Days of Wine and Rage

by Frank Moorhouse

  From the conversation:

  Fir trees make such a mess, but we always have a tree made from something: last year we used one of Daddy’s sculptures – what would you like to drink with your breakfast? Scotch, vodka and orange juice or there’s grape juice or apple juice? What are your orders for breakfast? – there’s omelette with chives, pancakes with lemon, mangoes and cherries. Paul is, of course, late as usual but we won’t wait for him. They wanted a dinner set from Opus in Paddington but the pieces aren’t replaceable and it wouldn’t have lasted a day with Luke and Mandy. Actually, they’re not calling him Luke now, they’re calling him Bishka – they decided he wasn’t a ‘Luke’. I brought you The Female Eunuch, Mother, so that I can borrow it. Kim’s parents gave me an Edna O’Brien for Christmas. I don’t know why they keep treating me as one of the family; we’ve been apart for two years. She’s a dreadful writer really, always writing about intelligent women separated from their husbands. I think the film Ma Nuit chez Maud is a statement about the strength of catholicism in France. He was a catholic man whose marriage remained stable because of the force of catholicism. The doctor in the film, on the other hand, was an intellectual and therefore bound to have an unstable marriage. No, Daddy, you can’t extract generalised statements like that from a film like that. I hear that Gwen Harwood, the Tasmanian poet, is supposed to be Timothy Kline in the Shapcott anthology. Remember? She’s the poet who made a fool of Coleman when he edited the Bulletin by sending in a poem with an acrostic which said ‘fuck all editors’. I don’t know if literary hoaxes serve any purpose. Take the Ern Malley thing – poor old Max Harris – it’s a sort of literary vandalism. When you think about it, Christmas is our only national tradition. Some of my relatives and our Jewish friends try to keep Chanuka alive by combining it with Christmas and they send cards saying ‘Happy Christmas and Happy Chanuka’.

  Christmas in the Balmain sub-culture

  Each year in Balmain ‘waifs and strays’ Christmas parties are held by those who, by inclination or by circumstance, are without strong family ties.

  This waifs-and-strays party included four people with recently broken marriages, five school teachers, two university lecturers, two postgraduate students, a barrister, a nurse, a drama student, four people who would see themselves as poets, a journalist, a fiction writer, two people self-employed in business, and two children – one named Sky and the other Jenny (an adopted Aboriginal girl).

  No Christmas cards were displayed. There was a traditional groaning table of food including turkey, duck, baked steak, and a Greek Christmas cake (but no traditional Christmas pudding: instead, diced cold fruit). Two cold soups were served, a cream cucumber soup and gazpacho.

  Drinking was on the average four drinks an hour. For some – including me – a little faster. One joint of marijuana was smoked. The customary mixed nuts and raisins were put about, and an innovation, Akai crackers from Japan, jokingly introduced as ‘macrobiotic’. There was a traditional fir tree, decorated.

  From the conversation:

  Darlings, we’ve arrived – the party may begin. It’s really a Latvian–Israeli Christmas – maybe the first in history – provided by Misses Esses and Levy. We spent the night decorating the tree which I cut myself. What sort of contraceptive did Casanova use? – the birth control campaign in Britain is saying that he didn’t get women into trouble. The answer is that he used, among other things, a sheep’s intestine as a condom. About the flies: I was going to spray the garden with DDT but didn’t get around to it. Pollution? I was going to do it as an act of pollution. To demonstrate your lack of harmony with nature? Yes. What will you have to drink – beer, wine, scotch? Have a piroshki – they’re Latvian – you’re supposed to be changing your eating habits because of immigration. Remember, tomorrow is Chairman Mao’s birthday party. Murray is having a keg. Is that your little sister? I mean she is dark. She’s adopted from an Aboriginal family. I like people who can play the Christmas game properly. Haven’t you any other music than that? (the British folk singer A. L. Lloyd was being played) – I’ll go home and get some of the Rolling Stones or Melanie. Did you know that Adamson claims he was first picked up by the police for living with an eleven-year-old girl? He didn’t know she was eleven but became suspicious when he’d send her out to shoplift food and she’d come back with potato chips and lollies. The manufacturing of the Adamson legends. Still, it’s a nice story. What does ‘Bogarting’ mean when you’re smoking pot? If you don’t know, man, then maybe you don’t deserve to know. Don’t bullshit me. It means that you shouldn’t hold onto a joint too long; it’s bad manners. The term comes from the way Bogart used to hold his cigarette in his mouth while talking. I heard that at the Thorunka party they had two Trobriand Islanders cooking a whole pig in hot coals in the ground. Poor guys have always eaten Mission food and probably never cooked anything in their lives. They probably had to ring the Department of Anthropology to find out how to do it. I hear one of them is doing a thesis on ‘The Libertarian Push – a study of primitive living in an urban environment’. Very funny.

  Hometown Christmas

  A country town of New South Wales and the night before Christmas day. There is home visiting with some guests who come and stay and some who just drop in. Among those present at this home evening were a Rotarian businessman, a bank manager, another businessman who was a scoutmaster, an accountant, a minister of religion, a Sydney businessman, and wives and children. Drinks were served – beer, scotch for the men and fruit cup and soft drink for the women and children. Alcoholic drinks were served at the rate of about one an hour. Mixed nuts, raisins, cheese niblits and figs were put around, and this year an innovation – Akai seaweed crackers from Japan – a conversational subject. The drinks were followed later in the evening with a sit-down supper around a table on which were spread ham and turkey sandwiches, smoked oysters, asparagus (tinned), tomato (as always), savouries, cream sponges and Christmas cake (cake forks were laid out). Tea and coffee were drunk. The house had been decorated with metallic foil and paper and plastic Christmas trees.

  Christmas cards were displayed in special racks, on the mantelpiece, or hung on the venetian blind. They came from personal friends, kin, business associates, organisations, and acquaintances met in other countries. Duplications were noted – these occurred where a person sent two cards to the same address. There would have been about two or three hundred cards displayed.

  The music played was the Esso Steel Band brought back from a holiday in Jamaica.

  From the conversation:

  All the children came near the top except Jennifer who’s good at needlework and cooking but doesn’t like books. When the builders renovated the bathroom she insisted on sweeping up and the other day she insisted on sweeping the garage after Daddy had swept it. She’s going to make someone a good housewife. You can’t expect everyone in the family to be a scholar – there have to be the Jennys of this world. Oliver and the family are late as usual, they’re becoming known as ‘the late Johnsons’. Eric’s son Ralph went to London to study interior decoration and now he’s opened a shop in Carnaby Street. They were the first to use the Union Jack as decoration. I thought that was against the law but apparently it’s not. Vandals nearly burned down the presbyterian church again. They piled bibles and hymn books on an electric stove in the annexe and turned the stove on. Probably kids. They’re burning down the universities so I suppose the churches are on the list too. Woolworth’s changed the windows on the new supermarket to arches to blend in with the church which is next to it. I’m told that the architect never visited the site once. They don’t give the service that you used to get from professional people. One parson I met overseas said he always stayed with catholic priests when he was moving about because they lived better than the clergy. One priest said, ‘We might not have a better half but we have a better living.’ Scouting is becoming scouting for old men – where are the boys? What’s legal in taxation? It all depends which column you put the figures in. W
hich column you put the figures in depends on which story you’re telling. It’s better to be able to organise twenty men to do the job than to do the work of twenty men. A team of chaps from the service clubs went up to the Gulf of Carpentaria to help the Abos. They won’t do a damned thing for themselves. They sat around and let our chaps do the work. Education is no use to them because they don’t know how to apply it. All the places overseas where the British have pulled out are going to the pack. South Africa is the only country that’s well run. Hawaii did the right thing by becoming part of America. If you can sell it, you’re in business: if you can’t, you’re out. A New Guinea school teacher wrote to me asking for magazines. I saw a special rate for Time magazine in which you get forty issues at half price. I sent this to him and he wrote back complaining that he didn’t want to wait for forty weeks before getting it. He couldn’t understand the subscription idea. And he was a school teacher. We saw the Queen Mother at an agricultural show in England – she was as close to me as I am to you. She looks very well.

  Tony Morphett, Born-again Christian

  (from On Being, September 1979)

  I’ve been a Christian for three and a half years. I recently referred to myself in front of a very fierce ex-deaconess – and anyone who knows deaconesses knows that a fierce one is very fierce indeed – as a ‘young Christian’. She replied, ‘You’ve had three years and that’s all the Apostles got!’ I forebore to say that the Apostles had had a very good teacher! Most people know me only indirectly – as the ‘script-writer’ behind certain popular television shows and the film The Last Wave. I began writing many years ago as a newspaper reporter, then progressed to working in ABC radio and television, writing novels in my spare time and dreaming of the time I’d be a full-time writer. I went freelance about ten years ago, and have since specialised in television drama.

  Now television drama is fiction, but mostly it’s a special sort of fiction. Because television is an intimate medium, because it goes into people’s living rooms, television drama tends to be as natural as possible. Particularly in the shows that I’ve been associated with in the past five or six years – Certain Women and The Sullivans.

  Certain Women was my roots. It was me discovering the area and the people I came from. I’m a western-suburbs Sydney boy and, at its best, Certain Women was a western-suburbs series about ordinary, recognisable, likeable people.

  And so with The Sullivans. I didn’t devise the format of The Sullivans, but I identify totally with the series. If someone told me that Alan Stone of Certain Women was really Tom Sullivan grown middle-aged, I’d go along with them.

  So the fiction I’ve been involved with is fiction which tries to stay close to real life, which requires research and an openness to what’s going on, a feeling for the pulse of society.

  Now if I have skills in these areas, I learnt them as a reporter. A good reporter has an instinct for the ways in which a story might break in the near future. In fiction this is called plotting, but we’re allowed to write it – whether it happens or not.

  A good reporter has an ear for the way in which people talk. And of course this is precisely the basis of good dialogue-writing. I learnt to write dialogue editing radio interviews, where you cut, not at the full stop, but at the breath pause. You cut for the intonation, and therefore you have to be able to listen.

  A good reporter can sketch character. And again, this is also a skill of the fiction writer.

  It’s no coincidence that the newspaper and parliamentary reporter Charles Dickens drew such sharp pictures of his society. Ernest Hemingway in America was an ex-reporter. And there are lots of Australian examples of reporters who took their reporting skills into various forms of fiction.

  But in each case, one can tell what is reporting and what is naturalistic fiction. Fiction has a ‘shaped’ quality we don’t often encounter in real life, and therefore don’t often encounter in reporting. It’s the difference between a carefully posed studio photograph of a family and a news picture of an accident. In the news picture we get a sense of immediacy, and also of incompleteness – the sense that the world extends outwards on all sides of the frame. We have a frozen moment of life rather than a set of living people carefully arranged.

  The reason I’m going into this exercise in professional biography is to give a context for a series of events I’ve been living through over the past few years.

  I’m a trained reporter who also writes naturalistic fiction, and who knows the difference between the two forms. I’m forty-one now and I’ve been at both games since I was eighteen, so that’s twenty-three years.

  At one time I was also an egomaniac who prided himself on his ‘objectivity’, whatever that means. In my case it meant that I tried to take an impartial observer’s stance on almost everything. One of the things I did not take an impartial stance on was that area of life people loosely call ‘religion’. I was perfectly happy to allow foreigners to be Moslems or Hindus – that after all was tolerant and non-racist – but I was full of anger that my fellow-Australians should choose to be Christians. I used to refer to the faith as ‘the Christian superstition’, and I was an avowed atheist.

  I was completely unwilling to admit that there was any supernatural dimension to life. And I certainly denied that Jesus of Nazareth was anything other than a man. A successful demagogue perhaps, who founded a superstition which has caused about equal quantities of good and evil on the planet. But obviously not God. My view would have been that he was some kind of religious maniac. I didn’t even accept the ‘good man and teacher’ cop-out (and of course I wouldn’t accept that today, either). I was, in a phrase, a rationalist bigot.

  I maintained this view over many years. I wasn’t brought up a Christian, and I cannot remember any desire to be one – even while meeting men and women who were Christians, and were clearly more intelligent than I was, more mature, and more full of joy. I also met some stinkers, of course, and they were the Christians I took most pleasure in.

  So my self-vaunted objectivity was, in this area at least, deficient.

  I was then involved in a series of events and experiences with a series of people which I’d like to share with you. I’ll tell them almost at random, as they seemed to happen.

  Firstly, my daughter Sarah, who is now seven, taught me through her reaction to nature that a bumble bee is as extraordinary an object as a hippopotamus; perhaps even more interesting, because a bumble bee is actually a harder design job. She showed me that the patterns in nature were there for whoever has eyes to see them, and that these patterns are a demonstration that we live in, and are part of, an immense work of art – stretching throughout time and space – but all the work of a master craftsman.

  Then there was a fictional person named Helen Stone, and a fictional Anglican priest who counselled her before her wedding. They were in Certain Women. The priest wasn’t very fictional – I got all my material from Alan Nicholls, now the rector at St James Church of England in East Melbourne. The process of writing that scene, of opening myself to that priest’s point of view, opened a door in me to the possibility of belief. God’s a great optimist, and whack! His foot was in that door and I never got it shut again.

  A dear friend, Reg Neal, also played a part – and this was a lesson which surfaced later, because at the time I didn’t know he was praying for me. He taught me that prayer works, for he was praying for me as I walked resolutely backwards towards the light.

  Next there was a man who wanted to hire me to write a documentary film about the disposition of elements in the earth’s surface. That man added the last straw to break the back of my pride. In preparation for the film, we sat down in a hotel and I asked ‘OK, how did they get there?’ In reply he described to me the full scientific view of the evolution of the cosmos. A vision of atoms floating free in space, of suns and planets forming, of chemical changes, and bacteria, and volcanoes and the growth of life – and I, the reporter, wrote it all down and went home.

 
; And couldn’t sleep. All this kept turning over in my head, until in the early hours of the morning there was a voice in my mind, a voice not my own, a voice with a personality and a dry ironic tone. And He said, ‘If you can believe all this, what’s so hard about the Incarnation and the Virgin Birth?’ The voice just asked this question and then stepped back to let me struggle with it.

  Now this was a curious experience for an atheist who knew there was no supernatural, who had never felt saner, who had no desire to believe anything more than he was believing already, who was successful, happy, had no desire to make a damn fool of himself – a very curious experience for that atheist indeed. So curious that it killed him. And a Christian was born; I was born.

  Now believe me, I didn’t want this happening to me. I’d been a nasty, hard, savage atheist all my life. I had all these awful images of what Christians were – Holy Joes, wowsers, people into real estate and cold stone buildings. I’d been kicked into faith and it was very inconvenient. I was bewildered. It was horrifying to be told that the Church had been right all the time.

  But although the atheist was dead, the reporter was still alive and he went and checked the sources. For the first time in my life, I did what is normally a reporter’s first duty – checked my facts. I had an old Gideon Bible, and I started at Matthew and read through Mark, Luke, John and the book of Acts. And I was appalled, because what I was reading wasn’t legend and it wasn’t naturalistic fiction. It was reporting. First – and second-hand accounts of extraordinary events, and sometimes – say in the case of Luke – the assembly of documentary evidence together with the results of interviewing eye-witnesses. Reporting has a taste, and that taste is in the Gospels.