Then I received a special purposes grant of $1500 – a consolation prize – from the minister running the fund, Peter Howson. With this money, and by selling some stories, teaching adult education classes, and the unexpected promise of a regular cheque from the Bulletin for a weekly piece, I got through the next two years and wrote The Americans, Baby.
My friends were from among the libertarians and ‘the Push’, described by historian Geoffrey Serle as a ‘weird small group … inspired by the doctrines derived from Anderson, Marx, Sorel, Freud and Reich, in a philosophic freethought tradition, a remarkably original provincial cult’. We met and drank most nights at the Newcastle Hotel, the Royal George, later at the Vanity Fair and the United States and then the Criterion. On some nights we would eat together and perhaps go to someone’s house for what was called ‘a party’. We spent the time talking – or what Jim Baker, a libertarian philosophy lecturer, called critical drinking. Sometimes later in the night we danced rock ’n’ roll, although there was some opposition to dancing because the music interfered with conversation. Now and then there would be a poker school, which I didn’t join, and on Saturday the horse races, which again I didn’t like.
The libertarians published a bulletin called the Broadsheet and sometimes organised lectures at the University of Sydney or downtown. They held an annual conference at Minto over two days and two nights. On the Friday night of the conference there would sometimes be readings of short stories or poems followed by a party. On the Saturday morning and afternoon there would be papers on libertarian concerns. In the late afternoon it was customary to go down to the river and swim nude. On the Saturday night a party. On Sunday morning some would swim and then late morning a light paper would be given, usually comic. In the afternoon, maybe another paper and then a ritualistic visit to a riding school where most of the women and a few of the men would go riding.
There were a few steady couples among the libertarians but it was considered that everyone was sexually free. There was a lot of casual sex, but I never found myself in group sex and I saw no public sex.
The Story of an Underground Paper
In 1970 Wendy Bacon, Val Hodgson and Alan Rees were elected editors of the University of New South Wales student newspaper Tharunka. They were loosely allied in the libertarian spirit.
In the making of Tharunka they had in mind a general Sydney intellectual newspaper which would still service student needs. They invited downtown writers like myself from the libertarian group to contribute.
For me this was to be the most significant activity of the decade. It was to involve us all in about forty prosecutions for obscenity and to put Wendy Bacon in jail for a week. It was my first experience of illegal or ‘underground’ journalism and it was the first time in our lives that we had written for, or had available, an uncensored public outlet for our writing. During its forty-odd issues, Tharunka was the most creatively edited and laid-out newspaper in Australia, and the only uncensored newspaper that Australians had seen. In 1972 I went to England and the USA and met with editors of other underground newspapers; looking at their papers, I found ours to be superior in content – literary, theoretical, and reporting.
The western phenomenon of underground newspapers – the expression of a rebellion against censorship, especially sexual censorship – was made possible by the availability of offset printing. With offset printing facilities, a professional-looking newspaper can be produced by untrained people using equipment commonly found in offices. Traditionally, old-style printers acted as censors or feared prosecution.
As one American underground publisher said at the time, ‘You discovered that all it takes is a carbon-ribbon typewriter, a jar of rubber cement, and $200 hustled from friends. The first issue comes out, you stand on a street corner and hawk it, gathering money for the next issue, rapping to people, finding out what’s happening.’
The old-style literary magazines, or little magazines, were theoretical, literary and academic. They used the hot-metal printing method and met with censorship from printers which they had accepted for years. In Australia they had circulations between 1000 and 3000. Tharunka, which moved downtown to become Thorunka and then Thor, had a circulation of 10 000. In the USA, where the little magazines had an estimated circulation in total of about 12 000, the underground newspaper had a combined circulation of between two and four million.
I thought and argued at the time that the underground newspapers would be a permanent part of media communication. Although they died away, they were replaced by many new little magazines edited without censorship and they set new, wider boundaries for the commercial press. At the end of the seventies there are about a hundred little magazines in Australia – twice as many as in the sixties.
Wendy Bacon emerged from the Thor crowd of about thirty. She was twenty-four years old, a student of sociology; she had a charismatic appeal to those who shared her views and was disarming to those who opposed her. Although it was part of the philosophy at the time to avoid leadership roles and hierarchical organisation, she was a central organising talent. Faced by intimidation from police and the government, she was remarkably tenacious and unflinching.
Many people supported Thor, either through editorial work, selling or legal aid. Jenny Coopes did much wonderful illustration and cartooning. Liz Fell, then a tutor in sociology at the University of New South Wales, was important. Despite a more chaotic life than even myself, she had a capacity for both theorising and action.
The editorial work moved from house to house and from printer to printer to avoid seizure by police. When the non-hierarchical organisation failed, we fell back on a shadow hierarchy. But the experience convinced me that creative publications can be produced without the usual pyramid structure (which also produces great publications).
I remember that we examined our motives and theoretical position fairly constantly while editing the publication. I remember spending hours one afternoon, with Roelof Smilde, Darcy Waters, Wendy and a couple of others, cross-examining each other as to our motives and reasoning. It was partly preparation for the court cases we were fighting but also for our own clarification. We taped the afternoon’s discussion but my flat was broken into shortly afterwards and the tapes stolen.
We did feel middle-class guilt about some of the material we published, but to have obeyed the guilt would have been, again, to act as agents of a sexually fearful society. So we sadly recognised it for what it was and tried to dismiss it.
Wendy and some of the others and myself were to go in different directions later in the decade and to lose the comradeship and companionship we had.
It was Peter Coleman who told the NSW parliament in 1972 what we were doing. He said that traditional pornography was produced by ‘money-grubbing, sly little men …’ but
this student pornographic movement is inspired by a complete loathing of the society we live in and enjoy, and seeks to destroy it and set up a totalitarian society … they don’t care about making money. In particular they seek to destroy all forms of our treasured society, which includes family, church, school and other institutions. It is porno-politics.
Coleman was more or less right except that those around Thor, Thorunka, Tharunka, were not totalitarian. Most of those fighting in this linguistic skirmish were anarchist – some theoretical, some impulsive. They called themselves libertarian, libertarian socialist, dropouts or, as was the fashion, they resisted being labelled.
In my book Conference-ville the narrator is talking with a young radical:
‘And what do you represent?’ I asked. ‘What group?’
‘You mean, what label can you pin on me?’
I realised that I still had on my identity tag from the conference.
‘Yes.’
‘You just want to pigeonhole me.’
‘I’m not asking you to describe yourself inaccurately – surely you know where your ideas come from.’
‘I’m an anarchist.’
That was an easy
way out. I’d used it myself. I didn’t bother to pursue him.
Some members of the Communist Party of Australia tried to associate sympathetically with the paper (but with discomfort), maybe because they saw us as enemies of capitalism, maybe they believed Coleman, or maybe they were trying to be trendy. It was the beginning of a new image for the CPA. It was trying to be independent of eastern European models, and to find a relationship with the new issues and with the young.
We jokingly adapted a slogan from Marshall McLuhan, via Emlyn Williams, a British playwright, to describe the drive behind the newspapers. We said, ‘Obscenity is linguistic violence on the frontier of reality.’
There were other publications about in the early seventies with a similar impulse behind them – High Times, Troll, Super Plague, Mejane, Eyeball. It was an impulse towards some sort of vaguely understood ‘liberated society’.
Australia, partly in the drag-stream of other English-speaking nations and partly by its own initiative, was moving through a bad-tempered renegotiation of the relationships between men and women, adults and children, and a rethinking of the sexual and emotional relationships between people of the same sex. In the phrase of the times, ‘the roles were being redefined’.
With this renegotiation there was an opening up of public communication. The freeing of what can be said through the media as well as what can be said conversationally was at the heart of the change. It reached a marvellous freedom in the mid-seventies although now some of that freedom has been lost.
There was also a connection between this renegotiation and the status of the ‘breeding family’ as ideas of zero population growth circulated and Australia shifted its thinking on population growth.
The editors of Thor did not at first think they were engaged in porno-politics. They did not even plan a prolonged or graded attack on the censorship laws. They belonged to a generation that inherited an historical movement towards free communication.
A lecturer in philosophy at the University of New South Wales one day suggested to Wendy that Tharunka publish ‘Eskimo Nell’, a bawdy ballad. Wendy said that they only hazily understood the limits of the censorship laws. They were not specifically out to liberalise censorship but did see it as part of a restrictive psychological system that went through from the laws to the schools to the media, and to conversation.
The publication of ‘Eskimo Nell’ made censorship the issue. The editors were told by the director of student publications not to publish it. The printers, Rotary Offset, refused to print it. The director of student publications resigned and the editors found new printers. They printed 17 000 copies and soon found a strong downtown demand.
It is difficult to convey the sense of excited surprise we had to see a ballad like this, which we had only heard recited or seen in handwritten or typed form, appear in print in a newspaper.
A mass meeting of 2000 students voted support for the editors. Ian Channel, a former lecturer who was employed for a time as ‘Campus Wizard’, attacked the women editors Wendy and Val, also joined by Liz Fell, and said they were motivated by ‘penis envy’.
We continued to produce uncensored issues of the paper: four-letter words, erotica, serialised banned books and obscene cartoons appeared. The battle went beyond the university authorities to the state. Politicians complained. At first they simply grumbled over four-letter words in a student newspaper, but then they came to see it as a threat to the whole society and its institutions, a totalitarian plot. They used legal harassment to drive it out of existence.
We planned a literary supplement to publish work from imaginative writers who’d had trouble with the censors in Australia. Nearly all writers contacted sent in work: Thomas Keneally, Michael Dransfield, Thomas Shapcott, J. Riviere Morris, Michael Wilding, A. D. Hope, Frank Hardy, Alexander Buzo, Robert Adamson and Peter Mathers.
I wrote the introduction:
This is not a supplement of ‘name’ writers of proven merit, intended to meet the Establishment on their terms – that erotic or obscene writing is acceptable, sometimes, if the English is correct and a professor of English testified to the literary value … the censoring of obscene and erotic material is political … politicians correctly sense that under the breaking of taboos lies a tangle of attitudes and life-styles that want to break from institutions, social procedures and cultural sets …
It was a big jump in our thinking. It had moved from taunting the University to defining a political rebellion.
Following issues contained an erotic Auden poem, the banned Zap comix, and a poem titled ‘Cunt is a Christian Word’ (about what she saw as the crippling nature of virginity) with the catchline ‘I have been fucked by God’s steel prick’ (a reference to the vision of Saint Theresa). The summonses began to pour in.
Pressure from within the University, together with a feeling that it was perhaps a misuse of a student newspaper (in the sense that student societies and others wanted space for routine news), caused the editors to resign and to take their unpaid, informal staff with them downtown to produce Thorunka, financed by sales and by supporters.
‘Thorunka’, after a while, seemed too close to the name of the student publication and it became ‘Thor’. The new paper reported on civil liberties, the women’s movement, Vietnam, anti-conscription, and contained literary material. It sold at twenty cents with ten cents going to the seller. Between five and ten thousand copies were sold, depending upon the energy and gameness of the sellers and the amount of harassment experienced.
I don’t think we claimed to be always fully aware of what we were doing or to be always precisely honest in our public statements. Behaviour is propelled by mixed motives and the dominant motive can change with the mood and in reaction to events. When we found ourselves in the middle of a rebellion against the law we tried to sit down and analyse our motives.
A desired end
Some of us saw it as putting into practice something we desired to be a characteristic of a good society, but which was a good thing to do in itself. We were producing the sort of publication we wanted to write for and we wanted to read. It was ‘becoming free by acting free’, as Libertarian psychologist John Maze would say. We tried as far as humanly possible to ignore restrictive laws and the restrictions within ourselves. It was a shift from advocating freedom of communication to freely communicating.
The editorial intention was to publish what we would have published had there been no censorship or taboos. This contained a deception. The censorship laws created material which was forbidden and which became worth publishing because it was forbidden. People wrote things they might not have otherwise written because of the laws. So we were confused here. The pool of unfree material created by censorship gained an unnatural potency and a political sensitivity which in a free society it may not have had.
Freaking out the authorities
This was one of our expressions. And it covered the material that was printed partly because it would stab at conventional sensitivities. This material might not have gained editorial inclusion purely under the first category. Some material was selected because it was outrageous.
As an anarchist action
Val Hodgson, who was the youngest editor, said at a Libertarian conference:
our efforts have been misconstrued by the general public and more so by the left-wing liberals to be a challenge against the censorship laws, and on a broader level, against outmoded puritanical virtues. They see us in the role that they themselves would play … we see Thorunka as a means of direct action … it is a challenge to the authority of all laws.
This motive played an occasional part in some of our minds some of the time.
Unmasking, demystifying, de-authorising
These three words were used a lot. After a while we saw that our behaviour was illustrating the official definitions of freedom of communication, how limited these were. For the first time, we were getting a clear picture of the limits of the society. The news media, with their low tol
erance for sexual candour, showed the same limitations.
Satire, obscenity and taboo-breaking also weakened the potency of taboos, we theorised, by showing them to be, like all mysticism, empty of an ‘unspeakable danger’. It showed that many of our taboos were symbolic imprisonment of the personality and the mind, a symbolic linguistic submission to authorities.
As Hugh Duncan has put it, obscenity can be used to ‘reduce the mystery of rank’. By putting out a poster saying that the Chief Secretary ‘munches muffs’ we restored him to human proportion instead of permitting him to behave as if he had supernatural authorisation to imprison people, to stop people saying certain things to each other. I had to have the poster explained to me: I did not know that ‘munches muffs’ meant cunnilingus.
Learning through conflict
Producing the newspapers placed us in an interplay of events which taught us about reality and our society. You meet the enemy on the doorstep instead of in the textbook. Sometimes the truths are about ourselves. About our own tensions, ambivalences, and our compulsions.
Wendy Bacon said, ‘We don’t know what they’ll do, so let’s do it and see what they’ll do.’
Avant-garde function
This, again, is seen more as a function by others than it was seen by us at the time. Morse Peckham, in his biological theories of art, argues that avantgarde material is rehearsal. It trains us to handle the unexpected, improves adaptability, our ability to survive. He says:
There must be … some human activity which serves to break … orientation … to prepare the individual to observe what his orientation tells him is irrelevant but what may very well be highly relevant … art is a reinforcement of the capacity to endure disorientation so that a real and significant problem may emerge.
No one argued that way around Thor. We would have felt uncomfortable about arguing that what we were doing was ‘socially beneficial’. That sounded like do-gooding. It had to be justified as being good for those engaged in it and for those who wanted to read it.
Days of Wine and Rage Page 2
