That is the end of a very long sentence, which I no doubt deserved, but which did little to reform me. I will continue to be a pun gent ode-r only interested in pedalling my wheres, why fors and bicycles along the high road of life to which I have become a custom.
So I have killed myself a wallaby which only leaves an emu and a coat of arms and then my job as Reserve Bank, old currency liquidator will be finished because my mission – the eradication of all florin influences, will have been achieved.
Somewhere in this Aboriginal scheme I would like to fit an explanation for my killing of a beautiful wallaby (an Australian buffalo) but it’s useless. A fortnight later I had dinner at the ‘Malaya’ with an American who was out here teaching in the country at South Dubbo High School – he was in Sydney for the weekend – we ate Chinese food – a week later he was dead too – probably while I was writing about the wallaby. He, too, died in the early morning, run over by a car – while taking an early morning jog – just like the wallaby but only in my limited context and yours.
I hope the Aboriginal housing scheme is a successful return to ‘something of a dreamtime’ – their existence has been pounded by many more contradictions of tone and subject matter than have occurred here.
I’m too young to think about death. The American died – age twenty-two.
Enter, Cosmos
(editorial from the first issue of Cosmos, 1973)
With the first edition of Cosmos something new and unique has entered the fields of Australian magazine publishing. Newspapermen and Francis II could no doubt have given us many invaluable hints on its creation. But lacking such royal advice has proved no handicap, and our first production proceeded smoothly.
We must ensure it continues to be so. We place ourselves under the guidance and protection of the Trans-Himalayan Lokanatha, Lord of the World – pious friends, take note – although, for all His power, Cosmos does not expect to escape controversy, and we shall welcome it as a tangible sign of public interest in our periodical’s contents.
Admittedly Cosmos is no threat to Queenslandic civilisation, nor is it ever likely to arouse the sensitive passions of the Victorian Vice Squad.
Its ‘sin’ will be that it is the other side of the Counter-Culture, the alternative way of life for those dissatisfied with society’s soul-destroying materialism and general indifference to the feelings of the individual.
Unlike the noisy, politically orientated forces of the Counter-Culture, which the public mind takes to be the Counter-Culture in its entirety, the other side, as taken up by Cosmos, has largely gone unnoticed. It makes no noise; it is not violent. It seeks to change society, not by forcibly ramming its ideas down into unwilling minds, but by peacefully stressing the need for change in each and every individual as a prescription for the world’s ills. It has captured no headlines, but it is there – and its numbers must be reckoned in the growing thousands.
It is not to an anthropomorphic God or ideological word-monger that the gentler side of the Counter-Culture looks for guidance and support, but to that creative Higher Consciousness in every individual which, in their collectivity, form one unity to which Emerson gave the name – The Oversoul.
As all on this side of the Counter-Culture know, this creative aspect in man, the true source of his being, remains largely dormant throughout the lifetime of the average individual who is trained from birth to obey all forms of outward authority, whether secular, religious or social. The sons and daughters of convention have no need to seek any inner guidance or inspiration from within while it is all done for them without. Yet we say that such people are only half alive, rarely knowing anything of true freedom, true happiness, or anything of their capabilities – and weaknesses – while living in constant danger of being misled by selfish interests.
Such people, observed Phillip Adams in the Australian, must be held responsible for disasters like Vietnam.
Let us delineate our position. We do not demand revolution, but seek peace through equable justice. We preach no dogmas, but quest for wisdom through enquiry assisted by intuition. We do not support callous authoritarianism, but work to gain for men that Self-responsible freedom which, once realised by the many in all its ramifications, can alone lead to a real and genuine state of Universal Brotherhood, with all its fruits thereof: joy, liberty, equality.
This Cause – to free the consciences of mankind from harmful conditioning – is not only in its incipient stages. If H. G. Wells is right, that Universal Brotherhood is the goal of history, then the Counter-Culture as a whole is moving in this general direction and must, one day, and hopefully in its more altruistic aspects, triumph. Before that longed-for day, there are problems of the past which have to be faced, solved and overcome.
It is here that the Counter-Culture divides and negates itself. On one side of it stand political activists who think society’s problems can be solved through political action, and, on the other, people who agree with them on what is wrong, but disagree with their means.
The apolitical Counter-Culture upholds the freedom of the individual, and, for all that, it may be more in the stream of history than its politically orientated side.
The political activists of the Counter-Culture organise themselves. The apolitical side is a social phenomenon manifesting on all levels of society. It is unorganised. In fact it is doubtful if it will ever be organised beyond, say, periodicals like Cosmos, though it may inspire sociopolitical movements in the years ahead, once it has worked out where it is going and how. But this is only a possible future development. The point to note is that the gentler side of the Counter-Culture is a living, growing happening because it is an individual thing, making no demands upon anyone except those which the individual places upon him or herself.
It does not gravitate towards passivity, towards that utter paralysis of the human soul, quietism, as the pot-smokers and acid-heads so fatally do, the latter especially bonding themselves to a master more furious and demanding than the irrational regimen of that society they originally sought to escape from. It is an active movement within the individual and in the mass holds the best promise for positive change.
It does not fling excreta at the crumbling walls of The Establishment for failings which are really within the individual, failings which the individual refuses to recognise and overcome within, by, and through himself, for its members know very well that the average man has never been taught how to recognise and deal with them, much less taught why he should question the fitness of things. Nor does it flail society, bad as it is, to achieve selfish ends inspired by pique or born of frustration, no matter how justifiable any such feelings of outrage may be.
It works for change in society through the individual for the good of the many. There is neither subtle force nor brutal violence. Only individual struggle and effort to overcome error within and without it. It is the most unselfish movement of a spontaneous kind in the annals of history, the nearest parallel, perhaps, being the great reform movement initiated by the Lord Gautama Buddha, from whose teachings the apolitical Counter-Culture draws so much of its strength.
We leave others to explain why this movement has sprung up. Our purpose in publishing Cosmos is to bind together the foremost thinkers in Australia of the gentler side of the Counter-Culture. The diversity of their opinions may be as bewildering to some as the political shades of the Counter-Culture, but close examination will show a certain uniformity. Their writings contain the seeds for a future, better society, one which some of us, young as we are, may not live to see fully realised. But it is there. It is as if the Counter-Culture had glimpsed a vision of Plato’s ‘ideal society laid up in Heaven’ and, having seen it, are working towards it for the good of man, and not so much for the advancement of their own particular creed or interest, whatever it may be.
In the misery, despair, and anguish surrounding us, the result of centuries of ignorance, selfishness, and insensitivity of man towards sentient life, we believe this to be a Cause wor
thy of support.
INTO THE EIGHTIES
I originally asked most of the contributors to this book to provide biographical notes but decided to use these five pieces, together with my ‘Turning Forty with the Decade’, because they create a retrospective from different age positions – Donald Horne in his fifties, Jack Hibberd and myself in our forties, Hal Colebatch, Vicki Viidikas and John Forbes in their thirties. The pieces also show the concerns of people as we go into the 1980s, and at the same time some of the different ways of being ‘Australian’ – from Hal Colebatch, who sees living in suburbia as being a good human solution, to Vicki Viidikas who finds fulfilment as an itinerant writer in India, sleeping on the floors of temples. Colebatch, Forbes and Viidikas expanded their notes in answer to specific questions from me.
Donald Horne
Born 1921
Senior lecturer in politics at University of New South Wales since 1975. Member of NSW Cultural Grants Advisory Council since 1976; research fellow, University of NSW, 1973–4; contributing editor to Newsweek International, 1973–6; member of advisory board on Australian Encyclopaedia since 1973; editor of the Bulletin, 1967–72.
Educated Muswellbrook District Rural School, Maitland; Parramatta and Canterbury High Schools; Sydney University; Canberra University College. Editor of Honi Soit, 1941; A.I.F., 1941–4; diplomatic cadet, 1944–5; reporter and feature-writer for Sydney Daily Telegraph, 1945–9; wrote for newspapers in London, 1950–54; editor of Weekend 1954–61; Everybody’s, 1961–2; the Observer, 1958–61; the Bulletin, 1961–2; co-editor of Quadrant, 1963–6. Executive, Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, 1962–6; creative director, Jackson Wain Advertising, 1963–6.
Shifts in political life:
These became something of a public matter, shown in some of the books I published in the seventies. It would be wrong, however, to see (as some people do) November 11 as my road to Damascus vision: I haven’t had one. The process was slower than that.
As I will record later, in the third of the Education of Young Donald series, I began shifting myself around in the early 1960s – at first mainly by reading. The nature of The Lucky Country shows this. It was perceived by many at the time as ‘radical’ – it was certainly more radical on new issues than the ALP at that time (it was written in summer of 1963–4). Writing books has been one of the main ways in which I have changed myself. I sit there and think – what could I possibly believe? Later, when it is done, I think – could I believe that? Too late. However, as well as writing – from the early 1960s, in bursts – I have done big sweeps of new reading, getting myself into some new perspective, or at least trying it out.
A lot of this changing has been inner-driven, not reactive, although done in a social context, of course. For example, the big year of change for me – a definite program of change, observed and recorded in a diary – was in 1972. But not because of the election, primarily, but because I used the occasion of my first eye operation – which, partly by accident, gave me two and a half months of recoveries, mishaps etc. – as a deliberate occasion for change.
However, there have also been reactive factors. These help account for my not being like a right-wing Andersonian: for example, I responded to the development of communist polycentrism in the sixties and to the collapse of the postwar boom in the early seventies. Also to the ‘protest’ period, mainly positively.
In the middle of the seventies – 1975 – I came out: I wrote Death of the Lucky Country and His Excellency’s Pleasure and addressed (how many?) eighty, I think, meetings. But Money Made Us (finished before Death of the Lucky Country was thought of, but published after it) shows, from internal evidence, changes that had already occurred in how I approached things – partly from recognition of end of the postwar boom and partly from greater (and still increasing) interest in the relations between power and culture. The Billy Hughes subject interested me in part because of the myth-making element in it – helping to bind us to the Digger decades of 1920 and 1930. The book on social change 1966–72 is concerned very much with the theatricals of cultural change and their relation to power; I am now writing on the subject directly in a book on Europe, tentatively thought of as The European Imagination, about the power of the monuments of Europe.
Vicki Viidikas
Born 1948
… you tell me you went to India and I figure that would’ve peeled a few skins back from your eyes. But you may have been surrounded by those dreadful middle-class Indians who smoke tailor-mades and long to be western? Anyway, not many westerners actually like India but are dismayed by the obvious disease, corruption, caste, etc. After sitting here [in Dalwood, NSW] for six months, recovering my frail health and working like a bug on the typewriter, I am halfway through a novel, a sort of rock ’n’ roll bible for the dharma bums, androgynous ones and myself (who never did like being a groupie and there are more groups than ever now to join).
Seeing the Lismore Council [click here] want to zone ‘alternative settlers’ into areas (it’s like being an enemy again – drunks in one area, gays in another, alternative farmers in another etc.) is very disturbing. And at Nimbin I was asked not to smoke – by total strangers to make it worse. It’s not alternative to take stimulants. Amusing? You know I left Australia because I thought I’d drown in cynicism and the bleeding hearts club if I didn’t. Who wants to be an icon? Plenty, but I don’t.
I really don’t know how I’ll keep living in India (no dole) but then I don’t want mirrors and vice and smack and definitions anymore. I love being in a country – India – where the spirit can breathe, where at least you flex your mind before binding it in definitions. I love the Australian bush but my dream of setting up an Indian village in New South Wales would never get off the ground. All those pesticides, crying cattle, building regulations; men who inspect weeds are finks; all those new alternative goody-goodies who want their children to be ‘individuals’ just don’t interest me. I’d rather bed down in a Hindu temple for a while and enjoy the traffic. If I’m going to go village I may as well go all the way.
In 1972 I wrote a poem ‘Keeping watch on the heart’ and mentioned ‘wanting a revolution in spirit’ – and I still want that. Writing this novel is helping, the biggest piece of self-discipline I’ve ever undertaken, with quotes from the Old Testament, the Talmud, Bhagavadgita, Lenny Bruce, etc. It’s a moral tract, a babe looking for the Holy Grail, herself, still …
I plan to be in India by the monsoon … Bombay is so expensive to stay in compared with almost everywhere in India; I don’t stay there for too long. I once did for over two months, in a terrible room full of cockroaches, but it was all I could afford as hotels run at something like $60 a week which is out of my reach … I don’t live anywhere in India but travel about, on the road, from one village to the next … Without a typewriter to carry around I’m much freer and then can stay in temples on the floor. I once had a house in Goa for six months but eventually the freak decadence got to me and I fled to Rajasthan which is my favourite part – the desert, with no counterpart here.
Actually I always wanted to go to Ayers Rock and do a trek with a camel but I’ve not had the companion, and travelling alone in Australia is very difficult when you’re a female. I get to screaming point because nobody wants to be your friend, but everybody wants to be your lover. So I still haven’t done Australia’s great interior though it’s a dream I still have. I’ve found Aboriginals in India and heard of the tribes who are Dravidians and fled across the Pan land bridge to Australia. The Australian bush for me has nothing white about it – I believe it’s all black man’s country – the very stones tell it, and the prehistoric animals breathe it. Many residents up here have reported hearing Aboriginal voices at night, and I’ve heard these on this land quite often, especially before dawn, and something sounding like a didgeridoo or Indian dampura (drone).
I’ve always loved the bush and wanted to live in it, but the isolation is immense and it drives me back to the city. Unfortunately I never
know anyone who wants to live in the country too, without necessarily becoming a purist. So living a simple life in India is the best thing for me – if I’m going to go backwards I may as well go all the way. Why live in a simulated simplicity here when it’s the normal way of life there? I think I have cultural ties with the Aboriginals and it always amuses me how out of place white men seem here. It’s obvious, the way three-quarters of the population huddle on a strip of coast, as far from nature as possible.
I can never be calm when I think what’s being done to the Aboriginals and how they’ve been forced to update. Why should they? It’s obvious their stone-age living is more balanced and peaceful than ours … There is such a POWER in the Australian bush, though I don’t think it’s violence, but the white man’s only reaction is one of violence and fear. The Aboriginals know this power, hence the dreamtime and their totems, acknowledges to a fierce God. The British cut their throats when they killed the first Aboriginal and cleared the first land for cattle. Having lived in India for so long, I know it’s possible to amalgamate two cultures without one falling to the other. Sometimes a family would show me their sick babies and ask me what was wrong. It was simply malnutrition, and a lack of green vegetables. The only way to make them realise that white rice wasn’t going to save their babies was to buy the stuff for them and throw away the bottle of vitamin mixture they’d bought as a cure.
… Anyway it’s very hard to talk about all this; if I could, I wouldn’t write a book at all. Aussie bush is one of the last natural wildernesses left in the world, but it’s obvious our (white) culture is destined to destroy it. If I met Gauguin I could go and live in the interior with him …
Balmain was the closest thing I ever had to home; that is, I stayed there on and off for seven years, and I’ve never lived more than one year in one place before, so it was neighbourhood to me, though a piranha tank with unnecessary teeth. I moved there for the rent: $10 a week. I’ve lived most of my life in grotty areas near the city, which suits me. I’ll live in a slum or in the country, but never in that infinite grey shit of suburbia which is a cosmic tranquilliser …
Days of Wine and Rage Page 41
