The Lost Tangerine Jacket MEDIA KIT
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The Lost Tangerine Jacket MEDIA KIT INTRODUCTION Much has been documented and archived and of course written about the abduction and murder of activist, journalist and myth Juanita Nielson and my aim has been to theatricalise theories past and invent passions new, since there never has been so passionate a tale as hers, which rocked Sydney a little more than forty years ago. What exactly happened and who precisely did what isn’t my scene, as Hippies with herpes thought they said in 1975 on American Independence Day when the poor thing vanished; last seen it seems by a guy called Eddie Trigg who murdered her – or did he? He was a bar room manager in a seedy grog den called the VIP Lounge, a decent vomit from reception at The Carousel Cabaret, and it seems he was both assassin and gifted memoirist, since his incredible prose style was discovered by the cops when he croaked it. (The characters in the unreal life of Juanita Nielsen are realer than the pulp fiction of the time; and you simply cannot overwrite them.) She was heroic of course to write so bravely against police on the take as well as police really getting off on assisting evictions in the Cross and Darlinghurst; morally of course the cops ought to have helped the poor but, I mean, when in history have they ever? In my long legged life around the Cross and all other places I have never witnessed one single incident of a copper helping anyone to anything but a hiding. And now in the night there is only yourself and myself left all alone to try and figure out who killed the thing they loved. Her mythology leaps and flowers in many roses; the crystal petals breaking into many tears from all who remember or misremember her. Her moral outrage is interesting because the 1970s were practically immoral, with pornography more popular than school study and schoolchildren encouraged to view video filth in twenty-cent booths rather than look at Leichardt in Theatre by Francis Webb. Coming from melancholic, perpetually morbid Melbourne one doesn’t have the foggiest clue about life until one hops on a rocking and rolling dangerously unseaworthy wooden ferry and quickly drowns en route to Manly, to the studied boredom of others on that leaky tub who read the Daily Telegraph through a wall of stinging brine. They only read of murder since that’s all there is in Sydney and then they get to Manly and swear because it’s too much like Melbourne anyway and there’s nothing to do except die. I lived in Sydney during the vigorous and Valium-imbibing 1970s, reduced by circumstances to hand delivering in-house mail for rock station 2JJ and the ABC in Upper Forbes Street in Darlinghurst. The atmospherics of the city had to do with tripping over preposterous Moreton Bay fig tree roots that grew out of burst asphalt footpaths while hundreds of murder victims tried to tell me who killed Juanita Nielsen in the brilliant sunshine of Sussex Street – or Pitt Street, rather. I adored Pitt Street for its crude name alone and always rather imagined I should enjoy being buried there at the age of one hundred. In mid-1975, as I dashed hither and thither at work, which was sorting and delivering mail and scurrying up horses of stairs at Broadcast House because the lifts were always out, the gnawing gossip was nothing but the latest assassination theories on who murdered who in William Street just the other day; or else who forgot to murder who as they had a party on or a house-warming or a grog-up in ibis-obsessed Hyde Park, which is where I read Francis Webb’s insanely good poetry, composed in a nut house. I got caught up (without ever resisting, by the way) in the street gossip and, that being my favourite kind of theatre anyway, I began to write into my memory the sorts of human English sentences ordinary drug addicts were saying about Juanita Nielson as they shot up their drugs or sipped a glass in some syphilitic bar in Taylor Square or wherever I happened to be. I wanted some day to compose a new stage play about her, written in some entirely new way, depicting the love and pathos I felt – luckily or unluckily – for her, shot dead in a seedy club only a joint away from her own tiny neat terrace home situated at 202 Victoria Street. I still expect her to turn up there aged eighty or more in her foot- high pumps and yard-long eyelashes, her enigma entirely intact. She never died. The books and the fictionalised films go one way but I go altogether another, which is into the natural light from the doorway of common knowledge or anti-history. The last time I was in Sydney writing my new play for Currency Press I was invited unluckily by a winner of the Archibald Prize (what could be worse?) to a mesmeric meeting of a Palaeolithic Sydney history club called the Fossils at the Old Glebe Point Road Public Library. They rabbited on about detente for six hours at least but no one talked to me. They were so desperately alienated from the rest of Sydney society they tried hard to flog their own out-of-print histories to one another, to no avail. My back ached just looking at them and there was no coffee. Just eye-watering pamphlets and terrible tits. The evening proved interminable but it did me some good in one respect and that was to renew my hatred of verifiable, factual history. History must be interesting or it ought to be forgotten. If something is true then it happened, but when you live in a bleak and crummy rooming house and are a year behind in rental, who really needs to remember anything other than their own father’s name or mother’s reputation or what a rotten pineapple tastes like? I became besotted by the story about the vanished heiress with the extreme makeover and matching wig and wondered in 1975 when I lived in the Cross just what it would have been like to be her. Who was she exactly? Did Eddie Trigg murder her on the say-so of Abe Saffron as folks said on stormy ferries or aboard crumpled drunken taxis to North Shore parties? In my room I liked reading the Kings Cross Whisper (what a great name!) and I wish it still existed as there is nothing like it in the year 2016. I recall a grim letter to the editor once that I shall roughly paraphrase as an indication of the house style. ‘Dear Whisper Letters Editor, I live in Bayswater Road with my so-called boyfriend named Ken and do you think he will pick up after him? HE WILL NOT! NO MATTER WHAT I DO HE BLOOMING-WELL LEAVES HIS BRA AND PANTS ALL OVER THE SHOP! WHAT AM I TO DO WITH THIS PIG OF A MAN? Distressed, Bayswater Road’. It is not the forensic truth I am interested in but the vox pop of Kings Cross, voices that say all they please about the abduction and murder of one of their own upon the fourth of July, forty-one years ago this year. It is not the worthy letter I have drawn from, nor well- made newspaper article, complete with gory illustration of a slain girl, claiming she was brave to stand up against Abe Saffron and his cobber Frank Theeman the developer who destroyed the Cross with the help of criminal admirers. It is the ordinary shop keepers and round-the-clock taxi drivers that I am paraphrasing in my play called Juanita, written for Currency Press as their writer in residence. It is not so much what really happened as the hipster language of 1975 that intrigues me enough to write a new play looking into steamy evenings in the tacky strip joints of the Cross where once I was moron enough to pay an old moll forty bucks for diseased intercourse because I got wiped at a Channel 9 Christmas party. She took an hour to get her kit off and demanded payment by credit but was too doped-up to do the card. She demanded cash next and said, as I remember, ‘The more you pay the better it is!’ I disputed that and left. And yet I never stopped loving Sydney and always remember the smell of Circular Quay and the stormy ferry crossings past the heads on my way to Manly; is it still there? Hardly anything spiritual or geographical remains of the oId Sydney my grandmother took me to when I was just eleven and it blew my mind. Her name was Gert, for Gertrude, and the way she waved her arm at the Harbour Bridge was the kind of gesture one makes when one owns something splendid; and I therefore have inherited from her that same holy possessiveness that no one can thieve from you. It’s a sense of place that feeds the grass of love. It is a very great thing that young Juanita posed for the lurid cover of a Carter Brown paperback only to be murdered in the same genre. It was as if she were gifted with foreknowledge, prescient enough to see her brilliant career would end with a thud. Why has neither the culprit nor her poor body ever been found in all these yearning years? Listening to her cultivated and rather beautiful voice on YouTube, it is memorable not just because it is mellifluous but because it is full of hope mixed with an exaltation of Darlinghurst, where she knew just about everyone on a first-name basis.