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  The morning after his opening, the city was plastered with billboards: SICK SMUT – THE STARS WALK OUT. Bruce had been booed within minutes of opening his mouth, and a celebrity DJ, Bob Rogers, fled with his wife. The outrage was so intense that the beer garden cancelled the season and the ABC its TV interview.

  I phoned Lenny Bruce’s manager, who sounded chilly. On behalf of the students, I invited his client to perform at the Roundhouse. The voice warmed – every other venue had closed its doors. ‘Lenny will do it for free, he desperately needs to be heard.’ A date was set. I phoned the Student’s Council at Sydney Uni, and they also arranged a Lenny Bruce show.

  An auburn-haired Catholic of impeccable probity booked the Roundhouse on behalf of the Arts Faculty. Once the confirmation was received from the warden himself, we printed leaflets and put up posters.

  In the afternoon, as I walked to the Roundhouse to check on the bookings, I was alerted by the sound of a lascivious baying, punctuated with seal honks and wolf-whistles. The door burst open. A young woman in a red dress and high heels, with long brown hair, flounced on to the grass. She glared at me.

  ‘Haven’t you drongos ever seen a girl before?’

  No – not like her. I looked again. An axe cleaved my heart in two, and then she was gone.

  In the canteen, the drongos milled about, still basking in the afterglow of the apparition. She had come to the Roundhouse to return books to a friend. Her name, I discovered, was Louise. Louise. It was love at first sight.

  An Arts student rushed over – the Lenny Bruce concert had been cancelled. I was angry and shocked. The Vice-Chancellor had intervened, no reason given. The comedian’s only crime in our country was to upset a disc jockey. I broke the news and the ban made headlines – UNI CANCELS SICK COMIC. The next day, the doddering supremo of Sydney University also chickened out.

  I called Lenny Bruce’s manager. This time he sounded morbid. He begged me to come and visit his client – ‘Lenny’s down in the dumps.’ I was asked to assure the comedian that his banishment was beyond our control. Bruce had told his manager that bringing him to Australia ‘was like booking Herman Goering to appear at a Jewish charity dance’. By the time I reached the Kings Cross hotel, Lenny Bruce was stretched on a bed, comatose, attended by two doctors. It was not the heroin I blamed for this seedy imitation of death, but the forces of law and order.

  2

  MY CHICK’S DYNAMITE

  On the first Sunday of the new year, 1963, about fifteen students eager to help with ideas for a new monthly magazine turned up at Wolseley Road, Mosman. It was hot and gusty, bushfires threatened. As usual, Dad had driven to Mount Victoria to stay with Mum for the weekend. To the neighbours, watching the Volkswagen Bugs and the Morris Minors disgorge the well-fed, mildly dishevelled youth, it might have seemed like a meeting of the North Shore debating society. In a way, it was. Most of my friends were cocky and argumentative, bound for solid careers in architecture or law, and none took recreational drugs.

  The gang sprawled on the floor of the living room with its jazzy scarlet wallpaper, an Astor seventeen-inch TV, a Night ’n’ Day lounge and a Victorian sideboard set with a crystal brandy decanter and six glasses; a gift from Country Life. It was a Tharunka crowd, mainly, though Richie Walsh and Peter Grose had enticed two striking associates from Honi Soit, whose Pepsodent grins flashed regularly from the social pages. Gina and Robin wanted to write a parody of high society, using a rating system based on the hit parade. Alex Popov, the smouldering, car-besotted Russian, who modelled his perpendicular movements on Elvis Presley, took one look at Gina – the current ‘Miss Arts’ – and spent the afternoon drowning himself in a vat of claret. Martin Sharp and Garry Shead, sowers of two issues of the Arty Wild Oat, the entire oeuvre, huddled in the corner in giggly rapport with Tharunka cartoonists Peter Kingston and Mick Glasheen. From the kitchen servery, I passed the cups of Pablo instant coffee and plates of Sao biscuits, demanding, ‘The name, the name!’

  In desperation, I gave a little speech on ‘nonsense syllables’, a device encountered in Psychology 2. These meaningless sounds, like blempto, glurth and yamsum, are used to test a subject’s powers of recall. ‘It’s a new magazine,’ I enthused, ‘so let’s have a new word.’ Richie admonished, ‘We don’t want to test the recall of our readers, we want them to remember the name forever.’ Then came a cascade of suggestions, until one word struck home. The word was Oz.

  ‘Too corny,’ said Sharp. ‘Appalling and childish,’ said Dean Letcher, the new editor of Honi Soit. ‘It’s a wizz,’ said Richie, jumping up and down. ‘Get it? Oz is a wizz – Oz is a wizz!’

  Conjuring magical memories of yellow brick roads, Oz seemed to fit the bill. Back then it did not occur to us, or anyone else, that Oz was shorthand for our homeland. Part symposium, part prank, a new adventure to share with friends, and friends were now my family.

  We formed a company and raised fifty pounds. The management fell to me, because I had the most free time. Peter Grose had joined the Mirror as a cadet, sucked into the Murdoch vortex. Richie Walsh, in addition to boning up for Med 2 and launching a career as a student politician, took a part-time job at the Institute of Industrial Psychology. To them, at this stage, Oz was a thing apart; to me, my whole existence. Gina’s father found us a weekend office at The Rocks, in a building which in colonial days had housed the horses of Governor Philip. It functioned as a joinery workshop during the week and we were soon covered in sawdust and sniffing glue as we put together the first issue.

  During the royal visit in March 1963, our Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, declared his feelings for Her Majesty: I did but see her passing by, but I will love her till I die. Everywhere the royals went, grandstands collapsed, buses collided and kids keeled over (700 at once in an Adelaide park). Richie collated a diary of the mishaps and mayhem, and Sharp penned a caricature of the Queen with a smile-mask tied to her mouth.

  The Murdoch-owned Mirror covered The Visit. ‘In Adelaide, crowds were quiet and subdued; in Hobart, they were shy, overawed …’ Two weeks later, the Mirror changed its mind: ‘Adelaide loved every minute of the royal visit. Crowds were enormous. In Hobart, people stood in thousands to cheer and wave …’ Rupert Murdoch was honing his tabloid skills. Oz picked up on the deception and headlined it as DEPARTMENT OF FACT. We had begun to hone a few skills of our own. (Today, Murdoch’s manipulation of the news remains blatant. Bloggers are crims, Greens are Reds, Israel is the underdog.)

  One night at Vadim’s, an arty hangout in Kings Cross presided over by the eponymous host, Martin Sharp pointed out his friend Robert Hughes, the artist and critic. Bob played to a table of admirers. His conversation, a mix of baroque elegance and streetwise wizzbang, seemed as dazzling as his prose, which appeared in his columns for Nation. ‘Get him to write for us,’ I urged Sharp. When Martin returned, after working the whole room, as well as Bob, he changed my life.

  ‘I don’t believe you’ve met Louise,’ he said, as I stood and nodded at the girl who had wowed the Roundhouse. After telling Louise that I was starting a magazine, he left the two of us alone. I tried to impress her, treasuring the number of times my jokes struck home, which was about one in ten. If that. Her beauty shrivelled my savoir faire. Her composure drove me nuts. In a few minutes – or was it hours? – a bloke came to retrieve her, and she introduced me to him, fumbling for my name.

  ‘This is Peter Grose,’ she said.

  Aaaaagggghhhh! ‘I’m not Peter Grose …’ She was already being led back to her table.

  Gina wrote a piece for the Oz première issue on the history of chastity belts. Sharp sketched cross-hatched versions of the gruesome devices and we had our centre spread – ‘The Maiden’s Key to Chastity’. A couple from NIDA posed for a photo. We put the padlocked belt on the man and gave the key to the woman. A premonition of feminism? At the time, we saw the photo as a metaphor for how we felt about Sydney – locked in the past, bound by convention, but poised to shatter its chains.

 
I, too, was poised – in the Red Room, my Mosman lair, now aptly dotted with flickering hazard lamps swiped from the sites of roadworks in progress. It was rotten to risk causing an accident, but the one I feared most was causing conception. On weekends, the air in the Red Room was pungent with Pax Gells, a liquorice-like spermicide prone to melt in one’s pocket. On Fridays, with Mum far away, I stored these ‘fizz pills’ in the fridge. My father’s advice on not getting a girl pregnant was couched as an analogy with the State Rail system, the train speeding towards Central – ‘Get off at Redfern, son’ – but sometimes, in the careless throes of greenhorn passion, I overshot the station.

  The girl concerned burst into tears when she broke the news. In those days the idea of an abortion was considered so shameful that the word could not even be mentioned in public. The newspapers, in cryptic pars on the inside pages, citing elderly dentists and blood-soaked schoolgirls, referred to ‘an illegal operation’. Under the NSW Crimes Act, a woman who procured a miscarriage, or anyone who aided her, was liable to ‘penal servitude for ten years’. I made surreptitious enquiries and found a gynaecologist of high repute in a ritzy neighbourhood. After the termination, my friend’s shame and suffering was intensified by the knowledge that, in the eyes of the law, she was a criminal. Later, I approached the doctor for an interview, his anonymity guaranteed, to be published in the first Oz.

  Sharp and I drove through the city streets from midnight till dawn, with buckets of flour and water, slapping up posters. Supplied by the Mirror, they were stark and effective:

  OZ

  is

  a

  new

  magazine

  At the same time, the Sydney Uni Dramatic Society staged a ‘Revue of the Absurd’, featuring ‘The Song of Disembraining’ by French playwright Alfred Jarry. During the chorus – Hooray! Arseholes to you! – three beefy johns from the Vice Squad marched onstage, putting the cast and the stagehands to flight. The sergeant cornered Albie Thoms, the producer: ‘Get me Alfred Jarry.’

  ‘Why don’t you look at the programme? He died in 1908.’ The sergeant didn’t budge. ‘That’s what you say.’ Albie was charged with ‘aiding, abetting, counselling and procuring’ an obscene song to be sung onstage.

  Louise finally succumbed to my telephone assaults, if not to my advances. Her conversational style was as laconic as mine was loquacious. Eventually, she got the hang of my name. Schooled at Loreto Convent, Louise studied Arts at Sydney University, where she had been voted Miss Engineering. About her religion and her electorate, I was merciless, constantly putting her down; an attempt to divert the force of my feelings. Across a crowded room, she could stun with a glance. And how she could dance! At parties, I manipulated the turntable to telling effect, focusing on a hit by the Drifters, ‘Save the Last Dance for Me’. Thanks to a summer of splashy movies, moon-lit patios and Thursday nights watching The Fugitive, we drifted into a tender affair.

  On the morning of April Fool’s Day, student volunteers in tight white cotton polo-necks and tartan skirts, still glowing from a summer on the beach, gathered at the former stables in The Rocks. The bulk of the Oz press run had gone to newsagents, but the volunteers got the rest, and we sent them uptown with shiny bundles. In minutes the girls returned, empty-handed. ‘We were mobbed. People are fighting over it. The city’s gone mad.’ Our little sixteen-page black-and-whiter was a hit. By lunchtime, almost 6,000 were sold and the mid-city stalls were clamouring for more. I ordered a reprint. It was the happiest day of my life.

  But not of everyone’s. Some buyers shredded Oz in front of our street-sellers, incensed at the headline ABORTION. The lessors of our office, the Maritime Services Board, moved to evict us. The Mirror cancelled its ad contract and threatened to sack its ebullient cadet, Peter Grose. How dare we impugn their reportage! Full of jovial apologies, Peter resigned from Oz.

  A wrist-slap came from Mum: ‘If you MUST write off-beat articles on such things as chastity belts, please be sure you are ON the beat regarding the facts, and avoid such stupidities as “modesty was introduced with Christianity”.’ She listed examples of modesty and chastity practised by pre-Christian cultures, and signed off as ‘Grannie, Mt Victoria’.

  Okay, so the first issue was lopsided, like me.

  We continued to meet on Sundays at The Rocks. Robert Hughes turned up, slamming his head on the iron roof strut. It shook the building, but not Bob. He plonked his typewriter on a carpentry bench and belted out a parody of the previous day’s Ban-the-Bomb march. In its ranks he detected the seeds of a new fascism; an incipient culture of complaint. Borrowing Sharp’s stick pen, he caricatured a peacenik in sandals, slung with CND signs. As if this wasn’t enough for one afternoon, Bob hit the keyboard again and came up with a satire of the in-depth celebrity meaning-of-life interview, much favoured by Playboy. We were awed. Appropriately, as Bob interrogated himself on the typewriter, he entitled it ‘An interview with God’.

  One morning my father and I were aroused at home by a pre-dawn knock on the kitchen door. A policeman thrust a blue sheet of paper in my hand, summonsing me to court on a charge of publishing an obscene magazine, ‘to wit, Oz’. My father glanced at the charge, muttering, ‘the bastards’, as the cop scurried away. Our first issue had caught up with us.

  Richie received a summons the same morning. His father, a deeply conservative church-going Anglican, suffered a heart attack, severe enough for the Walsh family solicitor to arrange for the case to be adjourned until September. He advised that as first offenders, we could avoid a recorded conviction. The catch was – we had to plead guilty.

  The printers panicked. Oz 4 was pulled off the press and its typeset pages loaded into the boot of the Country Life Holden. For the next three days I drove around Sydney, increasingly despondent. A dozen appointments, a dozen refusals. The word was out. I phoned Richie, dragging him away from his Anatomy studies, and he urged me to try the Anglican Press.

  ‘Isn’t it owned by the Church?’

  Richie replied that its proprietor, Francis James, was a champion of free speech, and a maverick.

  Yes, his escapade with the Packer family tabloid barons had been a hoot. In order to consolidate a take-over bid, Sir Frank Packer had sent his two burly sons to bash their way into the Anglican Press. Once alerted, Francis James flew into phone mode. An unlikely ally, Rupert Murdoch, ordered his sports editor to recruit toughs to help James’s forces, which included a former heavyweight boxing champion. The wily editor of The Anglican forced opened a lavatory window and clambered inside. He unbarred the doors and his troops swarmed in. The Packer Boys, Kerry and Clyde, were given a drubbing and hurled in the gutter. The front page of the following day’s Mirror announced KNIGHT’S SONS IN CITY BRAWL.

  Richie and Sharp met me at the Anglican Press, along with Sharp’s girlfriend, Anou, who had lately been helping out at Oz. Anou’s long hair was tinted mauve and she kept her sunglasses on in the gloom.

  A short, twinkling figure rose from the desk to greet us. Francis was a member of the Anglican Synod; framed photos showed him hobnobbing with deans and bishops. I was frank about the outstanding obscenity case, but he hardly listened. I discussed printing technicalities with the foreman while James – in a suitably mystified tone – asked Walsh why he wanted to be a psychiatrist. Sharp sat next to Anou, lighting a Gitane and smirking at Richie’s replies. A date was set for the presses to roll.

  As we departed, James remarked, ‘You lot might think of yourselves as angry young men. Piffle! Young Walsh here will take to the establishment like a duck to water.’

  (Thirty years later I asked Francis what he remembered most about this meeting: ‘It was the first time in my life I ever saw a woman wearing jeans.’)

  On Monday morning, 2 September 1963, I turned up at the Central Court of Petty Sessions in Liverpool Street, wearing a sober suit and a severe short-back-’n’-sides. Richie’s solicitor entered a plea of guilty on our behalf. The room was drab, the air smelt stale, a stained-wood carving
of the Royal Arms loomed above the bench. Peter Grose was separately represented and also entered a plea of guilty. Sergeant Turner told the court that Oz contained material of the worst type ever published in NSW. He singled out the article on chastity belts and the interview with an abortionist.

  The solicitor appearing for Grose told the magistrate that his client was ‘surprised and horrified’ by the first issue, over which he had little knowledge and control. Grose had acted more as a consultant than an editor, and he wished to stress that he had ‘since completely disassociated himself from the other two defendants’. A hush fell on the court. ‘In short, your Honour, my client has searched his soul and found Oz to be utterly worthless.’ The magistrate, E.J. Gibson, adjourned the court for an hour while he perused the offending issue.

  Student colleagues stood in the lobby and glared at Peter Grose, who retreated into a family huddle. What treachery! If only he had warned us. Richie must have felt rotten about his friend’s betrayal, but we didn’t like to ask him. I felt sorry for Peter, a pawn of propriety.

  Passing sentence, the grim-faced Gibson said he found little to recommend in Oz, which was ‘clearly obscene’. He was appalled that men ‘of such good family backrounds’, with the benefit of a university education, should publish such muck: ‘Better conduct is expected from such as you.’

  Our solicitor interjected, ‘At least Oz wasn’t sold surreptitiously, like dirty postcards.’