Beef Week Queen

Miss Indy don’t make no moral stand, just wants publicity
But Miss Beef Week’s got charm and wit, and no iron deficiency.
- Never Mind The Bullocks (aka Flange Gasket), 2009

It was just Marty and me in the mighty M5 for the cruise back to Brisneyland the morning after BDO Goldie. We had media commitments later in the day – and they could stay as late in the day as they wanted, as far as we were concerned. Amazingly, considering the amount of piss they’d put away across the day, both Dr Cletus and Mad Mick had made it to work in the big city (well in the leafy east at least – Dr Cletus in St Lucia, Mick in Ashgrove) by the start of business hours. Marty was still so crook he’d thrown me the keys. Wasn’t feeling two thousand percent myself, but it was probably more fatigue than residual pissededness and anyway there weren’t any RBTs in the fast lane of the Pacific Motorway at midday on a Monday. I was nursing a takeaway coffee in my left hand and nudging the BMW forward with my right draped over the leather-rimmed tiller. Making Marty nervous, he was a two-hands-on-the-wheel-at-all-times kinda guy, but the M5 was so inherently stable on those massive wide tyres it’d take a missile attack to kick it out of its lane.

“Mate,” I said, “how much do you make out of Gasket? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“Out of Gasket?” he repeated. “Jeez, I dunno… why do you ask?”

“Just wondering,” I said.

“Yeah, sure you are,” he grinned. “Trying to work out whose songs pull more royalties?”

“Curses,” I declared, “I’ve been rumbled.” Then laughed, and added, “It’s not just personal greed and ego. More something Lena mentioned over in NZ…”

“Oh,” he remarked, at the mention of her name. “I pays me taxes, me, honest guv…”

“Ah you heard about that then?”

“'Course I heard. I’m a director of the company.”

“Of course,” I nodded.

“The fact I heard it from Danno instead of the Executive Director of Talent Management is beside the point…”

“Shit, really?”

Marty frowned, making a dog-patting gesture. I figured he meant ‘Keep it down’ not ‘I want to adopt a puppy, can we stop at the RSPCA’. “We’ve had words. It’s sorted.”

“That why she skipped out on the Goldie show?”

Marty shrugged. “Nah. She hates festivals. Too many dirty bogan bleached-blonde skanks in low cut Aussie flag tops. And that’s just the blokes. Even so she’ll be at Sydney, front and centre.”

“Backstage in the VIP lounge sipping champagne and moaning about the heat.”

“Yeah that too. And can you blame her?”

“That or having to associate with poor people… I see your point.”

“Anyway,” he said, “that’s all sorted, and the ATO are getting a significant square-up as soon as Maddy can nick her daddy’s chequebook... so why the sudden interest?”

“Not that, actually. It’s that… well, over in NZ, over a couple of vinos at Hollywood’s joint, Lena said the tax stuff wasn’t actually the point of the exercise.”

“No?”

“Nah, she basically tripped over it. Or rather this forensic accountant mate of hers did… I say mate of hers, he was actually an ex of Agnes’ I think.”

“That narrows it down,” Marty suggested. “Forensic accountant, what the fuck?”

I took a swig of coffee, then as per standard Gasket operating procedure, paused to flip off the Carlton brewery at Yatala as the BMW surged past. “Fucking useless muppets,” I declared. “Yeah, so the deal was, she’s writing this book about Sam… swears blind she’s NOT writing this book about Sam, but fuck she’s doing a lot of research… anyway she’s writing this book about Sam. Half of her going over for Tractor’s funeral was chasing up stuff about his crash, talking to Anne. She says not but she’s transparent as fuck. The accountant thing, that was her calling in a favour – dude was shagging Agnes on the side, he was married, was going to get cleaned out in the divorce, and Lena managed to salvage it by finding out his missus was shagging a married Victorian cabinet minister…”

“Can we get to the bit where you explain why Lena sent forensic accountants after my wife’s family company? Cos that doesn’t seem very nice and friendly-like.”

“Right, yeah. Look, as I say, they weren’t after you per se, they were looking at the whole financial situation for Gasket, dude just went off on a tangent when he sniffed out something suss with dB’s tax arrangements. What they were trying to do originally was trace the royalties situation for McCarthy, just find out where it goes to.”

“Just goes to his family, yeah?”

“Yeah, nah, not really.”

“You channelling Roy Symonds?”

“Not drunk enough. Nah, there’s some sort of blind trust arrangement going on.”

“Blind trust?” Marty screwed up his face. “Sounds like a Collective Soul album title.” But he knew what I was talking about. Knew it was a bit out of the ordinary, anyway. Why bother?

“Yeah, hence the CSI work trying to find out who was involved – and more to the point why.”

“Why,” Marty mused. “That’s kinda the point, isn’t it? So this was just a hunch she played, getting this Aggie-shagger beancounter in?”

“Pretty much,” I nodded. “Took a cursory look at the paperwork she could get access to, went WTF, called in her contact.” Fucking fulleh-siiicked-up Civic tooling on a deserted highway in the rightmost lane doing 105, if that. Fuck the fuck off you fucken fuck. “First question is who – who set it up, who’s on the board, whatever.”

“They know that now?”

“Getting there, she says. Which means yes they do, but you’ll have to read about it in the book…”

“Sounds about right,” Marty considered. “Though I don’t get the connection to what my Gasket royalties are…”

I nodded. “If we can stop off at the office before we head to Triple M, I reckon I can show you.”

“Ooohh,” he minced. “Kinky.”

We had plenty of time before our radio station appointments, starting with the M’s – actually on the line with their Sydney drivetime team, the little-known double act of Slaven, R. and Nelson, H.G. – before being shopped around Nova and the Js then heading to Rockinghorse for an in-store at half-four before scrubbing up to make an appearance at the Arctic Monkeys’ sideshow tonight at the Arena. It was the first promo tour I’d been on where the two of us were actually plugging different acts entirely, but at least it was better than pedalling the promotional trike myself. We even had time for a feed of lunch down at New Farm, and another coffee. Marty ran on them like 98-octane premium for the M5. After which, we dropped by the office.

“Now, let’s have a look here,” Marty began, flipping open a laptop. I’d half expected to be exhuming dusty financial records, but this was 2009 after all.

“Checking your deposits on internet banking?”

He laughed. “Not the worst idea in the world… but it all comes through the business account, sort of like a black box, I just get paid a living wage each month. Saves on tax…” The irony wasn’t lost on either of us. “So I’ll just log into our corporate financial records.”

“You can do this?”

“Yeah, of course, I’m a director of the company,” he reminded me. “And besides I figured out Maddy’s password.” He laughed. “It’s the same as her Facebook. Hope she doesn’t mix those two up. Madonna Cohen-Lewis ‘likes’ dodgy tax arrangements… now what do we want to look at?”

“Erm… what your incomings are ex Gasket?”

He frowned. “These days Gasket’s all out of Exocet, same as most of my solo royalties, so might be hard to dissect out…” Like the Gasket albums that came out around the same era, Marty’s first solo album had come out on Intercom, but he’d gone independent as soon as he was legally able (i.e. when Intercom’s suits got too freaked out by the ambient electronica stuff he wanted to release as a followup) with distribution through Exocet. DIYing on their own indie label proved to be pointlessly difficult and financially arse-reaming so his last couple of records had been under contract to the Exocet label, though given Maddy’s and Richie’s respective management styles, it was always a slightly fractious union. In fact, Marty had admitted, just quietly, that if it hadn’t been for the arrival of Daniela Selinic as UN peacekeeping intermediary in mid ‘08, dB probably would have stopped working with Exocet some time ago. “Ah no, here we are. Line by line, nice.”

So it was. Similar format as the reports I got sent from APRA – broken down by recording, by medium (where the royalty was earned, i.e. being played on radio, TV, movies, elevators, whatever) or however you wanted. Like most paperwork they’d switched to email these days, so it wasn’t a problem to get my latest statement up on the iPhone. These days it was a fair wedge more than the price of a carton of light beer, a bit of a change from three months ago when we started this tale, for which I had to thank Richie, Danno and everyone behind the best-of album and the BDO tour – even Lena’s inveterate shit-stirring in the media.

And truth be told, the bottom line wasn’t actually that different between Marty’s Gasket royalties and mine. Probably as we didn’t really start insisting on separate writing credits in the band until our later years, when people weren’t listening to us anyway. Though we might have used to think of, say, Blip on the Gaydar as Marty’s song, it was published as a Flange Gasket song, likewise something like Harold Holt which I pretty much wrote myself – we took the fairly socialist view that we wouldn’t have and probably couldn’t have written the song to that level without some form of input from the rest of the group, none of us was writing in a vacuum. That socialist view lasted until Intercom’s capitalist millions arrived, of course. Anyway, he was up on bottom line, because he’d done better out of the era when we’d published under separate writing credits, but there wasn’t much in it.

“So what’s all that prove?” Marty mused.

“Not much,” I conceded, “without this.”

Fucking non-multitasking iPhone notwithstanding, I managed to get to the attachment to the email Lena had sent me once she’d gotten back from NZ, following on from our conversations over there. It was a scan of a crumpled bit of notepaper, in Lena’s handwriting, with a column of numbers. One was circled.

“What’s this?” he asked. “Tip the margins on Footy TAB?”

“Sort of,” I replied. “That’s Sam’s royalty incomings into the trust account for last month. Lena couldn’t get me a copy of the original statements… all very cloak and dagger, apparently. But…”

Marty had already jumped ahead. “That’s more,” he simply said. “If those figures are right… and I’m wondering, now, actually…”

“Yeah. My thoughts too. But Lena’s insistent. I called her up when I compared the numbers to mine, she swears it’s legit. Which is why I wanted another data point for reference.”

“Nup, that’s definitely, what… ten, fifteen percent more?”

“I’d give it that. Fifteen up on mine, pretty much on the nose. And you tell me, can you think of a single Gasket song that he wrote that I didn’t have a credit on?”

Marty scratched his head. “Late era?”

“Nah, we wrote together right up to Thirty Bucks, even when we didn’t, if you know what I mean. Both names on everything. And unless some Latvian tractor factory is using some bucket of slop he wrote off Thirty Bucks for a big budget TV ad campaign no bastard here has heard of…”

“Got to be it, though, doesn’t it?” Marty mused. “Something like that. You’re thinking you’re getting screwed here, yeah?”

“Pretty much,” I shrugged. “It’s not the money… I mean yeah, finances are as tight as a fish’s arsehole at the moment, but that’s not the main thing. I just don’t fucking get it.”

“Clerical error?”

“He’s getting credited for shit we all should be? That’d piss me off even more. Especially if it can’t be fixed.”

“No, I mean…” He indicated the picture of the crumpled paper. “If I’m not trusting any part of the story, it’s this. I mean, even with the best will in the world, Lena could have screwed up. Transposed the numbers badly, anything.”

“Yeah,” I nodded, “Obvious weak link in the chain.”

“And as you know, this royalty stuff fluctuates month to month. Few months ago it was next to nothing. We sure it’s the exact same month as we’re comparing ours to? Different financial reporting dates? Lots of things.”

“True enough,” I said. “Time to roll to the M’s?”

“It’s just another afternoon,” Marty noted, “when too much sport is barely enough...”

He was as disappointed as I to find out that the time-honoured play-in for This Sporting Life had been a casualty of Roy and HG’s corporatization. In further disappointing news, we stumbled into another media shitfight of our own making. And our plans for tomorrow night were looking a bit socially awkward…

It’s fairly typical for acts on the BDO circus to spend the off-week between the first and second weekends playing sideshows up and down the coast. Neil Young had sold out the Brisbane Ent Cent at Boondall for tomorrow night, the Arctic Monkeys were playing tonight at the Arena as I mentioned, the Living End and a few others were stopping off in Newcastle on the way down to Sydney for Friday’s BDO date at the Showgrounds. I’d always remembered the Sydney BDO as being on Australia Day, but this year that was Melbourne’s slot, next Monday. Adelaide was the Friday after that, Perth the following Sunday, but that wasn’t much of a concern of mine – Gasket were only signed for NZ and the east coast swing, as that’d been what Hayabusa had been contracted to do. Marty of course was kicking on for the whole show, and I was toying with the idea of heading over to Perth just as a punter, sort-of to say goodbye to the whole thing, the live music scene. Still had NFI as to what came next for me, but this was a hell of a distraction to take my mind off it in the meantime. Something would come up. Something usually did.

What was coming up next – as in tomorrow night – was the nearest thing to a sideshow that Gasket had lined up. Real Girls Eat Meat, the new documentary by Gerard Costello, was having its premiere on Tuesday night in Casino, home of the Beef Week festival, at the old arts theatre which had been especially spruced up for the occasion. Travel plans had been made, transfers booked. Until the Richmond Valley Council revoked our permit to stage the event, 29 hours before the old art-deco doors were scheduled to creak open. A host of bogus reasons had been put forward – fire regulations for the number of people we were seating, non-payment of permit applications, and a bunch of other things sorted long ago, or so we thought, by Gerard’s film distribution company – but the real reason was that someone had belatedly shown the mayor of Casino a pre-release DVD of the film and he’d thrown his toys over the portrayal of his town as a yokel backwater, and the portrayal of himself as a boorish drunken fuckwit who made off-colour jokes about poofters and boongs at Casino RSM Bulls rugby functions.

We probably should have expected an ambush. The Mayor of Richmond Valley Council, after all, was Coraki cane farmer and former National Party MP for Richmond, Bob Cunliffe. And he knew just as well as we did how he’d come to be the former National Party MP for Richmond.

We learned about the above about two minutes before going on air at Triple M, through a series of luridly sweary texts from Gerard to Marty. Naturally, with Roy and HG’s interest in rural and regional affairs, it was the first thing the boys wanted to talk about. We pointed out the obvious – that the mayor had gotten the wrong end of the stick, that he was being oversensitive, that the depiction of rural life in Gerard’s film was really very affectionate, that Beef Week Queen was about as serious a post-feminist statement as Queen’s Fat Bottomed Girls, and that the last time Bob Cunliffe’s public pronouncements were in any way accurate or relevant was back when he was best buds with Harold Holt. Oh wait.

“Got out of that alive,” Marty remarked after we’d put down the cans and said our farewells to the Brisbane production staff.

“Just about,” I nodded. “Gotta say, the idea of old Bob and Catherine Deveny ending up on the same side of the fence is a mental picture and a half…”

Nova FM really just wanted to talk BDO backstage gossip, i.e. who was feuding/fighting/fornicating with whom, which was fine by us. The only Casino their audience had been to was in the old Treasury building. By the time we reached the ABC studios in Toowong for our Triple J interview, we’d had more texts from Gerard containing updated plans for tomorrow night. And swearing. Lots of swearing. At that stage the only feasible option looked like being shifting the premiere to Brisbane somewhere – but that would have meant getting all the people who were in Casino up to Brisbane, accommodation would need to be cancelled and rebooked, yada yada yada. The only other option was to cancel and reschedule, which would have been a total shitfight for people like Marty who had ridiculously compacted schedules as it was, as well as being an admission of defeat to the likes of Bob Cunliffe. Fuck that. When asked, we made sure to pin the whole thing – including the probable loss of a large amount of visitor income for the region – squarely on the mayor’s shoulders. For the record, though, calling him ‘Cuntliffe’ on air wasn’t intentional, it was just a Freudian slip. Honest.

Anyway, by the morning, we had a venue. And a challenge. One of the key contributors to the film, Southern Cross Uni humanities lecturer Dr Gordon Bennett, chair of rural studies (and, ironically enough, elder brother of Razorslash lead munter Steve), had pulled a few strings at short notice. The challenge for Gerald’s distribution company people was turning SCU’s Whitebrook Theatre, currently set up with all pomp and circumstance for graduation season, into a venue fit for a film premiere. The challenge for Marty, Gerald and I was to go on local North Coast talkback radio first thing Tuesday morning, and justify our existence.

“I smell an ambush,” Gerard noted. Under the hipster wardrobe and conceptual hair he was a sharp one. “Bet you any money you like we’ll end up going head to head with Cunliffe…”

He was right, too. Unannounced, after a few pointed questions from the bloated Laws-wannabe shock jock behind the big desk – I’d never heard of him before, he’d apparently swanned into the region recently, transferred from some other network down in Victoria – we suddenly heard through the cans, “And now on the line from Casino, we have Richmond Valley Council mayor Robert Cunliffe…”

Cue ten minutes of patronising, finger-waggling old-man-ranting, complete with affirming tut-tuts from Laws-Lite. We were being made to feel like naughty schoolkids getting a dressing down from the headmaster. Rollies all round. Fucking hicks.

What did we have to say to that? Well, Gerard tried. Really, he did. He had his whole argument laid out, practiced, honed. But Cunliffe, and his 2IC behind the mike, cut him off, shut him down, ran him over at every chance. Standard issue talkback wankery. I sniped from the flanks, figuring cheap shots about Cunliffe’s history (being parachuted into the area in the ‘70s, losing the safest seat in the country, paying private security thugs to beat up greenies at logging protests, and generally being a lying, corrupt, right wing arsehat) were fair game if these fuckers weren’t going to debate on facts. Marty, who’d run ten miles to avoid an argument, just looked pale and said nothing.

“Let’s open the lines up to see what YOU think of Gerald [sic] Costello’s new ‘mockumentary’, and whether you like being made a mockery of… Caller, you’re on the air…”

Fucking great. Here we go. John Laws and his producers were the master of this, manipulating the talkback crazies to support whatever batshit fascist thesis he wanted to put forward, and shutting down dissenters quicker than the Soviet-era Stasi. Time to play Batshit Bingo, perhaps. Key phrases on your Batshit Bingo board this morning include ‘Political correctness gone mad’, ‘Send them back where they came from’, ‘Pauline Hanson was right’ and ‘Bring back National Service’.

“Hi there, Darryl…”

“Ah yes, this is… Amy, from… Sydney?”

A laugh. A girlish laugh. Too young to be one of these fascist arseholes surely? Then again, the fuckers had to come from somewhere, Nazis didn't grow like wildflowers. “Not there now, just back visiting friends. I’m from the area.”

“And I understand you have a personal story to share about what Casino Beef Week means to you?”

“I do, actually.” She had a pretty voice. I hated that it was going to be used to make us three look like complete cocks. “I’m actually a former winner of the Miss Casino Beef Week pageant…”

Oh, this gets better and better.

“Hello, Amy,” Cunliffe’s voice said, carefully.

“Hi Dad,” she replied brightly.

Facepalm. Gerard raised his eyes to the ceiling. Marty crossed himself, almost seriously.

“And what did you think when you heard about this… documentary, for want of a better word?”

“Well, I’ve actually seen it,” Amy (if that was her real name) explained. “I’m the arts reviewer for the student paper at Sydney Uni. I’ve seen a pre-release version, so I’m probably in a fair place to comment.”

And at that very point, you could see just a frisson of nervousness crossing Laws-Lite’s brow. Arts student. Probably a leftie. Not good. Not good at all.

“...And your thoughts, Amy?”

“I thought it was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. It captures the inherent bigotry and misogyny of the entire concept and holds it up to ridicule as the repressive paternalistic crap it is…”

“Amy…”

She’d really wound up by now. “And as for you, old man, if you don’t like being shown up as a racist idiot, try shutting your mouth when there’s a fucking microphone anywhere near…”

“Sorry, we’ve, erm, lost the line there, Amy…”

“Amy,” I declared, “thanks for your insights. If you’re in the Lismore area, come along tonight, we’ll spot you a double VIP pass. Can even bring your old man… We’ll have to get your details again though, unfortunately old mate Dazzle here was a bit quick on the red button…”

That sorted it. Darryl was backpedalling furiously, Cunliffe had gone into some sort of grumpy sulk, and the crankies that did pop their heads over the parapet were met with a polite-but-firm ‘So, you’ve seen the film then? No?’ Which put us resolutely back on-message, that being – come and see the bloody thing, THEN make your mind up. And since we now had a lot more seats available for the VIP premiere, proceeds going to Farm Aid Australia…

And afterwards, once we’d thanked Dazza and the mayor of Mootown for their promotional assistance, we left the station, headed into town and raised our glasses – well, our takeaway coffees – to Ms Amy Cunliffe.

Though it was Amy Tyler, not Cunliffe, as she pointed out when we met our saviour later that afternoon. Amy was an intense, freckle-faced kid, seemingly younger than her 19 years suggested, in a tight Che Guevara T-shirt with short, rakishly styled hair and a sparkly stud through her nose. She looked like you’d imagine the arts reviewer for the Sydney Uni student paper to look: fuckin’ random. And yet somehow quite spankworthy, but the less said about that the better. She’d taken her mother’s name after her folks divorced, she explained.

“I can understand why,” I offered. “That name, in this area…”

“Actually it was more I was sick of being called Cunt Lick,” she replied.

“Nominative determinism?” suggested Mandela.

“Ha, exactly…”

Amy’s plus one for the night was her girlfriend Mandy, or Mandela to her (presumably Nimbin-based) parental guardians. A fellow arts second-year, she was tall and freaky with blonde dreadlocks, something like basketballer Lauren Jackson crossed with the Predator. They made a great pair. Intense, ascerbic, well-read and witty. Everything that wasn’t valued by traditional beauty pageants – though, to be fair, Beef Week Queen wasn’t a typical beauty pageant, nor was Amy Tyler your typical former beauty queen. Could still recite more about her chosen breed of bull than I’d ever have known. Or to put it another way: “Yeah, I know my Brahman from my Limosin…” And then went on to absolutely SLATE us for being unreconstructed bogan misogynists. Both barrels, kitchen sink, the lot. “Basically, it’s growing up with bogan fuckwits like you that made me want to fuck girls in the first place...”

“So thanks,” cheered Mandy. “Seeing as though I get all the benefits.”

She also got a sharp elbow in the ribs. Not sure if that counted as a benefit.

“You’ll keep, Cunt Lick,” Mandy declared with a smirk.

The last time I’d been in this building had been ten years ago. I’d been graduating – somehow – from my SCU Education course. I was very, very ill, on account of going out after the previous night’s Gasket show in Byron and drinking stupid amounts of alcomohol. Jeff, who’d been here with the olds to bear witness, didn’t look too flash either. He was our guitar tech, of course, chief amongst his duties being drinking as much piss as possible. My girlfriend at the time Kara was quite disgusted I’d shown no self control whatsoever and almost ruined her chance to wear an expensive cocktail frock and outshine her best friend who was also graduating today. In surprising developments, we didn’t last. Hi, Kara, if you’re reading. Still waiting for those CDs back, by the way. Dandy Warhols, Chili Peppers and You Am I. You know the ones. Chop chop.

I was a lot less likely to have that problem with my current girlfriend, as despite any and all my suggestions, she still thought I had rubbish taste in music and there wasn’t anything actually wrong with B105 FM. She’d appeared just on five, the little yellow Beetle spearing over the top of the ridge and wending its way down to the SCU carpark. Where she’d come from, what she’d been doing, no idea. She probably had a story, she usually did. The text I’d gotten from Mick yesterday evening seemed to changed the game a bit: “U know there wasnt actualy a midnite sess on sun night?”

I’d been annoyed at Mick for checking up, obviously, but he wasn’t going to back away from his duty. That was, to keep me away from bunny-boilers, psycho hosebeasts, succubi and other threats to my sanity. I’d done the same for him in the past. Got equally short shrift at the time, of course, except once it was too late and the ‘Told you so’ routine got an inevitable airing over a few quiets. He thought he was doing me a favour. Might well have been. But I was a big boy and I’d played this game before a few times.

One day, I might even figure out the rules.