by Mark Colvin
At the Wintergarden I saw Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation; Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs Miller, The Long Goodbye and California Split; All the President’s Men; Claude Chabrol’s Innocents with Dirty Hands; Cousin, Cousine; Yves Robert’s The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe; Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger; and François Truffaut’s Day for Night, among many. I became a film autodidact, and started writing (probably very pretentious) reviews. Come June 1976, I put myself on the early shift during the two weeks of the Sydney Film Festival so I could leave at midday every day and sit in the glorious gilded extravaganza of the State Theatre, watching films to talk about on the radio the next day. That year and the next, I interviewed emerging Australian directors like Philip Noyce and Fred Schepisi, and was exceptionally impressed by the passionate tenacity of the visiting Englishman Peter Watkins, whose film about the aftermath of a nuclear war, The War Game, the BBC had banned in 1965 but was now being shown for the first time in Australia. It was also in 1976 that I saw Taxi Driver, my first exposure to the work of Martin Scorsese and a complete revelation. Its bleak view of a tortured, paranoid, nocturnal New York was deeply controversial, but nonetheless somewhat overshadowed in the press by the controversy surrounding Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Salo.
Australian Government censors had been hard at work at least since the 1920s, ‘protecting’ the public from films that ranged from All Quiet on the Western Front in 1930 to Federico Fellini’s Satyricon in 1969. But Salo, a work set in the pariah republic Benito Mussolini set up in northern Italy at the losing end of World War II, was narratively framed around Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom. The novel was if anything an allegory of the extremes of power, corruption and decadence, and a picture of what happens when people are treated as consumer goods. On screen, it was a horrifying depiction of what happens when all of that is taken to the ultimate conclusion. As such, it was extraordinarily graphic, and in those days before Australian ‘censorship’ made the transition to ‘classification’, it was completely banned, not just for public exhibition but also for film societies and festivals, which were usually allowed some leeway. So I found myself not watching the film itself but interviewing an academic and friend of Pasolini’s, Gideon Bachmann. He presented the banned work to a packed house at the 1976 Sydney Film Festival, not as a movie—that would have brought in the cops immediately—but in the form of a series of stills, the music soundtrack and a reading of the script.
This represented two things: a bizarre demonstration of the persistence of censorship in this country—despite the reforms introduced several years earlier by the then Liberal Minister for Customs and Excise Don Chipp, reforms intensified under Whitlam—and a unique form of protest. However, the following year, an almost equally confronting Japanese film, Ai No Corrida (In the Realm of the Senses), was shown at the festival, to protest from the ‘moral majority’ but without censorship. Slowly, the culture was changing.
Those were insane fortnights, getting up at 4.30 a.m. and ‘working’, if you can call watching films with a notebook and pen working, till 10 or 11 at night. But I wouldn’t have traded them for the world—the 1970s may have been the best decade of all time to plunge into the study of movies as an art form. The next year, 1977, I enjoyed the Sydney premiere of the first Star Wars movie without in the least anticipating how its semi-camp, sequel-oriented, action-adventure excess was going to become the new normal.
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As we got more organised as a newsroom at Double J, and established stronger relationships with others at the station, we also gradually got more airtime. Mac Cocker was one key to this.
A big, bearded Yorkshireman with a pronounced Sheffield accent, he and I started at the station in the same week, pretty much at the same time as another Englishman, Tony Barrell, who became one of my closest friends. Mac was an extrovert with a thirst in those days: going to the pub with him usually meant a long session and a lot of yarns. On air, he was not just fearless but positively loved to push at the boundaries of what you were allowed to say. When Mac died recently, an Irish friend of mine told me that Mac’s had been the first voice he ever heard on Australian radio, straight off the plane, and definitely the first he’d heard anywhere using the words ‘fuck’ and ‘stoned’ on the radio. If Mac liked something enough—one example was Elvis Costello’s ‘(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea’—he might say ‘Tasty. Very tasty. Very tasty indeed,’ and immediately play it again. No-one in ‘conventional’ broadcasting ever did that. But Mac was also very interested in news and current affairs, and made it clear that he would make room within his drive-time music program for as much material as we could throw at him. This evolved into what might have been the forerunner of Triple J’s Hack, a fast-moving music and talk program of a type which is common now on ABC Local radio, but which in the mid-1970s had never been done before.
We had plenty to cover. In May 1976, Neville Wran had led Labor to a narrow victory in NSW, ending nineteen years of Coalition government. Increasingly, we were dealing with his spin machine, led by Peter Barron, who later went on to Canberra with Bob Hawke, and who gradually systematised a new method of ‘media management’ which, as it grew and became more sophisticated, was eventually exported to Britain and underpinned the rise of Tony Blair. Sand mining on Fraser Island and uranium mining in the Northern Territory were big issues for our youth audience. In Queensland, where the police had a particular reputation for violence against hippies and protesters, the first tiny cracks in the Joh Bjelke-Petersen regime were showing: the squeaky-clean Ray Whitrod resigned as police commissioner because of the state government’s attempts to block his anti-corruption efforts. That story, of course, still had years to run.
Meanwhile, youth culture itself was changing, not just in Sydney but in big cities like London and New York, from which our generation took a lot of cues. In London, the trigger was mass unemployment amid years of decline under alternating Labour and Tory governments locked in a spiral of inaction and decay. In New York, it was the degeneration of the city into bankruptcy, crime, dirt and squalor. President Gerald Ford’s negative reaction to the city’s pleas for a bailout (which happened during Australia’s supply crisis) had resulted in one of journalism’s most famous headlines, ‘FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD’, in the feisty New York Daily News. The city was also rife with paranoia as David Berkowitz, the ‘Son Of Sam’, went on a trail of apparently motiveless serial killings which the police seemed powerless to stop.
In sunny Australia, though the problems were far less dramatic, rising youth unemployment and continuing anger about the Dismissal had sown the seeds of punk. It exploded in late 1976 with the Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy in the UK’, but New York had been there first, with the Ramones putting out a self-titled album of two-minute thrashers of uncompromising simplicity, like ‘Beat on the Brat’, ‘Judy Is a Punk’ and ‘Now I Want to Sniff Some Glue’. The Ramones album took a long while to take off, so it is Brisbane’s The Saints who are usually credited with the first punk hit single, ‘I’m Stranded’.
Musically, this was a generational change as big as the arrival of rock’n’roll in the 1950s or the British invasion of the early 1960s. Rod Stewart, who’d been a rhythm-and-blues man with The Faces but by now had started to morph into a middle-of-the-road pop artist, described it self-satirically years later as a ‘well-deserved kick in the harem pants’ for him and his generation. Through the 1970s, album stations had encouraged bands to write longer, often more pretentious tracks, filled with virtuoso solos by everyone, including the drummer. There was plenty of great music, but there were also massive and showy concept albums and grandiose collaborations with symphony orchestras. Record companies were spending millions on albums by the likes of Stewart and Fleetwood Mac, much of which was spent on ‘fruit and flowers’: the A&R man’s accounting code for cocaine, booze and women. Now, suddenly, there was a generation of kids who wanted to throw away the flowery shirts and bell-bottomed trousers and jump up and down to
extremely loud music made on the cheap, however basic and even badly played. No-one ever played a Ramones song to listen reverently to the guitar solo. Punk was exploding out of gigs in London basements, New York clubs like CBGB & OMFUG and Max’s Kansas City, and places like The Funhouse in Sydney’s Taylor Square where Radio Birdman were the house band and where I spent a lot of sweaty Friday nights.
A lot of this music was banned on nearly every radio station in the world. Sometimes it was because of the language, sometimes the way the songs treated drugs and violence, but in almost every incarnation, punk, with its ripped clothing, piercings, Mohican haircuts and safety pins, did exactly what it was meant to do: stir up the oldies. Hence Mac Cocker’s frequent back-announces of ‘Evening, Bishop’: a shout-out to the bishop of Maitland, in the Hunter Valley, who was way outside our listening area but somehow managed to hear enough to write regular letters of complaint to ABC Managing Director Talbot Duckmanton.
The bishop and the Festival of Light’s Fred Nile might have been our most prominent external enemies, but there was, in 1976, a more dangerous one right inside the gates. We now know from historian Ken Inglis’ authoritative This Is the ABC that it was in January that Malcolm Fraser first approached Sir Henry Bland, a retired Public Service mandarin who had closely advised Fraser the previous year, about chairing the ABC. During February, while Bland thought it over, Fraser announced Budget cuts to the ABC: his Expenditure Review Committee, known in the press as the ‘Razor Gang’, had taken its pound of flesh. There were plenty in Coalition ranks who wanted these cuts applied directly to programs they disliked for political or ‘moral’ reasons. But there was a clearly established precedent for how the actual distribution of the ABC’s Budget money was a matter for its board, and the government had no right to direct, say, a cut in funding to This Day Tonight or Four Corners. Despite the continuing fury of the deputy general manager, Clement Semmler, Duckmanton decided to resist pressure to close down Double J. We had survived, along with a number of other controversial areas of the organisation.
If the board was the problem, Fraser became more determined to change it. In July he announced the appointment of Bland, whose long record as a Public Service chief covered labour, national service and defence, but had never remotely touched on broadcasting, journalism, music, film or the arts. And there was nothing bland about Bland. Sometimes known as ‘Hatchet’ because of his often-admirable determination to cut waste in management during his Canberra years, he was forthright and extremely determined. Undoubtedly the ABC suffered from bloat. The journalist Richard Carleton, who’d just left the ABC for 3AW, told a Melbourne audience of political academics in February 1976 that the organisation was grossly overpadded with management. But Carleton also emphasised that, in his view, the program-making itself was generally efficient and professional.
If Sir Henry had stuck to the inefficiencies and sinecures of middle management, things might have been different, but he did not. He tried to make the chairmanship an executive rather than a supervisory role, and in doing so bit off more than he could chew. The most publicised aspect of this was censorship, specifically in that Bland took strong exception to the TV series Alvin Purple: a sex comedy based on two bawdy movies whose titular character was, it seemed, irresistible to women. Censorship battles through history have not always centred on classics like James Joyce’s Ulysses. Indeed, no-one, in retrospect, would describe Alvin Purple as a television classic. But equally, the material Bland wanted to censor would seem tame today. Inglis records that during this row, Bland was receiving messages of encouragement and support from the commercial media moguls Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch.
But the Alvin Purple ruckus was just the visible part of the massive internal battle that Bland sparked at the ABC. Behind the scenes, egged on by Semmler, he was trying to force management to change or control the output of some programs and stations, including Double J. There was a row about the choice of historian Professor Manning Clark to deliver the Boyer Lectures—a yearly series of talks by prominent Australians that was instituted by the ABC—on the grounds that he had been very pro-Whitlam. Bland also took very strong exception to the presence on the board of Marius Webb (one of Double J’s founding coordinators) as the ABC’s first staff-elected commissioner.
All these factors created turmoil: protests, strikes, bureaucratic battles, and an increasingly unmanageable situation. There was a Sydney Town Hall meeting where 1700 staffers passed a motion of no confidence in Sir Henry, and a 24-hour strike that took the ABC off the air. Sir Henry’s overall solution, to dissolve the ABC altogether and reconstitute it under new rules, finally hit a brick wall in parliament, where Coalition backbenchers threatened to cross the floor and forced Malcolm Fraser to back down. Bland was gone before Christmas 1976, his resignation mourned by few.
A postscript to this episode: thirty-eight years later, with the ABC under attack from Tony Abbott, the same Malcolm Fraser tweeted: ‘Purpose is to starve, then amalgamate then kill or if value left to sell ABC & SBS. OPPOSE NOW.’ Thinking this was a bit rich in the light of history, I replied, ‘Dear Malcolm, I’m sure you’re sincere now. But I survived Sir Henry Bland. And your Razor Gang. We remember.’
‘Touché,’ Malcolm returned, ‘but different ideology now.’
Chapter 21
Dark Glasses
IN THE YEARS 1975 to 1977, I came of age as a reporter and a broadcaster. Part of it was not just journalism but collaboration and friendship, especially with the late Tony Barrell. I wrote when he died in 2011 of how Tony saw in Double J ‘a place where he could do just about anything that there is to do in radio’. What he did then was begin to formulate a radio style of his own, made up of myriad influences.
With the producer and engineer Graeme Bartlett, Tony and I made two programs, one about the American Bicentennial, and the other, called 1984, about the future. In doing so, I was amazed by Tony’s ability to take material which in my hands would have been prosaic, and turn it into a sort of audio poetry—mixing interviews, music, scraps of actuality from here and there, and comedy extracts from groups like The Firesign Theatre. He had a remarkable ability to organise vast masses of material and then juxtapose it in amusing, unexpected, thought-provoking ways in an audio tapestry. The whole concept of large-scale ‘sampling’ and ‘mashup’, so dominant in the visual and audio arts today, only became fully technically possible with the coming of digital. But in Tony’s brain it was already there, and within our (analogue) capabilities we helped pioneer it.
But there was also ‘straight’ journalism, from political interviewing and analysis to coverage of the big stories. Few were bigger than when, at 8.10 on the morning of 18 January 1977, a crowded commuter train derailed at Granville, in Sydney’s west, hitting a road-bridge stanchion and bringing that bridge down on top of it. I was the only reporter in the newsroom, so I still had to prepare the 8.30 a.m. bulletin and another special report at 9 a.m. before I could leave the building, but as soon as reinforcements arrived I drove out, getting to the scene maybe an hour and a half after the accident. Emergency crews were everywhere but there was little security: you could walk through a fence onto the line a few hundred metres away and then get quite close. Closer than I wanted to, but as a reporter you have to look horror in the face.
The whole bridge—concrete, asphalt, iron girders, the vehicles driving across it—had come down instantly, with full force. The flimsy old Sydney ‘Red Rattler’ carriages were crushed like balsawood, and it was clear no passenger directly underneath had stood much chance of survival. Of those killed, not all died instantly. Some of those who were still alive were even able to have conversations with their rescuers, and may have thought they’d be all right if they could just get free and into hospital, but they died soon after of internal injuries and something called ‘crush syndrome’. They were just ordinary people, mostly from the Blue Mountains, reading their books or newspapers, on their way into the city to do their jobs. The crash killed eighty-t
hree and left over 210 more injured: it was and remains Australia’s worst ever rail disaster.
You go numb, trying to cover a story like that for the first time at the age of twenty-five, or at least I did. Some people freeze up entirely: luckily, for me it was not the numbness of paralysis but a sort of emotional shell. You concentrate on your notebook and your tape recorder, try to sort the most relevant points from the least, to do everything you can to stop the emotional blast of what you’ve seen and heard from interfering with your judgement. You write short, simple, coherent sentences because you know that the facts are stark enough to speak for themselves.
And then, in those days, you faced the most significant challenge: actually filing the story. There were no public phones free in the area. This was of course the era before mobile phones, and while some of the TV journalists had electronic links back to their stations, I was just a guy with a tape machine. You knocked on doors and begged people to let you use their phone, promising to pay for the call. Then they watched aghast as you took their phone apart and connected it with alligator clips to your tape recorder. You filed, you did a Q&A (in this case with the morning presenter, Bob Hudson), then you went back on the track to get more material. It was a dark and terrible day, but I learned from it for the first time that I could, single-handedly, cover a really big and difficult story without falling to pieces.
