The Story of a Man Named Shirl

Million Dollar Riff
The story of a man named Shirley
Graeme Strachan was born in East Malvern on January 2, 1952. He went to Mt Waverley High, and decided to become a carpenter when the only subject he passed in form 4 was woodwork. He had scraped through the first two years of high school pretty smoothly, with the exception of non-favoured subjects such as French. "I used to cause teachers a lot of trouble sometimes, either through my arrogance, my mouth . . . but a lot of the teachers who gave you a hard time look back now and say, oh, he's alright, but at the time they hated your guts.…