The Digger No.16 May 1973

Wfomen invade the steelworks:

ISSUE 16, MAY 1973, 30 CENTS

W elcom e Fritz the C al

Fritz the comic book hero, now on celluloid and soon for local release: the real thing? Page 2

PSYCHIATRYAYOTAHOYM-ITIIA More than you ever needed to know about mental hospitals, magic madness, shock and horror . . . . and

M urder at R oyal P ark Crisis in the Bay The

persecution and destruction of Port Phillip Bay as carried out by certain chemical companies under the direction of the Victorian government

BLANK PAGE FOR ISSUU VERSION ONLY

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ECOCIDE M elb o u rn e is h ea d in g towards one of the greatest ecological disasters! Awe might ever see. Experts give Port Phillip Bay a maximum of twenty years before all life is totally wiped out. The situation is already so bad that readings have placed most of the bay side beaches at levels 4000 times higher than world health safety standards.

Doomsday and disaster is coming and the state government does nothing but encourage it.

Blatant non-concern by overseas companies in what they do with their toxic wastes has made one half of the city of Melbourne an ecological and social ghetto.

There is video tape evidence of companies abusing existing anti-pollution laws, which are only sucks anyway.

Read the full story inside on page three, and then either pack up and leave before it all happens, or sit around and watch Melbourne go one better than Cleveland and kill not just a lake, but a whole bay.

The Holding Handicap ~ long odds in a fixed race

by Ian Turner Four weeks to VE-Day (Victorian Election), and its about now that the back-room boys on both sides start getting toey.

Calculating machines work out the percentages; ticks, crosses or queries are put against long columns of figures. Wins and losses are totted up; a new balance is struck. Politicians and party planners confront in advance the prospect of victory or defeat.

The starting point for the commercial channels, is all that p arties get for free. sums is the traditional break-down th e of the electors. In round figures, Everything else they have to pay for. you can say that in any election It costs a lot to sell a party there will be a hard-core vote vote of 40% for the ALP, and — whether it’s an image or a policy. Individual candidates for 40% for the Liberal and Country Parties. The other 20% of voters parliament are allowed, under the electoral law, to spend only some either go for the minor parties per head on their (DLP, Australia Party, Communist $500 Party) or are “swingers”. What campaigns. But there’s no limit on elections are all about is capturing the amount the party itself, or the second preference votes of private supporters, may spend on minor-party voters, or the number a campaign in support of a party’s candidates. one votes of the swingers.

Most TV ads come in 30 Groups on the far left (the second spots. Every second costs Communists) and the far right around $10. A minimal TV cover (League of Rights, Nazis) don’t for an election campaign would count. Their preferences will go be twelve spots per channel per to ALP and Lib./CP respectively.

The DLP is more complicated — week — that is, $10,000 a week.

Full page press ads cost around they can throw their preferences $800 in the Age, $1300 in the either to Liberal or Country Parties, and affect the outcome of Sun, and $2400 in the Herald. the vote in some areas. The Six in each paper in the course of a campaign adds up to Australia Party is a swinging party — it says that this time it will $27,000. On top of that, you can add radio (far from cheap — it’s split its preferences between the Liberals and the ALP. So there easy to run away with $10,000 in will be bidding between the Libs spot advertising), country TV, and the Country Party for DLP country and suburban press. And preferences, and between the Libs then there are leaflets, posters, bill-boards, the cost of organising and the ALP for Australia Party meetings. preferences.

A couple of weeks ago, the The genuine swingers make Libs leaked the information that up what political commentators call the “middle ground” — the their campaign for the Victorian was budgeted at votes which are up for grabs by e le c tio n s either of the major parties. There $200,000. That can’t be right. are two kinds of swingers — They’re bluffing, one way or the “ feelers” and “thinkers”. The other. Either they mean that former absorb their politics they’re going to spend $300,000 through the gut, the latter on keeping Victoria out of the hands of the ALP — or they’re through the mind.

Feeler-swingers are swayed cracking hardy, and they’re really Who knows? So far, by images, slogans, the bandwagon broke. effect. They respond emotively they’ve had a big run on radio and often unconsciously to what (XY which they get for free), on they absorb from the media; they billboards (probably free-loading here, too) and in suburban papers pick up odd comments selectively, (expensive if they were paying for preferring those which confirm their gut-reaction; they go for it at full rates, which is unlikely). whoever they feel is the likely Nothing on TV yet. If they’ve winner. got into the big money, there’s Thinker-swingers are of two no secret where it is coming from kinds. Either “ one-issue” people, — big business. If they’re not into lik e WEL, UMFAG, th e it, they’re in trouble. We won’t conservative groups, the Right to know until the final fortnight.

Life outfit, and the teachers Meanwhile Clyde Holding and the unions, who decide their vote on ALP have begun their run on TV the basis of the response of but little else as yet. Whatever parties or individual candidates to the ALP does, it won’t be able the one issue with which they are to match that sort of Lib budget involved. Or “across the board” — it doesn’t have access to the people, who weigh up the policies big time donors. of the rival parties, and then vote All that is pretty hard to for the “ better” party (or the lesser evil — I know one Sydney convert into raw material for the academic who always votes for calculating machines. But there are the party out of power, unless other factors which influence an there are compelling civil-liberties election, and which can be more precisely quantified. reasons to do otherwise).

In both cases, the media are First of all, it’s not a important. Feelers react to the scratch race, it’s a handicap. The look or the sound of a leader. ALP starts from well behind They pick up the good vibes. A s c r a t c h because of th e bright PR man, and sympathetic “gerrymander”. The lower house handling by the media, can make of the Victorian Parliament, the a lot of difference. Take the Age Legislative Assembly, consists of for example. In December, they 73 seats. The biggest of these is were running for Whitlam, and Scoresby, with 50,000 electors; the ALP got a good cover. This the smallest is Kara Kara, with time, they’re running for Hamer 16,000. That’s a factor of three and the Liberals. So Hamer gets a to one.

Overall, the bigger nice pic in the Age four or five electorates are in the metropolitan times a week, on page 1 or 3, and outer suburban electorates, where most Age readers will see where the ALP holds the seats or it He’s posed with one of his has a chance of winning. The “ dicky-birds” (WEL are having smallest are in the country. What something to say about that), or that meant at the 1970 election with a soccer player, or even was that the ALP, with 43% of (Ray Meagher notwithstanding) in the total votes, got 22 seats; the association with Michelangelo’s Liberals, 37%, 42 seats; the David. Money can’t buy that kind Country Party, 4%, 8 seats. (There of p u b lic ity , provided the is one independent). The system is rigged in favour of the feeler-swingers read the Age. The same goes for the conservatives; that is called a “gerrymander” after Governor thinker-swingers. Next time you read the Age — if you read the Gerry of Massachusetts, who used Age — have a look at where the to fix things that way. The ALP’s Liberal and ALP policy statements policy is “one vote, one value” , are placed, how much space they but that won’t do it much good get, what sort of headlines. Oyer this election.

Second, there’s preferential any one week, the Libs are doing much better than the ALP. Why? voting. In England, they have — that’s policy. Both parties rely “ first past the post” voting (that a great deal on press cover to get is, you vote with an x for the an even hreak. This time, the candidate you want to win); in Libs are in front. Both parties rely Australia, we have “ preferential” a great deal on press cover to get voting — that is, you have to put their message across to the a number beside the name of thinker-swinger. They rarely get an every candidate in order of your even break. This time the Libs preference (if you don’t do that, your vote is informal, and doesn’t are out in front.

That kind of press cover, get to be counted). That means along with some free radio and that the votes of candidates who TV time from the ABC, and 15 can’t win — like those standing minutes of free TV time from the for the DLP and the Australia

Vegetal prices up

Party — are passed over to another candidate. In the past, the DLP has given its preferences to th e L ibs; with these preferences, the Libs have won enough seats to keep themselves in power. This time, the DLP is talking about giving its preferences to the Country Party in seats where both Liberal and CP candidates are standing. That is logical enough, as these are the two furthest right parties in the elections. But it could cost the Libs up to six seats in country electorates.

In the past, the Australia Party has given its preferences to the ALP. This time, they are talking about splitting them — some Lib, some ALP. If they poll well enough, this could cause the ALP some difficulty in outer suburban electorates — though, in most of these, the Australia Party is likely to prefer the ALP. And, in some marginal country electorates where it matters, there will be hard bargaining between the Libs, the Country Party and the ALP over whose preferences go where. That could influence the result in four

or five seats.

Third, there is the matter of F e d e ra l-S ta te relations.

The Federal Labor Government, elected last December, is riding high. It is acting fast, and it has strong public support. But there are m any questions — housing, education, urban planning, prices among them — on which the Federal government can’t go it alone.

So Whitlam and his M in isters are involved in co-operative deals with the state governments — including the Hamer Liberal government in Victoria. Hamer has come back with a bit of “state rights” rhetoric, saying that he’s not goingto have any of those Canberra heavies trampling over the Victorian nature-strip, but he’s playing it cool and grabbing as much of the action as he can.

T here are q u ite a few imponderables here. Has Hamer scored form his association with Canberra? Is there any mileage left in state rights? Will the voters reason that they ought to have a Lib government in Victoria, to balance out Gough Whitlam? Or

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

We gave shits but got Fritz After perusing your last three issues, I submit the following observations for what they’re worth: YOU GIVE ME THE SHITS . . .

You’re as far behind the original innovative creative (if you like) frame of reference of your chosen medium as are your surface (as opposed to subterranean) brethren on the top of the dung-heap . . . It’s not merely the gap in the action (minimum two years, arguably) that grates . . . There is a certain thing

j called panache. Don’t really matter what it is, the important thing is you ain’t got none, baby . . .

And it’s not so much the direct ripoff, it’s the ripoff mentality . . .

It’s not just that it’s all been done before. That it has lad, but oh, oh so much better. There’s the rub . . . So there you have it, friend. The eternal paradox. Rip off and the world will shrug and a few might care and you die a death of sorts; try something original and piss in the wind.

Maybe you can discover Billie Holliday, or Fritz the Cat, or the itinerant poor, or rediscover Woody Allan . . .

Tom Kramer, Strathfield, NSW

will they go for Labor leader Clyde Holding’s argument that, if you want to cash in on Canberra’s promise, you must have an ALP government in Victoria as well.

Fourth, there are the new voters. The ALP has been arguing for years that 18-year-olds should have the vote. Hamer said that he would give them the vote when Canberra did.

The Whitlam government acted, and Hamer followed along. There are about 175,000 people in the 18—20 age group. A bit over half of them have enrolled to vote in this election. The polls say they cut up about 55/45 in favour of the ALP — but it’s impossible to calculate what that means in individual electorates.

So what does it all add up to? Not even the calculating machines know — the factors are too imprecise. The ALP needs another fifteen seats, in a house of 73, in order to form a government. That’s a lot — it would take a 614% swing on the 1970 state election figures. But if These lines appear to be the theme, as we could decipher it, o f five and a half foolscap pages, a carefully documented and rhetorical description o f a disgruntled ex­ patriate ’s nostalgia and deja vu.

Anyway Tom, thanks for the tip on *Fritz the Cat. See inside for our discovery this issue.

Gamma globulin in B ali I have a few criticisms to make of Chris Moss’s article, having just returned from England by that route.

Firstly, I think $400 is a little unrealistic — this would be an absolute minimum, assuming that you’d hit'ch to Darwin (we tried the reverse but found it impossible) and travel the cheapest way, which always takes much longer. It also assumes that if you only allow three

Labor held its December federal vote, it would have the numbers.

There are only two possible results — either the ALP wins outright, or it takes enough seats to force the Libs and the Country Party into an uneasy coalition. My guess is that, if you can get anything better than evens about an ALP win, you’d be wise to take it.

Ear for eyes There’s a new music amagazine starting in Sydney. It’s called Ear, a monthly, the first edition due in about six weeks. Two Sydney journalists, Tony O’Grady and Michael Delaney, are putting it together for the publishers, Modem Magazines, in Rushcutters Bay. Ear, say Tony and Mike, will cover all aspects of music from country through rock to blues, jazz and classical, both local and overseas.

It’s going to be gloss and full cover. months, you are going to be travelling almost non-stop, which gets to be an awful drag. I would suggest at least $600.

We found the most difficult border for visas was Thailand because my husband (why doesn’t someone invent an alternative to that word?) wasn’t wearing a shirt with a collar in his visa photo.

We got our best information from BIT Information Service, 141 Westbourne Park Road, London W ll, who publish an up-to-date informa­ tion sheet for 50p — rough Australian equivalent including post­ age $ 1.

Another necessary thing is good health insurance, which I think AUS do. We both got hepatitis in Bali and have huge medical bills to pay now we’re here. There is an injection of gamma globulin which is supposed to guard against hepatitis, but its effectiveness lasts only six months.

The overnight hotel thrown in with the air fare through Burma is a thing of the past; it applied when Burma issued only 24 hour visas.

Bill and Sylvie, Parkdale, Vic.

Strange reports of beheaded turnips, screaming onions, truckloads of tannis root taken through the cities at dead of night. What’s all this then? Indeed. Ross Wilson and the Sons of The Vegetal Mothers have started rehearsals; Ray Amott, Ross Hannaford, Russell Smith, Tim Partridge making up the band.

Manager Peter Andrew says the band will head out in the country in a couple of weeks for its first appearance (sort of like being off-Broadway if you are a play) and then start playing the scenes around Melbourne. Ross is going to do a few old Sons’ numbers like “ Brown Rice” and a couple of electric DC numbers like “Teenage Blues” plus a few vampire numbers (no titles).

Andrew says he hopes people have got over odious comparisons with DC because that was last year’s pastime, and this is a new band.

Meanwhile Ross and Gully Smith are still working on the rock theatre (not terminology: after Tommy, no-one says rock opera anymore) called What the fuck is happening'on Planet Earth, with some apparently good songs.

They hope to stage it sometime this year, with some assistance from the Arts Council.

Which leaves the band which was once Spectrum etc, rehearsing minus Arnott and with old Miss (or is it Ms) Universe people, and the new name is Ariel, apparently some reference tosomething someone called Shakes­ peare once wrote, said or did. Mike Rudd still hopes to take the band to America, having set the deal up for a September Spectrum visit some weeks back.

Bugs at O fficeP icn ic Local filmmakers don’t get it easy. Once again it’s the same old scenario of no distribution.

Filmmaker Tom Cowan has written and directed a feature-length film titled Office Picnic, which has picked up good reviews from those people who have seen it and know. It ran for a limited season in Canberra, and now Tom is in Melbourne trying to hassle theatre time for his work.

But with not too much success.

Originally Roadshow were arrang­ ing to screen it in Melbourne, but this deal fell through. Then Greater Union made Tom an offer he could refuse, which he did.

At this time, Tom is discussing Office Picnic. with Hoyts, about a screening at the Atheneum, under the new Hoyts’ policy (see elsewhere this issue).

Of course Tom is just one of many who can’t crack a showing.

There must be hundreds of films sitting in the National Film Library gathering dust.

Last week Tom gave a special screening to the Australian Film Teachers’ Appreciation Society at Victoria’s State Film Centre, and it was enthusiastically received. Kit Guyatt, of Phallic Forest fame, edited the film. It’s a story of life, love and tragedy in the public service offices. Maybe with a lot of luck, we’ll see it . . .

May 1973

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The Digger '

This cat some Mighty Mouse?

Published by Hightimes Pty Ltd, 125 Barkly St., North Fitzroy 3068.

Postal Address: PO Box 77, Carlton 3053 Telephone: 347-2782 (temporarily).

Editing May Issue: Virginia Fraser, Helen Garner, Colin Talbot.

Reporting: Jenny Brown, Phillip Frazer, Ponch Hawkes, Colin J ames.

Advertising: Terry Cleary.

Administration, Promotion and Circulation: Garrie Hutchinson, Colin Talbot.

Artwork and Layout: Ian McCausland.

Sydney Office: Editorial —Jon and P onch Hawkes.

Advertising: Michael Zerman.

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Telephone: 660-6957.

Distributors: New South Wales: Allan Rodney Wright (circulation) Pty Ltd, 36-40 Bourke Street, Woolloomooloo, 2021. Telephone 357-2588.

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Telephone 30-4222.

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Published monthly throughout Aus­ tralia. Cover price is recommended retail maximum.

The Digger accepts news, feat­ ures, artwork or photographs from contributors.

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

The Digger is a member of the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS).

Fritz on film just ain’t th e sam e One of Australia’s big theatre chains is apparently showing interest in “ specialist” films — which basically means perhaps alternative culture/experimental/good films. The chain is Hoyts Theatres, which like its friends has steered away from and totally ignored these types of film in the past. The Hoyts’ screenings will commence at Melbourne’s Atheneum theatre, and later in the year will be put on in a Sydney Hoyts venue.

It has become obvious in fact that there is money to be made in this market, people want to see the films, so put them on. First scheduled is Luis Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm o f the Bourgeoisie, which has been well received overseas. It’s a sort of reverse Exterminating Angel. This time people can’t get into places.

Also scheduled are works from local experimental film-makers if they desire. Other overseas films slotted are Eric Rohmer’s Love in the Afternoon, Fritz the Cat, an animated cartoon based on R Crumb’s cartoon, Michael Apted’s The Triple Echo and Robert Altman’s Images.

Hoyts’ managing director Dale Turnbull said the screenings were of the “art house” genre. He wants to have filmmakers there talking about their product, and 16mm stuff. * * Hs Reporting on the animated film, Fritz the Cat, and its controversial American season is Colin James.

Regardless of its numerical follow­ ing, in the last three or four years it has been making an impact: examples are the Oz magazine prosecution for cartoon obscenity and locally, busts in the underground press and the university press for obscene comix, and so on. There probably isn’t a person who hasn’t seen one or more examples of underground comix because they are virtually inescapable. Meanwhile, Crumb hits the large American dailies, appearing in the New York Times Sunday Supplement, being hailed in that paper as “perhaps” the greatest cartoonist to emerge this decade.

Whatever — he does stand out in the ranks of underground car­ toonists. His comix are discussed, attacked and have their loose philosophies discussed in greater depth than they deserve. Mainly though, they are just laughed at.

As a person he is an enigma. A recluse who lives outside San Francisco seeing very few people.

Drinking beer and pissing off the stoned admirers who come to shake his hand and stare at his head in admiration. His day-to-day existence,

For those who don't read newspapers;

Acting on an Australian, Security Intelligence Organisation interdepart­ mental memo, Attorney General, Lionel Murphy led a Commonwealth police raid on Asio headquarters in Melbourne. The raid on the offices which are disguised as a branch of the Gas and Fuel Corporation — yielded 62 documents which were later tabled in parliament. Murphy said they contained incontestable Back numbers of The Digger are evidence, that three Croatian terrorist available from the office for 45 ( organisations operated Australia cents each — except nos. 2 and 7 and in view of that, the previous which are sold out. attorney general Senator Greenwood Send cheque or postal order to: had been their “ active protector”. \ Back Numbers, Murphy also alleged that the j The Digger, evidence was sufficient to convict thé P.O. Box 77, Carlton 3053. government on three counts — misleading parliament and the nation, deceiving a friendly foreign power '-f_ Yugoslavia — and imperil­ ling the lives of Australians by shutting its eyes to evidence of ' organised terrorism.

On early April, acting on information gained in the raid, a squad of 260 Commonwealth and NSW police raided 80 Croatian Twelve months worth of The homes in Sydney and Wollongong. In Digger, twelve issues, will set you the absence of police figures the back $3.60. daily papers put the number of OUT-OF-TOWN SPECIAL: If arrests between 10 and 13, and said your postcode is 25 miles from a the raids had also yielded two pistols, capital city, you can have one two rifles, and 10 pounds of year’s subscription for $3 all up. explosives. A Bulletin article added QUEENSLAND SPECIAL: allegedly stolen bolts of cloth, Northern distributors effectively typewriters and tape recorders to the ban The Digger. Queenslanders pay tally, and said it was a common i only $3, regardless of their police tactic to add a stolen goods city/country status. charge to others using people’s anxiety to get their goods back as a guarantee against subsequent wrong­ ful arrest charges.

NSW premier, Askin (the man who suggested during an anti-LBJ demonstration that LBJ’s chauffeur “ run the bastards down”) said his state was not countënancing becom­ ing a police state and there would be no more raids there. Victorian premier, Hamer, said that extremist groups were “evil .cancers on the i Subscriptions, body politic” and ought to be j The Digger, exterminated.

P.O. Box 77, On April 3 Whitlam personally i Carlton 3053. directed an inquiry into an apparent | conspiracy between several public servants to withold information on i terrorism from the new government.

He told parliament that a document — the interdepartmental memo that led to the raids — found in security Dear Digger, files three weeks before suggested I enclose my cheque/postal such a, conspiracy. Two days later an order for $3.60/$3.00 ($3.00 subs Asio officer was transferred to are available only to subscribers “ other duties” when the investiga­ living outside a 25-mile radius of tion showed him to have been capital cities, or in Queensland). responsible for inaccurately reporting Please put me down for one year’s a meeting in the memo. subscription to The Digger (12 Former attorney general Green­ issues). wood asked Murphy to table the warrents used in the raid and the affadavits on which they were issued.

Name I Murphy said the obvious answer was Ithat they should not be tabled.

Greenwood some days before had Address admitted to keeping photostat copies of most of the classified documents he had seen as atW ~<ey general, saying he did not know i* ’ ~ had .P’code breached the crimes act by doing so but anyway none of them was top secret and in his opinion none related j to national security.

I j Aftermath: Thé Bulletin alleges a ¡deficit of 12 warrants (68 compared i with 80 houses raided). Immigration Make cheques payable to Hightimes ! minister Grassby announced that he ^ * ty . Ltd. crossed not negotiable. i was investigating charges that 415 ! migrants had been implicated in

Back numbers

The animated feature Fritz the Cat was adapted from the set of Fritz comix, written by R. Crumb. This cartoonist, who brought Fritz to life, has many comix and characters to his credit.

political extremist activities in Australia, 195 of whom were naturalised Australians. He said that his department would begin deport­ ing Croatian terrorists except for those already naturalised. There had been a rush of naturalisation applications from Yugoslavs . . .

Liberal senator Wannan said that Murphy’s claims that Croatian terrorists had trained with Australian soldiers at the Wodonga army camp were nonsense. Members of the Croatian community had only established a holiday camp in the area and anyway there was indisput­ able evidence that members of the Yugoslav communist secret police were in Australia, and why wasn’t he investigating that?

In the middle of it all 2Q00 Melbourne Croatians packed a Mel­ bourne western suburbs town hall to celebrate Croatia’s wartime seperation from Yugoslavia under Nazi, Ante Pavelic.

And on April 14 it was reported that three naturalised AustralianYugoslavs had been arrested, secretly tried and executed in Yugoslavia following an aborted uprising.

Whitlam sent a strong protest to the Yugoslav government over its failure to notify the Australian government.

The Yugoslav governmertt had only told the Australian government at the time, that nine naturalised Australians had been killed in the uprising.

Down with Bombs Attorney General Lionel Murphy has gone to Paris to try to persuade the French to stop dropping test nuclear bombs in the Pacific atmosphere. ACTU president Bob Hawke flew to New Zealand to discuss with NZ union officials the possibility of black banning French shipping if the tests don’t stop. The British PM, Edward Heath, had told NZ that Britain is not prepared to risk damaging trade' relations with France by joining the protest, and the British medical journal, The Lancet thought the British government could show a tiny bit more concern by urging the US to share its nuclear knowledge with France . . . Meanwhile a French uranium enrichment plant to pro­ duce nuclear fuel may be established in Australia, Tasmania and possibly be used as a bargaining point to stop further testing.

Ecology an ! Poison Japanese experiments using a copper sulphate unigel poison mix­ ture to control crown of thorns starfish on the Barrier Reef have failed. Plastic pipes containing the poison were laid round uninfested areas off ¿Townsville but failed to kee» the starfish out . . . The head of a 2500 member shooters’ organisa­ tion has been elected president of the Conservation Council of Victoria. He sees no conflict of interest and says that shooters are among the strongest conservationists in the state and have undertaken conservation programmes like putting nesting boxes in swamps around Victoria . . . Britain is facing a once in 50 years drought . . And a Japanese government body has proposed a national compensation scheme for death or damage to health caused by pollution. It would be financed by regular compulsory contributions from industry and car owners.

and the few statements published that have been attributed to him decries the culture he seems to be able to chronicle so well, and would seem to decry even his right to do so at all.

Within a movement that he doesn’t seem to consider himself to be part of, he is attacked and dissected for his sexism and racism and perversion and so on and on. The problem with all the attacks is that they are done on works that have been completed for years. Like most people Crumb has not stood still, he has not been static, but has adjusted his ideas. It’sinterestingthat you hear very little criticism about his works

May

Fritz stories. Two written in 1965 — “Fritz Bugs Out” and “ Fritz Secret Agent For The CIA” , and one written in 1968 — “ Fritz the No | Good” . They were first published in I comic-book form, and later as j Crumb’s popularity grew, and as 1 Fritz’s popularity as his best work grew, they were re-published in large book form.

The characters are all animals. ! Fritz obviously a cat. All his girl 1 friends cats or dogs, Ira — a rabbit, Heinz (the old swine) — a pig. Then there’s sundry raccoons dogs, etc.

The police are naturally pigs, and all the Blacks are Crows.

All the original comix characters

would be the first “head” production of this sort; it would be large budget; only the best animators would be used; and it would follow Crumb’s story exactly. Initially Crumb was to be the film’s consultant, but other than seeing a few initial sketches he didn’t see anything until the movie was finished. He then withdrew his support and disclaimed any associa­ tion between his comix and the movie. It is now advertised as being “adapted” from bis work.

The movie did have a large budget and good animators. The budget itself ran out (or something) because all through the movie you get cheater repeat actions. Sequences where the

reason the move has its “ R” rating.

A major fault with the cartoon is that not only have a lot of the j characters been visually bastardised, ¡b u t the story has been almost ! completely changed. The screen | writer has taken situations from two j of the original stories, and tried to ! hang them together by using large | irrelevant speeches from Crumb’s ] original copy.

It misses out because it fails to i re-create the character that Crumb so successfully created for Fritz.

But then if you haven’t read the original, it most likely has its own integrity as a film and as a story. The animation and color is good. In fact

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The stories that the animated feature Fritz the Cat are based on were first drawn in 1965. A long time ago, especially considering people are only now (or is it still) trying to analyse the concepts within the stories, measuring them against today’s standards.

Originally there were only three

Ducks Feet For China The latest news on China is mostly about what Australia is going to export there, in newly opened trading channels. These exports will include ducks’ feet for soup, oranges, eggs, meat, oysters, jade from a newly opened jade mine at Cowell 130 miles north west of Adelaide and possibly meat pies. But, says Australian Ambassador designate to China, Stephen Fitzgerald, trade is not the over-riding concern in Australia-China relations. “There is a somewhat euphoric view of the potential of the Chinese market which must be tempered with a little realism. It is simply not true that there are 800 million potential customers for everything we pro­ duce.” . . . . America has sent its first envoys to China, and Russia is installing new inter-continental ballis­ tic missiles along the northern frontier with China . . . Singapore Prime Minister Lee says that China’s declared policy of non-interference is regarded with suspicion by some Asian nations, and back in Peking deposed Cambodian head of state, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was given a flash airport welcome — including teenage girls waving paper streamers and performing dances after his return from a secret tour of areas in Cambodia controlled by forces supporting his exiled government.

Clenched Fists in Cambodia The Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh is under siege by communist forces loyal to Sihanouk’s Royal Government of National Union.

Asked in Peking how long he though the US supported government of General Lon Nol could survive, Sihanouk replied that it depended on Nixon not on Sihanouk’s supporters, but that they were strong enough to carry on till. 1976 — the year of the next US presidential elections.

Meanwhile US bombers have been raiding communist targets in Cam­ bodia for weeks at a time. Marshall Green, American’s new ambassador to Australia, described the bombing as part of a US policy of “ a clenched fist with one hand and an open hand with the other to bring about negotiations/with those characters in Hanoi.” His statement followed growing congressional unrest about the bombing and the constutionality of President Nixon’s authority for the daily bombings . . . Countries assisting the Lon Nol Government besides the US includethe Philippines and Taiwan.

A National Times report says that the Lon Nol government is on the verge of collapse and the military is having trouble with dissidence in the already small army. Incidents have included a disgruntled battalion of 200 men who marched from the battleground to the presidential palace to complain that they hadn’t been paid for three months. They said they would stay out till they were, and fired a few shots over a government official’s head to prove it. They were paid several hours later.

Other troubles include commanding officers including the names of dead men, on the payroll and collecting their wages.

While fighting in Cambodia reached its strongest ever, Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, said that Nixon did not regard the situation as a crisis.

Creighton Bums of The Age in Melbourne described this diagnosis as having something of the ring “ of that old, old, medical joke ‘operation j successful —patient died.’ ”

Vietnam Washington Monument The last American troops have left Vietnam and the last American prisoner has been flown out carrying

| are very stereo-typed, and it is this j same action is repeated in order to I fact that has generated most boost the time a scene runs. (For j criticism. People find it hard to instance the bath sequence). | j accept that they may conform to The animators also ran out, most | some readable standard. In fact you of them screaming, “Filth ! read the stories, and laugh at all the Aaaargh.” The movies producers had stereo-types, but when you finish hired the best animators they could ! you deny the one that you relate to find, and that meant luring away most. some of Walt Disney’s animators. All When the animated version of went well with these guys until they Fritz was first being talked about all, started drawing the line at animating sorts of things were promised. It animals pissing and fucking — the

a bunch of plastic flowers given him by North Vietnamese before he left.

However, according to a report in The Australian, “ the American presence in South Vietnam, par­ ticularly, in Saigon, remains about as ill-concealed as the Washington Monument.” The report said that half a million troops had been reduced to 150 marine guards at the US embassy and 50 officers in what is now known as the defense attache’s office, but altogether nearly 10,000 Americans remain in the country, well over 90 per cent of them in official or semi-official jobs.

“And the US has made only half-hearted efforts to camouflage the continuing military influence inside the civilian clothes,” the report said.

Returned American prisoner? told stories of being tortured, including years of solitary confinement, shoulders torn from sockets, jaws prised open with iron bars, ropes so tight they cut off circulation, and being shackled to bunks and being left to lie in their own shit. A former POW, Commander Richard Stratton led demands that the North Vietnamese leaders be tried for war crimes. . . . An Oklahoma City newspaper claimed that the My Lai massacre was planned by the CIA in an attempt to wipe out the civilian population of a village as an example to the enemy. Quoting Pentagon sources, the newspaper said the army selected a general with a CIA background to handle the investiga­ tion of the massacre, to avoid implicating the agency.

North Vietnam has been threaten­ ed that America could resume bombing and mining raids unless the terms of the ceasefire agreement are kept. General Minh, leader of the S o u th Vietnamese opposition, accused President Thieu of giving the communists the pretext to restart a full scale war by not carrying out ceasefire previsions.

On April 6 the heaviest fighting in Vietnam since the January 28 ceasefire has erupted in all four of the country’s military regions.

it’s great, regardless of some of the cheating and corner cutting they have used.

Most people will go to see this movie regardless of how bad the crits are. But many could be left with a feeling of dissatisfaction. If that’s you, go out and buy the Ballantine Books edition of the three original stories — it costs about the same as going to the movie and it might just be more satisfying.

— without a vote and unopposed — for another five year term as head of state. The election was declared unanimous with members of the People’s Consultative Congress shout- ’ ing agreement and applause . . .

Australia is to give Indonesia eight coastal patrol boats and four maritime patrol aircraft worth about $7 million, and has already handed over 16 Australian sabre jets as part of Australia’s $20 million three year military aid programme for the country.

workshop, gym and cultural centre; and another into a pre-school, snd medical centre which would include a detoxication unit to help alcoholics.

The corner store would'become a low cost co-operative. The whole project co-operative committee, and low rent on the houses would be collected to help pay back the cost of the promised Federal loan.

Some white residents of the area complaining that the housing scheme would lower property values have formed the South Sydney Protection Committee to fight it.

Aborigines' Royal Share However the company which owns most of the land has offered to sell it Aboriginal communities on at no profit to the Government and Northern Territory reserves affected contribute money to the building of by mining will get a direct share of the project, and members of the the royalties paid by miningv Builders Laborer Federation have companies. Ten per cent on the begun -¿renovation work. royalties received by the Aboriginal. already The project got its beginning Benefits Fund will be paid into a when a group of Aboriginals squatted local community fund under a in the mostly abandoned houses. federal cabinet ruling . . . But Aboriginal law student, Paul Coe, says that Aborigines are critical of proposals to give land rights only in High Noon the NT. “The people who have suffered most are those in NSW and the gone west cowboy Victoria and Queensland. In the whole of NSW there is no on a horse that smokes grass — recognisable tribal situation left. We riding herd on clouds .want compensation for those states blown from the tip of his gun, too” . . . Coe is also critical of the appointment of Mr. Justice Wood­ he slides the chillum ward to advise on how to grant land back in the holster ^ rights. “ Once again a white man has he’ll never breathe out again. become so powerful in Aboriginal affairs that his recommendation Eric Beach could decide the lifestyle of •Aboriginals for decades.” .. . An­ other Aboriginal student, David Anderson, accused the Victorian Aboriginal affairs ministry of racism and neo-colonialism, following the WATCH suspension of all meetings of the Aboriginal Affairs Advisory Council FOR

by Aboriginal Affairs director, Reg LUIS Worthy during his six months BUNUEL’S absence studying racial conflict in the US. Anderson who is deputy chairman of the Council says: “He seems to think no Aboriginal is capable of running a meeting.”

Under various headings including “Canberra will handle blacks” and “Canberra to take control of The Philippine's Genghis Khan Aboriginals,” the dailies announced that the federal government would A five member delegation of foreign ministers from Moslem assume full responsibility for policy countries Will visit the Philippines to and finance in Aboriginal affairs, and discuss reported persecution and take any legislative action necessary torture of Moslems there with to do so . . . Another rather surprised President Marcos. Hundreds of sounding story in the Melbourne Age SOON FOR Moslems have died in fighting with reported that 25 Aborigines with MELBOURNE’S potential to succeed in professions Philippine government troops in the NEW SPECIALTY CINEMA south of the archepeligo in the last had been “located” in South few months. A five year old Moslem Australia. At least half the group had boy missing an ear and a hand — been judged capable of doing a allegedly cut off by government university course, and one\ woman, a troops after f *y had killed his mother with four children, showed parents t~; >af brought to the an ability to use words better than ministers conference as proof of 98 per cent of the European atrocities. . . The Philippines am­ population. The locating was done Collins St. bassador to Egypt who had been following a call for applications for invited to address the conference said Aborigines to train for a proposed there was no discrimination against SA Aboriginal task force.

And a part-Aboriginal Tasmanian, Moslems by the Marcos Government which had simply been fighting with Rosalind Langford, wants to destroy insurgents in what happened to be a the myth that there are ho predominently Moslem area, Aborigines in Tasmania. “People say “President Marcos has given amnesty we were all killed off and even and all military operations have Aboriginals in other states don’t realise this isn’t so.” A member of ceased. Insurgents will be pardoned if they give themselves up,” he said . . . the newly established Tasmanian information centre, she estimates A few days earlier Hollywood actress, Dovie Beams, claimed she there are about 3000 Aborigines in was kicked out of the Philippines Tasmania. after having a tw^, year affair with Housing Alternatives President Marcos. Her deportation was arranged by the President’s wife, The Redfem Aboriginal Com­ Imelda. The actress is writing a book Mail orders shipped anywhere — about the affair including extracts of munity Housing Scheme could well just add 20c postage. tapes taken by a recorder under her become a hallmark not only for the black community but for urban bed. The tapes include conversations planning as a whole, according to the 4 HOTHLYN HOUSE between her and Marcos about Tribune. The scheme involves acquir­ ARCADE, politics and Marcos singing songs ing 65 houses in a block, pulling including the Yellow rose of Texas.

MANCHESTER LANE, down the back fences and grassing in the area between. Plans for the Indonesian Democracy MELBOURNE. scheme also involve converting one President Soeharto was re-elected factory in the block into a hall,

~S-i'

“The discreet charm of the bourgeosie”

ATHENEUM

SOURCE BOOKS

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Page 3

The Digger

May

by Colin James

H and

Jiive

By Jenny Brown Spectrum/Murtceps bade a ripToaring double farewell last Sunday (April 15 __) afternoon/night at Melbourne’s Dallas Brooks Hall, to crowds totalling 2500.

Tickets to the 8 p.m. show sold so fast that a second, afternoon concert was announced, only days before.

Around 500 showed up for the 2 p.m. show, which was comparatively tense and jerky as the band fought problems caused by nerves and a temperamental PA. But by the time the venue’s seats were bustling again with the bums of the two bands’ happy mourners, these troubles had been worked out, and the crowd loosened into what was to be a solid three hours of top-class Australian rock’n’roll.

Murtceps played first, working energetically and with more stylish fire than they had for some time.

Opening with the band’s smart-arse trademark “We Are Indelible” , they rolled on through “ Ray’s Boogie”, “Hand Jive” , “Going Home” and “ Some Good Advice” , in a success­ ion of extended versions which had the house beat-clapping and jiving in the aisles right through the fiftyminute set.

Spectrum returned to the stage after a break, singer-guitarist Michael Rudd suave in a creamy-white suit, and played to a more-and-more demonstrative crowd some beauti­ fully whole-hearted versions of “I Think I Missed the Station” , “Make Your Stash” , “Essay in Paranoia”, “ Superbody” , “111 be Gone” , “Crazy Song” ,, “ Love Is a Many Splendored Thing” , “The Sideways Saga” , and a song or two from soon-to-be-released farewell LP Testimonial, while overhead the Edison Light-show gyrated and bubbled.

Their second encore (the crowd just wouldn’t let them off) was a second helping of “111 be Gone”, and won Spectrum perhaps their most frenetic audience response ever, rivalling Thorpie’s in energy level.

The entire concert was taped for replay on air by 3XY. A boisterous, raving goodbye for Spectrum/Murtcepts . . . and one that rent a little more than the old coronary . . . The Dallas Brooks Hall has since placed a ban on rock concerts. Oh well . . . that’s showbiz.

But whoever would have predicted that these serious, intellectual, quiet-living types could ever have incited a teenage riot?

If you take a line up the Yarra river in Melbourne, the suburbs to the west can be considered a ghetto area. The western suburbs are solid Labor areas, and the eastern suburbs are solid Liberal areas. Because of this political situation the State Liberal Party has had a consistent attitude toward plac­ ing, and in fact attracting, all the city’s poisonous industry in the western suburbs.

This attitude has created a situation of ecological imbalance that has already reached doomsday proportions. The main problem has to do with the ground water. Ground water, or that water which seeps through the soil and reaches the water table has use in watering stock; it can be used by industry, and sometimes can even be used as drinking water. The ground water table in the western suburbs has a solid rock bottom that slopes down toward Port Phillip Bay. For almost nine years industrial companies have had permission from the state Liberal government to dump untreated toxic waste into the ground water table. Some have dug bores down to the table for the sole purpose of dumping their chemical waste, and some of these bores are taking up to a million gallons of untreated waste a month.

The main polluter in this area is Monsanto. Monsanto is an allAmerican company that makes chemical substances for industrial use. Things like paint thinners, etc.

They have a quarry on some of the 100s of acres they own in the Deer Park and West Footscray areas of the western suburbs, and into this quarry they dump their untreated waste.

The main substance they are dumping into this quarry is called Phenol, and in fact Phenol pollution is the main problem in the whole area. There is no doubt that Monsanto dumps phenols into the water table, and it looks like they are the only company in the area that gets phenols as waste. The fact that the whole western area is lying on a bed of highly toxic phenols has been known by the liberal government for the last two years.

Monsanto claims that to treat the waste to create a safe substance would ibe too expensive and if they were forced to do so would have to go out of business. Two weeks ago, Monsanto announced their yearly profit to be $2.2 million.

The problem with all this waste that is in the western suburbs water table, is that it is slowly moving toward the bay, and the longest time we have before it reaches the bay and effectively destroys all life in it, is 20 years.

What we have in these suburbs is an example of the Bolte Liberal regime attracting foreign companies Council Guns Aimed at Garrison here with the promise that they won’t have to meet health and safety The Garrison discotheque in standards that any other country Windsor, and Melbourne’s ^ only would minimally demand before f o ur-late-nights-a-week rock’n’roll allowing a plant to be built. revue, will be shortly closing down If we look at the industrial if it hasn’t done so already. complex that has been built in The Prahran City Council took Westernport Bay — the Esso/BHP the management of Garrison, namely natural gas complex and the Lysaght the Australian Entertainment Ex­ steel mill, we see a wharf built for change and particularly Adrian the exclusive use of these comapnies, Barker (ex-editor, for a short time, of and financed with $10 million of Daily Planet and Planet), to court public tax money. The wharf is over the matter on Monday, April 9. fenced off from the public and The prosecution won. guarded by company security guards.

The charges were breach of the As well as giving these companies Health Act — Food was being served a free wharf, Bolte also promised ' without a licence — and also breach them that they wouldn’t have to pay of a Town and Planning ordinance rates on the land they are occupying.

A promise he had no right to make, passed in the fifties, which stated because rates are purely and that a venue such as Garrison exclusively a local council area. The couldn’t operate in the Prahran area. local council told both Bolte and the Adrian Barker felt that the companies to take a flying fuck at second (and the major) charge was a themselves, because they wanted the littlfe unfair, since Garrison had been money from the rates. If they had functioning under one management have received vjates from these or another since 1964. companies, it would have helped The entire proceedings of the trial lower everyone else’s rates. They were taped by the Prahran City didn’t get any money though, Council, according to Barker; who because Bolte pushed through felt a little outnumbered, with his legislation that gave the companies a lone barrister, by the seven or so rate-free existence. persons representing the prosecution Other major polluters in the area Barker said that Garrison had are ICI and Nylex. Supposedly two offered to stop selling food on the separate companies, Nylex is con­ premises, but he’d been given the trolled by ICI. The interesting thing distinct impression that the Prahran about ICI is that the company is also Council were out to close the venue the major polluter in NSW and down one way or another, and the Sydney. In this state they regularly offer was ignored. dum p. 44 gallon drums of corrosive —Barker could think of no good poison (cyanide) into the sea. Four reason why the Council should want Corners did a documentary on this to close the venue. On top of noise about three months ago. complaints, drugs had not been It’s also interesting that ICI is one mentioned (as they had in the closing of the major suppliers of anti-pollu­ down of the Much More Ballroom in tion devices in this country. A Fitzroy’s Cathedral Hall, earlier this strange contradiction that one of the year). country’s major polluters is also Barker said that local police making thousands of dollars by reaction to Garrison had been beating the band-wagon of industrial favorable, as they felt it kept the kids cleanliness. ICI has a series of bores off the streets. . . in the western suburbs that they are “But what gets me the most is pumping waste into. that a poll of Prahran’s 18-23s has The impending death of Port just been held, and guess what Phillip Bay through this waste they said that Prahran doesn’t offer seeping slowly towards it was the them entertainment!” subject of a State Government Meanwhile, an appeal is being interdepartmental committee. The considered, and Garrison intends to decision of this committee was that open indefinitely until further there is no way to stop this decisions are reached. happening. To do so would either be The closing of Garrison would too expensive, or more importantly, mean hard times for many* beyond the limits of present Melbourne musicians, as well as the technology, because to try to deal frustration of hundreds of late-night with the problem that now exists rock voyeurs. you have to clean up around 100 square miles.

So the Liberal Government has * * * virtually said that we should all Broderick Smith (ex-Carson) on forget the problem until it hits us, harp and vocals; Kerryn Tolhurst and then run around crazily trying to fix it. They couldn’t even get it (ex-Country Radio), on mandolin and steel guitar; Chris Stockley (ex together to stop Monsanto, ICI and Axiom); and a bass player and a the others from dumping toxic drummer (both called John, ahem), waste.

When action finally is taken, it have formed a band called The Dingos, which is currently fast-w will be the taxpayers, not the inning fans around Melbourne. They companies responsible, who will pay for it. Once again we will have a say it’s kinda country . . . situation where taxpayers subsidise

Slow death o f Port Phillip Bay:

The corporate gaggle creates Melbourne ghetto area is far worse than even the worst corporate indifference.

In this western ghetto there is a banana State in South America.

Not only does the State Liberal large industrial park with plants on it from wholly overseas companies -4 government encourage others to act Dow Chemicals — BASF — Total — irresponsibly on the matter of BP and so on. Companies who have pollution, they are also active in it themselves. They have been talking no feeling for the environment here.

Running down the centre of this about building a new power station park is a four foot diameter steel in Newport (near the Williamstown pipeline that all the companies tap ferry) again in the western ghetto. into, and discharge their liquid The plant would use natural gas instead of fossil fuel. The fact that it industrial waste into.

The end of the pipeline runs into will be using natural gas is Kororoit Creek. The end of the interesting, because BHP has found pipeline has nothing on it except a huge deposits of natural gas in Bass grill and a spillway. The end of the Strait, and they desperately need a creek is about three-quarters of a market for this.

They say that domestic use of mile from Port Phillip Bay. Some-' times the end of the pipline runs red, this gas by the whole of Melbourne is sometimes it . runs white and not enough, and they need a bigger market. If the power station gets sometimes it runs green.

The Melbourne Metropolitan built it alone will use as much gas as Board of Works (MMBW) has tested the whole of Melbourne now does.

T.P. Scott, Sir Roger Darvall, B.J. the substances flowing from the pipeline and have positive proof that Callinan. Names that mean nothing what is coming out is untreated until you find out they have industrial waste. Part of the deal with common directorships on the boards the setting-up and running of the of major oil companies, and also of industrial park was that they would the SEC. BHP is in partnership with a not dump untreated waste into major oil company over the natural gas deposits. There would appear to Kororoit Creek.

The MMBW report was quashed be a great conflict of interests in and never published. So the people ^there somewhere.

If the power plant is built it will who are policing the polluters are in actual fact scared of the polluters drop nine tons of nitrous oxide a day and kow-towing to them like crazy. on the city of Melbourne. The sea

useless. They then tried putting popular pressure on the SEC, but the SEC totally ignored them. In desperation they turned to the Builders Laborers Union, who when they found out what was happening put a black ban on the site, and this will stand until the government has an enquiry that the union considers sufficiently independent, on the ecological effects of the power plant.

So what has happened in that suburb is disillusionment with the supposed democratic process, and a combined local effort and union action has emerged, and shown that it has the real power.

An ecoly count, is a measure of how much human excreta is in a body of water: Tests by both Melbourne radio 3XY and the department of Sociology at Monash University, have turned up ecoly readings in Port Phillip Bay up, to 4000 times higher than accepted world safety standards . . . 4000 times past the level where beaches should be closed to the public.

Beaches such as St Kilda. Ricketts Point, Elwood, Mentone, Mordialloc and Frankston — beaches where families go because they are supposedly safe, are actually in­ credible dangers to people’s health.

At these beaches you are actually swimming in raw sewage, that

clay about ten feet down, all this overflow runs along this natural barrier and ends up in the bay.

Regardless of Monsanto’s phenol waste hitting the bay and completely killing it, the bay is practically lost already. Lost not only to large abuse, but to small abuse.. Take the King Neptune Hotel at Frankston. A very large pub that fits probably close to two and a half thousand people in on Friday and Saturday nights. Until eight months ago this hotel didn’t have any sewage pipes. All the waste from their toilets was sent straight into the Frankston sea front. The hotel only stopped this practice after being taken to court by the local council.

Things have got so bad that even the Liberals can no longer ignore it, and they have Set up an Environment Protection Council just three months before the State Elections. The council has said, “Well, we’re trying, but just wait and see.”

There are 20 council members, all picked by the government. When they were picking the members, they went to the Trades Hall and said they could place one member on the council. The obvious choice was Colin Willman, who for years, even before it became fashionable, had been kicking the pollution can. An obvious choice because he had the

Brambles, a big trucking company have as a subsidiary a company that disposes of 80 per cent of legal industrial waste in Melbourne. They do this in two quarries.

One in Springvale, and one near the Tullamarine airport. They use a technique c a lle d Bio-Bedding, which is all very impressive and scientific, but out of the million gallons a month they toss into the Tullamarine quarry, they ‘reclaim’ or ‘clean’ at the most 20,000 gallons. What happens to the other 180,000 gallons th e y dump?

Some probably evaporated naturally, some dries out into sludge, but most of it goes into the water table.

Someone at Brambles is lying. They claim to dispose of waste and they don’t. They also claim they don’t have phenols at their centres; they do.

The state government has called for tenders to build a huge industrial waste-treating plant in Melbourne. The plant will be super-sophisticated, utilizing all the efficient techniques at present known for waste reclamation.

There are two main bids for the contract. One is from ICI (our old friend) and the other is from Brambles. The winner of the tender has yet to be announced, but Brambles has already got it through some political manouvering.

What will happen is that Brambles will have the waste disposal market cornered. They will get a huge tract of land from the government for free, will build the plant and then be able to charge whatever they like to treat waste. It’s an obvious fix.

What should happen is that the Board of Works should build and run the plant, and if there are profits to be made off the companies who have already polluted large tracts of land, then those profits should be used to fix the whole goddam lot up again.

G uru Went to meet my guru in his lavish hotel suite caftan karma clothing sutra sandals on my feet, palefaced pious choirboy pointing to the door, ‘Remove your shoes and headband —crawl across the floor’.

Incense in the carpet ashtray funeral pyre herbal holy ointment helps me cross the fire, man those hare krishnas are heavy handed cats monastic tambourine man screaming where its at.

This one’s even further out five-ton dharma pray to learn to love and serve me instant nirvana.

photo by Sands _

Another big polluter in the area is the Petro-Chemical complex at Altona. People who live near this complex can’t leave their washing out at night, because the companies in the complex discharge illegal waste at night in order to avoid publicity.

The substances discharged into the air are impossible to wash out of clothing. They also cause pitting in the duco of cars, and cause the duco to peel.

In Altona there is a high school and a State school which share a common playground. Four times in the last year these schools have been closed down and the children sent home because the air was so bad that children couldn’t breath. They spent their time running around gasping with burning and itching in their lungs. They were sent away from school to avoid the polluted air, to homes a hundred yards away. A great escape, but if you’re going to go down from the pollution you may as well do it with the rest of the family.

In the last year, there has also been at least one serious explosion at the complex. This was hushed up because there is no protection for the public from these explosions. The complex is surrounded by a chain-wire fence only, and in some places abutts public roads and houses. Initially, there was a buffer zone, but greedy real estate developers and expansions by the complex have eaten it away.

There are ways to control the emissions from the Petro-Chemical complex, and in other countries they have instituted stringent controls over these companies. It is possible, but it requires an expense that the companies here are not going to foot.

They are not going to foot it, because the local government will not pressure them to do so.

The companies have no sense of community responsibility, but that is What a government is for; to make sure companies act in a way that is of benefit to the community, not only to themselves. The extent of government irresponsibility in this

water used in the plant’s boilers will be chlorinated first, in order to prevent algae fucking up the boilers, and then warm and still chlorinated it will be discharged' into the bay at the rate of half a million gallons a minute.

You would think this would mess up the ecological balance in the bay, but according to the Fishery and Wildlife Department you “might lose a few, but some will make it”. This department is not going to act against the power plant because even though they did a study on what effects-it wouldhave on the ecology, they say they don’t really know what will happen until it happens.

There has been very strong local opposition to the plant, and in order to cool this, residents in the area were told that because the plant’s chimney was so high, it would act as an umbrella, and no nitrous oxide would fall on Williamstown, but would be spread over to other suburbs. Unfortunately, the residents weren’t too happy about being the only clean suburb in the area and continue to oppose the building of the plant.

It is also interesting to note that the new plant is not being built in the Latrobe Valley, where all the other power plants for the State are located. The Latrobe Valley is union-controlled, and requires around 1300 men a day to operate a plant. The new plant would require only 100 men a day, and could operate for some time with even half that number. If the plant is built what the government has is a very effective strike breaker, that could cut union strength and bargaining power in the Latrobe Valley.

Williamstown resident opposition to the plant covers almost the entire community. Ages of the organisers range from early 20s, to late 50s, and has been effectively organised to create a concerned group for all issues involving local welfare.

This group tried approaching both the State Liberal and Labor parties but found them totally

extends in a belt up to a mile out to sea.

It becomes frightening when the state of our bay can be taken so lightly. The health department is also taking it lightly, and according to them are incapable of doing anything because they don’t have the staff to cope with, or test for the problem. t he public relations pfficer of the Board of Works (Mr Brindley) indicates nothing will be done about the Bay’s problems until at least 1980, because there has been no financial allocation to the board to solve the problem, and in fact no-one seems to know where the money will come from.

The reason for the shitty state of the Bay has to do with the completely unplanned and uncon­ trolled sprawl in suburb building that has been allowed to go on. Many of the new areas (most of which are in the western suburbs) have no sewerage and no sewage control.

What they have are septic tanks which are overflowing.

Because Melbourne has a layer of

Went to meet my guru in his lavish hotel suite try to find the answer source where all roads meet, glassy eyed devotee fixes in on me trembling in the corner sipping right credentials. The Government lemon tea, rejected him. They said they wouldn’t have him on the council wants to lay it on the line and that the Trades Hall should give this must surely be the way them a list of five names and they magic carpet Christian ride would choose one.

How effective or concerned will throw your ego out today. the Council be when they don’t want Meher Baba, Prabhupada, proven conservationists on the board.

Maharaj Ji, What do they want to hide?

Meanwhile, the dumping of toxic' Rama Krishna, Maharishi, The industrial waste goes on. Small Holy Trinity, companies make a fortune by It’s all the same contracting to dispose of chemical waste when there is n6 way that what’s a name these wastes can be disposed of ships upon the sea. legally. Large companies give them these contracts knowing that the disposal company will rip up a You have a choice man-hole cover and pumping the let’s hear your voice waste into the sewer system under resounding from within cover of darkness.

It won’t be long So far there have been about ten near-deaths when workers J n the the gods are strong sewers have been overcome by your world is caving in. illegally dumped waste. When a death finally does occur, the companies who create the waste will be just as guilty of murder as the company that dumps the waste illegally.

Vietnamese visit The first representatives of the Provisional R evolutionary Government of South V ietnem to v isit . A ustralia, and representatives o f the Democratic Republic of north) Vietnam will arrive in May.

public meeting Hear the Vietnamese speak on the present situation in Vietnam and their struggle for peace and independence.

DALLAS BROOKS HALL Victoria Pde. East Melbourne TUESDAY MAY 8TH - 8P.M

Went to see my guru in his lavish hotel suite lost about a stone or two in the sweatbox heat the smiling man had stopped the fan and ripped it from the wall the devotee said he didn’t mind we should transcend it all, Excuse me sir, I said to him, with his knowing acid stare but words go round and round my head neither here nor there.

Without within there’s no strength the peasant grinds his grain & within without lies the dreams of mortal gain.

Loose the twisting vine in free arc across the sky visions of the freedom head the old must surely die.

Gerald Frape

Pag« 4

The Digger

May 1973

BHP needs workers, fears women:

Why no woman-of-steel?

by Ponch Hawkes

I

It’s growing Grass is third favorite drug in America according to a US national commission on marijuana. A survey taken for the commission last year showed that 30 million Americans about 15 per cent o f the population - considered themselves marijuana users, compared with 80 million alcohol users and 5 7 million tobacco users.

Other surveys have put the percentage of marijuana users at between 11 and 16 per cent including a gallup poll count of 15 per cent.

Research by William McGlothin, for the bureau of narcotics and dangerous drugs (BNDD) shows the annual retail expenditure for mari­ juana and hashish combined is $1.4 billion. Its distribution, he says, is handled through a nationwide chain of some 17,000 wholesalers and 280.000 retajl sellers who are prosecuted at the rate of one in four.

Their customers on the other hand are subjected to a three in one hundred arrest rate.

McGlothin estimated the cost of charging a person for simple possession at $780 in California 1969, although that state’s bureau of criminal statistics recorded the average costs for all marijuana arrests last year at $130 each.

Finally, the US treasury depart­ ment has reported that while confiscation of heroin last year dropped to half the last total, marijuana seizures doubled to 620.000 pounds. Since this is recognised even by customs officials as only ten per cent of the amount of grass successfully imported, the total actually exceeds 6,000,000 pounds or an import average of eight tons a day.

- MIT

Fantasies Regular marijuana users have more frequent and different day­ dreams than non-users, according to a study conducted by two psycho­ logists at Murray state university Kentucky; The researchers said they found marijuana use associated with “fre­ quent intense daydreaming” of hostile, aggressive and sexual fan­ tasies which substituted for acting out the real thing. Regular user fantasised extensively in an attempt to reduce anxiety or as a form of wish fulfilment, they said.

*** • - On the map:' Apart from having, good tennis players, swimmers and Cricketers, Australia is now known for its dope.

In America, a West Coast publication, the Marijuana Informa­ tion Transfer, had an article on the packaged Sunshine grass, mentioned in Digger some issues ago.

Bust Chase In the no-holds barred style of Eliot Ness, U.S. Federal agents are chasing down narcotics pushers for such crimes as tax cheating, serving liquor to minors and having dirty counters in their cafes.

Pursuit of hoods on such unorthodox charges dates back to the days of A1 Capone who was jailed for tax dodging when police could not make murder charges stick.

Attorney, Robert Kennedy, developed the practice to an art when his anti-Mafia drive netted a major gangster with his car trunk full of illegally shot wildfowl.

Now agents of DALE — Drug Abuse Law Enforcement. — are using the same techniques to hail heroin street hustlers who are too slippery to be caught on narcotics counts.

Armed with city health laws, agents are checking out junky restaurants and bars for insects in ice cream machines, dirty counters and scum on sinks; and they are making cases against operators of dope hangouts that serve liquor to minors, operate after hours and water the whisky.

They then turn their information to relevant law enforce­ ment agencies for prosecution.

They’re also busting suspects on tax evasion charges, and hunting down parole busters and jail escapees.

Nixon appointed director, Myles Ambrose, has visited 38 of DALE’S target cities and urged local officials to co-operate with DALE’S in­ novative methods.

In a year’s operation DALE agents are reported to have seized or bought for evidence 100 pounds of heroin, 50 pounds of cocaine, 25 pounds of hashish, 6000 pounds of marijuana and smaller amounts of LSD, amphetamines and smoking opium.

They also claim 3,782 narcotics arrests, 449 convictions , and the seizure of a warehouse full of “implements of crime,” including $714,146 in cash, 788 pistols, nine hand grenades, 292 cars, an anti-tank gun, a cabin cruiser, six machine guns, an aeroplane, and 104 pounds of explosives.

STARCHIE & THUGHEADS “ILLEGAL” IMPORTS (ONLY THE NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED TO PROTECT THE GUILTY) Now Available Brass Balloon — “Cottage of the Unholy” 6.50 Blue Fraud — “Bright Side of the Sun” 6.50 Shallow Red — “ Destroyed Out China (Double live Album) 12.25 Bold Pudding — “Spew It” (Double) 10.75 Alex Cop-Out — “Destitute Pensioners” 6.50 The Bums New Album (Featuring Rod Spew-It) 6.50 Lug Sham and Group (Featuring Bobby Doleful) 6.50 Post and Pack 80c (VP to 3 Records) If you can be bothered sorting out the above crap, write to Box 5159 AA G.P.O. Melb or visit in person under-the-counter at Archie ‘n’ Jugheads, 5 Manchester Lane Melb (Next to source “illegal” books, Dendy “ illegal” movies and Edward Beale “illegal” haircuts).

The W ollongong/Port Kembla/skyline is dominated by the chimneys of the ‘Big House’ or ‘Big Fellow’ as the locals call it, BHP’s subsidiary Australian Iron and Steel. The chimneys of the steelworks spew forth brown smoke into the already heavy pall that hangs over the area.

It’s not a company town like '• in the movies; but A.I.& S. wields enormous power, as the biggest employer in the area, 25,000 people on its payroll.

A.I.& S. has 600 job vacancies at present, 600 jobs for men that is.

To fill the gap it has followed its normal practice and applied to the government to import more migrants to fill those jobs.

Local women, angered by this situation and tired of continual fobbing off of their requests that women be employed to fill these vacant jobs, have started an action program to secure employment for women throughout the s t ee lw or k s industry.

Four w o me n ch a in e d themselves to the wire-mesh fence outside the A.I.& S. employment office, demanding talks with the management and a tour of the steelworks to see the sorts of jobs available. The following week, after their request for an inspection tour had been denied, as was the request made on their b e ha l f by the F ed erated Ironw orkers’ Association, the biggest union concerned with the steelworks, they took further action.

Four women disguised as men, wearing overalls, boots, safety helmets, hair* tied back according to the regulations and with blackened chins slipped past security guards to make their own inspection tour. Despite the fact that they left women’s liberation literature in the works and were ph o to g rap h ed on A.I.& S. property, the steelworks refused to acknowledge their invasion.

Heavy industry is traditionally male work. - The steelworks does employ women in subordinate administrative, clerical, technical, canteen and cleaning jobs and in the tin-plate assorting section.

Jobs are scarce for women

in Wollongong. In February, 1196 w o m en were registered as unemployed; actually the “ hidden* unemployment” figure is at least 5 times that, for example married women who do not register for employment because as their husbands are employed they < would not be eligible for benefits.

Decentralization policies and tax incentives to manufacturers have not succeeded im bringing in m anufacturing female-employing industries to the area. Apart from several clothing factories most women are employed in the service industries, in shops, offices,, as nurses and teachers.

Many single girls drift out of the district, at least 12CT women travel by bus to Sydney every day to work and the rest sit at home trapped in their suburban box-prisons. Employers are able to pay the absolute basic b ecau se of award wa g e competition for jobs. Many retail shops dismiss girls when they turn 18 in favour of their younger cheaper sisters.

One young girl was receiving $18 sweating it out in a clothing factory; she found it more profitable to get a dole cheque of $21. Jobs are advertised and women queue in the streets for them. Several years ago 600 stood in line for jobs in a retail store.

Yet 600 jobs stand unfilled at the steelworks and BHP still refuses to employ women.

BHP has applied to the government for more migrants. It has systematically used migrant labour to depress incomes.

Traditionally the migrant workforce has been the cheap fodder of the steelworks labour force.

The government brings them out for BHP; and as the supply wears down, as the more enterprising get out to higher paid jobs and better conditions, as single men move to the cities seeking companionship, so the time comes for a fresh intake of migrants. The turnover rate in the steelworks is enormous: about \A of the work force per year; union officials quote 100 new employees a week.

With the Labor government this labour supply may not be so readily available to BHP. Mr Cameron, Minister for Labor, commenting on BHP’s request to

bring more migrants to their plant in Whyalla, S.À., said it was “to depress wage levels and conditions.” The Department of Labor has reported that wages and conditions offered at Whyalla are not sufficient to attract Australian workers and are in fact

in peacetime employers would have to pay for establishing amenity blocks, and probably fear women would press for better conditions for everyone, including child-care facilities for the children of steelworkers.

The women have to combine with the trade unions to force entry to the jobs. While the unions have pushed equal pay for equal work (which will be law in January 1974) they have made no initiatives to break down the male domination of industries. The Port Kembla branch of the Federated Ironworkers Association is the biggest union represented in the steelw orks.

Nando Lelli, Italian-born secretary of the F.I.A. wants “equal rights with no privileges for women” , not all the union leadership is so positive.

Many of the rank and file workers have expressed fears about seniority, feeling that women should have to go through the ranks just like the men; there is also the fear that if certain categories of jobs are opened to women they will be the easier ones and men will therefore be excluded from these positions.

There is also the fear that light duties like gardening will be given over to women; these are now held by older men or men recovering from illness.

In the “ unofficial” women’s tour of the steelworks, if was obvious that, while not all the heavy jobs have been eliminated, much has been mechanized and both men and women can be trained to operate machines. It’s because sheer physical labour is inefficient that it has been replaced in industrial processes.

The tough jobs in the steelworks, the blast furnaces, open hearth and th e coke ovens are significantly all filled with non-Engl ish mi grant s.

The argument is always this: “Do you really think that you could work breaking down a furnace in extremely high temperatures?” The answer is that not all men want to do that type of work, and if they don’t, they don’t have to prove themselves. Some women may wish to tackle this work, while others may prefer other types of work. If work is idangerous and arduous, for women, it’s dangerous and arduous for men.

an eight stone female; industrial accidents involve forces measured in tons Wollongong women are fighting for the right to work, to be able to have a choice about being a worker. BHP by its discriminatory hiring policies are

Janne Reed, Kathy Gordon, Ponch Hawkes on the job

b el ow ra te s in A delaide; advertisements for positions are designed to deter applications from Australain workers.

Tubem akers, a local pipe-making plant whose orders were boosted enormously by natural gas expansions, have recently employed 30 women in their plant because they were unable to get men to fill the positions. It was widely publicised this week when one of those women was crushed to death between two pipes. This will obviously be used as an argument against the employment of women in the steelworks: but that’s a distortion of the real issue. It happens every day — another Worker crushed — and it makes the papers (if it’s a man) only in the Deaths column. It usually makes no difference whether the worker is a fifteen stone male or

tying women to their traditional wife/mother roles.

Wollongong Women’s liberation wants vacant jobs to be open to women on an equal basis with men — the only criterion should be ability to do the work. Nobody is claiming that working in the steelworks would be a cushy job: it’s hard work, noisy and dirty and conditions are poor, but if men can take it, so can, women, say the liberationists.

Forces that keep women in the unpaid labor — housework and childcare — range, from legal restrictions concerning entry to apprenticeship schemes through to regulations that prohibit women from lifting more than 351bs weight — most preschool children weigh more than that. Steelworks managed to use female labor well enough during the war when employers had no alternative; now

Trotskyists, anarchists unpopular in Peking:

China has political prisoners too...

by Jill Jolliffe People who regard themselves as socialists have had a hard time squaring up with their consciences the questions raised by the whole boring, ego-tripping, eccentricChristian business of Francis James in China.

It’s too easy to say he was a CIA agent and leave it at that. The tact is that Francis James has never been charged in a Chinese court of law, but has been held without trial for three years.

Can we, then, afford to dismiss Francis James easily? It is easy to say he is a CIA agent. It is neither easy nor palatable for a socialist to account for his story.

What scant knowledge there is about the right to political dissent within China suggests that real wor­ kers’ democracy does not exist there.

Public executions were performed in China up to as late as the ‘Hun­ dred Flowers’ period initiated by Mao in 1957. At that time, there students in Wuhan were accused of organising ‘armed rebellion’ and were executed before 10,000 people. This is reported by both Edgar Snow (one of the few Western journalists acceptable to the Mao regime) and C.P. Fitzgerald, as well as by Sinolog­ ist Roderick MacFarquhar. According to Snow: “MacFarquhar thought that they were singled out because the government was more concerned about disaffection among students — traditionally the leaders of pop­ ular discontent in China — than among any other group.” (“ Red China Today” , p.390) In “ Report from Peking” D.W. Fokkema cites a similar execution during the Cultural Revolution per­ iod. On April 29th, 1966, at the height of 24-hour frenzied Red Guard demonstrations particularly aimed at foreigners, Yang Kuo-ching stabbed two foreigners. On June 13th the verdict and judicial consider­ ations were proclaimed at a Workers’ Stadium in Peking in front of 13,000 people. After suitable mass denun­ ciations (televised) by the 13,000, the death sentence was pronounced and the defendant was led away and immediately executed, as a ‘counter­ revolutionary’.

Those stories do not constitute a picture of a ‘reign of terror’, but they do demonstrate that all is not as it appears in China.

The Fourth International — the movement which directly derives from the Left Opposition in the Soviet Union post-1924 -h a s certain knowledge that members of its Chinese section, some of whom were

founders of the Chinese Communist Party, went into Mao’s jails in the early 1950s. Some were liberated from Chaing Kai-shek’s jails by the revolution only to end up shortly afterwards in Mao’s jails.

In December-January of 1952-53, Maoist secret police conducted sweep­ ing raids throughout China, arresting all known Trotskyists, their friends and relatives. In terms of Chinese law, the arrests and subsequent imprison­ ments were all illegal: there were no indictments, no public trails and no publicity in the Chinese press. Word reached the outside world that some of the Trotskyists were tried at closed hearings on the blanket charge of ‘counter-revolutionary ac­ tivities’ and sentenced to five to ten years hard labor. Others were not specifically sentenced but were to stay in prison until they ‘refor­ med’. Being revolutionaries, they were not likely to denounce their views (that is ‘reform’). About 200 people were thought to be arrested in all.

Some of the prisoners were prom­ inent revolutionaries. *Chen Chao-lin was a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party, bom in 1901. At the end of World War I he worked in Paris with Chou En-lai, and after the Bol­ shevik revolution studied in Mos­ cow’s Communist University of the Toilers of the East. During the 192527 Chinese revolution he played an active role. After its defeat he joined the Left Opposition move­ ment. Arrested by the Kuomintang, he was jailed from 1930-37. After the success of the 1949 revolution, he continued as a political activist in Shanghai, right up to his arrest. If Chen is still alive he has now served 28 years as a political prisoner — seven in Chiang’s jails, 21 in Mao’s. *Chiang Tseng-tung — a workercommunist active in the Shanghai labour movement, he took part in the Shanghai general strike and uprising in 1925. Active until arrested in December, 1952, he is about 60 years old, if still alive. *Chou Jen-sen — a revolutionary intellectual who was arrested in the Fukien port city of Amoy; believed to be imprisoned in Shanghai. *Ho Chi-sen — a Peking student leader in the 20s, Ho was an early member of the C.C.P. During the Northern Expedition of the Kwangtung revolutionary army in 1925-7 he played a leading revolutionary role, along with Mao Tsetung. After Chiang Kai-shek’s seizure of Shang­ hai in 1927, he worked underground to revive the prostrate C.C.P.

In poor health when imprisoned by his old colleague Mao, he is now about 73 if alive. The Fourth In­ ternational believes he may have died in a forced-labor camp.

Other known prisoners include Ling Hwer-hua, an executive member of the Canton Printer’s Union —

Chen Chao-lin. Allegedly imprisoned Chinese Trotskyist leader, photo­ graphed in 1941. sentenced to a hard labor camp m Wuhan for an indefinite term; Ling Sun-chi, a lecturer at Canton’s Sun Yat Sen University arrested in 1953; Wang Kuo-lung, a middle-school teacher believed to be imprisoned in Shanghai, and Yung Kwan a,student activist who spent five years in Chiang’s jails; it is not known whether he is still alive.

These are only a few of the Trot­ skyists known to be jailed in the People’s Republic of China. It is I almost certain that some have died.

As well as the ‘veterans’, many of the younger generation of Trotsky­ ists were jailed — most were sentenced to five to ten years hard labor. Some are believed to have since regained their freedom.

While members of the anarchist movement have not, to the knowledge of their international comrades, been imprisoned by the Mao regime for their dissenting political ideas, they have certainly been hounded and per­ secuted, in particular, during the Cultural Revolution.

The anarchist movement* has a long tradition in China — at the beginning of this century it was a large, thriving movement.

Strangely, t h e ' use of Esperanto played a key role in building the movement. The anarchist press — the Ping Ming press — translated works from Russia, Spain, England, France, Germany, Italy and Mexico per the use of Esperanto. 1944 was the year of Kropotkin’s centenary, celebrated internationally by anar­ chists. In London a slim volume of Kropotkin’s works was published, edited by Herbert Read. The Chinese anarchists’ tribute was to publish the entire works of Kropotkin, trans­ lated by the famous Pa Chin. Need­ less to say, Pa Chin was an Esper­ anto scholar.

Canton was an anarchist strong­ hold from the ’20s, at which time the anarchists had begun to organise in the industrial cities. The anar­ chist movement was established there following a textile workers’ strike and it is exciting to note that during the Cultural R evolution in 1965 and ’66, workers allegedly went on strike in exactly the same places and held the factories with­ out management and control from above.

The anarchist movement was, of course, after the Chinese Communist Party took power, and the raising of slogans which the movement pre­ viously organised industrial strikes around: “ Sack the Party officials!

Sack the Management!” is now a criminal offence under the legal code.

The anarchists were not wiped out after the revolution as they had feared, nor even subject to the jailing and repression which' the Trotskyists xwere. What evidence there is suggests that the anarchists have continued to organise amongst the Chinese people, as well as any illegal movement is capable.

During the Cultural Revolution, however, life-long anarchists from the intellectual wing of the move­ ment were singled out for attention.

The writer Pa Chin (mentioned above) — whose real name incid­ entally, was Li Fei-kan, Pa Chin (in English Ba Kin) being an amalgam of Bakunin-Kropotkin — was one such

victim. Early in his career Pa Chin had been saved from arrest by the Communists only by the interven­ tion of Lu Hsun, a revolutionary writer who died in the 30s and who, ironically, Mao saw fit to dub ‘the helmsman of the Cultural Revolut­ ion’. Pa Chin himself was one of China’s most highly-regarded revolu­ tionary writers.

After having undergone public ‘humiliation’ and ‘penance’, he has been allowed to go on ‘writing’.

What he writes are revised versions of his own works, where pictures of Bakunin, which were invariably on his heroes’ and heroines’ walls, are taken down (presumably replaced

by Mao) and the endings re-written to be ‘less pessimistic’. (Smiling, muscle-bound proletarians looking to the rising sun?)

One other such target of the Red Guards committed suicide. The 80year-old Professor Hsaio was prescrib­ ed ‘re-education’ by the Red Guards in the form of being made to drag the dung cart through the streets. “ In a dignified letter he stated that at his age there was only one answer to tyranny, and that was suicide. He did not agree with his students that the honour­ able task of the nightsoil-carrier was degrading; on the contrary, he said, if they wished to degrade the dung-carrier they should ap­ point him to be their professor. He for his part had carried his load of dung around the lecture-halls long enough, and it was time to end his life, appreciating the in­ tention of the Maoists to humil­ iate him.” (p.22, “ The Origins of the Anar­ chist Movement in China” , publ.

Simian, London, Dec. 1969) Similarly, the revolutionary trad­ itions of Chinese literature, of the women’s movement, of the self­ management movement of the Canton area, of the workers* strikes of the Cultural Revolution, and of the early days of a politically vital Commun­ ist Party, must eventually bear fruit.

But so long as there are political prisoners in Chinese jails, so long as political censorship persists, those traditions cannot be said to flourish and the socialist revolution cannot be said to be complete.

GREG and ROSS NICHOLSON A R E A L IV E AND WELL A T THE RECORD COLLECTOR CNR. TOORAK RD. & D AVIS A VE SOUTH YARRA.

Page 5

The Digger

6

“End sane chauvinism!” : Insane Liberation Front.

Mental hospitals drive you crazy

by Ponch Hawkes Overseas patients have started to organise a Mental Patients’ Libera­ tion Front. It is especially strong in the States with file burning demon­ strations, legal services established, research projects, housing and contact networks set up, the publication of many newletters and the Madness Network News, and a patient’s bill of rights.

Their demands include an end to the existence of mental institutions and the freeing of people imprisoned in them, establishment of neighbor­ hood freak-out centres staffed by ex-mental patients, an end to economic discrimination against people who have undergone psychiat­ ric treatment and the destruction of all records, an end to sane chauvinism, a demand that all suicide laws be wiped off the books.

From the Manifesto of the Insane Liberation Front “We want an end to the practice of psychiatry. The whole ‘science’ of psychiatry is based on the assump­ tion that there is something wrong with the individual rather than with society. We see psychiatry as a tool to maintain the present system.

Rebelling often means being imme­ diately sent to a shrink because of ‘emotional disturbance.’ We see the majority of shrinks a) make money of our problems; b) see us as categories and objects — to them we are an ‘anxiety neurosis’ or a ‘paranoid reaction’ instead of a human being; c) foster dependency instead of independency by making us distrust ourselves and consequent­ ly look for answers in the all — knowing God, the psychiatrist.” *** In Sydney over■ the last six months a group o f people have been conducting inquiries into the psy­ chiatric establishment o f New Southi Wales and all its ramifications. A t the end o f this month their report will be published in National U. It will include transcripts o f interviews with psychiatrists, ex-patients and psy­ chiatric nurses, and what went down when members o f the group entered psychiatric hospitals as “stooge” patients. Ponch Hawkes as member o f the group writes: All that is certain about “mental illness” is that some people assert that other people have it. Psychiatry is everywhere. It’s at the community health centre, next to your butcher shop, it’s advertised in your local paper. It’s your friendly G.P.: “Well, you could do with some more

specialised help. I have a friend, a good man, good psychiatrist, he’ll take care of you.”

It’s in your school or university counselling service, it’s in the courp when the S.M. asks for a psychiatric opinion. It’s at the dole office when you can’t exist in the series of shitty jobs they keep offering you.

The process is all over the media: “Dr X’s casebook” on TV, the Dorothy Dix columns, all sell you psychiatric solutions. It’s in the AIR and it’s especially there with your family and friends who whisper about nervous breakdowns and mental sickness.

We live in a society where the mature man is the one who can hold down a job and provide for his family, where the well-adjusted woman is the one who can totally accept the role of wife and mother.

The ‘good kid’ is the one who has respect for authority. The acceptable homosexual is the one who supresses and hides her/his sexuality and the acceptable old person is one who learns not to bother anyone and quietly lives alone. We’ve learned to accept the killing of each other and the earth, learned to tie down our sexuality, imprison our kids in schools, accept deadening jobs and alienating relationships.

It’s at the established emergency services when you phone up seeking someone to talk to. It’s at the “cool” referral places too: “Sure, we’ve got this shrink. He’s a really hip cat.” It’s in the prison system when they still can’t handle you after they’ve locked you up. It’s at your marriage guidance counsellor or local minister.

They all offer to shunt you into the helping hands of the shrinks. When women seek the basic right to control their own bodies and score an abortion, they are urged to a shrink’s desk.

Psychiatry usually doesn’t take into account your experiences, yourlife-style, your friends, your environ­ ment. It looks at your behaviour in isolation, in a hospital or on the other side of the shrink’s desk.

He/she is always the one who knows, and you are the one who has to ask and seek the answers. It’s hard to say you don’t agree that your ex­ periences could negate the extensive knowledge and training the shrink has. You can’t be treated as an equal in that sort of power set-up; it’s absurd for shrinks to claim they work in a neutral value-free zone, or that they don’t, live in and uphold the values of the society. They have

Get your shrink taped.

Shopping for a psychiatrist

by Robin Winkler

There are enough good reasons to make you think twice before you decide to run the risk of seeing a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist.

But if you are already seeing one or decide that you just have to see someone, the following suggestions might help redress the imbalance of power between you and the almighty doctor.

The therapist is not infallible. He or she is a human being who can lay very heavy trips on people often with the best of intentions and with­ out realizing it.

You are talking with him about fundamental problems of living — you have the right to know who he is, what his attitudes are, and what he plans to do. You don’t go to just any butcher and say, “ Give me any meat, whatever you think is best.”

You make it your business to know what it is you want and whether he is the right sort of person to provide you with service. The same goes for psychiatrists, and more so.

Often people are too intimidated by the medical, mystical trappings; don’t know what questions to ask to check the therapist; don’t know what the dangers are and are often unsure of what it is they actually want.

Perhaps if you ask some of the ques­ tions listed here and keep an eye out for the following clues, you are less

likely to get ripped off.

These ideas aren’t easy to put into practice. You may be very upset, de­ pressed, confused when you visit your therapist. You may feel quite desperate and don’t know which way to turn. When you feel this way, it may be asking a bit much of your-1 self to have the presence of mind to lay back and carefully check out your therapist. But the following ideas could be used in a number of ways: e.g. when you’ve settled yourself and feel more comfortable after a few meetings, ask the questions then; if you are a friend or relative ac­ companying someone going to a therapist, perhaps your friend might want you to help in asking questions.

Although that’s up to your friend.

A lot of people see therapists more than once so it’s never too late to check your therapist out.

Of course it’s always difficult to talk about ideas of what to do to avoid being ripped off, when you don’t know the individual circum­ stances what apply in any one case.

Everyone is different. This is a special problem here, because what we’re talking about is so subtle. For ex­ ample, therapists often subtly pres­ sure you to change your image of yourself to an image you neither want nor agree with; “ I can help you, but first you have to recognise you have a lot of problems.”

Sometimes you really don’t know how others think of you, and it’s positive to hear an opinion from someone else, particularly when yot feel unsure of yourself. If you go in

sets of prejudices just like anyone | else and they may concern you. It’s i no two-way relationship. The shrink | doesn’t tell you if he/she is feeling uptight and down; with a shrink everything is cool all of the time.

You can use the shrinks, to get out of a job, get on sickness benefits, j or sometimes as an alternative to jail or you can use the institutions for | free food and board for a while, but it doesn’t end there because they keep records. Already NSW is moving towards a central computer file of psychiatric records. When you enter an institution a letter is auto­ matically sent to your G.P. and it’s not hard for bodies like the Public Service to get hold of your case file.

(It’s a different scene if you personally ask for a look at what they have been saying and writing down about you). And although they say it doesn’t happen, try getting a job with the Education Department or anything that needs a security clearance. It’s not paranoid to think that this information gets passed around. Psychiatry is not open, accountable or responsible:you can’t appeal the judgements it makes of you. Society places stigmas on mental patients. It has a whole set for ex-mental patients too (remember the McGovern-Eggleston affair) so that people are often forced to be secretive or lie about whole sections of their lives when they apply for jobs or seek housing.

We have also learned to accept the psychiatrists as gurus, to let them say “I’m sane and healthy, you’re not, pay me, and I’ll make you better.”

There’s no doubt that people act illogically, do violence on themselves and others, cry and withdraw; but why is that surprising- behaviour in an unhvable situation? When you’re desperate, depressed and unable to get what you need, you reach out for what is being offered; and psychiatry is being offered all over the place. It’s waiting and saying “we can help you.” It’s not a tool of change but of adjustment and control. It makes you believe your problems are some fault of yours as an individual and not tied up with the type of society we live in . . . But while the situation is often that there aren’t any other alternatives to getting involved with shrinks, it’s a good idea to take a look at what is being offered and what can happen.

If you’re lucky (?) and rich enough and have an interesting case and you can wait long enough for an appointment, you can find yourself in the private therapist’s rooms in one-to-one therapy or in one of his groups or in a private bin. If you can’t afford that, it’s one of the state ¡psychiatric institutions or one of its outpatient clinics in the community.

Institutions have two types of patients: voluntary, when theo­ retically you can leave whenever you please, or scheduled patients which means that in their wisdom the courts or doctors have decided that your departure is not a matter for you to decide.

But mental hospitals drive people crazy. You have to be prepared even at the more progressive institutions to find that sleeping, walking, eating, work, recreation, therapy, visitors, privileges, admission and release are all governed by rules and regulations.

resisting everything the therapist says in order to avoid being ripped off, you may be working against yourself.

It’s hard to make general rules in these matters.

The following ideas are more orien­ tations to be considered when you are seeing your therapist, factors to be considered when making a choice about what and whom to believe.

Often patients don’t realise there is a choice to be made. The ideas we’ll mention here may simply give you more alternatives to choose from, or give you a little more confidence in making a choice.

Ask your therapist what he plans to do. What is it he has in mind when he. sees you? What are his goals? He may answer, “I have no gaols of my own; you are the one who should decide on the gaols.” That’s fine — if you can clear up in your own head what you want to get out of the sessions, make sure your therapist understands, then check what he is doing against what you want.

Don’t let your therapist spring a new goal or technique on you with­ out first discussing with you what the new strategy means. There are many ways to approach a problem, and very often by seeing one therap­ ist you have already closed your options without realising it, because the therapist you’ve gone to has a particular theoretical orientation. He therefore may not consider some approaches you would like to con­ sider. So you might ask your therap­ ist what his orientation is, and then check what he says with trends or methods you know about.

It’s highly likely you will be receiving drugs from your therapist.

Have you been told about effects and side-effects of the drug you are taking? Do you know what the drug is?

Trust your own experience. Often a therapist will get a set picture of you and subtly force you to change your idea of yourself (usually in a negative fashion) or to reconstruct your own experience. He may do this by just failing to respond or pay attention when you say: “ but I just don’t feel that way” . He or she may simply tell you “you feel that way because you have a hang up (you are immature, you hate your father etc.)” or simply judge your experience as ‘wrong’ — that your feeling indicates

Many of your follow patients will feel powerless and hopeless, having bought the line that they are “sick” and can’t help themselves, rather than they temporarily can’t cope or have a different way of perceiving and doing things. Unless you are allowed out to work, most times at psych hospitals there is just nothing to do except watch T.V. maybe, or weave a few baskets in occupational therapy. Often the dope they put you on blocks you out so much you can’t even read, much less do anything else. It leaves you passive and pliable.

Interesting that outside the institution the ‘drug abuser’ becomes a candidate for the bin, once inside they ladle out the abuse, four times a day, call it medication and because it’s their brand it’s OK. A young psychiatric nurse once said to me about a mutual friend: “I never knew what sort of person she was because she was so doped up all the time” . . . You can ask the shrink about what you’re on and w^y and refuse to take it, but that, along with a lot of other rules you might break, are usually taken as signs that you are resisting “getting well.” But unless you are articulate —and many of the working class people who form the bulk of the population of state psychiatric institutions aren’t — it’s unlikely that you’ll see your shrink very often anyway. After the shrink has conducted the initial trial, i.e. examination, and pronounced judg­ ment (read diagnosis) and brings down the sentence, you get the treatment. Subsequent interviews are often quite short, “Are you feeling better”?. But they don’t hear your reply, being too busy writing out the next prescription.

Hospitals usually have group therapy programs too, based on the idea of collective problem solving.

Not much of a collective solution though, with experts, shrinks, social workers and do-gooders running them, and patients having very little say in their establishment or operation. Ask any patient, ex­ patient or psych nurse about what a farce they can be. One group I was in was run by a minister whose therapy technique was to take the last sentence of what you said and ask you what you meant by i t . .. Most patients tried to say as little as possible. But your participation or otherwise was of course noted down. There are always a series of threats over your head; you are reminded that you are privileged to be there receiving treatment in the first place. In liberal institutions, the story is that next time you won’t be allowed such good treatment, you’ll be sent to a harsher institution, or that you will be locked up, confined to pyjamas or restricted in any of the many ways that are possible. ECT, aversion therapy, insulin sleep treatment aren’t things that used to happen, or happen some place else; they are part of the ‘cure’ and treatment being used every day in Australian psychiatric practice. But even in their own terms the treatment doesn’t work; readmission rates are staggeringly high. One nurse told me, “I used to make it a point to say goodbye to all the patients, but I don’t bother now. You know they’ll be back.”

■

you are “ immature” , not making good progress, need extra sessions etc. Be aware of these pressures, point out to him what he is doing (he will often deny it) and evaluate your own experience yourself. Some­ times he may be ‘right’ but often he isn’t. Ask your therapist why he’s avoiding your question and that you want answers, not bullshit.

Therapists often feel uncomfort­ able when you challenge them, and typically respond by interpreting your challenge in psychiatric lang­ uage instead of dealing with it simply as a reasonable question to ask. This can be a very cloying trap — therap­ ists often use psychiatric ploys when they disagree with you and not use them when they agree with you. If this is happening, point it out and label what is happening.

A favourite trick of therapists is to put the onus on you; you have to talk (explain yourself). He just listens.

He judges and that’s legitimate — you judge and that indicates transference problems etc. The result is often an oppressive atmosphere where you feel inadequate, one down and help­ less. He on the other hand, is superadequate, all powerful and in com­ mand. This is not necessary for you to feel better and can be dangerous in that he and you conspire to give him plenty of rope to hang you.

It is reasonable that since you have come to him, you should do a lot of talking but that doesn’t have to result in a heavy one up-one down atmosphere. So, be aware of this danger. If you notice this is happen­ ing, you might tell your therapist — “ Look, you have been doing this . . . this . . . and this . . . You probably aren’t even aware you’ve been doing it.” Don’t let him slide out of it by implying that you must be sick or slightly out of tune for noticing such things. If he does that, point that out to him. If he persists, take notes of what he says during the sessions, so you can be confident when talking about it. Taking notes often will be sufficient to force him into recognis­ ing the seriousness of what you are* saying. As a general precaution and helpful resource, you yourself might tape record your own sessions. Play them back to yourself. Check out what happens in therapy and tell your therapist what you’ve found.

It’s your session and not just his, so

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BURYING THE STR

At 11 p.m. on Tuesday, February 28, Nancy Lindsay, aged 57, was found dead in her bed in the female admission ward at Royal Park Psychiatric Hospital. What follows is a description of the events leading up to her death.

At 3.00 p.m. on the same Tuesday

a 56-year-old woman arrived at Prince Henry’s Hospital in an ambulance. She came from Delgetti Guest House in Park Street, South Yarra. She was at first seen by a qualified doctor now training to be a psychiatrist. The doctor was con­ cerned about the state of the woman and consulted a psychiatrist. Both doctors decided the woman was having an acute schiozophrenic attack of a psychosis. A phone call was made to the central office of the Mental Health Authority to see whether they had any record of the woman. Prince Henry’s was told that there was NO record.

It was later found that in fact the woman was a chronic schizophrenic with a 20-year history. She had spent a considerable amount of time in authority hospitals and had been discharged from Royal Park last year.

She then went to Delgetti Guest House - a private business which nevertheless has the approval of the MHA as a recovery or rehabilitation home for mental patients.

None of this was known by Prince Henry’s. They decided that the woman was suffering an acute psychosis. She was given 200 milligrams of the drug largactil — an anti-psychosis tranquillizer.

The effect of this drug lasts a varying amount of time — depending on the state of the patient. In this case the doctors estimated about two hours.

It was given about 4 p.m. In the meantime Prince Henry’s arranged for the woman to be admitted to Royal Park. The record card sent to Royal Park recorded the diagnosis — psychosis and the drugs administered The woman was “in such a state” at the time when she was being taken to the ambulance to take her to Royal Park that doctors finally felt they had no alternative but to “shackle” her to a stretcher. This is in fact illegal, but they said they felt they had no alternative. The doctors later described the woman as “one of the worst” they had ever had to

Apparently at that time they were ‘all extremely busy trying to get all the patients to bed — a chaotic period. At some time soon after being placed in the room the woman wandered out of her room and entered an identical room twenty yards down a corrider from her own.

She then strangled Nancy Lindsay.

Whatever struggle there may have been was not noticed by the nurses.

The strangled patient was found dead in her bed by nursing staff at about 11 p.m. during a routine check. A doctor later pronounced the woman dead and set the time of death at .9.35 p.m. Police were called in jbefore midnight.

why shouldn’t you tape it? Therapists often tape sessions with clients, so you can too.

When you point out to your thera­ pist the way he is putting himself into a position of power, he may respond with a number of thoughts that he puts across to you like this: “ You put all the blame on me, but really you’ve been asking for this yourself.”

If he comes up with this, then it may be worthwhile to point out that this clearly shows he wants to approve of the assertiveness you are showing by challenging him. In good manipul­ ative fashion he may respond by patronising you thus: “Well, I’m really pleased with your new behav­ iour —it shows you are much better. ” This serves the purpose of putting the therapist back in control. He may even pat himself on the back for bringing about your new healthy progress.

The actual result is that the thera­ pist’s behaviour is not in fact chal­ lenged, and his role has not changed from being one-up and an unchallen­ ged authority.

Another reaction to your challenge may be that you are in his hands and you just have to trust him. He may be thinking he has to preserve his godlike status in order to maintain “placebo effects” , i.e. you have to believe you are getting better in order to get better, and his power trip is necessary to maintain that belief.

You could point out that, if all he is doing is conning you into a false

belief, then he’s not doing much good, and besides, the power trip isn’t necessary to make you believe — person to person discussion, twoway communication is another poten­ tially less oppressive way. You could also point out that therapists often simply like to be in control, and feel threatened if they lost it.

Often judgments are passed off as ‘medical assessments’. What you be­ lieve in is your own business and your therapist’s beliefs are also his business. But often therapists are so convinced of their moral rectitude and you of their authority, that the therapist gives your bram a bit of washing e.g. “If you keep on sleeping around, what can you expect” ; “Wives should go along with their husbands” ; “ Dropping out indicates emotional immaturity” . A favourite trick is to imply, “ Your life style or beliefs are not wrong, but just slightly mentally unhealthy.” This is very insidious and something to watch out for. Most people aren’t very aware of what they believe in until someone challenges them. Ther­ apists rarely ever challenge your be­ liefs. Rather, they obliquely suggest in their psychiatric ‘wisdom’ that the way you live is immature, indic­ ative of hang up etc.

This can be very hard to deal with, even when you recognise it. You may discuss it with your therapist, and both of you may feel happy kbout it, but nothing really changes. You may have to leave because you find

insufficient common ground in your belief systems.

A very heavy therapist is likely to resort to bald statements from his position of authority. “ I am an expert on mental health and I am telling you what you are saying is (check the appropriate one) (1) Es­ capism (b) Avoidance of reality (c) Regression to early childhood (d) Defensive paranoid hostility (e).. . ” Dr other such gobbledygook.

What is really happening is that you live in a way the therapist doesn’t understand and doesn’t ap­ prove of. Your therapist has been so well trained to think he understands everything, and that anything he dis­ approves of is mentally unhealthy or “caused” by some weird psychologic­ al process. Because of his training, he finds it difficult to accept diverse beliefs without shoving them into some psychiatric category.

Through a lot of this, you may feel a little unsure of yourself Check it out with your friends. They often know you better than your thera­ pist does, or at least in a different way. You don’t have to have a de­ gree to be able to deal with problems of living, and often a degree only serves to make things worse. There are probably a lot of people who have experienced what you are exper­ iencing. It’s a fair bet your therapist hasn’t . . . so your friends and people you know have more idea of what you are going through than your therapist.

■

Murder is not uncommon in Victoria’s mental institutions. It happens perhaps ten times a year.

Little is ever heard of the murders.

The assailant is after all a mental patient — a fairly good definition of insanity at the moment of the killing.

On Tuesday, February 28, this year there was another violent death at a mental institution — destined, as usual, “to pass unnoticed through the records of the Coroner’s Court.

The death of Nancy Lindsay highlights the corruption, ineptness and maladministration of the Mental Health Authority - an authority whose arms represent a greater threat to individual freedom than either the police force or our prison system.

The challenge to the methods of psychiatry in general and the Authority in particular is a vital task if the Mental Health Authority is to be changed. But this story is limited simply to incompetence and chaos in a Government department which has been totally neglected by Govern­ ment. The two men who must share the blame for Nancy Lindsay’s death are the Victorian Minister for Health, Rossiter —better known as “Punchy Rossiter,” and the Chairman of the Authority, Dr Stoller.

Digger believes the staff directly involved with the death cannot possibly be charged with the blame.

Their task is a hopeless and thankless one.

The sources for this story haye been many, But it came principally from three people - all closely involved in the institutions and the event. They are a psychiatrist, a psychiatric nurse and a senior police officer. They remain nameless.

handle.

The ambulance arrived at Royal Park at about 8.30 p.m. The woman* was seen by a young doctor who qualified as a doctor over three years ago, and has beln training to be a psychiatrist for about a year. The woman was seen only briefly by the doctor and then given a single room within the female admission ward.

She was not given any further drugs.

At the time Royal Park was carrying out a trial on a new drug. During this period no-one is given any of the traditional drugs as this would invalidate the test. The woman’s room was left unlocked - the normal practice in the ward unless the doctors specifically order otherwise.

The ward itself - which has 31 beds, all of them taken on the evening —is almost per ma nen tl y locked.

Apparently the woman was not seen again by nurses or a doctor in the hour after being placed in the room.

There were three girls on duty in the ward that night — a senior trained nursing sister, a junior trainee nurse who had only recently started working as a nurse and a ward assistant with a considerable amount of experience. They had to look after the 31 patients in the ward plus four patients in the Metabolic Unit which is adjacent to the ward.

P sychiatrists have been sh o ve d in th e h o t seat. W ith th e a n ti- p s y c h ia try w o rks of R o n a ld L aing a n d D avid C ooper n o w a m o n g th e bibles o f the liberated, co n ven tio n a l sh rinks have co m e in fo r lashings.

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tANG LED PATIENT There was no psychiatrist on duty at the hospital that evening — the normal practice. A consultant psychiatrist was meant to be on, call. In fact he went out to dinner without leaving a phone number and was not finally contacted until after midnight and did not arrive at the hospital until after the police had left.

The next morning the “chronic schizophrenic” was transferred toLarundel. It is not known whether she is still there.

News of the killing was first heard by reporters at about 1.30 a.m. on Wednesday, it was checked but no story appeared in the morning papers. The first reports were that a woman’s body had been found in the grounds of Mont Park another Melbourne mental hospital. This was apparently told to reporters by 'police, and was broadcast by radio stations throughout Wednesday morning.

Late on Wednesday morning one reporter was given an off-the-record briefing on the case by a senior police officer. The policeman said a woman had been strangled by another woman — both in their fifties — in the admission ward. He said the woman had been found in her bed. He said the murderer had wandered out of her room and down the corridor to the dead woman’s room. No-one saw her go in or out.

The policeman said he thought it particularly strange that a woman “in that sort of condition” was left alone to wander around the ward. He said the police were completing a report which would be sent almost immediately to the Minister for Health.

In the home of edition of The Herald there was a two paragraph report drawn from the police sheets prepared for the Press. It said a woman s body had been found in the grounds of Royal Park and that she had been strangled. The report also

said a report was being prepared for the Minister of Health. This was learnt from a member of the police.

That afternoon the reporter who was given the Press briefing rang the police officer back and asked whether the woman was found in the grounds or in the ward. He was told: “Look, I’ve told you what happened!

I’m not saying any .more than that.” The same report appeared in The Age the next day.

On Monday a reporter asked the Police Press Liaison Officer if he could look at the original Press sheet on the murder. An officer checked on the file for the sheet but could find none. He told the reporter it was either missing or never placed on the file. The reporter asked him to check the police D24 file.

When the reporter checked back later he was given a sheet reporting the death by strangulation. The original typed, report said found “in A94 ward.” A red circle had been placed around these words and above it the word delete was written. Below in handwriting was written “in the grounds of.”

On Tuesday a reporter approached a senior policeman in the Homicide Squad, and asked to speak to him “off-the-record” about a number of facts he had learnt about the case. The policeman refused, saying as far as the police were concerned the case was complete. He said it was now up to the coroner. He said a report had been sent to the Minister for Health in the middle of last week.

Meanwhile on the Friday and the Monday, staff at Royal Park had been told by their superiors that they were not to discuss the case — even amongst themselves. The Statei Psychiatrists’ Association also held a committee meeting to discuss the case and decided that it should not be allowed to come to public notice.

The Association is extremely critical of the way the MHA is being run and

in particular the support being given by the State Government. But the psychiatrists felt publicity of this death would not help their case.

They felt it would simply lead to restrictive and harmful security and a search for scapegoats amongst junior staff. They pointed to the case of Graham Young, the poisoner in England.

(There was a political storm in Britain last year after it was found that Graham Young had murdered several of his work mates by poisoning them. Young had been released from prison following psychiatric reports that he should be given his freedom. Young had been in prison for eight years after being convicted for murder by poisoning when he was 14. Politicians on both sides of the House of Commons demanded that procedures and security in Britain’s psychiatric prisons and hospitals should be strengthened.)

By law there must be a coroner’s inquiry into Nancy Lindsay’s death.

Initially, an official of the court said the inquiry was likely within three or four weeks. *** Last week an official said the inquiry will not be for three or four months. He said the autopsy e xa m i n a t i o n ' by Government pathologists had shown no cause of death. The inquiry will be held at Royal Park and although the Press is allowed to attend, none of the major newspapers have ever attended the inquiries held at Victoria’s mental hospitals.

A reporter called Mr Rossiter to ask him about Nancy Lindsay’s death. Rossiter replied that he knew “nothing about it whatsoever,” that the police had not given him a report and would not be giving him one.

The only report, he said, would go to the Coroner and the Mental Health Authority. “It’s nothing to do with me,” he concluded.

■

Psychiatry is social control. And certification provides the most obvious weapon of control: when people who are “causing trouble” in society are removed and locked up.

Those who are “recommended” are taken —forcibly if necessary —to a psychiatrist or a mental hospital.

There they stay until the doctors decide to free them. If someone is “recommended” to a short-stay psychiatric hospital, certification lapses after three weeks. But of course the doctors can certify the person again.

If someone is recommended to a long-stay mental hospital, the certi­ fication lasts for an indefinite period.

The Mental Health Act in Victoria and similar acts in other states sets out procedures for what is politely called “recommendation” (certification) of patients. Basically a person can be “recommended” to a short-stay hospital if two doctors think he/she appears to be mentally ill.” (Mental Health Act (1959) of Victoria). The Act defines “mentally ill” as “suffering from a psychiatric or other illness which substantially impairs mental health.”

Obviously the anti-psychiatry attack on the concept of mental illness hasn’t reached the ears of the legislators. Anyway, for the purposes of certification it is left pretty much to the doctor to decide what it means to be mentally ill.

And the presence of, or appear­ ance of “mental illness” is sufficient for certification. It is not necessary for the doctor to believe that hospitalisation will make the person less “mentally ill.” The doctor could believe that hospitalisation would make the person more “mentally ill,” but the doctor would still be legally justified in certifying the patient.

Unless the “patient-to-be” is already in an institution, most certifications are carried out, not by psychiatrists, but by GPs or the Police Surgeon. These people are called in for an opinion by relatives, friends or police officers who have apprehended somone acting bizarrely in a public place. In other words, certification procedures are set in motion when someone else is disturbed by or cannot cope with the behaviour of the patient-to-be.

What all this means is that certification procedures are often instigated for the benefit of just about everyone except the patient.

Certification results in removal of a person who is disturbing in one way or another and benefits those who are left behind. If the patient also benefits, this more or less an accidental by-product.

This article is not really concerned with the legitimacy or otherwise of such methods of social control.

(After all, what do you do when your husband beats you half to death and threatens to kill you if you leave him?) The point is that certification decisions are often made for the benefit of society and that they may or may not turn out to benefit the patient.

And this fact highlights the total inadequacy of the present provisions for appeal against certification. If a person is threatened with prison he/she automatically gets an open court hearing and a right of appeal (no matter how imperfect). When a person is certified all he/she gets is a rather vague provision under which

Psychiatry as a social prison

Bending heads for a better society

by Anne Graham

he may try to get his case brought before a judge — a provision which no-one knows about and the terms of which are quite inadequate. In any case it’s hard to arrange legal proceedings from inside a mental hospital, and if your relatives asked for you to be certified in the first place they’re not likely to help you to appeal. In the extreme case a certified patient may be kept in solitary confinement in the back ward of a mental hospital where he is legally required to be seen by a doctor at least once in every year!

The use of psychiatry as a method of social control may be a particular feature of prison settings. There is some reason to believe that prisoners are placed in psychiatric sections of prisons or transferred to mental hospitals when it suits the prison authorities, irrespective of whether the move will benefit the prisoner.

At Pentridge in Melbourne the Classification Committee has the task of allocating newly convicted prisoners to the various divisions of Pentridge and to Victorian regional prisons. At a classification meeting last year, one prisoner was allocated to G Division (the psychiatric section) with the comment that “we can’t have a madman like that running loose in Pentridge.” (!) This comment suggests the decision was made largely on the basis of the needs of the authorities. At the same meeting another prisoner asked to be assigned to G Division on the grounds that he was suicidal and desperately wanted psychiatric help.

His request was refused.

Under the Mental Health Act a prisoner may be certified and transferred to a mental hospital. An article in Digger No. 14 by a former inmate of Pentridge suggested that the prisoners who caused too much trouble around the jail were the ones likely to be certified. In Victoria the final place to which troublesome people can be transferred is J Ward, Ararat. (J Ward, the ultimate in custodial psychiatry, is described elsewhere in this issue.) *** There is a lot of confusion about whether therapy is liberating or oppressive. This confusion arises partly because there are so many different therapies. The film Family Life presented two vastly different psychiatric approaches and illus­ trated the wide range of activities which all come under the general name of therapy. So it is not a matter of whether therapy is liberating or oppressive but rather what kind of therapy is liberating.

In recognising society as a source of oppression it is important not to overlook the fact that what was originally a society-imposed restric­ tion may become a self-imposed restriction. Take for example, the way a girl-child is socialised into the feminine role. Not only does society expect a woman to be submissive, to wait to be asked, to defer to men etc., a woman comes to expect these things of herself. Not only does society say “a man doesn’t cry,” but a man comes to believe this himself.

He then feels ashamed if he cries, not just because society frowns on it but because he himself frowns on it.

In response to their experiences in society many people suffer from severe depression and feelings of worthlessness. Society encourages us to distort our anger, to turn it against ourselves or against certain approved anger-targets or scapegoats. We get angry at ourselves for not living up to our own expectations, which were originally society’s expectations.

When a woman doesn’t feel happy staying at home all day with the children, she may torment herself with the idea that she is a bad mother. In effect she is punishing herself for not living up to her expectation that she would be happy staying at home with the children.

She doesn’t get angry at the women’s magazines or at the neighbours who tell her that she should be happy at home; she doesn’t get angry at the government for the lack of child-care facilities which prevents her from leaving the home. She gets angry at herself.

When people fail to live up to their own expectations, they tend to feel pretty worthless. This feeling is reinforced by a society which looks down on people who aren’t making it in society’s terms. It can spiral to the point where people feel so worthless and hopeless, they feel powerless to help themselves.

If therapy can help people to recognise their own worth as individuals, to recognise that they do have some power to act (limited though it may be); if therapy can help to release anger which has been turned against the self so that it may be directed at its proper targets, then therapy is liberating.

A liberating therapy is one which aims at freeing the individual to

choose his own directions in life; it is a therapy which values individual choice and freedom from selfimposed restrictons. After such therapy an individual is not free; he is still subject to the oppressions of society. But he is better able to correctly locate the source of oppression and to take appropriate action.

Where do you find such therapy?

More likely outside of a hospital than inside i.e. you are more likely to find it among psychiatrists working in private practice or at some govern­ ment clinics. Possibly the only way really is to ask around amongst people who have been in therapy.

Some women’s centres and gay centres may be able to offer suggestions.

And now for a word about drug therapy — by far the most common form of therapy inside hospitals and still common outside of hospitals.

By itself drug therapy does nothing to increase people’s aware­ ness or understanding of themselves or their situation. It does nothing to encourage people to confront either their personal or environmental problems. However drugs are essen­ tially a tool and like any tool they may be put to all sorts of uses. A person who is extremely anxious or extremely depressed may become more capable of confronting prob­ lems or taking action if given a drug which anxious or depressed feelings.

In this way drugs may sometimes play a role in enabling people to make changes in their lives. But the drug itself does not encourage a person to make changes or take action; while the person may become more capable of acting he/she will not actually do anything unless already motivated. Indeed the use of drugs alone may decrease a person’s motivation to take action or make changes because drugs make it easier to tolerate his/her present situation.

All too often drugs are used to make the patient feel better (or even just to keep the patient quiet so as not to disturb the rest of the hospital), without any attempt to encourage him/her to explore and perhaps change the unsatisfactory life situ­ ation.

The question of what drugs can and cannot do has been clouded over by propaganda from the drug manufacturers. This propaganda is directed to GPs as well as to psychiatrists. As a result, in Australia today GPs probably prescribe a greater volume of psycho-active drugs than do psychiatrists.

Drug manufacturers feed' off people’s unhappiness. Through their propaganda, they encourage a doctor to think “a drug will fix it,” to think that there is no need to enquire further into the sources of a person’s unhappiness. Drug manufacturers are creating a climate where drugs are seen as a cure for everything. Not only does this discourage people from seeking other ways of combat­ ting their problems, but it con­ tributes to Australia’s high rate of addiction to to psycho-active drugs, to accidental drug overdoses by children and probably to the suicide rate.

Australia has one of the highest suicide rates in the world and overdose of drugs is the most common method of suicide. The ready availability of drugs makes it

easy to act on what may be only a momentary impulse to suicide. *** Psychiatry as a specialist “body of knowledge” about people and the way they live gradually spreads out to become part of the general moral and philosophical climate of our society. Psychiatric ideas and con­ cepts gradually become part of society’s world view, part of the prevailing norms and values.

You may not be an expert in the sociology of knowledge, nor entirely understand how this process operates. But you can look around and see that it happens. A classic example would be the effect that Freud’s writings had on the norms and values of society earlier this century. Of course as theories are popularised and spread out into society they may become changed and/or simplified. The original theorist doesn’t have complete control over the propanganda process.

In general it is still true in our society that mad equals bad. It is bad to be mad, , mentally ill, psychotic, neurotic etc. Madness is also strange, foreign, something we don’t understand and therefore frightening. Conventional psychiatry with its techniques for labelling people does little to make madness more understandable and therefore less frightening. The fact that madness is both bad and frightening lends special power to the propa­ ganda of psychiatric theories. When psychiatric theories describe what it is like to be “mentally healthy” we tend to accept these ideas as a blueprint for living. These theories tell us what we ought to be like, how we ought to live. Even if a theory just repeats what is already an established norm in society the theory gives extra legitimacy to the norm. A person who doesn’t fit the norm feels he is not just different, he is “neurotic” or “sick.”

The women’s liberation move­ ment has attacked psychiatry for propagating the view that women are naturally passive, submissive, and find their fulfillment in home and the family rather than in any other kind of work. If a psychiatrist wishes to describe the way people behave or function now in this society then that is fair enough. But some theorists, not content with this, go on to assume that the way people are in this society is the only “natural” way to be, indeed the only “healthy” way to be. They do not merely say that in our society women tend to be passive (and perhaps relate this to certain factors in society); they say that women are by nature passive. In this way psychiatry is reinforcing the prevailing norms about the nature and role of women. Furthermore a woman who doesn’t fit the norm is not just different. She is neurotic.

The gay liberation movement has attacked psychiatry for contributing to the oppression of homosexuals. In regarding homosexuality as an illness or a neurotic symptom, psychiatry has perpetuated and reinforced the already prevalent view that homo­ sexuals are somehow either dangerous or inferior or both. In addition it indirectly helps to keep many men preoccupied with the need to appear virile and to engage in a somewhat aggressive form of heterosexuality.

On the other hand it seems to me that psychiatry, or at least psycho­ analysis has made certain contri­ butions to the liberation movements.

First of all historically, Freud’s theory of the sexual basis of much of human behaviour did a great deal to bring discussion of sex out into the open. This was partly because of what the theory actually said and partly because of the way it was interpreted by others. But in any case, Freud played an important part in precipitating us out of the . Victorian era and into an era which is somewhat more accepting of the sexual nature of human beings.

More importantly, even though psychology and psychoanalysis have contributed to the oppression of women and of homosexuals, they have also provided ius with the theoretical concepts necessary for an analysis of that oppression. The insights gained by psychology and psychoanalysis allow us to see that the most subtle way in which society oppresses us is by getting us to oppress ourselves.

■

J Ward end o f th e lin e The ultimate in custodial psy­ chiatry takes place at J Ward, Ararat.

J Ward is the last ditch for hiding those whom the authorities would like us to forget. It is a maximum security ward catering for both convicted prisoners and non-prisoner patients who have been “ too difficult” for other mental hospitals to handle.

Built in 1860 as a prison, J Ward was transferred to the Lunacy Department in 1886 as a temporary measure to alleviate overcrowding in Victoria’s asylums. In 1908 the Inspector General of the Insane declared that its continuance as an adjunct to a mental hospital was “barbaric.”

The only structural changes since that time are the new, thick, bolted, steel doors and the addition in 1963 of a new wing consisting of 14 single rooms, a little more comfortable than the original 43/. Each cells in the main block measure about 10ft. by 8ft., is cold, damp and unfurnished except for a bed. There is no sewerage or lighting, only a small, barred window high up in the corner of the high grey walls. Patients are

woken at 7 a.m. and locked up at 7.30 p.m. No possession are allowed to be taken into the cells, and patients must undress in the corridor under the scrutiny of nurses.

A psychiatrist from Ararat Mental Hospital visits J Ward one half-day per week. “Treatment” consists of tranquillising and anti-depressant drugs and ECT (shock treatment).

The main aim of treatment appears to be to keep the patients quiet. The objectives of the nursing staff are custodial. Focus is on prevention of escape, avoiding troublesome out­ bursts and “minimising suicide risks.’ Suicide attempts are ap­ parently quite common.

Supposedly some patients at J Ward are voluntary. What this means is that a patient has been transferred from the certified category to the voluntary category administratively and without the patient’s knowledge.

Should he discover his new status and try to exercise his right to leave “a certificate would be slapped on him.”

In 1972 when this information was collected, two 14-year-old boys ,were among the patients in J Ward.

Page 8

The Digger

The Social Roundsman:

O ut o n th e to w n w ith Jesus and Gazza

by Alistair Jones

may not digest easily with hard-core

Will the wonder of Superstar rock aficianados but may grow in popularity with more conventional never cease? Currently in popular music fans. He also has a Melbourne for a limited season, cover of Rod Stewart “ Handbags and with the offer of half price Gladrags” on Sydney top 40 radio. admission for children , the show The potential in Superstar for is basically the same as it was promoting the careers of its players when originally staged by Jim has always been a viable epiphany for Sharman in Sydney. Sharman any young performer’s agent. Jon now works in London and English, Michele Fawdon (Mary claims he will never return to Mag.) and Trevor White (Jesus) are the contemporary counter­ these fair shores. And Reg possibly parts of Gladys Moncrieff or more Livermore, veteran of Su p er­ recently Jill Perryman and any others s ta r ’s reckless cousin H air and who rose to local stardom as leads in countless other shows, has the heyday of the J.C. Williamson joined the company as a tap musical.

The course of the show seems dancing King Herod. Liver­ more effortless these days. A more’s polished cameo, that breakdown in backstage communica­ which he would wryly dismiss tion when the lighting board fused as a collection of old tricks, one night in Sydney, which rescues a structurally weak precipitated the untimely release of fire curtain-and an abrupt halt to second act from a possible the the show in mid-song, seems unlikely descent into the egg-crate. to be repeated in Melbourne, Unlike the Hair barrel of monkeys, backstage spirit at Superstar has the tension of ambitious young careers trying to go places.

There is no dope smoking backstage in the Miller productions these days.

An edict was issued from above, calling for instant dismissal of any company member discovered con­ suming dope on the premises. A series of awkward negotiations with the Narc. Squad over past wrangles, chiefly with several members of the Hair cast, necessitated the official ban.

Fortunately, the administration of the edict has been tempered with compassion by an humane stage management staff. An early offender received a forty dollar fine rather than have his career endangered. If the word gets around in legit, theatre that you’ve been busted, Actor’s Equity can have you disowned and the prospect of future work grows slim.

An early prediction that record­ ing contracts and future musical work could be the cast member’s prize for work in Superstar seems to have come true. John Young (Annas) released a light and balmy single entitled Pasadena with considerable top 40 success. Jon English (Judas) has recently released a slickly evocative album, Wine Dark Sea hip but smooth nightclub stuff which

however much a sudden darkness adds to the atmosphere of miracles.

Similarly, the feeling that tonight just might be the night that Jesus or Judas could actually get strung up through an incorrectly connected harness (a scare more than once in Sydney) has faded as the company grows in experience. The unfolding duodecahedron so popular for entrances has been negotiated far too many times to have much chance of severing a leg.

It’s the same old show. An entertaining, if impersonal spectacle with some moments of classy rock’n’roll. Both Jesus and Judas have moments when their vocal antics are breathtaking, Michele Fawdon’s Mary Mag. is engaging if something less than gutsy, ex-Easybeat Stevie Wright has a speedy cameo as Simon the Zealot, Reg Livermore’s song and dance Herod is a magic moment of high-camp theatre, Ponty Pilate is dynamic and the costumes are some of Rex Cramphorne’s best. If the show prompts any thought, it might be the tenuousness of the tightrope trod by the popular hero, particularly if he or she wants to be both longliving and effective.

Give God a burst. Pull your arse' out of that puddle called keeping the home fires burning and encourage a dove to settle on your head. Do.

Recently, four young ritual magicians representing Fire, Earth, Air and Water were apprehended, by officials from a university in Sydney, fo r performing a ritual based on the Qabalah in the sound-proofed langu­ age laboratory.

They had taken in with them full ceremonial apparatus, including symbolic robes, swords, a brazier containing charcoal for burning incense, a number o f lamps for illumination, a small altar on which was placed a ceremonial cup and a symbol for the Rosy Cross.

The ritual was taken .from an obscure book by the notorious magician Aleister Crowley, and was designed to invoke into visible appearance the spirit o f Intelligence, Taphthartharath.

more to it than that.

Western magic is the product of a certain type of mystical thinking which, has Prevailed for thousands of. years/’r and 5Swhich has h^d its outpourings in certain of the world’s great religions: Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Orphism; in some of its major heresies like Gnosticism, Catharism and Mithraism, and in the Greek philosophical systems which eventually helped to form Neopla­ tonism - among whose members could be found Iamblichus and Julian the Magician. This type of thinking sees the Creation as a type of unfolding process. In the Beginning, a type of pervasive latent unmanifested Energy is the sole Reality. Gradually, by a process of precipitation, variable images and creative potencies become more tangible, and progressively more “real” or physical, until we arrive at the manifested Cosmos as we know it in our dimension.

Thus in the Persian Gathas, allegedly written by Zarathustra himself, Ahura-Mazda is seen as the Creator of all things, and encom­ passes both Good and Evil, which proceed from Him as- the basic conflict of all life forms in the battle

by Neville Drury Anyone who has seen the film “ Rosemary’s Baby” could be ex­ cused for supposing modern Western magic to be nothing more than something quaint performed by decadent suburbanites on a rainy Sunday afternoon. However, there is

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Though if Christ had turned fewer cheeks and more boulders into bread, Judas might well have been able to pull off a witchdoctor’s coup and negotiate something truly splendid for the Prince of Peace, or so Superstar suggests.

But Jesus was just impossible; you may be a star Johnny Angelo but if you want to keep your vassals loyal, you have to get out there and win them and keep on winning them.

Miracles may be cheap tricks and beneath the dignity of a deity, but they sure pull a good box office.

Judas spins off the J.C. carousel and from his position outside the action, decides that the times are most Certainly out of joint and that the J.C. course is attracting so much attention that things can only get more chaotic. Perhaps Judas, for all his flash and panache, was a homebody at heart and unable to keep pace with the hurly-burly of being alive.

Don’t you remember me Jesus?

It’s your old buddy Judas, the one who has been around since you first started publicising this initiative. It’s been a lot of fun buddy, but you seem to be taking it seriously all of a sudden; you’re believing your own PR. Stop upsetting the ox carts and budgerigar cages and call it off before we all get hurt. It’s grown too big and it’s about to peak. This plum is too ripe.

The other disciples were spending a lot of time around a table set for 13, either unaware that this was supposed to be a final occasion of some moment or too intoxicated with their own revelling spirit to care. Come on baby let the good times roll. And when this hoo-hah has sorted itself out they sing, we’ll set about dashing off some gospels so that people will still talk about us when we’re gone; by the time I get to see you I’ll be riding on my own, but I guess I’ll tag along for the ride.

How soon they forgot the fishes and the loaves. But the tight-lipped arrogance of the skinny, befreckled schoolboy who spends the football practice taking violin lessons and the music classes harping about his schoolmates’ lack of earnest involve­ ment as listeners, rarely captures the imagination of the populace; and when the personal staff of the Christ campaign were looking for re­ assurance from their leader, he reviled them for their lack of faith and claimed that he knew they wouldn’t last. Of course they are going to piss off on him because it’s sure no fun around here.

And the rabble? They dutifully trudge across the twilight skyline one minute with a Hey Sanna, Ho Sanna, or hang about looking for gossip and miracles the next, or flee the temples

when J.C. gets heavy or run with Caiaphas when he’s putting on a good show. Well-known thief .and bad person, Barabas, got his freedom swapped for J.C.’s incarceration with the support of the rabble. Perhaps King Herod had it in perspective when he challenged J.C. with “If you’re so cool then walk across my swimming pool.” You’ve got to earn ’dem freebies brother.

Mary Mag. was doing her bit to keep the girls loyal, but the ladies in those days didn’t count for much.

Their lot was to bear the kids, draw the water and knead any bread they got; Mag would’ve needed any she had left from her strolling days around the Galilean docks, to keep body and soul together and be free to be with her man at rallies, personal appearances and on his arm at receptions.

So Friday came and that uneasy

May

coalition of Ceasar’s Pilate and Caiaphas (with elders) executed the machine;which sent our boy away for the weekend. And the rabble, for the most part, were rousing for the old guard.

What happened after that is between you and your confessor.

The Superstar story leaves Christ hanging there like freshly rinsed smalls. The rabble, led by the spirit of a recently suicided Judas wearing what appeared to be a lurextrimmed, Essendon football guernsey with legs and plunging neckline but what was possibly the Jester’s costume from Aleister Crowley’s pyjama party for Mick Jagger, swing into a rallying finale asking why J.C. chose “such a strange time in such a strange land” when he could’ve laughed the campaign in today with all the marvels of telecommunication

Gary G litter: never to be seen again?

Amongst the forgotten arts:

between growth and decay. This concept found its way into Gnosti­ cism which was a type of pagan Hellenistic reaction to Christianity.

But it borrowed the deity Abraxas from the Persian god of Time, Zurvan, and embodied in him the quality of both good and evil.

Judaism, in its esoteric form of the Qabalah, placed central emphasis on the symbolism of the Tree of Life as the basis of modern Western magic.

Briefly, though, the Tree consists of three Pillars representing the active, the passive and their harmony. The act of Creation, according to the ancient Qabalists, proceeded in a type of “lightning flash” which zig-zagged its way down from the “pure energy” level to the physical level, through all the levels on the Tree of Life.

These levels could be referred to in one sense as levels of conscious­ ness. Man, or at least mystical man, has to retrace his way upwards from his lowly restricted' state of being, if he would gain what has elsewhere been referred to as Cosmic Con­ sciousness.

It may not be immediately obvious where magic fits into all this.

The answer is that the magician determines by an act of will to undertake a journey which is the exact reversal; Of the “lightning flash” , and which will systematically enlarge his consciousness.

At this point it is necessary to refer to a concept which has fallen into academic disrepute, particularly among behavioral psychologists, and that is Carl Jung’s idea of Archetypes. According to Jung, man has been subject throughout his existence to certain recurring physical phenomena! These include the witnessing of the passage of the sun through the sky each day, its “death” at nightfall, and its “rebirth” with the new dawn. He has also witnessed the rage of the elements: wind, flood, uncontrolled fire, perhaps caused by lightning, the unpredictable nature of a landslide, and has formed as. part of his thinking processes the notion that nature is the embodiment of forces in flux. Consequently, he visualised these forces in an anthropomorphic way so that they were personified as deities.

Jung claimed, as a result of his psychoanalysis of dreams, that imagery was present in the subcon­ scious of each of his patients that could not be attributed to purely individualised memories, but which, in a sense represented a type of primeval mythology. Deep in all of our minds are subconscious rep­ resentations of the sun, moon, planets, elements, and of the basic experiences of growth, decay and

rebirth, personifications too of the represented mystically as the descent Great Father and the Great Mother. of Spirit into Matter, the female has Jung called these profound images, always been portrayed in unflattering which have inspired art, music and terms, as the embodiment of matter poetry, “Archetypes”, and it seems fmaya: illusion) as the sad Mother to be the case that many of the (Mary) and as negativity. Above both major religions of both East and West the Father and the Mother is the have produced deities which cor­ Origin, Kether, and these form the relate. Heinrich Zimmer for instance, Trinity. Beneath them lies the compares Shiva and Shakti, the Great Garden of Eden, with its four rivers, Father and Mother, with the Greek Chesed, Geburah, Hetzach and Hod, Zeus and Hera, and the Chinese Yang converging in Tiphareth, the Divine and Yin. We find universally deities Offspring who resides in the centre which symbolise rebirth too: in of the Tree of Life. Beneath these in ancient Egypt Osiris, in Hellenism turn are Netzach which represents Persephone (the new seed of wheat), nature and love, Hod its opposite, and of course Christ. The archetype symbolising rational intellect, Yesod is the “core meaning” , for individual seat of the imagery of the lower cultures impose their own particular subconscious, especially the seximagery. In medieval Europe, Christ instinct, and finally Malkitfi rep­ was represented as wearing robes and resenting physical manifestation. a crown appropriate to that era, and In Western magic, especially that an Eastern devotee could very well of the important occult order The visualise Christ with Asiatic features, Golden Dawn, the magician follows without invalidating the basic the journey of the archetype from symbolism. , Malkuth up to Tiphareth, which To return to magic: the magician symbolises spiritual rebirth. To do visualises his aim as a mental journey this, he must imagine that he is into the subconscious where he will partaking of the nature of each of experience visions of deities, or the gods in turn, and embodying into archetypes, which will in turn his own nature their very being. This revivify him, or provide him with is what a ritual is all about. It will realisations which he had not made control all the circumstances which before. He uses as his philosophical will assist him on his mental journey basis, the Qabalistic/Judaic Tree of of the imagination. It will embody all Life because by its very nature, it. the symbols and colors of the god, allowst a sort of compartmentalising the utterance of his magical Names or structuring of the deities which he of Power, the taking of a relevant hopes to encounter in a systematic sacrament (hallucinatory or other­ exploration of the subconscious wise), and the burning of incense imagery. According to the esoteric whose nature is conducive to the Jewish teachings, the Tree of Life deity concerned.

The magician stands in his represented in a metaphorical way, which represents the the Body of God. Since man was Temple, created in the image of God, he had Universe. He enters, and redefines within his subconscious all of the the magical Circle as the boundary imagery personifying all of the levels within which all creative activity or of consciousness reaching up to the manifestation occurs. He will ex­ highest level of “oneness” with the ercise considerable concentration so Godhead. In the Qabalah these levels that he is the master of all that is of consciousness, or “sephirah” were invoked. Upon the Altar within the designated in their order of mani­ Circle are placed a cup of Holy Oil, festation: Kether, the Crown; Chok- •The Wand, the Sword and the mah the Father, Wisdom; Binah, the Pentacle, familiar to those who have observed the symbolism of the Tarot Mother, Understanding; Chesed, trump, The Magus. The magician Mercy; Geburah, Severity; Tiphareth, the Son, Harmony and Beauty; wears a Crown, representing aspira­ Netzach, Victory; Hod, Splendour; tion to the Divine, a Robe (anonymity), a Breastplate contain­ Yesod the Foundation, and Malkuth the Daughter, and Kingdom (female ing appropriate magical ciphers, and representative of the Creator/ holds his Holy Book from which he reads texts relevant to his Ritual. All “ Mother Earth”). of his actions and all of the apparatus, These ten aligned themselves into the three Pillars which have already of his ceremony are designed to been mentioned, the outer two being inflame the imagination in a the Pillar of Mercy headed by the controlled way, to bring under the Great Father, and the Pillar of magician’s control deified aspects of Severity headed by the Great his own subconscious.

Mother. Regrettably, from the The magician imagines that he has viewpoint of Women’s Liberation, become the deity whose forms he has the male is symbolically the giver of imitated in ritual. The process of the life-force and the female the gods ruling man is now reversed so receiver. that the magician controls the gods.

Since traditionally this was also It is now the magician who utters the

at his disposal. The justification of Looks a bit of a dag! Awesome Judas is spirited but specious and thighs, bulging midriff and barrelprobably crass. chest all bound in glitter and perched Meanwhile, back in Melbourne, atop a battered pair of seven-inch, Harry M. threw a $17,000 opening silver platform soles which would night party which began after the look funky on Elton John but seem1a show with champers and celebrities bit orthopaedic on Gazza boy. Even at the new Palais de Danse next door his hairdresser has been defeated. to the theatre and proceeded when But it’s sorta fun. Stomping and that piss was consumed across to hollering that you love him, clapping Luna Park for more alcohol, free and stamping with this absurdly rides, Hot Dog and Sherbet and an enthusiastic construction crew. And endless supply of hamburgers and Gaz is working so hard; seehimsweat, chips. Just everybody was there, see him giggle, see him bound with Bazza Humphries’ favorite depilator beefy hips and grind his ample loins.

Steph. Deste wearing a set of cats-eye A likeable sort of person. spectacles with three diamenteEach song is alarmingly similar, studded layers of eyfebrow shaped perhaps identical; if his records are pieces mounted in parallel lines laid down in a wind tunnel, his stage across madame’s imperious forehead, act is excavated in a coal mine. Two Jeff Bate in dinner suit and drummers pounding in straight 4/4 gumboots, sports baron Ron Casey unison (the heart beat of a draught with a singed jacket (courtesy of a horse), a bass guitarist clambering up notorious Truth reporter) and all the and down the beat, a guitarist with favorite television personalities. And three differently shaped axes and all while this whooping was going on — of them ineffectual and inaudible bun fights on the merry-go-round, against the barrage of hammer dancing in the marquee — a lonely rhythm and a brass section pumping figure was scrambling out of a out riffs, perhaps decorating a mud fast-moving Ghost Train to crouch in pie with a forcer full of half-set the comer and leap up to expose his concrete. Sheer physical labor. cock and cods each time a carriage of Yes, we’ll have an encore! So Gaz revellers whipped past. For him, whipped backstage and squeezed into seemingly alone, Superstar was anuts’ something more sylph-like. A black night out. lurex spacesuit with a silver G on his * * * hearty right flank; he knows it’s all in Heroes come and heroes go and fun too.

By now Gaz was something of a Gary Glitter is with us at the moment. England’s latest pop star, mate and jiving and shaking was the who found fame after ten years of order of the minute. The front row well-deserved obscurity in the back- was invited forth to touch the hand, blocks of rock’n’roll, gained his his hand. The bouncers became edgy current moment with the release of but needlessly so because it was all his first self-penned song, I didn’t } too much friendly fun to explode know I loved you till I saw you \ into a rushing riot. A nervous rock’n ’roll. It’s that tuneless, thump- \ policeman shoved a young guy called ing rocker that sounds as if the radio j Michael, down. Gaz tried to tuner is trying like hell to change the j intervene with a roar, the cop looked station. j as if he wished he could be at home The Glittermen bounded onstage , in front of the telly instead of here in a variety of matching spacemen’s ' with a hooting football crowd. The suits with baggy backsides, patches j damage done, Gaz parodied the cop of lurex, smudges of eyeshadow and ; and invited young Michael backstage tinsel in their hair. Thump! Into that afterwards for drinks and chatter. prehistoric piston-pump beat so Hey, this Glitter guy is all right. He is; labored and loud; you’re sitting on a as friendly as he seems.

From then on Gazza almost pnuematic drill with a hangover headache. The house lights dangling looked sexy; trim, slinky and dynamic. He probably is getting a overhead tremble with the DTs. buzz being so enthusiastically re­ A few brass riffs, flatulent and off-key. Where is our boy Gazza? ceived far away from his mum and Gazza who? Gazza Glitter! The his home. Gaz, you’re ok. And the mechanical interchange of colored band tramped on like marching lights is interrupted by a white strobe mounties in lead boots but with a and here he comes. An apparition in new momentum.

And then we drifted off into the what appears to be silver bottletops stalks (love that strobe effect) to night, ears numb and fuzzy after the centre stage, sheds his Glitter-cape ordeal, still shaking in the aftermath and gyrates to the crude, foul sound. of the volume and reminiscing over What an entrance. Feet are stamping, Normie Rowe’s 1967 farewell Con­ a few nubile lasses are squealing and cert. Gazza is a good bloke and the bouncers see fit to remind a seeing him was a good time, although predominantly young audience that who knows what he sang or said. I guess that we’ll never see him again: seats are for staying in.

sacred names which sustain the Macrocosm. He will enter the subconscious at the lowest level, Malkuth (Earth) and he will proceed inwards to a vision of the Moon, which is also associated heavily with sexual imagery — hence the link between Hecate and the Witches with their erotic Sabbats — and he will eventually arrive at the level of consciousness representing the Sun. Associated with this are gods of rebirth (Osiris-Christ) in their capacity as givers of Life and Light.

Some magicians take what in a sense is the most “ direct” route by travelling up what has been called the Middle Pillar. That is to say, they do not retrace the zig-zag process, but perform rituals or concentrate upon symbols which will take them meditatively from Malkuth through Yesod to Tiphareth.

Interestingly, the Tarot cards-jare a superb adjunct to the “sephirah” of the Tree of Life. The major Tarot trumps from meditative doorways to the visions which link each Qabalistic level of consciousness. To take examples we will consider the Tarot cards relevant to the mental journey between Malkuth and Tiphareth.

The Tarot card of The World shows a naked woman (actually an hermaphrodite since she is an aspect of her Father) within a wreath of wheat, sacred to Persephone, who apart from representing the process of rebirth, was also goddess of the Underworld. In the corner of the card are the four symbols of the Resurrection, the Kerubimic Man, Lion, Eagle and Ox. The magician travels along the Path of Tau to Yesod, the Moon.

He now embarks upon Samekh, and for this purpose uses the card Temperance. In the traditional pack, for examples that of A.E. Waite, or Paul Foster Case, an angel is shown pouring the waters of Life from his right hand while bearing a torch in his left. The angel, who is either Raphael or Iris, stands between a fiery lion and an eagle “tempering” or conjoining the creatures who are traditionally lords of earth and air.

Mythologically the combination of lion and eagle produces a griffin, sacred to the Sun which is now approached, and accordingly Dante has alluded to the griffin as a symbol of Christ. (It was also sacred to Apollo, the Graeco-Roman Sun God). Paul Foster Case, whose book on the Tarot is one of the best available, believes that the angel on this Tarot card represents the most spiritual components of the in­ dividual mind, and that which overcomes the animal side of his nature. For the magician it represents one of the culminating visions of his mental journey, for he now imagines himself to be filled with the revivifying energy of the sun, the light of Harmony and inspiration.

The magician differs from the religious devotee through his con­ sciously-made venture into the subconscious. He believes that his own salvation is entirely up to himself. However, this belief soon transforms itself, because the journey

by its very nature takes him among the universals or “ archetypes” of his mind, and correspondingly this reduces his notion of “I” . His whole ego falls away because he is identifying all the tjme jwifli something so much greater than the individual self.

“And I saw Seven Golden Lightbearers, and in the midst of the Lightbearers, one clothed with a garment down to the feet and girt with a golden belt. His head and hair were white as snow and His eyes were as flaming fire. His feet were like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace. And His voice was as the sound of many waters. And He held in His right hand Seven Stars and out of His mouth went the Sword of Flame, and his counten­ ance was as the Sun in His Strength.

I am the First and the Last.

I am the Sun in his rising.

I am the Lord o f Life triumphant over Death. *

* *

References Israel Regardie The Tree o f Life (Rider, reissued by Weiser).

Aleister Crowley The Book o f Thoth (Weiser).

Neville Drury and Stephen Skinner The Search for Abraxas (Neville Spearman) Neville Drury The Path o f the Chameleon (forthcoming).

A.E. Waite: Tarot Pack (Rider/ University Books) Paul Foster Case, The Tarot (Macoy).

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The Digger

May

Libido:

Come in after quarter time

by Phillip Frazer Libido (screening Sydney and Melbourne) is four films in one. Four forty-minute films with a half-time

break. It is a production of the Australian Producers and Directors Guild, which commissioned the four scripts used, and two others solicited at large, and not used. The theme

that holds the four together is sexuality.

Libido is worth seeing. I came in about fifteen minutes into the first segment, JThe Husband, which was

written by Craig McGregor and directed by John B. Murray. I would have come away from the cinema happier if I’d missed the other fifteen minutes too. The husband (Byron Williams) is a Paddington exec., 30-ish, Elliot Gouldish, and his wife is the same. Prettier than Candice Bergen but she doesn’t act So good.

He has reason to believe she doesn’t want to fuck with him much any more, and from what we see of him in the limited time allotted, that’s not surprising. He effects the hurt dumb-dumb approach to her smooth-skinned social cool, but all that is so much cliche because ihey don’t get to do much in the .film.

Most of the action is his fantasies of her getting it on with everyone but him, which is lame in itself but the fantasy sequences are lamer still. We cut from him in bed falling asleep over a book to her stripping sensuously for five guys in under­ pants who gyrate and take turns lying on her and bumping up and down to bad rock music. One of the gang-bangers is black, and he wears a headband. Most of the men have moustaches.

Coming immediately after this crassness, The Child is like a string quartet after bad trad jazz. It’s Hal Porter’s story, directed by Tim Burstall who handles the intensity of it all remarkably well. He must have worked out most of his self-con­ sciousness in 2000 Weeks.

Porter has a ten-year-old boy stranded in a huge Victorian (meaning both the State and the period) country mansion. His father’s always overseas, so his sexy mother is left to find her own partners. She finds a local blade and leaves her son, t o , form a sudden and deep thing with the beautiful young govemness.

The boy gets a graphic close-up view of the governness getting it on with the same blade who took his mother

Abstinence is counter-revolutionary:

Tribute to the Orgone grinder masturbating patients in orgone WR: Mysteries of the Organism: accumlators ad experimenting on Times, Bourke St, Melbourne, children kept in cages. Reich was

by Kate Veitch persecuted, tried, declared insane, WR: Mysteries \ o f the ■Organism and imprisoned, to die in 1957 in a was conceived as a cinematic Pennsylvania Penitentiary. All his testament to Wilhelm Reich’s life and published works were burned in the teachings. public incinerator in New York.

Makavejev uses four kinds of Also included in this Reich-based material in the movie, thrown material is film of Reichian therapists together in a jaw-dropping, seemingly at work with single patients, and one random mish-mash of styles, scene of a group of about eighty, symbols, and effects. He had people ridding themselves of their intended to make a feature-length repressions, a huge room full of the documentary, but felt that this mental mucus., o f. hum an, beings. would miss the large audience to Much shrieking,. writhing,- screaming whom he wanted to display Reich’s fof vprim<d emotions, and somewhat ideas, and that a Vehicle that Was unusual body contact such as dramatic in form, with humour, standing, rocking back and forth, on would be more effective. So he a moaning fellow patient’s back. decided to forget about having the While working on this kind of framework of Reich to film around, film, Makavejev met and filmed and to follow his feelings instead, various members of the newer, filming whatever he found interesting flashier New York scene. Thus we and using appropriate material from have Tuli Kupferberg stomping the old movies.

There is the initial fairly straight streets in a ragged orange romper-suit documentary on Reich —interviews with a toy M16, which he later with his wife, son, co-workers, and merrily masturbates, looking mar­ wild and crazy. A few of his various ainiable rednecks in the little vellously town of Rangeley, Maine, where poems and some of the Fugs’ songs Reich spent the last ten years of his are used in the movie’s soundtrack.

I ’m gonna kill myself over your life, before being imprisoned in idead body i 1956. Here, on his estate, he built an I f you fuck anybody but me International Orgone Research You may think I ’m being kinda Centre, and conducted experiments into what he called orgone —cosmic shoddy But that’s the way i t ’s gotta be. energy, the energy of life and love.

Reich believed that unsatisfactory Betty Dodson, a painter, with her sexual activity led to neuroses and beautiful erotic drawings of men and cancer, and to combat these he built women masturbating, and her talk of such baffling devices as the Orgone the joy and intensity of this form of Energy Accumulator. sex. The professionally liberated Reich had fled to America from trendies at Screw magazine, and their “behind the Iron Curtain,” and held plaster cast cunt in which are strong anti-Communist beliefs. He embedded public hairs of all the girls even voted for Eisenhower. But the who work in their office. The editor, America of the mid-fifties, terrified Jim Buckley, rather nervous as his and mindless, was no place for a well-hungness is immortalised by one foreigner who got up to all sorts of the Plaster-Caster girls. weird, unthinkable things — par­ There is also a frothy, glitter-eyed ticularly things to do with sex! It was young boy-turned-girl: “Eric asked rumored that the Institute was me to marry him. I said yes . . . ” ,

he/she simpers “ . . . because Eric is a special kind of person and he thought that I was a special kind of person. I said yes .. . because I didn’t want to go through my life being4 someone who’s never asked!.”

Makavejev watched hundreds of thousands of miles of film in the film archives, searching for a third kind of material — footage of Stalin. He found a 1947 Russian film called TheVow, which displays Stalin in his role of benign father-protector, and, his gradual assumption of Lenin’s guise.

By careful intercutting the director tries to give the audience a subtle recognition of the Stalin below the noble facade, which he sees as parallel to the child’s recognition of the wolf dressed in Grandma’s clothes. He also intercuts this footage with the Plaster-Caster sequence : out of the block of plaster comes the big pink plastic phallus, cut to Stalin, the frozen sexual power of the political leader.

Also employed is an old Russian documentary, horror footage of a mental hospital. Those standard asylum treatments which can’t fail to hush your giggles and set your stomach rolling over slowly — force feeding, the tortured doll-like spasms of shock therapy. The cut from Plaster-Caster to Stalin is followed by footage of a grey-faced man, straitjacketed and expressionless, beating his head against a wall over and over, the rhythm of his banging repeated in the song which solemnly plays: We thank the Party Our glorious Party For bringing happiness To every home!

There is a fourth type of material.

Pure fiction, the surreal story of a Yugoslav girl, Milena, and her friends and lovers. They are all sexualpolitical stereotypes, Milena the pro-Party sexual liberationist, more concerned with the ideology of free

Page 9 for a lost fortnight in the Blue Mountains, and that makes the boy freak in a freudian fashion.

Burstall makes the most of his quarter, given the limitations of a boy star who has one pained expression for all occasions, and a plot that depends on build-up. It’s the one film of the four that gains from the coalesced color grain produced by making the film 16mm and the print 35mm.

After interval is Thomas Keneally’s The Priest., directed by Fred A. Schepisi, which is just the right name for a director to have.

Keneally’s priest has maintained the courtesie" of his role through his training, through a stint as a radical theologian, but can’t keep it up through a love relationship with a nun who loves him for what he is, but fears the big break, and the charge of priest’s groupie. Not much of the story makes it into the film except by way„ of reference some­ where in the interminable conversa­ tion or in flashback. Most of the non-action takes place in a drawing room at Sister Caroline’s convent, where the would- and wouldn’t-be

lovers agonise and drink tea while the cameraman fights a losing battle against the darkness of the interior the static nature of the ¡screenpic. Great dialogue for lapsed Catholics.

In the end, as is so often the Melbourne experience, the last quarter is the best, and of that, time-on produces the gems^ 1 David Williamson brings the whole exercise home with a script that throws proceedings right into Aus­ tralian suburbia 1973, which in itself is not necessarily a good thing, but he does it with the style, perception and subtlety that R. Crumb uses to turn Amerika into comic strips.

Williamson’s Family Man is a rich Toorak estate agent, late 20s, drives a Porsche, keeps a Mercedes for the wife and kids, drinks Fosters and buys the best grass in town. He (played by Jack Thompson) and his mate (Max Gillies) get pissed and go bird-hunting in bars, th^ night thei family man’s wife is having her third.

This bird-hunting bit is where credibility is strained, inasmuch as they actually score, with an act that’s almost pure Barry McKenzie, and with two women who are into

women’s consciousness. Okay, allow for that much artistic licence and the foursome ends up at the family man’s beach-house, which is a classic job with oiled wood, wall-to-wall broadloom and one of those stereograms with red lights that glow in the dark. Here the culture/consciousness gap plays itself out with teeth-chattering tension, and ends up with one of our heroines (played with not much inspiration by Debbie Nankervis) giving herself to Max in part of what she reckons- is an o ffe r-sh e -c a n ’t-refuse situation.

(Actually, the credibility wavers here too, because Max plays the sort of guy who could even be convinced to lay off in exchange for a long look at her great big tits).

David Baker’s direction is smooth in an unobtrusive way that makes the impact rest squarely on Williamson’s stage-play (that’s what it is, just as Keneally’s is a radio play), and on the four leads.

The finale, the punchline that freezes into the credits, made me want to give it away to my friends.

(Libido is this year’s Australian entry m the Cannes FilmTestival.

Rated R, uncut).

racked and ranked "Ehis is a song an epithalamium it is also a requiem this is a poem about couples it is called racked and ranked the title came from william faulkner who said “and thank God you can flee, can escape from that massy five-foot-thick maggot-cheesy solidarity which overlays the earth, in which men and women in couples are racked and ranked like ninepins.” this is a poem for couples from which i cannot escape this is a poem for people who are not couples but who want to be couples from which i cannot escape a poem for all you out there people who are coupling up or breaking up just to couple up again and giving me second prize because kate jennings, lose him weep him, couldn’t catch a man much less keep him

love than the practise of it. While she gives heated speeches to the assembled proletarian tenants of her apartment house on the necessity of unrestrained indulgence in carnal love, her inarticulate room-mate happily gets it on all over the flat with a member of the People’s Army.

“Abstinence is counter-revolution­ ary!” swears Milena, even while rejecting her proletarian ex-lover.

After a visit to the Bolshoi Ice Follies, Milena decides that she wants to get off with the star of the show, a darkly handsome young man who takes off his wig and false eyelashes in the dressing-room to reveal himself as a baby-faced blonde sweetie, A rather weird visit to the flat follows, the People’s ice-skating Artist, Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin’s name), is exhorted by Milena to embrace free love as a true-thinking Communist, while her room-mate prances around charmingly naked. He is boarded into a cupboard by the proletarian lover, who enters by smashing down the wall of the flat: “Tito’s shockworker!”

The next day Vladimir Ilyich and Milena go for a sinisterly romantic walk by a snow-covered river.

Terrifed by her attempted physical and ideological seduction, he speaks to her in Lenin’s tortured words concerning music : “ Nowadays you can’t caress people, they would bite your hand off! You must beat them, beat them mercilessly .. . though in principle we oppose all violence!”

What follows between them is a condensation of the basic message of both Reich and Makavejev : that sexuality is pro-life, repressed sexuality very definitely anti-life.

Reich believed that orgasmic energy revealed “the deep fear of freedom, fear of truth and fear of live in contemporary humans.” Makavejev further Wryly contends that if you lose your head over these fears, you literally lose your head.

couples create obstacle courses to prevent me from doing all sorts of things easily couples make sure i’m not comfortable with myself because i’m only half a potential couple couples point accusing right index fingers at me couples make me guilty of loneliness, insecurity, or worse still, lack of ambition. what do i do at the end of the day?: lose him, weep him, think of catching a man and eating him.

Kate Jennings

Shithouse theatre - not bad film.

M iddle-class protests itself Nuclear (Musical): Metro, Kings Cross itself.

They continually mock Night of Fear: Penthouse, Kings Cross modern society for its attitudes and hang ups but display, themselves, those hang-ups they despise so that

by Barrie Lowe by the end when they sing “ It’s great to be back in the world.” Nothing is There are currently two Aus­ going to be any different.

Their attitude to sex is prurient, tralian production showing in Sydney — Nuclear the all-singing, particularly in the scene in which they explain sex to Rikky, an all-dancing musical, and Night o f emasculated robot. They espouse Tear, a once-banned horror movie.

Nuclear (Metro) received a mixed love and “doing your own thing” but reception from the Press, most critics only as long as you conform to thenattempting to be kind and thus way of thinking, and as long as you forgetting that a long suffering public confine your love to your own girl. is paying Up to $5 a ticket. But it’s Their intolerance of the outsider is hard_ to say anything kind about summed up by Bruce (Mike Furber) Nuclear -. It just goes to prove that when he says of Mai: “What $100,000 doesn’t necessarily make a redblooded man would make a boy good show * which most theatre robot?” In fact what the kids do is people knew already — alas the reinforce the middle class values they are protesting against. ignorant business man.

The theme, as much as there is Setinabomb-shelter controlled by Mai, a scientist (Doug Wiggins) whose one buried beneath the fifties bomb life is ruled by logic, the musical mentality, is Science versus Art, and concerns a group of the “now that one is useless without being generation” trapped by a sudden tempered by the other. It is not increase in radioactive contamina^ handled well by either the cast or the tion. The “now generation” is authors and appears embarrassingly portrayed as a collection of naive, twee. Had the direction (Ronne simple minded individuals attempting Arnold) been more imaginative the to escape the hang ups of thè outside . show may have been saved from world and as seen by the authors tedium for the music (Rod Stewart) Rod Stewart, Mike Jenkins and Brian is pleasant enough in a Rodgers and Bell they sprout cliches more attuned Hammerstein sort of way. The to the Sunday newspaper concept of moon/june/spoon lyrics have been youth than to the reality of youth replaced by “You’re my magnetic

field, You are a pulsating quasar, Baby you are really gas, My brightest star,” and “We won’t be so attractive, when we all are radio­ active, We won’t be cherishing, Skin that is perishing.”

Regardless of its would-be modernity of subject the design (Desmonde Downing) and direction are so pedestrian as to make it look like an old JCW’s musical that has been touring the outback for the past ten years. The choreography (Ronne Arnold) is chaotic and under­ rehearsed and the dancers con­ tinually watch the people next to them to make sure they are in step — they usually aren’t. The best thing that can be said for the cast is that some of them try to rise above the mediocre material and sometimes succeed. It’s basically boring. * * *

In contrast Terry Bourke’s all-screaming, all-wailing Night o f Fear (Penthouse) is a very competent little gothic horror film, its faults are those of most television shows, the medium for which it was originally made, a superficial characterisation and a rushed plot (54 minutes).

It is a psychological thriller about a hermit (Norman Yemm) who lives in the bush outside Sydney and who has the habit of waylaying young

girls and cutting them up to feed his pet rodents and felines. The reasons for Yemm’s proclivities are ex­ plained, however, through newspaper clippings pasted to the wall of his shack. It’s a little too smug.

N ight o f Fear: has no unexpected shocks, you can anticipate everything that is going to happen. Then what makes it as good as it is? Its photography, which is excellent in its own plastic high gloss way, its acting which is never less than good (is this because none of the actors have any dialogue?), its building tension and its gothic atmosphere. There a numerous little camera tricks a la Hitchcock and some pleasing touches as the hermit chases one of his victims, and again as he hacks up a horse. The sex, on occasions, seems more to titillate than to futher plot development although Yemm’s orgiastic scene is a fine touch of horror.

Although the tale is grisly and superficial in its treatment of the psychosexual killer it is told with consummate skill hv- Iftim Bourke.

His next feature The Inn o f the Damned should be interesting.

With the new impetus being given the indigenous arts it is good to see a locally made film the equal of most o f the Hollywood imports. But Nuclear is the greatest reason yet for an out-of-town tryout.

Lots o f words from Sister Caroline (Robyn Nevin) and Father Byrne (Arthur Dignam.

Bookreviews:

Som e crazy reading Paradise. (Penguin)

by Game Hutchinson This issue o f Digger has centred around the idea> or non-idea o f madness. So this is a review o f several “mad” books — in a sense a presumptions task because it really requires a specific expertise in this area, and the term “madness” might not even mean anything.

But for starters there are dozens of different schools of “therapv”. There is “orthodox” psychology, for instance. Freud, N eo F reu d ia n s, Biochemists, Behaviourists and so on. Then the so-called anti-psychiatry group: L aing, Cooper, Esterson in England, the people around the Radical Therapist magazine, as well as Allport, Rogers as well as transactional analysts, various group therapists, and gestalt theorists etc. Even in France there are different schools — Foucalt, Mannoni, Lacan.

All o f that didn't get me very far, not having read even a tenth o f all o f it, and in fact not wanting to. And if the idea is to indicate what books might turn people on to an understanding of r‘toadness” (again, if that whatever it is,is) then the psychologists don’t usually write well enough to say much to non-specialists. Then poetry, perhaps.

Or literature.

Again that could drag into a book, rather than a few book reviews.

R.D. LAING, The Politics Of

Experience

&

The

Bird

Of

America's legendary bluesman coming:

Raw blues Muddy Waters sings :

Gypsy woman told my mother Just before I was bom You got a boy child cornin' Gonna be a rolling stone.

That was recorded in 1954. It’s no fluke that just one song by Muddy Waters should account for the names of the English rock group, the rock newspaper and Dylan’s “Like a rolling stone”.

The blues have always been the basis o f rock, and Muddy Waters the greatest o f the blues singers.

Muddy Waters will be in Australia in early May, giving a series o f

Probably the easiest intro to Laing’s work. Deals with different kinds of experiences, development of psychoanalytic theory, a description of a Laingian Trip, and a psychotic experience o f a friend o f his. Also s6me sort o f elegaic meditions on' alienation and madness which show Laing’s poeticized version of a kind o f Sartrean marxism. The best thing in it is a chapter on the Schizophrenic Experience which succintly puts the difference between Laing’s ideas and those of the conservative therapists.

R .D . LAING The Divided S e l f , Penguin.

Laing has partially disowned this book, saying it is the work o f a young old man — he wrote it when he was 28. But not c o m p le te ly .

He thinks he concentrated too touch on Them and not enough on Us. But it remains the cornerstone of the anti-psychiatrist’s library, and is, though fashionable, one of the most important books o f our .times.

It is an “existential-phenom­ enological account of some s c h iz o id and schizophrenic persons”. Before the case studies, he lays down a theoretical position that effectively destroys the orthodox clinical position of what schizophrenia is.

This theoretical position is complemented in Laing’s Sanity, Madness & the Family (with Aaron Esterson), which is a

collection o f case studies.

The clinical/poetical work in these books is extended much further in a book called. S elf and Others (Penguin) which deals with the complex interactions between people. In the end he gave up using dinico-philosophical language to describe the relationships and came out with an amazing book of poems called Knots (Penguin).

Perhaps the best way to understand Laing’s ideas on interpersonal relationships on an intuitive level.

B oth Laing and h is colleague, David Cooper, have written books that set out to show that the family makes people mad (Laing) and, besides that, is the basic organ of imperialism (Cooper). Both books are very convincing and written in the characteristic existential/poetic style, though Cooper has m ore-in common with Bobby Seale than with J.P.Satre.

Cooper has also written a simple and easily assimilated book on anti-psychiatry and his work in an anti-psychiatric institution — Villa 21. Probably the best intro to the whole scene (Paladin).

In the area of ‘Laing studies’, there is R.D. Laing and Anti-psychiatry edited by Robert Boyers and Robert Orrill, which originally appeared as a special issue of the magazine Salmagundi.

It co n ta in s a very good b iograp h ical introduction to Laing’s work by Peter Sedgwick as well as other interesting stuff.

(US paperback, Perennial Library).

There is also Going Crazy edited

by Dr Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek (Bantam). This contains some hard-to-find interview material with Joe Berke and David Cooper, bits out o f the works of Laing

one-night concerts in the capital cities.

He was bom 58 years ago in M ississip p i, h is real name McKjnley Morgan field, and first recorded in 1941. He was then playing oh Saturday nights for 50 cents and a sandwich. He moved to Chicago and was one o f the first artists to record for Chess.

By the mid-fifties, the blues was no longer regarded as “race music” to be promoted only to negro audiences, and Muddy was on his "way to world-wide recognition.

Muddy’s bands have included all the great figures in blues, notably his half-brother, Otis Spann, Willie Dixon, Bo Diddley, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells (who both toured here recently), but the most famous o f all his side-men

and Cooper, and complementary m a te r ia l fr o m A m erica n ‘Therapists’. Both books are worth having.

T here are also tw o collections of work from the Radical Therapist a pioneering American magazine which operates on the axiom that, therapy means; change not adjustment. It offers much useful first-person material as well as a fair amount of political and theoretical work The anthologies are called: The Radical Therapist, and Rough Times, both produced by Jerome Agel and published by Ballantine. , (Rough Times'* is the new name of the magazine.)

If you aren’t a subscriber, they are essential reading.

As a fine burst of esotérica, there is Michel Foucault’s book Madness and Civilization which is a hard-to-read history of how madness as a concept, and mental hospitals as institutions, came into being in Europe. Quite boggling.

There are also other books by Laing and Cooper: especially Reason and Violence, which outlines the recent philosophy of JJP.Satre and is a major influence on their work. (Both Tavistock).

And in conclusion anything that helps you to understand the society that manufactures madness, whether it be Milarepa, Mumford, Marx or Manson.

P.S. You could try these too: Erving Goffman — Asylums (Penguin) Thomas Szasz — The Myth o f Mental Illness (Paladin) Anthony Sterr — Integrity o f the Personality (Penguin) - Aaron Esterson — The Leaves o f Spring (Tavistock) These are also Great Books.

Around the little Melbourne magazines:

Poems by friends and strangers

by Kris Hemensley

Contempa (5) (ed Phillip Edmonds & Robert Kenny, PO Box 115, Armadale, Vic. 3143, 45 cents) Contempa Publications: (2) Creek Roulette by Colin Talbot 95 cents Fitzrot (1) (ed Peter Oustabasidis, 489 George St, Fitzroy, Vic. 3065 20 cents.

Outlaw (2) (ed Werner Pick, Tim Pigott and Suzy Sarovich PO Box 159, Fitzroy, Vic. 3065 (20 cents).

Parachute Poems (2) (ed Mai Morgan, 513 Elizabeth St, Mel­ bourne, Vic, 3000, free). *** Not that anything exists today to match the Melbourne of yesteryear (or even of Sydney today) but if the desires of ejj. PeterOustabasidis for A Scene are anything to go by, and if the observation by Phillip Edmonds as to a gathering of activities in and around the City is accurate, then there is (for those who require it) some comfort to be had from recent Melbourne developments.

Parachute Poems edited by La Mama veteran Mai Morgan is a magazine for all-comers. Number 2 contains a tribute by N.C. Thompson to his friend (& La Mama poet) Maurice Benton who was killed on August 4, ’72. It is versed in the same romantic spirit as informed the late poet’s work. But Benton’s visions were certainly not of the Politics-ofEcstasy/polemic which many poets in Parachute 2 incline towards.

The poems Thompson has chosen are typical of Bentons ouvre ( “I am outspanning the second decade o f / my life, / Accepting the fragmentary, the distorted / and the surreal;') & a prose-poem “ Reflection” indicates was his harmonica player, Little his ability to sustain the flashes of his poems. Needless to say Maurice Walter.

Muddy’s style has always been the Benton’s death is yet toother sadness style of his origins, the Delta in this season of sadnesses.

Old friends meet again in this b lu es, wi th Muddy’s high, anguished s ho u t i n g v o i c e issue (besides Mai who contributes 6 overlaying his powerful and pages plus an editorial) include rhythmically complex guitar work, Allison Hill (especially The Deserter), and Little Walter’s harp weaving Bill Beard (an old poem and a new in and out as the perfect one which is controlled and even accompaniment. They’re not noted “made”), Vicki Viidikas, and Geoff for pretty effects, but for power, Egglestone. The* Family indeed*!

These assured poets rub shoulders funkiness and raw vitality. with Georgia, Maxine, Vera, MarriLittle Walter isn’t with Muddy anne, Russell and many others all Waters any more, but he is between the same pink covers —and brining six Chicago blues-men, free “nacherally” . * * including Willie Smith on drums, Not only has it an Anarchist and James Madison and Sam bookshop and Shelton Lea’s Book­ Lawhom on guitars. shop btit Fitzroy also boasts two The first half of the bill is to be magazines. Outlaw's, second issue Chain and Matt Taylor, then — (Socialist/Surrealism) is memorable Muddy Waters. And that, quite for, the reprint of The Dishonour o f simply, means real, raw blues.

Poets by Benjamin Peret, an

under-publicised poet enjoying some­ thing of a vogue at present (who was translated in David Gascoyne’s historic collection of Surrealists some years ago, and is recalled in the more 'serious little mags and presses of UK today); also a proclamation by Rimbaud, and passages from Henry Miller, the Situationist International, and elsewhere. The editor’s own work is undistinguished except for the Tzara. manifesto translated by Sarovich. It does seem to be (sadly) the case that contemporary sur­ realism is overshadowed by its history — authenticity is plagued by inherited attitudes.

The other magazine is Fitzrot which must be the first fusion of English and non-English work (the editor calls for work in Greek, Spanish, German, et al) in the City.

The enthusiasms of the editor Greek-Australian Peter Oustabasidis percolate thru the little anthology — certainly the fruit of a community.

There is Greek-language poetry from Chris Fifis translated (though one suspects the attempt to retain the literal meaning has robbed the poems of life) into English, and poems more or less in the English language from Oustabasidis, Morgan, Egglestone, Robert Kenny, Mike Dugan, and Shelton Lea, and others. Incidental­ ly, Egglestone’s humerous epigramatic pieces (two were in Parachute and a two-liner in Fitzrot takes the prize; “No man is an island / No woman a clippership” !) have to be seen to be believed.

Contempa has been appearing for one year. Number 5 continues its open-house policy though it should be stressed it is not of the break-thru variety that Parachute is. I am reminded of Crosscurrants (68-9, ed Mike Dugan) though with the demise of the party-mags such as Auk, Flagstones, and Aardvaark it also serves that interest. It is certainly the only post-La Mama post-Sun Anthology magazine in the City.

Such poets as Linda Burtenshaw (number 2 was a special issue of her work), Game Hutchinson, Richard Tipping, Tom Shapcott, Graham Rowlands, Dugan, John Jenkins, Viidikas, Marc Radyzner, Lea and Allan Afterman have had work in previous issues. Of these the prose-pieces by Jenkins provide the greatest interest. “A School Story (for Ken Taylor)” in number 5 (first published in my Earth Ship magazine in 1971, UK) is fired by Taylor’s heroic manner — and is a reconnaissance of the past, virtually an inquiry into nostalgia itself.

Of the newer poets, Walter Billeter is outstanding. I have the

feeling that he has stacks of similarly delightful work - intricate colleges involving a multi-role persona which tell the story of the story as much as they are stories as artifacts — of the same calibre as his “The Paper Castle” (in number 1) and Patterns (in number 4). His trickery reminds oi Sterne or Joyce (who he invokes in “The Paper Castle” !) or the current German JJ whose name escapes me at present, who checks up on e.g.

Goethe’s account of a sunny day and informs the reader that according to records it rained that day! His improvisations do not negate his lyrical gifts.

Another obvious talent is Colin Talbot whose Creek Roulette is Contempa Publication’s second book (the first was Return o f the Prophet

by Dugan). The sparse syntax of his story in Contempa 5 (the bare facts of what was where and who did what) is made to carry the same extreme conclusions as his bookpoem. That is to say, the poem is intended to be other than 26 flitting pictures. That each picture is charged with meaning. In such a way a serial-poem might be composed — a progression in which images and references re-occur. Ultimately a concurrence — a complete picture.

This poem from Talbot is probably more impressive for some of the instalments and for the purpose it augers than for such totality. i. Crystal Brook always the best town part o f the best, country biggest island smallest continent those as we say were the days if only the brook were crystal.

In passing, a word for the production of Creek Roulette, though I am told the magazine doesn’t fare too well with its printers.

Another magazine promised is Poetry, edited by Robert Hughes (PO Box 94, Parkville, Vic. 3052) — whose poem (“Poets?") in Contempa 5 recalls the imaginative address of the La Mama Poets genre — or in particular Ian Robertson or Charles Buekmaster: “We are poets / waking to a forest already lost. / but this is not what we seek/not finally(trees. ” * Yes — my family needless to say! Yours truly who also has work in some of the above-mentioned but obeys the law that you don’t review yourself.

JOHN GUNNELLON BEHALF OF THE ROBERT STIGWOOD O R G AN IZATIO N AUST PTY. LTD. IN ASSOCIATION WITH EVANS GUDlNSKl » a s s o c ia t e s p t y ltd PRESENTS

and his band Australian Tour fla y 1973 Chain

Coincides w ith the release o f the single ''I Thought You Weren't My Friend" b/w "H o w To Set Fire To An Elephant" on Mushroom.

MattTaylor Australia's greatest blues singer.

Wednesday May 2nd Thursday May 3rd Friday May 4th Saturday May 5th Sunday May 6th Thursday May 10th Friday May 11th

Melbourne Festival Hall Sydney Hordern Pavillion Newcastle - venue to be advised Brisbane Festival Hall Canberra - venue to be advised Adelaide Apollo Stadium Perth W.A.C.C.A. Oval

Myers, MSD, Celebrity Services Horderns, Mitchells, D.J.'s Palings Swing Shops Allans Central Booking Office, Boans

A L L IN TER N AL FLIG H T BY TAA. TICKETS A L L STATES: $4.50; $3.50; $2.50.

Mav

Page 11

The Digger

Life as an Aquarian:

T h e hosts o f heaven still hovering The new Messiah? In 1967 one Fred Robinson was crossing state lines, feverishly lecturing settled citizens about their evil ways, and predicting the doom o f the Planet for the next year. He said the world would end with a bang and only the Good Guys would survive. Well, i f it happened we missed it. In 1968 came the psychedelic sessions, and Fred changed his tack, pinning faith on the “enlightened” young. His mes­ sage is still purity in all areas — including sexual. He tells Digger what he’s up to.

By Virginia Fraser

The hosts of heaven are patrolling the world in flying saucers ready to stop man from destroying it and himself in atomic warfare. The head of the space people is Jesus.

Fred Robinson says this. He’s a former cane and banana farmer from Queensland who was busted in the depression, and came to see things differently after his forcible exit from the rat race. At 82 he regards himself as a chosen vessel of the truth, directed by our enlightened ‘elder brothers’ in space.

English bom, he started his vorking life in a bank; some 60 years later is striking prophet-like with shoulder length bone-white hair and beard, bright blue eyes, a twentieth century John the Baptist for the New Order in red corduroy coat and big enamelled crucifix.

He has come to Melbourne “for an indefinite period” to tell young people about the new order and to persuade them by example and dialectic to give up impurity and live in harmony with nature, as he and his fellow spirits have done in a community called Shalem in the Perth Hills. There, about 14 people live together according to “the principles of true community living based upon natural law and nature and her cycles . . . and natural living according to cosmic law.”

Their major preoccupations seem to be two fold; firstly, purity of all kinds including complete separation from the world’s social systems, economics and polluted ways; and secondly the governorship of the universe by the super-kind and spiritually enlightened beings termed our “ elder brothers.”

Fred says: “The very essence of the message is that we have every reason to believe that the modern world m akes young people very, very dependent. We are out to show young people how to be indepen­ dent. Right at the core of the matter, the world problem is individual problems. Not Mr. Whitlam’s prob­ lems, not Mr. Nixon’s problems; it’s individual problems*1 And we have proved by example in Western Australia that the young man and woman together with others of a like mind can seek to be independent in food clothing and shelter.

As with the rest of the world we’re addicts but in our own way. We’re addicted to purity instead of pollution and we find that it pays very big dividends in health and happiness. If anyone is unhappy or unhealthy it’s because they’re refusing to co-operate with nature, innocently or ignorantly.”

Speaking over cups of carob tea in his temporary Melbourne residence, loaned by the suave dark chiro­ practor manipulating bodies down the hall, Fred constantly makes the distinction between the world of Shalem and Your World.

“Your whole present civilisation is based upon the imposition of will upon other people. In nature with God, that is never done. You are freewilled creatures. Your economy puts you at the mercy of those who control the supply of money. That is what I mean by dependent people.

We are all dependent on having some pieces of paper in our pockets for people to build our houses and make our clothes and our food. “We take the economy in our own hands. That means we use Y our economy society as I’m using it now ^ you can come over for a time —but we refuse to let it use us. ” Like using the chiropractor’s Balaclava house, bathed in the mellow glow of sun through lead; light glass, a muffled-footfall ■sort of hquse where, in a vast sitting room upholstered with arm chairs and divans, he can unfold the optomistic millenial story.

We are, Fred says, at the beginning of the Aquarian age which started in 1962 when it superseded the 2163-year-long Piscean age of ignorance and darkness. This is now the age of enlightenment, and the explosion of knowledge of modern

Soul food fo r the masses:

FU M A C K “Some love to dine at a nice place, with indoor plants, perhaps music, and kiss-arse service. Persons o f this taste eat as they once sucked double-boiled bottles. They hope not to think o f disease, silence, the rage o f servants.

“Other tastes run to the sheen o f fluorescent light on greased Formica, sounds o f traffic and kitchen, the chance o f something or nothing happening naked. ** argument, maybe a fight, or the jazed vibe o f hopeless people, to rock the table under the plate. Only persons o f these tastes truly meet a piece o f liver, a steak chop or brain. ” —Reliable Source This is a guide to getting fed. We want you to help write it, so it’s called feedback. We want letters about cheap ways to buy food, good cheap recipes, and cheap places to eat out. Besides the satis­ faction of helping fill other people’s holes, there are .. . prizes. For a start, Mushroom Records is giving t^wo dozen copies of The Mush­ room Cookbook away, one to each contributor whose info, is printed.

Send your contributions to feedback, C/o The Digger, P.O, Box 77, Carlton, Vic., 3053.

Salt of the Earth Dining Rooms Some tips for reviewers of restaurants: Melbourne has a good selection of salt-of-the-earth dining rooms in Swan St., Richmond, Gertrude St., Fitzroy, and in Albert Park. Unfortunately, we haven’t gotten around to all of them. If you have, or will, drop us a note.

Down to Earth, Punt Road, South Yarra: Cheap vegetarian tucker, a

jneal of brown rice, yoghurt & fruit, 50c.

Transylvania, Greville St., Prahan: Central European food in large servings for about 80c. Recently added a vegetarian lentil, spinach dish to their menu.

Mick’s Cafe, 16 Oxford Square (Cnr Riley & Oxford, Darlinghurst): Porridge, 15c! Roast pork 90c,lamb & mintsauce 80c, chook 95c, with bread and soup thrown in for 5c extra. The ambience is realism; Mick is said to keep an eye on the door, which he opens about 4.30 a.m., and closes about 7.30 p.m.

Allen’s Cafe, George Street, City, near Rawson Place: Distinguished by autographed photos of boxing immortals, e.g., Les Darcy, Allen’s is similar in most other regards to Mick’s. < Central Railway Cafeteria, Central Railway: An excellent, cheap cafe­ teria, where small bottles of wine are also sold. It is said, “sitting in there, thinking about socialism, one can become quite happy.”

Carbon Cycle, 260 Military Road, Neutral Bay: Vegetarian: $1 meal, veggies in season. Cottage cheese loaf, Hunza Pie recommended.

Banana whips 25c, Daffy’s Delight, 55c, & music. No pictures of boxing greats, no tobacco smoking or drinking allowed, either.

Una’s Coffee Lounge, Opposite Red Cabs in Victoria St., Kings Cross (near fire station): Tiny place with large serves of whatever Una cooked that night, for just over a dollar. Una is a good cook, as well as waitress, cashier & proprietor; seats are scarce; pros & c^oss regulars eat there.

Steakhouse, Oxford Street, Padding­ ton: On the strength of one visit, not so good: Soup flee with a meal, prices cheap, service no worse than elsewhere, but salt had been spilled in the soup.

times is part of the universal plan.

“In the main that knowledge has been perverted here; but the upsetting of the natural cycles and worldwide pollution, this inter­ ference with natural cycles by man is nearing its end. “ The hosts of heaven who are patrolling this planet in their flying saucers in their space ships, through many avenues of communication have been responsible for the explosion of knowledge.” They plant ideas for people to pick up. He himself worked with a woman who was one of the space people for 17 years. Her job was setting patterns on the ether of the planet* These beings, of whom Fred claims there are abut 3000 in the world, look like the rest of us, but have a much higher level of conciousness, and they are in possession of a developed spiritual science. When they came to earth thousands of years ago they were lobked on by the natives as gods.

Fred has great admiration for Erich Von Daniken, the author of Chariot o f the Gods, who expounded similar theories presenting ancient rock drawings, sculptures and con­ structions as proof. Von Daniken got a general razzing from the critics and the portentous film that was made from his book received a like review.

However this doesn’t faze Fred; the truth is always suppressed he says.

He adds that there is absolutely no need to be afraid of our elder brothers because they are so highly developed and spiritually mature that they are inevitably “ kind men and women who would not injure any living creature.”

His young companion on this missionary journey to the east, Jiva (pronounced jiver) Lawler, is less comforting. ]He reckons that when the time comes for the new pure life, those who are still living impurely will “have to be sent somewhere else” — although he later qualified what sounded like a Final Solution remark by explaining that the places where the others would go were worlds where their particular vices were the norm, an alcoholics world for alocholics and so on, and there they’d have to.work it out.

Fred says that new order has been moving rapidly down on us since the world dropped the two atom bombs on Japan during the last world war

Taco Bill’s, 198 Bondi Road: Tacos & Tostadas, 40c, small enchilada, 90c, bowl of corn chips, 30c; vegetarian, too. Mexican fruit cake, whipped cream, 35c. Said to be “really helpful if you haven’t much to spend.” Same family runs the Mexican' Micks in Coffs Harbor, Byron Bay. Open to 10.00 pm.

Hing Nam Cafe, 367 Darling St., Balmain (Opposite Post Office, on the hill): Asian: Braised chicken & rice, chicken chow mien, 90c; swept & sour pork, prawn chow mien 95c; other items about $1. Eat there, take away. Good Greek sweets at shop next door. Staff friendly, even scrutable; packs of kids who hang out at this corner once kicked poet Bill Beard’s front teeth out, after he gave them some lip. Be cool.

In Newtown, and all along Oxford St. out through Bondi Junction, as well as scattered through other suburbs, are milkbars with a few booths, and some virtues. The Greek in Balmain makes a great superscoop, for instance. Others are hazards, with spotlights on aquariums where dim sims are turning belly-up with senility. Send your appraisals to feedback. Some of these places offer reasonable, cheap meals with a neutral or better vibe.

Small nights out Universal Pizza, 129 Lygon St., Carlton: Good Calzone, both rustico & dolce; calamari, marinara spaghet­ ti. Much less expensive than Jamaica House, directly overhead.

II Gambero, 215 Lygon St., Carlton: Probably the best of the pizzatakeaway restaurants in Lygon St., with a long menu of salads, seafoods, casseroles. Prices range from 70c to $1.50.

Pyramid Restaurant, 273 Swanston St., City: The Pyramid is about the only Lebanese place in town where you can still get out for under $2. It is the ugliest, and probably has the best food, The Market Buffet, Cnr of Peel & Victoria Streets, North Melbourne: A takeaway pizza«* place with a reasonable buffet; the price depends on how much you take, but a plate of fish, beef goulash, peppers, and macaroni, warmed in the pizza oven, runs about $1.30 to $1.50.

Genevieve, 233 Faraday St., Carlton: Spaghetti bologrese, 45c, T-bone

NEWCASTLE TRADES H A L L COUNCIL MAY DAY COM MITTEE PRESENT THE

1973

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T ra d itio na l Smorgasbord Supper - Keg Beer & Punch in c l.

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1

and the elder brothers had to move their ships onto earth patrol. “Man has free will to commit individual or collective suicide, but he will not be permitted to disturb the balance of the whole solar system. That will be when they are entitled to interfere. “ Right after the atomic bomb was dropped they began to get a whole flood of flying saucers in America, and George Adamski” (another one of Fred’s sources and influences) “had | his own private observatory lin America. He was an astronomer and philosopher. Our elder brothers contacted him telepathically and arranged for a meeting in the desert — time and place. Adamski and some friends went out there and this little flying saucer landed and they came out of the saucer, human figures like ourselves and there was the first recorded encounter with human beings and spacemen on this planet.

Adamski was taken into the flying saucer and taken into the mother ship — a long cigar-shaped ship and they had a beautiful dinner with the captain and the crew and a long talk as to why the space people — our elder brothers — were patrolling this planet. Since then there’s been 150 books written on this subject by highly qualified people — engineers and highly trained, sceptical people.”

But in all these years no government had recognised the existance of these well established phenomena except the Brazilian government “which has said these vessels are exra-terrestrial.”

Fred’s first revised thoughts on what was true and real came when: “I was ruined in the last big depression 40 years ago. I was thrown out of the rat race very violently and this led me to an understanding of what was wrong with Your economy, and I’d never been involved in such an absolutely out of date thing in my life.” An expression of deep and vivid rancour crossed his face and voice.

After that he ran his own system of simplified barter and “that led me to an understanding that the practical side of life and the spiritual side of life must be balanced.

“For the first time in my life I had ample time to think and study.

Up till then I’d been working seven days a week. Everybody was unemployed and everybody’s going to have ample time in the future.

History’s repeating itself. It’s going to be another shortage of money.”

Asked how he knew this, he answered a trifle impatiently, a rare break in the benign calm of his discourse, that he understood it because he understood how Your

money system works.

The experience of trauma, whether economic like Fred’s or not, is a fairly common occurrence; but while many people’s understanding of their situation may be adjusted only to fit their own personal life, Fred’s went further. He came out of it feeling that he understood something which applied to the whole world and could help all its inhabitants. Mysteries had been revealed to him. He doesn’t claim them as h is: own ideas. All revolutionary ideas come from the space beings “floated in from outside. Even Jesus said ‘Of mine own self I can do nothing; it’s the Father who does the works through me.’ ” As proof of the Father’s interest he says that money, accommodation and help have always appeared as needed, although he has ¿iso taken a few human steps himself like advertising and handbilling for his talks schedule, and is eagerly seeking Press publicity — especially young Press publicity — because young people “ don’t have as many preconceptions as the old.”

Jiva, who has been a roadie for Chain and once edited Daily Planet, is Fred’s young eyes, drives him about in his battered van, organises his talks and looks after him. “General mothering,” he describes it. “I was living in the world like Rip Van Winkle and all sorts of things were happening in the new world I knew nothing about. Jiva’s been right through the whole scene.”

Jiva, a stocky fellow with short blonde hair, glasses and a quiet earnest deadpan delivery, claims indeed to have done it all, but now leading the clearn life is full of admiration for Fred. His occasionally taciturn intercourse with the world may be explained by his weary statement that neither he nor Fred expects anything of it.

In spite of this lack of confidence in the world, Fred is deep in a several month long series of talks on topics including the omniverse and our galaxy’s place in it; flying saucers and their origins; the failure of modem medicine and the need for physical purity; organic gardening; the inevit­ able and imminent failure of the economy; and the life and teachings of Jesus as represented in the Urantia Book. (The Urantia is a massive volume of explanation which apparently was dictated by our elder brothers to an anonymous scribe last century.)

Now a final word from Fred.: “ Do you know what my advice to most young people today is? Never grow old:,” :

steak, $ 1.20 - everything else is There are several reasonable priced in between. Genevieve is a Spanish restaurants just north of The pleasant,' inexpensive, mediocre Malaya, in George St. Best is the restaurant, with serves for smallish Valencia. people.

Anna, Cnr of Darlinghurst Road & Tamanis, 156 Toorak Road, South Liverpool St., Darlinghurst: Good Yarra and Lygon Street, Carlton, Slav food, but, it is said, “the between, Faraday and Elgin. If you chicken dishes are a rip-off.” About order from the chalk board on the $1.50 before coffee. wall you’ll get Italian food from The Aurora, Pyrmont Bridge Road & about 65 cents. Watch the unpriced Junction St., Glebe: Italian food, big salads under glass. You can run up a servings, fair value. bill of $2.00 in a few seconds. The Wilson’s Lebanese Restaurant, Pitt South Yarra food is better than St., Redfern, just around the corner Carlton. from Redfern St: The waiter he is helpful. Good serves.

Pubs are also worth checking out The Belgrade, Surrey St., King’s in Melbourne, the counter lunch Cross. capital of Australia. Every suburb has The Balkan, Oxford St., near Taylor several to many. Examine those Square, Darlinghurst, opposite the nearby for 40 cents to $1.00 meals. law courts: Yugoslav style, in-theQuality ranges widely from perfectly window cooking. Skewered lamb, foul to delicious. steaks, generally cheap meat dishes.

-Abound $1.50., A few goodies to go on with are: Home Cooking Restaurant, 292 The Continental, 230 Russell Street, City: Serve excellent steak and very Bondi Road: Soup, a roast, a dessert such as lemon meringue pie, for fresh salad for about $1.00. $1.50. Specials each night, some Prince Alfred, Cnr Bouverie and choice, such as steak and kidney pie, Gratten Streets, Carlton: Tasty, steamed pudding, beside the reasonably priced, with a real and English tea room ambience, Chinese good section. Indifferent special. two little old ladies, who open atmosphere.

Monday to Friday, 5 pm to 8 pm.

Peter Poyntons, Cnr. Cardigan and Three Stars Restaurant, 357 King St., Grattan Street, Carlton: Filling and Newtown (past the station): Go for clean, heavy on the Italian, from the specials, waiter will translate for about 40 cents. A very okka place you. Rissoles & ‘greek spinach” with surf and ski scores on the wall, (okra?), or lamb in lemon sauce, said and electronic dartsxwhich mustbethe to be filling. Small bottles of Retsina, most boring game in the world. $1.50. Prices around $1.40.

The Malaya, George St., Sydney, just north of Railway Square: Truly hot Hunger-during-dark Phase sambols, curries; do not expect much change from $2 a head. Popular. Shy Markets Cafe, Lackey Street, Hayoff the Chinese section of the menu. market: Opens at 1 a.m., for the

truckies & casuals of the market; becoming popular for homemade pies.

Barrack Motors, Esso cafe, cnr of Oxford St. & Greens Rd., Padding­ ton: Taxi, driver’s all night food bar, said to have “best hamburgers in $ydp^y” ; algo makes salami-burgers, grilled Sieese & ham, <&c.

Yellow Cabs Cafeteria, Inside Yellow Cabs depot, Tewksbury Ave., Darlinghurst.

Grenos, 221 Lygon St., Carlton: Spaghetti, 15c, lambs fry & bacon, 60c, schnapper, 70c, rump steak cooked to order, 90c, soup 20c.

Bread, butter, tea or coffee thrown in free. Strong, silent proprietor, with black moustache; the clientele are students, workers, outsiders.

Food remarkably good.

Alberto’s by Golden Fleece garage, 260 Hoddle St., Abbotsford: A taxi haunt; spaghetti, 60c, crumbed veal with hot sauce, 90c, steak & chips, $1, roast veal, $1.10.

who Used to record for Mercury, and now Columbia (CBS)?

Anyway, Bonnie has that sort of feel, and she is bound to get better. Paul Butterfield and all the old names appear on this one, which is a subtle cross between New Orleans and country music, and if you can’t decipher that, then it doesn’t matter.

These two female singers are generally better than the other WEA superhero at the moment, Bette Midler (The Divine Miss M, Atlantic SD 7238) who is cashing in on the revival of bad taste, which everyone now sees fit to love. Such as “Leader of the Pack” . Down this way we prefer the original By tne Shangri-Las, and generally the Andrews Sisters, Barbara Streisand and Laura Nyro are preferable to Bette. . . although she apparently puts in a great live performance which people like Bowie and Jagger j us t . . . love!

Her record isn’t much shucks, being more of a sampler. It is good to tapdance to, though.

Yes keyboard person, Rick Wakeman has his version of Henry VHI’s married life on record (The Six Wives o f Henry VIII, A&M AML—34804) which is okay. Start at Yes and Pink Floyd, and move on down the square till you get to Rick.

No words, just keyboards. it’s that eclectic

I ethereal stuff which might get { you there, although as Jackson Browne noted, can’t say for sure.

Shel Silverstein cartoons for ! j Playboy, writes hit singles for Dr Hook and the Medicine Show and has his own album out ,(Freakin at the Freakers Ball, CBS SBP 234270) which is something you might play to impress people and find out they thought it was lousy. He’s got a voice like Bert Reynolds imitating W.C. Fields and it’s that sort of sentiment. If you can’t get hold of “Justine” by the Marquis de Sade, then you could maybe procure this. The Best o f The Byrds Vol 2 (CBS) isn’t. What you might do is get the albums these songs came from and pass up this one-only offer.

If you think “ Dead Skunk” is an ecology thing, then that’s all right and it’s on Loudon Wainright 111 (on CtfS) which is one of the best albums to have if you like Randy Newman, Van the Man and old Dion records. You could get Albums 11 and 1 (on Atlantic) to complete the trilogy and perhaps be very happy about it.

She mightn’t be there anymore but Colin Blunstone of the old Zombies is back with Ennismore (on Epic). Rod Argent and Chris White produced it.

Worth a purchase if there isn’t any other way. Okay.

New discs

by C.M.

Talbot

This month has been fairly deadly for anyone who has an p’bum- habit.

That is, nothing muc h of any particular consequence was delivered. Things to look forward to though, include the Byrds re-union on Asylum which is due shortly. This al bum received unfavourable attention overseas because Brydphiles were maybe expecting the ultimate riffs.

It didn’t happen, as it never does, but still the album is worthwhile.

Be that as it might be, there are a couple of good lady singers out on WEA. Linda Lewis (Lark, Warners MS 2120) is a black woman from England, This is her second album and a goodun.. Linda has a particularly strange indescribable voice which I won’t bother to describe. Apart from saying that it is somehow captivating. She writes her own songs, looks good, sounds good.

The other is Bonnie Raitt (Give It Up, Warners) who plays her own slide guitar. Remember Tracy Nelson and Mother Earth,

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Cal eating We can recommend Coles over Myers, though both are reasonable in downtown Melbourne. The caf at Royal Melbourne Institute of Tech­ nology is OK; so is the Royal Melbourne Hospital’s, if you aren’t checked. The University of Mel­ bourne has an Asian bar in its caf, which serves reasonably priced Asian food; the Melbourne Uni caf is probably the best place for good coffee and a doughnut for breakfast in town, price for quality.

Spencer St. Railway Cafeteria: Not a spot on Sydney’s Central Railway cafeteria, but a good place to pass documents or eat porridge.

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