SPIRIT IN THE NIGHT by BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN. Story by Simon Castles.

Born in the ACT

This is an extract  from the book Mixtape. (Ginninderra Press, 2023)

Australian Capital Territory, 1980s

Greasy Lake sounded more fun than Canberra’s Lake Burley Griffin, but it was beside the latter I was born and around its waters I grew up. The former lake features on a track from Bruce Springsteen’s 1973 debut album, and can be found “about a mile down on the dark side of route 88”. There some lost souls including Crazy Janey, Wild Billy and Hazy Davy get teenage-silly drunk, scrap in the mud, and dance under the stars like spirits in the night. I’ve been to Greasy Lake many times in the thirty years I’ve liked Springsteen, even though it doesn’t exist.

Lake Burley Griffin does exist, but it’s an artificial creation, dreamed up by an American architect and backed by Sir Robert Menzies until somehow it was right there beneath his dark and wiry eyebrows. To many the lake is emblematic of Canberra: pretty enough to look at but not quite real.

As teenagers, me and my mates swam in the dank lake, which made us feel sick, and drank sun-warmed beers on the shore, which had the same effect. Under a high and cloudless Canberra sky, we would gaze at the pontoons in the distance, and at the dead fish floating by closer in, and play music on an oversized tape deck until the batteries died and the music warped to a drawl. We listened to the Oils and Chisel – and, because I forced his music on my friends, to Bruce Springsteen.

I would daydream about Greasy Lake and the many other places in Springsteen songs – “a rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert”, “the beach at Stockton’s Wing”, “that dusty road from Monroe to Angeline”, the Trestles, “the fields out behind the dynamo”. Places that seemed more magical, and yet paradoxically more real, than where I was. I would listen to Born in the USA and wonder about being a Springsteen fan who was born in the ACT.

What Springsteen would make of a place like Canberra – of “my hometown”, to quote one of his song titles – I’ll never know. But, in many ways, a less Springsteen-like place is hard to imagine. Springsteen songs seethe with the rage and desperation of working-class life, while Canberra is possibly the most comfortably middle-class city that has existed anywhere ever. Springsteen sings of factories. Canberra doesn’t have factories, unless you count the warehouses in Fyshwick that mass-duplicate porn movies. Springsteen tells of Thunder Road, of streets of fire, of going racing in the street. Canberra has roundabouts and wide, mostly deserted avenues.

But Springsteen also sings, “You can’t light a fire without a spark”, an observation that some might argue captures Canberra’s problems as a city almost perfectly. In the Australian imagination, Canberra is not synonymous with fun. And when I recall all the crap Canberrans cop because of this, the endless put-downs they endure, I’m struck by the thought that Springsteen’s music might have an unlikely resonance for those born in the ACT after all.

Growing up in Canberra you are forever being told your city is boring, sterile, weird, soulless and disconnected from the real Australia, the implication being that you had better get out of there if you want to know what living is. Me and my friends could hardly miss the message, and when the time came we left, almost to a man and woman. To be born in the ACT was in some senses to be born to run.

Canberra was chosen as the site of the capital because it sat roughly midway between Sydney and Melbourne – almost as if its founding idea, its very reason for being, was proximity to elsewhere, nearness to the places that mattered. To grow up in Canberra was to feel the pull constantly of the two great Australian metropolises your city was artificially created to exist between. And the Hume Highway beckoned in both directions, offering a promise like that in Springsteen’s Thunder Road: “The night’s busting open, these two lanes will take us anywhere.”

It would be too neat to say I was playing Thunder Road or Born to Run when my car left the Canberra city limits and I headed for Melbourne to live 25 years ago. Truth is, I don’t remember what was on the stereo or even if it worked. It would also be contrived to say I put pedal to the metal, since my 1982 Mazda hatchback’s fail-safe response to speeds over 70 was to shake violently and break down.

But what I did know back then, even before my car headed slowly in the direction of Yass, was that in Springsteen songs the road out of town promises salvation, but doesn’t deliver it. Real escape is a mirage. Your problems come with you, and plenty that is vital stays behind. All this would prove true, so thanks for the heads-up, Bruce.

In the last line of Thunder Road the narrator says that “it’s a town full of losers, and I’m pulling out of here to win”. This ghostly greaser swaggers with the sweet certainty of youth. But the man who wrote these lines in his early 20s now lives about a half-hour’s drive from the town where he was born and which he wanted to escape from with such steely hunger. Springsteen may have been one of the tramps born to run, but in the end he didn’t run far – or more accurately he did run far, but then retraced his steps, as if looking for clues to what made him run in the first place.

Unlike Springsteen and the many lost and longing souls who populate his songs, I was never running from anything much to begin with. I was a lucky middle-class kid legging it from a small city everyone said was boring, so I could have a lucky middle-class life in a big city that apparently had it all. Hardly a song in it. Yet one of the great things about Springsteen is precisely that in his songs all lives, all stories, are imbued with a certain romance and glory, and listening to him helps you see traces of a quiet majesty in your own small tale.

After my father died I was in Canberra more often, borne back into the past. I find I like the place more as I get older. Lake Burley Griffin might not be Greasy Lake, but time and memory have made it seem just as magical to me.

Sometimes when I drive over Commonwealth Avenue Bridge, I find myself gazing over to the spot on the lake where me and my mates used to hang out – to the sun-baked banks where we would daydream the days away and think life was happening elsewhere. And it’s almost as if I can hear Springsteen’s guitar floating over the water, reminding me I never ran very far.

Stereo Story 860
More Springsteen stories

Mixtape, Stories and essays about the 1980s by Simon Castles. (Ginninderra Press, 2023.)