Responsibility avoided again

In 1960 Brian Kiernan, absurdly youthful and freshly graduated MA from the University of Melbourne, arrived at Caulfield and we found much in common. It was a friendship built on books and a lunchtime beer.

Brian and his partner Suzanne moved into an Italianate mansion called Labassa. It has since been taken over by the National Trust, but was then divided into grand but shabby apartments. Theirs took in a drawing room and ballroom, and sometimes we had dinner there. We’d dine on the ballroom’s podium, with a distant fire burning in the baronial grate, flickering highlights in the wallpaper’s gold.

To add to its decaying glamour, Joe Lynch, the alcoholic subject of Kenneth Slessor’s Five Bells, once lived in Labassa’s tower:

Everything had been stowed

Into this room—500 books all shapes

And colours dealt across the floor

And over sills and on the laps of chairs.

During the sixties, Brian’s essays on such canonical novelists as Joseph Furphy, Xavier Herbert, Christina Stead and Patrick White rescued them from the benign prison of the democratic nationalist tradition, locating them within the vivifying currents of European and American fiction instead.

These essays, when collected into a book, also rescued Brian himself. They led to a lectureship in English at the University of Sydney, which made the Kiernans pioneers in what later became a minor exodus—the Careys, Williamsons, Oakleys and a number of others leaving Melbourne for sybaritic Sydney.

Just when I thought I was getting on top of sleepless teaching and settling into a routine, the principal called me into his office. He was a grave, authoritative man, and he asked me, gravely, authoritatively, whether I’d consider being sports master. The more I thought of it the more awful it sounded—so, true to my philosophy of constant movement to avoid responsibility, I applied for a vacancy in the Humanities Department of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

The interview was a frightening experience. I was confronted by a semi-circle of men, but I had my words ready. ‘Inchoate’ had got me into the university, and I had a small lexicon of others at hand: ‘captious’—as in ‘I don’t want to sound captious, but in some ways Caulfield Technical College wasn’t challenging enough.’ ‘Peremptory’ also came in handy, as did ‘lucubration’, trotted out to let them know I studied at night; ‘recondite’ did not go amiss, and ‘plethora’ and ‘hermeneutics’ were also deployed. I thought afterwards I’d given them persuasive evidence that I would not teach English expression well, but I got the job.

I joined an institution that had neither bike racks (as in Mildura) nor sports, and was elevated to lecturer, but my stay was short. Long words had got me into the place, and five short ones got me out of it: STUDENT DRINKS BEER IN CLASS. These words were on a Melbourne Herald poster outside Flinders Street station as I, with hundreds of other gaberdined commuters, hurried under the clocks to catch a train home.

The student’s name was Ryan, and the lecturer involved was me. I walked into the classroom on a Monday morning and Ryan (I later testified in court) was drinking beer from a bottle. He held it high, proudly, like a trumpeter doing a solo. I escorted him from the room and remonstrated with him (the perfect, formal courtroom word, as I continued with my evidence) in the corridor. The defendant (there he was, in the dock, tall, raw-boned, aged about twenty, with a sullen stare) then swore at me and threw a punch. It came at me slowly, and got no further than a shoulder. I grappled with him (another good courtroom word). To continue, in non-legal language: he lunged at me and ripped my shirt. I got him in a headlock, a hold I’d perfected from years of wrestles with my younger brother, and by the time we stopped I was ahead on points.

Ryan was found guilty of assault, and did a night in the slammer. (Later, tragically, he followed a girl to Tasmania, and when she rejected him he shot himself.) The head of the Humanities Department, an owlish bureaucrat, wasn’t happy with the publicity. I told him he seemed more concerned about the press report than the welfare of his staff. Perhaps, he replied, it might be best if I left. I agreed with him, and went into advertising.