THE BOOK OF STREET LEVEL GOOGLE SNAPS.
The Book
of
Street Level
‘Google Snaps’.
A Celebration of the Public Housing, Medical and Social Welfare systems in Australia,
This compilation is inter-active and allows the reader to click on links to relevant excerpts from my book of memoirs that document The'Busking Years' ...
The 'Streetfire Cabaret'
.....
welcome to my ‘Googled Out’, photographic
journey through this lifetime
as a sometimes homeless and
other times well accommodated drifter,
who welcomes the creature comforts that come his way ...
'But Always Prefers to Sleep Out Under the Stars'.
'But Always Prefers to Sleep Out Under the Stars'.
From the movie 2001 a space odyssey
0utside of the womb my first accommodation was the maternity ward at the Port Adelaide Hospital and from there I was taken to a ram shackle humpy that was created from large, sawn off tree branches and flattened out cooking oil cans that my Hungarian, migrant father threw together before he ran off to the mining settlement of Andamooka in search of opals.
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/being-there-then.htmll
A little more modern looking now, This is the first proper place I lived in as a kid. It’s a public housing duplex in Salisbury North down in South Australia.
Our single parent family shifted out of one public housing situation into another in the Salisbury and Elizabeth area for most of my childhood, then when I was fifteen my mother married a wealthy wheat farmer from the Adelaide Plains district and we moved into the expansive Bowyer family homestead while my new step father and his brothers built us a large, modern home of our own.
As I have heard it the Bowyer name has been around the Owen area since colonial settlement and as well as naming our road after them it was also engraved into an ancient plaque that sits on the corner stone of the old church in the middle of town. Quite a transition from the welfare funded life I had previously known.
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/down-on-farm.html
It probably wouldn’t qualify as a home as such, but the tumble down shack owned by my uncle Ainslie at Blanchetown on the banks of the River Murray was a place we spent every available Christmas holiday. Some of my fondest childhood memories linger here.
My time as a trailbike riding, farm girl chasing teenager was short lived and the call to the ‘Big City’ (well Adelaide) landed me at the swankiest single man’s digs a young bloke could have possibly wished for. The resident caretakers ‘Jack and Kitty’ rented me a room For thirty dollars a week with full board in the old servants quarters of Ayers House on North Terrace, Now an upmarket function center it was originally the colonial residence of Sir Henry Ayers the first Governor of South Australia.
I was to find that replacing my dusty old farm bike with a slick looking, high powered new road bike wasn’t such a good move and as a result my new accommodation was to be directly across the road from Ayers House in the Orthopedic ward of the Royal Adelaide Hospital.
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/them-old-blood-and-bones.html
My lower left leg was successfully re-attached in micro-surgery operations that were hailed as a ‘World first’ in the medical journals of the day. Amid the highly experimental treatment program a bout of ‘Osteomyelitis’ combined with a ‘methicillin resistant, staph infection’ caused my new place of residence to be The Northfield Infectious diseases Hospital. Luckily I beat the infections and kept my leg which meant that I was ready to move into a new home at The Saint Margaret’s Rehabilitation Center on Magill Road. After a brief taste of freedom I was admitted to the Glenside Psychiatric hospital suffering from what we now call 'Post traumatic stress disorder'.
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/mind-expanding-aquaintences.html
It would have been bulldozed years ago but between the ‘Maslins Nude beach carpark’ and Blanche point there was a clifftop shack that I occupied with a young surf band called ‘Station’. After nearly four years of being trapped in the hospital system it was …
‘ Time to have some fun!’.
Maslins Beach.
While staying as a guest at the rehabilitation center I got hooked up with a red haired English girl called Joy and we were later to rent a one room flat together in this old bluestone cottage. It sits next door to the British Hotel in North Adelaide which was one of the coolest pubs you could find in the Nineteen Seventies. Many a late evening was spent blowing scoobs and expanding our consciousness on the front porch after closing time.
Because I had been knocked off my bike by some ‘miserable, low life, hit and run driver’ who came through a red light I was found to be 100% free of blame and the court awarded me $30,000 dollars in compensation which was a sizable chunk of cash back in those days. Joy and I were on the first plane we could catch to Europe and I bought a VW camper in London where we started planning our trip to the continental mainland. While we were cabbing all over London hunting for the right camper van the Charles Dickens Hotel In Baker Street charged us a mere three hundred pounds a night for our stay. Are we having fun yet darling?
It just so happened that Joys mother had planned a trip to England to ‘Go visit the family’ which coincided perfectly with our arrival, so for weeks on end after I got the van I was required to hang around in Britain being an unpaid chauffeur and driving to places I didn’t care to go and meeting people who persistently wanted to know when Joy and I would be …
‘ Tying the knot’ … ‘YIKES!’
The one place I did like however was Joys Grandmothers house in the small village of Nailsworth in the Cotswolds. She lived in a six hundred year old dairy that was situated downstream from a trout farm, so I could wet a line from an easy chair as our washing was spinning in the outside laundry.
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/off-to-see-world.html
Once we were finally off on our ‘European tour of Discovery’ the camper was our home for the most part and we pulled into poolside motels every few days to pamper ourselves. While in Spain at the coastal township of Gandia we met a nice Norwegian couple at an outside cafe who worked for a shipping company and were due to leave in the morning. They kindly offered us the use of their villa which was nestled among endless orange groves and they said ‘Just leave the key under the mat’. For about three months we enjoyed their ‘Free rental hospitality’ as did many of the fun loving young backpackers we met who were passing through the area.
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/raise-glass-to-dali.html
When we returned to Australia these besser brick apartments near the cafe at Moana Beach were to be our home for a while but we had been well and truly bitten by the travel bug and longed to be back out on the open road. With my remaining capital I bought a PA system and a Ford Transit van and before long we were the resident road crew for a Maori disco band called ‘The Colour Machine’. The band toured between Adelaide and Cairns with our first gigs being in Sydney then on to Surfers Paradise.
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-color-machine.html
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/back-in-oz.html
As well as a six hundred dollar a week hiring fee and petrol money we were also included in the bands accommodation arrangements which included everything from hotels and motels to the various holiday apartments owned by their promoter. The fast lane lifestyle that goes with touring bands took its toll on Joy and without warning she was on the next plane back to her family in Adelaide. I sold the PA for what I could get when it broke down in Surfers Paradise and just started being a beach bum on the Northern beaches of Sydney. This was one of my favorite camping spots at Chinamans beach, sleeping under the stars in the transit and then spear fishing for my breakfast the next morning.
Try to drag your eyes away from the good looking bloke with the dog and you’ll see the dome sweat lodge I occupied at the ‘Earth Repair Gardens’ in the Blue Mountains during the late eighties. I might just add that ‘Millionaire hippies are good for the environment’.
The Benny Zabel whole earth rainbow flag.
My demo studio in the dome.
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-road-to-eco-topia.html
Through my undying commitment to all things activism related I was welcomed into the 'Nimbin People Power Network' and I found myself living in a tipi on an Alternative Lifestyle commune for a couple of years.
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/nimbin.html
As an aspiring song writer and front man I needed to be closer to the music industry action so I said goodbye to the flower children in Nimbin and moved back to Sydney where I occupied a storeroom full of music equipment at a rehearsal studio on Paramatta road.
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/big-smoke-city.html
From there it was to a room in this quaint sandstone cottage with a long time fashion designer friend. It sits at the top of the stairs that lead up from Tamarama beach.
I was having a friendly chat with a Hungarian guy I had just met in the old ‘Manzil Room’ nightclub and some dumb ass Aussie chick interrupted our conversation by shouting out at the top of her voice, ‘Are you a wog? Are ya?’ He went pale with genuine humiliation and I couldn’t help but notice he was reaching for something inside his jacket. Imagining the worst I took him in a firm brotherly embrace and led him away to another part of the bar. Thomas my new friend was so grateful that I had saved him from a sticky situation he bought my drinks all night. Then after he heard that I was between addresses he got very passionate and insistent as he invited me to move into his swanky penthouse apartment at the Ithaca building in Elizabeth Bay.
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-busking-years.html
Trying to make money as a singer and songwriter was too much of an uphill struggle for my liking and I found that being a street entertainer who also retails stinky North coast buds was a far more profitable enterprise. As well as working with me on the streets my main busking partner ‘Morty’ was an accomplished Austrailian actor who had appeared in shows like ‘Neighbors’ and ‘A Country Practice’. Among his extensive catalog of friends was ‘Mark Hembrow’ who was in the ‘Gallipoli’ movie and other great local films. Mark was on the lookout for a flat mate to share his beachside unit at North Bondi and apparently I was it. The only condition was that we had to lie for each other if ever girls came calling and either one of us was busy in the bedroom with another babe.
'Sounds good to me bro'.
I had become a couch surfing party animal, skipping
between permanent addresses and it didn’t really matter if my current residence
fell apart because there was always another great offer waiting just around the
corner. A fellow bar fly I knew from the Tivoli nightclub had great faith in the Environmental Rock Opera that I was writing which was called ’Once upon a Planet'. To further advance the project Peter invited me to set up a live in recording studio in the
flagpole rotunda of the roof garden apartment he was renting at the Imperial
Hotel in Paddington.
Our all night parties in the roof garden had caused tensions to go to boiling point with the hotels management and it happened just as I got word of an abandoned mansion over in Potts Point. I found out that the palatial building was called ‘Tusculum House’ and it was the home of ‘Monsignor Fulton’ the first Archbishop of Sydney. In more recent times it had been a Catholic care center for the drunks and street kids of Kings Cross, but the clergy got booted out by some Lebanese gangsters during the ‘Bottom of the Harbor Scandal’. Within a week of occupying the squat I had all thirty rooms filled with street people, artists and buskers and there were two fully functioning kitchens upstairs and down. The main ballroom became a martial arts training centre and the gangsters didn’t try a second time to throw us all out.
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/hangin-on-cross.html
The 'House of Peace'squat eventually folded when the National Trust moved in to restore it, so I jumped on a plane to catch up with some friends who were staying at the Digger street Art Community in Cairns. I camped under a mosquito infested veranda to avoid getting busted by the hard nosed local rangers or run the risk of ending up as crocodile food.
On my return to New South Wales I became involved with a girl from the mountains called Robyn who felt like she needed a ‘Sea Change’ and persuaded me to share the rent on this house in Shoal Bay, which had been my coastal escape from Sydney for the past few years. Our arrangement lasted a few short months during the summer then she decided that she really wanted to be back in the freezing cold mountains. I was sad to see her go but none the less I happily squatted in the building for another year before the local coppers politely informed me that the owner wanted to do some renovations.
The property next door was owed by ‘Old Sid’ who was a retired commercial fisherman in his eighties. He let me rent a disused storage shed and a concreted courtyard for twenty bucks a week as long as I cooked his evening meals and helped out with the upkeep of his holiday units. ‘No worries old timer’. I lived with Sid for five years and in that time I converted the shed into a ply lined recording studio and the courtyard became a horticultural showcase. My dog Tootsy had a number of litters which were given away to the local kids and I kept the best looking male of them all and named him Husky.
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/being-here-now.html
With Tootsie and one of the litters.
Husky as a pup the fist time I took him fishing.
When old Sid passed away the property was taken over by his executors and I had to find a new home. A long time friend of mine owned a car wrecking yard at Salamander Bay so I set up my camp in an old Bedford truck that had a dirty great python living in the rusted out cabin area.
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-red-light-area-of-hollywood.html
My time in the truck was cut short by the discovery of a once in a lifetime find at the local recycle depot. Just hours after it had been dropped off I stumbled upon this Farrier, racing tri-maran sitting on a boat trailer next to a mountain of old refrigerators. On making inquiries I was told it had been donated to the depot by some guy who was involved in a messy divorce and he didn’t want his wife to get it. Three hundred bucks I picked it up for with a time payment plan and they even dropped it out at the wrecking yard for me. Husky and I lived in the boat perched up on it’s trailer for about three months making repairs to the hull and pontoons then I launched it at the local boat ramp and sailed off to go and live at my favorite fishing spot.
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/stormbreaker.html
The yacht got washed onto a sand bar in a once in a hundred year storm and it ended up being impounded by the Maritime Authorities because the odds were stacked too high against me to save it. Life was telling me that it was time to hit the road again so I arranged for a local bloke to pick me and my belongings up in his van and drop us off on banks of the Hunter River in Newcastle.
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/sandfly-city-and-ice-aint-nice.html
The yacht got washed onto a sand bar in a once in a hundred year storm and it ended up being impounded by the Maritime Authorities because the odds were stacked too high against me to save it. Life was telling me that it was time to hit the road again so I arranged for a local bloke to pick me and my belongings up in his van and drop us off on banks of the Hunter River in Newcastle.
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/sandfly-city-and-ice-aint-nice.html
After a few months of exploring the Hunter River I contacted a bud from Springwood and arranged for him to transport me and my load to the Blue Mountains so I could catch up with the old crew and do some busking shows for the tourists. Hus and I squatted in this little workers hut through a snowy Katoomba winter with only a small pot belly stove to warm us against the wind chill.
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/on-high-ground-and-return-to-streetlife.html
As the spring arrived I paid a strung out methadone addict a hundred and fifty bucks to cart my load down to the Cooks River on Botany Bay. The canopied dinghy was home for me and my dog through most of the summer and during that time for us to be able to camp under a noisy road bridge in a gale was the pinnacle of luxury.
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/a-boating-we-will-go-and-other-botany.html
As I followed in the oar strokes of the First Fleet explorers I discovered this disused art decco beach house in Kogarah Bay. It served as an ideal squat for a few months and gave us the opportunity to ride into Newtown to do some busking shows. People loved Huskyboy and some days we made over a hundred bucks. The beach house ended abruptly with me having to deter a gang of iced up teenagers with a loaded and fully cocked spear gun.
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/keep-on-trucking-and-gone-to-dogs.html
One day while I was busking down at Circular Quay I met a bloke called Jamie who was heading up North in his van and he said he would drop us off in Byron bay for three hundred bucks. I jumped at the offer and when we arrived I camped under the tarped over dinghy which was propped up with an oar. This vacant lot in Belongil is all that’s left of the converted whaling station and abattoir that became a thriving art community known as ‘The Epicenter’.
In time I graduated from camping among the bandannas palms to a rental situation in one of the many artist’s studios the complex housed. The place was like a rabbit warren filled with a myriad of counter-culture types, but sadly it was gutted by a huge fire when some dumb ass hippie nodded off and dropped his smoldering joint in a waste paper bin.
After the fire I recycled what I could from the
demolition crews and constructed this raft on the Belongil estuary a little
way down the track.
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/up-creek.html
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/up-creek.html
This was my campsite while I was constructing the raft
and the very evening I moved into my new floating bedroom the tree came down in
a blow and landed right where I had been laying my head to sleep.
The Byron Bay sewage system is barely adequate to deal with the annual influx of Christmas holiday makers and the estuary was hit by a toxic fish kill so severe it rendered the entire waterway uninhabitable. The next logical option for me was to deconstruct the raft and transport it to the Brunswick River where I could build a full scale houseboat, so that’s what I did.
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/home-sweet-houseboat.html
No sooner was my wonderful, bamboo bachelor pad up and floating before I met the mother of my youngest daughter and well you know, … ‘Things change’.
Alicia swimming near the houseboat.
Alicia and I stayed in the houseboat for about five months before I allowed myself to be swept away on a hair brained scheme that involved a road trip down South in the Land Rover she intended to buy. Once there we would base ourselves on the River Murray where the borders of three states merge and we would grow dope plants in floating foam containers in the backwater lagoons and billabongs. The logic behind it was that if the cops from any one state moved in on us we could simply dinghy over the border. It was actually my idea to begin with but I was just thinking aloud and she really wanted to do it. To fast track you on the outcome, only one plant survived and Alicia became pregnant opting for the security of her family home and leaving me stranded with my dog and all of my belongings on the banks of Lake Bonney in sunny South Oz.
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/stranded.html
I scored a couple of ancient but water tight pontoons and joined them together with timber beams. On this I placed some ply board flooring and mounted the triangular structure I had been camping in which was constructed of PVC pipes covered with shade cloth and tarps off a caravan.
Once out of Lake Bonney and putting southward along the main arm of the river it was a series of long hauls between townships where every four or five days we would reconnect with civilization and I’d stock up on the essentials. Food, water, fuel, booze and weed.
Lord Muck sleeping as usual.
Our River Murray Odyssey came to close right here in
front of my uncles shack in Blanchetown. That submerged log is where I had my
first ever near death experience as a kid. I jumped into the deeper water to
impress my older cousins and I was going down for the third time when uncle
Ainslie jumped in to rescue me.
I had arrived in Blanchetown just before the silly
season and I got talking to a fellow at the local who was driving an empty
truck down to Adelaide the next morning to pick up the Christmas booze for the
pub. It was agreed that I would help him load the grog up at Thebarton then he
would drop us off at West Beach before heading back to Blanchetown. As I was
setting up my shelter it suddenly occurred to me that I was very close to Port
Adelaide the town of my birth. Right there and then I decided that my next big
adventure should be to travel by sea to the mouth of the Port River and then
venture into town to check the place out as an adult.
With the sun sinking fast on my arrival the most logical option was to try for a mooring at the local cruising yacht club, but little did I know what was in store. There was a full blown Christmas party taking place in the clubhouse when I strolled up to make inquiries and I was invited to join the festivities with a cold beer handshake. I found out that the party was also being thrown to farewell a veteran couple on their forthcoming round the world sailing trip and unbeknownst to me it was a club rule to grant ‘The Rights of a Travelling Seaman’ to the first ‘in transit’ boatie like myself who walked in the door.
‘Welcome to Port Adelaide boy!’
I had the use of a kayak storage shed at the top of a
small boat ramp and all the other club facilities for about three months in
which time I acquired a box trailer that I planned to load up with my stuff and
try for a ride back to the Northern Rivers.
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/techno-feral.html
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/techno-feral.html
Once fully loaded the trailer was left in storage at the club and towing a golf buggy I had converted into a swag hauling bike trailer we set off along the bicycle tracks towards Adelaide’s backpacker district. My plan to post ‘Ride Wanted’ ads all over the place paid off beautifully and our first trailer hook up got us all the way to Melbourne with a couple of Israeli guys who spoke very little English. I applied the same strategy in the Melbourne backpacker hostels and the next thing I knew I was casting a line in Brunswick Heads at the very same spot I had last been fishing before Alicia and I set off for South Oz.
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/full-circle.html
With winter setting in fast and unending problems with overzealous council rangers I took shelter in the storage shed of the local scout hall for a while. I got away with it for ages by just staying concealed and not smoking joints on Wednesdays and Friday evenings when the cubs and scouts held their meetings.
The Scout hall.
Eventually I got
sprung in the scout hall and when I set off to go camping in my usual spots I
found it had become a lot tighter in my absence. Official notices were pinned
to my tent by rangers and police threatening me with large fines, so I had to
go for a plan ‘B’ strategy to keep my little circus on the road. Not long after
my return to the area an old mate offered to rent me a caravan on his property
in the hills for Fifty bucks a week and I decided to take it.
‘BAD MOVE’.
The transition from a mostly flat, coastal environment to a windy slope in the hinterland was more than my body could endure and I was hit by a debilitating bout of sciatica that had me mostly bed ridden for about four months.
Coorabell.
https://steventripp.blogspot.com/2018/12/a-final-word.html
Only semi mobile due to heavy doses of opioid painkillers I was barely capable of loading up a trailer with my stuff for the journey back down to sea level. Brian a caring outreach worker with the Saint Vincent De Paul Society came to my aid and he was able to get me into a room at the Northern Rivers Hotel in North Lismore, where I was at last in close reach of medical attention.
I stayed at the pub for while but it couldn’t last indefinitely
because I was renting an upstairs room that was just too hard to scramble up
to. I was transported to and from medical and physio therapy appointments by a
community transport service and after about five months I was again able to
ride my pushbike. Amid my ordeals I was fortunate to connect with the mother of
an old busking pal who died a few years ago from cancer. Francesca owns a stilt perched house down by
the Wilson River and after hearing about my problems with the hotel room she
invited me to set up a camp on her property, in the area between the stilts
under her house. Now close to eighty poor Fran was steadily slipping into
dementia and she was barely capable of looking after herself let alone play
host to some disabled old fart who was camping under her house. As the Sciatica improved I was gradually able
to potter around in the garden with her as she held unending conversations with
herself and cursed all of the squawking birds claiming they were trying to
prevent her long dead son from singing her favorite song for her.
At the very first moment I felt able to make the next big move I booked a date with a guy from the local soup kitchen who owned a utility and often helped people move their stuff for a fee. After abandoning the boat and all that went with it I was left with a load that strapped neatly onto the golf buggy bike trailer and with the pushbike on top it was an ideal load for the ute. Having arrived at the Grafton Railway station and paid the driver, my rusty old bicycle was promptly abandoned beside a carpark dumpster and the buggy holding my swag and basic camping gear was pulled along behind as I hobbled towards the ticket office.
After an uncomfortable all night train journey numbed
out on Lyrica, Endone and Temaze I arrived at Central station in Sydney where I
stashed the buggy behind some bushes and hailed a cab which took me to the
Kmart store on Broadway. I picked up a brand new 26 inch bike for $140 and rode
it back to central where I attached the buggy to the seat with octopus straps.
My next campsite after a bloody demanding ride was
Wentworth park near the Pyrmont fish markets where a number of other homeless
people had pitched their tents under the light rail overpass.
The effort I was having to exert pulling the bike
trailer along became my regular exercise regime and I could feel myself beating
the sciatica more with each passing day. I became much less dependent on the
painkillers and after a week or so I was able to ride down to Circular Quay and
jump on a Manly Ferry. My arrival at the
Manly lagoon was incredibly significant because it meant that I had achieved
what I set out to do and it completed a cycle by returning me to the place I first camped when I arrived in Sydney from
Adelaide.
Daniel who was the social worker at the Manly Community Center was very helpful after he heard my story and in a few short days my most pressing needs were taken care of. I was put in touch with a female, Scottish case worker called Lynsey who helped me to get through a mountain of paperwork and started making preparations to get me on the emergency waiting list for public housing. Dr Timothy Rigg he GP I started seeing was happy to give Lynsey detailed medical reports on my progress and between them they compiled a rather chunky file. As I was travelling about through the years I looked into the possibilities of getting into the public housing system but I was always deterred by the long waiting time and I knew there was a lot of needy young families who would be next in line before me. I had long ago resigned myself to the fact I would probably die a homeless pauper on a riverbank somewhere so it came as real shock when I received the early morning call on my mobile phone saying that I had been offered a one bedroom unit in Brookvale.
‘What!’
‘A permanent home on the Northern Beaches’
‘But this is my favorite place in the whole of Sydney’
‘Strewth’
‘Magic must be Real’
‘My special thanks go out to all who made this possible’
'CHEERS'
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