All Balls and Glitter (6 page)

Sturt Street is the main road and there’s also a lake, called Lake Wendouree, with big gardens all around it, which the posh people – doctors, lawyers and so on – live near by. The lake’s all dried up now because of the drought, but it was once very beautiful. On family outings, we would feed the swans there and then have a picnic, or we would visit Hanging Rock, which wasn’t far away. There are vineyards and wineries around Ballarat too; it’s where Yellowglen makes its champagne.

All of us were excited about moving into the extended family home. It was a big house, with a tennis court and a swimming pool. Better still, we would each be getting a bedroom of our own.

Our upbringing in Ballarat was traditional on the whole. We always sat round the table at mealtimes, always said grace, and always had our chores to do. Chopping the wood was my responsibility because I was the only grown boy (Trent couldn’t really be expected to help, aged nought), as was the weeding and pulling up the carrots.

When we wanted vegetables, we went out and got them from the earth, which looking back was a wonderful bonus, although I never gave it much thought back then. It was just another aspect of normal life. After Dad retired from his life on the sea, he wanted to get back to the soil. He spent all his time outside, digging, hoeing and growing various plants.

We had quite a lot of land around the house so, as well as cultivating the vegetable patch, Dad bought a goat to keep in the south paddock. We called him Snowy because he had a white hide – originality not being our strong point, obviously. He was a mad
beast who used to ram anyone who got near him. I loved taking people down there because it would scare the pants off them when he started to run at them. He was on a chain, though, so he didn’t often catch anyone, but it wasn’t for the want of trying.

Snowy did escape once, and started eating Dad’s broad beans. We all chased him round the paddock, trying to grab him before he could do too much damage, which must have looked hilarious.

Dad was very anti-pets, but he kept Snowy because he was a four-legged lawnmower. When he’d finished grazing one patch, we’d move him on to the next. It was a very funny sight as Snowy would ‘mow’ in circular patches, leaving what can only be described as crop circles in his wake.

The other ‘pet’ we had was a dog called Buddy, who was a stray that we had found and adopted. But he was just fed on leftovers and Dad wouldn’t allow him in the house. He got in one day and we were all screaming and running after him to take him back outside.

There was also a cat in the neighbourhood, a stray that we called Mikie, but my sister Di later ran over it while backing out of the drive. Thankfully, she didn’t kill it. That happened the following week when the poor thing was hit by a passing car.

When Mum and Dad were busy, our neighbour Corinne looked after us a lot. She was lovely and, because she wasn’t married and didn’t have any children, she treated us like her own. She used to take us on trips, including skiing or to the Brown Hill swimming pools when it was unbearably hot. We always loved going out in Corinne’s car because she had air conditioning, which we didn’t.

She took Sue and me to Thredbo once, an alpine village in the Snowy Mountains, which was amazing. It was the first time we’d ever tobogganed. I remember my legs stinging from getting wet with the snow. Afterwards, we sat in a warm cafe and drank hot chocolate with marshmallows till our jeans dried off. To savour any sort of foodstuff was a luxury. Because there were so many
children in our family, you always had to finish your meals first if you wanted seconds, so we all ate really fast, and still do to this day. It’s not that we ever starved, but there were seven mouths to feed and you had to grab what you could.

School in Ballarat was never a happy experience for me. Transferring in year nine, when I was thirteen, was hideous. I didn’t know anyone and I had to introduce myself to the whole class. I remember thinking, ‘I speak differently to them,’ but I couldn’t understand why. I suppose I just wasn’t an ocker (an unrefined Aussie from the outback). The accents in Australia aren’t necessarily regional, but you do have city folk and outback people, the real ockers, and that summed them up.

Ballarat East High was co-ed. As a teenager, I wasn’t used to seeing girls in school, so I thought that was weird. And, believe me, the girls were tougher than any of the boys. They were rough as guts! They used to trip me over, block my way to the lockers and push me about. But they knew I couldn’t lash out at them because you can’t hit a girl, and if I retaliated at all, the boys ganged up on me. They were heinous.

I hated Ballarat East from day one. I felt like a total outsider and I didn’t fit in at all.

I was fat and I was also really short, believe it or not, because everyone else had grown much more than I had. I was a late developer in everything and most of the class went through puberty a long time before I did.

I was picked on a lot – for my long eyelashes, for looking like a girl, for my weight. The girls at school would say I had mascara on, which I never did, and they said I should wear lipstick. They really gave me a hard time. The boys never stuck up for me because I didn’t have any friends in the playground, so I used to hang around by myself, or sometimes with my sister and her friend. They never bullied me in front of Susan, only when I was on my own.

There was one male tormentor in particular who used to
torture me by saying, ‘I’ll be waiting behind the Caledonian Bridge. I’m gonna get you on your way home.’ The only way I could get back to Ditchfield Road was under this bridge.

Soon after I joined the school, I managed to get two tickets for
Countdown
, which was like the Australian version of
Top of the Pops
. Everyone wanted to come. I decided to take Susan’s friend Sharon Deacon, who was the most popular girl in the school. She looked exactly like Debbie Harry from Blondie, only with dark hair, and all the boys loved her. This bully was so put out by my choice of date that he said he was going to ‘bash me up’. He had the hots for Sharon. That, combined with the fact that he didn’t get to go to
Countdown
himself, was motive enough for wanting to hurt me.

My persecutor waited for me by the bridge, on and off, for ages before he got bored. Some days he was there and others he wasn’t, but it didn’t matter whether he showed up or not because the mere thought that he was around the corner frightened me enough.

Fortunately, I had a classmate called Steven Romeo, known only as Romeo, who used to defend me, and he became a friend. He was a big guy and he would walk me home because my tormentor couldn’t touch me with him there. I couldn’t protect myself at all. I was quite small and no threat to anyone.

It wasn’t just the kids at school who bullied me. When we were staying at Nanna’s, after we’d first moved back to Ballarat, but before our house was ready, we had to cycle to the high school on a path that went past a children’s home. For some reason, the kids there decided they would pick on me too.

Every single morning, they would form a line across the road so that there was no way I could pass on my bike. They used to let my sister go through and then stop me, which was just bizarre. They didn’t say much, just stood there in a long line and I would have to run the gauntlet to get to school. I didn’t understand it. I never knew why I was being singled out.

It got to a point where I couldn’t bear it any more, so I used the back route instead, which took three times as long. Luckily, all that came to an end when we moved to our own home and I went to school a different way.

The only thing I enjoyed about Ballarat East was the home economics class, in which I excelled. In all other academic disciplines, I was atrocious. I almost didn’t pass year ten at all. I failed maths, geography and history because I just wasn’t interested. My mind was forever elsewhere. I was good at art and music and that’s what I loved, where my passion has always been.

Music was my escape, my way of getting away from everybody, so I spent every free moment practising. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a French horn available, which was the instrument Miss Shaw had been teaching me in Sydney. My new school said I had to learn the trumpet instead, much to my disgust.

I was disappointed that I couldn’t continue to study the French horn. Sometimes you don’t get a choice in life. Given that I was stuck in a school I despised, I determined to make the most of a dispiriting situation. I simply had to learn to love the trumpet if I wanted to be in the school band.

All my practice paid off and I made the cut, in the position of second trumpet. I may have been compelled to master it, but in doing so and by accepting that, I actually grew and blossomed as a musician. And with the benefit of hindsight, Lavish wouldn’t have been half the woman she was without the skilled trumpet toots that adorned her act.

Being in the school band was brilliant. You’re at one with the instrument and the music, and you receive proper support, artistically, as well. For once, I wasn’t being treated like a freak. Furthermore, thanks to the Ballarat Memorial Band – which was a community rather than a school venture – I was even able to keep up the French horn in my spare time, so all was not lost.

After the Easter holidays in 1978, when I was thirteen, came a moment that was to change my life. During the break, I’d won a
colouring competition. I was at the very edge of the contest’s age limit and to be entering colouring competitions at thirteen is a bit tragic. Anyway, I won it and I was invited to a department store called Myer, which is an Australian equivalent to Selfridges or John Lewis. When I got there, there was a big Easter bunny waiting to present me with a huge Easter egg. There was also a photographer from the
Ballarat Courier
, so I had my photo taken with this bunny and it ended up on the front page of the newspaper. At the time, I was doing a paper round, so, to my intense embarrassment, I had to deliver myself all around Ballarat.

After the Easter vacation, I walked to school feeling thoroughly sick. I knew everyone would know about my prize-winning exploits and that I’d be the focus of a fair amount of ridicule. Sure enough, everyone had seen my picture in the paper. It was a nightmare. I got mercilessly teased about it, to the point that I wanted to leave school. There wasn’t anything I could do about it.

On top of this terrible shame came a new indignity. I had eaten the whole, massive chocolate egg myself, as well as numerous other Easter treats, and when I came back to school, I’d put on loads of weight. My PE teacher told me that I was fat, and that obviously Easter hadn’t been kind to me. My body shape and size has been a constant battle throughout my life – more on that later – and his hurtful comments cut right to the bone.

Ballarat is known for its wet weather and that morning it was living up to its reputation. Nevertheless, my teacher made me take off my shirt and jog round the running track by myself, in front of the whole class.

I was the fattest in my year and all blubbery. My schoolmates stood there laughing as they watched me. It was total humiliation. I felt completely worthless.

From that moment on, I hated any physical activity at school, but I knew I had to do something about myself. Dance was to be my salvation.

After my teacher had made me so ashamed of my body, I
resolved to search out some exercise that I could enjoy. Shyly, I told Amanda, who sat next to me in the school band, that I needed to lose weight and she suggested I try classes, which I assumed were like Jane Fonda workouts or aerobics. Actually, they were dance classes – jazz, mostly – and I loved them. I started going once a week.

A few months before my fifteenth birthday, in 1979, the incomparable Bette Midler was responsible for a huge surge in my self-esteem.
The Rose
had just been released and I’d learned ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ off by heart. All the other boys’ voices had broken, but mine didn’t break until the following year, so it was still really shrill, and I could do a perfect Bette impression.

For one school assignment, we all had to perform a song to boost our confidence. The first number I did was
The Mickey Mouse Club
anthem, in a really high-pitched voice, and then I went into
The Rose.

Bette Midler did this whole spiel before beginning ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’. It was called the ‘Concert Monologue’. I was word-perfect. With a flawless Southern belle accent, I launched into the speech I’d been rehearsing in front of the mirror at home, part of which went something like, ‘He comes home with the smell of another woman on him … I’m putting on my little waitress cap and my fancy high-heel shoes. I’m gonna go find me … a man to love me for sure!’

None of my classmates could believe it – but they all loved it. The funny thing was that it was all about sex, and from a woman’s perspective, so I didn’t really know what I was talking about. Nonetheless, I could take her off exactly as she did it.

It must have been so camp, but that never even occurred to me. You’d have thought that such a performance would have made the kids pick on me even more, but in fact it had the opposite effect. It somehow earned me respect because I’d made the whole class laugh and the teacher had adored it. Best of all, I had found a way to entertain.

It was in the wake of that turning point that an opportunity cropped up, which was to have a major impact on the rest of my life.

Somewhat unexpectedly, a girl called Angela asked me to be her partner at the debutante ball. Ballroom dancing was a normal part of the school curriculum in Australia then – but only if you were going to partner a debutante. As a result of her invitation, I took up ballroom lessons … and found that I couldn’t get enough.

My only previous experience of social dancing had been in Sydney, where the boys’ school and the girls’ school would come together for the occasional event. The boys would have to ask the girls to dance and I was so scared at the thought of approaching a member of the opposite sex that I’d hated every minute of it. That was my first impression and it wasn’t a good one. The whole experience was ghastly.