In January 1965, the Rolling Stones played the Sydney Showground, and Louise and I watched from the front row. Let’s spend the night together, Now I need you more than ever . . . Seeing Mick Jagger felt like seeing a part of myself – as if the Stones and I, and our all mates, belonged to a secret tribe. The mode of the music was alchemical, Mick’s strut signalling a burning impatience with the ancien régime.
A society hostess, Neelia, threw a party for the Stones. Her Eastern Suburbs mansion was blasting off by the time an assortment of scraggy adolescents, overdressed for the hot summer night in jerkins and sailor pants, clambered from a fleet of taxis. Neelia rushed out. ‘Oh doo goo hoom,’ she shrieked, her voice straining like an out-of-pitch flugel-horn, ‘we’re full to the brim.’ She’d been dealing with gatecrashers all night. The dishevelled ones retreated, and I shouted across the lawn, ‘That’s the Rolling Stones.’
‘Oh! My goodness!’ Neelia flung off her shoes, hoisted her scarlet gown and pelted along the gravel. ‘Oh dooo come back, dooooo come back . . .’
The Stones complied, but resentment lingered. I managed to insinuate myself into a conversation with some of the boys, but it was not the round table at the Algonquin. A few nights later, Sharp and I were sampling the city’s hottest nightspot, the Gas Lash, named after another Sharp cartoon which had invoked the wrath of the Vice Squad, this time in Tharunka. I had an inkling the Stones would drop by. ‘Want me to wangle you an intro?’ I had boasted to Jenny Kee. The Gas Lash playlist favoured the Rolling Stones, and ‘Route 66’ was slipping into gear when Louise and I hit the floor. I reckoned I could dance as good as Mick, any day. Suddenly – there he was. Jagger swept inside, looking insufferably charismatic, with Jenny Kee grinning gloriously between him and Keith Richards.
‘Howdja do it?’ I spluttered at the first opportunity.
‘Any girl who gets to meet the Beatles, Rick, can get to meet anyone she wants. Okay?’
Sharp drew a cartoon of Jenny in toreador pants uttering the line, ‘I was rolled by the Stones’. Then, in a fit of wishful thinking, he added, ‘And it was terrible’.
Mick Jagger’s rebel spirit cut to the gut, and he exuded sexual energy, but it was a young Jewish folkie who probed the core of generational angst. In Sharp’s studio, where we often mulled over editorial ideas, the needle was lowered on to a track that blew me apart, Bob Dylan’s anthem: . . . Come writers and critics/Who prophesize with your pen/And keep your eyes wide/The chance won’t come again . . . For the times they are a-changing.
You bet. It was in my bones, it was in the stars. ‘Play it again, Sharp.’ In the morning, I bought my own copy. Back home, Bob’s nasal twang boomed from my bedside turntable, as well as from the extension speaker in the shower cubicle. ‘Put him out of his misery,’ moaned Dad, ‘for God’s sake!’ The Colonel preferred Mario Lanza, though he had taken Elvis and Chuck Berry in his stride. Bob Dylan got his goat; a rasp that was the rap of its time.
John Wilcock, the Village Voice columnist, wrote to me about his involvement with a new kind of newspaper, the East Village Other (EVO): ‘Sort of wild and getting wilder all the time.’ John’s airmailed EVO was seized by Customs (as was a star-spangled poster sent by The Realist: FUCK COMMUNISM). ‘Take your case as high as you can,’ Wilcock advised. ‘Somebody has to, someday.’
At a party I met a striking young woman whose hair escaped in a shock of dark anarchic curls. Tall and voluble, she flashed her IQ like a searchlight. My Hawaiian shirt, all the rage, was fetchingly unbuttoned to show off a tan.
‘Aha, a male nipple.’ She took hold of it between thumb and forefinger. ‘See how it grows? Just like a dick.’
‘Ouch,’ I said.
‘Nipples are a mass of erectile tissues,’ she continued, as I tried to ignore the glances of onlookers. ‘You should learn to masturbate all your male parts.’ It was my first encounter with Germaine Greer.
Germaine was a brilliant student at Sydney Uni, where she was writing a Master’s thesis on Lord Byron, though her expertise stretched far beyond the romantic poets and male anatomy. At a festival on the Theatre of the Absurd, I watched her dominate the audience in a heated discussion of The Empire Builders, a play by Boris Vian. Self-assured, with a lightning wit, a flashing smile and an appalling certainty, she would rather be wrong than ambivalent, I realised, and she was rarely wrong.
In February ’65, the Oz team trailed into court to hear Judge Aaron Levine announce that ‘The Word Flashed Around the Arms’ did not glorify gatecrashers. On the contrary, it created feelings of ‘revulsion, abhorrence and censure’. Might it corrupt young girls? No, he had been reassured by Betty Archdale. Phew. Dad could hold his head high again on the harbour ferry. Outside the fluted columns of the Quarter Sessions, a group gathered for a celebratory photo. Sharp and Walsh flashed V-signs. The fingers of Francis James were also V-shaped, but his gesture conveyed a cruder implication. An elderly lady was passing and I waltzed her along Oxford Street. OZ NOT OBSCENE sang the tabloid posters. Sharp drew a caricature of the Oz trio for the Herald: ‘Damn Levine for whitewashing us like that – our careers are ruined.’
At the last minute, there was a haggle. Despite the ruling, the Crown stubbornly sought to defer its ‘formal application’ until a point of law could be clarified. Shit!
In April, Louise sailed to London on the liner Fair Sky, leaving me tearful on the dock, grasping at broken streamers. All her friends had gone abroad – everyone did, eventually. ‘You can follow me, darling.’ I had stood on the same dock, aged eleven, watching my sister Jill disappear into the night. As the gleaming white Fair Sky steamed towards the Heads, I had never felt more alone in my life.
But young hearts are resilient and my hormones were restless. With the Beatles and Stones out of the way, I set my sights on Jenny Kee. One morning, we woke up at Wolseley Road and took a ride with my father into the city. Jenny was not inclined to wear her outfit of the previous night – skin-tight jeans and a man’s navy singlet – so she went naked under a black rubber mack. Dad edged the Holden across the Harbour Bridge, with his shoulders hunched, as though a panther was about to spring on his head. At Wynyard, Jenny jumped off with scarcely a wave good-bye. We watched her sprint barefoot into the crowd.
Aged twenty-five, the ‘late developer’ had finally left home. I rented a timber cottage in soon-to-be trendy inner city Padding-ton. The notoriety of the trials, a ‘pad’ of my own and the absence of an official girlfriend allowed me to run amok. As Jenny put it: ‘You’ve gone fuck crazy.’ We were often at odds. A spat started when she stole a packet of peas from a supermarket. ‘Take them back,’ I ordered, ‘before they defrost.’
‘Up yours!’
‘You’ve got a job – why shoplift?’
‘Who gives a damn about a few peas, you snotty little Grammar School goody-goody?’
The next time Jenny was due to arrive at my pad, she didn’t turn up. Weeks later she appeared on the dance floor at Surf City, radiant from an impromptu hitchhiking spree to a distant beach-side hamlet, Byron Bay. ‘I’m not your midnight poke any more,’ she announced. It was over and I was hurt; but we stayed friends until she too disappeared through the Heads on a Greek passenger liner. Once more I was left holding the streamers.
Two or three times a week, I rushed from my copywriter’s desk to a five o’clock movie. Then it was a brisk walk to the Oz office to type out my Herald review. A lonely routine. When Anou tagged along, I was delighted. She was bright, flirtatious, original. Anou created her own outfits, sewing and trimming the gingham as I typed banalities. When Sharp went to Melbourne for an art opening, all those hours in the back stalls took a toll on our self-control. The sex was hot, the guilt immense. My best mate’s bird – how could I? Sharp reappeared, just as a song by a girl group, the Angels, resurfaced on the charts: ‘My Boyfriend’s Back (and you’re gonna be in trouble My boyfriend’s back, better get out on the double). I confessed to my friend, who was rather piqued . . . for about two days. Then all was
forgiven, Anou included, though we were never again left alone at the movies.
Marsha Rowe had settled into Oz, becoming ‘one of the boys’, though it was all too obvious she was a girl – intense, vulnerable, with dewdrop eyes and an inscrutable solemnity. A childish rivalry developed. Richie had her typing his copy and I had her making the tea. It was my downfall. Tea was an elixir from an early age. I was trained to brew it in pre-heated pots and bring it to my parents’ bedside, along with Arnotts Arrowroot biscuits. One evening, as we were trying to meet a deadline, Marsha brought me a milky mix that didn’t meet my exacting requirements. I tossed the cup against the wall – crash! Even worse, I dug out a box of tampons from the desk drawer and used one to mop up the mess. Marsha was devastated, as I discovered years later when she recalled the incident for the Sunday Times.
The brainstorming sessions in the office seethed with emotional undercurrents. Richie devised a work-related trip to Newcastle, where, to ‘save money’, he and Marsha shared a motel room. She outmanoeuvred him by taking a sleeping pill.
The situation was saved by Tina, a bubbly Paddington party-giver with a sharp tongue and a soft heart, whose rented terrace provided a melting pot for the demi-monde. I held her in in high esteem, being the first person I knew who subscribed to the airmail edition of a London newspaper, the Observer.
Australian Vogue now monitored Oz Youthquaker revels and offered this appraisal: ‘No, not talky parties . . . but strenuous parties with wild non-stop dancing to twist and stomp music.’ One night Richie attended a Tina soirée, all the while keeping an eagle eye on Marsha. On this occasion, one of the stompers was a handsome aesthete and talented painter, whose sensuous pout had long endeared him to wealthy bachelors of advancing years. Much to the amazement of other twisters, the dashing dauber hoisted Marsha over his shoulder, Tarzan-like, and charged up the stairs. It was three days before she was seen again. Richie was shattered, Marsha was in love, the painter had come out of the closet as a heterosexual. Back at Oz, the atmosphere calmed down.
On a whim, I decided to publish a guide to the Sydney underworld. Two hard-boiled tabloid journos supplied me with anonymous briefing sheets on the seamier side of the inner city – gangsters running the brothels, the casinos, the clip joints. Playing on the success of a series on socialites, Oz profiled an Underworld Top 20: starring The Yank, Smokey Joe, Cuffancollar Johnson, Sammy Showoff, Bondi Alec, The Scholar, etc. Top of the chart was Lenny MacPherson, whom we condemned as a ‘fence and a fizzgig’ (police informer). The issue sold out in three days. The Telegraph reported that a ‘known mobster’ was blasted with a shotgun at the Tradesman’s Arms, an underworld dive, while handing out Oz. Drinkers had been brawling over their placings in the Top 20.
The following Saturday, a bear-like stranger pushed through my Paddington door and introduced himself as Lenny MacPherson. I was alone. How had he got my address?
‘From a mate. His son’s at the university. A friend of yours.’ Thanks – whoever you were. Big Lenny said he wanted to see for himself who had devised the Underworld Guide.
‘I’m not a rival gang.’
‘And I’m not a fizzgig,’ he said, ‘okay?’
‘Okay.’
Then Lenny ‘took me for a ride’ – at my request – to the Savoy cinema, where, for my Herald review, I planned to see Polanski’s Knife in the Water. There were gashes in the roof of the car and the upholstery was shredded. ‘What happened?’
‘Shotgun.’ Lenny dropped me off. Despite his thirty years in the headlines as Sydney’s Mr Big, I have never seen him again. Nor have I ever compiled another Top 20 of Crime.
Satire boomed. Oz’s circulation nudged 40,000 and its success inspired a slew of imitators. The Mavis Bramston Show, a weekly dose of pungent piss-taking on Channel Seven, rated through the roof. The most successful series in Australian TV history, it kicked off with a ‘report from the Oz newsroom’, compiled by Richie. For my father, this show was the ultimate endorsement of Oz, and each Thursday night he settled on the couch with a glass of Johnny Walker and laughed his head off. Mum was a fan too, and she sold them a script satirizing the Pill – Miss Conception: ‘Would someone kindly tell us when/They’ll start to sterilise the men?’
In February ’66, Judge Levine dismissed the Crown’s contention that Oz unduly emphasised sex and stood by his earlier ruling. Oz was innocent. A word chalked on the footpath outside the court aptly described the pace of justice. ‘Eternity.’
It seemed a good time to leave town. Time magazine declared London switched on: ‘Ancient elegance and a new opulence are all tangled up in a dazzling blur of op and pop.’ The concept of Swinging London inflamed Sharp’s fantasies and the absence of Louise inflamed mine. ‘Boy, is Louise hot to trot,’ wrote Popov from Knightsbridge. ‘Everyone else is here – why aren’t you? Just kidding about Louise, but I bet it pissed you off.’ It sure did. I sent her flowers, poems, an elaborate dress, an opal ring, and measured the time with her mildly affectionate aerograms.
‘Come on,’ said Sharp, ‘what’s keeping you?’
Okay, we would go to Europe, but on one condition – that we stopped off first in Asia. My savings covered a short-hop airflight and some on-the-road cash, plus the Herald was willing to print my dispatches. Richie, now in the final years of medicine, took the news with his usual stiff upper lip.
Martin held a farewell exhibition at the Clune Gallery: cartoons, collages, popsicle-bright paintings. Everything sold, even a portrait of me bopping in a corduroy suit, the eternal groover.
On the floor of my Paddington living-room Mart and I laid out Oz 26, its images vibrantly pop-op and more – almost hallucinatory. In the charts, Mick Jagger was having his 19th Nervous Breakdown and The Who were wailing about M-m-my Generation. Why don’t you all f-f-f-fade away/Don’t try and dig what we all say . . .
I wrote an impassioned defence of Jørn Utzon’s masterpiece, the Sydney Opera House, then under attack from the ABC and the government. On the cover we used an Australian ikon of ignorance, Boofhead, captioned: ‘But I don’t give a stuff about Opera.’ I didn’t either, but felt that I should.
A headline in a Sunday newspaper struck an ominous note: WARNING ON FREE LOVE. It came from my sister Jill, whose first novel, Fall Girl, had been published in London to enthusiastic reviews. She informed the Sun Herald of the bleak scene which awaited Australians in Notting Hill: ‘They’re trapped in dingy basements with girls who can lead them astray.’ It didn’t sound too bad to me. ‘Aussies here let their hair down. They do things that shock their mothers.’ It was getting better all the time. We packed our bags with renewed excitement.
At the airport, we managed to score a VIP lounge and a screaming send-off from the Missing Links, Oz’s pet rockers. At the sight of my hand luggage, an Olivetti portable typewriter, the lap-top of its day, Richie suggested I was being pretentious again. We’ll be back in six months, I assured him, max.
I shook hands with Dad and kissed goodbye to my sister Josie. The band bashed out a personal favourite, ‘I’ve got my Mojo Working’. Tina, the Paddington party queen with the mocking tongue, suddenly wrapped me in her arms and had a little cry: ‘It’s not because you’re going,’ he sniffled, ‘it’s because I’m stuck here.’
That night we landed at Singapore and checked into Raffles Hotel.
5
MONDO KATHMANDU
Kathmandu, July 1966: ‘It’s my stomach,’ Sharp said, toying with the fried buffalo balls. ‘I’m sick of being sick.’
‘Nah. It’s that mag. Rave’s gone to your head.’ Mart hadn’t been the same since flicking through its chai stained pages and seeing the pics of The Who in union-jack overalls axing TV sets. At the Ananda Devi café, flies buzzed the pies. Roadworn Britishers in tattered waistcoats, shoe soles flapping, eyes brimming with homesickness, crowded around the croaky speaker, You got me going now, you really got me . . . you really got me . . . Aaahhhheeee . . .
Sharp clutched his gut and lurched towards the sq
uat pit, cheered on by the Kinks – You got me going now . . . On London’s King’s Road, the ‘dolly-birds in minis’ were leaping out of bright red Minis, and the pop couturier, Mary Quant, announced she had re-shaped her pubic hair into a heart . . .
‘Why are we here?’ Mart asked. ‘When we could be there?’
I trailed him into the alley, clutching an oily scroll of Buddhist demons, a Tibetan tanka, and argued that London wasn’t about to fall in a heap. ‘I am,’ he said. We trod warily past festering garbage – and splosh! – a pail of urine hurled from an overhead cubby-hole. How medieval it all was, how quaint and romantic, these doll-shacks jumbled above shopfronts in Kathmandu, the sherpas staggering to market with bales of yak wool the size of grand pianos, strapped to their backs. Any day now, the Nepalese were sure to discover the wheel.
‘We’re here because we’re on our way there,’ I countered, as Sharp doubled up outside the blacksmith’s.
‘I’ve seen enough of the exotic East.’
Despite the potency of its grime, I wasn’t ready to quit.
Our inexorable social decline had begun the day after landing in Singapore, three months earlier, when we checked out of Raffles Hotel. To merge with the overland drifters, who seemed more ‘authentic’ than tourists, we traded our smart luggage for disintegrating army rucksacks. The embassy reissued my passport, ‘occupation’ altered from journalist to student, to ease border hassles. On the outskirts of Singapore, we stood at the roadside holding up a hand-scrawled sign, ‘Malacca’, while locals on bicycles bumped into coconut palms and asked, ‘Who are you? The Beatles?’, to which Mart replied, ‘The Rolling Stones.’
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