Driving Miss Flack

Sydneysider: A personal journey

Sometime around late 1980 or early ‘81, I picked up Roberta Flack at the Boulevard Hotel on William St. True story.

I often lurked, in Taxis Combined cab 4489 in the hotel driveway, looking for a fare. It was a gig that had often been kind to me, in terms of celebrity fares. Miss Flack’s secretary came out and asked if I could drive Miss Flack to Chifley Square (I think it was).

The Great Singer slid into the front seat next to me and we set off. “Why are you going this way?” she asked. Clearly a tough Noo Yark dame, warning the cabbie, on principle, she weren’t going to be ripped-off.

“Because it’s the quickest way,” I replied.

She must have been satisfied, because she tipped me a dollar fifty. I really should have framed that dollar note and the coins. But we were very poor at the time and it seemed like a handy sum.

The driveway of the Boulevard was then, is now, a miserable windswept hole, but it had memories for me. About ten years earlier, when I was working as a lift fitters’ assistant, I’d helped build the place. It was an unnerving job. I remember my first day, looking down that bare concrete lift shaft from about the eleventh floor and having a sickeningly vertiginous sense of perspective. But the fear passed. After a couple of days on the job the view down the shaft went two dimensional.

We started working in the bare shaft in a narrow little suspended platform called a ‘lift boat’, drilling bolt-holes in the concrete and fitting brackets to the wall onto which the steel rails that guided the lifts would later be clamped. The worst part was fitting the rails onto the brackets. I perched on the bracket above the lift boat, grabbed the end of the rail (it was like a train rail) as it was lowered from above, and manoeuvred it into position against the bracket so the lift-fitter could bolt it into position. Once the rails were fitted the lift boat was replaced by a much safer platform called a ‘false car’ that filled the whole space of the shaft and from which it was impossible to fall to your death.

On another occasion I was leaning on the cab, in the driveway, reading the paper, when Gough Whitlam tapped me on the shoulder. The Great Man had his official post-prime ministerial office in the Westfield Tower next door. It seemed his Commonwealth car was running late. If it didn’t arrive in five minutes, would I mind driving him to the airport? Well of course I would. He asked how things were going in the taxi game.

I was at the time the secretary of the risibly tiny Taxi Section of the Transport Worker’s Union, so I very briefly outlined our troubles. Right there, with only me as an audience, Gough suddenly launched into a parliamentary speech.

“We in the Australian Labor Party have always maintained, and firmly believe … ” he began, and he rolled into a set-piece speech on industrial relations, the details of which now escape me.

While he spoke a couple of passers-by on William St spotted him and walked into the driveway to kiss the hem of his garment. Then his Comm car driver arrived and bore him away.

Another day, a youngish besuited man who struck me as being gay, came out of the lobby, explained he was the Premier of Queensland’s secretary, and asked me if I could drive the Premier to the airport.

A couple of minutes later, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen hopped into the front seat and his entourage squeezed into the back. There was the gay man, a bodyguard (probably Sergeant Bob Carter) and Beryl Young, his pilot. Joh was flying to New Zealand to receive some sort of award from the Lutheran Church.

It was an astounding thing to be a fly on the wall, listening in to his conversation, much of which centred on negotiations to buy the Premier a new executive jet. The Joh sitting next to me came across as an articulate, urbane, upper middle class businessman – a type I was very familiar with. There was none of the rambling brain-damaged gibberish which characterised his forays in the media. None of the “I, I, I, you, you, you … I’m telling you … you know you southern socialists … we’ll show you … yes we will. My friend Mr Iwasaki, he’s going to do good things for Queensland … build a resort at Yeppoon … yes he will and there’ll be a freeway, with palm trees yes and bougainvillea red and orange yes like my son John has growing over the barn you mark my words”. There was none of that stuff. Obviously that stuff was reserved for his brain-dead followers – folk who didn’t like to vote for anybody who might have been brighter than them.

At the airport the entourage bore the luggage inside and Joh paid me in cash.

“Would you like a receipt for that?” I asked. He took that as a comment, said “No need”, curtly and walked away.