Mug Shots (10 page)

Head down at night

I might have been coasting a little at work, but there was no chance of that at home. In 1966 Eugene, our fifth, had arrived, and every morning, as I took the St Kilda Road tram, I was escaping from work rather than going to it—but Carmel, the most efficient person I've known, managed superbly—so much so that I was able to write at night, once we'd got the quintet
to sleep
.

With two-and-a-half unpublished and unpublishable novels behind me, I turned to drama. My first effort was a one-acter about, predictably, a misfit trapped in the Public Service. It was called
Eugene Flockhart's Desk
, with the protagonist a research officer whose lifelong investigation of the poultry industry has led to uncontrollable outbreaks of arm-flapping and chook noises.

My theatrical effort got a single line in Peter Holloway's
Contemporary Australian Drama
: ‘A reading of Oakley's first play in 1966 was the last theatrical performance at the Emerald Hill Theatre in Melbourne.' Hidden in this innocuous sentence are the kinds of embarrassments that, I'd later learn, seem to go with the nature of theatre itself.

The Emerald Hill Theatre had kept Melbourne dramatically nourished for five years. Its driving forces were Wal Cherry and George Whaley who mixed Sophocles and Ionesco with original Australian work, beginning with Bill Hannan's
Not With Yours Truly
, whose innovations included a dog on stage. Emerald Hill received insultingly modest funding from the Elizabethan Theatre Trust and worked in a climate that banned the newspaper advertising of one of its productions—
You'll Come to Love your Sperm Test
, directed by George Whaley. The theatre mocked the censorship by changing the title to
You'll Come to Love your Whale Test
, directed by George Spermley.

The
Flockhart
one-acter appeared with Tony Morphett's
I've Come About the Assassination
. Friends and relatives were summoned. Some of the latter thought they were going to The Theatre and dressed up instead of down. I did too, with my Department of Trade blue suit laughably incongruous amidst the rollneck sweaters of the Morphett camp.

Never mind. Interval's now over and here we are assembling for
Eugene Flockhart's Desk
, our formalities mercifully concealed as the house lights go down. The actors, who seem to have been costumed out of St Vincent de Paul bins, take their seats, consult their scripts, breathe in and begin—and, right on cue, a downpour thundered onto the tin roof. The actors' lips moved, but no words seemed to come out of them. The first half of the play disappeared, and the theatre itself soon followed.

Undeterred, I wrote another play, about another tormented figure, a teacher called Mr Stone. It was called
A Lesson in English
, and in it Stone tries to take his pubescent class through Marvell's
To His Coy Mistress
. The literary niceties are soon lost as the poem unleashes their primal urges, which take over the room.

It took the fancy of William Bates, who ran the modestly titled William Bates Theatre. Once again, family and friends were invited, and we trooped up the stairs to a small draughty space over a Carlton garage.

What awaited me was a humiliation rivalling that of Stone himself. Bates played the part of Stone, but didn't know his lines, and there were frequent whisperings from the wings. The ensemble work of the class he was meant to be instructing suggested they'd been brought in at random from the street. The chill wind that cut across the audience's legs was as nothing compared to the frigid spectacle on the stage. I spent most of the time with my head down, waiting for the anarchy to finish.

After the charade I was led, a condemned man, to an area divided off by a torn emerald drape. The green room. Sherries were served by a man in a dinner suit. I was asked to speak, but would not. Two old ladies who had come all the way from Ballarat asked me to sign their programs. I stumbled down the stairs afterwards vowing never to write another play.

I sank back into prose, and wrote another novel. It was called
A Wild Ass of a Man
, and it bore the marks of desperation. It tried to be one continuous breathless passage. It was hectic and sometimes overwritten, with occasional colouring from
J.P. Donleavy's
The Ginger Man
.

It traced the progress of yet another comically doomed figure called Muldoon—his Catholic boyhood, his foolish undergraduate days, his disasters with teaching, advertising and girls. Finally, rejected by everybody, Muldoon is seized by a desire to announce that the end of the world is at hand, and suffers a revolving crucifixion on a Luna Park ferris wheel.

It did the usual rejection rounds, gently decaying each time, until John Hooker of Cheshires took pity on the tattered state of the manuscript and took it in. I was so grateful I accepted the meagre advance, submitted to his editing and made no objection to the frantic design of the jacket. Would there be any publicity? I timidly asked. ‘Ah,' said Hooker. ‘Come with me.' He led me to a room behind Cheshire's bookshop and showed me a piece of white cardboard with the name of the novel and its author hand-lettered on it, which would be ‘prominently displayed'—his words—in the adjoining bookshop. ‘There's your publicity,' he said, apparently without irony.

And so it was released—almost furtively, like a petty criminal from prison. There were isolated handclaps here and there; the Catholic Advocate declared it unsuitable for school libraries, and the venerable A.R. Chisholm remarked on ‘the torrential character of the writing, which is feverish but strangely controlled'. Despite a leg-up from Brian Kiernan—‘Funniest since Furphy'—it didn't sell well. The most significant thing about
A Wild Ass of a Man
was that it led Cheshires to abandon publishing fiction. In a year, I had closed a theatre and amputated a leading publisher's fiction arm.

Mama mia

Given my developing record, it was surprising to be invited to a meeting arranged by the formidable artistic matriarch Betty Burstall early in 1967 at what was to become one of the centres of Melbourne radicalism—the Hannans' terrace in North Melbourne. Bill and Lorna Hannan had already plotted a breakfast revolution—they were the first to my knowledge to introduce muesli, holding up packs of what appeared to be birdseed to their bemused friends—and were later to attempt bold experiments in education (Sydney Road Community School, where the students had a big say in what was studied and how the school ran) and family life (a group of households forming an economic union, sharing their incomes and just about everything else).

As we sat around in a semicircle on a Sunday morning, Betty enthused about a new kind of theatre she'd seen in New York—not a place of foyers and curtains and audiences sitting cut off in the dark, but performances in off-off-Broadway cafés where new kinds of plays were being produced—no props, no make-up: a direct, hard-hitting theatre with the actors right there in front of you, close enough to touch.

Betty, who managed to be regal and alternative at the same time, had it all worked out. The idea would be transplanted here, and she'd found the place for it—a disused underwear factory in Faraday Street Carlton. She was going to rent the shabby old building (for twenty-eight dollars a week), put in tables and chairs, serve coffee, and—looking around at us—put on some plays.

She called it La Mama—after the pioneering New York space of the same name—and it opened with Jack Hibberd's
Three Old Friends
. This was followed by my
Witzenhausen Where Are You?
—about a messenger in a big corporation who locks himself in the toilet and issues apocalyptic notes under the door.

My third play there—
It's A Chocolate World
—was performed in stifling summer heat (La Mama was a sweatbox). Peter Cummins, as the managing director of a chocolate factory, had to wear a suit. At every pause in the action, as sweat poured off him, he glared at me, unwisely in the front row no more than a couple of metres away. At the end, as the dutiful applause faded and everybody rushed for the exit and fresh air, Peter tore his jacket off and gave me an unscripted line—‘I'm going to be the first managing director in a fucking singlet.'

The realistic La Mama style had its drawbacks. When the actor/director Peter Carmody was performing there, the woman he was on stage with threw a fit and collapsed writhing to the floor. ‘This woman's in trouble,' he said, ‘she needs help.' There was an admiring pause from the audience—this was the kind of acting they'd come to see. ‘Look!' he shouted. ‘No jokes. This woman is ill!' Wonderful. Alternative theatre at its best. ‘She's having a fit, you fools!' he roared, as he ran out into the street for help.

La Mama gained strength and standing as playwrights—Hibberd, Romeril, Williamson, Buzo and many others—saw their plays evolve in workshops, and everything that was vital in local theatre seemed to crystallise around it. Not only plays, but poetry, music, dance—the night's program was chalked on a blackboard by the door, and the Carlton population of students, academics, bohemians and boozers filled the place every night (it only needed 60 to do it).

Max Chapman, a faithful audience member since the beginning, put the experience thus: ‘I have been interrogated under arc lights, lowered blindfolded through a trapdoor, abused by actors, drunk gallons of coffee and met great people. Frozen in winter, boiled in summer. I have been bored beyond endurance, witnessed an actor defecate on stage, then, just as despair began to engulf me, a brilliant play emerges.'

Tigerland

Like Betty Burstall, my wife is a driving force, and she decided it was time we left our characterless house in Carnegie—especially as we now had five children. The inner suburbs were calling, and early in 1969 the call was answered, and the caravanserai moved to Richmond.

Uh-oh: pregnant again.

We were pioneer gentrifiers of the area, bringing claret and corduroy into beer-drinking territory. Francis Street was narrow, and lined with tightly packed single-fronted cottages. Our house was double-fronted, with courtyard and out­buildings—a manor by comparison. It had been passed in at $11,500, and our offer later of $12,000 was accepted.

‘Mad,' said my estate agent father, falling back on his rich repertoire of maxims. ‘When you buy, you move up, not down.' He called Richmond a ‘dirty, filthy place'. (He'd not long been back from a tour of Europe, where he'd also found Italy and Greece to be dirty, filthy places.) He said these things walking up and down the potholed footpath in front of our fence. ‘We're going to convert the outbuildings into bedrooms for the five kids. They'll be across the courtyard, where they can make a bit of noise. There's a huge living room, a modern kitchen, and it's cheap.'

I had to explain all this to him because he refused to set foot in the place. ‘It's cheap because no one in their right mind would buy it. You'll never get your money back.' Then he got into his yellow Holden and drove off. We lived in the house for seven years. A sixth child later arrived, but my father never did. Then we sold it, considerably renovated, for $44,000, which I delighted in telling my father. (I didn't tell him that as soon as the new owners moved in, the fleas that had been dormant all winter rose up out of the seagrass matting and attacked them en masse. We paid for the fumigation.)

Not long after we'd moved in, Carmel, weakened by flu, stress and the labour of interior painting, caught hepatitis and turned the colour of sulphur. The doctor said she should go to Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital, but she would not. So everyone else in the family had to have a gamma globulin shot. ‘It's a pretty solid injection,' the doctor whispered, ‘you go first to show them there's nothing to it.'

‘There's nothing to it, see?' he said to them. ‘Look at Dad.' As I lay on my stomach with my pants around my knees I saw him advancing on me with what looked like Don Quixote's lance, which he sank into my right cheek. It hurt, but I tried not to show it. The kids weren't fooled, and scattered. I got up and went after a couple, limping stiffly across the courtyard. The two girls had disappeared into the back lanes of Richmond, but I got one boy down from the garage roof by his ankle. A second leapt at the back fence like a demented kangaroo, and the third hid in his tree house, drawing the rope ladder after him. ‘Be a man,' I said to him. ‘But I'm not a man, I'm a boy.' The boy later became a philosopher.

Even in 1969 Richmond was rich in ethnicities. Bridge Road was a roaring thoroughfare of nationalities, as if the Mediterranean had been laid out in a straight line. Commonplace now, exotic then: cevapi, fetta, baklava, mozzarella and, moving up and down the footpath, an old man selling fresh Greek bread from his trolley, with propellers on sticks for the kids. On a windy day his airscrews spun so fast I imagined him taking off and floating over the suburb, Chagall-style.

Sleepless in Richmond (the printery at rear went day and night).

As our first Richmond Christmas approached, Bridge Road's pulse beat even harder, and Southern European emotions became even more intense. Tribal hostilities were somehow involved with the local fish and chip shop, and late one Sunday afternoon it exploded in a roar of flake and potatoes. A couple of days before two large Sicilian women had had a tremendous brawl outside the greengrocer's, with one whirling the other by the hair and scattering her vegetables across the footpath.

Things were heating up. One December morning Jimmy, who lived on the corner, appeared at the front door in his dark blue railwayman's uniform with Watchman on the cap to tell me he'd put a bullet through the next kid who let his tyres down. Fortunately, he was little, but the man from across the road was not. He'd come red-faced and roaring out of his house and tell the kids in the street he worked night shift and they'd better shut up or else. The kids would scatter, shouting Greek and Italian obscenities, and then he'd charge over to me and we'd have a shouting match. Next time, he bellowed, he'd have a go at me.

On Christmas Eve we decided to do it the European way, and give the kids their presents that night. Instead of ending his run at our place, Santa would start there, clicking the front gate. They were to stay in their rooms and not peep, until they heard the gate. When it got dark the presents were rapidly arranged around the tree like cane toads around a Queensland streetlight. Then I clicked.

The children rushed over, and the ripping and tearing began. There was some muttering about the paucity of presents, but we had a surprise. On the morning itself, corrugated-iron panels were brought out of hiding and assembled into a crude circle, which was then filled with water and shrieking children. In the congestion one of the panels gave way, and a great wave gushed down the drive and across the narrow street, where it headed for an old Greek lady in black. She broke into an awkward Hellenic canter, but was saved by the gutter, at which the water lapped.

Night shift, provoked by the noise, emerged, swinging fists the size of hams, shouting that we were going to settle this ‘here and now'.

‘You're right,' I said, and held out my hand and wished him a happy Christmas. Abashed, he enveloped it in his and invited me in for a beer. Richmond had accepted us.