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  In all, seventeen experts were called for the defence. ‘The most formidable gathering of intellectuals to appear at one time in an Australian court,’ noted one report. True to her word, Betty Archdale told the magistrate that the morals of the girls in her care would not be injured by their exposure to Martin Sharp’s humour. (As opposed, I conjectured, to their exposure to Martin himself.)

  Gerald Locke targeted a Sharptoon satirising the folk singer Joan Baez, because of its enscrolled caption, ‘get folked’. John Olsen, already an eminent artist (and a former teacher of Sharp), became entangled in minimising this dastardly pun.

  ‘Can you see the relevance of the two words enscrolled?’

  ‘Get folked? I believe it is a colloquial saying among musicians’.

  ‘To get folked?’

  ‘Yes – meaning, let’s go and play some folk music.’

  ‘Oh, so musicians say – “Let’s all go and get folked”?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Something like that.’

  ‘Do you mix with folk singers?’

  ‘No. But I have heard them talk like that. . . just before they go off and play their music.’

  ‘What?

  ‘Yes. I’ve heard them. They go right off and . . .’

  ‘Where did you hear it?’

  ‘At a certain party.’

  ‘Where was the party?’

  He looked forlornly at Sharp. ‘I think there was probably one near Cranbrook School.’

  ‘And the musicians said, “Hey, let’s all go and get folked”, and then they all started to take out their guitars?’

  ‘It’s just a colloquial term, your Worship, no big deal.’

  The case was adjourned. Mum wrote wishing me luck: ‘How anyone in their right mind could say Oz depraves and corrupts beats me. It only disgusts from time to time.’ An academic in Canberra defied the Customs Department and set a banned book for his literature classes – Nabokov’s Lolita.

  The Anglican Press, which had long faced financial difficulties, went into liquidation. As a replacement, I chose an ‘offset’ printer, which used ‘camera-ready’ artwork instead of hot metal. Visuals no longer required costly ‘blocks’, so Sharp could decorate the pages at the last minute, often on the floor of the office while waiting for the courier.

  Oz going offset was like Dylan going electric; Mart and I flipped out on the newfound freedom. We scoured the streets ripping Mirror billboards from their mesh frames, and laid them out for an instant Oz spread:

  PROWLER STRIPS WOMAN NAKED! OBSCENE

  BROADCAST/ANNOUNCER QUITS! BANNED SEX

  BOOKS/FREE FOR SOME! LASH FOR 3 RAPISTS! NUDE

  TOP IN BUS/SYDNEY SHOCK! GIRL 13 RAPED/100

  YARDS FROM HOME! TENNIS STAR SHOCKS PRIEST!

  WHY MY SON IS A KILLER! WHIPPING FOR HUSBAND/

  WIFE’S RAGE!

  Our caption extolled the literary prowess of Rupert Murdoch’s new editor, so eagerly promoting the tabloid revolution.

  When the Oz case resumed, Gerald Locke’s belligerence intensified. Spectators were ejected if they laughed or lacked sober apparel. Francis James donned an ankle-length Nazi greatcoat, a souvenir from a dashing wartime escapade. He marched into court late, looking like a storm trooper, and apologised to the bench with ironic grandiloquence. As well as thick bifocals, the war hero possessed a pair of chunky contact lenses that pre-dated those of Jenny Kee. At awkward moments in his evidence, Francis extracted these accessories with a flourish – most took them for glass eyes – and polished each one with a white silk scarf. In the middle of the bench’s lambasting of a female theatre critic, who burst into tears, James stood up and shouted, ‘Shame!’ One morning, Locke was turning the pages of the offset Oz, our latest issue. His face flared and he ordered an adjournment, stung by Sharp’s cartoon of a magistrate dressed as a clown, uttering a Locke-ism: ‘This is a court of law, not a circus.’

  When Oz rested its case, a date in September was set for the ruling. Our fate was sealed, everyone said – a fine.

  Six months had gone by since the summons had landed. I was sick of the whole business. Sick of satire, sick of legal niceties, even sick of Oz. Since its inception I had not taken a break, apart from an exam cram. There was enough time to catch a slow boat to a Pacific island with a vernacular I didn’t understand. I had never before left Australia and ten days in New Caledonia fitted the bill. I booked a dawn flight home for the day of judgement.

  After a spell in Noumea’s youth hostel, a converted boat shed, I hit the road. Vietnamese nickel miners were the first to offer a lift, and I can still savour the spicy tang of my first stir-fry. Later, I drifted to an isolated beach, living off bread and jam, shaving in the rock pools, plunging into the Pacific.

  I got to know the locals and was delighted to discover that the guilt-free sexual mores chronicled by Margaret Mead in Coming of Age in Samoa were also practised here. Nubile Melanesians flirted by the campfire, inviting me to ‘jig-jig’. But my candle-lit Red Room talk-and-pounce technique had not prepared me for tribal feminism. Unaware of the local dialect for saying ‘Not tonight, Josephine’, I grabbed a stick and drew a line in the sand – a limp penis. The girls drifted off, perhaps thinking I’d once had an accident with a machete.

  Back at the hostel, a group of American ‘WTs’ – world travellers – told tales of opium dens on the Mekong, of free rides on the tops of timber trucks through Thailand. Despite its geographic proximity, the ‘Far East’ at that time seemed an impenetrable landscape of aliens in black pyjamas and lampshade hats growing jute. Backpackers of previous acquaintance had kept to the well-worn paths of Europe. The WTs opened up a new world.

  There was a hiccup in the Qantas schedule. The return flight was postponed to the morning after the Oz verdict. At the Noumea youth hostel I heard the news from Radio Australia. Oz had been found obscene and its editors sentenced to six months’ hard labour. The three of us were now on the way to Long Bay jail, according to the crackly account, which had attracted a crowd of WTs to my boatshed bunk. ‘Smut with humour is the literary device of the gutter,’ Locke had told the court. ‘Smut remains smut even when satire is used as its vehicle.’ He doubted that ‘The Word Flashed Around the Arms’ was really satire. The magistrate compared our magazine to a lavatory wall, its very cover ‘likely to encourage public urination’. The WTs kept muttering, ‘Wow!’, delighted to have an absconding pornographer in their midst.

  When the Qantas flight landed at Mascot Airport on 24 September 1964, I expected to be handcuffed and led off to Long Bay. Maybe the press would be there; and I worried about the impact of an arrest photo on my parents. In the aisle, a mother was struggling with a baby, so I gathered the bundle in my arms and walked down the stairs; a politician’s cheap bid for sympathy. To my amazement, Walsh and Sharp stood grinning on the tarmac, free on bail. Dad was beside them. Louise looked shy and demure in a lolly pink shift, and we hugged; it was good to be back in her arms. Press cameras clicked. An uneasy, yet courteous Detective Sergeant Green asked me to sign the bail application. His disapproval of Oz, I suspected, did not extend to wanting the editors put away. Louise showed me the Mirror front page – ‘3 JAILED – FILTHY PAPER’ – with its grim headshots of my co-defendants. The absence of my own visage produced an absurd pang of disappointment. Sharp had copped two months less than Walsh and myself, while Francis James, a man ‘of honest intentions according to his lights’, was let off with a fifty-pound fine. It must have been that Nazi greatcoat.

  ‘The Word Flashed Around the Arms’ was ‘filthy and disgusting’, according to Locke’s judgment. A cartoon of a clergyman squatting like a dog by a gramophone, labelled His Master’s Voice, was a ‘disgusting piece of blasphemy’. The Lenny Bruce item, ‘Ta Ra Ra Boom Te Ay’, was ‘grossly offensive, blasphemous and obscene’.

  I could see that Mart and Richie were still stunned by the viciousness of the verdict and their spell in the lock-up. They had been handcuffed, fingerprinted and dumped in the cells under the cour
t. ‘Next to common criminals,’ huffed Walsh. An urn of soup clotted with fish-heads was clanged on the floor. Left alone with it, they both wanted to retch. Just in time, Mart’s father turned up to bail them out.

  Locke’s summation found filth overlooked by everyone else. He singled out a letter-to-the-editor from Robert Hughes, for its allusion to roadside graffiti calling the Prime Minister ‘a shit’. No matter that Bob was castigating the perpetrators. ‘Obscene!’ So obsessed was Locke with porn, he overlooked pot. Perhaps he didn’t know what it was. A Farmers’ copywriter had described her months as a ‘depraved pot head in Tangier’ as the healthiest time of her life. She ceased coughing, her diet improved, she ‘slept like the heroine of an Ovaltine ad’.

  She found that Cannabis sativa was ‘a good clean smoke’, which put her way ahead of her time, and of me. Except for an amphetamine splurge on the eve of an Economics exam, which had enabled me to sprint through the required texts, I had no time for drugs.

  In Locke’s view, now was time to curb the flow of obscenity. ‘It is a serious thing to corrupt the minds of the young.’

  At home that night I listened to Eric Baume, an influential radio commentator whom Oz had exposed as a plagiarist: ‘And I was very pleased indeed to see – and I don’t care whether these people who talk about liberties and so forth jump in the lake – I was very pleased to see that three young men were jailed on charges of publishing an obscene publication. Well, that’s a good thing – to wipe Oz out will be one of the best things for the country. A dirty little rag with filth in it!’

  Elsewhere, the outrage was directed at Locke. At major campuses, nationwide, students and academics marched in protest. Funds were collected by the Royal George libertarians to reprint and circulate the ‘obscene bits’ of Oz. Students set up a nation-wide fund to raise money for an appeal. Others swarmed outside the court steps in Liverpool Street and held up placards composed from the Mirror’s billboards, chanting, ‘Sex and violence, sex and violence, sex and violence . . .’

  Writing from London, my sister Jill enclosed an item from the Spectator, which condemned the sentences as ‘fatuous and ill-conceived’. In the Daily Mail, a noted cultural commentator, Kenneth Allsop, asked readers to raise a glass of non-Australian wine and ‘celebrate that we don’t live in that tough-minded country which has banned Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Noddy and Biggles, where TV is emasculated and where you can’t get a drink after 6 p.m.’

  For the three of us, it was a taste of celebrity. Students wanted our speeches, glossy mags wanted our portraits, girls wanted our good vibrations. Maybe our little mag was mightier than we thought.

  4

  NON-STOP TWISTING and STOMPING

  I was in love with Louise. At times I pinched myself as we lay together in the Red Room, thankful at my good fortune and yet resentful at the effortless sway of her presence. Louise dreamily combed her hair as I stacked the turntable. Why was she so unwilling to whisper sweet nothings? Perhaps if we lived in Manhattan, we could clock up hours with a shrink to break the barrier of silence. At Mosman, we tried to build bridges in the bedroom, with light banter and Joan Baez.

  Louise braved a weekend visit to Upalong, the family home in the Blue Mountains. Separate beds, of course. After all, I was only twenty-four. Any woman who entered my mother’s household and failed to tongue-trip like Dorothy Parker on her fourth martini was suspected of suffering from brain damage. Or perhaps Louise had some affliction of the vocal cords? When overexcited, I confess to a touch of gasbaggery – but, compared to Betty Neville or my sister Josie, I was about as voluble as a Trappist monk. Louise was that strange kind of creature who took a pause for breath, and thought before she opened her mouth. She felt no obligation to obliterate silence.

  We went riding together. On a black horse Louise, with her fancy boots, cut a dashing figure while I slumped on a dozy Shetland. Ah, the bush, the blowflies, the bruises. We paddled and picnicked in the Cox’s River, or rode horseback to Bushrangers Cave via Little Zig Zag, and edged ourselves into remote recesses where Ned Kelly had allegedly hidden out. The unmarked trails near Upalong unfolded their glens and ferny cascades, granting a spell of solitude that required no Land-Rover, money or physical prowess; at nights the stars were brighter, the winds bracing.

  In Sydney, Louise often dated an older man, a professional gambler. ‘A good friend,’ she insisted. Another world. Purely platonic. It was an arrangement which cut both ways. Louise could dine out on Saturday nights, and I would be left to my own devices. I could also congratulate myself on being broad-minded.

  The gambler lent her his car. Late one night, Louise skipped up the garden path at Wolseley Road, a hibiscus tucked behind her ear, a surprise visit. Mum happened to be home, and took a dim view of this nocturnal doorknock by the silent siren in stilettos, a souped-up convertible at the gate. She found Louise acceptable on a horse, but basically she preferred the ‘girl next door’ like Anne, with her freckles and farmyard wisdom, not a fast-lane man-eater who was probably on the Pill. Dad, on the other hand, took a shine to the quiet girl with a flower in her hair.

  On weekday afternoons, the Oz crew drifted into the dusty mousehole in Hunter Street. Martin Sharp squatted on the worn carpet with his pen, engineering a moat of spilt coffee and cigarette ash; his girlfriend, Anou, perched on a filing cabinet, grinning behind saucer-sized blue sunglasses, her hair now tinted a soft pink. Louise sat at the desk in iridescent Thai silk, writing neat addresses for the back-issue labels. Her father had died when she was young, bequeathing a modest allowance and no immediate need for a job.

  Because of the trials, the press barged into our lives. ‘We aim to develop an enquiring state of mind in the community,’ Richie Walsh told Squire magazine.

  ‘Maybe we’re just nurturing cynicism,’ I countered.

  ‘I hope not.’ It was Debating Pro mode. ‘Knock, knock, knock – just for the sake of it.’ Richie shovelled sugar into another cup of tea. ‘Oz needs to foster positive values.’

  ‘Yeah, but we’re destroying unwarranted respect for outmoded values.’

  ‘It might have that effect, but it’s not what we’re aiming at.’

  ‘But isn’t cynicism towards royalty, say, better than slavish worship?’

  ‘No. I prefer to respect traditions. I detest cynics.’

  Richie’s final school years had been horrific. He was picked on by teachers. The rugby bullies dangled him from locker-room clothes pegs. The Barker College headmaster repeatedly caned him for ‘impudence’. Richie prepared for these onslaughts with a geometry book in his underpants. Like Sharp, he was compelled to repeat his final year and was also deemed not to be ‘prefect material’.

  Now he sipped his sugary tea and paced the office floor in a flannel blazer and regimental tie, lecturing Squire’s editor on the failures of the Church: ‘It is their leaders, not the satirists, who place too much emphasis on sex.’

  Squire noted that Neville was sympathetic to the Playboy philosophy, as expounded by Hugh Hefner (and Squire), while Walsh regarded Playboy as ‘an elaborate excuse for titillation’.

  ‘Don’t you like being titillated?’ asked Squire.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with it morally,’ said Richie. ‘I wouldn’t stoop to glancing at the stuff.’

  ‘I adore pictures of nudes,’ I said. If I looked at them long enough, I might get the hang of female anatomy. Sharp finished his sketch and held it up – a nude frontal of Walsh.

  Years later, reading the faded clipping of this encounter, Richie said he’d been sending up the interviewer. ‘If I was such a prude, how come I was the only editor to pose in the mag fully nude?’ He did, too, for a double-spread photo-satire on the army’s treatment of conscripts – the medical examination. ‘What a lovely bottom I had then.’

  Oz thrived. The artist Garry Shead, having started with whimsical collages mocking the alfs, sharpened his fangs. He depicted a white settler approaching an Aboriginal with a branding iron: ‘So ya won’t get los
t.’ Libertarian writer Frank Moorehouse delved into the meteoric rise of Edna Everage and found it fuelled by the arrant snobbery of an expanding middle class. John Wilcock, the co-creator of New York’s Village Voice newspaper – a formative inspiration – allowed Oz to syndicate his column, ‘The Village Square’, for free. It was a feverish grab-bag of rebel attitudes and breathless trend-spotting, rather like my own brain.

  Gerald Locke hit the headlines again. ‘Long hair shows an aversion to work,’ he told three young men, as he packed them off to jail for vagrancy. In a way, he was right.

  In December 1964 the Oz appeal was heard before Judge Aaron Levine; a slow-mo re-run of the lower court with a bigger budget. Top-notch lawyers fluffed their wigs and flashed their cufflinks. In the future they would be running the country – a State Premier, a Governor General – and this was their spotlit audition. Levine reserved his judgment until February.

  Oz was a symbol of social ferment, but I was bored, stuck in the clerical doldrums – answering mail, queuing at the bank, dealing with distributors. We advertised for ‘an efficient, full-time secretary’ at fourteen pounds a week. Marsha Rowe walked though the door in a navy blue safari dress and quizzed us about our pension arrangements, her dark eyes flashing under a halo of wavy brown hair. This heartmelting teenager could type, take dictation, and argue the finer points of psychoanalysis. Richie at last developed a fascination for Oz office management.

  I took a copywriter’s job at Jackson Wain and the Herald signed me up as its movie reviewer, the first one in its history, and, to this day, the one least qualified. ‘Haven’t a clue,’ I confessed to the Arts Editor. ‘Nothing to it,’ he replied, offering twenty pounds a week. Martin Sharp was also signed up. When the famously witty British theatre critic Kenneth Tynan uttered the world’s first four-letter word on TV – he stuttered, so it was about seven letters – the Western media had apoplexy. Mart sketched the head of a belligerent yob in mid-swear: ‘Get Tynanned’. The journos at the Herald threatened to strike if it was printed and John Pringle, the liberal new editor, backed down.