me there the following week.

The following week I looked out for him but didn't see him till the end of the night, he was walking past the kiosk and I skated over and said hi. We skated around for awhile and at the end of the night he wrote his phone number on my hand and we arranged to meet at Croydon Flea Market the next day.

We would meet up at Icelands or the market and talk on the phone a few times a week. He introduced me to his friend Iggy (after I spotted him in his photo album and said "I want that one") and Iggy and I went out together over the summer at the end of 78.

In 1981 I started working and in 1984 broke up with my Sharpie boyfriend from St Albans and decided to bury my sharpie days. I had my tattoo removed (two little sharpie stars on my shoulder blade) and got a job as a secretary in the marketing department for a multi national company. Other than the occasional chance meeting, eventually I lost touch with all my old mates.

In the early 2000s I googled Jacko, he has an unusual name but the results were not what I expected, it showed someone with the same name working for a government dept. and the name was mentioned in articles with a politician. Because he was more inclined to be an anarchist, I wasn't sure if it was him, so didn't bother making contact. In 2005, I tried again and found the website of a blues musician, he was thanking Jacko for finding him a copy of a rare blues CD. Given that Jacko was a music snob and collector of rare vinyl LPs, I emailed the musician and asked if it was Jacko from Box Hill and if it was, could he tell him an old mate, Julie Mac says hello.

The next day I got an email from Jacko and surprise surprise, it was him working at the Government Dept. He only lived two suburbs away from me in the Western suburbs so we arranged to meet for dinner. Even though we hadn't seen each other for nearly 30 years, it was like no time had passed. I find with the friends that I made when I was a teenager, because I already knew and trusted them, its very easy to pick up where we left off.

Jacko and I then set about finding Andrea, our other best friend. When we found her and the three of us were together, it was like old times.

Then we set out to see who else we could find.

Sam

After going to the Skinsnsharps exhibition with Jacko, I offered to scan my photos for Sam Biondo. I got the photos together and wrote as many names and dates as I could remember. It bought the memories flooding back as I saw pics of my old mates. I started to scan the photos and they were not coming out as well as I hoped, so then I thought about it. If I died tomorrow, what's the bet my husband and daughter would throw my albums in a dumpster with my poodle, antiques and all my other stuff that they hate - which is pretty much everything I own.

I decided to donate my albums and scrap book to Sam. Partly because the State Library has been interested in his collection and it makes me feel very special thinking that one day my teenage crap will be classed as historically important.

I contacted Sam and organised to meet up at Gloria Jeans in Spencer Street in December 2008. We had a great time going through the pics, ephemera and stories. He gave me a skinsnsharps T shirt/poster and some prints of the sharpie artwork from the exhibition.

Sam asked me to write a bio so he could put it with the pics on his site and with anything he uses in the next exhibition. I found I had trouble writing it, well not so much with the writing, but how it sounds.

My association with the Melbourne Sharps was through my boyfriend, a handsome Eastside Sharp called Skeeta. Then we broke up and I had a summer romance with Billy Idol look alike, Iggy from the Westside Sharps. Summer finished and I started going out with Chap a 6'2" blue eyed hulk from the St Albans Sharps.

What a bio, bloody hell, how does that make me sound? May as well say "Julie Mac was a sharpie from 1976-1978/9. She was a mole that went through three sharpie gangs!"

But seriously, sharpie gangs were really not a place for 'moles', there was a very real danger of the guys using the girl for 'gangies' (gang bang)

I figure after I write a few more entries for this blog, my bio might write itself.

On a mission from God

Post from Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Earlier this year I joined Facebook and slowly started building my friends list. Eventually I got in touch with some kids from my high school and each time I found a new one I would look through their friends list to see if I recognised anyone.

One girl was friends with Craig S, a boy that was a couple of years older than me that lived locally. I first met him when I was 11 and we took an instant dislike to each other, I am pretty sure I started it at the local milk bar. He was trying to open the glass door at the same time as me and I didn't like the look of surprise on his face, so I called him a 'perve' which was a word I had recently learned from No. 96. From that moment on we were mortal enemies and would swear and snarl at each other when our paths crossed, especially smoking under the pine trees next to the railway line at the top of Sherlock Road.

When I had to start high school I was a bit nervous as he already went to that school. Other than throwing yonnies (rocks) at me on the way home from school along the train line and slagging a big greenie on my school dress the battle didn't have time to get too ugly as I started going out with one of the toughest of the Croydon boys and was immediately granted instant respect from the boys at my school and in the area.

I looked through Craig's friends and saw he was friends with Dani and Peter W, a Melbourne Sharpie couple I knew from Iceland in 1976 (when Pete bashed my Croydon Boy boyfriend). I was happy to see that they had married and were still together. Because I didn't think they would remember me, I didn't bother contacting them, but I looked through Dani's photos to see if she was in contact with Deb, I was pretty sure she would remember me as we spent a bit of time together at Rose Tattoo, the footy and a few other places. I found Debs profile and I sent her a message saying "Hi from Julie Mac", I have a picture of you sharpie dancing at Rock on the River in 1977.

She messaged me back and I could feel the paranoia dripping through the monitor. Who are you? How did you find me? Are you sure its me? I sent her the pic and a pic of me and Skeeta my Eastern sharpie boyfriend from that time. She was still really suspicious over the next couple of email/facebook exchanges as she couldn't remember us. She added Jacko because she remembered him and messaged the Whitesides' on Facebook and Pete added me. He got online and started asking after our old mates from 76/77. They had moved to Queensland and hadn't heard much of anyone since. As he listed the names I told him what I knew of each person and which ones I might be able to find. Dani and Pete were due to come to Melbourne in July 2009 and he wanted to organise a re-union with as many old friends as we could find.

Pete started searching for names on facebook and quickly found Donny B so I added him and the three of us started our mission.

Pete asked after Stef and Dave, I passed on Stef's email address which I had after seeing him at a Westside Sharps 40th birthday in 2002 and then inviting him to my 40th in 2003. It was easy to find Stef's apprentices JLK, Jenny, Linda and Caryn as I was still on Caryn's Christmas card list.

He then asked after Skeeta. I had recently found his two sisters on Facebook, so I contacted them, they gave me his mums phone number and she gave me Skeeta's number so I passed that on. That put us in touch with Mick and Kim also.

Then it was Hayden. I rang Katie S, I girl I used to know from Croydon and asked her if she knew Hayden's daughters names as he had married the older sister of our friend Lisa that was murdered. Katie gave me the names and I found one on Facebook, I sent her a message asking if her dad was Hayden and if so, could he please contact Pete on his mobile so he could meet up for dinner. It was his daughter and she said her dad would love to come. One we found Hayden, we then had contact with his brother Darryl and his wife Connie (she gave me my first genuine Conte cardigan when she retired from being a sharpie)

Col Creed was easy to find as he was a legendary tattooist in the Dandenong area.

Bobby had an unusual surname and I remembered the country town he grew up in so we looked to see if any of his family still lived there. After a deliberate red herring by Bobby's sisterinlaw, Don rang his mum and she gave Don Bobby's number.

Col had seen Phil P at his workplace in Fountain Gate, so Deb went there looking for him. He didn't work there anymore, but because Deb is such a sweetie, one of his old workmates gave her Phil's phone number.

It took me five calls before I found Woodsy. I rang Chap from St Albans and asked if he knew where Woodsy was, he said 'no, ring Stef'. I rang Stef and for a change he was nice to me, last time he saw me at a funeral he said "what are you fucken doin here". I looked at the nice car he was locking and said 'get fucked, did you steal that car?' Stef said he didn't know where to find Woodsy, but to ring Cutugno, so I looked up his phone number in the book. I went to their wedding 27 years ago, so I was glad when Cutugno's wife remembered me and she told me the suburb where Woodsy lived. The first number I rang was the wrong one, but the second number I tried, Woodsy answered. I said "Hi Wayne, it's Julie Mac, we are having a reunion for the Melbourne Sharps". Cool as a cucumber he said, "Yeah, I've been thinkin about that"!

Since then we have had five reunions in six months and we are making plans to track down a few more of the gang.

Photos taken of our reunion at Young and Jacksons (before we got thrown out) are on this site
http://skinsnsharps.com/galleries/sharpie-reunion-at-young-and-jackson-2009

Record for posterity

Original posting date Thursday, November 26, 2009

In 2003 I saw a post on www.schoolfriends.com.au from a boy in my class asking for school photos as some of his personal belongings had been destroyed, so I sent him a scanned copy of Croydon High School Year 10D 1978.


He was living in Gympie Qld and was the father of 11 children. His life had been very interesting - he had a couple of near death experiences after being hit by a tram/car and truck on separate occasions and being mugged and left destitute in a foreign land. He was left with an acquired brain injury.

We were not friends at school, my main memory of him was one needlework class. There was a huge huntsman on the wall and the girls were screaming. I went and got a straw broom from the Home Ec room and managed to get the spider on the broom. As I carried the broom and spider through the corridor, he saw me. He made eye contact, walked up to the broom and kicked it. Hard. The spider went flying into the air and then landed on and scurried down behind the lockers. The stupid girls that were following me and the spider started screaming again so I cracked the shits and bashed him repeatedly over the head with the broom, chasing him up the corridor until he escaped down the stairs.

In 2004 I was visiting a friend in nearby Rainbow Beach, so I caught the bus to Gympie to visit him and give him a copy of the Year 12 Year book. It is hard to describe how happy he was to get that book. We discussed our lives and both talked about writing a book, I told him I had a bit of work on the net and he advised me to get hard copies and soft copies of my work and not to entrust it to the net.

A few months later I received an email from his brother. He had suffered a seizure and had passed away as a result. His brother hacked into his hotmail account and sent me a message to let me know. So now he has gone and those stories are left untold.

The recent interest in Australian Sharpies (not to be confused with S.H.A.R.P (Skin heads against racial prejudice) started in 2001 with the exhibition (mentioned in Parliament) by Blackburn South Sharp, Peter Robinson, of his photos from 1971-1977. It prompted me to get out my albums and scrapbooks and I donated them to a very worthy cause. Sam Biondo from www.skinsnsharps.com has been collecting memorabilia from the sharpie days for the last three decades. While Sam was never a sharpie, he was forward thinking and realised the part Sharpies played in Australian youth culture.

Other than my albums/scrapbook, which I had un or subconsciously 'hidden' away, I hadn't kept anything, it was a part of my life that I had deliberately forgotten about.

Over the last few years I have done some cyber detective work and found some old sharpie mates. It dredged up a lot of stuff from the past and it took a few sleepless nights and teary days to process the memories and emotion into some form of adult acceptance. Using Facebook we tracked down other old mates and have had 6 reunions in a 5 month period.

We started a Facebook group and I trawl the net looking for anything of relevance to that period.

Just in case one day Facebook disappears into the black hole of cyber space, I am going to take my classmates advice and record things that I find here and back it up with a soft and a hard copy.

Sam's next exhibition will be :
Sunday 4th of July 2010 at:
The Kustom Lane Gallery
8 Luton Lane, Hawthorn
www.skinsnsharps.com