THE REBELLION OF WORDS

The beginning of the seventies coincided with my decision to become a full-time fiction writer and with my turning thirty.

My Futility and Other Animals had been published in 1969 by Gareth Powell Associates and had been well reviewed but remained undistributed to bookshops because Gareth had gone out of business. The books remained in packing cases although some were remaindered onto the market in the mid-seventies. I never received a royalty cheque.

I was living on accumulated holiday pay and sick pay from the ABC, where I had been a reporter until 1969. I had rented a room in which to work at Kings Cross when I lived with Gillian Burnett at the Cross. Gillian was a libertarian and had lived during her teens with Darcy Waters, a leading Sydney libertarian.

But now, separated from Gillian and from the ABC, I found myself with my books, a rented television, an electric coffee percolator, my typewriter – everything I owned – in a room, sharing a bathroom, and sleeping on a single divan.

I had used the good reviews for Futility and Other Animals and my stories published in magazines to apply for a fellowship from the Commonwealth Literary Fund. I did not get it. Elizabeth Riddell wrote about the annual awards and noted, ‘Among the unsuccessful applicants is the Sydney writer Frank Moorhouse.’ From being an unemployed journalist with his first book a phantom, read only by six reviewers in Australia, I had become a ‘Sydney writer’.

Then I received a special purposes grant of $1500 – a consolation prize – from the minister running the fund, Peter Howson. With this money, and by selling some stories, teaching adult education classes, and the unexpected promise of a regular cheque from the Bulletin for a weekly piece, I got through the next two years and wrote The Americans, Baby.

My friends were from among the libertarians and ‘the Push’, described by historian Geoffrey Serle as a ‘weird small group … inspired by the doctrines derived from Anderson, Marx, Sorel, Freud and Reich, in a philosophic freethought tradition, a remarkably original provincial cult’. We met and drank most nights at the Newcastle Hotel, the Royal George, later at the Vanity Fair and the United States and then the Criterion. On some nights we would eat together and perhaps go to someone’s house for what was called ‘a party’. We spent the time talking – or what Jim Baker, a libertarian philosophy lecturer, called critical drinking. Sometimes later in the night we danced rock ’n’ roll, although there was some opposition to dancing because the music interfered with conversation. Now and then there would be a poker school, which I didn’t join, and on Saturday the horse races, which again I didn’t like.

The libertarians published a bulletin called the Broadsheet and sometimes organised lectures at the University of Sydney or downtown. They held an annual conference at Minto over two days and two nights. On the Friday night of the conference there would sometimes be readings of short stories or poems followed by a party. On the Saturday morning and afternoon there would be papers on libertarian concerns. In the late afternoon it was customary to go down to the river and swim nude. On the Saturday night a party. On Sunday morning some would swim and then late morning a light paper would be given, usually comic. In the afternoon, maybe another paper and then a ritualistic visit to a riding school where most of the women and a few of the men would go riding.

There were a few steady couples among the libertarians but it was considered that everyone was sexually free. There was a lot of casual sex, but I never found myself in group sex and I saw no public sex.

The Story of an Underground Paper

In 1970 Wendy Bacon, Val Hodgson and Alan Rees were elected editors of the University of New South Wales student newspaper Tharunka. They were loosely allied in the libertarian spirit.

In the making of Tharunka they had in mind a general Sydney intellectual newspaper which would still service student needs. They invited downtown writers like myself from the libertarian group to contribute.

For me this was to be the most significant activity of the decade. It was to involve us all in about forty prosecutions for obscenity and to put Wendy Bacon in jail for a week. It was my first experience of illegal or ‘underground’ journalism and it was the first time in our lives that we had written for, or had available, an uncensored public outlet for our writing. During its forty-odd issues, Tharunka was the most creatively edited and laid-out newspaper in Australia, and the only uncensored newspaper that Australians had seen. In 1972 I went to England and the USA and met with editors of other underground newspapers; looking at their papers, I found ours to be superior in content – literary, theoretical, and reporting.

The western phenomenon of underground newspapers – the expression of a rebellion against censorship, especially sexual censorship – was made possible by the availability of offset printing. With offset printing facilities, a professional-looking newspaper can be produced by untrained people using equipment commonly found in offices. Traditionally, old-style printers acted as censors or feared prosecution.

As one American underground publisher said at the time, ‘You discovered that all it takes is a carbon-ribbon typewriter, a jar of rubber cement, and $200 hustled from friends. The first issue comes out, you stand on a street corner and hawk it, gathering money for the next issue, rapping to people, finding out what’s happening.’

The old-style literary magazines, or little magazines, were theoretical, literary and academic. They used the hot-metal printing method and met with censorship from printers which they had accepted for years. In Australia they had circulations between 1000 and 3000. Tharunka, which moved downtown to become Thorunka and then Thor, had a circulation of 10 000. In the USA, where the little magazines had an estimated circulation in total of about 12 000, the underground newspaper had a combined circulation of between two and four million.

I thought and argued at the time that the underground newspapers would be a permanent part of media communication. Although they died away, they were replaced by many new little magazines edited without censorship and they set new, wider boundaries for the commercial press. At the end of the seventies there are about a hundred little magazines in Australia – twice as many as in the sixties.

Wendy Bacon emerged from the Thor crowd of about thirty. She was twenty-four years old, a student of sociology; she had a charismatic appeal to those who shared her views and was disarming to those who opposed her. Although it was part of the philosophy at the time to avoid leadership roles and hierarchical organisation, she was a central organising talent. Faced by intimidation from police and the government, she was remarkably tenacious and unflinching.

Many people supported Thor, either through editorial work, selling or legal aid. Jenny Coopes did much wonderful illustration and cartooning. Liz Fell, then a tutor in sociology at the University of New South Wales, was important. Despite a more chaotic life than even myself, she had a capacity for both theorising and action.

The editorial work moved from house to house and from printer to printer to avoid seizure by police. When the non-hierarchical organisation failed, we fell back on a shadow hierarchy. But the experience convinced me that creative publications can be produced without the usual pyramid structure (which also produces great publications).

I remember that we examined our motives and theoretical position fairly constantly while editing the publication. I remember spending hours one afternoon, with Roelof Smilde, Darcy Waters, Wendy and a couple of others, cross-examining each other as to our motives and reasoning. It was partly preparation for the court cases we were fighting but also for our own clarification. We taped the afternoon’s discussion but my flat was broken into shortly afterwards and the tapes stolen.

We did feel middle-class guilt about some of the material we published, but to have obeyed the guilt would have been, again, to act as agents of a sexually fearful society. So we sadly recognised it for what it was and tried to dismiss it.

Wendy and some of the others and myself were to go in different directions later in the decade and to lose the comradeship and companionship we had.

It was Peter Coleman who told the NSW parliament in 1972 what we were doing. He said that traditional pornography was produced by ‘money-grubbing, sly little men …’ but

 

this student pornographic movement is inspired by a complete loathing of the society we live in and enjoy, and seeks to destroy it and set up a totalitarian society … they don’t care about making money. In particular they seek to destroy all forms of our treasured society, which includes family, church, school and other institutions. It is porno-politics.

 

Coleman was more or less right except that those around Thor, Thorunka, Tharunka, were not totalitarian. Most of those fighting in this linguistic skirmish were anarchist – some theoretical, some impulsive. They called themselves libertarian, libertarian socialist, dropouts or, as was the fashion, they resisted being labelled.

In my book Conference-ville the narrator is talking with a young radical:

 

‘And what do you represent?’ I asked. ‘What group?’

‘You mean, what label can you pin on me?’

I realised that I still had on my identity tag from the conference.

‘Yes.’

‘You just want to pigeonhole me.’

‘I’m not asking you to describe yourself inaccurately – surely you know where your ideas come from.’

‘I’m an anarchist.’

That was an easy way out. I’d used it myself. I didn’t bother to pursue him.

 

Some members of the Communist Party of Australia tried to associate sympathetically with the paper (but with discomfort), maybe because they saw us as enemies of capitalism, maybe they believed Coleman, or maybe they were trying to be trendy. It was the beginning of a new image for the CPA. It was trying to be independent of eastern European models, and to find a relationship with the new issues and with the young.

We jokingly adapted a slogan from Marshall McLuhan, via Emlyn Williams, a British playwright, to describe the drive behind the newspapers. We said, ‘Obscenity is linguistic violence on the frontier of reality.’

There were other publications about in the early seventies with a similar impulse behind them – High Times, Troll, Super Plague, Mejane, Eyeball. It was an impulse towards some sort of vaguely understood ‘liberated society’.

Australia, partly in the drag-stream of other English-speaking nations and partly by its own initiative, was moving through a bad-tempered renegotiation of the relationships between men and women, adults and children, and a rethinking of the sexual and emotional relationships between people of the same sex. In the phrase of the times, ‘the roles were being redefined’.

With this renegotiation there was an opening up of public communication. The freeing of what can be said through the media as well as what can be said conversationally was at the heart of the change. It reached a marvellous freedom in the mid-seventies although now some of that freedom has been lost.

There was also a connection between this renegotiation and the status of the ‘breeding family’ as ideas of zero population growth circulated and Australia shifted its thinking on population growth.

The editors of Thor did not at first think they were engaged in porno-politics. They did not even plan a prolonged or graded attack on the censorship laws. They belonged to a generation that inherited an historical movement towards free communication.

A lecturer in philosophy at the University of New South Wales one day suggested to Wendy that Tharunka publish ‘Eskimo Nell’, a bawdy ballad. Wendy said that they only hazily understood the limits of the censorship laws. They were not specifically out to liberalise censorship but did see it as part of a restrictive psychological system that went through from the laws to the schools to the media, and to conversation.

The publication of ‘Eskimo Nell’ made censorship the issue. The editors were told by the director of student publications not to publish it. The printers, Rotary Offset, refused to print it. The director of student publications resigned and the editors found new printers. They printed 17 000 copies and soon found a strong downtown demand.

It is difficult to convey the sense of excited surprise we had to see a ballad like this, which we had only heard recited or seen in handwritten or typed form, appear in print in a newspaper.

A mass meeting of 2000 students voted support for the editors. Ian Channel, a former lecturer who was employed for a time as ‘Campus Wizard’, attacked the women editors Wendy and Val, also joined by Liz Fell, and said they were motivated by ‘penis envy’.

We continued to produce uncensored issues of the paper: four-letter words, erotica, serialised banned books and obscene cartoons appeared. The battle went beyond the university authorities to the state. Politicians complained. At first they simply grumbled over four-letter words in a student newspaper, but then they came to see it as a threat to the whole society and its institutions, a totalitarian plot. They used legal harassment to drive it out of existence.

We planned a literary supplement to publish work from imaginative writers who’d had trouble with the censors in Australia. Nearly all writers contacted sent in work: Thomas Keneally, Michael Dransfield, Thomas Shapcott, J. Riviere Morris, Michael Wilding, A. D. Hope, Frank Hardy, Alexander Buzo, Robert Adamson and Peter Mathers.

I wrote the introduction:

 

This is not a supplement of ‘name’ writers of proven merit, intended to meet the Establishment on their terms – that erotic or obscene writing is acceptable, sometimes, if the English is correct and a professor of English testified to the literary value … the censoring of obscene and erotic material is political … politicians correctly sense that under the breaking of taboos lies a tangle of attitudes and life-styles that want to break from institutions, social procedures and cultural sets …

 

It was a big jump in our thinking. It had moved from taunting the University to defining a political rebellion.

Following issues contained an erotic Auden poem, the banned Zap comix, and a poem titled ‘Cunt is a Christian Word’ (about what she saw as the crippling nature of virginity) with the catchline ‘I have been fucked by God’s steel prick’ (a reference to the vision of Saint Theresa). The summonses began to pour in.

Pressure from within the University, together with a feeling that it was perhaps a misuse of a student newspaper (in the sense that student societies and others wanted space for routine news), caused the editors to resign and to take their unpaid, informal staff with them downtown to produce Thorunka, financed by sales and by supporters.

‘Thorunka’, after a while, seemed too close to the name of the student publication and it became ‘Thor’. The new paper reported on civil liberties, the women’s movement, Vietnam, anti-conscription, and contained literary material. It sold at twenty cents with ten cents going to the seller. Between five and ten thousand copies were sold, depending upon the energy and gameness of the sellers and the amount of harassment experienced.

I don’t think we claimed to be always fully aware of what we were doing or to be always precisely honest in our public statements. Behaviour is propelled by mixed motives and the dominant motive can change with the mood and in reaction to events. When we found ourselves in the middle of a rebellion against the law we tried to sit down and analyse our motives.

A desired end

Some of us saw it as putting into practice something we desired to be a characteristic of a good society, but which was a good thing to do in itself. We were producing the sort of publication we wanted to write for and we wanted to read. It was ‘becoming free by acting free’, as Libertarian psychologist John Maze would say. We tried as far as humanly possible to ignore restrictive laws and the restrictions within ourselves. It was a shift from advocating freedom of communication to freely communicating.

The editorial intention was to publish what we would have published had there been no censorship or taboos. This contained a deception. The censorship laws created material which was forbidden and which became worth publishing because it was forbidden. People wrote things they might not have otherwise written because of the laws. So we were confused here. The pool of unfree material created by censorship gained an unnatural potency and a political sensitivity which in a free society it may not have had.

Freaking out the authorities

This was one of our expressions. And it covered the material that was printed partly because it would stab at conventional sensitivities. This material might not have gained editorial inclusion purely under the first category. Some material was selected because it was outrageous.

As an anarchist action

Val Hodgson, who was the youngest editor, said at a Libertarian conference:

 

our efforts have been misconstrued by the general public and more so by the left-wing liberals to be a challenge against the censorship laws, and on a broader level, against outmoded puritanical virtues. They see us in the role that they themselves would play … we see Thorunka as a means of direct action … it is a challenge to the authority of all laws.

 

This motive played an occasional part in some of our minds some of the time.

Unmasking, demystifying, de-authorising

These three words were used a lot. After a while we saw that our behaviour was illustrating the official definitions of freedom of communication, how limited these were. For the first time, we were getting a clear picture of the limits of the society. The news media, with their low tolerance for sexual candour, showed the same limitations.

Satire, obscenity and taboo-breaking also weakened the potency of taboos, we theorised, by showing them to be, like all mysticism, empty of an ‘unspeakable danger’. It showed that many of our taboos were symbolic imprisonment of the personality and the mind, a symbolic linguistic submission to authorities.

As Hugh Duncan has put it, obscenity can be used to ‘reduce the mystery of rank’. By putting out a poster saying that the Chief Secretary ‘munches muffs’ we restored him to human proportion instead of permitting him to behave as if he had supernatural authorisation to imprison people, to stop people saying certain things to each other. I had to have the poster explained to me: I did not know that ‘munches muffs’ meant cunnilingus.

Learning through conflict

Producing the newspapers placed us in an interplay of events which taught us about reality and our society. You meet the enemy on the doorstep instead of in the textbook. Sometimes the truths are about ourselves. About our own tensions, ambivalences, and our compulsions.

Wendy Bacon said, ‘We don’t know what they’ll do, so let’s do it and see what they’ll do.’

Avant-garde function

This, again, is seen more as a function by others than it was seen by us at the time. Morse Peckham, in his biological theories of art, argues that avantgarde material is rehearsal. It trains us to handle the unexpected, improves adaptability, our ability to survive. He says:

 

There must be … some human activity which serves to break … orientation … to prepare the individual to observe what his orientation tells him is irrelevant but what may very well be highly relevant … art is a reinforcement of the capacity to endure disorientation so that a real and significant problem may emerge.

 

No one argued that way around Thor. We would have felt uncomfortable about arguing that what we were doing was ‘socially beneficial’. That sounded like do-gooding. It had to be justified as being good for those engaged in it and for those who wanted to read it.

Sexual pleasure

Although the matter was never discussed formally there was an acceptance that pornography or erotica belonged in the paper. This was sexually stimulating material as distinct from obscene material – that which simply broke taboos. Apart from being aware of the absence of psychological or commonsense evidence of the ‘harm’ of this, we probably thought that it was positively beneficial. Erotic material could awaken the erotic imagination because it operated outside the prescribed sexual behaviour. It was probably felt to be liberating because it aided sexual and self-exploration and gave pleasure.

There was discussion about whether erotica would have a place in a free society: whether it was a reflection of our sexual hang-ups or whether it was a reflection of eternal human fantasy. But for most of us it was sexual fun and, whether only for now, we wanted it in our publication.

The paper was sold at the universities in New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria, around Sydney hotels, especially those used by journalists, students, nurses, and the camp crowd, by bookshops who took the risk, by personal contact and a few subscriptions, at events such as demonstrations and occasionally at beaches.

The paper was eventually stopped by the exhaustion of the staff. At the time we had forty-one summonses to answer. When we stopped the government withdrew most of the prosecutions.

From then until the end of the seventies there was virtually no censorship of the printed word in Australia, except, not surprisingly, in Queensland and Western Australia.

The following is a report I wrote of a court case, showing the position Wendy Bacon took and the attitude of the authorities in the first formal confrontation. Her stand put Wendy in jail for a week.

Wendy Bacon v. The Commonwealth

(adapted, from the Bulletin, 13.2.71)

The first of the forty-one obscenity and indecency charges against staff of the newspapers Tharunka and Thorunka, heard in Darlinghurst Quarter Sessions, ended in a one-all draw but with Wendy Bacon in prison.

The all-male jury found Wendy Bacon, twenty-four, post-graduate student in sociology at the University of New South Wales, guilty of having exhibited an obscene publication but not guilty on a charge of having distributed an obscene publication.

However, she is spending a week in prison for refusing to supply the court with details of her personal background.

The summonses have been issued over the last few months to five people so far who face a maximum of $10 000 in fines.

The courts face a heavy demand on rooms, staff, jurors and judges. Those involved in the cases have indicated that they intend to have each case heard separately. They will offer a range of responses to the charge – from non-participation to full legal defence.

The case most likely to stir public interest – certainly some amusement – is the prosecution of the student newspaper Tharunka for publishing the bawdy, traditional ballad ‘Eskimo Nell’ – forty-nine verses of it. Those charged plan a full legal defence of ‘Eskimo Nell’ including witnesses to literary merit.

Miss Bacon in her case took a position of minimal participation. Appearing in court in jeans, she refused to plead either guilty or not guilty, she was not represented, did not call witnesses, did not present an orthodox legal defence, and refused details of her ‘antecedents’.

‘I appear because there are penalties which force me to,’ she told the court.

‘I am fundamentally opposed to this court system and for that reason I did not enter a plea.’

She said that to enter a plea would be an admission that she could be guilty of such a thing as ‘obscenity’.

‘To be found guilty of obscenity is to have committed no crime,’ she said.

The crown prosecutor, Mr V. R. Wallace, told the court that Miss Bacon had appeared in the vestibule of Central Court in Sydney on 17 August 1970, dressed in a representation of a nun’s habit bearing obscene words (‘I won’t read them – I have no taste for them,’ he said). They were the words, ‘I have been fucked by God’s steel prick.’

She had also distributed a pamphlet on which was printed an obscene poem.

In Miss Bacon’s statement to the court, she said the poem and the words on the nun’s habit were comments ‘on the sexual nature of virgins’ and about sexual repression.

Mr Wallace told the jury that a line had to be drawn between freedom and licence to behave in an unrestrained way which affronted society.

‘You are ordinary, decent citizens representing the community.’

In her statement Miss Bacon said her behaviour had been a way of protesting against the prosecution of the newspaper Tharunka, of which she had been editor. The staff of the newspaper had not planned a campaign against the censorship laws to reform them.

‘It was not necessary for us to go out of our way to freak out the government,’ she said. ‘What we were trying to do was to avoid being censors of ourselves.’

‘I appear here because I would not censor my own views.’

‘We want to publish pamplets and newspapers which represent our views and not those of the chief secretary.’

She said she had distributed the poem at Central Court to give people a chance to read the poem which was being prosecuted. The nun’s costume had been worn to highlight the special privilege and protection given to the christian religion.

The crown prosecutor objected a number of times to the direction of Miss Bacon’s argument as being ‘irrelevant rubbish’.

Miss Bacon told the jury that there was no such thing as ‘the ordinary person’ or the ‘average man’. She said the censorship laws were in confusion and involved differences of opinion. Outside the Establishment, especially among the young, there was a feeling that obscenity did not exist.

Judge Levine ruled that Miss Bacon could not quote Socrates’ dialogue with Euthyphro – ‘the comments of Socrates are not relevant to New South Wales Law,’ he said. [‘The Euthyphro’ is an investigation of the meaning of piety in which Socrates unsatisfactorily concludes that piety is that which pleases the gods.]

Miss Bacon said the policemen had asked for copies of the poem while she had been in the cells awaiting trial. They had read it and chuckled and exclaimed. They hadn’t found it obscene.

She said the jury had been set an impossible task.

Judge Levine said that the only test which could be applied was whether the material offended against the modesty of the average man.

‘She was putting herself on as a member of a religious order – the same words on the back of a postage stamp may not be obscene.’

He told the jury that they were not censors: ‘You do not by your verdict decide what people read or not read – a specific judgment on the matter before the court does not change the law.’ For the same reason the case was not a ‘political trial’ as claimed by Miss Bacon.

On the question of the existence of the average man Judge Levine instructed the jury that they were competent to judge for the average man: ‘You are twelve men selected at random to judge what the average view is. It is not an impossible task.’

The jury retired for four hours and delivered their verdict at 7.30 p.m. A crowd of about forty, mainly friends and supporters of Miss Bacon, heard the verdict silently.

Detective A. Cassimatis told the court that Miss Bacon had refused to supply details of her personal background.

Judge Levine asked, ‘Do you mean you can’t tell me if she’s married or single?’

He said that he was only sure that she had no prior convictions.

Judge Levine said that he did not intend to pass sentence without knowing anything about her. He remanded her in custody until the following Friday and ordered that a probation officer interview her in an attempt to find out something about her.

Supporters gathered outside the gates of the court – guarded by four policemen – and cheered as Miss Bacon was taken to prison in a police van.

A defence fund has been started to meet possible fines and court expenses of the forty-one charges.

 

Wendy was the first Australian citizen since 1948 to spend time in prison on a censorship charge. (In 1948 Robert Close’s book Love Me Sailor was prosecuted and Close spent a weekend in prison awaiting sentence.) Wendy wrote quite a lot about her eight days in Silverwater prison. One of her first accounts of her imprisonment was in Thor.

An Editor in Jail
Wendy Bacon

(adapted from Thor and Mejane, 1971)

I put on a nightdress with rosebuds on it and at 9 p.m. was locked in my cell.

A bed, a table, a toilet. No toilet paper. The words of the court began to repeat themselves in my head. The mosquitoes began to bite me. At about 3 a.m. a woman in the next cell freaked. She screamed for half an hour.

This was B. She was crying when I met her in the morning. She was in for possessing stolen property. She told me she tried to write to her parents asking for bail but she said the screw tore the letter up because ‘the spelling was bad’.

I felt shattered during the first two days; apparently most people do. I hated being treated like an object – at best, a child.

On the first day I had some visitors. As they left I touched one of them on the hand. The screw supervising the visit leapt at me: ‘You’ll have me shot if you do that.’

Before I had left Darlinghurst on the Thursday night of the trial, a police sergeant had told me, ‘I want you to keep to yourself out there … you’ll be meeting all sorts of people and don’t you go talking to them.’

But it is the contact with other prisoners that provides the psychological sustenance and which breaks the misery of the first days. The second prisoner I met asked me what I was in for.

‘Exhibiting an obscene publication,’ I told her.

‘That’s cool, baby. They can lock you up but they can’t change that,’ and pointed at her head.

One of the kids on a vagrancy charge said to me, ‘Let’s go upstairs and talk shit.’ They read an article in the Catholic Weekly on marijuana. On another night they ripped out the page and rolled a make-believe fag so that the word ‘marijuana’ from the Catholic Weekly headline was showing. They passed it around like a joint. Getting high in jail was talking shit.

On Saturday morning I was sent to the Superintendent’s office and she said to me, ‘The place is all right, it’s only the people.’

I wanted to answer, ‘The people are all right, it’s only the place.’

I learned a lot in my eight long days: I learned how to forge a cheque; how to get money off ‘a mug’ without fucking him; how to get onto some heroin.

Some academics and journalists regard Silverwater as a showplace. It’s a jail. You are locked in and there are bars on every window to let you know you can’t get out.

 

In an interview with the women’s movement newspaper Mejane, Wendy told of her relations with warders and with other prisoners.

 

The day begins at six o’clock. A couple of screws come round and the first thing they do is walk along the dormitory banging on the glass partitions with their keys and saying ‘Get up.’ You get up at six – I found myself getting up just so I could get a quick shower, and during that time you get up, get dressed and make your bed and then you really just sit on it, and the screws don’t come back till seven o’clock. At seven they have what they call a muster and everybody lines up; it’s just like school; they call your name and you say, ‘Yes miss.’ Then they go away again. You just sit and talk, or you could read during that time. At eight o’clock you go to breakfast; it seemed to me that meals were very quick and took about fifteen minutes, so at about quarter past eight you were back in the dormitory.

Mondays and Fridays you had to clean the dormitories: they make you steelwool every single scrap of the floor and also the walls, and then you polish the floors. I found this quite insane in a hygiene sort of way because at the same time as you are doing that you’re wearing shoes which are smelly and revolting and you feel as though you could get anything from them. But this sort of kept you busy for a couple of hours. Also at that time the prisoners that work – anybody that wants to can work: you can work in the laundry, in the kitchens and some people in the garden – go off. About thirty-five out of the sixty in our dormitory worked.

… the first night I was there I went down to bed at half past eight and you are allowed to go to the toilet before you go to bed. I was just walking along the corridor and suddenly this screw started screaming at me about why are you going into other people’s dormitories and if you ever do that again I’m going to put you in the pound. (The pound is a place where there are solitary cells and it’s where they take people when they’ve incurred the displeasure of the screws.)

Some of the prisoners are quite tough and they’re certainly not beyond having fights. One day while I was in there two girls had a fight. I didn’t see it but there was some blood on the floor so they must be quite tough. I didn’t feel threatened in any way in that direction, but one night, after a girl had what they call lagged on another girl – in fact had lied about it – and all the prisoners were quite furious about that (this was right against the prison ethic), they were talking in the dormitory about what they’d like to do to her and some of them were talking about how they’d knock her from one end of the room to the other. But I didn’t find any of them violently disposed; nobody directed any violence against me. I didn’t notice any of the wardresses being violent either; in fact they weren’t while I was there. It may not be physically violent, but just the way it flattens people and deprives them, that is a kind of violence in itself.

… some women that are in there assume a stronger role and a more assertive role than others. Also, although there was a certain amount of latent and obvious lesbianism going on, I wasn’t sure which ones were sort of aggressive lesbians and which ones weren’t. Perhaps if some of them are like that because there aren’t men around that would lead on to the point that some of them have been in all-women institutions all their lives.

One of the main activities was combing hair, and you can either have your hair combed or you can comb other people’s. There’s quite a lot of pressure on you to do this and I certainly didn’t mind mine being combed. I don’t think I’m a very good comber. I didn’t really enjoy it much but I did do it a couple of times. This is a way of expressing affection and having contact. There’s also an awful lot of sort of leaning on people and putting your arm around them and this sort of thing. Often it’s the only affection available.

There was allegedly one married couple in there who got married in a registry office and she was very butch and pulled the long pants that they wear – they wear these dreadful sort of long cotton pants – and she even pulled them down below her dress so she sort of looked like a male, and she was married to one of the women. Quite a lot of the young girls developed a sort of teenage crush on her. There were some people getting in and out of each other’s beds. A lot of these would be people who would only be lesbian in jail but there were also some who said that they were bisexual in and out of jail …

Other Protests

The fight against censorship was being carried on by student publications, by publishers and booksellers – in particular by Jim Thorburn of Pocket Bookshops and Penguin Books who were defending Portnoy’s Complaint – and by other magazines.

None of the daily newspapers took up the fight editorially.

As subsidiary activities, those around Thor published a handbook on sexual problems both medical and psychological, and The Little Red School Book, a manual of forbidden information for school children.

The Campaign for Action against Censorship began to picket cinemas showing censored films. Demonstrators handed out leaflets to ticket-buyers showing the number and length of cuts made to films.

Sandra Levy and I were shopping in Balmain one afternoon when two detectives said they wanted to search her car. I said that it was not legal for them to search the car – not knowing at the time whether it was or not and not having a clue what it was that they wanted to find. They then dragged me from the car and a fight between them and Sandra and I broke out. A police van was called and we were arrested and taken to Balmain police station.

In the following court cases it turned out that they had spotted copies of Thor and The Little Red School Book in the back of the car. They charged us with exhibiting an obscene publication, resisting arrest, assaulting police, malicious damage, insulting words. We cross-sued them for false arrest. After a number of court hearings we were convicted only of resisting arrest and fined $5 each.

As another action against censorship, the Film Censor’s office was broken into and the locks changed so that the staff could not get in when they came to work in the morning.

The protestors issued this news release:

 

Today the Sydney office of the Commonwealth Film Censor was symbolically closed down and put out of action. The office was locked to prevent the entry of censorship office employees, the telephones were cut, the mail diverted, and the electricity cut.

This was done by an informal group of people as a political protest at the interference by the State in the free communication of information and ideas.

It was intended as a symbolic act and political sabotage against all censorship.

The rational debate against censorship has continued for years with the State continuing to interfere with the citizen’s access to information and ideas and ignoring the philosophical and rational argument against censorship. The people involved in the protest do not in any way surrender the selection or suppression of films, books, magazines or any other communication to the State. This symbolic act of political retaliation and rebellion was motivated by frustration and a feeling of cultural injury.

 

Some of the pieces in this book, when originally published in the Bulletin, used the royal pronoun ‘we’. It was not to make the pieces sound like something from the New Yorker’s ‘Talk of the Town’ column. What happened was that I began a column in Thor called ‘Around the Laundromats’, in which I had discussions with a fictional character called Ward. Ward and I carried on discussion about topics of the day while doing our laundry in an inner-city suburb.

When Thor was suppressed by the weight of legal action brought against it, I moved the column to the Bulletin, then under the editorship of Trevor Kennedy. I had been writing pieces for the Bulletin before, under the line ‘Trend’, when Donald Horne was editor.

After a few pieces of ‘Around the Laundromats’, the Westinghouse company wrote to the Bulletin pointing out that ‘Laundromat’ was a registered business name and should not be used as a generic word.

The column, still with Ward, was changed to ‘From the Terrace’. However, after a few months Ward became exhausted as a conversationalist and I was left with the royal pronoun as a feature of the column.

The Inspector and the Prince: A Profile Of
Darcy Waters

(adapted, from the Bulletin, 14.2.71)

On the court lists at Sydney’s Central Court it was a commonplace offensive behaviour case; but around bohemia, or ‘the Push’ – or, more fashionably, the counter-culture – it was a contest of honour. It was an ideological drama. They’d arrested Darcy Waters.

The police inspector who’d brought the charge almost certainly didn’t know that the person he’d accused of spitting at his feet in a highly offensive manner was Darcy Waters. Darcy is a bohemian of the old style. Some call him a legend in his own time, a libertarian prince. Others say that the libertarian principality no longer exists except as a romantic recollection; but for others again, it exists still as a baffling and infuriating masonry.

Now forty-three years old [in 1971], Darcy, a boy from Casino, went to the University of Sydney just at the end of the second world war, but dropped out to become an informal student of, among others, Professor John Anderson. He moved with the Libertarian Society, an informal yet closely bonded anti-authoritarian group – amoral, essentially non-activist in politics, but a group that examined society with a relentlessly mocking detachment. Or, for political activists, with a lily-white gutlessness. The libertarians came to fascinate the Sydney afternoon papers and magazines because of their advocacy of ‘free love’.

The libertarians used to drink in downtown hotels and collected, as well as intellectual heavies, poets, journalists, and non-intellectual bohemia – the wider group becoming known as ‘the Push’.

Darcy remained an informal student or by now perhaps a ‘campus tutor’, at both the Universities of Sydney and of New South Wales. From time to time he quietly asserts himself in university matters with a libertarian perverseness which usually rankles both left and right. A few years back we remember he seconded us (as Push journalists) to help write the front page of Honi Soit, the student paper, on a freedom issue. Obscurely, the editorial had been allotted to Darcy to write and we put together the issue although we were both non-students. He has appeared on the staff lists of both Honi Soit and Tharunka.

Downtown, meanwhile, he led the libertarian life – non-careerist, anti-Establishment – getting an income from casual work on the waterside and from gambling. His nickname among his racing friends is ‘Horse’.

His role was as a charismatic presence and as personal mentor (to, among others, Wendy Bacon) – theorising to women in bed and informally over the years in hotels and at Push parties, with bluff remarks, puncturing humour, and principled qualification which, to impatient activists, seemed like quibbling or counter-suggestibility.

He rarely gives a paper at libertarian conferences or meetings – the last, an attack on the motor car, went for about five minutes. But he has helped shape every conference and every series of meetings. He rarely contributed articles to libertarian publications but has been associated with numerous non-conformist publications over the last twenty years – 21st Century, the Libertarian, the Sydney Line, the Broadsheet, and Thor. In fact, his main writing was a racing column for Nation in collaboration with libertarian philosophy lecturer Jim Baker and modelled on the Race Track by Audax Minor in the New Yorker, Darcy’s favourite magazine.

But to the court case. His opponent was Inspector Robert William Beath of Sub-district 3, thirty-six years in the police force. In attitude to authority and personal style, both were in perfect symmetry. Darcy wore jeans and a duffle-coat in court (his first duffle-coat – bought that week – although no longer high bohemian fashion it remains insignia); Inspector Beath, short back and sides, business suit, Springbok badge [indicating support for the then visiting South African football team].

Appearing for Darcy was hard-cases barrister Mr J. Staples [now Mr Justice Staples], just his sort of pigeon. As Darcy said to us, ‘Jimmy would have been offended if I hadn’t asked him to take the case.’

Magistrate Dunn, younger than both Darcy and Inspector Beath, ran a strict court, even creating space at the disused press bench of Court Five to accommodate us, the lone journalist. A place for everything and everything in its place.

Inspector Beath said he saw Darcy on 6 July 1971 at 9.50 p.m. in Oxford and Bourke Streets, Darlinghurst, cross against a ‘Don’t Walk’ sign, causing three vehicles to remain stationary to allow him to pass; he pushed aside a number of people, and again walked against a ‘Don’t Walk’ sign. When Beath had caught up with Darcy he said, ‘I belong to the police. You should have more sense than to walk against the lights.’ He alleged that Darcy replied ‘So what?’ and spat at his feet.

Darcy admitted walking against a traffic light (but without stopping traffic) and claimed that he said nothing to Inspector Beath and had not spat. At the station Inspector Beath had said he was charging Darcy with offensive behaviour. A senior police officer in the station had said to Inspector Beath, ‘You’re not easily offended, are you –’ and used Beath’s first name. Inspector Beath had replied, ‘I’m very easily offended, especially by long-haired bastards like this.’ He had then turned to Darcy and said, ‘I’ll make this stick. You’re just dirt.’

Under cross-examination by the police prosecutor, Sergeant Short, Darcy agreed that he was anti-Establishment and that he had no great love of the police force in general although he had no acquaintance with the police in particular until this case. But he didn’t agree that his demeanour in court was ‘nonchalant’.

A character witness for Darcy, John Maze, a senior lecturer in psychology, said he had known Darcy for most of twenty years. Darcy did not have an aggressive attitude to his fellow beings and typically remained calm and good humoured. He had never seen him react emotionally to provocation.

In his address Mr Staples argued that Darcy had been arrested ‘for not tipping his hat’ to the inspector. The arrest had been a ‘crazy line of action’ taken by the inspector who’d had a few drinks and a hard day at the anti-Springbok demonstrations on the same day.

Magistrate Dunn said that there were only two witnesses to the facts – the inspector and the defendant – and he found that the prosecution had not proved its case beyond reasonable doubt.

He therefore dismissed the case against Darcy Waters.

In the late afternoon light of Central Court, the bustle of legal business long finished, Robert William Beath, inspector of police, and Darcy Ian Waters, bohemian prince, left the precincts of the court without looking at each other, to go, as ever, in opposite directions.