Juan Ignacio Rafaelo Lorenzo Trapaga y Estaban aka Ignatius Jones passed away after a brief illness in the Philippines earlier this week.
Writer, director, musician and polymath, Ignatius’s life is a lesson that we should never take ourselves too seriously.
I knew Iggy working as a writer for magazines of uncertain distinction. He bore a laser sharp mind, a quick wit and an outrageous sense of humour. Editorial meetings were at 10 o’clock sharp every Monday morning, give or take an hour, at one of Sydney’s early opening pubs. Iggy either failed to attend or would arrive in a blaze of sound and fury with a Force Eight hangover. In his shabby state, he and the editors contrived many of Picture’s masterpieces, including my personal favourite, “Climbing Mt Druitt Without Oxygen”, which featured one of the scribblers press ganged into a role of mountaineer scaling the Great Western Highway in crampons.
Making things up was what Picture did best. The censor at the time, the Office of Film and Literature Classification had come up with a long list of predictable profanities it deemed unacceptable to appear on the cover of any magazine available for general sale. Iggy responded by inventing his own. Thus, one edition of Picture featured cover lines: “66 Pages of Hot Soaking Nunga.” The OFLC knew they were being mocked. The art director amended the cover line and added Iggy’s contrived and utterly meaningless word was added to the naughty list.
By this time, Iggy’s band of theatrical shock rockers, Jimmy and the Boys had come and gone. My wife remembers them fondly, seeing Ignatius contort, twist and croon at the long gone Windsor Castle in Paddington or The Phoenix around the corner which was a late closer until a certain former NSW Premier moved in two houses down and the terms of the pub’s licence changed virtually overnight.
“Quite disgraceful,” she recalled of Jimmy and the Boys, bearing in mind the act of being disgraceful would have been perceived as praise by Iggy.
Tim Finn wrote the band’s big hit, “They Won’t Let My Girlfriend Talk to Me” but I preferred their cover of The Kinks “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” because Iggy most certainly was not like everybody else.
As the band evolved, Iggy’s stage performances became more elaborate, featuring more props and more outrageous conduct. Viewed in hindsight, he was developing a sense of exhibition and panorama that would take him to his most extraordinary achievements as an events director.
The list is longer than the OFLC’s banned words rota but if I may cherrypick Iggy’s work later in life, it is difficult not to whistle in awe.
Co-artistic director Sydney Olympics 2000, opening and closing ceremonies. He directed the closing ceremony’s harbour stage, a dazzling pyrotechnics display that featured the “blowing up” of the Olympic rings on the Harbour Bridge to a global television audience of four billion. Later, the word ‘Eternity’ was emblazoned on the bridge as part of Sydney’s millennium celebrations.
He directed the opening night celebrations of a new country, the Independence Ceremonies of the Democratic Republic of Timor L’Este in May 2002, at the invitation of Nobel Laureate José Ramos-Horta and President Xanana Gusmão.
Iggy co-directed the 2002 Asian Games. When he asked the organisers what the budget was, he was told there wasn’t one which brought a gleam to his eye. Three billion people viewed the opening ceremony as Iggy spent up large on the organisers’ money.
There were operas, gigantic stage productions, national celebrations in Canada. Iggy directed Sydney’s Vivid festival for five years.
He also worked directing independence celebrations in Saudi Arabia and in the Gulf States. He was out of Australia for some time on these duties but when he returned, he delivered the funniest ten minute speech I’ve ever heard to a group of 25 accomplished raconteurs, the subject of which might euphemistically be called, theory and practice of male same sex relations in the Arab world.
Iggy would clamber around these huge productions, scuttling about from his viewing spot, yelling into walkie-talkies. A degenerative bone condition, no doubt exacerbated by his contortions on stage with Jimmy and the Boys, made this increasingly difficult and he was obliged to retire.
Iggy didn’t bother with a university education. He was entirely self-educated. His apartment in Surry Hills featured floor to ceiling bookcases stacked with thousands of books. I have no doubt he had read every single one of them. Indeed he was at his most comfortable sitting in an armchair reading history.
He was a dancer, a musician, a singer, a pornographer, a director. He was always the funniest man in rooms filled with funny men and women. He was also a gifted writer. After learning of his death I lamented that I would no longer read his musings on an email circular featuring some of Australia’s wittiest scribblers.
He wrote three books, True Hip and The True Hip Manual both published in the early 90s. His third book, Olympic Babylon does not bear his name. The book, co-authored with Pat Sheil, was an excoriating and very funny history of the modern Olympics but as Iggy had fallen into the embrace of the Sydney Olympic organising body, SOCOG, his name had to be hastily removed from the cover prior to publication.
To know him was to admire him, laugh at his acerbic wit and appreciate his planetary size brain. His life was a gift to this country and stands as an example to us all to think big, have fun and damn the abstemious and the censors.
Vale Iggy.
‘Frank and uncomfortable, but important’
As if the world wasn’t bleak enough already. According to the nation’s intelligence chief, it is only going to get worse. More confusing, more volatile and more dangerous.
Premier’s wild stunt is pure politics
It is unprecedented in Australia for a state to put a company under like this, but the politics is clear because the mill is the lifeblood for the 22,000 people in the town.