Brisbane, Queensland, 1970, 1971.

Darkness and dawn

In 1970 I spent each day trying to get through my job at the bank to reach the weekend, which was spent mostly in bed with my lover, reading the newspapers, eating chocolate and enjoying the kind of sexual pleasure I thought, until then, was a myth.
 ‘Rainy Days and Mondays’ by The Carpenters came out in 1971, the year the lover and I split up. I  was actually talkin’ to myself and feelin’ old. Frowning came naturally and the words ‘moon’, ‘June’ and ‘tune’ were replaced with ‘rainy’, ‘Monday’, ‘lonely’ and ‘clown’ and ‘down’.
Yes. That was exactly what it felt like. As if one layer of skin had been removed and everything hurt.
 ‘Maggie Mae’ by Rod Stewart also came out in 1971 and it too rang bells. Stewart told the true story of what inspired this song in an interview. He was at a jazz festival in the early sixties and an ‘older’ woman, his very first sex partner, pulled him into a tent, ‘had her way’ with him and then threw him out. The song begins with a mandolin being strummed sweetly, but that soon gives way to an electric guitar and Stewart’s rough voice, seemingly a voice that has been marinated in scotch for years, demanding that Maggie wake up because he has something to say to her. He goes on. At length. Tells her that the morning sun when it’s in her face shows her age but he doesn’t care- to him she’s everything. Or so he says. When he tells her all he needed was a friend to lend a guiding hand the double entendre is all too clear. He chides her for wrecking his bed and in the morning kicking him in the head; but we know his complaint is not serious because after all she was such a demanding lover that she wore him out. And he loved it.
In 1971, I was living in a flat near a railway line in Brisbane. My year-long affair had ended badly. Each morning I would turn on the radio while I was still in bed and Rod Stewart’s rough, raw and very male voice would demand that Maggie wake up because he thought he had something to say to her. It would remind me of the lost paradise that was the affair. The sexual energy in this song reminded me that I was not living vicariously any more. I was young and I was experiencing great pleasure and great pain. The mandolin at the beginning of ‘Maggie May’ only had to ring out for me to experience in memory every sleepless night spent making love and every day spent sobbing since the affair had ended. Rod never wrote a song as good as this again. Probably because it was based on a true story which involved his first experience of sex.  He sums it up when he sings, kidding on that square, that Maggie Mae stole his heart but he loves her anyway. Exactly.
Pop songs trained me to suffer. From twelve I was brainwashed to expect to be left by a man. To expect to suffer. And when it actually happened, I was bombarded on a daily basis with songs that maximised my suffering. Why do women go back to toxic relationships? Because they can’t escape the relentless training of numerous pop songs that make the pain of breaking up unbearable and normalize the unacceptable behaviour of men.
Anyone who has ever heard Tom Jones belting out ‘Delilah’, a song about a man murdering a woman because she laughed at him will know what I mean. These songs delight and entertain us and that’s good but there is a dark underside to many pop songs that has only become darker since the sixties.
I plumbed the depths in the seventies in the wake of the breakup, while ‘Rainy Days and Mondays’ and ‘Maggie May’ pierced my heart with exquisite little arrows of suffering. Even before the sixties there were torch songs and power ballads that told women love would hurt and harm them and it was something women had to bear. Men hear these songs too. They train them to have foolish expectations about who women are and what a relationship with a woman should be like.
Taylor Swift, in ‘Cruel Summer’, is still writing songs with lines like, ‘what doesn’t destroy me only makes me want you more.’
The darkness continues and dawn has not yet dawned.
Antonia Hildebrand (c) 2026
Stereo Story 894

Antonia Hildebrand’s first published short story appeared in Downs Images and in ‘Woman's Day' Summer Reading' and she has since been widely published in journals, magazines and anthologies in Australia as well as Britain and the USA and Ireland. She has contributed to ABC Radio National's Bush Telegraph program. Many of her short stories have been broadcast by Radio 91.3FM Yeppoon. She won the University of Southern Queensland Library Poetry Prize 1998 and the Fellowship of Australian Writer’s Marjorie Barnard Award in 1999 for her short story, ‘To Breathe’. She is the author of nine books, ranging from biography to autobiography, essays, poetry, short fiction through to novels. Her novel, ‘The Darkened Room’ was published by Ginninderra Press in 2022. Her next novel, ‘The Birthday Lunch’ is a work in progress. Her latest book is a poetry collection, ‘Broken Dolls’ (Tangerine Books, 2024.) She won ‘The Studio Prize’ for poetry in 2023.