Earlier dismissed as ‘a wailing wall of weirdies’, the ever-increasing crowd was blowing its top. Mobs blocked the road, rocked prison vans and swung banners at police, knocking off their helmets.
The sirens wailed. Louise trembled. ‘Everyone’s trying to get you out,’ she said.
The effigy of the judge was torched. I was bustled to the van, a guard muttering, ‘John and Yoko are out there, trying to get themselves locked up.’ Strains of the Beatles’ song, ‘God Save Oz’, could be heard.
Cuffed to the seats with Felix and Jim, I could smell the smoke and hear the chants of the crowd as the effigy of the judge crackled and flamed: ‘Roast pig, roast pig, roast pig . . .’ How had it come to this?
1
The HAPPIEST NATION on EARTH
Sydney, January 1959: I leaned against the rails on the upper deck of the Lady Denman and aimed my face at the sun. Its rays would cure my acne, said Mum. The deep blue of the harbour and its toytown city had a beauty to which I was quite oblivious. It was a few months since I had finished school, and I had started my first job. On weekday mornings I caught the bus from Mosman to Athol Wharf, via the zoo, and boarded the ferry. The benches filled with fatherly figures in grey suits, who buried their faces in the Sydney Morning Herald. Mob terror in Cuba, orgy of looting and burning as Castro’s rebellion takes control. Matrons in felt hats and sensible suits, who wanted to get away from the hurly burly, sat in the Ladies’ Saloon, where they thumbed through the Women’s Weekly or knitted socks. ‘We are a happy nation,’ proclaimed the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, in his New Year’s address, ‘and – despite some dismal critics – we deserve our happiness.’ On Bennelong Point the tramsheds lay flattened in readiness for the foundations of the Sydney Opera House. The ferry converged with others on Circular Quay and dolphins played in its wake, indifferent to the mood of the nation and such things as my acne.
I hurried the five blocks to Market Street. In our office, only one sap could never afford to be late – me. At 8.30 a.m. I collected a stack of newspapers from Mick, the cheery corner street-seller, and headed for the staff door of Farmers department store, the retail giant, a solid slab of grey in the heart of the city. Balancing the papers and Dad’s hand-me-down satchel, I punched the clock. A lift took me to the advertising department on the sixth floor. None of my more stylish colleagues had arrived. I took the escalator down to white goods and electrics, where the latest ‘stereograms’, fitted with automatic turntables, were on display, plus frypans, pop-up toasters and transistor radios. The stockbuyers lurked in shabby nooks at the floor’s edge; and to each I delivered a copy of the Herald and Daily Telegraph. Police seek phantom bombers of Kings Cross . . . Fire crackers hurled at revellers. On the fourth floor, manchester and lingerie, the delivery round was repeated, and so on, down to the ground floor and beyond, to the depressing ‘Bargain Basement’.
Back at the ad department half an hour later, the errands had stacked up. A bunch of corsets to be rushed to a commercial artist at Wynyard. Tearsheets of tomorrow’s Summer Specials and Back-to-School Bargains to be checked and initialled by the buyers. Proof shots of ‘cost price’ kitchenware to be collected. A copywriter’s urgent love letter to be handed to a window dresser. At 11.15 a.m. the first editions of the afternoon papers were waiting for collection. Ava Gardner arrives to film On the Beach, airport workers give their verdicts: ‘You see better looking sheilas at Bondi.’ My deliveries of the Sun and the Mirror needed to be prompt, so that errors in our ads could be corrected in later editions.
After a serve of stodge in the staff canteen, the errands resumed, invariably marked ‘deathly urgent’. If the pace faltered, I clipped the retail ads from The New York Times – Macy’s, Saks, Altmans – and pasted them into a huge scrapbook. At 4.30 p.m. it was time to gather the final editions of the afternoon tabloid – Mad-eyed prowlers lurk behind tombstones – and deliver them to the store buyers, who often raged at the way their goods were promoted, though they were too lily-livered to confront my boss, Zelda Stedman.
Three nights a week I took the bus to Kensington, a drab and unfamiliar suburb. In stark and windy pre-fab halls, I tried to keep awake during long lectures on How To Read A Balance Sheet. As a sop to my father, I had enrolled in Commerce at the University of New South Wales. Dad had urged me to pursue a career in accountancy, rather than advertising, and the course was part of a compromise hammered out with my mother at the kitchen table at the end of my final school term.
Dad was a lifelong company man, a stickler for duty and cautious to the hilt. Soon after he had married my mother, Betty MacKnight, in 1929, and fathered two daughters, Josie and Jill, Australia was hit by the Great Depression. As well as supporting a family on the wage of a book-keeper, Dad helped several of his twelve brothers and sisters, tinkling the coins on the mantelpiece for collection each payday. During the Second World War, he commanded an infantry battalion in New Guinea, fighting the Japanese. ‘Brave,’ said Mum, ‘and loved by his men,’ but Dad never romanticised his deeds. Back at his desk, ‘the Colonel’ ground away at the books, becoming managing director of the Country Life newspaper – for the ‘man on the land’. Country Life was illustrated entirely with photos of prize heifers, merino rams and stud bulls.
When I was seven and my adenoids had been extracted for the fourth time, Mum and Dad and the family doctor felt that the ‘sickly child’ would benefit from a move away from sea air, and I was sent as a boarder to Knox Preparatory School at Wahroonga – thirty minutes up the Pacific Highway. On the first night of term, wide-eyed, I heard the boys from the outback crying in the dorm. Nine years later they were prefects, cadet officers, sports stars, while I was still the class clown. As the Knox Grammar headmaster noted in his final report, ‘Neville is a great enthusiast, but deeply immature.’ He didn’t know the half of it. For reasons which remain painful to this day, almost forty years later, I emerged from the ‘privileged’ playgrounds of Knox with a chip on my shoulder.
There was much to resent – the teachers played favourites, the cane was in vogue and pupils were barred from the slightest questioning of authority. On one of the rare occasions I managed to make a mark, topping the tests for officer selection in the cadet corps, the major in charge overruled the results, opting to promote the stars of his cricket team. I resorted to the wild justice of revenge. Cadet training was compulsory, until I discovered a legal loophole, and, on the eve of the Anzac Day parade, led a mass walkout.
So, in December 1958, Colonel and Betty Neville were at the kitchen table, both annotating the A columns of the job pages – Dad for Accountancy, Mum for Advertising. Their goal was to direct their son, who didn’t have a clue what to do, towards a secure and stable future.
In her youth, Mum had published short stories in the Weekend Sydney Morning Herald and caustic verse in literary magazines. Family snaps showed her rollicking at the piano in a plaid suit with a fag in her mouth and a glass of sherry by the keyboard, surrounded by chisel-faced men with Brylcreemed hair parted in the middle – Dad, Uncle Ken, the neighbours – all singing When the red red Robin comes a bob bob bobbin’ along. By the time I was born, about a decade after my sisters, the sing-a-long chumminess had given way to resigned incompatibility. Now, with two daughters out of the nest – one in the thick of bottles and nappies, the other a poet on a bohemian barge on the Thames – Betty Neville was on the brink of buying a rambling wisteria-clad hideaway in the Blue Mountains.
Mum’s sharp blue eyes skimmed the A columns more quickly than Dad’s. A city department store required an Advertising Trainee. She circled it in red and immediately dashed off an application to the manager. ‘But they want a sample of my work,’ I moaned, unsure what ‘advertising’ entailed. She typed a burst of verse in the style of Archie and Mehitabel, extolling a brand of business shirts, and sealed the envelope. A week later, I was briskly interviewed by Zelda Stedman, who glowered down at me and said, ‘Your poem shows promise.’
Dad went along with it
: Farmers was a retail flagship, soundly managed, with a reliable appetite for book-keepers. The mysteries of corporate accounts could be unravelled in night classes. Meanwhile, an office boy had a foot in the door.
Adland taught me the basics of printing, layout and come-hither headlines. The office atmosphere was irreverent and the staff flamboyant. With no visible arts community in Australia at the time, no film industry, culture fests or government patronage, there was a dearth of bolt-holes for oddballs. The only alternative to advertising was suicide or a passage to Southampton.
Between deadlines, every other copywriter pecked away at their Novel. Young men with pale skin and bloodshot eyes arrived late at their desks, risking a chainsaw blast from Zelda and affecting an air of profound alienation. Over rounds of coffee (‘Neskafka’) in the canteen, they recited snippets from Allen Ginsberg, Peggy Lee and Omar Khayyam. The first disc released by Barry Humphries, ‘Wild Life in Suburbia’, was eagerly passed among copywriters. Edna Everage was someone we all knew, shrieking across the neighbour’s fence, if not our own. Heavy with irony, her catch phrase resounded through the department’s glass partitions: ‘Excuse I, S’cuse I . . .’
The staff selected by Zelda were her opposites: elegant, companionable, outgoing. They had flair, they had fun. I wondered, sometimes, why Zelda had hired me. The desert boots, tapered daks and natty jackets were usually a fizzle, despite endless consultations with Tim, my debonair workmate. The Sad Sack image was completed with a slumped posture, a basin haircut, ink-stained hands and a nasal twang. ‘For God’s sake, Richard,’ said Zelda, ‘pull your socks up.’ The wrong socks, of course.
In spring, the teenage models clicked their way to the front counter in high heels and low-cut cotton frocks, reeking of Bargain Basement perfume. In the canteen I looked deep into their mascara’d eyes and intimated I held the key to an endless vista of fashion spreads. Gabbie, a charitable pony-tailed blonde, agreed to come dancing with me on Bandstand, a pop TV show, broadcast live from TCN9. I used to watch it through the window of a Mosman electrical store, with the neighbourhood kids, when it was still called Accent on Youth. Brian Henderson, the compère, played record tracks as the camera panned across LP covers of couples doing the cha-cha.
Cribbed from an American show of the same name, Bandstand hosted live acts – the first TV outlet for fledgling local rock. In my final year at Knox – by then a day boy, thank God – while classmates messed about on the sportsfield, I found my way to the Channel 9 studios, and exulted in dancing in front of the cameras. It filled a desperate need of mine to be noticed.
On Saturday afternoon, I borrowed my mother’s maidenly Ford Prefect and drove Gabbie to Bandstand, where I gyrated on cue. It was the biggest dance floor in Australia, and I was a cutaway shot.
After I guessed the age of novelty songster the Big Bopper – Chantilly Lace, and a pretty face! – Brian Henderson awarded me the Bopper’s LP – live on TV! Topping the bill that lucky day was Chan Romero, with his manic chart-buster ‘Hippy Hippy Shake’ . . . For goodness sake! . . . Gabbie and I stood at the edge of the set and ducked his spit. After the show, and a mop-up, we motored to the nearby ABC studios to dance on Six O’Clock Rock, where the host was Johnny O’Keefe, who co-wrote and performed Australia’s first rock single, ‘I’m a Wild One’. I’m just outa school/ I’m real real cool/Gotta shake, gotta jive/ Got the message I wanna be alive/ I’m a wild one. Oh yeah, I’m a wild one . . . What a buzz to be chosen to jive across the arched bridge of the set, silhouetted against the opening credits. Oh Yeah, I’m A Wild One. My theme song. I wanted to be wild, too, but didn’t know how.
Late one Saturday night I ventured into a Kings Cross jazz cellar and daringly ordered raisin toast and a cappuccino, the latest craze. At the end of a 2 a.m. set, the goatee’d muso packed up his bass and put a question to the saxophonist: ‘Hey man, where’s the party?’ It gave me goose pimples, the sense that somewhere out there in the night was a secret city waiting to be embraced.
By the end of the second year at Farmers, my trousers were tighter and my shoes pointier, but I was still stuck with the paper run. The assistant manager had not found me to his taste. Fortunately my sense of curiosity about the world was finally stirring. In Esquire magazine – subscribed to by the department as a reference for menswear – I started to skip the ads and seek out the incandescent prose of Dwight MacDonald and Dorothy Parker. Paperback bookshops sprouted in the city, saucily jacketed, introducing me – and a new generation – to an exotic range of polemicists like Sartre, Bertrand Russell and Simone de Beauvoir, whom I tried to digest on the harbour ferry.
I began to scheme and dream. With a head buried in the text of John Osborne’s era-heralding play Look Back In Anger, I skulked about the house, hatching a daring plan. Mum decided the trouble was girls. A family of five cheerful daughters had recently relocated from a Coffs Harbour banana farm to a house down the road, and considering them ‘suitable’, she encouraged me to invite one of them out.
My ignorance of womankind had been the subject of jibes, even in the playground. To the last, I had argued that females were bereft of pubic hair, citing as proof the Latin teacher’s framed photos of Roman statues. When a Tampax instruction sheet was furtively passed among the cadet corps, I understood neither the mechanics nor the biology. To me, the rump of the silhouette looked like a kneecap. I stood on the Knox oval scratching my head. Good old Tim, who later followed me to Farmers, took pity. He pointed the barrel of his Lee Enfield rifle into a patch of dust. ‘This is a worm’s eye view of a woman,’ he said, scratching a pair of semi-circles back to back, and jabbing three apertures. ‘They piss from the top one, and they shit from the bottom one.’
‘Thanks, Tim,’ I replied, ‘but what do they do in the middle?’
When Europe’s New Wave cinema hit Sydney, I tried to brush up on biology, queuing for hours to see Brigitte Bardot in a mutilated version of And God Created Woman. At last I was ready to tackle one of the country girls next door.
The first time I saw Anne she was wearing a Girl Guide’s uniform. Slight, blonde, freckled and forthright, she had never learned the hard-to-get games of the city. Instead of New Wave, we settled for Cinemascope at the French’s Forest Drive-In. The back seat hotted up long before the plot and I revved the Ford Prefect out of there, wrenching the speaker from its cable. As I fumbled and groped in my Mosman bedroom, desperately trying to recall Tim’s diagram on the Knox oval, Anne said, ‘It’s better if you take your pants off.’ This proved helpful.
In January 1961, I unveiled the plan. I told Dad I had given notice at Farmers and enrolled in Arts full time at the University of NSW.
‘Airy fairy nonsense,’ he thundered. We sat at the kitchen table, tucking into carbon-coated lamb chops. Tipped off about my decision, Mum had made a strategic retreat to the Blue Mountains.
‘Bloody useless,’ he repeated. ‘What will it get you?’
‘A Bachelor of Arts.’ The courses already passed in Commerce would be credited to Arts, easing the workload.
‘Namby pamby rubbish. Arts is no use to anyone, except poofters and schoolteachers.’
I told him I might as well get an education, until I worked out what to do with my life.
‘Get a job, my lad. I’m not coughing up the fees.’ His knife glanced off the bone, and the chop slid across the puddle of Worcester sauce. ‘Bugger it . . .’
Sure. I’d already spotted part-time jobs on the campus notice-board.
‘Don’t think you can go on bludging here . . .’
‘Fine. I’ll move to a flat at Kings Cross and review books for the Herald.’
‘You’re throwing away a solid career . . .’
‘It’s a shallow career, Dad . . .’ Anyway, I could always go back to advertising after graduating.
My father was prone to greet any change of plan, no matter how minor, as a threat to Western civilisation. As for his son resigning a job, it was akin to the Apocalypse. The argument raged for weeks, with M
um penning pointed missives from Mount Victoria. She knew the pitfalls of an artistic life. Mum was the daughter of an opera diva, Bertha Faning, who had wowed the crowds at Saturday night ‘shilling pops’ in the Sydney Town Hall in 1899, and later, during a tour of London, won ‘rapturous encores’. Inconveniently pregnant, Bertha was forced to return to Australia, where she spent her remaining years cultivating a notorious temper.
Sit down and think hard on your future career [Mum wrote]. Is it to be one of a Sound Business Executive, with its substantial rewards, in the particular field of Advertising and Publicity?
OR
The acquisition of a degree in arts . . . for arts sake.
The main thing in this utilitarian age (we are not still in the Renaissance) is the earning of your daily bread and the bread of your future spouse and Little Ones, bound to be plentiful, being a Neville.
Mum warned that if I decided to strike out for myself, much dreariness would follow. Are you really the type to get wild rapture from cultivating Poetry and Learning and to starve if necessary in order to awaken your consciousness of these things?
In print, her defence of Dad was so much warmer than it ever was in person.
I know Papa, like Cyclops, has one eye in his head. He has known the horrors of penury and responsibilities from an early age. This makes him limited in vision and plodding in character – which is not his fault. You have the same ability to plod, thank God, but more than one eye in your head, which makes you restless because you will always be looking out of windows which must remain closed . . . Here endeth the first (and last) Lesson. God bless, Your devoted Mama.
PS A lot of men and women over 40 years of age are doing an Arts course these days.
Hippie Hippie Shake Page 2