PHIL BROWN

My son’s teenage years were full of concerts and shows at QPAC and theatre and ballet and exhibitions. Okay admittedly I had to promise him good canapes to get him to go to exhibitions with me but at least he went.

I was thinking of this the other day and reflecting how little of this cultural engagement there was during my own teenage years on the Gold Coast. Now they have HOTA and a wonderful new gallery but back in the 1970s there wasn’t much going on at all, let me assure you.

We had the movies of course. We used to go to the pictures in Surfers Paradise where the proprietor carried a walking stick which he would whack us with when we played up, as we often did. That was part of our cultural life and there wasn’t that much else frankly.

I never even attended an art exhibition until I was around 20. Maybe there were some on the Goldie back then but they kept them bloody well hidden.

I went to Miami State High School which was pretty bleak until they built a hall. My dad helped the principal, the legendary Bill Callinan (he was tough but fair) raise funds for this hall. Build it and they will come they say and they did. So later in my teens I actually saw a few shows at our school hall including the Afro rock band Osibisa and I remember seeing an Aunty Jack in concert affair featuring the stars of that zany TV show including a certain Norman Gunston (Garry Mcdonald) playing the harmonica.

I was even on stage in that hall myself in a fleeting role as a knight in Camelot and me and some mates did a Goons show sketch for a school function there too. The only other culture we got was at places like The Playroom where we would go to see bands after puffing on herbal cigarettes.

But there was no classical music in our sphere. We dug Lou Reed, David Bowie, Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa. Okay maybe there were some amateur theatre groups around but we never went to see them. To say it was a cultural desert was an understatement. They should have called it the Gobi Coast. Boom boom.