The Digger No.10 January 1973

Silvia and the Synthetics;gay violence on stage

by Barry Prothero P.3

ISSUE NO. 10 JANUARY 13 - JANUARY 27 30 CENTS

Pouch Hawkes and Jenny Brown talk to the PM’s wife

Ms.W hitlam atThe Lodge

Confessions I of a boy who sold himself Life on the streets and in the subway toilets around Sydney — a way o f earning a living P.2

G ettin g fired over fou r-letter w ords The incrimination and expulsion o f Helen Carner, teacher and friend o f students at Fitzroy High School P.6 ..

________________________

I M arijuana and I its sid e-effects The first in what could become a series; Beatrice Faust reports on reports o f a link between smoking and genital disease P.4

Bungool A tale o f old men and young . . . “ Outside the small pocket o f insider’s paranoia, it was the perfect rock scene: a beautiflil park with few bugs, a good line-up o f bands, and almost no people.” P.8

Sunbury Musicians, promoters, organisers and more get in for their bitch before the first note, by Jenny Brown , P.8

Extract from the novel

RINGOLEVIO Emmett Grogan’s game o f life and death P.4

BLANK PAGE FOR ISSUU VERSION ONLY

Grassby sweats over Keith Richard

But is it fair to rats

Stones clear smack-screen

The Stones February tour of Australia will go on. Final clear­ ance came last Tuesday when immigration minister A1 Grassby lifted a departmental ban of Keith Richard. The ban follow ed reports on the Stones’ past dope convictions, their current prob­ lems with French cops over dope, and their likely use of dope during the tour.

Reason for Grassby’s hesitation over Keith Richard was a report that the guitarist was heavily into heroin and/or methadone. In a country where there are no pro­ visions for addicts, this was seen as serious enough to consider excluding Richard and thus sabotaging the tour. Grassby asked the tour pro­ moters, the Paul Dainty Organis­ ation, to check on this and other details of the Stones’ dope involve­ ment.

Apparently, either the Dainty report, or other reports through government contacts, satisfied Grassby that the danger of a major drug scandal happening around the Stones in Australia was low enough to risk. (What the government had to lose in eighteen year-old votes must have been far greater.)

Whatiyer cooled Grassby didn’t work in Japan, where the Foreign Ministry has announced Jagger is barred from the country and the tour will thus not proceed, which must make the whole trip less than usually profitable for the boys. The Japanese leg of the tour was to be the most lavish and lucrative. i It is unclear where the story of Richard and heroin came from, but the French police investigation is a classic of confusion.

The Stones “moved house to the south of France” about eighteen months ago, allegedly to lessen the tax burden. But Jagger claims they’ve hardly been near the place in the last twelve months.

Last month English and American papers reported that five of the group, including Jagger, had been charged with using narcotics in a luxury villa on the French Riviera. Jagger denied it. He said he, Charlie Watts, Mick Taylor and Bill Wyman flew to Nice December 4th to answer questions at an informal investigation.

They were questioned by a judge about their drug-taking habits, and asked whether they knew certain people who allegedly had taken drugs.

The Stones denied everything and were allowed to fly back to Jamaica where they’re recording their new album. Next day London papers reported arrest warrants were out on Keith Richard and Anita Pallenberg, who lives with him. The warrants are supposed to refer to two men busted for dealing “50 grams of heroin” , in late 1971. The men said they had attended parties at Richard’s house. Richard issued a statement in Jamaica around Christmas claiming

The Digger naturally prefers letters that are signed, with an ad­ dress. Not only does this make for honest dialogue with and amongst correspondents, it protects all par­ ties from the gruespme possibilities of the law.

One letter below is anonymous — The Digger emphasises that its credibility, and any reflections it makes on real people, must there­ fore be severely qualified. We trust readers to understand this unilat­ erally, but make the point on be­ half of our own self-preservation.

M ackie subbing I submitted an article to you on the Pat Mackie versus Consolidated Press trial. An article appeared in the following issue (The Digger, No. 8, Dec. 2—16, 1972) under my name which was only recognisable in parts to the one submitted by me.

1 agreed in a phone conversation with Bruce Hanford to changes being made in the article and in particular to several paragraphs read out to me.

Unfortunately in the parts not read out to me, in the course of shorten­ ing the article, various inaccuracies were introduced. For instance Mr Harvey, an Industrial Commissioner

he knew nothing of the warrants, or heroin dealings.

So far, the Stones have heard it all only in the press. They have no charges, arrest warrants, or res­ trictions from French police or any Other authorities . . . as far as they know. They are preparing for their tour which will take them through Hawaii, Hong Kong and Aus­ tralia. Chip Monck — designer of their staging and lighting — was quoted in the latest issue of Rolling Stone thus; “There will be two re­ volving mirrors this time, one in front as before and another over the stage with a design on the back in neon.

The equipment will be much more compact because of the shipping costs.”

Stones concerts begin in Brisbane on February 13th, and all tickets are already sold. Total audience in this country should exceed 100,000,

Wainer w aits

Bert Wainer, currently under threat of deregistration by the 12 faceless men of the Medical Regis­ tration Board is still waiting to hear from them. A promised letter had not arrived late this week, although there is a meeting in a few days.

Wainer is adamant that he will fight them with all the legal weapons available to him. Wainer claims what he’s doing is obviously not illegal, since the courts and the police have not been called in.

But Wainer believes his activity is a threat to the comfortable status quo the medical profession, the po3 lice and the government have worked out for themselves. It also threatens the odd practice of doctors being unable to advertise their services.

Wainer has not in fact advertised any more than any number of other doctors whose names and places of work have been quoted in the press and on television. (Doctor so and so, expert on alcoholism, of Collins St said today . . .).

He told The Digger: “ If I have to overtly advertise to prevent wo­ men from hocking their pregnant uteruses around from doctor to doc­ tor receiving abuse, sermons’ being thoroughly exploited, and always being charged, then I think it is a moral thing for me to advertise re­ ferrals for abortion and advice on contraception.”

Doctor Wainer’s phone numbers are 419-2511 and 429-2887.

was included in a group described as AWU officials. That was unfortunate.

I do not object in principle to subediting, so I am not complaining here about the many paragraphs left out altogether. What surprised me however was that new things were injected into the article. For instance, in an entirely new first paragraph, Frank Packer was described as the man who put McMahon in power and Pat Mackie as a battler in a baseball cap. Mackie’s cap although it was made much of by the daily press at the time of the dispute, was irrelevant to the issues involved. Since I was attempting to examine the trial in the light of those issues, references to the cap still seemed irfelevent.

Interestingly, Consolidated Press made many references to it during the trial —one of their many attempts to obscure the issues by appealing to prejudice. I would not use the word “ battler” to describe Mackie.* As editors, you could have re­ jected the article.

Straight papers subedit articles in this way every day, although usually there are no by-lines. One of the reasons why people are attracted to­ wards writing for a paper like Digger, is that they feel they may get printed what they actually write.

This appears not to be the case.

Wendy Bacon Darling Point, NSW *One could argue that these touches

t m t s t Pi*g ANo

j o in t

¡y p R iJ u m ft 20 G M S N £ t

$ 30

if Price-controlled pot packet Packaged local pot has come on the market in the past month, and is selling steadily in Sydney and Mel­ bourne. “Sunshine Marijuana” is produced by a small farm in Queens­ land, run by twelve heads, according to trade sources.

The label, which was designed by a Melbourne commercial artist for four weight ounces, and is printed in three colors, is enclosed in the bag. The bag itself is sealed three times, with a hot knife.

The weight checked out as ad­ vertised (20 grammes, or about

2/3rds o f an ounce); the price ($30) is also printed on the label/which may violate retail price maintenance legislation, but which may safeguard the product’s reputation in the cur-, rent blackmarket situation.

The dope itself is all heads, full of seeds, in samples seen; the color is light green, and the gear is obviously from mature plants. The smoking quality is good to very good in samples tested. An independent trade source remarked, “it’s the best local grass I’ve smoked.” Asked if he had an interest in the venture, he said,

“no, I only have an interest in smoking more of it. No financial interests, or anything like that.”

A dealer in the brand stressed the new nationalism: “ If you’re gonna buy dope, you ought to buy Australian,” he said last week, in Burwood, a Melbourne suburb.

The novelty value and Oz chauv­ inism is gaining the line acceptance on a par with more psycho-active favorites such as Sumatran, South African and Laotian lines in the tweer areas of Sydney.

New York (UPS) — The Youth International Party has revealed a weird scenario for Inauguration Day. YIP leaders plan to assemble a horde of freeks in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20. After a brief inspirational message about the need for concen­ tration camps, the crew will don rat tails and ears and take off for the Inaugural parade.

Hundreds of people will drag a rat float as big as a truck by its tail through the streets, according to YIP spokespeople. Then they will present a great gilded rat-trap to the American people.

In offering an explanation for this seemingly bizarre behaviour, YIP people claim Nixon is actually a mutant rat. Since 1946, they say, clever aides have managed to conceal this through mass hypnosis, but there are hopes that this psychodrama will shock Americans out of their trance.

As corraborating evidence, they cite Kissinger’s role as the big cheese.

Fem inist sexuality New York (UPS) — For many years, female sexuality has been the subject of myth and, more recently, of scientific study. But women at the Feminist Sexuality Project aren’t interested in myth or science — they want to know what makes them happy.

The Commonwealth Employment Service told me that, as far as they know, there is no legal stripulatiai to prevent an employer from making racial specifications when advertising a position. I rang Mike Jones at InShoppe to ask him why he wanted only Europeans, and what exactly he meant by the term anyway, His first unguarded reply was that Europeans are “more accurate with figures.”

Digger: How exactly would you de­ fine a European?

Jones: Well, an Australian.

Digger: What’s an Australian,

add color,, but surely that was up to me?

The Digger will only make sub­ stantial changes to submitted copy if it is possible to discuss these changes with the author. In the case of the above-mentioned article, it appears these discussions, con­ ducted by telephone, were insuf­ ficient to clarify all the changes made. The Digger apologises to Wendy Bacon.

look pretty imponderable at this stage.

Bryan pointed out a second InShoppe ad right next to the of­ though? Are you trying to discour­ Jones: The best qualified applicant fending one, for a cashier and re­ age Aborigines or Asians from apply­ gets the job. ceptionist. We mused momentarily ing for the position? Or black Digger: Well, why do you bother over why an apparently racist* em­ people generally? to specify “European” in the ad­ ployer might leave a front-desk job Jones: There are plenty of black like this one open to black people, vertisement? people bom in Europe. while turning nasty on someone wor­ Jones: It saves time. king in the boweteofthe organisation.

Digger: (politely) I don’t really think Digger: (patiently) What I’m trying Bryan suggested that the racist in there are very many . to understand is why you specify the woodpile might be the accoun­ Jones: I’d know that better than “ European” if you are not going to tant him/herself, to whom the lucky you, wouldn’t I? I come from there, make any distinction in practice.

European would find him/herself don’t I? Jones: (on a rising note) Look, it’s responsible.

Digger: You sound as if you come not meant for you to understand. * * * from the north of England.

We have our own reasons. It doesn’t Unmarried pregnant women are Jones: That’s right. matter to me if you don’t under­ also ill-advised to try working at Not wanting to buy into a Com­ stand, as long as I do.

In-Shoppe. A woman I met recently mon Market dispute, I got back to * * * was sacked from In-Shoppe without the point.

Bryan Havenhand at AUS/Ab- notice;,; without pay in lieu of Digged: Would you refuse to inter­ schol told me that the Federal gov­ notice* and With no reason given view a black or Asian applicant? ernment has set up a working party for the sacking. She was less than Jones: No. We’ve had several nonto study racial discrimination in em­ two months pregnant at the time, Europeans apply. ployment, housing and education, perfectly well and cheerful, able and Digger: Would you offer the position I but as these are areas of State willing to work as hard as her more control, the legal hassles arising when fortunate sisters on the job, and with to a black or Asian applicant if her/ a person charged under a Federal seven years of clothes-selling ex­ his experience and qualifications law has to be tried in State courts perience behind her. were the best available?

Trade tricks Come now, Bruce Hanford, you shouldn’t believe everything that a crow tells you. For example harlots are dealt with at Central Court of Petty Sessions not Darlinghurst. As for magistrates wanking at the sight of “Sally” , she’s having herself on.

If she’s like the usual run of pros that front at Central, she’s a bag.

SM’s at Central have been known to put through 150 cases in a day, so they have to have both hands on the bench to riffle through the charge sheets, MO cards and other bits and pieces that concern the cases before the court.

Anyway the Clerk of Petty Ses­ sions would soon nab a wanking SM — he charges in and out of the court _ on the same level as the magistrate, putting files before the beak all day.

Jack Child, Darlinghurst, N.S.W.

Address letters/telegrams to: The Digger, P.O. Box 77, Carlton, Vic., 3053

Clinic dis-service I would like to offer a consumer’s evaluation of Doc Wainer’s service in response to your article about his Fertility Control Clinic and what he’s all about.

I don’t think his set-up is a “ser­ vice” at all since in my personal ex­ perience he withholds information on available abortionists and refers everybody wanting an abortion to one guy only who is apparently a masterful surgeon but, as I found and Wainer later admitted, an arro­ gant and inhuman cunt! On top of this you suffer the rude and superior attitude of this guy’s nurse and in my case a wait of nearly 3 hours after the appointed time before you get to see the guy.

It seems, in light of Wainer de­

liberately misleading people about the availability of alternatives to this one guy he refers everybody to that perhaps he has been clever in trying to “comer the market” . Since the legal status, quality and cost of abortion at the many other places where they can be obtained differ hardly at all with Wainer’s referralto-one-man-only-“service” , I think it is only too easy to see that Wainer has set himself up as a service for helping the public but which in fact is only a front for “capturing a greater volume of business” (inver­ ted commas in this letter indicate Wainer’s own terms), for his arrogant croney and himself and I doubt that either of them are starving because of this “service” .

I found Wainer’s surgeon such an unfeeling and arrogant bastard that I left his place five minutes after | being with him, upset and crying. I j : returned to Wainer’s place where his j objectionable receptionist had delight in telling me I’d blown it by walking out of the surgeon’s place and there

W histler silenced Palo Alto, Cal. (UPS) - It’s of­ ficial now — John Draper, a Calif­ ornia electronics engineer, is really Captain Crunch. And for that he was sentenced Nov. 28 to five years probation and a $1000 fine and or­ dered to stop his almost legendary adventures in phone phreaking.

Draper pled no contest to charges that he schemed to defraud the phone company by sending signals into long-distance circuits to make free calls. He got his nickname from the discovery that the whistle which used to be given away in Captain Crunch is the triggering frequency to con­ nect into toll-free long-distance' cir­ cuits.

Estimable Digger Qartoonist Ron Cobb is missing from this issue.

He didn’t just miss the deadline, he hightailed it to Indonesia with Robin Love to make a movie for the Australian Union of Students.

Cobb has promised to return the issue after next with the Illustrated Cobb Guide to Indonesia And Its Wonders.

Blackout for In accountant In-Shoppe’s Melbourne Accoun­ tant is looking for an assistant, ac­ cording to Saturday’s Age, but if you saw the ad and weren’t too sure about your racial classification, you wouldn’t have trucked on down there to check out the job. Because the ad says quite boldly EURO­ PEAN.

They have embarked on a study to enable women to better under­ stand their sexuality, employing a questionnaire with questions like: How do you masturbate? What do you think is the importance of mas­ turbation? How important are phys­ ical affection and touching for their own sakes (not leading to sex)?

Do you do as much of them as you like? Is having orgasms important to you? What part does sex play in, your life?

The questionnaires can be ob­ tained singly or in bulk by sending a stamped, self-addressed envelope to Shere Hite, Feminist Sexuality Pro­ ject, National Organization* for Women, 28E. 56 St., New York, N.Y. 10022.

She’s not sure how news of her pregnancy reached the ears of the powers that be. She asked repeatedly why she was being sacked, and was told that there was too much staff, but as two other women had been hired sinceshe’d started, this seemed a lame excuse. When she claimed her right at least to be given notice or severance pay, she was told, “Sorry, that’s just the way it is.”

This might have looked like paranoia or an isolated case, were it not for the fact that another single girl on the staff was pregnant too.

This girl, onbeing hired, had frankly admitted being pregnant, and had been told by the staffing officer that this was cool, and that she cquld go on-working as long as she M t up to it.

This humane character, however, was transferred to Sydney and re­ placed by a Simon Legree who called the pregnant women in on the same day and sacked them both, unceremoniously.

H.G.

was no-one else in the whole of descending pat on the head for APG Melbourne who was performing abor­ in following Europe’s lead. “Good tions. Wainer repeated the same in­ 1 Work, Famous Five!” formation and only after my insis­ Not a word on the controlled tence that this couldn’t be so and a yet relaxed performances by the further flood of tears would he actors, on the particularly clever and divulge alternatives to his pig surgeon. funny characterizations. (Honorable I had no trouble whatsoever in mention to Herbie the ferret.) And arranging appointments to see these the smooth, fluid movements and guys and had an operation carried nice timing of the choreography. out in an ideal way by an ideal I think it a trifle pettish to com­ abortionist. plain at the delay in the program, What sort of dis-service is Wainers? for whatever cause. The television age It stinks! of punctuality rears its ugly head.

Yours Anonymously And finally, I feel it incumbent (No name or address supplied.) upon myself to state, forthrightly and unblushingly, that I witnessed an APG performance for the first time, and was impressed —I laughed a good deal, unreservedly. I twitched in sync to the excellent music; and I came away heartened, at the improvement Just a word or twenty on the in Kounter Kulture Theatre. “Billy Review by Ian Hayward Robinson of the Mountain” isn’t all that heavy — APG’s — “A Nite in Rio and Other why should “A Nite in Rio” strive Bummers” . The tone of the review for a Depth of the Year award? Why was just a little too d o se to the the hell shouldn’t I enjoy a good type of attitude APG was in fact sat­ laugh; without being ashamed of my irizing for comfort. We all know that wretched Antipodean status, or these days people regularly perform grateful of crumbs dropped from the Stark Raving Nude and his (Ian H. great gaudy culture centre of Europe?

Robinson’s) meticulous noting of Why not indeed. who bared what, belied his, too easily “Ms Mario Brandon ” nonchalant — “personally, I didn’t Prahran, Vic. notice them much.”

This telling observation had fol­ lowed a brief, but facile resume of January 13 — January 27 the performance itself, with a con­

APG

Page 2

The Digger

January 13 — January 27

Working on the railway;

Published by High times Pty Ltd, 58 Canterbury Road, Middle Park, 3206.

Editorial offices are at 366 Lygon Street, Carlton.

Telephone: 347-2782 (temporarily).

Postal address: P.O. Box 77, Carlton, Victoria, 3053.

Editing: Phillip Frazer, Bruce Hanford, Helen Garner Administration and circulation: Game Hutchinson Advertising: Terry Cleary Artwork and layout: Ian McCausland Reporting: Jenny Brown, Colin Talbot, Virginia Fraser Subscriptions and typesetting: Sue Cassio Sydney office: Editorial — Jon or Ponch Hawkes. Advertising— Michael Zerman.

8 Norfolk Street, Paddington, 2021.

Telephone: 31-5073.

I |

f

W hat can a poor boy do, kept sell his arse...

t | | |

This story is from a friend who's spent the past four months working as a male prostitute on Sydney's railway beat. The writing is largely his work, with some o f my infamous editing, but we can't give him a byline . . . because o f the way some people are. The photographs are by Sean Foley.

| \ | | \ j

work. One of them said, “you’d think he would have given you ten minutes to get away in . . .’\ The outstanding warrant was for absconding whilst on bail. The of­ fence alleged was that I’d called a policeman “a short-haired fascist pig” while walking home from a laundromat, in October 1970, at the height of Askin’s law & order jag. In fact, I did : not, but after at­ tending Hornsby court, being reman­ ded for four days in Long Bay, I negotiated a guilty plea to save being tried on other charges, and was fined $50 with no time to pay in Newtown court. I was not allowed any contact with the outside world, and had no money, so I did ten more days in the extension at Long Bay, sweeping.

By the time I got out, there were no more vacancies for pickers at Cowra, and I was broke, unemployed, and scraping the rings on my ass, as they say. I was also randy, as I hadn’t had a fuck for two weeks, so I went down on the beat. There had been the odd occasion in the past when I’d made myself available for $10 or $20, or (at the nadir) a bottle of beer and a hamburger . . . “ Do you mind if I say something to you, you won’t take offence?”

“It’s not likely.”

“Well, I think you look very manly.”

I didn’t like his come-on, and I didn’t fancy him for aesthetic reas­ ons, so I knocked him back. He wanted a detailed explanation, and followed me up the street. Then he offered me $10 and a taxi-fare home.

He was 23; it was the first time I’ve been offered money by someone under 45. “ Sold, honey.” ’ The idea dawned on me: I’d struck a source of income, one that had never occurred to me before. * * * My second client, a wealthy city businessman, has to get someone else to solicit his fucks for him, because he can’t be seen frequenting public toilets. He has a reputation to pro­ tect — he laid this heavy rave on me what a big deal man)ie was . . . that’s how I met my buddy Allan, he set me up with him. Allan’s been a male prostitute for 15 years, hasn’t been employed for 12 years. He’s made his living just cracking it.

Doug just strolled through Town Hall station. He looked at me. I was convinced he was a cop. I saw him speak to Allan, who wears an old baggy suit. It looked like a plot, so I split; I went up the street, up Park St., into Pitt St. I was walking along when Allan caught up with me. “ Look, before I say anything,” he said, “promise you won’t hit me.” “ Of course, I won’t hit you.”

He asked if I’d seen Doug down­ stairs, I said yeah, he said he wants to go off with you, and he pays. Then Allan asked me why I’d moved off . . . I told him, I didn’t know he was camp. “ Darling, I’ve been a woman all my life!” he shrieked.

Allan and I met Doug at the top of the stairs at the station. I’d been told he was good for $15, and I could push him for $20. He said he’d only pay if I was prepared to take it; I said I was more than prepared to take it for money. Doug and I walked down to the Menzies Hotel, where he spoke to someone in the foyer. His car was sent around, and we drove miles out into the bush. I’d assumed he was looking for a quiet spot, but he knew exactly where he was going, down a dirt track . . . he backed his station wagon about 200 yards down this mountain, after squeezing between a tree and a boulder.

Doug was in. his 50s, had a big dick, and fucked me rather ruthlessly . . . he used me like a trampoline for about half an hour. It hurt a bit, but I copped it sweet (as they say) figur­ ing to earn the $20.

Afterwards, he said: “ How much did Allan say I’d pay you?”

“To be honest,” I said, somewhat cynically, “he said you were good for $15, and I could push you for $ 20 .” “ I’m afraid I’ve been misrepresen­ ted. I only ever pay $ 10.”

“I’m not one to quibble,” I allowed, taking into account that I was an hour’s drive into the bush.

On the way home, while he was laying this rap down about how im­ portant he was, I said, “ it surely mustn’t be much skin off your nose to pay me twenty.” “ When you go through five a night, it can get a bit expensive if you pay twenty,” he replied.

He has a strict time schedule for fucking. He picks up boys between eight and midnight, Monday and Wednesday nights.

Most of the commercial trade works up at the Cross, in Fitzroy Gardens, and a few will wander down­ town and do the rounds of the rail­ way stations, if they have a bad night. Allan and I usually start off, f early in the evening, at Town Hall \ station, and I’ll head up to the Cross \ about ten, and come back at mid­ f night. There are nights when we \ don’t score, and wind up wandering \ around at three in the morning.

The routine at Town Hall is to \ \ lounge provocatively and obviously, f in the proximity of the entrance to | the mens’ toilet. I wear, say, a pair of flared jeans, desert boots, and a Distributors; \ green athletic singlet. It doesn’t New South Wales: Allan Rodney f matter much what you wear, as Wright (circulation) Pty Ltd, 36-40 | long as your -head looks all right.

Bourke Street, Woolloomooloo, \ When I’m on the beat, I shave at 2021. Telephone 357-2588. | least once a day, and spend a fair; Victoria: Incorporated Newsagen- % time on my hair —you know, as long cies Company Pty. Ltd., 113 | as you don’t look chatty.

Roslyn Street, Melbourne, 3003. | The station is underground. There Telephone 30-4222.

H are seven entrances, stairwells in the footpath on both sides of George St South Australia: Perry Nalne, M others ! for the block between Bathurst and Book Farm, 1 Coramandel PI. Adelaide.' | Park Streets. On one side is the Sydney Town Hall, with people West Australia: P. and H. Redman, f standing on the steps to rendezvous, and an Anglican cathedral. On the PO Box 3, Palmyra, 6157. other side is Woolworths, and an office block.

On the Woolworth’s comer, preachers of various persuasions ad­ Published fortnightly throughout dress passers-by. One mainly talks Australia. Cover price is recom­ about Hell; if you ask him for his mended retail maximum. name, he says “I preach the gospel, I preach the gospel” . There’s another man with a sign that says PSYCHIATTRY IS AN EVIL AND MUST BE The Digger accepts news, feat­ BANNED. There’s the ubiquitousures, artwork or photographs from comrade flogging Direct Action. contributors.

There’s a down-at-heel old lady who Send material with a stamped sells bunches of limp flowers for SAE if you want it back, to The 50 cents or a dollar, the main sales Digger, P.O. Box 77, Carlton, point being the sores on her legs.

3053; The lady fetches flowers in big clear The Digger is a member of the plastic bags, all mashed up, and the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS). queens help her carry them up from the trains.

The basement of Woolworths opens on the first level of the station, near the men’s toilets, where I lean against a pillar in extreme postures.

At night, while I’m there, the en­ Back numbers of The Digger trance to the department store base­ 1—9 are available from the office ment is sealed off, and the steps up for 45 cents each. to the closed portcullis is a roosting Send postal order or cheque to: place for stiffs, derros, chats, winos, Back Numbers, as they say.

The Digger, The first level of the underground P.O. Box 77, . . . the light is fluorescent. A bit Carlton, 3053. of daylight gets down the seven stairways. The ceiling, pillars, iron­ work and tops of the walls are pain­ ted the familiar, dusty, arsenic green; the first six feet of the walls are tiled, ceramic the colors of a liver sufferer’s brown urine and pale faeces.

As trains come and go, winds are rammed up the wells from the Twelve months worth of The two platform levels below, complic­ Digger, 26 issues, will set you back ating the odor of boiling mutton$7.80. Unless you come under one fish fat and the toilets and the drying of the following categories: spit, with billows of unsunned dust OUT-OF-TOWN SPECIAL: If and ozone from the blue arcs of your postcode is 25 miles from a bad connections. capital city, you can have one year’s The first level is 130 strides long, subscription for $5 all up.

40 strides wide. Besides the Jail-like QUEENSLAND SALVATION apparatus used to sell rail tickets SPECIAL: If you live in Queens­ and control access to and from the land, the odds are you’re not platforms below, there are all manner reading this unless you’ve already subscribed, given the effective of commercial franchises in grimey, ban o/i The Digger by distributors lustrous color — newsagents, tobac­ in the northern state. However and conists, barbers, florists, a chemist, whether or not, Queenslanders pay cobbler, and takeaway food bars.

The idea is to make space produce only $5 regardless of their city/revenue. Tucked in less desirable country status. ranges are display ads for cinema, religions, and consumer non-durables.

There, are; also, three autophoto I Sue Cassio, boothes, three pix for 40 cents, or m Subscriptions Manager, four for 60 cents.

I The Digger, I cracked it in one of those I P.O. Box 77, booths, once — not a fuck, or ■ Carlton, 3053. . anything. A guy paid me $2 for Dear Sue, having my picture taken with my I enclose my cheque/postal ■ shirt off. For more involved requests, go further — a dark lane or the order for $7.80/$5.00 ($5.00 I IAnglican cathedral, for blow jobs, subs are only available to sub- wanks. Cars. Hotels. Once I took a I scribers living outside a 25 I client to the listening booth at ■ mile radius of capital cities, ■ Fisher Library in Sydney Uni, and I or in Queensland). Please put I fucked him while we listened to " me down for one year’s sub- ■ Exile on Main Street.

Most of the people who go through ■ scription to The Digger (26 I the station during my hours take no I issues). notice of me. However, some of the railway heavies hassle us, and there’s always the law on tour (“ Lily law” I Name ...............................

■ or “Auntie Lil” ), and a few of the people in the franchise shops are freaked out by perverts . . . one of J Address.................................

I the shop assistants abuses Allan and me, and when I spoke to her once, she began to cry. “Something’s got to be done about you,” she said.

I ............................ P’code,............ I * * *

L

Back numbers

I

I--------------- 1

Make cheques payable to Hightimes _ Pty. Ltd. crossed not negotiable. I

L

I had a job teed up at Cowra, picking asparagus, but there was a delay. I took a job cleaning, at Farmer’s department store. I didn’t know the security man was running a check on me until two plainclothesmen showed with a warrant, twoand-a-quarter hours after I started

Down the stairs and around to the right, the reporter heads into the bog for a reconnoitre| “I'd have a look at the lay o f the land, and if I see anything that looks like trade, I'll stand along side and l e i it all hang out. . „ ”

A unty Lil wanders around the beat, keeping an ever-watchful eye.

Most o f the pinches o f commercials, however, are made by plainclothesmen . . .

In fact, the police aren't the main worry, The main worry is sharpies, the kids who wander around the city looking for a bit o f the old ultra­ violence. We met a couple in a billiard room down George S t, and asked them to pose for photos. They agreed readily, and when this longhair tried to get into the game, they turned on a bit o f snaffle for us . . .

Down on Woolworth's comer, just about supper time, “I preach the gospel i preach the gospel" is starting to wind up about Hell and the pain to come. He puts a small mled notebook with his sermon written in it on top o f the surround o f the Town Hall station stairwell. ..

I bumped into Allan the next day, determined to blast him for his mis­ representation; he explained that he gets tipped for fronting for Doug, and part of the deal is that he gives an inflated price.

Allan’s been my daily companion since. I’ve been off with Doug twice again. * * * Allan of the baggy suit is 37, has spent a dozen years on the beat, and has no home. He sleeps around. He sleeps in the cubicles of public toilets, where he can manage a couple of hours before an attendant notices him, and throws him out, or calls the cops. He might spend the night

in a cheap hotel room with the odd fuck. The nearest thing to a home is, for Allan, the Mathew Talbot Hostel for Homeless Men, a soulless flop house operated by St. Vincent De Paul. He might spend three nights a month there, on average; it’s a place to rest, when he’s really,bushed.

They lock you in, or out at 5pm.

When Allan is really going bad, he scores handouts from soup kit­ chens and tea rooms, but when he’s flush he’s never likely to eat more in a day than a sandwich. A ham sand­ wich, on white. A pie, perhaps, for vairety , or a saveloy out of the hotdog concession at the station. On the other hand, when it comes to booze, he’ll spend every cent he gets

on the two of us in the pubs, to the exclusion of food for several days.

It happfens that whichever of us has money “supports” the other. Allan describes himself as an alcoholic, and likes to have a bottle of sweet sherry in his coat by pub closing. He attends occasional AA meetings, for a cup of tea and a bit of a stir.

Allan’s lost count of the number of times that he’s been busted for “soliciting a male with immoral intent” . He’s been up against the law for years, and the law’s generally won. Once, he says, he had $600 in his pocket when he was busted, and when his property was handed back to him, he only got $50. He took action against the cops to recover the money; the action didn’t succeed.

So not only was he down on the deal, but the police were down on him.

After his failed suit, he was on the beat in the station, in the toilet. A guy walked in and immediately accused him of asking to have his cock sucked. Allan hotly denied it; “ You’re joking of course, I’m a woman! Darling, I just couldn’t do a thing like that!”

The guy identified himself as a cop, and took Allan’s name, where­ upon a second cop walked in and said, “was I right, is his name . . . . ? ” They booked him. Allan was found guilty, and appealed. The lice successfully opposed bail, so Allan rotted in the remand section at Long Bay for ten months, and when the Supreme Court finally up­ held his conviction, he went back to Long Bay and served 14 days as a convicted prisoner.

You can hear any number of stor­ ies about where the police are at.

There’s a tall dark plainclothesman who wears a brownie-orangey suit who hangs out in Fitzroy Gardens, in the Cross. He has fuzz written all over h im .. . he picks up the commer­ cial boys and busts them after th ey accept the money. Two guys have identified him to me, as the cop that busted them. Two other guys have told me that they’ve been off with him, on a non-commercial basis.

Once you’re known in. the camp circles as “commercial” , the “ char­ ities” make it quite clear that their shit doesn’t stink. They seem to manage to kid themselves; a reput­ ation as “ commercial” doesn’t exact­ ly open every door in Sydney.

There is a small group who have all experienced the desperation of walk­ ing the streets in the small hours in the pouring rain without a cent for food or anyplace to stay. Hanging on trying to stay awake, walking th e rounds of the maid beats from the Fitzroy Gardens to Green Park in Darlinghurst Road, and down into the city, the underground route, Central, Town Hall,Wynyardand so on. Hoping to pick someone up with a bed to spend the night in. The bed means a lot more than the fuck.

I’d say that I now know about a dozen guys in Sydney who live full time on what they earn on the beats, with varying degrees of success.

There are particular places where prices are high and people get rich quick, but that isn’t exactly what I call the beat. It’s a fairly stuffy, over­ dressed, piss-elegant kind of scene, certainly not my milieu. * * * I’ve been picked up on various beats in Australia, but the only charges I’ve had out of it were drunk and disorderly — and the magistrate (in Melbourne) dismissed that charge.

On the Town Hall beat, after one of the sharpie brawls, a few of us were standing around discussing the action, and a couple of plainclothes heavies came up and said to me: “where do you think you’re going?” “ Nowhere, in particular” .

“Well get out of the station. Clear out. Piss off and don’t come back.”

Who owns the station? Sean Foley the photographer talked to some ticket attendants, who were all blacks. And alien. Two were from Lebanon, one was from Bangla Desh via Singapore. They said nearly every­ body on the inner city stations was like them, “hardly any native-born white Australian people” .

One hunched forward on his stool, a young, pretty Lebanese, with his ticket-clipper in his hand; he said, “ One day we’ll own the station.”

He talks a bit about the sharpies, though there is a language problem.

He mimes how they’ll touch you on the shoulder, and if you say anything, they hit you. “ We saw fifteen on three over there — oooh, it was bad, they killed this bloke . . . they broke some glass.” The station attendants aren’t sweating the sharpies, though: they’re generally let alone, and they’ll call the police in if harassed.

The sharpies: short hair, some­ times with a long fringe over the neck, a Woolworths shirt — a dress shirt, a golf shirt, a guernsey — a set of baggy-thighed jeans, and striped Adidas running shoes . . . the odd tattoo. Their girl-friends almostas-crew-cutted.

They congregate in groups varying in size from five to thirty, and strike on a split second’s warning. They usually pick a lone and defenceless victim, who just happens to be passing by, minding his own business. If the attack takes place downstairs in the station, the worst thing likely to land on the victim is a boot or a walking stick (an optional part of the uniform).

However, the chances of escape and/or survival are much more limited up on the street where they keep a

cache of iron bars in the rubbish tins at the lights.

The two things sharpies hate most are longhairs and poofters, whigh places some of us in double jeopardy.

It can get a bit heavy down in the station standing alone and feeling a little vulnerable because you know that they know, and they jostle you, making miaowing sounds and mut­ tering “ Cat! Cat!” Down in the Town Hall bog one evening, I was being eyed ominously by the lads, when all of a sudden one of them whooped and with superb precision (they seemed pos­ sessed o f an uncanny group con­ sciousness) they leaped as one on to a couple of long hairs at the ticket window.

Within minutes cops streamed down the stairs, and a short time later, the two longhairs were being escorted out of the stationmaster’s office handcuffed to two uniformed cops, while the sharpies were strut­ ting up and down at the counter of the takeaway joint, unharmed, un­ troubled, shovelling pies and hot dogs into their faces.

Another time a guy about 35 strolled past, alone, and was reduced to a bleeding unconscious heap on the ground, kicked senseless, his upper lip changed into a fringe, one eye barely hanging on to his head.

I ran over, once the coast was clear, and stuck my coat under his head.

As I was wondering what to do next, he came to, looked at me, and said, “ Fuck off, poofter” . I took his advice quite readily, and when he walked past me ten minutes later, I told him that I’d put a boot in myself next time. And so it goes. * * * A girl I know loaned me $15 last week, and she wanted it back . . . she’s working on a film and isn’t getting paid. She wanted it bad enough to call around to where I’m staying (on the floor) and drive me down to the Cross for a try at crack­ ing it. I walked into the Rex with her, and met an old client, who’s just gotten married. We couldn’t go back to his place; his wife was there; so we worked it out to go back to the girl’s place in her car. We got off, and he said he’d lost his wallet. “ I wouldn’t like to think you’re playing games with me,” I said.

“Oh, you know me better than that,” he said. I took him to the door, and told him to catch a bus in Ox­ ford Street, and slammed the door.

The girl said I should go out after him . . . when I got to the comer, he’d disappeared: he must ha/e had some money. * * * One dismal night, it was getting very late, it was cold and wet and I was just starting to think about going home when I noticed a young guy at the far end of the station. I hung around to have a look at him, figuring that at this stage I might as well get off with someone I fancied.

In several hours I’d not seen any­ thing that even remotely resembled trade.

Propped in my customary way on a comer, I kept my eye fixed firmly on his, and as he got closer I slowly let a smile spread across my face. I use this tactic to make contact, to avoid going through the ritual of comparing equipment side by side in the toilet. Most times two or three “bog-creeps” will form an audience and stand around the two of you.

For some of them the whole trip is a live peep show. There’s the added hassle of the claim jumpers who’ll sometimes squeeze in between, to promote their own cause.

So, as hoped, he stopped and we talked, and then walked down George St., to a htoel where he had a room, having found each other satisfactory. His room was a single, unadorned except for one purely functional wardrobe, plus a single bed and dresser which both had their origins in the same school of carpentry. The delights held in store were destined to more than com­ pensate for the mediocrity of the surroundings.

I got undressed first, while he had a quick shower, and almost dozed off, so it was quite a flash when he came back. We spent the entire night all but sleepless, like Rudy Valen­ tinos, like raging tigers, as Rudy wrote in his journal, fucking each other senseless.

I had to leave far too early, to be out of the room, and the hotel, be­ fore the staff were astir. But it was a long time since my pulse had quickened as it did the night before, so it was with some contentment that I strolled home through a very empty Sydney. It was one of those late winter-early summer mornings that only Sydney ever turns on.

The reverie continued well into the day, and from the time he’d got into the bed with me, the only cur­ ious island of diversion had been a racket during the night in the street outside the hotel. Drawn to the win­ dow by the extent and duration of the noise, we saw across the street, outside an amusement lounge, a lone middle-aged man surrounded by a gang of sharpies. About a dozen of them, armed with walking sticks, were battering him to his knees. It looked like the old running the gaunt­ let routine. At the point where he ceased to offer ahy resistance, they piled back into their car and took off around the comer.

January 13 — January 27

The Digger

Page 3

Sylvia and the Synthetics’ underground act

Putting in the high-heeled boot

by Barry Prothero

Morris Spinetti — one o f the foun­ ding mothers. bit too concerned about their decor­ ations to be happy about frequent Synthetics happenings. The last show had to be cancelled at the last mo­ ment because of the huge game of snakes and ladders painted on the downstairs floor — the Synthetics crowd would have scratched it about and the Roxy mob hadn’t got sick of playing it — it was big enough for people instead of counters. The other place they’ve had them is the old Purple Onion, in Kensington, but that dark and mothy grot is owned by Kandy, a drag queen whose former ventures have been of more than passing interest to the law. Although the Synthetics only hire the building, the cops are so sure of making a kill on anything connected with Kandy that they’ve been seen lurking around the place a week after a Synthetics show hop­

ing for a repeat and a bust. If they did make a raid on one of the “en­ tertainments” there’s no doubt the whole caboodle would go. The Syn­ thetics isn’t the sort of thing the Chief Secretary approves of and they don’t pay protection to the cops.

Consequently they have to appear almost by surprise and they can only advertise for the last couple of days, leafletting the gay bars.

While they’d like to get straight people along, it’s hard to see how you’re going to know when they’re happening if you’re not gay.

A Synthetics show is basically a kind of party, but it’s transformed by the frenetic madness that infects the place from the stage. The noise is tremendous and there’s no escape — “ We don’t give them tables where they can sit and talk —the only way they can get away from the light show and the noise is by flaking out or by going out the door.” Som e people do go out the door — “There are a lot of queens,” says Paul, “who would like to see us stopped.” — and there are others, including some of the Synthetics themselves, who pass but on the floor. ' Even before the main show begins, there are a couple of things to set the tone. The queen in the black dress on top of the ladder in the' comer with one leg bent behind his head, standing upright on the other one staring into space leaves a sur­ real image floating in the mind, and the two who appear and rip down the red parachute that hung from the ceiling are in a frenzy of fury that’s too real to leave you feeling easy. When one of them falls the twelve feet to the floor everyone believes he must be really hurt, and however cool you might be, real violence is disturbing.

The show proper is undisciplined and chaotic. It’s raw, but it’s ener­ getic. Some things are funny, but the humor is a bit sick; you’re con­ stantly caught unawares by the gro­ tesque. The Synthetics are out to shock, extending the violence of films and T.V. “People are used to the pretended violence in films — we give them the real thing. We actually are violent.” If you get too close to the stage, you’re likely to be shoved back by a high heeled shoe planted firmly on your chest — thoroughly ungentle drag queens, these. The man I saw it happen to looked quite shaken. He obviously preferred his poofters to be gentle­ men.

The Synthetics don’t want to give a show that people just stand and watch; they’re after a reaction, and they get it. Where else in Sydney are you likely to see half a dozen of the audience strip off their gear and join the mob on stage? One blonde chunk wandering around the place naked said he didn’t mind people sucking at him but he didn’t like them putting his cock into their beer.

It’s not just the grass and the booze, although they help; the Syn­ thetics are totally uninhibited and it’s a feeling that they manage to spread.

The best thing I’ve seen them do is a straight enactment of a sexual fantasy, a number called “ A House­ wife’s Dream of Love” . The house­ wife, a mouse of a thing in the style of circa 1943, appears with a vacuum cleaner to clean up the mess from the number before. She hoovers away to the soul-soaring one-two-three of “The Blue Danube” , increasingly fas­ cinated by the sexual potential of the bits and pieces of the cleaner.

The music gets louder, and the chorus, all doing their own things round about, are getting their gear off. The vacuum’s accessories are pulled to bits and everyone’s away, simulating fucking each other and having them­ selves off with the extension tubes and winding suction hose. The mousey housewife sits in the midst of the hairy bottoms and the sweaty groins, glassily enraptured with the immortal Strauss, quietly rubbing herself up and down on the main body of the machine. And so she dreams, with the vacuum sucking its way into the dark and dirty comers of her mind.

There are a couple of ventures that the Synthetics have planned for the future — they plan to hire a boat and do a harbor cruise called “ The Syn­ thetics at Sea” , and sometime they’d like to get hold of a theatre, al­ though that would call for a degree of discipline that they don’t have at the moment.

They can’t be specific about dates and they can’t advertise widely, but if you hear they’re doing a show, try to see it. If they can keep up their energy and their invention, you’ll be in for quite some evening.

Sylvia and the Synthetics: (l. to r.) Scarlet, Morris, Helen Shapiro, Doris, Bruce Gould (flexing), Polly, Andy, Clayton, and (with mike) B etty Keep the Housewife’s friend. According to Doris, the blond with glasses “no roles, just role confusion. ”

John Pearson

The Cosmopolitan Restaurant, Double Bay, likes to keep its image pretty ritzy. The waiter didn’t quite know how to handle the ten seedy looking queens who wandered in.for breakfast at about midday on Sun­ day. He tried to make them take a table outside on the street, but they insisted on staying in with the aftermatins-at-St.-Miehael’s-set, threw down their champagne breakfast and paid the $200 bill with real cash — Sylvia and the Synthetics were get­ ting themselves together after the show the night before. Most of them had passed out in the dressing room of the run-down joint that used to be The Purple Onion on Anzac Par­ ade in Kensington, stoned out of their minds, or boozed, or just too com­ fortable on the heaps of tat they wear for drag to give a stuff about getting home. “ Unfortunately Sylvia won’t be performing tonight. She was decap­ itated on the way to the theatre.”

It’s the ritual opening of every show the Synthetics have given, and even though no-one believes it, it’s a clear sign of what’s going to happen will be a hell of a lot different from the usual beplumed and bejeweled chorus line of bobbing silicone tits.

Decapitation a-la Mansfield just doesn’t do for openers if the show’s going to be a larger than life revamp of the Ziegfield Follies.

The Synthetics are like no other drag show that this country has seen. They’re violent, kinky, grot­ esque, and if you have even the mildest qualms, mightily offensive.

The conventional drag show (you can see them at Les Girls in Kings Cross, if you want to sit among as­ tounded squares from the suburbs, or at Capriccio’s on Oxford St., if you prefer to sit among squealing queens from the suburbs — other Aus­ tralian cities don’t seem to go in for them as much as Sydney, or per­ haps it’s just that the N.S.W. police are more corrupt) is a very glamor­ ous affair that might have been car­ ried straight from Las Vegas in a whirlwind of sequins and diamantes.

Everyone’s got shaved and powdered armpits, legs sand-papered sm ooth, balls daubed with vaginal deodorant and pubic hairs neatly trimmed to hide behind the little spangled triangles that keep the show decent.

And they dance and sing, but mostly mime songs done by Shirley Bassey, Judy Garland or Piaf, or gather in great clouds of ostrich feathers to do production numbers from Camelot or Funny Girl ox Cabaret. Everything is a-glitter and a-dazzle. It’s just like real show girls do — only the queens usually do it better.

The Synthetics are hairy legged, mostly hairy chested, they obviously sweat like pigs, and none of them looks like a real show girl at all.

The drag they wear, and they wear it with a flair for the bizarre that is inspired, comes from Tempe Tip and various opportunity shops where you can still get house frocks from the 40’s and a pair of ladies plastic sandals from about 1952. Make up. your face to look like a cross be­ tween Marilyn Monroe and Marcel Marceau with eyelashes that make a huge sweep towards the ceiling, put on a bathing cap and cover it with glitter, slip into a little black thing from the last days of the war and throw a dreadful fox around your shoulders — you look wondrous sit­ ting on a rope above the stage swing­ ing away like Betty Hutton at the end of The Greatest Show on Earth.

Not that the Synthetics are just nostalgia with a dash of theperculiar.

Wriggle into a little floral .piece in blue and pink that would have looked good on a parson’s wife around 1954 and sing a song called “Coming of Age” : people might think you’re doing a mild send up, until you come to the line about eating your heart but and you bite on a sheep’s heart and your chin drips with blood. You just keep singing on. Pound your audience with noise that doesn’t let them think.

Blaze them with lights from time to time, shock them with a bit of real violence and don’t let them escape from any of it for a moment, and you’ve got a wild show. * * * Sylvia and the Synthetics emerged in mid-October. They were bom out of unemployment so I suppose you could see them as a legacy of our late lamentable liberal govern­ ment. Paul Hock, queen of relatively tender years, found himself out of work and with a couple of jobless friends (anyone know anyone who hasn’t got jobless friends?). First he considered adding to the spate of cheap, soup-kitcheny restaurants but he didn’t have enough money for that, so he thought he’d give a party

at a profit. The people of the incred­ ible Roxy at Taylor Square made their building available (you can’t miss it, the one with the huge sculp­ tured nose on the door and the eye­ lashes over the windows — it’s the only building on the block that even remotely resembles Clara Bow) at the small cost of half the proceeds — that’s counter-cultural economics.

If you’re going to charge people money, you’ve got to give them a show — just a quiet little affair — it was at the next bigger and brighter Synthetics’ night that the cast of not so elegant drag queejns trampled the stage to bits.

Paul Hock and Dennis Norton conceived the style with Morris Spinetti who used to do a mime act with Wendy Saddington, and they collected the people; Andrew Sharp, another sometime mime artist who worked at Bonaparte’s, Bruce Gould, an alarming contortionist, a blonde muscleman someone found in an alley, and a few others with obscure and unlikely talents.

You’d expect a show that’s as mind blowing as the Synthetics to come from people with some sort of counter-cultural background, but the main people behind it have been un­ til recently stereotypic queens of the trendy sort, working for the IN Shops and John and Merivale and really taking the newest and latest with a dedicated seriousness that only the clothes-conscious queen can manage to sustain. None of them are involved with Gay Liberation or any other political group and don’t seem to understand what these are on about — “As far as we’re con­ cerned, we’re all liberated — it’s only in your mind anyway. We don’t need all that.” And on dropping •out:? “ Everyone goes through it but you don’t get anywhere. You con­ fuse yourself, build up illusions.”

They’re still in the clothes business but now they don’t seem to wear the stuff they sell. Even so, they’re surprisingly conservative people to be producing the amazing events that they call “total theatre” . They saw Fellini’s Satyricon and the surreal people on the fringe of Cabaret, they knew a bit about America’s Cockettes, and of course, plenty about Pop, but it’s still difficult to understand how the show they do, developed.

It’s apparently an original and spon­ taneous invention, ff it’s got to be compared with anything, the theatre most like it is The Theatre of the Ridiculous, a group run by John Veccaro and Charles Ludlum in New York, people with Warhol connec­ tions who perform in rundown theatres and lofts.

In Australia, the Synthetics are unique. * * * There’s no fixed venue for the Synthetic’s shows and they don’t give them regularly. The Roxy is too small for the crowds they draw now and anyway, the people there are a

The Synthetics’ dress up to play: “I t ’s the best fun thing I ’ve ever been in; we’re not in it for the money. ” N.B. Sylvia and the Synthetics play Paddo Town Hall Sunday, Jan. 28, Australian Day Weekend. The theme o f the show is “the Australian Heritage. ”

Page 4

The Digger

by Virginia Fraser (This issue, a special on What Your Government Did This Fortnight) The Federal Government has threatened France with action in the International Court of the United Nations if it does not stop nuclear testing in the Pacific.

And the Prime Minister, Mr Whitlam, who sent President Nixon a letter protesting renewed bombing in Vietnam before Xmas, has said if the Americans started bomb-, ing again “ I’ll be making a public statement.”

Australia is stopping all defence aid to South Vietnam including $12 million the Liberal-Country Party government planned to spend over the next two years. Plans for train­ ing Cambodian soldiers in Australia have been cancelled and the Aus­ tralian surgical team at Bien Hoa was withdrawn early this month when the rebuilding of the Bien Hoa hospital was completed.

However in the interests of de­ fence “and in view of the large amount of money Australia has al­ ready paid,” Australia will accept: the F i l l . It is still looking at a $355 million destroyer project and new tanks.

Australia has also recognised China, and East Germany, stopped recognising Taiwan; given commun­ ist journalist Wilfred Burchett his passport back after 15 years; and withdrawn the Australian passports held by two Rhodesian officials.

The South African government was told by the Australian Ambas­ sador there that racially selected sporting teams would no longer be able to visit or pass through Aus­ tralia, though individual sportsmen and women like golfer Gary Player, would be excepted. “ Racism and racial discrimination are reprehensible and we shall take all necessary steps to prohibit discrimination on these grounds,” Mr Whitlam said.

The new government’s first move on Aboriginal land rights came, two days after Whitlam and Barnard were sworn in, with an instruction to the Interior Department to freeze all applications for lands in Aboriginal reserves until an Aboriginal Affairs minister had been appointed and could examine them and existing: leases in detail.

Whitlam also announced that the government would establish a $5 million fund to buy land for sig­ nificant Aboriginal communities though he said about a fortnight later that it might be impossible to

grant land rights to Aboriginals living in and near towns and cities.

During his second press conference Whitlam said that the federal govern­ ment would legislate to ban all racial discrimination in the states as well as the territories, but such legislation was not included in the first bills announced this week as being ready to go before Parliament.

Aboriginal children in “ distinctive Aboriginal communities” would be taught their own language as a first language and English as their second.

Whitlam said that Aboriginal culture “which must be preserved not crushed” would also be taught — mainly by Aboriginals.

The Aboriginal Affairs Minister, Gordon Bryant late last month prom­ ised action to cut the death rate among Aboriginal babies. “The s i t ­ uation with child health in the Nor­ thern Territory is unforgiveable. We ought to make this as urgent as we make the bushfire situation. If we have not made a real improvement by the end of 1973 there ought to be some pretty dramatic head-rolling going on.”

Bryant, along with Queensland Premier, Mr Bjelke-Petersen, is against the Federal Government’s intention to move the boundary be­ tween Papua-New Guinea and Queens­ land so that some Torres Strait Islands — now Australian territories — would become part of PNG. The Queensland Premier took legal ad­ vice on the subject and discovered that a referendum would probably be necessary before any change in borders could be made.

Australian manufacturers will be given preference in the letting of government contracts as long as their tenders meet specifications. In his policy speech Whitlam promised that a Labor Government would lead in ensuring Australian ownership and control of Australian oil industry.

So far he has ordered that the Primei Minister’s Department make sure that the government’s fuel sup­ plies come from Australian compan­ ies. (The current petrol supply con­ tract expires this year.)

Migration will be cut by 30,000 to 110,000 to June this year, and only those who can prove they have either jobs or someone to care for ' them when they get here will be accepted,:, and preference will be given to skilled people. “ It is grossly unfair to prospective migrants and dishonest to us as a country to bring someone out here only to put him straight on social service benefits.”

Unemployment reached a record 136,769 in December which is 5000 more than the credit squeeze

Pipe Dreams

H ow hash is made

by Ed Rosenthal (UPS) Most brown and black hash comes from the Mideast or Northern Africa. It is a concentrate made in those countries to pep up their mediocre grass. Lebanon, Israel, Turkey and Morocco are especially well-known for the product.

Turkish hash is usually opiated and is dark, gummy and sweet­ smelling. Moroccan and Lebanese usually have a greenish tint and are almost minty-smelling, indicating the grass was cut before it flowered.

Blond hash usually comes from Nepal, India, Tibet and other highaltitude Oriental countries. It is not a concentrate, but compressed,

chopped flowers of very powerful grass. (Flowers are very potent.)

The more male flowers the hash con­ tains the crumblier and lighter in weight it tends to be. The female flowers contain more resin, are some­ what more potent and weigh more.

If the hash contains a high percen­ tage of them it may be hard rather than crumbly.

Blond hash should not be con­ fused with keef, which is also crumbly, and light in color. Keef is just chopped top leaves of MidEastern grass mixed with resins or hashish for binder. It is not nearly as powerful as blond hash.

Hashish is usually prepared in the Middle East by the alcohol-water

Diseases we share (again);

Pot causes crotch-rot too. The herpes is caused by a virus which normally lives peaceably in the body, but on any number of Now there’s this Pommy doctor who works at an infirmary near one signals will start multiplying at the of the better English Universities, expense of body cells. It is difficult to cure, and when it .erupts, in and he’s bad mouthing pot — in a very genteel way, of course. He and the crutch, it is a real kill-joy.

The doctor noticed that genital his colleagues have seen some very herpes correlated with cannabis nasty cases of genital herpes among students. If you don’t know what l smoking in one of his patients. When they got high, they got herpes, when this ailment is, and you didn’t col­ they stopped smoking, their coldlect your copy of Digger number 3 sores cleared up. Asking around, the before the vice squad did, I’m sorry. good doctor found that his colleagues Our censors have deprived you of a very remarkable article which com­ had seen the same pattern. From past experience of herpes (he’d writ­ bined immense human interest and ten a text-book on it) the doctor educational value with eye-watering believed that the signal which sets wit. Herpes progenitalis recurrens the herpes virus on the tear is vasod­ was described as a cold-sore on the cock, but the writer made an un­ ilation, or expansion of the blood­ vessels. Then he asked whether can­ fortunate slip ;>for a fairly feminist nabis could expand blood-vessels as male, because ladies can get them

by Beatrice Faust

January 13 — January 27

and Canada.

“What we will be working towards is the elimination of public inquiries into private tragedies in the courts,” said Attorney-General Lionel Murphy.

It would abolish discretion state­ ments which require that people filing suits also confess to all previous adul­ teries; simplify divorce petitions so that they set out only the details of the home, children, the ground for divorce and the orders being sought; hear undefended suits in private, and reduce the maximum cost of a defended divorce from $1000 plus to $500 and an undefended divorce from $450 to $150.

The government has offered Aus­ tralian universities and colleges of Sometimes you come across a book the facts of which are so advanced education a blank cheque much like fiction, and vice versa, that it is obviously True. If it to meet their deficiencies. The only isn’t then it ought to be. limits to this aid, according to the Ringolevio is like that. A story about a hood, a burglar of Treasurer, would be the physical capacity of the building industry and incredible skill and morality, a junkie, a killer, movie-maker in the availability of trained teachers.

Italy, writer, worker at the Guiness factory in Ireland, writer It has also urgently called for a of pom in London, army graduate, and founder, guiding spirit report on the location and nature of the San Francisco diggers. One of the few people to battle the of tertiary education facilities in Hip Independent Proprietors in the Haight, founder and unsung the Albury-Wodonga area, and told the chairmen the Australian Univer­ hero of free rock concerts and mixed media events, a person who sity Commission and Commission of had a price put on his head by New York alternative culture her­ Advanced Education that it wants oes'and is “hated” by Abbot Hoffman and Jerom6 Rubin.’ to take over the responsibility for He is now known as Emmett Grogan, but in the beginning of tertiary education from the states. file book he calls himself Kenneth Wisdom. He has tried and The Chairman of the Ihiversities Commission, Professor P.H. Karmel mostly succeeded in keeping his real self anonymous. has been appointed chairman of a The Digger publishes here the first of two installments from committee on schools. The commit­ Ringolevio, Grogan’s book. They form the first small part, and tee according to the Melbourne Sun they deal entirely with the allegory Grogan has set up for his will recommend further Federal grants life — the game of Ringolevio. There are perhaps other more to both government and independent schools till ’74 and ’75. dirty or exciting parts, but this is Grogan’s game . . .

“Australia has been singled out G.H. as one of the world’s most barbaric Published by William Heinemann Ltd., 1972 nations because of the scant con­ Copyright c Eugene Leo Michael Emmett Grogan. cern for endangered fauna shown by the previous government,” said Attor­ ney General and Customs Minister, Senator Murphy.

Everyone who grew up in the The ultimate game o f my child­ He announced formation of an hood was Ringolevio. I t was a game o f boroughs of New York City and environmental legal group in his life and death. A game to be fought played in the streets knows about department to prepare conservation rather than played. I can think o f and this, game, which is called Ringolevio.

No one who was there will forget legislation to control the import and still remember the names o f several export on a wide variety of ani­ kids from my old neighborhood who Good Friday in 1956, when the Chap­ mals, and announced a select com­ either crippled themselves or dashed lains and the Aces Wild came to Hes­ mittee meeting on wild life con­ themselves to death, trying to escape ter Street — to go against each other servation. Meanwhile the export of or attempting to capture an oppon­ in the contest which has gone down in the annals of oral history as one crocodile skins and crocodile skin ent. of the great Ringolevio games.

Ringolevio prepared us for life. products, except those from recog­ The Chaplains was the largest nised farms, would be banned exports. The violence, the inequities, the Federal money formerly alloc­ poverty, the wars. You learned when street gang in the city. It had over ated to the construction of inner to keep your head down and it three or four thousand members, suburban freeways will be diverted made you smart and fast, the two and they were all black. Nobody knew how it got started, but every­ to improving public transport sys­ principal elements o f survival. You tems and building new cities; “in­ may have flunked your mathematics body knew where — Harlem. From stead of ripping out the guts and but you made the grade. there it had spread all over New chmm). and booting the poor out I've never met a Phi Beta Kappa, York City. They had style, these of old ones.” There would also be a Magna cum Laude, or a Most Chaplains, and the thirteen guys who an enquiry into the economic ef­ Likely to Succeed who really made were coming to Hester Street were ficiency and the social and environ­ it in life. Sure they made it in some their Ringolevio team, and they’d mental effects of freeways according corporate level or in advertising, but never been beaten. to a government telegram to the Un­ they just bit for the old USA The “'Aces Wild, on the other ited Melbourne Freeways Aetion oakey-doke and remained oblivious hand, didn’t belong to anything.

Group. to the realities o f what life is actually They were just thirteen other guys, The Tasmanian government has about.

Who happened to be good at what been asked by the Federal to The great Ringolevio players o f they did. All of them came from consider alternatives to flooding Lake my time all made it in their own Brooklyn, but each of them lived Pedder. ways — a few went to the electric in more or less, different sections.

Footnote of mild anti-climactic chair or did terms. Some were great j| They had various ethnic backgrounds, self-congratulation: At the ALP Xmas crqoks, burglars and stick-up artists | but they were all the same color. party, Mr Whitlam said that Labor but never con men, gangsters or These Aces Wild were just a had already proved the change of pimps. Others became great athletes, bunch of loners, who came together soldiers, radicals, cops, poets and only when some group claimed it government worthwhile. even businessmen. They made it be­ was the best, and challenged anyone cause they learned that you have to to try and beat them at Ringolevio. move fast in this world. None o f them Neither team was about to lose, ever got hit by streetcars or auto­ and both of them met with respect I ing the residue. It usually works bet- mobiles or slipped on banana peels. extraction method, as follows: for the other. A lot was on the line.

The grass is chopped and placed | ter if the grass is wetted down first They were always the ones who It was important. They were twelve in a covered vat. Enough water is with a hand sprinkler. To get all caught the ball that was hit into years old, and they were going to used to cover the grass. The mixture the resin out, soak the grass in the bleachers and were never the play for keeps. is placed over a low heat in a well- j alcohol after running it through the apples who got hit on the head.

It was March 30, forty-three ventilated area and simmered for a extractor, then run it through again.

Today I still evaluate the guys I If the grass is dry it should be meet as Ringolevio players — were degrees outside, when Willie Ponday, The water is poured off into dexteur turned the corner of Seventh, an open pot over a low heat to sim­ soaked in a solution of 50 per cent they good ones or bad ones or did and bounced up 129th Street to­ | alcohol and 50 per cent water. After they even play. Sometimes I'd say mer and evaporate. wards Lenox Avenue. The slush Ethanol or isopropol alcohol is two hours it is ready to run through to my good friend Grogan, “Do from the Great Snow Storm of ’56 now added to the grass. This is not the extractor. The extraction and you think that cat ever played the had been removedfrom most of the done over heat, since alcohol vapor solution are both evaporated and the game?” A nd Em m ett would look across the bar at the guy, study his neighborhoods in the city, but it is explosive. After 24 hours th e residue is hashish. clung to the uptown curbs, trying to White petroleum ether is another moves a moment and say, “Never alcohol is poured off and added to hold its crust for two more days, so solvent that can be used for dissolving happened.” We know. A nd we may the first solution. that the people of Harlem could The process is repeated once more resins. Be careful with it, however, as get shot down, Grogan and me, but it with alcohol. The new alcohol sol­ it is extremely flammable and its won't be with our hands up. I t will have a White Easter, Willie wanted to ution is added to the alcohol-water vapors are explosive. Recently several be in glorious flight soaring across pour Ronson lighter fluid all over it, strike a lot of matches, and burn the solution and evaporated. The residue recipes have been published calling some tenement roof reaching for that black-frosted sludge into the sewers. for pine tar turpentine or benzene elusive cloud o f freedom and on is genuine hash. One pound of grass Willie Pondexteur had been bom makes three to five ounces of hash. as binding agents.' They are not our lips the cry “Ringolevio, Ringo­ somewhere in Louisiana, by a man necessary, and they make the hash levio, one, two, three!”

A much easier way of making no one knew, and to a woman he had hashish is by running fresh grass harsh if not impossible to smoke. only heard about. He lived with his ALBIE BAKER through an extractor and evaporat- Don’t use ‘em. seventeen-year-old sister and her two kids, in a kitchenette apartment with It’s a game. A game played on the streets of New York, for as long as mattresses on the floor and a tele­ vision set in the comer. Their aunt easily as minds, and found that it fatty nerve tissue. In the English anyone can remember. It is called had brought them North right after Ringolevio, and the rules are simple. could indeed. The most common ex­ cases, this took from two to three he was bom, but she died when he ample is blood-shot eyes, which are days. So cannabis probably activates There are two sides, each with the was ten. Now there were simply the same number of players.

There are not caused from the outside by the virus, producing herpes at one four of them, and they were on irritating smoke, but from inside by remove. Also crude cannabis inter­ no time limits, no intermissions, no welfare, but mostly on their own. substitutes and no weapons allowed. relaxing the walls of the blood-vessel. feres with the rate at which body Willie was a tall, taut-muscled kid What’s more, the physically active cells replace themselves, so it prob­ There are two jails. There is one with an all-around quickness. He objective. bit in pot, which glorifies in the ably reduces the body’s ability to Each side tries to capture and was a Chaplain because he liked the name tetra-hydro-cannabinol or resist attack. jail all the members of the other prestige and the power of belonging THC, has a fondness for fat and is This is apingenious argument, but side, while maintaining the freedom to the gang, and he dug his role as readily taken up by nervous tissue what’s its credibility? of its own teammates. When every­ ringleader of their Levio team. which is very fatty. (DDT does the Rather like the argument that one on one side is captured, the He passed the Imperial Bar and same thing, with more serious results Bruce Hanford is a sexually mature Grill, and ran up the stoop of the than have ever been proven for pot: m|Je and therefore could cause other team wins.

To jail, or “ den” someone, you run-down tenement where the Chap­ birds die in winter when they start pregnancies, and Hanford has been to draw on their fat stores and the seen with pregnant women, there­ must catch him and then restrain lains had a clubhouse. He slammed DDT hits poisonous proportions. In fore he as good as got them pregnant. him, because he is allowed to resist the door on the cold empty street, the States, mother’s milk contains There are plenty of other suspects with all the skill and strength of his and he felt that everyone inside was more DDT than the health regul­ around who meet the requirement mind and body. You cannot simply waiting just for him.

There were thirty-odd people ations permit for cow’s milk. If for causing pregnancy, and there are tag him and announce that he’s the law is more hostile to pot than plenty of other substances around under arrest and expect him to go jivin’ and carrying on, with the Coas­ ters and the Dell Vikings on the hi-fi, to DDT, it may be because one that could distend the blood vessels peacefully. You must get him there. man’s high is another man’s poison, to promote herpes. Alcohol is the And once he’s inside the den, you and wine and reefer being passed to and one man’s poison is another most commonly used. Alcohol also must keep him there because he make the trip downtown a little man’s insecticide. Anyway, we don’t reduces the body’s ability to resist can escape (if the jailer gets too close easier. Willie embraced his brothers, hear the xenophobes screaming about infection. So why isn’t anyone trying to the prisoners, they may pull him and goosed a few of the sisters, and in, and leave), or be broken out (if , talked with Dupree, one of the wayDDT the way they do about pot.) to blame the ailment onto booze?

The herpes virus, when it is not’ Contrariwise, why sweat over pot one of the prisoner’s teammates can back original founders of the Chap­ causing blisters, just sleeps around when it is only one of the possible get to the jail without being caught, lains, and the man who had arranged the body — probably in the nervous triggers for herpes? Again, it’s just he has only to step within its peri­ the match with the Aces Wild. He tissue. That is, it is just lying there one man’s high is another man’s meter, shout “ FREE ALL,” and was nineteen years old, which meant there’s a jailbreak). Bribery is also a that everything he said made sense waiting until someone takes a joint vasodilator. possibility, but cheating is not. and sounded good. and the THC starts to bank up in the

peak in January ’72, and rising with kids leaving school. However job vacancies were 12.7 percent up and better than the same time for the last three years. To ease unem­ ployment in the States the Treas­ urer, Mr Crean promised a total of $31,325 million to Tasmania, Victoria, South Australia, and W.A. to provide public works to employ the jobless laborers, create jobs in the country and help drought-struck farmers. The money is to be spent over six months.

On January 9 pension increases bringing all social service benefits up to a base rate of $21.50 a week for a single person and $37.50 for a married couple /were announced.

This means a $1.50 a week increase for old age and invalid pensioners, and between $14.00 and $4.50 a week increase for the unemployed depending on their age. (At the mo­ ment an unemployed person be­ tween 16 and 18 gets $7.50 a week benefits.)

The Australian dollar was revalued by 7.05 percent on January 6 to correct the “ fundamental disequili­ brium” in the last year’s balance of payments. The Treasurer, Mr Crean, said that Australia’s reserves had swelled to $5000 million — three times its level two years ago — which was a potentially inflationary sit­ uation.

While the government says that it won’t be necessary to introduce higher income taxation to pay for its expenditure, and is in fact drop­ ping two taxes — an excise tax on wine and a luxury tax on contra­ ceptives — it is working to close several tax-dodge loopholes used mostly by middle- and high-income earners.

The performing arts grant will be increased to more than $4 million this year so that, Whitlam said, they would “appear to advantage” in the Sydney opera house, the Perth con­ cert hall, and the Adelaide festival centre.

All mass media cigarette adver­ tising will be banned according to Social Security Minister Hayden. “ My personal view is that we should also initiate a major anti-smoking cam­ paign.”

The government also plans to take over a drug company to produce in competition with major drug houses (the managing director of one of which said that over 90 percent of prescribed products used in Australia came from overseas manufacturers and the government couldn’t be serious could it?), and to expand the charter of the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories which made a loss in 1971 of $1.2 million, so they could move into the manufacture of more profitable non-biological drug products.

The government is also considering the establishment of family courts to deal with divorces, maintenance, child custody cases and children’s court proceedings, on the recomendation of a senior official of the Attorney-General’s Department who has studied family courts in the U.S.

R IN G O L E V K )

AGAMEOFLIFE&DEATH He told Willie how to get to Hester Street on the subway, and that everything had been set up with the bookmakers and the guys that ran the block. He gave him seventy-five dollars, five for each kid and ten dollars trouble money, and said that he and the other heads of the gang would drive downtown in about an hour with the rootin’ section.

“Now goddamn it, we countin’ on y’all to show ’em that we the baddest bunch a niggers they ever seen! So, y ’all beat dem ofay mother­ fuckers from Brooklyn, and we’ll slide hack here wit pockets full a coin, and them known’ that the Chaplains don’t lose nothin’ to nobody!

Y’hear!” said Dupree — loud enough for everyone to pick up oh.

Willie then motioned his team into a group, gave each one five dollars in singles, and said that it was time to split. He kept the extra ten dollars, and nobody questioned his right to hold it. Willie Pondexteur had earned those rights, a long time ago.

Everyone bundled up against the outside, and when they hit the stoop they saw Delmos, sitting in his bat­ tered ’54 Ford, reading the Daily News: Delmos was a plainclothesman who kept an eye on the 129th Street Chaplains’ clubhouse. Nobody didn’t know that Delmos was a cop. The only reason he was considered a plainclothesman was that he bought all his suits at Robert Hall, and he, hadn’t bought a new one for years.

Delmos was from the 32ndPrecinct.’

The 32nd Precinct was very afraid of this block, 129th Street, especially where it ran from Seventh Avenue to Lenox. This was because they knew that a lot of Chaplains hung out there.

They also knew that this gang did more than play games of Ringolevio.

Delmos had been sitting in that spot for a very long time, and the only answers he ever got were stares.

And when he saw the thirteen kids walk down the street toward the subway, he wondered what in Christ’s name were they up to now. He radioed in to the station house.

Kenny Wisdom was bom on Dean Street in Brooklyn, November 28, 1944, and ever since, he had known that there was more to life than that.

He lived with his mother, father and his six-year-old baby sister in a two-room flat, which also had a kitchen and a bathroom. He’d been there for twelve years, and the only thing that had changed was the place where he slept. When he was two, he made so much noise in his sleep that his parents had bought a folding cot, and set it up in the living room at night, next to the kitchen. His sister now slept where he used to — in a large crib beside his parents’ bed.

Kenny made a lot of noise in his sleep because he had asthma, and his wheezing kept his father awake all night and made him think about old men dying in Lyons hotels on the Bowery. So Kenny slept on the cot in the front, and his father got good nights’ sleep and was able to get up fresh in the mornings and go to his marginclerk’s cage at Delafield and Delafield on Wall Street, and attentively keep track of the stocks and bonds that passed through the brokerage firm, knowing that there was no possibility of a pension — only token bonuses every year at Christmas, The only consolation prizes which his father, Leo, had were that the man who sired Mont­ gomery Clift was in the next cage, and Barry Sullivan, the actor, had once been an office boy at The Firm.

Even then, at the age of twelve, Kenny Wisdom would watch his father arrive home pt night, and he’d want to tell him what he could only feel. He loved his father, a kind, generous and gentle man, and Kenny was sad to see him go and come, like all the rest of the mass meat.

The phone rang and his mother went for it, but Kenny grabbed the receiver, and before placing it to his ear, told her that it was for him.

She backed off, but listened to whatever she could hear. She heard pig Latin.

“Esyay. Eetmay emay atyay illiamsburgway idgebray and edfordbay venueay in ortyfay inutesmay.

Eesay ouyay, othermayuckerfay,” he said. And then he hung up, smiled at his mother who wasn’t looking at him, and put on his sneakers, grabbed his jacket off the floor, kissed his baby sister, said goodbye, and left.

“Where are you going?” he heard. “ Out to play,” he answered, as he closed the door on any further inquiries.

Kenny Wisdom "hit the sidewalk with both feet, solid and alone. He headed toward Third Avenue, where the bus would take him to Bedford

January 13 — January 27 his brothers finally said “ Fuck it!” and got off at 14th Street to walk, or catch a bus, or anything, the rest of the way.

Only a few of them had been downtown before, and when all of them came above ground out of the subway, they walked right into the middle of the Salvation Army Good Friday production in front of SA headquarters. And it tickled the shit out of them.

Avenue, where he could transfer to another bus which would take him to the Williamsburg Bridge. And as he walked up the block, he glanced, as he always glanced, at 340 Dean Street — the building where a certain John Mahoney paid six dollars a week for a room in which he went to bed at ten o’clock every night, and rose at eight thirty every morning, until the coppers found out that Mahoney was really William Francis Sutton.

That was back in February 1952.

Kenny was about eight, and was bringing some bottles back to the store for the deposit money, when he saw a squad car stop, and the two cops get out and start talking to this little guy who was taking the battery out of his car, and who nobody in the neighborhood hardly ever noticed.

Kenny sensed something, so he dilly-dallied on the other side of the street, watching, while one of the cops drove away in the patrol car, and the other kept an eye on “John Mahoney,” he as carried his battery to Sammy’s Servicenter on Third Avenue. Having no idea of what was going on, Kenny followed them to the gas station arid hung around, curious to know why this fifty-yearold man seemed about to be getting pinched.

The detective ■cars screeched the comer of Bergen Street, turning left onto Third Avenue. They slowed down and pulled to the curb in front of Sammy’s. Only two men got out of all the cars, a detective and the uniformed cop who had left his partner to watch this guy with the bad battery. That’s when Kenny be­ gan to realize that there was nothing small-time about this little man, “Mahoney.”

The cops questioned him for a few minutes, then they took him by the arm to one of the cars, and they U-turned it back to the Brooklyn police headquarters, which was on Bergen Street, four blocks away.

When they left, Kenny crossed the street with his bag of empties to the attendant, who was dailing the pay phone so fast he kept getting wrong numbers.

“What was that all about?” he asked.

“That was about Slick Willie the Actor Sutton!” came the reply, along with “Beat it, punk!”

Kenny, then, went back across the avenue, into the grocery store, and put the five Pepsi bottles on the counter; got ten cents from Scafidi the grocer; walked outside; stood on the sidewalk; stared at the dime in his hand, and cried for the last time in his entire life. .

You see, Willie Sutton had been Kenny Wisdom’s Babe Ruth ever since he started understanding the stories which the people told about him, and the newspaper accounts of his life. Sutton had been first ar­ rested in April of ’28, they said, after a street comer shooting and gang fight on 7th Avenue and 14th Street in Brooklyn. Willie was badly beaten by the cops before they locked him up. His mother, Mrs. Mary Sutton, who lived at Terrace Place near Prospect Park, fought the

Page 5

The Digger

case to the Supreme Court, and her son was finally acquitted.

When he was freed, he began to rob banks, and he was so good at it he never had to hurt anyone during a robbery, or at any other time. He became known as “ Slick Willie” and “Willie the Actor” after he escaped from an “escape p ro o f’ cell at Sing Sing in 1932. He robbed more banks, was arrested, and escaped from Pri­ sons in Philadelphia in 1945 and ’47.

Since then, he had been a fugitive, and the papers and the people said that he engineered the Manufacturers Trust Company robbery in Sunny side, Queens, on March something 1950. That’s about the time he be­ came John Mahoney and took a room in this house on Dean Street, and told anyone who asked him that he worked for Con Edison.

Walking to the bus, Kenny remem­ bered that day in 1952 when Sutton took his last fall, and he also remem­ bered how this Jewish clothing sales­ man whose name was Arnold Schuster, and who read detective magazines all the time, bragged to the press that he was the one who spotted Willie Sutton on the subway, and followed him, and tipped off the police that he was in the South Brooklyn neighborhood.

A few weeks after the cops cap­ tured Sutton, they found Arnold Schuster, dead with several fresh bullet holes in his body. Police headquarters put out an all-points bulletin for the guy they said shot him — John “Chappie” Mazziotta.

In later releases they declared that Chappie was seen in the midwest, Florida, Australia, Japan, and a few other places. These reports made everyone in the neighborhood laugh with their bellies.

Kenny stood at the bus stop, thinking about William Francis Sutton and the seventy-thousanddollar reward /that had been offered for his capture while he was at large for those five years, and the .38 revolver which was stuffed in his belt, but which he didn’t attempt to use when he allowed himself to be arrested for the last time in 1952.

And afterward, his landlady at 340 Dean Street told everyone that he brought her roses every Christmas and Thanksgiving — after she caught the Puerto Rican woman, who never spoke, in his room one night. She said that all he had of his own in his room were some clothes, a table radio, a chess set, a bottle of whiskey, a few thousand dollars in a shoebox and one book, U.S.A. by John Dos Passos.

On that, same day in ’52, Kenny recalled that he returned from the grocery, and was sitting in the kitchen, when his uncle Tom burst into the apartment with a handful of bills, shouting that he’d just won a bundle on a horse race. “ Let’s Live triumphed over Hierarchy by two lengths at Kialeah!” his uncle yelled.

The bus came, and Kenny Wis­ dom got on it — to go and play a game.

The Grand Concourse D Express had stalled so many.times, and was barely creeping, that Pondexteur and

Some bearded hipster was lugging a two-by-four cross all over the sidewalk, and a foxy chick ran over to him and wiped his face with a scarf, while the blue-red uniformed, capped and bonneted band, played a dirge, and the Chaplains tried to give the struggling dude a boost by cheering him on until a Salvation ~ captain, with a tambourine full of money, told them that the point of the whole thing was that “ He” wasn’t supposed to make it.

Willie Pondexteur asked him what was the quickest way to get to Hester Street. He was told that the least complicated way was by foot, and which route to take. Instead of thank­ ing the captain, he shouted at the guy with the wood, “The meek shall inherit the earth! Six feet of it!”

And as the thirteen Chaplains star­ ted toward Third Avenue in lower Manhattan, Willie turned back to the crowd, and said goodbye. “Christ was a sucker!” he yelled. Real loud.

The bearded, robed guy with the lightweight cross kept plodding around the pavement without breaking his shuffle, but he threw a quick “you gotta eat” look at this black kid who was doing all the heckling. He missed, the kid was already gone.

At about East Fifth Street in lower Manhattan, Third Avenue be­ comes the Bowery. And, when you walk down it, like Willie and the others did, on a cold windy day in March, you see lots and lots of white men with hair on their faces and two, three overcoats wrapped around their nearly breathless bodies, with dull-drunk, or sober-frenzied eyes, searching everything for any significance. You hear the coughing everywhere. You look through the windows of the missions, and watch these thirsty souls, as they shake their hands, trying to darice a cup of black coffee or a roll to their mouths. And you notice that there are no women, except for the ones whose tits have fallen into their stomachs, and the scrubbed-faced prims who pimp religion and a mo­ ment of steam heat for the price of a prayer.

Every bindle stiff on the street lifted his lids, and eyed this group of black kids coming along the Bowery. They were apprehensive because there were a lot of them.

Tradition had taught each person who settled for the Bowery that they were all easy prey for cops, or beefy'weekend drunks, or gangs of kids who vante d to spill some blood, break some bones, or burn someone’s face off with gasoline. They were very uneasy about this gang of Chaplains.

At East Houston Street, Willie asked a not-so-old black deadbeat how much farther they had to valk to get to Hester. The once-upon-atime man ran his wet eyes over the faces that were standing in front of him, wiped his snotty nose with his chapped-scabbed hand, and asked them if they was crazy.

“What you mean, crazy?” Willie snapped back.

And the guy told them what he meant. He told them that any colored boys that went to that neighborhood had to be soft-headed fools, because the people down there hated niggers, and they took pleasure in whuppin’ the tar out of ’em, and dumpin’ them into ambulances like trash into a garbage truck. “ Look who’s worryin’ ’bout who!” laughed Willie. Then he pushed his face forward and said; “We can take care of our own good goddamri selves, Pops! Now, how far down and where is this Hester Street?”

“Six more blocks and on the right-hand side,” came the reply in the simple matter-of-fact tone of someone not caring about anything once again.

It took Kenny Wisdom some thirty-odd minutes and two buses to get from Third Avenue in South Brooklyn to Bedford Avenue and South Eighth Street in Williamsburg.

When he got off at the stop; he bumped into Antonucci the Schemer Antonucci was called the Schemer because his brian maneuvered instead of thought. He wanted to design everything into a plot, and lay a train of money into the right front pocket of his pegged pants. He was never outrageous; just calm, cunning and conniving.

They both walked to and halfway up the concrete ramp on the Brook­ lyn end of the Williamsburg Bridge, ■ where the rest of the Aces Wild were j huddling against the wind — theiri j hands shoved deep into their pockets, i their heads crouched into their coats. j It was a rough place to stand and wait, but that’s the way these kids got together — hard, alone, and fuck the elements.

At about the same time that Kenny and the others were crossing over the East River on the Williams­ burg Bridge, Fred Allen was dropping dead some place in upper Manhattan And if you’d have asked these kids

about what had just happened to Fred Allen, they’d have told you that he had gotten what he deserved —just like Boogie Woogie.

The noise of the BMT trains drowned out anything anybody had to say to one another, so they looked down into the river at the tugs and the barges and thought about things that boys weren’t supposed to know. Things that people, low and high money people, use to gap th em ­ selves from their childhoods. Things that are supposed to separate them from having been raised some other way, by some other people, in some other place. Things that are personal and essential for anyone who’s on the make out of wherever they’re from.

No, these fellas, watching the river and the cars go by, closing their minds to the sound of the subway trains, weren’t supposed to know these things. But they’d grown up quicker than that. They all, already, knew that they wanted out. Each one, simply, wanted to find the stride that would take him there. And it didn’t matter to most of them how long it took, as long as they made it. None of them ever consid­ ered much of anything else.

When the Aces Wild reached the Manhattan end of the bridge, Delancey Street was Good Friday busy.

All kinds of people were bustling every which way to take care of what­ ever they had to, before the gates went down for the three-day Easter weekend. Pitchmen were all over the street hawking everything from stockings to live, different-colored bunny rabbits. The Manufacturers Trust Compañy bank looked like it had a run on its hands. And the Jewish merchants on Orchard Street were shouting like crazy about giveaways, fine buys and bargain hunters’ joys. The Chinese shopkeepers, quietly, stated that they had the best wares in everything that Christ had to offer and, after all, Formosa was also a town in Arkansas.

The Lower East Side, the beach­ head of the Atlantic — where wave after wave of broken immigrants came, still come, to the open-ended ghetto, trying for something which will give them the momentum to a better life, which for most is Long Idand. It’s a confusing world, the downtown East Side, a mix of Jewish, Old World, Peurto Rican, Bohemian and all those whose lives wouldn’t allow them to survive in antoher neighborhood. It goes back, and stays there, in the early 1900s. It’s always been a familiar community to those who’ve come from foreign shores because these streets always held someone who could speak their tongue.

Where Delancey sort of becomes Henriiare Schfff and heads across Chrystie Street, it cuts into the Bowery — three blocks north of Hester Street. Kenny Wisdom spotted Willie Pondexteur almost right away.

They both eyed each other, arid the Aces Wild stayed on the east side; the Chaplains kept on the west side of the avenue until they got to Hes­ ter, where everyone turned right, and walked into the Cefalu Social Club on the comer of Hester and Eliza­ beth streets. One after another.

Jimmy Peerless greeted each of them with a double handshake as they came through the door. And he said, “My pleasure. My pleasure,” over and over again. This man, Peer­ less, owned an import-export com­ pany that minored in deportation, but he was lucky and luck pays off.

In bags of money, dropped at desig­ nated points by invisible men who drove around in ’50 Chevies all day, picking up the cash receipts from the many outlets of Mr Jimmy’s varied enterprises, all of which were considered highly illegal by the dis­ trict attorney’s office and the New York State Legislature. This pothered Jimmy Peerless about as much as his wife —never.

At the turn of the century, this area of New York became Little Italy because many Italians settled in there. It was also known at that time as Hoodlums’ Den because most of the residents were employed in the activity of crime. Hester Street sits in the center of this Italian section, with its four- or six-story tenement walkups, fine Italian res­ taurants, grocery stores and meat markets which specialize in items imported from the cities from which their owners had migrated, and clotheslines strung from building to building. The label of Hoodlums’ Den was lifted during the thirties, as the illegal occupations of the residents became less violent and more organized. Anyway, they usually only killed each other.

Hester Street was picked as the spot for this game because it was neutral territory — nobody on either team lived there. Of course it was a strong Italian environ, and there were a couple of Italians in the Aces Wild Club, and, sure, the Chaplains were all black guys — but it was more or less made certain to everyone by Jimmy Peerless, who was the Don, or mayor of the block, that nobody would interfere in the contest, and that the bookmakers would keep everything straight, because there was money to be made, and anyway, everybody in the area really wanted to know,, for once and for all, who could play Ringolevio better: them, or us.

Jimmy Peerless introduced his pudgy, twenty-three-year-old law

student of a nephew, who showed the teams a piece of paper with lines drawn on it and a different word written along each of the lines. He was explaining the boundaries that had been worked out for the game, but he was making it very complic­ ated by using language that you only hear in a geography class at a private prep school. He had everybody con­ fused, until his uncle reminded him that he was supposed to be talking about three blocks, not the North­ west Passage. His nephew immediately changed his manner of speaking, and pointed out the window to indicate the area that was to be used: the part of Hester Street that starts at Eliza­ beth, and crosses Mott and Mulberry streets. In other words, he said, the boundary lines were Elizabeth Street on this end, and Mulberry Street on the other, and no one was allowed to run, or hide, or anything on any street but Hester.

Everyone agreed that they under­ stood, so Mr Peerless smiled and told them that they all looked like good boys, and that he was sure they would put on a good game, and that everyone was excited about who would turn out to be the winners.

He also mentioned that his friend was going to start the game in about half an hour. “With a small-a bang!” he laughed, as he left with his people, so the kids could get a chance to size each other up in the warmth and privacy of the Cefalu Social Club.

The Chaplains and the Aces Wild looked at one another and they knew it was going to be some goddamn game. They also knew that there were a lot of bets being laid down on the outcome, and that the books had promised a third of the take to whichever side won, and guaran­ teed fifty dollars to each of the losing thirteen. But there was more at stake than anything anybody could offer.

And nobody had to wonder what it was. Everybody, simply, knew that whoever came out on top in this one, would have to deliver more than it was worth.

Kenny Wisdom had met Willie Pondexteur only once before, in Coney Island. So he gave him some skin, and then embraced one Chap­ lain he really knew, Cool Breeze.

Cool Breeze lived somewhere in Harlem, and had gotten his JD card at about the same time as Kenny.

The coppers gave these Juvenile De­ linquent cards out in the 1950s to kids who weren’t yet teenagers, when they did soemthiiig of a misdemeanor which they shouldn’t have been caught at. And, when you got one of these cards, you had to join some Police Athletic League team, if you wanted to stay out of one of the many state reformatories.

Kenny and Cool Breeze joined the PAL basketball teams in their respective neighborhoods. They were good. So good, that they both made the All City Junior All Star team, and played together against private grammar and junior high school clubs around New York.

Cool Breeze always wore funny clothes. Orange sneakers, no socks, purple pants and a green polo shirt with a neat round hole cut out of the right side, so that everyone could see his nipple. He also had an out­ rageous way of walking. He sashayed around like he was a girl, or some­ thing. Once, when their PAL Junior All Star team was playing this school in Queens, Cool Breeze was sashayin’ to the water fountain during the warm-up, and a high school kid called him a sissy.

Cool Breeze hit him four times with two combinations, and before the guy could hit the floor, Breeze grabbed him by the hair and bounced his face against the gymnasium wall.

The guy went down like a sack of cement. Cool Breeze looked at him, crumpled on the ground, then he bent at the waist, made his legs stiff and straight, flung his arms out behind his back, and shouted at this guy whose health he’d just impaired, “ Now, go home ’n tell yer momma dat a faggot beat y ’up!”

Kenny Wisdom liked Cool Breeze very much. The enthusiasm with which they greeted one another loosened up everyone else, and they all started introducing themselves at once.

“I’m Ralphie.” “ Name’s Basile.” “ B.O., here.”

“They call me Homeboy.” “ Jimmy Taylor.” !

“Jake.”

“Geòrgie Goodbye.”

“Gildersleeve’s my tag.”

“Joe Stretch is mine.” “ Octavius.”

“Solly Girsch.” “ Lanier.”

“Buckeye.”

“They hung Ju-Jube on me.”

“Benny Levine.” “ How’s Bull for short.”

“Mule will do * ; “Antonucci.”

“Tommy Lee, Jr.” “ BoBo.” “ Glen Feet.”

“Clearhead O’Keefe.”

“Cool Breeze.”

“Jesus.” And everybody cracked up With laughter.

“No honest. My name is Jesus Rodriquez. I swear to God!” Then Willie Pondexteur and Kenny Wisdom, th£ ringleaders, gave a hello to everyone, and started to discuss the things that had to be talked about, if the equality of humanity

wasn’t going to be lost in the over­ zealousness of prejudice, or reality.

The discussion didn’t last long. They all knew that if things got out of hand, no one would win, and almost everyone would lose. So they agreed on rights and wrongs and shook hands, and when they walked out of the meet, everyone knew that each one was on his own, and that they all had to do everything to win. They just meant every word which no one had to say.

The first car in the caravan of the Chaplains’ bleacher section pulled in­ to a parking space at a curb on the Bowery. /The other carloads found spots in the same vicinity. It wasn’t easy. There were ten cars filled with fifty, sixty young people who’d come from Harlem for the ride downtbwn to support their team with their spirited, excited presence. Most of them were girls. Little black girls who were charged up, dressed for the occasion, and wanting to see every­ thing they’d heard about midtown and lower Manhattan at Eastertime.

They’d made Dupree and the 'other drivers crazy, especially when they demanded to see the Easter lilies at Rockefeller Center. They yelled and bitched and rocked the cars, which almost caused some accid­ ents, and caused a lot of disturbance.

Dupree finally gave in, and turned his lead car crosstown toward Fifth Avenue, but he wasn’t overjoyed about it. Not one bit. “ Lilies!” he said. “It’s forty fuck­ in’ degrees out ’n y’all wanna go see some stupid, jive-ass, motherfuckin’ lily show! Lilies! You -like ’em so goddamn much, whyn’t y’all go hang out in a cemetery! Dat’s what dey made fo’, dead peoples!

Sheet! Lilies!”

And when they* got to Rocke­ feller Center there was no place to park. So the girls jumped out and the cars circled the block, vhich was clogged with traffic and swarming with suspicious cops, who did double-takes at this line of cars being driven by niggers who were, obvious­ ly, not chauffeurs.

The security guards at Rockefeller Plaza also were stricken with alarm when they saw the bunch of little black girls heading straight for the lilies. They grouped themselves and lined up around the lily display, de­ termined to protect each and every flower from the clutches of these dirty little nigger girls.

The girls refused to even recognize the arrival of the fat-assed guards.

Instead, they just looked at the lilies, walking all around them, making jokes, saying how pretty they were, pointing things out to each other that they’d never seen before, laugh­ ing — and wrhen the cars pulled back onto Fifth Avenue the girls bolted through the plaza so suddenly that; the captain of the guards almost suf­ fered a cardiac arrest.

That had been over an hour ago.

Dupree had simmered down, and as he walked along with everyone gath­ ering around him, and the girls talk­ ing, giggling about all they’d seen for the first time, and the other Chap­ lains, who’d driven the cars, taking swigs of gin to fire away the chill of the air, he pointed up to a street sign that said Hester, and told every­ body to shut their mouths and get themselves together.

Hester Street was full of people who came from all over to see this contest. They wrapped their money in paper slips which placed their bets, and they paid to stand inside the heated bar-and-grills, delicatessens, empty storefronts and hallways to watch and see who would win and who would lose. The crowd made the bookmakers, standing around in the Calamari Bar, very happy. And they all bowed to Jimmy Peerless and said all kinds of things which add up to thank you for having permitted this event.

Dupree and his people stopped at the comer of Elizabeth Street, where their Chaplain team was draw­ ing the lines of their jail on the side­ walk with a piece of chalk around a flat metal cellar door. Willie Pon­ dexteur told them it wasn’t going to be easy, but they were going to win, and everyone started smiling and trading skin and making state­ ments to the affirmative and grabbing chunks of tits and ass from the girls who were still chattering about the flowers and their ride from uptown.

Then a big hulky man with a wide-brimmed hat came over, and took Dupree and the others who weren’t going to play, to a large, heated room with windows fronting the street, a full refrigerator, whiskey, wine, beer, sofas, and a stove with pots and pans and ready to go, com­ pliments of Mister Peerless. Them an didn’t say goodbye when he left everyone in the room. He said, “ No aiding and abetting.”

The Aces Wild decided to outline their ten-by-ten-foot den near the intersection of Mulberry and Hester, using a fire hydrant as a centerpiece.

A few of the neighborhood girls stood around watching, but nobody looked at them. Everyone was too busy trying to figure out what they were going to do on this block no one knew anything about. They all looked down Hester Street at the Chaplains, and up at the roofs, and at the people fogging up the windows behind the fire escapes, and they talked about how many cars were parked on the block, and which posts looked good.

Guido Spinelli ran a restaurant in the neighborhood. He was a threehundred-pound man who stood five feet eight in featherweight shoes, and he was going to start this thing off right. With class.

He came out of his brownstone with a .45 automatic pistol — the kind that they give to officers in the army, that looks like a Hershey bar. It was the starting gun, and he was about to get things going.

As Guido was stepping off his stoop onto the pavement, a little six-year-old named Tony took care­ ful aim and blew the wrapper off his straw. The wadded tip of the paper hit Spinnelli dead in his left eye.

He never knew what happened. He just flinched and the .45 went off.

The bullet ricocheted off the asphalt, and smashed into Minnetta’s Grocery Store window, and blew up a jar of jelly.

That’s when the hundred or so people who were still on the sidewalk trying to buy thier way into some­ place warm, started running. They screamed, and dropped whatever they were holding in their hands, and slip­ ped and slid, trying to get traction out of there. All they knew was that a little guy who was very fat had pulled a trigger that made a lot of noise, and a bullet broke a window and splattered jelly all over a store, and if he did it again someone might get killed, and none of them wanted to be around.

Yes, it was going to be some goddamn game!

Kenny Wisdom had big-boned shoulders, and a lanky-framed welter­ weight body with no hips, and freckles all over his face. He was pretty to look at, but he was no dummy. Everyone agreed that he had smarts. So when the gun sounded, he didn’t care if it was a mistake. It meant only one thing to him and the twenty-five others who’d come face to face to find out who could play Ringolevio better: it was time to get it oh.

Nobody goes first in this game, everybody goes at once. The biggest, toughest guys on each side, which were Mule, Cool Breeze and Basile for the Chaplains, and Bull, Solly Girsch and BoBo for the Aces, play cops, and try to find and catch individuals from the other team, and put them and keep them in jail.

These cop-guys, or den keepers, sel­ dom try to arrest each other, until there’s no alternative, or unless,they get a clean shot at each other — other­ wise, because of their strength and toughness, the game would become a war. The rest of the players lay-up wherever the cover is good, until it becomes necessary for them to do ■all they can to free their mates who’ve been captured — and then, maybe, win.

Out of all the chaotic activity that was unleashed in a frantic burst on Hester Street, the last clear thing that Kenny Wisdom saw before he dove through the front door of a tenement was Solly Girsch running up the back of a Studebaker and leaping onto Chaplain Jake, who col­ lapsed like a paper bag. And as Kenny ran toward the backyards, he knew that Jake was their prisoner. That’s all he knew.

Mule was chasing Georgie Good­ bye up a fire escape. Cool Breeze collared Joe Stretch by the cast-iron railing outside the tailor shop. BoBo was dragging Octavius out from be­ neath a truck by his legs. Basile was; 1carrying Buckeye off to jail in a half nelson. Bull was hit flush in the face with a two-foot snowball by Ju-Jube who slid by him into an alley. And Georgie Goodbye ran across some roofs and down a fire escape, leaving Mule wondering where the hell he went.

The score was two up. And it was only the first minute or so of the game. Everyone who could see out­ side was cheering, and saying things t;o each other like: “You see dat!” “ Dey don’ kid around, deese kids!”

“I’ll be sonna beetch!” “ Holy shitta!

Gonna be some-a-good-a fight to win-a dis!”

Dupree and the rest had their faces pushed tight against their win­ dows as soon as they heard the re­ port of the automatic. And they were even more excited than every« one else, but a little pissed at the stupidity of Mule for hitting the fire escape after Goodbye, instead of trapping Ralphie by the entrance to the luncheonette. And overwhelmed with delight by Ju-Jube’s slick geta­ way which happened ten feet from them. They were laughing themselves into hysteria as they watched Bull pick at the wet filthy crust which covered his eyes and filled his mouth.

Kenny Wisdom looked out into the backyards which formed the alley that stretched all the way from Mulberry to Elizabeth, down to the .Chaplains’ jail. The wooden fences, sectioning it all into lots, were high enough, and the fire escapes, going up the brick walls of each building, offered a quick way out in a squeeze but he knew that as soon as some­ one began moving around out there, it wouldn’t be a secret for long. And, if it was one thing that Kenny Wis­ dom didn’t like to do — it was move around in the open. He’d rather sneak all the way. Therefore, he decided to go underground — into .the cellars.

TO BE CONTINUED

Page 6

by Helen Garner Sometimes you don’t realise how far out on a limb you are until somebody chops it off.

For a couple of days, over the two weeks it took for the axe-people to get their tools sharpened, I was almost seduced into the desperate belief that the only real people in the world were those who were out on other limbs of the same tree, people who didn’t think frankness about human sexuality was ‘.gutter talk” , who considered nakedness normal and not a perversion, who could think and talk about their own sexual experience without revulsion or dismay. Every day after school when I opened my back gate and found my daughter playing in the sun and my friends sitting quietly on the grass laughing and listening to music, I had the same sensation of having struggled out of a nightmare back to the level sunny openness of the real world. But the rest of the world was real all right, as I found to my cost.

Since I got the sack I’ve under­ stood a lot about the way people look at the world, and also about myself. I’ve learnt that being as honest as you can by no means guarantees that other people will respond in kind; that many people I’d once thought of as fearless have a strongly developed instinct for self-preser­ vation which they accuse me of lack­ ing; that some people see dismissal from the Education Department as a favor, in that I had been spared the trouble of making the decision to get myself out of a bureaucratic structure; that others see dismissal from any job, no matter what the circumstances, as something to be ashamed of; that people will p u t their money where their mouths don’t dare to be; and that in the world’s terms the most loving people have the least power.

This is what happened: In Digger number 8 I published an article about bisexuality. My name was fairly prominent on the cover of the paper. On Tuesday 5 December one of the women teachers came down to the baths where I was with my form one class and told me that the caretakers of the school, Mr and Mrs Lack, had been circulating a copy of my article among the teachers. Next morning Mrs Lack approached me in the staffroom with her daughter, and asked me if I had written this article. I said that I had. She said she thought it was “terrible” and that a teacher should not say such things. I asked her what had offended her about the article; she did not seem able to ex­ plain, but said that her grandaughter would be a first form pupil at Fitzroy High School in 1973 and that she did not want her to be taught by someone like me. These two women were the only people who, disap­ proving of my views, spoke to me directly about their disapproval.

For the remaining two weeks of the term, I took my class to the baths every day, so that I was not aware at first hand of developments back at the school. My friends on the staff kept me informed, but until the Thursday of that week no-one else spoke to me about the article.

On Thursday 7 December I went to see the Principal, Mr Miller, on my own initiative. He seemed sym­ pathetic in that he appeared to con­ sider it my right to publish what I liked, but he said that as prospec­ tive] parents (the caretakers?) had; complained, as well as several teach­ ers, he felt he was being forced to make a report to the Department. He told me that some teachers felt what I had written reflected on them, and that they were npt prepared to be associated with me. Mr Miller showed me a draft of his report and I cor­ rected his spelling, at his request.

His estimate of my professional capabilities vas a complimentary one.

On Friday 8 December the head­ master of the junior school left me a note about some mark sheets, asking me to come and see him. I did.

He appeared very upset and re­ ferred obliquely to “ this business” : he said that, as prospective parents had complained to him, he had felt obliged to bring the matter out in the open by making a formal report to the Principal. We were both close to crying and I left immediately.

(He stressed that everything was being done strictly in accordance with VST A procedures; this was not the case, however, for at no stage was I able to ascertain the names of people who had made complaints.

In my first conversation with the Principal I asked for their names, and he replied that he did not feel free to tell me until he had their permission. I pressed him to get this permission but in our next interview when I brought up the matter again he said that permission had been refused.)

On this same Friday I spoke to the Principal again. He gave me a copy of the junior school head­ master’s report. He said that his own report was merely a request for elucidation of his position. He won­ dered if I would be happier at another school. I said I would not.

He stressed that he had always found me an excellent teacher. He thought that I had perhaps been indiscreet in publishing such an article. He re­ marked that it was a most unfor­ tunate coincidence that in the same

The Digger

Schoolchildren don't say fuck, miss

Beware the wrath of caretakers issue of Digger a letter had been sexual organs and the sexual act. Is published from an anonymous wo­ this true? man teacher who had expressed the G: Yes. Where have these reports hope that she would have homo­ come from? sexual relations with her pupils be­ S: That is not the point. There are fore the end of the year. I said that further reports that you have pub­ I thought he had misunderstood this lished an article in a newspaper called letter.

The Digger on the same subject. Is On Monday 11 December when I this true? came back from the baths at lunch­ time, one of the women teachers G: My name is not on the article' you mention. took me aside and told me “They’re on to the first article.” One of the *S: It would appear that the names of men teachers had been showing a pupils indicate that this article con­ copy of it round the staffroom. The cerns Fitzroy High School. article was one published anonymous­ G: I repeat that my name is not on ly in Digger number 6 titled “ Why the article you mention.

Does The Women Have All the Pain, S: What justification can you offer Miss?” , an account of an extended for having discussed these matters conversation with form one children in what can only be called gutter about sex. None of the teachers who terms? read this copy of the article which G: My justification is that when a ’ had appeared around the school child asks me a direct question, I asked me if I had in fact written it. give a direct answer.

That evening, 11 December, two of S: I have no intention of carrying my form one boys came up to me on any further discussion of the in the street in Clifton Hill and told matter. I am going to dismiss you. me that, that afternoon (my after­ Your services have been terminated noon- off), they and four or five because you used popular four-letter other boys from that class had been words to describe the sexual organs approached in a lane by the woman and the sexual act. What were you who runs the school canteen. She supposed to be doing at the time asked them if Mrs Gamer had talked when this discussion took place? to them about sex. Another woman G: I am not bound by a syllabus as whose name they did not know was such. with the canteen woman at the time.

These women threatened to tell their S: I was not asking about a syllabus; fathers if they did not give them the I want to know what subject you information they wanted. One boy were supposed to be teaching. denied that we had discussed sex, G: I take a course called Combined the others ran away.

Studies. At our school, each first form has what is called a home teach­ On Tuesday 12 December I met the kids as usual at the baths. They er, and this teacher has time with that were sitting miserably huddled to­ class equivalent to the time allotment gether against the cyclone wire fence, for three subjects. Within that time upset and frightened because the we have freedom to engage in various kinds of projects which could not same two women had come to the houses of several of them on Monday necessarily be classified as any par­ evening with a copy of the article ticular subject. and had asked them in front of their S: So that in effect you were free parents (or older brothers and sisters, to teach whatever you liked, accor­

if their parents could not speak English well enough) whether I had talked to them in class about sex.

One girl had at first refused to answer, but when the women told her that two other girls in the class had given them the information they wanted (which they apparently referred to as “proof ’) she gave in and said yes.

The children were upset because they thought they had dobbed me. “ It’s our fault, Miss, we asked you the questions.”

One boy said that his parents had refused to let the women speak to him, had told them that what I taught in my class was none of their business, asked them if a single one ofinypupils had complained to his/her parents, and sent them away.

That night, this boy’s mother came to see me, with the mother of a child in another first form. After we had talked, they went away to write a letter to the Minister in my support.

On Wednesday 13 December I was at the baths with my class. Mr Miller rang me there to tell me that Mr Schruhm, Director of Secondary Edu­ cation, had called him and arranged an appointment for me at 11.30 the next day.

On Thursday 14 December I spoke to the Principal again. He seemed confident that at most I could expect a transfer. He was anxious lest the matter get into the Greek and Italian papers. He suggested I should ask Mr Schruhm to transfer me to “ one of those trendy joints.”

Next morning I went to the VSTA and arranged for Rob Bluer, the Assistant Secretary, to come with me to Mr Schruhm’s office. At the office Bluer was not admitted to the presence* and waited for me outside. Here’s what took place inside: (I took notes).

S: It has been reported that you have conducted sex education courses at your school.

G: Will you tell me what are the exact charges that have been made?

S: It has been reported that you have discussed, using popular fourletter words, the male and female

ding to your whim or fancy?

G: No teacher is free to do this . . . I have no syllabus for C.S., but nor am I in the habit of behaving in a whimsical or fanciful way in my classroom.

S: You did not consult the parents or principal before you took this action. You did not consider the rights of the individual students.

G: I stressed to the children before the lesson — that is, the discussion, it wasn’t a lesson, I hadn’t planned it, the children initiated it — that if any of them were upset or embarras­ sed by the subject they should say so immediately and we would not continue.

S: (smiling wryly) I have taken note of your comment. You have exceeded the bounds of professional conduct to such an extent that dismissal is my only appropriate course of action. You are dismissed out of hand.

G: What does “ out of hand” mean?

S: It means you are dismissed as of today.

G: In that case, are you now pre­ pared to tell me the names of the people who have accused me?

S: No, I am not. There is no ques­ tion of accusations: you have admit­ ted to having conducted a discussion using gutter terms.

G: There must-have been complaints, otherwise the matter would never have come up. Will you tell me if the people who complained were teachers, parents, or the Principal?

S: No, I will not.

G: Have you received any indications of support from parents or children in my class? I know that there are several people who support me.

S: Your behaviour doesn’t have to be acceptable to any small or big group. It has only to be objectionable to one parent for action to be taken.

G: I take it, then, that I am never going to find out who complained about me.

S: No, you are not.

G: Did you take note of the fact

that the Principal gave a good report of my professional capabilities?

S: I did.

G: It seems that there is nothing more to be said.

When I left Schruhm’s office and told Rob Bluer I had been sacked, he went straight in. Schruhm told him to get out, and we returned to the VSTA offices where I wrote up the transcript of the interview and then went back to school. I collected my pay up to January 7; the Depart­ ment called Mr Miller and told him that my pay would cease on that date.

In the school office I found a letter which had been posted to me.

Posted. It was signed by Mrs Wiegmann, who not only runs the canteen but is the Honorary Secretary of the Parents’ and Citizens’ Association.

This letter demanded my resignation and threatened “ drastic action” if this were not done “quietly” ; en­ closed was a copy of a letter sent to the Minister for Education, which said, among other things: “ We consider and request the De­ partments concerned make inquir­ ies and seek her resignation from the Departments. It would not be right to send her away from our school to another. We con­ sider teachers have certain respon­ sibilities and moral standard in their teaching of the childrens education. W? consider this teacher has gone far beyond the bounds of this standard, by teaching sex in a filthy way behind locked doors.”

The letter addressed to me includ­ ed the information that it “had been written in the company of some o f the parents and President of the Parents and Citizens Association of Fitzroy High School” . The letter addressed to the Minister gave no indication that the complaint had not been endorsed by a fully con­ stituted meeting of the Parents’ and Citizens’ Association.

When I had read these documents I went to see Mrs Wiegmann in the canteen and asked her why she had not given me the letter earlier so that I might have had a chance to defend myself. She replied, “If you don’t believe what’s in that letter, go and see the Parents and Citizens.”

I explained that I was objecting not so much to the contents of the letter as to the fact that I had not known until too late who had made the charges against me and what the charges were. We weren’t able to continue the conversation because I could hardly help crying.

At a Staff Association meeting on Friday 15 December, the last day of the year, support for me was expres­ sed chiefly in the form of donations amounting to about $270. Other motions of support for me were either defeated, withdrawn, or amem ded so that they became general issues: e.g. the matter of my having been denied union representation in my interview with the Director. One motion rang very hollow indeed on the last day of the school year: “If this staff has enough reason to believe that Helen Garner was victimised by the Education De­ partment, this staff starts an in­ definite strike until justice is done.”

This motion was referred to the VSTA. Since then I have had no further contact with school authorities, except for one short conversation with Mr Miller on the day I was sacked, in which he expressed sur­ prise and distress at my having been dismissed, and remarked that in his view I might well be a prophet of the future. Cold comfort. * * * People keep asking me, “ Why didn’t you change the kids’ names?”

The only reason I can think of for doing this would have been to pro­ tect them from the interrogations they were later forced to endure. It makes my heart sick to think of them being bailed up in the street by strangers, confused to the point of tears, forced to make statements in front of teachers who terrify them.

I’ll never forget the way their sun­ burnt faces stared at me when I came into our room to tell them I’d been sacked. All the things I’d planned to say to them stuck in my throat in front of their miserable gaze.

“But Miss!” cried one of them (see, I’ve stopped using their names), “ what about the petition we signed?

They said you wouldn’t get the sack!”

How could I tell them they were so utterly without power? How could I make them understand that when you tell the truth you make your­ self vulnerable to liars?

Well, there were plenty of tears shed when we said goodbye, and I wonder now if I will ever be so close to kids again. I guess a teacher always feels like that at the end of a year. But I’m afraid of developing that instinct for self-preservation that I mentioned earlier, the instinct that creates a wall between you and your class, or if not a wall, a kind of semi-transparent membrane that makes everything a little less direct, a little more cautious. I don’t really understand why, but it wasn’t there between me and those kids in room 8 at Fitzroy High School. I reckon room 8 must still be humming with good vibes. I wonder if they can penetrate walls?

Meeting the Prime Minister's wife at The Lodge

"Opening fetes is done much better by women anyway...”

by Ponch Hawkes with Jenny Brown

Photography: Sean Foley

I was charged by Margaret Whit­ The feel of Labor’s election coup was a kind of heady el­ lam, enough to want to respond to ation which even got to the the warmth she showed us. And hard-nosed journos, traditionally maybe that’s the reason why the so ambivalent about their re­ interview was, in some ways, a serious disappointment to me. I found my­ lationship with the powers in self making it easy for her, not pre­ Canberra, always aware that senting a threat or a challenge, they can print, if they’re lucky, pussyfooting with questions instead about one tenth of what they of following them up. Without know. The ALP had finally meaning to; because she’s such a shown its colors, and the silen­ nice woman, she disarmed me.

Megs may not be a spokeswoman ced Labor supporters were com­ ing out like jubilant cicadas for the women’s movement, or for after a long, cramped sojourn consciousness three, but she’s a good deal more real than Sonia. She’s underground. honest, and I think she’s open to And with a new government change. came a new set of stars, among * * * them the Whitlams. The pros­ The drive to the Lodge was pect of interviewing Margaret clogged with limousines, so the Whitlam occurred almost sim­ Commonwealth cops o a the front ultaneously to a fistful of harder- gate got a message back by walkieline female journos, who would talkie to send us around the back. normally yawn off the chances Sean, our photographer, had scrum­ of extracting anything worth maged the car and found a pair of reading from a politician’s wife. shoes. They made his white jeans Margaret seemed to have this, with the NLF flag on the arse stand well, nerve; a bit of wit, per­ a little short up his legs, and there sonality; more of a willingness just wasn’t anything to be done to talk openly about the more about the hole in his singlet. I was wearing a friend’s grandmother’s controversial, less boring, issues dress, dark blue, hem on the knees, than her famous predecessor, bare-legged, and Jenny had cigarette who, it turned out, was clam- burns in her skirt. You could see trapped for a good reason. What the pink lining through them. The Margaret Whitlam was all about cops walkie-talkied some more and was beginning to matter to a lot we were greeted by Ron, the butler, a short, classic, greying character in of people.

the chauffeur was chatting her up.

Back in the pantry Jenny and I worked on our last-minute question sequence. Ms Whitlam stuck her head through the door, saying, “ Oh, it’s so cool in here, shall we do it here?” , but Sean thought the patio looked great, so we headed back there, taking drinks, notes and the borrowed tape deck.

Looking back on the conver­ sation, I see that right from the be­ ginning, Ms Whitlam’s pleasant man­ ner seduced me from my aim. My first thought, in planning the inter­ view, was to rip through to a reveal­ ing story, showing up the impression I had that she hadn’t thought very deeply about a lot of the questions she’d given straight answers to in the other interviews I’d read.

But here she was, turning the tables on me before I’d even started, asking me charmingly about Digger and how we make out financially, about communal living, about our reading public.

“My son is coming back from England tomorrow, he’s 27. Do you think it would be satisfactory for him?” % Handing over a pie of Diggers, I pointed out Helen Garner’s story, “Why does the women have all the pain, miss?” I explain how she was sacked from the Victorian Education Department because of the article.

Digger obviously hasn’t hit the Lodge magazine rack, but she says, “Well, David (White) said it was black jacket and pin-striped trousers.

Our invitation was confirmed: Miss worthwhile.”

Finishing Helen’s article, she com­ * * He Hawkes, her associate Miss Brown, mented, and the photographer, Mr Foley, Making a splash among the be“I can understand the conster­ suited journos at the Hotel Can­ were shown into the Lodge. nation of the Department —although Making polite, weather-type con­ berra isn’t so difficult when you’re she didn’t put her name to it, or a Sydney blow-in in jeans and a T versation, Ron apologised for escor­ identify her school, did she? Well, shirt; but it’s pretty exhilarating to ting us around the back, past the umm . . . I just don’t think kids find yourself the only woman journo swimming pool. The Prime Minister use these words as frequently as in evidence at the Wine and Brandy was having a meet up front. Walk­ adults think they do. I think they Producers’ Association annual juice- ing through a huge hanging bower of use other words, although I imagine vines and ivy, we rounded a comer out for the Press Gallery. The cham­ she’s repeated what she heard, or pagne (they were backing in trucks and stepped into the dappled, sunwhat was said to her. But I almost splattered quiet of the Whitlams’ of it) gave me the bounce to talk feel you have to put these words back when guys introduced me as a patio. into their mouths.”

Ms Whitlam stood up to meet us “ good bird” , and to shout “ Fuck I pointed out that these were off!” when the dude from the Wine and I had to lift my hand high to Industry opened his speech with shake hers. She’s a huge woman; migrant kids in an inner-city school.

“Gentlemen of the Press” . . . long conjures up visions of her swimming She accepted the possibility of days. She was wearing a yellow language variation in the case, adding, pause . . . “and ladies.”

“My own daughter went to Tech But something came out of that dress. She smiled easily, and instantly last year and it was quite a thing melted a bit of my tension. night apart from the pleasure of She was out on the patio, fin­ for her to hear a different set of raising a little feminist hell; I met David White, the PM’s brand-new ishing off the week’s work on kids talk. You know, it wasn’t that regular Woman's World she hadn’t heard the words before, Secretary for the Media. He’s short her column, and took us up on our but that she hadn’t heard them used with medium length hair and beard, into rock and roll, can get serious offer to disappear for ten minutes quite so frequently. She thinks most but mostly laughs a lot, and has a . . . we were offered the choice of of the kids are completely hung-up stomach that shows he’s paid his a look around the grounds or a on sex; they talk about it all the time, but they never do anything, dues to the hard-drinking Labor man drink. We decided on the drink. it’s d l talk.”

In the pantry, I asked for lemon image.

She could have been seriously squash, Jenny tentatively wondered “Can you get me an interview if the invitation referred to something mistaken here, but I pushed on to with Margaret Whitlam?”

No stalling. He came across. “ Oh, /alcoholic. Assured she could take her the next question —where the res­ pick, she had a bourbon and coke. ponsibility of sex education lies.

I think that could be arranged.”

I first saw Margaret Whitlam on Sean chose a bottle of Crest lager. Margaret frowned. “ I’d like to think it was with the TV the night she said that if mari­ ! Jenny was still taking notes. She parents, but most parents are so asked Ron a conversational thing or juana was not more harmful than smoking or drinking then she didn’t two, he paused, and . . . the tension ill-equipped. I think there has got to be something national, official. I sang too tight. see why it should not be legalised. “ I think I need a drink. You really think it should be done scien­ I thought she was terrific and I thought, maybe things really are see, you have to watch what you tifically at school, like political say in here . . . it’s too easy to be science, and that it should be done going to happen in Canberra.

As I did the legwork for the inter­ misquoted.” Jenny grinned and put at a much earlier age. Kids need to down her pen. know something about politics. Nine view and read more about her, I It was beginning to feel real homey or ten is just about the best age. began to get a feeling that she’s gone through a lot of changes in round the pantry table. The house­ When they’re in the middle of pri­ the last two years, unlike many keeper said, “It’s so relaxed here mary school, they’re iieally curious about everything, and very recep­ middle-aged women from privileged now.”

On my way to the bathroom I tive.” backgrounds. As a woman I felt a “ Did you have any difficulty tell­ strong empathy with her, though I passed by three or four women fol­ fear to sound ridiculous claiming ding and ironing, and I glimpsed ing your kids about sex?” I asked. sisterhood with the Prime Minister’s through the kitchen a classic scene: She snorted, amused. the cook was cutting up carrots and “I didn’t have any difficulty. Ask wife.

Page 7

January 13 — January 27

spec tor Scott o f Scotland Yard was the biggest deal on radio. We used to spend the weekends in winter time either doing acrobatics outside or preparing the play on Sunday night. It was even before the days of Lux radio, and it was performed for the gathering of the clan. We thought it was very exciting.”

Margaret Whitlam; schools are there to stick to the curriculum ated by adults, who make decisions given free rein; but her answers re­ tionary person. I think about the them if they had any difficulty!” vealed confusion about the extent age of seven looking up the word ab o u t. . . ” “ Do you think they did?”

“Well, only because they are econ­ and nature of secondary students’ ‘adultery’ —‘violation of the marriage “We’ve always been perfectly frank rights, and possibly ignorance of re­ bed’. I thought, what's that?” about everything that came up.” omically dependent” , she cut in.

Images of cut and ‘violated’ beds; | “ For example, teenagers at school cent developments in views on Hmmm. we laughed.

“Would you put a minimum on — would you see they had rights secondary schools.

“What I was getting to, was more This lead on to the question of the age of a person wanting con­ separate from belonging to their permissive censorship for adults” . censorship of books and films.

I family?” traceptives?”

“Well, I thought Portnoy's Com­ “It’s difficult to allocate particular got a little apologetic: “If you don’t “No. It depends on the person. A lot of children from Europe mature rights^ they have outside the family, want to answer this question, I’m plaint was one of the most diverting so much earlier than children bom while they are receiving education at sure you’ve been asked it before . . . ” books I’ve ever read.”

“Do you think children should Mrs Whitlam just laughed and said, in Australia, they’re obviously going the expense of the family or the schoolgirlish, “ Oh, I always put my be allowed to read any book which to need something earlier. Some state.” is allowed into the country?”

“What about rights to join political big foot in it anyway.” children are a little more precocious “I think so; people who are going We laughed; a dig at her trouble than others; there are children of 14 organisations, and to express their to read it and can’t understand it who are as mature physically and views?” said Jenny, shifting in her with the press.

Margaret continued: “ I think that . . . people only read it if someone psychologically as people of 20. seat.

“Yes, oh heavens yes. I mean children really assimilate, that is, points it out to them, the fact that And I imagine if you’re mature in one way, it’s wise to be mature in that’s freedom of speech, freedom -can understand only a certain amount, this is a banned book. They have of choice.” and what they can’t understand, they only to say that a book which has another.” don’t need to. That is,, — in the been banned in Melbourne will be on fields of literature, film — even music sale in Sydney, and Angus and Robert­ these days is said to be particularly son have queues outside the shop.

“It’s like rationing in the war. I permissive, isn’t it? — I can’t see any need to increase censorship. At the never ate so many chocolates in same time, I don’t see any need to my life! Because I knew that on Friday morning, you could get relax it either.

“I think the way films are graded, chocolates at the Oceania chocolate with the “ R” , “A” , “G” or what-' shop . . . I never bought a chocolate ever, indicates whether the film has there before.” something in it that might offend, * * * if you are the sort of person who is going to be offended by that sort of Margaret seemed relaxed. I swit­ film. OK — you don’t have to see it, ched to another subject. but of course the very people who “I was reading, in an earlier inter­ complain are the people Mho seek it view, that looking back over your out. They make a point of going to life, you’d like to do something see a film marked ‘R’ simply because more creative. I wondered what that they want to rave on about how dis­ would be.” gusting, violent, sadistic and immoral “It’s nice to speculate on this,” it is, and really they’ve been fore­ she said, “but it’s probably far more Mss. Whitlam,Hawkes and Brown warned.” productive to train yourself in some­ What about books? thing in which you won’t have any Jenny elaborated. “ Quite often Would you think that decisions “Well, it’s really protection of the trouble being employed. It’s not that about the use of contraceptives are in schools, children are severely re­ I ever had any artistic leanings — it entirely up to the person involved?” primanded for doing things like pub­ consumer.”

“I remember reading something was just a thought I had.”

“Entirely up to the doctor dis­ lishing personal views in school about you reading a particularly “But if all things were tributing the contraceptives . . . to papers.”

“I think, maybe, school is not ‘saucy’ book when you were young.” possible . . .?” me it all fits in with the family “ Really I think I would have planning aspect of sex education, the place to do that. This is an extra­ “Oh yes, I used to take it out, disseminating from a family planning curricular activity that should be and put it back after I finished read­ liked to act, to be associated with clinic, and as much as it shouldn’t conducted outside the school. School ing it. I can’t even remember what theatre. Anything, from acting to just prepare people for the families is there specifically to pass on in­ it was about. I only read it because management, would suit me very well.” they’re going to have, but for the struction according to the curriculum. they told me not to.”

We talked about a photograph of families they don’t want to have; and If it goes beyond that I can see they Jenny asked her if she’d found young Margaret in drag, as a naval also instruct members of the family are infringing on the rights of the it shocking.

“I found it very revealing, not officer, with a friend. Jenny men­ in every aspect of sexual activity, or j teachers.” tioned that it had looked a lot like Jenny pointed out that in schools shocking.” inactivity.” “ Did you find out about sex a hippy wedding. That broke the “Do you see kids as having where a newspaper is an officiallylady up. encouraged activity, publication of from books?” I asked. rights of their own?”

“Yes, it did really! I think I was “I think most kids did in those “ How do you mean?” she asked students’ opinions isn’t seen as an me. infringement of anyone’s rights. Ms days, although I just didn’t ask about eleven . . . We used to put on I deliberated.

Whitlam quickly conceded that, in terribly much. I preferred to read little plays all the time. No TV, “Children are very much domin- such schools, students might well be everything. I’ve always been a dic­ radio wasn’t what it is today. In-

“You have advocated wages for housewives. What would you think your wage ought to be?” I asked.

“Someone the other day actually expected I did get a salary. I don’t, but I do get the services of a sec­ retary. She is just settling into that, she is just learningwhat to do — and I’m just learning what to give her to do.”

We started rapping about her in­ Another interruption; the arrival terest in theatre. of her sister-in-law. And when she “I’m very catholic in my tastes .stepped back on to the patio, our . . . I like everything, from opera hearts and story sank. to farce, that ridiculous revue-type “I’m afraid we’ll have to finish farce that Gordon Chater does. The in ten minutes, otherwise there’ll be Mavis MacMahon Show, I think real strife with the staff.” that’s terribly amusing.”

I contemplated the twenty or so She is very interested in Australian other questions an experienced inter­ theatre, likes David Williamson, and viewer would have asked by now, tides to see as many plays as she and thought sadly of the maxim that can. She’s seen commercial Austral­ an interview is only as good as the ian films like Wake in Fright but interviewer.

“I’d like to ask you two more doesn’t seem to have had contact with what she calls ‘arty’ cinema. questions. The first about marriage Her patronage of the arts is that of and the nuclear family, how they a subscriber and she makes a point seem to be breaking down; what of paying for whatever she goes to. do you see as the pressures bringingA social writer from Melbourne that about — and what do you rang, wanting a guest list for her see as alternatives to -the nuclear gossip column. Ms Whitlam made a family?”

“Actually I don’t see the family face.

“I’ve got all these diplomatic unit breaking down. I think it’s wives coming this afternoon . . .Oh, changing. Needs are changing. People I don’t know, they’re all going to tend to move out along their inde­ wear such big hats, we won’t be pendent paths more than they used able to fit more than ten of them in to, and young people want to live the Lodge at the one time, so they’ll by themselves or with someone other all be terribly peeved at having to than their family group.

“I think that’s perfectly natural. stay in the garden.”

Dutifully she takes leave of us I think that housing has a lot to do with it, the smallness of the houses to talk to the woman.

Everything seemed to be flowing we live in, there’s no privacy. Very very easily; the vibe is so good that little provision for privacy in the I thought she was sure to let us ordinary suburban home. You’re go on till after one, giving us plenty damn lucky if you have three bed­ of time to get all our questions in. rooms. If there are six people in She was coming across warm and the family, who is going to have a unpretentious. She wasn’t trotting room of their own?

“I don’t regard it as a breakdown, out formulas and policy statements.

She writes a personal advice just a change, and an admission of column for Woman's World, the sort different needs today. I recognise of magazine that gives tips on how that all my children would rather to cope with marriage and families. live by themselves or with people; Her writing is couched in supportive of their own choosing. And anyway, social worker terms; she’s a trained I don’t want them round my apron social worker. About her column strings!”

“What about alternatives?” she says, “It’s very homey, not your “You mean communality? I sort of thing at all.”

She is also a regular panellist on frankly don’t fancy that very much.

Sydney TV. We wondered how this To me it would be like living in a fitted in with being the PM’s wife, boardinghouse all the time. It’s and when she returned Jenny asked probably good discipline, you have her if she thought that being married to put up with other people — if was important for a politician’s they act in ways that displease, image. She answered off the top of you must solve the differences. You her head; her reply also showed an can’t ignore it, or sulk like you assumption that politician equals can in a family.” At that point she laughed, and deferred to me: “Can male politician; “I don’t think it matters really. you?”

I asked my final question of her.

I think it’s probably helpful, because if he’s married and has a partner to “What do you see happening in Aus­ do all the work in the electorate, it tralia in the next twenty years?”

“Well, it can only get better. I is useful. People sometimes assume that the work of the electorate is of think our importance will grow in a secondary nature — well, it is in the world as a whole. For too long a way — and that I’m denigrating the we’ve allowed ourselves to be more role of a woman, because I say that isolated that we in fact are. Physr a woman can do things that a man ically, we’re not nearly as isolated doesn’t have time for . . . it’s all now, with modem communications, as we’ve tended to enjoy believing, part of a scene.

“If a politician is married, you get two for the price of one. The wife is out there meeting people, actually looking after the electorate. I don’t think this is bad, because naturally you have an interest in your hus­ band’s work. Even if it means going to fetes, school organisations and service clubs, it’s a part she can do without training, and I think a politician must have some specific training (not necessarily to be a politician), and he should be using his training for that, and not for opening fetes, which is done much better by women anyway.”

Jenny pointed out that tact and the training of experience was impor­ tant for public relations work, and that, in fact, Margaret was doing a job. The lady was quick to agree.

And I hope we’ll expand within ourselves and not allow take-overs. I know we won’t allow take-overs.”

“What about within individual people’s lives?” “ People’s lives have to be im­ proved. The ordinary man’s life has to be better. An ordinary man who does an ordinary job has got to be assured of a comfortable income — and of a job. I don’t think anyone should have to worry about meals, housing, health care or education.

I don’t think these things should be provided for nothing, but they should be available, at a price that makes them available for everybody.

I think it’s an entitlement which will become more possible in the next few years . . .”

We thanked her; she apologised

for having to go so soon. Jenny asked her about her interview with Germaine Greer a few days before “ Oh it was shocking! Absolutely shocking. I was so nervous, so was Germaine. I wasn’t ‘in voice’ at all.” She seemed honestly embar­ rassed.

At the front door of the Lodge, Margaret Whitlam wished us good luck, laughed nervously and said, “I hope you won’t be too hard on me.”

And somehow, I felt we wouldn’t.

P.H. * * * Well, that was it. Digger's inter­ view with Margaret Whitlam was over and done. Ponch and Sean were shown through a room or two ,, of the mammoth, classy, but comfortorientated Lodge, on the way out, by the woman the butler calls “Madam” ; I followed a few feet behind. The heat wrung sweat from me, my stomach was in limbo.

Hundreds-feet high gums from all over the grounds made a noise of far-off surf; Margaret was apologising for Sonia’s curtains.

As we passed from Madam’s hands to those of Ron the butler to the Security guards, we turned to wave briefly . . . Margaret Whitlam was a colossal toy woman on the steps of a colossal toy Lodge, a grandoise, gracious white building fronted with white Grecian pillars and topped by a row of Australian flags — one tangled unrecognisably by the northerly; I felt numbed, frustrated and sick to the stomach.

I felt what had looked like a good chance dying in the arse. It wasn’t that Ms Whitlam had emerged as a bore; she obviously had it in her to be a witty and intelligent (if not confident) talker. But our hopes that she might be familiar with the whys and what-fors of the womeq’s liberation and progres­ sive . education lobbyists were shot.

Thé lady had given us her attention, if not her concern.

Ponch seemed glad enough to have done the interview with Ms Whitlam, her frustrations with it came later. Sean Foley was relaxed as we sat and ordered a salad in the airconditioned restaurant in the metropolis Canberra. My annoyance at his assuming control of the tape recorder in the Lodge (he kept turning the thing off in those unof­ ficial, important moments to save tape!) had not got to him. I ignored my salad and tersely listened to the tape replay.

Ponch and I had discussed ques­ tions well before the interview, real­ ising fast that what each of us (and, in fact, everyone we spoke to of Margaret Whitlam) would like to ask the PM’s wife varied pretty extra­ ordinarily.

Still, the story was an interesting one. How mich personal power does the wife of the Prime Minister have?

Looks like a great deal of potential power, if the woman in question sees it that way. She has a certain amount of “greatness thrust upon” her; and yet there’s a shower of press exposure she can duck, if she’s tactful and adroit.

But Margaret Whitlam seems to be shouldering a fair am ount, of accepted, if not sought-after public­ ity, without using it to feather her own personal nest. Disregarding a few “slips” , such as her pro--egalisation of marijuana statement on TV, she has managed to emerge as a personality in her own right, but politically a shadow personality to Gough. As she puts it*.

“The pitfalls (of being a first lady) are trying to project your own per­ sonality too much.”

She says that a P.M.’s woman is “first of all a wife. She’s only there because of her husband.”

In many ways it seems a rather ironic situation where a woman such as Margaret Whitlam, who is “in politics” simply because her husband is, should have a rather nervously accepted limelight in the pages of the press, when other women, un­ qualified by such a high-ranking hus­ band are breaking their backs to be heard — on the very issues we’d drilled Margaret about, and about which her knowledge was scattered and unsure — and who, if they do get heard, face a good chance of putdown from the media.

Ironic also, that Margaret Whitlam is probably the only “ official” spokeswoman for the Australian Labor Party, the government.. .

J.B.

Page 8

The Digger

reality firm.

It’s valued at $509,000, a 400 acre picnic ground and golf link, with a licensed res­ The Hawkesbury River, 40 miles taurant. Jones P/L bought the place north of Sydney, oozes around a from the Hook family in 1970, and bend wide and green and deep, not long afterwards leased the park to banked by the tide. On the left is a Armand Beaudoin, a French-Canadian rusty sandstone cliff, and red gums; who looks a bit like a miniature Burt on the right is the beach of Bungool Reynolds.

Park. The flies aren’t too bad. Rock Beaudoin has worked hard to and roll rumbles over a ridge. Nobody make the place pay. He’s booked a is swimming naked. The people who lot of factory picnics into the grounds are swimming are a little defensive, for summer weekends. Picnickers pay because a judge has ruled that rock 60 cents to get in. He’s got live and roll is an abnormal use of the music in the Chandelier restaurant. area . . . out in the river, the normal} He’s got rangprs on horseback and users of the area are walking on mokes, patrolling the place . . . it water. looks a bit like a dude ranch, in fact.

Their boats are carmine and can­ Last November, Beaudoin’s buddy, ary yellow, with script names 8” another Canadian named Brian Dick, high, “Ichabod” , “Shari” , “ Fallacy” , rang up Sunrise management and “ Eliminator” , short boats with little said he wanted to mount a rock fest freeboard, that heave themselves out on the same day as Sunbury. Roger of the catfish waters by the karkarDavies, at Sunrise, said no fear. Dick karing of heavy V-8 engines . . . came in to see the Sunrise people, “ Fallacy” has a watercooled exhaust the biggest Sydney rock agency, and system that sprays water and mist invited them out to the site. The from two nozzles at the ends of a site is great. Davies, however, knew lifted manifold, which look for all that Baulkham Hills Shire had re­ the home .galaxy like the impellers fused a permit earlier last year for a of a Marvel Comic spacebuggy.

Festival at a site just down the river.

Three to five people sit in these Beaudoin and Dick reckoned they boats, which usually trail two skiers had the matter in hand. . . . the water of the wide green bend They did not have the matter in is choppy from all the boats. The hand. chop makes a tiny surf on the sand The council refused permission. of Bungool beach.

Beaudoin and Dick made a second Two girls walk onto the beach. application, and that too was knocked They are rock and roll spunkies, back. The shire councillors felt that with long, curly hair, wearing soft the festival would affect the normal bikini bathers on hard young bodies. New Year weekend amenities for the Up the slope of the beach, two boys locals. It was, after all, a move that With wispy four day whiskers and increased the price of admission to bikie length hair hoot at the girls. Bungool park from 60 cents to $9; The girls ignore. The boys confer. and, according to Dick, Bernie MulThe boys run down the dune-slope lane, the president of the Shire, is yelling like horsemen towards thej a heavy water skier . . . and the girls . . . right past them, into the Bungool Festival plan (a detailed list water, splash splash. of security measures) called for stop­ The girls walk on, smiling that ping skiing from the beach. strained smile that girls smile if Beaudoin and Dick decided to they don’t know a little karate. press on. When the council saw some Karkarkar there’s another skiboat of their advertising, it decided to coming by the beach . . . my god, take out an injunction to stop them. it’s called “Aquarius” .

The Supreme Court hearings took place between Christmas and New * * * The catfish live in fresh water, up Year weekend: the judge granted the the river, by Windsor and Bungool. council an order enjoining the There are no catfish downstream at Festival. In effect, the council could Brooklyn, where the water is salty, have Beaudoin up on contempt-ofunless tides exceed five feet. Then court if he held the event, and' that the catfish are dragged toward the could mean an indefinite jail term ocean by the ebb tide, and you can’t for the park manager. The Sydney catch anything from the trestle but dailies ran the story big; it looked as these eel-tailed spikey catfish. This though the event was off.

Beaudoin went to Sunrise pro­ is a law of nature. motions, and asked them what was * * * he gonna do. Beaudoin had already Few of you will recall that in paid airfares and percentage of the 1803, several hundred Irish convicts money to book 35 acts — most of busted out of Castle Hill Prison the rock draws in the country, from farm. The NSW corps pursued them Hot Dog to MacKenzie Theory to toward Windsor, killing about 25 La De Das . Sunrise (Roger Davies, of. the Irish, to encourage the others David Gingus, Mike Chugg, Phil to behave themselves m future. By 5 Jacobsen) were all sweating, too: their the time the Corpsmen got to Windsoi ! entire stable was booked into Bun­ their blood was so high they strung gool for a big holiday weekend, and up the local magistrate’s son on the acts had no where else to go, suspicion. Or so it’s rumoured; the even for exposure. matter was hushed up, in the inter­ In short, everybody was in a jam. ests of good order: such is the law There was a legal conference eight of man . . . hours long, and an agreement was Bfojngool Park is owned by Jones reached. Bungool was back on, only Developments Pty L*td, an Australian not in any form as a Festival . . .

by Bruce Hanford

SUNBURY Bands mumbling in the wings instead of last year’s four — for triple that price. “ Don’t you believe Although the band’s third album in the music world?” (their first as Murtceps) is outselling John Fowler, Odessa Promotions, everything — Australian, local and Organisers of the Sunbury festi­ import were offered around half the bounty on Carson. vals.

Both Carson and Murtceps have With the Sunbury festival coming recently released L.P.s; E.M.I. claim off again this year, in a mere fort­ Murtceps’ “ Warts Up Your Nose” night, (Fri, Jan 26th-Mon, Jan is doubling sales of Carson’s “ Blown” .

29th), rumors fly thick and fast Spectrum have proved their ability as meteors among the organisational to draw as a solo act, filling the nebulae and their trade satellites.

Ballroom once last year without sup­ The main bone of contention is port. Their Dr Hyde, Murtceps, re­ the hiring and rate of pay of the rock peated recently. A band in that acts booked for the show. drawing/selling position shouldn’t Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, re­ play a festival for $200, and they turning from England, will be paid won’t. a rumored $ 10,000. , As singer/guitarist Micre Udd While this establishes new pres­ says dryly, “ Oh well, we never really tige for an indigenous rock act, at enjoy festivals much anyway.” the other end of the scale bands are The band had guts to pull out, accepting underpayment for the and the skin is off the noses of chance to play the show (the old Spectrum/Murtceps fans rather than T.V. trick — we no pay you — you those of the band. They are now get free exposure!) or even, in at backing Spirit’s national tour. least one case, curtly refusing to Meanwhile, a relatively little show for the price. known band of Australia’s top McKenzie Theory will play the straight rock players, Mighty Mouse, festival for $170. Lead guitarist will gig for more than double the Rob McKenzie, was far from ec­ price on the fast-rising draw Mc­ static with the price, (having been Kenzie Theory — $400. This also paid more for a single spot at the doubles the Spectrum/Murtceps offer. now-defunct Much More Ballroom), Four of the line-up will be paid a but said he’d accèpted it because he second time, as part of the specially wanted the band to play Sunbury. reformed “Chain.”

Gary Young’s Hot Dog were offered The La De Das won’t be playing a similar figure and tqok^ it for . . . Either they weren’t asked to similar reasons. ^ the party, or the fare wasn’t good John Graham and Blackspur will enough. do a set for $1/2B. Michael Gudinski, the main man Spectrqm/Murtceps were sugges­ from the Australian Entertainment ted a figure of around $200, having Exchange is standing well in the been put down for a single spot line of accusatory fire, but not as

by Jenny Brown

8 more throttles, and 9 buttons — by calculation, approximately 240 goodies to tickle or watch, and it’s attached to the soundboxes by an umbilical cord, a thick gathered bundle of wires . . . this fine instru­ ment of control is perched on a couple of 44 gallon drums, dinged and rusty, Bungool Park Garbage Cans.

I sit down beside Howard, and we begin rapping about the sound gear. ...

Above us, on the stage and the bluff, I see Beaudoin and Chugg, and a word, and a roadie move to the 1 m stage manager, who yells down: “ Hey wM ÊÊÊÊt Howard^ pick up the headphones.”

Howard puts them on. I look up at the intense people on the:bluff, llllllll hearing a few words from the ‘phones in Howard’s ear.

“Sudden local rise in the level of paranoia?”

“Yeah,” says Howard, “ to the level of don’t tell anybody about anything.” ' We both kind of smile a bit, and I groove off to talk to the cops. * * * y11 Ü1 1 '■ % *j “¿i lÊf ífs Í The police are parked up on a hill behind the stage, a squad car, a 1 ' 1 Æ ifêst . t {31*,^/ -!•. , . ” 'ZhiùC-'.. ' (s.' \ H;-. ¿ cage-ute, and one of those big Ford lock-up vans; they’ve got an 18’ á "'r* h M|¡ i w caravan up there, with an 83 mega­ hertz radio whispering away in it, and i "' S I I f i a partitioned space where a tired cop H i 'T - "f ' * i can crash or a curious couple of cops m ÊÊÊMÈS ! g j 1 Jj f f M i l p ( H JS 1 i can question you . . . but, like, there are only four cops on this Saturday, a garrison force, in case the people MiÈËËilÊimÈÊÊm.JlIlIllÉWmsSÊÊÊÊm XV' come; and, these cops are keeping a low profile.

The cops in charge must have It was lonely at the top at Bungool. . . and out there in the middle o f that been hand-picked, big Sgt Leeding huge, unpeopled lawn, the Dancer danced, amusing a cop. from Blacktown, Insp. George Cannacott, whose brother ran the special no, as a picnic. A whole set of things beautiful park with few bugs, a good abortion squad and is now working had to be changed, the helicopter line-up of bands, and almost no on that funny North Shore dopeambulance was cancelled, the stage people. Those who were there emit­ murder, the O’Truba case . . . these roof tom away, etc . .. and the Bun­ ted the lightest, finest vibes imagin­ are very cool cops, not at all stupid; gool people were right out of or­ able. they don’t have much to do with the ganizing the music side of things.

Here we are, a few miles down­ few plainclothes (golf shirts, bermuda Sunrise people took over running the stream from Windsor, a few hun­ shorts) down in the crowd; they gate, and the bands were to play sort dred longhairs sitting on a mowed don’t have much to do with the of incidentally: it seems that as long lawn, listening to a band. The 69ers.

Blacktown Security Service special as the music is incidental, rather than Who are also on the lawn, playing cops, who are wandering around like the specific attraction, then an event through their own P.A., and the turf funky cowboys with smiles on their is a picnic rather than a festival . . . is soaking up the sound. On the ridge faces and a motley assortment of such is the law of man. above the huge, mowed lawn, which is pistols on their hips.

Their deal is to watch. If the normally used for factory picnics, are gay pavillions. Alfalfa sprout crowd grows, they’ll increase rostered The Daily Mirror plugged hell out salads, 35 cents, lentil pies, 25 cents,, strength, but still keep a low profile. of the Bungool . . . Picnic; it said Orange Frosties 7 cents, loaf of Gold There’s no need to fly the flag unless that the promoters had found a way Star Milk Vienna 30 cents, Aerogard you’re going to show the strength. If around the court order. When Beau­ 85 cents, cigarette papers, 5 cents the event gets to a certain size, a doin and Dick saw the Mirror on — genuine Zig Zag rolling papers! second caravan would come in, plug Saturday, as a few hundred people In fact, the organization of the site, into the first one — it would be full of radio gear to helicopter, insterstate, motored into the grounds, they the site itself, is perfect for a'rock launches, walkies frequency . . . the freaked. At that stage, they didn’t fest.

Across the huge lawn is a stage, first wave could be summoned out of want publicity: they wanted to feel Richmond, Windsor, arriving in may­ carved from a grey sandstone bluff. safe from the threat of jail.

When I came in, Armand Beau­ On the stage is the full Jands tour be 30 minutes . . . if bikies or skin­ doin wouldn’t talk to me. Brian Dick sound monster, 16 300 watt bass heads came in, the force would show the strength, patrolling in twos. gave me a brief rundown on what units, eight on either side of the Now, with the small crowd, three was happening, and split for another stage, big, squat and black, and on cops just get in a squad car and tool huddle in the office. Mike Chugg, these units are the upper range stacks. down around the hill, out through blue-eyed and cherubic, was standing Howard Page is below the stage, on the camping ground, every half hour around rehearsing a form of words the board of the system. The board which involved him in taking sole consists of a 16-channel system, and or so, not even getting out of the car.

They pull up on the ridge by the re­ responsibility for the incidental music each channel has a row of two lights, freshment pavillions, look at the . . . I drifted off, grooving./Outside a VU meter, 8 knobs, a switch and a the small pocket of insider’s paranoia, throttle, and in the centre there are tiny crowd. “The injunction is a bailiff matter, a council matter,” it was the perfect rock scene: a eight more VU meters, 8 more knobs,

BUNGOOL Fine vibes in the park

directly as Odessa Promotions’ John Fowler, the man who dubbed A.E.E. exclusive booking agents for Sun­ bury 1973, and who has the final say about the prices and appear­ ances of every band who will step on Sunbury’s stage.

There’s only one other big rock agency outside A.E.E. in Melbourne, and that’s Let It Be, and there’s some feeling in the rock trade that A.E.E.’s band bookings and fees are heavily slanted in their own direction.

Which, in practice, slants anti-Let It Be. L.I.B.’s bands blowing Sunbury are Country Radio, McKenzie Theory, Gary Young’s Hot Dog, Pirana, the 69ers, Mississippi, John Graham and Blackspur, and Dutch Tilders. Eight of them. Daddy Cool and Miss Uni­ verse were also originally booked, but both have broken up and failed to reform so far.

From A.E.E.’s stable* Aztec’s Gerry Humphries and the Joy Band, Chain, Carson, Friends, Coloured Balls, Madder Lake, Mighty Mouse, Matt Taylor’s band (I hope it’s not Chain again), Healing Force, Lang­ ford Lever, Kush (I think), Syd Rumpo and Mantis. A total of four­ teen.

About half a dozen of the total thirty-seven or so acts are wellknown rock groups unaligned with either A.E.E. or L.I.B.; others are near-unknowns or acts like the Chan­ nel Nine Orchestra.

It would seem Gudinski has a fairly natural bias towards A.E.E. acts; he’s friendly with his bands as a rule and gets off most on their music. Should John Fowler pick an agent like Gudinski — who can’t avoid being biased — to book Sun­ bury’s bands? There are many who think not.

I rang John Fowler and put this suggestion to him. Fowler sounded wound up and was quickly on the defensive.

“I have the final say about which bands appear and so on. I reserve the right to book who I w a n t . . . I’m not ignorant of the Australian music scene.” , “ You don’t think Let It Be bands have been slighted through the A.E.E. arrangement?”

“That’s insulting, it’s not true.”

January 13 — January 27 one says. “It doesn’t have anything to do with us.”

Why are the cops here?

“We’re just here to see what happens. You never know what the papers will do this evening, how they’ll write this up. You never know how the television will handle it.

They were here, with their cameras, taking pictures of little crowds, you know? They could make it look like a big occasion, and we’d require twice the number of police here.”

The cop was, in fact, cool. He squinted out through the windscreen, at the huge lawn, at a figure out alone past the meagre clusters of longhairs,at a familiar actor seen at every Festival or Picnic — The Dancer . . . in his long hair, embroidered pull­ over, faded AMCOs, and bare feet, cracking his neck and ankle to the turf-muffled music, striking Egyptian postures . . . “heh heh,” the cop coughed, farmboy humor gushing up through his thick neck, “ look at that rat out there,” he gestured with a big hand, “he’s been doing that for two hours straight.” “ He’s showing great endeavour, isn’t he?” I suggested.

“You could say that,” the cop replied, pulling his face on again. sN-* :}: Three herons fly through a reasonably pink sunset, and a few campfires utter blue woodsmoke. A dozen or so longhairs bend over Suzuki guitars by their VWs and green duck tents, complimenting the cicadas and Jam tttf with diagram - chords. The powerboats have retreat­ ed, and in the distance, from this corner of the park, you can hear Lizard playing down on the lawn. The bass seems to rush a bit. Every now and then, Howard looses a segment of casette music through the Jands system, and it rolls over the live band into the red gum cliff north of the big lawn, and bounces back a few seconds later.

At sunset Saturday night, there are maybe 200 vehicles in the park, ex­ clusive of motorcycles. The vehicles have averaged maybe three passengers.

A few more come in as the stars come out . . . the audience is told to move across the lawn to the main stage. They make noises like birds, some crowlike — rawk, I'm com­ pletely pissed — others keener, or undulant.

Glen Cardier opens the concert.

He’s a good singer of funny songs, the sort of act that would get mur­ dered in front of a dance audience . . . here he gets a good hand, and cries of “more” from several hundred people — a third of the crowd. Chuggie comes on, says, “ I’m sorry, we can’t have any encores for obvious reasons” . He is poorly understood.

The 69ers are setting up just as the southerly buster breaks over the site. No rain, just winds, raising columns of dust up the light beams.

The band gets it on, dirty joke rock, which they do rather well, in a style that reminds me of a band with the same name that used to play a similar repertoire around Kan­ sas City Mo. in 1963.

I asked him then how the bandsI*7 “The groups came to us with gets, are up all over . . . if necessary, prices were decided on. prices . . . most of the prices we’re I could show you figures.” “ Well, the agencies were asked paying are what they asked for.

Entry prices for the show are to submit a list of bands they “Certain people are jealous of not $8 for three days, $7 for two, and through were suitable for Sunbury, being on the bill.” $4 for a single day. There is also along with suggested prices. You I asked Fowler how he decided an extra charge for those arriving must remember we have to turn the who made the bill and who didn’t, for Friday night’s music. This was thing out as economically as pos­ and what each act was worth. free last year, but at the special sible ,. . . but all the band’s prices “Well for a start I don’t talk Sunbury press conference,, (where were way upon last year’s.” prices, it’s not fair. I look at it this the press received luxury treatment way: people come to festivals for ,after being flown out to the site two main reasons, (a), because they in a fleet of helicopters), organisers go to festivals anyway, and (b), claimed this was to allow “payment because they want to have a pro­ for the bands who played free of gram with a variety of bands. charge on that night last year.” “ You have to draw the line some­ When I rang Michael Gudinski at where with the bands. Some aren’t A.E.E. to inquire which of his bands here a heck of a lot in Victoria; were playing Sunbury, he bought up maybe they should be. Who do you the inter-agency strife before I had cut? Would you throw a thirty-six a chance to mention it. piece orchestra? We’re using them “All the press are running around to break Mississippi, and Ross Ryan, trying to muck Sunbury up,” he who was very highly acclaimed on said, sounding upset. “ Bungool was the Roy Orbison tour. I think we the biggest mess, no-one seems to owe something to the unknowns. remember that A.E.E. was only al­ Don’t you believe in the music lowed one band on the whole show, world? Our industry needs all the but I don’t run around shit-stirring support it can get. Would you rather about that. It’s not worth it. we paid an exorbitant amount to “It’s not up to A.E.E. which bands an overseas act? go on, and we get no commission “ I know what kind of story you’re out of this. looking for,” Fowler continued, “I wanted Murtceps to go on. “but try and keep an unbiased view They didn’t want to play for the of the situation. price. That was fair enough.”

“In no case has there been a Gud said the situation wasn’t as complaint from an agency — apart “ goodies vs. baddies” as it seemed. from one extreme case, but that was For instance, Sherbet’s original fig­ out of the question anyway. ure, given by their agency, was “This backbiting going on . . . “ four times what Thorpie was of­ If this performance wrecks Sunbury — fered last year. When we wouldn’t accept that, they suggested a figure this is just the sort of opportunity that wrecks this sort of thing. Sun­ which cut two-thirds off the original.”

Billy Thorpe — rumored $10,000 Fowler had said of the incident bury gives the bands a lot of work.” for Sunbury I changed the subject, asking if “now you tell me, who’s getting I suggested that Spectrum/Murt­ the same sort of crowd was expec­ ripped-off?”

Gudinski claimed that he wasn’t ceps manager had claimed that the ted this year. particularly worried about Sherbet’s band was offered a third of last “Same happy crowd” , said John. non-appearance anyway, because at year’s payment. Fowler searched “But it’s a hell of a risk, dealing through papers to try and check on with twenty-five or thirty thousand the free concert at Rosebud over Christmas, “all the fights were on people.” this, which he believed incorrect. when they were playing. You know, “I’m getting a little tired of all I .mentioned that I’d thought the this,” he muttered, shuffling. “Sher­ crowd last year had been forty-five they’re on that Valentines/Zoot trip, dressing up and so on. All the bet, was it?” thousand. heavy guys call them pooftahs. We “Spectrum.”

“Well,” said John, “ the papers “Oh yes. No, I can’t find the put it at anything from twenty-five *don’t want any violence . . . what do papers, but far more than last year. to sixty-thousand people. How can you do? We weren’t that keen to book the band.” (And threats o£, All the bands were offered more you tell for sure?”

He claimed expenses were well violence at the festival, from sharpies, than they were last year. And Spec­ are being rumored all over.) trum/Murtceps aren’t a great deal over the calculated $100,000.

Gudinski said that Flying Circus, more popular than last year, are “Bands are costing us over three they? times what they did last year. Bud­ and possibly Brian Cadd, would play

At ten to ten, the leader interrupts in the middle of an a capella gross-out to ask, “Is there a doctor in the house?” Everybody laughs. “This is quite serious,” he says, “ if there’s a doctor in the audience, would he please come around behind the stage.”

One of the Mirror reporters in the audience leans over, and says to a .cadet: “ Hey Greg, there’s a story.”

What’s happened is, that Bakery, which plays next, and which came over from Perth in an old square purple Commer, has been unloading in the wind. The door of the van sailed open and cracked Russell, one of their roadies, in the head . . . he is subsequently taken to hospital, for observation.

Up on the hill, in the white house next to the police caravan, Greg Quill and Country Radio are sitting around wondering where Tony Bol­ ton, their drummer, is . . . he rings in, eventually, to say he’s sick.

La De Das follow; Bakery, Blackfeather follows La De Das. I go home. * * * • New Year’s Eve, the Sunrise people tell me that 3000 were on the site. They wouldn’t talk about gross — Gingus said $12,000 was “ too high, way too high” . The scrabble to cover the bands and so forth had begun. I tried ringing Reaudpiti a. few times, and couldn’t score; Shire Pres.. Mullane was “unavailable” , but seems unlikely to try to get Beaudoin jailed. The next council meeting isn’t until January 23.

The score for Bungool: a sub­ stantial loss for the promoters, the probable loss to the music industry of a really magnificent venue, and a few injuries — a roadie who didn’t duck, and a couple of people who sat on redback spiders.

No arrests, as far as we know, no fights, and a fine buzz for everybody who took everything they needed with them.

Apparently there was one incident of note. New Year’s Eve a prankster slipped something, maybe acid, into the drinks going into the organizers office, and the Bungool heavies and Sunrise heavies unwittingly took a trip.

One of the Blacktown Security Service men felt the rush coming on, and asked, “what’s happening?” When he was told, he took off his pistol, and had it locked up in the safe.

After the Bungool management disassociated itself from the music, and Sunrise began running musicians’ picnics incidental to the non musician’s picnics coincidental in the park, the price was basically $3 a day. Sunrise claims a take of about $3000. The Park management had sold a limited number of $9 tickets, at the gate and through the post. It was rumored that Mitchell’s and David Jones sold as many as a thousand advance tickets, but neither Bungool nor Sunrise could lay hands on this money: both ticket retailers are hanging on to the money, and will refund it to anyone who wants it back.

the festival, and that the whole thing would be recorded expertly. “ Last year was a bit of a mess.”

Negotiations for filming are not yet completed. * * * Meanwhile, in sweaty Brisbane: “ On January 21, all roads lead to THE SOUNDS OF SUNBURY,” or so claims the publicity sheet which arrived in the mail last Monday, en­ titled “Sunbury Comes to Brisbane.”

The “key organizers” of the fes­ tival are Jim McKay Jnr. and Peter Hendrie. Curiously enough, McKay was last year’s public relations man for Victoria’s Sunbury Festival, and is reportedly sueing Odessa Promo­ tions for his share of last years profits.

Another peculiarity is that although the festival only programs eight bands, (it’s a nine-hour festival from 3pm—12pm), three of them are bands allegedly not playing Vic­ toria’s Sunbury show because of “high” financial principles. These are Sherbet, La De Da’s (Let It Be) and, extraordinarily, the top-classers Max Merritt and the Meteors (A.E.E.), back from Europe to play their last gig before breaking up.

Other bands on the bill are Brian Cadd, Johnny O’Keefe, Blackfeather, Mississippi, and Country Radio; (all booked for Sunbury Vic); with others to be possibly added by mid-January.

Sound system is by Jands, who the press handout refers to as “Aus­ tralia’s biggest and loudest public address system.”

The festival will be held in Lang Park (wherever that is). Fleamarket and stalls are planned. * Tickets will be on sale at the ground, on the day, and cost $2.50.

The blurb says: “Patrons may sit, stand, dance, mill around, what­ ever they like . . . the word is, ‘come and do your thing.’

“THE SOUNDS OF SUNBURY Brisbane’s biggest ever rock festival.

Over fifty musicians, singers, com­ peres and well over TEN TONS OF EQUIPMENT.” Well, the press sheet may be a little odd, but the festival sounds O.K., especially since it’s pulled the coup of the Meteor’s last gig.

Will the real Snnbury Festival . . .

*

by Colin Talbot Joni; Mitchell For The Roses, Blue, Ladies o f the Canyon, Clouds, Songs to a Seagull.

It was about the end of 1969 that people started recording versions of a song called “Both Sides Now.” There were Nana'* Maskouri, Judy Collins, Frank Sinatra and Dion each with versions. The song was astoundingly beautiful . . .

Rows and rows o f angel's hair icecream castles in the air feather canyons everywhere I've looked at clouds that way — B ut now they only block the sunr In fact the song was so perfect, figured the songwriter must be per­ fect, and that if the songwriter was perfect, then all the other songs from his/her pen would be perfect.

I went down to the local record store, found the correct Nana Maskouri album, and underneath the title “Both Sides Now” it said Joni Mitchell. Johnny Mitchell? Joanie Mitchell? What’s this Joni . . . So around this period Joni Mitchell’s Clouds (Reprise RS6341) was re­ leased here and one couldn’t ask for much more. There was a portrait on the cover of this Joni Mitchell, and she had long golden hair and she was pretty. And the songs she sang she wrote herself and she accompan­ ied herself on gutiar and piano. In other words she was a singer-songwriter in the proper Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Laura Nyro sense. And the songs on Clouds (“ I’ve looked at Clouds from both sides now . . . ” ) were beautiful in the main lyrically,; such as “Chelsea Morning” and “Tin Angel” and they were sung beauti­ fully.

Her version of “ Both Sides Now” was brilliant. Apart from writing the words and being the song, her voice was going to deserve a star trip.

But of course probably wouldn’t make it for a long time. This is usual with people who have talent.

But if we can go back in time a moment. In 1971 after releasing Ladies o f the Canyon, the Warner Bros group released an album called Joni Mitchell. Well this album under another title was actually her first qlbum, before Clouds. It was first called Songs to a Seagull, and you can see it on the sleeve, because the words are made up from seagulls drawn on the cover. However, Warners couldn’t have noticed . . .

Anyhow this album was produced

by David Crosby of you-know-who fame and it, too, was beautiful. The songs again were all written by her and the album was written in two sections, “ I .came to the city” , and “ out of the city and down to the seaside” .

The album is beautiful (but a couple of songs tended to be a little crowded from Joni’s voice being either double-tracked, or answering itself), for instance “I Had A King” . .

I had a king in a tenament castle lately he's taken to paintinghis plaster walls brown, h e’s taken the curtains down .. .

And there’s a line in “ Nathan La Franeer” where she “saw an ageing cripple selling Superman balloons.”

With that sort of lyrical genius it’s amazing how first this album, and then the Clouds album could come out and be heard by supposedly in­ telligent people and not be recognised for genius, which is what they con­ tain.

So Joni Mitchell is a genius and is the most important singer-songwriter to emerge from the sixties into the

Theatre tko’s film fest Melbourne audiences have thus far been spared, but come March 24th Harry M. Miller opens Jesus Christ Superstar at the 3000-seat St. Kilda Palais. Miller needs a large venue for J.C. Superstar, and he needs big crowds to make up the losses on Grease.

Whoever turns up for J-C between opening night and projected wind-up (July at earliest), it’s likely to include

Page 9

The Digger

January 13 — January 27

Indulging Toni

seventies. This includes Neil Young, Graham Nash, maybe Steve Stills Paul Simon, Gordon Lightfoot, Van and maybe even more, I don’t know, Morrison and good old Cat Stevens She explains this on her new album and the not-so-well-known Laura in “ Blonde in the Bleachers” . Well Nyro. Finally with this album For she doesrt’t really explain it, it’s The Roses (Asylum SD 5057) she is about groupies etc .

The bands and the roadies definitely here, and I think, will Lovin ' 'em and leavin' 'em probably be eventually sort of recog­ It's pleasure to try 'em nised over here, and her records will It's trouble to keep 'em. get played on radio a bit more, for what it’s worth, and people will gener­ And it sort of sounds like her who ally buy a few more of her records “can’t hold the hand of a rock and and talk about her a bit more. (By roll man.” the way For The Roses is an import One of the rock and roll man’s but is due to be released here on hand she couldn’t hold forever was Asylum through EMI in the next good old Graham Nash, whom she few weeks. Another thing is that wrote of in “ For Willie” on the WEA has apparently bought Asylum. Ladies album and in “My Old Man” , So Joni, who switched from Reprise so I’m led to believe, on Blue. Well for this album, is now back in the Graham Nash must have had some­ fold, whether she likes it or not.) thing .because he was inspiration for For The Roses is getting big the most beautiful song she has writ­ treatment in the States and big ten, “Willy.” treatment here from Ms Mitchell fans He says he'd love to live with me who’ve heard' it. Mostly they are but for an ancient injury which saying it’s the best thing she’s done. has Well it is definitely better than Blue not healed/he said I feel once (Reprise MS 2038) which was her again like last album release, because Blue I gave my heart too soon wasn’t her best album. In fact some he stood looking through the lace of the stuff from the first two al­ at the face on the conquered bums still has more charm than the moon. songs from Blue, which however is And counting all the cars up the important chronologically, while still hill being a very pretty albun to listen to. and the stars on my windowsill. . .

And as a record of total concen­ But everything was okay on, Blue tration and quality of lyric, tune on “My Old Man” because they and voice throughout, For The Roses eventually got to live together. is her best. But Ladies o f the Canyon Also on Ladies was another (Reprise RS637631) is her most bril­ beautiful song, “ Rainy Night House.” liant. However there were a couple I t was a rainy night of bummers on this which fucked we took a taxi to your mothers the mood she was putting across so home well. They were “ Big Yellow Taxi” and left you with your fathers and “ Woodstock” which I thought gun alone were pretty base compared to the upon her small white bed sheer beauty of the rest of it.

I fell into a dream * * * you stayed up all the night to to see who in the world I might Joni Mitchell wasn’t her bom be. name. Her first name was Roberta, she married someone called Mr Mit­ Which is something she looks like chell, she preferred Jonie, she didn’t she’s trying to find out a b o u t . . . who like Mr Mitchell, she came from she might be that is.

For instance back on Clouds and Canada, that’s why she is now Joni Mitchell of California. And in her in particular “Both Sides Now” life as a rock n roll star, she’s been where she said she looked out most through a lot of other rock stars. things from everywhichway . . .

B ut now old friends are actirig Tom Rush, Len Cohen, James Taylor.

David Crosby, Jackson Browne, strange

some who would normally be at the Palais that time of year for the annual culture-event-supreme, the Melbourne Film Festival. Last week, no Festival organisers were answering their phones. Possibly they were looking for a new home.

APOLOGY Re: Much More Ballroom story (Digger No.8) Apologies to Ballroom organisers Bani McSpeddon and Phil Jacobsen, who apparently weren’t arguing, and to McKenzie Theory, who were never going to say that kind of thing on stage in the first place.

Learn to write, Readers are encouraged to write — reviews of records earn the reader/writer a selection from recent LP releases, and copy on any other topic will likewise be rewarded.

So far about 200 people have sent in lists of their All Time Greats (LPs and singles), and we’ll print a sample or three next issue.

Address envelopes to the appropriate section, at The Digger, P.O. Box 77, Carlton, 3053.

(CARTOONISTS) We’re not proud, we’re just after good cartoons. For two months The Digger has been canvassing cartoonists to submit work for a proposed cartoon supplement. Cartoons used will be paid for. Final deadline is now Friday January 19th.

Send material to The Digger, P.O. Box 77, Carlton, 3053, with a stamped SAE if you want them returned.

Please!

Spirit tour Murtceps/Spectrum will tour Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Cairns with Spirit, an American electric rock band. Venues will be announced by East Coast Promotions, who expect Spirit to land January 15, for a 24-day stay.

Like M/S, Spirit is a polished, musicianly group. Another band

They shake their heads, they say I've changed Well something's lost, but some­ thing's gained in living everyday; . .

And then much later, in fact in For The Roses just released, she says in “Woman of Heart and Mind” ; A fter the rush when you come back down You're always disappointed Nothing seems to keep you high Drive your bargains Push your papers Win your medals Fuck your strangers Don't it leave you on the empty side.

Joni is a bit hungup on the Amer­ ican Dream which she doesn’t like, although from her songs she seems to watch a lot of TV, she’s hung up on the man-woman getting it to­ gether and keeping it that way life, she’s hung up on being with people and wanting to exist away from them in the country (isn’t everyone) and hung up on rock n roll stars. Well at least she is in her song lyrics.

The only thing is that the emotions are starting to rule the intellect and I think the songs are suffering.

You see she’s giving the same mes­ sages as she always gave, except be­ fore she gave them with a lot of poetry and allegorical insight. Now she’s just getting them off straight.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I think she’s over-trying over-simplification. Does­ n’t she know we got nothing against complexity?

But still if you take “ You Turn Me On, I’m A Radio” , then she still has her happy in-love side of life. This isn’t unusual because she usually has a couple of noworries carefree songs about how good it is to be in love for a minute or two when the sun is out and the stars are bright . . .

Oh honey you turn me on I'm a radio I'm a country station, I'm a little bit corny I'm a wildwood flower Waiting for y o u .

Similar sort of thing to her single “Carey” on Blue, really, all that loving for just the moment. (Incid­ entally, James Taylor, Stills, Nash appear on For The Roses).

Just as an added insight, she does a lot of drawing, which you can notice on several of her record covers, she has never recorded a song not her own, and a lot of important people have recorded her songs.

Well, where does that leave For The Roses? Well again, it leaves this album as having the potential of being one of the best releases of 1973, leaves us satisfied just about that Joni Mitchell is a burning talent, shows us a nude Joni in the centre­ fold, because we’d suspected she has an ass, shows us she ain’t afraid to say “fuck” with lyrics. It shows she’s still searching for the ultimate riff, and she doesn’t know whether it’ll come with people, music or what.

And it shows she’s not too sure about being a star because it can be cruel. And it’s a beautiful album, of course . . .

I heard it in the wind last night It soundedlike applause Chippy Now End o f Summer No more shiny hot nights And the bumping o f the logs And the moon swept down blackwater Like an empty spotlight. (“For The Roses'').

Concerning Bootleggers and Tull

Breaking the pig’s leg together. It is of little significance the technicians and the machinery to produce high-quality that the plonking of Dixie cups (generally) Jethro Tull, Nothing is Easy, and the frenzied (he got carried away) L.P.s. And give their bands a share, Bootleg “Trademark of Quality” clapping and stomping of Freak Two however shitty, of the profits — if L.P. Tracks; Nothing is Easy/To Cry should figure strongly in this Jethro there are any. Since “ Trademark” You a Song/Aqualung/Cross-eyed Tull recording, along with the fluc­ don’t Waste their time recording Mary/Wind-Up/Locomotive Breath. tuations of live-concert sound waves nobodies, they most certainly make (Band with Jeffrey Hamnond-Ham- and the tape recorder’s battery (which profits cm their records. mond and Clive “Thumper” Bunker.) may have been a little flat)’, after A record company pays an In short: Only if you’re hooked. all, music for the people and all that. artist/band to sign an exclusive re­ “We pride ourselves in making cording rights contract. “ Trademark Is This So Fantastic? available these productions of worth­ of Quality” hasn’t paid for that Somewhere in the ulcerated car­ diac churnings of Los Angeles, a while art. Great care has been taken kind of deal. Or for publicity, another big rock ‘n’ roll concert is about to* to preserve the dignity and sound benefit the established companies start. The weather is hot and (heh) quality of the material involved as provide. In fact, “Trademark” hasn’t much as possible. Look for the paid foranything much. muggy; thousands of bambi-arsed teenagers and premature thugs are ‘Trademark of Quality’ label when (c) The public Is the third group ticketing their way through the doors purchasing these collectors’ items, being ripped-off for their minds and their money. Obsessive musical fan­ it’s your guarantee.” of a big, tough, brown hall.

That’s what the Squeal Brothers atics, or even just fans, are tempted Among them squirm three long­ haired, bearded men in tailored print on their buy-buy sheet of to shell out for “new” recordings leather coats and jeans. From a dis­ fifty-seven albums, some double. The which may well be of painful tance, they resemble Sheldon’s albums have been wrung from live quality. famous Freak Brothers, (except^ for performances, pinched reject studio Compared to the production of tapes, televised and radio perfor­ a few strange details . . . like the Thick as a Brick or even Stand-Up, mances and fan club Christmas ten-dollar-bill patches on their jeans) Nothing is Easy is unbearable, even about to pull a hoist. Each carries Records. “Trademark” have har­ considering it’s a live recording. Cf. a large briefcase. They flick glances vested a rich crop of musicians, in­ the live side of Living In The Past, cluding Dylan, the Stones, the at each other. probably roughly from the same In the hall the kids are milling Beatles, Zappa, Hendrix, Jethro Tull, period. No! No! No! the Faces, Led Zeppelin, Janis J., like lemmings, but two of the briefAnd the price reduction (for us) Neil Young; you name ’em. The cased freaks press singlemindedly to hardly equals the reduction in costs albums are of varying quality and their seats — one at either end of exclusive rights, studio time, of the middle row of the front sec­ interest. Apparently some are very production, composer’s dues, art­ good. This one is shit-awful. tion. As though programmed, they work and what-have-you (for them). lean forward simultaneously and be­ * * * The only redeeming light on gin to fiddle-faddle with their brief Nothing is Easy (the recording is so cases under their seats, wiping sweat Maybe you think that “Trade­ bad you coudln’t possibly comment from their itching palms. Freak mark of Quality” records are trying on the music) is the evershining dry Three has disappeared backstage, (on to present a new deal in music — and emphatic wit of Ian Anderson; cue), to bribe a few ushers with hotdemanding a buck or so less than flautist,, vocalist and M.C.; who even dogs and gelati. the average retail price for an L.P.; slays the Americans. (Introducing new Hs * * presenting some unreleased material bass guitarist, Jeffrey HammondWhat are these men doing? Why to buyers; working outside the pow­ Hammond, Ian comments that Jef­ are they here? These men áre, in erful monopoly networks of the frey has been released from the fact, here for dishonest purposes.

English jail in which he was serving* larger companies.

Having tired of the pros and con­ But the “new deal” is a cop-out, a sentence for exposing himself to victions of being dealers in contra­ because: old ladies outside toilets, and is now band drugs, they have decided to (a) The artists aren’t getting a brass “really into cocker spaniels . . . try the new heroism of becoming razoo from “Trademark of Quality” There isn’t a clean one in the house.”) dealers in contraband music, and are being asthetically mangled Needless to say, he was called a j These men have borrowed a tape (at least some of the time) through pooftah that night. | recorder from a house, and they And there’s one other good thing bad recording and production, and j áre going to illegally tape this conalso through release of any material about Nothing is Easy; the record I cert by Jethro Tull. with the artists’ name on it (re­ itself is a luscious, gluey shade of Freaks One and Two have smug­ gardless of standard and intention), peacock green. Probably scratches gled microphones into the hall and easy, but who cares. Nice to hold are setting them up beneath their seats. (b^ The established record companies up to the light. are far from angelic, but while they Freak Three will soon reappear, to N.B.: Dear “Trademark” , I think make money from their bands, they you meant “ Quantity” . take up his seat between them, with give the know-how, the equipment, the hot machine, to wire the lot

by Jenny Brown

THE >MUSIC OF OUR AGE this is RO CK O F É 0 E S

from L.A., the five members are lad by Cass Cassidy, who has been drumming around the West Coast scene since the 1950s, when he worked with Thelonius Monk.

Spirit has had a recent personnel change, since two members split to form Jo Jo Gunne. Their album (12 Dreams o f Dr. Sardonicus) and single (“Cadillac Cowboys” ) are on sale coincidental with their tour, and they look for a set at the Sunbury (Vic.) Festival.

A unty Jack’s lam ent The Aunty Jack Show came and went very quietly — not surprising considering it only had 7 half hours to make its name in. Aunty Jack is rapidly passing into myth. In the future her name will be invoked as one o f the originators of an inven­ tive, freaky, unselfconscious Aus­ tralian humor. It was a half-hour television series on ABC-TV. The few who witnessed her met­ eoric appearance will, like those who tripped on the first Goon Shows, have the warm feeling of belonging to the avant-garde giggle. Graham ‘I’ll rip your bloody arm off Bond and Rory O’Donohue — Thin Arthur to the aficianados — wrote most of the scripts and it’s their ener­ gy that carried Aunty Jack's Golden

Glove up there amongst the heavies.

If ‘watching The A unty Jack Show' becomes, as it probably will, a favorite anecdote while passing the chillum there is a possibility that the other Aunty will hear of it and decide on a re-run. For those who missed out the first time around it will be a chance to be astounded by the absurd and bizarre antics of Bond, O’Donohue, Derum and their friends.

The thought of A unty Jack stay­ ing in retirement, lurking in the ‘dusty caverns of the ABC’s files s depressing: she needs exposure.

And on the subject of T.V., here’s the schedule for the remaining ABC-TV broadcasts of five rock con certs —

Thorpie & Spectrum/ Country Miurtceps Radio Aztecs shown Jan 17 shown Sydney 8 pm shown Jan 16 Melb. 7.55 pm shown shown Jan 25 Jan 18 Bris. 7.55 pm shown Jan 19 shown Adel. 9.15 pm shown Jan 30 Jan 23 Perth 7.55 pm Jan 23 Jan 16 Hobart 7.30 pm shown

Manfred Wendy Mann Saddington Jan 31 Jan 24 Jan 30 Jan 23 Feb 1 shown Feb 2 Jan 26 Jan 23 Jan 16 Feb 6 Jan 30

" D o n 't Do It” , "W heels O f Fire'', "T he Shape I'm In ", "G e t Up J a k e " — just four of the eighteen tracks on this fabulous two record set.

A ls o available on cassette.

S ABB 11045

C a p i t o l tm

¡ § ||

• Manuf act ured & D i s t r i b u t e d by EMI ( A u s t r a l i a ) L i m i t e d

Page 10

_______________________ | ______________________ '________________________________________________ The Digger______________________________

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i

January 13 - January 27

SYDNEY FLYER Catatonic chiaroscuro

Bruce Goold as “The Guy ”, lead figure in Penumbra, a shadow play by Noel Sheridan

Alchemy, Brett Whiteley's “Grand Work to bring together the previous” photographed in The Studio.

The black lines are his addition to the photo, from the exhibition note book.

Whiteley’s intensely personal madness Brett Whiteley’s new exhibition opened at Bonythons this week, featuring Alchemy a 200 yard painting that snakes down the wall like an oriental screen: the “Grand Work to bring together the previous.”

It’s juxtaposition of weird images that flow into each other in a chaotically

intricate manner. Taxidermised animals protruding from it, portholes to look through into fish ponds at swimming goldfish, a brain in a perspex box, more hples with photographs and lights behind, all mixed together in a strange series o f shapes and colors. As he puts it, this strange elliptical style of

M USIC

20,000 people, got thrree encores and then flew back to start this tour.

Sherbet and the La De Das are in the middle o f a country tour. The gigs they have left are: Jan 13 Southport RSL Jan 14 Toowoomba Jan 15 Alexandra Headland SLSC Jan 17 Lismore City Hall Jan 18 Armidale Town Hall Jan 19 Tamworth Town Hall ^ :Jan 20 Muswellbrook Town Hall Jan 21 Lang Park Oval, Brisbane The La De Das played on the first day o f the Great Ngaruawahia Music Festival in New Zealand before

The hotel scene is picking up. On the 19th and 20th Cinnamon and Jeff St. John will be at the Manly Vale Hotel and on the Saturday they will be joined by Country Radio. The next weekend features the Dave Miller Set with the La De Das on Friday (26th) and Sherbet on the Saturday.

The Polaris Room at the Kingsgate Hotel is develop­ ing into a bit o f a scene with resident band Air. Just across the street the Crest Hotel was let rock back into inside its walls with Band of Light and Gunga Din getting into it on Sunday nights.

***

"the audience went crazy in transported ecstasy . . . we were silenced in disbelief .gjdazzled... stunned by the awesome beauty . . . the beautiful music.”

— ROLLING STONE MAGAZINE

painting allows for infinite freedom for both of us.

The exhibition is also a variety o f other intensely personal ink and oil mad­ nesses, triptychs, foldouts, chairman Mao, directional squiggles on the wall as much a part o f it all as the painting hanging.

The preview on Friday

w as a peculiar con­ glomeration o f people, middleaged wallpaper hunters, freaks blowing joints under Margaret Whitlam’s nose, a Yellow House Family re­ union and bodies lounging around on the floor taking it easily.

The exhibition lasts until 23rd January. Gallery hours

11.00 I 6.00.

.

***

The Daily Mirror is running a series o f $1 concerts at the Sydney Town Hall from 16 th through 19 th featuring such groups as Country Radio, Flake and Jeff St John and 2SM is running a couple of shows on Bondi Beach on the 27th and 29th.

***

Black Sabbath will be in Sydney on the 16 th,

M OVES One Shots National Film Theatre Pro­ grams, at the Common­ wealth Centre Theatrette, cnr. Phillip and Hunter Sts. Jan. 16, 7.30 p.m. Cloak and Daggpr; Secret Beyond the Door.

Jan. 18, 7.15 p.m. Inside Daisy Clover.

Jan. 23, 7.30 p.m. You Only Live Once; Laura.

Jan. 25, 7.15 p.m. Love With The Proper Stranger; The Stalking Moon.

Currently Showing Ascot, 246 Pitt St, Tales of Beatrix Potter

Barclay, 681 George St, A Clockwork Orange Century, 586 George St, Young Winston Classic Cinema, 9 Spit Rd, Mosman, The Decameron Supper shows at 11.15 — Jan. 13, 14; Jan. 20, Patton; .Jan. 27, Killing o f Sister George.

Colloroy Classic, 109 Pittwater Rd, Colloroy.

Jan. 13, Nicholas And Alexandra Jan. 14, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice and There’s A Girl In My Soup.

Jan. 15-17, The Burglars and The Heist Jan. 18-24, Percy and Kama Sutra Rides Again Jan. 25-27, Ryan’s Daughter and Night At The Opera Dendy, 360 Pacific Highway, Crows, Nest Harold1 and Maude and Goodbye Columbus Mon.-Fri. at 1 p.m. and 3.15 p.m. Sat. at 1 p.m. Super Bug Rally Embassy, 79 Castlereagh, The Mechanic Forum, 749 George, Bedknobs and Broomsticks Gala, 236 Pitt, Portnoy’s Complaint Liberty, 232 Pitt, Pinochio Lyceum, 210 Pitt, What’s Up Doc?

REHEARSAL S TU D IO S Contact Barry Slee McPhee Enterprises Pty Ltd 50 Bedford St Surry Hills phone 697730

¡esus goes legit

i Five Summer stories

A Film by i Greg Macgiluvray and J im Freeman A beautiful, comical and controversial story about surfing. Aesthetically photo­ graphed in Hawaii and California.

A FILM FOR ANYONE WHO ENJOYS THE OCEAN’

N IM R O D S T R E E T T H E A T R E P R E S E N T S

THE LAST SUPPER SHOW

by Michael Boddy, misic by Patrick Flynn. Directed by Aarne Neeme, with John Derum, Terry Clarke, Max Cullen, Jon Hardy, Carole Skinner, John Wood.

Tues—Sat 8.30; Sun 7.30

Phone: 31-3754

LA ST WEEKS!!

Offset Press For Sale

BENCH TOP, FOOLSCAP SIZE - BEST OFFER.

1962 VW Cream, good cond., new motor 10,000 miles, 11 months registration 3 $300.

1968 Austin 1800 Deluxe automatic, immaculate condition, 42,000 miles, 6 months registration — $750.

PHONE S Y D N E Y 623-4060

Now at M E T R O M A N L Y T H E A tR E

Digger has FIVE copies of the soundtrack LP, and fifteen free passes to the movie — free, even. Write and ask for whichever you want — 8 Norfolk Street, Paddington, 2021.

First Floor, 590 George St. (between Century & Plaza Theatres) Phones: 61-2604 and 61-2569 Anchorites of Sydney’s celebrated UPSTAIRS BOOKSHOP lavish devoted care on your every book want.

Also Anchor caters for some special interests: • Movie books • Race Relations Mental & Social ecology Local & overseas periodicals in these areas Why not pay us that ole su’prise visit?

JOHN

PRINKS

ANCHOR POOR JH0 P

If you want anything printed in the Sydney Flyer listings, or if you have a news item for the Flyer, contact Jon or Ponch Hawkes. To ad ­ vertise on this page ($3 per column inch), con­ tact Michael Zerman,

The Digger 8 Norfolk Street, Pad­ dington, telephone: 315073.

Gerry Lopez leans down the pipeline in 5 Summer Stories

Wave rave Surfing movies are about waves; if you love waves, it’s hard to think o f a bad surfing movie. 5 Summer Stories is the latest one, and better than most, because its longer, which means more waves.

It’s showing in Sydney at

Metro Manly, within walking distance o f the Manly Ferry Wharf, until January 31.

Then it will roadshow in WA and Victoria.

The film is the slickest most professional o f the genre.

The filmmakers (Americans MacGillivray and

Mayfair, 73 Castlereagh, Cabaret Mecca, 28 Station, Koganah, Jan. 13-24, Ryan’s Daughter, opening 25th, Gone With The Wind, Mon. to Sat. at 2 p.m. Puss In Boots.

Metro Bondi Junction, 530 Oxford, Pinochio Metro Kings Cross, 288 Orwell, The Adventures Of Barry McKenzie Metro Manly, 42 North Steyne, Five Summer Stories New Arts Cinema, 166 Glebe Pt Rd, Glebe, The Torture Chambers o f Dr Sadism and Black Sabbath Paramount, 525 George, The Godfather Paris, 205 Liverpool, Man Of La Mancha Plaza, 600 George, The Professionals Rapallo, 527 George, Sunstruck Regent, 487 George, Trinity Is Still My Name Roma, 628 George, Song Of The Red Ruby Roselands, Roselands Shop­ ping Centre, Pinochio and Winnie The Pooh State Theatre, 49 Market, Mutiny On The Buses State Theatrette, 49 Market, Dagmars Hotpants Town, 203 Pitt, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Union Theatre, Cnr. Sydney and Parramatta Rd, Glebe, Jan. 13-19 at 2 and 8 p.m.

Islands; Jan. 22-26 at 10.30 a.m. and 2 p.m.. Wizard o f Oz. Village Twin, 377 New South Head Rd, Double Bay, Cinema 1 - Deliverance; Cinema 2 — The Decameron.

Supper shows at 11.15 p.m. on Jan. 13 — Joanna and Jan. 2 0 .— Boston Strangler.

PHONE GUIDE Alternative Community Telephone (698-2652). Box 23, PO Surrey Hills, 2010.

Women’s Liberation. 25 Alberta St, Sydney.

Men’s Liberation. 67 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe (Mondays nights).

Gay Liberation. 67 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe.

Camp Inc. (82-4023) Box 5074, GPO, Sydney.

Abortion Action Cam­ paign. C/- 25 Alberta St, Sydney.

Abortion Law Reform Association. (36-6016). Box C35, Clarence St PO, Sydney. , W o m e n ’s E le c to r a l1 Lobby (36-2245) PO Box 24 Neutral Bay Junction 2089.

Revolutionary Marxist Group PO PO Box 13, Balmain 2041.

Socialist Youth Alliance (26-2121) 139 St Johns St, Glebe.

Australian Labor Party (26-2732) 377 Sussex St, Glebe.

Communist Party of Australia (26-2161) 4 Dixon St, Sydney.

Glebe Anti-Expressway Group (660-5835) PO Box 82, Glebe.

Sydney Day Nursery & Nursery Schools Assoc.

(26-5421) 39 Park St, Sydney.

Lifeline (33-4141).

P o is o n s Information Centre (51-0466).

Drug Referral Centre (31-2579) 43 Craigend St, Darlinghurst & 91 Pittwater Road, Manly (977-2197).

Wayside Chapel Crisis Program.

(35-1010 & 35-6577) 29 Hughes St, Potts Point.

Alcoholics Anonymous (26-6968) 550 George St, Sydney.

THEATRE G o d sp e ll by John M ich ael Tebelack dir.

Sammy Bayes Richbrooke Theatre, 150 Elizabeth St, Sydney. 61-9880, Mon. to Thurs. 8.30. Fri., Sat. 5.40 and 8.40. Prices: Mon. to Sat. even. $3.50 and $4.50, Fri. and Sat. mats. $2.80 and' $3.80. Concessions % price to children and pensioners to mats.

The House o f Blue Leaves by John Guare, dir.

David Goddard, Independent Theatre, 271 Miller St, North Sydney, 929-7377.

Wed. to Sat. at 8.15. Prices: $3, $2, $1. Sat. $3 and $2.

C o n c e ss io n s: Students, $1.50, $1.

The Jeral Puppets a program o f children’s puppet plays.

Puppeteer, John Lewis. Community Theatre, 2 Marian St, Killara, 498-3166. Mon.-Sat. at 3 p.m. Price: 70c. Closes Jan. 27.

Jesus Christ Superstar by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, dir. Jim Sharman, Capital Theatre, 13 Cambell St, Haymarket, 212-3677.

Mon.-Sat. at 8.30, Fri. and Sat. mats. 6 p.m. Prices: $5.20, $4.20 and $3.20.

Concessions: Party bookings.

The Last Supper Show

by Michael Boddy, dir.

Aarne Neeme. Nimrod Street Theatre, 10 Nimrod St,

Al-anon Family Groups (31-9668) Cnr Bourke and Burton Sts, Darlinghurst.

Divorce Law Reform Association (95-3211) PO Box R325 Royal Exchange.

Nexus Group PO Box 325 St Marys.

Callan Park Psychiatric Centre (82-6601) Balmain Rd, Rozelle, 2039.

P u b lic S o lic ito r (61-6581) 55 Market St, Sydney.

Law Society o f NSW (25-5395) 170 Phillip St, Sydney.

Legal Service Bureau 32-34 York St, Sydney..

Council for Civil Liber­ ties (660-7582) 149 St Johns St, Glebe.

Aboriginal Legal Service (669-1109) 142 Regent St, Redfern.

Family Planning Associ­ ation o f Australia (62-5211) 92 City Rd, Chippendale.

Venereal Disease, NSW Health Dept. 93 Macquarie St, Sydney.

United Dental Hospital (211-4322) 2 Chalmers St, Surrey Hills.

Alternative Health Centre 23 Collins St, Surrey Hills.

E c o lo g y A c tio n (29-6717) 189 Clarence St, Sydney.

Public Interest Research Group (PRIG) C/- SRC Level 1, Wentworth Building, Uni o f Sydney.

Consumer Affairs Bureau (2-0344) 53 Martin Place, Sydney.

Draft Resisters’ UnionPO Box 85, Newtown, 2042.

Divine Light Mission (82-4836) 453 Darling St, Balmain.

The Digger has a great little pamphlet called “Abor­ tion is Free and Legal” send us a stamped addressed envelope to 8 Norfolk St, Paddington, 2021 if you want it.

Freeman) don’t get it on with their attempt at rapeof-the-earth relevance. Out in the waves, however, they’re truly firing: spec­ tacular pipeline surfing, by some o f the great ones — D avid N u nh iw a, Jeff Hakman, Gerry Lapez, Nat. Young and others.

The film’s being pro­ moted with a full-color Rick Griffin poster — Griffin was

the artist'for Bill Graham in the days o f San Francisco’s Avalon Ballroom. The pro­ motion and good word-ofmouth has meant good crowds for Jack McCoy, an American who’s thinking of taking a permanent lease on Metro-Manly and showing speciality releases (e.g. Mac­ Gillivray and Freeman on Aztec minis) and One Cent Midnight Movies.

Darlinghurst 31-3754. Tues. to Sat. at 8.30, Sun. at 7.30.

Prices: Tues., Wed., Thurs — $2; Fri., Sat. Sun. $2.50.

Concessions to actors, stu­ dents and members: Tues., Wed., Thurs — $1.50; Sun. $1.75.

only. Prices: $1, children 60c. Closes Jan. 27.

A Pretty Kettle o f Fish musical revue at the Fish­ mongers Hall, 336 Pitt St, 26-5313.

Mon-Sat. 8.30, Sun. 7.30. Prices: Sun. to Fri. $7.50. Sat. $8.50.

The Spring Heeled Terror o f Stepney Green by and dir.

Stanley Walsh, Music Hall Restaurant, 156 Military Rd, Neutral Bay, 909-8222.

Mon.-Sat. 8.30 - dinner from 6 Mon.-Fri. $2.70. Sat. $3.20 (not including food and drink).

Summer Tree, by Ron Cowan, dir. Hayes Gordon.

Ensemble Theatre, 78 McDougall St, Milsons Point, 929-8877, Mon.-Sat. 8, Sat. mat. 5. Prices: Mon.-Thurs. and Sat. Mat. $2.75 and $2.25. Fri. and Sat. Evens. $3 and $2.50. Concessions to students. Mon. and Tues. $1, remainder reduced by 50c.

The Three Cuckolds Commedia dell’Arte dir.

Victor Emeljanow.

New Theatre, St Peters Lane, East Sydney, 31-3237. Fri., Sat. and Sun. at 8.15. Price $2.

Concessions: Students $1, children and pensioners 70c.

The Trial o f Brer Rabbit a musical for children.

Richbrooke Theatre, 150 Elizabeth St, 61-9880. Mon.Sat. at 10.30 a.m. and 2 p.m.

Prices: children $1.30, adults $3.

W alter, Walter by Richard Barry, dir. Doris F itto n .

In d ep en d en t Theatre, 271 Miller St, North Sydney; 929-7377.

Closes Jan. 27.

Les Girls, All male revue.

Cnr. Roslyn St and Darling­ hurst Rd, Kings Cross.

3 5 - 6 6 3 0 .2 shows nightly Mon.-Thurs. 3 shows Fri. and Sat. Prices: Mon.-Thurs. $3; Fri. and Sat. $3.50.

The L ittle Angels National Folk Ballet o f Korea Elizabethan Theatre, W ilsons St, Newtown, 51-7471. Jan. 8-Jan. 13, 8.15 p.m. nightly, 2 p.m., Thurs and Sat. Prices: $5.70, $4.20, $3.20. Concessions for students and pensioners; The Mavis McMahon Show dir. James Fishburn, MacLeay Theatre, 81 MacLeay St, Potts Point, 35-0433, Mon.-Sat. 8.30 (dinner at 6) Thurs. Mat. 2 p.m. Prices: $6 with dinner.

Closes Jan. 27.

Memories The Best o f Six Years Killara 680 Coffee Theatre, 680 Pacific High­ way, Killara, 498-7552.

Tues-Sat. at 8.30, Nov. 18 and Dec. 2 at 3.30.

Concessions for children and students.

The Haymakers, a chiL dren’s activity play by John Cousins, dir. Barry Lovett.

Australian Theatre, Cnr. Lennox and Probert Sts, Newtown. Mon.-Fri. at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Sat. 2 p.m.

T SAT. 13

r i

7 7 7 7

SUN. 14

MON. 15

C

\ / | C

ILLl V

2 2 10 2 9 2 2 2 7

12.30 -

| ^ M

1 .0 0

2.30 2.30 - 4.00 1 .0 0 -

6.30 - 7.30 5.406.30 8.15 -

5.50 6.25 7.30 9.00

9.30 L30 6.30 8.45 10.00 -

10.30 2.30 6.55 9.20 11.00

6 .0 0

that showed at One Central Street Sydney through December.

Advertised as “an evening o f catatonia and endogenous depression with lots o f terrific songs”, the event was mostly a mime-choreo­ graphy to a soundtrack, silhouettes o f the actors thrown onto the screen from behind by 60 and 110 watt bulbs in tubes on the end o f poles (it was lots more too).

Penumbra will be making a return season at UNSW in the next few weeks, and Sheridan has plans for enlarging it later.

Julitha Dent wrote a very positive review which wouldn't fit on this page, but it should be said the reviewer was “totally blown out” by the event.

Wed. to Sat. at 8.15, prices: $3, $2, $1,- Sat. $3 and $2.

C o n c e ss io n s: Students, $1.50, $1, Jan. 15, 16, 22 and 23.

Where Do We Go From Here? Burgess dir. David G od d ard , In d ep en d en t Theatre, 271 Miller St, North Sydney, 929-7377.'

Sat. 2.00. • Prices: $1.20 adults, 60c children. A children’s play. Closes Jan. 13.

Another Manly Fairy dir.

William Orr. Music Loft, 7 The C o rso , M anly.

977-6585. Mon. to Siat.

Open till 6, dinner at 7 show 8.40. Prices $7.00.

Banjo by and dir.

Norman McVicker. Pocket Hayhouse Theatre, ,94 Terry St, Sydenham. Re-opens Jan. 13 Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m.

Prices: $ 2 .0 0 ,f concession^: students and pensioners $1.50.

Barefoot In The Park by Neil Simon dir. . Kevin Jackson. Genesian Theatre, 420 Kent, 29-6454. Opens Jan. 20 Fri. and Sat. at 8.15 p.m. Price $2.

Beauty and the Beast by Charles Perraut, dir. Norman Mclver. Pocket Theatre, 94 Terry St, Sydenham. Sat. at 1.30 p.m. Prices: children 80c, adults $1.40.

Blop Goes The Weasel a p a n to m im e by George M arshall, dir.

Alistair Duncan. Australian Theatre For Young People at the Parade Theatre, University o f NSW, Anzac Parade,

Kensington. 663-6122. Mon. to Fri. 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. and 10.30 a.m. Sat. The Bugs Bunny Show Hordem Pavilion, opens Jan. 12 for 8 days, 10.30 a.m., 2 p.m. Prices children $2 and $1, adults from $2.50.

The Coming o f Stork by David Williamson, dir. Aarne Neeme. Australian Theatre, cnr. Lennox and Probert Sts, Newtown, 51-3841. 8 p.nv, prices: . $3.50, $2.50, cbneessions for students, mem­ bers, nurses. Closes* Jan. 28.

Dick Whittington And His Cat Rockdale Town Hall, Mon. to Sat. at 2 p.m. Closes Jan. 27.

Dirty Dick’s Theatre Restaurant 313 Pacific High­ way, Crows Nest. A musical entertainment based on “Elizabethan' Days”. Tues, ' to I7nr*f$7,v*M&' $8; Sun.! $5.50, 8.10 .p.m. to mid-! night. Bookings 929-8888.

Don’s Party by David Williamson dir. John Clark.

Old Tote Theatre Company, Parade Theatre, UNSW, Anzac Parade, Kensington, 663-6122. Mon. to Sat. at 8.

Sat. Mat. at 2. Prices: Mon. to Thurs. $3.50, Fri. and Sat. $4, Sat. Mat. $3, concessions to students Mon. to Thurs. and Sat. Mat. The Dragon, The Donkey and The Nightingale dir. Ian Tasker.

The Australian Theatre for Young People.

Bailey Hall, Victoria Avenue, Chatswood. Jan. 15-27 Mon. to Fri. 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.

Sat 2 p.m.

The Digger's suggested viewing Saturday 13 - Thursday 25 (Sydney only) Canadian Ice Hockey The Jesus Revolution Nostalgia Unlimited —excepts of 16 years of Australian T.V. First T.V. Special Elvis ever made The Invisible Moustache of Raoul Dufy Wild New World —Canadian Spring Surf Carnival Special The Crimison Curtain div. Astruc with Anouk Aimee Elvis live via satellite from Honolulu.

Highlights N.S.W. Swimming Championships Rollin’ On The River —guest B.B. King Four Comers — Dyslexia ., the Hidden Handicap The Legendary Champions —old boxing footage

TUES. 16

10 9 2

7.30 - 8.30 7.30 - 8.30 9.05 - 9.55

Cousteau’s forgotten mermaids A day in the life of Brian Cadd Horizon: the unborn child —a new dilemma

WED. 17

10 2

7.30 - 8.30 8 .0 0 - 8.27

The Everley Brothers Country Radio

THURS. 18

9 7 2

10.30 - 12.10 10.30 ■# 11.30 5.20 - 5.34

2

7 . 3 0 - 9.12

10

9.00 - 10.55

SAT. 20

2

8.10 - 9.23

Mao’s China (film team from Yugoslavia in China)

SUN.21

7

1.00 - 3.00

7

6.30 - 7.00

Final of U.S. Gridiron football —Miami Dolphins v. W Pentangle in concert

TUES. 23

2

9.05 - 9.50

Horizon: Arthur C. Clarke

WED. 24

2 2

8.00 - 8.30 10.45 - 12.00

Wendy Saddington The Kings Thief

THURS. 25

7 2 7

12.00 - 1.30 7.30 - 9.20 8.00 - 9.00

2

9.30 - 10.45

I was a communist for the FBI The Taming Of The Shrew Hollywood —Sirens, Symbols and glamor Girls .

The dream divided: F./Scott Fitzgerald

A Hard Days Night Only One New York The Young Producers — Sydney High School filmmakers The War Lover with Steve McQueen and Robert Wagner The Adventures of Don Juan with Errol Flynn

January 13 — January 27

Page 11

The Digger

M ELBOURNE FLYER DISCOS Ganison Sat. Jan 13th: Mantis, Gary Young’s H ot Dog, Carson Sun. 14th: Syd Rumpo, Mighty Mouse Thur. 18th: Tank, Healing Force Fri. 19th: Rat Ransett, Bakery S a t.

20 th: Murtceps, Threshold, Mighty Mouse Sun. 21st: Bread Boozie Roll Band, Friends Thur. 25th: Tank, Mighty Mouse

Q Club Sat. 13th: Friends, Healing Force, Buffalo Drive Sat. 20th: Lobby’s Colored Balls, John Graham and Blackspur, Fat Alroy Easy Rider Sat. 13th: Fantasy, Yvonne Barrett Tues. 16th: Up Thurs. 18th: Friends Fri. 19th: Big Push Sat. 20th: Big Push Iceland Sun. 14th: Mississippi Sun. 21st: Blue Dog (Lon­ don Express)

Roundhouse (Rosebud) Open Fridays and weekends Berties Sat. 13th: Jade, Lobby’s Colored Balls Sun. 14th: Atlas, Lobby’s Colored Balls Sat. 20th: Murtceps, Syd Rumpo

Carlton Country Club Opening night, Saturday February 3rd: McKenzie Theory, Lipp Arthur, Fred Cass and the Cassettes, Edison Lights, Benny Zable and “another big bizarre band.”

PUBS Southside 6 Sat. 13th: Mississippi (after­ noon) Sun. 14th: Healing Force Mon. 15th: Tainui Sound Tues. 16th: Tainui Sound Wed. 17th: Pulse, Tainui Sound T h u rs.

18th : Johnny O’Keefe Fri. 19th: Tainui Sound Sat. 20th: Gary Young’s Hot Dog (afternoon) Sun. 21st: Syd Rumpo Sandown Park Sat. 13th: Rondells Wed. 17th to Sat. 21st: Rondells Moreland Sat. 13th, Fri. 19th, Sat. 20th: Rebound Dorset Gardens Sat. 13th: Dorothy Baker Fri. 19th, Sat. 20th: Napier Brothers

Tottenham Sat. 13th: Vicki Forrest Sun. 14th: Lucky Starr Thurs. 18th: Napier Brothers Fri. 19th: Keith Humber Sat. 20th: Jill Green Sun. 21st: Napier Brothers Pier Hotel (Frankston) Sat. 13th: Lucky Starr Sat. 20th: Digby Richards Distillery Sat. 13th: Yvonne Barrett, Napier Brothers Wed. 13th to Sat. 20th: Julie McKenna, Napier Brothers Top Hat Sat. 13th: Lucky Starr Sat. 20th: Dinah Cole

MOVIES One shots National Film Theatre season o f films by Fritz Lang and Otto Preminger. Show­ ings start at 7.40 pm at

no shit A S E L L O U T ! this is IT. JEANS, SHIRTS, SWEATERS - THE WORKS. CHUCKED OUT AT Vi PRICE, BUT IT’S STILL THE BEST GEAR ABOUT AT ANY PRICE. REFLECTIONS - TIVOLI ARCADE CITY

Dental Theatrette, Grattan St, Carlton, near Flemington Road.

Tuesday 16 Jan: You Only Live Once, and Laura Wed 17 Jan: Manhunt, and Where the Sidewalk Ends Tues 23 Jan: Cloak and Dagger, and Secret Beyond the Door I Wed 24 Jan: You and Me, and Ministry o f Fear

Currently showing Albany pracula AD 1972 1 0 ,1 2 , 2 , 4 , 6 , 8 Athenaeum Willard 11, 2, 5.10, 8.10 Australia 1 Deliverance 3.45, 6, 8.15 ; Australia 2 Summer o f ’42, Billy Jack 10, 1.45, 5.35, 9.35 Balwyn Portnoy’s Complaint 7.45 Barclay The Godfather 10.15, 1.30, 4.45, 8.05; Sun. 4, 7.35

Bercy What’s Up Doc? 1 1 ,2 , 5, 8.05 Capitol The Adventures o f Barry McKenzie 2, 5, 8 Carlton Taking O ff ThursSun only 8.15 Chelsea The Great Waltz 11, 2, 5, 8 Cinema Centre 140 Bourke Cinema 1 Cabaret 11.15, 2.10, 5.10, 8.15 Cinema 2 Young Winston 10.30, 1.40, 4.50, 8.05 Cinema 3 The Mechanic 11, 2, 5 Dendy Brighton The Assas­ sination o f Trotsky 8 ’ Dendy Collins St Murmur of the Heart 3.15, 5.45, 8.15 Dendy Malvern ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore 8; Sat and Sun 4.15, 8; Wed 11 a.m.

East End 1 A Clockwork Orange 10.30, 1.45, 5, 8.15 East End 2 Decameron 10.45, 1, 3.15, 5.30, 8 East End 3 Stork 10, 12, 2, 4 ,6 , 8

Esquire Trinity Is Still My Name 11, 2, 5, 8.05 F o ru m Bedknobs and Broomsticks 11, 2, 5, 8.05 Metro Bourke Black Beauty 9.30, 11.45, 2.15; Sat 11, 2 Metro Collins Pinochio MonFri 9.1Q, 11.05, 2.15, 5.20, 8.15; Sat 1 1 ,2 ,5 , 8 Midcity 200 Bourke Cinema 4 Man o f La Mancha 10.40, 1.45, 4.50, 8.05 Cinema 5 Alice’s Adven­ tures in Wonderland 10.45, 1.35; Conquest o f the Planet o f the Apes 8 Odeon Sunstruck 11, 2, 5, 8 Palais Keep on Rockin’ 8 Rivoli 1 The Emigrants 8.15 Rivoli 2 Family Life and the Firemen’s Ball 7.45 Rapallo The Life and Times o f Judge Roy Bean 11.15, 2.15, 5.15, 8.15; no show Sun Roma Bedroom Mazurka 12, 2,4,6,8,10 Star Naked Cello

LIBERATION STUFFED IN AMONGST THE FINEST IMPORT RECORDS A V A ILA B LE YO U 'LL NOW FIND STUDDED JEANS, SHIRTS & HEAD BOOKS FOR STUDDED HEADS THERE'S A NEW L.P. SHIPMENT DUE LATE JANUARY.

155 GREV1LLE ST. PKAUKAN £

d ead

Open till 9.00pm Wednesday and T hunday till 9.00pm Fnday k all day Saturday

music

9 GRAIE

FUI DEAD

BS2627

¡¡Eia rtin ’s Theatre 3 ■

Swanston Portnoy’s Com­ plaint 1 0 , 12 , 2, 4, 6, 8 Times Au Pair Girls (R) Trak The Other 5.30, 8.30)

THEATRE It’s a sparse choice this summer, with La Mama and the University theatre groups in recess.

Comedy How The Other Half Loves opens Jan. 16, 8.30; Wed & Sat 2.15 Her Majesty’s No No Nan­ ette 8.15 closes Sat 13 Jan. Matinee Humphrey B. Bear

10,2 r

The Harry Secombe Show Jan 17-27 only Pram Factory Beware of Imitations opens Jan 24, Tues-Sun 8.15 Russell Street The Tavern 8.30, Fri 5.15, 8.30 St Martins Matinee The Water Babies 1 1 , 2

Cases o f Boonspa and tennis racquets;

Spud ’n’ Spa event

by Fargus Canning Xmas Eve eccentric figures garbed in long white coats and Chinese hats assembled outside La Mama theatre for the first annual Swangin Spud’n’spa Soiree.

Cases o f Boonspa and tennis rackets were abundant. Hugh McSpedden, famous Mel­ bourne bus conductor, led a convoy o f picnic vans, in a bright blue and orange domed van, a duck perched on the spirit o f his Combi wagon.

A tribe o f village idiots tested the rate ot flow of

water on the banks o f the Hurstbridge creek. The sights o f Doreen proved too much for the exposed Carlton eyes. But where were the 500,000 as we passed through Woodstock? The big rigs whizzed by on the Hume Highway as NIAGGRA played Honeysuckle Rose,, and the grey clouds settled in on to the bleak football oval.

The organisers, the Ponderosa C & W Appreci­ ation Society, thought it was so good that they are planning another one next year.

FREE TIC K E TS for ‘Keep On Rockin’ THERE ARE 25 (12Vz DOUBLES) TICKETS WAITING FOR THE FIRST TO WRITE TO DIGGER. IT’S REALLY A GREAT FILM - PROBABLY THE BEST ROCK FILM EVER! SO WRITE TO DIGGER, BOX 77, PO CARLTON

44 St. M artins Lane, So u th Yarra.

Phone 26-2300

FIRST PRODUCTION OF THE 1973 SEASON FEB. TO JULY - OPENING FRI FEB. 2.

“THE COLLECTOR”

BY DAVID PARKER FROM THE NOVEL BY JOHN FOWLES - A PLAY OF UNNERVING PERCEPTION & SUSPENSE Bookings Phone: 26-2188, or call 44 St. Martins La. Sth Yarra.

ALBUMS

A NIGHTLY JOINTLY Saturday 13:

Friday 19:

Saturday 20:

Mantis,i Hot Dog, Carson

Rat Ransett, Bakery

Threshold, Murtceps Mighty Mouse

Sunday 14:

Thursday 18:

Sunday; 21:

Syd Rumpo Mighty Mouse

Tank Healing Force

Bread Booze & Roll Band Friends

Thursday 25: Tank, Mighty Mouse

366 Lyon St,Carlton 3477573

BOB*WEIR OTHER GRATEFUL DEAD ALBUMS THE GRATEFUL DEAD WS1689 AOXOMOXOA (Import) WS1790 ANTHEM OF THE SUN WS1749 LIVE DEAD 2WS1830 Workingmans dead wsi869 AMERICAN BEAUTY WS1893 THE GRATEFUL DEAD DOUBLE ALBUM 2WS51935 GARCIA - Jerry Garcia BS2582 New Release ROLLING THUNDER - M. Hart BS2635

GRATEFUL DEAD ON

166 highst

“The worst record shop in the world. From the moment you walk in the door you’ll realize you made a mistake.”

YEP GRATEFUL DEAD FREAKS, WRITE IN A REVIEW OR AP­ PRAISAL OF ANY O n. ALBUM & THE 9 NICEST BITS OF WRITING WIN THE AUTHOR ONE OF THE ALBUMS LISTED ON THE LEFT (EXCEPT ‘AOXO­ MOXOA!) SO NAME YOUR CHOICE AS YOU WRITE IN TO DIGGER P.O. BOX 77, CARLTON, VIC.

MELBOURNE LET IT BE SUITE 15.100 DRUMMOND ST CARLTON 3478633

BANI McSPEDDEN P RESENTS

TM £

c a r i :T O

Prahran

Yours sincerely, David N. Pepperell

f \ ; mm

SYDN EY SUNRISE MANAGEMENT 32 UNDERWOOD STREET PADDINGTON 312111.

SPECTRUM, INDELIBLE MURTCEPS, Melbourne COUNTRY RADIO, GARY YOUNG’S HOT DOG, CAPTAIN MATCHBOX WHOOPEE BAND, Bands: MACKENZIE THEORY, BLACKSPUR, TALABENE, BRIAN CADD

N

comrFRY

Interstate Bands:

LA DE DAS, SHERBET, 69ERS, HOME, MISSISSIPPI, BUFFALO DRIVE

Despite other adverts, these bands are Exclusive!

C U I IB

bizarre operling night

S A T 3FEB

CLUB

355exhibition st.

FEATURING: MACKENZIE THEORY LIP ARTHUR & A SURPRISE SUPER GROUP, FRED CASS & THE CASETTES EDISON LIGHTS4 BENNY ZABLE

3floors-fppd-fun Xfantasy

c X ^ L 7S A X 2 0

P A L A IS ST.K JLD A NOW ON NIGHTLY 8PM - 94-0651

A film by D.A. Pennebaker in color who made ‘Don’t Look Back’ and ‘Monterey Pop’.

Filmed at Toronto Rock n’ Roll Revival.

“Keep on rocking is the best film of Rock n’ Roll music available as yet” John Collis, Time out.

MATINEES WEDNESDAY & SATURDAY 2PM Tickets from theatre.

I \

FRIENDS HEALING FORCE BUFFALO DRIVE & A Surprise Compere

admission $1-50

A

LOBBY’S COLOURED BALLS JOHN GRAHAM & BLACKSPUR FAT ALROY

0

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