I had managed to navigate my way through high school without any peer pressure to indulge with alcohol. Most of my friends at Camberwell Grammar weren’t terribly wild. And with a full schedule inside and outside of school (army cadets, horse riding, basketball, etc) I genuinely didn’t have much time to stray.

But once I turned 18 and I left school, all of this changed.

I began to indulge myself in as much nightlife as I could afford (which wasn’t a whole lot most of the time). I’m not sure how it happened, but one night a group of us went to the Anchor and Hope Hotel, which was in Richmond and was owned by the car racing legend Lou Molino. There was this band, the Lonely Boys, and as it happened it was the last night of their lead signer and charismatic saxophonist, Bobby Valentine.

Anyway, because it was his last night, or maybe this was how the Lonely Boys always did it before we first saw them, but it WENT OFF! Like it was a seriously amazing night of entertainment. The memories are hazy now after all these years, but the memory of HOW GOOD it was has never left me. It was quite something. The Lonely Boys did 50s and 60s music, and they did it really well!

And so I (and we, my mates were similarly hooked), were Lonely Boys converts after that night. But who replaced Bobby Valentine? It was this guy us youngsters hadn’t really heard a lot about before. His name, Russell Morris.

Other members of the band were Dave Russell (on bass) and Coburg Tipping (guitar). Dave had an interesting history as part of Ray Columbus and the Invaders, a New Zealand based group who had some success. He had also been the original manager of Split Enz and produced their first album. He was a very cool dude. Co was a huge fella and had a very cool car from memory. He still plays around town with Rod Paine and the Fulltime lovers.

It wasn’t uncommon for us to see them 3 times a week at various venues. Over that period we got to know the band, as well as many of the regulars who came along to their shows. This went on for at least 2 or 3 years, and we saw them many many times over that period.

I recall a trip to Canberra to see them (with my mate Jimmy), and we also travelled to the F1 in Adelaide (with my mate Dave) to see them there as well.

Good times and good people.

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February 8th, 1983 I was a year 9 student at Camberwell Grammar School. That afternoon I was in the library, which had an elevated view back towards the city. It was a good place to be, because it was air conditioned. It reached 43 degrees that day, it was stinking hot.

Suddenly the calm and orderly business of the library was interrupted by shouts. As I rushed to the window to see what the fuss was about, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

A HUGE dust cloud was making it’s way across the city headed east. I had never seen anything like it, it felt positively apocalyptic. This probably added to the feeling of impending doom I had when I attended the Stop the Drop concert just five days later.

This isn’t my pic, but it gives you a sense of what it was like;

It was estimated that about 50,000 tonnes of topsoil were stripped from the Mallee. The combined effect of drought and dust storm inflicted damage on the land that, according to the then President of the Victorian Farmers and Graziers’ Association, would take up to 10 years and tens of millions of dollars to repair.

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