by Anne Summers
The limits of the challenge to the old definitions of Australian culture posited by Oz and its successors, or rather its irrelevance in terms of developing a real counter-hegemony to the Hancock-Horne vision, is demonstrated by the reactions of those women who were caught up in it. Many women, including myself, feel a peculiar intellectual schizophrenia in attacking the mid-1960s rebellion, for we did identify with it, and it played a major role in our acculturation to a position of radical protest against many facets of old Australia. Yet it could never entirely accommodate us and our needs even though, for a long time, we were unable to identify precisely the source of our alienation and we felt caught in an excruciating double bind. We passionately defended this rebellious posture against the criticisms of parents, teachers and other authorities for we certainly did not agree with them, but there still remained an uneasiness that much of our protest was hollow for we defended something that gave us only honorary status. We felt like Catherine in Seven Poor Men of Sydney: ‘I’ve fought all my life for male objectives in men’s terms. I am neither man nor woman, rich nor poor, elegant nor worker, philistine nor artist. That’s why I fight so hard and suffer so much and get nowhere’.17 It was only with the formation of women’s liberation, when women began to discuss this discontent and to tentatively assign reasons for it, that we began to understand that our sensibilities had been split, our feelings fractured by trying to identify with a radical posture which had not thought it necessary to challenge, along with the other sacred cows it tore down, the view that it behoved Australian women to sublimate all their ideals and aspirations in dutiful wifehood and bountiful maternity. It was evident that this challenge would have to be made by women themselves and this was the reason that Mejane and, in late 1972, Refractory Girl18, were begun by groups of women who needed media in which to begin to voice their dissatisfaction with current definitions of this level of our culture, and to begin to explore possible alternatives.
The need for such publications is continually reinforced by the intransigence of the now ageing rebels. The ‘vital importance’ of women’s liberation is conceded by all who have any pretensions to views left of centre in both the cultural and political spheres, but these token acknowledgments too often are accompanied by a continuance of the old chauvinist attitudes and practices. A case in point is that weekly newspaper that has, in three years, changed its name as many times and is currently published as Nation Review.
Nation Review is Oz reached early middle age, its brash iconoclasm now the nomenclature of a sizeable minority of the population and, having acquired a wealthy backer, at last able to indulge in all its adolescent fantasies. Its hallmark, a ‘lean and nosy ferret’ embodies an incipient phallic symbolism, which can hardly be accidental. Nation Review prides itself in its ‘liberated’ attitude to women; it is the only large-circulation newspaper to have adopted Ms. as a descriptive title for all women, regardless of their marital status, it occasionally exposes and denounces instances of discrimination against women and it supports ‘women’s issues’ such as abortion. But if Nation Review thinks this is sufficient to undermine the sexist basis of our culture, it has largely missed the point of the criticism. The complaint has been that women have had little to identify with in a critical tradition written entirely by men that concentrates on issues, activities and themes that these men have identified as important. Nation Review has done nothing to reverse this trend. Its distinctive features, particularly its regular columns, are all written by men. Moreover, most of them depend for their effects on a peculiar kind of humour that uses women as objects of scorn, derision or ambiguous sexual ambition. It is a strange food column that devotes paragraph after paragraph to descriptions of the state of the underwear, or the lack of sobriety, of the diner’s female companion, but this is the Sam Orr whom Nation Review readers know and love. It is an even stranger film critic who appraises films in terms of whether or not they are likely to arouse a woman to maximum capitulation after minimal seductive effort on the part of the male escort. The reviewer of Last Tango in Paris wrote, ‘Go and see it, and watch how scared your girlfriend waxes on the swift drive home’19 and implicitly exhorted his male readers to exorcise their violence and frustrations on the hapless body of whichever unfortunate woman happened to accompany them that evening. Whenever an item such as this appears, letters of protest from female readers inevitably follow, as do the ‘Where’s your sense of humour ladies?’ justifications from the reviewer or columnist in question.
The 14–20 October issue of the Nation Review in 1972 was handed over to a group of women journalists to edit: the editor of the newspaper sat back and congratulated himself on his benevolence while these women slaved for months on a miniscule budget to produce this single issue. The cover misleadingly announced that ‘This issue has been taken over by women’, implying that, like the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) women who actually physically seized editorial control of the US underground newspaper Rat a few years ago, these women had ousted the elders of Nation Review and had thereby gained access to all the resources of the publication. Actually what happened was that the $1500 budget allocated to this issue had to cover not only contributors’ payments but also the many airfares for the Sydney-based temporary editor and subeditors and layout people to fly to Melbourne where the paper is produced. The result was that contributors to this issue received well below AJA (Australian Journalists Association) award rates for their articles, while the regular male columnists all had a week’s holiday on full pay. Such are the benevolent ways in which Nation Review supports women’s liberation.
The Living Daylights, a counter-cultural companion to Nation Review and edited by another member of the Oz brigade, began publication in October 1973. Despite its proclamations to the contrary, it too is heavily male-centred in its preoccupations. It has published articles that explore men’s sexist attitudes and responses, but their content has been consistently eroded by other features that have glorified a masculine, at times almost macho, cult.
When such blatant assertions of masculine self-importance and power appear in publications that ostensibly challenge the old cultural hegemony, even if the traditional ‘ocker’ image of the Australian males is embellished with new, ‘alternative’ guises, it is evident that this counter-culture is no less repressive as far as women are concerned than that which it challenges.
It would be encouraging for women to conclude that this was why the Living Daylights enjoyed a life of only six months as a separate publication. But obviously financial considerations governed its demise and incorporation into Nation Review, where its heady influence is still occasionally evident, and we cannot brashly imagine that women’s disillusion had much to do with this. Rather, the answer would seem to lie in the fact that the counter-culture is neither large nor wealthy enough to support an expensive weekly. The ‘alternative’ man is still a distinct minority – and he only pays lip-service to the ideas of women’s liberation. The majority culture still rests serene, its misogynist ockerism unassailed. Which indicates that women’s struggle to have the traditional images of Australian culture changed in order to reflect some of their experiences is going to be very difficult indeed.
CHAPTER THREE
The sporting wife
[I]t’s easy to tell it’s Saturday … The garish clubs are beginning to gird themselves up for the late afternoon rush, rapid-fire race broadcasts drift out of the pubs, surfboards are loaded on to the roofs of old jalopies, and in the parks the children’s playgrounds and duck-ponds draw family groups, New Australians, toddlers, prams, dogs … This is the life Australians have created for themselves in their leisure hours, and in a way it shows them at their best. There is a sense of community.
Craig McGregor, Profile of Australia, 1966
The third ‘level’ of culture consists of those multifarious recreational activities with which Australian people, women and men, occupy their leisure time. Even more than with the other two ‘levels’, which are
to some extent minority proclivities both in terms of the numbers of people either participating or influenced by them, activities at this level are circumscribed by class and generational preferences. Often the popular images we fondly believe to characterise our national profile are no more than images projected by cultural revivalists searching for symbols to serve as unifying rallying points for what they see as a diverse and directionless people. Many writers seem to imagine that such cultural jingoism is both possible and desirable. Yet individual reactions to a recreational activity such as football, uncritically upheld to be an engrossing national pastime, are diverse and complex; and it is facile to suppose that the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Grand Final day holds a crowd whose presence can be appraised by a single slick standard. Similarly those who portray Australians as a nation of beer swillers discount the marijuana smokers, the wine and spirits drinkers, and the teetotallers. To cull from an increasingly heterogeneous society a small number of recreational activities inevitably does injustice both to those groups and individuals who do not indulge in these pursuits, and to those who deliberately oppose the erecting of these activities into the mythic proportions they have already attained.
Yet these stereotypes do persist, and they do reflect the actual behaviour of a large section of the population. Whether extolled or criticised, sport – particularly horse-racing, football and surfing – is recognised as being of particular significance to Australian men, and ranks along with (beer) drinking, gambling and an obsession with cars as national pastimes. All these activities thus earn a mandatory mention by the carvers of cultural myths and stereotypes.
Sport to many Australians is life and the rest a shadow. Sport has been the one national institution that has had no ‘knockers’. To many it is considered a sign of degeneracy not to be interested in it. To play sport, or watch others play sport, and to read and talk about it is to uphold the nation and build its character.1
Australians drink with great relish, often with the sole idea of getting drunk; among young men the mark of a successful party is that everyone got drunk, several chundered (vomited) and half a dozen or so flaked (passed out) … In Australia drinking is an occasion for raucous bonhomie, yarn-spinning, laughter, swilling down schooners, middies and ponies of beer and, occasionally pumping drinks into the girl-friend or the wife – it is all part of that explosive good humour and companionship which Australians equate with ‘the good life’.2
The Australian’s loving preoccupation with his car has become a commonplace: he fondles each nut and bolt in interminable conversations in the pub; strips it, lays it on the lawn, and greases its nipples while his wife wonders whether he will ever better his indoor average of one-a-month. But put him behind the wheel and he becomes the world’s most heedless driver … So many Australians equate driving with masculinity: pass them and they suffer instant emasculation.3
The Australian mania for gambling can be documented by the vast amounts of money that are poured into bookmakers’ bags, poker machines, lotteries and the TAB. In March 1973, the TAB turnover in New South Wales alone was more than $7 million a week4, a total of $814 914 000 was invested in totalisators around Australia in 1970–71, while a further $813 318 000 was paid to licensed book-makers.5 This was some $600 000 more than the amount expended on social service payments by the Australian Government in the same period.6 A further $110 227 000 was spent in lottery tickets in 1970–717, while some $140 million was jabbed into poker machines in 1972 in New South Wales, the only state where this kind of gambling is permitted.8 Altogether some $2000 million was gambled legally in Australia in one year, almost one-tenth of the national wages bill.
In the quotations cited above, there is an unmistakable tendency in each of the writers to equate ‘Australians’ with ‘Australian men’. To ‘many Australians’, Horne maintains, sport is life. What he really means is that to many Australian men, sport is life. Sport, drinking and gambling are upheld as the working man’s prerogative, due recompense for his hard work in factory, office or wherever he may happen to earn his living. They are also espoused, more or less explicitly, by men of all classes even if their pursuit is couched in rituals designed to delineate the class differences. The members’ stand or the public enclosure, the local pub or the executive bar, two-up or baccarat – the differences are finely shaded, elaborate measures designed to mesmerise those iconoclasts who might be tempted to lump them all together in the one inclusive fellowship. For while men may argue among themselves about whether they merit being classed with the fraternity, it is abundantly clear that women do not even have the choice. At every level in every recreational activity that is characterised as a crucial part of Australian life, women are either physically barred or their participation is circumscribed by a melange of rules, conventions and attitudes that ensure that these activities remain the preserve of men.
Male pre-eminence in horse-racing is specified at almost every level of participation: club membership, punting, riding and training.9 Members’ stands have special enclosures where only men may congregate to watch the finish; watchful attendants protect the fraternity from the trespasses of any unwitting female. In the past, female jockeys have been able to ride only at picnic race meetings, although city clubs are now beginning to allow women to ride the odd race. Unlike the situation in the US, female jockeys – or ‘jockettes’ as they are derisively referred to – will not be able to ride against men.
There are women trainers in New South Wales, some of whom are fairly successful, but none has even looked like entering the galaxy of glamour trainers whose names are familiar to anyone who even glances at the sporting pages of any newspaper. Women are employed as track-riders, strappers and stable-hands, all jobs that receive equal pay but are menial and low in status, and offer only vicarious opportunities to share in the mystique and glamour surrounding those, such as jockeys, who perform before the public and whose careers are kept before the populace by the press.
There are no women on-course bookmakers at racing clubs – although there have been a few at greyhound tracks – and when it is remembered that the Victorian Lotteries, Gaming and Betting Act 1906, which first licensed bookmakers, did so on the condition that they did not accept bets from women10, it appears that women have several rather intangible obstacles to surmount if they are ever to be able to follow racing with the same freedom as men.11 The assumption that women were not interested in betting seems to have been the reason for setting lower admission prices to the tracks for women, and although approximately three times more men than women pass through the turnstiles at each meeting, the avidity with which women patronise the Tote would seem to belie any assumption that they have no proclivity for gambling. Given the extent of economic deprivation among women* it is not to be expected that very many women would have the money to become large-scale gamblers, but even if a woman did harbour an ambition to be a professional punter she would find several difficulties in her way. The rules of the Australian Jockey Club exclude women from the betting ring and although this is no longer enforced, the proscribing of women from membership of Tattersalls’ Club prevents a woman from placing bets on credit unless she can find a bookmaker prepared to designate an alternative place for settling accounts: this would inevitably limit the number of book-makers she could do business with, a serious obstacle to getting good odds.
In racing, as in most sports, there is active and overt discrimination against women, but this is probably less bothersome than the more elusive ways in which women are excluded. The entire sport is conducted on the assumption that only men wish to take it seriously. The very title of the leading form guide, the Sportsman, assumes that only the male sex has any taste for the tensions and exhilarations of following the horses.
Women gamblers are notoriously considered to be governed by capricious inclinations rather than a careful studying of the form: they are said to choose horses by some intuitive response to its name, or by some confused and diffused sexual attraction for a part
icular jockey. Many bookmakers adopt a patronising attitude to women, even when they are investing quite large amounts; some will pretend to adopt a protective stance towards women who frequent racetracks, promising them tips or good odds. Occasionally they will sneer at a woman placing money on a long shot.
It is accepted that upper-middle-class women and attractive young women will play a decorative role at racetracks, particularly at Carnivals when there is usually one meeting set aside for the fashion stakes. Then elegantly or outlandishly dressed women will attempt to attract the attention of a social notes writer, while the next day’s press will feature photographs of women wearing amazing hats or daring outfits, with jocular captions implying that this is the only level at which women can participate in racing. They may place bets, but they are not expected to care about the results: once the business of being noticed is over it is thought that women should retire to the bar to sip champagne, to wait until their escorts have completed their day’s punting. (The positioning of the men-only enclosures opposite the winning post presupposes that women are not interested in watching the finish of a race, and in any case precludes them from doing so with the same facility as men.) Women from the lower-middle and working classes have no such carefully defined role. But the 1973 Autumn Carnival in Sydney was advertised in such a way as to suggest that it was a fine place to bring the family, implying that Mum and the kids could sit around on the lawns while their husbands got on with the serious business of losing a week’s pay.
Yet women are indispensable in maintaining the comfort of racing crowds. They are the ones who serve food and drinks non-stop for up to seven hours to crowds whose main response is to complain about how long it takes to be served or how expensive everything is. Both charges are true, but these women who bear the brunt of the hostility and irritability of tired punters are unable to control either factor, and certainly their rates of pay and working conditions are not enhanced by having to contend with churlish customers.