Mug Shots

by Barry Oakley

  Option three was a trip to the city along St Kilda Road, then lined with mansions (since replaced by sterile shoeboxes). One continued into Swanston Street, where we’d peer up at the Manchester Unity Building, Melbourne’s first skyscraper. ‘Fourteen floors,’ said my father, as we took in this wonder. Then on to dubiously multicultural Carlton. ‘That’s the university,’ my father would say authoritatively, and we’d look over at this steepled enclave, where no Oakley had ever set foot, until a single word took me there.

  Unexplored territory

  When the time came in 1950 to leave suburbia (at least during the day) where Victas were turning grass into lawn and Hills hoists lifting white washing skyward, I encountered an unnerving absence. Eleven years of roll calls and regulations were replaced by total indifference. There were lectures and tutorials, but whether you went was your business. No one seemed to care what you wore or what you said.

  I joined a shabby aristocracy that flaunted rollneck sweaters, duffle coats and sandals. In the University Caf we stirred the world around in our coffee cups and talked of Kafka. Suburbia had to be shed, and no one did it more spectacularly than Barry Humphries, who could be seen in the library studying like everyone else—only he did it with the back of his chair resting on the floor, his long legs waving in the air like a mantis.

  I followed the smart money and skipped lectures, until I realised what I was missing. A.D. Hope, in a suit of blue serge even in summer, mumbling on Dostoevsky—memorably if you sat up close. How could this man, who dressed like an inspector of schools, and spoke as if we were sharing not a lecture but a secret, write poetry of such sensuality as Imperial Adam? ‘She promised on the turf of paradise/ Delicious pulp of the forbidden fruit;/ Sly as the snake she loosed her sinuous thighs.’

  Or Ian Maxwell, a small man with an imperial head, intoning Paradise Lost from memory (‘He’ll weep in a minute,’ said the student next to me, who was repeating the subject.) Or A.R. Chisholm, an even smaller man with an even bigger head—a head that French erudition seemed to have enlarged, a head that had nodded and noted when listening to some of the giants of French literature, resulting in the following essay subject appearing on the noticeboard: ‘Paul Valery once said to me that the poet is himself unaware of some of the images that may radiate to the reader’s mind. Discuss.’ Or Vin Buckley, smaller still, and compensating with the gravity of his delivery as he opened up A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for us, still glowing with the shock of the new.

  I was entering not one realm but two. After a chance encounter up at the shops, when I was acknowledged, as a queen might a subject, I forced myself into a public phone booth, inhaled its stuffy metallic smells with some calming deep breathing, and dialled Valerie’s number, praying I wouldn’t get her terrifying Major-General father. Saved: Valerie answered. My suggestion we see Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky at the New Theatre was met with a pause (puzzlement? incredulity?) and then ‘okay’.

  Though it sounded like grudging agreement, I pressed on, and on the Saturday night I penetrated the G— living room in an ill-fitting gabardine overcoat, and faced the parents, who seemed to start back slightly, as if I were from another planet (I was).

  We bussed it into town—my offhandedness a pretence, hers looking like the real thing. Would Eisenstein bond us? I’d seen Alexander Nevsky at the university, and told her it was the greatest film ever made, but when the Teutonic Knights advanced over the ice to Prokofiev’s music, she laughed. I was offended, and she was bored. The evening was a failure. ‘What?’ said Dick Hughes afterwards. ‘You didn’t even get to two?’ I’d escorted Valerie to her front gate, it was a moonlit night, and I hadn’t even got to two.

  Still, there was always the other realm, which gave itself to me at once. Thanks to my university tutors, the doors of the Great Hall of Literature were opened, and after a few preliminary struggles with syntax, I felt completely at home. Yeats was easy, Hopkins and Eliot more difficult. But once their codes were cracked and their meanings broken into, the effort made the pleasure even greater.

  It was wonderful to listen to the poets, but the supreme music came from James Joyce. If the Portrait gleamed with newness, what could Ulysses possibly be like? I hurried into Cheshire’s bookshop one Saturday morning and there it was, not long unbanned, between bare green wartime-economy edition boards. I can still remember taking it home on the red bus. It seemed to give off heat, like new-baked bread.

  Unguided by introduction or commentary, I sailed through it in wonderment, missing much but getting the free-flowing gist. The old language had been turned into a new language, the old style smelted with something strange and the old respectability opened above and below. A skylight had appeared over the house of fiction, and underneath the literary drawing room a trapdoor gave on to a cellar where instinct and ribaldry ruled.

  Ulysses is probably responsible for more bad prose than any other novel, and a modest portion of it was mine. Stream-of-consciousness short stories were speedily sent off to Melbourne University Magazine, and just as speedily sent back. All now lost and forgotten, save for one surviving shard: ‘He looked past Luna Park with its writhing switchbacks, past the oriental domes of the baths, to the spire-prick and chimney-poke of Melbourne city.’

  If Joyce was leading a literary revolution, Marxists were attempting the same in university politics. There were rousing lunchtime speeches from Labor Club luminaries like Ian Turner and Ken Gott, warning of the class war to come because of the immiseration of the proletariat—who, in the real world, seemed to be doing quite well.

  The novelist Frank Hardy, notorious for his crudely carpentered Power Without Glory, was once brought in for extra munition. He put on a fiery performance. ‘It’s people like you lot,’ he shouted up at the students ranged around him, ‘who’ll be the first to go.’ That was his thesis and we had the antithesis—a shower of orange peel and paper aeroplanes. He wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

  The Labor Club’s noise eventually reached the ears of the Melbourne Establishment, which responded in the person of F.L. Edmunds, MLA for Hawthorn. As recalled by Max Marginson, he described university academics as ‘socialists, parlour pinks’—and in a pryotechnical final flourish, ‘dingoes crowing from their dunghills’.

  Are you engagé?

  At the same time, there was a quieter revolution afoot across Tin Pan Alley at Newman College. Inside this Mayan/Byzantine fantasy designed by Walter Burley Griffin, Catholic students were engaging in the unprecedented activity of thinking for themselves. They were trying to join together what the Australian Church had put asunder: ‘Catholic’ and ‘intellectual’.

  The Newman Society’s Ian Turner and Ken Gott were Vincent Buckley and Bill Ginnane. They were the leaders of what was called the intellectual apostolate, quoting French theologians we’d never heard of, to the effect that we had to complete the work of the secular university by opening it up to the sacred. The clergy had always been the leaders, with the laity sheepishly following. Now there was a double reversal: the world was to be affirmed, not denied, and we were the ones who were going to do it.

  There were meetings, Masses and summer camps at Point Lonsdale, where an assortment of sandals, shorts and floral dresses, under a tin roof that pinged with the heat, would listen to talks about the power of the incarnation to transform the world. But there were also earthy dissenters who thought the jargon of being engagé with the milieu pretentious. ‘What’s all this weltanschauung nonsense?’ objected one of them. ‘Why can’t you just say a way of looking at the world?’

  And there were parties in Parkville, opposite the university. One night, when I was being hammered by John Dormer, the eccentric heir to an English beer fortune, I beat a backwards retreat—and there in a corner, scarcely able to sit, let alone talk, was Vin Buckley, the guru himself, comatose with liquor. I was shocked. That night, my university education really began.

  Plotting a Catholic takeover of Melbourne University in 1953 (from le
ft: the author, Greg O’Loughlin, Des O’Grady, Brian Buckley).

  Archbishop Mannix was uneasily tolerant of the Newman Society, very much preferring a different apostolate, run by B.A. Santamaria, under the superbly meaningless title of The Movement. The Cold War was warming up, and The Movement was on the move. It organised Industrial Groups (Santamaria had a genius for anodyne titles) to infiltrate the Labor Party, and Dr Evatt, Labor’s leader, a man of massive intellect and minuscule political acumen, was being sawn off at the knees. The Groups (to their credit) battled the Communists in the unions, and from Catholic pulpits wildlife imagery flourished. While the Reds were white-anting us from within, the priests would inveigh, the Communist octopus was slithering southwards from China, with tentacles poised to embrace us. We were trapped between the termites and the calamari.

  For Catholics, the fifties were not a time of suburban torpor. It was always five minutes to midnight. From anonymous offices in Swanston Street, men with briefcases went out to the parishes. At the West St Kilda branch of the Catholic Young Men’s Society, which I’d joined to play cricket and football, we were told that unless we got off our backsides, the yellow hordes would soon be swarming through the streets.

  Tired of the aerated theologies of the Newman Society and awkward with girls, a few of us retreated to the Campion Society, whose members were earthier, but just as fond of talk. We would gather on a Saturday night round a table forested with bottles, and smoke, drink and talk, often till dawn. Was The Movement sanctioned by the bishops, and therefore Catholic Action? Or was our affiliation with it a matter of choice, and therefore no more than the action of Catholics? Was Santamaria manipulating Mannix, or was it the other way round? My father had his own theory about the Catholics and the Communists. ‘They’re all in it together.’

  Green in the face

  After innumerable beery nights in smoke-filled rooms, eight of us decided on a hitchhike round Tasmania. My fellow Campions included Bill Hannan and Ron Fitzgerald, both to become leading educationalists, Kevin Keating, soon to join the Dominican order, Desmond O’Grady, later a writer and Rome correspondent for a number of newspapers, and the prickly Ron Conway.

  Conway, who became a prominent Melbourne psychologist, had an unnerving habit of applying his alleged analytic talent to the rest of us. I and one or two others in the group, he confided as we flew to Tasmania, were heading for a crisis. There was indeed a crisis—when we split into two quartets, how to avoid being in the same one as Ron?

  Tasmanians proved extraordinarily generous in those innocent times, and trucks and utilities stopped for us, despite our dishevelment and number. I had only two dramas. In the first, after we decided to pair off to get quicker lifts, my companion Bernie Barbour and I were dropped off at night beside a paddock. We got through the fence, dug our hip holes, laid our groundsheets and slipped into our sleeping bags.

  Not prisoners on day release—Catholic lads on a hitchhike around Tasmania.

  When I woke up, at dawn, a trio of bulls was giving us close and unwelcoming inspection. It took a lot of whispering to wake Bernie up, which he did to this: ‘Don’t move.’ We didn’t move. The bulls didn’t move. ‘Stay horizontal,’ Bernie offered. We stayed horizontal. The bulls continued to stare at us. They looked hard and mean. The farmer that now happened to drive past would have shared their puzzlement. He would have seen two green sleeping bags, caterpillaring like giant pupae towards the fence.

  The second trauma came at the end of the hitchhike, when we boarded the geriatric Taroona for the trip back to Melbourne. I’ve always been a poor sailor, dating back to the days when my father took me on fishing trips in Port Phillip Bay, and I’d spend the time seasick in the bottom of the boat, while he tossed empty beer bottles into the water and pulled flathead out of it.

  The Taroona bucked across Bass Strait all night, and after leaving my lavatory-sized cabin to throw up in the genuine one, I couldn’t find my way back, and opened a succession of identical doors onto a variety of snoring and suffering passengers, before finally finding my own. Much to my embarrassment (twenty-one, and still a mummy’s boy) my mother was at Port Melbourne to greet me, and looked shocked: ‘You’re green in the face.’

  Ron, myself and the mystic marriage

  After this adventure, Ron Conway had taken a puzzling fancy to me. He would invite me to his Middle Park cottage where he lived with his mother, usher me into a room crammed with books and records—he was the Catholic Advocate’s music critic at the time—put on a Mahler symphony, and we’d share its rhapsodic transcendencies in silence. Sometimes, in the middle of an epiphany, there’d be a timid knock on the door. Ron, not pleased, would open it a few inches only. A pallid hand would pass him a plate of biscuits, then the door would be smartly closed. I never saw more of his mother than her fingers.

  Ron belonged to a Catholic theatre group called the Cardijnian Players, where his fondness for dominance found an outlet in directing and writing. By 1951, when I thought there was modest evidence of literary ability, he was quick to put me straight. ‘Your talent, I have to say, is for the cameo. I prefer the broad canvas and epic sweep.’

  He soon got what he wanted. Ron was commissioned to write a play about the life of St Jean Baptiste de la Salle, founder of the order of Brothers at whose school he taught. The result, as described in Conway’s Way, his self-serving memoir (is there any other kind?) was as follows: ‘Suitably steeped in the history of 17th Century France, I wrote four huge acts, with nearly 40 speaking parts … the sheer scope of the play supports the conviction I’ve shared with the composer Vaughan Williams: “I have always preferred the imperfections of epics to the perfection of miniatures.’’ ’

  Though there wasn’t a single joke in The Courtier of God, it remains one of the funniest productions I’ve ever seen. Conway had dragooned some of his colleagues into performing. The sight of Desmond O’Grady trembling with terror as the French statesman Colbert, and other untidy Campion Society members in pantaloons and plumes mumbling their lines before a flouncing Louis XIV (played, inevitably, by the author) sent Bill Hannan and myself, safe in the back stalls, into convulsions.

  There was a chorus, featuring the Women of France (‘Lo! The fields of France lie golden in the sun, ripe for the harvest’) but the high point came just before a keenly awaited interval. The curtain suddenly dropped, leaving de la Salle, who was seated on a chair having an attack of melancholia, marooned at the front of the stage. Though supposed to be near to tears, when he looked up and realised his predicament, he burst out laughing and propelled himself backwards though the drapes. In the front row, the heads of the distinguished hierarchy invited for the occasion bobbed up and down in something close to hysteria.

  In the hope of saving me from what he saw as an impending crisis, Ron paid me a visit, and in our lounge room, with my brother giggling behind the door, formally offered me his friendship, and laid out a manifesto that was to govern it: mutual respect; a refusal to criticise the other behind their back; and a readiness to accompany the other on outings of a cultural nature. It sounded like an emotional contract, and produced in me a desire to flee. He was jilted, and our relationship cooled.

  By the time the Campion Society had honed their distinctions, Vladimir Petrov had defected, the Industrial Groups had split the Labor Party, Menzies had won the 1954 election, and I had become a Bachelor of Arts (Pass).

  The West St Kilda CYMS branch ignored the warnings of a Communist apocalypse and continued with their customary activities of drinking and sport. I now opened the batting for their cricket team. Our home ground was the mysteriously named Peanut Farm, behind Luna Park. A large crowd inexplicably attended our opening match, only to turn their backs in a reverse Mexican wave at regular intervals. The Farm was the headquarters of the local SP betting industry, and cricket gave them the perfect between-race pretext.

  Practising for the West St Kilda Catholic Young Men’s Society football team.

  Cricketing standards were
low, but there was a nine-gallon keg set up on the back of a utility as an incentive to dispose of the opposition quickly. When all else failed, as it often did, the captain would call on Maurie to send down his medium pacers. Maurie, a crimson-hued alcoholic, had a whirring windmill action that could shoot the ball at the close-in fieldsmen, the batsman, and occasionally at the wicket. Once he whirled the ball so hard he bowled himself in the foot and had to be carried off.

  Horrie, king of the chimps

  Secondary studentships provided only a small living allowance, compelling me to show a range of incompetencies in part-time jobs: stuffing kapok into pillows (lasting one week), builders’ labourer (four days, after falling down a manhole) and scrubbing thousands of ball marks off the walls of three squash courts at my father’s club (‘the exercise will do you good’).

  There was also the Titles Office, where there was casual work as a filing clerk. This involved climbing metal companionways to retrieve or return bulky folios of land titles, which gave up generations of dust when opened or closed.

  The job attracted a variety of what were then called displaced persons. They included a gentle Hungarian intellectual called Tom Pick whose family had once had a sausage factory in Budapest. He was scholarly, owlishly bespectacled, and occasionally unintentionally patronising. ‘What? You have read Apollinaire?’ And Hans, who’d flown with the Luftwaffe and had seen ‘terrible things’. He had a high nervous colour and always seemed on the verge of eruption. One morning, when we were enjoying our extended tea break high up on the ­catwalks, we heard a commotion below. Hans was having a fit on the floor. Something had triggered a wartime memory, and staff had to pinion his arms and legs as he lay there, crucified and screaming.