Punks in the 80s: Jane Dambrauskas, Susan Sunandar and Mark Ritchie

Speakers: Jane Dambrauskas, Susan Sunandar and Mark Ritchie
Running time: 8 minutes 30 seconds

Transcript:

Jane Dambrauskas: [0:08] I suppose it was late 1979 when I was at school, just before I left school, I had seen the Sex Pistols on television and I thought that was very different because they were swearing and vomiting and that was a really bad thing. It was something interesting and out the ordinary. But the biggest influence for me getting into the punk scene was the fact that I’d written for a position to be a photographer with the Sydney Morning Herald or the Telegraph at that time.

Jane cont’d: [0:39] And they actually knocked me back because I was a girl because at that time there were still the ‘women’s jobs’ and ‘men’s jobs’. And it sort of shattered my idea of what I was going to do with my life, because I knew I didn’t want to be a secretary or any of these basic role models that women should be.

Jane cont’d: [0:56] And I suppose the alternative punk came up, and I knew some people that were interested in it and we just went into Sydney and found some posters, and found some bands playing, and that’s how we got into it really.

Mark Ritchie: [1:08] You use the Sex Pistols as a – who I’ve always considered, like, as a catalyst band. They’re a band – they are considered the earlier of the UK punk bands anyway. They sort of opened your eyes. And I thought, ‘Hey, this is something. This is what I’ve been waiting for. This really gets to me.’

Mark cont’d: [1:26] I’d look around at the normal way everything goes around and it’s sort of, ‘Why do I have to mosey along like everybody else and go to the cul-de-sac, get my Hills Hoist, my Colorbond fence? This is just not what I want. And then when I met people, other people who are in the punk scene and I thought, ‘I can relate to this a lot more.’

Susan Sunandar: [1:49] Well, I became a punk when I first saw the Sex Pistols on TV singing ‘Anarchy’ in the UK. I know I thought, ‘Wow! This is what I’ve been waiting for.’ It’s different with different punks. Some people are very much into the political side of it and ‘We’re going to change the world.’ And some of them are just into, ‘I want to have a really good time and have fun.’

Susan cont’d: [2:13] But it always, I suppose it was always political in a way because no one agrees with the way governments, and you know, huge corporations, are running the world for their own ends really.

Jane: [2:27] To be identified as a punk, you needed to dress like a punk because that’s how you were identified. So I suppose the clothing was a way of identifying who was a punk and who wasn’t a punk. Because you, sort of wanted to hang around with punks because they thought like you did. Zippers were really big. There were certain things that were big in the punk scene.

Susan: [2:49] Op shop stuff…. Used to like animal prints, lots of zips. I know the zips were all over the clothing and it was practical. It was so you could put things in your pockets, zip it up and it doesn’t matter how pissed you got and rolling around and whatever, you’re not going to lose things. It was all for a reason. It wasn’t just a fashion statement.

Mark: [3:07] Punk hair went from being very short to being very big. And – being short haired was – I generally kept mine very short – and it was always easier that way because you could dye it and bleach it. You could change it a lot.

Susan: [3:22] I used to back-comb it…. blow dry your hair after you’ve put hairspray in so the hairspray would sort of melt and set – set like rock, really. That was sort of the early 80s people were doing that with their hair. And always bright colours, different colours because it makes you feel good looking at yourself with coloured hair – it was ‘colour therapy’. [laughs]

Jane: [3:47] Black, all black. And I suppose it was some ideas of the punk bands as well, and ideas of other people and what they were doing. Safety pins were actually not that big in the Sydney punk scene because the safety pins had passed by the time it hit our shores. And we had a little bit of our own identity.

Susan: [4:06] I never wore things like cutup denims or cutup jeans because if you’re wearing clothes that are falling apart, they’ve got to occur like that. You don’t want cutup a good pair of clothing. You want something to last. You used to get these weekend punks cutting holes all in their clothes and you’re thinking, you’ve missed the whole point, really.

Mark: [4:29] Jeans were just a pair of old Levi’s that gradually wore away with age. Didn’t really care about them. Just patched them up, as rips come along, we’d just patched and then patched. And because you used to wear them pretty tight, with zips up the back so they’re easier to get on and off. Spray painted – painted on.

Jane: [4:56] The paintings on here was done by a fellow that I knew over here in Australia but I actually can’t remember his name. This is a band called Crass. They were quite… I would say – how would you say the head of the anarchists when anarchists don’t really have a head? But I would say they were the most influential out of the anarchist pack. But it was all about identifying as punk. Everyone had a leather jacket and studs were a big piece of it.

Jane: [5:26] It’s a bit old. Every Friday and Saturday night you’d be out, going and seeing a band and having a drink. The Civic Hotel was very big. We use to hang out there a lot Friday and Saturday nights. The lady behind the bar was very good to us. She would allow us to have bands in the back room. I suppose for her too, she made a lot of money because all the punks would come there and you’d have 100 or 200 people there buying drinks on Friday night.

Jane cont’d: [5:52] There wasn’t any drama, there wasn’t any fights. She sort of was a bit of mother figure I would say, almost. We just wanted to have a drink and have a yarn and talk to people. So I’d say the Civic Hotel was the biggest. It wasn’t the only one. Before that it was Chequers. You’d go to Civic and then you’d walk up to French’s at Darlinghurst, which was a grotty old cesspit, I’ve got to say.

Jane cont’d: [6:14] And we’d go there and you’d have the certain places you’d hang out, because if you walked into a normal pub, for want of a better way of saying it, looking like how you would dress, which was outrageous at the time, you’d more than likely get beat up or thrown out of there. So you wanted to hang around like-minded people.

Susan: [6:33] A lot of the pubs you’d go to for a while would be, like old men’s drinking pubs, who were sort of running out of custom, so they’d let punks drink there for a while till they got sick of us – boost the sales a bit, I suppose.

Jane: [6:46] Sussex Hotel was seen as a mods pub… and the mods hung where they hung…and the punks hung where they hung… and the skinheads hung where they hung…and we didn’t actually get on very well with each other. Punks were quite passive; mods were quite passive. Skinheads hung around with the punks, but they weren’t part of the punk scene because they were so aggressive.

Mark: [7:08] A lot of the little tribes – you’d have inter-tribe gatherings so to speak. On the weekends, you’d have like football matches between the punks and the skins, and the mods and rockers, and things – they’d have little football matches and picnics and things like that. But at night it was [makes growling sound]. ‘Mod, let’s go to a mod stomp,’ or something like that. It was silly because they were friends during the day, and during the week, but Friday, Saturday nights was growl at each other and posturing.

Jane: [7:33] In a way, mainstream society made you a sub-culture, because they wouldn’t be involved with you. And at the same time you identified more with the people in that culture than you did with people outside of that culture. I’d like to call us free thinkers. You know? It was about our life and how we conducted ourselves and the idea of discussing politics that weren’t mainstream or Conservative or Liberal or Labor. We were into anarchist thinking.

Jane cont’d: [8:00] Not everyone of the punk scene was into that, but there was a lot of thought about that – freedom of expression, being who you wanted to be. But I can’t really remember getting that involved with Australian politics actually. We were too busy partying, having a good time, experiencing our teenage life with a peer group that we enjoyed.