216 Pyrmont Bridge Road - 1979

At the end of 1979, my last year at Wesley College, I had moved into a sharehouse with Gordon Weiss, Philippa Stone, Louise Marcroft, and Garry Wilton. Number 216 Pyrmont Bridge Road, Glebe, was a 5-bedroom terrace house a short bicycle ride from Sydney University. Newly-renovated, it was one of a pair of houses, the other of which would be occupied by another group from Wesley.

I respected Gordon for his apparent reliability. Lou and especially Philippa had become my friends and frequent companions all the previous year. I had approached Gordon and told him that I thought we should set up a sharehouse; this was the customary next step for many a Wesley resident. We pretty immediately agreed that we wanted Lou and Philippa to make up the foursome, so that there would be even numbers of male and female. Lou wanted to include my old friend Garry. This was not such a good call, but she was very keen on getting him out, as he still lived with his family and needed some exposure to the real world, and Lou felt she (with our help) was the person to deliver it.

Gordon, Lou, Philippa and I got on very well at college, and as a household. We were prepared to try Garry out. Philippa could already cook. Lou had been married in a past life, and was likewise practical. I did what a good scientist does when it came to cooking, I bought textbooks, read up, and experimented with gusto. By January I could whip up meals no problem. I assume Gordon had done the same.

Garry proved to be entirely unequal to the task of coping with getting his life together, from organising his finances to cooking. It took him days of planning to get a meal ready. He would ring his mother for help with a simple curry. He had a full-time job, yet he was often broke. He seemed unable to get around to cleaning a bathroom. Like me, he bought wood and tools with the intention of making some furniture. I made my waterbed within days of moving in. Garry never finished making his furniture. I still sleep in the same bed I made that Christmas.

Career-wise, I was very disillusioned with engineering... I could not see myself working at the sort of places I had seen, with the sort of people in my graduating class. They were the worst type of maladjusted neanderthals and I imagined all engineers to be like that. I interviewed as a teacher at Grammar. I spent a month working casually at Macquarie University, travelling there on my moped, and subsequently on a 250cc Honda motor cycle I bought in January. I applied for a postgraduate scholarship. Eventually I landed a job working for Modern Magazines, on the staff of "Electronics Today International". The photograph at left, my staff photo at ETI, was probably taken later in the year, but it represents the image I cast at Modern Magazines when I started there in 1979.

It was a heavenly job. I had read ETI (as well as all the other electronics magazines) since I was 10 years old, and I had every copy on my (recently-built) bookshelves. Now I worked there. The staff were great, from Collyn Rivers, the managing Editor, through Roger Harrison the editor, down to JayCee, the receptionist. They ran an egaliterian shop, and everyone loved their work. We were in the same building as Fairlight Instruments, one of whose founders (Kim Ryrie) was the son of the founder of Modern Magazines. And I was getting paid to do what I had read with awe about other people doing for so many years. This may not have been a stellar career move, but it was buckets of fun.

I was awarded that scholarship to return as a postgrad to EE, working again with Godfrey, but I deferred my start for as long as I could, 6 months, to stay at ETI. I was not sure I would even take it up in the end.

As you will see in this not-quite-chronological testimony, tensions would build up in this Eden. This photo, the last of a staged sequence taken in January, has some prescient quality. We would eventually eject Garry---or he resigned from the household I do not remember which. Personnel and feelings changed. I would continue to work at ETI eventually going part-time, take up the postgraduate scholarship, discover that I liked teaching electronics very much, have a very serious relationship with a lady, and more. I would learn a lot.

Do not get the idea I stopped socialising as hard as I possibly could. In January Seth invited a number of us "oldcols" for a holiday at his family beach house. We ate, surfed, ran on the beach, and partied with campfires at night.

At home, we socialised all the time. Philippa and I decided we had to have one "dry" day a week, to recover from the other six. I remember having the most intense, fabulous arguments over dinners, with debate on many topics. Philippa had a powerful, logical mind. It was the intellectual equivalent of fencing lessons with Cyrano de Bergerac!

We socialised with the girls next door. Cathy would chat from the upper story window late into the night...
or we would have BBQ lunches in the back yard....

...or other oldcols would come over to play games.

By February I was producing original stuff at ETI, and getting a reputation. Here Melissa is holding my electronic version of the hot potato game. I won my reputation with my first piece of work. When I arrived, Roger told me that two of the staff were arguing about what might be required to make a device that showed a green light when your car battery was OK, yellow if going flat, and red if overcharging. One person could do it in one package of four opamps, another with only four transistors, more packages but less circuitry. He sought to estimate my ability by comparing my result with these two benchmarks of wisdom. I did it in two transistors with a design Roger described as "ingeniously simple", beating both previous designs on both cost and complexity, and I got my first article out in record time.

The people I worked with at ETI were great. At right is Collyn in a typical pose. Every Friday the whole place piled out to some local watering hole for lunch. The place ran well. In Collyn's time there was no hint of nasty politics in the rooms where the work was done. This would change in a few years, as the time of electronics and ham radio was replaced by the time of computers and times got tight for electronics magazines. I recall Collyn telling me and Roger (at left) about some stuff called Gallium Arsenide, and how it would one day make fast transistors. As I write this (2005), I am trying to convince Agilent that it needs to pay attention to Gallium Nitride, two generations beyond the GaAs that is our mainstay. To some managers this means as little as GaAs did to me then... what could this editor know of the technological future? Lots, it seems to me now.

One of the people at Modern Magazines was the editor of Sonics, Ron Keeley, who had been the drummer in Radio Birdman, the first Australian rock group to tour internationally. He would eventually move to England and become editor of Hobby Electronics there, and I would work for him briefly in 1981. In the mean time, we designed a fuzz-sustain box together.

Below is a picture of Bob, the sales manager. He was a delightful rogue. He was also, I was relaibly informed, a ladies' man of the first division, and it was easy to believe. He was charming, fit, and a devil. There was talk that he was about to settle down with "a wonderful girl". We talked a lot, he had such stories to tell. (Especially the one where they finally caught up with him over the $3000 of parking fines he had neglected to pay... I was impressed as well with the loyalty colleagues showed.) For all those abilities he proved to be woefully under-informed about the science of sex, and we exchanged a lot of notes, the theorist (me) and the empiricist (him). I might have remained in touch with him except that he was fatally flattened by a truck.

I think we did a surprise birthday party for Melissa. Here she is arriving with Chris, one of her housemates. She lived in a house her father had bought in Redfern with her boyfriend, David, and their friend Chris. By now it was March.

By April my next graduation had come around. Also, I had bought a car with some financial help from my Nan, who wanted me to go back to do the postgraduate degree... it was a blue VW Passat, JBS-002, that would be with me for many years. I still had the Honda, though I had sold the moped.

Here is Gordon sitting on my Honda bike. There are precious few photos of it, I think I was becoming too busy to photograph so much.

For a short spell circa March and April, Philippa had returned to live in Wesley and Ming, whom she was still dating, stayed with us. He still drove himself hard, and he could still sleep just about anywhere, and through almost anything, but that is incidental.

In that interval we frequented Wesley, and I went on the annual regatta trip with Philippa. I met Susan Pearce, who was finishing her bachelor's in Architecture at Sydney University. She was a sharp, tantalizingly supercilious, tempting person, not to mention fun.

Not that the regatta was a breeze for Philippa either, who wound up in the harbour at some point, and whose loose cotton dress was displaced to reveal briefly to the world some of those things that endeared her to Ming. I was reminded of this incident by a photograph I shall not include right here.

Susan did not like being photographed either.

We took a time to get together. She told me later that she had such trouble plucking up the courage to ask me out, walking past my house without knocking, like a schoolgirl with a crush. I eventually asked her out, I think. We got together anyway.

This relationship was to prove passionate and also difficult, through no fault of ours. Her family had returned to Wales in the UK, and she stayed to finish her degree, flying home every break. Never get involved with someone who is doomed to leave. Unfinished seriousness can be deadly.

May, June and July were a blur of socialising, with dinners and rages whose photographic record is at once full of many images and a lot of sameness. Here is a picture that will only appeal if you have seen Diva. The laconic hero of that film was one of Gordon's icons, and he is here emulating his zen of garlic bread. Ming was doing his best to thwart.

There were still pranks at Wesley---that we came to watch, since we occasionally attended formal dinners as guests.

There were visitors and time spent in each others company...

I recall I was doing a lot of picnics. I'd go off to some suitable isolated part of Centennial Park of similar with one or a group of people.

Melissa's partner David Finch had been in a briefly-fatal car accident, and in May he was discharged into her care. They lived close to where Richard Lesze was living, and we met them there one evening. David looked about half his natural heft... it was easy to believe upon seeing him, held up by Melissa, that he had been a DOA.

In July, Fen (Fiona) Cameron had her 21st party. Susan and Philippa still did not like to be photographed.

This might have been the only straight party in the season...

About this time Gordon became tired of Garry's domestic non-performance. He arranged to jack Garry's room. It was decked out like an Aboriginal humpy, and the door bore this sign. 3801 was Garry's service number.

We would hear, in times to come, that our tactics were mild, compared to the old school friends with whom Garry next lived. Stories are told of Geoff Ellerton and Colin Cornick, two seriously heavy football-style guys, making Garry and an array of bathroom-cleaning tools prisoners in a bathroom until it became spotlessly clean.

With August came Jackie's 21st birthday. This is us ready to trek next door as a household. This is Jackie hunkering down for a long, hard rage:

I do not think Garry actually left until early 1980, but he was fading out of the social picture by this time. There was something going on between him and Lou, I think she wanted him to be a lover and he was not of the same desire. At any rate, they seemed to be feeling the strain, and we did not intrude. (If you read this Lou, what was the story?)

This was the start of a descent... August brought the skiing season, and I apparently went with Tony C and some of his friends. I remember little of it. We must have looked a ragged lot.

The person pictured at right above is worth mentioning. James Gibson is an extraordinary person. He graduated about the same time as I did, perhaps a year later, in the same school. He was a rally driver; in years to come he would work for a while at Ausonics in the Nucleus group, where I would be a consultant. He would get fired from there for not getting on with his boss (his description of the reason). He worked in Europe. He played the flute in an orchestra. He seemed to do many things. He eventually got to do what he had always wanted, which was to make a living as a ski instructor in the European Alps. By all objective measures you might have expected him to be the life of a party and an accomplished hero. Contrary to this expectation, he was one of the single most boring persons I have ever met. He called at 216 one evening and literally opened with the line "I did not have anything to do so I thought I'd do it here"; I turned up at a party with Susan, Philippa and Nicola once and he promptly enquired as to which ones... you get the idea. He did not seem to have pleasing social skills.

August and September seem to have brought a new bout of parties. I have photographs of several events recorded on the same reel of film, lots of people and little memory of what was going on. Half of them seemed to be at our house, too.

This picture, of Philippa's brother collapsed in our laundry, might be a good summary of the time... a period that one must assume was fun at the time, but not one leading to any memories, decisions or life advances.

October and November brought four events: I lectured at an Amateur (Ham) Radio conference; I became engaged with the Air Navigation Group where I was doing my Masters; we oldcols attended the Intercollege Garden Party; and I crashed the Passat. No photographic record of the prang, one wet day early in October, but even insured, it was depressing, so I leave that topic at once.

Below the Air Nav people are loading a VOR antenna stack onto a truck to take it out for field trials. These were held in Picton; we assembled the new VOR on a handy mountain, and a DOT aircraft mapped its performance. I was involved because, well really everyone in the group helped, but also because my undergraduate thesis had been the feasibility study and model, and this was the real thing, using antennas designed by Alan Young.

We also had something of a ball doing the VOR work. Picton was good for flight buffs. This picture was taken on a subsequent expedition, but it is representative of the activities.

Here is Philippa leading the charge into the garden party. I have described the IGP in my summaries of 1977 and '78, and would not bother to catalog the usual array of wildly dressed, horny and intoxicated debauchery, but some commentary springs from the photos.

It was known that Susan and I were an item, by this time. It was also known that she was to return permanently to England in December, at the end of the academic year.

I am not sure I would know what to do now, and I certainly did not know how to handle that then. Should she stay? Should I go? The first looked like marriage---not on my agenda---the second must have looked like diving off high cliff and pulling out the instruction manual for your parachute on the way down.

No doubt, caring about Susan Pearce was not the source of pleasure one might have hoped. In the long run, neither of us had the maturity---hate that word---to cope.

I would write her 76 letters in the next year, and go to visit her in 1981. Time would have washed away the feelings. Funny how romance requires prompt action.

Observe centre right Melissa's brother Marty, undoubtedly very tired and emotional, being propped up by Karen, a rather straight and motherly sort.

Note the conspicuously Scottish-dressed person in the above photograph. It is a person called Malcolm Duncan. I had been at high school with this fellow. He was a resident of St Paul's College. I was once told that if the ten most-hated people at Paul's were lined up "the first one would be Duncan, and the other nine of them would be Renshaw". This proved to be an accepted description.

Only two more events remain to be noted here, en clair. December saw 216 having a full-on, wrap-up party, and it brought Susan's departure. Whatever else happened---Christmas, family, work events---sank into relative insignificance, and will remain unlinked to the historical record.

On the eighth of December, 1979, we held a toga party. It was one of those parties that just clicked. Even Garry prepared perfectly---he was good at parties.

Precisely as one might predict, Richard Lesze arrived promptly.

Philippa still did not like being photographed, and Susan did not seem to care by this stage. Gordon had his usual opening enthusiasm.

We had created "columns" upon which one could scribble, and seeded them with grafitti. Andrew and others added. ("Cleo was here", "Land rights for Carthaginians", etc.) Plenty of poeple got into the spirit of it.

William was perfect as always; Jane and gregor were in full form; Tony brought that wonderful effervescent spirit he always exudes. If I had been a girl, I think I would have fancied Tony. I doubt that would have distinguished me.

It would happen in 1980 that Jane would leave Andrew and move in with Gregor, and Andrew would come eventually to live in 216. It was not going to be a long move for Jane: The three of them shared a flat. One cannot help wondering when looking at the above photo of them what might have been the state of play in that Eden.

Nick was almost certainly there only just in time for the end. The sun rose and we were still seeing people off.

In the cold light of dawn, only Philippa, Richard and I were still there and awake. Philippa had laid herself out in the middle of the private car park that formed the centre of the block upon which 216 stood. Richard and I went for a walk around Glebe. I took no more photos, yet I remember that walk, the warm, sultry, overcast summer dawn, the mood and architecture of Glebe through which we wandered still wearing our bedsheet togas, and I recall the good feeling and Richard's company as if it were yesterday.

Susan left soon thereafter. This time we were not too busy fucking to make the plane.

Whatever followed that Christmas---I recall working at ETI, visiting old connections and my family in Rose Bay---was not comparable. This party and the wake of it was the finsihing of 1979.