Mug Shots (4 page)

Are you engagé?

At the same time, there was a quieter revolution afoot across Tin Pan Alley at Newman College. Inside this Mayan/Byzantine fantasy designed by Walter Burley Griffin, Catholic students were engaging in the unprecedented activity of thinking for themselves. They were trying to join together what the Australian Church had put asunder: ‘Catholic' and ‘intellectual'.

The Newman Society's Ian Turner and Ken Gott were Vincent Buckley and Bill Ginnane. They were the leaders of what was called the intellectual apostolate, quoting French theologians we'd never heard of, to the effect that we had to complete the work of the secular university by opening it up to the sacred. The clergy had always been the leaders, with the laity sheepishly following. Now there was a double reversal: the world was to be affirmed, not denied, and we were the ones who were going to do it.

There were meetings, Masses and summer camps at Point Lonsdale, where an assortment of sandals, shorts and floral dresses, under a tin roof that pinged with the heat, would listen to talks about the power of the incarnation to transform the world. But there were also earthy dissenters who thought the jargon of being engagé with the milieu pretentious. ‘What's all this weltanschauung nonsense?' objected one of them. ‘Why can't you just say a way of looking at the world?'

And there were parties in Parkville, opposite the university. One night, when I was being hammered by John Dormer, the eccentric heir to an English beer fortune, I beat a backwards retreat—and there in a corner, scarcely able to sit, let alone talk, was Vin Buckley, the guru himself, comatose with liquor. I was shocked. That night, my university education really began.

Plotting a Catholic takeover of Melbourne University in 1953 (from left: the author, Greg O'Loughlin, Des O'Grady, Brian Buckley).

Archbishop Mannix was uneasily tolerant of the Newman Society, very much preferring a different apostolate, run by B.A. Santamaria, under the superbly meaningless title of The Movement. The Cold War was warming up, and The Movement was on the move. It organised Industrial Groups (Santamaria had a genius for anodyne titles) to infiltrate the Labor Party, and Dr Evatt, Labor's leader, a man of massive intellect and minuscule political acumen, was being sawn off at the knees. The Groups (to their credit) battled the Communists in the unions, and from Catholic pulpits wildlife imagery flourished. While the Reds were white-anting us from within, the priests would inveigh, the Communist octopus was slithering southwards from China, with tentacles poised to embrace us. We were trapped between the termites and the calamari.

For Catholics, the fifties were not a time of suburban torpor. It was always five minutes to midnight. From anonymous offices in Swanston Street, men with briefcases went out to the parishes. At the West St Kilda branch of the Catholic Young Men's Society, which I'd joined to play cricket and football, we were told that unless we got off our backsides, the yellow hordes would soon be swarming through the streets.

Tired of the aerated theologies of the Newman Society and awkward with girls, a few of us retreated to the Campion Society, whose members were earthier, but just as fond of talk. We would gather on a Saturday night round a table forested with bottles, and smoke, drink and talk, often till dawn. Was The Movement sanctioned by the bishops, and therefore Catholic Action? Or was our affiliation with it a matter of choice, and therefore no more than the action of Catholics? Was Santamaria manipulating Mannix, or was it the other way round? My father had his own theory about the Catholics and the Communists. ‘They're all in it together.'

Green in the face

After innumerable beery nights in smoke-filled rooms, eight of us decided on a hitchhike round Tasmania. My fellow Campions included Bill Hannan and Ron Fitzgerald, both to become leading educationalists, Kevin Keating, soon to join the Dominican order, Desmond O'Grady, later a writer and Rome correspondent for a number of newspapers, and the prickly Ron Conway.

Conway, who became a prominent Melbourne psychologist, had an unnerving habit of applying his alleged analytic talent to the rest of us. I and one or two others in the group, he confided as we flew to Tasmania, were heading for a crisis. There was indeed a crisis—when we split into two quartets, how to avoid being in the same one as Ron?

Tasmanians proved extraordinarily generous in those innocent times, and trucks and utilities stopped for us, despite our dishevelment and number. I had only two dramas. In the first, after we decided to pair off to get quicker lifts, my companion Bernie Barbour and I were dropped off at night beside a paddock. We got through the fence, dug our hip holes, laid our groundsheets and slipped into our sleeping bags.

Not prisoners on day release—Catholic lads on a hitchhike around Tasmania.

When I woke up, at dawn, a trio of bulls was giving us close and unwelcoming inspection. It took a lot of whispering to wake Bernie up, which he did to this: ‘Don't move.' We didn't move. The bulls didn't move. ‘Stay horizontal,' Bernie offered. We stayed horizontal. The bulls continued to stare at us. They looked hard and mean. The farmer that now happened to drive past would have shared their puzzlement. He would have seen two green sleeping bags, caterpillaring like giant pupae towards the fence.

The second trauma came at the end of the hitchhike, when we boarded the geriatric
Taroona
for the trip back to Melbourne. I've always been a poor sailor, dating back to the days when my father took me on fishing trips in Port Phillip Bay, and I'd spend the time seasick in the bottom of the boat, while he tossed empty beer bottles into the water and pulled flathead out of it.

The
Taroona
bucked across Bass Strait all night, and after leaving my lavatory-sized cabin to throw up in the genuine one, I couldn't find my way back, and opened a succession of identical doors onto a variety of snoring and suffering passengers, before finally finding my own. Much to my embarrassment (twenty-one, and still a mummy's boy) my mother was at Port Melbourne to greet me, and looked shocked: ‘You're green in the face.'

Ron, myself and the mystic marriage

After this adventure, Ron Conway had taken a puzzling fancy to me. He would invite me to his Middle Park cottage where he lived with his mother, usher me into a room crammed with books and records—he was the Catholic
Advocate
's music critic at the time—put on a Mahler symphony, and we'd share its rhapsodic transcendencies in silence. Sometimes, in the middle of an epiphany, there'd be a timid knock on the door. Ron, not pleased, would open it a few inches only. A pallid hand would pass him a plate of biscuits, then the door would be smartly closed. I never saw more of his mother than her fingers.

Ron belonged to a Catholic theatre group called the Cardijnian Players, where his fondness for dominance found an outlet in directing and writing. By 1951, when I thought there was modest evidence of literary ability, he was quick to put me straight. ‘Your talent, I have to say, is for the cameo. I prefer the broad canvas and epic sweep.'

He soon got what he wanted. Ron was commissioned to write a play about the life of St Jean Baptiste de la Salle, founder of the order of Brothers at whose school he taught. The result, as described in
Conway's Way
, his self-serving memoir (is there any other kind?) was as follows: ‘Suitably steeped in the history of 17th Century France, I wrote four huge acts, with nearly 40 speaking parts … the sheer scope of the play supports the conviction I've shared with the composer Vaughan Williams: “I have always preferred the imperfections of epics to the perfection of miniatures.'' '

Though there wasn't a single joke in
The Courtier of God
, it remains one of the funniest productions I've ever seen. Conway had dragooned some of his colleagues into performing. The sight of Desmond O'Grady trembling with terror as the French statesman Colbert, and other untidy Campion Society members in pantaloons and plumes mumbling their lines before a flouncing Louis XIV (played, inevitably, by the author) sent Bill Hannan and myself, safe in the back stalls, into convulsions.

There was a chorus, featuring the Women of France (‘Lo! The fields of France lie golden in the sun, ripe for the harvest') but the high point came just before a keenly awaited interval. The curtain suddenly dropped, leaving de la Salle, who was seated on a chair having an attack of melancholia, marooned at the front of the stage. Though supposed to be near to tears, when he looked up and realised his predicament, he burst out laughing and propelled himself backwards though the drapes. In the front row, the heads of the distinguished hierarchy invited for the occasion bobbed up and down in something close to hysteria.

In the hope of saving me from what he saw as an impending crisis, Ron paid me a visit, and in our lounge room, with my brother giggling behind the door, formally offered me his friendship, and laid out a manifesto that was to govern it: mutual respect; a refusal to criticise the other behind their back; and a readiness to accompany the other on outings of a cultural nature. It sounded like an emotional contract, and produced in me a desire to flee. He was jilted, and our relationship cooled.

By the time the Campion Society had honed their distinctions, Vladimir Petrov had defected, the Industrial Groups had split the Labor Party, Menzies had won the 1954 election, and I had become a Bachelor of Arts (Pass).

The West St Kilda CYMS branch ignored the warnings of a Communist apocalypse and continued with their customary activities of drinking and sport. I now opened the batting for their cricket team. Our home ground was the mysteriously named Peanut Farm, behind Luna Park. A large crowd inexplicably attended our opening match, only to turn their backs in a reverse Mexican wave at regular intervals. The Farm was the headquarters of the local SP betting industry, and cricket gave them the perfect between-race pretext.

Practising for the West St Kilda Catholic Young Men's Society football team.

Cricketing standards were low, but there was a nine-gallon keg set up on the back of a utility as an incentive to dispose of the opposition quickly. When all else failed, as it often did, the captain would call on Maurie to send down his medium pacers. Maurie, a crimson-hued alcoholic, had a whirring windmill action that could shoot the ball at the close-in fieldsmen, the batsman, and occasionally at the wicket. Once he whirled the ball so hard he bowled himself in the foot and had to be carried off.

Horrie, king of the chimps

Secondary studentships provided only a small living allowance, compelling me to show a range of incompetencies in part-time jobs: stuffing kapok into pillows (lasting one week), builders' labourer (four days, after falling down a manhole) and scrubbing thousands of ball marks off the walls of three squash courts at my father's club (‘the exercise will do you good').

There was also the Titles Office, where there was casual work as a filing clerk. This involved climbing metal companionways to retrieve or return bulky folios of land titles, which gave up generations of dust when opened or closed.

The job attracted a variety of what were then called displaced persons. They included a gentle Hungarian intellectual called Tom Pick whose family had once had a sausage factory in Budapest. He was scholarly, owlishly bespectacled, and occasionally unintentionally patronising. ‘What? You have read Apollinaire?' And Hans, who'd flown with the Luftwaffe and had seen ‘terrible things'. He had a high nervous colour and always seemed on the verge of eruption. One morning, when we were enjoying our extended tea break high up on the ­catwalks, we heard a commotion below. Hans was having a fit on the floor. Something had triggered a wartime memory, and staff had to pinion his arms and legs as he lay there, crucified and screaming.

Work was undemanding at the Titles Office, and at the Melbourne Zoo almost non-existent. We were supposed to be painting the outdoor seats, but under the tolerant foremanship of an old ex-digger named Drummer, you could make yourself comfortable under one of them and doze off.

A fellow-worker, a portly and expensively tailored Bachelor of Education from one of the Gulf states, found the work demeaning. He had no intention of wedging himself under a seat, and opted for the revolving wheel in the playground. He'd stretch out on it, have us push him, and fall asleep. One afternoon the Works Manager appeared not long after we'd got him circling. He leaned over the rotund form and told him he was fired. He took his dismissal in style, allowing himself a couple more leisurely turns before easing himself onto the ground and, looking as ever the real manager in his well-cut beige suit, striding off.

More comedy followed the next day. ‘Don't go near that chimp,' Drummer warned, ‘he's a grumpy bastard.' As soon as Drummer disappeared for his morning smoko, we dared one another to go behind the safety fence and taunt Horrie. I did so, in front of a handful of visitors. I taunted it, glowering under its hessian sack. Then I threw gravel at it. Horrie hurled himself at me, shot an arm through the bars and grabbed at my jumper, while I performed an equally speedy move backward. I came out shamefaced, to laughter. ‘If he'd a' got you,' said Drummer later, ‘he'd a' broken your arm like a fucking carrot.'