John was an incessant finder of value in B-grade films and one of the first to talk about the richness of Hollywood, the vigorous individuality of directors working within the studio system; and he began to evaluate the film genres – westerns, gangster films, the domestic comedy.
A hundred filmniks would take the WEA residential school at Newport for a long weekend and have continuous screenings and discussion in darkened rooms.
John also championed the bughouse cinemas like the old Capital – not only for their visual and architectural associations with the golden years of Hollywood but because they showed, John argued, unpromoted masterpieces.
A writer to an intellectual newspaper back in 1965 accused John of ‘wilful personal enthusiasm about films of melodramatic violence, unedifying taste, neglible intellectual stimulation, and questionable allegorical significance.’
They were the days when art cinemas showed ‘continental’ movies: Bergman was the only director – artist; if it didn’t have sub-titles it was trash.
Never a person for possessions, John claims to be the first person to go to a drive-in cinema without a car. He badly wanted to see a certain film and, together with cineaste Norma Crinion, he took a taxi to the drive-in, paying the taxi-driver off at the gate. They were prepared to sit in one of the car bays but the manager supplied them with two chairs.
John’s only complaint was that he was charged for the non-existent car.
John won a scholarship to the University of Sydney through his performance in WEA adult education courses. His years at the University are still talked about by staff. He had too much to say. He could begin essays and examination questions but never finish them. He could never exhaust the possibilities of the first question on the examination paper and so only answered one question, but at exhaustive and brilliant length (so legend would have it).
One of his lecturers said that he assigned John a 2000-word essay on the ‘Knight’s Tale’ by Chaucer. Months later, John brought in 7000 words. He was told he would have to cut it or it would not be read. He eventually submitted a 2000-word essay with a 3000-word appendix.
He can never give a one-hour paper – he always spills over. No form contains him.
He has always preferred to go barefoot. When he joined the WEA for a while as an executive officer, he literally ‘stepped into his predecessor’s shoes’. He had no shoes of his own but found a pair in the office which were later recognised as belonging to the former assistant secretary.
Since graduating in the early seventies he has held a few lecturerships and is now at Caulfield CAE. He has also risen to eminence and power. And he gets to meet celebrities.
He met Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show) and executives from the film industry.
‘We went to this posh turn where you had to wear a bow-tie. Someone found me a bow-tie so that I could get in – but blow me, the doorman didn’t even lift my beard to see if I had it on.’
After years of theorising outside cinemas with friends, after a show or in coffee shops, and being attacked for ‘wilful personal enthusiasm’, he is now appointed, elected, seconded, and pulled onto committees and advisory boards all over the country.
‘When I had things to say that were original, they didn’t want to listen,’ he said. Now that his ideas have become orthodoxies they want him
‘I should be crying,’ he said.
But he admits to enjoying the democratic grind and power-play of committee life.
‘I actually enjoy a good committee meeting.’
We dug up a piece of his criticism which, while it doesn’t illustrate his original aesthetic, does show the relentless involvement he expected of film-goers, ‘… this print is old and not in good condition. Visuals may be scratchy and the sound muffled but this should not be an excuse for missing the film.’
The Blooming of Little Anarchism
John Flaus was one of the contributors to the anarchist magazine Red and Black, published by Jack Grancharoff – Jack the Anarchist.
As long as I have been around Sydney libertarians, Jack was known as the archetypal anarchist. He was Bulgarian, often bearded, and always assertive. He spoke at the Domain.
I was a contributor to issue one of Red and Black with a short story, ‘What Can You Say’, about a young man who discovers that he is an anarchist although he wasn’t aware of it. It was the only imaginative writing to appear in the Red and Black’s nine issues.
Jack Grancharoff was also founder of a magazine called the Anarchist which went for three issues.
The other anarchist-oriented magazines of the seventies were Cane Toad Times from Brisbane; Every thing, an anarchist-feminist magazine which produced two issues out of Sydney; Acracia, produced by the Federation of Australian Anarchists out of Melbourne – about forty issues; and 9-2-5, a literary magazine from Melbourne.
Most anarchist material in Australia adopts a tone of exasperated scorn in a world full of tyrants and people suffering from illusion. Much of the material is from a purist vision of people forced to exist in a corrupted society.
The Sydney libertarians who were allied with classical anarchist thinking tried, but often failed, to introduce a non-judgemental, non-moralistic tolerance into their behaviour and conversational tones; that is, a tone of inquirer rather than that of judge and executioner.
It was considered authoritarian to try to make a person comply with your demands by making them feel ill at ease, guilty, or by exciting animosity against them. This didn’t exclude analysis and criticism but the line between criticism and moralism was often blurred.
As Orwell has suggested, the societies where only public opinion determined behaviour were more conformist and restrictive than societies where a British legal system operates.
The state is not the only source of coercion.
Apart, though, from the magazines of theory, which looked especially at history and a little at anthropological studies of social organisation – especially the writing of Ken Maddocks in Sydney anarchist publications – there seemed to be an outburst of anarchist-oriented behaviour not related to theory.
Many of those who participated in non-parliamentary political activity – resident groups, communalism, the women’s movement, FM radio, 2JJ, non-commercial magazines and newspapers – did so with an unstated anarchist ethic. Part of this was a reaction against authoritarian socialism as represented by overseas models or by the behaviour of local groups.
Simply stated, the anarchist ethic was a concern with self-management, non-coercive personal relationships, non-hierarchical working arrangements, a disregard of rigid sexual morality, and the attempt to bypass or reject the profit mechanism in dealings.
Communist and socialist parties based on interpretations of Marx permitted action against capitalist systems but did not believe in personal emancipation within these systems.
The anarchist-oriented movements did believe that significant changes could occur in one’s own life, personal arrangements, and in relations with society – in one’s own lifetime. This was more attractive and offered greater possibilities for action and behaviour – ‘building a new society inside the shell of the old’.
Several magazines serviced this approach: Horizon from Sydney, Social Alternatives from Brisbane, Grass Roots from Shepparton, Earth Garden from Sydney and Down to Earth from Canberra. They were interested in rural communes, new therapies, child-raising, consciousness-changing and non-industrial possibilities.
There were, even in the conventional economy, slight movements away from authoritarian boss-worker relations: flexible working hours, joint consultation, experiments in worker participation, especially in South Australia and in the organisation of universities, and what could be called ‘elusive transformation’.
For the hard-liners all this was futile until there had been a revolutionary change. But the evidence is that anarchist-oriented thinking has predominated in non-parliamentary politics in Australia.
Among students and youn
g people the label ‘anarchist’ is seen as acceptable when the label ‘communist’ has been corrupted by the performance of communist governments and by the authoritarianism inherent in communist theory.
I would argue that there has been more ‘elusive transformation’ than hard-liners will admit, or than analysis has shown.
How Many Badges Did you Earn?
I didn’t make it to the launching of the book about green bans not so long ago, but a spy told me this. Jim Cairns, who officially launched the book, was talking afterwards with a group about political campaign badges – moratorium, green ban, Aboriginal land rights, etc. – and about who had the most. Jim said that when cleaning out his drawer he found he had forty. This is considered a maximum score for the seventies. I found I had six.
When Labor gets back into power, the wearing of these badges at state occasions will be required.
A Radical Country Newspaper
(adapted, from the Bulletin, 17.7.73)
A twelve-year-old girl doing a project on newspapers came into the Yass Tribune office one day in 1971 and asked its owner-editor, Bert Mudge, whether he was insulted when people called the paper ‘the local rag’.
‘It was a good question,’ Bert told me, ‘but it’s about ten years since I’ve heard the paper referred to as “the rag” or the “two minute silence”.’ Bert thinks the country-town newspaper is a better product now than it was in the past. When Yass was a two-newspaper town the competition made the papers economically weak and frightened to offend.
Bert Mudge, in his sixties, is not frightened to offend. He has worked on the Yass Tribune all his life, having inherited it from his father along with a labour radicalism. Among the 250 newspapers in Australia, it was one of the few, if not the only, country newspaper that carried a radical line.
‘I said at a country press conference that I was the only paper with Labor sympathies and two other owners jumped up and said they had Labor sympathies too. I said, well it’s a pity you don’t show it in your newspapers.’
The Tribune, up to sixteen pages, thumped off a flatbed rotary press Mondays and Thursdays, with editorials and comment against the Vietnam war, capital punishment, apartheid, and for the Labor Party. As well, the paper carried on the traditional duties of the country newspaper: the recording of births, deaths and marriages, social notes, sport, and traffic accidents.
‘I don’t flatter myself that I convert anyone,’ Bert said, ‘but right or wrong I like to write my opinions.’ His piece on the moratorium demonstration against the Vietnam war was typical. He quoted Labor member of parliament Tom Uren’s support for the demonstration, adding in his editorial, ‘Mr Uren expressed the sentiments of another 100 000 people in the country towns who could not join in yesterday’s demonstrations. He also spoke for the other countless thousands in this country who never have the guts to demonstrate against anything more important than the rise in the price of beer.’
One of Bert’s theories is that although there is freedom of speech, the average country-town worker is intimidated. ‘No bank clerk is going to get up at an RSL meeting and express his true opinions when the manager of the bank is sitting on the executive of the organisation.’
As I talked with Bert about country newspapers, something overtook the interview – the presence of Bert’s father. Bert at sixty-three was totally conscious of his father and the Yass Tribune has perfect father-son continuity. Some of the opinions published were those of his father, which in his day he couldn’t afford to publish.
‘My father was my best friend – and still is although he’s been deceased seventeen years. He remains within me.’ Bert quoted his father’s maxims on business and journalism.
‘My father also taught me the value of a quid.’
He told me of the dilemmas of a country editor.
‘I remember a local identity was picked up for driving under the influence after the picnic races. Over the weekend every prominent person in Yass came to us and wanted us not to publish the story. I said to my father – and I hate myself to this day for saying it – I said that maybe we shouldn’t publish it. My father eventually told one of them that if they gave him 5000 pounds he wouldn’t publish the story – and they’d own the newspaper. My father said to me then, “Either we run the newspaper or they do”.
‘Then, later on, one of my father’s friends, a local bank manager he’d been playing bridge with for years, was charged with misappropriation of funds. My father told me to write the story without holding anything back but that they didn’t want to see a word of it. That’s the agony of being a country newspaper editor.’
Had he taken his radicalism straight from his father? Bert thought at first that he had not but as we talked he found himself quoting his father and agreed that many of his opinions had come from his father. But the educative experience that had built, tested and confirmed his views was three years in a prisoner-of-war camp during the Second World War. ‘We discussed everything that concerned people – we argued. That was my education. We talked to stop ourselves from being hungry.’
Bert was unaffiliated with any political party and told me that he was a ‘swinging voter’. I queried this.
‘Well, I can’t remember when I haven’t voted Labor,’ he said smiling, but added, ‘I think I voted Country Party once but I don’t for the life of me know why.’
His radical policies went against the grain of the basically Country Party district in which his newspaper circulates. The town and district lives off wool and passing traffic. Yass is a town of motels and service stations. It is within the Labor-held seat of Burrinjuck. But Bert has run editorials critical of the sitting member too.
As far as he knows, his policies cost Bert no loss of advertising and only three subscribers out of his 2100 circulation.
‘I’ve lost no important friendships and I get good letters to the editor.’
The letters to the editor in the Tribune were treated differently from the usual way in other newspapers. They were usually printed over two columns and boxed in for emphasis.
He had sent complimentary subscriptions to every local boy who went to Vietnam – about twenty-five of them – but was disappointed at the absence of a reaction from them to his argument on the war.
‘I had two young local chaps just back from Vietnam come into the office and thank me for sending the paper. They said it kept them going while they were up there. But they didn’t mention the editorials or the war at all.’
Bert’s anti-Americanism came from his father. He said that his father had read the Saturday Evening Post from cover to cover up to a couple of years before he died. One day he had cancelled the subscription to the Post and said, ‘Bert, Australia has more to fear from the Americans than from the Russians.’
As I left the Tribune office, Bert showed me a letter. ‘This is the sort of letter that makes it all worthwhile,’ he said.
It was a subscription renewal from a former Yass army mate now living in Sydney. ‘Enjoy your editorials,’ it said. ‘Hope we see a few years yet, Bert – you to publish it and me to read it … the other night I heard on the radio “Is the Straight-talking Australian a Myth?” – and I thought of you.’
The End of the Libertarians
The Andersonians, the libertarians, the Push – that ‘remarkably original provincial cult’ in Sydney (see Darcy Waters’ profile, click here) – has had a number of journals. Its first was Free thought, which began in 1932. Then came the Libertarian and the Sydney Line (a booklet), the Pluralist, and the Libertarian Broadsheet which began in 1957. The Broadsheet ran for ninety-five issues. The following documents mark the end of this period in Sydney intellectual history and the end of the Broadsheet after twenty-four years.
To the meeting on the future of the libertarian Broadsheet, 13 August 1979, from Frank Moorhouse
Some ideas:
Finance
(1) We circulate 500 foundation subscribers with the first issue and ask them for $10.
&nb
sp; (2) I have mixed feelings about funding agencies and the lack of resilience they induce in a magazine and the impact that the agency has on ‘shape’ of content, even though they do not dictate content.
(3) I’m willing to make a $50 contribution to the setting up of a libertarian-oriented magazine.
Name
I don’t like Rough Red because it has communist connotations. Why not Rough Red and Black? Or revive the Pluralist, or Red and Black? Or the Sydney Line?
Editorial
(1) An ongoing critical examination of the policies and theories of the marxist groups.
(2) Establish links with left opposition in the eastern European countries (we have connections with Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and could find others).
(3) Erotica and other imaginative writing.
(4) Specific articles could be done on Spanish anarchism since Franco, the reassertion of cultural inhibition in Australia, an article on the French neo-Freudians.
Letter from Jim Baker to Frank Moorhouse, August 1979
Dear Frank,
I had lectures on Monday and didn’t go to the meeting, but I was able to pass on your letter for tabling at the meeting.
However, it appears the meeting was not a great success. No decisions were made. I’m told there was not much enthusiasm for doing anything … I think things will still be in abeyance for some time …
Radical and Other Christmases in the Seventies
Christmas breakfast with the communists
The cards – many of them UNICEF – were displayed on the mantelpiece. The presents were distributed from a symbolic tree made from honesty-bush. The children and the grand-children were present. The music was the singing of Donovan and Lena Horne. Both the mother and the father are members of the Communist Party of Australia, although not as active as they have been in the past. Their son, a photographer, lives with a woman who has a child by him and a child by another man she has lived with. The other daughter is a teacher, separated from her husband, who now lives a back-to-nature life in the country.
Days of Wine and Rage Page 34