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Road to recovery begins at the pub
IT’S only been open for six weeks, but in the wake of last week’s horror flash floods, the Murphys Creek Tavern has become much more than a watering hole to the local community.
It’s been transformed into the Murphys Creek Community Recovery Centre, and it’s a 24-hour hive of activity for volunteers and co-ordinators, with volunteers vacuuming up the flakes of mud being walked in by the hoardes of people.
“The doors never really shut,” says Petra Kliese, whose grandfather is tavern owner James Barns, who fought hard to open the first pub in the community in nearly a century.
A group of teenage girls sit by the door, gossiping and signing volunteers in. They say they got seven A4 pages worth of helpers yesterday and today has been almost as busy.
“The community support has been fantastic, but we are overwhelmed with volunteers,” co-ordinator Ben Lawler confirms. On leave from his job in the army where he teaches people to fly war helicopters, Mr. Lawler took over the co-ordinating job at the weekend.
“I had a mate ring me up on Friday and point out the fact that there were some great efforts going on here, but no-one was co-ordinating it,” he explained.
“Sue the pub manager was doing an awesome job on her own, but she was getting fatigued and overwhelmed.”
Mr. Lawler’s army training has been invaluable with organising a big effort with so many people. He has organised the mass of people into teams, with a local resident heading each one.
“I get to sleep really well at night, but I wake up at 3am with my mind going full speed and I can’t stop,” he said.
Ben Lawler isn’t the only person losing sleep, says midwife and registered nurse Marianne Wobcke. She’s helping her friend, Bowen therapist Heather Graham to run the first aid and massage tent in the back corner of the tavern.
“A lot of the people we’ve been working with are in a lot of shock. They’ve still got so much adrenaline in them and they’re barely breathing,” she explains.
“Just to get them to lie down, breathe a bit deeper and to place our hands on them really makes a difference with them being able to cope with this situation.”
Marianne and Heather are also treating the myriad of injuries that you’d expect from a group of people walking around in the bush, cleaning up debris.
“We’re getting a lot of cuts and abrasions and they’re festering quite quickly.”
There are also more severe medical issues being tackled at the centre.
Eliza Wilkie has been manning the phones for the past couple of days, dealing with inbound calls from concerned relatives looking for their loved ones and making outbound calls for everything from insulin for diabetics to heavy machinery needed to make local roads usable again.
“We’re getting a good response when we call businesses up and ask, but we’re not getting many offers,” said Ms Wilkie.
The community desperately needs specialist volunteers – electrical contractors, people able to deal with septic tanks, builders and demolishers.
Through all of this, a group of 30 staff members from Bunnings Warehouse in Toowoomba hand out fresh fruit, loaves of bread, water and muffins donated by Coles to hungry and thirsty volunteers, after having volunteered in the clean-up themselves.
Keri Blackburn usually does night fill at the store, but has turned her body clock around to co-ordinate the efforts, first in Murphys Creek and later on in Helidon and Gatton.
“It’s been an awesome project to work on,” she enthuses.
“We have people on our team who are missing people in the flood and have flood damaged houses themselves, but they’re still pitching in.”
Ben Lawler is equally amazed.
“It’s impossible to overstate how wonderful the locals have been. They’ll come out of this tighter as a community than they ever were before.”
Originally published with additional multimedia content at Finda Toowoomba.
Tex Perkins (Rave Magazine)
It’s a tough life being a veteran Aussie rocker. TEX PERKINS speaks to SOPHIE BENJAMIN about whooping cough, hernias and his black cattle dog.
They don’t make front men like Tex Perkins anymore. Intelligent, humourous and strangely attractive, Perkins has class and gravitas in spades. Since his noisy entrance onto the Australian music scene with his band The Dum-Dums almost thirty years ago, Perkins has sung with orchestras, hosted television shows and fronted dozens of musical projects, most notably The Beasts Of Bourbon and The Cruel Sea. Cartoonist Bill Leak’s portrait of him won the Packing Room prize, where the gallery staff vote for their favourite paintings in the year’s Archibald entries.
“I’m an absolute veteran!” he enthuses. “In any other career I’d have two gold watches by now.”
But this is the music business and instead of polishing his jewellery, this morning Perkins is battling an attack of whooping cough and nursing the beginnings of a hernia after having surgery for a previous injury earlier this year.
Perkins’ upcoming appearance at the Waterfront Food & Wine Festival is far removed from his adolescent punk beginnings. The event is a day of fine food and dining held at a Gold Coast outdoor arena where Perkins shares a billing with Daryl Braithwaite and MasterChef judge George Calombaris.
“Which one is George?” asks Perkins. “Is he the one with the cravat?” I describe him to Perkins, but there isn’t even the smallest flickering of recognition.
“I didn’t actually watch MasterChef. I’m not saying I chose not to, I have nothing against it, it just wasn’t part of my routine. I’m sure there will be a lot of people happy he’s there.”
There’s nothing like a hectic work schedule to interrupt your weeknight TV-watching plans and Perkins has many special projects on the boil. He’s currently playing the lead role of Johnny Cash in the Melbourne stage show The Man In Black, an all-singing all-dancing production of Cash’s life story. Having spent the first half of 2009 in a white lounge suit crooning covers with Australia’s fifth-best covers band The Ladyboyz, Perkins is keen to cut down on his dry-cleaning expenses.
“I can’t say no to Cash, especially if it’s got a Johnny in front of it. Plus, the black suit’s a lot easier to keep clean.”
It’s not much of a stretch imagining Perkins as Cash. Along with his nonchalant attitude towards both his fans and detractors, his vocal delivery owes more than a little to Cash’s wry tenor and Tex Don and Charlie’s live album was called Monday Morning Coming Down, a reference to the Cash song Sunday Morning Coming Down.
The story is mostly told by his songs, but with a small amount of narration and acting from Perkins and his co-stars. Perkins has recorded voiceovers for documentaries before, but it is Cash’s formidable collection of songs that have given him the most grief.
“I’ve found learning the shitload of lyrics for the songs to be the most challenging part, even though they’re well within my ability. Some of [Cash’s] early stuff like Hey Porter is really rhythmic and The Boy named Sue has ten verses that are all fired out very quickly, so just to get on top of that I had to do a bit of training, stay fairly sober – but that’ll change.”
I point out that Cash himself wasn’t known for staying sober during the early years of his career.
“Yeah but he was Johnny Cash. Don’t worry, I’ll be as drunk as a lord by the time I come to Brisbane.”
At this point Perkins excuses himself to have a coughing fit and resurfaces with a change of mind.
“You know what I told you before? Scratch that. I’m going into rehab next week so I’ll be completely sober.”
Um, right. My polite disbelief must be more audible then I’d anticipated.
He giggles. “Anyway, believe what you want.”
Moving right along, Perkins’ Sounds Of Spring appearance is on the back of his pun-tastically titled back catalogue collection, Songs from my Black Cattle Dog.
The release focuses more on Perkins’ song writing than the sexy showman he was in Beasts Of Bourbon and The Cruel Sea, with the bulk of the release coming from his solo work and his collaboration with Don Walker and Charlie Owen, Tex, Don and Charlie.
“You got the pun? Good on you! I was very surprised at how few people got it. I was talking to Don Walker the other day about it and I asked him if he got it. He was like ‘Yeah, it’s like depression, but Australian depression, like Winston Churchill’s black dog.’
“I did not correct him.”
Many musicians look upon best-of’s as more of a contractual obligation than a bona-fide release. Perkins is somewhere in between.
“I certainly did choose it and it was my idea, but it is very much based on the idea that it is a record company ‘thing’. It’s the end of my contract with Universal and while it fulfils a typical record company kind of function, I’m happy to do it because it gives me a chance to look back over a body of work. It’s a ‘farewell and goodnight’ sort of thing.”
Not that it’s a particularly sad farewell on his part.
“The actual role of record companies is redundant. All musicians need nowadays is a good distributor and a good publicist. Record companies have been allowed to be really wasteful and indulgent, with money going to the wrong people for shit reasons and I’m pleased to see the demise of them.”
For a man who describes his career as one of “many tentacles”, the obvious question is – where to now?
“Exactly. Many places and all sorts of things. I just don’t know what’s going to pop up next and it’s all very interesting to me. I’ve managed to do all these other things and I’m still twangin’ away at my guitar and singing songs.
“A bloke like me’s gotta do somethin’.”
Dead Letter Circus – Rave Magazine
When SOPHIE BENJAMIN was given the opportunity to chat with hometown heroes DEAD LETTER CIRCUS on the set of their next video clip, she jumped at the chance (and the promise of free food). She spoke to frontman KIM BENZIE and guitarist ROB MARIC about perfectionism and the D.L.C. Sausage Machine.
“Would you like a… something?”
Dead Letter Circus’ singer Kim Benzie smiles, almost embarrassed, and gestures towards the biscuits, fruit and lollies arranged neatly on the catering table at Red Brick Studios in Newstead, where we’ve arranged to meet.
Things sure have changed since their first nerve-wracking shows in 2006 at the now-defunct Living Room in Caxton Street.
Earlier this year, their album This Is The Warning debuted at #1 on the digital charts and #2 on the ARIA charts, second only to the infamous Justin Bieber. Today’s video shoot is for Disconnect and Apply from the band’s self-titled EP, which they are releasing in the UK after selling 7, 000 copies independently in Australia since its release in 2007.
These numbers and achievements are impressive, but it’s been hard work. Notorious perfectionists, the band took the better part of two years to complete the album, pushing back deadline after deadline and canning a trip to South-By-Southwest to add the finishing touches.
“You never finish an album, you just abandon it,” says guitarist Rob Maric, wryly.
“You call time somewhere between the deadline and the feeling of, ‘I can live with this.”
“We are a perfectionistic band and part of that is sharing criticism and doing it in a way that people don’t take it as a slight on them as a person,” explains Benzie.
“We have a joke about a thing we call the D.L.C. Sausage Machine. You put the person into it feet-first and they come out the other end with no ego.”
One of the more recent victims of the D.L.C. Sausage Machine is Tasmanian digital illustrator Cameron Gray, who did the intricate album artwork. Benzie discovered Gray’s work while looking at websites on surrealist artwork, and after making email contact, set him to work creating a piece of artwork for every song on the album, in close consultation with Benzie and the rest of the band.
Maric laughs, astounded. “Can you believe, he’s a young guy who works at McDonalds, and he did it all on his 13” Macbook on his girlfriend’s kitchen table!”
The One Step tour will be the first time the band has engaged the sevices of an additional member to play the band’s music live, playing the layers of keyboards and guitars that have become integral to the band’s sound.
“We wanted to be known as a bunch of players, as opposed to a massive backing track band,” explains Benzie.
“I’m really loving it because I get to play all the original lead parts again,” Maric enthuses. “I’ve been doing these bastardised hybrid parts to fill in.”
When the conversation turns to the consequences of a punishing tour schedule, both Maric and Benzie nod thoughtfully and share their experiences with managing burnout. Benzie has ‘another life’ as a father to his young son (“I look a bit different to the other parents,” he says), and Maric takes comfort in the idea that things could be a lot less fun.
“You know that if you wanted to you could just stop and work a simple job, but we feel really privileged that we can have a career from it. It’s all just a big bonus, what we’re living right now.”
DEAD LETTER CIRCUS take their One Step tour to The Zoo on Tuesday August 17 and Wednesday August 18 (SOLD OUT). THIS IS THE WARNING is out now through Warner Music. www.deadlettercircus.com
