‘It was bad news ever to get too close to Gretel … she was dangerous to know.’
—Gretel’s first love, Bruce Allen
Laurie Pinniger knew the value of a good start in life. She could afford to install Gretel in one of Melbourne University’s residential colleges. When Gretel went down to be interviewed at the end of 1963, Laurie paid for a room at the Windsor Hotel. ‘She spared no expense for her precious daughter,’ Gretel beams.
Gretel was accepted into the conservative Janet Clarke Hall (known to its residents as JCH), one of the smallest of the university’s eleven undergraduate colleges. Fewer than one hundred female students were accommodated in a magnificent late-Victorian building with a cloistered courtyard garden. The high-ceilinged dining hall was graced by a grand piano and a portrait of Lady Clarke, the college’s founder. This Anglican college had been among the world’s first university residential colleges for women. At the time, a condition of entry was that students must pass a practical cookery test and household management exam. Along with her fellow freshers, Gretel bumbled her way through the meal preparation and scored just enough in the exam to pass muster.
Gretel was not interested in becoming part of the college community. ‘There were lots of girls from very wealthy families,’ she recalls. ‘It didn’t attract me. I was drawn to the wild ones. I’d been to school with these other types. It was like the rich relations who’d given me the shunt … I don’t want to be in a club that doesn’t want me.’
The wider Melbourne University campus served as the setting for Gretel’s first major encounters with the opposite sex. Until now, apart from her brother and step-brothers, the only boys she had conversed with at length were from the local fruit shop. The university in the early 1960s was a lively community whose students were keen to take an activist role in Australian life. As Gretel’s contemporary Vicki Rousseau recalls, young students such as Gareth Evans and Patrick McCaughey were engaging passionately in the public issues of the day: ‘There was a sense of destiny among many of the students.’
But it was not just college life that failed to inspire Gretel. She didn’t click with the mainstream university, either. After enrolling in the School of Arts to take Philosophy, Fine Arts and English, she was quickly distracted from her courses and attended neither lectures nor tutorials. Even though she loved philosophy—she attended all the Rationalist Society’s lunchtime talks, and discussed Aristotle and Aquinas with fellow students—she failed to hand in a single course essay.
Within her fields of interest—largely aesthetic and philosophical—Gretel’s pursuits were idiosyncratic. She took little interest in practical or political matters. Forging a personal identity and gaining recognition were far more pressing needs. Instead of attending scheduled classes, she sketched butterflies making love to flowers and read widely. Although she devoured Proust and Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, she sat for no examinations.
Of course, Gretel was far from being the only student who failed to attend classes. Sandra Hill, then a recent emigrant from England, was also a first-year student at Janet Clarke Hall. ‘Our delinquent absences didn’t mean we weren’t avid readers and learners,’ Hill says. ‘In some cases we’d just found the set subject material not very interesting and were already caught up with books and ideas that seemed more exciting. And then some of us … were also looking for novelty, extension, or challenge … something more than study in the library.’
The enigmatic look that formed part of Gretel’s style was a puzzle for many. In the evenings, JCH students had to attend dinner in their flowing black academic gowns. It was in the college dining hall that Sandra Hill first met Gretel. ‘The Gretel I spoke with early in first term was wide-eyed, enthusiastic, yet with a vaguely distracted air,’ she recalls. ‘Her voice was emphatic and distinctive. She had long untidy brown hair and wore no make-up.’ At the time, Gretel wore very understated garments—a dark plaid skirt, a dark jumper, black stockings, black flat shoes—a kind of Bohemian look. Within a few months, her look would change radically.
Sandra and Gretel soon discovered they shared an energetic outlook and a passion for poetry—William Blake’s in particular. Both girls were drawn to romantic intellectual ideas and creative figures, and found ‘bourgeois’ college life dull. Sandra could quote Keats, Shakespeare, D.H. Lawrence, Oscar Wilde and Baudelaire, and enjoyed airily dismissing the works of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Given their common interests, Sandra passingly assumed Gretel and she might become friends. It didn’t happen.
‘Gretel just didn’t seem interested in friendship as I understood it,’ she says. ‘She didn’t seem to become close friends with anyone. Although her manner was generally friendly and outgoing, she also seemed detached and self-absorbed—seemed to inhabit a world of her own … Like many, I admired Gretel’s bracing chutzpah, enjoyed her eccentricities, thought fondly of her from afar.’
One day the college grapevine began buzzing with rumours that Gretel had received a marriage proposal from a well-known campus identity, philosophy student Lauchlan Chipman. ‘An atheist, rationalist, philosopher, debater, with a controversial public profile,’ recalls one contemporary. ‘He was a smallish figure with a confident presence; and he seemingly lived in his head.’
More likely to be giving a lunchtime lecture on causation to the Rationalist Society, Chipman had never even been seen with a woman. Some thought him rather self-important. However, his ego, along with his intellectual reputation and celebrity status on campus, seemed to be key attractions for Gretel.
Chipman was a master in marshalling and structuring an argument (he went on to complete a doctorate at Oxford and become a leading professor). Gretel’s account of her suitor’s philosophical dissertation on the rationalist logic of relationships—a prelude to his marriage proposal—amazed Sandra Hill and others, who were having coffee when she sailed in with her latest news. Gretel explained that Lauchlan’s key reason for popping the question was his assessment of her not simply as beautiful but—here she lowered her voice to a grave whisper—‘intellectually sound’.
Over forty years later, Chipman still remembers Gretel clearly: ‘I thought she was very spectacular … I remember liking her very much … She was bright … you never quite knew what she was going to say.’ He was struck by Gretel’s ‘very enquiring mind … about ideas generally, [she] very much wanted to get to the bottom of things … Typically she was fairly quiet to begin with, and then she’d come in very full and loud … She was never upset by things like hierarchy or status.’
Sandra could not fathom what Gretel might have found attractive in such an unromantic rationalist, and was also astonished that Chipman believed he and Gretel were suited. ‘To my youthful eyes,’ she recalls, ‘he gave the impression of being emotionally constricted and somewhat socially conventional.’
Gretel emphatically maintained to her college confidants that she had no intention of having sex with her suitor. Her dilemma—which she seemed to be rather enjoying—was how to respond. ‘What was a girl to say?’
‘Later, when Gretel had swanned off,’ Sandra says, ‘we chewed over this amazing news once more, reduced to giggles. We didn’t think Gretel was fibbing—but was she embroidering? Had she misunderstood? Although the proposal seemed crazy … the fact of its oddness, its incredibility, paradoxically gave it an aura of veracity. Stranger than fiction was what we were coming to expect from Gretel.’
The university at that time was very much a boys’ club. Female students on campus and in the radical Melbourne Push scene tended to be defined more by whom they slept with than by their own talents. Status could be gained through being very pretty or the partner of a high-ranking male. Hence it was the men who received most of the attention. Nonetheless, says Vicki Rousseau, each year ‘there were a few eccentric women you noticed because they were very wild, very beautiful and aesthetes’.
Gretel had, by late 1964, reinvented herself into just such a woman. Wendy Cameron, another fellow JCH student, recalls her ‘sweeping into my room draped in a huge colourful feather boa, with her arms out like a statue, saying “Isn’t it fantastic!” She … wore amazing clothes. And she strode along the college corridors with big swinging steps like a model.’
Wendy had also spent years in a conservative boarding school. To her, Gretel seemed ‘a wonderful example of how different it was possible to be’.
Vicki Rousseau remembers that Gretel ‘just drifted around—ethereally beautiful Botticelli looks. A middle parting, wavy tresses, wide-eyed, and she sat around listening, kind of joining in, in a sort of offbeat way. Always a bit alluring, a bit enigmatic, someone to take note of. I assumed she had loads of lovers, [though] she denied it, [assuring me] she was a virgin.’
Sandra too came to realise that she knew less about Gretel than she had assumed. ‘Gretel seemed a conundrum, a coalition of contradictions. Seemingly canny and knowing, yet apparently naïve. Self-centred, yet given to impulsive acts of generosity. Sharp yet vague. Remote yet impressionable. Seemingly open, yet closed off … Gradually I realised that Gretel and I had different values and dreams. And that Gretel wasn’t really interested in my life or other people’s lives; our main role in her life was to be an audience.’
Sandra recalls Gretel’s room held a ‘cornucopia of treasures’ and was often ‘knee deep in clothes’. She bought herself not only a record player but a sewing machine on which she was always creating something exotic with velvet, satin, feathers and jewellery. Gretel would shop for her materials in Melbourne’s weekend markets. Vicki Rousseau says she ‘didn’t wear things just to attract attention. She wore them because they were exquisite textures and shapes and design—lots of floaty fabrics, shawls. She was sort of timeless, like a young goddess.’
Vicki recalls that they would sit around the laminex-topped table where Gretel seemed always to be producing beautiful things. ‘She’d rummage in some wonderful tapestry bag she was carrying—Look what I found in a little shop this morning. It would often be a tiny, exquisite item.’
One day Vicki was looking for matches. Gretel eventually produced a silver cardboard cylinder with a Venetian design. She unscrewed the top to reveal white matches with shiny gold tips. ‘I sort of loved her for that,’ Vicki says. ‘You could feel that she wanted to surround herself with beauty.’
Sandra Hill was one of many who were struck by Gretel’s wonderful array of garments. ‘I had very few clothes and was hugely impressed with her ability to sew and run up some fabulous outfits.’ One day Gretel appeared in a loose grey velvet smock with red cross-stitching across the bust. When Sandra commented on how lovely the dress was, Gretel confessed she thought it made her look too big (she was at times concerned about the size of her hips) and offered to lend it to Sandra for a while. Sandra was delighted—‘and touched by Gretel’s casual generosity’.
One image that has stayed in Sandra’s memory for decades illustrates the intensity of Gretel’s perception, her exuberance, her narcissism and her childlike innocence. Gretel burst into Sandra’s room to share a most amazing experience—a spiritual epiphany. She had, she said, just a moment before been sitting on the toilet down the college corridor, the window open to the spring breeze. She had heard the chirruping of birds nesting in the eaves. ‘One bird went tweet tweet tweet,’ she exclaimed, ‘and I knew it was singing just for me.’
‘A song of innocence,’ Sandra smiled, referring to William Blake’s sequence of poems.
‘Yes!’ Gretel’s eyes widened in excitement. ‘That’s it! A song of innocence.’
For many girls, however, Gretel’s eccentricities were quite threatening. For fellow college resident Anne Hopkins, a quiet girl from the country, the big city and university were in themselves almost overwhelming. Encountering Gretel on top of that was rather scary.
‘I recall seeing Gretel sitting swaying on her bed … in the gloom of her room, dressed in black with long, curling locks. She seemed to be in a trance—probably drug-related, I guessed—and reading poetry at the same time … She was like an apparition from Hades. Shock was my main reaction, I suppose, but actual fear was there as well, because she was just so out there for the times. How did she get in here? I remember thinking, since JCH College was orthodox Anglican conservatism to the letter. Her clothes seemed always black and velvet with lace and strange jewels. I don’t recall that anyone made friends with her, as she was just beyond the pale.’
Gretel kept up her hope that being in Melbourne might bring her closer to her father. Sandra Hill recalls her saying one day that she and her father were to have lunch the following week. Gretel had never before admitted that her parents were divorced, let alone that she had a father in Melbourne. This meeting was clearly important. But on her return from lunch, Gretel seemed disappointed. Sandra Hill gathered that the encounter had not gone well.
Gretel’s Bohemian lifestyle was not cheap, given her taste in clothing required money. While some fellow students worked in milk bars or cheap restaurants Gretel got a job in a bottle shop, before finding herself hostessing in a nightclub.
The Monte Carlo was in an upstairs room of a building on a triangular block at St Kilda Junction, the hub of the city’s red-light district. It was run by a Mr Murat, reputedly a member of the Yugoslav underworld. These were the days of six o’clock closing—selling alcohol after this hour was illegal. The law didn’t faze places like the Monte Carlo, which did a roaring trade, charging £5 admission and exorbitant prices to drink all night. There was a band and six waitresses. Gretel’s task—for £2 a night—was to entertain customers from 9 p.m. until closing time—between 5 and 6.30 a.m. next morning. Waitresses earned an additional commission for each bottle they sold. The floor covering was absorbent, so by quietly spilling her champagne or Barossa Pearl a girl could ensure she was always topped up, guaranteeing her bottle commission.
When a warning light flashed in the club, the girls knew a police raid was a few minutes away. Soft drink bottles would quickly be opened, alcohol tipped out onto the floor and the bottles would be taken out the back, where the cops never ventured. The cops would glance at the soft drinks and leave. Everyone was happy.
The job also involved dancing with the customers. On Gretel’s first night a man swayed against her during a slow dance, pressing ‘this hard thing which I knew must be his cock’ against her thigh. Dancing every night at least improved her confidence in her body, which she still felt was ‘defective … with severely limited appeal’.
It was several nights before Gretel realised that her fellow waitresses were earning extra after closing time doing ‘escort’ work. She wasn’t interested: she had not yet given up hope of a religious vocation. Instead, she began selling dances for ten shillings each.
‘For the protection of my virginity, I organised an account at a cab company and had a cab waiting for me from 5 a.m. until I should appear.’ Having nabbed a few hours’ sleep after dinner, Gretel would ‘put on’ her sluttish Monte Carlo persona—beehive hairdo, lavish make-up, a skin-tight black dress with a plunging neckline and side splits, and stiletto heels. Over the top she would pull a cheap-looking Astrakhan coat. Confessing to a few fellow students that she was working in a club, Gretel was at pains to make clear that the work did not involve prostitution. ‘I’m still a virgin,’ she told Sandra Hill and her girlfriends.
It was against college rules to stay out after midnight on weekends. During the week, the curfew was 10 p.m. Gretel’s terror of being found out and expelled made each night an adrenaline rush. She copied a senior’s door key so she could sneak in as the sun was rising. She was eating little, sleeping less and living on her nerves. To keep going and stay up, she started taking methedrine. Within three weeks she had shed over five kilograms.
Some customers would gaze at Gretel with moist eyes, and tell her they had a daughter her age as they tried to slip their hand up her dress. When a man asked if she would come home with him, Gretel, secure in the knowledge that her cab was outside, would say that depended on how generous he was inclined to be. Most didn’t last the night, too full of drink to take their impulse further. But one night a customer, realising Gretel was not going with him, became rough and threatening. Crazed from lack of sleep, methedrine, adrenaline and fear, Gretel picked up a knife from the nightclub’s kitchen and slashed his arm. Blood from a severed artery began to spurt high in the air. A taxi was summoned to take the man to hospital. The medical staff were told he was found in the gutter after a knife fight. The man did not dare to disagree.
One night, two fellow waitresses agreed to revisit a wealthy customer and his brother, whom they’d previously slept with. This time, they planned to rob the blokes. Gretel tagged along. The job went sour, and she and the two whores were tossed onto the street in the chilly Melbourne dawn. Somehow they ended up down at the wharves, on a ship where the girls had boyfriends. Gretel returned to college with a besotted Swedish sailor in her wake, bearing a pile of stockings and perfumes from the ship’s hold. The next morning, Gretel invited Wendy Cameron and a few other students to view the sailor because he was ‘so fantastically beautiful’. The whole incident testified to the high value she placed on physical beauty.
‘She said he had a bald patch on his head and it was ever so soft and we could come and feel it if we wanted to,’ Wendy Cameron recalls. ‘I asked if he would mind us doing that. She said, Oh no, he doesn’t mind anything … He was sitting in a chair amid the sea of clothes, facing away from the door. We followed Gretel and each had a turn of feeling his bald patch. Then she introduced us to him. I was so embarrassed I could hardly look at his face.’
Gretel was pulling in £30 a night at the Monte Carlo, stuffing the notes into her bra. At the end of her third week at the club, two unshaven opal miners from Lightning Ridge asked to sleep with her and produced a handful of raw opals as payment. They had been generous all night, but Gretel again ducked out into her waiting cab. She sneaked into college and was about to open the front door when she heard someone coming from the other side. Panicking, she ran back to the road and jumped into the first cab she saw. Sitting in the back seat were the opal miners she had just escaped from.
Gretel had to think fast. She threw herself to the floor. ‘Thank God you’re here,’ she choked. ‘Get me to a chemist’s, quick. I’ve got a hole in my heart! I need cortisone and Largactil or I’ll die.’ Alarmed, the taxi driver accelerated out of the university and down Royal Parade. There were no chemist shops open at that hour but Gretel continued to gag and moan, insisting that her heart had already stopped twice. ‘What might save me,’ she wheezed, ‘is an infusion of much coffee.’ Minutes later they were at the Pieteria, an all-night coffee lounge near Flinders Street Station. An unmolested Gretel congratulated herself on her inventiveness.
Back at Janet Clarke Hall, she found a note from a resident tutor. In block letters and heavily underlined, it read: ‘Where have you been? What have you been doing? Come and see me immediately.’ In the nerve-racking interview that followed, Gretel told one lie after another. Getting caught, she knew, was only a matter of time. Unwilling to risk expulsion and let her mother down, she chose to abandon the Monte Carlo job.
Gretel’s absence from college life meant many students barely knew who she was, but for those who did know her rumours about her lifestyle fed the gossip mill. Wendy Cameron recalls that although Gretel didn’t make close friends in college, she regularly brought in casual friends from outside. ‘She seemed to move from one subculture to another. She invited them to lunch and dinner at the college … Our parents were charged for [guests] on the term account. The rest of us usually invited only one or two. Gretel would have six or eight at a time. At one stage she told us that she now preferred the company of gay people, who were, she said, more artistic and sensitive. So large groups of them came to dinner, including some cross-dressers, much to the amazement of the rest of us.’
Late hours and methedrine taking worsened Gretel’s long-time insomnia. Lying awake at night, she realised that she had lost her faith. Her paintings had only ever been of religious or apocalyptic scenes. Now she felt creatively bankrupt. ‘God had died in an overdose of adulthood. I had at first no idea how to replace this. I needed something to fill the vacuum left by my departure from the Monte Carlo and God’s departure from my life.’
What was the point of living? she began to wonder. She slid into depression. In her eyes, sex was for prostitutes, exotic women and married couples. One of her few girlfriends in Sydney had made Gretel promise she would not experiment with intercourse. But Gretel now believed one should live for the ‘great moments’ in life. Good sex was clearly one of these. Two weeks before her nineteenth birthday in October 1964, Gretel came to what she saw as a momentous yet inevitable decision. She would surrender her virginity.
There was a party coming up at Toorak. Gretel resolved to give herself to the most beautiful man there. As the evening approached, she spent six hours dressing as if for a sacrificial rite. She painted her face white, drawing on Aztec features in black, purple and silver. She sprayed white paint on her hair and plaited it around a square wire frame. She wore a black dress with a beautiful black, purple and silver beaded jacket, with an ivory fan of lush black feathers as an accessory.
At the party, ‘it seemed to me that every man wanted to fuck me … Confident of my beauty … I first approached Gunther, a blond German.’ Deciding that he was too drunk to initiate her into the mysteries of love, Gretel flirted instead with his close friend, philosophy honours student Bruce Allen.
Lauchlan Chipman recalls Bruce as ‘very bright but very complex’, fluctuating between a dark moroseness and manic exuberance. Some girls found Bruce arrogant. A few thought he lacked human sympathies, fearing him capable of casual cruelty. Blond, with a chiselled face, a lion’s mane of hair and a tall, perfect frame, he reminded her of a sculpted angel, or Michelangelo’s David. Dazzled by his beauty, within ten minutes Gretel had enticed him to take her home. She laughed at his surprise and pleasure. Given Gretel’s reputation for unattainable virtue, Bruce could not believe his luck.
They repaired to Bruce’s tiny upstairs pad in a Carlton terrace. The lino-covered floor was barely visible under piles of clothes and books. On Bruce’s narrow bed, the pair kissed and hugged in the glow of his electric radiator. Gretel had little idea what people did in bed but recalls Bruce as ‘a most considerate lover’. He stroked, caressed and fondled as Gretel gazed on, wondering if this was happening to her. After some clumsy manoeuvring, the deed was done.
‘I was slightly disappointed,’ she remembers. ‘I had expected something momentous and devastating and my immediate reaction was to feel cheated …. I had a confusion of feelings. I thought I hadn’t done things properly.’
Bruce too had been raised in Sydney, in what Gretel sensed to have been a strict family environment. To Gretel he exhibited ‘a strange mixture of perversion and prudery’. He blushed readily, laughed loudly and enjoyed dirty jokes so hugely he would slap his thighs. They were facets Gretel loved. Bruce liked to record his thoughts and experiences in a journal. Gretel could not help but sneak a look when he was out of the room. He had fallen in with a weird crowd as an eighteen-year-old and his early experiences of sex had clearly been ambivalent.
Bruce did not seem all that impressed by women as moral beings; clearly though he was ready—eager even—to make an exception for Gretel. Bruce recalls ‘the mixture of hope and longing’ that Gretel aroused. Nonetheless, Gretel felt sure that if she ever showed any weakness, he would treat her with contempt and their relationship would be over.
No male visitors were allowed in JCH students’ rooms outside limited afternoon visiting hours. Sexual relations on the college grounds—indeed even hosting after hours male visitors—was strictly forbidden.
One day the cleaners complained that Gretel’s room was impossible to deal with, since every surface was covered with clothes, books and detritus. Heavy velvet curtains, kept drawn even in daytime, also made it dark. The corridor prefect knocked on Gretel’s door to give her a talking-to. Gretel opened it a crack and, peering out from the candle-lit gloom, made emphatic promises to remedy the matter. Hidden in the old wooden wardrobe was a naked Bruce. Gretel had no intention of mending her ways.
Fired by the mad intensity of youth, the pair would sit in a Parkville café gazing into each other’s eyes as the Nuns’ Chorus from Casanova played in the background, or squat motionless in the lotus pose, their foreheads touching, each conscious of the other’s slightest breath or movement. Their desire would intensify until it overwhelmed their self-control; they entered a Blakean world of bodies transcending senses. The pair’s love was sublime and complete. Bruce would later write, ‘Our young love … was … as pure and passionate as anything between Adam and Eve.’ Bruce admits there was a mystical dimension—something which combined elements of the French poet Rimbaud (je est un autre), the Kama Sutra and Blake’s ‘Marriage of Heaven and Hell’.
Their passion carried them on a roller-coaster of thrills and adrenaline as they experimented with risk and also pain—making love outdoors, dripping wax onto each other’s bodies, burning each other with cigarettes. Some of their games derived from the stories of Edgar Allen Poe. The pair would visit Melbourne’s cemetery at night to make love violently among the grave-stones. Such ghoulishness appealed to Gretel, while for Bruce this was the ultimate dare. Wrestling with the urge to flee, he had not failed to notice how his hair rose as he and Gretel slipped under the cemetery railings. Plainly his atheism, which refused to acknowledge anything beyond death, co-existed with archaic layers of superstition. It was only Gretel’s presence that gave him courage. On one occasion the pair made love atop Australian billiards legend Walter Lindrum’s grave, making good use of the miniature marble billiard table gracing his tomb.
Once they were given a lift across town by a Greek man. At their destination, Bruce got out—and the Greek accelerated away with Gretel still beside him. He raped her in the car in a dark, unfamiliar streetscape.
‘I went along with it just to preserve myself,’ she assured Bruce later, wide-eyed as she recounted the horror. While her relationship with him remained passionate, Gretel was beginning to wonder about the darker side of love—about domination and total submission. That this was not something she could explore with Bruce was beginning to dawn on her. Meanwhile, she failed the year and left college. She knew she would not be welcomed back, and had no desire to stay. She was developing other interests that would lead her far beyond the world Bruce inhabited.
Frank Baarda, a JCH student who later married Wendy Cameron, rented the back rooms of a run-down house in Faraday Street, Carlton, from an elderly Italian man who lived in the front room. Gretel was looking for a room. Frank recalls her turning up one night, ‘sporting a long multi-coloured boa (purples and yellows) made from a bright luminescent synthetic fluffy material, and accompanied by two dwarves’. She had with her a suitcase. Opening it a crack, Frank had the impression of its contents being alive. They seemed to start erupting onto the floor and had to be pushed back in.
Frank was both attracted to this bizarre woman and threatened by her. He had no intention of letting Gretel stay, and ‘after a while Gretel and the dwarves headed off towards the cemetery, where they apparently intended to overnight’.
At the end of the next year, when he and Wendy were driving up the Hume Highway on their honeymoon, they came upon Gretel with a bearded blond surfie in an open Jeep. The two cars passed each other several times, prompting much enthusiastic waving. Frank was reminded of the actress Isadora Duncan with the wind in her hair in the line from The Ballad of Lucy Jordan, where she rides through Paris in a sports car.
Despite being accepted into the National Gallery’s art course in 1965, Gretel never managed to enrol in any classes. Ultimately she and Bruce located a North Melbourne house to sublet together. With her eye for design, Gretel busied herself beautifying the space. When their landlord discovered she and Bruce were subletting, he demanded that Gretel find a guarantor or leave. Although her father had seen her only two or three times since her move to Melbourne, she asked him for help so she and Bruce could stay on. He ‘didn’t even wish to hear the circumstances’, Gretel recalls. As a property owner himself, Stewart Pinniger declared, he was always on the side of the landlord.
Melbourne in the mid-1960s was a rather provincial place. Gretel concentrated on breaking into the city’s alternative ‘in’ scene. Many in the philosophy crowd drank at the Horsemarket Hotel and Norton’s on Sydney Road. Members of the Melbourne Push frequented venues like Tattersalls in the city and Jazz Centre 44 in St Kilda, and gathered at grungy house parties around Parkville, Carlton, Fitzroy, Prahran and St Kilda.
There were several fringe coteries, some of which meshed with criminal networks, a drug scene and a dark sexual scene. Some in these groups modelled themselves on writers like Jean Genet, Rimbaud and the Marquis de Sade. And they did not always regard rape as a serious crime. In this milieu, only occasionally did a woman attain status in her own right, and usually by exhibiting masculine behaviour. Such women needed to have a hard-drinking or drug-taking reputation, a powerful controlling presence and a capacity for sexual exploitation or violence.
Gretel first spied Lilith Rocha while staying at the Windsor Hotel late in 1963. She was fascinated by Lilith’s eccentric appearance: ‘I was determined to know this person the moment I met her.’ Three years older than Gretel, Lilith was a product of Protestant and Catholic parents—‘What the nuns called a mixed marriage. It was as if you’d come from Mars,’ Lilith says. She had been badly treated at her Catholic school, ‘beaten up by the nuns’, who assured her schoolmates that ‘a bad apple can ruin the barrel’. ‘I had a Prince Valiant haircut and they … made me sit with the boys … I just had to have a defence mechanism, really, to make it look as though being different was my choice.’
Leaving school early, Lilith had developed her own distinctive look, dyeing her blonde hair a flaming scarlet. She took to wearing thick black eye make-up, long black fingernails and short skirts, and dabbled in magic. To Gretel, Lilith was a genuine Bohemian. She lived in a shared ground-floor apartment on the corner of Toorak Road and Chapel Street. Experimental drug use was commonplace in Lilith’s circle. ‘Amphetamines you just got from the doctor by saying you were a model and needed to be thin,’ Lilith says. A friend worked at the pharmaceutical company Drug Houses of Australia and used to bring home prescription drugs as well.
‘We used to say, “Oh, liquid adrenaline! That’ll be nice. Oh, yes, that’s an aphrodisiac.” We used to throw [all the drugs] into a great big teapot, add some gin and drink it … I don’t know how we survived … sometimes we were crazy for days … off our faces … amphetamines and alcohol. Terrible cocktails. Sometimes we didn’t even know what they were. We just drank them all.’
Lilith and her entourage would attend wild ‘fuck and enter’ parties. Tony Bilson, later to be a famous Sydney chef, was one young man who fell into Lilith’s web. He was soon flatting with her, and particularly recalls her incense, her velvet drapes and her eccentric get-up. Years later, Tony would play a vital role in Gretel’s life. Many of Lilith’s men were far less savoury. But, although she could not fathom Lilith’s taste in these ‘no-gooder low-life men’, Gretel thought her ‘absolutely exotic’.
Lilith’s first memory of Gretel is vivid. ‘She was dressed like Bo-Peep, with a blue cape on … She seemed so innocent and naïve … We used to think she was a boring little convent girl and we used to lock her out … Oh, no, not her again, she’s too straight,’ Lilith would groan. ‘She was like a Labrador puppy. She used to climb in the window, she was so determined to be part of that scene … I was really not a nice person in those days, crazy and dismissive … somehow she was very impressed by that.’
Yet with time, Lilith’s attitude softened. ‘She always reminds me of one of those Flemish Madonnas—she’s got that milk-maid quality. An innate innocence and vivacity that I can’t help really liking.’
Lilith earned money as an art students’ model. Gretel decided to do the same, modelling naked every Friday for Wes Penberthy’s first-year drawing students in the School of Architecture. Someone had told her that Lilith used to touch up her nipples with lipstick before she posed. Gretel copied the trick.
For some classes, Gretel might sit for just an hour; for others it might be a two- or three-hour stretch. Sometimes she had to hold a pose for half an hour or more. ‘I was so nicely treated by everybody … and they all said what a fabulous model I was … and in fact, it seemed something of a turn-on.’ Gretel had discovered that she could attract appreciative attention simply by taking her clothes off. More importantly to Gretel, while sitting ‘my mind could roam free. I was being paid to meditate.’
‘She was very much like a Botticelli figure,’ Wes Penberthy recalls.
Gretel was making close to £30 a week from modelling, and spending it all on beaded clothes and bags at Melbourne’s weekend markets. ‘It seemed like money for jam, so for several years it was my one source of income.’ Like Lilith, Gretel would party all night, then go into the studio and take her clothes off. Sometimes she would fall asleep on the couch.
Meanwhile, by the end of a year together, Gretel’s passion for Bruce had stripped his protective skin to reveal ‘layers of pain’ in the young man. He admitted he was less comfortable in his body than Gretel. A welter of stormy emotions surfaced. Early in 1966 Gretel introduced him to her Sydney family. As the heat of summer intensified, so did their arguments. Ultimately Bruce walked away, as he later confessed in a letter to Gretel, ‘for the sake of some small point of arid pride’. Bruce also described a ‘rupture of trust’ that he felt undermined the intensity of his love. Years later he gave Gretel his version of what had gone wrong, ‘I loved you too strongly, too absolutely.’ There was simply no middle ground. The pair had come to see each other in radically different ways.
Watching her parents’ marriage break down, Gretel had learned that ‘men had the power, and that seemed more desirable. A man was the one who could choose to stay or leave, and I didn’t want to be left as my mother had been.’ Bruce’s rejection cut her deeply. Accusing him of latent homosexuality, she holed up in Sydney in a room in Kings Cross, reading and re-reading the last letter Bruce had written her. Having turned her back on religion, she now had ‘a nervous breakdown. It was like I’d lost God. I was in mourning … I was a mess for quite a long time … I went through a version of my mother’s grief over losing my father. The threat was that this might be the last [love] I’d ever know.’
Returning to Melbourne, Gretel was again admitted into the School of Art. But still reeling from Bruce’s rejection, she missed the start of the academic year and was in ‘too much grief to really concentrate on my studies’. Gretel repaired to a local pub, where she drank. And drank. Finally, she sought out the ugliest person there. Bill Collins, then in his forties, was a Carlton identity, a drinker and a great raconteur with a taste for the sound of his own voice who hung around the university pubs and the Bohemian scene. Bill always had an attentive audience of naïve students eager to absorb his tales, but he also numbered among his circle some of the city’s leading thinkers. Politicians, poets and philosophers—Bill seemed to know them all, or know a juicy story about them. Feminists saw the former abattoir worker and Kokoda Track veteran as a chauvinist pig, a charlatan and a bully. But he occasionally impressed Gretel.
Bruce Allen recalls that, ‘Bill had a ready pair of fists and was not a person to get on the wrong side of, but he could be the soul of humanity and conviviality. However, he was not exactly the kind of man you’d leave your girlfriend with for safe-keeping.’
Clearly, Bill was a man of many parts who defied easy pidgeon-holing. Given Gretel was drawn to the unusual and unconventional, Bill was someone she needed to experience at close quarters.
She moved into a place with Bill—their only furniture a double mattress. She could not bring herself to have sex with him. Instead she read The Story of O. Banned for decades before its eventual publication in English in 1970, this French novel was one of the first widely read accounts of sadomasochistic love. It described a woman’s bondage, flagellation and violent penetration by masked captors in spare and elegant prose. Gretel was fascinated and aroused, imagining herself as the nameless O. The protagonist’s unabashed desire to be owned, controlled and hurt by a man, even given by him to whomever he chose, struck a chord. ‘I thought, I want that. That’s so amazing.’ Gretel would spend years in the search for her own Sir Stephen—a man to whom she could submit completely in exchange for his love and protection.
She continued modelling for art students to pay the rent. Ultimately, her natural curiosity meant ‘I got swept into the wildest subculture in Melbourne, of really flamboyant gays and incredible characters … I had discovered a social life and wild, wild friends.’ One of these, Billy Seale, was a kindred spirit to Gretel. Another, Michael Puxley, an English emigrant, was an incredible combination of Michael Palin, Oscar Wilde and Stephen Fry.
It was at a girlfriend’s party in Elsternwick that Gretel met the philosopher Imants Richters. Im was a friend of Bruce’s—good reason to seduce him as some sort of revenge. Enjoying the power trip, Gretel hardly thought of Im as a person. ‘He was important as Bruce’s friend, a weapon.’ Her disinterest was to change once Im took her to bed.
Im took an immediate, startled interest in Gretel, and was soon besotted. Drained of passion and intensity by Bruce, Gretel says she never felt the same obsession for Im, though ‘I loved him enormously … we were happy hermits, engrossed in our private lives and happy beyond any expectation.’ Still, it was a long time before Gretel could excise from her consciousness ‘that blond, powerful angel of darkness, blessed with beauty’ but full of inner turmoil.
Im was a refugee from Latvia who had left Perth for postgraduate studies in Melbourne. Six weeks short of completing his Master of Arts thesis when she met him, he would never hand it in. Gretel relished their discussions of philosophy and his capacity for love and care. He would buy her extravagant presents well beyond his modest means ‘because he wanted me to be happy’. The first gift was an exotic kaftan of red silk shot through with gilt thread, hundreds of tiny buttons and hand-stitched detail. It took Im many months to pay off.
Gretel found Im a better lover than Bruce. Lilith Rocha recalls that he was ‘incredibly sensitive’, something of a poet, and that he adored Gretel—and understood her, even though ‘he quite often got upset by her. They had fights.’ Meanwhile Gretel continued to hang around with the philosophy crowd. One such friend she recalled as ‘beyond peculiar’. At parties, ‘to illustrate a conversational point, he would turn around and fuck his girlfriend in the middle of the crowd! Just as a conversational coup!’
Amidst Gretel’s wilder friends, Im would have something of a grounding influence. Nonetheless, ultimately even he would prove unable to contain Gretel’s boundless energy.