00:00I'm going to, this is going to sound a bit sucky, but I have extremely fond memories of Canberra.
00:05I'm always happy to come back here.
00:07This is one of the, I associate Canberra with one of the happiest periods of my life, which was my uni years.
00:12I lived here for four years.
00:14The busking group, the Doug Anthony All-Stars, started in Civic here, performing in Petrie Plaza.
00:19There's a little park where the merry-go-round is, or was, I don't know if it's still there anymore,
00:24commemorating the fact that we were born and we died there.
00:28So I have very happy memories of that.
00:30I also, we're going to talk about this on stage tonight, remember at a place which was absolutely suffused with punk ideology.
00:39This is the early to mid-80s we're talking about, when punk was huge in Canberra and made a lot of sense.
00:44It's a kind of an anti-apathy, DIY fun ideology.
00:48It's not often remembered, but Susan Lee was part of that scene back in the day as well.
00:52She was, yeah, yeah, she'd left just after I arrived, so I didn't know her then.
00:57But we talked about it when she came on the show and I recorded a conversation with her here in Canberra.
01:02How we formed is going to require some vulgar language, but it's essential to the content and in context.
01:07It's not too offensive, I hope.
01:08But we started as a busking group.
01:11When I moved here, I started busking with a friend of mine, Robert, who's since gone on to become quite high up in the United Nations, weirdly enough.
01:17And then we met Tim Ferguson.
01:20First time I saw Tim performing, he was standing on a stage that used to be in Garima Place way back in the 80s.
01:27He was wearing, wrapped in an orange sari or a sheet.
01:32He had mong hip black hair.
01:34He was very, very handsome.
01:34And he was banging a cowbell and singing a song of his own composition called The Mutant Opera, which had as its chorus line, fuck the mutants, fuck the mutants, fuck the mutants.
01:46Tim's position on this is that Canberra had a terrible mutant problem at the time that only he was addressing, but that was it.
01:52But Tim was a very wild and exciting performer.
01:55Rob left the group and we'd already known Paul McDermott, who grew up here in Canberra.
01:59He was part of another performing group and Paul joined and Paul had that beautiful voice and was able to write songs with me and Tim as well.
02:06So that's how it all started here.
02:09It started as a busking group in Petri Plaza on Saturday mornings, performing to bored public servants, whereupon we would often steal their children and put them in the guitar case.
02:19That was always a lot of fun too.
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