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I’ve been drawing since I was a kid, cartooning. I was getting pretty quirky.
The media was pretty conservative back then, and this was something amateurish but really interesting music and commentary.
I got their subscriber magazine. It used to come out every month. It was the same size as Semper but more cheaply produced, photocopied, and stapled.
There were some pretty serious people putting it together, writing about dealing with the federal government bureaucracy and so on, and I thought it needed some cartoons. So, I took some cartoons in and slipped them under the door at night, downstairs. And they printed them, then they called me in to help out with the layout. And that’s when I met other creatives like Ann Jones, Damien Ledwich, and Terry Murphy. I helped them out, and I think that John Jiggins from the Cane Toad Times saw my stuff in Radio Times and got me involved. From there, Bruce Dixon offered me a job – $100 a week to do cartooning and layout for Semper.
Were you a student at the time?
No, I was never a student. I didn’t get past high school. I matriculated, so I was ready for uni, but I couldn’t see anything I wanted to do at the time. I’m pretty sure all the other people were all students. I spent years in this area working.
That’s cool, spending a lot of time on campus hanging out with students.
Hanging out with all the groovy people! And at that time, there was a conservative Bjelke-Petersen government cracking down on the right to march, the right to protest, and at the time he had no police jurisdiction over the campus, so all the activists would organise on campus, and the marchers would come from here and go down Coronation Drive to the city, and meet a whole lot of blue uniforms with batons and a bit of violence. So, it was pretty interesting being in that environment. Then punk music started soon afterwards, and that was all Do-It-Yourself. So, some of the people I was meeting were starting bands. Ann Jones was in the Toe-Suckers.
Getting involved in Radio Times and Cane Toad Times got me introduced to all of these creative people. There was a section of the community that felt bonded because they weren’t approved of by their government, and they were a little bit rebellious and creative. Musicians, artists, cartoonists, writers. It felt like a community within a community. For me, it was like finding my group, my tribe. It was just wonderfully creative; I would go along to art galleries and concerts and so-on.
Because media was very different, no one was on their phones, and TV was pretty boring at the time, so people went to films, magazines, and concerts. There was more of an appetite for magazines back then. People would see a magazine and say, ‘Oh, I’ve got a story,’ and they’d post it in or bring it to the office. Even without the internet, you can make connections.
I think the Cane Toad Times was a bit more social because we had to have meetings at people’s houses. There didn’t seem to be that happening at Semper. I don’t think it was conducive, because there weren’t that many seats, and people were busy. It was dark and in a no-persons-land between 4ZZZ and the refec. So, it wasn’t really inviting. 4ZZZ had big glass fronts, went out onto a car park, you could just walk in, and it was always interesting.
Written by Jester Roach
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