Days of Wine and Rage

by Frank Moorhouse

  Hal Colebatch

  Born 1945

  Born Perth. Educated various places, of which I remember Leederville technical school with the greatest affection. B.A. (Hons); M.A.: B.Jurisprudence. Spectators on the Shore, poems, Edwards & Shaw, Sydney, 1975; In breaking waves, poems, Hawthorn Press, Melbourne, 1979; Coastal Knot and other poems, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1980; Admiral Harvey, a play, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1980; Souvenir, a novel, Artlook, 1980.

  During the seventies my long-standing political beliefs were confirmed and reinforced. I became more politically active. My central and essential political commitment is to individual freedom.

  I entered the decade with a lingering contempt for the suburbs and their inhabitants, state politics and such things, and ended it with a belief that they preserve what is probably the happiest and most fortunate society in the world.

  I stood unsuccessfully as the endorsed Liberal Party candidate for Perth in the 1977 state elections.

  The first part of the seventies was unsettled for me personally, the latter part happy and fulfilling. In the public sphere I welcome the growing disillusionment of public life, using the word disillusionment to mean the loss of illusions, especially illusions about utopian politics.

  Jack Hibberd

  Born 1940

  MBBS, University of Melbourne. Full-time freelance writer; member of Theatre Board of Australia Council, married to actress Evelyn Krape, two children from a former marriage. Author of twenty plays since 1967; also short stories, poetry and criticism. Most recent play: A Man of Many Parts; three others due soon: Smash Hit!, Odyssey of a Prostitute, Is Tonight the Night? Also imminent: integrated six-part television comedy, Tall Tales.

  Significant shifts in the seventies

  (1) Artistic: disentanglement from organisations to pursuit of individual, independent aims; from larrikin indigenous to personal cosmopolitanism.

  (2) Political: from mild right to unutopian, democratic left.

  (3) Personal: increased devotion to intimate, non-professional friendships; family-prone and uxorious.

  (4) Clothes: from bohemian and dandy to eclectic, shabby conservative.

  (5) Intellectual: more anthropology and philosophy; more attention to the classics and Irish and European modernists; decidedly less cinema.

  John Forbes

  Born 1950

  … As to the effect of this decade: being born in 1950 I’m sort of shackled to the spurious ten-year zeitgeist but really I’ve nothing to compare it to that would mean all that much to the average National Times-reading sociologist of culture … anyway here goes.

  In 1970 I was earning $36 a week and studying at Sydney University. Today I make $51.45 a week, having given up the idea of being an academic – though, having rejected this career in 1975, I’m much more aware of the value of money than I was then. In 1970 I thought that various things would happen, that, spectacularly, didn’t, but now I have a much better idea of why they should and a much improved estimation of their chances (ratshit). In 1975 I got more money than I had before or have since – $6000 through grants and scholarships. But, from the point of view of the advancement of Australian culture I don’t mourn Whitlam, because he had the mistaken idea that one’s culture was a function of the ability to appreciate it, a subtle, but debilitating error … In the first half of the seventies there was some terrific stuff written here and this didn’t fade away so much as change form. The second part brought back good music …

  Another good thing about the seventies was that a lot of things I value were put out on the street and lost their status as indices of privilege, which makes me feel better about being in favour of them. This was mainly due to ‘liberation’ the suburban version of ‘libertarianism’ that so spectacularly eclipsed its parent.

  The seventies – a narrow view

  In 1970 I was nineteen and in my second year at university. I liked university a lot and have more or less been there ever since. I went overseas on a literature board grant in 1975. I spent sixteen months in England, New York and Crete and really appreciated Sydney when I got back. Since then I’ve been ‘doing an M.A.’ i.e., not doing much at all – it should have been finished two years ago. During this period I lived on a scholarship, various odd jobs and the dole.

  All through the seventies I’ve been interested in writing poems and having them published. My first book, Tropical Skiing, came out in 1976 – it sold about 1000 copies and I’m proud of that. My second book, Stalin’s Holidays, comes out in June 1980. In ten years I’ve written about fifty good poems and I hope to improve on this in the eighties. A lot of good poets appeared in the seventies – John A. Scott, Alan Wearne, Laurie Duggan, Ken Bolton, Gig Ryan, Martin Johnston, Denis Gallagher, PiO – but given our affluence and lack of cultural norms (derived, albeit real, good taste) we could’ve done better. During the seventies there emerged a lot of better ways to be interesting – so fewer people became poets to achieve this status. Relieved of this minor social role, poetry now attracts less attention and less ready cash but, where it hasn’t become more boring, the quality of the work has improved.

  The political event of the seventies that annoyed me most was the invasion of East Timor – or rather our failure to do anything about it. This ongoing slaughter situation exposed the left as hypocrites and the right as, at best, gutless wonders. We could have stopped it; instead we let them butcher away to their hearts’ content.

  Another immediate political concern is Fraser’s unemployment policy. If the dole went up $30 tomorrow it would still be below the poverty line. This is unfair to the school-leavers and the retrenched and inconvenient for me. It could be worse – they could abolish the dole altogether (as ‘they’ are doing by inflation) but then, I would, along with the rest of the unemployed, forget about symbolic transactions.

  Socially, I didn’t exactly wing my way through the ME-decade (though who did? – had we all, it may have been the ‘I-decade’). But I’m reasonably happy about this; a world that matched my expectations would have been pretty boring. The sensibility trained to conform can only benefit when the culture shifts and one’s basic assumptions turn into the stuff of ratbaggery. Unlike Les Murray I can’t relax into Reaction – I can’t squat down, have a few drinks and wittily curse what refuses to be impressed by ‘my talents’. Today demands performance in areas I was taught to think would ‘take care of themselves’, sex for example. But better a puzzle than a cursus honorum and I hope the eighties won’t differ, except to be worse, in this respect.

  Turning Forty with the Decade

  (from National Times, 3.10.77)

  The playwright Ron Blair said to me recently that one of the illusions of ‘turning forty’ – especially when it coincided with the end of a decade – was the mistake of thinking that the whole society turned forty with you. That the society moved in step with you.

  The National Times asked a few writers about their approach to turning forty.

  I said I planned to cry a lot.

  In the old days, when what is called the counter-culture or alternative society was called the Push, some of us younger males, when we ever got a young woman away from the ‘older men’ of the tribe, would be forever asking the woman ‘how old’ such and such a man was they’d been with.

  ‘He’s thirty-eight,’ they’d say and we’d be appalled. Why didn’t these old guys pick on women their own age? And why weren’t they retired, or something?

  I recently had an argument with a younger person when sexual difficulties arose between us. ‘You’re the older person,’ was flung at me, ‘you should know about these things!’

  ‘No,’ I flung back, ‘you people are the liberated generation, you’re the ones who got it all together about sex, you should know!’

  The way I see it, my generation wrote about the problems, the younger generation wrote about the answers.

  Being forty means that when you were young in Sydney there was only one university and people of my age still
get in taxis and say ‘to the university’.

  In Sydney then there were only two pubs – the Newcastle and the Royal George – and one wine bar – Lorenzini’s – that our sort of people drank at. It was easier to find ‘our sort of people’.

  We had at least five crucial years of sexual life before the pill or reliable contraception and without the insights of the women’s movement, gay liberation, or transcendental meditation.

  So it was easier to find our sort of people but harder to know what to do when you did.

  In the year I published my first short story – 1957 – there were about 2300 stories published; by the end of the seventies there were about 500 stories being published.

  Well, I chose the wrong vocation but I won’t bore people by listing the mistakes I can now see that I’ve made.

  I realise that there seems no way, as I study the advertisements, that I can get into the army which was my second choice of career at high school. Nor can I do expressive dancing which was my third choice.

  I’m just as suicidal now as I was when I was fifteen. Only the possible method keeps changing, with a move away from drug death towards gunshot. But I’ve picked up so much medical information about suicide, especially botched suicide, that I have a horror of both drugs and gunshots for fear of doing it badly and surviving.

  I used to think until now that one should have absolute candour, have no private self/public self separation. That privacy claims, especially by writers, were pathological and also mystique-creating. I always felt that any human, especially a newspaper reporter, had the right to ask any other human any question and get a straight answer. How else were we going to cut through the crap and dissolve hypocrisy?

  Well that position seems now to be risky. I told everyone about myself but they didn’t tell me everything about themselves.

  As a writer you read literary criticism and find that around forty you become introspective when you come across a writer who is said to have ‘in later years lost contact with the springs of life’ and ‘later in life returned again and again to the theme of despair’.

  You begin life as a teenager with a literary idol like Ernest Hemingway and when you’re forty Hemingway is dismissed by the critics, finished. His style as a person is dismissed by the women’s movement as disgustingly macho.

  You find that you and your friends take a greater interest in survivors in history: how much they drank, how many marriages, how they lived and got their work done and whether they ended their days in asylums.

  You become interested in people who found Great Love late in life and who started second families. Or a first family late in life.

  You look up the 1977 Jubilee medal list for your father or mother’s name and find your own. Then you spend the day waiting reluctantly and regretfully for a telephone call from your republican friends telling you that you have to give it back.

  After years of feeling inadequately under-read, somehow about this time you begin to feel superfluously over-read with younger people.

  The way you calculate ‘middle age’ mathematically changes.

  You say, ‘This will be the last and final year I buy a pair of jeans.’

  You find yourself suppressing the words ‘But we tried that in 19–’ when younger people on the committee come up with bright ideas.

  You receive letters from younger writers asking you whether they should go on writing, is it worth it, and you realise that there is no one to whom you could write with the same questions.

  When you sort the first twenty years of your letters and publications for the National Library archives because they’ve written to you, you find a letter from Cyril Pearl, then editor of a magazine AM, written to you when you were fifteen saying, ‘Dear Master Moorhouse – Yes, you obviously have talent as a short-story writer …’ but then advising you to finish your schooling before coming to the city to ‘be a writer’.

  And you find yourself, a lifelong agnostic, thinking, Yes, there must be something to religion, to the life of the spirit, and you spend some time reading, pondering this and arrive at the same conclusion you reached at fourteen.

  You are still amazed at the inexhaustibility of sexual pleasure and its seemingly infinite subtlety of variation even within relationships of long standing. Sexual embarrassment doesn’t worry you any more.

  And at last Proust takes on his full meaning.

  In bundling up the letters for the library you come across a sentence written in 1957 in a journal (the only year I kept a journal) – ‘I went to the Athenian, had a plate of spaghetti and rough red with Dick, 2/6’.

  Twenty years later almost to the day I went to the New Hellas (which is the Athenian moved around the corner) and had a meal with Dick.

  It wasn’t spaghetti and it cost a lot more than 2/6 and the red wasn’t rough. But the same waiter from twenty years ago served the same two people a Greek meal.

  You have to be about forty before you are able to have that happen.

  I suppose that’s something.

  Untitled

  After the lost generation we find the single

  beatnik emerging, it’s like Castaways in Space

  with a drug supply at the corner store

  and we’re getting fresh on adrenalin milk-shakes

  when the beatnik declines as a focus for the novel

  and the word ‘hippie’ surfaces in the dictionary.

  Inside a novel is a growing boy

  buried in the print and waiting to get out,

  in a diary a man pretending to look

  carefully at his youth, on the painting

  of the whole sky the fingerprints

  of an unwilled and crooked politics.

  I look back into myself ‘as a visitor

  looks at his room and the bowls of flowers

  obviously not gathered from the garden

  he can see carelessly framed in a window;

  the cupboards are lined with yellowed paper

  and in a trunk he finds a suit

  that fashion forgot, and a broken toy

  belonging to a past he never knew.’

  I sure could see a lot of gum trees

  from our front veranda –

  John Tranter

  (an extract from Dazed in the Ladies Lounge, 1979)

  Events of a Decade

  A Personal Chronology

  1970

  For the first time an Aboriginal dance company tours Australia professionally.

  A serious weekly, the Review, is started by Gordon Barton in Melbourne.

  Sydney’s Nimrod Theatre opens.

  Earth Day marks the beginning of a concern with environmental issues.

  1971

  Vitamin sales begin to climb – up 66 per cent.

  National Times established.

  Australian Council for the Arts under H. C. Coombs and Jean Battersby has funding doubled by Prime Minister John Gorton.

  Bra-less fashion follows bra-burning demonstration in the United States.

  Cassette recordings become commercially available.

  ABC children’s programme The Argonauts goes into decline.

  Gordon Barton buys oldest Australian publisher, Angus & Robertson.

  Attendance figures (per head of population) at the Australian Opera’s first fourteen-week season exceeds figures from overseas.

  William McMahon replaces John Gorton as prime minister.

  Cinema attendances begin to rise for the first time since the fifties when they began to fall following the introduction of television and other factors.

  Canned beer takes off in preference to bottled beer.

  Australian pianist Roger Woodward acclaimed internationally.

  End of Rest and Recreation leave (R & R) for US servicemen in Australia as Vietnam war winds down.

  Australian actor Chips Rafferty dies.

  Tenth anniversary of the introduction of the contraceptive pill to Australia.

  Federal government establishes t
he Australian Film Commission to encourage an Australian film industry.

  Jeans designed exclusively for women come onto the market.

  Acupuncture treatment introduced to Australia from China.

  Concern expressed over growing youth unemployment.

  Photographs of Gough Whitlam show that he is no longer using hair oil and is, perhaps, blow-drying his hair.

  1972

  McDonald’s burgers come to Australia and open first outlet at the Sydney suburb of Yagoona (Kentucky Fried Chicken arrived in 1968).

  According to many factors considered, such as income, the London Economist survey lists Australia as fourth-best place to live after the United States, Canada, and Sweden.

  Australian Ballet Company runs two seasons for the first time – no city anywhere in the world matches attendance figures (per head of population) at ballet performances in Australian cities.

  Twenty new Australian plays scheduled for production in one year.

  Telecom (then PMG) introduce the wallfone.

  The word ‘greenies’ is used to describe conservationists. The Builders Laborers Union in New South Wales, under the leadership of Jack Mundey and Joe Owens, introduces bans on building work which threatens the national heritage or resident’s rights – a first in industrial action. But they were not yet known as ‘green bans’.

  The ALP issue photographs of female models wearing ‘It’s Time’ tee-shirts and the ‘It’s Time’ theme begins.

  PMU market the first chunky soups.

  Women journalists get equal rights with men at the Journalists Club in Sydney after a sit-in at the club.

  Wynn’s introduce the wine cask – a plastic bag of wine in a cardboard box with a tap.