by Mark Dapin
It was in fashion that Fraser’s curious genius – his commercially astute aesthetic sensibility, and his ability to sell himself as a man of discernment to people without taste – had its most appropriate outlet. He knew how to dress, and he knew about clothes. He stood out in an office partly staffed by men in crumpled chain store shirts, polyester trousers and novelty ties. He was probably the most elegant man in newspapers, and he produced Australia’s most elegant men’s magazine, and he was the first to give any real thought to how its fashion pages might service its readers. We ran comparative reviews of plain white shirts, priced between $50 and $350, tested for comfort, quality and fit by a young city trader. It was a service to the readers, something useful we could offer them. Every year they bought half a dozen white shirts, and they had few reference points to ease their choice. We later looked at chinos, navy blazers and brogues: all items Fraser thought essential to a complete wardrobe.
The journalists wrote about the development of the garment, the meaning of the detail, how to spot style in turn-ups, collars and cuffs. We never ran conventional stylist-driven fashion shoots, where male models pouted lasciviously at other male models. For Fraser, it was important not to even show a model’s face. He believed women looked at a supermodel in a miniskirt and thought, ‘I could wear that,’ but men saw a handsome man in a suit and worried, ‘The model’s got more hair than I have,’ or ‘That bloke looks like a poofter,’ and did not notice the clothes.
Outside of fashion, many of the features were comically dull, but it did not matter. Nobody had to buy the magazine. It existed for advertisers to buy into. The ‘environment’ created by the AFR Magazine’s editorial was perfect for high-end advertisers, because it was a landscape of luxury yachts, rich people, classic paintings, rich people, beautiful gardens, rich people, exquisite photography and rich people. In a move markedly less successful than The Picture’s brave decision to allow its readers to write much of the magazine, Fraser even commissioned some stories from rich people.
Soon after the AFR Magazine was launched, Fairfax moved into ‘the new building’. The Jones Street headquarters was always somehow ‘the old building’, even when there was nothing to contrast it with, whereas ‘the new building’ looks brand new today. Every computer terminal was packed up and transported from Ultimo to Darling Harbour, and Fairfax took over the top eight floors of the IBM tower, on the corner of Sussex and Market streets.
It was an exhilarating place to work, with views across the harbour and out to the Blue Mountains. The printers were shunted off to Chullora, in the distant, unvisited west, and Fairfax shed the last of its proletarian stubble. Whereas the old canteen offered roast of the day with three veg, the new cafe sold focaccias and pasta dishes, and nobody was ever found asleep inside.
The AFR Magazine was implausibly successful, a sumptuously dressed shop window for Tag Hauer watches, Louis Vuitton luggage and Argyle diamonds. It minted money for Fairfax and, at its height, added 10 000 to the sales of the host edition of the AFR.
D moved to a small house of her own in Leichhardt. I found a place in Balmain with Brian, the father of her sister’s child. He spent most nights in his bedroom, surfing the internet, which in those days was something only flamboyantly intelligent people did, even if they were looking for porn. We had a lovely old house overlooking the docks, but only our bedrooms were furnished. The downstairs rooms were hollow and unused, and I hung a heavy bag in the basement and turned the room into a gym. We lived like bachelors. Brian threw all waste vegetable matter into the back garden, on the grounds that it was biodegradable. Nobody ever cleaned the bathroom.
D and I tried to keep alive a relationship that had been hit by a truck then reversed over and crushed. We should have split up when we started to live three suburbs apart, but we were each determined not to be the one who gave up and therefore – somehow – proved the other right. We argued with our customary manic energy, and were left with little strength for anything else. I once read a definition of love as four parts sympathy and one part lust. The lust had been strangled by nightclothes, and we had long discarded any mutual sympathy. We each thought the other was wrong – and, in fact, represented everything that was wrong with the world.
Our lives were shifting apart. We stopped looking for anything in common. She found her comfort in her garden, I found mine in the pub. Somehow, the AFR Magazine crew – except for the editor – had become a small gang of mates who hung out together and went drinking all the time. The new art director, the staff writer, the casual sub, the AFR reporter who sat at the desk opposite us and I all began to spend long nights at St Elmo’s, a pub which – in the great tradition of journalists’ bars – had only one factor to recommend it: proximity. It was thirty seconds walk from Darling Park.
St Elmo’s was an empty, soulless pub that seemed to have been conceived as a theme bar, but the theme had been forgotten over time. Upstairs was a lingerie restaurant, whatever that may be. In the basement were pool tables. SMH journalists rarely drank in St Elmo’s; it was urgently uncool, preposterously dire. Instead, it was favoured by the IT support staff, SMH artists and AFR subs. Often, Fairfax employees were the only people in there. D did not like St Elmo’s, she did not like pubs, but with my friends and a pinball machine, a jukebox, a late-opening bar and felt-upholstered seats, I felt more comfortable than I had since the Rex.
Chris married the woman he had gone away with the weekend I left Jo. A few of us met him at the Pyrmont Bridge Hotel at nine o’clock on the morning of his wedding. We drank a breakfast beer on tables looking out over Darling Harbour. D and I went to the service and the reception together, and when she had drunk enough, she said to me, ‘If you don’t marry me, I’m going to leave you.’
I had drunk enough to say. ‘Fine. Well, let’s always stay friends,’ hug her and walk away. It hurt me to be with her, and I couldn’t stand to hurt myself anymore.
So it had all been for nothing.
In our years together, we had argued about academic qualifications; the admission policy of the bowling clubs; the amount of time it took her to get ready to go out; answering machines; archaisms in prose; Asian food; astrology; authority; backpackers; belching; Bill Clinton; body fat; brevity in journalism; buying vegetables and not eating them; cafes; camping; China; clichés in conversation; coffee; debt; drinking; drugs; the effectiveness of alternative medicine; empathy; English trade union militants; the ethics of capitalism; the existence of an inner life; the existence of the working class; the existence of the jacaranda tree in the quadrangle at Sydney University at such times as that tree was unobserved; financial planners; friends who try to sell you things; the French contribution to global culture; furniture; gardens and gardening; George Steiner’s In Bluebeard’s Castle; getting out of bed on the weekend; going to church; going to sleep at night; graphic design; Helen Demidenko; herbal tea; holidays in cold climates; honesty; housework; how to cook hot chips; the Hunger Project; in-store credit cards; Jean-Paul Sartre; Jesus; Joanne Whalley-Kilmer; joint bank accounts; justice and vengeance; lay-bys; lending money; the length of her hair; the length of my hair; the loss of my wedding ring; masturbation; the meaning of Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia; moral relativism; motivational speakers; my tendency to introduce a plural subject with the reduced form ‘there’s’; old people; organic bread; papal responsibility for the holocaust; Pearl Jam; the possibility of objective truth; the price of soft drinks in health food shops; protest songs; punk rock; racist friends; the rationality of owning more than one copy of the same book; reconciliation; recycling; Red Hot Chili Peppers; relationships with ex-partners; religious faith; respect for bosses; responsibility; scientology; a scuba diving instructor who checked out her body; seeing Australia first; self-help books; selling things to your friends; shawls; the size of her vocabulary; state of origin football; staying in touch with former workmates; the slogans used by the African National Congress in the struggle against apartheid; the sugar content of a mango shake in th
e Philippines; tea-tree oil; television; Time; toxins; the trauma suffered by rape victims; U2; unfair-dismissal legislation; vendor bidding at real estate auctions; violence; the way I spoke to my mother; wearing pyjamas; whether children showed deliberate malice; whether fashion trickled down from haute couture or rose up from the street; whether I was being pretentious by reading Vanity Fair in the Bagel House; whether I was just like her dad; whether I was just like her ex-boyfriend, Stephen; whether Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of Day was a political novel or a romance; whether Landmark Education used similar methods to the Communist Party; whether the movie Strictly Ballroom was about ballroom dancing or ‘about’ self-actualisation; whether the reader or the author supplied meaning to the text; whether women could wear long-sleeved shirts over track pants; white socks; why she did not write fiction; why I couldn’t be more like her former flatmate, Darren; why I kept checking the postbox; why I preferred certain clothing labels; working environments; the writing of wills; Y-fronts; yoga; young people.
We had fought heroic battles over arcane trivia, shed blood for ephemera and jetsam, exhausted ourselves with banal recriminations, desperate grudges and deliberate misunderstandings. Most of it was my fault.
It was coming up to Christmas 1995, and I decided to go back to the UK for a holiday. I travelled via Nepal, and went trekking in the Himalayas, alone and without a guide. I wrote D a crazed, ungenerous letter, saying everything I did not mean.
SIX In which Ralph is called Ralph
When I returned from the UK I spent eighteen months working as freelance writer and journalism teacher. I wrote long, serious features for HQ and Good Weekend. I covered mass media for Todd’s Desktop magazine, and in 1996 I wrote an article on men’s magazines. I interviewed Phil Abraham, Brad Boxall and P-mag identity Jack Marx, and we all concluded there was no room for a non-porn men’s title in Australia. Australian men bought mags to laugh at and wank over, nothing more.
In 1997, everything changed, like D, over night. Every serious Australian publisher was looking at starting up or buying the licence to a men’s lifestyle magazine. Boxall was working on a launch for ACP, and Jack was on staff. The new men’s titles had come to Australia after their market-shaking success in the UK. The first of the UK titles was Loaded, founded in 1994 by James Brown, formerly a journalist on the weekly New Musical Express.
Brown’s Loaded was a chaotic masterpiece of individual vision. It lent a partially authentic voice to the playground howl of a generation that did not want to grow up. It was aimed at my class in every sense: lower-middle-class kids building frighteningly serious careers, looking for comfort in shared memories of Georgie Best, Johnny Rotten and Dr Who; my class at school – the boys who could read and write; my level of classiness – blokes who had never stopped believing that Sta-Prest trousers, tasselled loafers and a Fred Perry shirt were cool. It cared about the things we cared about – drinking, taking drugs, eating cheese-and-onion crisps, remembering old Carry On films and old laughs with your mates. Every men’s magazine since has aimed to capture ‘what men talk about in the pub’, but none has succeeded with the wit and acumen of Loaded. The young Loaded, like a schoolboy, was not particularly concerned about women. The cover star was as likely to be Michael Caine as a bird (and Loaded loved the word ‘bird’, because it evoked The Liver Birds and Confessions of a Window Cleaner, a generation of fag-smoking, lager-drinking soul boys in high-waisters and platform soles – the readers’ older brothers).
Many Australian journalists wanted to produce their own Loaded, but they did not understand what Loaded was. I knew the magazine-that-became-Ralph was in development. Brad invited me to the windowless cell in Park Street where Seddo had been condemned to work on his dummy, then left us together to talk about what I could do for him. I turned over the pages of the secret mock-up book, through stories that all seemed to be about cars, and decided I could not do anything. The project was called ‘Burn Out’, and looked similar to modified car magazine Street Machine, but with a Batchelor-&-Spinster-bumper-sticker, cold-slab-of-XXXX, two-packs-of-Winnie-Blue, meet-youse-at-the-wet-t-shirt-stage feel.
‘Burn Out’ was a kind of Seddo lifestyle magazine, replete with road trips, bike reviews and lawnmower racing. Seddo was a surfer and revhead, a laidback, earthy, popular bloke with laughing eyes. He lived in a fibro house in the suburbs, and had previously published his own motorbike magazine. Along with Brad and Butler-White, he had attended a seminar given by Loaded’s James Brown in Sydney. They came away from it with the idea that soccer was the glue that held Loaded’s audience together, and decided the car culture was to Australia what the football culture was to the UK. Young Australian men gave their love to their Falcons, Monaros and utes. The Ford vs Holden battle was Australia’s Manchester United vs Liverpool.
Seddo and I stumbled through a typically awkward editor-contributor meeting, at the end of which he said, ‘Well, I haven’t got anything for you at the moment, but if I think of something, I’ll let you know,’ and I said the same to him.
I went out with a friend, treated her appallingly, and spent a while on my own. Brian and I moved to a unit in Louisa Road, Birchgrove. I thought it was the most beautiful street in the most beautiful suburb in the most beautiful country in the world (although I was always irritated by the idea that the other side of the road might be better). From my bedroom window, I saw yachts glide across the waters of Sydney Harbour like feathers over wax. I was hypnotised by calm and soothed by storms. I loved to watch the rain. I started boxing again in the mornings with Kon, as the ferries cruised past Garden Island. Whenever I did not train, I missed the exercise and the challenge, although I did not necessarily miss Kon’s glove in my face. In Birchgrove, I boxed twelve three-minute rounds, mostly on the pads, at 7 am, three days a week.
Towards the end of the year, I became gripped by the idea that it was my fault D and I had split up, and I had not given our relationship a chance. D had stopped talking to me, so the idea grew on its own, uninformed by any recent experience. I also became strangely concerned that she would not be provided for in her old age. One afternoon, I rang her to urge her to make contributions to her superannuation fund. I asked her if she would go out with me again, and she laughed in the way a more cruel woman might laugh at a lunatic’s trousers falling down in the street.
I then decided to become a new person and win her back.
Obviously, you cannot just become a new person in your living room. I flew to Sri Lanka and the Maldives to mend my ways. There, I gave up smoking and read Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, which I mistakenly believed to be D’s favourite book. I sent her letters about how much I liked The Portrait of a Lady and elephants (D loved animals, and elephants were the only animals evident in Sri Lanka). I was completely sincere, determined to change. I would become the man she wanted, then we would both be happy.
D had never actually said she wanted a man who wore a suit, but when I came back to Australia five weeks later, I bizarrely presented myself to her in a new suit and tie. I tried not to swear, and talked about my stopover in Paris, the short stories I had written in the Maldives, and the novels – well, the one novel I had read – of Henry James.
We decided to get married, but we split up again three weeks later.
Photographer Paul McIver and I produced a two-part feature about martial arts weapons for Penthouse. We found men who had mastered the sword, the chain and the butterfly knife, and some other men who liked to dress up in padded suits and hit each other very hard with sticks. I put on the breastplate and helmet and let them hit me very hard with sticks, to see what it felt like. It felt like being hit very hard with sticks, and was particularly disorienting when blows landed on my face and head.
The Master of Sticks conceded there were few real-life occasions on which anybody was attacked with two sticks of equal length, but maintained his skills could be used equally well by a man wielding any number of things, including a mobile phone. This intrigued me, and I tho
ught about it often. Mobile phones were larger and more solid in those days, but they still did not look much like sticks.
A few weeks later, I went to the Dundee Arms with a couple of AFR journalists. The Dundee was a five-star hotel bar dressed up as an old sandstone pub. It had no regulars and no atmosphere, but since St Elmo’s had closed down, and the Shelbourne had not yet opened, it sold the closest beer to the Fairfax building. The journalists were discussing who was the greatest sportsman of all time, and had narrowed the field to Don Bradman or Muhammad Ali. Two English lads slithered into the conversation and started to take the piss, the way English lads do, saying Bradman was a mean boxer and Ali a fine cricketer. When we left the Dundee Arms for the Forbes, a more popular city pub, the English lads came with us.
At the Forbes, one of the lads sat across the table from me and talked about the movie Independence Day, which he called a ‘load of shit’. It was Hollywood propaganda, and Hollywood was controlled by the Yids, so Independence Day made heroes out of Yids and niggers.
‘Yids and niggers save the world,’ he said. ‘What bullshit.’
So I hit him in the face with my mobile phone.
It was as effective as the Master of Sticks had promised. He grabbed his eyes, then jumped to his feet and began apologising frantically. Blood ran pleasingly from the bridge of his nose, and I was gently evicted from the bar by a Fijian bouncer with biceps the width of my thighs.
When I told Kon about it, he could not understand why I had not used my fists. He did not realise I was Master of Phone, and gave me no respect. He spent our sparring rounds trying to wind me up about Independence Day, in the hope I would unleash my boxing beast within.
The next time I hit somebody across a pub table, I threw a right cross.