I stayed in letter-writing touch with Carmen after interviewing her for the Listener and writing a chapter of my book Stacey on her exploits, culminating in an appearance before Rob Muldoon’s Parliamentary Privileges Committee to explain her claim that one in four MPs was gay. She had to apologise for what she claimed to be a fair assessment from those who frequented her Wellington nightclubs. Her appearance on Parliament’s steps in a flamboyant hat was on the national television news. I received letters from her up until her death in Surry Hills a few years ago, and I also wrote about her beautiful friend who, much to Carmen’s envy, had a successful sex operation and married well in Australia. I have drawn on the lives of these two lovely ladies and added my own extrapolations.
I found John Pilger’s A Secret Country so good on the abuse of human rights in Australia I bought a copy. That was the left side of the coin. The right or perhaps more fairly establishment side is Gerald Hensley’s excellent Friendly Fire : Nuclear Politics and the Collapse of ANZUS, 1984-1987. An enjoyable and remarkably frank read is Working with David: Inside the Lange Cabinet by Michael Bassett, David Lange’s third cousin and cabinet minister closest to the prime minister. Google launched a thousand references and my own files were sources for the Lucky Country.
I worked in Sydney in 1967 for The Bulletin, wrote subsequently for The National Times, and for Britain’s New Statesman on Aussie icon Barry Humphries and his stage alter ego Dame Edna Everage. I was back staying in Sydney with friends in 1991. It is a beautiful harbour city almost the equal of Wellington. Australians, as Fourth Goon Michael Bentine said in an interview I did with him, are the funniest people in the world. Example: The Queen is visiting a woodchopping tournament upcountry from Sydney and asks a practitioner how much he chops in a day. ‘Yeh, yer Maj’sty,’ he says. ‘Reckon about a fucking ton.’ The Duke steps forward: ‘I say, my good man, steady on.’ The woodchopper frowns. ‘Orlright. Half a fucking ton.’ Bentine does all the voices. Furthermore, he does eight regional Australian accents. I still have the cassette tape recording. Like Bentine I love the brash Ocker humour.
Brad is loosely based on an American I knew well in New Zealand. He told me he deserted from the US Navy over Vietnam and earned an MA in history at Sydney University.
The first Sydney Hilton was built in 1969, replacing a Victorian hotel, retaining its marble bar placed in the basement out of sight of the distinctive and rather brutal concrete edifice. I play freely with the marble bar artefact and indeed the entrances to the hotel situated between George and Pitt Streets. The modernist building did not last, replaced in its turn early in the new millennium. At the opening in 2005 there was much denunciation of the old hotel given over to 500 car spaces, 38 storeys and almost 600 rooms, but boxed inside concrete with little interest in spectacular views and scant provision for miserable pedestrian access and gloomy retail. There was even the maudlin suggestion that the Sydney Hilton bomber of 1978 was attempting therapeutic demolition.
The ‘convict stain’ is now a source of pride to many Australians. Brad Argent, spokesman of genealogy site Ancestry, said there was a time when the ‘convict stain’ was very much hidden. ‘I’ve heard stories of politicians (historically) disposing of records to hide the shame of a convict ancestor,’ he said. ‘I think the cultural turning point was Season 1 (2007) of WDYTYA (Who do you think you are?) where Jack Thompson, upon discovering his convict ancestry, proudly proclaimed them as “Australian Royalty”.’