INTO THE EIGHTIES


I originally asked most of the contributors to this book to provide biographical notes but decided to use these five pieces, together with my ‘Turning Forty with the Decade’, because they create a retrospective from different age positions – Donald Horne in his fifties, Jack Hibberd and myself in our forties, Hal Colebatch, Vicki Viidikas and John Forbes in their thirties. The pieces also show the concerns of people as we go into the 1980s, and at the same time some of the different ways of being ‘Australian’ – from Hal Colebatch, who sees living in suburbia as being a good human solution, to Vicki Viidikas who finds fulfilment as an itinerant writer in India, sleeping on the floors of temples. Colebatch, Forbes and Viidikas expanded their notes in answer to specific questions from me.

Donald Horne
Born 1921

Senior lecturer in politics at University of New South Wales since 1975. Member of NSW Cultural Grants Advisory Council since 1976; research fellow, University of NSW, 1973–4; contributing editor to Newsweek International, 1973–6; member of advisory board on Australian Encyclopaedia since 1973; editor of the Bulletin, 1967–72.

Educated Muswellbrook District Rural School, Maitland; Parramatta and Canterbury High Schools; Sydney University; Canberra University College. Editor of Honi Soit, 1941; A.I.F., 1941–4; diplomatic cadet, 1944–5; reporter and feature-writer for Sydney Daily Telegraph, 1945–9; wrote for newspapers in London, 1950–54; editor of Weekend 1954–61; Everybody’s, 1961–2; the Observer, 1958–61; the Bulletin, 1961–2; co-editor of Quadrant, 1963–6. Executive, Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, 1962–6; creative director, Jackson Wain Advertising, 1963–6.

Shifts in political life:

These became something of a public matter, shown in some of the books I published in the seventies. It would be wrong, however, to see (as some people do) November 11 as my road to Damascus vision: I haven’t had one. The process was slower than that.

As I will record later, in the third of the Education of Young Donald series, I began shifting myself around in the early 1960s – at first mainly by reading. The nature of The Lucky Country shows this. It was perceived by many at the time as ‘radical’ – it was certainly more radical on new issues than the ALP at that time (it was written in summer of 1963–4). Writing books has been one of the main ways in which I have changed myself. I sit there and think – what could I possibly believe? Later, when it is done, I think – could I believe that? Too late. However, as well as writing – from the early 1960s, in bursts – I have done big sweeps of new reading, getting myself into some new perspective, or at least trying it out.

A lot of this changing has been inner-driven, not reactive, although done in a social context, of course. For example, the big year of change for me – a definite program of change, observed and recorded in a diary – was in 1972. But not because of the election, primarily, but because I used the occasion of my first eye operation – which, partly by accident, gave me two and a half months of recoveries, mishaps etc. – as a deliberate occasion for change.

However, there have also been reactive factors. These help account for my not being like a right-wing Andersonian: for example, I responded to the development of communist polycentrism in the sixties and to the collapse of the postwar boom in the early seventies. Also to the ‘protest’ period, mainly positively.

In the middle of the seventies – 1975 – I came out: I wrote Death of the Lucky Country and His Excellency’s Pleasure and addressed (how many?) eighty, I think, meetings. But Money Made Us (finished before Death of the Lucky Country was thought of, but published after it) shows, from internal evidence, changes that had already occurred in how I approached things – partly from recognition of end of the postwar boom and partly from greater (and still increasing) interest in the relations between power and culture. The Billy Hughes subject interested me in part because of the myth-making element in it – helping to bind us to the Digger decades of 1920 and 1930. The book on social change 1966–72 is concerned very much with the theatricals of cultural change and their relation to power; I am now writing on the subject directly in a book on Europe, tentatively thought of as The European Imagination, about the power of the monuments of Europe.

Vicki Viidikas
Born 1948

… you tell me you went to India and I figure that would’ve peeled a few skins back from your eyes. But you may have been surrounded by those dreadful middle-class Indians who smoke tailor-mades and long to be western? Anyway, not many westerners actually like India but are dismayed by the obvious disease, corruption, caste, etc. After sitting here [in Dalwood, NSW] for six months, recovering my frail health and working like a bug on the typewriter, I am halfway through a novel, a sort of rock ’n’ roll bible for the dharma bums, androgynous ones and myself (who never did like being a groupie and there are more groups than ever now to join).

Seeing the Lismore Council [click here] want to zone ‘alternative settlers’ into areas (it’s like being an enemy again – drunks in one area, gays in another, alternative farmers in another etc.) is very disturbing. And at Nimbin I was asked not to smoke – by total strangers to make it worse. It’s not alternative to take stimulants. Amusing? You know I left Australia because I thought I’d drown in cynicism and the bleeding hearts club if I didn’t. Who wants to be an icon? Plenty, but I don’t.

I really don’t know how I’ll keep living in India (no dole) but then I don’t want mirrors and vice and smack and definitions anymore. I love being in a country – India – where the spirit can breathe, where at least you flex your mind before binding it in definitions. I love the Australian bush but my dream of setting up an Indian village in New South Wales would never get off the ground. All those pesticides, crying cattle, building regulations; men who inspect weeds are finks; all those new alternative goody-goodies who want their children to be ‘individuals’ just don’t interest me. I’d rather bed down in a Hindu temple for a while and enjoy the traffic. If I’m going to go village I may as well go all the way.

In 1972 I wrote a poem ‘Keeping watch on the heart’ and mentioned ‘wanting a revolution in spirit’ – and I still want that. Writing this novel is helping, the biggest piece of self-discipline I’ve ever undertaken, with quotes from the Old Testament, the Talmud, Bhagavadgita, Lenny Bruce, etc. It’s a moral tract, a babe looking for the Holy Grail, herself, still …

I plan to be in India by the monsoon … Bombay is so expensive to stay in compared with almost everywhere in India; I don’t stay there for too long. I once did for over two months, in a terrible room full of cockroaches, but it was all I could afford as hotels run at something like $60 a week which is out of my reach … I don’t live anywhere in India but travel about, on the road, from one village to the next … Without a typewriter to carry around I’m much freer and then can stay in temples on the floor. I once had a house in Goa for six months but eventually the freak decadence got to me and I fled to Rajasthan which is my favourite part – the desert, with no counterpart here.

Actually I always wanted to go to Ayers Rock and do a trek with a camel but I’ve not had the companion, and travelling alone in Australia is very difficult when you’re a female. I get to screaming point because nobody wants to be your friend, but everybody wants to be your lover. So I still haven’t done Australia’s great interior though it’s a dream I still have. I’ve found Aboriginals in India and heard of the tribes who are Dravidians and fled across the Pan land bridge to Australia. The Australian bush for me has nothing white about it – I believe it’s all black man’s country – the very stones tell it, and the prehistoric animals breathe it. Many residents up here have reported hearing Aboriginal voices at night, and I’ve heard these on this land quite often, especially before dawn, and something sounding like a didgeridoo or Indian dampura (drone).

I’ve always loved the bush and wanted to live in it, but the isolation is immense and it drives me back to the city. Unfortunately I never know anyone who wants to live in the country too, without necessarily becoming a purist. So living a simple life in India is the best thing for me – if I’m going to go backwards I may as well go all the way. Why live in a simulated simplicity here when it’s the normal way of life there? I think I have cultural ties with the Aboriginals and it always amuses me how out of place white men seem here. It’s obvious, the way three-quarters of the population huddle on a strip of coast, as far from nature as possible.

I can never be calm when I think what’s being done to the Aboriginals and how they’ve been forced to update. Why should they? It’s obvious their stone-age living is more balanced and peaceful than ours … There is such a POWER in the Australian bush, though I don’t think it’s violence, but the white man’s only reaction is one of violence and fear. The Aboriginals know this power, hence the dreamtime and their totems, acknowledges to a fierce God. The British cut their throats when they killed the first Aboriginal and cleared the first land for cattle. Having lived in India for so long, I know it’s possible to amalgamate two cultures without one falling to the other. Sometimes a family would show me their sick babies and ask me what was wrong. It was simply malnutrition, and a lack of green vegetables. The only way to make them realise that white rice wasn’t going to save their babies was to buy the stuff for them and throw away the bottle of vitamin mixture they’d bought as a cure.

… Anyway it’s very hard to talk about all this; if I could, I wouldn’t write a book at all. Aussie bush is one of the last natural wildernesses left in the world, but it’s obvious our (white) culture is destined to destroy it. If I met Gauguin I could go and live in the interior with him …

Balmain was the closest thing I ever had to home; that is, I stayed there on and off for seven years, and I’ve never lived more than one year in one place before, so it was neighbourhood to me, though a piranha tank with unnecessary teeth. I moved there for the rent: $10 a week. I’ve lived most of my life in grotty areas near the city, which suits me. I’ll live in a slum or in the country, but never in that infinite grey shit of suburbia which is a cosmic tranquilliser …

Hal Colebatch
Born 1945

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

 

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

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

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

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

Jack Hibberd
Born 1940

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

Significant shifts in the seventies

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

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

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

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

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

John Forbes
Born 1950

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

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

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

The seventies – a narrow view

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

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

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

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

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

Turning Forty with the Decade

(from National Times, 3.10.77)

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

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

I said I planned to cry a lot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The way you calculate ‘middle age’ mathematically changes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And at last Proust takes on his full meaning.

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

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

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

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

I suppose that’s something.

image

Untitled

After the lost generation we find the single

beatnik emerging, it’s like Castaways in Space

with a drug supply at the corner store

and we’re getting fresh on adrenalin milk-shakes

when the beatnik declines as a focus for the novel

and the word ‘hippie’ surfaces in the dictionary.

Inside a novel is a growing boy

buried in the print and waiting to get out,

in a diary a man pretending to look

carefully at his youth, on the painting

of the whole sky the fingerprints

of an unwilled and crooked politics.

I look back into myself ‘as a visitor

looks at his room and the bowls of flowers

obviously not gathered from the garden

he can see carelessly framed in a window;

the cupboards are lined with yellowed paper

and in a trunk he finds a suit

that fashion forgot, and a broken toy

belonging to a past he never knew.’

I sure could see a lot of gum trees

from our front veranda –

John Tranter

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

image

Events of a Decade
A Personal Chronology

1970

  • For the first time an Aboriginal dance company tours Australia professionally.
  • A serious weekly, the Review, is started by Gordon Barton in Melbourne.
  • Sydney’s Nimrod Theatre opens.
  • Earth Day marks the beginning of a concern with environmental issues.

1971

Vitamin sales begin to climb – up 66 per cent.

1972

1973

  • Film and Television School starts.
  • Attorney-General Lionel Murphy visits ASIO and demands to see files.
  • Aquarius Festival held at Nimbin in New South Wales to celebrate the back-to-the-earth movement.
  • The ABC begins the controversial radio programme ‘Lateline’.
  • The Communist Party of Australia’s newspaper, the Tribune, is fifty years old.
  • Massive increase in spending on Aboriginals – $67 million.
  • Liz Reid appointed first women’s adviser to a federal government.
  • Whitlam government increases funding to writers from about $228 000 to one million dollars.
  • Quadraphonic sound introduced commercially.
  • New South Wales Dance Company formed.
  • National Gallery buys Blue Poles for $1.3 million (purchasing began in the late sixties).
  • At opening of Sydney Opera House an Aboriginal actor representing the historical character Bennelong perches on the highest sail to read a poem.
  • Homosexuality among consenting adult males legalised in ACT and federal territories by conscience vote.
  • The term ‘green ban’ comes into currency.
  • Neville Wran resigns from the NSW Upper House to contest the seat of Bass Hill, and wins it.
  • Former Liberal Party prime minister Sir Robert Menzies goes on the old-age pension after the Labor government lifts means test.
  • Wran becomes leader of the opposition in the NSW parliament.
  • Patrick White awarded Nobel Prize for Literature.

1974

  • Australia’s first Hilton Hotel opens in Sydney.
  • Cinema Papers begins publication.
  • American Express introduces its credit cards to Australia (Diners Club arrived in the sixties).
  • Lake Eyre fills with water for the first time in 140 years.
  • John Kerr appointed governor-general. A profile in the National Times by Andrew Clark says Kerr has a ‘cloak-and-dagger’ background, a reference to his work in army intelligence during the war.
  • Bankcard introduced.
  • lta Buttrose appointed editor of the Women’s Weekly.
  • Gough Whitlam wins a premature election forced by the Liberal-controlled senate.
  • The Boy Scout movement invites female membership in mixed-sex troops.
  • Cyclone Tracy destroys much of Darwin.

1975

1976

  • FM broadcasting begins.
  • Political commentator Anne Summers reports the growing use of the expression ‘dole bludger’.
  • Australian Press Council established to deal with complaints against newspapers.
  • Cartoonist Patrick Cook bursts onto the scene.
  • For the first time in Australian history, beer consumption per head falls.
  • Australian literature expert from the University of Sydney, Brian Kiernan, sees New Wave Australian short story emerging.
  • Neville Wran elected premier of New South Wales.
  • Digital watches come onto the market.
  • Theatre Australia begins publication.
  • Vietnamese refugees, to become known as ‘boat people’, begin to arrive on the Australian coast.
  • For the first time since the thirties the country population begins to increase faster than the city population.

1977

1978

  • Explosion in Sydney Hilton Hotel kills two and injures nine – thought to be a bomb planted at commonwealth heads of state conference.
  • Jogging books appear on the market.
  • Effervescent vitamins sweep into fashion, especially the Roche product Berocca, rumoured to cure hangovers.
  • The former governor-general, Sir John Kerr, publishes autobiography with a justification of his dismissal of the Whitlam government.
  • Gough Whitlam publishes a book in reply.
  • Centre Point Tower in Sydney becomes Australia’s highest structure.
  • Gough Whitlam retires from parliament.
  • Illnesses from oysters bring Australian oyster-eating virtually to a stop.
  • Johnny O’Keefe, musician, pioneer of Australian rock, dies.
  • ‘Genesis of a Gallery, Part Two’ exhibition of masterpieces from the National Gallery tours Australia.
  • Robert Gordon Menzies dies.
  • ABC current affairs programme ‘This Day Tonight’ ends.

1979