Days of Wine and Rage Read online

  About the Book

  This was social history - entertaining, fascinating and informing - in the making.

  Days of Wine and Rage explores the tempo and shifts in mores and style of a dynamic decade - the 70s - in Australia’s cultural development. Deftly interweaving literature and documentary history, Frank Moorhouse traces, from their avant-garde origins, significant threads in Australia’s social fabric - the sub-cultural movements towards sexual liberation, cultural identity and a new creative and intellectual confidence. The multi-faceted examination evokes a lively impression of the ambience in which these social changes were generated and of the characters who got them going.

  Frank Moorhouse was hailed as ‘the widest-read chronicler of the new intelligentsia and their uncertainties’. Nowhere are his skills in literary and editorial craftsmanship and his acuity as observer of social nuance more evident than in this book.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Preface

  Introduction

  Twenty Years of Sydney Vivian Smith

  THE REBELLION OF WORDS

  The Story of an Underground Paper

  Wendy Bacon v. The Commonwealth

  An Editor in Jail Wendy Bacon

  Other Protests

  The Inspector and the Prince: A profile of Darcy Waters

  TOWARDS LIBERATION

  The Myth of the Male Orgasm

  Yes, if asked in a survey I’d say I was a liberated lady

  Defenders of Sexiness and Violence

  For the Course, for the Strike – and for the Party

  A Film Producer Comes Out Richard Brennan

  Où Est le Porno? Norman Bartlett

  And a Catholic Poet’s View of Change

  ‘Sidere Mens Eadem Mutato’ Les Murray

  Couples Kate Jennings

  THE WAR

  Pat Yank Anonymous

  An Anti-conscriptionist the Night Before He Went to Jail

  After/The Moratorium Reading Nigel Roberts

  THE GOLDEN YEARS

  I Say Whitlam Doesn’t Matter

  Shades of the Electorate

  The Moment of Victory, 1972 Laurie Oakes and David Solomon

  THE REPUBLIC

  I Speak for Whitlam at the Opera House

  The Meaning of Defeat Donald Horne

  The Violent Option Manning Clark

  Donald Horne – Profile of a Republican

  The Mother Pi O

  LE GHETTO DE BALMAIN

  The Ghetto Gathers

  A Subject of Derision

  Balmain is Cannery Row

  We Have a History!

  The Stenhouse Circle and Balmain, 1851–72 Ann-Mari Jordens

  Breaking Literary Decorum

  Listening Backwards Vicki Viidikas

  Great Pub Crawls

  Getting Credit

  Luncheon With a Royal Highness

  The Pears Soap Story

  Camping in Balmain

  Sonnet 95 John Tranter

  THE LITERARY LIFE

  The Tabloid Story Story Michael Wilding

  The Poet and the Motor Car

  The Death of Three Young Writers

  Rodney Hall on the Death of a Cult-Hero Rodney Hall

  Poem for Charlie Michael Dransfield

  The Thoughtless Shore Robert Adamson

  The Poetry of Michael Dransfield and Charles Buckmaster Allen Afterman

  Burnie John Laurence Rodd

  Donald Horne on James McAuley Donald Horne

  Where in the World was Kenneth Slessor? David Malouf

  The Last Expatriate

  David Malouf Replies David Malouf

  A Conversation With Patrick White Thelma Herring and G. A. Wilkes

  MAKING MOVIES

  Film of the Decade – ‘Mouth to Mouth’

  Interview with John Duigan Scott Murray

  ‘Dimboola’: Play to Film Jack Hibberd

  Going to the Fair Thomas Keneally

  Kitsch Jennifer Maiden

  CAFES AND BARS

  Cafe Society: Table-to-table Fighting

  A Change of Restaurant

  The New Bar

  The Old Bar

  The Angel is Gone

  The Newcastle is Gone

  The Hilton Arrives

  The Value of Lunch at the New Hellas Myfanwy Gollan

  Saturday Afternoon at the Nedlands Hotel Hal Colebatch

  Pot v. Alcohol

  CONFERENCE-GOING

  Conference Tactics – Writers at a Conference

  Teddy Bears’ Picnic – Political Economists at a Conference Frank Campbell

  The End of Anti-Communism – Anti-Communists at a Conference

  Developing a Dialogue – Feminists at a Conference Glynn Huilgol

  Sexism is Insidious Julie Maddox

  TAKING POSITIONS

  Towards an Australian Marxist Intelligentsia

  The Benefits of a Liberal Education Rex Mortimer

  An Anarchist Comes to Power

  The Blooming of Little Anarchism

  How Many Badges Did you Earn?

  A Radical Country Newspaper

  The End of the Libertarians

  Radical and Other Christmases in the Seventies

  Tony Morphett, Born-again Christian Tony Morphett

  Australian Feminist Periodicals in the Seventies Jane Sunderland

  Women’s Hostility – Political Weapon or Personal Poison? Yvonne Allen

  Portrait of a Powerful Australian Woman Andrew Clark

  OR LET’S TRY RETURNING TO NATURE

  The Bush Against Laundromat

  Fighting It Out with the Locals

  Breakfast John Forbes

  Death in the Early Morning: two no-bull deaths Ranald Allan

  Enter, Cosmos

  INTO THE EIGHTIES

  Notes from:

  Donald Horne, born 1921

  Vicki Viidikas, born 1948

  Hal Colebatch, born 1945

  Jack Hibberd, born 1940

  John Forbes, born 1950

  Turning Forty with the Decade

  Untitled John Tranter

  Events of a Decade – A Personal Chronology

  Acknowledgements & Notes

  An Informal Index

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright Page

  Preface

  Days of Wine and Rage was published in 1980, written by me and more than forty other contributors in the highly vocal and revolutionary 1970s. I have not substantially revised it, preferring to leave it as a document of its times. David Williamson and his wife Kristin Green were the only two writers who declined to have their pieces republished and this required the removal of the related pieces by Anne Brooksbank and Robert Ellis.

  In a letter to them I said, ‘What went on in your remarkable exchange was more than literary fighting – it demonstrated the way we wrote, the passion we felt, the openness we claimed and exercised. It was a shining example of candid exchange in a culture which I feel is again returning to inhibition.’

  Readers who are interested will have to search out the first edition.

  Looking back on those wild days of wine and rage of the 1970s, we did not quite realise that we were in the midst of, and part of, a great social revolution. It did not feel that way then. While we were being vocal and valiant, it felt as if we were ultimately impotent and that the repression of freedom was unstoppable.

  Civil libertarians were raided and pushed around by the police and dragged into court, demonstrators suffered violence, women had to get their husband’s permission to leave the country and couldn’t open a bank account, Aboriginals were not allow
ed in bars, gays were beaten up, ASIO spied on journalists and writers, and books, magazines, films, plays, TV and radio were heavily censored. Australia was one of the most censored countries in the Western world.

  But although we didn’t know it, we were winning and in many ways we did revolutionise Australia.

  What do I see now?

  Most of the basic gains are intact – especially those for women and for freedom of sexual expression. But today as I write this I read that the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission reports that same-sex couples are discriminated against every day and that there are fifty-eight laws that require amendment to eliminate discrimination. And not all women receive equal pay or fair promotion in some industries.

  In Days of Wine and Rage I wrote that our central concern of the 1970s was ‘a bad tempered re-negotiation of the relationships between men and women, between society and homosexuality, and the relationships between adults and children …’

  The renegotiation of our relationship with ‘nature’ or the planet was just beginning and I went to the first conference about it in Canberra in 1973 entitled ‘Man and the Biosphere’, under the auspices of UNESCO (see ‘The Bush Against Laundromat’).

  Now, in 2007, I am again worried about freedom of expression generally and about the health of our cultural pluralism.

  Although I am an enthusiastic student of politics, I am not politically partisan or tribal. I suppose I could still be seen as democratic libertarian.

  To me there seems to be a growing reckless authoritarianism in the social policies of the government and in its attitude to freedom of expression, and the Labor Party seems quiet on the issues. Censorship and cultural control are alive both under the claims of national security and again motivated by the ideology of the Coalition Government and by religious morality.

  I am not alone in being worried about freedom of expression. Concern has been expressed by The Australian Law Reform Commission, the Security Legislative Review Committee, the Human Rights Commission, the Press Council, arts organisations and civil liberties groups. And now the mainstream media organisations have formed a committee of concern called Australia’s Right to Know, backed by ABC, SBS, Fairfax Media, News Limited, Commercial Radio Australia, Free TV Australia and the Media Alliance.

  The Coalition Government has also been ideologically hands-on in interfering with educational curricula, control of universities, and has been disrespectful of diversity in its appointments to boards of cultural and media organisations. And while back in the 1970s we thought we were moving towards joint consultation between labour and management and an increased involvement of the workforce in the running of the workplace, the government has become increasingly class-driven in its disempowerment of the employee in the work place.

  These bad trends go against the surveys done of the population at large, which is overwhelmingly tolerant, pluralistic and progressive, especially on moral issues. A recent survey, for example, shows that 80 per cent of the population are relaxed about gay marriage and gay adoption, and against sexual censorship.

  The struggle against the authoritarian mindset has continued for hundreds of years now. It is not over.

  As I said in ‘The Writer in a Time of Terror’, which appeared in the Griffith Review in 2006:

  When in doubt, liberal democrats should opt for the widest freedom of speech as our default position – just as the medical profession opts for preservation of life. [The] liberal democrat strives to prove and to establish that a society can survive, flourish, and be safe and orderly while still maximising freedoms of expression and those other freedoms which rest on freedom of expression.

  Frank Moorhouse

  June 2007

  Introduction

  Because this is a personal book and not a comprehensive book, the poetry and other pieces I’ve selected are things that came to me by the flow of my reading and through conversation during the seventies. They are not a ‘selection of the best’, but all are good. I did go back and look again, more widely than my reading at the time. It was also a retracing of my steps through the seventies. To have tried to be comprehensive in poetry, journalism and social theory would have been a gigantic task because of the emergence of two serious weeklies, the Nation Review and the National Times, together with the existence of the Bulletin and the hundred little magazines which came and went. It would have been beyond my time and sensibilities.

  Much of the selection is that which came my way and I admired and remembered, or that which I found and which seemed to catch the times.

  I found as I wrote the book and selected the pieces, that it was becoming also a homage to Sydney, where I had lived for twenty years. More particularly to the Sydney ‘community of ideas and arts’ which had nurtured me creatively, supported me financially, and sometimes protected me. It is also, to narrow it down even further, a homage to my suburb, Balmain, which, for all its posturing and for all the satire it invites, was a significant part of the pageant.

  But what happened in Sydney also happened in the other cities in their own styles and this is also reflected.

  Jim Davidson, the editor of Meanjin Quarterly, has pointed out that the significant visible change in Australia in recent years is that there are a number of ways of being a ‘real Australian’ and that being ocker is only one, and a fading one. The ocker has ceased to be the dominant Australian stereotype and has become, instead, a sometimes amusing and sometimes embarrassing, older brother or sister – or part-self.

  The book is a combination of new material and material selected from many sources. I thank Jean Rodway and Christopher Mooney for their help on the research. Some of the previously published material has been revised or edited for this collection. Much of the material is my own and this I have sometimes revised more substantially to fit the context of this book. Full details of sources are to be found at the end of the book.

  Frank Moorhouse

  Sydney, June 1980

  Twenty Years of Sydney

  It’s twenty years of Sydney to the month

  I came here first out of my fog-bound south

  to frangipani trees in old backyards

  and late at night the moon distorting palms.

  Even then the Cross was crumby, out of touch.

  I was too timid for Bohemia as a style

  or living long in rooms in dark Rose Bay hotels.

  All one night a storm flogged herds of Moreton Bays,

  for days the esplanade was stuck with purple figs.

  The flying boat circled for hours and couldn’t land.

  That was the week I met Slessor alone

  walking down Phillip Street smoking his cigar,

  his pink scrubbed skin never touched by the sun.

  Fastidious, bow tie, he smiled like the Cheshire cat:

  ‘If you change your city you are sure to change your style.’

  A kind man, he always praised the young.

  Vivian Smith

  (from Southerly, 2/1977)

  THE REBELLION OF WORDS

  The beginning of the seventies coincided with my decision to become a full-time fiction writer and with my turning thirty.

  My Futility and Other Animals had been published in 1969 by Gareth Powell Associates and had been well reviewed but remained undistributed to bookshops because Gareth had gone out of business. The books remained in packing cases although some were remaindered onto the market in the mid-seventies. I never received a royalty cheque.

  I was living on accumulated holiday pay and sick pay from the ABC, where I had been a reporter until 1969. I had rented a room in which to work at Kings Cross when I lived with Gillian Burnett at the Cross. Gillian was a libertarian and had lived during her teens with Darcy Waters, a leading Sydney libertarian.

  But now, separated from Gillian and from the ABC, I found myself with my books, a rented television, an electric coffee percolator, my typewriter – everything I owned – in a room, sharing a bathroom, and sleeping on a sing
le divan.

  I had used the good reviews for Futility and Other Animals and my stories published in magazines to apply for a fellowship from the Commonwealth Literary Fund. I did not get it. Elizabeth Riddell wrote about the annual awards and noted, ‘Among the unsuccessful applicants is the Sydney writer Frank Moorhouse.’ From being an unemployed journalist with his first book a phantom, read only by six reviewers in Australia, I had become a ‘Sydney writer’.