Days of Wine and Rage

by Frank Moorhouse

  PAT I TOOK Y’ KNIFE DOWNSTAIRS

  ‘POEM FOR THE LIVING PEOPLE’

  There is always a little bit of

  sunshine in everything we do

  there is always a bit of rain

  on every Tuesday afternoon

  my happiness today is my love that

  I convey to all the people of this world

  may your sunshine wash your face

  as the cool water rinses your feet

  I hope you and I will meet

  as then we will be together

  as the sun shines upon a flower

  an drinks the earth’s cool water

  an grows an lives.

  An Anti-conscriptionist the Night Before

  He Went to Jail

  (unpublished, 1972)

  The few times we’ve had a four-course lunch with wine this week we’ve thought of Geoff Mullen. He’s eating jail food.

  We talked with Geoff Mullen the night before he was sentenced to two years jail for failing to comply with the National Service Act. On that night he drank a can of Carlton Draught (his favourite beer), I had a bourbon and we shared a plate of black olives.

  It was at a party organised for Geoff. On one wall was a display of about twenty posters against the Vietnam war and conscription. Many were designed as a part of Geoff’s personal campaign against conscription. The next day he was to go to the Special Federal Court, Sydney, where he was to be sentenced for non-compliance of the Act.

  He was outwardly more high-spirited than we were. When he arrived at the party he joked about homosexuality and prisons. ‘Where I’m going I hear it’s quite the thing,’ he said.

  We sat him down for an interview before we were both too drunk. A few of his friends gathered around to listen.

  ‘Tomorrow in court I’m going to object to all that’s objectionable,’ he said.

  The week preceding the court case, Geoff had published a poster with a photograph of himself in khaki shorts, medals, a steel helmet, and carrying an antique rifle. The poster said: ‘Fight for Peace, Declare war on conscription. Demonstration in support of Geoff Mullen’. It was authorised by the Draft Resisters’ Union.

  We’d interviewed Geoff when he’d been arrested earlier that month. Then he’d promised, in a news release and with a poster, that his appearance in court would be ‘an elegant morning’s entertainment’. And he’d issued an invitation ‘to anyone who wishes to express their contempt of courts’.

  At that earlier hearing there was plenty of contempt of court but little elegance. Geoff would’ve liked some elegance but it was more like a people’s court after the French Revolution. The rowdy public gallery screamed insults at the magistrate, Mr Anable, and the prosecutor, Mr Carruthers. The crowd had clapped and cheered Geoff and booed and hissed the magistrate and the prosecutor.

  Back at the party, Geoff described himself as a ‘libertarian anarchist … I’m not a pacifist; I’m not a conscientious objector either.’ He said he believed in selective violence but the Vietnam war was not to his political inclination.

  He’d stay in jail as a political act.

  ‘They got Zarb out on compassionate grounds but they won’t be able to toss me out of jail on compassionate grounds. My old girl’s not going to crack.’ (Michael Zarb, an objector to conscription, was released from jail because of the ill health of his mother.)

  ‘Why don’t you stay underground?’

  ‘No point any longer in remaining at large. The cops just say “good” – they don’t want trouble and they leave you alone. I’ve been at large for five years.’

  We said we thought this was a situation which was to be welcomed. Geoff thought that this politically reduced his effective opposition to the war and conscription.

  ‘I want to cause some political harm,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how they reason but I think they find it embarrassing to have political prisoners. They’ll have to repeal the Act to get me out of jail.’

  What about jail? How was he going to take it?

  ‘I object, naturally, to jail – to slavery, to all authoritarianism. When I meet up against authoritarianism I tell it to go to buggery. And I’ll not cooperate in prison – I won’t get any good behaviour reduction of my sentence.’

  Did he have any idea of what jail was like?

  ‘I spent a month in jail in January 1969 on remand and had a look at what it was like. I’ve read the book on asylums by …?’

  ‘Goffman.’

  ‘Yes, Goffman.’

  ‘But what about the psychological damage of long jail sentences?’ We really wanted him to decide to skip, to go underground. We didn’t understand anyone going to jail when they could avoid it.

  ‘No one knows how he’ll react in these situations but I think that if I don’t confront them I’d do myself psychological damage. I couldn’t respect myself. There is this personal motive as well as the political one. I had to do it, for self-respect. I’d show them I was afraid of them if I went underground again. If I go to jail I have surrendered my self but not my values. They can hold me physically but they can’t defeat me.’

  Wasn’t this self-sacrificing?

  ‘You don’t only have one set of motives. I mean, I’m doing it for myself. Sometimes, yes, I’m depressed and frightened about it. I am, though, doing it for selfish reasons in the sense that I am doing it because I have to, to demonstrate my position. If you keep bending and bending like most people, you are eventually beaten as a person.’

  At the 1969 elections Geoff stood for federal parliament as a gesture of defiance, against Leslie Bury, then minister for labour and national service. His poster read: ‘Vote for Mullen and surprise Gorton. Vote for Mullen and surprise Mullen.’ He received 1345 votes, but the percentage of votes Bury got was the lowest he’d received for at least ten years.

  Geoff had a catholic schooling at Waverley in Sydney and came out ‘guilt-ridden and thinking that the DLP would save Australia’.

  He went to the University of Sydney, dropping out after a few years before completing a degree. He read and was influenced by American anarchist Paul Goodman, by George Orwell and by George Woodcock’s book Anarchism.

  He worked as a clerk in the Department of Works and then returned to university, this time to the University of New South Wales.

  ‘The Vietnam war had the same effect on me as on many people – I couldn’t support it. And I couldn’t support conscription.’

  His opposition had not quite crystallised in 1967 and he registered for national service, being at the time in an ‘existential turmoil’.

  At the University of New South Wales he co-founded the Labor Club in 1968 and his political self emerged. The Labor Club that year was anarchist and marxist.

  He completed his degree in 1969 and became a computer programmer at IBM.

  ‘At IBM!’ we exclaimed, tickled, ‘an anarchist at IBM!’

  ‘IBM didn’t interfere with my beliefs – quite amazing – paid me for the day I took off for the Moratorium demonstration. I told them what I was taking the day off for. They have given me two weeks off with pay to prepare my court case. They said that if for some reason I got off tomorrow my job would be there for me and if I went to jail for two years I was to come to see them when I got out.’

  What about jail – how would he keep intellectually alive?

  He would write, he said.

  Someone at the party said that Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in jail.

  Geoff laughed. ‘I might write a Politics of Ecstasy [by Timothy Leary on his experiences with the drug LSD] but not a Mein Kampf.’

  He is twenty-four years old, just – he had his birthday five days before.

  Well, that was that. We put away our note-book and rejoined the party. It was a party without much exuberance.

  Next day at the court there was a brawl in the corridor of the court house between supporters of Geoff and the police.

  Geoff was sentenced to two years imprisonment and fined $100.


  THE GOLDEN YEARS

  Fighting police in the streets, publishing underground magazines and drinking and partying with the Push had narrowed our vision. In 1972 Sydney libertarians and bohemians had no idea that there was a change in the national mood. We still felt embattled, that we belonged to a permanent enclave in a hostile society.

  We had no contacts with the Labor Party, which we considered just as alien to our values as any other political party. I had lost contact with, for example, Richard Hall, who had been a friend in the earlier journalism days of the sixties. He was now private secretary to Gough Whitlam but I didn’t see him. Clem Lloyd, another old journalist friend from cadet days, was private secretary to Lance Barnard, then deputy leader of the opposition.

  I was living in Balmain in an almost rent-free flat, allowed to me by old libertarian friend Sandra Grimes. I had finished The Americans, Baby. Earlier, Frank Thompson of Queensland University Press had wanted to publish the Becker stories from The Americans, Baby as a novella to be called The Coca-Cola Kid. But the university’s then vice-chancellor, Sir Zelman Cowen, vetoed the publication of the book because he had too much trouble with students and the Queensland government at that time.

  John Abernethy, head of Angus & Robertson then, met me one day on the ferry going to Balmain, where we both lived. He said he’d read Futility and Other Animals and was impressed – he’d like to bid for any new manuscript I had. I remember telling him that there was no way that a conservative firm like Angus & Robertson would be able to handle The Americans, Baby.

  ‘Try me,’ he said.

  He accepted the manuscript and Douglas Stewart was assigned to edit it. I was paid a $500 advance.

  The Film Unit (now Film Australia) around this time invited me to submit a treatment for a possible feature film. They were encouraged by John Gorton’s interest in creating a film industry and thought they would have a mandate to make feature films.

  I did a treatment which they found unsuitable. This was to become the film Between Wars.

  I was awakened to the forthcoming federal election of 1972 by an approach from Digger magazine in Melbourne asking me to write about the election. I was also dimly aware that people who normally didn’t were taking this election very seriously.

  But I decided that the election of a Labor government wouldn’t change a thing.

  I Say Whitlam Doesn’t Matter

  (adapted, from Digger, December 1972)

  Does the counter-culture have a real-politik? Yes. Hold it – I’ll tell you what I mean by counter-culture. I mean those who traditionally, or by some circumstance of the times, feel themselves apart (if not disaffiliated) from the wider society. They live, by choice or by circumstance, by distinctly different mores – in their own sub-cultures.

  I include ideological gypsies, politically conscious bums, minstrels, sceptical anarchists, utopian anarchists, kooks, some of the young, merry pranksters, semi-nonconformist middle class who prefer the company of those on this list, anxiety neurotics, hipsters, hippies, yippies, déclassé academics, angst-ridden writers, film makers, painters, musicians, old-world bohemians, fifties’ beatniks, libertarians, liberationists, communalists. What Jim Baker calls the ‘lumpen intelligentsia’. It does not include authoritarian socialists and communists.

  There has always been a resistance among these people to politics as an activity while they often retain a high interest in politics as absurdist drama. There has been a consciousness, too, of politics as a threat to the non-conformist life. So in one sense we’ve always felt, or said, that politics has nothing to do with us or, in another sense, it has everything to do with us. All the laws we are forced to break so as to live a sub-cultural existence are made and enforced by parliaments.

  This election has led more sub-cultural people to interest themselves in political activity – in the campaign and in the electioneering.

  Some have even begun to believe in the ALP!

  The reasons are plain. The McMahon Liberal government threw out Joe Cocker. [Cocker was a pop singer from Britain whose act was considered obscene.]

  The ALP has also cunningly shaped up an image of being into New Politics – of having changed to sincerity and enlightenment. Some specific policies of the ALP have offered more loot to some of us, including increased grants to the arts and public lending right (yes, one day we’ll all live on grants!) and they have offered to abolish conscription (but are not opposed to conscription).

  So we’ve had all sorts of backsliding among the counter-culture and expressions of ‘faith’ in politicians, even tones of hope and nationalism.

  It has been common enough in conversation about the city for even the libertarian Broadsheet to reiterate policy in an effort to pull ideological soft-heads back into line.

  But even the libertarians this year, for the first time, offer a rationalisation for voting. For the first time the line in the Broadsheet is almost political.

  In an analysis of possible libertarian positions on the election, ‘Jack Diamond’ (alias Jim Baker) says, ‘There is a grave need to re-assert our basic principles on elections. Just because the present government consists of the finest set of fuckwits seen since federation many well-meaning people are being tempted to support the Labor Party. This is a very dangerous tendency.’ The tone is mock gravity.

  Strangely, though, the piece goes on to ‘expose’ the ALP as a false party and not truly socialist (why this should matter to a libertarian or anarchist is not clear, but as ever there lurks an identification with a romantic proletariat).

  The Broadsheet fails to deliver any of the basic libertarian objections to politics and instead talks like a trotskyist, and the Baker piece ends with ‘… if you vote for the Labor Party you are a reactionary defender of the existing capitalist system’.

  Other possible positions are briefly outlined in the Broadsheet:

  Leave the McMahon government in power because of its tranquil inertia: ‘Vote for the Liberals – they are the nearest thing to anarchy we can get.’

  Vote the ALP into power so as to expose it for what it really is.

  Vote Liberal because the longer they are in power the easier it is to make the revolution (which revolution is that?).

  The violent anarchist position – ‘If it asks you to vote for it, blow it up.’

  The fundamental libertarian position is ‘No matter whom you vote for, a politician always gets in.’ I have liked it and used it to shut up people who want to discuss party politics. It works so well that it has occurred to me it must be suspect. It is after all a slogan and must contain, therefore, simple-mindedness, if not outright mystification.

  But it is a handy-sized package of some very respectable political theory. It is a distillation of Pareto (Les Systémes Socialistes), who formulated a theory of the inevitability of elites; Michels (Political Parties), a study of the oligarchical tendencies in modern democracy; Nomad (Aspects of Revolt) and Machajski (an obscure Polish-Russian), both of whom have developed these lines.

  Machajski argues that those who put themselves forward as spokesmen for the working class in reality belong already to a class of a new kind – the political class – who, he argued, would defend their own interests against all others; on gaining power, their relation to those who give this power, and to the system, changes.

  But the Machajski theory is a way of looking at political theory at another magnification. To apply it, and the libertarian slogan, to a closer focus is a misapplication. It does not help us when looking at government as short-term housekeeping, or management, of the system in a representative democracy.

  Politicians, empirically, behave differently. There are different sorts of politicians. They owe their power to different pressure groups and to an extent they answer to these pressure groups. But we have to make distinctions among politicians. All politicians, at this level, are ‘not the same’.

  Another fact of life which breaks the libertarian slogan is that the same politicians behave diffe
rently at different times in their political tenure. Political parties change the pattern of affiliations, their contractual relationships (what they are doing for whom) during their life in power.

  For the same reason marxism is too wide a focus to be useful at this level. Marxism might be right on the hundred-year cycle but it is of no use in assessing the behaviour towards us of a political party in a representative democracy next year.

  The counter-culture is not a pressure group. No party in power wants to know about the counter-culture and its diverse parts.

  Now for a slight tangent. There are ‘political groups’ within the counter-culture – socialist, for instance, and revolutionaries. Usually the revolutionaries brood about the possibility of the collapse of the system and their rise to power. The socialists and the revolutionaries use the counter-culture as a sanctuary, as social accommodation. They are accepted and even listened to by the counter-culture while the society at large does not listen.

  Yet, revolutionaries and authoritarian socialists get into power, they clean up the non-conformists with great enthusiasm and with much greater efficiency than democrats. They make the non-conformists disappear because in a socialist society there can be no alienation.

  This is not to forget that some revolutionaries are play-acting and use political theory as a source of personal identity. Many, deep down, are plain old bohemians.

  What does the ALP offer the counter-culture? It should be noted that there has not been an ALP government for so long that we can only compare promises and policy. With the Liberal Party, at least we know it by performance – a much more reliable guide.

  Censorship