LE GHETTO DE BALMAIN
The Ghetto Gathers
By the early seventies, friends had drifted into Balmain and people connected with the arts and the universities came to live there. Some of the people included Judy Morris, Serge Lazareff, John Gaden, Robert Klippell, Nathan Waks, Charles Coleman, Murray Khouri, Caroline Hebbron, David Williamson, Murray Bail, Peter Carey, Brian Kiernan, and probably a hundred others.
Frances Kelly from the National Times wrote about Australian writing for Le Monde and mentioned Le Ghetto de Balmain.
I picked this up for my column in the Bulletin and for a while wrote a ‘letter from the Ghetto’. I began to feel like the Vicar of Balmain as more new arrivals and visitors from other states and overseas called.
We had begun the Balmain Readings of Prose and Verse in the sixties and in their latter years they were attended by hundreds. Public readings, like those of Balmain and the Poets Union readings at the Royal Standard Hotel in Castlereagh Street, became quite a regular part of the Sydney scene in the seventies. Nancy Keesing, when chairperson of the Literature Board, once visited a reading, looked around and said, ‘What they’re spending on alcohol and drugs would publish a dozen books.’
We had the Balmain Pub Crawl around the twenty-five hotels (originally) of Balmain. We had annual events such as the New Year’s Eve party, the waifs’ and strays’ Christmas party (for those who chose not to have a family Christmas, or had no family), the Chairman Mao’s Boxing Day party. The hotels were filled with live music, folk, rock, and jazz. In 1979 the Sydney Buskers’ Association held its first conference in Balmain. Earlier in the seventies the annual Australian Jazz Convention was held there.
Many little magazines began from conversations and donations in Balmain. Tabloid Story was conceived there. For the Balmain economy, literary grants were the equivalent of a new factory opening.
As it became more visible as a community, Balmain became a target for jokes and satire.
A Subject of Derision
(adapted, from the Bulletin, 30.8.75)
We thought we should write and let you know how things are here in Le Ghetto de Balmain (as Le Monde calls us). Spirits are low. We have been getting a bad press.
Behind our cruel and clever front, we here in the Ghetto, despite the opiates upon which we depend, are underneath it all sensitive people.
But we have been accused of being bludgers because we get more Australia Council money than any other suburb (for godsake, we do more). We are grubby, says Professor James McAuley, editor of Quadrant. We are pederasts, says the Sydney Morning Herald. We all write in short sentences, says the National Times.
Well, all right, some of us are pederasts. Though we wish to point out that, since we edged the working class out of Balmain, pederasty may have increased but poofter bashings are down.
Jon Cleary said in an interview that he didn’t think there was much of a future for Balmain regionalist writing. An apologetic journalist from the Australian came to us after the Literature Board grants had been announced and showed us a memo written by the editor James Hall. Beneath the heading ‘Balmain writers’, the editor had scribbled ‘Who are these bastards? How much do they rip off the government? What do they do with it? Are they audited?’
The hostility was not really against the physical suburb of Balmain (usually extended in journalistic commentary to include Carlton in Melbourne, and sometimes the whole of Adelaide). Balmain became short-hand for the fantasised (and sometimes real) way of life of some of the people in Balmain, Carlton, Adelaide. It was hostility against the new writing, especially young writing, sexual explicitness, experiment.
They also write about each other, the allegations said.
We have to point out that Leichhardt, in which Balmain is located, has 60 000 ‘real’ people other than writers who live and work there.
We think the bad press comes from our poets fighting among themselves. The little magazines are full of accusations of poet against poet. They call each other ‘vermin’ and say that some poetry published recently reveals the ‘petty desire to wound’.
Fay Zwicky, academic and poet from Perth (who says she is asked by east-coast editors to review books because ‘she is out of it all’, which makes her mad), has said that being a poet or posturing as a poet is a way of being rebellious in the seventies. It has replaced being a communist.
She quotes George Steiner: ‘Romantic ideals of love, notably the stress on incest, dramatise the belief that sexual extremism, the cultivation of the pathological, can restore personal existence to a full pitch of reality and somehow negate the gray world of middle-class fact … the artist becomes hero.’
Fay Zwicky points out that the idea of the artist as hero is not new (must there always be someone around who points out that things are not ‘new’?).
She does point out too that it is no offence to write a bad poem. Even poets have their off days. Anyhow, the fight goes on among the poets. Some poems are called ‘ego explosions’; there are claims that poetry has to get back ‘to the old carnality’ and for the need for a poem to have ‘a central inhabitant’. Macainsh doesn’t make sense to Zwicky, Packer doesn’t make sense to Jenkins, and Tranter doesn’t make sense to Packer.
A lot of this infighting comes about because poets have nothing to do in the afternoons.
Balmain Is Cannery Row
(adapted, from the Bulletin, 18.9.76)
We were at a college of advanced education recently when a young, bearded, barefoot man came over and said that he’d just read a book that had really blown his mind. We asked what book it was.
‘You wouldn’t know it,’ he said; ‘it’s not on any of the courses.’
‘Try me.’
‘Cannery Row,’ he said, ‘by William Steinbeck.’
We told him we had read the book and just stopped ourselves from saying ‘when we were your age’.
We told him that it was John – John Steinbeck.
Our having read the book did not establish common ground but instead seemed to deflate him; we guessed that we had deprived him of his advantage, his personal magic. We all had that need when young to possess the experience of a writer or book that was not the property of the older generation.
But anyhow, Steinbeck is still around and young reading males, at least, are still into boozing and whoring books.
Further, we saw a travel piece by Gareth Powell, our first publisher, about California and in the review he said, ‘For Steinbeck fans a visit to Cannery Row is a must. What Steinbeck wrote was hardly fiction; as you’ll realise when you go there. I’ve sat and drunk bourbon in Doc’s laboratory in Cannery Row. What more can a man ask?’
We were interested that Cannery Row had been one of those books for Gareth, who is a decade older than us (you are Gareth!).
For those who haven’t read Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday and Tortilla Flat, the books are about bums and layabouts in a fishing village.
Steinbeck describes Cannery Row as ‘a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream … Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches, by which he meant Everybody …” ’
Oh well, John.
We got my copy of the book out of a book-case and found that it wasn’t ours. It was the copy we’d given our girlfriend twenty years ago in 1957. It was a Penguin, number 717, cost four shillings, and the copy had been bought at the Nowra Gift Shop. As a seventeen-year-old we had inscribed it with a fountain pen as follows, ‘To my dearest Wendy, I hope this [something crossed out] Cannery Row stirs in you the same unforgettable, wild, free laughter as it stirred in me …’
We believed then that every noun deserved at least three adjectives.
As we said, the book is about lazy days in the sun, not having a job, boozing and whoring. The adolescent dream of avoiding conventional life.
… Mack and the boys sitting on the pipes in the vacant lot, dangling their feet in the mallow weeds and taking the sun while they discoursed slowly and philosophically of matters of interest but of no importance … now and then he saw them take out a pint of Old Tennis Shoes and wiping the neck of the bottle on a sleeve, raise the pint one after the other …
The book was published in 1945 but when we read it it seemed to have been around for all time. We don’t remember how we came to read Steinbeck in a country town. These books arrive mysteriously into your life at the right time.
Re-reading it we can see why it is still a cult book for adolescents, especially non-mystical adolescents. Philip Bray, of Bray’s Books, Balmain, confirmed that Cannery Row was still selling well but that Hesse, a mystical writer, was being read by another sort of young reader. Steinbeck is more decadent romantic than mystical.
Cannery Row is full of primary feelings – sadness, happiness, laughter, tears – it has no unsatisfactory, complicated moods or relationships. There is a bountiful environment – a Chinese store run by Lee Chong which gives endless credit. There are ways of making easy money, stolen booze, beaches, a warm-hearted brothel called the Bear Flag. There is a place called the Palace Flophouse where Mack and his friends live. We’d call it a commune.
There is, in the book, a defence of beards. There is an undemanding intellectual life with a marine biologist bum as guru – ‘Doc’, a dissolute elder-brother figure. Doc tries a beer milkshake, which we thought was a nicely symbolic drink – childhood/adulthood.
In our re-reading we were surprised by one reference – ‘two generations of Americans know more about the Ford coil than the clitoris’. We don’t remember reading that twenty years ago. Probably the young man reading Cannery Row today would know more about the clitoris and would think that the ‘Ford coil’ was some sort of IUD.
We were going to write that Cannery Row was full of philosophical statements which one had tried to live by but had to discard in the face of complex reality. But a voice within us said – ‘that’s life in Balmain’.
Balmain is Cannery Row.
In fact, we remember at Murray Sime’s birthday party last year someone looked around and then said to us that we should write a book about Balmain ‘like Cannery Row’.
But we don’t think that Cannery Row will survive another generation. Steinbeck’s male, boozing, whoring and philosophising in the sun won’t survive the emerging consciousness. And, anyhow, where’s the women’s Cannery Row?
We Have a History!
Jim Davidson, editor of Meanjin, has said that Australia is a ‘sandcastle civilisation’. Many small constructions are finished and then washed away and not known or recorded by those who follow. He said that we enjoyed a cultural amnesia. This was true of Balmain writers and others.
Until recently few people knew of the existence of the Stenhouse Circle in Balmain in the mid nineteenth century. Stenhouse, a Scots lawyer, had a library of about 10 000 books and a vigorous interest in the arts. A group of writers gathered around his Balmain house, including Charles Harpur, Henry Kendall, Daniel Deniehy, Richard Rowe and Henry Parkes. Jim Davidson said that ‘So weak is any sense of place in this country that none of the so-called Balmain writers has shown any awareness or inclination to draw upon their antecedents in an imaginative fashion …’
In 1979 the first Stenhouse Memorial Gathering was held in the Balmain Watchhouse to mark the publication of the book The Stenhouse Circle, by Ann-Mari Jordens.
The Stenhouse Circle And Balmain, 1851–73
Ann-Mari Jordens
(from The Stenhouse Circle, 1979)
During the 1850s Sydney grew into one of the great urban outposts of the British Empire. As they watched the first spadeful of earth turned for the first antipodean railway in 1850, the town’s inhabitants became aware that they were at last entering the age of Victorian progress. By 1855 twelve miles of track joined Redfern to Parramatta; the city had begun to nourish itself from its hinterland through veins and arteries of iron.
Early in 1851 Edward Hargraves rode into Sydney with news of the discovery of payable gold at Summer Hill Creek and the exodus began. Suddenly Sydney became one of the busiest ports of the world. Immigrants streamed in to make their fortunes in the latest El Dorado. In August the following year the first steamship sailed through Sydney Heads and two years later colonial communications were revolutionised when the electric telegraph was used in Sydney. Suburbs rapidly developed in the hills and valleys around the city to accommodate the population which grew from 52 000 to 95 000 within ten years. In 1856 colonial political life was transformed by the granting of fully responsible government.
Early in this decade Stenhouse finally found an adequate home for his family and his growing collection of books. He had lived above his office in Elizabeth Street until his marriage in 1846, when he moved south to nearby Surry Hills. In 1851 he rented a cottage named Hillside in Johnson Street, Balmain, and it was in that harbour-suburb that he discovered the house where he would happily spend the rest of his life. It was a comfortable wooden bungalow on a fifteen-acre block. Its garden ran down to Johnson’s Bay and from the rise on which Frederick Parbury, effectively the first landholder in Balmain, had chosen in 1835 to build it the view was spectacular. Behind it a well provided ample sweet water, a scarce commodity in the rapidly expanding suburbs of Sydney. By the ferry which plied between its moorings at the bottom of his garden to the city, Stenhouse could reach his office in fifteen minutes. In 1859 he proudly described the room which by then was the acknowledged centre of literary Sydney: ‘my library has been made beautiful, fitted up with new shelves, mirror, morocco chairs etc. and it now contains all my books, which line every available space from the ceiling to the floor’. This comfortable room and its contents soon became redolent with the tobacco-smoke of the strange assortment of men who sought fortune and fame with their pens. Many of them, as did Stenhouse himself, became involved in the late 1850s in the production of the colony’s first purely literary magazine the Month, and in the complex affairs of its progenitors: Richard Rowe and Frank Fowler.
Rowe gravitated naturally to Stenhouse for he had known patronage most of his life. The son of a Welsh Wesleyan minister who died when he was a boy, he became a pupil of Mr Bradnack’s school at Colchester, where his mother had settled with her children. His headmaster assumed responsibility for his education and when he moved his school to Bath he took Rowe with him. There he remained as an usher when his schooling was complete, but at twenty-five he finally succumbed to the lure of adventure and emigrated to New South Wales in 1853. It is not certain when he met Stenhouse; probably through Deniehy and the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts.
Rowe was working as a journalist on the Sydney Morning Herald in 1856, the year Stenhouse first lectured to the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts. Rowe’s wry description of café conversations with ‘literary friends talking transcendentalism – unsubstantial as the smoke of the cigars we puff; in Carlylese, every third word beginning with a capital’, suggests that this lecture had made quite an impact. It certainly aroused the interest of Henry Parkes who was determined to attend it even ‘at the cost of absenting myself from the assembly’, and asked for a copy to publish in the Empire. Rowe was at this time, as he remembered years later with bitter regret, ‘a friendless young fool’, soon to be rudely awakened to the discovery that ‘the reaping of wild oats is not so pleasant a process as the sowing’. In about September 1856 he recovered his senses after a prolonged drinking bout to find himself in prison. Stenhouse visited him there, and took him home on bail to Waterview House, where Rowe wrote a De Quinceyesque but basically true account of his fall for the Sydney Morning Herald, appropriately entitled ‘The Confessions of a Drunkard’. His article, dated Balmain, 27 September, concluded with a splendid description of Stenhouse at home in his library.
And now, blowing the long forbidden cloud, I sit in that friend’s nest, veiled round with verdure. The walls are hid with books – old, rich and rare, modern, and sparkling – mental wine from every land, of the vintages of every age. It is in the library that I sit, listening, delighted, to my host’s ‘most musical’ meandering flow of talk. Ripe scholarship, erudition singularly wide and deep, the most delicate sensibility to the beautiful, glee at discovering it like that of a child who has come upon a hidden bank of forest flowers, personal recollections of those Northern Lights that twenty years ago crowned Edinburgh … the stars that stud the ‘Noctes’ … make it, indeed, a treat; whilst, ever and anon, my hospitable hostess, with her bright smile and warm Hibernian heart, glides in and out, beaming beautiful as a sorrowless Madonna. Close by the open window a pear-tree waves its wealth of summer snow; like it, my heart has blossomed in the sunshine, and droops beneath its load of gratitude and joy.
Rowe took advantage of both Stenhouse’s library and his conversations to review for the Sydney Morning Herald Henry Cockburn’s recently published Memorials of His Time. ‘ “Cockburn”, said Professor Wilson to a gifted literary friend of ours, long-buried in dusty law papers like bright gold hidden in a dirty napkin, “Cockburn is a man of no common calibre, but he can’t write”.’
As soon as he was sufficiently recovered from his alcoholic excesses Rowe went to Muswellbrook, a town 150 miles north of Sydney, as a language tutor in the home of Mr John H. Keys. Unfortunately Rowe’s command of the language he was supposed to be teaching was shaky and he sent an urgent plea to Stenhouse for a dictionary. ‘I am going through the “Exercises” at somewhat a jog-trot pace with my pupil’, he explained, ‘but am trying to acquire a superficially general acquaintance with the language empirically, by reading through the key’. He was not, evidently, the most qualified of tutors. When the much-needed dictionary arrived Rowe complained of:
a suspicious aspect of newness about it that I don’t like; and its leaves are not fragrant with the sacred incense-fumes with which I know they must have been impregnated, had it been long a dweller in your literary Parthenon. A shelf in a bookseller’s shop I greatly fear, is the shrine from which it has descended to enlighten my ignorance by its revelations.
He wrote on, he explained, not because he had anything to say, but ‘to keep up a sort of connection with Balmain – the only place in New South Wales with which I associate home feelings’.
Rowe first met Frank Fowler in Muswellbrook. This tubercular English journalist of twenty-three who was to bring chaos and bitter dissension into the Waterview House circle during the next two years, was accompanying a politician on an electioneering tour. They later met again in Stenhouse’s library where their chance acquaintance ‘ripened into friendship’. Fowler was a lovable young enthusiast with a sometimes unfortunate talent for self-publicity. He had arrived in Sydney in December 1855, and on 5 January 1856 gave the first of a series of public orations which made him something of a literary lion in Sydney. He thus made the acquaintance of Stenhouse who chaired his lecture on Edgar Allan Poe, given in the Mechanics’ School of Arts on 8 July 1856. He attracted an unusually large audience which included ‘several members of parliament and many gentlemen distinguished by their literary attainments’, despite competition from a Philharmonic concert patronised by the governor-general and the first night of the English Opera Company. In this lecture, which was largely biographical, Fowler displayed a familiarity with American literature in general – mentioning James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Empire remarked that ‘however successful Mr Fowler’s previous lectures on widely different topics may have been, nothing he had essayed has given more general delight than his evening with Edgar Allan Poe’.
Another American writer provided Fowler with material for a second unqualified success the following month, when his play Eva; or, leaves from Uncle Tom’s Cabin was performed for a week in the Lyceum Theatre. Although an adaptation, ‘the language in many scenes and the dramatic construction of the piece throughout, bears the impress of great originality’, remarked the Freeman’s Journal critic. The play had original music written for it, and new scenery which included as a special feature grand panoramic views of the Mississippi River and of New Orleans. Serenades and dances by Ethiopian minstrels accompanied by banjos and tambourines provided entertaining interludes, and the principal actress was particularly well chosen. The Freeman’s Journal critic enthused:
Mr Fowler can congratulate himself on having written a piece, which the entire press of the city agree possesses considerable literary merit; he can also think himself a particularly lucky man, in finding an artiste of such eminent dramatic abilities to embody the mental creation as Miss Anna Maria Quinn. Of the acting of Miss Quinn we feel we cannot speak in too high terms – suffice it to say, that we never saw her in any character in which she appeared to more advantage.
Flushed with success, Fowler set about the task of stimulating Sydney’s literary life by gathering together the colony’s leading writers. In October 1856 he wrote to Stenhouse:
You may have noticed in the papers some time back a short notice to the effect that the literary workers in this country had formed themselves into a guild under the title of ‘The Literary Association of New South Wales’ … I am sure your sympathies are with such an object. We have held one or two very interesting meetings and I think the association will do good and – as a consequence – become prosperous.
My object in writing to you is to know if you would allow us to publish your lecture on the Imagination with the ‘imprimatur’ of the Association? – the nascent literature of the country demands as much from you, and I am sanguine of your compliance.
The Association was formed, and was still in existence eight months later, but then faded into oblivion ….
On 1 July 1857 Fowler launched his most important and successful contribution to the literary life of his day – the Month. This was the first substantial Australian magazine to publish articles, translations, short stories, poems and serialised novels entirely by local authors. Previously, newspapers such as the Sydney Morning Herald, the Empire and the Freeman’s Journal had provided a limited outlet, chiefly for poetry. More than ten years before, Robert Lowe had included a literary section in the Atlas, believing that there was a sufficient and growing interest in such matters in the colony. He expressed the hope that local writers would be encouraged by his ‘proffering a quiet niche for the offerings of such of our colonial friends as may occasionally wander from the cold realms of utilitarianism to the warm regions of the colonial and the imaginative’, but in fact he looked to Britain and Europe for most of his material.
The first number of the Month was received with enthusiasm by both the Freeman’s Journal and the Sydney Morning Herald. The former greeted its appearance in a short preliminary notice.
Frank Fowler is determined to leave no means untried for imparting a sound literary taste to the Sydney public. We have received the first number of his magazine, and read it with the same zest that we are sure it was devoured by all book lovers. In appearance it is certainly the neatest thing of the kind ever presented to Australian readers … We hope it may meet with the general patronage, which the smallness of its price will render necessary in order to make it pay all expenses.
Breaking Literary Decorum
The Balmain Readings of Prose and Verse began as a gathering of young writers and friends with an open invitation to any one to read either their own work or a work they liked.
At the first gathering, the advertised readers were Ian Bedford, Geoffrey Mill, Clem Gorman, Rozanne Bonney and myself, all reading our own work. There was a tape of Push poet deceased, Harry Hooten and Harry Jones (also dead).
Darcy Waters, Terry McMullen (reading from McGonigal), Dr J. ‘Rocky’ Myers, Professor David Armstrong, Michael Thornhill and Ken Quinnell read works by their favourite authors.
We instituted the Oral English Award which went to Darcy that year. Darcy had presented a demonstration of the different race-calling techniques of the British, American and Australian race commentators. The award was also presented to Garner Ted Armstrong, the evangelist of ‘The World of Tomorrow’, a radio programme, and to Ward Austin, then a radio announcer with Radio 2UW and the base operator of Yellow Cabs. The half-serious intention of the award was to recognise distinctive and creative use of spoken English.
The first readers of the evening were those invited writers who read what they most liked of their work that year. Then would come invited readers who read what they liked. Don Anderson, for example, introduced us to samples of new American writing, especially Donald Barthelme. Finally the reading would be thrown open to readers from the floor.
Sometimes the readings went for six or seven hours, beginning usually around six or seven in the evening. No time limit was placed. There was a master of ceremonies who included, at various times, Terry McMullen, Darcy Waters and, for a number of years, Adrian Heber, and each had his own way of stopping a reader who had become entranced by the microphone and an audience.
Finally, in the late seventies, the readings ceased because of disruption. The open and non-authoritarian nature of the occasions made them vulnerable to exhibitionist behaviour and to political activists who needed an audience. And to bores.
Audiences exercised some control by booing and hissing but were essentially powerless against disrupters.
Maybe we should have been more resilient. The lack of decorum that characterised the Sydney readings gave them a robust – or disconcerting, depending upon your psychic strength – boisterousness.
The Draft Resisters’ Union reading, organised at the University of Sydney in the early seventies, was typical. About two hundred people attended and we read first, cursing the alien atmosphere of the Carslaw lecture theatre (the readers refused to use the lectern).
There was a disruptive collection of money for more booze organised by Murray Sime, a Balmain lawyer who looks after the affairs of a few writers.
Robyn Ravlich (The Black Abacus), who had had three ribs broken after being hugged and fallen upon at a Balmain reading, this time had two male protectors, one on either side of her. They also took part in the performance she’d organised, acting as a chorus. While she wrote her poem on the blackboard, one of the male assistants dropped cardboard letters of the alphabet and the other read a fake poem.
While she was finishing her piece, Terry Larsen (Tarflowers, FJ Holden) began a tap dance at one end of the lecture theatre, which was a lead-in to his piece (which, however, was not scheduled at this point).
He did some readings of patriotic Australian verse which required the audience to shout a response. But he had some critics who abused him and a beer can was thrown in his direction. He threw back all the chalk he could find.
He went into his FJ Holden act but was interrupted by an irate young woman who said she’d come to the reading to hear poetry and not to listen to drivel. Others in the hall shouted at her that her vision of poetry was limited.
Another critic said the piece was not related to the Vietnam war. Terry replied that it was not about the blood and suffering but it was about the sort of guys who were being sent there.
Some of the audience walked out because they considered the reading frivolous.
A white-faced organiser, Antonia Finnane, came out to stop Terry continuing but lost heart before his impetus and the unruly audience. She returned to her seat, waving a hand which said, ‘It is out of control’.
Michael Wilding (Living Together), an organiser and a scheduled reader, had his face buried in his hands.
An old pro, Robert Adamson (Canticles on the Skin), followed Terry and parried invective and interjections with the audience. He was used to it, having been broken in at the Balmain readings. He’d once had water thrown from a cliff-top down onto him while reading in a natural amphitheatre at Balmain. Drenched, he’d kept on reading.
Someone in the audience asked him to speak up. He replied that he was reading a ‘quiet poem’ and he’d ‘be buggered’ if he was going to speak up. As a concession he followed it with what he described as a loud poem and he bellowed it out.
For no apparent reason someone then accused Bob of being a stooge of Grace Perry (editor of Poetry Australia). This was a blatant misrepresentation of Bob’s position in poetry politics. He challenged the interjector to come down to the front and say it. The interjector didn’t take up the challenge and Bob went on with a superb and memorable reading.
The organisers seized the lull to close the reading, excluding Martin Johnston (Shadowmass) who had been drinking rum with us.
By the end of the seventies there were two attitudes to readings. One was that it was performance. People like Eric Beach and Nigel Roberts and others felt that one should rehearse and develop the performance; that the oral form should contain gestures and a full use of the speech range. Others believed that the poet should ‘read’ as if from a page of a book; that performance belongs with actors and that poets should ‘be themselves’ on stage.
Listening Backwards
for Kerry
Where have the readings led us? into definitions, structures … the last pillars of sound … solidified, scarred, embedded. You come here like a jitterbug, raving of Anarchists, Politics … ridiculous! you grind your teeth in frustration, saying hideous, the crime of meaning …
I agree. Whatever has gone before is entombed, bandaged like the Pharoah in his lotus blossoms, still perfect after thousands of lives. So these words we now dispense with … like yet another commodity … dead, ancient, so used their breath is stale. Yet poets still seek their voices, the magic of first gestures into meat and sound … the song.
So where have the readings led us? From graffiti bandits to mythologised fishing ports in America … where they speak of Typewriter Art. Where buckweat pancakes are enough if made public, where candles for Kali and
Heroic Addictions
are enough, where suffering and soup cans are criterions for life … where anything, anything is enough if made public.
Why do I feel moths and belljars when I hear the poets read? Why do the seats arrange themselves like firing squads before a wall … the poets know power if they understand Public Relations and the Lions? Why this smell of blood when the words are so decayed, the flesh torn off and sold?
We meet again and agree these structures will poison us. We huddle over coffee cups, you dreaming of the Northland where the elements will embrace you, wordlessly, till you’re breathed silent. And me dreaming of deserts where the exotic will be a palm tree, a baying goat, the lick of a drum … ill each of us forgets our values, becomes an empty gourd … to be worded again, to be answered … from a deep memory, the jackal’s howl.
Great Pub Crawls
(adapted, from the Bulletin, 21.8.71)
Sydney’s two Bacchanalian festivals are the two pub crawls – the Rocks Pub Crawl and the Balmain Pub Crawl.
Of these two the Balmain Pub Crawl is the smallest in number – about eighty drinkers – but it is the longest and most pointless. It promotes no good cause and celebrates only excess. The Rocks crawl, held as part of the Argyle Festival, attracts about four thousand drinkers. It marks the installation of the first water bubblers in the Rocks. It covers twelve hotels with fine names such as the Fortune of War, the Dumbarton Castle, and the Hero of Waterloo.
The Balmain crawl covers ten miles and twenty-five hotels [in 1975], again with grand names such as Dicks, the Unity Hall, the Bald Rock, the Dry Dock, and the Forth and Clyde [since closed down].
Two of the good old Sydney pub crawls have died – the one from Sydney University to the Quay and the one from the University of New South Wales to Town Hall. With Tony Morphett, we were the last to do the Great Wagga Wagga Pub Crawl – from the Farmers Rest to the Black Swan. In the following years Wagga lost many of its twenty-five hotels. Tony and we argued bitterly somewhere along the way and finished the pub crawl drinking on opposite sides of the bar, not talking.
We are uncertain whether pub crawling is life-affirmative or life-negative. It probably depends on the attitude of each participant. Maybe it is an allegorical journey through all the moods of life to oblivion. But already we hear our fellow voyageurs shouting ‘loss of points for intellectualising’, one of the offences under Oxford University Rules for Pub Crawling.
The points system of the Balmain crawl (based on the Oxford rules, which are found only in the oral tradition), is elaborate, arbitrary, and excruciatingly fair. It rewards and punishes with the subtlety and perceptiveness that you’d expect from eighty drunks.
The Balmain crawl, although radically democratic (‘we are all organisers: we are all captains’), does have functionaries. The Chief Marshal’s position in recent years has been filled by lawyer Murray Sime. In recent years we have been the Scribe and the Chaplain; Adrian Heber, a divinity student, doubled as Caterer; and the Official Photographer’s post has been filled by Rob Wallis [now one of Sydney’s leading photographers].
The points system penalises social misdemeanours such as zeal, grim determination, pride, and something called ‘complicating the issue’. For Oxford reasons the playing of pool or the piano in a hotel in the morning of the crawl is an offence called ‘diversion from the task at hand’, but in the afternoon it is likely to win you points as evidence that you can ‘drink and think’.
The Rocks crawl is more formally structured even than this. Hotels on the route have time-punching machines at which participants have to clock their official entry card. Unlike the Balmain crawl where the route is historically fixed, the Rocks crawl is a matter of preference. There is a prize for the person who does the Rocks crawl according to a secret route, predetermined by the organisers. The prize is a case of Guinness stout, three dozen oysters, a taxi ride home, and an Alka Seltzer.
The Rocks crawl raises funds for the Actors’ Benevolent Fund and the Rocks Old People’s Fund.
Pub crawls attract journalists but little publicity. An organiser of the Rocks crawl, Shirley Ball, said, ‘It is really incredible – I counted twenty journalists on the crawl and we got hardly a word of publicity. They seem to forget about it next day.’
The pubs around the Rocks ran out of glasses during the crawl because people either souvenired them or left them in the streets along the way.
The Rocks crawl also organises entertainment at each of the hotels but as any voyageurs will tell you, to linger at any one hotel on a serious crawl is the trap of pub crawling. You stay for more than one drink and before you know it, hours have passed and the will to move has gone. Momentum is crucial.
Despite the deliberate idleness of the Balmain crawl, some participants have been heard to seek justifications for it. We’ve heard people say that it was a great way to see historic Balmain and that it was better exercise than jogging. The women’s-movement team saw it as a way of surveying the local hotels for discrimination against women. Only one hotel has ever refused to serve women in the bar and it was boycotted.
The Rocks crawl attracts many celebrities from television, stage and radio. The Balmain crawl has a rather more bookish and local membership – a sprinkling of university staff and poets, who generally live in the suburb. The old locals treat pub crawlers with head-shaking tolerance, having drunk in one pub and one pub only for a lifetime. At Balmain, one year, a barmaid asked why we chose Balmain for the pub crawl. She looked back at us with fearful disbelief when we told her that the whole motley crowd came from Balmain.
Getting Credit
(adapted, from the Bulletin, 27.12.75)
Memo: To Trevor Kennedy, editor of the Bulletin.
Could you use your influence to get us an American Express card? The advertisements asking people to apply for one are everywhere. We applied but didn’t get one. It’s because we live in Le Ghetto de Balmain. Paraphrased, the letter from American Express said that, with what we’d told them, together with what other people had told them, there was no way we’d get a card.
We guessed it was because of where we lived and partly because we have no steady job, are not on the electoral roll, are not in the telephone book, do not own our own home, do not have a car, do not have insurance, and are divorced and a sexual deviant. But we do not gamble. Put that in – we are not gamblers.
We’re the sort of person American Express needs – we are great luncheoners.
Everywhere we go an American Express symbol looks at us with contempt: ‘second-class citizen’, it seems to say, ‘second-class citizen’. Could you mediate with American Express and point out to them that the way we run our lives means nothing about us as a credit risk. Some of the worst credit risks in the world are married, own a house, a car, have a steady job and credit references. Some of them owe us money.
Letter from American Express
Dear Sir,
It is not that you live in Balmain (some of our best friends …) and it’s not that you are an unemployed, uninsured, homeless, divorced, disenfranchised, pedestrian deviant with no telephone. It’s just that no one admitted to knowing you … [thank you friends].
[Signed] George J. Fesus, Vice President.
Enclosed was an American Express card.
It was, we wrote to American Express, good to see the human face of capitalism.
Luncheon With a Royal Highness
(adapted, from the Bulletin, 15.11.75)
We represented the Ghetto at the New South Wales government’s arts luncheon for Princess Margaret.
We went along with ‘a composer, four singers, an actor, three stage directors, a painter, two poets, a pianist, and a clarinetist,’ as the Sydney Morning Herald so accurately described us. We managed to talk to the princess about Balmain and the conversation then moved widely over Toad of Toad Hall, the young and poetry, talking animals in literature.
We mentioned to Nancy Keesing, chairperson of the Literature Board, who was there, that we thought that we should’ve been put through a training session on protocol. She said royalty was much more casual these days.
That was what we suspected and felt disappointed. We missed the pomp from the picture books of childhood. Gilded carriages and doffed hats. But they’ve still got the magic. We think that the way royalty use the magic now – putting on an everyday guise to walk and talk like ‘ordinary people’ – in fact reinforces their distance. The magic is saying ‘We have to make a huge effort to be like humans and it’s really just a trick – we are still divine.’
One of the princess’s party told us that the trip had got rotten press coverage. She said the Australian seemed to have something against them. And then there were, she said, ‘those beastly Brownies at Bowral who cried’.
That was when the royal party took the day off and left the Brownies standing on the railway platform all day with their flags in their hands ready to wave.
‘They’re not supposed to cry,’ she said.
We ate fresh asparagus, pheasant, strawberries Victoria, cheese and petits fours. A simple writer’s lunch.
The wine, Philip Hermitage 1959, is named after Princess Margaret’s brother-in-law. Come to think of it, the strawberry dish is probably named after a relative too.
We sat with the fabulous Lady Anne Tennant, lady-in-waiting and childhood friend of Princess Margaret, and enjoyed ourselves immensely.
Lilian Horler, a lawyer, made some sort of protest by talking republicanism at lunch.
The Pears Soap Story
(adapted, from the Bulletin, 29.5.76)
Balmain makes other things beside poetry, lesbians and revolution.
Balmain makes Pears soap.
We have two soap factories at Balmain and some days the suburb smells very clean indeed. It’s difficult to know whether to classify this as pollution or very clean air. Pears is one of those soaps that everyone knows about but very few use. It is used by a subsection of the middle class (probably British-oriented) and has only about 2 per cent of the toilet soap market, and that is at the expensive end. There are twenty brands in the toilet soap market.
We have been in many discussions about whether Pears soap had ‘changed’.
We started our investigation with the tough questions. Peter Dunstan, general manager of Pears’ information and public affairs, answered them.
We asked, ‘It’s claimed by you that Pears soap is transparent but we can’t see through it.’
We pointed out that the word ‘transparent’ is as large as the word ‘Pears’ on the wrapper.
Chris Hobart, managing director of Unilever subsidiary Rexona, was brought in. He argued that if you cut a slice of Pears soap you can in fact see through it. This was not true of other soaps.
We carried out this test later in our home laboratory but we still have to say that it is more translucent than transparent. We suppose it depends on the fineness of the slice.
We probed the contents of Pears soap. We were once told by a Balmain consumer radical that it was not in fact ‘pure’; it was allegedly made from the scraps of other soaps. Being a student of rumours, popular fallacies and folk beliefs, this seemed a typical example – that everything is the opposite of what it claims to be.
The Unilever people told me that Pears is made from animal tallow (beef), caustic soda, rosin gum (from trees in China), coconut oil and rose scent, in an alcohol base (most soaps use a water base). The soap is about 80 per cent tallow, the beef and rosin gum giving colour and lather.
There is no pear fruit in the soap despite the trademark and the old advertising slogan ‘Apples make cider, Pears make soap’.
But was it the same Pears as you got in England; was it the same as it always had been? Chris Hobart conceded that ‘it is a lighter colour in England – a honey colour’. Out here it is a darker ruby red but the formula is the same.
The chemists later told us that the formula did vary, with 2 per cent more coconut oil in the Australian soap but that this would not produce a discernible difference.
‘We are trying to bring the Australian Pears towards the British soap in colour – to lighten it up. The belief has been that the Australian consumer preferred a darker Pears.
Chris said that he thought the colour balance was definitely out. Having just arrived from England, he thought the soap needed more rose bouquet too and he wanted the Andrew Pears signature on the wrapper again (had you noticed that it was gone?).
‘But,’ said Chris, ‘the soap is still as pure and as natural as ever.’
Rose? We were dumbfounded to be told that it was a perfumed soap. We’d thought that Pears was without scent. It was something of a blow to our boyhood masculinity, having preferred it as a non-perfumed, non-sissy soap.
We raised the question of firmness and the complaint that Pears in Australia was more inclined to go to mush.
The Unilever people came up later with an answer that the British water is harder than Australian water (the harder the water the harder it is to lather the soap; hence soft water over-lathers and softens the soap).
We watched the handfilling of the moulds in the classic Pears soap shape. The soap matures in the moulds over fourteen weeks and dries out, leaving the hollow or ‘dimple’ (where you stick the small remaining piece of the cake you were using).
This is an old method. Other soaps we saw being made come out in a continuous flowing strip of hardened paste and are cut, shaped and wrapped in one operation.
Pears is a flagship product of Unilever.
The story of Pears is that a barber, Andrew Pears, started making the soap for his customers in 1789. In the mid nineteenth century an advertising man (one of the first), named Thomas Barratt, began to mass-market the soap. Barratt devised what are now standard advertising techniques including the testimonial, and then the parody of testimonials. He began with well-known people, stating in the advertisement that ‘Two years ago I used your soap, since when I have used no other.’ The parody had a tramp saying it.
Barratt created Pears Cyclopaedia in 1897. He also made the first classic failure of advertising – one that haunts all advertising people – he made the soap product a household word but not a household presence. People read the advertisements, enjoyed them, came to know the name of the soap, but did not buy it, not as a mass product anyhow.
It is obviously not quite what most people want from a soap.
How does soap work?
Dirt, say on a collar, or the skin, is made up of fatty excretions from the body, dust and soot from the atmosphere. This dirt gets jammed into the fibres of the collar or the surface of the skin by absorption or by a feeble chemical bonding, or is sometimes held there by static electricity.
The soap or detergent contains molecules which when mixed with water try to flee the water; they flee into the dirt and this impact loosens the dirt, prises it off the collar or skin. Rubbing or agitation then carries the dirt away.
But we know that we wash our hands for reasons other than hygiene. We do it to please our mother. We do it to punctuate our routines – the beginning or ending of something, say a meal or a piece of work.
We use hand-washing to re-concentrate on the task. We use it to shed unpleasant experiences from our consciousness. It is a ritual of rejuvenation or awakening. A stimulant.
We liked the irony that Balmain made the most middle-class of soaps.
[Note: Pears soap is now back to its original colouring and is again transparent, thanks to campaigning consumer journalism.]
Camping In Balmain
(adapted, from the Bulletin, 19.6.71)
The opening of Sydney’s first homosexual club rooms and offices opposite the Balmain police station required a little daring, we thought.
To us it seemed fraught with social combustion because it was not only opposite the police but also a boys’ club run by the police, and just down the road was the Balmain RSL.
It’s true that Balmain’s social profile has altered in the last five years, changing from a working-class, inner-city suburb to visibly semi-noncomformist, middle-class and hippy. While Balmain adapted with only slight friction, the Camp Inc club would be a real test of social tolerance.
Not that Camp Inc has any special fondness for Balmain (or maybe it has a secret fondness) – as its journal said, ‘Camp Inc is alive and living in Balmain!! (and who would want to die there anyway???)’. Camp Inc moved to Balmain because the camp real-estate network found them ideal accommodation there.
The club is a large, gracious, two-storey, stone colonial house designed by Blackett. Formerly a methodist youth centre, it has offices, kitchen, relaxing grounds with a barbecue, and a number of large rooms for socialising. Upstairs there are two flats, one occupied by Michael and John, activists and founders of Camp Inc.
The Balmain police were informed of the club’s existence by their legal adviser but have never paid a visit. ‘The firemen next door at the Balmain brigade have,’ Michael told us.
The club has socialising every night except Sunday, when an afternoon barbecue is held to raise the rent. So far the calendar offers films, discussions (next week ‘The Married Homosexual’), trips out of Sydney, and informal wine and cheese parties.
Use of the club is accelerating, with about sixty and more attending every night. ‘They’re all types – butch dykes, queens,’ Michael said. ‘Naturally, at first we were all strangers and socialising was a bit hesitant.’
The club hopes to organise its space to provide for different groupings. ‘Homosexuality by itself is not enough of a social link, really,’ John said. ‘It brings such a wide diversity of backgrounds and interests.’
The club has been offering counselling – at least advice and ‘a friendly ear’, with reference to a sympathetic psychiatrist if a person feels the need for that sort of help. It is working the other way too – with psychiatrists sending patients to Camp Inc as a way of helping them out of social isolation.
‘Some people just come to me to talk and to say “I am a homosexual”,’ John said, ‘to admit it to themselves through me. The letters we get are like that too.’
Most of the people there on the Sunday we went were male, although about a third of the Camp Inc membership is female. There was some of the extravagant carry-on and affectation popularly associated with the image of homosexuality but of course most were conventional in dress and manner.
We talked with Len, a middle-aged publican, about the origins of the words ‘gay’ and ‘camp’. He said that American troops during the second world war had used ‘gay’ to mean homosexual and it was now reviving. ‘Camp’, he said, went way, way back, although now he’d noticed that the newspapers were using it. He didn’t accept the idea that camp derived from the police acronym ‘Known as A Male Prostitute’.
The journalism of the homosexual magazine Camp Ink and their newsletters is a self-concious parody of camp humour and jargon.
All right you Melbourne lot – we’ve got a bash coming up for you, so you can stop whingeing … we’d like to call it Cocktails and Hors d’oevres but actually it’s the usual cheap plonk with party pies, little savs, lamingtons, and bread and butter with hundreds-and-thousands. Oh, and prunes and bacon for those with irregularities … everything included unless you care for lollie water, in which case BYO. Dress semi, so no need to wear your ruffles, but suggest leaving your jeans and Snoopy sweatshirt in the wash. We’ve told you what you’re getting so that you won’t have a fit of the vapours over the price – $7.50 a head. Oh dear, some fainted anyway … don’t worry if you are coming alone because it’s always a family affair …
John sees problems in the club rooms. ‘The danger is that we will put all our energy into the money-making side and lose the – original political aim – to challenge and change the laws and opinion. We don’t want the clubs to develop into bigger and better ghettos.’
Sonnet 95
James Michener thinks of writing a guide book
to Bohemian Balmain, Sydney, Australia.
People are sick to death of the South Pacific.
He quickly flies to Balmain and has a look.
There it is, like a movie! Writers, artists!
The harbour, blue as always, the container wharves
just like it says in the novels, and the lesbians …
My God, the Lesbians! Bohemia Gone Mad!
This is too much for James, and he flies out.
TOP WRITER JETS OUT OF SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA!
But is that how it really happened? I like to think
of James in the Honolulu Hilton, older and sadder,
nursing a drink by the pool, nursing a broken heart,
dreaming of a pert little lesbian in Balmain.