I was picking up the Small Child today from school and found myself parked ouside a property that shares a common fence with the school ground/  This house has been here since before I went to school there 30 years ago only now if is adjacent to the back wall of the kid’s new art block… but back in the 70s it was where our monkey bars and swings were.

Every day when I stop outside this house I have a fleeting memory of someone we called Window Willy’.  There was a man who lived in that house for the whole seven years I went to primary school there and he got that nickname because he was in the habit of occasionally standing in the window in his bathrobe and flashing his naked form to the kids playing on the monkey bars.  No shit.  Everyone in the school knew about Window Willy, even the teachers.  They would tell us ‘Stay away from the fence children and don’t look up at his windows”.   They pretty much gave the impression they thought he was harmless.

I don’t know if there was any action taken by the school in relation to Window Willy back then but the manner in which it was generally tolerated or ignored astounds me now that I’m a parent myself.  As it turns out a few years ago I found out that there was a priest in our parish around the same time who WAS meddling with children from the school.  The Year 7 girls used go over to the priory and cook and clean for Fr Fitzmaurice as part of their ‘Home Economics’ classes and it seems Fr Fitzmaurice used to take liberties with the girls by getting them in a closet or cubby of some sort and he abused untold number of girls there during his tenure.  It turns out that many of the women in the parish knew Fr Fitzmaurice was a bit ‘handsy’ but no one did anything about it. (Link to Broken Rites about Fr Fitzmaurice)  Unbelievable.

Well all I have to say about all this is thank fuck things have changed! I’m parked outside Window Willy’s place today thinking about all this crap and wishing it was mandatory for anyone living in the vicinity of a school to have a Blue Card.
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Years ago when I was but a year or so out of my Catholic school girl’s uniform and had been working full time for the Qld Govt  for a while… I decided to go get myself a tattoo.  As you do… mostly to piss off the uber-conservative parental units yes?  🙂   Anyway I’d always wanted one and had a custom design I’d chosen and everything.  Now as anyone who knew anything about BrisVegas back in the late 80s/early 90s knows – this meant I had to make my way down ‘Expert Tattooing’ in Stones Corner which was the bright red building right on the roundabout.

That little red tattoo parlour was a BrisVegas landmark and it had been there as long as I could remember (but it’s gone now of course).  As was typical for these places back then it had the appearance of being a place for the city’s hairy and unwashed… you know the chain smoking, drug dealing, gang member, Harley riding miscreants.  Because back then EVERYONE who had tattoos was a criminal of some sort and ended up in jail or they were going to eventually.  Or if they were female well… then they were tramps.  These were the rules – no exceptions.

Anyway I remember rocking up down there (which took some pluck at 17 to walk in dressed straight from work in heels and a skirt) and going in to find out about getting my design done.  It was here I met Gary, Andre and Mo.  And yes… they were all covered from head to toe in tats, smoked like chimneys, swore like troopers and made fun of poor niaive little Borys like you wouldn’t believe. – because you see I couldn’t convincce any of them to do my tattoo for me regarless of how much I pleaded.  Beacuse at the time the law behind the old Qld Banana Curtain stated that you had to be 17 to get a tattoo… unless you were female in which case the law stated you had to be 18.  I shit you not.

So I kept going back and trying to con them into it… and they never gave in.  After a while, Gary and I became the most unlikely of friends – we’d go to lunch, I’d ask him to do my tattoo, he’d say no and repeatedly said that I was too pretty to get tattoos and would flatly refuse to do it.  Even once I did turn 18 it still took me about another three months to talk him into doing it for me… but by that time we had become good friends and I had learned that he was one of the best so I waited him out (and threatened to get Andre to do it instead :P).  He eventually did my pixie for me on my shoulder and about a year or so later he did a little mushroom on my foot for me that he doodled on a serviette over lunch one day.

But as time passed, we eventually lost touch.  I tried to track him down a couple of times but all I could ever find was listings for places to buy his flash (Gary had given up tattooing but was still designing flash and he was mostly working doing gorgeous oil painted murals for some of the fancier resorts up and down the Whitsunday Coast)… but now he’s back!  We found him!  He’s opened a new shop called Carina Tattoo on Old Cleveland Road in Carina.

So if anyone is thinking of getting a new tat and wants a world reknown actual ‘artist’ to do a custom piece… then it’d definitely be worth your while to hightail it to Carina in Brisbane.  🙂

Internationally known Australian artist and tattooist, Gary Davis, brings over 40 years of artistic experience and excellence to his remarkable flash art. Highly prized all around the world, Gary’s intense colors, flowing style and variety of designs have earned him a respected and permanent place as one of the true legends in the tattoo industry.

Hailing from Carindale Brisbane, Australia, Gary’s considerable artistic talents go well beyond tattooing and tattoo design — he is an accomplished painter, illustrator, sculptor, cartoonist, and graphic designer.

When I was a kid we used to have summer thunderstorms all the time…  maybe it’s the distortion of remembered childhood but it seemed like they rolled in every other afternoon and always right on 3pm just as school was letting out.  I lived two streets away from my school and would walk to and from school every day with my sisters and Catherine – an older kid from across the street who liked to lord it over us with her ‘I’m the boss of you’ attitude… I remember she used to yank on the back of the pixie collars of our school uniforms effectively choking us if we walked too far ahead of her and I recall disliking her a lot.  In a rather immature and uncharitable manner, I remember being secretly pleased once when she was injured while walking a large german shepherd named Prince on a lead that had gotten away from her and dragged her on the road for several metres.  She lost a lot of skin off her elbows and knees and I felt she’d got her comeuppance for being such a bossy know-it-all bitch all the time…. but I digress.

BigSal, Borys and LittleTish (c. 1981)

I always loved the afternoon storms.  I would stare out the windows in last period as the clouds darkened and wait to hear the first fat raindrops hitting the hot concrete in the quad.  We’d stand under the awnings for a few minutes after we got out of class to see if it was going to let up a bit and then inevitably decide to make a run for it.   We’d all be running hell for leather to get home and that nasty little bint Catherine would race on ahead without waiting for us to catch up.

I love the feeling of freedom I always had from running home from school in the rain.  To get home we had to pass through a large empty oval park with hardly any trees which would turn into a shallow lake a couple of inches deep during every big storm before the water drained away (yes… slight lightning hazard there).  Sometimes I used to stop in the park and tilt my head back… just standing there enjoying the feel of the raindrops falling on my face.  Once we were already soaked we knew we were in for a half hearted scolding from my Mum (usually about getting our leather school shoes all ruined) so sometimes we’d just give up and run amok kicking water at each other in the park and floating leaves or paddlepop sticks down the gutters.   When I was a teenager I used to force my Mum, my little sister or my cousin Rochelle who used to live with us to come out and go walking in the pouring rain with me.

Now as an adult I hate being caught in the rain – your shoes get ruined, you have to try and cover your (usually stupidly expensive) handbag and then there’s the dripping mess to clean up in the entry hall when you get in the door…. unless of course I go out to get drenched deliberately  🙂  If I’ve nowhere I need to be and nothing I need to do… I still like to grab an old shirt and go stand out in the pouring rain getting soaked to the bone or take a walk around the streets.  I feel like less of a lunatic if I drag the Small Child out with me (though he doesn’t usually want to come out and get wet) and we’ll jump in puddles and kick water at each other for a while before coming inside and getting warmed up.

The day of my Dad’s funeral was the culmination of a particularly stressful week and I remember being in the backyard at my parent’s home and watching the clouds gathering at around 3pm and it definitely looked like it was going to pour any minute.  At the first sign of rain about 80 people tried to cram into the downstairs of the house to avoid getting wet taking drinks and food tables etc all undercover.  I found myself standing under the patio staring out at the backyard as the rain pelting down.  After several minutes watching the rain…  I walked out into the backyard and just stood there with my face to the sky.  My cousin Rochelle came out too and gave me a hug and we stood there having a bit of a cry until we were saturated.  I rounded up the Small Child and some of his cousins and got them playing tag in the rain laughing and just enjoying the feeling of being alive while the other ‘adults’ looked on from inside the house.

Running around in the pouring rain with the kids that afternoon and laughing as though we hadn’t a care in the world seemed to have a truly cleansing and cathartic effect.  I swear I went home that evening feeling like a massive weight had been lifted.  Getting soaked in the pouring rain still evokes the same carefree feelings it did when I was a kid… and after the draining day I had yesterday I found myself looking out my window this afternoon wishing the sky would darken and send me a therapeutic thunderstorm.
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