The writing on the wall.

That summer I saw two words scrawled on the brick wall of a commercial building (shop? accountant’s office?) somewhere in Moonee Ponds, probably around Queen’s Park. The two words were stacked one above the other, like the headline over a side column on the front page of the newspaper. The words were Elvis Presley.

I was in a car with my parents driving along Mt. Alexander Road, and one of them made a disparaging comment about Presley, or the graffiti, or both. They were in their late thirties then, with four children yet to reach the complexities of -teen age, complexities which generally either relax their parents’ steely rigidity, or confirm them in their uncompromising stubbornness. God forbid they took the latter course in the late sixties. In time, my mother would disrobe herself of whatever puritanical coat she wore, and overcompensate, like so many of her middle class contemporaries, eventually to play Victor Jara and U2 records and serve wholemeal garlic bread at family occasions. My siblings and I were confronted with two maternal personas, the pre- and post-1970 models. Both continued to be superlative hostesses, the post-1970 model extending her range of visitors to waifs, strays and people she met in hospital wards.

My father entertained no such socially identifying mores, and continued shaving timber and listening to horse races in his garage, painting landscapes copied from Walter T. Foster ‘How to Paint in Oils’ books, and taking his Nikon to the shadowed streetscapes and open parklands of Melbourne’s inner north.

Elvis Presley was then still the personification of rebellion according to Essendon morals, which were slightly behind the times. His name in the form of graffiti proved it: incorrigible! The locals had yet to meet the Who, the Doors, or the Rolling Stones. These people (the hard-liners, not necessarily my parents), I thought to myself later, would never have need of a judiciary. They decide everything themselves. The Moonee Ponds courthouse stood just down the road from the appearance of the graffiti. Such a lonely building. St Thomas’s Anglican church was next door, bursting on Sundays. 

Presley was all over the airwaves that year. The radio was as much a part of our household as the soap-spattered glass in the window over the kitchen sink, or the cigarette smoke spiralling over the dinner table, or the washing machine chugging and throbbing in the outside laundry. 

Lyrics mattered. In my pre-comprehension mind (I might have been four years old) I magnified Wooden Heart’s first-person lyrics into the horrific story of a man facing vivisection to find out if he was really a fully-grown Pinocchio. ‘I’m not made of wood and I don’t have a wooden heart …’.  And while I was horror-struck by the Wise and Weisman song’s hero having to insist he was made of human flesh, the blue-rinse set had been so agape over lyrics such as ‘buzzing around your hive’ (I Got Stung) they took semi-orgasmic pleasure in conferring with their fellow puritans to confirm their suspicions about the song’s de-metaphored meaning.