Weekend stt lounge 15 /1 /16, page-89

I lived in 'The Cross' from late '68 to early '75.

In 68 this was 'the' song of the day ... if you had a guitar this is what you played.



The Cross is where all of the US troops would go when in Sydney for 'RnR'. As a young teenager I tried asking them about the war. Silence, always silence. As a rule the guys were only interested in 2 things ... their cameras and the girls .. and in that order.

Music changed very rapidly .... I remember this got a lot of airtime.



Everyone smoked .. there was a little heroin but you hardly heard about it.  The standard deal of dope was a matchbox full which usually cost $10 [sometimes what you got was tea leaves]. Joints were single paper affairs, nothing fancy [Bongs didn't exist yet]. You smoked the thing down to the very end till you burned your fingers and your lips. It was a tribal icon to own and wear a 'roach clip' ... [couldn't find a decent image but this is the basic model]



And of course ... there was 'acid'. I could never get any.... somehow, whenever I turned up it had just all gone. It was only years later I realised no-one wanted to be responsible for giving acid to a kid. [It is a bit of an indication that people did actually think about others in the Cross. For most of my time there I only had interesting and good experiences]

If you were middle aged you were sort of caught in a no-man's land between the reality of the Vietnam war and the fantasy US culture i.e. things like 'Paint Your Wagon' ... which did however produce this great song...



The Vietnam war ruined the Cross. Yes it was the most violent place in Sydney. The cops were bent ... everybody knew the Crown Sergeant by his first name .. Desmond .. a lovely bloke .. no idea if he ever took a bribe but all of the others did. I turned down an offer from the local 'film-maker' to be a teenage porn star ... a tall Eurasian fellow ... who explained, "Its alright to bribe the police .. so long as you offer them enough" [He was paying them $1000/month] ... But ... the Cross was also the home for 100's and 100's of artists, social misfits, malcontents and strangebodies. The RnR's brought with them a lot of money... they would blow 6 months pay in 2 weeks. This attracted mainly Japanese investment money and properties were being bought and demolished with the intention of building dedicated hotels for the GI's... that went phutt because US authorities got sick of their boys getting ripped off and cancelled Sydney as an RnR destination. However, many long time time residents [good people] had already been chased out. The Cross kept the violence but lost the fun....

If you really liked music then this was another must have of the time...



I never went to Vietnam ... thankfully Whitlam was elected in '72 and the first thing he did was get us out of the war. They stopped drawing the marbles. [They drew marbles out of a barrel, each one with a date on it. If they drew your birthday you were conscripted]