The 23rd Kitchen Tape

Recorded 20 June 2018

The Brown Towel Caper

GM: Today is Wednesday the 20th of June 2018. Trenna Mahney will be speaking. 

Tren, we’ve talked a bit about your time at Girls’ Friendly Society in Adelaide Terrace? It sounds like an interesting period to do a bit more discussion.

[GM: phone call interrupts us]

I think we should look a bit more at this time at Girls’ Friendly Society.  The sort of things you did.  If we get time we’ll move on to your first employment but we’ll see what happens.

THM:  I’m a bit befuddled with where I am in the story, so I don’t really know what I’m talking about today. 

GM: What about some of the people who you met during your time at Girls’ Friendly Society.  You were talking about Sue?

THM:  Have we talked about her ability to be able to just draw clothing very well?  

GM:  You talked about how you could describe something to her and then she would draw it out.

THM:  How we would go for walks and just go to apartment blocks and….? 

GM:  No I don’t think you’ve covered that.

THM:  Well, there were things that Sue…  Sue, you know, I admired her.  She was everything I wanted to be. 

But I was also pretty naive in that I wanted to think good of everybody.  Everybody was good and they intended to be good. 

But I also thought that they could do things that were maybe not strictly legal, but not be a criminal.  

For example,  Sue would always jump out the window at GFS to meet Paul.  Paul and her had a fiery relationship, they we’re off and together, and then they were off again. 

She had a German girlfriend, for the life of me I can’t remember her name, but she was very artistic, and tall, and sort of like, I guess, some of the German “in” crowd back in the 60s.  They were the cool people, and she was that sort of woman. 

She had a hard voice. I don’t think she took to me, she thought I was a bit of a child.  She wasn’t around all the time that Sue was there and I think she was someone that Sue’s parents didn’t really want her to hang out with because she was going to bring Sue to no good. 

I don’t know if that’s what happened.  Sue did end up coming to no good, as too how far I don’t know. 

A Lot of Walking

Anyway, one time I did go with Sue.  It wasn’t jumping out the window.  It was a party at some flats somewhere or other.  We walked there, we walked everywhere. 

I would imagine we would walk up to 10 km in a night and not consider it too much to do.  We just did, and quite often we would end up at flats, and they were people’s flats who were renting them so no real adults there, but quite often people several years older than my, still only 15 years.  

I felt like I had cow shit in my mouth

They were anywhere up to their early 20s, which to me seemed really a lot older than me.  I remember sitting around talking, and we all sort of talked supposedly intellectually, but I don’t know if that was because half of what they talked about I didn’t even know what you’re talking about. 

Some of them were talking about how beautiful things worked, and the way the flow of this and the flow of that. I thought “they’re artists”. 

In hindsight, they were tripping at the time.  I just probably didn’t understand that.  They brought out marijuana.  Were there other drugs there at the time? I don’t know. 

But I learnt very quickly I just loathed the smell of marijuana.  It smelled like cow shit, and I couldn’t bear the thought of putting something like that in my mouth.  I had already started to smoke regularly so I knew how you breathed in to have a cigarette, but it was a different style with marijuana. 

You sort of breathed and held.  All I could think of was it was going to make me vomit, because I felt like I had cow shit in my mouth.  It was just such a horrible smell. 

So we sat around in the circle, very cool and groovy,  and with the lampshades covered – the whole bit – sending a soggy joint around to everyone, and me trying to be as cool as I could be.  I was just taking it and barely sucking.  

Someone said “did you get anything then?”  And me goin’ “Oh, yeah man I’m cool”.  I know we used to say “man” to everything.  “Freaky, man” is what we used to say quite a lot at GFS. 

It’s something I picked up, and when I met up with Julie and Sue I introduced that terminology to them.  I’d go “freak out, man” and they would think I was pretty cool, because I did go through a stage of the odd smoke or whatever.   

The  smokes I very first tried were probably the cheapest.  I think they were Craven-A but they weren’t very, they weren’t cigarettes you’d like.  I was smoking them purely for the fact of smoking them. 

Then I discovered menthol cigarettes, and then I smoked menthol.  I smoked Alpine Light Menthol, something like that, and they were much more tasty, and I used to think it was fresher on your breath, but I don’t know. 

It was an era when every second person whether they were daggy or not smoked, so it was no big deal.  They weren’t particularly expensive in those days.  

Sue on the weekends used to say “come on, let’s go for a walk” and we’d go for a walk.  We’d just walk. 

Sometimes we got on a bus.  I don’t know whether they were free buses.  In the city, later on, I remember the buses within the city became free, I don’t know if they were free back then, I don’t think they were, but I don’t remember paying for buses. 

Maybe we paid enough to get us one section or something like that. Sometimes we would bus it, but never stay on the bus for a long way.  Quite often the whole thing was the walking, because by walking you could meet people, or you could see things that might be interesting. 

Flats, Number 96, and the Heist

We would find ourselves quite often in flats.  

Blocks of flats in the 1970s quite often had a delicatessen down the bottom of the block.  If it didn’t have that, then it usually had a shared laundry.  We decided that it would be fun, well I say we, I can’t take the credit because it was Sue, I really didn’t see the point, but it was the challenge, that we would nick stuff off the clothes line.  

At that time the show which changed Australia, Number 96 started on TV and they had all sorts of perversions on there.  It may have been something we had watched on Number 96, but to my mind Sue wasn’t much of a TV watcher. 

She was either out partying or she was doing design for class, clothes that she wanted to create herself.  

So I just think it was stuff that came from Sue. So we would go, and we would nick stuff off the line.  Some people would leave their belongings on the line. 

Very rarely was it good clothing.  I think we got some men’s jeans, God knows why.  

I definitely remember some brown towels, they were predominantly hand towels because they weren’t too heavy to carry.  Also I don’t think towels were quite as large as they are now. 

Anyway, we would get these things, look through them, and go “Yeah, I haven’t got a towel, we’ll take that with us”.  There were only, I think, on a number of occasions, I don’t know how many times we did it, it wasn’t a lot, maybe only about 3 times.  

I don’t think at any time we got anywhere near being caught, except for one day, someone was coming down as we were taking stuff off the clothesline. 

Sue acted it out beautifully.  She just said hello, and started talking to them.  They never questioned it. 

Afterwards I said to Sue “they will report that to the police, and they’ll be able to say what we look like”.  She thought that was hilarious. 

She said “why would someone report some scabby old brown towels being taken off the clothesline by a couple of girls? I don’t think so.”  I think she was right. I don’t think it was ever reported.  

The good stuff that I got into with Sue, was that she was daring.  She absolutely looked more sophisticated and older than me. 

I probably had some groovy clothes on too

She could do beautiful makeup.  She would make me up occasionally, and I think that’s probably where I learnt my very basic skills of eye make-up, and that was that you always used several colours.  It was never just use one colour. 

One colour was daggy and that’s what bogans wore, and you would feather it and use things like yellow and green and brown, and I would do that.   But because my eyesight was so bad I wouldn’t know if it’s working.  

I do remember doing this when I had green and all different colours on my eyes, and I’d paint my nails light green, which I thought was the coolest thing that I ever did.

Seeing Ophthalmologists

I had to go to the Ophthalmologist.  My ophthalmologist had been Dr Lamb.  I had mainly been at Craig House under the care of Dr Bremner, but I stopped being under her care once I became a teenager because she worked for the children’s hospital, Princess Margaret Children’s Hospital.  Now I was an adult.  

He had his rooms in West Perth but he was going into semi-retirement.  I mainly saw him when he was way out in Midland or somewhere.  That was really out in the sticks. 

To get there I had to take several buses.  I remember going out to see him and he had said that I had very strange coloured nail polish on, and that if that was the fashion of the day it didn’t make me look very much like a lady.  

He knew that I had left Craig House and he thought it was his duty to tell me that the matron at Craig House would be disappointed in how I looked.  I probably had some groovy clothes on too. 

“yes, what a fine specimen we have here”

No doubt he looked in my eyes so would have seen all my eyeshadow, and maybe it wasn’t looking quite as good as I thought it was. 

He was elderly and before he passed away he did introduce me, I guess it was a referral but he called it an introduction, to his offsider who is taking over from him.  A young man called Dr Michael Walsh.  

So Michael Walsh took over Dr Lamb’s surgery and he became my ophthalmologist pretty much from when I was 15.  However many years later I would realise that he had been the Registrar for Dr Bremner way back in 1968 when I had some of my surgeries. 

He was the doctor who would sign the forms about what had happened to my eye.

I remember him coming around in 1968 when I was in the hospital [PMH], or I remember a doctor and them having all young doctors coming around with him.  I felt like such a dick because I was such a skinny little thing, and I’d had my surgery, and I had bean bags on either side of my head. 

Not bean bags, they were hessian bags full of grain, so they weren’t at all comfy.  They were on either side of my head, and I had to lie as still as I could.  

Well, Dr Walsh came in with these trainee doctors, pulled back the blankets and he said something like “alright I’ll give 10 marks to the first person who can say what we have here”.  And someone said “Marfan syndrome” and he said “yes, what a fine specimen we have here”. 

Anyway, back on track.  Sue. 

We used to wander along the streets. We’d walk along the [Adelaide] Terrace and up the street next to us, near the Sheraton.  We would walk up to Hay Street, I can’t remember the name of that street, I don’t know if it was Hill Street?  It was.

There was the Grosvenor Hotel and also 6PR.  That wasn’t quite as daggy as it is now.   It was still a daggy station.  

But opposite the radio station there was a nightclub.  I don’t remember the name of it, but it was all painted in very weird colours. 

Sue said that it was really cool and funky and that we could get in that night because it was so dark that when you got in there, no one would know we were only 15.  It had that type of light that made you look all funny, and you could see people’s underclothes.  

I remember walking in there, me having such bad eyesight it was a horror to me.  But it also was particularly cool, with sort of all circles of light, and stuff like that. 

I don’t remember much about it, but I tried to play along that, yes, it was cool.  She met up with some of her fellow art students and I just hung around. 

In all reality I wasn’t quite ready for this life yet.  It was a bit too sophisticated for me, and it was a bit too hard to [visually] comprehend what I was doing. 

So we did things like that.  What it did was give me a grounding, so that when I met up with my less informed friends I came across as the coolest kid in town, because I knew what I was doing.  

As I said, Sue was not like the others at GFS.  She was only going to be there for 3 months. 

I remember crying, and I think I had a diary while I was there.  I do have it. 

The 1973 Diary

So, I know that Nancy had given me a 1973 diary to write in, but I’m pretty sure she gave it to me not at the beginning of the year.  Maybe she did. 

I tried to write in it.  I didn’t really know the full purpose of a diary, and it was a bit corny. I did do the thing, you know, where you go “Dear Diary” or whatever like that. 

I don’t think there was much of interest that I noted.  I just recorded the things of the day, or the whinges of the day, I think.  

I would need to read that again.  I’m pretty sure I’ve got in there when Sue left.  It was, you know, a very sooky Trenna who wrote I was losing my best friend, and that I would never meet anyone like her again because she was the coolest person in the world. 

And that her partner was the coolest guy, and to be partnered with a guy who looked and sounded like Mick Jagger, and who was also an artist.  I thought they were just unbelievable to meet. 

Whereas most of the others there were pretty daggy people from the country.  When I say pretty daggy I mean extremely daggy.

 [GM:  Trenna subsequently got me to read her 1973 diary to her.  We both found it extremely interesting.  Later, I dictated it to her and she typed much of it into her iPad.  It includes the entry when Sue leaves GFS.
Here is an extract of Trenna’s 1973 Diary, from Monday, 11 June 1973…

After tea we went up to Ruth’s room and decided to take Sue out to tea as a going away present. We caught a bus out to Kentucky Fried Chicken (Sue, Margaret, Ruth and I), it was really pouring with rain. We bought a barrel between us and then ate it at the bus stop. Then we caught a bus up to Kings Park to have some fairy floss but he wasn’t there so we caught a bus to Fairlanes bowling alley. We had about four games of pool, then had an ice cream and walked back to GFS. Well it’s now 11:00 and I’m off to bed. It’s the last night that Sue will be sharing a room with me worst luck.

However it appears that Sue returned in July, then on 18 September 1973, left again. Here is Trenna’s diary entry for that date…

Sue woke me at 5:50, I lay in bed while she dressed and packed her last bag. Then I walked down with her, the place was really deserted and when we got to the door it was locked. The taxi came and Sue couldn't get out. I woke up Mrs Cole but she gave us the wrong key. Finally at 6:25 Sue left. I waved goodbye then I burst into tears. Jesus I really am going to miss her. I just pray she keeps in contact with me. I went down to breakfast and then afterwards had a shower and dressed and left for work. Work was pretty good, the day seemed to fly by. I walked back to GFS at 5:00 and then went to tea. I had two letters, one was from Helen (birthday card) and the other was my cheque. I came up to my room after sitting at the table for 45 minutes. I started sorting out some old clothes when I noticed my diary. I'm really lonely already please let Sue be my friend I don't have any others, not real ones anyway.

Later on, some more town girls arrived so they were a bit more with it.  Some of them were a bit older and it wasn’t quite as bad. 

I remember when Sue went I became more friendly with Ruth.  She was just a nice girl, but then I moved into another room, which was at the top of the stairs, to the right. 

Now I have a feeling I got that room to myself, which I really loved.  It may have been by the time I left GFS.  

Maybe it was when I was working at Girlock Brakes by then. I’d got that job at Girlock after 3 months of training at Key Personnel.

I was so good at it that I got the job, which I was a bit braggy about.  I was very keen to earn my own money, but I realise now that, God, I wish I had a choice of what to do in my life then. Because I really was on my own. 

Nobody advised me on what to do other than to go and live at GFS, because that’s all that was really available to someone who would not get older than 30, and who would never marry.  [GM: If you haven’t already, see the post “”Dead at 27, and Never to Marry””.

I too had decided pretty much that I shouldn’t marry someone because I couldn’t bear the thought of a little child being sent off to a home, and not having a mum or a dad to look after them. I think I just really wanted this job.

What Tag?

This is where I think that Child Welfare came into it.  I think the matron at GFS, who I’m sure had a name, who we called Mrs something with a “W”.  She had got Child Welfare to cough up $50 so I could buy clothes to wear to work.  And I did.  

I know I bought a pink jumper which I kept for years.  I bought the most gorgeous black and white striped, what was it called at the time –  a batwing jumper, which was so modern. 

And quite often there would be guys who came in there too.  Guys who lived in flats.  

I bought a skirt, I think that might have been a bit tartan, but in a cool way.  They’re the things I remember.  I do remember having a bit more. 

But, I didn’t know how to wash jumpers, and they were woollen, not like today.  A lot of the fabrics were true, real fabrics so you would get wool or angora or cotton.  There was very little synthetic.  

I remember one day us girls going around to the laundromat.  We had a laundry at GFS but it had pretty crappy washing facilities, and it didn’t have a tumble dryer, but there was a laundromat around in that street, where the Sheraton was, but towards Hay Street. 

On the right hand side there was a laundromat there, and we went there. We took our washing there.

I think one of the things was that we could take a pile of washing there and then all of us could put all of our washing in the tumble dryer, because you needed to put a few things in there and that way it would be really cheap to get them dry, and that would be good. 

And quite often there would be guys who came in there too.  Guys who lived in flats.  

Also there were boarding houses along that street in those days.  Primarily they were for older blokes, drunks, who’d go to The Grosvenor [pub] around the corner. 

There were always a few drunks who’d come in to the laundromat.  We were always quite friendly, taking the piss out of them, and they were always friendly to us.  So, we would do that.  

But little did I know that you were meant to read the tag.  The tag would tell you how to wash the clothing, and I do remember that everything I washed shrunk. 

So my pink jumper became really really tiny, and all of the girls had to pull the arms and pull the body and it never ever really fitted me properly after that.  I wore it for years until it became cream-coloured.  

My batwing jumper, which had huge bat wings, in a way it wasn’t too bad because the bat wings I was a bit over bat wing for me.  The wings on that had reduced a bit but we still had to pull it back. 

We just laughed ourselves silly trying to pull that jumper because it was such a weird shape that we didn’t know which way to pull it. I know I did wear it.  

Perhaps I didn’t wear it as long as I had hoped to but it got me through my first winter of working whilst working at Girlock. 

Nancy had been a West Perth supporter, so I said I was an East Perth supporter

If I had been at Key Personnel from March it would have taken me through to June, so I would have been starting work pretty much in the dead of winter.  

I can remember that because I used to have to go and get all the lunches for everybody.  There was a shop, a lunch bar nearby.  We [Girlock] were in Moore Street and I had to walk around the corner back into Wellington Street. 

It was the bottom street where the bottom of the Royal Perth Hospital was.  In those days there were the nurses quarters which were starting to be phased out, and then there were Bey Apartments, which at that stage I didn’t know it, but I would soon be living in Bey Apartments.  

Initially they had been built primarily, I think, for all the nursing, and not just nursing, but I think there were young doctors. Which meant men in those days who worked there. 

Just the ones who were registrars, because they were proper, self contained flats, they weren’t just rooms, so they had to look after themselves. 

So I think I will leave it there for now because Sue’s now left, I’ve moved from the room I was in, to the room over at the corner of the stairs. 

I know that’s where listening to the radio became a really big thing for me.  I did listen to 6PM every day.  

First Boyfriend- sort of …

It was when the next lot of friends came along, who were called Twinnies.  They were younger than me, and they were the sweetest girls. 

They were identical twins.  They were Aboriginal girls, Joyce and Sharon.  They had a cousin, his name was George, but we all called him Poony.  

He would quite often come around.  He had won the lottery, it was the $16,000 lottery.   At first I thought he was making up a story, but I thought he was good-looking. 

He was Aboriginal, he had a really good body, and he played under 19s footy for East Perth.   We all liked East Perth.  

The only reason I had picked East Perth was that Nancy had been a West Perth supporter, so I said I was an East Perth supporter. 

I didn’t even really know much about the game but we used to walk to the game when it was on, because, you know, the guys were gorgeous, even though I couldn’t see what the hell was going on in the game. 

Especially when I went without wearing either glasses or bifocals or contacts [so I looked more attractive].  Quite often Poony would play in the game before the main game because he was in the under 19s team.  

He had what was considered to be a good future in front of him, but he won $16,000 and he was just really big on spending this money. 

He loved clothes, he loved shoes.  He bought the most expensive, big-checked suits and those shoes that gangsters used to wear with the double coloured patent leather ones that you would buy in the flash arcades, in City Arcade. 

At night he would always take us to Brown’s Milk Bar [in Barrack Street] where he would buy us something.  I would always have a banana split, and an apricot nectar, and he would always pay. 

Eventually he would become what I considered my first boyfriend.

The Perth Concert Hall was finally finished, and Gordon Lightfoot came to play there.  Poony loved Gordon Lightfoot so he took me to see Gordon Lightfoot, because he was my boyfriend. 

We would always talk on the phone, but it would always be Twinnies and me talking with him.  Rose would hang around, but no way would she have anything to do with him. 

Rose was Aboriginal but she came from up north.  Her mum was Japanese, her dad was Aboriginal, but he was unfortunately, what she described as a “closet drinker”. 

I literally thought he drank booze in the closet, and never understood the term.  Her mum was adorable.  She was stunningly beautiful.  She always wore her hair in a bun.  She was lean and elegant but she smoked like a chimney.  But she was lovely.  

Rose was set on marrying a white man who wore a tie, and that’s all she was interested in.  She was never, ever going to marry an Aboriginal man. 

I don’t know if that advice had come from her mum but she knew that she was not going to marry an Aboriginal guy.  She thought that Poony was just a waste of all the opportunities he had had and quite frankly, he was. 

We didn’t mind because we always got to have good times out.  And he was a funny bugger.  

I didn’t particularly like Gordon Lightfoot, but he loved that sort of music, and we went and saw Gordon Lightfoot whenever it was that he came, in 1973, at the Concert Hall and that was our first date out. 

GM: Here is a link to an amazing document that purports to list concert tours in Australia 1954-79. Apparently Gordon Lightfoot didn’t come to the Perth Concert Hall until 23 and 24 September 1974.

I think we might have held hands as we walked from GFS to the Concert Hall and back.  I’m pretty sure we didn’t kiss. I don’t think we ever kissed.  If we did it would have been as a bit of a joke. 

But we did consider ourselves to be boyfriend and girlfriend.  

That was quite hilarious because we always knew that he liked Rose, rather than me, and one day I got the girls on the phone to drag it out of him. 

They had to say that I wasn’t there, and so they did, and they said “so, do you like Rose or Trenna the best?” And he said “well, Trenna is really nice, and she’s really funny, and I like being with her, but I really want Rose to be my girlfriend”.  We went into hysterics knowing that that’s not what was going to happen.  

I think that was the end of me pretending to have a boyfriend.  [GM: My understanding is that Poony’s real name was George Cross.]

Anyway, so I will leave it there.

[GM: As an aside, here is an interesting blog post about the Perth Concert Hall, scene of Trenna’s first date. Apparently there is a throne room there for Queen Elizabeth II!]