Mug Shots (18 page)

As seen on TV

The Canada/Australia Award gives the recipient a modest sum and the opportunity to eat, drink and read one's way from one end of the country to the other (in alternate years, it enables a Canadian writer to do the same here).

Since my visit coincided with the grandly titled Harbour­front International Festival of Authors in Toronto, I started off there, where one does one's best to appear to take for granted the presence of famous writers, while at the same time having furtive peeps at them. I try hard not to look at Salman Rushdie, who sits in a corner of the Hilton Hotel Reception Suite, aloof, five o'clock-shadowed, heavy-lidded, like a Mughal prince.

At dinner, a reunion with Elizabeth Jolley, who tells the company she'd had to ring the housemaid to find out how to use the bathroom tap. Elizabeth, always playing the naif, confused and out of place, maddeningly humble and apologetic, lost in the big world.

Rushdie lets us know what's happening up in the dome of the pantheon: ‘I was having lunch with Calvino when we learned that Garcia Marquez had won the Nobel. Italo (Italo!) thought it outrageous it hadn't gone to Borges, who'd invented magic realism in the first place.'

It was whispered that it was still possible that the blind, all-seeing Borges might come, but it's a no-show—the supremely important don't bother to descend at all. Still, there was Ted Hughes, forelock over forehead and prognathous of jaw, and J.P. Donleavy, white-haired and layered in Irish country-squire greys, with the comic novelist's inevitable air of loss. And wasn't that Derek Walcott over there?

Rushdie dazzles us with his talk. The provost of Cambridge when he was there was an innocent old bachelor, who told the students at the beginning of the year: ‘You may think you'll learn a lot in the lecture room. But the most important work will be in each other's rooms at night, fertilising each other.'

The readings over and the crowds (700 to every performance) gone home, in poor shape (Seagrams, a sponsor, had left a bottle of whiskey in each writer's room) I started out on my cross-Canada tour. At Halifax, the last leg of my flight to Newfoundland is cancelled because of crosswinds at St John's airport. But Eastern Provincial announces that if anyone's interested, they're still going in. A few take up the offer—most do not.

‘These guys,' says a flight attendant to a woman even more nervous than me, ‘they're bush pilots. Crazy guys. Fly when no one else does.'

Thinly overcoated in Newfoundland.

To calm us, they hand out free drinks. But it's tricky. The attendants are smiling as we come in to land, but they're hanging on to their straps, white-knuckled and tense. It's close—I can see the wing dip dangerously low as we touch down, and when we make it the pilot gets applause.

It wasn't hard to be a celebrity in treeless, rocky St John's, so I was invited out to their breakfast TV program. It was hosted by a silver-haired smoothie named Broph, who was, as my escort put it, ‘kinda slow'. He had one of my books—the plays launched by Bernard Hickey in Brisbane—and opened it at one titled
Marsupials
. The native creatures it dealt with were publishers and writers. Broph thought it was about kangaroos.

‘Tell us about these animals in your play,' he said. I explained that these animals were involved in alcohol and adultery.

‘We get enough of that here. Kangaroos, where's the kangaroos?'

‘There aren't any.'

‘Tell us about them,' persisted Broph, refusing to give up.

‘They hop and they eat grass, and that's about it.' Broph wound the interview up with, ‘That was the visiting Australian writer Barry Oakley, and his
Marpusials
.'

At Halifax—on the way back now—wartime convoys used to gather in the harbour, I was told, before crossing the Atlantic. I was taken to St Paul's church where one can see ‘the silhouette of a clergyman imprinted on a window by the great 1917 harbour explosion, when munitions ships blew up, resulting in the biggest man-made explosion until the atom bomb'.

There was Montreal, there was Ottawa (a painfully stuffy lunch put on for me by the Australian High Commissioner, who hadn't the slightest interest in writers from his own country or anywhere else), and then Calgary, which, as the novelist Mordecai Richler once noted, looks as if it's just been uncrated. I gave the usual reading to the usual dutiful crowd, saw an enormously fat Siberian tiger at the zoo, and, at the museum, tins from Sir John Franklin's expedition to find a Northwest Passage (it was the lead poisoning from the tins that killed them). Then something even sadder: a subdued group of Sarcee Indians being shown their own traditional ­artefacts—magnificent headdresses, a huge tepee like a basilica of animal skins—by a white guide, telling them about their own lost culture.

Then over the Rockies on the Canadian Pacific to Vancouver, where the local writers told me it was no use going out to Dollarton to pay my respects to Malcolm Lowry (
Under the Volcano
) because his beachfront shack had burned down and there was nothing left to see. Finally Vancouver Island, the warmest place in Canada, which had been brought to life for me by the novelist Jack Hodgins, then San Francisco, and then, with my foie somewhat gras, home.

The entire instrumentarium

‘Writer/Producer—ABC Radio Drama and Features.' That sounded promising, though I had doubts about the producing side. Since my old one had gone the same colour as my hair, I got myself another pink Airline Pilot shirt. If I combined its man-of-action map pockets with the Canada/Australia Award and the fact my radio play
The Great God Mogadon
was that year's ABC entry for the Prix Italia, I was in with a chance.

I glowed, I deprecated, I joked. (‘What is it about this ­position that attracts you?' ‘I'd be able to walk to work.') I got the job. On my first day in the excrement-coloured building in William Street, where Drama and Features occupied a floor, I was put on display at a staff meeting, then led to a bare office.

Shan Benson, a friendly, rubicund man in green shirt and cravat, came in soon after and gave me something called the Lewis Packer file, which contained a series of letters of increasing vehemence from a man who hadn't liked the way his radio play had been edited. ‘Step carefully with freelance writers,' he said, and left me with the file. The letters started with the producer, worked their way up the bureaucracy to Leonie Kramer of the ABC board, then went down again, with threats like the following: ‘Matters of breach of contract will be pursued with your legal department, although that department seems to believe the ABC to be so sacrosanct that a mere writer must accept ex cathedra claims of mortmain.'

Ron Blair, ringing for the deputy head of the department, Julie Ann Ford, but getting me, tried to calm my apprehension about the technicalities of radio production. ‘All you have to do is make sure the actors don't pop—just keep an ear out for their plosives.'

But the following day I went into one of the control rooms to watch the technically gifted Andrew McLennan. He sat at a jumbo-jet control panel directing a group of actors below us in the studio like a Qantas pilot. The play was a typically complex drama by David Foster which required orchestrating a ­dizzying variety of sound effects. It was as if I were to learn how to play piano by watching Glenn Gould play Bach.

I continued to sit in my office, working on a play about the painter Danila Vassilieff, who built a house of massive stone blocks at bohemian Eltham, on the outskirts of Melbourne—but I can't be the writer and not the producer indefinitely. Dick Connolly, head of Drama and Features, calls in on me (perhaps to see if I'm still alive) and creates slight alarm, by saying I'll have to take over the high-culture
Radio Helicon
program, his pride and joy, later in the year. Dick's a great language man, a lover of Latin, and asks whether I've read the new Seneca translation. Not as yet, no. Did I know that there's a Latin word for the opposite of apotheosis, translatable as pumpkinification? (Maybe it's happening to me.)

Early in May, on the day our son Kieran has to go into ­hospital to relieve the pressure on the graft on his arm from his scalding accident eleven years before, I have to attend a radio seminar at the Goethe Institute. Kieran is now thirteen, and we've given him a Walkman as a treat. He's very grown up, and says he's not scared as Carmel takes him to hospital. She tells me later than he even managed a joke as he was trolleyed into the theatre—‘Will I see pink elephants?' We go back in the evening to see him, bandaged and brave, his arm zippered with fifty stitches. He begs for a Cherry Ripe, and we say not yet. But he has to have it, and then vomits it up over the sheet.

The cultural anschluss (my second after Kallista) is run by a German acoustic maestro called Peter Leonhard Braun, who would be happy to give advice to those brave enough to play their tapes for him (I still didn't have any).

First up was the maddeningly confident Tim Bowden, who had the office next to mine and whose door carried the following souvenired notice: ‘Grand Hotel Cairo. Will Guests Requiring of Partners for Sleeping Purposes Male or Female Please Most Kindly Request the Desk of Reception.' Bowden played one of his tapes of interviews with prisoners of war of the Japanese—a series of moving and beautifully edited stories, with one elderly Australian voice seamlessly coming in after another.

Stories like these: ‘McLusky, a terrible talker, finally died, one of hundreds. As we were lowering him into a grave his body bends, and there's this explosion of breath from where the head is. “Christ almighty,” said one of the burial party, “you can't shut the bugger up even when he's dead.”'

Who couldn't be moved? Who couldn't laugh? Radio's von Karajan pondered and then pronounced: ‘Your narrator's voice is too cold for the subject.' Cold? What on earth could he mean? ‘I vill prove my point.' He plays a tape about an appalling World War I battle at Armagnac, which he says is still remembered all over Germany. There's a memorable sequence in which one of the men who tend the graves was digging a well, and comes across, six feet down, a soldier, intact, sitting with his rifle between his knees. But Braun's narrator's voice is too dominant. Speak up and say so? No.

Who'll be the next victim? Kevin McGrath, of ABC Education, plays his tape about the notorious actress Susannah Cibber, against a background of the conflict between classical Italian and English ballad opera in the eighteenth century. Sounds okay to me, but the maestro is shaking his head. ‘Zat is transport radio. You are trundling the information from A to B. It is museum radio, it is dead radio.' Kevin, a diminutive man, seems to shrink further in front of us. ‘I cannot accept it. Though I admit your copulations (he means links) were effective.'

Back in the office, Tim Bowden was encouraging me. ‘Sooner or later you're going to stop writing scripts and start producing them. There's nothing to it.' So finally I had to come out, cross the road to Forbes Street, enter a control room, and look down through the glass at the actors awaiting their instructions in the vast space below. They were going to do one of my own scripts, about the aeronautical pioneer Lawrence Hargrave, with Neil Fitzpatrick playing the part.

When the technical operator asked where I wanted the microphones, and I said ‘the usual', he nodded knowingly, briefly bluffed by my shoulder straps and map pockets (I was winging it in my Airline Pilot shirt)—this chap can't be ­bothered with technicalities—and off he went.

When Hargrave had to demonstrate his rubber-band-­powered flapping-wing model flying machine, the sound effects girl scraped a piece of fibreglass rhythmically with a stick, and it sounded exactly like fibreglass being scraped with a stick. Later, when Hargrave is supposed to be levitated by his box kite, Fitzpatrick got up on a ladder and yelled his lines over a tape of wind, and it sounded like an actor up on a ladder doing just that. Lawrence Hargrave never flew, and neither did my first radio production, and if the ABC ever decide on a re-run, don't miss it.

I'm put in charge of scripts. Complaints about some of Shan Benson's rejections now went to me. Harry Reade, the shorts-and-thongs rough diamond who drank at breakfast at playwrights' conferences, was particularly irate. ‘Who's the fool who rejected it?' he roared down the phone from a superbly Queensland address (83 Caladium Street, Gumdale). ‘I know why. It's about Aborigines. I grew up with fucking blacks in shacks in Shepparton and I'll write about them how I fucking well want.'

I had the radio on during my rejecting duties, and I was lucky enough to pick up another Queensland opinion on the subject.

Interviewer: ‘The Aborigines were here before the Bible was written.'

Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen: ‘Well, who knows what it was, when they were, or when their religion? Can you call that a religion, worshipping something or other that's dead or something like what you were saying, the spirit of the goanna?'

I truffled amongst the scripts for hidden treasures. Musical themes were popular: ‘Herr Beethoven, no orchestra could play this “music” as you call it. Speak to me! Are you deaf?' From a feature on Handel, getting increasingly impatient with a singer: ‘Not like that, you silly waterhead!' And lines with a powerful sub-text, from a play about Magellan: ‘Captains Mendoza and Cartagena have left the ship, and now there's a whole boatload of seamen heading for Concepcion.'

Geoffrey Whitehead had recently taken over as head of the ABC, and one lunchtime the radio staff gathered to meet him. Pasty face, shaded glasses, funereal suit. Bowden, sitting next to me in the airless studio, wasn't fooled for a minute. After Whitehead had come out with some rapid-fire platitudes about the value of radio, Tim got to his feet and asked: ‘What radio programs, in the course of your listening, appeal to you in particular?' Whitehead goggled, paused, smiled, and retreated behind a translucent shower of words.

As well as this big meeting, there were lots of small ones. It's how bureaucracies function. At one, the future of Drama and Features was discussed. Because of its unyieldingly highbrow programs, it existed in a permanent state of budget uncertainty. But the audience figures were alarming. For Sydney, 3000 was considered average for
Radio Helicon
—the program Dick Connolly, its founder, wanted me to take over. For
Wednesday Play
, an asterisk, which meant its Sydney listeners were below a thousand. We seemed to be huddling around the dying fires of high culture.

It was my job, when I moved into the Helicon office, to keep the flame alight. I was in charge of the department's flagship: two hours a week of high-protein culture. I was visited by postulants. Eric Waite, a small, sallow man in an ill-fitting blue suit, told me he had tapes containing new material about Xavier Herbert—how his wife Sadie hated him, and how he'd had an affair with Dymphna Cusack.

I green-lighted that one (as they say in Hollywood), as well as an interview by Ann Whitehead of the descendants of the William Lane New Australia settlement in the 1890s in Paraguay. The accents were as if preserved in amber, with a lost Australian purity about them. But I'd also inherited commissioned scripts which I had no choice but to put on. Did anyone want a feature on Dr Johnson's life of the poet Cowley? Or the sonnets of Petrarch? Or a painfully detailed description of the objects on the French writer Georges Perec's desk?

Was it any wonder that the announcer Peter Young, after introducing the Helicon program for the night, would go round to the control room and watch
Minder
on TV, returning just in time to read my continuity with an enthusiasm that suggested he'd been enjoying
The Rhetoric of Cicero
the whole time?

Though I was technically in charge, it was Dick Connolly's fiefdom, so I took a risk by committing cultural adultery one night when he was away—I programmed a mini-rock opera by James Griffin, and sat at home enjoying its irreverence, while expecting an angry phone call at any moment. Later, Dick and I had it out. ‘Do you see Radio Helicon as something totally sealed off from popular culture?' His reply was tart: ‘Listen—people tune in to get away from popular culture.'

Dick had a thing about German radio, and a year after our first Teutonification, we had another. It was run by Klaus Schoening, balding and all in black. He demonstrated something called
Hirschspiel
, a combination of words, sounds and music—in short, as he put it, ‘the entire instrumentarium' in order to create ‘acoustic documents'.

We sat and listened politely to yelps, hisses, groans, songs and speeches in impenetrable German. Still, his English was entertaining.

‘Is your ABC station a monopole?'

‘We are, in a sense, historigans.'

‘We must develop a new granma of acoustic signals.'

After all this, Keith Richards, our man in Brisbane, was foolhardy enough to play a tape—a monologue by an overnight porter in a run-down hotel. It was dismembered in front of us. ‘No, no, not like that! It must not be
about
reality—it must
be
the reality. You must create radio—phonic tooth—like this: he pressed a button and released an orgy of chanting, yelling and drumming.

‘This isn't
about
the conquistadors' savagery in Mexico,' he shouted above the din, ‘it shows the thing itself.' The actors declaimed repetitive lists of ugly German words for Kill! Maim! Rape! Burn! with increasingly percussive force, hammering the listeners into the ground. We tried to follow it in an eccentric translation: ‘Go and catch the old animals and grind them into a fine powder.' (And what the hell was
gliss
?)

In the stunned silence that followed—‘You are shocked I see and you are meant to be shocked'—Schoening said he regarded the play as a the greatest radiophonic work of the century, adding that it was greatly appreciated by a Prix Italia jury ‘which consisted of eight critics, eight blind people, and one with a single eye only'. (Laughter.)

‘I am sorry, but I intend not a joke.'

Back in the office, we're told there's a computer course now available (the thing's in a cardboard box waiting to be let loose), and Shan Benson and I are the only ones who haven't enrolled. He's retiring soon, and so, I hope, am I—though to what? Who will save me, proven incompetent in both film and radio? Our weekly $300 salary usually lasts till the day before payday, which means twenty-four hours of careful husbandry. ‘Last night, like a squirrel to his eyrie'—as recorded in my diary of the time—‘I took up to our bedroom, away from the appetites of the boys, one third of a pint of milk, six slices of bread, three Vita Brits and an apple.'