“Oh, Brian. You lost your money.”
“The thousand dollars was gone by the end of the first day. So they lent me some to keep the ball in play, and I won a bit back. It was just like playing Monopoly. All these meaningless large-denomination notes kept changing hands. Sometimes I had a great stack of it, at other times I had nothing and had to borrow some more.”
Without benefit of room service, Marjory fills their cups with more tea, sugar, milk. She hands Brian one. Hikes are different than you and me, Ernest. They’re crazier.
“Thanks. Well, at close of play on the third day I had $500 in front of me. I think they must have arranged among themselves to let me keep that much. We all shook hands, and I went out and bought a new suit and an air ticket to Melbourne. The rest went in the bank. You could buy quite a bit for five hundred bucks in those days, before the ruinous inflation of the socialists had brought us all unstuck. It was strange, Marj. I could barely credit anyone being stupid enough to exchange these bits of paper for a packet of cigarettes, let alone a new woollen suit.”
“Did you ever see Alice again?”
“Never saw any of them again. Six months later two bloody great Commonwealth wallopers came to my front door and asked why I wasn’t living with my wife. I said we’d had a quarrel. They wanted to know if I’d read reports that Australians were being paid to marry Asians so they could stay in the country in breach of the immigration regulations. I told them I never read the gutter press. A couple of months later I saw a little news item on page 7 or 17, well back anyway, about Alice and a few other men and women being deported.”
For a moment Brian looks so doleful and distant that Marjory’s heart softens. She puts down her cup and saucer and sits beside him on the bed, taking his slack hand.
“Brian, that’s a sad and sordid tale.”
His mouth tightens, then relaxes to a sardonic grin. “You’re too innocent, Marj. It was all quite amicably arranged.” He gives her a swift, hard kiss and goes to the door. He stands at the boundary to the corridor. “The only sordid bit was that it had to happen at all.”
1970: marching
Cockroach Delighthouse
Rozelle
Sunday 10 May
My dear Joseph
Trauma and hysteria, hatred & tears. No, not me, baby—the musical Antony.
I found myself last night at a Peacock Point party—great music and dancing, I was in high spirits—and Antony & his entourage turned up. Time to remind him of some unanswered mail.
It was quite late when I confronted him. I was civil and cool (hadn’t had a drink all night). No, he wouldn’t talk to me, he was going home. Come off it. Oh, all right. We went outside and he became quite uncontrollable, so emotional, ranting and weeping, I hate you, hate Joseph, hate, hate—You destroyed me utterly, that letter, so horrible, so cruel it made me cry…
So it went. Excuses of his pitiful upbringing. I mentioned that this was not totally germane to the matter of his debts to me. How about some money? Screams and shouts again. Really bitter, fuck.
“You used me as an escape from Joseph, never loved me”—all this crap. I told him, “Yes, you hate me, you hate Joseph because you couldn’t destroy my love and admiration for him.”
“That’s right, I couldn’t & I hate him, I hate you, your insanity destroyed me, and then you abandoned me, just pissed off with Alan…” He really believes his lies, Joseph, I really think he’s convinced himself that he didn’t turn his back without a word, that I goaded him into coming to Sydney—it’s all so incredible.
Of course Iris and Francine rushed to the rescue. Leave him alone! Antony in tears (admittedly he was a bit drunk) kept justifying himself, appealing to Iris: “You know how upset I’ve been, I can’t sing when I’m like this.” Crap crap crap.
I let him go. He staggered off, a broken man, into the night—it was both a good act and pathetic, such a pathetic sight. I guess I don’t get my money back.
This torrent of hatred for you amused me. I’d humiliated him, and he knew you are not vulnerable to me in that way. He’d have killed me…enough of that. Sorry to bore you, but thought you might care to know how it all turned out.
Passed psych. More exams in 6 weeks or so. Have done no study.
Work is shitting me to death. So to speak.
The moratorium was a great success. Did you see our street theater on telly? Cheers and applause at Sydney Uni. Crippled frightened little Vietnamese. Five people as the War Machine in stark white face, black clothes, dead black stocking Balaclavas—we looked vile, quite horrifying. Then we led the march! Thousands of students with linked arms behind us—Americans, Australians, Vietnamese, screaming and whipping, kicking and abusing, genuine tears from fatigue and emotion, pleading, the War Machine chanting and droning.
We went on stage again at the Town Hall but the police blocked off most of the view. The cops were bored, really crapped, because there was no violence. When a communist guy got up to speak he was drowned out by the crowd yelling “Peace Now!”—incredible, how can anyone suppose that the Moratorium was a “communist front”?
Because we were up on the platform we could see how many people were there. And the street march in Melbourne! 75,000 people…it must have been devastating. Saw a bit of it on telly. Tell me about it.
I’ve had an average of 4 hours sleep the last week. Now the Moratorium’s over I can recover.
Write and give me strength.
with the usual dreary spirit of love
Caroline
1971: political science
Day ebbs from the sky. Ray gets up, turns on the light. He refills the kettle and carries the pot to the sink. Frustrating as this conversation is, infuriating, it intrigues him.
Living as he does in an Annandale terrace with three other socialist atheists of comparatively like mind, involved the rest of the time with tutors and students, he is out of touch with the world at large. The Nourses must be close to the norm for a middle-class couple of their age-cohort. Shut Marj up and reason with them. She’s too close to them, too full of personal bile and bias. Christ, listen to the woman—she’s being just as absurd as they are. No, not just as absurd, that’d really be pushing it. But pretty intemperate.
“Look,” he breaks in, leaning on the back of Marjory’s chair, “just tell me one thing, Tom. Why do you have such a low opinion of activists?”
No hesitation. “Louts with no respect for their elders. Just because they’re lazing around at university they think they should be running the country. When I was their age I was working my guts out making a place for myself in the world. They expect it all to fall into their laps.”
“Must’ve been tough,” Ray says sympathetically. “Growing up in the Depression, war breaking out, low wages.”
“It was awful,” Doris Nourse says. “You young people have no idea.”
“But the economy’s more buoyant now. More options’re available. Isn’t that part of the freedom you fought for?”
“They ought to be studying for their exams, not wasting the taxpayer’s money disrupting the community.”
“Exams! Exams are a mystification,” Marjory announces, a proposition, Ray sees to his gloom, that is a prime exemplar of the evil it denounces. “As it happens, a survey by the Political Science department has shown that most of the radical activists do better than average in their exams.”
“Tom, it’s not that we have too much,” Ray says. “The point is that we have enough. We’re not all forced into the rat race quite so soon, or so urgently. And that’s an epithet your generation coined, ‘rat race’.”
“You need to get your nose out of all those books and into real life.”
“Oh God,” moans his daughter. Ray digs both thumbs into her back but she shrugs irritably. “You’re the one who’s so strong on reports and figures and statistics. I can show you a whole armload of U.N. reports giving the details of ecological destruction and world poverty and suburban neuroses and waste in our c
ommunity and—”
Ray jabs her again. She subsides into sub-vocal muttering.
“Look, Tom,” he says, “every day in our academic work we’re faced with real facts about human misery and other real facts about how little our community’s doing to relieve it. And further real facts, if it comes to that, about how much of that misery we actually cause.”
He raises his voice as Nourse starts to speak. “I agree with you—academic abstractions are often remote from everyday reality, universities are often diversionary. I imagine we’d differ on the details of that criticism. But one by-product, Tom, one by-product of our training in the ivory tower is the capacity to gather data together, and frame solutions to general problems on the basis of that data.”
“What’s this got to do with the real world?”
“Well, let’s take an example. The real world contains four billion people. Each year millions of them literally starve to death. Another real fact: our own society is the richest, most technically advanced in history. We have the answers. But we won’t use them. It’s a matter of deliberate choice.”
“Piffle. Australia sends millions of tons of wheat to Asia.”
“A pittance and you know it. An effective solution’s going to need more than shipping off our surplus grain on time payment. There’s just not enough caring. That’s why we march. Tom, it’s your generation that’s been brainwashed. You’d rather spend billions on weapons and useless pollutive gimmicks than on saving half of mankind from hunger and disease.”
“Be realistic,” Nourse says, stoking his pipe. “They’d just go on breeding like rabbits and starving in even greater numbers.”
Ray Finlay can scarcely credit this. Is the man literally deranged after all? But abusive invective wins no converts. “Indeed, that’s possible. If we keep them so poor they can’t spare resources for education. If we cut off their markets, distort their economies, force them to sell their oil and produce dirt-cheap by pointing a gun at their heads—”
“It’s the way of life they’ve chosen, Ray. Look at Japan, a miracle.”
“Propped up with American money. But yes, Japan shows what can be done if we’re prepared to spend the cash.”
“Why should we?”
“I could mention ‘Love thy neighbor’.”
“Be practical, Ray.” Nourse squints at him with amusement. “Anyway, I thought you were rather proud of giving up your religion?”
“Religion crap,” Marjory says angrily. “It’s simple justice. Listen, we did it to them! Just like we gave the aborigines poisoned flour and poxy blankets. We’ve got rich on their backs. We sailed in with gunboats and smashed up their economies, we gave them the elementary techniques to cut child mortality without allowing them to industrialize properly…I mean, these are clichés, for God’s sake, truisms—”
“You’re both talking like bloody communists.”
“Facts, Tom. No interpretation necessary. Left and right can exploit those facts but they didn’t create them. We have dues to pay,” Ray says, conscious of his overwhelming moral superiority to this dreadful barbarian. “Our first duty is to get our damned sticky fingers out of what remains in the pot. Instead, we toss the change from our pockets into the crowd and put our fortunes into military dictatorships.”
In the tired silence, Marjory rouses herself to pour fresh tea. Ray lights a cigarette. Have to give them up. Useless pollutive gimmicks indeed. He coughs.
“You see, Ray,” Tom Nourse says, “I’m sorry, but that’s the way the world is. There are no simple solutions.”
“Nixon thinks half a million troops is a simple solution. The Pentagon and the Kremlin think there’s one buried in concrete silos, waiting for someone to light the blue touch paper.”
“I don’t think anyone is going to use nuclear weapons,” Nourse says judiciously. “We all agree that’s a very bad way to fight a war. Some of my friends in the Defence Department are working on chemical methods that are much more humane.”
And Marjory flares finally. Ray feels his skin tighten. It is almost terrifying. It is like magnesium igniting in a darkroom.
“Yes,” she says in a funny high voice, “that’s the difference isn’t it. Between us and you. We just can’t get it into our silly heads that one way of killing people is more humane than another. It’s sad for your balanced evaluations, but we have a strange notion that war is absolutely filthy and utterly unjustifiable. We reject the whole thing and the whole society that wants it right from its stinking foul premises.”
An intolerable desolation darkens Ray’s spirit.
What she says should be true, but where does morality lie? Confounded in a bad pun. He knows he will rejoice when and if the revolutionary warriors march victorious into Saigon and Phnom Penh. If there are bloodbaths of reprisal, likely enough, despite the bland assurances of the spokesmen for the left, he can see that he will shrug them off in calculations of justice and realpolitik. It is a matter of estimating consequences, his old bugbear. Like Joseph Williams, he yearns for tachyons to carry messages from the future. Or the realization of his dream of a calculus of systems, an authentic basis for sociological prediction, a scientific theory of history that works on the fine grain. But where then would be freedom? In the absence of utopia, he knows there is no simple pacifism. He has read Fanon, who teaches that the black man can regain dignity only by killing his white persecutor.
Tom Nourse takes no offence at his daughter’s quivering outburst. “It’s man’s nature,” he explains. “There’s no sense in getting angry about it. The whole universe is competitive.”
It is a point Ray will concede, in his bleaker moments. Is it not the impulse behind his fascination with I.Q. tests, with the Burt dogma of inherited gifts? Marj, true to form, can’t see it that way.
“Oh, right. Human beings are just another stack of statistics. Punch them into a Balance of Payments computer program.”
“You’ll understand when you get older,” Nourse assures her. “But don’t misunderstand me. The difference between the society we enjoy and what you propose is that you want us to give up our high standard of living. My friends want India and those other countries to have the same high standard of living. Level up, not down, you see.” It is dark outside now. Time for dinner. Nourse gets to his feet. “It’s been nice seeing you again, Ray. Come round and visit, Marjory. If there’s a program you want to watch on the television.”
Doris Nourse, hiding at the edge of the table, gathers her things together and gives Marj a kiss and a hug. “Now don’t get too near those mounted policemen,” she warns. “The horses sometimes get frightened by all the people.”
At the door, Tom Nourse turns and extends his hand. “And thank you for the discussion. I might be an old square, but I always like to hear both sides.” The door clicks shut. There is a hysterical silence. Ray Finlay dumps cups and glasses into the sink and hopes Marjory will wait until her parents have reached the street. Behind his shoulder, he hears a strident, torn, high-pitched laugh.
1970: foreign aid
Blessed Saint Kilda
May 12 70
Look love it’s like this:
A certain quantity of money has come into my hands. I’ve got more than $1300 in the bank right now and my need is not great. So herewith, five hundred bucks so you can stop shoveling shit.
I’m being awfully presumptuous, and if you’d rather not, just send it back. But I thought it’d be pleasant if you had the option to piss your job off and study full time, or at least work only one day a week (say) waitressing. I assume you can get the full $200 student loan mentioned in the handbook. I won’t want this back for a long time, and if worst comes to worst I can always use my degree to get another job.
The Moratorium here, as you will have read, was luverly. Vast and very peaceful. Bumped into a bunch of first-year kids, recognized one of them (lives up the street from my parents, I coached her brother in physics last year), went sadly away full of yearning for the coming force of
Wimmens Lib when the silly creatures started an excited conversation about palmistry (some buffoon on telly, evidently): who they were fated to marry, when and where. Looking into the future was apparently, for them, limited solely to that blissful and inevitable consummation. Hell’s teeth.
This household is giving me the shits—just sitting around, I mean, reading a bit but bugger all else. Martha’s seriously considering giving up teaching, which I find a vile prospect: the baby home all day too, mewling and puking. Absurdly, I can’t think of anything else to write about. There’s been nothing dramatic or tragic for miles in any direction. Visitors from Sydney; big deal, you see them all the time, or don’t know them. Karen’s given up screwing for two weeks until her twat heals after some unnameable operation. Gray gray and nothing’s afoot. So I’ll bid thee good night for the nonce and to bed.
love to all
J.
1970: taking it
May 16
My dear Bandersnatch
The check was all a bit much. My spontaneous reaction was to send it back, but, thinking about it…I haven’t. Probably because I’m so stuffed, feeling dreadful. I’m at the end of my tether & I’ve got exams in June & my only real hope of scraping thru is to chuck the job.
I have friends in Paddo who are opening a shop where I can sell stuff I make—they have a sewing machine, maybe I can make clothes or toys out the back of the shop. Any orders?
The Socialists’ Scholars Conference begins on Thursday so if you’re coming up I’ll expect you Wednesday.
Got the photos I took of you. They’re pretty bad, you’re so tense you look as though you’re about to crack in two.
Hope to see ya. Any of the Shakespeare Grove people are welcome, but will have to bring blankets & sleep on the floor.
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