Tilt

Kate Lilley

University of Sydney

Corresponding author: Kate Lilley, Department of English, University of Sydney, NSW 2006 Australia. kate.lilley@sydney.edu.au

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/csr.v24i1.5963

Article History: Received 06/03/2018; Revised 19/03/2018; Accepted 19/03/2018; Published 20/04/2018

Citation: Lilley, K. 2018. Tilt. Cultural Studies Review, 24:1, 31-33. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/csr.v24i1.5963

© 2018 by the author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license.

Fonzies Fantasyland at 31 Oxford St (now a disappointing IGA) opened in 79 next door to Patches a few months after the Ghost Train fire at Luna Park killed seven.

It was Alan Saffron’s brainchild: Mr Sin’s legitimate heir (later disinherited) dreamed of a chain of Leisure Centres to clean up the family name. I was an original Fonzies girl: blue polysatin shorts, nude stockings. Prior experience none unless winning a poetry competition or playing Fire Power at Reggio’s counted. The kitchen hands from East Sydney Tech approached their work as an installation. They wore kinky white nurse’s uniforms and Dolly Parton wigs like something out of Richard Prince. They perfected psychedelic ice cream sundaes and gave out quarter tabs of acid gratis. They were cool: I looked up to them and heeded their advice.

The hard men got together
in the glassed-in office (Cone of Silence).
Abe stopped by for a sandwich: ‘Keep it simple’.
A silver stream flowed through my hands.
When the red pay phone rang
it was Susie, Alan’s wife, checking in from Hawaii.
If I accidentally locked the till one of the street kids who hung around
jumped the counter with his wad of keys.
In the quiet early hours of the morning
punters lay on their backs tripping
in the rainbow neon tunnel,
Donna Summer blaring into the night.

When Brooke Shields came to town
for the premiere of Tilt
(in between Pretty Baby and Blue Lagoon)
we rolled out the red carpet
and formed a guard of honour.
She was sweet, tired, five years younger than me.
The movie flopped and she ended up
in St Vincent’s with bronchitis.
Space Invaders had landed
and the mood was introverted.
The art students were the first to go,
taking their joie and their LSD.
I was reprimanded for reading
and stayed too long on my break upstairs at Patches
watching the drag show and drinking Bacardi.
I wore the wrong stockings and didn’t care:
the dark bit at the top showed under my shorts.
The junior manager I’d reported for sexual harassment
lectured me on pride in appearance.
The writing was on the wall and I was ready to go.
To show there were no hard feelings the boss
handed me a scrap of paper.
‘If you’re ever in any trouble, call this number.’
I thought of Juanita Nielsen
last seen entering the Carousel Club July 1975.

Two year later it was Fonzies’ turn to burn.
The chief suspect was Les Murphy,
youngest of the three Murphy brothers
jailed for life (‘never to be released’).
It was the trial of the century.
Anita Cobby, 26,
a nurse at Sydney Hospital,
arrived at Blacktown Station
just before 10pm, February 2 1986,
found the payphone out of order
and started walking.
She was found two days later
in a Prospect paddock
almost decapitated.
Kidnapped, tortured, raped and murdered
by five men in a Holden Kingswood
as detailed in their confessions.
According to the NCA report
Les was working at Fonzies when the fire broke out
but no charges were laid.

Around that time I went to a weird party
high up in Victoria Towers
on the street where Juanita Nielsen had lived.
It was an empty shell suspended
over the wharves of Woolloomooloo
said to be owned by a dealer.
I felt bad and left straight away,
heading for my second home,
the Academy Twin (3A Oxford St:
opened with Polanski’s Macbeth in 1974,
the year we moved to Sydney,
closed for good in June 2010).
Heatwave was on starring Judy Davis
as ‘Kate Dean’, a Nielsen-style activist heroine.
Takings were low but it won for Editing
and Cinema Papers called it ‘subversive’.
By then Luna Park was back in business,
the Green Bans were history
and Alan was long gone
(see Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares for the LA sequel).
In the dim auditorium
we were part of another time, watching it burn,
and I was on my way to another life.

About the author

Kate Lilley is Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Sydney. She is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Versary (2002), Ladylike (2012) and Tilt (2017).