by Barry Oakley
I had the radio on during my rejecting duties, and I was lucky enough to pick up another Queensland opinion on the subject.
Interviewer: ‘The Aborigines were here before the Bible was written.’
Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen: ‘Well, who knows what it was, when they were, or when their religion? Can you call that a religion, worshipping something or other that’s dead or something like what you were saying, the spirit of the goanna?’
I truffled amongst the scripts for hidden treasures. Musical themes were popular: ‘Herr Beethoven, no orchestra could play this “music” as you call it. Speak to me! Are you deaf?’ From a feature on Handel, getting increasingly impatient with a singer: ‘Not like that, you silly waterhead!’ And lines with a powerful sub-text, from a play about Magellan: ‘Captains Mendoza and Cartagena have left the ship, and now there’s a whole boatload of seamen heading for Concepcion.’
Geoffrey Whitehead had recently taken over as head of the ABC, and one lunchtime the radio staff gathered to meet him. Pasty face, shaded glasses, funereal suit. Bowden, sitting next to me in the airless studio, wasn’t fooled for a minute. After Whitehead had come out with some rapid-fire platitudes about the value of radio, Tim got to his feet and asked: ‘What radio programs, in the course of your listening, appeal to you in particular?’ Whitehead goggled, paused, smiled, and retreated behind a translucent shower of words.
As well as this big meeting, there were lots of small ones. It’s how bureaucracies function. At one, the future of Drama and Features was discussed. Because of its unyieldingly highbrow programs, it existed in a permanent state of budget uncertainty. But the audience figures were alarming. For Sydney, 3000 was considered average for Radio Helicon—the program Dick Connolly, its founder, wanted me to take over. For Wednesday Play, an asterisk, which meant its Sydney listeners were below a thousand. We seemed to be huddling around the dying fires of high culture.
It was my job, when I moved into the Helicon office, to keep the flame alight. I was in charge of the department’s flagship: two hours a week of high-protein culture. I was visited by postulants. Eric Waite, a small, sallow man in an ill-fitting blue suit, told me he had tapes containing new material about Xavier Herbert—how his wife Sadie hated him, and how he’d had an affair with Dymphna Cusack.
I green-lighted that one (as they say in Hollywood), as well as an interview by Ann Whitehead of the descendants of the William Lane New Australia settlement in the 1890s in Paraguay. The accents were as if preserved in amber, with a lost Australian purity about them. But I’d also inherited commissioned scripts which I had no choice but to put on. Did anyone want a feature on Dr Johnson’s life of the poet Cowley? Or the sonnets of Petrarch? Or a painfully detailed description of the objects on the French writer Georges Perec’s desk?
Was it any wonder that the announcer Peter Young, after introducing the Helicon program for the night, would go round to the control room and watch Minder on TV, returning just in time to read my continuity with an enthusiasm that suggested he’d been enjoying The Rhetoric of Cicero the whole time?
Though I was technically in charge, it was Dick Connolly’s fiefdom, so I took a risk by committing cultural adultery one night when he was away—I programmed a mini-rock opera by James Griffin, and sat at home enjoying its irreverence, while expecting an angry phone call at any moment. Later, Dick and I had it out. ‘Do you see Radio Helicon as something totally sealed off from popular culture?’ His reply was tart: ‘Listen—people tune in to get away from popular culture.’
Dick had a thing about German radio, and a year after our first Teutonification, we had another. It was run by Klaus Schoening, balding and all in black. He demonstrated something called Hirschspiel, a combination of words, sounds and music—in short, as he put it, ‘the entire instrumentarium’ in order to create ‘acoustic documents’.
We sat and listened politely to yelps, hisses, groans, songs and speeches in impenetrable German. Still, his English was entertaining.
‘Is your ABC station a monopole?’
‘We are, in a sense, historigans.’
‘We must develop a new granma of acoustic signals.’
After all this, Keith Richards, our man in Brisbane, was foolhardy enough to play a tape—a monologue by an overnight porter in a run-down hotel. It was dismembered in front of us. ‘No, no, not like that! It must not be about reality—it must be the reality. You must create radio—phonic tooth—like this: he pressed a button and released an orgy of chanting, yelling and drumming.
‘This isn’t about the conquistadors’ savagery in Mexico,’ he shouted above the din, ‘it shows the thing itself.’ The actors declaimed repetitive lists of ugly German words for Kill! Maim! Rape! Burn! with increasingly percussive force, hammering the listeners into the ground. We tried to follow it in an eccentric translation: ‘Go and catch the old animals and grind them into a fine powder.’ (And what the hell was gliss?)
In the stunned silence that followed—‘You are shocked I see and you are meant to be shocked’—Schoening said he regarded the play as a the greatest radiophonic work of the century, adding that it was greatly appreciated by a Prix Italia jury ‘which consisted of eight critics, eight blind people, and one with a single eye only’. (Laughter.)
‘I am sorry, but I intend not a joke.’
Back in the office, we’re told there’s a computer course now available (the thing’s in a cardboard box waiting to be let loose), and Shan Benson and I are the only ones who haven’t enrolled. He’s retiring soon, and so, I hope, am I—though to what? Who will save me, proven incompetent in both film and radio? Our weekly $300 salary usually lasts till the day before payday, which means twenty-four hours of careful husbandry. ‘Last night, like a squirrel to his eyrie’—as recorded in my diary of the time—‘I took up to our bedroom, away from the appetites of the boys, one third of a pint of milk, six slices of bread, three Vita Brits and an apple.’
The inward sleep
There is, or was, a god and his name was salty, pungent Max Suich, at the time chief editorial executive of Fairfax newspapers. I’d written to him, putting out feelers for work, and now he rings, and asks what I’m looking for. I tell him. He says he’ll get back to me. Eighteen days go by (I’m counting), and in a procedure not unlike K’s attempts to get through to the authorities in Franz Kafka’s The Castle, I start ringing, but get no further than his secretary.
Then there’s a week’s relief from radio and from waiting—a tour of the Richmond/Windsor area with Olga Masters, sponsored by the National Book Council. Our job is to read our work before selected groups of victims, and then become victims ourselves. We kick off before a deathly silent class of schoolgirls, then an equally silent group of English teachers. It was as if we were reading out obituaries.
Then came workshops. We ran the first together. Olga’s policy—she’s a modest, hesitant, good-hearted woman—was to encourage everything. She has an unusual way of starting. It seems to take a few seconds before her mind slips into gear. We listen to a strange remote lady reading a strange remote poem. I’ve been through this before, and have developed the technique of the inward sleep. On the outside, I seem to attend. On the inside, I sleep quietly. The poem is incomprehensible. I am silent afterwards, Olga (‘Your—yes—poem—I—very good—’) warmly encouraging.
A delicately boned English lady reads a story that includes the sentence: ‘Jack jerked himself back to the present.’ I dared not look up. The strange, remote woman, having been encouraged by Olga, turns to prose, a story about a man who feels ‘a warmth and hardening in his groin’ every time he starts a fire. After starting one in a dress shop, he has trouble escaping through a window ‘because of the condition of arousal he was in’. Eyes down again.
Olga presses on, praising everything. When I say goodbye to her, the workshops thankfully over, she says she has headaches and trouble focusing. Her headaches, and her sometimes awkward progress through her sentences, mark the beginning, I later lear
n, of a brain tumour that will kill her.
When I get home, Carmel tells me Max Suich has rung—could I ring him Monday? When I do, he says Robert Haupt, the editor of the soon-to-be-launched National Times on Sunday, the National Times re-invented, wants to have lunch. ‘Theatre reviewing,’ says Max, ‘your old trade.’
This is good news—I’ll cease being a burden on Drama and Features—and bad: it’s a job I need but don’t want. Could I go over to the other side again? I’d had an eight-year break from scribbling in the dark. My spirits rose—if this is possible—and sagged at the same time. I was becoming quite good at getting jobs I’d rather not have.
‘Fuck it,’ said Robert
There was no one else at the restaurant where Robert Haupt and his deputy editor Valerie Lawson said they’d meet me. A fire was burning. I chose the table carefully—a three-seater. If I chose the right chair, one of them would have to sit beside me—depriving them of the psychological advantage of my having to face both of them. They came in, and pleasantries were exchanged. Robert inspected the wine list, and ordered an expensive white. He tasted, paused, and found it good. We all drank, and it was indeed good.
More pleasantries. The food arrived, and was presented with ceremony. Robert ordered another bottle. I struggled with Tasmanian scallops in a pastry that Leo Schofield would have found too hard. Robert was editing a schnapper, and Valerie excavating half a lobster.
I was counting his drinks. I had a strategy. Get him half-under before money is mentioned. We had each now put away five glasses. Robert’s crinkly black hair had freed itself from the top of his head and was hanging over his right temple, like a wig that was about to come off. Valerie remained inscrutable behind tinted glasses. She was beginning to laugh for no reason. I was becoming flushed. The second bottle disappeared.
Robert ordered champagne, at an unthinkable price. Would the gentlemen like cigars? The gentlemen would. A box of Havanas was presented, and two neatly decapitated. Wait. Wait for the champagne. Wait for him to have a glass. We paused, we puffed.
‘Okay,’ said Robert, who’d become slightly dishevelled, ‘what are we looking at?’
‘That depends on what you’d like me to do.’ There was a feeling that Robert had more or less forgotten what he wanted me to do. He was on to his second champagne. I stayed with my first.
‘Twelve hundred words a week,’ said Valerie, who was holding her liquor better than either of us. ‘How much would you want?’ Awkward silence. Crackle of fire in the corner. Robert was becoming distracted. Look at him, not at her. I leaned forward slightly to catch his eye, which was fixed on a blond at a nearby table. We puffed again. The cigar was ambrosial. Don’t do the drawback. Don’t have a dizzy spell. I needed to go to the toilet. Robert needed another drink.
‘Excuse me while I phone my accountant.’ It wasn’t funny, but they both laughed. While I was relieving my bursting bladder, Robert, I hoped, would be having another champagne. I’d planned to ask for $300 a week, but decided to think big. When I returned, Robert’s wig-like coiffure had slipped further down the side of his head. I was a trifle unsteady. Robert’s nose, always impressive, was now glowing.
‘I was thinking of $400 a week.’ Silence. Absurdly high? Laughably low?
‘We were thinking $350,’ said Valerie, who, now that moolah was mentioned, had regained her native cool. Robert was looking away. He seemed not to care. Everything stopped. Who’d weaken first?
‘Fuck it,’ said Robert, ‘$400 it is.’
I poured him the last of the champagne, while he made a feeble protesting motion. I liked Robert. A man after my own liver. I puffed, without doing the drawback. He puffed, and deeply inhaled. His eyes were glazed. He was having visions.
‘We’re going to build you up as the only national critic. If there’s an important play opening in Melbourne or Brisbane or Adelaide, you’ll go there.’ Pause. I should’ve asked for more. Too late now. ‘We’ve just given TAA a big newsprint freight contract. I think they’ll come to the party.’ When I get up, will I fall over? Robert did, years later, in a New York restaurant, while doing a deal with his publisher over a book on the Soviet Union; with a glass in his hand, his heart would stop, and he’d fall backwards in his seat, dead.
Rat remains on sinking ship
First up, in Melbourne, I got two turkeys, but some high comedy in the street. Spook House, at St Martin’s South Yarra, was so bad the actors looked embarrassed taking their final bows. Near me, Len Radic and Helen Thomson were scribbling away for the Age and the Australian. ‘How long have you been a critic?’ Helen, surprised, asked afterwards. ‘About two hours,’ I said. I’d joined the freemasonry of critical coroners, who hasten away while the corpse is going cold to write their reports. Was it killed, or did it die of natural causes? It was a gloomy business.
Kill Hamlet, at the Anthill Theatre, a cold hall in South Melbourne, was even worse. The program gave due warning of what was ahead: ‘The spectator should sweat in a theatre without armrests.’ Germany was declaring cultural war on me yet again. An actor prowls around the small, freezing and terrified audience, commenting and confronting. ‘And you, sir, yes you, you will come out here and be a tree?’ I sat there and sweated—will he see me, furtively taking notes? True to my inflexible principle—never sit at the front in alternative theatre—I thought I was safe, though he was getting closer and louder.
‘Conventional theatre,’ he barked, ‘involves a play-safe contract between actor and audience. Zis contract tonight we break.’ Would he spot me? Would it be—‘and you, sir, come out and pretend to be a critic, ja?’ I escaped. It wasn’t a bad play—simply not one at all.
Late the following afternoon, since I was back in my home city, I decided to revisit Stewart’s Hotel, where, since the days of the Pram Factory, the tribe always gathered. Like the Painters and Dockers, the group—writers, actors, publishers, academics—looks after its own and punishes its own. I had left this network, implying that its closeness, its gossip, its affairs were not good enough—and worse, I’d left it for Sydney. Abandoned Melbourne content for Sydney style.
And here, as I got out of the taxi and crossed Elgin Street, was the proof. I was wearing my Gold Coast white pants and hitherto successful pink shirt. It was unseasonably sunny and the drinkers were out on the footpath—and the drinker-in-chief, Dinny O’Hearn, Carlton identity and sub-dean of the Melbourne University Arts Faculty, began jeering at me. A man I’d always got on well with, a praiser of me in the Age book pages, now drunk and unshaven, took special exception to my prized shirt—Sydney poof! Paddington parader!
It was a ritual humiliation, during which the others remained silent, and I could only re-establish myself by submitting with good grace. When I was through the gauntlet, a millionaire businessman and writer, in jeans as dirty as Dinny’s, brought me out, as a sign of tribal acceptance, the biggest glass of beer I’d ever seen—so big the publican came out after it to make sure it wasn’t stolen.
Some weeks later, Billy Marshall, one of my screenwriting students from the Film School, told me that the Aboriginal people of Papunya (he’d spent years teaching there) had institutionalised this kind of mockery into the Teasing Group. The outsider is teased by the group, and this helps bind it together. Their favourite insult, their equivalent to Sydney poof, is directed at ears—because they relate intelligence to hearing. Pina wima! Pina wima!—Little ears! Little ears! And some say, according to Billy, they tease more when in danger of losing their Dreaming. The Stewart’s Hotel tribe were losing some of theirs—the Pram Factory, their sacred site, was now derelict a hundred metres down the road.
My first visit to Brisbane was equally unpromising. The Queensland Theatre Company’s adaptation of Animal Farm, involving twenty-three actors in animal costumes and a small orchestra, was bad, and their public relations man knew it. He greeted me effusively, took me straight to the bar and kept asking if I’d like another whisky. I kept saying yes. But even five in rapid succession f
ailed to dull my critical sensibilities. The sight of anthropomorphic figures capering to music and doing Playschool violence to the original’s spare prose was so painful it prevented sleep. The low hum that could be heard between numbers could have been Orwell spinning at turbine speed in his grave.
Because I phoned my copy in, there were typos every week. ‘And the baby was suffocated’ became ‘and the baby was sophisticated’. It could have been worse. When Clive Barnes reviewed A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the New York Times, he wrote that he’d found David Wallace’s Bottom particularly splendid, but the crucial word came out in lower case.
By November 1986, after only three months, the paper’s circulation is declining, and there have been crisis meetings at Fairfax (would I get the sack? Could they afford me—the interstate flights, the hotels?). Worse, Kristin Williamson tells me Robert Haupt might go. Candy Baker, who’s taken over as arts editor (is that the third in as many months?) says the National Times on Sunday office is like the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. Later still, as we take the long pathway to the Wharf Theatre to see Tom and Viv, Robert Drewe tells us Haupt has just resigned, to be replaced by Valerie Lawson. As we take the same boardwalk after the show, Robert Haupt’s in front of us. We have to go slowly so as not to catch up. What could I possibly have said?
There are some theatre experiences that move into the backstage of memory and refuse to leave, and Barry Dickins’s Royboys, which I was permitted to fly to Melbourne to review, is one of them. It was an elegy to the recently deceased Fitzroy Football Club, and it was staged in the plush depths of the Arts Centre. Amongst the usual crowd there were some very large men—famous footballers, at ease in their native jungle habitat but awkward and uncertain here—such as Jack Dyer, now a little stooped, and the man whose name Dyer, as a radio commentator, was unable to pronounce—Robert Dieperdomenico. (Dyer used to do almost as much damage to the English language as he did to his opponents. A well-known coach, he once noted, had just come back from ‘the French Riverina’, and a particularly tall ruckman was once described as extending his arms ‘like a pair of giant testicles’.)