Days of Wine and Rage

by Frank Moorhouse

  Rowe was working as a journalist on the Sydney Morning Herald in 1856, the year Stenhouse first lectured to the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts. Rowe’s wry description of café conversations with ‘literary friends talking transcendentalism – unsubstantial as the smoke of the cigars we puff; in Carlylese, every third word beginning with a capital’, suggests that this lecture had made quite an impact. It certainly aroused the interest of Henry Parkes who was determined to attend it even ‘at the cost of absenting myself from the assembly’, and asked for a copy to publish in the Empire. Rowe was at this time, as he remembered years later with bitter regret, ‘a friendless young fool’, soon to be rudely awakened to the discovery that ‘the reaping of wild oats is not so pleasant a process as the sowing’. In about September 1856 he recovered his senses after a prolonged drinking bout to find himself in prison. Stenhouse visited him there, and took him home on bail to Waterview House, where Rowe wrote a De Quinceyesque but basically true account of his fall for the Sydney Morning Herald, appropriately entitled ‘The Confessions of a Drunkard’. His article, dated Balmain, 27 September, concluded with a splendid description of Stenhouse at home in his library.

  And now, blowing the long forbidden cloud, I sit in that friend’s nest, veiled round with verdure. The walls are hid with books – old, rich and rare, modern, and sparkling – mental wine from every land, of the vintages of every age. It is in the library that I sit, listening, delighted, to my host’s ‘most musical’ meandering flow of talk. Ripe scholarship, erudition singularly wide and deep, the most delicate sensibility to the beautiful, glee at discovering it like that of a child who has come upon a hidden bank of forest flowers, personal recollections of those Northern Lights that twenty years ago crowned Edinburgh … the stars that stud the ‘Noctes’ … make it, indeed, a treat; whilst, ever and anon, my hospitable hostess, with her bright smile and warm Hibernian heart, glides in and out, beaming beautiful as a sorrowless Madonna. Close by the open window a pear-tree waves its wealth of summer snow; like it, my heart has blossomed in the sunshine, and droops beneath its load of gratitude and joy.

  Rowe took advantage of both Stenhouse’s library and his conversations to review for the Sydney Morning Herald Henry Cockburn’s recently published Memorials of His Time. ‘ “Cockburn”, said Professor Wilson to a gifted literary friend of ours, long-buried in dusty law papers like bright gold hidden in a dirty napkin, “Cockburn is a man of no common calibre, but he can’t write”.’

  As soon as he was sufficiently recovered from his alcoholic excesses Rowe went to Muswellbrook, a town 150 miles north of Sydney, as a language tutor in the home of Mr John H. Keys. Unfortunately Rowe’s command of the language he was supposed to be teaching was shaky and he sent an urgent plea to Stenhouse for a dictionary. ‘I am going through the “Exercises” at somewhat a jog-trot pace with my pupil’, he explained, ‘but am trying to acquire a superficially general acquaintance with the language empirically, by reading through the key’. He was not, evidently, the most qualified of tutors. When the much-needed dictionary arrived Rowe complained of:

  a suspicious aspect of newness about it that I don’t like; and its leaves are not fragrant with the sacred incense-fumes with which I know they must have been impregnated, had it been long a dweller in your literary Parthenon. A shelf in a bookseller’s shop I greatly fear, is the shrine from which it has descended to enlighten my ignorance by its revelations.

  He wrote on, he explained, not because he had anything to say, but ‘to keep up a sort of connection with Balmain – the only place in New South Wales with which I associate home feelings’.

  Rowe first met Frank Fowler in Muswellbrook. This tubercular English journalist of twenty-three who was to bring chaos and bitter dissension into the Waterview House circle during the next two years, was accompanying a politician on an electioneering tour. They later met again in Stenhouse’s library where their chance acquaintance ‘ripened into friendship’. Fowler was a lovable young enthusiast with a sometimes unfortunate talent for self-publicity. He had arrived in Sydney in December 1855, and on 5 January 1856 gave the first of a series of public orations which made him something of a literary lion in Sydney. He thus made the acquaintance of Stenhouse who chaired his lecture on Edgar Allan Poe, given in the Mechanics’ School of Arts on 8 July 1856. He attracted an unusually large audience which included ‘several members of parliament and many gentlemen distinguished by their literary attainments’, despite competition from a Philharmonic concert patronised by the governor-general and the first night of the English Opera Company. In this lecture, which was largely biographical, Fowler displayed a familiarity with American literature in general – mentioning James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Empire remarked that ‘however successful Mr Fowler’s previous lectures on widely different topics may have been, nothing he had essayed has given more general delight than his evening with Edgar Allan Poe’.

  Another American writer provided Fowler with material for a second unqualified success the following month, when his play Eva; or, leaves from Uncle Tom’s Cabin was performed for a week in the Lyceum Theatre. Although an adaptation, ‘the language in many scenes and the dramatic construction of the piece throughout, bears the impress of great originality’, remarked the Freeman’s Journal critic. The play had original music written for it, and new scenery which included as a special feature grand panoramic views of the Mississippi River and of New Orleans. Serenades and dances by Ethiopian minstrels accompanied by banjos and tambourines provided entertaining interludes, and the principal actress was particularly well chosen. The Freeman’s Journal critic enthused:

  Mr Fowler can congratulate himself on having written a piece, which the entire press of the city agree possesses considerable literary merit; he can also think himself a particularly lucky man, in finding an artiste of such eminent dramatic abilities to embody the mental creation as Miss Anna Maria Quinn. Of the acting of Miss Quinn we feel we cannot speak in too high terms – suffice it to say, that we never saw her in any character in which she appeared to more advantage.

  Flushed with success, Fowler set about the task of stimulating Sydney’s literary life by gathering together the colony’s leading writers. In October 1856 he wrote to Stenhouse:

  You may have noticed in the papers some time back a short notice to the effect that the literary workers in this country had formed themselves into a guild under the title of ‘The Literary Association of New South Wales’ … I am sure your sympathies are with such an object. We have held one or two very interesting meetings and I think the association will do good and – as a consequence – become prosperous.

  My object in writing to you is to know if you would allow us to publish your lecture on the Imagination with the ‘imprimatur’ of the Association? – the nascent literature of the country demands as much from you, and I am sanguine of your compliance.

  The Association was formed, and was still in existence eight months later, but then faded into oblivion ….

  On 1 July 1857 Fowler launched his most important and successful contribution to the literary life of his day – the Month. This was the first substantial Australian magazine to publish articles, translations, short stories, poems and serialised novels entirely by local authors. Previously, newspapers such as the Sydney Morning Herald, the Empire and the Freeman’s Journal had provided a limited outlet, chiefly for poetry. More than ten years before, Robert Lowe had included a literary section in the Atlas, believing that there was a sufficient and growing interest in such matters in the colony. He expressed the hope that local writers would be encouraged by his ‘proffering a quiet niche for the offerings of such of our colonial friends as may occasionally wander from the cold realms of utilitarianism to the warm regions of the colonial and the imaginative’, but in fact he looked to Britain and Europe for most of his material.

  The first number of the Month was received with enthusiasm by
both the Freeman’s Journal and the Sydney Morning Herald. The former greeted its appearance in a short preliminary notice.

  Frank Fowler is determined to leave no means untried for imparting a sound literary taste to the Sydney public. We have received the first number of his magazine, and read it with the same zest that we are sure it was devoured by all book lovers. In appearance it is certainly the neatest thing of the kind ever presented to Australian readers … We hope it may meet with the general patronage, which the smallness of its price will render necessary in order to make it pay all expenses.

  Breaking Literary Decorum

  The Balmain Readings of Prose and Verse began as a gathering of young writers and friends with an open invitation to any one to read either their own work or a work they liked.

  At the first gathering, the advertised readers were Ian Bedford, Geoffrey Mill, Clem Gorman, Rozanne Bonney and myself, all reading our own work. There was a tape of Push poet deceased, Harry Hooten and Harry Jones (also dead).

  Darcy Waters, Terry McMullen (reading from McGonigal), Dr J. ‘Rocky’ Myers, Professor David Armstrong, Michael Thornhill and Ken Quinnell read works by their favourite authors.

  We instituted the Oral English Award which went to Darcy that year. Darcy had presented a demonstration of the different race-calling techniques of the British, American and Australian race commentators. The award was also presented to Garner Ted Armstrong, the evangelist of ‘The World of Tomorrow’, a radio programme, and to Ward Austin, then a radio announcer with Radio 2UW and the base operator of Yellow Cabs. The half-serious intention of the award was to recognise distinctive and creative use of spoken English.

  The first readers of the evening were those invited writers who read what they most liked of their work that year. Then would come invited readers who read what they liked. Don Anderson, for example, introduced us to samples of new American writing, especially Donald Barthelme. Finally the reading would be thrown open to readers from the floor.

  Sometimes the readings went for six or seven hours, beginning usually around six or seven in the evening. No time limit was placed. There was a master of ceremonies who included, at various times, Terry McMullen, Darcy Waters and, for a number of years, Adrian Heber, and each had his own way of stopping a reader who had become entranced by the microphone and an audience.

  Finally, in the late seventies, the readings ceased because of disruption. The open and non-authoritarian nature of the occasions made them vulnerable to exhibitionist behaviour and to political activists who needed an audience. And to bores.

  Audiences exercised some control by booing and hissing but were essentially powerless against disrupters.

  Maybe we should have been more resilient. The lack of decorum that characterised the Sydney readings gave them a robust – or disconcerting, depending upon your psychic strength – boisterousness.

  The Draft Resisters’ Union reading, organised at the University of Sydney in the early seventies, was typical. About two hundred people attended and we read first, cursing the alien atmosphere of the Carslaw lecture theatre (the readers refused to use the lectern).

  There was a disruptive collection of money for more booze organised by Murray Sime, a Balmain lawyer who looks after the affairs of a few writers.

  Robyn Ravlich (The Black Abacus), who had had three ribs broken after being hugged and fallen upon at a Balmain reading, this time had two male protectors, one on either side of her. They also took part in the performance she’d organised, acting as a chorus. While she wrote her poem on the blackboard, one of the male assistants dropped cardboard letters of the alphabet and the other read a fake poem.

  While she was finishing her piece, Terry Larsen (Tarflowers, FJ Holden) began a tap dance at one end of the lecture theatre, which was a lead-in to his piece (which, however, was not scheduled at this point).

  He did some readings of patriotic Australian verse which required the audience to shout a response. But he had some critics who abused him and a beer can was thrown in his direction. He threw back all the chalk he could find.

  He went into his FJ Holden act but was interrupted by an irate young woman who said she’d come to the reading to hear poetry and not to listen to drivel. Others in the hall shouted at her that her vision of poetry was limited.

  Another critic said the piece was not related to the Vietnam war. Terry replied that it was not about the blood and suffering but it was about the sort of guys who were being sent there.

  Some of the audience walked out because they considered the reading frivolous.

  A white-faced organiser, Antonia Finnane, came out to stop Terry continuing but lost heart before his impetus and the unruly audience. She returned to her seat, waving a hand which said, ‘It is out of control’.

  Michael Wilding (Living Together), an organiser and a scheduled reader, had his face buried in his hands.

  An old pro, Robert Adamson (Canticles on the Skin), followed Terry and parried invective and interjections with the audience. He was used to it, having been broken in at the Balmain readings. He’d once had water thrown from a cliff-top down onto him while reading in a natural amphitheatre at Balmain. Drenched, he’d kept on reading.

  Someone in the audience asked him to speak up. He replied that he was reading a ‘quiet poem’ and he’d ‘be buggered’ if he was going to speak up. As a concession he followed it with what he described as a loud poem and he bellowed it out.

  For no apparent reason someone then accused Bob of being a stooge of Grace Perry (editor of Poetry Australia). This was a blatant misrepresentation of Bob’s position in poetry politics. He challenged the interjector to come down to the front and say it. The interjector didn’t take up the challenge and Bob went on with a superb and memorable reading.

  The organisers seized the lull to close the reading, excluding Martin Johnston (Shadowmass) who had been drinking rum with us.

  By the end of the seventies there were two attitudes to readings. One was that it was performance. People like Eric Beach and Nigel Roberts and others felt that one should rehearse and develop the performance; that the oral form should contain gestures and a full use of the speech range. Others believed that the poet should ‘read’ as if from a page of a book; that performance belongs with actors and that poets should ‘be themselves’ on stage.

  Listening Backwards

  for Kerry

  Where have the readings led us? into definitions, structures … the last pillars of sound … solidified, scarred, embedded. You come here like a jitterbug, raving of Anarchists, Politics … ridiculous! you grind your teeth in frustration, saying hideous, the crime of meaning …

  I agree. Whatever has gone before is entombed, bandaged like the Pharoah in his lotus blossoms, still perfect after thousands of lives. So these words we now dispense with … like yet another commodity … dead, ancient, so used their breath is stale. Yet poets still seek their voices, the magic of first gestures into meat and sound … the song.

  So where have the readings led us? From graffiti bandits to mythologised fishing ports in America … where they speak of Typewriter Art. Where buckweat pancakes are enough if made public, where candles for Kali and

  Heroic Addictions

  are enough, where suffering and soup cans are criterions for life … where anything, anything is enough if made public.

  Why do I feel moths and belljars when I hear the poets read? Why do the seats arrange themselves like firing squads before a wall … the poets know power if they understand Public Relations and the Lions? Why this smell of blood when the words are so decayed, the flesh torn off and sold?

  We meet again and agree these structures will poison us. We huddle over coffee cups, you dreaming of the Northland where the elements will embrace you, wordlessly, till you’re breathed silent. And me dreaming of deserts where the exotic will be a palm tree, a baying goat, the lick of a drum … ill each of us forgets our values, becomes an empty gourd … to be worded again, to be answered … from a deep
memory, the jackal’s howl.

  Vicki Viidikas

  (from Knäbel, 1978)

  Great Pub Crawls

  (adapted, from the Bulletin, 21.8.71)

  Sydney’s two Bacchanalian festivals are the two pub crawls – the Rocks Pub Crawl and the Balmain Pub Crawl.

  Of these two the Balmain Pub Crawl is the smallest in number – about eighty drinkers – but it is the longest and most pointless. It promotes no good cause and celebrates only excess. The Rocks crawl, held as part of the Argyle Festival, attracts about four thousand drinkers. It marks the installation of the first water bubblers in the Rocks. It covers twelve hotels with fine names such as the Fortune of War, the Dumbarton Castle, and the Hero of Waterloo.

  The Balmain crawl covers ten miles and twenty-five hotels [in 1975], again with grand names such as Dicks, the Unity Hall, the Bald Rock, the Dry Dock, and the Forth and Clyde [since closed down].

  Two of the good old Sydney pub crawls have died – the one from Sydney University to the Quay and the one from the University of New South Wales to Town Hall. With Tony Morphett, we were the last to do the Great Wagga Wagga Pub Crawl – from the Farmers Rest to the Black Swan. In the following years Wagga lost many of its twenty-five hotels. Tony and we argued bitterly somewhere along the way and finished the pub crawl drinking on opposite sides of the bar, not talking.