In selecting the marxist pieces, I’ve tried to give the flavour of these very productive groups. I have chosen not to try to explore the differences which exist among the marxists but I have tried to present their current influences and their concerns. They have developed a characteristic language, often involving immense compression of past thinking into single words. This causes outsiders trouble in comprehending marxist theoretical writing (which is not really meant for outsiders, anyhow). Much of the writing is dressed in a combativeness intended to demonstrate the writer’s revolutionary credentials to his fellow marxists. There is also a moral fastidiousness which comes from the feeling that many socialists have that they live in a tainted society, that there are few activities within the society worthy of appreciation. Much of the analysis then becomes elaborate moral exercises in discrediting the motivation and nature of activities and discrediting other analyses. This can close them down to experience and interfere with perception.
But the seventies showed that the marxists often ask the right questions, even if they give unsatisfactory answers. There is also a provincially over-excited response to foreign thinking from whatever country or person happens to be fashionable. This affects political theorists and activists across the political spectrum.
Three valuable books which came from the left were, for me, Tim Rowse’s Australian Liberalism and the National Character, Michael Sexton’s Illusions of Power, and John Docker’s Australian Cultural Elites.
The marxists are about the only theoretically productive political groups in Australia. They are also aware, from time to time, of their problems. To quote from the journal Arena: ‘we need to get away from mandarin socialism, jargon theoreticism, and marxology’. It is a beautiful example of language being precisely what it describes.
For many decades now the left has set itself the aim of ‘isolating the problems, finding the correct methodology, escaping from incorrect categories and then giving a comprehensive account’. It has also concerned itself with then ‘getting an equally informed, evenly raised consciousness and agreement among the intellectuals and transferring this consciousness and critique and data to other classes’.
The left sustains four important theoretical journals: Arena, Australian Left Review, Intervention, and Australian Independent, together with newspapers and newsletters.
The quotations from editorials of Intervention that follow show some of the dilemmas of the marxists, their concerns, and at the same time the disappointments which face all serious magazine editors.
Towards an Australian Marxist Intelligentsia
(from the editorials of Intervention, 1972–5)
‘Intervention’: the first issue, 1972
The revolutionary left has never been very strong in Australia. While particular historical circumstances have imposed practical limitations, a continual and profound source of weakness has been the absence of revolutionary theory.
Australia has been a capitalist economic formation from the outset of its colonisation, yet it generated an industrial proletariat relatively late in its development. The first avowedly marxist party did not emerge until 1920. Its creators had read little Marx (and no Lenin until 1926!), and their communism amounted to little more than an enthusiasm for the victory of the bolsheviks. This theoretical immaturity was revealed, and at the same time reinforced, by the subsequent subjugation of the Australian left to Stalinist theory, and political practice fixed the Communist Party of Australia in a barren orthodoxy which was incompatible with any viable revolutionary theory. The disintegration of this orthodoxy in the 1950s and 1960s led to the fragmentation of the CPA as its members sought in various ways either to dispel the nightmares of its past or to recapture the unequivocal certainties of those bygone days.
The 1960s also saw the rise of a new left, characterised in its initial stages by the double rejection of both ‘advanced industrial society’ and official marxism. The single most important factor in the growth of this new left was America’s and then Australia’s increasing involvement in a war of aggression in Vietnam. The inadequacy of a merely moral objection to this war and the realisation that the American and Australian policies were not isolated and aberrant propelled many in the direction of the marxist critique of imperialism and capitalism. Yet the discovery of marxism was made in diverse and contradictory ways.
One serious obstacle to this discovery was the absence of any viable intellectual tradition in Australia and the absence of a marxist intelligentsia. The handful of intellectuals who aligned themselves with marxism had in general failed to link their political standpoint with their theoretical endeavours. The abstract nature of their efforts was never overcome. The few who appreciated the political necessity of a unified theoretical practice had found it impossible to sustain their attempt in the face of hostility from the communist leadership and harassment by the bourgeoisie. Thus when the new left turned to marxism it faced the old left intellectuals across an enormous gap, for the theoretical tools available to these intellectuals were found to be inadequate to present reality. But in spite of this breakthrough, the new left has not yet fulfilled its potential. Progress has been impeded by hasty and attenuated assimilation of various overseas theories, notably trotskyism and maoism; and there has been a similar process of uncritical absorption of theoretical influences such as the Marcusian stream in the American new left. Consequently, the new left in Australia has fragmented into its present condition of increasingly isolated and all too often dogmatic sects.
With this history it is not surprising that the Australian revolutionary left has still not developed a knowledge of the workings of Australian capitalism and its distinctive characteristics. Indeed, most of the left do not appear to recognise that this is a crucial task. Perhaps characteristically, it took an overseas marxist to force the problem to our attention. James O’Connor wrote in Arena 24:
There appears to be a problem of ‘locating’ Australia in the hierarchy of the world capitalist system. Australia certainly is not underdeveloped in the sense that India, Brazil and Nigeria are underdeveloped. It is certainly not developed in the sense that the United States and EEC are developed. In short, the categories bequeathed to us by Paul Baran in his classic study, The Political Economy of Growth, do not seem to be much help. There is no room in the current marxist world-view for countries such as Australia, which on the one hand have high per capita incomes and on the other do not have an integrated industrial base. I conclude that we will have to modify the categories, fortunately not without help from others.
While we have reservations about aspects of this statement, we do believe that O’Connor has pointed to an important problem – the exceptional character of Australian capitalism – and the immediate task of this journal is to explore and define these exceptional characteristics. Further, we believe that the marxist framework is indispensable to the achievement of this task. A successful socialist strategy implies a mastery of the events of today and the anticipation of those of tomorrow. A valid interpretation of events necessitates a correct theory, for without theory revolutionary practice can be little more than pragmatic adjustment to events. To be dominated by events means to compromise with them – the beginning of the slippery slope to opportunism. The conscious avoidance of compromise through a blind rush into activism only begets the same result, for here a lack of theory means a lack of realistic assessment of the resources at one’s disposal and that of the adversary. Such consequences of the disregard for theory have dogged the history of the left in Australia. This editorial committee stands by the proposition that an understanding of social reality, of capitalist society, is a necessary condition for a successful socialist strategy.
Such claims are not novel. They have been emphasised time and again by the great revolutionaries such as Lenin and Gramsci. But as we have indicated, the insights they provided were not taken up and practised in Australia. Hence the question must be posed: why are we able to take these insights and why do we see it as important to launch the journal now? The answer to these questions involves a consideration of marxist political and theoretical history over the past fifty years.
The isolation of the Russian revolution and the ascendance of Stalin ultimately brought about the transformation of the theories of Lenin and Marx into ideologies, that is, into distorted visions of reality. In Italy the fascist judge’s pronouncement on Gramsci – ‘We must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years’ – abruptly ended his theoretical and political influence. With the Comintern dominated by dogmatism, the marxist theoretical debate was silenced in the international communist parties and only a few figures like Korsch and the members of the Frankfurt school kept alive the best in socialist thought. Through their philosophical sophistication these representatives of western marxism formed a viable opposition to the crudities of stalinism. But paradoxically, the death of Stalin, which thawed the bolshevik orthodoxy, also revealed the weakness of its opposition. For at this point, western marxism found itself literally in mid-air. Having assumed a revolutionary proletariat as an epistemological basis, the seeming quiescence of the working class during the fifties left such a marxism stranded in a philosophical vacuum, searching for a ‘new revolutionary subject’ and asserting a purely negative critique of capitalism. The embattled marxists who had been faced by the crude stalinist distinction, ‘bourgeois science, proletarian science’, had introduced and emphasised the young Marx and presented marxism as a humanism. Such an interpretation was naturally attractive to a number of communist intellectuals who rejected stalinism. This diluted form of marxism, ‘lived as a liberation from dogmatism’, was taken up by the revisionist wings of western European communist parties and itself transformed into orthodoxy. A response to the populism and eclecticism inherent in this newly legitimate but equally inadequate marxism became inevitable.
The past decade witnessed a resurgence of marxism. Internationally it has been spanned by the revolutions in Cuba and Vietnam, the magnificent explosion of student militancy and increasing working-class revolt, plus the revival of notions of workers’ control, soviets and the struggle for the liberation of women. (If we wish to trace this development through bourgeois theory, it could be characterised as the shift from the optimism of the pluralistic and consensus theories of the 1950s, which pronounced the end of ideology and celebrated the stability of capitalism, to the cynical technocratic and elitist theories elaborated in the 1960s.) This wave of revolutionary political activity spawned numerous periodicals and journals concerned with discovering marxism and thereby re-animating the marxist theoretical debate. Both as a consequence of this activity and critical for its development, at least in the English-speaking world, has been the translation over the last decade of all the crucial marxist theoretical texts (to name only two: Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness and Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks). The stage is set for solid theoretical struggle and for the production of correct knowledge, as the plea of ignorance of texts can no longer be sustained. The political developments of the last decade have also established the conditions for re-opening and elaborating leninism and for revivifying the debate around marxism as a science, a debate which has been raised quite outside of the sterile stalinist opposition of ‘bourgeois science, proletarian science’. It is here that we would emphasise the importance of Louis Althusser.
Our statement that the stage is set for the development of a closer understanding of capitalist theory makes full recognition of the problems this raises and of the work it demands. A successful socialist theory implies some minimum criteria: the understanding of reality must be objectively true for the theory must provide scientific knowledge of society. Such knowledge is not pure or contemplative but is always guided by the criterion of political intervention. As such it is a revolutionary praxis that attempts to effect the theoretically derived alternatives inherent in society. Furthermore, a successful intervention entails change not only in the structures and institutions of society but also in the social relations, practices and beliefs that sustain them. In short, such intervention implies knowledge of the totality of the social situation.
‘Intervention’: the fifth issue, 1975
The reader may have already noticed that Intervention is appearing with a new subtitle: ‘An Australian Journal of Marxist Analysis’. The reason for this is that our original aims in setting the journal up have not been fulfilled. As we explained in the editorial to the first issue, we intended the journal to be devoted to a specific task: that of analysing the history and structure of Australian capitalism, a task that would produce knowledge of practical, strategic use for the socialist movement in Australia. However, it seems that the marxist left is too small, too fragmented and too isolated for a journal to be sustained on such a basis alone. We are, therefore, choosing to widen the scope of the journal. While we would still prefer articles on the history and current development of Australian capitalism in Australia, we shall no longer attempt to make this the focal point of each issue. Articles on broader issues, on philosophy, social theory, aesthetics and the history of countries other than Australia shall be welcome.
Of course, we shall continue to adhere to the general theoretical direction that inspired the journal. We see Intervention as being specifically marxist in orientation. But we view marxism as a scientific theory rather than a dogma; not a set of eternal truths above and beyond criticism, but a theory subject to normal criteria of logical consistency and empirical testing, the strength of which lies in the explanatory power of the basic concepts of historical materialism.
The contents of this issue reflect the substantial broadening of the journal’s scope. The main articles in this issue, in different ways, are all concerned with the analysis of societies very different to present-day Australia.
Timor has suddenly emerged from obscurity into controversy in recent months. The article by Grant Evans provides a background to and analysis of current developments on that island, in a situation where the Australian left has responded rather too simplistically. Timor is small and acutely underdeveloped, and little is known about the functioning of its social system. It can hardly be said to have a settled peasantry, let alone a proletariat. What content do the ready-made slogans about ‘national liberation and socialist development’ and ‘revolutionary vanguard parties’ have in such a context? Evans’ article is a reminder of the real, painful problems of underdevelopment, problems which are often obscured in a fog of romanticism in much current left writing on ‘third world’ countries.
The Benefits of a Liberal Education
Rex Mortimer
(from Meanjin, 2/1976)
Ted Hill made a fetish of secrecy and mystery, so when on that morning in February 1957 he said to me, ‘Come outside, I’ve got something to say to you,’ I knew he wanted to make sure that no ASIO bugging devices would pick up our conversation. Without preliminaries he dropped his bombshell. ‘You’ve been chosen to study in China. You’ll be leaving in about two weeks.’ Then he stood and watched my reaction with wry amusement. He did not doubt for one moment that I would go, any more than I did. But he also knew that I was stunned, my mind whirling with the implications of his deliberately blunt pronouncement.
The Party at the time was in a state of considerable stress, marking the onset, had we but known it, of a period of prolonged conflict and crisis in the ranks of Australian communism. The shock waves of the 20th Congress and Hungary were still reverberating, leaving behind them confusion, disillusionment and recrimination. The big ‘revisionist’ exodus had hardly begun; most of the dissidents were still searching for the root causes of the Great Betrayal, clinging to shreds of hope that the nightmare would give way to the dawn of a new beginning, while the leadership gradually recovered its self-confidence and moved from containment of the revolt to its suppression.
I was thirty-one years old, and already a communist for almost fourteen years. I had recently been elected to the Victorian State Committee, in recognition of the fact that (despite inner turmoil) I was one of the few tertiary-trained communists of some standing who had accepted and propagated official rationalisations of Soviet brutality. For the past three years, I had been employed as a solicitor in a communist law firm. Outside working hours, and often within them too, I was caught up in a host of party activities – bossing a group of locality branches, writing propaganda, taking study group courses, speaking at meetings, keeping the Party’s publications out of the law courts. In short, I was an indefatigable part-time apparatchik.
I had come a long way from that night in August 1943 when the Melbourne University branch of the Communist Party had accepted my application for membership on the casting vote of the chairman, the puritan half of the meeting holding that I was too ‘irresponsible’ to join the ranks of the remakers of history. Ironically, the dubious new recruit was to outstay them all and rise higher than any in the party hierarchy. Yet the overridden fifty per cent had a strong case. At that stage, the most pronounced feature of my radicalism was an exuberant and wayward energy, which drove me, as a seventeen-year-old fresher, newly liberated from the authoritarian restraints of school and a tyrannical grandfather, to seek self-realisation in the company of the most unconventional, dynamic and anarchistic student personalities of the time. Their attraction for me stemmed as much from their outrageous behaviour as from their left-wing views. My precocity in their circle took flight under the stimulus of liquor, endless philosophical debates, girls, utopian fancies, midnight destructive exploits, and student reform politics. I was very nearly sent down after less than six months at the University, but my bravado was undiminished: the Red Army was my charger, the partisans in Europe my standard-bearers. The select group of which I was a part not only understood what the war was really all about and how the postwar world would have to be remade; it also flouted capitalist conventions there and then. I was proud to be its acolyte, prouder still to be its upstart university spokesman.
There were, at the same time, other sources of my radicalism: the death of a father in my infancy from wounds received in the First World War, and then the long depression years when my mother supported three children, her parents, and up to six unemployed relatives at a time, out of a war widow’s pension and part-time work in a shoe shop. This background had formed a mind eager to renounce the view that war and poverty were natural calamities, that had tried and then come to scorn the comfortable platitudes of organised religion, and that now discovered in historical materialism the only convincing explanation and remedy for social evils. This mind could be disciplined, harnessed to a cause; it remembered with deep ambivalence a mother’s uncomplaining fortitude and acceptance of her lot.
The indulgent, make-believe qualities of university politics catered for both sides of my personality. After I had left this nursery my rebellious tendencies were gradually submerged beneath mounting layers of political conformism. It had been my ambition upon graduating to become a trade union official, my juvenile symbol of the proletarian leader. Ted Hill steered me instead into a communist law firm, where my energies were soon employed day and night for the advancement of the Party’s cause. I was closely involved in the great political campaigns of those cold war years – around the Communist Party Dissolution Act of 1950, the anti-communist powers referendum of 1951, the Petrov Commission of 1954–55 – along with a legion of lesser issues. I worked full-time in ‘front’ organisations and for the Party itself, carried out the deadening chores of party routine work, and acquired the skills of an agitator, organiser, propagandist, educator. I had entered half-knowingly on the road to transformation into a cadre. Occasional flashes of ‘liberalism’, as manifestations of independence of mind were called, together with an untameable frivolousness, failed to arrest the steady process of my incorporation into the inner world of the organisation.
Important as political indoctrination is in the formation of the cadre, the crucial element is habituation to the rules and ways of a small, confined, hierarchically ordered system, in which the neophyte finds his role, his meaning and his satisfactions. In this closed world of the organisation, which devours all his time and attention, the recruit gradually comes to see the outside world and its concerns as hostile, trivial and self-indulgent. His is the arena of purpose, knowledge, fellowship, where he is constantly reassured in the belief that he is at the heart of a world-transforming movement, a person of a special mould, a confidant and aide of an all-seeing, austere and demanding leadership; that he himself, in a measure, is a leader to whom others lower down in the hierarchy defer.
This conditioning, with its parallels in other closed belief systems, accounts for both the strengths and weaknesses of the cadre: on the one hand, his unstinting devotion and motivation to acquire the skills of his trade; on the other, his rigidity and dependence on the organisation for orientation. He whose associations have all but narrowed down to his party colleagues, whose reading seldom departs from the range available in party bookshops, whose thinking is shaped by the structured lines of party polemics, is a formidable motor of the apparatus. He is also a peculiarly vulnerable part of it. The impact of the wider world, when it does strike the cadre, produces profound psychological shock in all but the thoroughly desensitised. The unexpected, in a sense unimaginable, intrusion of situations not provided for in the party prospectus revives the latent conflict between the two worlds in which he resides. He may react in one of several characteristic ways. He may achieve a more complex (and usually more cynical) synthesis confirming his faith, thereby equipping himself for higher leadership posts. He may deny the other world, embedding himself more deeply still in the mythological belief system of the organisation, becoming a true believer inaccessible to the impress of reality. He may seek to suppress the conflict by throwing himself more feverishly into routine activity, and becoming an unthinking and eventually useless cipher seeking relief in drink and the more vacuous traits and cults of the Dinkum Aussie. Or he may, often for quite trivial reasons on the surface, suddenly snap the ties that bind him to the organisation and rejoin the outside world, seldom without lasting neuroses induced by his failure to resolve his inner conflicts and refashion his disordered consciousness.
Some such choice as this was confronting me early in 1957 when Ted Hill produced his bombshell. I was very close to the Victorian Party Secretary at this time. We had worked together in the major legal confrontations between the Party and the government over a number of years, my role being that of pupil, fact-grubber, aide and messenger boy for the master. In return for my unstinting devotion, Ted had trained me in his rigorous analytical approach to the law, fed me his peculiarly intransigent brand of Leninism, and shown towards my irrepressible frivolity a rare degree of indulgence. Now, it seemed, the crowning reward for my labours and loyalty, the ultimate symbol of approval, and the way out of my political dilemmas, had been bestowed upon me by my patron. I was to journey to the land of revolutionary heroes.
China in 1957 was relatively untouched by the storms shaking the foundations of the communist movement elsewhere. Riding on a wave of post-revolutionary confidence and popularity, the CPC was reaching the heights of its first ‘liberal’ phase, characterised by a range of social experimentation surpassing the early years of Soviet Russia. Mao had proclaimed the slogan ‘Let all flowers bloom, all schools of thought contend’, under which both traditional and modern forms of art and discourse were enjoying their brief Indian summer. At the same time, the government was initiating new ventures in decentralisation, state-private cooperation in industry, democratic participation at the grassroots level, debureaucratisation.
Little of this had registered with me from reports in our party press, although it was vaguely realised in cadre circles that something different from the Soviet model was being fashioned in China. My scanty knowledge of events and life in this great civilisation, derived in the main from the writings of Lin Yu-tang and Edgar Snow, added up to a confused kaleidoscope of impressions, of which the most vivid was the picture of Mao’s romantic and ascetic guerilla army sweeping to power over the crumbling edifice of Chiang’s corruption. It was a powerful stimulant for jaded commitment. I sensed, rather than reasoned, that a new wave of conviction and enthusiasm was about to wash over me. In truth, though, it came to be no more than a reprieve; the experience that resolved one conflict was to ignite the slow-burning fuse of a new and more consuming one.
We arrived in Canton in the latter part of February. Our first impressions of China were overwhelmingly favourable, and so they were to remain. We were struck by the general air of neatness and cleanliness, the industry and pride of the Chinese people, the absence of beggars or extreme poverty, and above all by the indefinable impression the people gave that they felt ‘liberated’ in the sense of being masters of their own country and its future. Chinese communist officials too were characteristically modest, spartan, considerate and hard-working. Their ‘style’ was quite unlike anything we had encountered, seeming to combine selfless devotion with an almost elusive individuality, which together were extraordinarily impressive.
The hospitality which was lavished on us from the moment of our arrival in China was generous to the point of embarrassment. On tour we ate in banquet style, were treated to abundant entertainment, and waited upon hand and foot. Only during our formal study phase, lasting five months, was our living style reduced to more modest proportions. Our long-term residence in Peking had formerly been a warlord’s mansion. Surrounded by high walls, guarded day and night by armed men, the house consisted of a large block set in a courtyard and backed by a three-sided rectangle of small rooms. The four members of the Central Committee in our delegation were given large rooms in the central block, and the remainder of us were disposed, two to a room, in the small rooms behind the main building, which also contained our meeting room, dining-room, library and recreation room. We were supplied with domestic staff, interpreters, clothing and generous pocket money.
Our studies began early in March, and lasted in all eighteen weeks. The first six weeks were spent on the history of the Communist Party of China, followed by four weeks each on philosophy, the united national front, and the mass line method of work. All were based on Chinese experience and texts. Each morning for three days a week, a Chinese lecturer would visit our premises and deliver a lecture which was translated to us by one of our interpreters. After that, we would engage in private study during the afternoons and most evenings.
The central thread of the lectures was formed by the delineation of the nature and qualities of the Communist Party and communists. For the CPC, it was clear, the decisive question in social revolution is the Communist Party itself. Objective conditions may be more or less favourable from time to time, but correct leadership in the Party and firm resolve by its members will always enable it to survive and develop by adapting itself to the conditions of time and place and using positive features in any situation to its advantage. Likewise, every individual was considered capable of transcending his social origin or background, given the necessary will to do so. ‘Proletarian’ qualities, conceived of as a set of attributes (steadfastness, self-sacrificing zeal, modesty, etc.) vital to the proper functioning of the Party, derived essentially from an analysis of the needs experienced in the course of the revolutionary struggle, and were epitomised in the person of Mao himself.
The great pitfall to which communists were prone, and which threatened their undoing, was ‘subjectivism’ – the substitution of estimates based upon one’s personal interests or inclinations for a dispassionate review of the situation. There were many streams flowing into the river of subjectivism, but all must be dammed by following two courses: the continual practice of self-remoulding and dedication to the ‘mass line’ method of work. Ideological remoulding was never a final or finished process, but required repeated struggle with one’s weaknesses, in which criticism by others was a vital aid. Towards those outside the Party, the communists must display a combination of devoted concern and an awareness of their own special mission.
The Australian group members, particularly the younger ones, responded very favourably to these themes, and to the course of lectures as a whole. The emphasis on personal remoulding came as a revelation to most of us; we had been reared on a more deterministic variant of communism, in which the mastery of theory rather than the attainment of ideological purity was the main concern. The presentation by the Chinese lecturers, with its abundance of practical illustrations and moral examples, convinced us of the power of ideas, fused with organisation, to move mountains. Perhaps we subconsciously wanted to believe this, since objective circumstances in Australia were not proving beneficial to the progress of the communist movement; in any case, we raised no resistance to the ideas put before us.
Our supply of news was good enough to appease the hunger of isolated expatriates. Besides a shortwave radio, which we used to listen to Radio Australia, we had delivered to us daily copies of a Hsinhua Newsagency release containing an extensive coverage of international and domestic events. Chinese English-language magazines, and copies of the Soviet journals, Moscow News, New Times and International Affairs, arrived regularly. From time to time, batches of daily press cuttings from Australia, and copies of our own party newspapers, would arrive by airmail.
Each Monday night, we were driven by bus to the state store for sightseeing and shopping. We would then wander the markets and settle down in Peking’s one and only bar supplying draught beer, known to us as the Peace Pub, until 10 p.m. On Saturday nights, the Chinese would show us a film, usually of the romantic revolutionary genre, to which the local members of our household also came.
At the conclusion of the course of lectures, we were given one week in which to write up our personal evaluations, for which we had been prepared at an early stage in our course by the Class Committee. One member of the delegation at this time had been appointed to pay special attention to the personal failings of individual members, and to hold private discussions with each in order to help the member to relate the matter of the lectures and reading to his or her deficiencies. The Chinese lecturers took no part in this process. As things turned out, our experience of ‘emptying the foul waters from our stomach’ was very mild indeed compared with what we later heard from members of previous delegations.
After our week of travail, we each read our self-criticism to the other members of our sub-group, who added their store of criticism to the pile and urged a more thorough-going examination. In my sub-group, however, the whole matter ended on a note of farce. After hearing our ‘confessions’ and adding his own caustic remarks about our personalities and behaviour, our leader flatly refused to present a self-criticism, informing us that he did not regard the process seriously and that, if he were going to bare his faults, it would be to the higher leaders of the Australian Party to whom he felt himself responsible. A furious argument ensued, but to no avail. We thereupon took the matter to the delegation leader who, after expressing his sympathy with our point of view, advised us to forget the matter, as he was convinced that no progress could be made. From this time on, our dedicated approach to systematic remoulding subsided.
This was only one indication of a deep cleavage in our group, the implications of which were to prove one of the most potent influences making for my subsequent rebellion and renunciation. The younger and more junior members of the delegation came to recognise and discuss among themselves, at first guardedly and hesitantly, and then with increasing cynicism, the ways in which the most senior and high-ranking among us least measured up to the CPC criteria for being ‘a good communist’. They were the most self-indulgent, the most authoritarian, the most petty and the most complacent. Their decisions were frequently arbitrary and capricious, their response to criticism intolerant and vindictive, and their mutual relations marked by jealousy and spite.
At first we had accepted the special powers, privileges and allowances accorded to our leaders as their due, but as the respect in which they were held declined, so our resentment at these perquisites of office grew. No overt challenge to the leadership was ever mounted – our feelings were too confused and our vulnerability too great for that, and Chinese instruction emphasised party discipline just as strongly (if less one-sidedly) as did the Stalinist doctrine by which we had been fashioned. But frequent mutterings and cynical comments were retailed with relish, obstructive tactics were occasionally applied, and any safe opportunity to ‘put down’ one of the men at the top was grasped eagerly. The general morale of the group suffered considerably as time went on, especially when boredom, homesickness, and other frustrations of the monastic life raised the general level of tension in the group.
Viewed from a later and more dispassionate perspective, the inadequacies of these men, in terms of the ideals which we were internalising as a result of our instruction, are readily understandable. Products of the rough-and-tumble depression years, and reared in a tough, rigid and authoritarian Stalinist school in which survival demanded ruthlessness and deviousness, they had become set in habits which could hardly be transformed by a few months of spiritual evangelism. Their positions and their self-esteem had been hard won precisely by successful display of these characteristics, and to have given them up would have involved not only a threat to their life’s ambitions and security, but a drastic change in their mental make up. Self-indulgence for them was both a means of easing the anxieties and strains of their positions, and an exercise of the privileges earned by their success in climbing to the top of the party ladder. It was also in tune with the working-class ethos rampant in the Party, which exalted the larrikin qualities of ‘real men’.
At the time, however, we were viewing these men through spectacles supplied by Mao; he insisted that leadership demanded spiritual qualities above all else, and China’s revolutionary and post-revolutionary achievements, in contrast to the catastrophic human results of Stalinism, seemed to bear him out. A seed of disillusionment was sown in me by the failings of our group leaders; as yet it had barely germinated, since I had not begun to generalise the experience I was undergoing. A humid party climate, and the fertilising effects of group conflict, would do their work before too long.
Other foci of conflict and unease existed in the group, each of which served to reinforce in my mind the Chinese teaching that defective ideology saps the unity and energy of a revolutionary organisation. The restricted and artificial life we were leading threw individual weaknesses into high relief, and magnified petty irritations into bitter antagonisms. The lack of sexual outlet, and a succession of ailments (particularly influenza and dysentery) from which we suffered all added to the toll. Some members found it difficult to adjust to the food, some were unused to prolonged study, and others were made restless by sustained periods of inactivity.
There was no small element of priggishness in my attitude towards the personal inadequacies of my fellow members, although I was not so blind as to be unaware of the gulf between my own ideals and my behaviour: in fact this caused me bouts of guilt and depression. Essentially, though, I perceived a major difference between the outlook of myself and some other members of the group, on the one hand, and that of our leaders in particular. While we accepted and tried to emulate Chinese norms of behaviour, the others made no apparent effort to do so and in many instances displayed arrant hyprocrisy in their manipulation of the norms to their own personal advantage.
Despite these tensions, most of us were reasonably content with our lot. Absorption in Chinese life and revolutionary history dominated our thinking and feeling, but as well, informal relationships within the group did much to mitigate resentments by providing a sympathetic network through which members relaxed and let off steam. One device for relieving strain was to apply outlandish nicknames to individuals to dramatise their quirks; these were publicly used and mostly accepted in good part. I had the luxury of two appellations. Because, in my naïve enthralment with China, I had been the first to buy and wear a ‘Mao suit’, I was dubbed ‘Shanka’, a contraction of Chiang Kai-Shek. Alternatively, the fact that I awoke on my first morning in Peking with an erection inspired my room-mate to label me ‘Rigor Mortis’, in a deft play of words on my surname. Another outlet was the performance of satirical lampoons on the characteristics of unnamed but easily recognisable group members; this became a feature of our Sunday night entertainment, and one member of the delegation revealed an unusual talent for devising scripts of considerable aptness and incisiveness.
Our five months of study in Peking were followed by a two-month journey through eastern China, from the Soviet border in Manchuria to Shanghai, designed to flesh out our studies with practical insights into China’s achievements, programs and problems. While it achieved this objective, its effect on our ideology was rather contradictory: frequently we must have resembled a guzzling, inebriated bandwaggon of western barbarians.
Arriving back in Melbourne in early October 1957, my overriding aspiration was to give more devoted service to the Party, and to try to introduce the more flexible and democratic practices of the Chinese CP. I hoped to work full-time for the Party, being convinced that what I had learned had strengthened my dedication and better fitted me for leadership. Before I had gone away, I had generally supported the leadership style of Ted Hill, noted for his uncompromising strength of mind and will and his decisiveness. I now had strong reservations about this type of leadership and its effect, but my mood was directed towards reform rather than rebellion.
My hopes of being taken on full-time by the Party were not disappointed, and I became a journalist on the party weekly in Victoria. I soon learned, however, that the atmosphere in the leading circles of the Victorian Party was not sympathetic to the kind of reforms I contemplated. Ted Hill had drawn the conclusion from the political crises of 1956 that firm and strict control was needed in the Party to guard against ‘revisionism’ and other sins. He was not favourably impressed by the ‘psychological’ techniques of the CPC, and relied upon a small circle of loyal followers in the party apparatus to execute his commands without question. My first major clash with him came when he treated a member of the newspaper staff in what I considered to be a high-handed and inconsiderate manner. After this incident, I was discreetly approached by another party official and found to my surprise that a core of opposition had formed against the Secretary and his dictatorial methods.
In a disconcertingly short space of time, I found myself catapulted into a desperate struggle for survival against the Secretary and his group, who interpreted the criticism levelled against them by the rebels as outright revolt. The fury of their counter-attack, with its demands for recantation and self-abasement, gave us no alternative but to respond in kind or resign ourselves to disgrace and expulsion. We were far too convinced of our moral rectitude and historical justification to take the latter course. To add to our troubles, the ideological context of the dispute took a sudden and unexpected turn. We had been basing our stand on the principles of communist organisation and behaviour we had learned in China, but, with the outbreak of the Sino-Soviet dispute, Chinese political propaganda began to appear to both sides as the embodiment of intransigence and inflexibility. Ted Hill quickly apprehended the domestic implications of this new trend, and the erstwhile admirer of Soviet communism was transformed into a Sinophile. We dissidents were obliged by polemical necessity to seek to reconcile the Chinese teaching we had taken in with the liberalising doctrines of Khrushchev, a not too comfortable contortion.
Intra-communist conflict is invariably bitter and sordid. This internecine strife, which lasted over three years, was no exception. The whole arsenal of marxist invective was dredged for ammunition, the lives and careers of the participants were culled for evidence of symptomatic misdeeds, and wills were bent towards the systematic breakdown of the opponents’ morale. At first confined to the higher committees of the Victorian Party, where it raged without remission, it soon drew in both the national leaders of the Party and many rank-and-file members. Suspicion, intrigue, mutual espionage, gossip and slander became a daily occurrence. People who were obliged by their party roles to work together did so with stiff-lipped formality, behind which lurked the ever-present anticipation of some weakness in the other side which could be exploited in the next round of the conflict. Outside formal contacts, relations between the opposing forces were confined to venomous glances and acid remarks. Old friendships seized up with friction and turned into lasting enmity. One’s entire life became dominated by the need to be on guard against treachery and denunciation. Thus a rare personal visit to my flat by a longtime ex-communist friend, observed by an adversary, was used as evidence of my unsavoury associations with the class enemy. A leader’s extra-marital liaison was exposed in any anonymous letter to his wife. Those who prided themselves on their lofty motives, including myself, stooped to acts of devious malice which in normal circumstances most would have regarded as unthinkable.
In time, the physical and psychic costs of the conflict began to tell upon us all. Ted Hill, long suffering from poor health, came at times to the brink of collapse; I recall at one meeting he spent a considerable time lying on the floor swallowing pills to control his hypertension, unable to desert the field of battle. I myself began to suffer regular migraine attacks, and developed an ulcer along with lesser symptoms of nervous tension. To save my sanity, I fell back upon an early passion, the blues, and would lie for hours in bed clinging desperately to the gut humanity and fortitude boomed out by Bessie Smith and Leadbelly. When, many years later, I read Peter Berger’s comment that the only revolutionary worthy of trust is a sad one, I knew only too well what he meant.
The Secretary had the numbers and, initially, the backing of the Party’s national leaders. By all the rules of the communist game, our small group should have capitulated or been ejected. Two factors saved us: the desire of the national leadership to conceal its adherence to the Chinese cause in the international conflict, and the support we enjoyed from officials of one of the largest and most important party-controlled trade unions, whose president on one occasion actually threw his party ticket on the table in front of the party national secretary to forestall our destruction. Eventually, in 1961, for reasons still obscure, the national leadership returned to Moscow’s fold, and Ted Hill became the hunted rather than the hunter. The conflict raged on for another eighteen months, but we, the odious renegades, had been miraculously transformed into heroic defenders of communist principle against a dogmatic tyrant. (Though, to be sure, since rebellion is contagious, we were treated with just a hint of caution.)
After the Party split, I was promoted to the post of editor of the Victorian party paper, and elected a member of the seven-man Victorian State Executive and of the Central Committee. For the next three years, I helped to map out and apply the more flexible policies adopted by the Party during prolonged and painful post-mortems. In addition, I was fighting to overcome the fatigue, depression and scarring resulting from years of debilitating internecine conflict.
By 1965, however, I had come to a dead end. I was frustrated in my work on the newspaper, since it was obvious that the attempt to popularise it could not make ground against the pressures of financial retrenchment and party ambivalence. Dimly I sensed that this was only part of a more deep-seated problem: the endemic crisis in the movement, which stemmed from the obsolescence of its doctrine, its inappropriateness to the circumstances of contemporary advanced society. Attempts by the Australian party leaders to refurbish the Party’s image had gone some distance, but were ultimately outweighed by the doctrinaire defensive reflexes of most of the membership, the leaders’ decades of conditioning and social exclusiveness, and the oppressive authoritarianism of the communist states with which they were identified.
I was becoming more and more openly critical of the Party, and below the specific issues on which I was expressing disagreement, there subsisted a general reservoir of estrangement and disenchantment. Deep down, I divined that my long years of incarceration in the inner world of the party organisation had atrophied my critical and intellectual faculties, and immured me in a set of concepts which bore but the crudest relation to the social reality of my time. I yearned to wrestle once more with this reality, but had lost a grip on the required tools. At the same time, I was not yet ready to break entirely with the Party, to face the outside world alone, bearing the guilt of my ‘defection’. So I compromised. Resigning my post as editor of the Guardian, I commenced an MA preliminary course in politics at Monash University and, upon its completion, began work on a post-graduate thesis. I began to rediscover the greatly changed world of scholarship, to renew acquaintance with the intellectual culture, and to plunge over my head in the stimulating, frustrating, pedantic theories of the social sciences.
I kept up, with flagging interest and growing strain, my participation in the work of higher party committees. But my party colleagues recognised, as I did, that the alteration in my milieu and perspectives had made me an outsider. The gulf between us yawned, widened by disagreements and mutual disappointments. In 1968, I left for a year’s study in Europe. My observations and experiences there, taking in the May events in France and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, left me convinced that there was no hope of resuscitating the communist movement in the West on any basis that I could support. Upon arriving back in Australia in April 1969, I submitted my resignation after twenty-six years’ membership.
In retrospect, my Chinese adventure stands out as a watershed in my party history. Situated roughly halfway along the path of my membership, it marked the apogee of my unquestioning commitment as a party cadre, from which point the curve rapidly turned downward. Although the immediate effect of the training was to enhance my dedication by impressing me with the qualities, the achievements and the ideas of the Chinese communists, it also prepared the ground for my subsequent rebellion and disenchantment. The overwhelming stress placed upon the moral purity of the communists themselves as the crucial factor in the success of revolutionary movements, served to raise considerably my level of expectation regarding the performance of the Australian Party and its leading members. When the Party not only failed to meet my demands but treated them as seeds of treachery, the way was open for my passage from reform to rebellion. Our revolt might easily have degenerated into just another squalid factional fight had it not been for the outbreak of the Sino-Soviet dispute, which injected into it issues which called in question fundamental postulates of the movement itself. The changes set in train within the Australian Party (or, rather, the main contingent of Australian communism) served to delay, but could not finally prevent, my departure from its ranks. The questioning had gone too far, the answers were not forthcoming.
The days of overseas training for mainstream Australian communists are over. First the Chinese, then the Russian, schooling was repudiated as the Party in this country moved towards a position of greater ideological independence. But if the Chinese leaders ever reflect upon the period during which they exercised such a profound influence on the thought of their Australian comrades, it may occur to them with some perplexity that the chief leaders of ‘revisionism’ in this country were trained in their academies.
For my part, I have come to regard my time in China as one of the most precious experiences in my life, just as I now view China’s social experiments as among the more hopeful in an increasingly depressing world. And I shall always be grateful to Mao and his colleagues for the benefits of a liberal education.
An Anarchist Comes to Power
(adapted, from the Bulletin, 21.7.73)
After having not seen him for a number of years, we met our old anarchist friend John Flaus in the Royal Oak Hotel, Chippendale. This was in the mid seventies just before the Royal Oak became a feminist separatist hotel. John looked the same as ever – black and white flowing beard, beret, conversationally enlivened, but something was missing. No, not missing – something was present. He had shoes on.
We knew then that there was a story in it.
We interrogated him and he admitted to having compromised but said ‘Look, no socks’. The defiance of bourgeois trappings was still there.
It turned out that John was in Sydney for his first meeting as a member of the Australian Film and Television School board. John had come to power and corruption had set in.
After apologising for the shoes, he told us that the commonwealth chauffeur who had picked him up from his room in Carlton had still been disturbed by his appearance, especially when he had finished his dressing and toilet in the car on the way to the airport.
But John’s rise to power was slow.
John was one of the original filmniks, as well as a theoretical and practising anarchist. A filmnik in the sixties was one of those people, especially in Sydney, who was evangelically enthusiastic about ‘film’ as an art – especially about the value of the popular, or B-grade, films. They gathered around the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) film group and the University of Sydney film group. They began to study popular culture so long scorned by high culture.
John was an incessant finder of value in B-grade films and one of the first to talk about the richness of Hollywood, the vigorous individuality of directors working within the studio system; and he began to evaluate the film genres – westerns, gangster films, the domestic comedy.
A hundred filmniks would take the WEA residential school at Newport for a long weekend and have continuous screenings and discussion in darkened rooms.
John also championed the bughouse cinemas like the old Capital – not only for their visual and architectural associations with the golden years of Hollywood but because they showed, John argued, unpromoted masterpieces.
A writer to an intellectual newspaper back in 1965 accused John of ‘wilful personal enthusiasm about films of melodramatic violence, unedifying taste, neglible intellectual stimulation, and questionable allegorical significance.’
They were the days when art cinemas showed ‘continental’ movies: Bergman was the only director – artist; if it didn’t have sub-titles it was trash.
Never a person for possessions, John claims to be the first person to go to a drive-in cinema without a car. He badly wanted to see a certain film and, together with cineaste Norma Crinion, he took a taxi to the drive-in, paying the taxi-driver off at the gate. They were prepared to sit in one of the car bays but the manager supplied them with two chairs.
John’s only complaint was that he was charged for the non-existent car.
John won a scholarship to the University of Sydney through his performance in WEA adult education courses. His years at the University are still talked about by staff. He had too much to say. He could begin essays and examination questions but never finish them. He could never exhaust the possibilities of the first question on the examination paper and so only answered one question, but at exhaustive and brilliant length (so legend would have it).
One of his lecturers said that he assigned John a 2000-word essay on the ‘Knight’s Tale’ by Chaucer. Months later, John brought in 7000 words. He was told he would have to cut it or it would not be read. He eventually submitted a 2000-word essay with a 3000-word appendix.
He can never give a one-hour paper – he always spills over. No form contains him.
He has always preferred to go barefoot. When he joined the WEA for a while as an executive officer, he literally ‘stepped into his predecessor’s shoes’. He had no shoes of his own but found a pair in the office which were later recognised as belonging to the former assistant secretary.
Since graduating in the early seventies he has held a few lecturerships and is now at Caulfield CAE. He has also risen to eminence and power. And he gets to meet celebrities.
He met Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show) and executives from the film industry.
‘We went to this posh turn where you had to wear a bow-tie. Someone found me a bow-tie so that I could get in – but blow me, the doorman didn’t even lift my beard to see if I had it on.’
After years of theorising outside cinemas with friends, after a show or in coffee shops, and being attacked for ‘wilful personal enthusiasm’, he is now appointed, elected, seconded, and pulled onto committees and advisory boards all over the country.
‘When I had things to say that were original, they didn’t want to listen,’ he said. Now that his ideas have become orthodoxies they want him
‘I should be crying,’ he said.
But he admits to enjoying the democratic grind and power-play of committee life.
‘I actually enjoy a good committee meeting.’
We dug up a piece of his criticism which, while it doesn’t illustrate his original aesthetic, does show the relentless involvement he expected of film-goers, ‘… this print is old and not in good condition. Visuals may be scratchy and the sound muffled but this should not be an excuse for missing the film.’
The Blooming of Little Anarchism
John Flaus was one of the contributors to the anarchist magazine Red and Black, published by Jack Grancharoff – Jack the Anarchist.
As long as I have been around Sydney libertarians, Jack was known as the archetypal anarchist. He was Bulgarian, often bearded, and always assertive. He spoke at the Domain.
I was a contributor to issue one of Red and Black with a short story, ‘What Can You Say’, about a young man who discovers that he is an anarchist although he wasn’t aware of it. It was the only imaginative writing to appear in the Red and Black’s nine issues.
Jack Grancharoff was also founder of a magazine called the Anarchist which went for three issues.
The other anarchist-oriented magazines of the seventies were Cane Toad Times from Brisbane; Every thing, an anarchist-feminist magazine which produced two issues out of Sydney; Acracia, produced by the Federation of Australian Anarchists out of Melbourne – about forty issues; and 9-2-5, a literary magazine from Melbourne.
Most anarchist material in Australia adopts a tone of exasperated scorn in a world full of tyrants and people suffering from illusion. Much of the material is from a purist vision of people forced to exist in a corrupted society.
The Sydney libertarians who were allied with classical anarchist thinking tried, but often failed, to introduce a non-judgemental, non-moralistic tolerance into their behaviour and conversational tones; that is, a tone of inquirer rather than that of judge and executioner.
It was considered authoritarian to try to make a person comply with your demands by making them feel ill at ease, guilty, or by exciting animosity against them. This didn’t exclude analysis and criticism but the line between criticism and moralism was often blurred.
As Orwell has suggested, the societies where only public opinion determined behaviour were more conformist and restrictive than societies where a British legal system operates.
The state is not the only source of coercion.
Apart, though, from the magazines of theory, which looked especially at history and a little at anthropological studies of social organisation – especially the writing of Ken Maddocks in Sydney anarchist publications – there seemed to be an outburst of anarchist-oriented behaviour not related to theory.
Many of those who participated in non-parliamentary political activity – resident groups, communalism, the women’s movement, FM radio, 2JJ, non-commercial magazines and newspapers – did so with an unstated anarchist ethic. Part of this was a reaction against authoritarian socialism as represented by overseas models or by the behaviour of local groups.
Simply stated, the anarchist ethic was a concern with self-management, non-coercive personal relationships, non-hierarchical working arrangements, a disregard of rigid sexual morality, and the attempt to bypass or reject the profit mechanism in dealings.
Communist and socialist parties based on interpretations of Marx permitted action against capitalist systems but did not believe in personal emancipation within these systems.
The anarchist-oriented movements did believe that significant changes could occur in one’s own life, personal arrangements, and in relations with society – in one’s own lifetime. This was more attractive and offered greater possibilities for action and behaviour – ‘building a new society inside the shell of the old’.
Several magazines serviced this approach: Horizon from Sydney, Social Alternatives from Brisbane, Grass Roots from Shepparton, Earth Garden from Sydney and Down to Earth from Canberra. They were interested in rural communes, new therapies, child-raising, consciousness-changing and non-industrial possibilities.
There were, even in the conventional economy, slight movements away from authoritarian boss-worker relations: flexible working hours, joint consultation, experiments in worker participation, especially in South Australia and in the organisation of universities, and what could be called ‘elusive transformation’.
For the hard-liners all this was futile until there had been a revolutionary change. But the evidence is that anarchist-oriented thinking has predominated in non-parliamentary politics in Australia.
Among students and young people the label ‘anarchist’ is seen as acceptable when the label ‘communist’ has been corrupted by the performance of communist governments and by the authoritarianism inherent in communist theory.
I would argue that there has been more ‘elusive transformation’ than hard-liners will admit, or than analysis has shown.
How Many Badges Did you Earn?
I didn’t make it to the launching of the book about green bans not so long ago, but a spy told me this. Jim Cairns, who officially launched the book, was talking afterwards with a group about political campaign badges – moratorium, green ban, Aboriginal land rights, etc. – and about who had the most. Jim said that when cleaning out his drawer he found he had forty. This is considered a maximum score for the seventies. I found I had six.
When Labor gets back into power, the wearing of these badges at state occasions will be required.
A Radical Country Newspaper
(adapted, from the Bulletin, 17.7.73)
A twelve-year-old girl doing a project on newspapers came into the Yass Tribune office one day in 1971 and asked its owner-editor, Bert Mudge, whether he was insulted when people called the paper ‘the local rag’.
‘It was a good question,’ Bert told me, ‘but it’s about ten years since I’ve heard the paper referred to as “the rag” or the “two minute silence”.’ Bert thinks the country-town newspaper is a better product now than it was in the past. When Yass was a two-newspaper town the competition made the papers economically weak and frightened to offend.
Bert Mudge, in his sixties, is not frightened to offend. He has worked on the Yass Tribune all his life, having inherited it from his father along with a labour radicalism. Among the 250 newspapers in Australia, it was one of the few, if not the only, country newspaper that carried a radical line.
‘I said at a country press conference that I was the only paper with Labor sympathies and two other owners jumped up and said they had Labor sympathies too. I said, well it’s a pity you don’t show it in your newspapers.’
The Tribune, up to sixteen pages, thumped off a flatbed rotary press Mondays and Thursdays, with editorials and comment against the Vietnam war, capital punishment, apartheid, and for the Labor Party. As well, the paper carried on the traditional duties of the country newspaper: the recording of births, deaths and marriages, social notes, sport, and traffic accidents.
‘I don’t flatter myself that I convert anyone,’ Bert said, ‘but right or wrong I like to write my opinions.’ His piece on the moratorium demonstration against the Vietnam war was typical. He quoted Labor member of parliament Tom Uren’s support for the demonstration, adding in his editorial, ‘Mr Uren expressed the sentiments of another 100 000 people in the country towns who could not join in yesterday’s demonstrations. He also spoke for the other countless thousands in this country who never have the guts to demonstrate against anything more important than the rise in the price of beer.’
One of Bert’s theories is that although there is freedom of speech, the average country-town worker is intimidated. ‘No bank clerk is going to get up at an RSL meeting and express his true opinions when the manager of the bank is sitting on the executive of the organisation.’
As I talked with Bert about country newspapers, something overtook the interview – the presence of Bert’s father. Bert at sixty-three was totally conscious of his father and the Yass Tribune has perfect father-son continuity. Some of the opinions published were those of his father, which in his day he couldn’t afford to publish.
‘My father was my best friend – and still is although he’s been deceased seventeen years. He remains within me.’ Bert quoted his father’s maxims on business and journalism.
‘My father also taught me the value of a quid.’
He told me of the dilemmas of a country editor.
‘I remember a local identity was picked up for driving under the influence after the picnic races. Over the weekend every prominent person in Yass came to us and wanted us not to publish the story. I said to my father – and I hate myself to this day for saying it – I said that maybe we shouldn’t publish it. My father eventually told one of them that if they gave him 5000 pounds he wouldn’t publish the story – and they’d own the newspaper. My father said to me then, “Either we run the newspaper or they do”.
‘Then, later on, one of my father’s friends, a local bank manager he’d been playing bridge with for years, was charged with misappropriation of funds. My father told me to write the story without holding anything back but that they didn’t want to see a word of it. That’s the agony of being a country newspaper editor.’
Had he taken his radicalism straight from his father? Bert thought at first that he had not but as we talked he found himself quoting his father and agreed that many of his opinions had come from his father. But the educative experience that had built, tested and confirmed his views was three years in a prisoner-of-war camp during the Second World War. ‘We discussed everything that concerned people – we argued. That was my education. We talked to stop ourselves from being hungry.’
Bert was unaffiliated with any political party and told me that he was a ‘swinging voter’. I queried this.
‘Well, I can’t remember when I haven’t voted Labor,’ he said smiling, but added, ‘I think I voted Country Party once but I don’t for the life of me know why.’
His radical policies went against the grain of the basically Country Party district in which his newspaper circulates. The town and district lives off wool and passing traffic. Yass is a town of motels and service stations. It is within the Labor-held seat of Burrinjuck. But Bert has run editorials critical of the sitting member too.
As far as he knows, his policies cost Bert no loss of advertising and only three subscribers out of his 2100 circulation.
‘I’ve lost no important friendships and I get good letters to the editor.’
The letters to the editor in the Tribune were treated differently from the usual way in other newspapers. They were usually printed over two columns and boxed in for emphasis.
He had sent complimentary subscriptions to every local boy who went to Vietnam – about twenty-five of them – but was disappointed at the absence of a reaction from them to his argument on the war.
‘I had two young local chaps just back from Vietnam come into the office and thank me for sending the paper. They said it kept them going while they were up there. But they didn’t mention the editorials or the war at all.’
Bert’s anti-Americanism came from his father. He said that his father had read the Saturday Evening Post from cover to cover up to a couple of years before he died. One day he had cancelled the subscription to the Post and said, ‘Bert, Australia has more to fear from the Americans than from the Russians.’
As I left the Tribune office, Bert showed me a letter. ‘This is the sort of letter that makes it all worthwhile,’ he said.
It was a subscription renewal from a former Yass army mate now living in Sydney. ‘Enjoy your editorials,’ it said. ‘Hope we see a few years yet, Bert – you to publish it and me to read it … the other night I heard on the radio “Is the Straight-talking Australian a Myth?” – and I thought of you.’
The End of the Libertarians
The Andersonians, the libertarians, the Push – that ‘remarkably original provincial cult’ in Sydney (see Darcy Waters’ profile, click here) – has had a number of journals. Its first was Free thought, which began in 1932. Then came the Libertarian and the Sydney Line (a booklet), the Pluralist, and the Libertarian Broadsheet which began in 1957. The Broadsheet ran for ninety-five issues. The following documents mark the end of this period in Sydney intellectual history and the end of the Broadsheet after twenty-four years.
To the meeting on the future of the libertarian Broadsheet, 13 August 1979, from Frank Moorhouse
Some ideas:
Finance
(1) We circulate 500 foundation subscribers with the first issue and ask them for $10.
(2) I have mixed feelings about funding agencies and the lack of resilience they induce in a magazine and the impact that the agency has on ‘shape’ of content, even though they do not dictate content.
(3) I’m willing to make a $50 contribution to the setting up of a libertarian-oriented magazine.
Name
I don’t like Rough Red because it has communist connotations. Why not Rough Red and Black? Or revive the Pluralist, or Red and Black? Or the Sydney Line?
Editorial
(1) An ongoing critical examination of the policies and theories of the marxist groups.
(2) Establish links with left opposition in the eastern European countries (we have connections with Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and could find others).
(3) Erotica and other imaginative writing.
(4) Specific articles could be done on Spanish anarchism since Franco, the reassertion of cultural inhibition in Australia, an article on the French neo-Freudians.
Letter from Jim Baker to Frank Moorhouse, August 1979
Dear Frank,
I had lectures on Monday and didn’t go to the meeting, but I was able to pass on your letter for tabling at the meeting.
However, it appears the meeting was not a great success. No decisions were made. I’m told there was not much enthusiasm for doing anything … I think things will still be in abeyance for some time …
Radical and Other Christmases in the Seventies
Christmas breakfast with the communists
The cards – many of them UNICEF – were displayed on the mantelpiece. The presents were distributed from a symbolic tree made from honesty-bush. The children and the grand-children were present. The music was the singing of Donovan and Lena Horne. Both the mother and the father are members of the Communist Party of Australia, although not as active as they have been in the past. Their son, a photographer, lives with a woman who has a child by him and a child by another man she has lived with. The other daughter is a teacher, separated from her husband, who now lives a back-to-nature life in the country.
From the conversation:
Fir trees make such a mess, but we always have a tree made from something: last year we used one of Daddy’s sculptures – what would you like to drink with your breakfast? Scotch, vodka and orange juice or there’s grape juice or apple juice? What are your orders for breakfast? – there’s omelette with chives, pancakes with lemon, mangoes and cherries. Paul is, of course, late as usual but we won’t wait for him. They wanted a dinner set from Opus in Paddington but the pieces aren’t replaceable and it wouldn’t have lasted a day with Luke and Mandy. Actually, they’re not calling him Luke now, they’re calling him Bishka – they decided he wasn’t a ‘Luke’. I brought you The Female Eunuch, Mother, so that I can borrow it. Kim’s parents gave me an Edna O’Brien for Christmas. I don’t know why they keep treating me as one of the family; we’ve been apart for two years. She’s a dreadful writer really, always writing about intelligent women separated from their husbands. I think the film Ma Nuit chez Maud is a statement about the strength of catholicism in France. He was a catholic man whose marriage remained stable because of the force of catholicism. The doctor in the film, on the other hand, was an intellectual and therefore bound to have an unstable marriage. No, Daddy, you can’t extract generalised statements like that from a film like that. I hear that Gwen Harwood, the Tasmanian poet, is supposed to be Timothy Kline in the Shapcott anthology. Remember? She’s the poet who made a fool of Coleman when he edited the Bulletin by sending in a poem with an acrostic which said ‘fuck all editors’. I don’t know if literary hoaxes serve any purpose. Take the Ern Malley thing – poor old Max Harris – it’s a sort of literary vandalism. When you think about it, Christmas is our only national tradition. Some of my relatives and our Jewish friends try to keep Chanuka alive by combining it with Christmas and they send cards saying ‘Happy Christmas and Happy Chanuka’.
Christmas in the Balmain sub-culture
Each year in Balmain ‘waifs and strays’ Christmas parties are held by those who, by inclination or by circumstance, are without strong family ties.
This waifs-and-strays party included four people with recently broken marriages, five school teachers, two university lecturers, two postgraduate students, a barrister, a nurse, a drama student, four people who would see themselves as poets, a journalist, a fiction writer, two people self-employed in business, and two children – one named Sky and the other Jenny (an adopted Aboriginal girl).
No Christmas cards were displayed. There was a traditional groaning table of food including turkey, duck, baked steak, and a Greek Christmas cake (but no traditional Christmas pudding: instead, diced cold fruit). Two cold soups were served, a cream cucumber soup and gazpacho.
Drinking was on the average four drinks an hour. For some – including me – a little faster. One joint of marijuana was smoked. The customary mixed nuts and raisins were put about, and an innovation, Akai crackers from Japan, jokingly introduced as ‘macrobiotic’. There was a traditional fir tree, decorated.
From the conversation:
Darlings, we’ve arrived – the party may begin. It’s really a Latvian–Israeli Christmas – maybe the first in history – provided by Misses Esses and Levy. We spent the night decorating the tree which I cut myself. What sort of contraceptive did Casanova use? – the birth control campaign in Britain is saying that he didn’t get women into trouble. The answer is that he used, among other things, a sheep’s intestine as a condom. About the flies: I was going to spray the garden with DDT but didn’t get around to it. Pollution? I was going to do it as an act of pollution. To demonstrate your lack of harmony with nature? Yes. What will you have to drink – beer, wine, scotch? Have a piroshki – they’re Latvian – you’re supposed to be changing your eating habits because of immigration. Remember, tomorrow is Chairman Mao’s birthday party. Murray is having a keg. Is that your little sister? I mean she is dark. She’s adopted from an Aboriginal family. I like people who can play the Christmas game properly. Haven’t you any other music than that? (the British folk singer A. L. Lloyd was being played) – I’ll go home and get some of the Rolling Stones or Melanie. Did you know that Adamson claims he was first picked up by the police for living with an eleven-year-old girl? He didn’t know she was eleven but became suspicious when he’d send her out to shoplift food and she’d come back with potato chips and lollies. The manufacturing of the Adamson legends. Still, it’s a nice story. What does ‘Bogarting’ mean when you’re smoking pot? If you don’t know, man, then maybe you don’t deserve to know. Don’t bullshit me. It means that you shouldn’t hold onto a joint too long; it’s bad manners. The term comes from the way Bogart used to hold his cigarette in his mouth while talking. I heard that at the Thorunka party they had two Trobriand Islanders cooking a whole pig in hot coals in the ground. Poor guys have always eaten Mission food and probably never cooked anything in their lives. They probably had to ring the Department of Anthropology to find out how to do it. I hear one of them is doing a thesis on ‘The Libertarian Push – a study of primitive living in an urban environment’. Very funny.
Hometown Christmas
A country town of New South Wales and the night before Christmas day. There is home visiting with some guests who come and stay and some who just drop in. Among those present at this home evening were a Rotarian businessman, a bank manager, another businessman who was a scoutmaster, an accountant, a minister of religion, a Sydney businessman, and wives and children. Drinks were served – beer, scotch for the men and fruit cup and soft drink for the women and children. Alcoholic drinks were served at the rate of about one an hour. Mixed nuts, raisins, cheese niblits and figs were put around, and this year an innovation – Akai seaweed crackers from Japan – a conversational subject. The drinks were followed later in the evening with a sit-down supper around a table on which were spread ham and turkey sandwiches, smoked oysters, asparagus (tinned), tomato (as always), savouries, cream sponges and Christmas cake (cake forks were laid out). Tea and coffee were drunk. The house had been decorated with metallic foil and paper and plastic Christmas trees.
Christmas cards were displayed in special racks, on the mantelpiece, or hung on the venetian blind. They came from personal friends, kin, business associates, organisations, and acquaintances met in other countries. Duplications were noted – these occurred where a person sent two cards to the same address. There would have been about two or three hundred cards displayed.
The music played was the Esso Steel Band brought back from a holiday in Jamaica.
From the conversation:
All the children came near the top except Jennifer who’s good at needlework and cooking but doesn’t like books. When the builders renovated the bathroom she insisted on sweeping up and the other day she insisted on sweeping the garage after Daddy had swept it. She’s going to make someone a good housewife. You can’t expect everyone in the family to be a scholar – there have to be the Jennys of this world. Oliver and the family are late as usual, they’re becoming known as ‘the late Johnsons’. Eric’s son Ralph went to London to study interior decoration and now he’s opened a shop in Carnaby Street. They were the first to use the Union Jack as decoration. I thought that was against the law but apparently it’s not. Vandals nearly burned down the presbyterian church again. They piled bibles and hymn books on an electric stove in the annexe and turned the stove on. Probably kids. They’re burning down the universities so I suppose the churches are on the list too. Woolworth’s changed the windows on the new supermarket to arches to blend in with the church which is next to it. I’m told that the architect never visited the site once. They don’t give the service that you used to get from professional people. One parson I met overseas said he always stayed with catholic priests when he was moving about because they lived better than the clergy. One priest said, ‘We might not have a better half but we have a better living.’ Scouting is becoming scouting for old men – where are the boys? What’s legal in taxation? It all depends which column you put the figures in. Which column you put the figures in depends on which story you’re telling. It’s better to be able to organise twenty men to do the job than to do the work of twenty men. A team of chaps from the service clubs went up to the Gulf of Carpentaria to help the Abos. They won’t do a damned thing for themselves. They sat around and let our chaps do the work. Education is no use to them because they don’t know how to apply it. All the places overseas where the British have pulled out are going to the pack. South Africa is the only country that’s well run. Hawaii did the right thing by becoming part of America. If you can sell it, you’re in business: if you can’t, you’re out. A New Guinea school teacher wrote to me asking for magazines. I saw a special rate for Time magazine in which you get forty issues at half price. I sent this to him and he wrote back complaining that he didn’t want to wait for forty weeks before getting it. He couldn’t understand the subscription idea. And he was a school teacher. We saw the Queen Mother at an agricultural show in England – she was as close to me as I am to you. She looks very well.
Tony Morphett, Born-again Christian
(from On Being, September 1979)
I’ve been a Christian for three and a half years. I recently referred to myself in front of a very fierce ex-deaconess – and anyone who knows deaconesses knows that a fierce one is very fierce indeed – as a ‘young Christian’. She replied, ‘You’ve had three years and that’s all the Apostles got!’ I forebore to say that the Apostles had had a very good teacher! Most people know me only indirectly – as the ‘script-writer’ behind certain popular television shows and the film The Last Wave. I began writing many years ago as a newspaper reporter, then progressed to working in ABC radio and television, writing novels in my spare time and dreaming of the time I’d be a full-time writer. I went freelance about ten years ago, and have since specialised in television drama.
Now television drama is fiction, but mostly it’s a special sort of fiction. Because television is an intimate medium, because it goes into people’s living rooms, television drama tends to be as natural as possible. Particularly in the shows that I’ve been associated with in the past five or six years – Certain Women and The Sullivans.
Certain Women was my roots. It was me discovering the area and the people I came from. I’m a western-suburbs Sydney boy and, at its best, Certain Women was a western-suburbs series about ordinary, recognisable, likeable people.
And so with The Sullivans. I didn’t devise the format of The Sullivans, but I identify totally with the series. If someone told me that Alan Stone of Certain Women was really Tom Sullivan grown middle-aged, I’d go along with them.
So the fiction I’ve been involved with is fiction which tries to stay close to real life, which requires research and an openness to what’s going on, a feeling for the pulse of society.
Now if I have skills in these areas, I learnt them as a reporter. A good reporter has an instinct for the ways in which a story might break in the near future. In fiction this is called plotting, but we’re allowed to write it – whether it happens or not.
A good reporter has an ear for the way in which people talk. And of course this is precisely the basis of good dialogue-writing. I learnt to write dialogue editing radio interviews, where you cut, not at the full stop, but at the breath pause. You cut for the intonation, and therefore you have to be able to listen.
A good reporter can sketch character. And again, this is also a skill of the fiction writer.
It’s no coincidence that the newspaper and parliamentary reporter Charles Dickens drew such sharp pictures of his society. Ernest Hemingway in America was an ex-reporter. And there are lots of Australian examples of reporters who took their reporting skills into various forms of fiction.
But in each case, one can tell what is reporting and what is naturalistic fiction. Fiction has a ‘shaped’ quality we don’t often encounter in real life, and therefore don’t often encounter in reporting. It’s the difference between a carefully posed studio photograph of a family and a news picture of an accident. In the news picture we get a sense of immediacy, and also of incompleteness – the sense that the world extends outwards on all sides of the frame. We have a frozen moment of life rather than a set of living people carefully arranged.
The reason I’m going into this exercise in professional biography is to give a context for a series of events I’ve been living through over the past few years.
I’m a trained reporter who also writes naturalistic fiction, and who knows the difference between the two forms. I’m forty-one now and I’ve been at both games since I was eighteen, so that’s twenty-three years.
At one time I was also an egomaniac who prided himself on his ‘objectivity’, whatever that means. In my case it meant that I tried to take an impartial observer’s stance on almost everything. One of the things I did not take an impartial stance on was that area of life people loosely call ‘religion’. I was perfectly happy to allow foreigners to be Moslems or Hindus – that after all was tolerant and non-racist – but I was full of anger that my fellow-Australians should choose to be Christians. I used to refer to the faith as ‘the Christian superstition’, and I was an avowed atheist.
I was completely unwilling to admit that there was any supernatural dimension to life. And I certainly denied that Jesus of Nazareth was anything other than a man. A successful demagogue perhaps, who founded a superstition which has caused about equal quantities of good and evil on the planet. But obviously not God. My view would have been that he was some kind of religious maniac. I didn’t even accept the ‘good man and teacher’ cop-out (and of course I wouldn’t accept that today, either). I was, in a phrase, a rationalist bigot.
I maintained this view over many years. I wasn’t brought up a Christian, and I cannot remember any desire to be one – even while meeting men and women who were Christians, and were clearly more intelligent than I was, more mature, and more full of joy. I also met some stinkers, of course, and they were the Christians I took most pleasure in.
So my self-vaunted objectivity was, in this area at least, deficient.
I was then involved in a series of events and experiences with a series of people which I’d like to share with you. I’ll tell them almost at random, as they seemed to happen.
Firstly, my daughter Sarah, who is now seven, taught me through her reaction to nature that a bumble bee is as extraordinary an object as a hippopotamus; perhaps even more interesting, because a bumble bee is actually a harder design job. She showed me that the patterns in nature were there for whoever has eyes to see them, and that these patterns are a demonstration that we live in, and are part of, an immense work of art – stretching throughout time and space – but all the work of a master craftsman.
Then there was a fictional person named Helen Stone, and a fictional Anglican priest who counselled her before her wedding. They were in Certain Women. The priest wasn’t very fictional – I got all my material from Alan Nicholls, now the rector at St James Church of England in East Melbourne. The process of writing that scene, of opening myself to that priest’s point of view, opened a door in me to the possibility of belief. God’s a great optimist, and whack! His foot was in that door and I never got it shut again.
A dear friend, Reg Neal, also played a part – and this was a lesson which surfaced later, because at the time I didn’t know he was praying for me. He taught me that prayer works, for he was praying for me as I walked resolutely backwards towards the light.
Next there was a man who wanted to hire me to write a documentary film about the disposition of elements in the earth’s surface. That man added the last straw to break the back of my pride. In preparation for the film, we sat down in a hotel and I asked ‘OK, how did they get there?’ In reply he described to me the full scientific view of the evolution of the cosmos. A vision of atoms floating free in space, of suns and planets forming, of chemical changes, and bacteria, and volcanoes and the growth of life – and I, the reporter, wrote it all down and went home.
And couldn’t sleep. All this kept turning over in my head, until in the early hours of the morning there was a voice in my mind, a voice not my own, a voice with a personality and a dry ironic tone. And He said, ‘If you can believe all this, what’s so hard about the Incarnation and the Virgin Birth?’ The voice just asked this question and then stepped back to let me struggle with it.
Now this was a curious experience for an atheist who knew there was no supernatural, who had never felt saner, who had no desire to believe anything more than he was believing already, who was successful, happy, had no desire to make a damn fool of himself – a very curious experience for that atheist indeed. So curious that it killed him. And a Christian was born; I was born.
Now believe me, I didn’t want this happening to me. I’d been a nasty, hard, savage atheist all my life. I had all these awful images of what Christians were – Holy Joes, wowsers, people into real estate and cold stone buildings. I’d been kicked into faith and it was very inconvenient. I was bewildered. It was horrifying to be told that the Church had been right all the time.
But although the atheist was dead, the reporter was still alive and he went and checked the sources. For the first time in my life, I did what is normally a reporter’s first duty – checked my facts. I had an old Gideon Bible, and I started at Matthew and read through Mark, Luke, John and the book of Acts. And I was appalled, because what I was reading wasn’t legend and it wasn’t naturalistic fiction. It was reporting. First – and second-hand accounts of extraordinary events, and sometimes – say in the case of Luke – the assembly of documentary evidence together with the results of interviewing eye-witnesses. Reporting has a taste, and that taste is in the Gospels.
It had taken me a long time – and an act of what theologians call ‘irresistible grace’ and what I call a kick in the pants – till I was forced to do in the area of the central events of human history what I would have done automatically if I’d been reporting a minor road accident. And I found myself face to face with the evidence of what happened when God invaded time in the flesh of a man. Not very long ago – the lifetimes of thirty men. I was dealing with evidence, a large proportion of it dealing with the trial, and execution and, worst of all, the rising from the dead again of this man Jesus. And I really didn’t want to know that. It smashed a hole in my ceiling and showed me the sky, and the sight of that frightening depth forced me to my knees, which is never an attitude which has appealed to me.
Evidence. The evidence is that the central events in human history happened in the Middle East about thirty lifetimes ago. For the past three and a half years I’ve been trying to cope with that fact. I have checked my sources, I have checked my facts, and I’m convinced. And everything else follows from that.
As someone who began as a reporter, and who now reports on his society through the form of television drama, my response to Christ was not particularly religious in the sense of ceremony or stained glass or clasped hands and averted eyes. My response to Him was a response to fact. I took the view that the whole business is either true or it’s not. And if it was true, then it demanded a response.
I realised that Jesus went to the line for me. I didn’t want Him to die for me – that’s not my thing. But He did it. That laid something on me and I had to respond. And I responded as a servant – out of a sense of obligation. But it’s turned into a love affair.
Australian Feminist Periodicals in the Seventies
Jane Sunderland
(adapted, from Hecate, 2/1979)
The 1970s have witnessed the appearance and, in many cases, disappearance of a wide range of feminist papers and journals in Australia.
These publications’ variety of content, and their diversity of approach, reflect the pluralistic nature of the women’s movement, and the different, frequently non-complementary, paths it has taken. Substantial changes have occurred in many of the periodicals themselves during these years, influenced by such interrelated factors as alterations in the membership, organisation and political orientation of the collectives and other groups responsible for these publications, a changing political climate, the nature of the market, and increases or (usually) cuts in funding. The effect of these factors on a periodical is manifested in its political tendency, content and general coherence. A strengthening political line in some journals, with increasing concentration on class struggle, in conjunction with a clearer direction, for example, can be related to the decreasing emphasis on the women’s movement as a separate entity, accompanied by the gradual alignment of feminists with parties. Tendencies now dominating the publications of the women’s liberation movement range from bourgeois feminist to anarcho-feminist to socialist-feminist, the central split being between those who see the primary struggle as one of class and those who see it as one of sex.
The method of production of recent feminist publications has resulted partly from a conflation of the ideologies of sisterhood, non-specialisation of tasks, and the equal value of those tasks, and an anarchist tendency to avoid anything approaching authoritarian-style leadership. Consequently, many periodicals are collectively, or co-operatively, produced. These rarely acknowledge an editor, and members of the collective, together with contributors, are often identified by no more than a first name. Hence individual power, and ‘fame’, are minimised, and contributors protected from ‘unsupportive’ attack. However, apart from the fact that effective, constructive criticism can be inhibited by this mode of operation, potential efficiency of distribution and production can also be adversely affected. The absence of an ultimately responsible member (or members) to at least co-ordinate can, in the long term, undermine the original dedication and commitment. As one of the Vashti co-operative, discussing the struggles of small publications to survive, points out:
… the crucial factor is lack of woman resource and energy. In the final analysis … even if the money runs out, the women raise it somehow, but when the collective numbers dwindle, the commitment becomes more exhausting and paralysing for those remaining. I remember well the despair and weariness of the three women who in effect produced some four issues [of Vashti] between mid-1973 and mid-1974.
Several co-operatively produced periodicals have survived, but not necessarily with, in practice, equal distribution of responsibility.
Australian feminist periodicals can be divided into three non-discrete groups: newsletters, newspapers, and magazines or journals. At the start of the decade, regional newsletters were the primary outlet for the dissemination of information and exchange of ideas: in addition to an advertisement for Mejane, the pioneer feminist newspaper, Refractory Girl in winter 1973 listed only newsletters (from Sydney, Hobart, Canberra and Adelaide) under its heading ‘Current Women’s Liberation Publications in Australia’. Newsletters are often short-lived: the struggles they report usually fade in intensity or come to a temporary halt, or time and energy are directed elsewhere. Brisbane’s Shrew, produced in the early seventies, was eventually discontinued, its function taken on after a gap of several years by Ms. Appropriate, put out by the Women’s Community Aid Association, and the Brisbane Women’s Liberation Newsletter, produced from the Brisbane Creative Arts Centre; and again in 1978 by the Queenland Women’s Liberation Newsletter. And the Hobart-produced Liberaction, after continuing for three years, concluded with The Last Liberaction in May 1975.
Some newsletters have aimed at national distribution and have directed their material towards particular groups of feminist and other women. Examples are Bluestocking, first published in December 1975, aiming to give ‘the latest information on resources for non-sexist learning’, the Women’s News Service, produced six times a year by the Australian Union of Students, Magdalene, ‘a Christian newsletter for women’, also put out six times a year, by Christian Women Concerned in Sydney, and Women and Work, produced three to four times a year by the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Employment and Youth Affairs in Melbourne. This prints brief articles and reports on such subjects as the right of married women to work, apprenticeships for girls, and training available for women under the NEAT scheme.
A recently founded Sydney newsletter, Women’s Voice, runs reports on women’s struggles. It may well develop into a journal comparable to the British Socialist Workers’ Party’s (formerly International Socialists) Women’s Voice, though the geographical separation of the major Australian cities could militate against its becoming a similar national journal.
The importance of a newsletter should not be underestimated: it can be distributed free to women who would not buy or come into contact with more permanent feminist literature, it can impart information about current struggles quickly and effectively without losing its readers in a mass of theoretical analysis, and it can provide a forum that does not require a wait of several months for responses.
Several feminist newspapers have also come – and gone. Mejane, ‘a women’s liberation newspaper’, first published in March 1971 in Sydney, produced its twelfth and last issue in April 1974. Carrying both ‘political’ and ‘personal’ articles, it devoted some issues to one area, like health. In 1972 Melbourne women produced Hussy, ‘the liberated woman’s newspaper’ but, like its predecessor, it has now ceased publication. Vashti’s Voice (later to become Vashti, and a magazine), was also published in Melbourne in the same year – and is continuing. It includes a variety of articles, reports, stories, reviews and creative writing, from an equal variety of political positions – the opinions expressed being ‘not necessarily the opinions of the Co-op’. The Co-operative chooses not to ‘restrict’ itself to ‘one feminist analysis or stream of thought’ but rather to demonstrate ‘the diverse views existing amongst women’s liberationists’. Accordingly, articles taking either anarchist or socialist positions are printed, together with frequent reports of feminist activity outside Australia. There is also a strong emphasis on women and the arts.
Mabel, a Sydney-produced ‘Australian feminist newspaper’, brought out its first issue in December 1975. It was originally more centrally concerned with questions of class than were comparable papers. Mabel ceased publication in 1977 because of ‘lack of woman resource and energy’. The gap it has left is now taken by Rouge, the first issue of which appeared in June 1979. Rouge doesn’t appear to have any particularly coherent political line, the first issue requesting only that contributors avoid ‘jargon and academic language’, and demonstrating a preference for contributors’ anonymity. Rouge collectives have been established in several Australian centres, but the newspaper’s continuation is dependent on ‘desperately needed’ donations and subscriptions.
Two other significant feminist newspapers are Women at Work and Right to Choose, both of which are aimed at a more specific market. Women at Work is produced from Melbourne by the Working Women’s Charter Campaign and is directed towards migrant as well as native Australian women workers: it includes articles in a variety of European languages. Right to Choose is the Sydney-produced newspaper of the Women’s Abortion Action Campaign (WAAC).
Magazines and journals comprise the largest group of Australian feminist periodicals, both past and current. Some have an appearance of ‘respectability’ and receive funding, but many, funded or not, frequently quietly disappear and, even while in publication, despite a few progressive librarians, go largely unseen except by those who subscribe. Many ‘political’ magazines carry creative material in the form of poems, short stories, graphics and interviews with writers, this being a feature also of most non-feminist Australian small magazines and journals, such as Meanjin, Overland and Quadrant. These publications occasionally devote an issue to women’s writing: see Meanjin’s IWY issue for an example.
Feminist magazines and journals usually have a more clearly defined editorial policy, and are written for a smaller, more select and more highly educated audience, than are news-letters and newspapers. Join Hands, published twice-yearly by the women’s collective of the CPA – responsibility for each issue being rotated from state to state – is a journal of ‘women, liberation and socialism’. Although the emphasis is on the struggles of working women, it also carries poetry and discussion of the arts.
Refractory Girl, originally describing itself as a ‘women’s studies journal’ was the first major Australian feminist magazine or journal not aligned with any political party. Collectively produced, the first issue of this quarterly appeared in 1973, and publication is continuing. Though a recent issue carries the subtitle ‘a journal of radical feminist thought’, the ambiguity of this has still led to a general editorial policy of requesting ‘contributions of all kinds’. Like other journals with a similar ‘open-minded’ approach, it thus produces a series of articles with no common tendency other than a feminist approach. One distinctive feature, however, is its regular and useful section ‘Research Notes’.
Hecate was conceived in 1974, after a group of Brisbane women produced the fourth, non-Sydney, issue of Refractory Girl. They proposed to the Sydney collective that two issues of Refractory Girl be produced each year from each of the two cities. The Sydney women were not keen to give up overall control, and so the Brisbane women decided to go ahead with their own publication. The first issue of Hecate appeared in early 1975. Apart from Perth’s feminist magazine Sibyl, Hecate appears to be the only feminist magazine or journal consistently produced outside New South Wales or Victoria.
1973 saw a publication by the Melbourne As If collective (the Anarcho-Surrealist Insurrectionary Feminists); an editorial accordingly rejected ‘the idea that our subjection as women is somehow of secondary importance balanced up against some more important struggle’. The two opposing approaches – divided on the importance of sex or class oppression as ‘primary’ – recurring frequently over the decade, is not in fact unique to the seventies: several early working women’s and feminist publications also adhered either to the idea of women working within parties, or to the idea of a movement with no necessary connection with the class struggle.
Within the next two years three women’s journals with a primarily literary emphasis came into being. Cauldron and Fin, produced from Sydney and Kew (Melbourne) respectively, both described themselves as feminist publications, and carried short, mainly literary, articles about little-known figures, as well as poems and stories. Again, Fin welcomed all contributions ‘within a feminist context’, and Cauldron carried an implication that the fundamental struggle is that of women’s subculture against male hegemony.
Luna publishes work by feminist writers such as Joanne Burns as well as more widely known women poets like Judith Wright; nevertheless, it remains primarily a journal of creative writing by a selection largely of established writers, the majority of whom are women.
Womanspeak was first published from Sydney in 1975, when it decribed itself as ‘a magazine for women to speak their minds’. (Later, a little more boldly, it ‘aimed to introduce women to some of the ideas of the women’s movement’.) It puts out some fifteen issues per year and typically carries creative writing, book and film reviews, interviews and articles – although these are often of a primarily personal nature, rather than attempting to be informative.
Scarlet Woman also produced its first issue in 1975. Describing itself as a ‘feminist-socialist quarterly’, and aiming to ‘present and develop ideas on how socialism and feminism are related to one another’, it is now strongly CPA-influenced. Articles correspond to the editorial position and any deviations from the editorial line are highlighted. Scarlet Woman is produced by two ‘autonomous’ collectives in Sydney and Melbourne, each of which takes responsibility for alternate issues.
Scarlet Woman was followed in 1976 by Working Papers in Sex, Science and Culture (now Working Papers). It ‘critically examines the function of language, ideology and scientificity in the construction of sex theories ranging from conventional sciences to liberation movements’. Similarly oriented is Sydney’s The Politics of Sex, Sexuality and Class, ‘a new feminist-homosexual journal’, first published in 1976.
Lip is a glossy extravaganza, an annual journal now describing its area of interest as ‘art and politics from a feminist perspective’. Its feminist tendency is apparent in such articles as Women’s Art and Feminist Criticism’, ‘Sisterhood – for whom?’ and ‘Feminism and Publishing’; but other articles often focus on artists who simply happen to have been born female.
The Women’s Sociological Bulletin is an academic publication currently produced from La Trobe University, Melbourne. Though very much the preserve of the academic theoretician, it nevertheless contributes a well-researched and well-documented body of findings, together with their interpretation, to the widening fields of ‘herstory’ and gynthropology.
An odd-woman-out, and clear anomaly, is the recent Sister – A New Direction for Women. Published by the Progressive Women’s Spiritual Association – a subsection of Ananda Marga – it ‘will endeavour to print material that contributes to the all-round progress of women’. There is an emphasis on health – i.e. ‘the harmonious integration of all aspects of personality’ – the third world and, predictably, women and spirituality.
What of feminist publishing? There are some feminist presses: Everywoman Press (Sydney), Sybylla Press (Melbourne), and now Sisters in Melbourne: a new feminist publishing house which ‘will provide an outlet for the best in women’s writing and research’. Most works published will be ‘in areas badly served by current Australian publishing’. Sisters plans to publish some twelve books each year, the first being Country Girl Again, a collection of short stories by Jean Bedford; Working Women, discussion papers prepared by the Melbourne Working Women’s Centre; and Sisters Poets 1, a collection of work by four Australian women poets.
The number of feminist publications current at any one time has risen over this decade. The newsletters and newspapers which made up a large proportion of this number will probably continue to come and go as feminist activity continues to fluctuate, and will meet needs as these arise. However, the magazines and journals, serving different but related interests to those served by newsletters and newspapers, have become reasonably stable continuing publications. They provide a forum for presenting new theoretical frameworks, for disseminating significant results of research which help rewrite Australia’s history and change its past, male, image; and for attempting to analyse contemporary feminist practice, often from a wider theoretical perspective, so that it can accordingly be placed in a wider theoretical framework.
In contrast to the relatively favourable period of the Whitlam government, where a definite shift in attitudes towards women’s liberation was accompanied by limited funding for some projects, the present period shows a marked deterioration, at both financial and attitudinal levels. Sisters reports the story of a Melbourne publisher who refused to reprint What Society Does to Girls, because ‘society has changed and a book like this is no longer necessary’ – and the output of the Australian feminist presses remains very limited. Fortunately, periodicals are less dependent on what is good for the capitalist press than are books.
Though at present in a relatively inauspicious position, feminist publications will continue in their role of developing and strengthening understanding of oppression. Despite recurring organisational problems and financial struggles – which may result in one or two disappearances and the subsequent appearance of new or ‘replacement’ journals and magazines – the survival of these feminist publications seems, in most cases, assured.
Women’s Hostility – Political Weapon or Personal Poison?
Yvonne Allen
(from Refractory Girl, winter 1979)
Long ago … I learned that the resentment, the anger, is impersonal. It is the disease of women in our time. I can see it in women’s faces, their voices, everyday, or in letters that come into the office. The woman’s emotion: resentment against injustice, an impersonal poison. The unlucky ones who do not know it is impersonal turn it against their men. The lucky ones, like me – fight it. It is a tiring fight. (Doris Lessing: The Golden Notebook, 1962)
Hostility between the sexes did not arise as a result of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the late sixties. In our daily lives we are, and always have been, constantly reminded of the division between the sexes. In spite of the fact that all forces indicate, and push us towards, cohabitation with a member of the opposite sex, we are surrounded by resentments leading to hostility between men and women. A four-year-old boy says adamantly ‘I’m not playing with her – she’s just a girl!’ An eight-year-old girl moans ‘Who wants to play with boys – they are so rough and bossy!’ An Apexian (male by definition) says ‘Of course Apex is for men only – we need somewhere to get away from our wives.’ A Henpexian (the wife of an Apexian – I hear the term is changing) sighs ‘Thank goodness his holidays are over, and I can settle into the old routine again.’ Societal attitudes constantly express dislike of, boredom with, distrust of, and resentment towards, the opposite sex. What is surprising is that the anger or hostility gathering force today, and expressed openly by the women’s movement towards men, is regarded with such amazement and fear by our society, in particular its male half. The object of this paper is to examine women’s hostility towards men, to determine the extent to which it is justified, and to examine it as a valuable political weapon in the fight between the sexes.
Hostility is not a new weapon in the political arena. It has been a driving force of all political conflicts based on economic interests, race and sex. If the hostility is justified then it can be a central and useful force within political struggle. If it is unjustified, then it can be a harmful, reactionary element within the same struggle. If hostility is to be useful, then it is important to determine in what way it can be justified. It is also crucial to realise that justified hostility felt by women towards men is as important in creating cohesion between women as class hostility and race hostility are in creating class and racial cohesion.
When, then, can women’s hostility towards men be justified? I believe that it arises out of three factors, which may be responsible singly or conjointly for it:
(1) Sex – This involves an understanding of the sex role (male/female) which society forces upon us, and with it the ‘natural’ (in the sense that it is expected of us and everyone tends to do it) polarisation towards the roleplay of one’s sex group, and, in its extreme form, antipathy towards the opposite sex.
(2) Sex consciousness – By this I mean consciousness, which is not false or mistaken, of what it means in terms of oppression to be female, why this oppression exists, and where it comes from. There are three common forms of false consciousness.
Firstly, it is believed that women are not oppressed at all, that they rather play a subordinate, supportive role as part of the natural order – an order which defies reversal and question. ‘The second sex? Well that may be so but isn’t that what they were created for’ says Dick, just as Dora might say ‘But my job as a woman is to be a wife and mother, just like my mother and her mother before her. So women just don’t compete with men.’ This form of false consciousness depends for its existence upon conformity and inertia.
Secondly, it is argued that women are responsible for their disadvantageous position because they let it happen to them in the first place. One often hears the statements ‘They go around asking for it’ or ‘All women love to be treated as sex objects’ or ‘Liberation is one thing, but I don’t want to give up male chivalry; it’s nice being treated as something special.’
Thirdly, it is argued that all men must be held responsible for a male-dominated society which they created, embodied in such statements as ‘Men made this rotten society and keep it going because it is in their interests to do so, so all men are the enemy.’
These two latter forms of false consciousness disregard, I believe, the fact that people’s lives come to be dominated systematically by non-personal forces (economic, social and family structures) which they themselves, both male and female, have created over history in response to historical conditions. Sexist society is constituted by both men and women, the majority of whom act mindlessly in conformity with given social conditions. It benefits men rather than women. It is largely created by men, and sustained by men – but men who are alien, insecure, dominated, in the world they have created. To hold women responsible for their position is to ignore the forces of history that ensnare us all. To hold all men responsible is to confuse those who benefit from the system (i.e., men – who also suffer under the system, but to a far lesser extent than women) with those people (male and female) who actively resist change (i.e., the development of sex consciousness). It is crucial here to distinguish between those people who benefit from the system (i.e., men) and those people who uphold it, whether or not they are the oppressors or the oppressed. They are more likely to be men than women, but may include women, and may not include all men.
(3) Sex loyalty – This involves loyalty to members of the same sex group. Female sex loyalty is known as ‘sisterhood’ in the women’s movement. The equivalent Australian term for male sex loyalty would, I suppose, be ‘mateship’.
For hostility to be justified, it is necessary for all three of these factors to be operating. Let us take some examples to illustrate this.
Jane is very much aware of her sex role, because she has grown up knowing that while boys are supposed to be active and dominant, girls are expected to be passive and submissive. She sees men getting better and more highly paid jobs, and most women working, unpaid, at home. Because of this she feels resentment (hostility) to men in many instances. She is aware of her sex and her hostility is ‘natural’.
Mary understands her expected sex role and resents it. She has not formulated why this is so (i.e., has no sex consciousness) yet she feels at ease with other women, trusts them and sticks up for them (i.e., sex loyalty). Her hostility is ‘natural’, but not rationally based and supported, and hence, as yet, not justified.
Elizabeth experiences the ‘natural’ hostility of Jane and Mary (i.e., is conscious of her sex role) and also understands that women as a group are oppressed by a male-dominated society (i.e., sex consciousness). But she lives and works in a male world, and does not support her sisters. She might say ‘If I want to be successful I have to do it the men’s way’ or ‘I just don’t like or trust other women’ or ‘I always get on better with men.’ If Elizabeth exhibits anti-male hostility, it is ‘natural’ hostility, but not justified, as she is denying her own sex group the loyalty it deserves.
Phyllis understands her sex role, but suffers from a form of false consciousness, believing that women’s secondary position vis a vis men is of the natural order of things. She has no wish to change the status quo, rather tends towards conformity, and may suffer from a common ailment of the oppressed (e.g., female/worker/black) namely, inertia. Her hostility, if she exhibits it, is ‘natural’ but not justified.
Pearl and Sheila are fully aware of and loyal to their sex group (i.e., sex and sex loyalty) but both, like Phyllis, suffer from a form of false consciousness. Pearl blames women for the position they are in. Although she feels loyalty to her sisters, she thinks it is their own fault, and it is her duty to teach them better. Should Pearl direct hostility to men, it is ‘natural’ but unjustified. If she directs hostility to other women, it is both misdirected and unjustified. Sheila, on the other hand, feels hostility towards all men because we live in a male-dominated society. She is confusing that group in our society who benefit from sexist structures (i.e., men) with the real enemies, namely those who uphold the system, either oppressors or oppressed, which may include men and women, but mainly men (who also benefit). Her hostility to all men must be seen then as ‘natural’ but unjustified.
Alice is aware of her sex group, conscious of why females are oppressed, and loyal to her sex. Her hostility is, then, both ‘natural’ and justified.
Hence, while Jane and Mary’s hostility may easily develop from ‘natural’ to justified hostility like Alice (given the addition of sex consciousness, and in Jane’s case, sex loyalty), Elizabeth, Phyllis, Pearl and Sheila may, and often do, act against the interests of women. Elizabeth is divorcing theory from practice, and is identifying with the oppressor rather than her own sex group, the oppressed. Phyllis, because of false consciousness, is upholding the sexist system, in spite of being one of the oppressed, by refusing to recognise her oppression. Pearl and Sheila, while recognising their oppression, and experiencing sex loyalty, are mistakenly directing their hostility – Pearl towards women, Sheila towards all men. While Elizabeth actively resists sex loyalty, and Phyllis, Pearl and Sheila actively resist sex consciousness, they are to be regarded as harmful to the women’s struggle.
There are, then, four problem areas in women’s unjustified hostility to men. Firstly, there is hostility with sex consciousness but no sex loyalty, which gives us one type of female sell-out, or Uncle Tom of the women’s world. Secondly, there is hostility combined with false consciousness (women are not oppressed), which gives us the second type of female Uncle Tom. Thirdly, there is hostility with false consciousness (it is women’s fault) which creates sister-haters, sister-pitiers, or self-haters. Finally, hostility with false consciousness (all men are to blame) gives us the man-haters and female chauvinists.
We have noted that all female hostility is ‘natural’. What we must attempt to do is ensure that it is also justified. The importance of justified female hostility cannot be underestimated. It marks the progression from personal poison, experienced by the unlucky women who turn their hostility against any man whatever he is like (i.e., women who understand their sex role and may or may not have sex loyalty) to an active political weapon in the fight for equality between the sexes. The rise once again of a cohesive, conscious body of women turns the hostility from the impersonal poison described by Doris Lessing in The Golden Notebook in 1962 (in isolation from other women) into an impersonal and very positive force of the seventies.
Given that all of the hostility generated by the women’s movement today can be viewed as ‘natural’ and much of it as justified, why is it that it is greeted with such amazement and fear by men and often women? And why do so many people attempt to underestimate it?
Firstly, female hostility is a direct attack on the status quo. It attacks the superior and advantageous position of the male, and it threatens the whole peaceful, although generally resented, position of the supposedly ‘contented’ females in our society.
Secondly, it is out of character for women to be openly hostile. Women, after all, are supposed to be the conciliators of the human race. Suzi Caplow states that:
a woman in our society is denied the forthright expression of her healthy anger. Her attempts at physical confrontation seem ridiculous; ‘ladies’ do a slow burn, letting out their anger indirectly in catty little phrases, often directed against a third party, especially children. A woman has learned to hold back her anger: it’s unseemly, aesthetically displeasing, and against the sweet, pliant feminine image to be angry. (Notes from the Third Year: Women’s Liberation)
Angry and hostile women are, in fact, stepping out of their expected sex role. Hence, it is no wonder that female hostility towards men is regarded with fear and amazement.
Thirdly, an attack frequently directed from the left at the women’s movement is that it is regarded as divisive in the class struggle – that is, if women split from men, the class struggle will be slowed down. Denise Oliver states that:
The basic criticism that we have of our sisters in Women’s Liberation is that they shouldn’t isolate themselves, because in isolating yourselves from your brothers, you’re making the struggle separate – that’s again another division, the same way that capitalism has divided Blacks from Puerto Ricans, and Puerto Ricans from Whites, and Blacks from Whites. This sort of division has kept a revolution from taking place a long time ago. Racism has to be eliminated and that whole division of male from female has to be eliminated, and the only way you can do that is through political education. I don’t believe a group of women should get together to educate themselves, and then not go out and educate the brothers. (Palante: Young Lords Party, 1971)
I agree that the only way to get rid of divisions cutting through the class divisions (i.e., sex and race) is through political education, but that is precisely what the women’s movement is about, and it shall come nearer to success when all female hostility is based on a combination of sex, sex consciousness and sex loyalty.
But there is an important need for this education to take place firstly among women. Male chauvinism rears its ugly head not only among the class oppressors. It is also found in left-wing movements and in black movements. It is important, therefore, for all women to stand apart from their class and/or racial groups, and to educate themselves to objectively recognise male chauvinism everywhere. Eldridge Cleaver sums it up when he says:
Because of the bizarre aspects of the roles and the strange influence that non-traditional contact between them has on the general society, blacks and whites, males and females, must operate almost independently of each other in order to escape from the quicksands of psychological slavery. Each – black male and black female – white female and white male – must escape first from his or her own historical traps before they can be truly effective in helping others to free themselves.
The goal must clearly be freedom – integration is not yet feasible as a goal. It is not feasible because integration depends on mutual concepts of freedom and equality. (Soul on Ice, 1967)
Separation from, or non-integration with, men is a stage, difficult, unpleasant, dangerous, which must be worked through. It does not mean non-communication with men. It does not mean no political education for men at the same time. Rather, it is a stage where women must attempt to channel their resentments towards justified hostility.
Where do men stand vis a vis the women’s movement? I have already indicated that all men are not necessarily our enemies. Let us return now to the three factors operating in female hostility, namely sex, sex consciousness and sex loyalty, and take some examples.
John is aware of his sex role, has grown up being told that boys don’t cry, men are dominant, aggressive, and so on. He does not regard women as an oppressed group (i.e., no, or false, sex consciousness), and he is a typical footy-playing, beer-swilling male (i.e., exhibits male sex loyalty). John is, in other words, a typical male chauvinist, and as such, an enemy of women, to the extent that he actively resists sex consciousness.
Fred knows he is male, and the sex role that it implies. He is aware of the oppression of women (i.e., sex consciousness), but is loyal to his own sex (men). Fred, like Elizabeth, is divorcing theory from practice. He, too, like John, is a male chauvinist, and an enemy to the extent that he continues to divorce theory from practice.
Tom understands his sex role. But he is aware of the oppression of women (i.e., sex consciousness), and instead of acting in his own interests, attempts to be loyal to women and act in their interests rather than his own, which would be male chauvinist. Tom faces a dilemma. If he is to be consistent, he will be justifiably hostile to his own sex group (i.e., men), a position probably containing within it elements of self-hatred, and also involving isolation from his own sex group. On top of this, his justified hostility is not ‘natural’, because that depends upon actual experience of the female sex role which he, like all other men, can never have. Tom, in fact, would have had, prior to gaining sex consciousness (or may still have, in spite of sex consciousness) a ‘natural’ but unjustified hostility to women. His position has contradictions written into it. It is important to recognise these for two contrasting reasons. Firstly, we must always treat him with caution, in the sense that he may easily deviate and become an enemy of the movement.
Secondly, because his position is such a contradictory one, he must be treated by women with sympathy and understanding, to the extent that he enables non-sexist attitudes and actions to develop from the contradictions he faces.
The Toms of the world are slowly increasing, and I believe it is crucial to accept their support and offer our encouragement to them, given the dilemma with which they are confronted. To ignore them, or direct hostility towards them, as Sheila in our previous example would, is to cut off some of our support, and to ignore the fact that the liberation of women and men is interdependent. We must accept their support critically if we are ever to move from the stage of non-integration to the stage of total revolution – a revolution of sex, class and race.
Thus, justified female hostility to men can be seen as a useful political weapon in the women’s struggle, and with justified male hostility to men (a much rarer thing), can combine to create a cohesive force to attack sexism today.
In conclusion, I have written this paper out of a real need to clarify for myself my own hostility towards men, in an attempt to make this hostility a positive force in the sex war. My main difficulty has been in indirectly attacking what has been for men, and many other women, a central and important concept – namely, ‘sisterhood’. I have found the concept of sisterhood fundamental in coming to terms with my own femininity. It has taught me to love, trust and respect other women. But my own experience of the conflicts and schisms within the women’s movement has led me to believe that the concept of sisterhood has elements of romanticism (as well as much beauty) written into it. I now believe that ‘sisterhood’ will remain as a superficial, although very useful, element in the women’s struggle, and will only become a cohesive force when we can all direct our hostility towards our true enemies.
Portrait of a Powerful Australian Woman
Andrew Clark
(abridged, from the Bulletin, 24.4.79)
In December 1978, after the ABC strike, Chairman John Norgard made an unannounced visit to Canberra to plead with Malcolm Fraser to put away his razor and stop slashing Auntie’s budget.
Accompanying Norgard was a good-looking, middle-aged woman, wearing a pleasant fifties dress, her slightly greying hair set to suit the same period. During the discussions she smiled readily, and laughed occasionally, but remained reserved. When she spoke it was forcefully and to the point. The Prime Minister was impressed.
Patrick White, on the other hand, calls the same woman ‘Killer Kramer’, a member of her staff says she’s a dragonfly, and feminists have accorded her their ultimate insult – the title of honorary man.
The subject of these sobriquets is Professor Leonie Kramer, D.Phil (Oxon). In appearance she typifies the attractive, well-groomed, intelligent and conservative women who are occasionally found among the more exclusive suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne. Dr Kramer, fifty-four, is more than that – more intelligent, more hard-working, more experienced, more dedicated, more complex, and more interesting. Most important of all, she is more powerful.
Through her membership of an extraordinary range of official and private bodies, Leonie Kramer’s presence is pervasive, though not always identified, in Australian public life. She has, because of the peculiar way in which these positions reinforce each other, been placed in the position where she helps mould the moulders of public opinion.
As institutions become more conservative, her power increases.
Distinguished from all but a handful of Australian women by her access to, and use of, power, Dr Kramer is no darling of the feminists, although she claims she’s a ‘feminist in another kind of sense’. The feminist explanation of this paradox is that she is a success because she has sold out: a token woman who is a threat to no one, least of all the established order.
The reasons for the antipathy are more complex. However, it is so strong now that of the women who are both prominent and apparently moderate or conservative – like Margaret Guilfoyle, the Minister for Social Security, and Dr Jean Battersby, of the Australia Council – Dr Kramer is the target of the most vitriolic attacks from women’s liberation groups.
She does not help to smooth waters with comments like this: ‘I find an awful lot of women are boring.’ Further, ‘I don’t believe in solidarity. I can’t bear this shoulder-to-shoulder, backs to the walls, brothers and sisters business. It’s quite alien to me. I’d rather do something on my own. It may take longer and it may be less effective but I couldn’t work the other way.’
Critics ascribe this reaction to an establishment, elitist background, and a jealous regard for her own position. There is some truth in this explanation – Dr Kramer admits it has some validity, too – but the facts tell a rather different story.
Leonie Kramer’s background is not establishment but genteel middle-class. Her father, Alfred Gibson, was a clerk with the State Savings Bank of Victoria, and she was brought up in the staid Melbourne suburb of Kew. Both her parents read widely, and made a substantial sacrifice to send her to PLC (The Presbyterian Ladies’ College), immortalised in Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom.
PLC implanted both discipline and learning in its pupils, in varying doses. Leonie Kramer benefited from the school, and was happy at home. She says much of her amazing energy and determination comes from her family background. ‘In a way that’s where it all began. I was also brought up to believe that you came into the world to do something.’
She graduated from Melbourne University at the end of World War II with first-class honours, majoring in English and Philosophy. ‘I had one ambition – to go to Oxford,’ and she was accepted there as a postgraduate student. Before leaving Melbourne she collected material on Henry Handel Richardson, and wrote the first of three monographs on the great Australian author and former PLC student.
At Oxford the significant influence was ‘the place rather than the people’. She also met her future husband, Harry, a South African doctor, who was at Oxford on a Nuffield scholarship. She completed her D.Phil, writing her thesis on seventeenth-century English Literature. She spent a few years teaching at St Hugh’s, a women’s college, and Ruskin, host of worker-students, before the newly married couple returned to Australia in 1954.
Dr Kramer’s first job in Australia was lecturing in English Literature at the Canberra University College – later absorbed into the Australian National University. After two years, her husband, now a pathologist, was transferred to Sydney, and she was without a job.
For Leonie Kramer, a strong believer in formal work structures and institutions, it is paradoxical that it was her freelancing over the next two years which laid the groundwork for her later influence. Through an old friend, poet and English teacher Jim McAuley, she joined the editorial board of Quadrant, organ of the right-wing Congress for Cultural Freedom. This link provided her contact with an influential group of conservative barristers, academics, businessmen, trade unionists and journalists.
She wrote book reviews for Quadrant, the Bulletin, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Observer and Nation (both now defunct). She also made regular appearances on ABC programs, and became active on the commission’s advisory bodies. Nearly a quarter of a century later, this long association with the ABC was capped with her appointment as a commissioner.
In 1958 Dr Kramer returned to formal academic life as a lecturer in English Literature, and was later promoted to associate professor. In 1968 she became Professor of Australian Literature at Sydney University – the first woman professor at Australia’s oldest university, and the second person in the world, let alone Australia, to hold a chair in Australian Literature.
In the decade since that appointment her power and influence have spread, especially in education, current affairs broadcasting, and literature. In education, her base begins with her job at Sydney University, a position in which she is currently more powerful because she also heads the English department. Influence was spread for many years by her membership of the University senate. It has spread even further since 1974, when she was appointed to the Australian Universities Commission, which advises the government on funding and policy towards universities.
Moving from official to private, her prominent role in public debate over education issues is guaranteed by her joint founding and membership of the Australian Council for Educational Standards (ACES) which has acted as a critic of some education experiments since shortly after the Whitlam government entered office and the Schools Commission was established.
Official influence in secondary education is underwritten by her membership of the NSW Secondary Schools Board, which advises the state education department on policy.
Finally, there is her position on the ABC, a body which runs many education programs, and airs debates on education policy.
In literature a similar pattern emerges. It starts, again, from her university position, moves to the ABC, with its numerous programs on literature and drama, then to Quadrant, where she not only reviews but commissions articles and reads contributors’ material, and last but not least finishes with her Vaucluse dinner parties attended by members of the Sydney literati.
In current affairs, the starting point is the ABC, then moves to Quadrant and the Association for Cultural Freedom, a promoter of public debate and a body with a definite influence and line on current issues.
However, Dr Kramer says she did not seek many of these positions, and professes to be ignorant about the development of power, and its personal implications. ‘I don’t think I’ve got any concept of power for myself. In fact, when I first became head of the department I used to joke with myself and look in the mirror to see if I felt that glorious sense of power, and nothing happened.
‘I don’t feel as though I’ve ever been ambitious. Everything I’ve ever done seems to have just happened to me.’
Why is she a member of so many commissions, committees, and boards? A combination, Professor Kramer says, of proving that she is a hard and effective worker, and their desire to have a token woman.
She claims to be ‘not very good’ at committee work because ‘it takes me a long time to feel that I have something to contribute’. Members of committees she has joined, particularly the Sydney University senate, and the advisory board on prisons in New South Wales, complain that she does not speak up enough.
However, seasoned Kramer observers see this reticence fitting into her style. As one close associate of Professor Kramer, who insisted on remaining nameless, put it: ‘She’s like a crafty dog at a committee. She walks round and round the bone and seems to be ignoring it. But she knows it’s there and she’s determined to get it eventually.’
Her strong point in committee work is an ability to seize a central point, and ignore the fat and waffle of debate. It is an ability she also employs at university seminars, combined with a gift for stimulating students to develop their basic points further, instead of simply picking holes in the argument – in other words, playing the old academic point-scoring game.
At the ABC she is more forceful and contentious. She attacks individual programs at commission meetings, and praises others. She admits expressing ‘fairly strong views that may or may not be acted on’.
However, Professor Kramer is being disingenuous when she claims ‘I don’t think I have any influence at all at the ABC.’ Both Kramer and Norgard, a former senior BHP executive, were appointed to the ten-member commission at the beginning of 1977. Since then a discernible Norgard–Kramer axis has developed, and she is regarded by senior ABC executives as the most influential commissioner.
Many of her ‘fairly strong views’ have been expressed about Broadband, a current affairs discussion program, broadcast on ABC radio four nights a week, and Coming Out Ready Or Not, a weekly radio program produced by the ABC women’s unit. Broadband was formerly broadcast for an hour and a half each night, but was last year cut back to forty-five minutes. Dr Kramer, and Laurie Short, were active critics of the program at commission meetings.
Her criticism of the program, like her views on education, literature, and women’s liberation, concern style as much as content. She objected to Broadband’s non-use of the fruity-voiced ABC announcers, but a more personal style. She has also attacked its alleged radical bias. ‘Some of the programs have been good and some have not been as objective as I would want them – not by any means.’
When I asked whether any serious, probing current affairs program could ever be objective, as opposed to ‘balanced’ or ‘fair’, she said: ‘I don’t think objectivity is incompatible with people expressing strong views.
‘There is a proper place for minority programs and minority views as long as they are responsible, and as long as the people taking part in those programs have as their object the promotion of soundly based arguments and discussion.’
Dr Kramer said, ‘Australia does not seem particularly good at sustaining argument and discussion. It’s very important that a national broadcasting system like the ABC set a kind of standard for how it can be done, and how rigorous and exciting it can be.’
Of the program produced by women, for women, and about women, Coming Out Ready Or Not, she said: ‘I don’t listen to it much, and I don’t like it particularly because of its whingeing tone. However, I’m sure some of its programs are good.’
Typical of the reaction of feminists to Dr Kramer is that of Eva Cox, head of the NSW Council for Social Service, who chaired the ABC advisory committee in that state. She found Dr Kramer ‘a very tight-minded, bigoted girl who is not prepared to be pleasant. I think she has got very rigid ideas and anybody who offends her ideas offends her. She certainly tended to put a blight on discussion.’
Miss Cox said Dr Kramer reported a female ABC employee who was attending an advisory commitee hearing in an official capacity after she interrupted discussion to explain the function of the women’s unit.
Professor Kramer says she attended only one meeting of the advisory committee and never spoke personally to Miss Cox. ‘That’s an opinion based on absolutely no evidence. It depends on what you mean by bigoted. People can say having an opinion is bigoted, and you can’t do anything about that, can you?’
Dr Kramer said she did not report the woman employee by name at the commission meeting, but told commission members she thought it was ‘improper’ for her to ‘rudely interrupt’ a member of the committee.
At one commission meeting, Professor Richard Harding, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Western Australia, and a Labor appointee to the commission, took Dr Kramer to task over her criticism of feminist programs. He used the following very Australian analogy to justify their continuation: He was a racing man, and after every Melbourne Cup there was an Oaks day when ‘we give the fillies a go’.
The ABC is not the first place where she has had a run in with women’s liberation groups. During the mid-seventies she opposed the introduction of a women’s philosophy course at Sydney University, joining ranks with fellow Association for Cultural Freedom member David Armstrong who is Challis Professor of Philosophy at the University. During that imbroglio she was awarded the title of ‘honorary man’, and described as a ‘fascist’, ‘reactionary’, ‘and all sorts of other names’.
Women, she says, should work within the system to achieve their aims. It is ‘incredibly naive and paranoid’ for feminists to believe that male-dominated institutions deliberately work to exclude women, she says.
‘Why should you suppose that a collection of professionals that happens to be men for a whole set of historical reasons would try to keep you out. In fact the record of this (Sydney) university, like the record of the ABC, shows that this doesn’t happen.’
Affirmative action programs for women are, she says, ‘full of pitfalls’. A university could not appoint the best person for a particular job ‘because that person isn’t a woman. That’s against all the things that anybody would want to press for.’
I asked if her attitude was influenced by the fact that she had made it, while many of her detractors had not.
She said, ‘That’s an assumption that a lot of people would make, and there may be some truth in it. My interpretation is that it’s less to do with having made it than knowing what you have to do to make it. It doesn’t do any good at all to jump up and down and shout about the injustices you are suffering from. It takes a long time to deal with them, but in the meantime you’ve got to show that you can operate effectively.
‘When I first started as an academic I can’t tell you how many women asked: “How long do you have to go on working?” So many women treated me as some poor creature whose husband couldn’t afford to keep her properly. I was criticised almost every week of my life. These were not feminists, but housewives, and some of them very intelligent women.
‘I’ve become case-hardened, and I would certainly resist a simple explanation of why women would criticise me.
‘To make it as a woman you have to be better in a way, but not necessarily more intelligent or more capable. It involves more stamina, energy, and will, which is slightly different to ambition.
‘You really do have to be prepared, as a man doesn’t quite have to be, to work very hard if you have a family: that is, if you take the rather old-fashioned view that, apart from whatever help you get in the house, it’s still your responsibility to look after the children, to attend to their woes and miseries, to feed your husband.
‘People say that women don’t get to positions because of the forces that keep them out. I’m fairly sceptical about that. I think the forces that operate against them are those of temperament, willpower and stamina.’
Dr Kramer admits she has never had many women friends. ‘I’ve worked in a man’s world all my life and I’ve been in a situation where I’ve been the only woman. That means that many of my acquaintances have been men.
‘I’ve partly not had many women friends because they have not been in my area, and partly because I think an awful lot of women are boring. I know an awful lot of men are boring too, but the interests of a great many women are extremely limited. I find it difficult to pretend that I’d prefer to talk to them than a man whose interests may be just as limited but different to mine – for example, businessmen.
‘While I may not be a femininist in one way, I am in another – I don’t like seeing women making themselves substitute men.’ I reminded Dr Kramer that feminists at Sydney University had accused her of this same sin.
‘I can see why that’s said,’ she replied, ‘and it really bores me. The description is wrong. Anybody who wants to do serious and hard work has to behave rationally. You can’t afford to be quirkish and irrational and use women’s tricks, which women have rather successfully developed.’
An incident four years ago at the University of New South Wales once again brought both Dr Kramer and feminists, and other groups, into conflict. Her daughter, a medical student, reported home on a lecture given on human sexuality by sexologist Bettina Arndt. Professor Kramer, already a member of the Australian Universities Commission, rang the dean of the medical faculty, Professor Robert Walsh, to complain.
Following the complaint, a group of academics at Sydney University wrote a joint letter which said that Dr Kramer was employing her position improperly, and attempting to interfere with academic freedom at another university. Dennis Altman, a senior lecturer in government at Sydney University, who has written widely on homosexuality, and Sue Wills, who holds a similar position at the Ku-Ring-Gai College of Advanced Education, also gave lectures on male and female homosexuality.
Altman says Kramer attempted to have his lecture stopped before he gave it. However, exhaustive checks with the University of New South Wales academic staff have failed to come up with any support for his claim.
Professor Kramer gave a ‘blanket denial’ when questioned about Altman’s claim, but admitted she had ‘registered a protest’ about the Arndt lecture. However, she denied that she was improperly using her position on the Australian Universities Commission, and claimed she had contacted Professor Walsh as a concerned parent.
Despite the protest, Bettina Arndt’s lectures were continued the following year.
She denied that this action indicates that she is a puritan. ‘The word carries an overtone of severity and joylessness, and a refusal to do certain things.’
However, the same intolerance intruded into a review she wrote in November 1976 Quadrant of Patrick White’s novel A Fringe of Leaves. Referring to the heroine in the book, Ellen Roxburgh, she writes: ‘As a castaway in Queensland she gnaws an Aboriginal thigh-bone and discovers that it “nourished, not only her animal body but some darker need of the hungry spirit”. This second episode – the sacrament of cannibalism – is not so much grotesque but crude in its forced allegory.’
The tension between White, who privately refers to her as ‘Killer Kramer’ and ‘The Kramer’, and Dr Kramer dates back to her editing of a book of Australian short stories in 1962. She did not include one White short story.
I asked her about this omission, and she said: ‘There were very, very few of his short stories published then. (The Burnt Ones, a collection of White short stories appeared two years later.) I had thought about it at great length. Doug Stewart, who was reading the volume for me (for Angus & Robertson) said: “You haven’t put any Patrick White stories in it.” So I thought about it again. Now I think it may have been an incorrect decision.’
However, Dr Kramer rejects White’s claim that in his earlier years as a novelist in Australia, the local critics ganged up against him. ‘I believe he has had a better run than any other.’
She says now that White is ‘the dominant figure’ in current Australian literature, but believes Hal Porter is a better stylist. ‘Porter is very mannered and very idiosyncratic and annoys a lot of people but he’s very good. He’s never had anything like the reception White has had and yet I really think – if I’m really going to stick my neck on the block, I might as well do it properly – he’s a better stylist.
‘I’m coming to think – and I haven’t formulated this judgement very thoroughly – that Porter is much more observant than White. He’s a sharp and sometimes cruel observer, but so in a way is White.
‘If you compare the two of them the impression I have is that White is working much more from the outside – that sometimes he’s constructing characters that fit a kind of thesis the novel is propounding. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing – it just makes it a different kind of novel.
‘With Porter you get the impression that characters are formulated and shaped up for themselves. They’re a more central part of the novel. He’s got a rare vocabulary – much wider and richer than White. It surprised me when I realised that because White’s style is very Baroque – very enriched and decorative – but it’s more limited in its language than Porter’s.’
Surprisingly, she regards criticism, including academic criticism, as ephemeral. However, it is important because ‘it ought to stimulate discussion about books and plays and theatre and music. Therefore, it ought to be hard-hitting, when that’s appropriate, in order to stimulate that discussion …
‘But I can’t bring myself to correct my essays. It would confer upon them a permanent value I can’t believe in.’