Hippie Hippie Shake Page 5

  ‘That makes it worse!’ The magistrate fined the three of us twenty pounds each, convictions gleefully recorded. As we trailed from the court, our friends hissed at Peter Grose. Shortly afterwards he took up a post in London as correspondent for Rupert Murdoch’s impending national daily, The Australian.

  With exams approaching – finals, in my case – Richie and I decided to postpone the next Oz until the Christmas break. It was a miserable time for my co-editor. He was already at odds with his father for ducking a law career, and now Oz was seen as a disgrace. He worried about the press reports further eroding his dad’s health.

  Neither my own parents nor Martin Sharp’s were fazed by the fining. Back on campus, where I started to reacquaint myself with the classics of English literature, the editorship of Oz was viewed as a plus, rather than a minus. Sharp drew a strip for Tharunka: a prancing, dancing dickhead in a duffel coat, boasting that in the defence of Oz, he would outdo Oscar Wilde. Mart’s barb hit home. I would never plead guilty again.

  The paperback explosion was a bonus for exam cramming – cribs of Freud, insights into the metaphysical poets. When I read how George Orwell brought his intellect to bear on saucy seaside postcards, I trawled through booklets of popular song lyrics and tried to do the same for the Sydney Top 40. Most of them were slush, thematically identical – ‘boy loves girl but girl jilts boy’ – and the male reaction was either a flood of tears – I’ll be CRYING, CRYING, CRYING, CRYING, Yeah, CRYING, CRYING over you – or a tough-guy trickle – A little bitty tear let me down … spoilt my act as a clown … Tin Pan Alley, I decided, was ‘an asylum for emotional imbeciles’. No wonder I felt so at home there. The piece was posted to Nation, an outpost of independent ideas. The following Thursday, I hurried to the newsagent and found it printed under the heading ‘My Chick’s Dynamite’. Hey hey hey! My unsolicited opinions could hold their own in the media marketplace!

  As students sat for their November finals, the news came through of President Kennedy’s assassination. Some of my classmates were so distraught that they made an application to have their exams deferred. (It was unsuccessful.) Youth was the key to Kennedy’s charisma. Our own Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, was seventy. The NSW State Premier, Mr Heffron, was seventy-three. The Chairman of the Literary Censorship Board was eighty-one and his equivalent on the Appeals Board was eighty-four. The Chancellor of Sydney University was in his nineties. A few tycoons were so ancient they refused to list their ages in Who’s Who. In Nation, the writer Geoffrey Dutton contrasted this grim gerontocracy with the vibrant image of our country overseas, ‘bounding from triumphs on the tennis court to bulldozing another million acres or two of virgin bush’. In reality, ‘youth in Australia controls nothing but the teenage gramophone record business.’ And not even that.

  In the Christmas issue, we introduced into Oz ‘The Stiff Arm of the Law’, which became a regular file on police misconduct. For it, Dean Letcher, a law student, devised and doctored a ‘Report to the Commissioner’:

  It was rare for police veracity to be doubted in public. A hundred and forty copies of the issue were seized at a newsagent’s in Kings Cross; by none other than the officer whose name and rank had been appropriated for the report – Detective Sergeant Green. He took them to a magistrate, who ordered them burned.

  Oz 6 hit the stands; our best issue yet. For the centre spread, Sharp had drawn a board game inspired by the ‘Stiff Arm of the Law’: Coppers’ Snakes & Ladders. Beat a suspect unconscious and leave no bruises – LADDER. Pick up another plainclothes cop in a public lav – SNAKE.

  From New York’s outrageous magazine The Realist we lifted a monologue about a man who started telling dirty stories in the confessional and ended up delivering them to a packed congregation at High Mass, after which everyone ‘goes into a medley of “Mr Wong’s Got the Biggest Tong in Chinatown”! And that’s when we got raided …’ It was written by Lenny Bruce.

  A block away from our office stood the new headquarters of the P&O Shipping Line, recently opened by the Prime Minister. Set in the polished stone wall was a bronze basin sculpture: a series of interconnecting troughs at waist height, with water gurgling on to the pavement. I posed myself at the bronze recess, along with two friends, and pretended to pee. ‘For the convenience of passers-by,’ explained Richie’s caption, ‘and, despite a nominal charge, you don’t need to pay immediately: Just P & O.’ We put the shot on the cover.

  It was a popular Oz, the right mix. Circulation topped 10,000. For the first time, I dispatched copies for sale in Melbourne. They were confiscated by the Vice Squad, but it hardly mattered. It was expected. We were on a roll.

  In Oz 7 we instituted another regular feature – ‘This Month in Censorship’ – topping the list with James Baldwin’s prize-winning novel, Another Country, which had just been banned.

  The cover of Oz 8 (our anniversary issue) showed Sir Robert Menzies touched up to resemble Adolf Hitler. This man is an Australian Liberal. His party advocates: The White Australia Policy, Illegalisation of the Communist Party, Capital Punishment, repressive Literary Censorship … The State Rail stalls banned the issue on sight. A persistent Oz letter writer, David Dale, complained that our humour was too serious: ‘Although your satires are often amusing, one senses a great deal of bitterness behind them.’ So what? By April 1964, the end of our first year, Sharp, Richie and myself felt that the magazine was on the right track and our own futures were entwined with its progress.

  That same month I formally graduated a Bachelor of Arts. My mother’s delight was tempered by the pre-dawn knock on the door the next morning. A policeman handed me a summons to appear, along with Richie and Martin, at the Court of Petty Sessions for publishing an obscene magazine, ‘to wit, Oz 6’ – the one with the urinal cover.

  My father stood there in his plaid dressing gown.

  ‘This time it’s serious,’ I said.

  ‘Too bloody right it is,’ he snarled, shaking his fist at the the retreating rookie. ‘We’ll fight these bully-boys all the way to the Privy Council!’

  3

  a DIRTY LITTLE RAG with

  FILTH in it

  When the oldies abandoned their opulent houses on the northern beaches for their weekend hobby farms, teenage parties blazed. The children of surfers – classic bronzed Anzacs – were turning into surfies: hedonists ‘hanging five’ on Malibu boards, their straggly locks bleached by the sun and a dash of Ajax cleanser. The rhythm was Californian – the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean – but the rituals were local. Some chicks, it was rumoured, ‘put on queues’ behind the sand dunes. The last boy in line was said to be ‘stirring the porridge’. That summer, Little Pattie broke into the charts with a home-grown hit, He’s My Blond Headed Stompie Wompie Real Gone Surfer Boy’.

  Martin Sharp and I sometimes spent a Saturday arvo at the Newport Arms Hotel (‘the Arms’), pretending to booze it up, our ears cocked for the word on the hot turns to gatecrash. One night, jiving late to Little Pattie on a seaside patio, eyeing the barefoot surfettes and researching the morning’s ‘in’ beach to top up our tans … Varooom! A screech of wheelies, a punch-up, a well-aimed chunder … Sharp fled to the Oz office and penned a first-person monologue in the voice of the ocker gatecrasher, ‘The Word Flashed Around the Arms’. This cartoon was to revolutionise the country’s attitude to censorship.

  In law, a publication was obscene if found to have a ‘tendency to deprave, corrupt or injure the morals’ of people into whose hands it was likely to fall. A work of ‘literary or artistic merit’ was exempt.

  My father arranged an appointment with the solicitor retained by Country Life newspaper, where the three of us were interviewed by Detective Sergeant Green from the Vice Squad. To each question, the answer was identical. ‘On the advice of my solicitor, I do not wish to reply.’ Later, we were advised to dig up an expert to argue that Oz was of literary or artistic merit.

  It seemed a formidable task. Literature meant Shakespeare, art meant Michelangelo. Did S
harp’s joke scale such heights?

  The first person we approached was Reverend Roger Bush, the ABC’s ‘Radio Parson’, a chance to pull a rabbit out of the hat. In a preface to Sharp’s monologue, I had pointed out that ‘Roger Bush has been lately seen on Sydney’s northern beaches armed with a tape-recorder, conducting his own sociological survey of teenagers’ habits and morals’. Martin’s account provided a more accurate insight than a hundred ABC docos, especially if read aloud in a ‘guttural, awkwardly emphatic monotone’. Roger Bush could confirm the legitimacy of Sharp’s target.

  At the Reverend’s home in French’s Forest, Mart and I were greeted by a dog-collar topped with waves of spruced grey hair, rolling across a crinkled brow. ‘Why do Oz?’ Bush asked, guiding us into his study. ‘Did someone put you up to it?’ By his own estimate, the Radio Parson had interviewed over 1,500 teenagers. Over a pot of tea, we invited him to court.

  ‘As it happens, boys, I’ve already agreed to appear for the prosecution.’ Oh, shit. ‘And because of my involvement with the case, and my concern for the youth of Australia, I have taken the liberty of tape-recording our discussion.’

  Sharp and I slunk from the house. Had we uttered anything incriminating?

  A visit to the university was less dispiriting; several former lecturers agreed to testify. But still – we needed a heavyweight from the world at large. At the Abbotsleigh Ladies’ College in Warrawee, Mart and I presented ourselves to the silver-haired headmistress, Betty Archdale. A Master of Law, a member of the English Bar, she sat on the Council of the Girl Guides Association. I drew her attention to ‘The Word Flashed Around the Arms’. ‘Utterly disgusting,’ she said.

  ‘You mean the whole magazine?’ Might she too be an agent of the Crown?

  ‘Oh, no. I mean the behaviour it portrays.’ Her senior girls had complained of such ‘goings-on’. Sharp’s satire was ‘salutary’ and she would be delighted to testify. The bell clanged and we floated from her office. Nine hundred schoolgirls swarmed into the playground, hurling their straw hats over our heads and swamping us in their high spirits.

  In June 1964, the Beatles came to town. Oz had poked fun at the Fab Four’s buttoned-up mod suits, but that didn’t stop Sharp taking his mum to see them at the Sydney Stadium. They both turned Beatlemaniacs overnight, despite not hearing a note. We decided ‘Twist and Shout’ wasn’t so bad after all, and a globe-trotting journalist from Nigeria, Olabisi Ajala, secured us a mop-top interview:

  ‘Wherein lies the future of the Commonwealth?’ he asked Paul McCartney.

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  John Lennon was less confounded. ‘As long as it keeps going and everyone’s pals, I suppose it’s all right.’

  A friend of mine, Jenny Kee, also managed to interview Lennon. Jenny was an oriental beauty with scarlet-painted lips and a raucous Aussie accent who dazzled everyone she met. With an Italian mother and a Cantonese father, her Eurasian heritage was a novelty, but she didn’t care to look back. Her art form was fashion. At our first meeting, trailed by jocks, she had shimmered across the dance floor in a gold lurex jump-suit belted with a silver serviette ring.

  The Sheraton Hotel in Kings Cross was ringed with armed security guards and a thousand shrieking fans. Jenny attached herself to a Herald photographer and slipped inside. She bolted for the stairs and, on an upper landing, rammed a bag in the lift door. The Fab Four headed for the penthouse on foot. Jenny wasn’t the only one in the stairway ambush, but in her tartan suit with leather trim and black mod boots, she was the one girl singled out by Lennon: ‘Would you like to come to a party?’

  Jenny was the party. The first things she removed, she told me later, were her contact lenses. ‘What are those?’ he asked. When John unbuttoned her jacket, she re-buttoned. ‘I’m not like that,’ she insisted. Lennon took out his guitar for a jokey but courtly serenade. His later siege of the tartan outfit was successful. Jenny’s two previous swains paled into oblivion beside the ardour of the young Beatle, whose prolific talent at songwriting was matched by superhuman prowess between the sheets. According to Jenny, ‘it went on all night’. By morning, she had decided to save up for a passage on a cruise ship to Carnaby Street.

  She was relieved to have scored John, rather than the Beatle next door. Screams, giggles, the smack of leather striking flesh. ‘He’s with a Qantas hostess,’ confided Lennon. Jenny was mystified. Perhaps the Beatle was cranky about the in-flight service.

  The fad of ‘toplessness’ hit Sydney. Mart Sharptooned the July Oz with a topless policewoman, a topless schoolgirl, a topless nun. For the cover, he conjured up the Mona Lisa, also topless. When I dropped off a bundle to my mate Mick, the paper-seller on the corner of Farmers, he fretted over a possible charge of blasphemy: ‘They won’t let you get away with doing that to the Madonna.’ The phrase struck me. It was a sentiment that seemed to permeate the air after each Oz. You won’t get away with it. I began to wonder: just what was it I was not supposed to get away with?

  Other publishers, it seemed, could get away with murder … or almost. After a string of take-overs directed from his Sydney base, Rupert Murdoch was crowned by Oz ‘the undisputed king of the yellow press’. One reader found a provocative diary under his fourteen-year-old daughter’s pillow and idiotically took it to the Mirror. Shock-horror scoop – ‘promiscuity in the playground’. In the uproar, the girl and a friend, a thirteen-year-old boy mentioned in the diary, were expelled from school. After a tip-off, I visited the boy’s family, who were distraught and terrified – the son had hanged himself from a backyard clothesline. Except in Oz, this tragedy went unreported, as did the results of an examination of the girl by a doctor from the Child Welfare Department. She was a virgin.

  In July 1964, the Crown opened its case against Oz, with Sharp appearing in a grey pin-stripe suit. The first witness was Detective Sergeant Green, who recounted how a reader’s letter of complaint had prompted him to purchase a copy of Oz at Kings Cross (and to have the rest incinerated, though this wasn’t mentioned) and to launch a prosecution. Green tendered Oz 6 as Exhibit 1.

  Then Reverend Roger Bush took the stand, primed to translate the contentious monologue.

  Exhibit 1: ‘The word flashed around the Arms that there was a GAS turn up at Whale Beach Rd, so we piled into the Mini Coopers and thrashed over …’

  Bush: ‘The word passed quickly around the hotel at Newport that there was a mighty party in progress at Whale Beach Road. So we climbed into the Mini Coopers …’

  The Bench was baffled: ‘Motor cars?’

  ‘A small motor car,’ explained the sergeant. The Mini Cooper was like a Morris Minor, ‘with an extra carburettor, I think’.

  Exhibit: ‘And you know what? The old man of the bird who was having the party said we couldn’t crash – so Dennis belted him and we all piled in and had a helluva lot of grog …’

  Bush: ‘The father of the young lady who was having the party said we would not be admitted as we had no invitation. So Dennis engaged him in fisticuffs and we all went in. There was a tremendous amount of hard liquor …’

  Exhibit: ‘There were a few KING birds there, but they were all holding hands with these fairies – so Dennis belted them and we all got on to the birds and Frank got one of them so pissed that she passed out and we all went through her like a packet of salts – KING!’

  Bush: ‘There were a few gorgeous girls there, but they were all holding hands with these effeminate types. So Dennis hit them and we all kept company with the young ladies – perhaps “partnered the girls” might be a better translation. And Frank got one of them so inebriated, she passed out. So we all dragged her out to the garage and one after the other had intimate relations with her pretty quickly. Terrific, exclamation mark.’

  And so it continued until Sid, ‘the funniest bloke I know, kicked in the TV set and chucked in it. God it was FUNNY.’

  Bush played it fair, conceding that the piece was a heightened composite of possible Saturday night scenarios. Why, it w
as this very conduct he sought to combat with his radio shows.

  The first witness called by the defence was Dr Harry Heseltine, my former English tutor. A shy and courteous scholar, Harry was the co-editor of the literary quarterly Meanjin, and the editor of several heavyweight anthologies. When asked for an assessment of ‘The Word Flashed Around the Arms’, he replied, ‘I consider this piece to have a degree of literary merit’.

  Gerald Locke glared from the bench. ‘What standards do you apply?’ His salmon jowls shivered in perplexity. ‘What do you mean by literary merit?’

  Harry answered in a seamless grab: ‘I take it that what distinguishes literature from other writing is that literature does not deal with direct statement or moral imperative, but creates some set of circumstances, and so proceeds to contemplate the possibilities or limitations of human conduct within that set of circumstances. If we can say this is happening in a piece of writing, I would be prepared to describe it as literature. If that set of circumstances is created consistently and coherently, I would ascribe merit to it. As regards the piece from Oz, a given set of circumstances is created consistently and coherently; a character emerges for the speaker. He is deliberately given to us as at least sub-literary. He cannot punctuate very well. He mis-spells. He has a limited education. The only way he can express enthusiasm is through one or two fairly slangy sub-colloquial intensifiers. There is ugliness in some of the acts he reports – the vomiting. There is senseless waste and destruction of the television set. This discourse is consistent and coherent and given to us as sardonic on the part of the author – asking us to contemplate and to judge the false morality and the ugliness of the actions. Indeed, your Worship, I take this to be literature and satire of considerable merit.’

  Martin stared fixedly at the floor, and I felt proud of him; and proud too of Harry, who stood blinking in the box as though he had been discussing the weather. The beak sank into a sulk.