Because this is a personal book and not a comprehensive book, the poetry and other pieces I’ve selected are things that came to me by the flow of my reading and through conversation during the seventies. They are not a ‘selection of the best’, but all are good. I did go back and look again, more widely than my reading at the time. It was also a retracing of my steps through the seventies. To have tried to be comprehensive in poetry, journalism and social theory would have been a gigantic task because of the emergence of two serious weeklies, the Nation Review and the National Times, together with the existence of the Bulletin and the hundred little magazines which came and went. It would have been beyond my time and sensibilities.
Much of the selection is that which came my way and I admired and remembered, or that which I found and which seemed to catch the times.
I found as I wrote the book and selected the pieces, that it was becoming also a homage to Sydney, where I had lived for twenty years. More particularly to the Sydney ‘community of ideas and arts’ which had nurtured me creatively, supported me financially, and sometimes protected me. It is also, to narrow it down even further, a homage to my suburb, Balmain, which, for all its posturing and for all the satire it invites, was a significant part of the pageant.
But what happened in Sydney also happened in the other cities in their own styles and this is also reflected.
Jim Davidson, the editor of Meanjin Quarterly, has pointed out that the significant visible change in Australia in recent years is that there are a number of ways of being a ‘real Australian’ and that being ocker is only one, and a fading one. The ocker has ceased to be the dominant Australian stereotype and has become, instead, a sometimes amusing and sometimes embarrassing, older brother or sister – or part-self.
The book is a combination of new material and material selected from many sources. I thank Jean Rodway and Christopher Mooney for their help on the research. Some of the previously published material has been revised or edited for this collection. Much of the material is my own and this I have sometimes revised more substantially to fit the context of this book. Full details of sources are to be found at the end of the book.
Frank Moorhouse
Sydney, June 1980