Deborah Forster

One boiling Saturday in 1970 when we were 15, my friend Helen and I decided to get jobs in the river-bound city of Melbourne. We took a red rattler train into town with narrow swinging doors, all dusty with the smell of everyone. Bourke Street was the target. We had long dark hair in bobbing ponytails bouncing with optimism but we got so many knockbacks, we had to sit on the GPO steps and regroup with a sad sandwich (probably Vegemite). Still, we kept going and discovered that being told ‘No’ is not a big deal and in the end, it’s not even personal. If you relax, it takes the sting out. I think of those girls that we were and hear the lyric from the title song of ‘Hejira’ (I see something of myself in everyone just at this moment of the world).

Just before closing, I landed one. Helen had to come back next week, and she was successful too. Mine was in the Block Arcade at PB Shoes where I snaffled some very nice shoes over the years. So on Friday nights and Saturday mornings for four years, I went into the city. My wages kept me buying records, especially Joni. From her records I learned about life and writing, she taught me to look around, and that beauty was unexpected and is everywhere.
In the shiny arcade, the giants, ’Gog and Magog watched as we scuttled about on our daily business. There were fancy tea rooms nearby. I worked in the tiny upstairs at PB where the slippers dozed and it was warm and I could read. It took ages to master the cataloguing system of the shoes and I dithered around the boxes panicking while the customers sighed tightly.
Then came a job as a cadet journalist at ‘The Australian’. It was okay money so I moved out. On Fridays, most of the staff drank to the limits of endurance. This was fascinating, if familiar. There were a couple of idiots among them but that’s life. Took me years to get a by-line and in the end, you get used to being shouted at. Dickens (or his successor) might have imagined that place in La Trobe Street with the newspapers folded as orderly as fish scales and the musky smell of the black ink spilling over us.

In that deep past most record albums were about $6 each. At home, I played them with my ear pressed to the dusty red velvet on the radiogram in the lounge room before my parents got home. Privacy was an unimaginable concept.

When ‘Blue’ came out I was 16. It was 1971 in the last days of high school and I cried many a tear over ‘Little Green’ and ‘Blue’. ‘Blue’ is sublime and it’s hard to choose from the beauty of any of the songs, especially ‘River’ but the one that amazed me when I first heard it was: ‘The Last Time I Saw Richard’ (Richard got married to a figure skater and he bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator and he drinks at home now most nights with all the house lights left up bright).

When I left home in 1973, like most of our generation, my records were my most precious possessions. They were how we communicated with each other. I now had a portable record player and friends would come to listen to the latest records. In November this year, Joni will be 80 and will give her first concert for 23 years after an aneurysm some time ago. She is still amazing.
In 1974, my future husband had driven to Perth across the Nullabor with four other hairy blokes in a Ford Transit van with one battered tape of ‘Court and Spark’. (They didn’t consider getting a new one). ‘Court and Spark’ is something for the ages and ‘Down to You’, on ‘C&S’, is my ‘Hallelujah’.
(Everything comes and goes
Marked by lovers and styles of clothes, Things you told yourself were true
Lost or changing as the days come down to you)

There are more albums I love but I can’t go on forever:’ Song to a Seagull’, ‘For the Roses’, ‘Ladies of the Canyon’, ‘The Hissing of the Summer Lawns; and ‘Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter’. ‘Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow’ from ‘HOSL’ is unforgettable.

By 1978, I’d been at ‘The Australian’ for four years and was ready to go to the UK as most young journos did in those days. Student charter flights were outrageous romps. My friends at work had given a lovely pale blue Samsonite suitcase to me that would just hold a couple of jumpers. I thought it might be an attempt to get rid of me and I bought my ticket for the STA flight anyway. I packed up my records and took them over to Mum to store. Then the unexpected happened. I went and fell in love. Just like that. But the man who would be my husband had to like Joni Mitchell. Dealbreaker.

He paused as if this was a question not worthy and smiled his shaggy smile. ‘Of course, I love Joni Mitchell.’ And so I was free to love him. He sold his blue Kombi to buy a ticket on the same flight and we were off. We are still married 44 years later.

By the time Joni came to Melbourne in 1983 for a concert at the Palais in St Kilda, I was two weeks off delivering my first child. I was enormous and trembling with nerves. I wanted the baby to hear her live. Could she be as good as the records? She was, and more.
As time has passed our children have grown up listening to Joni and one of them got married to ‘A Case of You’. They are still married. And during a recent renovation I found the mouldy records in a box in the roof, untouched and waiting. So many scratches. God, I was hard on them.