DRINKING AT THE DAM by SMOG. Story and video by Troy Walsh.

Wyangala Dam, New South Wales. 1993-2024

From about age 15, the white bellied sea eagles that fly above the waters of Wyangala Dam in Wiradjuri Country, Central West NSW, have spotted me cracking a can of beer or cider in a boat, by the shore, or midway climbing up the steep hills that edge it.

No doubt, too, I have been in their periphery while standing with a drink watching as the sea eagles hover, squawk, and try to rustle up a feed over my block of land perched in the dam’s surrounding heights.

It was also 30 years ago that radio station Triple J spread its wings for the first time over Cowra, where I spent most of my childhood, about 30 kilometres west from the dam wall. It delivered a flapping of new sounds in my ears; sounds that I had been struggling to stay awake and find late at night on MTV and Rage. My older brother was also a source but to acquire his good stuff I had to risk a lopsided, violent confrontation.

Smog’s (aka Bill Callahan’s) ‘Cold Blooded Old Times’ was one of the earlier revelations from the Js and led me later to another song from the band that instantly became a classic for me — Drinking At The Dam.

Wyangala Dam, or “the dam” for locals, was part of my earlier childhood but it wasn’t until my mates and I organised camping trips without parents that we started getting pissed out there. Then with our own vehicular access we really lifted our game. Many of my class at high school would have got drunk, power-chundered, lost their virginity, and passed out for the first time at the dam, and not always in that order on the night.

It helped that my best mate’s dad had a big ski boat and a girl-at-school’s family had a cabin in a quieter bay, where girls could tell their parents they were staying safely…  If you ignored the boys camped down by the shore who had toys to throttle ourselves across the water, motorbikes, boxing gloves, swags, beer, weed, heavy metal music, serious injuries, and destruction. Maybe we fished, I don’t remember.

Fishing, though, was what brought most of us lads to the dam in the first place. Going out with our fathers and uncles back in the days when fishing was more about catching and eating, catfish and even carp, and when tactics like nets were considered fair sport. The beer our dads and uncles carried around in battered old Eskys, just as important as the bait. It is not uncommon for me now to come across an old rusted can of KB caught in between granite boulders. Kids Beer we used to call it.

Fishing is also what connects most of my old mates with the dam today. Some spend hours out there in their pursuit of happiness through a hook; alone on the water in their tinnie hoping for a monster Murray cod.

Some only on the annual trip when the wives are also along in the latest dual-cab 4WDs, shiny caravans and oversized boats. The big boys and big girls  like getting plastered again at the dam, and are still fairly likely to leave their drunken and broken mess behind. Something for the soaring sea eagles, and me, with a can in hand, to ponder as we pass by.

Stereo Story #809