As soon as we drove into the car park we were buoyed by the sight the giant shed with large blue ‘70s font curling across it, reading “Skate Centre”. It had been a decision made on the third day of a somewhat cheeky work-wag week to catch up with old friends out of town, even though I don’t actually think anyone needs an excuse to ditch life for a while and escape into the long grass. We’d been lying around, admittedly slightly hung over, talking about the film Whip It! and trading childhood skating stories (yes, back then we all got around on wheels instead of crack), and before we knew it we were in a bitumen lot that struck a remarkable resemblance to the one in which Ellen Page gets her first hit of roller derby adrenalin. This one, however, was near empty and we were far too craggy and dumbed by the previous night’s beer intake to make any charmingly sarcastic repartee or be mistaken for spirited 17-year-olds.
The group of girls who walked into the centre ahead of us weren’t, however. There were five of them, all wearing long, red-and-black-striped socks with pig-tails and tank tops emblazoned with “Speed Demonic” and “Skate Skank”, kicking each other in the heels and generally ‘talking trash’. We were, we thought, in the presence of real-life out-of-town derby chicks and, inspired by the role-play, hired roller skates rather than the blades we’d been brought up on. (That said, the last time I wore blades involved speeding down my steep childhood street towards a busy intersection and having to purposely fall over onto a gravel driveway before reaching the bottom, tearing strips out of my arms and legs in the process and not really winning any points in the ‘90s battle for skate cred.)
Inside, too, the rink was just like the nostalgia-smacked film, barely touched since the ‘70s, right down to the $2 skate hire and cardboard buckets of hot chips being served over the canteen counter. There was even an old fat dude perched high up in a booth, commentating on those making loops around the cement floor in the centre of the room, with well-worn catchphrases like, “That was a doozy!” and, “She’s done this before!” suavely bellowed just like the guy from The Price Is Right. In fact, it might have been the guy from The Price Is Right.
The music was another matter. A chart-thieving mix of new American rap (not the good kind) and bland ‘atmospheric’ dance pop, it wasn’t exactly the glam rock or riot grrrl fantasy we’d dreamed up back on the couch. Bikini Kill had been replaced with Iyaz, and Kiss with Stan Walker.
The scene once we entered the rink was even more depressing. The derby girls, it turned out, weren’t derby girls at all but hopeless losers like us who could barely put one wheel-bottomed foot in front of the other. Together – us and them – we were the unskilled tourists amongst a crowd of families and well-underage kids who were skating, mostly on blades, like they came to the rink every weekend, gliding gracefully around in practical, loose-fitted clothing and smiling and waving as they passed each other. There wasn’t a side-swipe, beer, ripped jean or cuss word for miles. It was like they hadn’t even heard of Whip It!.
We joined the parading sober people and, after some time, the music turned towards more Aus-centric radio-rock fare; to a coastal anthem by The Sundance Kids, the wistfully grungy new single from British India, a bit of Gyroscope and even – I think, though I might have been deluded by all the bright surf-brand t-shirts – a song by winsome Brisbane duo Ellington. It wasn’t the riot we were hoping for, but rolling along in a wholesome daze, the tracklist seemed oddly fitting; catchy, sincere and somewhat heartening local band-rock soundtracking an innocence that was, here, obviously enacted weekend after weekend in this weird time-machine of a place.
It was a different kind of role-play I almost wished I could take part in more often. That is, until the lights went down, the disco balls up and Owl City’s Fireflies came on.
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