Hippie Hippie Shake Read online

  Too long to wait. I worked as a builder’s labourer for a few days, until I fell off a swaying plank, my wheelbarrow of wet cement splodging on top of me. I tried out as a waiter, carrying trays of roast chickens to a ballroom of banqueting Commerce graduates. They got blind drunk, chucked food at each other, chundered over their tuxedos and were thrown out of the hotel. It seemed a good time to be departing the Commerce Faculty.

  In the end, Dad resigned himself to the idea of Arts. Mum dug up a modest insurance policy, which took care of the first term’s fees. On my last day at Farmers, it was revealed to me later, my father paid the boss, Zelda Stedman, a ‘thank you’ visit and presented her with a bunch of roses. This tough-as-old-boots taskmaster looked at him in amazement and burst into tears.

  My first weeks as a full-time student were a let-down. Still emerging from its chrysalis as a technical college, the campus was a rubble-strewn mess of ex-army huts and windblown walkways. Female students were thin on the ground and forbidden to wear red (the manual for trainee teachers issued by the Education Department claimed the colour incited lust). Luckily, what few women there were had enrolled in Arts. Elsewhere, it was a sea of crewcuts and thick spectacles, Pelaco shirts and grey slacks, surging to classes in wool technology and food processing.

  Sydney University, our long-established rival, was very different – not only grassy quads and gothic spires, with pre-Raphaelite poets discussing the meaning of life in Latin, but students who marched to the city protesting against apartheid and staged public symposiums on free love. One of its academics announced that his two favourite pastimes were taking a shit and having a wank, in no particular order. He seemed to speak on behalf of all Australian males, then, as now. The Sydney Uni newspaper, Honi Soit, questioned the continued relevance of Anzac Day. On our campus – invariably dismissed as ‘Kensington High School’ – the big adventures were football, Bible class and arms drill.

  If it hadn’t been for my early deviation into Commerce, I would have fitted snugly into the quad at Sydney Uni. Instead, I was stuck at Kenso High, stumbling over scaffolding, being teased by the T-square dorks for growing my hair over my ears.

  I vented my anger in an article for the student newspaper, Tharunka (an aboriginal word for ‘message stick’). With my byline spelt in lower case, in homage to e e cummings, and to focus attention on the author, I headed it: This University Isn’t. Clutching the typescript like a Dead Sea Scroll, I bowled up to the Tharunka office and met its editor, Ian Davison, a science student in baggy shorts with crooked teeth and a jutting chin. ‘Give us a hand,’ he yelled from a tangle of galleys, and I swung into action, empowered by the training at Farmers. We laid out the pages, dreamed up headlines. By dawn I had been appointed features editor. Tharunka was home, better than home.

  My denunciation of ‘Kenso High’ appeared in April ’61, inciting a flurry of bitchy letters and instant notoriety, which suited me fine. Fidel Castro had humiliated the US at the Bay of Pigs, and I had cocked a snook at the Vice-Chancellor. Strutting about the Roundhouse, a newly built student rendezvous, I realised that two years in adsville had given me an edge. It had also given me a pair of crotch-huggin’ houndstooth strides and a shiny pair of Italian winkle-pickers. At Farmers I was a frump; here I was Beau Brummel. Jamming the cafeteria tables together, I presided over an instant salon, incorporating ‘freshers’ from Arts, old mates from Commerce and the Tharunka mob. During term, the numbers swelled, as did my head. The National Institute of Dramatic Arts was attached to campus, and feline creatures in leotards, a few with foreign accents, buzzed our tables – the NIDA girls, Carla, Carmen, Macushlar . . . This was the most fun since – since I could remember.

  It was an era of pranks. A sign – Beware of the Crocodile – was swiped from a national park and stuck under the Vice-Chancellor’s window. Then a croc was smuggled out of the zoo and released in his lily pond. He caught sight of the reptile before it caught sight of him, and called the police. ‘What will it be next?’ the Vice-Chancellor fulminated to the media. ‘A tiger?’ Hmm.

  The newness of Kenso High left nothing to inherit, everything to invent. With the uni set to celebrate its first Foundation Day, I wanted to come up with a prank to put the place on the map. To put my face on the map.

  Posing as a front man for a beatnik musical trio, I arranged to appear on Bandstand. On cue, Brian Henderson beckoned me to the podium and enquired about the purpose of Foundation Day. His manner was so pleasant, and the cameras so seductive, that my resolve faltered. But the fake trio, the Beats, was setting up. Scores of students were standing by to jam the network’s switches and alert the newspapers. ‘Now, fellas!’ I yelled. Four burly mates from Commerce charged the stand and, fending off astonished technicians, bundled Brian out of the studio. The Beats struck up, a NIDA student gyrated to the rhythms of a bongo and Ian from Arts I, clad in a black beret, intoned, ‘I saw the best minds of my generation, starving, hysterical naked . . .’

  Amidst the confusion, I melted away and drove to the rendezvous, where Brian Henderson sat in the back of a metallurgy student’s Morris Minor. He looked faintly bewildered. ‘When your sponsors pay a £100 ransom to our Appeal,’ I told him, ‘you can go home.’ Then he was driven up the coast to a sleepy holiday village.

  The beachside weekender, loaned by a student, was jumping by the time I arrived. Brian stood on the verandah in a borrowed duffel coat, drinking gin and tonic. Bobby Freeman shrieked from the loudspeaker – Do Ya Wanna Dance, and hold me tight? – and the girls from NIDA smooched over the bespectacled compère, hanging on to his every pleasantry. In a back room, news of the kidnap crackled from the radio and the phone rang hot.

  ‘We’ll pay the ransom,’ boomed the editor of the Sunday Mirror News-Pictorial, ‘in return for an exclusive interview with Neville.’ Gulping claret from a bamboo mug slung around my neck and dancing the twist, I felt hugely important. At midnight I was lying on the beach under a full moon with one of the NIDA girls. Several other guests were there, also with girls from NIDA, all of us coping with shell grit on sensitive body parts.

  In the morning, Brian Henderson treated his captors to bacon and eggs, and expressed regret that the party was over. SHOCK STAR KIDNAP trumpeted the billboards. The front page of the Mirror News-Pictorial – a ‘dramatic scoop picture’, supplied by Tharunka – showed our stunt-men in action. Scores of teenagers and startled technicians watched helplessly as Mr Henderson was put into a car. Three students then went in front of the camera and did an act. One played a tom tom, a girl did a weird dance and a third, wearing sunglasses and a beard, read Shakespeare . . . It is not known when Mr Henderson will be released. The next day at the Roundhouse, our lunchtime salon exulted in its triumph, with my tongue out-wagging the rest. ‘Your gag saved a dreary Bandstand,’ wrote Mum. ‘You were okay, except for the sidelong glances at the camera and the zombie tone in your voice.’ Then came a crisis.

  The Foundation Day Tharunka, designed for downtown distribution the following morning, had just been delivered to the Roundhouse. It was an eagerly awaited issue, a parody of the Sydney Morning Herald. Editor Ian Davison had created a facsimile of the Herald’s front page, with a lead story aimed at stopping commuters in their tracks. The trouble was – he was too successful.

  The front page reported that the Sydney Harbour Bridge had collapsed. Photos showed a gap where the highway should be. BRIDGE DISASTER, ran the headline, PYLON STANDS IN GRIM COMMENTARY. Bystanders were pictured ogling the ruins. Road and rail chaos. Police leave cancelled. Army called in. The second lead was Cuba’s declaration of war against the Soviet Union. Tharunka was printed by the Herald’s press and their management cried foul. They peppered our parody with disclaimers – ‘a Uni of NSW special’ – and folded it so the front page was hidden.

  Their action threatened the effectiveness of our Foundation Day fund-raising – Tharunka’s street sales profits were earmarked for a hospital burns unit. Volunteers assembled in the Roundhouse and refolded 10,000 br
oadsheets. By dawn, ‘The Sydney Moaning Tharunka’, was being hawked from city corners and every strategic approach to the Harbour Bridge. Drivers swerved to the sidewalk and scanned the front page, eyes popping. Gridlock hit the inner city.

  In my own contribution, ‘The Crime of Big Business’, I blasted TV ads which targeted children. ‘Toddlers croon the Pepsi jingle even before they’ve learned the National Anthem. Is it fair to use them as billboards?’

  For me, a year which had begun with the blues ended on a high. Even the exams were a breeze. To ‘cram English’ meant skimming novels at Balmoral Beach and rabbiting on about ‘characterisation’ at tutorials, waving a sherry glass. To be amiably quizzed on the merits of Jane Austen was not a terrifying prospect. Academics were less daunting than schoolteachers. Our philosophy professor, Eric Dowling, was an incisive libertarian, whose scandalous behaviour matched his beliefs. He conducted a sizzling affair with Stephanie, a classmate. Naturally, this had to be kept from the ears of the administration, and Stephanie and I, both feeling very bohemian, would discuss its implications on the Lady Denman. Paddy McGuinness, a bearded and mumbling Economics lecturer, slouched about the campus in bare feet and black corduroys, promoting the creed of anarchy as the best solution to the world’s ills. As a role model he was, like our bonking philosophy prof, a change from the octogenarian Commerce lecturers in grey suits who salivated over actuarial graphs. Paddy was a member of ‘The Push’, a renowned cell of free-thinkers who favoured promiscuity, jazz and getting pissed. Their philosophy was propounded in a roneoed ’zine, The Libertarian Broadsheet.

  Their pub was the Royal George. It was exciting to think I could mingle with anarchist pamphleteers, all railing against religion, patriotism, censorship and moral conventions. One Friday night I ventured in. Smoky alcoves, the juke box blasting Roy Orbison’s ‘Working for the Man’, paperbacks of Kafka and Camus protruding from pockets, people in black sweaters espousing free love. I was buttonholed by a libertarian in a dark suit and rolled umbrella who told me he had just enjoyed sex with an American sailor – ‘His dick was black, but wonder of wonders – his sperm was white!’ Sirens, Black Marias . . . the pub was surrounded by police, supposedly checking for under-age drinkers, but probably goaded by the pervasive whiff of anti-authoritarianism. A big word, much in favour at the time, for being a rebel without a cause. Anyone who wasn’t anti-authoritarian was an alf, a despicable conformist. ‘The George’ was one of the few pubs a longhair could enter without inciting an ocker’s thump, the fearsome ‘king-hit’. The fatherly sergeant spilled the contents of my frothing schooner, indifferent to pleas I was not under age: ‘It’s a bit too much for a nipper like you.’ It wasn’t. The Push stance of ‘permanent protest’ had struck a chord.

  In March 1962, I became editor of Tharunka. Innovations included shrinking the sports pages and replacing the footballer pin-ups with shots of children playing marbles – a payback for humiliations on the high-school playing fields. I lavished the pages with pictures, poetry and parodies. Another facsimile send-up, this time of the Catholic Weekly and tame enough to amuse my mother, shocked the alfs. ‘This paper belongs to the students,’ snorted a typical letter-writer, ‘not to the editor.’ Alas for his anti-authoritarian sentiments, I disagreed.

  One April afternoon in the Roundhouse, a young man in a paint-splattered T-shirt rambled over to my mini-salon. He introduced himself as Martin Sharp, an art student from East Sydney Tech. Lurking shyly in the shadows was his companion, Garry Shead, who held up a copy of a newspaper, The Arty Wild Oat, which the pair had just published. ‘Arty means pretentious,’ said Sharp mysteriously. I blinked. Attracted by the new-look Tharunka, Sharp and Shead suggested we collaborate on a one-off – The Arty Wild Tharunka. That afternoon, the three of us soaked up countless cappuccinos – the irresistible machine had just been installed – until Sharp drove me home.

  Our high-wire chatter continued on my parents’ Mosman verandah, with its view of the harbour and its twin peninsulas, ‘the Heads’. We pooled our views on the seismic shifts in the cultural landscape: the new protest music, pop art, the Pill, sick humour, the stirrings for Aboriginal rights and a growing revelation that it may not be necessary for either of us to live the same lives as our fathers – his a high-society skin specialist.

  At an early age, Martin had been packed off to board at Cranbrook School, even though its manicured grounds virtually adjoined his family’s gardens. An only child, Sharp’s ‘artistic’ temperament had often incited corporal redress. He’d been forced to repeat the final year at Cranbrook, an indignity intensified by his failure to be appointed prefect.

  ‘Got a tin opener?’ Sharp asked, stubbing out a Gauloise on the verandah’s brickwork. As Dion blasted ‘The Wanderer’, from the bakelite wireless, I watched him spring across the lawn to his car – a Triumph Herald he’d hand-painted blue. Sharp wielded the opener like a machete. Stab, slice, snip-snip . . . he dumped the roof in the gutter and stepped into his new convertible. With a wave he was gone, taking part of my heart with him.

  Next morning I whacked out an editorial on the brilliance of student newspapers – ‘So vigorous because the downtown press is so disastrous’ – and floated the idea of a joint student paper. That afternoon I went spear-fishing at Balmoral Beach with Sharp and caught a dead crab.

  Two weeks later, the Student Council at Sydney Uni sacked the editors of Honi Soit. The reason given was ‘flippancy of tone’; meaning that student politicians had been treated with insufficient solemnity. It was the first time an Honi editor had been dismissed in thirty-four years. Tharunka was also under pressure. The Vice-Chancellor demanded a written assurance from the council president that all criticism of the campus would cease.

  In July, a conference of student editors was being held in Adelaide. My sacked counterparts at Honi Soit, Richard Walsh and Peter Grose, both reinstated, agreed to share the costs of a car trip. A friend from Arts, Alex Popov, was standing by with his father’s Ford Customline.

  Filling the boot with duffel coats, flagons of claret and paperbacks, the four of us set off on a blustery morning for the faraway city of parks and churches. At the wheel, Alex Popov, the blazing-eyed son of Russian immigrants, slid the absurd tail fins through the outback mud. Beside him I clutched an anthology of Beat poetry, hoping its essence would seep into my soul. From the back seat, Richie Walsh mocked the world. This bracing new cohort, I quickly discovered, possessed a mind like a rat-trap. He didn’t let me get away with anything. When my raves went from Beat to bombast, they were quickly deflated by his talent for sarcasm. Richie had switched courses from Arts-Law to Medicine, with a view to becoming a psychiatrist. After an hour in his company, anyone would need a psychiatrist. A champion debater at high school and uni, Richie treated small talk as a contest between opposing teams. Peter Grose, his childhood friend, coped by shielding himself with rat-a-tat-tats of raucous laughter. Popov clung to the wheel, the day turned to night, the night into the dawn, and still the sparks flew from our verbal sabre-play – much of it bemoaning the boring nature of our birthplace . . .

  Lolita, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Naked Lunch and Peyton Place were all on the list of prohibited imports. Books by James Baldwin, Henry Miller and Jean Genet were routinely seized, along with Playboy and children’s stories with ambiguous titles, like Fun in Bed. Instead of fighting this prudery, the media kowtowed. The Herald had recently refused an ad from a Kings Cross nightclub, because its floor show included ‘female impersonators’.

  Racism was entrenched. The Labour Party pursued a ‘White Australia’ immigration policy, and Aboriginals were outcasts in their own land, barred from swimming pools, shops, cinemas and suffrage. Albert Namatjira’s paintings, famed throughout the land, would never be hung in the NSW Art Gallery, noted its director, ‘unless his works improve’.

  Being white and privileged, as we were, gave no immunity from a feeling of cultural suffocation, a sense of the deadness at our nation’s core. T
he experience of my father’s generation, of wars in distant lands and the bloody fights for freedom, was enshrined in slogans on Anzac Day, and from a teenager’s point of view, that was where it ended.

  Somewhere on the outskirts of Adelaide, still blasting away at our betters, the four of us floated the idea of launching a magazine of dissent.

  Back at Tharunka I plotted a feature. Brothels flourished in Sydney, despite draconian laws against prostitution, and were another taboo topic. One night I knocked at a grimy door near Central Station, armed with two pounds from petty cash. An ancient madam in a horsehair wig led me to an iron bed in a neon-lit room, where my dick was doused in Dettol. And that was the high point. When I wove this unseemly encounter into my article, ‘The City By Night’, the Herald heavies refused to roll their presses. On what grounds? ‘Our personal taste.’

  So I terminated Tharunka’s lifelong relationship with the Herald and moved to the Mirror, the tabloid recently acquired by a brash out-of-towner, Rupert Murdoch. His paper hit out at the ‘Herald censorship of students’ and his press offered us a free hand, adding zing to our pages. An anti-cop cartoon was enlarged to a single image on the front page. ‘The City By Night’ found a home on the back. Bertrand Russell sent an account of his famous CND sit-downs in Trafalgar Square. The accompanying photo showed sandal-clad marchers strumming guitars, captioned ‘Ban the Bombers taking time off to enjoy skiffling’.

  My reign at Tharunka ended. ‘Your issues are bright, well illustrated, and adult,’ wrote Mum, ‘with good layout. What a lot you’ve learned as editor. You will find it valuable in the event of a future in newspapers.’

  In September 1962, the world’s leading exponent of ‘sick humour’, Lenny Bruce, was booked to appear at Sydney’s Aarons Hotel. To locals, he was not a famous name. His act was unknown, his records unavailable – except to me and my cronies. Some Sunday nights I played squash with a schoolfriend whose father often travelled ‘over-seas’. After the game, his mother, dressed to kill, served coffee and cake on a silver tray, as though entertaining a foreign legation, while we listened to the latest batch of ‘sick’ comedy smuggled in from New York. Man, we’re all the same cats, we’re all the same schmuck – the President, me, you, every putz, has got the one chick, he’s yelling like a real dum dum: ‘Please, touch it once. Touch it once, touch it once …’ Lenny Bruce was hair-raising. An LP cover showed him with the Ku Klux Klan, picnicking in a cemetery.