I used to DJ at Heaven Nightclub in Canberra’s Garema Place pretty much every weekend between 1997 and 2001. My sidekick Jono and I also ran a regular night called Positive in the venue’s Back Bar which, by the standards of the times, had reached legendary status across the country. Positive was constantly bringing in big crowds thereby making the club a lot of money, so I was surprised and even a little hurt when Sylvie, the matriarch of the club, charged me full price to get in and DJ at my own night. But nonetheless I paid, and ever since then I have always wondered why I did.
This article is a love letter to a particular place and time in the city’s social memory.
To understand Heaven’s resonance, it’s helpful to imagine a much smaller Canberra in the mid-to-late ‘90s. Every Friday and Saturday evening in the smallest cracks of the city, people would be getting ready: A nervous boy would try on sequin shorts in their bedroom out of sight from their father, another might sneak off early from Mooseheads. Girls would gather at homes or in bars for a Stoli Ruski. Hospitality staff would start playing dance music towards end of shift and slowly, out of these cracks they would all assemble and line up for the ritualistic torture of the Heaven door.
Imogen was the High Priestess of Judgement. She was smarter than us, wiser than us and moodier than us all put together. Occasionally she’d call on Sylvie, the matriarch of the club, to help turn away groups of footballers trying to cause a ruckus. Sylvie would stand at the top of the steps with her bad-ass New York attitude and hair piece lurching dangerously to one side. She would stare down any number and size of man, knowing that the greatest gift she could give her customers was safety. She proved the awkward truth that without exclusivity you can’t have inclusivity.
After the door we were all there together. No VIP rooms, no roped-off areas or anything that vaguely resembled a hierarchy. Safe from any threats outside and before social media made our lives a performance, we could be truly free.
When Heaven was ‘on’ the dancefloor sat under a cloud of cigarette smoke and the walls sweated in the perspiration of the happy. We breathed it in deeply and willingly. We bumped into each other accidentally, rubbed across each other apologetically, hugged each other purposefully and practised the very opposite of social distancing. We gave massages to close friends, to hippies, to strangers and even once to a bikie who said a polite thanks.
We bought drugs, sold drugs, lost drugs and found them. We broke every convention in the book on fire exits and turned the back stairwell into a thriving economy of illicit substances and fumbly pashing. We laughed so much but there were tears too – a friend’s sister overdosed, another DJ fell off the roof, hearts were broken, some were honest with themselves or others for the first time and it hurt. By the next weekend all wounds were bandaged, knives wrapped up and castles rebuilt.
We had a competition to see how close you could get to setting Sylvie’s hair piece on fire with a cigarette, without actually doing so. We stayed awake too long. We fell asleep on sticky couches. Our friend Mr Tim neatly folded his silver pants (which he never did at home) and slept peacefully for hours while three metres away, the DJs stoked a furnace of nasty trance music.
We listened to music from right around the world and made in our own bedrooms. We overheated because the air conditioning never worked and we froze because it was always Canberra when we left in the morning into ice cold air, a symphony of magpies and street sweepers. We called in sick at work from the payphone in the carpark as cars drove by playing loud dance music and blowing our excuses before we’d even hung up.
We actually had the time of our lives and all the while we dreamt of leaving.
One Night in Heaven is at the Vault, Dairy Rd, Fyshwick on Saturday 30 November from 8pm to 5am.
Tickets at https://events.humanitix.com/one-night-in-heaven
