I got to uni when I was still sixteen. It was a two-day train ride from Lismore, and things were very different there. You didn’t always have to be good at sport – mere oratory and writing and acting, my specialties – would do, and sex for the weeds, though it had its difficulties (accommodation primarily), was on the agenda. Growing up was possible, and imminent, and so was growing old. I did miss Lismore though, and the unfinished business I had there – have still, when I go back and look at the white familiar houses. It’s like a big airport novel of many pages from which I, as a character, am now excluded. And I missed, and miss, the Seventh Day Adventist Church, its warm, clear, soft simplicities, the singing and gossip and glory and plain rules and health food and mutual, tyrannous caring. Defining myself as a loner against these two great tides of inherited faith and small-town life was a brave thing to do, I guess, if that’s what I did – and not just adapting to a new address, getting out from under, finding my own truth. But somewhere back there in the unchanged streets is a Sabbath School teacher with a carpentering business married to Ruth or some similar girl, with four kids and a wood-and-fibro house in Crescent Street with my name and my soul, the one I left behind. I miss him too.
Sydney Morning Herald, 1995
HAPPY ACCIDENTS
In August 1959 my roommate, Trevor Davis, told me he was leaving the room and going home to Forster after a family tragedy. I put up on the quadrangle noticeboard in Sydney University a colourfully illustrated advertisement for someone to replace him in room 10 at the Raffles Private Hotel on Bondi Beach. Rent, with two daily meals, five pounds a week, two single beds in the one room, adjoining dingy bathroom. A laundry in the basement, a ping-pong table down the hall, a cornflakes breakfast each morning with the landlord, Abe Saffron, not yet as famous as he later became, and his then wife, who wore skin-tight leopard-skin leotards at all times of the day.
The advertisement was answered by Les Murray, who, on finding that I too came from the North Coast and also wanted to be a writer, moved in, and my life, I suppose, absolutely altered from the mild undergraduate trajectory towards a lifetime job as a state-school teacher – writing, perhaps, a novel at night in my spare hours every six or seven years – that it was then on. Quickly, Murray’s friends came noisily visiting. One of them, Mike Molloy, who one night while drunk attempted unaided human flight from the window of the ping-pong room on the second floor, was a Cinesound cameraman – he eventually shot Stanley Kubrick’s films 2001 and Barry Lyndon – and with him and two of his friends and one of mine I began to write and co-direct a film, still unfinished, about a dying soldier in a jungle remembering Sydney, called Who Travels Alone, and my long flirtation with movies – as critic, actor, writer, director – was thus begun. If a person other than Les A. Murray had answered the advertisement, it would probably not have.
Murray and I, meanwhile, were both writing – I short stories about teenage love for The Australian Women’s Weekly, always rejected, and he poems that to my annoyance didn’t rhyme. I was seventeen, and he at twenty more determined on his course in life. Having been rejected by the air force for, I think, flat feet, he had replaced this high-vaulting ambition with poetry, whatever that was, another country of the mind.
Stirred by his example and stung by his contempt for my Women’s Weekly short stories – ‘I have an inferiority complex,’ I said. ‘Nonsense, Robert,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing complex about your inferiority’ – I joined in my second undergraduate year the university newspaper honi soit. For this I wrote ghostly short stories and imitations of other writers – Arthur Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse, William Shakespeare. I joined, too, the drama societies SUDS and Sydney University Players, for whom I impersonated the second officer in a Twelfth Night whose Malvolio was John Bell, Toby Belch John Gaden, and whose first officer was a tall, erect and cheerful bad actor called Bruce Beresford. Bruce had already directed two short films – at the early age of fourteen he had persuaded the Australian army to let him have three of their Centurion tanks to climax one of them. We began to go together to foreign movies with subtitles – He Who Must Die, The Four Hundred Blows, Black Orpheus, Wild Strawberries – and to write to each other opinions of them. Together we planned a movie that he, Bruce, might direct, and by that year’s end it was made, called The Devil to Pay. It starred John Bell, and was vigorous, fast-paced, closely plotted and almost uniformly terrible.
Murray and I were evicted by Abe for encrusted filthiness, and in another shared room in a boarding house in Strathfield, whose dysfunctional hot water system persuaded both of us to give up washing altogether, we began to grow tetchy with one another. We tended to fall for the same girls, and we quarrelled fiercely over religion – Les was a lately converted Catholic, I a fading Seventh Day Adventist – and after six months Les left and was replaced in the small brown flaking bedroom by a Korean encyclopaedia salesman who, most nights, as I drifted towards sleep, would stoutly try to sell me the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
My campus life, however, was looking up. I’d become co-editor, with Laurie Oakes, of honi soit. I’d co-starred with Arthur Dignam in the first Australian production of a Pinter play, The Birthday Party. I’d co-starred with John Bell in the first play ever at the Union, later the Footbridge Theatre, Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance, in which I fearsomely threatened the audience with a Gatling gun, and some of them dived for cover. I befriended a student politician, Michael Kirby, an old young man who seemed then even older and wiser than he does today. I’d co-starred with John Bell in a revue – called, I think, Wet Blankets – co-written and co-directed by a very self-confident twenty-one-year-old called Clive James. I’d seen the rising student actress Germaine Greer play Mother Courage, and gone to the first Sydney season of Barry Humphries’ new sketches on Edna Everage and Sandy Stone. I’d been elected to the Student Representative Council and was giving colourful speeches, dressed sometimes in only a towel. I’d been made president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a post I was dismissed from for laziness and right-wing tendencies within a month.
I’d failed some exams. Some I didn’t even attend, preferring to play pool across the road in the Lalla Rookh hotel. I’d lost my scholarship, and to continue at the university, to which I’d become addicted, I’d worked first on the railways, and been fired; on the night shift as a printer’s copy-reader, and been asked to leave; and then as an advertising copywriter at Hansen Rubensohn-McCann Erickson under the new young advertising whiz kid Bryce Courtenay, who praised my creativity and fired me for overindulging it. My love life became disorderly after I appeared uninvited on the front lawn of a rich girl to whom I’d been lately, briefly, engaged, and I had to swear in court, with Kirby as my lawyer, that I would no longer so energetically seek her company.
By the end of 1963 my life was a mess. Beaten for roles in student productions by Peter Carroll and Henri Szeps, overspending the honi soit budget by thousands and being fired from my second term in the editorship for that, applying for a job at the Daily Mirror and being beaten for it by my now hated protégé Laurie Oakes, I was, or I felt, an old man, at twenty-one. Where had it all gone wrong? What did the future hold for me?
In early 1964, a now part-time student, I got a job as a shipping roundsman on the Sydney Morning Herald, and was fired two weeks later when five hundred people missed the Orcades owing to an error of mine regarding the departure time – the day of departure, in fact – and they had to be flown on to Brisbane to catch it there at Sydney Morning Herald expense. Three days later I was in the ABC, where I stayed for seven years, working for the News department, on Four Corners, This Day Tonight, Chequerboard, making lifelong friends – Paul Murphy, Mike Carlton, Charles Wooley – meeting my wife, learning things; learning journalism, film, brevity, the shape of the world as it then was; moving around from Religion to Rural to the Women’s Midday Show to Current Affairs; unappreciative of course, always complaining that things weren’t better; writing scripts that others rewrote; meeting, in ABC Melbour
ne, George Whaley and Michael Boddy, with whom I made a start in live theatre; studying acting under Hayes Gordon when I came back to Sydney; alert, ambitious, lazy, driven, scared – as always – that I would be found out.
And I did not know it then, but by the time I was twenty-five and travelling with my future wife, Annie, on some of her inherited money – through Europe and America and the Middle East in the tumultuous, now legendary year of 1968 – that all of the ingredients of my future life – on stage, in film, in series television, in documentary, in journalism, in stand-up comedy, in oratory, in politics, in song-writing, in acting, in speechwriting, in committee work – were now in place. I did not know it then, but I was beginning a life that was more like a life in the twenty-first century than the twentieth: of sudden shifts and changes of plan, of doors that unexpectedly slam shut and others that open to unimaginable vistas of possibility; of foreshortened careers and betrayed promises and long friendships; of resurrected projects and new ways of handling old obligations; of life not as a plan but as a response, or a series of responses. Life as a kind of busking, as a kind of hitch-hiking in the speeding cars of kindly strangers to unpredictable destinations, many of them entirely beautiful and stirring.
A month ago, for instance, I had to read – because Bob Carr had to launch it, and I had to write his launching speech – Tim Flannery’s book The Eternal Frontier, about how all the present species derived from a moment when a comet struck the earth, and how the consequent tsunamis and bushfires and nuclear winters that followed wiped out most of the dinosaurs – not the turtles, not the crocodiles – and how most of the wondrous vegetation and we, as a result, were able to evolve. It may be the best book I’ve read, and I would not, I think, have read it ever but for an accidental compulsion in one of the jobs I currently hold – on Mondays I work for Bob Carr – to study and master its contents.
By a similar accident I was obliged to write about Fred Hollows, and follow his footsteps – with old ABC friend and co-writer Stephen Ramsey – to Nepal and Eritrea and Vietnam. And I suddenly understood what the Third World is – a place much happier than ours, because it is more involved with family and community than money, because it knows, and we have forgotten, what is truly important; a fundamental realisation that, but for my duty to an accidental project, I would not otherwise have made. By another similar accident, I met at a Hobart festival of university drama Michael Boddy in 1961 and nine years later, with The Legend of King O’Malley, we together changed the course – or so it is said in the textbooks – of Australian theatre.
So much happens by accident that I wonder, I truly wonder, if anything else much matters. By the accident of Trevor Davis’s family tragedy I met Les Murray, and my life was changed. By the accident of his unattractive big flat feet, Les Murray became a poet, and many lives were changed. By the accident of the Butterfly Ballot in Palm Beach, Florida, Al Gore is not now president, fighting global warming and dismantling free trade; instead the Cold War is back and the world in the charge of a posturing dimwit who may well wreck the whole human experiment. By accident, the accident of five hundred people missing the Orcades, I got to the ABC and was there sustained, forgiven, made viable in an otherwise hostile world that may, without that accident, have consumed me. By the accident of the ABC, I met my wife, Annie, in Melbourne. Of that accident have come my three children, whom I love and would die for, children who without a lot of happy accident would not now exist.
Accident, is it, accident is king, and good always follows? Of course not. But neither is the opposing doctrine that things are inevitable – free trade, globalism, economic rationalism, the break-up of community, the extinction of country towns – and there is therefore only one way of running a life, by getting early the kind of job that has you in your twenties ringing up strangers and telling them to pay up or else, that gets you in your thirties onto the corporate ladder at the top of which, in your fifties, your shareholders pay you fourteen million dollars to go away. For things are not inevitable – any more than it was inevitable that, once the hydrogen bomb was built, it would be used. Any more than it was inevitable that, when television arrived, cinema, radio, the ballet, the opera, the rock concert, the live theatre would wither away. Or that Paul Keating, once he was fired for insolence from David Jones, was a spent force in Sydney Town. All over the ecosystem, all through the economy, are things that are not inevitable, like Les and me and John Bell and The Legend of King O’Malley, happy accidents waiting to happen.
But … how can they be encouraged? The wisest thing on the subject was said to me by the film director Philippe Mora.
‘It all happens by accident,’ he said, ‘but you have to be where the accidents happen.’
Sydney University in the early ’60s was one of these places. Paris in the 1920s. Bloomsbury in the 1910s and ’20s. The Cafe Royale in the 1890s. Key West in the 1930s. It encourages my belief that good art comes in clusters, and if there is a meeting place, a pub, a salon, a campus, a college of the arts, an Algonquin Round Table or a school like this, where like minds cluster and provoke one another, pass judgement and jibe and stir to greater effort, greater art, greater happy accident, then good things arrive more readily in the world.
As this age goes on, and more and more of our young people have little more to look forward to than a series of part-time jobs quickly over, plus an underlying hobby – in music, in pottery, massage, iridology – that makes some sense and gives some constancy to who they are and what they yet might be, these clusters of friends, these judgements of peers, these after-school study groups, like Glenaeon has, may be all that lies between their eventual success as writers, artists, musicians, performers, potters, jewellers, weavers, sculptors, and the oblivion that has been carefully constructed by the corporate world for those who dare to seek the good and be happy in their life on earth at a task that has chosen them.
I, thank God, have Les Murray still, and friends – from the ABC, and Nation Review, and the Nimrod Theatre, and the Australian film industry, and the Australian Labor Party, from the National Playwrights Conference, from the Sydney Writers Festival, from the casts and crews of the films that I have written and made – that have kept me true to myself and fit for my several varying tasks on earth, clusters of judgement and inspiration that, after death and taxes and beauty, are all we know on earth and all we need to know.
W.B. Yeats said it best – he usually does – when in the Dublin Municipal Gallery, having gazed long at the portraits of so many living and dead that he knew and he loved, he wrote,
Ask not where man’s glory most begins and ends,
But only say of me, I had such friends.
A speech to the parents, Glenaeon School, 2003
MY SYDNEY
The inner Sydney I knew when I came down on the old steam North Coast Mail to go to university is there no longer. The Sydney of the Hasty Tasty and Vadims and Lorenzinis and the Hotel Australia and the Bondi trams, I was too young and fierce and shy to appreciate then, and I mourn it now. Ancient Sydney, it will soon be known as. Like the foot-ruler and the pound, it will always be more real to me than the bland, glass-fronted fatuity that followed. But in these gleaming ruins there are a few pickings, and out of these I eke my present life.
My life slouches down two worlds, one green and watery and the other close and polluted. I love them both, according to their lights, as I do my family and my scabrous vagabond youth. They are what remains of the ancient bohemian Cross, and what still shines and dreams in the waters and forests of the northern peninsula.
In the Cross I can go at four a.m. to the Jaffle Joint and warmly breakfast on cremated cheese and bacon and be back in my tight little flat in time for Danger Man on Channel 9, my favourite program of all. In Palm Beach I can wake screaming at three a.m. to the rumble of possums across my tin roof, get up trembling, read a book until five … and then watch Danger Man. In either place, my little son will wake me at six, then I go back to sleep till eight or nine.
At which point I rise and begin to procrastinate writing. Procrastination takes up most of my day. Eventually I get bored into useful activity, and I write exceedingly fast and am always two days over the deadline. My editors, directors, producers and creditors hate me very much.
Palm Beach is the best place in the world to work. The prospects of water and sailboats and distant forests and winking lighthouse move me to easy eloquence, and my scripts are always fifty pages too long. I write in bed in a green sleeping-bag with a sharpened pencil, or with a typewriter on a desk overlooking a view. Like most people in Palm Beach, I overlook the best view in Australia. Like most people in Palm Beach, I will never leave, unless my little son gets killed on the roaring roadway underneath our cliff, or by a landslide, or by ticks or snakes. Or the possums increase my nightmares beyond endurance. It is hard to know what to do about possums: their hands and their eyes are so like human beings’, but murder is much on my mind. They live in our roof and in certain seasons fornicate abrasively with screeches and thumps at hours more common in Kings Cross. They also live on our duck food, and therefore multiply exceedingly. Our two pet ducks stay awake all night too and hiss deafeningly at every form of life. I came to Palm Beach in quest of a good night’s sleep. Perhaps there is no such thing.
Bob Ellis Page 4