by Mark Dapin
Sydney Forum graduates organised a writers’ group, of which D was a member, but many of the dealings between people who had ‘Got It’ consisted of selling things to each other. The banal dreams they pursued were often the same: to abandon their profession – they were mostly professionals – and start a small business. Even D, who years previously had completed the Forum and abandoned her career in the public service, had been uncertain whether to be reborn as a sub-editor or the proprietor of a shop that sold cats and cat toys. D was defiantly in debt, partly as a result of paying for advanced Forum courses, partly as a result of paying a financial planner to advise her how to get out of debt, and she regularly bought things she did not want or need – such as expensive self-published books of photographs of swimming pools – to support the dreams of her friends.
D and I argued frenziedly about the Forum, even though she withdrew from it when we started living together. She continued to use the Forum’s ‘technologies’ (i.e. words). There was a whole vocabulary I did not understand, and which could not be explained to me, because the Forum is experiential – you have to do it to Get It.
The Forum taught that if somebody did not or could not do something, it was because, on some level, they did not want to. It combined the crass hectoring of a drill-sergeant sales trainer with a non-specific mysticism: you are in the place you are because you choose to be there. Millionaires choose to be rich, homeless people choose to be poor. I kept asking why so many black people chose to live in Africa and starve, but I was told it is impossible to understand why another person does anything. Their actions cannot be analysed, their reactions cannot be anticipated. You must choose to do what is best for yourself, and other people must make their choices in parallel. Your choice – whether it be to love them or to rob them, to reward them or to rape them – exists outside their choices. In fact, you make your own universe, and everyone else makes theirs.
I was never clear if Forum graduates believed other people were real in the same way that they were, and it can be lonely to live with somebody who is not convinced you exist. It must have been as lonely for D to live with an enemy. I wanted to prove myself right, to make me worthwhile, but it would also prove her wrong, and make her worthless.
D thought that to do something well, you had to commit yourself to it, to believe in it. I did not believe in anything – I had lost my every moral, cultural and political bearing – but I thought I could do anything better than her ‘transformed’ friends, because I was real. By real, I meant I was really who I said I was when I had met her, and not a liar. I also meant I was a real writer. For the first time since I was at school, I had started to think of myself as talented.
I was deputy editor of a soon-dead travel magazine, Away, and a sub-editor on the Sydney Weekly, which was, in 1994, a lively and credible free newspaper. I freelanced as a writer and a sub, for the Sydney Review, Flight Deck, Ita and Australian Women’s Forum – all of which have since closed down. I also wrote a little for The Sydney Morning Herald, without causing that paper to go bankrupt.
Most of the magazine work in Australia is at ACP. When David Smiedt became chief sub-editor at Cleo, he hired me to help out on the Bachelor-of-the-Year special issue, ringing up eligible, single men, asking them their star signs. Once I was in the building, and learned the computer system, it was easy to move between magazines.
D argued that people who believed in a product were the best at the job, so everyone had to be enthusiastic about their work and their bosses, no matter how stupid their work or their bosses might be. It was better somehow to ‘believe’ in real estate or financial planning, or pornography, because only if you were properly enthused could you become the finest in your field. I thought that by believing in something worthless, or parasitic, or damaging, you were doing harm to yourself – and since I considered almost everything to be worthless, parasitic or damaging, it was best not to take your job seriously.
I thought I could be better at any kind of writing than any deluded, middle-class share trader with secret dreams of poetry, no matter how often he spoke his affirmations, so I set out – with typically idiotic obsessiveness – to work for every magazine at ACP, and that would show D. . . something.
I am useless at most things – I can’t change a fuse, skip a rope, or catch a ball – but I can look at a text and break it down to its components parts, strip it like other people can strip their motorbikes, and use the parts to build something else. I can see how writing works. When I was twelve years old, I read through Robert E Howard’s Conan novels. I made a list of the most exotic, most frequently recurring vocabulary, broke down the structures into scenes, and noted what kind of scenes the books seemed to have in common, and created my own sword-and-sorcery story from the severed limbs of Howard’s barbarians. I knew I could mimic any magazine’s style.
In 1993, I took shifts at the Australian Women’s Weekly, She and Woman’s Day, but the first place to offer me a full-time subbing job was The Picture.
The Picture shared with People the ‘Sexy Seventh Floor’ of Kerry Packer’s relentlessly shabby Park Street headquarters. The P-mag boys still felt like outsiders, exploited and reviled. When the Park Street foyer was modernised, Richard Walsh had put up posters advertising all ACP’s magazines, including People and The Picture. Mode’s gorgeously airbrushed fashion models hung beside Gert Bucket and her rolling hills of fat. Kerry Packer, who entertained business leaders and prime ministers in the building, demanded that the P-mags be taken down. As a compromise, they were tucked away by the elevators, where they could not be seen from the street. Even then, the company did not display the actual covers – only bills bearing the titles.
For some reason, the seventh-floor walls were upholstered like vinyl lounges, giving them a wipe-down look that suggested a peepshow booth. All day long the urinals hissed like hecklers, and there was a sour, textile smell about the air.
Chief sub Simon Butler-White showed me how to log in, which tray to pick up jobs from (the one marked ‘Subs’) and which to put them back into. I shook a photograph out of a job bag, glanced at the instructions, and spat 300 words of pun-loaded schoolboy humour. Butler-White told me it was funny but warned me not to be so hard on the Poms – they were Pommy champions now. When I had last read The Picture, in 1990, the Poms were second only to ETs in their alienness and bastardry.
I had some history to learn: The Picture regularly celebrated the annual parties held by outlaw motorcycle gangs, where club members and their guests drank Bundy, smoked grass, compared bikes, and ran wild amateur strip shows. The parties, which became known as ‘bikie beanos’, were a desperately regular source of free pictures for the P-mags, but notoriously difficult to write about, because they were all the same. Essentially, the story was bikers-ride-in-and-drink-beer, women-take-off-their-clothes, bikers-ride-back-where-they-came-from.
Butler-White wrote ‘The Mild Bunch’, a story about the North Queensland Motorcycle Show run by Renegades MCC. The Picture was always careful to point out that bikers were not barbarians, and their parties were just an excuse for a bunch of knockabout blokes to have a good time. In ‘The Mild Bunch’, Butler-White wrote that the Renegades show was ‘less disturbing than a primary school FETE!’ marred by ‘wimpy stuff like someone FARTING and saying ‘Excuse me’‘ and rumours that ‘there may have been SOME HOMOSEXUALS in attendance’.
The Picture suggested the bikies be reported to the Australian Bureau of Standards, and ran a picture of Blonks MC Darwin bikers showing their colours. The Blonks were given speech bubbles, like cartoon characters. One said to another, ‘Trevor – I’ll see you over by the crochet display’, Trevor replied, ‘OK ducks – I’ll just grab a Perrier!’ Above them was the graphic ‘Hell’s Pansies’.
On 11 October 1990, at 3.30 pm, two Renegades, on behalf of the Blonks, rode down from Queensland, walked into the ACP building past the security guards, entered then-editor Tony Murphy’s office and threatened to break his legs. The Blonks were
serious bikers – the club was later swallowed by the Hells Angels – and Murphy was forced to write a cheque for $2000 compensation, while a sub drafted an apology, which ran in the 21 November edition.
The Picture admitted that, as a magazine, it was ‘a DISGRACE’ with a ‘HALF-SMART DICKHEAD ATTITUDE’. It mentioned the Renegades’ visit, and their mood of ‘restrained aggression’. They ran the actual Renegades’ colours: a skull with a Mohawk biting a knife, and the caption ‘Our Renegades story was below the belt. We’re big enough to admit it.
They’re big enough to MAKE us.’ After the Renegades incident, The Picture worked more closely with the biker clubs, even faxing the copy for the bikers to check, to make sure nobody had accidentally implied they might be gay. Richard Walsh instructed the subs to drop their ‘sneering approach to humanity’. Suddenly, everybody – not only bikers – became a champion for The Picture. They adopted a wholehearted love for all God’s creatures, including ‘champion homo-thex-uals’, who had previously been the source of much sneering humour. Cane toads, too, were eventually rehabilitated in a 1992 story headlined ‘We Were Wrong – Cane Toads Are Top Blokes’, which broke the news that cane toads ‘could’ cure AIDs. They even tried to make a champion out of a junkie, with a competition in which heroin addicts could win a cure ‘in fabulous drug-free Thailand’. Staff writer Eric Inch took unemployed heroin addict Roy Hurst to a thirty-day drug dry-out at the Buddhist retreat of Wat Tham Krabok. While Hurst was detoxifying, eight monks were arrested for dealing heroin to patients – and Hurst himself disappeared for several days in Bangkok – but he came out clean, enabling The Picture to bill him as ‘Our Junkie – Cured’.
Now I understood the new direction, I rewrote my first story, with a softer, friendlier tone, and Butler-White immediately asked if I would like to work there full time. I said ‘no’, but I did two more stories before I left that shift, which was twice the number most subs completed in a day. In subsequent shifts, I got even faster, until I cleared out the tray. They gave me work for the next issue, then the one after that, then they asked me not to come in again because I had done everything there was to do.
By the 1990s, the barbershop weeklies had become too racy for most barbershops, and the barbershops themselves were retreating from the cities. Stylish young men had their hair cut by razor-thin girls with green nail varnish and red dreadlocks, in unisex hairdressers where they could listen to dance music, not the horseracing. The culture of Brylcream and Pirelli calendars and condoms under glass survived only in country towns. In Sydney and Melbourne, the boys sat with the girls in chrome-trimmed salons, the tables strewn with fashion magazines and street-press freesheets, and the business names always misspelled with ‘z’s, and adorned with redundant apostrophes.
These were the Boxall Years, in which The Picture editor Brad Boxall came to dominate the men’s market to a greater extent than Naylor ever had. Brad’s personality – or an element of it, a parody of it, or, Brad sometimes seemed to argue, the direct opposite of it – governed a whole (top) shelf of magazines, from the original broad-based ‘P’ titles to later, more esoteric publications such as Picture Premium, 100% Home Girls and the magnificent Me and My Boobs.
Brad has deliberately brisk manners, and affects a certain ruthlessness. He rightly thinks of himself as The Man Who Can Get The Job Done. He is short and broad, with a shaved head, and the combination of his round glasses and his thin grin makes him look a little sinister. With Brad as the boss, The Picture worked like a factory. There was none of the panic that infects other weeklies on deadline day (and most other days). Each product that travelled down the conveyor belt from subs-to-art-to-subs-to-art, was polished, designed, cut, corrected and improved, until it reached the end of the process and went off to the colour centre for separations. There were no women working on the subs desk, and it was a bit boring – especially compared to Woman’s Day, where there were no other male subs. I sat next to Geoff ‘Seddo’ Seddon, and talked about Performance Bikes, the magazine he was producing from his shed with designer Chris Andrew.
In the early 1990s, The Picture had uncovered – if not invented – a hidden suburban culture. As well as its imaginary world of ETs, freaks and monsters, it chronicled a real Australia of broken-down Kingswoods held together with Sellotape and string; Friday-night topless barmaids at the bloodhouse by the video store; beer bellies, beer fridges, Winnie Blues, cask wine and burnouts. It reflected the raucous, directionless lives of young men unrepresented in the media, feared and loathed by the middle classes, and it made them look inviting and exciting.
It was a publication for people who could not read. The stories were short, the headlines were hysterical, the photos were huge, and the captions were jokes. It was the magazine in the mechanics’ dunny, the stand-by at the smoko, under the mug in the corporation-workers’ tea room.
Although David Naylor was still the publisher of both P-mags, ACP encouraged similar titles to compete. The Picture and People were, therefore, biting at each other’s balls, but The Picture had started to show full-frontal nudity, while People girls were only topless. Classified ‘unrestricted’ – which meant it could be sold to any schoolboy – every issue of The Picture carried the promise of dozens of pubic mysteries revealed.
Like all editors, Brad was the subject of much speculation and gossip among the subs. Staffing was always a problem on The Picture. People who can write ribald humour tend not to be the same people who know where to place a comma, or how to spell Kyrgyzstan. Funny, accurate subs were more highly prized than a slab of cold VB and a tray of hot sausages. Brad joined the magazine as a sub in 1990, and proved to be grammatically accurate, ecclesiastically careful and naturally funny. He was one of the few people in Australia with experience in homegrown pornography. At Federal Publications, where he had been editor-in-chief, he had put together one-man magazines such as Golden Girls, Bra Busters, Big and Bouncy, the Queensland-only Paradise, and the awkward Playgirl for Men.
Nobody in the P-mags had ever been as serious, organised or ambitious as Brad, and in less than two years, he took over the magazine like Stalin took over the Bolshevik Party. The Picture had always been a cheerful, confused voyeur, the bloke staggering down the main street at midnight shouting, ‘Get Yer Tits Out!’ at traffic lights. Now it became a little more perverted, but in a startlingly childish way, at once brazen and coy. Brad’s first competition was ‘Post Us Your Pubes and Win $50’, a search for the women with Australia’s ‘BOSS MOSS’. Female readers were invited to clip off a tuft of pubic hair and slip it into an envelope. The competition stated, ‘Each sample must be accompanied by a letter describing yourself, the TOOLS used for the quim trim and exactly HOW you cropped your undergrowth for us.’ The Picture looked forward to the ‘first batch of snatch thatch’. When all the entries were in, Brad personally assembled them into a map of Tasmania.
The key to Brad’s The Picture was what he called ‘free-range tits’, or women photographed spontaneously undressing – at bikie beanos, or country race meetings, cricket matches or the Summernats street-car festival. They were women who wanted to strip – and therefore looked happy about it – and they were the kind of women the readers might bump into at the bloodhouse. They were attainable in a way the centrefold girls never were, a fantasy the reader could expect to be fulfilled if he had a bottle of Bundy and a winning smile. Most of all, they were cheap. There were no studio costs, no hair and make-up fees, no lighting and no modelling fees. If somebody gets naked in public, they are in the public domain. Anybody can photograph them and any publication can print those photographs.
Every month, The Picture’s sales rose. The staff felt as though they were geniuses, that they had touched a place in the Australian subconscious that nobody had found before. They pioneered a new genre of satirical, idiotic porn. Every week, women sent in clumsily framed photographs of themselves lying naked on the beach, or pouting on the lounge, or looking surprised in the shower, and offered their services as cover
girls. They were ordinary girlfriends, wives and mothers, hoping for a little extra cash. They had stretch marks and cellulite, sagging breasts, smudged eye make-up and lank hair, but somebody had told each of them they were beautiful.
Brad thought they were beautiful, too. He knew his readers spent most of their lives wondering what was going on in their neighbour’s wife’s underwear. He set out to show them, and began to run blurry two-page galleries of homely-looking hopefuls at the back of the magazine. He paid them $50 each, and they were christened ‘home girls’. In time, they became affectionately known as ‘homies’, and less affectionately as ‘swamp donkeys’.
There are Ten Immutable Rules of Magazine Publishing. Number Four is: A Successful Publication Provides A Service. TV Week offers program listings. The Australian Financial Review prints stock-market tables. Wheels reviews new cars. Bacon Busters details the best places to shoot pigs. The Picture’s service was home girls. The gallery of mundane glamour was repellently compelling. Everyone who picked up the magazine turned first to the home girls. Women, who made up twenty per cent of The Picture’s readership, compared their own bodies and saw ‘better’ breasts or ‘worse’ bums, but they also saw that every kind of woman was desired and desirable, which was not the message they had been receiving from women’s magazines, or had previously expected from men’s. Home Girls marked a kind of accidental democratisation of pornography. For male readers, Home Girls satisfied the fantasy of walking into the women’s changing rooms, and they eagerly searched the blank, doughy faces for a teller they recognised from the petrol station or the bank.
