Mug Shots (11 page)

Disgusting passages

On 6 July 1970, twenty guests sat down to a lunch arranged by Dennis Wren of Heinemanns to celebrate the publication of my second novel,
A Salute to the Great McCarthy
, the story of (I quote from the blurb) ‘ a brilliant young footballer from the bush determined to make good in the bright lights of the city'. He does, briefly, then (blurb again) ‘women, football, coaches and businessmen all get him down in the end'.

I was heavy with influenza, about to become a father (my wife dared not attend) for the sixth time, and in a state of terror at having to address the gathering, which included such seventies media luminaries as Gerald Lyons, John Larkin, Andrew McKay and Elizabeth Auld, with a ballasting of literati (Ian Turner and Stephen Murray-Smith). But wait—one invitee was missing. We waited, and then he walked in—John Coleman, the greatest full-forward ever to play the game—apart, maybe, from Bob Pratt, whom I was too young to see.

Coleman had retired in 1954 when still in his prime (he'd damaged his knee after one of his sensational leaps). He was still trim and fit and handsome, though deathly pale (he would die of a heart attack three years later). Attention and questions gradually turned from the nervous novelist to him. Who wants to hear someone who only imagined playing football when you can talk to the real thing? He told me he'd enjoyed the book (a footballer who's read a book!), especially the part about McCarthy's first game as a full-forward. ‘You got it exactly,' he said. Aided in no small measure by a brief appearance in that position with the West St Kilda Catholic Young Men's Society.

So the book was launched, followed one week later by Kieran, our sixth (and last). I too was having an obstetric experience, moving from uterine obscurity to the wider world. There were interviews and enthusiastic reviews, and as a result the novel sold well, and stayed in print for twenty-five years.

And then there were six.

It appeared on school syllabus lists, where it gained, at least in the West, notoriety: FOL FIGHTS SCHOOL FILTH ran the headline. ‘A deputation has presented a petition of more than 5,500 signatures to the WA Premier, Sir Charles Court, demanding that “filthy, indecent or blasphemous words and incidents or excessive violence be exised (sic) from books read in English classes—including
Catch 22
,
The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith
and
A Salute to the Great McCarthy
”. FOL (Festival of Light) chairman Mr Ray Ellery claimed the disgusting passages in these books were upsetting thousands of the State's parents and children. He called for the Superintendent of English, Mr Peter Gunning, to be suspended.' An author couldn't have wished for more.

Becomes Freemason

Thus encouraged, we bought our first car, a second-hand Holden station wagon, and Carmel learned to drive it. A mother of five, and now a nursing mother of a sixth for merely two months, and she learns to drive? She had long ago resigned herself to the fact that she was saddled with not simply a non-driver but someone with a practical incapacity that bordered on the pathological. (My father had tried to teach me in his pre-war Plymouth, but the hand-and-foot co-ordination involved in double-declutching between second and third gear was beyond me.)

It wasn't easy to back the big Holden into the drive, so I'd stand by the gate and help with directions. Neighbouring men would nod understandingly, thinking I was giving Mum driving lessons. ‘They never learn, do they?' offered one, and I could only nod in rueful agreement.

The pantechnicon more or less mastered, it was soon used to ferry supplies for a party to celebrate the winning of the Captain Cook Bicentenary Award for fiction (jointly with Tom Keneally) for
Let's Hear it for Prendergast
, my third novel. A piano was trundled in, as was the pianist, Dick Hughes, who played Dixieland jazz for the hundred guests, while Kieran, at four-and-a-half months, tried to make sense of it all from his pram, while inhaling fumes of tobacco and alcohol with subtle undertones of hash. It was a prodigious feat of catering and cooking, and Carmel, with me as witless kitchen hand, did it all. One guest, the editor of a Melbourne literary magazine, showed his appreciation by getting drunk and pissing in a corner of one of the children's bedrooms.

To get the as-yet unpublished novel out as rapidly as possible, a Heinemanns editor had been dispatched to Adelaide to check the proofs, but alcohol may have affected him too. I counted seventy typos in the rushed-out edition. But the reviewers didn't seem to notice. ‘Ferociously funny,' said the very elderly A.R. Chisholm in the
Age
. Even the unsmiling Scot John Douglas Pringle lapsed into an untypical Australian metaphor in the
Sydney Morning Herald
: ‘Australia's greatest humorist—by a furlong.' (Now the word is meaningless.)

The gestation of
Let's Hear it for Prendergast
involved so much drinking that it was no wonder the novel was brought to birth impaired. Dennis Wren insisted on lunch whenever a matter had to be discussed, which entailed the consumption of alcohol until nightfall. He was an enthusiast and visionary, who moved his company into spacious new offices in St Kilda. His own office was on this ample scale, with ensuite bathroom and revolving bookcase that opened onto a bar. His extravagance later proved his downfall. The managing director of Heinemanns made a special trip out from London to sack him. ‘I want you out of the building (but it was Dennis's building!) today,' the urbane assassin was alleged to have said. I imagined him sitting on a box of books on the footpath, wondering what had happened, and where he'd go for lunch.

The early seventies were heady times in publishing. Penguin Books, not to be outdone, opened even larger premises in Ringwood, a Melbourne outer suburb, where, at the launch party, I was required to operate a Heath Robinsonian publishing machine created by Bruce Petty. It involved the flicking of switches and turning of wheels. The intricate innards would spin and hum, and a book would drop out at the end.

Guests then went out to a courtyard and got down to business. One of the most distinguished, a poet and academic, did his not infrequent falling-down number, and had to be dragged to the sidelines. Was there a doctor in the house? There was. The pioneer playwright Jack Hibberd diffidently gave him mouth-to-mouth, while drinking went on uninterrupted.

By now, after six children, what the Catholic Church—picking up the phrase with surgical gloves—called artificial methods of birth control, were now essential. What was pronounced evil by the Church was a blessing for us, so we joined the exodus and left.

Too embarrassed to ask for condoms over the counter, we got them mail-order and stowed them under the mattress. They were found by one of our young sons. My mother was visiting at the time, and our son ran out of our bedroom blowing into a slowly inflating sausage, yelling, ‘Balloons! Hidden balloons!'

After leaving the Church, I was welcomed into the freemasonry of drink, in which publishing occupied one of the most active lodges. John Hooker, the publisher of my first novel, took his masonic duties extremely seriously, the password being lunch or dinner. We were dining with him and his wife (both now dead) one evening at a table forested with bottles, when he became incandescent, and turned on each guest, prefacing each insult with ‘and as for you …' Finally, he reached his wife. ‘And as for you,' he said, ‘unlike the others, you are not second rate. You are third rate.' She ran crying upstairs to the bedroom, with the host hurrying after her to apologise. Then he called down to us from the landing: ‘Just talk amongst yourselves.'

Hooker left Cheshires for Penguin Books, which, with assistance from the managing director, he turned into a dining club. As with Dennis Wren, business was always done at lunch. Hooker, along with many other publishing initiatives, decided to reprint my first novel as a Penguin paperback: lunch; and he would do the same with my second and third: lunches, usually until nightfall.

The seventies in Australia were the last bacchanalian decade. Jogging was rare, aerobics unheard of, smoking
perfectly
acceptable. But a stage was reached when the collective liver couldn't take it any more. Enjoyment lost its innocence. The few literati who survived into old age, their lungs blackened and noses veined, look back on that time with nostalgia. The bad times have been filtered out, leaving only rosy memories of couples drinking and arguing around a table, and perhaps doing some touching up under it. As a friend put it—‘Thank heavens we could only afford casks then—otherwise my first wife would have thrown bottles.'

The gap between the bricks

We were mobile now, and this made Christmas more complicated. Christmas Eve with presents and tree, then the day itself at my parents' place in East St Kilda, with still more presents. I can still see, in memory, the spectacle of us on our way: two adults, six children, pusher, pram, pudding, presents. Reflected in the Chapel Street shop windows, we looked very low in the water. What if we got a flat tyre? How will I reach the spare? Where do you put the jack? Was I the only man in Australia who couldn't change a tyre?

My mother's impeccable lounge, violated every Christmas.

My mother's been up since six preparing. My father's organised drinks, turkey, ham. The Springtime dinner set is out—white plates bordered with English garden yellows, greens and blues. My grandmother is helped up the front steps. Her cheeks are flushed, her makeup out of register, like bad colour printing. She's puffing and talking at the same time.

We begin in the lounge under the Rupert Bunny portrait of my mother. We exchange gifts. My grandmother's obsession with waste has reached the stage where she saves pieces of cardboard (to make into Christmas cards), newspapers to sell to the butcher, milk bottle tops and silver paper for Oxfam, bits of string. My father, affable over his beer, pats the children on the head: ‘And which one are you?'

We move into the dining room and take up our positions. My grandmother, who seems to have starved herself for days, disposes of her serving and then has the children's leftovers. It's warming up. Faces are getting flushed. At a certain point, hoping to provoke me, my father will say something about the Catholic Church: the Pope's wealth, the tunnels between the convents and the presbyteries, the slave laundries.

Carmel's pudding is served from the auto tray so that my mother can turn her back and push five-cent pieces into each portion. We give ours to the kids, but my grandmother keeps hers, and delivers her annual homily on the importance of thrift. ‘Look after the pennies,' she says, as if she's just made it up, ‘and the pounds will look after themselves.'

At the end of the meal, my father goes to his bed and begins snoring immediately, as if stunned by a club. The carpet under the table is like a relief map. Cleaning up begins, and preparation for afternoon tea. My brother, his wife and their six children arrive, and more presents are unwrapped. My mother normally keeps the lounge room dusted and polished. Boxes, paper, plastic, toys, plates, food, noise—today its violation is total.

My brother and his family leave first. When he's gone, I get the key to the cellar to steal a couple of bottles of wine from the cases he keeps stored there. As I crouch down and go in, I'm overpowered by a smell of dryness and dust, a tomb smell. Beyond the bottles there's a gap between the bricks. It leads to a gloomier gloom, a rat-and-spider place I was never as a child brave enough to go into.

Fear of the dark was still there, waiting. It's because of this primal fear that the light of the tree on the hearth means so much to kids, almost as much as the gifts around it. Perhaps for them Christmas is still a primitive festival, celebrating the year's turning, like a door opening and a light coming on.

Phantom hisser exposed

‘The place should be shut down,' said the man from the Health Department, as he looked aghast at the moribund building which the La Mama Company was planning to move into. It was virtually a shell—but after weeks of painting, hammering, welding and wiring, the place that had once been a pram factory became the Pram Factory, with a three-year lease negotiated by the entrepreneurial John Timlin for one hundred dollars
a week
.

The La Mama practitioners now called themselves the Australian Performing Group, and with the bigger venue developed a more expansive style. For their first show,
Marvellous Melbourne
(December 1970), they went back to the melodramas of the 1880s—the last time there'd been a popular theatre.

Alfred Dampier's 1889 extravaganza of the same name was turned on its head, to reveal, in song, stereotype and swagger, the proud city's seething underside: the larrikins, the corrupt politicians, the opium dens and brothels. It was vital, visual, vaudevillian, and it was rough. Less-than-Marvellous Melbourne was re-worked, and when it reopened in March the following year was a hit.

Later that year came another—David Williamson's
Don's Party
—frowned on by some of the ideologues of what was now called the Collective because, as a piece of straightforward realism about the middle-class, it veered dangerously close to the despised repertoire of the Melbourne Theatre Company.

But they had it wrong. It's not a middle-class party. The characters are ocker and crude. Years later, when I saw a London production, with slack-jawed yobboness played to the hilt, to the delight of the English audience having their view of Australia confirmed, I wanted to run out of the theatre screaming, ‘This isn't us!' Instead, I just ran out of the theatre.

Don's Party
was followed by a third hit—
The Feet of Daniel Mannix
—about the immoveable, immemorial Archbishop of Melbourne, who'd been at the centre of nearly every national controversy for fifty years. Perhaps in revenge for what I'd had to endure for at least twenty of them, I made him a comic, vaudevillian figure. His fight against secular education was done as a tag wrestle; his clash with W.M. Hughes over conscription during World War I becomes a gun battle; his arrest by the English off the coast of Ireland is done in bathtubs.

Bruce Spence played the lofty, looming Mannix, and Max Gillies, in green tights and cloak, was the slightly sinister Greensleeves. Gillies had studied B.A. Santamaria's weekly TV show until he sounded more like the man than Santamaria himself. There were songs written by Williamson and John Romeril, music by Lorraine Milne and direction by Graeme Blundell.

Almost everyone liked it, except the Catholic Advocate (‘mean and spiteful') and, one night, a phantom hisser. It was also a night when I was on front of house. The hisser's timing was flawless—vehement sibilance at every pause in the action. I tracked it down to an elderly man in horn-rimmed glasses whom I recognised as the author and journalist Cyril Pearl.

At the end, he counterpointed the applause with alliterative cries of bosh! bollocks! baloney! I was in charge of the lights on the exit steps, and when he tottered to the brink I turned them off, and he half-tumbled down to the dustbins.