About

Hopefully by the time this podcast is distributed, Cookey is still alive. He’s meant to be dead, according to Doctors, and each morning the scrawny, raspy patriarch of Prahran struts and staggers down Chapel street, weeping at another morning and declaring to bypasses each: ‘I’m still alive!’ That’s how I came across Cookey, in exactly this manner. Within hours I was in his ramshackle single bedroom flat in the projects tucked conveniently behind the curtain of glossy cafes, shiny shopfronts and funky bars. He greeted me with a rasp and we manoeuvred ourselves into a position to chat about his life, amongst the spartan paraphernalia of his life. “I’ve had one of the most interesting lives anyone can experience,” he tells me. An hour is a pittance in a lifetime, and how can one of the most colourful stories out there be squished into that time frame? We tried. We talked about his first memory, about how the world has changed for better and worse, about his favourite love story, shared his favourite song by John Lennon and why he thought, as a musician, he never had children. This is a story that hopefully we are gifted the time to capture more of. For now, we’ll just have to settle for this first insight into the razor sharp humour of a man dying of terminal cancer; a man more alive than most people you’ll meet in the street. “It’s not really in my hands when I go,” he told me at the end of the chat. “Or where I go. But if there’s anyone you really hate, I’ll die on their doorstep for you.”