WHAT COMES TO MIND … ARCHIE ROACH AND FINDING THE ONE
- 5 hours ago
- 8 min read
Here we have the next instalment in What Comes To Mind, an alternative series in the Wind Back Wednesday space, based on the work of the brilliant photographer Stuart Spence.
Each time, he will dig out a photo from his archives going back almost 50 years and challenge me to respond with what comes to mind when I look at that image. It might be serious or ridiculous, personal or historical but it will be inspired by a photo I’ve not seen before, and maybe even unseen by anyone beyond Stuart himself.
This week, Archie Roach understands it.
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“The first time I saw Ruby, it were like a movie/While I was walking down the stairs/She was standing in the foyer/When I first saw her/And I first saw her standing there/And I asked where do the people go/And she said just follow me and I will show you/The way.” (Old So And So)
THE OFFICE FLOORS in Centrepoint Tower were huge. Seemingly going on for miles north-to-south and wider across than the whole of Sacred Heart Villawood, my primary school of two rows of five classes, a tiny library, tuck shop and offices, facing each other across a dark grey, uneven “playground” that was not so much built as dropped between them as a test of everyone’s knees, elbows and any other part of your body that came into scraping distance.
(We weren’t supposed to run there of course, the nuns told us; that was to be done out on the “oval” – an unkempt patch of grass that didn’t deserve the name and certainly was not shaped to justify the name. But really, as if we wouldn’t run across that patch of gravel. Ironically, when I broke my collarbone for the first time it was on the oval, not the tarred killing zone, so what did you know Sister Ferdinand?)
Anyway, back at Centrepoint, if you were sat nearer the middle than the windows – whose views went out beyond the Red Rooster Line, beyond the western train line, beyond the “oh, you’re from there?” line – or on the inside of the rows and rows of filing cabinets, natural light always seemed an optional extra. And as a junior clerk a year out of university (a drop-out from law school, so not even a graduate), the only optional thing I had was to look up.
Which I did, standing next to Mark, another curly-haired refugee from the Catholic schools of Sydney’s outer west, who claims he never heard my jaw drop to the floor but definitely saw the aftermath. I looked up and watched as a woman with an astonishingly regal posture and confident jawline, carrying some files and looking neither left nor right, up or down, seemed to glide along at pace. The gliding was in part because she was wearing a long, narrow skirt whose back was a series of horizontal buckles of punishing heaviness that nonetheless seemed more science than S&M.
How did that work? How did she move? Who was she?
To this day I don’t know why I said this, have no memory of the thought forming, let alone the basis for it. And even then, and certainly since, I knew it was a nonsense thing to say. After all, what was this, some dodgy midday movie with Ricardo Montalban being a cheap version of Claude Rains? A Love Boat episode? Still, I did say it. I did say to Mark, “she’s the one”. What?, he said, probably not even paying attention. Who? Do you know her name? What are you on about you idiot?
Naturally, pathetically more than comically, I didn’t actually speak with her. Even after I found out her name and that she worked in a distant nation-state further down the floor that had some relationship with my unit. How do you talk to girls? Well, first Bernard you could try, oh I don’t know, talking: it’s crazy enough that it might just work.
The best I could manage was when I took a call that needed to be sent on, I would stand up and see if I could see her and if she was not on the phone already, quickly transfer the caller before someone else picked up. And when she answered – Oh wow, what a voice And she spoke like some right and proper educated type. Bloody hell. – I would hurriedly offer a stammered “Hi, I’ve got a call for you, I’ll put it through”, which she would politely accept and I’d sit back down, wiping a thin sheen of sweat from my face.
Like I said, pathetic.
It took my short-term secondment to the Bankstown office later in the year, a two-month period in which she would fill my role, to force a proper exchange as I handed over the job and – purely to be helpful, of course – made sure she had my number in case anything came up. And even then, my oh so cunning ploy was not to actually say anything too personal but to leave in a drawer a piece of attempted comic writing I’d done about various characters on the floor which I hope might at least pique her curiosity. – oh, did I leave it there? Silly me. I wonder how that happened!
And after that … well, who knows? Like I said, pathetic.
When my breathing/When my breathing is quiet again/Feels just like a desert after rain/Yes, yes, yes/I love you and thank you so much (Love In The Morning)
Did it work though? Well, yes and no, sorta.
On my return to the city, which eventually involved a move from Centrepoint to the narrower, shorter – no view to the ‘burbs here – QBE building down Pitt Street, she and I fell into the same group: a bunch of early 20somethings and a couple of really old blokes (in their late 20s!) who would go drinking on a Friday, socialise on a weekend and go to gigs during the week. We were initially dotted across Sydney, miles from each other, and yet every male in the group found it made perfect sense to drive her home to Avalon after late nights even if it might take another hour to get home to Chester Hill (and later Petersham) or Whalan or Maroubra or Lane Cove from there.
Which she thought was super generous and thoughtful of us and not at all a sign that as well as being thoughtful and generous some of us might also appreciate the extra hour without competing claims on her attention. Or, you know, impress her a little bit. Sure, everyone else could see it – and look, even the football gods could, given she too was a Manly fan, as if she couldn’t be more ideal – and anyone who had the misfortune to hear me at length (hi Mum, sisters, friends, strangers on a bus) or see the lyrics I was writing (sorry John), knew it too. But not her. For two years.
Two years of gentle hints, increasingly pointed gifts (from the mixtapes to Billy Bragg tickets to Bragg’s Talking With The Taxman About Poetry), outright declarations (including at my 21st, at which point she promptly left – because her ride home was leaving then, she always maintained, and how else would she get back to Avalon at that time of night, and not at all because I’d used the L word when we were “just friends”), occasional forays into other relationships which foundered in the shadow of “her”, subtle insinuations into everyday life as the two of us would see gigs and movies and plays together, talking for hours afterward in my car or her new flat in Coogee. Loads of talk - as Archie sings, we couldn't stop talking, as we were walking - and tears before bedtime.
Actual tears, including the night after a party one of our friends tucked me into his brother’s top bunk as I drunkenly sobbed – dramatic much? – that this was the end of times.
Except it wasn’t, though it took another absence – mine, on holiday, sparing her – to make the obvious irrefutable even to someone whose main worry was losing a friend, not the questionable benefits of gaining a boyfriend when those were a dime a dozen. Just watch a midday movie for proof.
She met a boy/Who kind of knew/Some of the things that she was going through/But he was confused/So he ran away/She found him again/And here she is today. (From Paradise)
The songs that Archie Roach is most known for are those with that hurt/beautiful voice singing the stories of children taken away, of mothers left crying and wondering, of people scattered on the wind and taking solace in whatever form, destructive or otherwise, could help, coupled with the songs chronicling the slow, painful rebuilding of families and clans and individuals.
They are some of the best we’ve had in Australia: powerful and simultaneously brutal to and soothing of the heart in their directness and humanity, and only the most soul-corrupted One Nation/Alan Jones/leader writers of The Australian types would fail to be moved.
But the songs that really found me, and the parts of interviews he gave that really resonated with me, were the ones about his wife, Ruby Hunter, a songwriter and artist of equal stature who he credited with not just saving him but remaking him. In those statements and songs, you can feel the urgency of the need that preceded finding each other, and the depth of the work they did to and for each other. And the reason he could smile.
In those things this hardly closeted romantic heard some of my own story of a woman accepting a damaged man who was keen to remodel rather than live on insecurities; a flawed man who wanted to be better but had to learn how to shed, or at least start by modifying the worst of a sharp tongue and quick temper, let go of a residue of religious guilt and outsider chip on the shoulder. And in there too I saw someone else who knew that, for example, the confidence to upend life – say, by giving up a pedestrian but well-paying job to start again in a new career as a journalist on bargain basement money – on the basis that all this would be borne together, was a gift.
And just as much, maybe more, I could hear in Archie and Ruby the joy of a love shared and fulfilled, how each is changed by those very things.
When I see you/When I see you in the morning light/Then I know everything will be alright/Yes, yes, yes/'Cause darling, I love you so (Love In The Morning)
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