AUTOBIOGRAPHY
All The Rage
Paulie Stewart
Melbourne Books, $39.95

The emergency room reckoning is a fabulous framing device for an autobiography. It’s heart surgery that sets the dramatic pitch of Bono’s new memoir, Surrender. Paulie Stewart’s lower-key, higher-spirited All the Rage is set in motion by liver failure. One muso-activist’s organ is as vital as another’s of course. But some feel closer to home.

“My world was school, the footy, surfing, playing tennis, the Sunday roast, riding my bike, doing a paper round, television shows like World of Sport, Get Smart, Hogan’s Heroes and Epic Theatre and endless barbecues,” writes the kid from St Kilda who would wind up a newspaper pop reporter, singer with blue-collar pub rock disruptors Painters & Dockers and regional freedom lobbyist.

He describes the tragic inciting incident to this remarkable life with a similar absence of poetry and pretension. His older brother Tony was one of the Balibo Five: the Channel Seven journalists murdered by infiltrating Indonesian soldiers there in 1975, when Paulie was in his early teens.

You can almost hear the footy highlights shrieking on the telly as he recounts that horrific day, an insistent close-up of a shared memory that, try as we might, won’t be suppressed. His tight-knit family’s loss, combined with the ongoing obfuscation and denial of authorities at home and abroad, is the bitter impetus for his trajectory not just as a grassroots activist but as a rolling act of self-destruction.

And cut to comic relief. The author’s typically mischievous disclaimer about “the influence of morphine and oxycodone in Ward 8 of the Austin Hospital” is one explanation for the jump-cut structure that makes his Rage so readable. It’s equally informed, no doubt, by a life-or-death urgency to spill his memories however they come, in a shuffled deck of celebrity encounters (thanks Nic Cage and Nick Cave, no thanks Billy Idol and Diana Krall), road case shenanigans and political intrigue.

What makes Stewart such an inspiring guide, both of a backstage tour of roughshod rock’n’roll glamour from Countdown to Hollywood and a good deal of shamefully ignored and misunderstood regional affairs, is his refusal to surrender to the anger and despair that might well consume a less motivated boy from the Melbourne suburbs.

“With a murdered brother forever lurking on my mind, I couldn’t tolerate normal and relaxed,” he writes of his wild side as the Dockers’ frontman. “If life was short, I wanted to make my mark and scream into the night. We liked to push crowds over the top. The wilder the show, the better.“