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Art of Darkness ‘Kurtz is dead,’ said Mark Davis, SBS Dateline presenter, using the dead-pan, at-toned voice he occasionally wheeled out when Big Bad News had to be delivered. ‘He died of pneumonia and associated tropical ailments. He’s being buriedby April 14, 2004 in West Papua and he’s not coming back,’ he added, just in case I had any doubts about the terminality of the event. ‘Kurtz’ was the nom de guerre of Mark Worth, his self-inflicted reference to an abiding obsession with the character of Col. Walter E Kurtz, the fictional officer at the Heart of Apocalypse Now’s journey into Darkness. Like Worth, that larger-than-life character also met his fate in the midst of a jungle, at the end of a tormented quest and, in some metaphorical sense, by his own hand.
I first met Mark Worth (‘Worthy’) at an art gallery exhibition opening in Paddington, in the first half of 1996. He made, what you might call, a strong first impression. Within two hours, I witnessed him administer a head-butt to a nosy by-stander who had objected to my chatting up a nearby girl. Within two days I was living with him. You could call it love at first sight, although fear also played its (usual) part in our relationship. The incident was a typical bonding moment for Worthy, who always used to say that ‘brutality and tenderness’ were the keys to human obsession. Thus I wandered into Worthy’s domain: filmmaker, lighting-artist, war-journalist, art connoisseur, fashion-maestro, salon-hoster and bon-vivant. The gallery patrons were among the last extant examples of an endangered species: the last wave of the Melbourne New Wave scene that had spontaneously formed in, and around, the inner-city pubs of Melbourne in the late 70s. It was an unlikely coalition of aristocratic punk-rockers, bohemian art students and shady small time criminals that had shaken Melbourne out of the frigid slumbers of the Menzies 50s and dragged it kicking and screaming into the arousal phase of the 70s Cultural Revolution. These were the people that re-radicalised politics, vitalised art and toxified sex and drugs. Live fast and die young was the Modus Operandi of too many of them — including Worthy. Worth’s odyssey somewhat twisted the conventional bourgeois to bohemian script. He used to introduce himself with the statement that he was ‘born in Papua New Guinea’. But he came of artistic age in Melbourne during those strange days, and quickly attracted the attention of students and teachers at the RMIT Media and Swinburne Film and Television schools, where he studied in the early 1980s. At that time, Melbourne was divided into artistic quadrants, defined by venues and academies. To the north of the Yarra River was the Fitzroy art scene, led by the Palaeo-Modernist inspired painters of Roar Studios and including the famed ‘little bands’ of North Fitzroy. To the east lay the squat bulk of the Swinburne College, which housed the Film and Television school. This was the breeding ground of a generation of innovative rock videos and independent filmmakers, as well as the likes of John Hillcoat and Georgia Wallace-Crabbe, who went on to make careers overseas and interstate. In the centre lay the Chapel Street fashion scene, haunted by a combination of muscular gays and effete neo-romantic straights. They tended to define the dress sense, manage the night-clubs and host the parties — acting as a kind of curators to their more demonic post-punk denizens. And to the south lay St Kilda, with its copper-oxidised sunsets, glittering waters and heroin-fuelled night-life. The artistic focus of this scene centered on the ramshackle late-Victorian splendour of the Seaview Hotel’s Crystal Ballroom, which staged many memorable musical gigs while other, more personal, dramas were played out in the privacy of its dingy rooms. It was here that Worthy found his spiritual home, living for many years around the Esplanade. Worthy hung out, patronised and collaborated with many of the early New Wave bands, including the Models, Sacred Cowboys and Not Drowning Waving. He performed the traditional art school rite of passage: putting on light shows for rock bands, including the Birthday Party and Dead Can Dance. And he covered the nascent street fashion parades at the Ballroom and Palais, later recorded in his Revolt into Style doco. What Worthy, like his artistic role model Nick Cave, craved more than anything else, was to escape the ordinary, hum-drum, nine-to-five life of the ‘working stiff’. There was a touch of the Wise-Guy Goodfella in that attitude, which came out in his flashy dress-sense and attraction to violence. A recent JJJ documentary, Soundcheck, put the DIY movement into historical perspective: ‘What was happening musically in Australia was also happening overseas, although it is often said that punk in Australia did not have the political stirrings of punk in Britain. Within Australia this movement was more an anti-establishment counter culture which provided a release for band members and punters alike from the strictures of everyday life.’ But Worthy defied the apolitical stance of his New Wave cohorts. He was consciously a man of the left, and embraced the cause of West Papuan independence. Yet he was more old left than new left, he had no time for the cheap platitudes of political correctness, and less still for the obscure logorrhea of Post-Modernism. He practiced journalistically what he politically preached. His filmmaking career spanned almost two decades and included Super 8 Soldiers, Tabaran, Raskols, and his last film Land of the Morning Star. Unlike many of his fellow inner-city aesthetes of the time, Worth’s films all had a political text, especially those that focused on the various male-warrior cultures of New Guinea. There is some truth to the old saw that art and commerce do not mix. Mick Harvey ex-guitarist for the Birthday Party, used to say that poverty ‘freed us to create what we want’. The virtues of being ‘liberated’ from commercial remuneration can be exaggerated, but doing art for love, not money, certainly added some poignancy to the product. For Worthy, and the folk who emerged from the 70s cultural boom and economic crash, art was, more often than not, for art’s sake: for the love of the work and the respect of their peers. Worthy’s chosen art-form was guerilla documentary making — the epitome of independent filmmaking. He was an experimental-cinematic historian in the tradition of Dziga Vertov, the Russian Kino Eye documentarist. Wikipedia encyclopedia describes this Kino as the art of ‘captur[ing] ‘film truth’ — that is, fragments of actuality which, when organised together, have a deeper truth that cannot be seen with the naked eye.’ Fusing a combination of stock footage, kitchen sink cinema verite and experimental interventionism into some kind of emotional voyage into the subject’s Heart of Darkness, Worthy was one of few Australian filmmakers who could pull off this kind of filmmaking. He cared deeply about getting the subjective feelings — rather than just the objective facts — onto permanent record. In that sense he was in the Expressionist tradition, although I remember him for his uncanny memory for narrative detail, which could be retrieved no matter the lateness of the hour. Davis remembers Worth’s art always had an auteur perspective: ‘He was the last of the early Modernists.’ War was very important to Worthy’s self-definition. His father was a Chief Petty Officer on the HMAS Voyager when it was cut in two by HMAS Melbourne. Later on, during the Vietnam war, the family was stationed on Manus Island off the coast of Papua. Most of his films covered military conflict of some kind. Worthy was drawn to the example of the great Australian war-journalists such as CW Bean, Damien Parer and Neil Davis. He also had a great love of the film Apocalypse Now, which is based on Joseph Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness. The combination of Joseph Conrad’s artistic mood and Rock n’ Roll’s anarchistic method was irresistible.
It may have been Worthy’s experiences in PNG, or perhaps his upbringing on a naval base, but he invariably emphasised the team spirit over individual action. ‘Creative art came out of a collective movement, not merely the product of isolated individuals,’ says Davis, ‘the movement was the Thing.’ But the role of the salon-hoster was, in some ways, the art that Worthy had mastered best. He was a terrific host, straight out of the old school, laying on a great spread on Sunday afternoons — ‘Roast, veg and plonk’ were the basic ingredients of conviviality. Worthy’s open-house hospitality was legendary, another form of life that seems to be under threat in our atomised lifestyle. He frequently took in journalists and put them up until they found their feet. It was not uncommon to find more than one itinerant, or homeless, body camped out in the big living room above the Sports Bar, looking out over Bondi Beach. Worthy seems to have been one of the last of the true bohemians, managing to live like a king on the income of a pauper. It’s unlikely that pricey Sydney real estate and a stingy federal government will tolerate this way of life for much longer. ‘I can’t see much evidence of that spirit these days, people are too busy establishing themselves professionally to make a defiant personal statement’, says Clinton Walker, author of City Sounds and, like Worthy, a chronicler of creative sub-cultures. Wayne Eager, a founder of Roar Studios and one of Worthy’s earliest friends from those days is not so down at heart. He reckons that old farts like us don’t see what’s good in the new art around us. We are ‘getting old and out of touch’ or perhaps ‘independent culture is going through a lull’. ‘Either way, the DIY scene will be back,’ reflects the ever-sanguine Eager, although when pressed he qualifies: ‘it might take a couple of hundred years’ to regain its former splendour. Davis shares Walker’s cultural pessimism and regrets Worthy’s death in more ways than one. ‘I feel like Worthy knew my own story better than me,’ he says, this time with some urgency. He pauses for a moment and then, in a quieter voice, adds: ‘I feel like my own story has died with him.’ JACK STROCCHI LIVED WITH MARK WORTH FOR A YEAR IN THE MEN’S HOUSE ABOVE BONDI BEACH. HE IS NOW AN INDEPENDENT JOURNALIST AND THE MEDIA OFFICER FOR SECOND TREE, A SCI-TECH INTEREST GROUP.
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