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Boronia and The Basin community News – A Sharpie article

A local paper this week out of nowhere has written an article on Sharps.

It comes to no surprise that the skins and sharps culture is starting to make head waves.

After all this time, it seems that this unique lost chapter of our 70s Melbourne youth is starting to get the recognition it deserves.

This Scrapbook entry was posted on Monday, June 7th, 2010 at 11:39 am

4 Comments »

  1. My very first memories of Sharpies was at the Boronia High School dances and hanging out at the Boronia Mall on Thursday and Friday nights.

    Comment by Stef — June 7, 2010 @ 7:57 pm

  2. One of my mates from high school was Peter Davies who later became known as Troy. As Peter, he was the first person I knew to become a Sharpie. As soon as he turned 15, left school and worked briefly as an apprentice hairdresser in Boronia and always had the best haircuts and colours.

    Sadly, he passed away in 2007 after a long illness but as quoted in a film trailer on his life “Troy Davies is an artist who has lead an incredibly interesting and difficult life, he¹s been a sharpie, a drug addict, lived as a woman, is HIV positive and worked extensively with people such as U2, INXS and director Richard Lowenstein.” Troy worked with Richard on many music clips during the 1980’s such as Hunters and Collectors, Noiseworks and in particular INXS.

    Troy appeared as the “skinhead” in the punk era cult film “Dogs in Space” and as “Ecco Homo” he released two singles – one in 1988 with Michael Hutchence “Motorcycle Baby” which was a top 40 hit and one with U2’s Bono “New York New York” a few years later. Links to the video clips and film trailer are below:

    Motorcycle Baby
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2N16fT7XyAQ

    New York New York
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNvE-uWbEkM

    Ecco Homo – Troy’s documentary trailer with some footage from Dogs in Space.
    http://vimeo.com/11319254

    Comment by Stef — June 8, 2010 @ 9:52 pm

  3. Hi guys, thanks for the post and thanks to Chris O’Halloran for the programme in the mail.
    I would like to point out the article is a rewrite of an earlier piece from my blog in 2008 after viewing Larry Jenkin’s collection at the State Library and even back then I was struggling to get some decent photos for some reference and colour to the article.
    I went through my Mum’s house looking for anything from my own time in the 70s but come up short, even my two older brothers had little I could use.
    This seemed to be the norm when it came to Skins/Sharpie memorabilia and it wasn’t until I stumbled across skinsnsharps.com that I really felt I could finish the article proper due to – as I wrote on my blog originally -”Not everybody remembers things the same ……. so please forgive any glaring omissions” .
    It should have read “too many years and alcohol”
    It does seem strange for movement that was so strong to be the subject of mass memory loss and even less recorded history.
    I know as I’ve gotten older I have developed a strong sense of history and I wonder what it would have been like if I used a camera back then like I do now.
    For instance I recently took a picture of a door handle and took it Bunnings rather than take the bloody thing off.
    Thanks for the wonderful web site and a great resource for future writers.
    Out of respect (and copyright laws) I didn’t use any of the skinnsharps gallery photos rather hoping that readers would visit the site and share the same sense of recollection and memory jog I received.
    Thanks again
    Danny Nolan

    Comment by Danny Nolan — June 14, 2010 @ 4:48 pm

  4. My first contact with Skins was when I worked behind the bar at the Melrose Hotel in Flemington Road. A group of Skins drank there regularly. I remember one was called Clem, he was built like a brick shithouse.

    Comment by Ray Brown — June 20, 2010 @ 9:21 pm

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