Merlin's father.

Catherine's father.

The first time I ever laid eyes on the bastard was in a painting that was done not long after his funeral. I attended a meeting of the Labor Left faction one night in the winter of ’86. It was held in a long, concrete-walled conference room on the ground floor of the Allied’s union headquarters building in Red Hill. At one end of the room the entire wall was taken up with a mural showing all the wonders that unity of labour and trade-unionism could achieve, with particular emphasis on the Queensland that Bill Parris and the Allied had helped to build. It was, no doubt, one of those ‘art-in-working-life’ projects paid for by the Hawke Labor Government in the full flush of the high-spending years.

The mural was done in that peculiar ‘South-American revolutionary-naïve’ style that always makes me feel that the pre-schoolers have taken the nursery by storm with plastic bayonets and sickles, fresh from toil in the finger-painting fields and the plasticine mines. In the centre was a single figure, larger by far than all the rest, a tall, solidly built man with horn-rimmed glasses, iron grey hair and a dark, pointed beard, his hands raised in a gesture that was part liberation-theology Christ-like, part melodramatic music-hall magician. I had no idea who it was. I didn’t meet Catherine for another four years or so.

But the image stayed with me. It was so intensely religious, so genuinely iconic, yet at the same time without a real centre. He wasn’t a figure that held things together, or poured forth bounty from a cornucopia. He was the strange pseudo-Christ at the epicentre of a whirling chaos, and not the good kind that has beauty and underlying order and majesty. This was scattered and scatter-gunned. This was an explosion, destruction masquerading as creation. The figure in the centre sucked in power from all that appeared to come from him, undermining the meaning that was presumably intended.

It’s only in writing this that I’ve come to realise that the mural inspired a satirical character for a series of short stories I wrote later, during the time in the mid ‘90’s I worked for the Queensland Government, after Colleen had bent my head out of shape, and before Catherine and I moved in together.

The character was Shane Guevara, the artistic son of leftist South-American refugees who’d moved to Brisbane, and in particular to Logan City, a satellite town without an orbit, a cultural wasteland and economic sink-hole famous only for teenage pregnancy, petty crime and half-assed hot rods. Shane was a spray-painter with a strong ideological streak and a gift for the airbrush. A series of his best custom paint-jobs which larded the barebones plot were actually a series of extravagantly crafted in-jokes for those who had to suffer as a socially aware teenage boy during the 1970s in the land of Oz. They included the following:

"1976 Holden Monara, ‘Fall of Saigon’, 350 Chev, red and black, chrome sidepipes."

“Defeat of the Kuomintang” Mazda Bongo van, pale blue acrylic, 12 coats.

"William Morris Minor, 1100 cc, Paddy Hopkirk roll cage. Doilies everywhere."

1966 Ford Cortina, `Andreas Bader's Suicide', Holley 45, with extractors.

“Jane Fonda visits Hanoi as Barbarella”, 1972 Chrysler Valiant wagon, 245 hemi, bench seats, beige with matching trim.

Shane’s love interest was one Emily Wilding, a.k.a Em. A thin, passionate left-wing activist and vegetarian. Untidy dark hair, in a gamin 'Audrey Hepburn' cut that's grown out into a shoulder length straggle. Early 20's with green eyes, Em was a caricature of my own taste in women.

Em “rides a Vespa of indeterminate horsepower, and has an irrational fear of TAB outlets and bran mash. Is prone (sic) to throwing herself in front of things, police vans, local government. flunkies, lasagne.” All of which was an obscurantist clue as to the origins of her name. Emily Wilding Davison was the suffragette who famously threw herself in front of King George V’s horse at the 1913 Epsom Derby, and died of her wounds four days later.

Part of Shane’s genesis came from my own time in some really terrible garage bands as a teenager. A good mate and rhythm guitarist was Andy Ball, a red-haired spray painter who had a mural of the Meatloaf ‘Bat out of Hell’ album cover painted on a dodgy Ford Escort panel van in which the gearstick would come out of the gearbox while you were driving. He later bought and painted a black Ford Falcon identical to the Mel Gibson ‘Mad Max’ car.

The creative process is a strange thing. I sometimes wonder if the mural is still there. In the past I’ve fantasised about visiting and defacing it, with paint stripper or just some heavy black enamel. I try not to think about it too much. Better to bury the bastard in words than to get busted for civil disobedience.