Mug Shots

by Barry Oakley

  When our second, Justin, arrived, he was brought into a house held together with Blu-Tack. He was a crier too, but we had three bedrooms now, so he could be consigned to the far end of the house. The bedrooms soon filled with a third and a fourth. On the arrival of the fifth, the lounge was taken over, which left us with only the kitchen and living room. By the time the quintet was put to bed with their bottles, books, teddies, dolls and blankets, this room was a wall-to-wall litter of toys. Every night we shoved them into cupboards, and every day they came back again. It was a pointless but essential ritual, a brief respite from detritus as relentless as lava.

  We bought a Guernica print to put over the fireplace, and sometimes, on wet days, when the five were at play, war or both, Picasso’s images of chaos and uproar reflected what was happening at floor level. The contrast between day and night became unsettling. Hours of shouts, thumps and howlings—and then, by eight o’clock, after the last story had been told, the last warning issued, silence. We’d sit with a glass of what was still called claret and at about half past ten open the door, creep down the hallways to the front bedroom, lie there and wait for sleep, knowing that when it came it was preparing to leave at least one of the children.

  Married life in Carnegie.

  We had twelve years of broken nights, an endless catacomb of cryings and coughings, that focused particularly on what we called the red room. It had cheap red lino and a red night-light, and when going in there to a child trapped in a dream-terror, you seemed caught up in it too—the glow of ambulances and brothels, the nightmare redness in the heart of the dark. They might have been the swinging sixties for some. For us, they were the sleepless ones.

  There is a scene in Pride and Prejudice where the wealthy and eligible Mr Bingley is seen unexpectedly approaching on his horse, sending the Bennet family running around in crazed circles. Our own reaction, when our leisure was precious, was similar. Is it Uncle Len from Newcastle? Auntie Gladys from Shepparton? Max the mad Fitzroy poet? At an unexpected knock, we’d shepherd the brood into the laundry and hide.

  One lonely bachelor friend—we always had one lonely bachelor friend—used to outwit us by coming round the back, so we put a dustbin against the side gate as an early warning system. Once we heard it move, five little children had to be hidden and hushed. Finally the problem solved itself. One of the kids peeped out a window just as he was looking in, and he went away for good.

  Every weekend, our boisterous household was rivalled by our next-door neighbours—an elderly couple and their middle-aged son. They lived in a state of passive alcoholism during the week and broke out on Saturday, pursuing one another from room to room while roaring insults. Next to them was another middle-aged misfit son who lived with his mother and went on peeping expeditions on summer nights. And next to them again lived a large, sullen Slavonic man who stared out at the world from his front gate and rarely went beyond it. One night he shuffled in his slippers to the railway line at the end of the street and was killed at the pedestrian crossing. Carnegie was not as characterless as I first thought.

  Responsibility avoided again

  In 1960 Brian Kiernan, absurdly youthful and freshly graduated MA from the University of Melbourne, arrived at Caulfield and we found much in common. It was a friendship built on books and a lunchtime beer.

  Brian and his partner Suzanne moved into an Italianate mansion called Labassa. It has since been taken over by the National Trust, but was then divided into grand but shabby apartments. Theirs took in a drawing room and ballroom, and sometimes we had dinner there. We’d dine on the ballroom’s podium, with a distant fire burning in the baronial grate, flickering highlights in the wallpaper’s gold.

  To add to its decaying glamour, Joe Lynch, the alcoholic subject of Kenneth Slessor’s Five Bells, once lived in Labassa’s tower:

  Everything had been stowed

  Into this room—500 books all shapes

  And colours dealt across the floor

  And over sills and on the laps of chairs.

  During the sixties, Brian’s essays on such canonical novelists as Joseph Furphy, Xavier Herbert, Christina Stead and Patrick White rescued them from the benign prison of the democratic nationalist tradition, locating them within the vivifying currents of European and American fiction instead.

  These essays, when collected into a book, also rescued Brian himself. They led to a lectureship in English at the University of Sydney, which made the Kiernans pioneers in what later became a minor exodus—the Careys, Williamsons, Oakleys and a number of others leaving Melbourne for sybaritic Sydney.

  Just when I thought I was getting on top of sleepless teaching and settling into a routine, the principal called me into his office. He was a grave, authoritative man, and he asked me, gravely, authoritatively, whether I’d consider being sports master. The more I thought of it the more awful it sounded—so, true to my philosophy of constant movement to avoid responsibility, I applied for a vacancy in the Humanities Department of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

  The interview was a frightening experience. I was confronted by a semi-circle of men, but I had my words ready. ‘Inchoate’ had got me into the university, and I had a small lexicon of others at hand: ‘captious’—as in ‘I don’t want to sound captious, but in some ways Caulfield Technical College wasn’t challenging enough.’ ‘Peremptory’ also came in handy, as did ‘lucubration’, trotted out to let them know I studied at night; ‘recondite’ did not go amiss, and ‘plethora’ and ‘hermeneutics’ were also deployed. I thought afterwards I’d given them persuasive evidence that I would not teach English expression well, but I got the job.

  I joined an institution that had neither bike racks (as in Mildura) nor sports, and was elevated to lecturer, but my stay was short. Long words had got me into the place, and five short ones got me out of it: STUDENT DRINKS BEER IN CLASS. These words were on a Melbourne Herald poster outside Flinders Street station as I, with hundreds of other gaberdined commuters, hurried under the clocks to catch a train home.

  The student’s name was Ryan, and the lecturer involved was me. I walked into the classroom on a Monday morning and Ryan (I later testified in court) was drinking beer from a bottle. He held it high, proudly, like a trumpeter doing a solo. I escorted him from the room and remonstrated with him (the perfect, formal courtroom word, as I continued with my evidence) in the corridor. The defendant (there he was, in the dock, tall, raw-boned, aged about twenty, with a sullen stare) then swore at me and threw a punch. It came at me slowly, and got no further than a shoulder. I grappled with him (another good courtroom word). To continue, in non-legal language: he lunged at me and ripped my shirt. I got him in a headlock, a hold I’d perfected from years of wrestles with my younger brother, and by the time we stopped I was ahead on points.

  Ryan was found guilty of assault, and did a night in the slammer. (Later, tragically, he followed a girl to Tasmania, and when she rejected him he shot himself.) The head of the Humanities Department, an owlish bureaucrat, wasn’t happy with the publicity. I told him he seemed more concerned about the press report than the welfare of his staff. Perhaps, he replied, it might be best if I left. I agreed with him, and went into advertising.

  Has he come good yet?

  In the employment ads, which I scanned regularly, I’d always been attracted to the sound of advertising copywriter, and decided now was the time to try to be one, despite the remonstrances of my father, ever ready to draw on his inexhaustible store of apothegms. (‘Never give up a steady job.’) He reminded me, unnecessarily, that I had a wife and four children to support, and this was not the time to jump ship (his phrase).

  It was 1963 when I leapt from the railings. I was thirty-two, with a handful of stories published in magazines advertising people had never heard of. I was hired as a copywriter by the manager of an agency called National Advertising Services at £2500 a year (heady money for an ex-teacher). The manager, a charming man called Ron Walker, who looked like a more dignifi
ed version of Groucho Marx, was just back from Madison Avenue with a new way of writing ads that he’d learned from a hot agency called Doyle Dane Bernbach.

  DDB (as those in the know called them) had developed a style so understated and clever the customer didn‘t think he was being sold a thing. In the middle of the shouting bazaar of the print ads was this silence, this sharp little half-tone. Picture: a Volkswagen. Caption: GET THE BUG. Copy: No frills. No fins. Just function.’ And so on. Short sentences. Verbs? Forget ’em. Surbordinate clauses? Don’t make me laugh. The art of the deafening whisper.

  NAS had offices in smart St Kilda Road, and I exchanged a chalk-and-talk sports jacket for a new disguise: a sharp suit of hound’s-tooth tweed. I was put in an office overlooking Melbourne Grammar with someone else Ron had gambled on: Morris Lurie. On my first morning, supersmart Barbara Robertson, who looked after the fashion side of the business, came in with a box of lingerie. She held up the unmentionables in turn—bras, panties, negligees—and said she needed something chic about each of them for a fashion brochure—and SAP.

  ‘SAP?’ I said, turning to Lurie who, in his navy-blue suit, looked as short and sharp as a DDB sentence.

  ‘Soon as possible,’ said Lurie. ‘How long have you been in the business?’

  ‘About forty minutes.’ While I was lifting up the erotic underwear and gazing at them nonplussed, Lurie was already tapping at his typewriter, and in half an hour he’d done the lot.

  Academic, prolix and bewildered, I was demoted to less demanding assignments. Paint-tin instructions for Dulux, VW dealer ads, copy for Floor Cleaning Monthly, Quarry Mine and Pit, and Hardware Retailer. For weeks I listened to exchanges I only half understood: letterpress, swing tickets, reverse type, fifty per-cent stipples, wet flongs, logo, repro and litho (wasn’t he an Italian acrobat?).

  The job tickets with copy requirements were brought into us by a begoggled and grinning office boy who knew a lot more about the business than I did. Ron Walker also thought Peter Carey might have possibilities, and when he wrote some Arabian-Nights copy about a new brand of perfume, he too joined the copy department, which was now moved to a flat further down St Kilda Road. Ron, who disliked the front-office meet-the-client charade, came with us. He was our copy chief, with a little office off our big one.

  Lurie’s Talmud, his guide to everything, was the New Yorker. He wore button-down Brooks Brothers shirts and cloth ties and bought Miles Davis records and read John Cheever stories, and while he dreamed of seeing his own fiction between the ads for whisky and pigskin luggage, he worked, as Carey and I did, on prose poems for shampoo and furniture and vinyl tiles, while Ron Walker turned out more copy than the three of us put together.

  One day he opened the door to tell us Dunlop was launching a new range of golf clubs carrying Arnold Palmer’s signature. Did we have any ideas? In half an hour he was back again, before we’d finished our morning coffee and jokes, with a piece of paper in his hand. ‘When You’re The King of Golf’’, he read to us, ‘You don’t sign anything new until it’s perfect.’ We applauded. Ron Walker was the king of copy.

  Lurie and Carey were getting better and better, while I didn’t seem to be improving at all. ‘Ron’s waiting for you to come good,’ Lurie would tell me. Was he Ron’s messenger or just being malicious? Probably both. Still, there was always the literary samizdat Southerly for an occasional story—and for Lurie, the New Yorker for the occasional rejection slip, often written in glowing terms. And then it was Peter Carey’s turn. Tired of being the ninety-pound weakling on Literature Beach, he decided to have a go himself.

  He called his novel Wog, and it was about a man who buries himself in a bunker. He showed us the opening chapter. It was unusual, not to say eccentric. ‘Keep going,’ I said. ‘Don’t bother,’ added Lurie. ‘Wasting your time.’

  Carey did keep going, and just as Lurie encouragingly predicted, no one would publish it. But he was reading and learning fast. At the time, Carmel and I were battling it out in our cold-water weatherboard in Carnegie. We had no TV, no stereo, no car, and four little kids. Peter used to pick me up on a nearby corner on his way to work, and I paid him by giving him the books I reviewed for the Sunday Australian, which formed the basis for his literary education.

  Unlike Lurie, I’ve always been an encourager—so I arranged for Carey and Leigh, his then partner, to meet the publisher John Hooker and his wife at dinner at our place. By that time, Hooker would have read the novel and be in a position to offer some comments. When suitably lubricated, he offered only one: ‘I’ve read your manuscript, and my advice to you is that you’re not a bad writer—you’re not a writer at all.’ Carey and Leigh, indignant, then left, leaving Carmel and me to put up with Hooker’s fulminations. Later, when in bed, we were awakened by a phone call. It was Carey: ‘I want that bastard’s address.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So I can throw a brick through his window.’ I thought it wise not to give it to him, but it didn’t matter. Later, as Carey became more and more successful, metaphorical bricks went hurtling into the Hooker house, each heavier than the last.

  On top of the world

  Ron Walker waited eighteen months for me to come good. Then I gave notice and joined a bigger and duller agency—George Patterson’s, where the account executives and their clients were harder nosed and snappy captions regarded as fancy. The hardest of the noses were attached to the flinty faces of Holden advertising managers. ‘Don’t give us clever,’ they’d say. ‘Give us punchy.’

  The agency regarded their copywriters as tradesmen, to be tucked away at the end of a long corridor in a windowless attic out of sight of their clients. In this merciful isolation I joined Geoff Taylor, novelist and ex-bomber pilot. Our attic was directly above the Regent Theatre in Collins Street, and the soundtrack from afternoon movies would often beguile us as we toiled over our prose.

  Because of its remoteness, our office attracted agency malcontents, who’d come up to have a smoke, tell a dirty story or, once it emerged that I was a Catholic father of four, spread Playboy centrefolds on my desk.

  The Holden executives thought, rightly, that we were also remote from automotive reality, and one day we were taken on a tour of the factory at Fisherman’s Bend. It was an experience I’ve never forgotten. We paused at a door to be given protective glasses, and entered a roaring vastness, a jungle of pipes and cables. Liver-red engines floating high on circuits, intricate organisms waiting to be born. And beside us the assembly line begins, rising from the floor like a secret spring, taking the vehicles’ bones on the long, slow road to completion.

  Men go hard at it from every angle, screwing, riveting, hammering. They have time only to spare us a glance, lest the car inches out of their reach. Then the spray tents, then the drying ovens. Above us the engines dip and dive slowly down to be winched into the chassis. Conception: a Holden is formed. We were peering into capitalism’s intricate guts, the intestinal line where the machines were created—that we, the admen in our pressed suits, had to polish into product. I felt guilty. We were the ones with the dirty hands.

  Coming good was not hard at George Patterson’s—there was no good to come to, just hard-selling copy. My main task was to write material for a magazine called The Accelerator, which promoted Holden spare parts to dealers under the NASCO brand. It was tedious work for both Geoff Taylor and me, and it was in reaction to this that a satirical home movie was planned.

  Geoff brought in his old bomber-pilot helmet and leather jacket, Ridgway of the TV department provided a video camera, and Ramsay of radio did the lights and sound. At Ridgway’s shout of Action!, Taylor, goggled, helmeted and Hitler-moustached, began a lunatic German gibbering in front of a map of Europe. At that moment, Dick Cudlipp, the general manager, came in to introduce a new member of staff. There was a brief freeze-frame, after which no possible explanation could be offered. ‘I see,’ said Cudlipp, and he did see. There was no foreman material here.

  It was job-ad time again. T
here was one for an advertising copywriter in what looked like a safe haven—the Department of Overseas Trade. I collected my sad little advertising samples and presented them to the head of the Publicity Branch, a lean, mean and unsmiling man called A.C. Forrest. He flicked through my proofs without enthusiasm, then said he noted in my application that I’d published stories in magazines he’d never heard of. I explained that they were literary magazines. The word ‘literary’ seemed to set him off. ‘You can forget about all that if you join us.’ True to one of my maxims—agree with whatever is demanded of you and then ignore it—I replied, ‘Of course.’

  Always cover yourself

  I got the job, and joined the confraternity of the public service. Trade Publicity was a journalists’ graveyard where publications of varying degrees of dullness about Australian export products were produced. But I was the only copywriter, so I could set my own pace.

  I wrote prose-poems about carpet sweepers, potato peelers, Nomad aircraft, swizzle sticks, eucalyptus-scented lavatory deodorants, dried fruits (‘Australian dried fruits contain 15% more lactose and fructose than dried fruits from other countries’). If Australia exported it (or hoped to) I wrote copy for it: radio commercials for canned fruit in Swahili, ads in Japanese papers for toy koalas with pouch transistors that played ‘Waltzing Matilda’, passionfruit cordial in America, stainless-steel urinals in Peru.

  This, I thought, might be the job I’ve always wanted—no competition, very little pressure, steady, undemanding employment with little chance of the sack, working away quietly amidst verities that seemed to be timeless.

  First, The Power of Numbers. Everyone is graded mathematically. I was a Class 8—a reasonably senior position in the Third Division which entitled you to a small office, with glass partitions (up to shoulder height only for Class 8s) and a rug underfoot—but not a carpet. Wall-to-wall came only with Class 10. You looked down on a 7, and up to a 9.