The report turned out to be untrue and was retracted by the newspapers that day, so we were not released from our uncharacteristic role.
Horne is a republican. He would like Australia to have a president. He probably wouldn’t mind having a go at being president himself. He remarked to his son, Nicholas, aged then eleven, ‘How would you like to be the son of the president of Australia?’ Nicholas said he wouldn’t like it – sons of presidents got kidnapped.
Horne’s political position, though, is best conveyed with all its subtleties and flavours by reading Death of a Lucky Country (which sold nearly 50 000 copies in the first month of publication). He wrote it during the constitutional crisis and while undergoing an eye operation.
He told me that now, back in the quiet of the university after those hectic days of the constitutional crisis, eye operations, and emotion, he felt like a hero from those childhood adventure stories who returns from the ‘hols’ after adventures with bandits, secret caves, sinister conspiracies and sleuthing.
‘I came back from the vacation after nearly going blind, witnessing a giant conspiracy, addressing rallies of thousands, seeing the fall of a king, and having written a book.’
He is now recognised in the street. He was posting a letter to the Age newspaper, priority paid, in Bondi Junction and the postal clerk said, ‘Give them hell, Mr Horne.’
At Tony’s Bon Gout restaurant (it was in Elizabeth Street then) when I interviewed him, four women from one table came over and said of Death of a Lucky Country: ‘Thank you for saying what we all wanted to be able to say.’
He sees the political situation as an unfinished crisis. He wants a new constitution. I asked him if he were going to have his friend, Professor Blackshield, of the faculty of law at Sydney University, draft the new constitution.
Horne said no; he’d decided to write it himself. ‘I’ve written every other type of thing – but I’ve never written a constitution.’
This is not a comprehensive book and I did not try to cover all the usual categories of Australian experience. This poem by the Melbourne poet known as Pi O, of Greek origin, gave me a remarkable glimpse of the life of a ‘new Australian’ coming to adapt to a country like Australia, and also an insight into the meaning of the events of the Whitlam years.
The Mother
went to the mothers. she’s lonely.
the little men are slowly coming back.
the Valium isn’t working.
she tells me in Greek: ‘they learnt about the world
thru our language’.
‘they’d spit at you, in a glass of water’.
she serves me up a salad:
vinegar, tomatoes, oil, onions, radishes, lettuce,
(full of the smells of spring)
‘keftethes’, & a plate of potatoes
boiled in sauce.
‘i didn’t give you Valium’
‘you or Athena’
‘nor Thalia too’
‘i didn’t give you tablets’.
i watch tv. she asks me: ‘what are they saying?’
i say: ‘Dr Jim Cairns has resigned’.
she cries.
O
(from Panash, 1978)
LE GHETTO DE BALMAIN
The Ghetto Gathers
By the early seventies, friends had drifted into Balmain and people connected with the arts and the universities came to live there. Some of the people included Judy Morris, Serge Lazareff, John Gaden, Robert Klippell, Nathan Waks, Charles Coleman, Murray Khouri, Caroline Hebbron, David Williamson, Murray Bail, Peter Carey, Brian Kiernan, and probably a hundred others.
Frances Kelly from the National Times wrote about Australian writing for Le Monde and mentioned Le Ghetto de Balmain.
I picked this up for my column in the Bulletin and for a while wrote a ‘letter from the Ghetto’. I began to feel like the Vicar of Balmain as more new arrivals and visitors from other states and overseas called.
We had begun the Balmain Readings of Prose and Verse in the sixties and in their latter years they were attended by hundreds. Public readings, like those of Balmain and the Poets Union readings at the Royal Standard Hotel in Castlereagh Street, became quite a regular part of the Sydney scene in the seventies. Nancy Keesing, when chairperson of the Literature Board, once visited a reading, looked around and said, ‘What they’re spending on alcohol and drugs would publish a dozen books.’
We had the Balmain Pub Crawl around the twenty-five hotels (originally) of Balmain. We had annual events such as the New Year’s Eve party, the waifs’ and strays’ Christmas party (for those who chose not to have a family Christmas, or had no family), the Chairman Mao’s Boxing Day party. The hotels were filled with live music, folk, rock, and jazz. In 1979 the Sydney Buskers’ Association held its first conference in Balmain. Earlier in the seventies the annual Australian Jazz Convention was held there.
Many little magazines began from conversations and donations in Balmain. Tabloid Story was conceived there. For the Balmain economy, literary grants were the equivalent of a new factory opening.
As it became more visible as a community, Balmain became a target for jokes and satire.
A Subject of Derision
(adapted, from the Bulletin, 30.8.75)
We thought we should write and let you know how things are here in Le Ghetto de Balmain (as Le Monde calls us). Spirits are low. We have been getting a bad press.
Behind our cruel and clever front, we here in the Ghetto, despite the opiates upon which we depend, are underneath it all sensitive people.
But we have been accused of being bludgers because we get more Australia Council money than any other suburb (for godsake, we do more). We are grubby, says Professor James McAuley, editor of Quadrant. We are pederasts, says the Sydney Morning Herald. We all write in short sentences, says the National Times.
Well, all right, some of us are pederasts. Though we wish to point out that, since we edged the working class out of Balmain, pederasty may have increased but poofter bashings are down.
Jon Cleary said in an interview that he didn’t think there was much of a future for Balmain regionalist writing. An apologetic journalist from the Australian came to us after the Literature Board grants had been announced and showed us a memo written by the editor James Hall. Beneath the heading ‘Balmain writers’, the editor had scribbled ‘Who are these bastards? How much do they rip off the government? What do they do with it? Are they audited?’
The hostility was not really against the physical suburb of Balmain (usually extended in journalistic commentary to include Carlton in Melbourne, and sometimes the whole of Adelaide). Balmain became short-hand for the fantasised (and sometimes real) way of life of some of the people in Balmain, Carlton, Adelaide. It was hostility against the new writing, especially young writing, sexual explicitness, experiment.
They also write about each other, the allegations said.
We have to point out that Leichhardt, in which Balmain is located, has 60 000 ‘real’ people other than writers who live and work there.
We think the bad press comes from our poets fighting among themselves. The little magazines are full of accusations of poet against poet. They call each other ‘vermin’ and say that some poetry published recently reveals the ‘petty desire to wound’.
Fay Zwicky, academic and poet from Perth (who says she is asked by east-coast editors to review books because ‘she is out of it all’, which makes her mad), has said that being a poet or posturing as a poet is a way of being rebellious in the seventies. It has replaced being a communist.
She quotes George Steiner: ‘Romantic ideals of love, notably the stress on incest, dramatise the belief that sexual extremism, the cultivation of the pathological, can restore personal existence to a full pitch of reality and somehow negate the gray world of middle-class fact … the artist becomes hero.’
Fay Zwicky points out that the idea of the artist as hero is not new (must there always be someone around who points out t
hat things are not ‘new’?).
She does point out too that it is no offence to write a bad poem. Even poets have their off days. Anyhow, the fight goes on among the poets. Some poems are called ‘ego explosions’; there are claims that poetry has to get back ‘to the old carnality’ and for the need for a poem to have ‘a central inhabitant’. Macainsh doesn’t make sense to Zwicky, Packer doesn’t make sense to Jenkins, and Tranter doesn’t make sense to Packer.
A lot of this infighting comes about because poets have nothing to do in the afternoons.
Balmain Is Cannery Row
(adapted, from the Bulletin, 18.9.76)
We were at a college of advanced education recently when a young, bearded, barefoot man came over and said that he’d just read a book that had really blown his mind. We asked what book it was.
‘You wouldn’t know it,’ he said; ‘it’s not on any of the courses.’
‘Try me.’
‘Cannery Row,’ he said, ‘by William Steinbeck.’
We told him we had read the book and just stopped ourselves from saying ‘when we were your age’.
We told him that it was John – John Steinbeck.
Our having read the book did not establish common ground but instead seemed to deflate him; we guessed that we had deprived him of his advantage, his personal magic. We all had that need when young to possess the experience of a writer or book that was not the property of the older generation.
But anyhow, Steinbeck is still around and young reading males, at least, are still into boozing and whoring books.
Further, we saw a travel piece by Gareth Powell, our first publisher, about California and in the review he said, ‘For Steinbeck fans a visit to Cannery Row is a must. What Steinbeck wrote was hardly fiction; as you’ll realise when you go there. I’ve sat and drunk bourbon in Doc’s laboratory in Cannery Row. What more can a man ask?’
We were interested that Cannery Row had been one of those books for Gareth, who is a decade older than us (you are Gareth!).
For those who haven’t read Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday and Tortilla Flat, the books are about bums and layabouts in a fishing village.
Steinbeck describes Cannery Row as ‘a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream … Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches, by which he meant Everybody …” ’
Oh well, John.
We got my copy of the book out of a book-case and found that it wasn’t ours. It was the copy we’d given our girlfriend twenty years ago in 1957. It was a Penguin, number 717, cost four shillings, and the copy had been bought at the Nowra Gift Shop. As a seventeen-year-old we had inscribed it with a fountain pen as follows, ‘To my dearest Wendy, I hope this [something crossed out] Cannery Row stirs in you the same unforgettable, wild, free laughter as it stirred in me …’
We believed then that every noun deserved at least three adjectives.
As we said, the book is about lazy days in the sun, not having a job, boozing and whoring. The adolescent dream of avoiding conventional life.
… Mack and the boys sitting on the pipes in the vacant lot, dangling their feet in the mallow weeds and taking the sun while they discoursed slowly and philosophically of matters of interest but of no importance … now and then he saw them take out a pint of Old Tennis Shoes and wiping the neck of the bottle on a sleeve, raise the pint one after the other …
The book was published in 1945 but when we read it it seemed to have been around for all time. We don’t remember how we came to read Steinbeck in a country town. These books arrive mysteriously into your life at the right time.
Re-reading it we can see why it is still a cult book for adolescents, especially non-mystical adolescents. Philip Bray, of Bray’s Books, Balmain, confirmed that Cannery Row was still selling well but that Hesse, a mystical writer, was being read by another sort of young reader. Steinbeck is more decadent romantic than mystical.
Cannery Row is full of primary feelings – sadness, happiness, laughter, tears – it has no unsatisfactory, complicated moods or relationships. There is a bountiful environment – a Chinese store run by Lee Chong which gives endless credit. There are ways of making easy money, stolen booze, beaches, a warm-hearted brothel called the Bear Flag. There is a place called the Palace Flophouse where Mack and his friends live. We’d call it a commune.
There is, in the book, a defence of beards. There is an undemanding intellectual life with a marine biologist bum as guru – ‘Doc’, a dissolute elder-brother figure. Doc tries a beer milkshake, which we thought was a nicely symbolic drink – childhood/adulthood.
In our re-reading we were surprised by one reference – ‘two generations of Americans know more about the Ford coil than the clitoris’. We don’t remember reading that twenty years ago. Probably the young man reading Cannery Row today would know more about the clitoris and would think that the ‘Ford coil’ was some sort of IUD.
We were going to write that Cannery Row was full of philosophical statements which one had tried to live by but had to discard in the face of complex reality. But a voice within us said – ‘that’s life in Balmain’.
Balmain is Cannery Row.
In fact, we remember at Murray Sime’s birthday party last year someone looked around and then said to us that we should write a book about Balmain ‘like Cannery Row’.
But we don’t think that Cannery Row will survive another generation. Steinbeck’s male, boozing, whoring and philosophising in the sun won’t survive the emerging consciousness. And, anyhow, where’s the women’s Cannery Row?
We Have a History!
Jim Davidson, editor of Meanjin, has said that Australia is a ‘sandcastle civilisation’. Many small constructions are finished and then washed away and not known or recorded by those who follow. He said that we enjoyed a cultural amnesia. This was true of Balmain writers and others.
Until recently few people knew of the existence of the Stenhouse Circle in Balmain in the mid nineteenth century. Stenhouse, a Scots lawyer, had a library of about 10 000 books and a vigorous interest in the arts. A group of writers gathered around his Balmain house, including Charles Harpur, Henry Kendall, Daniel Deniehy, Richard Rowe and Henry Parkes. Jim Davidson said that ‘So weak is any sense of place in this country that none of the so-called Balmain writers has shown any awareness or inclination to draw upon their antecedents in an imaginative fashion …’
In 1979 the first Stenhouse Memorial Gathering was held in the Balmain Watchhouse to mark the publication of the book The Stenhouse Circle, by Ann-Mari Jordens.
The Stenhouse Circle And Balmain, 1851–73
Ann-Mari Jordens
(from The Stenhouse Circle, 1979)
During the 1850s Sydney grew into one of the great urban outposts of the British Empire. As they watched the first spadeful of earth turned for the first antipodean railway in 1850, the town’s inhabitants became aware that they were at last entering the age of Victorian progress. By 1855 twelve miles of track joined Redfern to Parramatta; the city had begun to nourish itself from its hinterland through veins and arteries of iron.
Early in 1851 Edward Hargraves rode into Sydney with news of the discovery of payable gold at Summer Hill Creek and the exodus began. Suddenly Sydney became one of the busiest ports of the world. Immigrants streamed in to make their fortunes in the latest El Dorado. In August the following year the first steamship sailed through Sydney Heads and two years later colonial communications were revolutionised when the electric telegraph was used in Sydney. Suburbs rapidly developed in the hills and valleys around the city to accommodate the population which grew from 52 000 to 95 000 within ten years. In 1856 colonial political life was transformed by the granting of fully responsible government.
Early in this decade Stenhouse finally found an adequate home for his family and his growing collection of books. He had lived above his office in Elizabeth Street until his marriage in 1846, when he moved south
to nearby Surry Hills. In 1851 he rented a cottage named Hillside in Johnson Street, Balmain, and it was in that harbour-suburb that he discovered the house where he would happily spend the rest of his life. It was a comfortable wooden bungalow on a fifteen-acre block. Its garden ran down to Johnson’s Bay and from the rise on which Frederick Parbury, effectively the first landholder in Balmain, had chosen in 1835 to build it the view was spectacular. Behind it a well provided ample sweet water, a scarce commodity in the rapidly expanding suburbs of Sydney. By the ferry which plied between its moorings at the bottom of his garden to the city, Stenhouse could reach his office in fifteen minutes. In 1859 he proudly described the room which by then was the acknowledged centre of literary Sydney: ‘my library has been made beautiful, fitted up with new shelves, mirror, morocco chairs etc. and it now contains all my books, which line every available space from the ceiling to the floor’. This comfortable room and its contents soon became redolent with the tobacco-smoke of the strange assortment of men who sought fortune and fame with their pens. Many of them, as did Stenhouse himself, became involved in the late 1850s in the production of the colony’s first purely literary magazine the Month, and in the complex affairs of its progenitors: Richard Rowe and Frank Fowler.
Rowe gravitated naturally to Stenhouse for he had known patronage most of his life. The son of a Welsh Wesleyan minister who died when he was a boy, he became a pupil of Mr Bradnack’s school at Colchester, where his mother had settled with her children. His headmaster assumed responsibility for his education and when he moved his school to Bath he took Rowe with him. There he remained as an usher when his schooling was complete, but at twenty-five he finally succumbed to the lure of adventure and emigrated to New South Wales in 1853. It is not certain when he met Stenhouse; probably through Deniehy and the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts.
Days of Wine and Rage Page 13
