Nine Parts Water, One Part Sand. Douglas Galbraith
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On a summer’s day in 1953, a young Joy Hill travelled from Perth to Bunbury to attend the Bunbury Rowing Club’s Coronation Weekend Dance. Joy was, by her own estimation, ‘always a dancer’, and she trod the boards with gusto. It was just before the interval as she lined up for the barn dance, her hair a little tousled and her face flushed, that Joy looked across the dance floor and saw a handsome young man talking to a group of friends.
‘He looks alright,’ she thought.
His name was Owen Salmon, and suddenly the Coronation Dance seemed a lot more interesting. In the months that followed, Joy spent more and more time in Bunbury with Owen, and before long, they were dancing at their wedding reception.
In 1956, Joy fell pregnant. ‘And that’, she says delicately, ‘was the end of the perfect marriage.’
•••
When anything went wrong with electricity in Western Australia, Owen was dispatched to fix it. Joy was ten days overdue with the apparently reticent Kim Salmon, sick of the sight of herself and everybody else, when the call came in to the Depot for Owen to head out — now. As Owen jumped in the truck the news reached him that Joy was to be induced. He drove hard for 160 miles north, knowing that Joy was heading for hospital in the opposite direction.
After a lengthy hospital stay, Joy was enduring a horrendous thirty hour labour, unable to get word to Owen on her slow, painful progress to delivering the future Godfather of Grunge. Owen was beside himself, worried about Joy, berating himself for being so far away, and juggling the 66,000 volts of power coursing around him as he worked.
Eventually the news reached him. His son, Kim Leith Salmon, was born. It was, almost literally, electrifying news. Owen turned his truck south and made for Bunbury.
It’s May 2017, and only a few months ago Kim Salmon turned 60. The Volkswagen tour van hurtles through France towards tonight’s gig at Les Toques, Perigueux. Nuclear power stations expelling thick columns of smoke loom beside the road, connected by an endless parade of power line towers that bear a surprising resemblance to cartoon cats. Inside the van, guitar cases, drums, suitcases and other flotsam bounce around, moving together like cogs in a machine. Kim Salmon has a sketch pad on his knee, capturing scraps of scenery in watercolour and ink.
A dozen shows in as many days through Switzerland, Germany and France have Kim invigorated. The entourage is congenial; his partner Maxine delights in the company, food and surroundings. Tour Manager Gary is pretty and unflappable, and Laura is archetypically French. Parisian drummer Dimi is tall and good looking and oozes a gentle cool, while musical co-conspirator Michael Stranges provides comic foil.
Banquets of oysters, baguettes, cheese, wine and beer are typical of the touring party. Locals insist on proving their hospitality and the nights of song are accompanied by days of affable indulgence. Only one café offers resistance through an inscrutable girl with an ambiguous haircut, thick rimmed glasses and a chambray onesie — either perfectly hipster cool or hopelessly out of step. Icily rejecting Kim’s overtures to the small garden salad, she intimidates with her cool demeanour and command of the menu.
As darkness falls in each town, Kim Salmon occupies the stage. Le Volume in Nice, Sonic Ballroom in Cologne, the Sedel Club in Lucerne … each show is scorching, and Kim Salmon like a dervish. Bent over his guitar, he performs a wild exorcism of noise and the refrains of Swampland pour out for perhaps the millionth time. The audiences are euphoric and they stand up close, circling the stage and shouting like they’re watching an illegal cock fight. Dimi, Mike and sometimes Delphine form a tight gang behind Kim, and as the set lists get longer the band gets sharper.
Undeterred by lost passports, relentless driving, wrenched guts and long nights, the tour reaches its crescendo at Tek Rock Zen in Evreux before a final scramble to Charles de Gaulle for the flight home. Just twenty-four hours later, Kim is back teaching guitar at JMC Academy in South Melbourne. Age does not weary him.
Kim’s earliest recollection of childhood is walking down the front steps of his parent’s Bunbury home and becoming aware of his knee joints, his skin and bones. ‘God this is really hopeless, how flimsy is this? I became aware of my body, I had this idea of flesh and bones and it seemed disappointing. It felt very squishy and frail. I had to accept my mortality. I guess I was expecting to be some kind of metallic alien, but I was just a plain old human.’
His first few years were spent alone with Owen and Joy, embarking on long walking expeditions around Bunbury. Exploring the wasted spaces along the railway line, nosing around the rusting wheat silos, scarpering along the jetties, and messing about in the estuarine mud. An observant and interested Kim quietly accompanied his parents, listening but not talking much as the world was introduced to him.
His brother Brad arrived when Kim was 3 years old, breaking the quiet. ‘Brad was a pretty good baby for about a fortnight. And then he started to scream’, says Joy. As Joy tried to soothe the crying Brad, Kim would disappear into drawing, blocks, or Meccano constructions and generally keep a safe distance from this noisy new thing. ‘It was like the party was over when Brad came. We moved to Perth, and Bunbury seemed like a lost haven, green and full of adventure with ships, lighthouses — the whole thing’.
Transplanted to Embleton in North Perth, Kim adapted to his new surrounds. It was semi-industrial wasteland; part rural, part sandpit, part swamp. The Salmons landed in a state housing district: ‘lots of housing blocks with nothing on them, lots of T junctions and L shaped streets going nowhere.’ Embleton’s local mythologies were soon woven into Kim’s psyche — missing children crushed in the sandpits, swallowed by the ravening grit, never to be seen again. He trod carefully.
As the empty streets gradually filled with houses, a gang of kids emerged for Kim to consort with. They’d ride up the deserted streets to the nature reserve beyond Irwin Road, and hunt insects or catch gilgees and tadpoles in the muddy waters of Mahogany Creek. In the rain, the dirt roads would flood and transform into misshapen canals of gushing, sludgy water. The boys made boats out of sheets of rusty corrugated iron and rowed down the tracks using broom sticks as oars.
On infrequent incursions to Bunbury, Kim and his cousin David would manufacture tin can bombs, hang out amongst the mechanical relics in the railway yards, and swim at the rugged back beach. On occasions he would accompany his grandmother Sammy to her job cleaning doctors’ surgeries where Kim was entranced by the gleaming tangles of laboratory test tubes and science equipment.
To a young Kim Salmon, it was all his very own sci-fi drama or jungle adventure.
•••
When Kim was 7, his sister Megan appeared, and the Salmon family was complete. Good at drawing and music, Megan’s artistic temperament was aligned to Kim’s, and she adored her older brother. Brad, meanwhile, was gorgeous, with movie star looks and a beguiling twinkle in his eye. But he was larger than life, and just didn’t fit into the normal picture. The swamps of Embleton held enough cruel kids to make life uncomfortable for him. Observing the unwanted attention drawn by Brad’s antics, Kim learned to be invisible. ‘As a child I wanted to be left alone and left to do my own thing. I saw attention as a danger and hoped people wouldn’t notice me; stick your head up and you’ll get it sliced off …’
The conclusions drawn from watching his errant younger brother confirmed Kim’s inherent independent streak. He refused to go to Sunday school, scouts, play team sports or join clubs. ‘I wasn’t a joiner. I didn’t want to