Days of Wine and Rage

by Frank Moorhouse

  Altman says Kramer attempted to have his lecture stopped before he gave it. However, exhaustive checks with the University of New South Wales academic staff have failed to come up with any support for his claim.

  Professor Kramer gave a ‘blanket denial’ when questioned about Altman’s claim, but admitted she had ‘registered a protest’ about the Arndt lecture. However, she denied that she was improperly using her position on the Australian Universities Commission, and claimed she had contacted Professor Walsh as a concerned parent.

  Despite the protest, Bettina Arndt’s lectures were continued the following year.

  She denied that this action indicates that she is a puritan. ‘The word carries an overtone of severity and joylessness, and a refusal to do certain things.’

  However, the same intolerance intruded into a review she wrote in November 1976 Quadrant of Patrick White’s novel A Fringe of Leaves. Referring to the heroine in the book, Ellen Roxburgh, she writes: ‘As a castaway in Queensland she gnaws an Aboriginal thigh-bone and discovers that it “nourished, not only her animal body but some darker need of the hungry spirit”. This second episode – the sacrament of cannibalism – is not so much grotesque but crude in its forced allegory.’

  The tension between White, who privately refers to her as ‘Killer Kramer’ and ‘The Kramer’, and Dr Kramer dates back to her editing of a book of Australian short stories in 1962. She did not include one White short story.

  I asked her about this omission, and she said: ‘There were very, very few of his short stories published then. (The Burnt Ones, a collection of White short stories appeared two years later.) I had thought about it at great length. Doug Stewart, who was reading the volume for me (for Angus & Robertson) said: “You haven’t put any Patrick White stories in it.” So I thought about it again. Now I think it may have been an incorrect decision.’

  However, Dr Kramer rejects White’s claim that in his earlier years as a novelist in Australia, the local critics ganged up against him. ‘I believe he has had a better run than any other.’

  She says now that White is ‘the dominant figure’ in current Australian literature, but believes Hal Porter is a better stylist. ‘Porter is very mannered and very idiosyncratic and annoys a lot of people but he’s very good. He’s never had anything like the reception White has had and yet I really think – if I’m really going to stick my neck on the block, I might as well do it properly – he’s a better stylist.

  ‘I’m coming to think – and I haven’t formulated this judgement very thoroughly – that Porter is much more observant than White. He’s a sharp and sometimes cruel observer, but so in a way is White.

  ‘If you compare the two of them the impression I have is that White is working much more from the outside – that sometimes he’s constructing characters that fit a kind of thesis the novel is propounding. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing – it just makes it a different kind of novel.

  ‘With Porter you get the impression that characters are formulated and shaped up for themselves. They’re a more central part of the novel. He’s got a rare vocabulary – much wider and richer than White. It surprised me when I realised that because White’s style is very Baroque – very enriched and decorative – but it’s more limited in its language than Porter’s.’

  Surprisingly, she regards criticism, including academic criticism, as ephemeral. However, it is important because ‘it ought to stimulate discussion about books and plays and theatre and music. Therefore, it ought to be hard-hitting, when that’s appropriate, in order to stimulate that discussion …

  ‘But I can’t bring myself to correct my essays. It would confer upon them a permanent value I can’t believe in.’

  OR LET’S TRY RETURNING TO NATURE

  The Bush Against Laundromat

  (adapted from a paper given at the conference ‘Man and the Biosphere’ in Canberra in 1973)

  I want to outline impressions and information I have about how people are reorganising themselves both in the city and the country, and to look analytically at the back-to-the-earth movement.

  If we had the beatniks of the fifties, the hippies of the sixties, then we have the greenies of the seventies – the back-to-the-earth movement, the ecological action groups, and those people campaigning against modern city development.

  Hooked up to the greenies are movements of social reorganisation within the big cities, especially in Melbourne and Sydney, with internal migration, a sorting out into cohesive homogeneous groupings, and a weak, but related, emotional communalist movement in both the city and the country.

  To identify the back-to-the-earth movement as a radical fashion is to give it perspective, but not necessarily to denigrate it. To classify it as symbolic behaviour still leaves it valuable as a sign or signal of perhaps permanent changes ahead for society. Neurotic radicalism, ‘youth rebellion’ or ‘novelty radicalism’ is often a dramatisation of valid issues or ills which in the wider society are either accommodated or unarticulated. It is true that neurotic radicalism also carries anxiety – unjustified fear – along with perhaps sensitivity to real threats, that maybe some people see things earlier, or have an earlier breaking point under growing city stress, which others will respond to at a later point.

  The city against the country is, of course, one of the great polarities of civilised times. Just about every thinker has stated a position on it, in literature and in politics. A friend pointed out that Juvenal nearly 2000 years ago wrote about it. In his Satires (III) he says, ‘Myself, I would value a barren offshore island more than Rome’s urban heart.’ Juvenal then listed the problems of living in Rome – traffic, bad planning and corruption (the last has also been a recurring item in Australian political history).

  Symbolically, the country has been mother, ‘mother nature’, and the city has been a denial of nature, at variance with the natural order. The country has symbolised innocence and purity; the city artificiality, decadence and pestilence. The country is claimed as organically the true community, the small village, while the city is described as anonymous, the lonely crowd.

  The values can be reversed in literature and song, with the city being the heartbeat, the pulse of civilisation and the arts, while the country is stagnant, a backwater of hicks and yokels. As Samuel Johnson said in 1777, ‘No, sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life: for there is in London all that life can afford.’

  The bohemian fashion of the fifties and sixties and of other decades was to boast that one had never left the city limits – to be the ultimate city man with a distaste for the rural life. But the fashion is now anti-urban, anti-city. The songs don’t go ‘How you going to keep them down on the farm now that they’ve seen Paree?’; they go ‘People call me country but I don’t care’. In Thoreau’s formulation the city was mindless and conformist while the country was individualist, meditative, philosophical – deep, a dialogue with nature, a seminar with God.

  I dug out my adolescent copy of Walden – one of those cult books which in a complicated and mysterious way you find your way to when young, one of those that seem to come to your attention at just the right time. I dug out my old copy and found that as a seventeen-year-old I’d marked sentences which I considered terribly important.

  I had heavily underlined ‘If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer’. In the margin I’d written ‘very true’.

  Our society lives out the city/country polarity both ritualistically and earnestly. At its strongest we have Thoreaus in the outskirts of our cities and in the bush – hermits whom as a child in the country I remember watching and persecuting. I remember with others stoning their camps and it remains a humiliating guilt. I guess we were instruments of the town’s own restrained fear of deviation.

  Again, at its strongest we have the current phenomenon of rural communalism and the flight from the city. At its weakest, mildest, we have the symbolic return to nature – the weekend dr
ive, the Sunday driver, drinking a thermos of tea around a drum of rubbish at a roadside rest stop.

  The weekender dream

  The five-or five-and-a-half-day week created a new leisure period known as the ‘weekend’ – an expanded Sunday – towards the end of the last century, and the railways promoted the trip to the country. In Australia, the popularity of motoring in the thirties, abundant land and the urge to be with nature produced the dream of having a ‘weekender’, a second dwelling. Weekend pioneers cut roads and found virgin beaches, built huts known as a ‘place’. The newly found areas were known as ‘spots’ – a good fishing spot, a good camping spot. You or a real-estate agent shared the dream with others and soon, imperceptibly, a township sprang up with a milkbar-general store and a petrol pump; and then a hall, then a camping ground, and then, by gradual ‘improvements’, a replica of a city suburb with mown lawns. The escapees rebuilt the prison around them; they were back in the city. The weekenders often became ‘life enders’ – retirement houses – and the retirement is seen as an extended weekend.

  The pioneers soon had to share the beaches with vacationers who came in tents and caravans. This was resolved by creating ‘camping grounds’. The campers, shooters and fishermen acted out the polarity and, in the twenties and thirties and even through to present times, treated the farmlands and bushlands as a public domain. Before the war especially, farmers often complained of city people who used the paddocks and farmlands for camping and picnicking. Chambers of commerce sometimes urged the farmers to permit this because the city people spent money in the towns. But the signs went up, ‘Private Property’, ‘No Campers’, ‘No Shooters’, and the towns provided camping grounds where the city people were herded and policed by local government by-laws.

  But the shooters were not accommodated, and today the farmers and shooters are still in conflict over land rights. The shooters continue to use the land. It is almost a carryover from the poaching of the working class. I share the sense of wrongful exclusion, which must go back to the land enclosure Acts.

  The weekender people and the towns are today in conflict with the transients who won’t be put in the camping grounds and don’t want to be restricted by regulations, by-laws, ad-hoc rules of managers and rangers. They are bikies and surfers. As one distressed coastal newspaper said, ‘they use the beaches as bedrooms’. It has come close to violence along the New South Wales coast, a fight over who ‘owns’ the beaches, territorial rights and personal space.

  The alienation of the national parks

  The national parks were another way society tried to accommodate the need for urban man to have something of a rural existence.

  But the parks do not ‘belong to the people’; they belong to those who control them – the rangers. The National Parks and Wildlife Service in New South Wales is a highly attenuated delegation stretching from the state parliament through the cabinet to the minister of lands, to the director of the Service, down to park superintendents, and eventually to the rangers and their forbidding signs.

  In talking to people in the National Parks Service I was told that the signs can’t say ‘please’ because this implies an option. The legal staff want them to be legally precise so as to secure convictions and carry authority. The parks provoke remarkable vandalism and aggression. The weekenders, the Sunday drivers, the campers, the shooters and the fishermen are acting out simple and psychological urges: the simple need for variation in the pattern of life, the recreational value of physical activity and change of scene, together with a need to ‘touch base’. There is the practice of the primitive skills of fishing, hunting and survival.

  I suppose there is also the imperative of technology – railways and cars demand to be used. Possessions employ their owners. There is the flight from stress; the city is the family and work arena, so the bush becomes a refuge. As Lewis Mumford points out in The City in History, early suburbia and ‘the place in the country’, represents the masses taking over the practices of the well-to-do. ‘They proposed in effect to create an asylum, in which they could, as individuals, overcome the chronic defects of civilisation while still commanding at will the privileges and benefits of urban society.’ Once it became a mass movement most of the benefits were lost.

  Schemes of closer settlement

  In Australian political life we had anti-urban movements which agreed on the virtues of the country and the dangers of the city but were of little success. Closer settlement policies, including the settlement schemes aiming to put returned soldiers on the land, were seen as having virtues beyond economics (they seem now to have had little economic virtue at all). Supporting closer settlement in 1905, Holman (Labor MLA, NSW state parliament) said in the Sydney Daily Telegraph:

  Get the bulk of our people away from the towns and give them such conditions that young fellows can make homes for themselves and settle down in comfort as soon as they arrive at a marriageable age and there will be no real difficulty then about the declining birth rate. It is the town life and the greater or lesser degree of degeneracy – in the physical as well as the moral sense that attends it …

  Since the economic disasters from the miscalculation of economic viability, the virtues of closer settlement schemes have been under-stressed in recent years, although the War Service Settlement Scheme formally terminated only in 1970. Under the Rural Reconstruction Scheme the policies are in fact reversed. The number of rural holdings has been declining as the government now pays to amalgamate small uneconomic farms.

  The cry of decentralisation

  There are still policies for getting people out of the city, but the reason given for doing so changes from party to party and decade to decade. It would be generous to attribute decentralisation plans to the thinking of the English nineteenth-century town planner Ebenezer Howard, who argued that every city, community or organisation had a limit of physical growth, an optimum size.

  Don Aitkin, professor of politics at Macquarie University, thinks that ‘decentralisation’ began with the Royal Commission of 1911 into the drift to the cities. ‘This word, a cliché of Australian political rhetoric, has become a modern Country Party’s rallying cry. As a policy … invested with a certain mysticism … a cure for most of Australia’s ills, a panacea for problems of defence, industry, education, health and morals.’ Almost certainly, decentralisation and closer settlement schemes have some roots in historic anti-city emotion.

  The back-to-the-earth movement

  There has been a spectacular revival of rural romanticism in the seventies. It is in contradiction to present government policies of farm amalgamation and is occurring now when small farmers are giving up. It is a non-commercial ‘new peasantry’ with a communalist and cooperative ideology running through it. I’m not aware of any significant earlier movement like it in Australian history, although it has been a recurring theme in American history. Depressions, especially that of the thirties, caused evicted tenants and unemployed persons in some places to form ‘happy valley’ shanty and tent communities along the New South Wales coast, in Queensland, and around Sydney at La Perouse, Lidcombe and Sutherland. There were people who tried subsistence and backyard farming. In the United States there was something of a subsistence farming movement, with Ralph Borsodi, author of This Ugly Civilisation and Flight from the City, as one of the main proponents. The latter is one of the cult books of the new back-to-the-earth movement both here and in America.

  But the phenomenon of economically unmotivated, middle-class city-dwellers turning to experiments in subsistence farming, barter, mutual aid and communalism is new. Although statistical accuracy is difficult, the editors of Earth Garden, one of the magazines of the movement, estimate that 30 000 Australians have left the cities to ‘return to the earth’ since 1970, for a combination of motives other than commercial farming.

  In talking with some of the people involved in this movement and analysing written material, I found motives more elaborate than those of countryside recreation. The ba
ck-to-the-earth movement breaks into:

  (a) People who’ve bought small farms and go to them at weekends, working in the city, and who intend to, or dream of, living on the farm eventually for non-commercial purposes.

  (b) Families living on small farms from one hectare upwards, trying for a degree of self-sufficiency.

  (c) More than one family living together on a farm with a variety of communal arrangements.

  (d) Clusters of families in one area with a similar ideological approach for farm and country living – as at Kangaroo Ground and Castlemaine in Victoria.

  (e) Loners, hermits, vegetarians and others with a nature ideology and self-sufficiency ideals.

  (f) Communes of individuals and families, and sometimes joint purchase of land, with pooling of resources and labour, as at Cairns, Nambour, Atherton and Cedar Bay in Queensland, Bega and Nimbin in New South Wales, and Shalam in Western Australia.

  The Alternate Pink Pages lists about a dozen communes, but the editors of Earth Garden said that the number is unknown. I’ve heard of about thirty communes, some with up to fifty members. Two publications give the movement some cohesion and visibility. Both still receive letters from new readers which express surprise that other people are doing the same thing as they are; that is, leaving the city. Earth Garden has published eight issues since 1972, going from a sale of 2000 to 10 000 and still climbing. Grass Roots – ‘a magazine for down-to-earth people’ has a smaller circulation. Organisations have formed in the movement, but are for service and information rather than political purposes, for example the Organic Gardening and Farming Society of Tasmania, the Consumers Co-operative Society; and the Communal Living Information Centre.