Mug Shots (12 page)

Day to day, hour to hour

On 13 November 1971, when
Daniel Mannix
was packing them in at the Pram Factory, we were unable to do front of house because two of our children were sick with German measles and croup. To ease their crouping, we prepared an inhalation of creosote and boiling water. Kieran, now sixteen months, was at the reaching-and-pulling stage. He did exactly that with the plastic creosote container, and the boiling water went all over him. We took off his skivvy and the skin of his arm came off with it.

We rang our doctor, who told us to take him straight to the Children's Hospital. We put two other kids in the back, and while I held Kieran, writhing and screaming in a sheet, Carmel, who'd only recently learned to drive, ran red lights all the way to the hospital, where he was given a pain-killing injection and taken away.

Kieran had third-degree burns to thirty per cent of his body. Nineteen seventy-two was the hardest year of his life—and ours. He needed skin grafts, and when he came back from
hospital
his arm had to be kept straight in a pink plastic splint for a few hours each day. He couldn't play properly, but Carmel, a Mother Teresa of patience, played records of his favourite songs and danced with him to take his mind off his pain. He woke a lot at night. He was a full-time job, and we had five other small children as well.

Every Wednesday my mother came over, and Carmel went into town to do an adult education philosophy course. It was the only thing that kept her sane. The future didn't exist. There was only the present. Not good days and bad days but good hours and bad hours. But by 1973 it became a little easier for Kieran and for us. Thanks to Gough Whitlam, university fees were abolished, enabling Carmel to begin an arts course part-time. And also thanks to Gough Whitlam, I could help more:
I got
a literary grant.

The happy corner and the nasty corner

Back in the unreal world, the Pram Factory did another play of mine—
Beware of Imitations
. They'd had a good year, with Jack Hibberd's
Stretch of the Imagination
, the Hannans'
Compulsory Century
and Katherine Susannah Prichard's
Brumby Innes
.
Beware of Imitations
kept the good box-office times going.

I'd had to endure two benevolent dictators, and now that Mannix had been mocked it was time for the second: R.G. Menzies. I provided a script, and Bill Hannan (as director), Max Gillies (as Menzies) and Bruce Spence (as the suffering servant) did wonders with it. Max and Bruce got on as if in a dream—and their improvisational romance was creatively chaperoned by Bill Hannan. It was the most exciting improvising I'd ever been involved in, and made the Pram Factory's tenet about group direction seem right—but the reason wasn't so much the tenet as the talent.

In a nursing home, Sir Wilfred McLuckie dreams of the past and dictates his memoirs to his servant, with crucial episodes re-enacted, and a finale showing McLuckie's horror as he sees student demonstrators violating the Shrine of Remembrance. At the end, ‘a giant earthworm with a wide loose mouth sucks him in—he's engorged, like a frog entering a snake'. (Thirty-seven years later, the symbolism of this escapes me.)

At the Pram Factory, opening nights were dramas in themselves. Anything could go wrong, and usually did. The play featured a Nasty Corner, with red flag and picture of Ben Chifley, and a Happy Corner, with Union Jack and portrait of the Queen. In Act One, Sir Wilfred performs an elaborate sycophantic dance, to music, sinking to his knees and finally his stomach in obeisance to the Queen. Gillies had developed an exotic mix of steps and swayings, but on opening night the music didn't come on, and he had to do it in silence.

I can still see the death-pale face of John Sumner, the director of the Melbourne Theatre Company, as he watched this heroic performance, grim-faced and unsmiling, while the
audience
roared and whistled all around him. The overall result, to quote
The Perambulator
(the Australian Performing Group's newsletter), was ‘its biggest-ever box-office success—bigger even than
Don's Party
!'

Modest financial success made no difference to the take-it-or-leave-it facilities endured by the audience. Bare boards to sit on, bitter proletarian coffee in chipped mugs, third-world toilets: no middle class comforts here. Backstage could be just as demanding. I never felt comfortable at meetings of the Collective. In the eyes of many in this intimidating entity, the idea of individual talent was bourgeois and elitist—no stars, no power-wielding directors, and no self-styled writers either. Since you can't do plays simply by hating capitalism and all-in-it-together enthusiasm, the result was some total turkeys.

In their zeal to show the working classes what was good for them, the Group once took a play called
Money
to the canteen of the Rosella soup factory. It was a marriage of Marx and
Sesame Street
, simplistic and patronising, and the immiserated workers voted with their cutlery, which clacked on indifferently while the lecture-pantomime was being performed.

At one end of the Pram Factory building lived the Tower Children—a group within the Group, family-hating dopesters, communitarians, anarcho-surrealists, insurrectionary feminists, with matching headgear—Afghan knits, Harlem tea-cosies, cowboy hats, Cultural Revolution caps. Their heroes were the three Ms: Marx, Marcuse and Mao. In the words of Tim Robertson, in his effervescent history of the Pram Factory—‘The Great Helmsman was prominent among the household gods of the Tower. The bad news about the Cultural Revolution went unheard. The Red Guards were seen as a bit over the top, but basically okay.'

Robertson, in trying to catch the tone of those on the hard left, exaggerates only a little: ‘In solidarity with the fucking working class, theatre was a fucking means not an end. A fucking weapon in the class war. A fucking waddy to fucking whack your fucking weltschmerz into the fucking weltanschauung that would lead to the dictatorship of the fucking proletariat, mate.'

As a Catholic father of six who'd worked in advertising, living in a tidy, even stylish house (get a look at this!) I sometimes felt I was the Enemy They Had to Have. I couldn't abide the fulminations of John Romeril and Lindzee Smith about capitalism (faulty yes, evil no). Romeril predicted that by 2000, capitalism would be dead. In the cruellest of ironies, by then the Pram Factory had been demolished and replaced by a shopping mall.

At the end of 1974 I submitted a play called
Bedfellows
to the Group, which voted that it go to the Programming Committee, to which I was summoned to make my pitch. The committee was dominated by a Gang of Two—Lindzee Smith, who could see nothing wrong with the terrorist bombing of innocent civilians if it furthered the revolution, and Jon Hawkes, a pony-tailed counter-cultural who was also an accountant (could one be both?).

I was treated to an hour's patronising interrogation about why I thought an institution as obsolete as marriage (and its even quainter concomitant, adultery) was worth writing about. I replied that the justification, if there were one, lay in the script. They'd found it diverting in an antiquated middle-class way. They let it through reluctantly, as if it were infected, and as I was dismissed there were whispers … ‘crock o'shit'.

So
Bedfellows
was done at the beginning of 1975. Had I been paranoid, a feeling the Collective tended to inspire, I'd have wondered why my plays were always put on in high summer, when the theatre was stifling. Jack Hibberd directed, Max Gillies, Fay Mokotow and Bill Garner performed.

True to the APG's Opening Night Principle, something went wrong. The play opens with Paul, a middle-aged academic, dozing off in his chair. (‘Enter Carol with milk bottles, which she clinks in his ear.') Fay clinked too hard and the bottles broke, covering the floor with broken glass. Fay was bare-footed, and what followed was almost a formal dance, as she and Gillies zipped and zapped around the glass. The unhappily married couple and the play survived, and it became a hit, with people being turned away and an extended season, followed by a national tour.

The only one who didn't like it (apart from the Gang of Two) was Bill Garner, who played the part of Gillies's cuckolder. He told me he disliked it so much that he had to go to the Albion Hotel to anaesthetise himself before his appearance in Act Two. Garner, a member of the worker-control down-with-directors left, saved his best theatrical performances for Collective meetings. He acted best when not on stage.

My strangest friend

I had encouraged Peter Carey, only to have the dubious satis­faction of seeing him sail past me. I also encouraged Gerald Murnane, and it happened again. I remember nothing of our first meeting, but Gerald, who retains everything, describes it thus: ‘One hot evening in late 1964, Catherine (his wife) and I visited you and your family in Carnegie. I still recall my feeling of mild embarrassment. I would have worn a sports jacket and tie. I suppose she wore a twin-set. We arrived at feeding time. I'm sure we got a glass of wine or a cup of coffee and a snack, but all I recall is child after child being served with a large bowl of ice cream and then carrying it round the room and eating it on the run, as it were. (Only a few years later, with three children in nappies, Catherine and I were organising our own feeding sessions).'

At some later stage Gerald showed me some of his work—handwritten pieces recounting, if I remember correctly, the daily confessions of a would-be writer, in response to which I was forced to use my Peter Carey word, ‘unusual'. (Not to say eccentric, I thought to myself.) And again, as with Peter Carey, I urged him to keep going.

He did, and would have done so without any encouragement from me. Gerald's first novel,
Tamarisk Row
, appeared in 1974, and he held a dinner party in celebration. First, a photo album was passed around, containing a pictorial biography of the author. Later, the author blows a whistle, and we're told to change places with others. When I remarked on the magnified marble on the cover of the book, he told me it was one of those referred to in the childhood chapters, and then led me into a room of filing cabinets, where he pulled out a drawer, selected a file marked M, and produced the marble in question, preserved for all those years. Then we returned to the dining room, and he blew the whistle again.

Still in my role as encourager, I brought his third novel,
The Plains
, to the attention of the
Sydney Morning Herald
's literary editor, who'd never heard of him. I gave it an enthusiastic review. It was published by an obscure press in a jacket that resembled a piece of grey serge, and I declared it to be ‘like a diamond hidden in flannelette'. Gerald's response was a muted thanks. The best review, he pointed out, had appeared elsewhere, but he was grateful I had covered his ‘exposed northern flank'.

We fell out when I was critical of
Inland
, his fourth novel. I wrote that I sometimes got lost in the circuitous sentences, forever coiling themselves around their subject—a writer watching himself write. A long epistolary silence followed. Much later, when I found out that Catherine was dying of cancer, our friendship revived, and he told me, in his monotonal matter-of-fact way, what she and he were enduring. When the disease advanced, Catherine couldn't sleep for more than an hour at a time, and thus neither could he, and this went on for a month before her death.

Some time after that, Gerald sent me an extraordinary document: Details of the Archives of Gerald Murnane. They consisted of: The Literary Archive, with photographs of the filing cabinets, opened and closed, which contained drafts of everything the author had ever written, letters to and from publishers and comments from reader and reviews; The Chronological Archive, seventeen drawers packed with files carrying such titles as How I Fell Out With Barry Dickins, Peter Goldsworthy, Helen Garner, Gerard Windsor, Rodney Hall (and me); 10,000 anagrams of Gerald Murnane; A Letter About My Bowel Movements et al; Judith Wright, Hypocrite and Liar; Objects that Wink at Me; 3000 Words About Naked Females; more than 1000 Illustrations of Naked Women Removed From Girlie Magazines and Marked With Coloured Stickers To Explain My Reasons For Preserving Them; and The Antipodean Archive—about 800 pages of manuscripts, maps, sketches describing the organisation of horse-racing in two imaginary countries, reporting in detail the results of ­hundreds of races run in each country.

In his accompanying letter Gerald said he'd welcome any comments, so I told him the material was both extraordinary and somewhat disturbing. To me the archives revealed (I summarise) a solipsistic belief that the self is the only reality—a self so documented that there's a sense of seeing himself endlessly repeated in mirror after mirror, for which the French have a phrase—mis dans l'abime (plunged into the abyss). Gerald was outraged—the other recipients—librarians—had nothing but praise. With Gerald, if you weren't an admirer you were an enemy, and now I was one.

‘What have I done?'

I'd penetrated fictional and theatrical territory, but cinema remained unexplored. One day a plangent voice—‘This is David Baker phoning'—invited me into it. He had just read
The Great McCarthy
, he brayed, and found it ‘highly risible'. He had directed TV series innumerable—the placement of the adjective was his—and now he thought it time to branch out. In short, he sang, a movie. Could this be discussed over a lunch? Disconcerted though I was by his manner, I replied that it could.

Carmel and I drove up to Warrandyte, then still sylvan and rural, where Baker welcomed us into a bush house built largely of wooden poles, and provided a lubricated lunch. Then he rose and started pacing the room. He was a big man, with good legs, which he showed off in short shorts and, liberated by ­chardonnay, began his pitch.

He'd read the novel three times, and it had retained its ­risibility throughout. There were many situations that would lend themselves to film, and he'd lined up a screenwriter codger—John Romeril, whom I knew well—who should fill the bill. Codger? Risibility? Was the novel safe with this man?

Baker then went to the end of the dining area to the toilet door, and left it open as he unzipped. ‘I know what you're thinking,' he brayed as he pissed, ‘you are cogitating on one thing and one thing only: lucre.' The cataract continued, then he zipped and emerged. ‘How does twelve thousand smackeroos sound to you?' I told him it sounded quite well (this was 1973).

He fiddled with his top teeth, some of which he pulled out. ‘These phucking teeth are driving me mad … twelve thouphand big ones for the righth … if I can raithe the moolah.'

Baker raised most of the moolah, and then paced up and down our living room to tell me he was $5000 short. Would I be prepared to entertain the notion (what phrases!) of only taking $7000 and regarding the balance as an investment? An investment, mark you, that could well take off. You know about Melbournians and football. The punters will be beating at the door (hammering at one for effect).

I entertained the notion, unwillingly, and Baker started shooting the following year. The more I watched him, the uneasier I became. First there was the star, the great McCarthy himself: John Jarratt. When some friends and I (to be used as extras) took him out on Wesley College oval for some warm-ups, he seemed to be trying to kick the ball with his knee.

Worse—what I saw being shot didn't seem risible at all. In the novel, McCarthy is persuaded to play the role of Batman in a TV commercial, zooms down from a high window on a cable, and ends up breaking his leg. Baker is cutting and zooming to a frantic TV cameraman trying to capture it for the commercial—but why has he given him a long white beard?

There's a scene where, in hospital, McCarthy makes awkward crustacean love to a woman similarly plastered. Baker, not content with the usual opportunities thus provided, adds a fart or two to add to the merriment.

I only learned of this latter embarrassment when I visited Tim Burstall a few months later. Burstall had bought the rights to my third novel,
Let's Hear It For Prendergast
(fortunately he never got to making a movie of it). He asked me if I'd like to see some reels of
The Great Macarthy
(Baker even got his name wrong). We sat at his editing machine, I put my mug of coffee on top of it, he pressed a button, and the coffee whirled everywhere. Some of it seemed to drain into the machine's innards. Would
Macarthy
come out in sepia?

After profuse apologies, I watched some sequences of Baker's movie on a little screen. Then I looked at Burstall, and Burstall looked at me. ‘It's only a rough cut,' he consoled. Can a fine cut transform a rough cut? With a director whose idea of comedy is false beards and farts?

A fortnight later, I went to a preview at the State Film Centre. Before the initial credits rolled, it was excellent. After that, it was not. Humiliated and unable to bear it, I left before the end, only to be pursued by the director. ‘What's the matter?' he called as I fled the foyer. ‘What have I done?' He'd turned a comic novel into a witless farce.