by Anne Summers
While I waited to hear, I kept writing although I now steered clear of police corruption. In June I’d written about the disappearance of a young woman, Trudie Adams, from the Northern Beaches in Sydney who had last been seen getting into the back of a panel van, a vehicle I referred to as ‘the mobile bedrooms of the young’. Two young women got in touch; they knew all about panel vans, they told me, as they’d been ‘surfie chicks’ in Cronulla in the early 1970s and had written a novel about their experiences. They enclosed a few pages. I’d gone around to the house they shared in Annandale to check them out. They were hilarious, both excited to have a ‘real’ journalist take them seriously, but anxious to appear supercool. They gave me drinks, a book of Dorothy Parker poems and their manuscript. I said I’d help them get published. A week later Suich and I had lunch with them and soon these very impressive nineteen-year-olds were writing a column in the Sun Herald under the byline of the Salami Sisters. In mid-August, just before I left for America to take up the US fellowship which I was thrilled to learn I had been accepted for, I wrote to Hilary McPhee and Di Gribble. Three years earlier they had formed McPhee Gribble Publishers and were making a name for themselves with literary works by emerging writers such as Helen Garner. I had a novel that might interest them, I wrote. As I was leaving Australia in a few days, it was best if they contacted the girls direct: ‘Their names are Gabrielle Carey and Kathy Lette …’ The book, of course, was Puberty Blues and McPhee Gribble published it the next year.
A year earlier Suich had talked me out of it when I had tried to resign from the paper to work full-time on a book. I had intended to write a biography of Adela Pankhurst Walsh, the daughter of British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, who had come to Australia in 1914. I’d first encountered her while I was researching Damned Whores and had become intrigued by the story of this English radical pacifist, who had joined Vida Goldstein’s Women’s Peace Army in Melbourne to fight the 1916 conscription referendum but then with her husband Tom Walsh, a communist and an official with the Seamen’s Union, had done a startling political about-face and become sympathisers with Japan in the late 1930s. She was briefly interned during the war. I’d tried to work on the book at nights and weekends but I’d made little progress. I knew lots of journalists wrote books, and the two occupations seemed to complement, even feed off each other, but it didn’t work that way for me. I spent too much time on my journalism and I was too much of a party girl. I was single and young; I would be at the pub, or having dinner with friends, having fun. Maybe if I’d had a partner and a domestic life I might have managed to go straight from the office to my typewriter at home. The only way I could see myself finishing a book was to leave journalism and write full-time. Suich had sweet-talked me into staying then, but now I felt I needed to test what my vocation was: journalist or writer. And what about my feminism? I felt guilty because my unpredictable hours meant I could no longer commit to being a regular on the roster at Elsie Women’s Refuge. I did find time for other less-demanding women-related activities as an editorial board member of Sisters Inc., a new feminist publishing venture in Melbourne, and I was the Australian member of the advisory group for Virago, the feminist publishers in London started by Carmen Callil, the dynamo Australian-born London publisher. Soon I was receiving regular packages of paperbacks with their trademark dark green spines and being introduced to writers such as Maya Angelou and Vera Brittain. I also retained the small editorial consultancy with Penguin Books that I had had since before Damned Whores had been published, and in June I began to write a fortnightly column on the Australian book trade for Fred Brenchley, who was now editing the Financial Review. There were constant invitations to talk, at conferences or seminars—even on television. One such appearance, on a commercial station’s morning show, led to an invitation to do a regular spot. I was establishing a pattern that I have found myself unable to alter ever since: doing too many things, stretching myself too thin, never able to refuse an invitation or an opportunity, never satisfied, always restless. I was startled to learn that some of my colleagues thought of me as ‘ruthlessly ambitious’. I saw myself as driven, as single-minded, someone with boundless energy who could never see a reason not to take on another challenge, but ‘ruthless’? I could not see that.
I hoped that in America I might be able to make sense of my life. Maybe distance, and a vastly different culture, would give me perspective. What kind of writer was I? How did being a woman fit into all of this? Earlier that year, at Writers’ Week in Adelaide, I had asked the novelist Thea Astley what she thought of the fact that none of the major featured women writers had presented themselves as women, preferring instead to be identified by their nationality. Margaret Atwood was a Canadian, Fay Zwicky an Australian. I commented that I was disappointed the feminist voice was not present in Adelaide.
‘When you pick up your biro to write you shed your sex,’ Astley had said to me.
I didn’t argue with her, but I didn’t want to agree either. I did not see how you could ‘shed’ your sex, unless it was to put on a false skin and play at being something other than who you were. But nor did I know what it meant to write as a woman. I was a woman. Who wrote. I was a reporter, an observer but I was also a catalyst, someone who revelled in action, especially action that championed women. I had no idea how to reconcile being a realist and an idealist, an observer and an activist. Maybe it simply was not possible.
At a party I met Jill Neville, a dazzlingly smart and interesting woman who was a writer. She was more than a decade older than me and had come of age at an even worse time. She had escaped to England before she was 21 and only came back to Sydney occasionally to see her family. She and I hit it off immediately as we talked about how to cope with the world as a bright, successful woman. ‘We are still a minority,’ she said. ‘And something men don’t understand. Nor,’ she elaborated, ‘do women who are married or not ambitious.’ Yes, I thought, she’s right. There are not many of us. Not yet.
CHAPTER TWO
HOME OF THE BRAVE
We left JFK Airport in a battered yellow taxi. Not, to my disappointment, a classic Checkers cab. It was winter and late afternoon so the sky was already dark. We bounced along the expressway through Queens on our way to Manhattan, past what seemed like endless cemeteries. The traffic moved fast. Our driver was not about to have anyone pass us so we moved even faster. My usual nervousness in cars faded in the face of my fascination with being in New York for the first time.
I noticed several burning car wrecks on the side of the road. Our driver was uncommunicative, angry even, as if whatever problems he had in life were the fault of these two unwitting passengers. I was just a wide-eyed young Australian but my companion, the man I was starting to feel comfortable calling my boyfriend, was an American. He had been able to return to the US after years in exile in Australia as a draft dodger because of the amnesty offered by the newly inaugurated President Jimmy Carter. He was having a complicated reaction to the country of his birth which in many ways mirrored the complications of our nascent relationship. We’d started in Canada, then gone to Washington State, where his parents lived in a small semi-rural community that was beautiful and peaceful and bland.
Now we were in a very different America.
It was early 1977 and I was the first person I knew to go to the United States. Most of us were anti-American, at least its politics but also what we saw as its vapid consumerist culture, and that in itself was reason enough not to want to visit. We’d been opposed to the Vietnam War, which had ended two years earlier, and angry at America, at what we saw as the gross misuse of its power, using military force, for instance, to invade countries in Central America to protect the interests of US corporations. At the same time, there were many Americans I admired. It was American writers and activists who gave us the arguments against the war and against the capitalist system. We relied on the inflammatory and provocative writings of American women in the early days of women’s liberation. As a teenager in Ad
elaide I had absorbed the poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, founder of the famous City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, and Allen Ginsberg and other Beats. I had been On the Road with Jack Kerouac and now a different American fiction was nudging its way into my consciousness, as books by women exploded into the literary firmament. It had started in 1972 with the Canadian Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, an astonishing book that enabled me to see on the page, for the very first time, a woman with whom I could fully identify. A year later Fear of Flying, Erica Jong’s raucous sexual romp that gave us the memorable phrase ‘the zipless fuck’ to describe casual encounters, became an international bestseller. Lisa Alther quickly followed in 1975 with Kinflicks, another novel that demonstrated women could be as sexually explicit in their writings as men, and in 1977 Marilyn French would blow everyone out of the water with The Women’s Room, a novel of female empowerment that seemingly every woman I ever met had had her life changed by. And as well as the writing, America offered music. There was jazz and there was folk and there was rock ‘n’ roll.
We stayed with Phillip Frazer, a supercool lefty entrepreneur who had just arrived in New York intending to continue his work with alternative publishing. In Melbourne, he had published a weekly pop music newspaper Go Set and subsequently The Digger, a political and cultural newspaper that captured the spirit of the times. Frazer’s girlfriend, Paula Longendyke, was an artist who had a large loft downtown on Park Place in what is now known as Tribeca. In New York lingo, ‘downtown’ was anywhere below 14th Street but we were ten blocks below Canal Street, not far from Wall Street, and that was definitely not a residential area in the 1970s. We were lucky to have a free place to stay; the loft was very large, with huge windows allowing light onto the raw floorboards and unpainted walls. Today, even in its totally unrenovated state, it would sell for millions. At the time it felt to me like living in a cardboard box. We were a good twenty blocks away from what I thought of as the bohemian New York of Greenwich Village, and even a long way south of Soho, whose old industrial buildings and cobblestoned streets had already attracted a colony of artists. I was with pioneers, the artists and writers whose low income required them to find ever cheaper places to live and work. It was eye-opening and, in many ways, exciting. We spent a wintry weekend at minimalist artist Frank Stella’s extraordinary house in the Hamptons. Paula had the keys as she was a friend of the artist, although I doubt he knew we were enjoying his hospitality. I wondered at the curved floorboards until someone mentioned they’d come from an ancient ship. It was my first exposure to the grey and blustery waters of the Atlantic Ocean, and to a beach that was open only to those wealthy enough to own houses along its frontage.
I was much too sophisticated to admit that I wanted to see any of the city’s fabled landmarks. Only tourists cared about the Empire State Building, Times Square or Central Park, I told myself. Skyscrapers, like the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, located a couple of blocks below Park Place, which had opened just four years earlier, did not interest me. I was there for the ideas, the politics, and the music and with Frazer’s journalistic and political connections I was in the right place. Yet I felt some disappointment. I was not sure what I had expected, but it wasn’t this.
New York had not yet become the Big Apple, the exciting place that lured millions of tourists each year. The brilliant ‘I(heart)NY’ logo and marketing campaign were a year away from launch. In the 1970s, the city was unattractive and quite dangerous. Street crime was high, the subway was not safe and there was an air of menace in some areas, even if you stuck to the main streets. The streetlights were orange, casting an eerie yellowish glow on everything. People picked their way through these dim and grimy streets like alien creatures. Shop fronts were barred, or boarded and shuttered. I felt I was in a dystopian world, not unlike the one that would enter film legend a few years later with Blade Runner. Spurts of steam erupted constantly from beneath the streets. In some places, tall funnels channelled the steam into the night. One night I got off at the wrong subway stop and had to walk three blocks through what seemed like a war zone. The streets were amuck with garbage, broken glass, dumped wrecks of cars. Overhead was a giant uncompleted overpass, a highway to nowhere. It gave the scene a sense of a future that was not going to arrive.
I would turn 32 in a few weeks, time I made some decisions about my life. I had just completed my first year in journalism. I had won a Walkley Award, the highest honour of our profession, so I should have been revelling in my success but I was still breathless with shock and disbelief from the death of my seventeen-year-old brother Jamie, and I was questioning the relevance of everything around me. I had taken leave from the National Times, but I did not see how I could go back—to the job and to my old life. To just resume normality seemed obscene. You can’t lose your little brother and stay the same. I’d gone to America in part to see if I could lose myself in love with my new companion, perhaps stay in New York and find work. Shortly after I arrived, I’d published an article about the recent outlawing of rape in marriage in South Australia in the new left-wing monthly magazine, Seven Days, thanks to Phillip Frazer who was on the editorial staff. In 1894 my home state had become the first Australian state, and only the fourth place in the world (after Wyoming, Colorado and New Zealand), to give women the vote. Now premier Don Dunstan, who later that year would win his third state election, was adding to his already impressive list of reforms. His government had already decriminalised homosexuality, introduced Aboriginal land rights, got rid of an electoral gerrymander, established the South Australian Film Corporation and the Adelaide Festival of Arts, and in 1975 had become the first state in Australia to legislate against sex discrimination. The conversation about rape in marriage—that there was any such thing—was only just getting started in feminist, legal and political circles and it is fair to say that many people were not yet willing to see it as a crime. South Australia, the staid state where I had grown up, was once again leading the world in pioneering social reform. The people at Seven Days were impressed.
One night word went around that Patti Smith was performing somewhere near us. We joined the throng, trudging south, shoulders hunched against the late-February freeze, then milled around in the street outside the venue that looked like a neglected garage. New York might be strange, ugly and alien but it was the place where the world’s best writers and singers and poets lived and worked and were liable to appear at your local. And Australians could make it here: Frazer was in publishing and underground artist Tim Burns currently had a show. I took a train way uptown to near Columbia University to visit Glenda Adams, who had just published Lies and Stories, a collection of short stories.
It was alluring, but was it enough to persuade me to stay?
In the end it wasn’t. Patti Smith had not appeared. The crowd peeled off when they realised it was just her band. New York offered phantasms aplenty, but how much was graspable? I’d had an article published, but I had not been paid for it. How could I get enough money to live? I was not sure about the life in downtown lofts but my glimpse of another New York was just as strange. I spent a few days in an Upper East Side apartment where the view was of scrubbed streets and the pair of potted ficus trees in the living room had already reached the low ceiling and were now doing a U-turn and starting to grow downwards. If there were no limits at all in downtown New York, uptown was far too constrained for my liking. I did not feel I belonged in either place. And, I had to admit to myself, I was afraid of having no job and no place of my own. I was not a risk-taker, I realised. In early 1977 I went back to Sydney, and back to the National Times. But I was now a different person. Jamie’s death and the end of the relationship in America had changed me. The romance had been stormy enough, but it reached a crescendo one night in Scottsdale, Arizona where we’d gone in pursuit of the Lockheed bribery scandal story that I had been chasing in Australia and had decided to pursue further while I was in the US. We’d brazenly presented ourselves at the front door of a former Lockheed
executive. I’d explained I was a reporter from Australia and wanted to talk to him. He was extremely courteous. He invited us in, offered us drinks, introduced me to his wife—and then took my companion (who was also a journalist but he was not the one doing this story) into his study and shut the door. Our fight that night was so ferocious we were asked to leave the hotel where we were staying.
