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Rather His Own Man

Page 8

by Geoffrey Robertson


  So it came about – for better or worse – that the next five teenage years of schooling were spent in a rustic atmosphere of fields and gum trees rather than an asphalt jungle in inner Sydney. I would walk a mile to Eastwood Station, usually meeting halfway my friendly rival Roger Hillman, and catch the train to Epping (one stop), where a school bus would take us up the hill and drop us off at a school with no history, no old boys, no girls and no reputation to live up or down to.

  Epping’s motto was ‘Strive to Achieve’, but with the emphasis very much on ‘Strive’. We were mainly from hard-working families with fathers who had returned from the war and mothers who dutifully described their occupation as ‘domestic duties’. Our faces and races were monochrome: the White Australia policy precluded any other colour (freckles were allowed). We were expected to learn how to become useful members of society, a step up from our parents, whose ambitions were for us to earn more money than they did, perhaps as engineers, solicitors or accountants (though actuaries were a popular aspiration, since they were reported by the Sydney Morning Herald to be the best-paid profession). The notion that a son might become an actor or a poet or a ballet dancer would have been viewed with horror, although a top sportsman would have been very acceptable.

  Our school, which had only been operational for two years, was still in the process of being built. In my first year, we were all ordered to bring from our gardens some samples of kikuyu grass, which we proceeded to plant on the sports field (it remains there sixty years later – my proud contribution to my old school). The centre of this institution of learning was the tuckshop, selling over-creamed buns and greasy meat pies which contributed, no doubt, to quite a few of our heart attacks in later life. Parents were expected to help out, but my mother refused to dispense unhealthy food, or to allow me enough money to buy it: my lot for lunch would always be her wholesome sandwiches. My father became the mainstay of the P&C (Parents and Citizens Association): as its treasurer, he put its limited funds into investments that paid off, or at least paid for the cricketing and football gear that was essential to state education but was not provided by the state. By this time he had been made registrar of the Commonwealth Bank – a title that gave him some heft with the Education Department, which he badgered to provide us with a teacher of Latin. This was regarded as a luxury for state schools although every wealthy private school had one and he thought the ancient language might be useful if his son ever chose a career in law. (It wasn’t, as it happens, although five years of its study did help my sex life by enabling me to translate the erotic poetry of Catullus.)

  My sex life needed all the help it could get. Puberty brought the teenage equivalent of the scourge, the acne that was Black Death to social life, and which scarred me until university. Red pustules covered my face: each morning I would take a blackhead extractor to the overnight pimples, covering the bathroom mirror with ejaculations of pus. I was sent repeatedly to a skin specialist – an avuncular doctor in Macquarie Street – who prescribed a sulphurous solution which I had to apply every morning and which made my face raw and purplish-white, and even less sightly than before. It left the indelible impression on my mind that I was ugly and unfit for female company, so I retreated to my books and rarely accepted invitations to parties. In any event, the girls I met on the train (usually from our ‘sister school’, Cheltenham Girls High) displayed no interest in me whatsoever. In those days, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, girls never made passes at boys with A passes. Intellectual achievement could not get me a partner to the Epping/Cheltenham school dance. It was then that my mother decided I must learn some social graces: she enrolled me in a course at Miss June Winter’s Academy of Dance.

  There, in a converted shed near Epping Station, I had the most excruciating experience of my teenage life. It was soon clear that I got no rhythm, and had two left feet. The moment of truth arrived with the ‘Ladies’ Choice’. The boys were lined up against one wall, with the girls about to venture, like heat-seeking missiles, towards their target. Roger and I quaked with apprehension – there was one beautiful and rather forward girl whom we both fancied and she made a move in our direction. To my brief delight she selected me rather than my rival, a generosity I repaid by treading on her toes. She did not make the mistake of selecting me again.

  I could never get the hang of ballroom dancing, and my embarrassment was only relieved because a fat American named Chubby Checker had made a dance called ‘the twist’ so popular that Miss Winter had to include it in our repertoire. It enabled you to distance yourself from your partner and gyrate within your own space, without contact with your partner’s body, or with her toes. A few years later, at university balls, I would manage to sway and smooch to ‘Hey Jude’ and other Beatles standards, but any other form of dance still eludes me.

  As for sex, in the fifties it really was a terrible business for sensitive teenagers. There was no sex education, apart from a ludicrous quasi-evangelical group called the Father and Son Movement, which was invited to the school for one evening each year. Embarrassed fathers were required to sit with their more embarrassed sons to watch magic-lantern slides of tadpoles swimming towards a cartoon uterus, and endless close-ups of sores on male groins and organs – the consequence, we were assured, of sex with any woman who was not our wife. The wages of sin were death, and we were inculcated with paranoid fears of venereal disease. The Father and Son outfit was also militantly opposed to masturbation – their literature hinted that it might cause eyesight loss, mental derangement, general ill-health and, worst of all, perpetual prepubescence. Hence a cartoon of a grown boy riding a child’s rocking chair, with the caption ‘Growing up means leaving childish things behind’ – only primary school boys would pay any attention to their willies, which could thereafter curl up as if in hibernation but spring back into action on the wedding night. It was all too silly for words.

  Nor was it the only absurdity. Australia was the most censorious society in the free world, keeping out books with the same determination as it kept out black, brown and anyone but white people. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was acquitted at the Old Bailey obscenity trial in 1960, but not even Robert Menzies’ Anglophilia would allow him to permit it into Australia. The story I later heard from his minister for Air, Fred Osborne, who lived nearby, was that the cabinet all assumed that Menzies would respect the British decision and allow the book entry. They were taken aback when he stormed into the cabinet meeting to declare, ‘I’ve read this dreadful book. And I am not going to allow my wife to read it.’ They did not have the courage to disagree, so the Dame Pattie Menzies protection test determined in my youth our federal level of sexual tolerance.

  The most extreme censorship was in the state of Victoria, where a pompous killjoy named Arthur Rylah was attorney-general: he announced he would prosecute any book that was not fit for his fourteen-year-old daughter. He published a blacklist, which served as a signal to kids in New South Wales to find these salacious works. We discovered Mary McCarthy’s The Group still on sale (not for long) and there was even a copy of God’s Little Acre – the Erskine Caldwell classic – in our school library. It became much-thumbed, taken out by boys who would never have gone near it had the dim-witted Rylah not pronounced it dirty.

  I wonder now what drove these moral paragons – were they somehow trying to conceal their own depravity by pretending to electors that they were saving us from sin? Nobody ever called them out, and the incidence of rape kept on increasing (although not in the statistics: as a result of the stigmatising of sex, most rape victims were deterred from reporting the crimes against them). Liberation of a kind (at least for men) had come to America in the fifties with the publication of Playboy – it was, of course, banned from Australia. Film censorship was just as stringent; I recall the loud-mouthed moderator of the Methodist Church describing cinema-going as ‘like travelling through a sewer in a glass-bottom boat’. More evidence, I think, that the dirt was all in the minds of the men who set Australia’s moral stan
dards.

  Angry though I still am about those wowsers, I must admit that censorship did me some good. It forced me to hunt out literature the censors were too ignorant to have banned. I had read that Rabelais, for example, was pretty … well, ‘Rabelaisian’, and I found a copy of Gargantua and Pantagruel on the innocent shelves of Eastwood Public Library. It had enough scatology to last a lifetime. There were Boccaccio (The Decameron) and Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales), with rude sections you had to read into the books to find. And, immortally, Ulysses, which I forced the school to buy me as a prize for coming top in maths. Who could have a more erotic love affair than with Molly Bloom, or with Joyce’s own wife, the blowsy barmaid Nora Barnacle on whom she was based?

  My life-long aversion to censorship – both in ideological terms when it amounts to denying the right to information or opinion, and for the practical reason that it is usually counterproductive – really began at Epping when I discovered how it was being used to disadvantage all state school kids in my year. The background to this scandal was that we were all studying, in 1962, aged sixteen, for our Leaving Certificate – our passport to the future. English was a compulsory subject and The Tempest was our set text. We were issued with a cheap edition which, on first reading, struck me as a play that was deeply flawed, inhumane and racist. It was the story of Prospero, Duke of Milan, being exiled to an island with his daughter, but taking books that enabled him to learn sufficient magic to confound his enemies and create a brave new world. Except that his seemingly cruel and unjust treatment of his own servant – the indigenous Caliban – undercut the whole message of this apparently humourless text. Then one day on the train, I noticed some private school kids of my age with a larger book – surely a different edition of The Tempest, with more pages. I hastened to Dymocks to find their edition, which was published by Methuen in London, and discovered a rather wonderful and quite funny play.

  It turned out that some idiot in the New South Wales Education Department had determined that state schoolboys were only fit for the bowdlerised edition, in which the absurd Doctor Bowdler had not only removed all the comedy and rude jokes (‘This ship is as leaky as an unstanched wench’, ‘Monster, I do smell all horse piss’) but any reference to a main fulcrum of the plot – Caliban’s attempted rape of Prospero’s daughter. State school kids would therefore have no understanding of Prospero’s motivation for punishing Caliban, a handicap for analysing the play that would not afflict our private school rivals.

  I wrote an angry denunciation of the Education Department – my first piece of investigative journalism – in the school newspaper, and the very fact that educators could betray education in this way still rankles. But what made this censorship not only stupid but actually absurd was that surgically removing all – and even inferential – references to sex meant that state school kids would never read a word of Prospero’s speech in favour of pre-marital chastity, as he warns his daughter’s suitor in terms that a seventeenth-century Father and Son Movement would have applauded:

  If thou dost break her virgin knot before

  All sanctimonious ceremonies may

  With full and holy rite be ministered,

  No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall

  To make this contract grow, but barren hate,

  Sour-eyed disdain, and discord shall bestrew

  The union of your bed with weeds so loathly

  That you shall hate it both. Therefore take heed,

  As Hymen’s lamps shall light you.

  Hymen’s lamps had to be dimmed and virgin knots left untied for the Leaving Certificate in 1962. And this was just one small example of the hypocrisy that was characteristic of the city in which I was growing up. It was a strange experience, reading newspapers and watching television that presented a political and social world so different from the real one. Cover-ups were commonplace: the Anglican archbishop, Gough, preached against promiscuity while secretly enjoying it himself, and Catholic priests ignored or excused the paedophilia that was rampant in their own religion. The Askin Liberal government was irredeemably corrupt, as were state Labor governments before and after, yet not a word was mentioned in the media unless a politician was stupid enough to be caught (like the minister for Corrective Services in the early 1980s, Rex Jackson, who had been accepting regular bribes to release prisoners early).

  The New South Wales police force was thoroughly corrupt as well, with senior officers – praised by the media for putting down anti-Vietnam demonstrations – doing a nice line in protection rackets with abortionists or setting up serious crimes with their friends the serious criminals. These were subjects that would never be mentioned in the newspaper because of defamation laws inherited from England, which awarded large sums in damages to anyone whose reputation was lowered by published criticism. I later spent much time trying to reform these laws, in England and the Commonwealth – there is no doubt the catalyst was my schoolboy disgust at how they had contributed to my blindfolded youth in Sydney, the city of dirty secrets.

  In sport, I captained the school tennis and squash teams, which saved me from having to hazard my head playing rugby union. I simulated an interest in photography in order to gain access to the school darkroom, just off the assembly hall, where the seditious tendency in the school – myself and a half-dozen mates – could hide and plot, and express our dissatisfaction, not just with our teachers but with our government. I was made secretary of the Photographic Society, and announced elliptically in the school newspaper that we had ‘decided to enter several new fields’ and planned ‘many and varied activities’. Not all of them would involve photography.

  There was no obvious outlet for political views in school, other than through debating in competitions with other schools. This was quite a big deal, as teams of three would vie for this cup or that shield. I was third speaker (or ‘whip’) for the school team, which meant engaging in off-the-cuff criticism of the other side. Roger was first speaker, with Peter Gordon – the Marxist member of our darkroom gang – as second. We were doing very well in the main competition until we met Fort Street – an engagement in which we were beaten by a bad adjudicator. We had to propose the motion ‘Melbourne needs 50,000 Negroes’. It sounds incendiary, but was suggested by a visiting American sociologist who was vilified by the press for this implied criticism of White Australia.

  I had not thought much about the White Australia policy until we began our one-hour preparation – all we could think of at first was to argue that Melbourne was so boring it needed some jazzing up. But as the minutes ticked on, and we talked about our monochrome existence – no coloured faces in the school, not even a Chinese restaurant in Eastwood – we began to understand and agree with the viewpoint of the alien sociologist. The racist assumptions in 1901 of Australia’s founding fathers – kick the kanakas out of Queensland, stop the slanty-eyed Chinese, treat Aboriginals as sub-human (in 1962 they could not even be counted in the census) – had consigned us to a dull incomprehension of what amounted to humanity. We convinced ourselves, if not the adjudicator, and I like to think of the moment as some sort of turning-point in our thinking about the racist mindset of the nation in which we had, by happenstance, been born.

  The darkroom gang was to have some adventures. One of us infiltrated the Epping Young Liberals and snaffled an invitation to a speech by Mr Menzies at Sydney Town Hall. We huddled together conspiratorially in the gallery as the great man – the target of several years of darkroom disapproval – took the stage for an election address. Here he was bathed in adoration from the blue-rinse brigade in the hall. They applauded his every proposition, and this gave me a mischievous idea. When Menzies came to the subject of education, prefacing it with the boast ‘Now this is a subject I do know something about’, I nudged the others and we broke into frantic applause, which was picked up immediately by the sheep in the hall. It died away, slowly, as the audience came to realise that they were applauding their leader for confessing he had been ignorant of every
thing else he had spoken about. As the applause faded – some of the blue-rinse brigade slow on the uptake – a few sarcastic laughs could be heard from the press gallery. A Liberal Party panjandrum angrily approached us, demanding identification – we said we were enthusiastic young Epping Liberals who had come to applaud everything the leader said.

  And in any event, as we noted under our breath, Bob Menzies knew nothing about education other than his own predilection for private schools, to which he was promising to allocate even more taxpayers’ money, at the expense of state schools. His slogan ‘State Aid for Church Schools’ would extend the swimming pools at Sydney’s array of private schools (I still cannot understand why churches run these exclusive establishments for children of the rich – Jesus, whose concern was for the poor, would not approve). But his real object was to win the Catholic vote, since Commonwealth funding would help pay for the bog-standard Catholic education provided by various Brother- and Sisterhoods of that church, which ran schools in order to maintain its supply of adherents. (The last act of the darkroom gang was to picket St Mary’s Cathedral on Commem Day in 1963 with placards demanding ‘Church Aid for State Schools’.)

 

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