Days of Wine and Rage was published in 1980, written by me and more than forty other contributors in the highly vocal and revolutionary 1970s. I have not substantially revised it, preferring to leave it as a document of its times. David Williamson and his wife Kristin Green were the only two writers who declined to have their pieces republished and this required the removal of the related pieces by Anne Brooksbank and Robert Ellis.
In a letter to them I said, ‘What went on in your remarkable exchange was more than literary fighting – it demonstrated the way we wrote, the passion we felt, the openness we claimed and exercised. It was a shining example of candid exchange in a culture which I feel is again returning to inhibition.’
Readers who are interested will have to search out the first edition.
Looking back on those wild days of wine and rage of the 1970s, we did not quite realise that we were in the midst of, and part of, a great social revolution. It did not feel that way then. While we were being vocal and valiant, it felt as if we were ultimately impotent and that the repression of freedom was unstoppable.
Civil libertarians were raided and pushed around by the police and dragged into court, demonstrators suffered violence, women had to get their husband’s permission to leave the country and couldn’t open a bank account, Aboriginals were not allowed in bars, gays were beaten up, ASIO spied on journalists and writers, and books, magazines, films, plays, TV and radio were heavily censored. Australia was one of the most censored countries in the Western world.
But although we didn’t know it, we were winning and in many ways we did revolutionise Australia.
What do I see now?
Most of the basic gains are intact – especially those for women and for freedom of sexual expression. But today as I write this I read that the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission reports that same-sex couples are discriminated against every day and that there are fifty-eight laws that require amendment to eliminate discrimination. And not all women receive equal pay or fair promotion in some industries.
In Days of Wine and Rage I wrote that our central concern of the 1970s was ‘a bad tempered re-negotiation of the relationships between men and women, between society and homosexuality, and the relationships between adults and children …’
The renegotiation of our relationship with ‘nature’ or the planet was just beginning and I went to the first conference about it in Canberra in 1973 entitled ‘Man and the Biosphere’, under the auspices of UNESCO (see ‘The Bush Against Laundromat’).
Now, in 2007, I am again worried about freedom of expression generally and about the health of our cultural pluralism.
Although I am an enthusiastic student of politics, I am not politically partisan or tribal. I suppose I could still be seen as democratic libertarian.
To me there seems to be a growing reckless authoritarianism in the social policies of the government and in its attitude to freedom of expression, and the Labor Party seems quiet on the issues. Censorship and cultural control are alive both under the claims of national security and again motivated by the ideology of the Coalition Government and by religious morality.
I am not alone in being worried about freedom of expression. Concern has been expressed by The Australian Law Reform Commission, the Security Legislative Review Committee, the Human Rights Commission, the Press Council, arts organisations and civil liberties groups. And now the mainstream media organisations have formed a committee of concern called Australia’s Right to Know, backed by ABC, SBS, Fairfax Media, News Limited, Commercial Radio Australia, Free TV Australia and the Media Alliance.
The Coalition Government has also been ideologically hands-on in interfering with educational curricula, control of universities, and has been disrespectful of diversity in its appointments to boards of cultural and media organisations. And while back in the 1970s we thought we were moving towards joint consultation between labour and management and an increased involvement of the workforce in the running of the workplace, the government has become increasingly class-driven in its disempowerment of the employee in the work place.
These bad trends go against the surveys done of the population at large, which is overwhelmingly tolerant, pluralistic and progressive, especially on moral issues. A recent survey, for example, shows that 80 per cent of the population are relaxed about gay marriage and gay adoption, and against sexual censorship.
The struggle against the authoritarian mindset has continued for hundreds of years now. It is not over.
As I said in ‘The Writer in a Time of Terror’, which appeared in the Griffith Review in 2006:
When in doubt, liberal democrats should opt for the widest freedom of speech as our default position – just as the medical profession opts for preservation of life. [The] liberal democrat strives to prove and to establish that a society can survive, flourish, and be safe and orderly while still maximising freedoms of expression and those other freedoms which rest on freedom of expression.
Frank Moorhouse
June 2007