Reunion (4 page)

To attend university in the late 1970s was to enter a promised land where anything seemed possible. There was a church-going, private-school girl in his philosophy class who metamorphosed into a radical lesbian separatist before the end of the first semester; and a classical pianist and first-class dork from his high school discovered basement jazz clubs and reconfigured himself as an avant-garde musician. As for his own guitar-playing, a few
weeks after the start of the university year he was regularly performing at an inner-city folk club. Such things just happened: someone suggested it, someone else made the introductions, and suddenly he had a regular paying gig.

Fortified by free education and feminism, mature-age students flocked to the university. Together with Ava and Helen, he met nuns in civilian clothes and housewives fairly bursting out of their narrow lives. They mixed with Greeks, Italians, Indians, Chinese and Vietnamese, throngs of people from Melbourne's multicultural heart. Ava from the white and uniform outer suburbs and Helen from provincial Geelong met people the likes of whom had never before crossed their paths. Even with his own left-wing, Jewish background, Jack's circle of friends was soon more colourful than that of his parents.

For students fresh out of school, university supplied a brilliant sojourn between the restrictions of childhood and the responsibilities of maturity. And it was surprisingly easy. With free education and living allowances, no one needed to work more than a few hours a week, and although money was always in short supply, particularly for Helen, he and Ava were happy to cover for her. Ava, with no family to call on, never seemed to run short. She said she had savings; once she mentioned a bequest from an aunt. Neither he nor Helen pursued it. The personal was far less intrusive back then and a great deal more private.

Theirs was the post-Vietnam generation, wise to authority but not stymied by cynicism. Pre-Thatcher and pre-Reagan the world was more than a collection of GNPs. The iron curtain was still in place although the cries from behind had become disturbingly shrill. No one was denying the repressive culture of Soviet politics any more, but the loss of ideals was palpable
in many quarters, and his own parents, who had quit the Party in 1959, were not alone in their political griefs. The Cold War was arctic, and with nuclear stockpiles increasing at a terrifying rate the world was sandwiched between two righteous Goliaths, neither of which was about to fall. In the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate there was a pervasive anti-Americanism among their generation, but also a loss of confidence in the power and promise of the left. Spin was confined to tops and planets, backroom boys were illegal gamblers, and globalisation and the global economy were yet to enter the lexicon. The marriage between science and the military was still in its honeymoon phase with both parties on their best behaviour, and business donations to political bodies were made with a sturdy veneer of social responsibility. Broadsheet seriousness dominated tabloid trash; CNN was yet to be born and the BBC lived up to its accent. Australia was poised to make its way in the Asia–Pacific region, but in the real world of Europe, the only world that mattered to those like them with scholarly interests, Australia was not on the map. In the post-Nixon era in America and the post-Whitlam era in Australia, politicians in the West had lost much of the respect they had formerly engendered, although were far from being the sweet-talking, poll-driven shysters of recent times. In fact, the cavalier attitude of the self-righteous liar so common to contemporary democratic leaders was thought back then to be the exclusive province of despots and criminals. When they entered university there was a sense of the future, and the future was positive.

It was also young. Far from parents being your best friends, in those days of free will and self-expression, the family, rotting deep in the reservoir of determinism, was definitely on
the nose. People moved out of home as soon as possible, and many of them, including Ava, returned rarely, if at all. Both Helen and Ava were the first members of their family to attend university. Helen's parents were proud of their daughter but, according to her, bewildered. Ava marched into the future as if her family did not exist.

Jack was willing to give up sleep for his new friends, he was willing to share his music, he would dress down, read up, he would march for the liberation of women, but when it came to family he was stymied. Family was his connective tissue: to turn away from his mother and father would be to walk away from himself. He, too, was the first of his family to attend university, but unlike the Bryants and Rankins, his parents, forced by circumstances to leave school early themselves, had always touted tertiary study as a basic essential of life, along with food, drink, shelter, warmth, a sense of history and left-wing politics. He would observe Ava and Helen as they shaped themselves according to the times and their ambitions, and even if he had wanted to follow suit it would have been impossible. It was as if he were grafted onto his parents and their past, saddled with all the hopes and opportunities denied by Polish anti-Semitism, by Hitler, by the brutal deaths of aunts, uncles, cousins and neighbours who had remained in Poland long after his own grandparents had migrated to Australia. Then there was communism and the years of loyalty, visionary years followed by confusion and distress and disbelief and finally his parents quitting the Party not long before he was born. Jack doubted he would ever be a child of his times although he tried to make light of it. ‘I am a cyst on history,' he wrote at the top of a blank page. But despite his efforts, neither the essay nor his levity progressed.

He knew that Ava and Helen envied him his background; more families like his, they said, and the institution might be worth saving. And he accepted their compliments, although in truth what they admired he had experienced primarily as discomfort. He was convinced that 1960 was a most inauspicious time to be born. All the excitements of the sixties, the new politics, protest music, students determined to strip the world of their parents' mistakes, all of this was happening while he was still in primary school. Too young to have a personal stake in the movement for change, as the child of activists he nonetheless found himself at its centre.

He had marched with his parents in Vietnam moratoriums and anti-apartheid demonstrations; he had accompanied them on each new campaign championed by the left. But he wasn't of draft age and he wasn't under threat; he was just a child, a child, moreover, who hated crowds. The crush of people so much bigger than he was, the shouting, the huge banners with their precarious lurchings, how he envied the babies and toddlers protected by prams and strollers. And he couldn't rely on his parents to look after him as they were seasoned banner carriers and loudhailer users. He might well have attended some of the defining moments of the sixties and seventies but his childish fears and failings were inflamed to a far greater extent than any political passions. For all that Helen and Ava admired his background, all too often he had felt a fake.

Family aside, in most other respects he, Helen and Ava inhabited the same made-to-order, one-size-fits-three utopia, and a queer business how oddballs and outsiders managed to find one another. Not that it was always a happy liaison. Leopold and Loeb, for example, gravitated together only to commit what turned out to be the not-so-perfect murder, and
Parker and Hulme, those two imaginative creatures from New Zealand, suffered a similar fate. And there were some outsiders like Orwell and Wittgenstein who abhorred other outsiders. But not so for the three of them. After years of finding sanctuary in the solitary protectorates of their own minds – the same solution for all three despite their different backgrounds and sensibilities – they arrived at university and found one another.

Most conversations would find them in an impassioned state of wonder, most days an exhilaration which never ceased to amaze. Serenity was on the dark side, serenity looked across the river to death; together they experienced so much that was new, and change itself seemed to add to the intensity. They fell in love with ideas, they fell in love with books, they fell in love with films and songs, they fell in love with their tutors who fell in love with them, and they fell in love with each other – although only Jack would make it an enduring devotion. Restraint was practised very occasionally and only when issues of safety were involved. Like most students at the time, they believed all ages of consent should be lowered, marijuana should be decriminalised, judges and lawyers should stay out of the bedroom, that the law was an ass.

They regarded their friendship as special, and wondered, or rather hoped, they were perpetuating the tradition of the Bloomsbury group or the Cambridge Apostles or the luminaries who gathered at Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Co in Paris. They assumed they would always be friends.

‘Early friendships are cemented with the hardest glue,' Ava had proclaimed one evening, about a month after they all met.

As for the wider world of the 1970s, it came via films and music, books and periodicals, all reinforcing how very seriously Australians had missed out. Australia had neither Jimi nor Janis nor Woodstock nor Black Panthers. There were no Beats on or
off the road. Critics like Foucault and Barthes would starve in the wilderness that was Australian culture where intellectuals were regarded as less desirable than dole bludgers. There were no Australian Buñuels or Wertmüllers or Herzogs, and the only thriving political groups were feminism and the anti-nuclear movement and these were nourished by their overseas counterparts. The brain drain of the fifties and sixties that had eased during the Whitlam years was again a stream and they planned to add to it. They wanted to make a difference, they wanted to contribute to the future, and there was no point in staying where they were not appreciated. Indeed, the major reason for being at university in Melbourne was to acquire the credentials to be transported to a university elsewhere.

And yet despite its apparent shortcomings, there was a sense in which Melbourne, located in a country from which they all felt estranged, provided well for them. Together they discovered an underground city, a secret intellectual city of art-house cinemas and makeshift theatres where entry was by donation and included a tumbler of wine. They patronised bookshops without street frontages and attended public lectures in dusty back rooms. They read alternative journals and newspapers and a welter of broadsheets. And in pubs and cafés and cluttered student houses at all hours of the day and night they argued about love, death, betrayal, responsibility, progress, goodness, evil, marriage, as if these concepts had never before been properly considered.

One night at the pub in the middle of a particularly volatile argument on the origins of evil, Helen suddenly pitched forward, held up her hands and silenced the lot of them.

‘We should start a club,' she said, ‘a club for discussion – like the Cambridge Apostles. We could invite others to join, choose
an evening, a venue, present papers, make a few rules.' Helen was now on her feet. ‘It would have to be secret of course, for the mystique factor. And members would need to pledge eternal loyalty to one another and the life of the mind.'

And so the Laconics Society was born. They settled on Thursday evenings for their meetings and the pub in which the proposal was first advanced became the first location. They used a room off the main bar – formerly the ladies' lounge, according to the publican, ‘Back in the days before women's lib, when there were sensitive female souls who could only swallow alcohol separately from men.'

Helen and Ava were quick to remind him that away from the environs of an inner-city university, ladies' lounges were still essential to Australian life. And in an aside to Jack, Helen had added, ‘My mother would prefer to be seen in her underwear than in a public bar.'

The former ladies' lounge suited them well. The walls were a pale khaki and adorned with cigarette posters: Kent, Lark, Camel, Marlboro, Kool, Craven A ‘they never vary', Turf cork tips, and ‘fresh as a mountain stream' Alpine. The floor of ancient pine boards was heavily gouged and stained with cigarette burns and booze; over in a corner they dubbed Pollock was an interesting splash of blue and orange paint. There was a table of murky green laminex roughened with food and spills which Jack attacked with steel wool and cleanser the afternoon before the inaugural meeting. The chairs with slatted backs and wooden seats were so uncomfortable they could only have been designed by a misanthropist and purchased by a publican who never sat with his customers.

The Laconics Society endured throughout their undergraduate years and reconvened when they moved to Oxford.
Every Thursday they would meet to hear a paper presented by one of the members, followed by raucous discussion fuelled by house wine and hot chips. Membership was by invitation, and once admitted members were bound to secrecy.

Ava, Helen and Jack formed the core group, to be joined at the end of the first year by Conrad Lyall – Connie. Other members were drawn from classmates, from Connie's best students, and from their own lovers, many lasting only as long as their affair with one of the founding members. The weekly meetings rarely garnered more than six people, but no matter how tired they were or at war with the world, no matter how severe the headache or chest-cold, no matter how hostile the weather, Jack, Ava, Helen and Connie when he was in town, would attend.

Other interests simply could not compete. Apart from Ava and Helen's feminist groups and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament they joined no clubs. Although Jack had long been partial to sport, specifically middle-distance running, a predilection he kept to himself, not because he was unable to defend an interest in sport, but he worried he might be a middle-distance man.

Unlike the others, he lived in constant discomfort. He didn't like it this way, but it was how he understood living in good faith to be.