The Digger No.45 September 1975

MASSAGE PARLOURS, BT A WOMAN WHOWORKS THERE

STREET-FIGHTING WOMEN OF IRELAND ____

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Page 2

THE DIGGER

September 8 - October 6

Published by High Times Pty. Ltd. 444 Station Street, North Carlton, Victoria 3054.

Telephone: 384831 Postal Address: PO Box 77 Carltón, Victoria, 3053.

Cover price is recommended ret­ ail maximum.

D IG G E R C O L L E C T IV E : M E LB O U R N E : Terry Cleary, Bob Daly, Neils Hutchison, _ Phillip Frazer, Reece Lamshed, Grant Evans, isabelle Rosemberg, Jean Frankel. Sandra Zurbo.

A D V E R T IS IN G : Terry Cleary S Y D N E Y : Hall Greenland

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The Digger accepts news, featurés, artwork or photographs from contributors.

Send material with a stamped self addressed envelope if you want it back, to The Digger; PO Box 77, Carlton, Victoria 3053.

The.. Digger^ is a jnember of the Alternate Press Service (APS)

FILM The Last Grave at Dimbaza, the film that won first prize at the Melbourne Film Festival this year and shows black life in South Africa will be shown free at the following places: Thursday 11th September - Croydon Presbyterian Church Friday 12th September - Ringwood Presbyterian Church (next to Eastland) at 7.30 and 9.00 in the evening.

Saturday 13th September - Community Centre, Oban Rd. North Ringwood at 8.30p.m.

For further details contact CARE (Campaign Against Racial Exploitation) Phone: 415710.

AUSTRALIAN WOMEN ARTISTS 1840 -19 4 0 One hundred years of Austral­ ian women’s paintings are being exhibited at the Ewing and George Patton Galleries, Melb­ ourne University. It’s on from September 2 to 27th. Monday to Friday 10am to 6pm, Wednes­ day 10am to 8pm and Saturday 12 to 6pm.

These photos show scenes from The Mother and The Elephant Calf, currently playing at the Pram Factory in Melbourne, (see Page 25 for details). The Mother is set in pre-revolutionary Russia and shows the gradual involvement of a working class woman in revolutionary struggle.

Petit-bourgeois, avant-guarde critic Lenin Radish has this to say about The Mother-. - It's OK, but obsolete. I have not seen the play yet but this is an old-fashioned one which Brecht wrote while feeling down. So don’t blame him if other people put it on. My mother was disgusted. And as for The Elephant Calf, who’s heard of a talking elephant?”

Anyone who doesn’t see these plays is a right clod.

WOMEN’S LIBERATION CENTRE/ACTION GROUPS WORKSHOP There’s a day of discussion on Women’s Liberation activities at the Women’s Liberation Centre, 50 Little Latrobe Street from 10a.m. through to 6p.m. All women are welcome. Bring your own lunch, but coffee and tea will be provided.

DEMONSTRATIONS A demonstration to co-incide with the Second Anniversary of the military coup in Chile will be held in the Melbourne City Square at 4,30p.m. on Thursday, 11th September.

A demonstration to commemor­ ate the third anniversary of the declaration of martial law in the Philippines. Sunday, 21st Sept­ ember in the Melbourne City square at 2.30p.m.

Demonstration for justice in child care. Melbourne City Square, midday, Tuesday 9th September. Contact 3472028 for details.

D IG G E R IS NOW A T 444, S T A T IO N ST. N O R TH C A R LTO N .

PH: 384831.

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VIETNAM RECONSTRUCTION PLEDGE Funds are urgently needed to re­ build Vietnam. Your help is desperately needed apd you can do so by donating one week’s wages. All aid will be sent straight to the All South Vietnam Patriotic Catholics Ass­ ociation, the agency nominated by the Provisional Revolutionary Government. Cheques payable to: Vietnam Reconstruction Pledge, c/- C.I.C.D., 208 Little Lonsdale St. Melbourne 3000

WOMEN WRITERS WANTED Jane Craney and Esther Caldwell write: “We are collecting women’s writings for use in school texts and resource mat­ erial. We are particularly inter­ ested in short stories and have

the offer of a commonwealth grant for a collection suitable for senior students. Our ultim­ ate aim is to provide schools with literary and other material which is more realistic and constructive about women’s lives than that being studied at present. We want material which validates the real achievements and experiences of women in their own right, rather than their acquiescence and support of male achievements.”

Writers o f all ages and stages are invited to send typewritten manuscripts with double spacing to: Jan Craney and Esther Caldwell, 60 Osborne Road, LANE COVE, NSW 2066 THE FREE CENTRE

LEARNING

The Free Learning Centre is a place offering contact between

FILMAKERS’ CO-OP Wednesday, September 10 to October 6 the Filmakers’ Co­ op will be showing How Willing You Sing (M) by Gary Patter­ son. Screenings 8p.m. every night Tuesday to Sunday. The support is Peter Tanner’s latest exposure Struttin ‘ the Mutton (R) with the Hilarious Danny K.

Are you holding a public meeting? Have you just formed a new political party? A re you organising a demonstration? Any of these things, the Digger Directory of Events would like to hear about. Entertainment, dances, concerts and films, new pamphlets and journals, significant events, court hearings. We'll give them all a mention in this section.

All you have to do is send your information to PO Box 77, Carlton, Vic. 3053 or phone into 384831. But make sure you do it before October 1st when copy closes for this section for the next issue.

(Don't forget your contact addresses and phone numbers.)

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CONTRIBUTIONSWELCOMED IN ANYAREA OF THE HUMANTIE5 OR THE SOCIAL SCIENCES. WE ARE ALSO INTERESTEDW ARTICLESON WOMEN'S POSITIONER INVOLVEMENT, IN ANY OTHER AREAS. REVIEWS OF FILMS PLAYS, AND ORIGINAL ALSO WELCOME, AS WELLA' GRAPWCS-PHOTOGRAPHSei TW O ISSUESYEARLY NEXT ISSUE JANUARY

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Page 3

THE DIGGER

September 8 - October 6

For the man who comes, i t ’s hatred and power disguised as worship.....

Forthe masseuse it’s cash-paying animal-fat Men in power rarely disapprove of any form of sexploit­ ation for profit except that form in which they have no share of the take.

In Melbourne, capitalist politicians have traditionally made much noise about pornography, prostitution, abort­ ion, and now massage parlours. Thè noise is directed at their conservative, repressed constituents. Action usually only follows significant disorder amongst the controllers of the sex industry of the moment.

But last week as a result of the hullabaloo raised by vote hunting Council candidates (35 councils were involved in elections) the Victorian Government ruled that massage parlours were no longer allowed to operate in residential zones. Next time you go down to your local deli (comm­ ercial zone) for cold meats you may find that it’s been taken over by the new purveryor of meat . . . the massage parlour.

While Melbourne politicians, police, porn-lords and press fight over the spoils, a woman who has worked in a mass­ age parlour wrote this article which has just appeared, along with the poem, in Anarcho Women.* The question of massage parlours is an ideological ques­ tion rather than the moral one it is often seen as, as the exis­ tence of the massage parlour is the epitome of women’s op­ pression.

Men who go to parlours know nothing of feminism, have never questioned their sexual condi­ tioning, or considered women’s sexuality as anything other than the passive receptacle of their

Most fantasies are based on sexual power. Once a man re­ laxes into the massage and his own fantasy, a conditioned ar­ rogance emerges. He starts trying in various ways to rough-handle the girl (they are rarely gentle) and issue orders (e.g. “Kiss him, babe, (his cock) you might like it”). Most of them are also very genitally oriented. The size of their cocks is very important to them, a symbol of virility and

to be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.

Among the girls there is a good feeling of solidarity, an ‘us vs. them’ philosophy that is very supportive. It is easier to treat clients, who don’t see the girls as being human, in the same way.

Self-protection. For the girls, the men who come in are merely cash-paying animals. Actually, most of the girls working there are very moral about sex — most are married with kids or are very caught up in monogamous rel­ ationships.

Most hold fairly conditioned views of male/female relationships (i.e. the man being the dominant one sexu­ ally) and aren’t very sexually adventurous in their ‘normal’ lives. They have a strange moral snobbery and condemnation of girls that ‘screw around.’

The parlour owners are the most obnoxious, for they are very patronising in an obscenely ‘big daddy’ish way —a combinat­ ion of arrogance stemming from power drawn from the position of boss, and also that of a man’s conditioned dominance. The

girls and then leave. Most of them have a good working rel­ ationship with the parlour own­ ers and are known on a firstname basis. * * * Like most enterprises in our capitalist system, parlours are run on a chain basis, a business enterprise in which big money can be gained. A ready-made market has been created for the product (sex)—consisting of those who are made to consider them­

selves failures in terms of the myth o f the virile stud, a myth which is perpetuated in fairly obvious ways (which I won’t go into here — things like the media etc.) to perpetuate an artificial need for a ton of var­ ious goods.

Prostitution, parlours and clubs probably offer the most blatant gratific­ ation for .that market, at the same time perpetuating that myth, with all it’s implications and values.

I ’m still scared - having to touch, talk, please yet another stranger.

- repulsion. terrified, the old social graces won’t come off.

‘Justpopped in from work?’’ freeze. hoping he ’s the talkative one.

Spattered words, dropped bombs bursting thick, heavy silence pauses, - look at your hands examine his back, slowly breasts dragging, lingering along expanses o f fat.

‘Like this kind o f work?’

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own cock. Most men who fre­ quent the place are initially fairly nervous, concealed under a hammed-up overt arrogance and pretence of machismo (often trying lines like “You play ball with me, baby, ’n I’ll play ball with you.”). Although lacking in confidence, they still feel it necessary to display an initial show sexual power/aggression.

They don’t just lie back — most try various tricks to get a screw, either verbally or physically.

There is usually a constant pest­ ering and pressing throughout the massage. They seem to think that basically what all women want is a screw, that the girl is going to love it, that that is what she needs, etc. (e.g. “I know how to turn a woman on, you know -1 know what it takes” etc.). A parlour girl is a sexual object, that is, a pair of tits and a cunt — the object of the man’s fantasy. She has no sexuality of her own, except to the degree that he creates in his own mind.

Therefore the object of the girl is to play up that fantasy ele­ ment as much as possible. She is totally disregarded, doesn’t exist in any way except as a pair of breasts for fondling or biting, and as a cunt, hidden by briefs, a focus for riveted eyes and, again, fantasy.

power, a basis for confidence or lack of. Men with large cocks are usually more aggressive and arrogant. Nearly all of them in­ sist that the girl look at the size of their cocks and tell them how they rate.

The whole sexuality of the place is pretty warped. The girl’s sexuality, being geared towards the gratification of men’s sexual/ power fantasies reinforces sexual passivity, de-sexing her in the true sense. Sex and power are interrelated, most massages are hammed-up to create a harem/ slave type fantasy. We are told,, “ Fuss over him — make him feel like a king.” Massage is intended as a poiyer/ego boost for men who don’t ‘make it’ in the sex­ ually competitive outside world.

Here they live out the domin­ ance over a woman they feel they should have as a man, as well as a sexual ego-boost, all on a concentrated fantasy level.

The girls massage semi-clothed and when a man comes in one of the girls dances topless on a little stage/cage while he waits. The object of this, of course, is to mystify our women’s bodies, to impregnate a sense of sexual pro­ mise, an aid to fantasy. The man can undress and seduce the girl in his own mind (mental rape).

This enables him to feel that kind of power thrill that lies in any good seduction fantasy. For

* A new pamphlet published in Melbourne by Anarchist Women, PO Box 132, Collingwood, Vic. 3066.

owners often play out their own power games on the girls - gang­ ster roles and sheikh-like fantas­ ies (talks of ‘his girls’ - his har­ em). The sexual power of owner­ ship. Often they attempt to seduce new girls that come in to the place. (Girls that screw with them are given special treatment and privileges.)

Most of the men that come in maintain a double standard i.e. are unhappily married, yet wouldn’t dream of having any affairs or being unfaithfuly to their wives in any way, yet they come to a parlour or to a pro and still see themselves as being totally moral, totally faithful. A man’s ‘natural right’ — still tied to the older Victorian double standard morality of a man, his wife and mistress.

Much less said o f cop corrup­ tion—the same double standard— as is shown in an incident that happened to a friend of mine who got busted. The cop got the massage, hand relief etc., and then tried to blackmail her into giving him free massages in the future in return for not busting her. His line was “I may be a cop, but I’m a man too.”

Luckily she was able to talk her way out of it. In the time I’ve worked at a parlour we’ve had quite a number of visits from the vice squad. They’ve come ip and had a few beers with the boss, have a little ‘chat’, eye off the

‘Roll over on your back ’ Stop your eyes from closing, force open - fingers outstretched Acutely aware o f an erect cock pointing upward faceward, waiting, demanding Fingers reach for his stomach, plunge in thick animalfal.

- wanting to run. no escape - they want their moneysworth fat fingers grip my cunt ‘What’s in there is my affair’ run scream fuck o ff run/bastard I ’ll kill you Arrogant grubby fingerprobe - greased with power.

- Thinks it’s his right. fingers dig in, watching cunt-hatred (disguised as worship).

He slides o ff the table, kneels and bites (watching for. my reaction) power, disguised as worship High Priest, highly sexed, arrogant he bites (little boy hitting back) wave o f sickness and hatred smiling, entice him back onto the table, carving table, the fat roastingpig burning, succulent flames leap up cauldron witch-filled,

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A thousand tortures flash hot, fierce as I continue the massage and bite my tongue.

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September 8 - October 6

THE DIGGER

Page 4

Bashings, Smashings & a Lock-O ut

By Brenda Marlowe Angelo lives in a small but beauti­ fully neat house in Brunswick with his wife and two kids. He came out to Australia some 20 years ago, from north­ ern Italy, and has worked as a builder’s labourer ever since. His wife, Eva, works as well now, at a dry-cleaners not far from where they live.

Angelo was working on a small building site when the workers there were issued with notices from the bosses about the trouble in the city. If the union didn’t stop their campaign for more money then they would close down the whole building industry. Then they cut 26 dollars out of his pay-packet. The next week he was paid off and the site was closed down. Angelo was told by his union, the Builder’s Labourers Federation to apply for the dole. The following week, he made it down to the local Unemployment office to register. But because his wife was working, he wasn’t entitled to get anything. Eva was earning $74 aweek. For the next ten weeks, they had to make do with that.

Angelo thought the union’s advice to sit the lock-out was bloody stupid.

“They should have done something”.

He’s for a strong union, “If you didn’t have a union you’d get nothing.” But he’s not very happy with the one he is in, because of the leadership.

Angelo was only one of about 4,000 workers locked out by the Master Builders. (The media reports of 40,000 out of work were quite wrong of course.)

The lock-out had little effect in the suburban and country areas. For working class politics, the dispute was very imp­ ortant, and the media was quick to grasp its implications. The Australian for instance, called the disput “ A War to End All Wars.” They commented, “The metal industry employers took on the almighty metal unions and won, severely weaken­ ing the union movement’s frontlines of defense. Now, with an ‘if they can do it, so can we’ attitude, Victoria’s MBA and MPA (Master Plumber’s Association) are seeking to wrestle power from that other group of militant heavy-weights, the building unions.”

The bosses were clear on what they were doing. But were the ‘heavy-weights’?

Were the twists and turns, the alliances and double-crosses, the accusations and violence tearing the second line defense to pieces? And somewhere caught in there were people like Angelo. **** Back in June of last year, the Builders Labourers Federation was de­ registered. The Master Builders had been trying to do this for some time and finally succeeded in throwing the union out of the ‘fold’ of the Arbitration sys­ tem. As such, the union was no longer ‘legally’ recognised or protected as an organisation. This can be a bit traumatic for the particular union as other unions are allowed (again legally) to pick off it’s members. But fortunately for the BLF, the ACTU decided to continue to ‘recognise’ it.

So it was all a bit of a farce. In fact, Norm Gallagher, the federal Secretary jub'ulently acclaimed, “Tremendous. At last they have cut the chains of Arbitration from us.”

But not quite so. De-registration also meant that the BLF could not negotiate a new award for building workers. While this was being challenged in the High Court, Pat Clancy, leader of the rival Building Workers Industrial Union, started talking with the bosses about a new award that would cover the whole of the Australian building industry.

By the time Justice Evatt ruled that despite de-registration, the BLF could participate in the negotiations, Gallagher was too busy to be bothered with it.

From a room in the Sydney Hyde Park Plaza Motel, Gallagher was directing the operation to choke the ‘rebel’ NSW Branch of the BLF. But he did send a representative by the name of Dan Hellier to the Clancy negotiations. And

by March this year, the deal had been finalised. What did it involve? First, it, was a national award which was to level out all the various State awards. This meant that Victorian workers would get

T h e story on the V ictor ian building workers* lock-out and the dispute w ith M elbourne’s underground.

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two to three dollars, the other states more. Secondly, the award had a max­ imum paid rates clause inserted which meant that that was all workers were going to get until the award came up for renewal in 1976. Finally, the over-award payments that building workers were already getting was to be absorbed into the new national award. All the building unions involved in the negotiations, in­ cluding the BLF, agreed to these proposals.

By the time the Clancy deal came into operation, Gallagher had successfully accomplished his NSW venture. To the surprise and dismay of resident action groups, left-wing Labor parliamentarians, famous novelists and rank and file build­ ing workers, the rebel NSW leadership of Owens and Mundey went under. Gallagher had demanded an “unconditional surr­ ender”, and despite the Communist Party Tribune headline, “Builders Lab­ ourers Fight New Stage”, he got it. The NSW Branch was dissolved and building workers were instructed to take out Federal union tickets. Two weeks later, all the NSW Branch officers were expell­ ed from the BLF for life. The sacking and intimidation of ex-NSW BLF militants intensified on the job sites.

Mission accomplished, the victor­ ious Gallagher arrived back in Melbourne to tidy up here. To the surprise of many militants, he announced that the Clancy deal was unacceptable to the BLF. It was nothing less than a wage freeze, he said.

Although he accepted the ‘form’ of the national award, his union would seek to extend the Victorian Building Industry Award that they had worked under since 1956. So a new campaign of ‘guerrilla action’ - short sharp stoppages, interrupt­ ing concrete pours, overtime bans - was

initiated. The campaign was a bit half­ hearted as those supposed to carry it out were never once told what they were actually fighting for. However, it was strengthened by plumbers in the building, industry who also weren’t happy with being incorporated in the national award, and so took action to protest.

The Master Builders were dismayed.

They had worked together with Gallagher to smash the NSW Branch, he had agreed with the Clancy deal, and now he doublecrossed them. So they retaliated and said, “If you want the Victorian Award, well you can have it,” and thereupon took away the twenty-six' dollars that was being paid above the award. Gallagher sat tight. He realised that the MBA was forc­ ing him to pull his members out on strike.

After all, with such a slump in the building industry anyway, the bosses weren’t to lose much.

Instead Gallagher played another card. He claimed that the Australian Workers Union was doing builders’ lab­ ourers work on Melbourne's underground railway. He pointed the finger at the crane drivers on the Parliament House station. They were the one’s to get. And using the same tactics he had employed in Sydney, the tactics of slander, lies, harrassment, violence, he succeeded in getting rid of the crane drivers. But they were replaced by two more. This time, builders labourers working on the open cut Museum station were forced to strike to twist the arm of the Loop Authority into agreeing that Parliament House site was BLF work. They also paid off organ­ isers and students to ‘picket’ the strike.

But this time the crane drivers, Micky Thorpe and Bryce Allen, held out. ****

Wednesday lunch time. Workers from the Parliament House underground make a bee-line for the Imperial Hotel.

One of these men, looking muddy and tired, is the crane driver Micky Thorpe.

He was drinking alone at a table. I was introduced by a friend of mine, bought a beer and settled down to ask a few questions. “How did you first get involv­ ed in the demarcation dispute with the Builders Labourers?” “There was no bloody demarcation dispute,” he snapped back. He was pretty wary. And probably with good reason. I could have easily been another person having a go at him, having been called a scab and all that.

I tactfully rephrased the question. “When did you hear that Gallagher was after your job?” The answer shot back, “As soon as I started there.” “What Gallagher notified you?” A look as if what dumb kind of twit are you? “No, they had pickets on the job down here. Gallagher asked us to join his union but we wouldn’t join. Anyway I was already a member of his union. I have been for the last twenty seven fucking years. We wouldn’t give him the cranes because if he got the cranes, he would have got control of the whole job.” Gallagher had figured it right. The cranes that fed the under­ ground at that point was its lifeline.

Otherwise they would have to keep running material in from the Jolimont end, and that would be a nuisance. So stop the cranes and you virtually stop the tunnel. And to try to force the drivers into his union, Gallagher got pickets on the gates. Micky agreed. “And then one night I got bashed in my own home by four of them.” Who were they? “They were builders labourers, that’s who they were. I’m positive. And I also know for a positive fact that Gallagher’s asked three blokes to shoot me.” That’s all that Micky said about the bashing, but the next day when I spoke to him again, I asked him to describe the incident in more detail. He reluctantly obliged. “Well these four blokes just ran into the joint.

They knocked on the door and ran in and that was that. Pulled me down to the ground and kicked the cunt out of me.”

Did they make threats and all that? “No. They didn’t say a fucking word. But the misses lost the baby. She hit her fucking foot and tripped running down the road.

It was enough to upset anyone. So she had a miscarriage.” You mean they threatenend her too? “No, she just went running with fright. I don’t think they would have touched her.” [On the Wed­ nesday, there was no mention of his wife losing the baby. None of the finer details!] So we went on to discuss the effects of the picket - “a bit of an incon­ venience” - and how the crane drivers before Micky and Bryce took it over “were harrassed, followed home and eventually walked off the job. They work on other parts of the tunnel now.” It wasn’t hard then to get the AWU to cut off concrete supplies to builders labourers in the city. “We just said if you don’t support us, we’ll walk off the job and the whole place will stop. No one else was going to do our job.”

I had heard about the attack made on them outside the Dover Hotel in Lygon Street so I asked him how it happened. “I was down at the pub having a quiet drink. Came out of the pub to go home and about fifteen of Gall­ agher’s mob attacked us. They came out o f the union office. One of their own mates, a builders labourer, was bashed too. Bryce got hit over the head with an iron bar”. Are you going to press charges?

“No, you can’t. Not in an inter-union dispute. You don’t do that sort o f thing”.

Well then, how do you see the whole dispute? What was it all about? “Well, Gallagher wanted to get a foot in the underground. He could see that the whole building industry was coming to an end.

He’s going to try in his re-registration case to get mining into the builders’ labourers. So he wanted the underground.

But he didn’t get it. After ten weeks, they got what we said they could have in the first place. In december 1978, they take it over. That’s when the tunnel finishes.

And that’s it in a nut-shell.” ****

aI f Gallagher had an ounce o f decency he w ould tell his m em bers the truth ” Close to 1000 men work on Melb­ ourne’s underground. Even to the very inexperienced eye, it’s obviously mining work. Some of the workers have come here from other mining centres, some from overseas. Others are ex-builders’ labourers. It’s dirty work - staggering through mud and slosh. And at the same time the air is suffocatingly dusty. When it gets too bad, they bring tubes into the particular area and suck the dust out. The mole itself is a monstrous machine that burrows its way through solid rock at about three metres a shift. It’s cont­ rolled by one man surrounded by a complex of instruments and levers. Other men check its progress, scrape up the shit and fix any breakdowns. A conveyor belt takes the crushed rock out of the tunnel.

There are four tunnels being dug - two at about 50 feet down, another two at 150 feet - joined at intervals by cross­ passage ways. There are the bare outlines of lift and escalator shafts and a platform.

Bryce Allen was a builders’ labourer once. “But if you can’t get a job on a building site, what the fucking hell are you going to do for a quid?” So Bryce took on the job as the crane driver. He knew what was involved. “I believed what I was doing was right. Anyone who has seen this job can see that it’s not builders’ labourers work. Even builders’ labourers who have seen the job. Gallagher’s only empire building.” Bryce agreed that the work conditions on the underground were not good. “They should have a full time union organiser on the loop. But the AWU is a shithouse union because the leadership’s shithouse, the organisers are

Bryce and the other miners are very much involved in this job. They call the Imperial hotel “the headquarters”.

There’s a certain degree of satisfaction in the work they’re doing. It’s significant the way that work is so much our way of life, yet in another sense it is so hidden.

Perhaps this is only particularly striking in a case like the underground. But it also applies to a building, or a highway or ship. The labour process is somehow con­ ceded - except to those who work on it. bloody useless, and most o f its members are shit scared.”

When the project is completed for the ‘general public’ to use, it’s the engineers, architects, owners and government off­ icials who get the credit - the workers are conspicuous by their absence, but down in the tunnel in this rough unfinished stage, it’s the labour that strikes you. It’s the sight of these dark, muddy, sweating figures, the noise, the choking stuffiness, the glaring floodlights that leaves you with such an incredible impression. In 1981 when the trains are passing freely through these tubes, this image will remain although it’s really heen buried behind a gloss fOf paint, tiles and official publicity and backslapping.

The workers we met picked up on our excitement and interest, and fed us with details of the work and their own exper­ iences. It all seemed so remote from the bitterness on the surface. They weren’t really involved in the dispute with Gall­ agher - but they realised its implications. ****

WANTED FOR SCABBING don't work with scabs!

BRYCE ALLEN

H IC K THORPE

Cnrront Addross Unknown

2 tiffin Dryhnrfk St., Nnrth Malk

Scab

Scab ■ M ill OF ONSITE ■WHITEANT GI0UF

MEMEI OF ONSITE ■WHITEANT CION!

REW ARD-- For Eradicating Scabs — A Strengthened Union More Capable O f Defending Its Members’ Interests

THE SCAB By Jack London » awful tututance la is a two lagged ani

Where other people i

Page 5

THE DIGGER

September 8 - October 6

THESE MEN ARE GUILTY OF SCABBING FOR JOHN HOLLAND ( Working On A Crane That Builders Labourers Had Declared) Black And W alked O ff Assisting John Holland’s Attempts To Use The A.W.U. To Take Over Our W ork And Lower Our Wages And Conditions Attacking The Union's Premises And Stealing The Flag From The Office Roof THEY ARE ARE GUILTY OF TREACHERY TO THEIR FELLOW WORKERS THE STRIKING SHEARERS, IN 1891, MADE IT CLEAR WHAT THEY THOUGHT OF SCABS

THESE SCABS ARE NOT WANTED ANYWHERE!

Gallagher’s wrangle with the AWU turned out to be a mistake. Instead of securing more jobs for his members, about a third of the city builders’ labour­ ers were out of work because there was no concrete. And the Master Builders saw now that they had nothing to lose by forcing a lock-out. So on Wednesday, June 18, all builders’ labourers and plumbers were paid off and by Friday, all th city jobs had closed down. **** The BLF leadership instructed it’s members to get the dole or alternative work if that was possible and sit it out.

There were alternatives proposed. About two weeks into the lock-out, a group called the Rank and File Committee of the BLF contacted the media and crit­ icized Gallagher’s handling o f the dispute.

They demanded mass meetings be called to decide what to do, and to put an end to the senseless wrangle with the AWU. Gallagher resjponded with an attack on ‘white ants’ in the union. He claimed that the bosses were ready to crack, and that the Rank and File Committee’s public statement showed weaknesses in the union.

I asked a member of the Rank and File Committee whether they thought their public statement was divisive. “No. If calling for a mass meeting to call the largest possible number of builders’ labourers together to decide a course of action to be taken during the lockout is divisive, I don’t know what isn’t. It wouldn’t have made any difference. The Employers were on the offensive from the start. The union didn’t fight the lockout at all. As far as I can see, the only real division was between the leadership and the membership.” Then what were you saying should have been done? “We were saying that we should take over a couple of the city jobs. This would quickly have brought the dispute to a head.” And the union leadership wouldn’t go along with this? “No. An occupation is a militant action. Gall­ agher has called them “adventurist.”

They were used successfully by the NSW Branch. But Gallagher has carried out a pretty heavy slur campaign against that Branch down here, so all he has to do to refute it is to say that Mundey and Owens used that sort of tactic. And so the idea was thrown out.”

About four weeks into the lockout, the BLF did make some attempt to take over a couple of building sites “on hum­ anitarian grounds.” Early one Monday morning, about 40 builders’ labourers and about as many Trades Hall Council officials gathered outside the gates of the Peter MacCullum Clinic. The idea was for the workers to work on the uncom­ pleted buildings and then ‘bill’ the employers when the lockout ended. The same was to be done at the Yooralla School for Crippled Children. However, the whole idea was called off because of the poor attendence by the workers who were to do the work.

The ‘demarcation’ dispute was finally settled with Gallagher claiming a victory for the BLF. Bryce Allen saw it otherwise. “This dispute made a com­ plete idiot out of Gallagher. If he had an ounce of decency he would tell his members the truth. That is, he got nothing out of it. They will get the station in 1978 which is what we said all along.” Bryce is not so confident that we’ve seen the end of it. “Gallagher’s not going to let it lie. He wants revenge. OK, he’s lost this fight. But he’ll try to get us some way. I was told just recently that I’m going to be done in. I was told two nights ago that I’m going to be set up in the Imperial pub here.”

The building sites opened again on August 12. The employers agreed to open the gates so long as the building unions signed a proposal which in effect put them back to where they were before the lockout started. If employers and unions could not agree on a doc­ ument which could become the new award, then it would be arbitrated.

The BLF refused to sign. They argued that within the terms of reference, the arbitrator could hand down any sort of award he wanted, the Clancy type includ­ ed. So the cdnferences continued and the builders labourers’ began a limited cam­ paign for a new award. * * * *

There we have it: all the man­ oeuvres, the deceit and the violence. In the end of course it is the rank and file worker who loses out. The union is the only organisation that really represents his or her immediate needs. The Rank and File Committee recognises this. In fact, it’s whole purpose is to rectify this.

As one of its members, rhetorically per­ haps, says, “It’s up to the rank and file to make a decision on whether they continue to endorse again the bureauc­ ratic leadership we have at the moment or whether they have a change. The Rank and File Committee is for maximum democracy and democratic participation of the membership in the union. We should have a leadership that is answerable to the rank and file members at all times.”

Angelo agrees. “It’s not a free union. It’s all decided before you get to the mass meeting, that’s if one is held.

And Gallagher’s pretty stupid.” To illustrate his point, Angelo told a story about Gallagher at a mass meeting o f workers who had been on strike for 8 weeks. To win a point, Gallagher laid a bet against an opponent. A stunned audience watched as he pulled $70 from his pocket; stunned because they had got nothing for 8 weeks. Angelo also pointed oUt that these mass meetings are a waste of time for the vast majority of builders’ labourers who are migrants.

They find it difficult to follow what’s happening.

But the very things the Rank and File group desires to change are obstacles in its path - the undemocratic prodecures and the violence. Already several mem­ bers have been threatened. They go on to say, “There’s no doubt that there will be incidents of violence throughout the election campaign. Our best position is to expose it whenever it happens. But this could backfire on Gallagher because workers on the jobs are not likely to endorse violence during an election. If need be though, we will legitimately protect ourselves, but we will certainly not initiate any violence.”

September 8 - October 6

THE DIGGER

Page 6

Brunsw ick voters caught betw een priests & politicians

by Martin Curtis In local government circles the word Independent seems to have a different meaning from the dictionary sort of definition. It’s a crucial word in election fights because it’s users shout slogans like “Keep Party Politics out of Council” They say things like “I am completely INDEPENDENT of any political party and wish to work for the benefit of your community and you.”

But the whole idea of Independents vs. ALP presumes that Independents are blocks, and they most certainly are.

In fact they give themselves away by authorising each others propaganda and how to vote cards.

It is an example of the charade local government has become. There are plenty more examples.

On Saturday August 30 the people of 35 suburban and metropolitan councils in Melbourne went to the polls.

In Brunswick, where 51,200 people squeeze into the city’s 4.25 square miles, the issue was the local library. It’s an historical issue this library, and it’s been used by various people to kick political goals for 20 years.

The people of Brunswick are sick of hearing about it, but the councillor pol­ iticians drag it up whenever they need copy for their press releases or public meetings.

The apathy of the people towards the issue was summed up well by an old pensioner gent as he ambled away from the polling booths on August 30: “Most Brunswick people are T.V. happy. We don’t really even need a library here.”

Various people became involved in the elections, including the ALP Member for Brunswick West Mr Tom Roper. He gave his strong and apparently libellous views on the library issue to the people

F logging the horse I think after all the years of curelty, and work, the poor horse should be turned out to pastures, and a law passed for­ bidding the use of this (man called) beast of burden. To see the finish of a race through the glasses is a horrible sight to any normal person, the stunted little man flogging the horse to the post. If a horse is maimed, and has to be shot on the track, the film is .kept from the public, and all these hypocrites profess to be animal lovers.

E.Webb, Altona, Vic.

D iv in e chocolate Last year I wrote an article for you telling of my exper­ iences in Divine Light Mission and my reasons for dropping out of it.

That article was entitled “Knowledge is not Chocolate”.

of Brunswick through the pages o f the ALP local broadsheet the Wills Citizen.

The Mayor of Brunswick Cr Grahame G Kermonde has taken offence at Mr Roper’s allegations that he spent his mayorial allowance of $5000 plus another $4720 on the entertainment of local businessmen and visiting Victorian State Government politicians.

Mr Roper also accused Cr Kermonde of pressurising Brunswick Council into leaving the collective Moonee Valley Library group which was providing an excellent service and setting up their own library at an extra cost of $95,000.

The Brunswick Library saga has been a long running issue in which both the ALP and Independents have soiled their image.

Brunswick signed an agreement for library services between the cities of Essendon, Broadmeadows, Brunswick and the shire of Bulla in July 1971. A very important clause of that agreement stated that Brunswick would provide a new library building o f not less than 10,000 square feet within three years.

Brunswick is at the moment a year overdue on that promise. But the mayor says they were “Rolls Royce recommend­ ations” and that they were never taken seriously.

Anyway, the saga officially finished in July last year when council formally res­ olved to withdraw from the Moonee Valley Regional Library and support its own independent library from the end of September 1975. But like the tired old issue it is, it was ceremoniously dragged up again to give new candidates, particul­ arly those on ALP tickets, something to rant about. It also gave Tom Roper and the Federal Member for Wills, Mr Gordon Bryant, an excuse to bring out an ALP propaganda sheet, and to complete the

Well, I am revising my opin­ ion. Guru Maharaj Ji’s Know­ ledge is Chocolate. And I’m gorging myself at the moment.

Yum, Yum. Actually I can be anything, do anything, and still see Divine Light shining inside me, still hear the most fantastically heav­ enly music, still drink the nectar of the gods, still be continually in the vibration of the eternal Word that was and is in the beginning. By Guru Maharaj Ji’s Grace.

The problem with the world is that everyone is in separation.

Everyone is looking for the things which separate, instead of the things which unite. But actually God is one, we all have the same Father, we all come from the same source, we all are brothers and sisters whether we like it or not. Black or white, bearded or unbearded, Austr­ alian or non-Australian, comm­ unist or capitalist, male or famale, married or un married, WASP or hippie, premie or non-premie, we are all human beings and all servants of each other.

Love, Frank (The Bat) Starrs, North Glenelg, S.A. P.S. Yes I’ve been smiling lately thinking about the good things to come,

picture it gave the mayor o f Brunswick the basis o f a Supremem Court libel writ.

No one in Brunswick really seems to understand what has happened in the library affair. Most cling to one or two facts and quote them out of context with the overall background. This is done to make some sense of it. Actually the whole thing has been a series o f blunders, contradictions, steps foreard, regressions, embarrassments and party political manouvres. And underneath the official language of resolutions, motions, agree­ ments, architects reports and terse communication between Brunswick Council and the Regional Library runs the underlying, and oh so human, fact that the mayor and mayoress of Brunswick absolutely detest some of the people involved in the Regional Library.

Mayor Kermonde is a sheet metal manufacturer. He sits in an elevated glass cage on his factory floor, supervis­ ing the working days of his mostly migrant employees. Mayor Kermonde has the confidence of the business people of Brunswick and also seems palatable to the residents. They see him mostly leering at them off the pages of the local free paper The Sentinel.

Cr Kermonde recently stated in The Sentinel that Brunswick was not a poor working man’s suburb, but was one of the wealthiest in Australia.

“There are 19 millionaires living in Brunswick,” he said. “They are people who have worked up a business and stayed. Brunswick people are economic, frugal and pay their debts. There’d be more money owed by a handful of people in South Yarra than by all the people of Brunswick put together. Eighty four per cent of Brunswick people own their own property. The first thing a migrant does when he comes here is buy a home.” **** Jim’s Milk Bar is in Stewart St, Bruns­ wick. The shop is run by Jim and his wife, Esther who live in two rooms behind the shop. Two children and a grandmother also share the rooms. They open the shop at six in the morning and close it at ten at night, every day of the year. The couple have worked the shop solidly for two years. They plan to work it for another three years and then sell it to buy a house in an outer suburb. The couple

and I believe it could be something good has begun.

P.P.S. I think it would be most unfair if you didn’t print this.

C lass bias It has been widely recognized that there is a severe ‘class bias’ in university education - the children of the wealthy get to university, while the children of the poor don’t.

The Karmel Report conf­ irmed this with statistics reveal­ ing that 64 per cent of university students had fathers in profess­ ional or managerial positions (25 per cent o f the population) while only 20 per cent of stud­ ents had fathers doing manual work (50 per cent of the pop­ ulation).

This situaton occurs because working class parents are usually themselves economically and ed­ ucationally disadvantaged. They are thus unlikely to provide their children with an intellectually stimulating environment, and unable to send their kids to private schools with good fac­ ilities. Coming from such a milieu, the children generally

are Greek and do not speak much English. However their children speak good English and also do well at school.

The children go to Greek school two nights a week. There are two other little shops in Stewart St, but Jim’s Milk Bar stays open the latest. And in Sydney Rd. where the real-estate agents are there are signs in the windows which say ‘Mixed Business For Sale. Low Deposit.” **** On polling day most of the mig­ rants told me they didn’t understand the issues. One Greek husband filled in two voting slips, one for himself and one for his wife. A lot o f migrants voted 1,2,3, down the card. One Ital­ ian woman told me she had asked the priest who to vote for. Most came to the polls because voting was com­ pulsory.

Then there was the chirpy Australian pensioner lady who said : “The library issue hasn’t made any difference to the way I v o te d ,__but as a matter o f á fact I have á friend who is to become the new librarian.”

And while Brunswick Council revels in its in-fighting and personal politics, rates in Brunswick have jumped 333per cent (from $18.06 to $60) in three years and council has imposed a means test on rate rebates to pensioners. Brunswick creche and Day Nursery has announced it is broke and may have to close next year; the construction of a paramedical centre seems as far away as ever; a local pressure group working for the establish­ ment of a 24 hour free Health Centre seem ready to throw the fight in; and kindergarten workers at the Rose St School find council is not interested in paying them to extend their hours at the school to 5pm so children can be minded till mothers finish work. And in the latest library move it seems council will close the new independent library on Saturday afternoons and Sundays, when it comes into operation at the end of this month.

That simple little autocratic move will deprive about 50 o f Brunswick’s migrant kids o f a quiet place to study on Sundays, away from the noise of an extended family reunion.

So it’s not really surprising that people are going to the priests for advice?

accept this as their lot in life and have very low expectat­ ions.

It is therefore criminal that the thousands of people whom, despite such handicaps, can ben­ efit from university education are denied it by stringent entrace quotas, inadequate teaching fac­ ilities, pressures of job and family, etc. We are therefore calling for: -expansion of facilities to make open entrance to university possible -establishment o f an open (corr­ espondence) university, similar to that in Britain.

-paid time-off from work to study, and adequate living allowances to help remove economic barriers -adequate child care facilities to help remove family barriers

Maggie Burrows, Education Action Group Monash University, Vic.

D iggin g D igger In the eleventh newsagency I had asked at for a copy of Digger, the owner looked upfrom the Pix/Post he was read­ ing and said “That’s Lang Hancock’s new mining magaz­ ine isn’t it?”

No, but far out anyway.

Just where can you get a low mineral content copy of Digg­ er in Perth?

Sam, East Fremantle, W.A. —Try the distributor listed on Page two, or subscribe. (Ed)

Masses* m edia It was really good to see your article on the media in your last issue - it is about time people realised just what sort of big business is controlling what is being broadcast in Australia.

As an advocate o f ‘media for the people’, I would appreciate space being given to alternative ideas for broadcasting and community video use.

I have sent several peices to you have had no information as to their suitability for your paper. However, I am happy to see that you are now devoting a page in your new format to a diary of events. I would be interested to know if this is confined to Australia Council handouts - or whether altern­ ative groups could mention their own events as well.

I think it is good that 3t,hi have changed your format so you can’t be quite so self-indulg­ ent with latout - including pointlessly oversized photo­ graphs. As I see it, yours is the only newspaper hope in Austr­ alia for a free press ideal, which is important for the real opera­ tion o f a democracy. I know that the usual type of a counter­ culture enterprise is that they are practically broke - though to criticise the mass media, if not the Australia Council.

Media for the people*

Richard Coady, Sydney South, NSW.

September 8 - October 6

Page 7

THE DIGGER

Micky Allan

“Is anybody there?” said the traveller (for Ponch) I come in off the badlands, off the desert, out of the dead grass, a thousand miles of it behind me now, and the sun rises in my face to show the old city of bells and drums where my friends live who have forgotten me.

In the sunny rooms I hear their Voices speaking a language I used to understand: singing, laughter, plates clashing, rapid footsteps.

Nobody notices the dirty traveller hesitating in the doorway.

Micky Allan

Virginia Coventry

Yes, it’s them all right: brown faces, gold ear-rings, hair chopped strangely, and the odd habit of touching.

I’ve been away so long. When they look up will they remember me?

Helen Garner

Man doing exercises in his lunch hour. Domain Park, Sydney, 1975.

Virginia Coventry

September 8 - October 6

THE DIGGER

Page 8

From Mannix to the making of a political eunuch

by Patrick Connelly THOSE were the days, I thought. The bad old days when an anti Labor rally tarted up as anti Communism used to pull into the streets 10,000 - not a sad 4000.

For 4000 was the roll up, so the press and organisers claimed, for Australia’s first mass rally against communism in years — the Baltic states demos excepted.

The size of the crowd at that rally — in Melbourne’s City Square on May 8 didn’t impress me. After all, I’d been in a real demo, in March, 1970, in which at least five times that number had stamped the streets of Sydney, chanting for withdrawal of Diggers from Vietnam.

I still wasn’t impressed when Ms Jennifer McCallum, organiser of that May rally, claimed she was delighted at the response.

And I even raised a chuckle when she said another People Against Communism (for Communism, read non Lib- NCP) shindig early next year would draw

“ Frankston housewife” but it’s obvious she is more than a trendy Lib bored with yoga and origami.

Any woman who can speak so casually of $100,000 either has a letter of credit from Jim or has other good reasons for thinking she can raise the ante.

My guess is that because she so coolly told me she would publicise the August 17 rally only when the time was ripe for atmost impact, the People Against Communism movement is being as smoothly orchestrated by old pros as the loans scandal was.

Other pointers towards the backlash being a syndicate job are that an anti Red march was held, soon after the first Melbourne one, at Picton, a hamlet 64km south of Sydney; and that when I was having trouble finding Ms McCallum’s phone number, News Weekly found it for me in a matter of seconds.

100 , 000 .

But two months later, within hours, I suddenly knew it was serious; that the interests which had long sneered at middle class Labor’s tentative, often frustrated and futile moves towards social reform and tabbed them galloping social­ ism, had marshalled their forces so well that the extremist right wing back lash was now a palpable thing.

During that time span on July 15 I read John McLaren’s article in the current issue of Meanjin (No 1 1975) headed ‘The Ice Men Cometh: Labor contra the New Conservatives?’

And I phoned Ms McCallum.

McLaren’s premise seems to be that the federal government’s inept perfor­ mance has inspired its enemies not only to attack its fiscal mismanagement but to do so with a messianism informed by the work ethic and what I labelled, in a rare flash of revelation, as patriotic wowserism.

He writes: “The contempt for dem­ ocratic process shown by the new conser­ vatives is probably no greater than was that of Sir Henry Bolte or Sir Robert Askin in their heyday but the novelty is that this contempt is now complem­ ented by impregnable self-righteousness.”

He says the Victorian Attorney General, Mr Wilcox, challenging the legality of the Australian Assistance Plan, talks not about a power struggle but his concern for constitutional prop­ riety; Joh presents Gough and Gang as a threat to morality and urges a crusade for the old virtues of God, Queen and family; Sir Charles Court in WA” mounts assaults on abortion information services while selling the state off to the highest bidder.”

McLaren wrote all that months before the loan scandal hotted up and before Ms McCallum came on the scene.

Ms McCallum told me a fund raising dinner would be held on July 18 and that she would demand $100,000 a year to run her campaign. She said she was worn out organising the August 17 rally at Dallas Brooks Hall and anti-Red activities in trade unions.

Press coverage of Ms McCallum’s first rally was heavy but information on her was sketchy. She was called, tweely, a

This mounting pseudo-hysteria against people and policies anywhere left of the right troubles me. Unlike many readers of The Digger, I not only went through the era when that traditional Australian fear of the exotic was at its zenith in the mid to late 60s; I had, years before, helped encourage the atmosphere in which that extremism flourished.

It wasn’t really my fault, I suppose, for I was as much exploited as unwitting exploiter.

Like most other students at Australian Catholic schools in the early fifties, I accepted without question warnings about the imminence of the red peril.

Adequate documentation o f the ravishing of nuns in Korea and the martyrdom of priests in China aborted any pre-adolescent scepticism.

Russia, o f course, was the black beast.

It was with relish on that march day of 1953 that we read the daily telegraph that the teacher passed around the class.

Aficionados of imperishable wit will recall the front page treatment o f Stalin’s death: a large sketch o f a weeping crocodile and the story that began: “Plains of hell, Tues: Good old Joe has come home at last.”

But there was a closer danger: comm­ unist control of the unions.

We were encouraged to support the industrial groupers and their valiant fight and it was with something akin to triumph that my parents heard o f the 1955 A.L.P. split and the formation of a party that would save the nation.

I did not question their flight to the D.L.P. and joined them in admiration of Archbishop Mannix, In 1958, after the school system let me loose as a red baiting paranoiac I used to phone a communist bookstore at Kings Cross and threaten to redecorate its interior with a molotov cocktail. After my third call it closed down.

My first victory over godless communism! But a couple of weeks later it reopened, with a revamped window display - and probably with the interior fireproofed.

A year later, I quaked along with the rest of my ilk when the Sydney Sun ran

its famous scare story about Indonesia being armed with soviet rockets.

The story was illustrated by a sketch of the missiles Screaming down on a map of Australia, giving the time it would take for each to hit the various capitals.

Every night on radio 2UW I used to tune into the asian affairs commentary by ageing far right winger and former Aust­ ralia Firster, J.M. Prentice.

I got to know Prentice ( a confidant of Chiang Kai-shek and Syngman Rhee, so he said). He was reassuringly secure about western superiority but underlying his droll urbanity was the fear that fellow travellers would undermine the country.

He had a deep affection for asian cult­ ures and would drop their aphorisms into his conversation. A favourite was the Indian definition of the appeaser: “ a man who will feed the tiger anything in reach in the hope he himself will be the last devoured.”

He advised me to leave the public serv­ ice and enter journalism. But that avenue was blocked at the time.

By some aberration of logic — probaably via the preSplit line of the Groupers that it was better to renovate an existing house than build a new one — I joined the ALP. My local branch, near Parramatta, west of Sydney, was in Werriwa elect­ orate and it was with some awe that I, as assistant secretary, poured out the occasional cup of tea for our member, a rising luminary named E.G.Whitlam.

It wasn’t long before I began trying to reform the NSW Youth Council o f the ALP. I ignored advice about getting the numbers. Who wanted allies among the moderates, who were only pinkie stooges? I thought, and intoned to as

THE OTHER HAEE Edited by Jan Mercer

Women in Australian Society The Other Half is intended to contribute to the fem inist debate in Australia w ith a reasoned and substantiated analysis of the major areas in our society and the ways women are disadvantaged w ithin it.

Twenty-seven informed and concerned human beings have contributed in the areas of their special knowledge to the book’s wide-ranging perspective.

Published by Penguin Books Australia Ltd. Available from your local bookseller or newsagent

Page 9

September 8 - October 6

many o f them as I could comer, two NCC epigrams: he Who stands for nothing will fall for anything; he who floats with the tide will end up on the rocks.

I abhorred the left wing but found at my first and only annual conference, that hydrophobic armwaving was no match for a well marshalled argument.

Bob Gould and his push annihilated me when I spoke to the right wing clique’s motion advocating Australia’s possession of the bomb.

I drifted out of the party, finally entered journalism and after 18 months with a bush paper found myself reporting for the Canberra Times.

It was in June, 1962, while covering an address at a Canberra RSL club, that I met Geoffrey Fairbaim and Vladimir Borin.

Fairbaim, a product of the Victorian bunyip aristocracy, was surely the Aust­ ralian right’s most articulate writer-spoke­ sman throughout the Indochina conflict.

A lecturer in Indian history at the ANU (where he felt ostracised by most stud­ ents and the leftist academic establish­ ment), he was something o f an authority on guerrilla warfare - especially Giap’s techniques.

He was a convivially humorous intell­ ectual and I liked and admired him.

Borin* was a plagiarism from Jaroslav Hasek. In his sixties, with a wild white mane and eccentric mannerisms, he spoke fatalistically of what he called kommunismus. He had turned communist after World War 1 and became a journal­ ist with a red daily in Prague, his home town.

In the early thirties, he sided with Nikolai Bukharin, an early ideologue leader of Russia after the revolution, in his opposition to Stalin’s agrarian “ref­ orms”.

In 1936, Borin was summoned to Moscow to explain his deviationism and escaped, he told me, because Czech communist party leader, Gottwald, prov­ ided him with a visa out of Russia. He probably would have been liquidated as Bukharin was after the fast of the great purge trials three years later.

He turned against communism and after arriving in Australia in 1952, set to work opposing red influence in unions.

When I met him at the RSL club he was fulminating against Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong atrocities of the previous December and advocating intensification of the strategic hamlets scheme that President Kennedy’s “advisors” had beg­ un.

Borin had committed his points to print in an horrific little pamphlet en­ titled ‘This May Happen to You’, with a foreward by Fairbaim headed Speaking for the Silent. It was all heady stuff for one of my convictions and for weeks I flogged the pamphlet around Canberra.

I had no success and seized on the con­ spiracy theory of history, seeing in every refusal to stock the publication the voice of the appeaser.

Foiled there I found a ready forum for my obsession at the Civic hotel, in central Canberra. ANU students and the lefty lecturers used to foregather there and many was the drinking companion I lost as I hurled my slanderous diatribes at them.

There was one I couldn’t insult - a declared communist who was secretary of a small but pivotal union. With infur­ iating calmness he used to try and instruct me in dialectical materialism and would press on me the works of Marx and Lenin.

“Come to my party on Monday night.” he said once. “There are a few special people I want you to meet. Keep it dark, though.”

I turned up at the north Canberra address with three marxist tomes (un­ read) I was returning to him. Just inside the door were a conspiracy o f academics I recognised from the hotel, a few trade union officials and three men my host introduced as “attached to the soviet embassy.”

With admirable panache I hurled the books to the floor and stalked out, ranting about an attempt to compromise and frame me.

I soon had my revenge. On February 7, 1963, the first secretary Ivan Skripov was given two weeks to get out of Aust­ ralia.

The day after external affairs minister Garfield Barwick"announced the expul­ sion I was sent by the editor to keep watch on Skripov’s movements.

I demonstrated tny contempt for communism by striding to the main door of the embassy and offering a bottle of Smirnoff vodka as a fond farewell gift from the Australian people. The heavy at the door refused to take it but I had made my gesture.

That night, when the car bearing Skripov roared out of the driveway we gave chase, with the newspaper’s photo­ grapher revving the old Holden up to 80 mph as we pursued the infidel reds through Forrest and Red Hill.

We lost track of the car but acting on a hunch, we crossed the river, passed the war memorial and drew up across the driveway of Skripov’s residence at Camp­ bell.

His car arrived seconds later. With unlimited joy I watched them leap out of the car, brandish their fists at us and flee into the house.

As 1963 wore on the papers carried more news o f Indochina. There was armed conflict in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam . . . and it was the last-named that seemed to preoccupy Fairbaim.

Late that year I was there to cheer him on when he addressed a public meeting on Vietnam, bravely defending Diem from the accusations of corruption shouted out by the ANU students who stacked the meeting.

A few weeks later, Diem was dead, and even the dogs were barking that the Yanks had done him in. This puzzled me: why would antired liquidate antired?

Wanderlust set in and I bummed around Australia for a few months, winding up as editor of a weekly paper at Northam, 60 miles east of Perth.

I had complete editorial responsibility and filled the columns with homilies on the leftist threat that surrounded us. A pet topic was the sale of wheat to China and I portrayed wheat growers as perp­ etrators of a potential sellout a point that was resented as Northam was centred in the wheat belt A libel writ from Country party MHR Don Maisey silenced me and convinced me that flight was the wisest course.

In Sydney again, I joined the rightwing Daily Telegraph - just in time for the big one. Menzies had pulled us overtly into Vietnam, reintroduced the draft and left incompetent Harold Holt holding the baby.

The left was screaming, so I joined the good fight, turning up to the TV studios whenever those Whither Vietnam? deb­ ates were on.

With others of my persuasion I would hurt what I regarded as curly question at Cairns, Ted Wheelwright and co. My side was usually represented by Fairbaim, Santamaria, Owen Harries and Peter Coleman.

Sadly, Prentice had died and baroque Borin was no longer there to inspire me.

He had retired to a castle in Scotland.

Whenever Cairns or Uren spoke pub­ licly on the escalating war, I would be there to ridicule them. So would a group of pallid, clerkly types who, I learned, were the NCC-DLP panzer division.

They were allies o f a sort but I could not bring myself to affiliate with them partly because of the glamour in being a lone vigilante for truth and right partly because I remembered old Pren­ tice’s account of a Catholic bishop’s opinion of a certain NCC leader: “I wouldn’t trust him around the comer with a zac.”

The months rolled on, as did the demos and counter demos. The uni papers and left wing publications (I always kept up with the oppositions views) were full of police bashings, cries of persecution from protestors and pacifists, Martyrs were created every day . . . the last thing we wanted.

Suddenly it was mid 1966. The crucial election was near, the marches got bigger and noisier and the violence became more violent.

There was the partly successful attempt to pot Arthur Calwell with a shotgun (it was a loner’s effort but still symptomatic of the times) and police repression became more overt — espec­ ially during LBJ’s tour in October, during which I witnessed my first police savagery.

About the time Holt’s life was endang­ ered (so the papers told me) by the massive anti war demo at his Randwick rally, I had a disquieting experience.

It was a Saturday night and I was standing opposite the bookstore I had harrassed so long ago. The leaders of a long line of marchers chanting “give peace a chance” drew level with me.

From my left, a group of soldiers, a couple of them waving beer bottles, waded into the marchers screaming “commie cunts” and other terms of endearment.

Marchers from the rear moved in to help and the blood flowed.

Was this what it was all about, I wondered.

But my unease was soon dissipated in the excitement of the election. My convictions were vindicated when Aust­ ralia returned the Holt regime with a thumping majority. The people had spoken and we were in the war all the way with LBJ. It happened in the Domain one Sun­ day a few months later. Defeat had not tamed the left but triumph mellowed my hostility to a condescending tolerance of the losers’ viewpoint.

A slight, middleaged man in suburban rig - obviously one of my mob, I thought — stood among a group of students, expatiating on the poll result.

Holt’s victory had represented not a vote of confidence but a vote of coward­ ice, he said. Australia had come down not against any ideology - for so few under­ stood either the theory or practice of communism - but against the phantom of the unknown.

During the three years he himself had opposed Australia’s role in Vietnam, he said, the arguments that passed for Rightwing dialectics had been merely an apologia for paranoid fear.

All the statements defending our involvement - that we were fighting for democracy, that we were keeping faith with America, that we had a duty to maintain Western values - all were camou­ flage for the fundamental premise.

And that, the speaker continued, was that it was preferable to fight them “up there” regardless of the consequences to the indigenes - than to fight them here.

“That is what Canberra calls forward defence,” he concluded. “I call it coward­ ice.”

The clarity of his insight was a light­ ning flash that galvanised a conversion as instantaneous and irrevocable as that of Saul on the road to Damascus.

And like Saul, I was hurled from my hobbyhorse.

I began to hate the right wing for its spinelessness and yet was in a no-man’s land. The perpetrators of the big lie (or did they really believe it?) were despicable but how could I deny creed and breed by advocating the NLF cause?

With Whitlamesque evenhandedness, I argued withdrawal from a land where we should have been charged with trespass­ ing but argued against the ir evitable communist victory.

It was an equivocal stand but one in which I was vindicated on the day of the big moratorium demo of March, 1970.

The 25,000 protesters, massed outside Sydney Town Hall, heard a hardliner scream over the p.a.: “Victory to the Viet Cong.”

Almost as one, the crowd boomed “No!” and the speaker scurried from the rostrum.

Today, I am a political neuter.

I see the Lib NCP as an anarchronistic comedy duet, and dredged up a dry chuckle early in May when Doug Anth­ ony (foreshadowing the People Against Communism demo) advocated sucking up to the Yanks again because we had “never been so alone.”

I see the DLP as deserving of its exile to the level of purgatory that Dante reserved for public deceivers.

And I see the Labor government as a political eunuch, likp myself.

Like the Tonkin government that came to power in WA after 12 years in the wilderness, it is on borrowed time because of a minority in the Upper House and because of Australians’ im­ patience with social reform if it means reform will be of advantage to someone else. In a venal society such as ours, money is god and those who try to distribute it to the disadvantaged can be only temporary high priests.

Like Tonkin, who lost his Lower House majority of one only nine months after attaining office and who was threat­ ened twice with refusal to supply, Whitlam’s team is seen as having less than a firm grip on public expenditure.

Allied to this is Whitlam’s massive ego of grandstanding, Connor’s delusion of grandeur, the continuing existence of the communications commissariat and the nepotistic appointments of Spiegelman and Wilenski.

Add to this the absence of young blood in the ministry and the choice after the inevitable double dissolution is Hobson’s.

If I were not disillusioned, I would act on the ancient saw that for evil to prevail, all that is needed is for good men to do nothing.

I should be matching Ms McCallum’s initiative by forming the Apolitical Party or the Australian Informal Voters’ Movement. As the old King’s Cross Whisper gag has it, a close vote would result in Cliff Hanger being elected prime minister.

But I can’t be bothered.

In theory, I would like to embrace anarchism. But my record o f political gullibility has shown me I can’t trust myself . . . and anarchism is the ultim­ ate expression o f self.

September 8 - October 6

THE DIGGER

Page 10

|

Great pretender Almost 200 years after the French Revolution put down the despised concepts of nobility and aristocracy, there are still 4,057 authentic aristocratic fam­ ilies in France.

That’s the verdict of a new two-volume “Dictionary of French Nobility”, which sorts out the real aristocrats from the pretenders.

Ironically, the dictionary has excluded French President Val­ ery Giscard-d’Estaing from the ranks of nobility, but affirms that the manager of the French Communist Party newspaper L’Humanite is an authentic marquis.

—Georgia Straight

stands for 3-quinuciltinyl Benzilate. It reportedly produces a trip that can last for more than three days and is so powerful that people subjected to it often have amnesia afterwards.

The Army claims the drug is so highly concentrated that it can even be effective as a gas.

All volunteers are supposed to be warned o f the drug’s effects, says the Army, though it ackn­ owledges that abuses could occur. The testing is still going on.

—Goergia Straight

Borderline case

D om ino theory A westernized version of a traditional Japanese chess game has been developed by Vancou­ ver resident John D. Jameson and is now being introduced to manufacturers through the Ray­ mond Lee organization of New Y ork.

The game, which supposedly can be taught to a child in an hour, is played on a board with 81 squares. The game has 20 pieces for each side, some of them with the same names as traditional chessmen, but none with exactly the same moves. A player wins by capturing the opposing king, and in this game he has several new tricks up his sleeve. Most important, any piece he captures becomes a “paratrooper” which he can re­ turn to the board for his own use at any time, and to almost any place.

ramblers [ENS] A lot of people are getting “up and at ‘em” when they are awakened by train whistles. According to the Fam­ ily Planning Association in Eskisehit, Turkey, the city has the second highest birth rate in the world because its residents wake up to loud noises and engage in sex.

Another reason cited for the early morning activity was the roar of jet engines at a nearby military base.

m y cover

Surrealistic pillow [ZNS] Nelson Rockefeller, the man who has everything but the presidency o f the United States of America, has purchased a new bed for the vice-presidential boudoir.

The bed came complete with a mink seven-foot coverlet design­ ed by surrealist artist Max Ernst and was advertised at a mere $35,000. The’ amount Rocky paid for it has not been dis­ closed.

The bed will occupy the master bedroom at Admiral House, the official residence of the VeePee.

I want to serve public notice on CIA director William Colby that I’ve had it. The recent revelat­ ions concerning CIA involve­ ment in assassination plots against foreign politicians are the last straw.

Time was, I could identify myself to a new acquaintance as a former CIA employee and command a slight but immediate respect. The inevitable followup question was, “Did you have a license to kill?”

“No, of course not,” I would reply, and anyone who had known me for more than a week would accept that, but there was always someone to wink know­ ingly and say, “I get it. Can’t talk about it, eh?” If I admitted as well that the Agency had fired me, they might withdraw almost imperceptibly, and I could imagine them thinking, “Here’s a real baddie.” I kind of enjoyed it.

That’s all ended now, of course. The truth is out.

—Robert T. Wood St. Petersburg, Flo. (Letter swiped from HARPERS WEEKLY)

N ot

Sci~fi Crackers

M oonlight

The U.S. Army says it’s testing a new and potent form of “Super LSD” on some 2,500 volunteers.

The drug is called “BZ” which

[Earth News] Americans are flushing approximately two-anda-half-million trees down their toilets every year, according to the results of an experiment carried out by an Emmaus, Pennsylvania firm.

Rodale Press, which employs about 300 people, decided to trim about half an inch off every roll of toilet paper used in its offices in a month, and far from complaining, the employees not­ iced no difference in fact, they said, the number of rolls used actually decreased slightly.

The firm estimates that if all the toilet paper manufacturers in the US trimmed half an inch off every roll of toilet paper they would save 300.3 million pounds of paper annually. This trans­ lates into a planting four times the size of the District of Col­ umbia.

[ENS] The price of freedom for political prisoners in East Germany has roughly doubled over the past five years, thanks to inflation.

According to the London Sun­ day Times, the average price for gaining freedom from an East Germany prison and entry into West Germany is now nearly $25,000. West Germany has paid out some $125-million over the past six years for the freedom of more than 5,000 East German political prisoners.

But according to the Times, the East Germans are fattening their ransom purse by selling off a number of common criminals, whom they simply label as “political prisoners”. Up to 40percent of those being released and given passage into West Germany are now petty theives and shoplifters officially accused o f “harming and endangering the East German state.”

One common criminal who recently was included in a batch of ransomed prisoners reported­ ly decided it was easier to ply his trade in the East. When he attempted to return to East Germany, border guards caught him and returned him to the West, telling him, “The West have paid for you, they are welcome to you.”

About 900 East Germans are expected to be ransomed and paid for this year.

—Georgia Straight

Give m e back

Laver tree

[APS] Score one for detente.

The USA plans to explode the largest display of fireworks in history on July 4, 1976.

The occasion, of course is the 200th anniversary of the U.S. declaration of independence.

Where the detente aspect comes in is illustrated in a report in the Christian Science monitor, which says the Americans are unable to manufacture fireworks o f the same quality as the Red Chinese. As a result leading US fireworks companies have al­ ready cabled their order to Peking. On order are giant exploding rockets packed with you guessed it, red white and blue powder.

The prestigious Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has released a report alleging that 400,000 scientists and. engineers, representing about half of the world’s total scientific and technical man­ power, are presently engaged in work on current or developing weapons systems.

The report, based on informa­ tion in the 610-page SIPRI Year Book 1975, adds that the. worldwide expenditures for military research and develop­ ment now stand at about $25 billion — or four times the amount spent globally on med­ ical research.

In 1974, according to the report, total world spending on armaments amounted to $210 billion, which was 15 to 20 times as much as the total aid given to developing countries.

—Georgia Straight

C all a cop [ZNS] Buying the police has long been an accepted practise among the denizens of the underworld but a company in Chicago has started a new scheme to extend the service to members of the general public.

The company, called Wright­ way Escort Service, was formed by four Chicago policemen. It offers armed off-duty cops as escorts for out of town tourists who no longer feel safe on the city’s streets.

Wrightway says it charges $15 an hour for the first tourist and $10 an hour for each additional person who wants anti-mugging protection .

Page 11

THE DIGGER

September 8 - October 6:

Ireland’s Bloody Sunday March: shots and then the crowd runs for cover. Fourteen people were killed on that day.

In D erry-how the w om en and children took over REPORT FROM DRUSILLA MODJESKA & LYNDALL HANNA FORD .

A few months ago the first edition of a film called ‘Ireland: Behind the Wire’ was finished and shown in London. It had been made by a film collective over the last five years and documents the struggle in Northern Ireland since 1968. It was the first film either of us had seen about Ireland - other than straight news films and for the first time we got an idea of what daily life is like in Northern Ireland.

The daily reality is war. We were both astounded at how little we knew of what is happening there and how little is generally knojvn either in London or in Australia.

The straight press has done a very good job of distorting the situation by protraying it from Britain’s point of view, not as a war, but as a localised, inexplicable religious conflict in which Britain is gallantly ‘protecting’ an unstable population from itself.

In this interview we talked to two Irish women about life and struggle in the Catholic ghettos and in particular about the impact of the war on the women in the communities. For, in important ways, it is the women who form the coré of the struggle. In the face of poverty, disruption and the absence of many of the men the resistance has been sustained and developed by the solidarity and creativity of women and children. It is in the community that the revolutionary power of the Irish working class is based.

We didn’t intend the interview as an analysis of the different political parties in Ireland, or as a heavy political analysis of the situation, but rather to discuss life in Northern Ireland. In many ways the interview took its own form as Paddy and Margaret talked, and so we edited out our superfluous questions and remarks.

Paddy has now returned to Ireland. Margaret is living in London and is actively involved in the Troops Out Movement which is demanding the immediate withdrawal of British troops from Ireland and self determination for the Irish people as a whole.

Margaret:

Each Catholic area is totally surrounded by army posts, gun posts, and you can only get in and out of each Cath­ olic area through military posts.

Paddy: A nd lf you’re driving you have to go oyer these lumps in the road which allow the car down and then a soldier comes up and says who are you, where are you going; and more often than not they go and check it out with the comp­ uter to see if you have a record before they’ll let you go on.

Margaret: You are constanty searched and stopped. You can’t go into any shops or banks or anything without being

searched. There are road blocks every­ where.

Paddy: A year ago they started this so called survey whereby they went into every Catholic home in all the ghetto areas of Belfast and asked questions about who lived there, how many were in the family etc - just getting a com­ plete dossier on every family and every street.

Margaret: 80,000 houses have been raided, I mean searched. But raided is more the word because they don’t act­ ually ask if they can come in, they usually just break down the door.

Paddy: Yeah, they just kick your door in and either take off who they wanted or search it and make life totally unbearable.

This is the army. The police don’t go into any catholic area any more. They were phased out from ’69 onwards because they were totally unacceptable after the battle of Bogside and Samuel Devenny was killed. They actually don’t go into Catholic areas unless they are with the army for protection.

Margaret: The police force is Protestant mostly. It is meant to be a third Catholic but in fact that level has never been main­ tained. And it was the B specials who invaded the Bogside - historically a totally protestant force. When the state was set up in 1922 there was the A, B, and C police forces. The A force was made into the RUC, the B force was kept on as a part-time police force that was totally Protestant; and the C force was disbanded. So the B men were mob­ ilised in what the State called times of stress and their history with the Cath­ olic population is just really horrific. So when they invaded the Bogside people were absolutely raging and that started the whole riot.

Margaret: When the police retired def­ eated, it was at that point that the British government sent in the troops and they haven’t made any secret of the fact that they sent them in to replace the Police.

Paddy: Its a very telling point that dur­ ing the truce .that lasted over Christmas, the police were again phased in and were being used for road blocks and to control marches which they could never have done before. The State was using the truce to its advantage to get the RUC accepted once more. But I dont think it

will ever be.

After the battle of Bogside, barric­ ades were put up around the whole Bogside by the Catholics and they wouldnt let the police in. And areas of solidarity were set up in Belfast, in Ardoyne, in the Falls Road and in the markets. You just couldnt go in there unless you had recognition. They were called the Free Areas. Even the Army couldnt go in. But then the army was playing a very softly softly role. What happened was that Land Commander Ford made an. alliance with the local Catholic priest, a thing that just couldnt happen now, and they talked the barric­ ades dow n.. But Derry went on for a long time, it was completely in the control of the IRA as were most areas in Belfast. There are still areas in the North which the soldiers dont go into.

Like Crossmaglen. They don’t go into the village at all because the Crossmaglen battallion have claimed 34 - 1 of the British armed forces deaths from ’69 onwards. I mean this is never said offic­ ially, but this is fact.

But the free areas don’t exist anymore.

Operation Motorman smashed all that.

That was in 1973 - the British invaded the Catholic areas with tanks and armoured cars to ‘regain’ control. It was a real offence to any Unionist to see an area o f Ulster barricaded off from State troops and it was really a matter of the Government giving in under pressure from Unionist politicians and Unionist rank and filers. This was after intern­ ment and that was meant to be the great sop. In fact it sparked off the whole activist policy o f the IRA.

THE DIGGER

Page 12

Margaret: Internment is imprisonment without trial of anyone suspected of anti-unionist or anti-British feeling. In fact they just took anybody, they lifted hundreds of people, mainly men.

Paddy: Women were interned at the beginning of ’74. There are 26 women interned now and 400 men. 8 of them are loyalist. The rest would have Republican sympathies.

Margaret: They are interned in what are really concentration camps, there’s no other way o f describing them.

Paddy: They are nissen huts surrounded with barbed wire, with alsations and electric fences, watch towers and stuff like that, and the lights are on contin­ ually. In Long Kesh it’s particularly bad because they had a riot there a few months ago. It started off with the men

refusing to accept the camp food, and then the food parcels that are sent in by the relatives were withheld by the authirities. It escalated and ended up with the huts being burned down. After that the men had to sleep out and they weren’t even allowed the blankets and things that were sent in by their families. Only now have they started to build new huts but there’s still a lot of overcrowding because the accomodation just isn’t there for all the people in the camp.

Margaret: And when the men were lifted they were often quite brutally tortured during the period of their interrogation. I think the Court of Strasburg is currently investigating several hundred cases of toruture. Even after they’ve been interrogated they aren’t left alone.

Paddy: Oh no, not at all, it wouldnt be so bad then. What happens is the men have a really horrible life there crowded into these nissen huts. They try and keep themselves going by having education classes and craft sessions but at least once a week the army comes in and raids the camp on the pretext of look­ ing for arms and escape tunnels - and they wreck whatever’s there. So if they’ve got something built up, its smashed every week.

Margaret: The fact that so many men have been interned or on the run has meant that women have taken a more and more active part in the resistance.

Well, they do everything, I mean if people are interned you have to organise visits, transport. It’s very expensive for the families as well, because they have to pay to go to the camps which are a long way away. They have to pay for food parcels.

All that has to be arranged, and it costs a lot.

Paddy: Oh yes its ludicrous, people put themselves into poverty to supply the weekly food parcels. They send down chickens and lots of bread and they have to send down clothing because its cold there in the winter and people really do put themselves into dire straights just to do that. The men do need food parcels.

I mean they are fed, but its pretty awful.

They get this vegetable roll all the time, and it’s now called riot roll. It first got that name at the end of ’71 when they had the first riot inside the Kesh and that arose over a girl who was shot by the army and then charged with attempted murder. And her husband at that time was interned. She was in hospital, she had been shot three places in her body and he wasn’t being allowed out to see her so there was a riot, initially about the food and then it escalated into demand­ ing that he be let out to see her.

Margaret: And when people are interned no notice is given and it is often very hard to locate where they are. People would just vanish and the women have to trek round trying to find them. No-one will come and tell you.

Paddy: It’s exactly like that and it’s happ­ ened to everyone. Every family has either had someone shot, killed or det­ ained by the authorities during the last campaign. No family is untouched. And your families intermarry and you live a

few doors down from your mother; you just know everybody in your street, so whether or not a relative from your family has been detained doesn’t really matter, you’re going to know whoever has been lifted. In the areas that are very well organised they’ve got many buses going down at least twice a week, but sometimes the women have to take taxis and that costs at least five pounds a time.

Margaret: Often you’ll have people to visit in different camps . ..

Paddy: Yes. The authorities don’t take into consideration your geographical location when they detain your relatives They dont give a fuck. Back in the comm­ unities its mainly the women who are left and they’ve been really prominent in the resistance, initiating struggles. One of the things they did after internment was to organise rent strikes. It was a protest against internment and people withheld their rents and rates. And in fact squatt­ ing went on in huge numbers - though it was never called that at home. It started because people were intimidated out of their areas and they’d just go to an area where there was an empty house or flats being built and they’d move in there and just stay there.

Margaret: But unfortunately legislation has been passed to stop this form of community resistance and the state can now take money for rent out of your social security.

Paddy: And that was an SDLP man (Social and Democratic Labour Party) Paddy Devlin who introduced that law, a so-called Republican.

Margaret: And people have to rely on social security. Unemployment in the

Catholic areas has always been really high - 1 mean as high as 45% Paddy: In the totally Catholic Falls Road area its 31% unemployed and in the Shankhill Road area Which is Loyal­ ist Unionist its 12.8% Unemployment is high in both sectors, but it is worse in the Catholic areas. Then there was a fight about suplementary benefits after intern­ ment. If the men had previously been eligible for supplementary benefit, that was stopped when they were interned because then they weren’t eligible for work, but that was fought and won.

Margaret:

The women have also organ­ ised a prisoners’ dependents fund - and they are continuing to go round trying to raise money in order to support families who are left without any money.

And the communities have really pulled together to support each other. I remem­ ber one woman saying ‘before this happ­ ened I only knew a few people in the area. Now I know hundreds.’ They have organised to share child care - they’ve had to - if women are going to go out and run the relief centres for example. They’ve also set up swap shops, because people send in piles of clothes. In Derry they had a sort of co-op shop. They’ve got one in Anderson’s town.

Paddy: And in Ballymurphy. The Ballymurphy co-op has in fact expanded and they now have metal workshops and other sorts of craft establishments.

Margaret:

Also when the army was first doing all the raids to lift internees, the women organised a sort of warning sys­ tem with dustbin lids and whistles, didn’t they?

Paddy: Yeah, that was really good. So that if there was an army patrol come down the street and somebody saw it, they’d be out blowing their whistles and huge shrieks, or else banging the dustbin lid, and then everyone else would pile out of their houses and either try and stop the person being lifted or just make life so unbearable for the soldiers that they didn’t feel exactly safe in what they were doing. Yes, there have been a lot of changes. I mean we were practising politics before we even knew we were, just because it was necessary to do cert­ ain things and you did them. What Marg­ aret was saying about increased child care was happening in almost every dist­ rict. Its not a very conscious thing. They aren’t called nurseries, and the women don’t call themselves liberated women but because we have to do certain things in order to survive its done.

Margaret: Its very difficult because of the tightness of the community and the role of the Church and the women have this terrific amount to fight against, but as they’ve had to do more and in fact run the community more or less, they’ve gained strength from that and have begun to question the whole nature of the role they were playing before.

Paddy: They have realised and become aware of their oppression for the first time and that’s very good I think. And its been realised in political struggle. There is a Women’s Liberation group set up in Queens University but it’s been very

middle class and is concerned with things like setting up nurseries; whereas the women in the affected areas have had them all along - through necessity, not as the result of a feminist consciousness.

Margaret: Also the soldiers who are in the pill boxes quite often shout sexual abuse at the women as they go by and also when they are raiding houses, they are incredibly insulting to the women.

And going through that sort of exper­ ience, the women have gained a lot of strength and now they shout at the soldiers and continually jeer and taunt them. That’s quite a politicising exper­ ience.

Paddy: There’s very few women going to admit they’re in the provisionals. But the treatment over the past 4 years has definitely changed. Initially women were just in the Cumman naBman and making his tea, their “historical role” , and had to be really brave to push to change that role and a few people did. I think what helped women totally utilise their strength was internment which left large gaps in the organisation which women filled in. Then they actually saw what they could do - and were more capable in some respects. It also proved to the men, the leadership, that women could be involved in a 100% way. And in the community generally women have proved their strength. Once you get involved in something like that you feel totally confident about doing other things, and

challenging people who say you can’t do it. On the simpler level - like before 1968 very few women went into the pubs alone, and now they do and they know they have a right to be there; they never think about it now, they just go. There were men only bars in Ireland, and that’s all gone. And I think in lots of ways women will never return to the position they had in 1968. I mean they won’t be satisfied sitting at home and looking after the kids. But there is also bad aspects. Like kids getting marr­ ied at 16 or 17; girls marrying boys they’ve grown up with. Its a really bad situation because they will never have met anybody else. They never go outside their area for fear of assassination and the army lifting them and things like that, so they are thrown back onto themselves.

I mean I know on one side they are very political and not accepting any form of authority, but then this is happening too.

Margaret: Children have also been quite important in the resistance. They’re not the least bit frightened of the army and are very courageous, going out and throwing stones at tanks and things like that that often result in them getting shot at by rubber bullets.

Paddy: And interned. Girls under 15 are interned in the Myddletown convent.

There’s a boy of 14 in Long Kesh at the moment. And this sort of total resent­ ment of false authority has spread to the army and the police and also to the schools and the church. That’s really good because no longer can a teacher say do that and the kids do it automat­ ically. They just question everything.

And if they don’t want to go to school they don’t. I worked at a playground in

Page 13

September 8 - October 6

Belfast and we opened at 2 o ’clock and we always had the hall full at two. And every Sunday we would close down and so there was a riot every Sunday after­ noon in New Lodge. The army came and said oh please open and we did open it for a few Sundays and the riots stopped - so then we closed down again on Suddays.

Paddy: The women have had a much more difficult time in the South, because they haven’t been actively involved in any politics. They have perhaps realised their oppression when they have questioned things like the contraceptive laws. There’s some middle class womens’ movement, but I dont think they are very good. The South is very difficult to understand, the politics of it, because the majority of the people have this petty-bourgeois mentality. Like they’ve got their national independence, they’re striving for their economic independence, what more can they want; and they’re resentful of what they see as people coming down and interfering and stirring up trouble as in the north. And then the role of the Church is much stronger in the South than in the North. Because once people challenged the state in the North - from ’68 onwards - they could then go on to challenge every sort or authority, the church and the schools. But that hasn’t happened in the South. Women have been more accepting of what the Church says about contraception, marriage, div-

orce. And or course you’ve got men perpetuating that because it suits them, and that’s really hard to break down.

Contraception is really hard to get in the South and there’s still a very bigoted reaction to unmarried mothers. So if a girl gets pregnant and she isn’t married, she comes to England either, for an abortion or to have the baby and then once you’ve had your baby or an abort­ ion, its very hard to get work - and they go into prostitution. A third of the prostitutes in England are Irish women.

Contraception and abortion aren’t legal in the North either. The 1967 abortion act - and the homosexuality act - weren’t even debated at Stormont. But contracep­ tives are quite easy to get now and a lot of Catholic girls use them and the auth­ ority of the Church has been breaking down since ’68 when women became actively involved in the struggle. I think that’s one of the best things that has happened.

The Church’s position hasn’t changed.

It has always supported the state and it hasn’t changed now. Anyone involved the IRA is excommunicated; that’s automatic; and you get denouncement continually from the pulpit about men who are militarily involved. This has alienated a lot of people. You had a few good preists who were involved in “the troubles” as they’re called, and they were very quickly stepped upon by the hierarchy of the church and sent to some backwater where they’d be harmless.

The Church is as reactionary as it’s ever been in Irish politics; bul its losing its authority over the people.

Margaret: And there’s another thing: the army has actually been using Northern, Ireland as a sort of testing ground for its weapons. It’s been able to refine a lot of the weapons that it has been using during the last seven years - anti-personnel weapons, like rubber bullets and CS gas.

Like they’ve doubled the velocity of the rubber bullet gun during that time.

They’ve made CS gas much more lethal.

It’s a collective punishment for the whole community because the gas stays in the air and while people who are fit can run away from it, babies and old people or sick people are stuck in their houses, and the stuff seeps in. It makes you vom it. . .

Paddy: And your eyes water and your chest totally ceases action. Brendan Mehan has died in Long Kesh from the effects of CS gas. He was 22 and he had a history of bronchitis.

“...whistles and huge shrieks, or else banging the dustbin lid.

Margaret:

The rubber bullets are supposed to be fired ‘at crowds’ I think, but in fact the soldiers fire directly at anyone - children, women, anyone.

Paddy: They are six inches long and they are made of very hard rubber and shaped like a bullet. Emma Groves was blinded by one. She was playing a Rep­ ublican song on her record player and the soldiers told her to turn it down and she said that she wouldn’t. She was leaning out of the window and they opened fire with a rubber bullet gun and hit her between the eyes.

Paddy:

In England there’s never been any general understanding of the situat­ ion in Ireland. I mean people don’t even know what is happening. And unfortun­ ately I think that the bombs have made the English population more chauvin­ ist than they ever have been, if that’s possible. They’ve become totally racist about anything to do with Ireland.

Margaret: They always have been racist about Ireland because Ireland’s been used as a cheap labour force and because of press censorship all they see is the IRA as brutal thugs who come over here and murder innocent people. They don’t seem to understand that the population in Northern Ireland has been totally and brutally repressed for the last 50 years.

Paddy: I think in fact that a lot of the bombing that’s been happening in Eng­ land hasn’t been the responsibility of either of the Republican armies. Even so the Republican Armies have created an atmosphere in which people could let off bombs in England for their own ends.

That could also mean Republican symp­ athisers acting independently of any central IRA command.

The Birmingham bombings benefited nobody except the state because it allowed them to introduce the anti­ terrorist law (by which ‘suspect terror­ ists’ can be detained for seven days without trial) which will be very benef­ icial to them when they want to clamp down on the left movements in Britain and any working class movement that is seen as a threat.

I m ean we were practising politics before we knew it.”

“...also bad aspects.

Like kids getting m arried a t 16 or 17 girls m arrying boys they grew up w\\h”

THE DIGGER

Page 14

September 8 - October 6

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Margaret: Both Republican armies den­ ied the Birmingham bombings. There is also a lot of evidence that British milit­ ary intelligence have let off bombs at particular times, like in Dublin when they were debating the introduction of the special powers Act, to swing public opinion in a particular way. And there is certainly evidence that the Army has been involved in sectarian killings and assassinations to discredit the IRA. Paddy: Oh, absolutely.

Margaret: There’s very little accurate or detailed coverage of what’s happening in Ireland. Its not always censorship. In Belfast the reporters don’t go into the areas all that often. They rely on army bulletins for their news; and the army of course tells it from its point of view.

Paddy: Yes, Simon Winchester talks about this in his latest book. He wrote for the Guardian and he really wrote good reports. He talks about the time that censorship or ‘controlled news’ was introduced by the army and how the majority of the journalists just sit in the Europa Hotel in Belfast and wait for the daily bulletin and fire it off.

Margaret: Its quite horrifying if you’re there to see the reports of things you have actually experienced to see just how distorted and incorrect it is.

Paddy: Events become totally unrecog­ nisable. But then its in the state’s interest to portray the war in the way that they are doing it, as a religious fight. Its worked very successfully as people do think, it simply comes down to Catholics fighting Protestants whereas its much wider than that. There’s the whole quest­ ion of the national issue to be resolved and really it’s a class war.

When the State was set up in 1922 it was set up to placate the Ulster national­ ists who were then aspiring petty bourg­ eois business men. It suited their econ­ omy to be linked with Britain because they were developing the shipyards and the aircraft factories and for them to have been isolated in a nationalist Repblic wouldn’t have been in their interest at all, so they fought to keep the links with Britain. Now capitalism has changed so much since 1922 that England has had to try and make Ulster fit in with its new outlook, its new interests but they’ve left the Ulster Protestants behind all the time. Prior to ’68, in ’65 we had Terrence O’Neill installed as Prime Minister. He went round the Catholic areas being nice to them, smiling and visiting Catholic schools and that. All the time he was trying to introduce the foreign capital­ ists who were then very interested in Ireland because of the huge pool of unemployed willing labour prepared to accept much lower rates than the cap­ italists would have to pay if they set up their factories in Germany or England.

And he tried very hard to make the Protestants accept, the fact that new industries were coming and they would want to employ Catholics as well as Protestants. This worked quite well for the Catholics who were only too glad to get a job, but the Protestants saw that their privileges were being slowly eaten away and that set up their reaction. ****

Margaret:

The British left doesn’t have a good record over Ireland either. There’s the Troops Out Movement now and part of its function is education. To that end they have meetings around the country.

Paddy: There’s never any widespread political action in England over Ireland except when something really dramatic happens - like Bloody Sunday.

Margaret: After internment there was a civil rights campaign and there was a ban on any form of demonstration. But in spite of that between December 71 and January 72 there were 10 anti internment marches which culminated in Derry at the end of January. There was a huge

march and the army, determined to stop it, fired at what was a peaceful demon­ stration and killed 14 people.

Paddy: Once again the Army was react­ ing not only to pressure from the British government but also from the unionist politicians at home. Paisley had threat­ ened to stop the march - something he’s been doing very successfully since October 1968. He made know his intent­ ion to stop the march and was placated

by Unionist politicians who more or less said don’t bother we’ll do it for you.

And we knew all this beforehand but we never thought that people were going to be shot for marching, and this is in fact what happened. The people that were shot were all under forty and all male and its been said that the army were aiming at the male population who could be actively involved in military activities.

I don’t know . . .

Margaret: The press immediately tried to distort it.

Paddy: Oh god, they said they were all armed and carrying mail bombs up their trouser legs and all kinds of ridiculous things. In fact the tribunal brought out that none of them were armed.

Margaret: Bloody Sunday did receive a lot of publicity in England. There was a huge demonstration in London, but there was a much larger one in Dublin where they burned the British Embassy, they were so angry.

Paddy: I mean its disgusting that you need an event like that to mobilise people on an emotional issue, and I really feel

very angry about the way that people rose to the bait in a way. I mean it was good at the time and all that, but look what’s happened since, much worse things, not in any dramatic mass murders like that, but the assassinations have built up daily, and the repression bas built up.

In England we had a demonstration in February and maybe 2 to 4 thousand people came out. That’s absolutely ridic­ ulous when far more come out for Chile, or some sort of safe subject like Vietnam.

Ireland has never had the kind of political response in England that Vietnam has had. Vietnam is far away so its safe and you’re never going to be called upon to put your sympathy into practice. **** Paddy: I think that the British will with­ draw the army, of that there’s no doubt.

They are not winning and its an expensive business keeping those men there. Besides its in Britain’s interest that Ireland becomes a nation, but a nation that’s dependent on England for its develop­ ment, its economic development. I myself don’t think that will happen, but it just could. Because if Ireland is econ­ omically united and is a whole, it’s much easier to exploit than to have to pander to the Protestant minority every now and again. However, for the first time since 1965 the Southern Irish Government is taking a totally different and independent economic line from Britain. The Southern Government’s participation in the E.E.C. has given it relative prosperity, but prosperity only for the big landowners. If

Britain pulls out of the EEC the Irish Government has declared its intention of staying in.

The question is what happens after Britain withdraws. There are all these emotional scares arising about civil war and talk of blood baths and things like that. And there’s a blood bath happening now. I think that the army withdrawing will only clear the picture somewhat. I mean the whole question of the national identity has to be solved first and there are people involved in the struggle who will go on fighting for a socialist republic and I think that this is the only answer to Ireland’s problems. When you talk o f civil war you can’t envisage what form it’s going to take. I think the protestants are going to have to make some sort of assault to reassert their priveleged posit­ ion. But I just don’t know what is going to happen. This is where the south comes in again, because the desire to help arises when something emotional happens - like Bloody Sunday, and that’ll happen again.

But what can they actually do to help . . .

The Irish army is split into factions. I’m sure some of them will become involved in the fight on the side of the republicans in the North. But then its so mind blowing. God - it’ll be total upheaval o f the island. I mean its like a cleansing thing in a way, but its such a disastrous way to get it to the surface . . . .

Yes the British will go, but the war won’t be over. No, definitely not. That’ll just be the start of it.

September 8 - October 6

mas¡ammm Well here we are back on the road again after our financial crisis. Without your subs which rolled in to the tune of $1700 we’d still be searching. Thanks. Also a good night was held at the Benefit where we made $800.

Thanks to all those who came along and enjoyed them­ selves. Special thanks to those who made it a reality: Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band, Sharks, Toads, Hills Family Show, Jon Hawkes, Buzby Berkleys, Steve Hill, Red Symons, Jane Clifton, Peter Dickie, Graham Isaacs,, John Hopkins, John Pinder, Hugh McSpedden, Sound Fac­ tory, Feedwell foundry, and the cops who kept drugs and violence down to a minimum. We also enjoyed the deli­ cious salamis and fruit cake that came through the mail.

Thanks. . .

THE DIGGER

Page 15

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THE DIGGER

Page 16

September 8 - October 6

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—Aw...-A—

DORY PREVIN - BRIEF BIOGRAPHY BORN: Dory Langdon, October 2 2 ,1 9 3 5 in Woodbridge, New Jersey, U.S.A. EDUCATION: Primarily Catholid Schools. After completing High school, she studied acting for a year at the American Academy Of Dramatic Art. WORK; Spent several years as actress, model, dancer and nightclub singer, accomp­ anying herself on guitar. Became more involved in writing lyrics. Moved to New York to find work as a writer, where a friend sent some o f her lyrics to MGM. Moved to West Coast after being offered a contract for five months as a junior writer at MGM. Under this contract she was supposed to have worked as lyricist with Andre Previn, but was never introduced to him and was let go. To be able to keep writing, she took a series of odd jobs - bookkeeper in a gas station, working in a paper company. Finally she was employed as a writer by UPA, an animation firm; Met Andre Previn and they began working together. They married eighteen months later. Their marriage ended several years ago.

RECORDINGS: A(1 o f Dory,Previn’s albums have received record awards.

1970 On my Way To Where 1971 Mythical Kings & Iguanas 1971 Reflections In A Mud Puddle/Taps Tremors & Timesteps 1972 - , Mary C Brown & The Hollywood Sign 1973 Live At Carnegie Hall 1974 Dory Previn FILMS: ; Wrote theme and title songs for films for ten years. Received Academy Award nominations for:19 6 0 “A Faraway Part Of Town” from the film Pepe.

1962 “Second Chance” from the film Tipo For The Seesaw. : 1969 “Come Saturday Morning” from the film The Sterile Cuckoo.

Both “Come Saturday Morning” and the theme from “The Valley Of The Dolls” were gold record sellers for The Sandpipers and Dionne Warwick respectively. “You’re Gonna Hear From Me” from the film Inside Daisy Clover was recorded over eighty times. Other credits include themes for Goodbye Charlie, One, Two, Three and the most recent screen credit was the lyric to Last Tango In Paris.

BOOKS: On My Way To Where - lyrics published in book form by McCalls in hard­ back (1971) and Bantam books in paperback (1972).

PLAYS: Mary C Brown & The Hollywood Sign - A play with music, based on the starlet who jumped from the Californian landmark. J t once went into production, but never opened and is currently,being rewritten. She has also written and sung theme songs for television plays and documentaries. .

by Marion Slade I used to sing and tap dance with my uncles’ band. They were of Irish descent and did country folk songs. One played harmonica, another played accordion and when I was ten or twelve, they asked me what instrument I wanted to play. I chose guitar, so I sort of gravitated towards it naturally.

So you never really felt uncomfortable about being on stage if you were on from that age?

I wasn’t then, but when I grew older I did. Though my father insisted I become a performer, I really wasn’t emotionally equiped for it. I got worse and worse until I totally withdrew from performing.

How do you feel about it now? You don't often do concerts do you?

No I don’t. I still find it terrifying, but per­ forming itself has grown better and better even though I still have to be practically pushed on stage. When I was just performing in those early days, I was just interpreting someone else’s work. The reason it’s getting easier for me now is that when I go out on stage, even though I’m performing, I’m communicating my own ideas, telling people what I have to say through music.

A lot of women who write and perform their own work feel that they have to put it across in a very serious way in order to be taken seriously. I think people find my dialogue very funny but not in the way that . . . Well, I’ve watched women on tele­ vision commercials and as comediennes, and if they don’t totally make fun of themselves, put themselves down and become grotesque, then nobody laughs at t h e m ...........

Women aren’t able to come out and do it in the same kind of way as a satirist or as a serious humorist, the way men do. There is no such thing with women. I think what we’re asking is “I’ve been an underdog too long, what I have to say is serious to me, so please take me seriously.” So obviously there is a reluctance to be funny in that.

But I don’t feel that way any more. I’m only interested in myself as a human being first, and as a woman second; so as a being, I’m funny too, a humorous fool. I told them at Lincoln Centre, New York, that I’m very proud and I cherish the fact that though I’m feeling more and more a sense of auth-, ority over myself and my own power, at the same time, I’m a fool and a clown.

Through your work you have shown how you suffered, yet you still manage to combine the point o f your music with humour. Your songs o f your experiences in the mental asylum made me feel like crying with you, but even then your strength came through.

Yes, but Marion, what do you do when you hit rock bottom? You either kill yourself or you drown in your own stew, or you start laughing at it. What else is there when it gets that ridiculous? But it’s the kind of humour that is based on all these experiences, it’s not idle humdur and it’s not surface humour.

Who was it - some writer, a Greek patriot that said, when all else fails - laugh.

relationship between you and the audience.

Well, I don’t agree with you there. I think that when you make a record it’s like a writer writing a book. I try to get my ideas and what I am across, as true as I possibly can get. It’s essentially the words and not the music that I’m trying to communicate.

It's so easy to be totally misrepresented through the media. Do you avoid talking to the press and having publicity photos taken?

For long lengths of time I go into my writing and I only really come out of it to do an interview when I make a new album.

Then I won’t do another until the next album. I really hate having my photo taken, too.

Though people rarely1write about you here, I have seen it printed that you can't be identified with because you're a ‘mature woman'. As though anyone who hasn't made it by twenty-five is dismissed as a has-been.

No. As a matter of fact record companies don’t ever know what to do with me or my work.

I think that’s a cop out . If people dismiss my work as a result of that, then there’s nothing I can do about it.

I think people either actually die - like they kill themselves with drugs; or they die in an enclosed mythological seclusion, where you never hear from them again. Or they come back a ripened and mature artist, and that’s what I aim for.

On my first album, there’s a song called Twenty-mile Zone which is about screaming.

A good friend of mine said I shouldn’t have done it. She said to reveal that about my­ self publicly would do me a lot of harm, but I had to say it because it did happen to me.

I think it was a good thing because then Lennon wrote The Primal Scream and people began to admit it openly. When I performed it, all these people were laughing and clapping and carrying; on - so they knew it too, right? They knew we all shared that experience but no one could ever admit it, so it made it all much better.

Do you think that making records is a rem­ oved form o f communicating your ideas unlike a concert where there is a direct

I t must also have been difficult to be accep­ ted as yourself, instead o f being attached to Andre Previn. I saw him on his television

A nd now you still have to be strong against all those people who label you self-indulgent and neurotic. How does that reaction to your work affect you?

Well, it makes me feel lots of things. It makes me feel insecure; it makes me say fuck them, that’s their problem. I’ll go on and do what I want to do; and it makes me laugh sometimes. What it’s done more rec­ ently, is made my feeling for my work even stronger. After all the things that have happ­ ened to me in my life, to stop now would be the worst kind of self indulgence.

Do you have any trouble getting your songs on to record the way you want them to be.

Is there commercial pressure?

programme the other day talking to two women and being really patronising. I think you're two very different people.

Yes, I think so. But I think there’s an attraction between opposites; except opp­ osites can also repel each other or worse.

So it was very difficult?

Well, it was, because I was raised as all little girls are raised with dolls and all that, to get married one day. The only difference with me was that my father, particularly, felt he was the same kind of minority and he really wanted some kind of recognition. He knew he wasn’t going to get it himself so I think he wanted me to get it for him.

Thanks, I wish there was more time to p u t into it. We just did our second gig and we really enjoyed it.

Is it all women?

No, because when I started, I couldn't find other women to play with, though I've met a lot since. So the other three are men. We get on closely and they support what I'm trying to do, and also I have learnt a lot from them about the way men relate to each other musically and their particular struggles.

Absolutely. That’s why if people ask me if I’m feminist, I say I’m a human being and a woman. I think many people don’t really understand feminism. Also that’s why in my songs, I always try to take the male point of view too, even in a song like Coldwater Canyon off this new album. Although the guy put the woman through a lot, she did make the decision to go to his house.

So there are all those things which are very important. If you get any kind o f power or authority, I don’t believe it should be used to put down the other sex, otherwise it’s just reversing what men have done. If we learn nothing else from suffering for so long, we’ve got to learn a compassion. If we don’t, w e’ll become overdogs and the whole fucking thing will start all over again.

This interview first appeared in Spare Rib, No. 32.

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Page 17

THE DIGGER

September 8 - October 6

The Bay City Rollers: recycling popmania 10 years on

by Richmond Sturdy

&

Sally Simpson

If you are still wondering who the Bay City Rollers are, then you have missed one of the best hypes since the ’72 elec­ tion. From the same people who threw Its David Cassidy and Gary Glitter, Bell -Records present their latest extravaganza; the Bay City Rollers.

The Rollers are a Scottish pop group: “Alan and Dereck Longmuir, Eric Faulkner, Leslie McKeon and Stuart Wood . . . five goodlooking lads just setting out on what could be the pop success story of the decade ” (EMI Bio).

Tam is also a good business man who has grossed thousands of pounds through spin offs like “ fabulous” Roller watches and “crazy” Roller scarves. It probably haunts him that he can’t sell the conc­ ession on tartan cloth.

About three years ago the Rollers had a ‘biggie’ in Altona and Adelaide called ‘Get Dancin’: it even went to number 1 on the Hobart Hot Hundred. But this was not enough to keep the boys on top and soon they had fallen to the wayside, doing small gigs in small towns, taking shit from small-time hustlers. It must have been very hard because according to the PR release it almost drove Tam bankrupt!

Pushing on, Tam was in complete control and he insisted that the group remain ‘untouchable’. So when former lead singer Nobby Clark fell in love and wanted to slow down he was sacked. As they say in Roller Ball, no competitor is greater than the game itself, and Tam Paton was always around to make sure.

In his place Tam brought in Leslie McKeon, a lad of twenty years whose greatest thrill according to the Bio sheet was “passing my driving test,” and along with Leslie he hired additional guitarist ‘Woody’ Wood (Poor Ron! first Rod’s tartan and then his name).

The combination looked good so Tam increased his efforts, writing to DJ’s pumping out the PR. At one stage the record company sent out 7,500 leaflets to record retailers heralding the band as the Group of ’74 and as good as their word the Rollers next three singles, ‘Remember,’ ‘Shang-a-lang’ and ‘Summer Sensation’ sold over 750,000 copies in the UK. Recently the English music trade

papers disclosed that the band had not played their instruments on any of these three singles and apparently there remains a fair amount of suspicion about whether they even played on ‘Bye Bye Baby’. But in a world where the daily press is king, Tam judged such considerations irrelevant and realised that he only had to keep them in the papers to keep them on top.

He invented story after story to keep them on the front page, ànd prodded along by an obliging press, their popular­ ity snowballed.

After the David Cassidy tour tragedy in which a young fan died, Tam announc­ ed that he had not booked any extra security for the Rollers’ forthcoming summer tour. Offered such a good theme he squeezed it for what it was worth and one o f the most hysterical tours of Eng­ land followed. A policeman was crushed to death, fans fainted and Rollermania was bom. The British press along with Tam have a lot to answer for, but they had almost recreated Beatlemania. Others like Chas Chandler and Slade had tried and failed where Tam succeeded with a bunch of no-talents.

Their big break here was their current hit ‘Bye Bye Baby’ (pronounced Buoy Buoy Baa-bee), a pappy number which projects the band’s bovine clean image, no hints of ’earn rule fra these lads.

Along with the record came a tidal wave of publicity releases and photos. Event­ ually its impact was felt on the in-trays, the press caved in and small pars became big photos. Syndicated material from the UK was reprinted, not all of it favourable, but in the world of PR a mention is a mention, and that is all that matters.

Tam and three of the band then set off for Australia on a promotion for their imminent tour here. The timing was almost perfect - bang in the middle of the school holidays and just long enough after the budget to make front page news.

Unfortunately for Tarn the "events in Timor broke out at the same time, but you can’t control everything.

The boys and Tam grinned and strode off the plane at Kingsford Smith airport, leaving via the side entrance, seeing the press but missing the couple of hundred fans who had waited to see them. A couple of the editors who had been running stories of hysteria were visably disappointed and a peeved Sydney Morn­ ing Herald ran the head ‘Rollermania Mini’ on page 2, but it hedged its bets by using a large photo. The other dailies seemed not to have noticed the anti­

II1 III1 II

climax - the Australian pushed on calling the band “the most popular pop group in the world” and the rest carried photos and a storyline comparing the Rollers, for the hundredth time, with the Beatles.

Never mind the truth in all this, papers must be sold and editors are keen on stories, rather than messy opinionated news for eggheads. One of the most cunning features of this promotional trip has been the way the press have been relied on to create stories. After all, it’s an easy story, just a few pars and a pic, and if a mass of fans did mob the boys, then an even bigger pic could be used. So pars appeared in the Melbourne dailies announcing in advance security for the venues where the Rollers would appear, followed by times, dates and places the band could be seen. Even 3LO came to the party when an announcer gave out the details of when the group would arrive at the ABC to appear on their pop show Countdown.

Much of the actual publicity has been aimed squarely at the press, rather than the fans. Paton seems to have the press fooled in his single handed attempt to convince the world that the Rollers are “the new Beatles”, a concept aimed fair and square at the reporters, who can remember the Beatles. It is certainly wasted on the fans, most of whom were 3 or 4 at the time of Beatlemania. Not long ago two Roller fans were overheard discussing whether or not the Rollers really were like the Beatles. One turned to his mother and said “You remember then Mum, what did the Beatles sound like?”

Despite \all the publicity, only a few hundred fans gathered at Tullamarine to meet them and once again the band failed to show. Another notable feature of this campaign is the tease aspect. If the crowd is not big enough the band is whisked out a back entrance before the fans can see them.

The Rollers next engagement in Melb­ ourne was their well publicised motorcade down Bourke Street, through the lunch time peak crowds, chased by their fans.

One of the best methods of attracting publicity, prescribed by PR consultants the world over, is the Pop Star Trot. By its judicious' use you should be able to get into the news however unimportant you are. All you need is a couple of rep­ orters present. It is a safe and proven bet that if reporters et al are moving quickly beside Le Star Big and his resident flacks, excited stories and photos follow,

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directed for use on page 2. The speed is important for if you move too fast you wind up in front rather than surrounded by the group - Gary Glitter is possibly the greatest exponent of- the fine art of the Airport Trot.

In Bourke Street the motorcade passed the pipeband (They were insurance - if no fans had turned up a car following a pipe band amongst thousands of shoppers could not fail to attract the attention of shoppers and provide stories for hard­ hitting news hounds) and was slowly halted by a mass of fans. The Bay City Rollers had actually showed up in person!

Wow! After a brief mellee the open car sped away from the crowd to deliver them later to the studios of 3XY where the boys chatted and engaged in a battle of wits with the station’s dee jays. Mean­ while, two floors below, the Age’s press pulped out the story for Saturday’s edition.

The Roller’s will be back in Australia to tour in November. At present there seems no doubt that the expensive camp­ aign has paid off - Rollermania is now a familiar word Australia-wide. And when you come to think of it, how could it have failed? The Rollers were brought to Australia by EMI, their record comp­ any here, in conjunction ’with the Digamae group of radio stations (which includes 2SM, 3XY, 4IP and others too numerous to mention), so radio exposure was no problem. And the Age has a stake in 3XY so of course the Rollers are news to them. As for the rest of the press they did just what they frequently do, they took the easy way out. In the PR world those most adept at spoon-feeding get the best results.

Buyers guide to Soul Soul Music has only recently caught on in Australia. Two years ago few import record shops had separate racks for Soul Music, but today all do, an indication of a considerable change in musical tastes.

This guide is not comprehensive, but rather a brief survey of some of the best.

THE GOSPEL SOUND CBSM 64727 If you are one of those citizens who likes to take a music back to its roots this may be the album for you. It traces gospel music from its earliest recordings (Blind Willie Johnson in 1927) to the gospel singers of the present day.

Produced by John Hammond and Tony Heilbut, two of the most knowledgeable authorities in this field, this double album is outstanding. Every track is a classic.

HISTORY OF RHYTHM & BLUES ATLANTIC RECORDS Six albums.

BACK IN CIRCULATION J.J.CALE’S BEST ALBUM

NATURALLY with such fantastic tracks as CRAZY MAMMA; AFTER MIDNIGHT; CALL ME THE BREEZE.

NOW A VAILABLE -$5.95.

This series, released seperately, traces the career of this company and its great artists from 1947 to the early sixties. One of its strengths is the two albums devoted to the fifties which features many of the groups who were the forerunners of the Soul music of the sixties - The Drifters, The Coasters, and Clyde McPhatter. The Sixties albums feature such notables as

Booker T. & The MG’s, Otis Redding, doing the early Memphis sound style, and the glorious singing of Ben E. King and Solomon Burke.

MOTOWN Motown has released a series of anthol­ ogies, mainly two or three volume albums of all the great names of the sixties. Try Junior Walker for some really earthy blues-soul music featuring his very edgy, driving tenor sax. If you prefer something less heavy maybe you would prefer the man who Bob Dylan has nominated as the greatest songwriter in Rock, Smokey Robinson. My own favourite in this series is the Four Tops anthology. Four singers who within the limitations of the three minute single format created some of the greatest music of the sixties.

R A Y CHARLES LIVE ATLANTIC SD2-503 This double album was made from two live performances by Ray Charles in the late fifties, before he moved across to a more pop-oriented style. With him is a dynamite band and the Raylettes, and these two albums, I feel, are the best things Ray ever did. Absolutely galvanic performances, and extraordinary fusion of jazz, blues, and soul, which twenty

—Continued on Page 18

September 8 - October 6

THE DIGGER:

Page 18

A history o f Atlantic Records;

T H E P A R K IN G L O T

III II II

T H A T ATE ROCK .A

Charlie Gillette, Making Tracks (E.P. Dutton & co. Inc.) - price $5.95.

by A1 Watson Rock N‘ Roll in the fifties and the Rock of the sixties and seventies has always been more than a music - it was and is an industry. The performers are only part of the story of Rock, and after reading Charlie Gillette’s study of the development of Atlantic Records, Making Tracks, you come to realise that the non-performers, persons who are never more than an accessory name on an album cover, have exerted a tremendous influence on the direct­ ions the music has taken. Producers, A&R (Artists & Repetoire) men, all play their part, but it is in the record company’s hierarchy that a few persons exert an enormous influence on what happens on the scene.

In the case of Atlantic Records, a handful of persons, the Ertegun brothers, Herb. & Miriam Abramson, and . Jerry Wexler, were not only the business executives that built up a billion dollar industry, they were also intimately involved in the creative process that lead to the birth of Roek N’ Roll, and have remained part of it.

Gillette, sensing the implications of this, addresses himself to the question - “Are we the servants or masters- of the men who sell us records”. It is a brave question, and one that he sheds little light on. His story is not really aimed at following up such an invest­ igation. For perhaps he loves the music too much and is, like us all, somewhat too seduced by its myths and legends to indulge in such iconoclasm. But despite this failure . to take up the challenge that he sets himself, he has more effectively than any other rockwriter shown the significance of the record company in the development of the music.

Atlantic Records are ideal for such a study. Their story starts in the heroic days of the early fifties, when as a low budget company operating out of a Hotel room in New York City, they started to produce some of the first miraculous ‘singles’ that announced the beginnings of Rock N’ Roll. It finishes at the present day which finds the company in very different circum­ stances. Still effectively controlled by its founders, Atlantic Records is now a recording giant, but has been taken over and incorporated into the multimedia conglomerate, Wamer-ElektraAtlantic (W.E.A.), and is ultimately owned by the Kinney Corporation, an enterprise that amassed its vast assetts in the USA from such mundane enterprises as parking lots and funeral parlours.

Atlantic was only one of the numerous small record companies that

started catering for minority tastes in the U.S.A. after the second world war.

Post-war prosperity gave the blacks and poor southern whites a greater spending power than they had ever enjoyed before but the big companies such as CBS and RCA were not inter­ ested in catering to such relatively small markets. Thus emerged the Independent companies, known as ‘Indies’ in the trade, operating on ai shoestring budget. They were instru­ mental in introducing the music which came to be known as Rock N’ Roll to a wider public. Gillette points out that the following artists started their carreers with five ‘Indie’ labels: Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, (SUM), Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley (Chess), Fats Domino (Imperial),. Little Richard (Specialty) Clyde McPhatter, The Coasters, La Vem Baker, Joe Turner, Ray Charles, (Atlantic). A list that just about sums up Rock N’ Roll of the fifties.

Most of these companies did not survive the era. Only the Chicago based Chess company and Atlantic survived to become important forces when Rock N ’ Roll matured to the Rock for the sixties, Gillette really devotes his book to understanding how this occurred. That is, why did Atlantic continue' to prosper whilst most of the other ‘Indies’ ultimately failed?

Financial acumen aside, the main reasons for Atlantic’s success was that the controlling hierarchy of Atlantic were far more sophisticated operators than their competitors. During the fifties most of the other ‘Indies’ were crude tough operators, ready to exploit a singer for a chance ‘single’ that may have been successful on the charts, but uninterested in giving artists any support in building up their careers. Atlantic on the other hand were prepared to spend time and m oney on their artists, and in partic­ ular enjoyed a high reputation with black musicians and singers for integr­ ity and involvement. Where other ‘Indies’ would literally take a group off the street and make a couple of quick singles, Atlantic with star groups like ‘The Coasters’ would spend weeks rehearsing them for a record session.

More than any other ‘Indie’ they realised that the company’s career was inextricably involved with those of the artist.

This is how Gillette chooses to see it although he does mention other views of the situation, but does not choose to follow them up. He makes much of the fact that Atlantic was consistent in paying its performers royalties whereas most other ‘Indies’ did not. But he ignores that Atlantic were notoriously mean in forward advances to the artists, and it may

TH E RECORD COLLECTOR WHAT I DID DURING THE HOLS___ In response to no enquiries during 3 months absence of news or Digger’s fringe friends Rubbernose washes baby clothes and drives a french polluter while Smithy scrapes at window panes and is still a rail commuter Old Youngski's been to moscow as befits a left wing mogul and stuffed himself on caviar and rye bread made by Vogel (ski) The old survivor Willison, has always pulled the strings wrote lovely verse on johnathan's seagull but couldn't dodge the droppings while clinging to the toilet bowl his valium brain all hazey a hand reached out and pulled the chain - Thank you Modesty Blaisey for you he writes about manure somehow it seems to fit he's always written 'bout himself least now its pure . . . !

RECORD CO LLECTO R

— T W O SH O P S : C N R . T O O R A K

R O A D A N D D A V I S A V E N U E , S O U T H Y A R R A , 2 6 7 .1 8 8 5 , A N D 7 1 0 G L E N F E R R IE R O A D , H A W T H O R N , 8 1 9 .1 9 1 7 .

A

A

A___ A___ A___A—-J

have been, ultimately, no more gen­ erous than more blatantly exploitative companies. Like most other rockwriters he skirts the unpleasant implic­ ations of exploitation of black artists by white owned companies. Most of Atlantic’s stars of the fifties were black, and most o f them today are still alive and living in modest circum­ stances. This may be their own fault, but the fact remains that Atlantic accumulated a massive amount of capital during the fifties that allowed them to expand into a media giant in the sixties.

Gillette doesn’t seem to grasp the irony in blues singer, Joe Turner’s wisecrack that if Ahmet Ertegun ever went broke he could come and work as his chauffeur.

However, exploitive or , not, Atlantic’s main directing forces Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler showed a sensitive understanding of the trends of the music during the sixties. Not that they ever pursued the middle of the road pop market to any extent, but they always contracted artists, either directly or through connected companies who were ultimately fant­ astically succussful. For instance Atlantic held the distribution rights to the Memphis based Stax-Volt company during the sixties, featur­ ing such artists as Joe Tex and Otis Redding. And as Gillette implies it was Jerry Wexler who had a great deal to do with establishing the mus­ ical format on which they rode to success. After wearing out his wel­ come in Memphis - where he was granted the spiteful accolade of the ‘New York Jew’, Jerry shifted his patronage to The Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Studio. Here he continued his run of successes combining the talents of Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin, doing recording sessions that broke them into the big time.

Wexler has a profound understanding of the music, its sources - the blues, gospel, jazz, country music, and its present expression, and he is con­ vinced that it has its finest flavouring in the southern states of the USA. When one considers those artists with whom he has involved himself this is hard to deny. Either black Aretha, Otis Redding, Donny Hatha­ way, or white - Duanne Allman, Dir John, and Delaney and Bonnie he has a consumate sense of music.

What has kept Atlantic going has been the intense involvement of its management in the musicians who make the music, as well as the music itself. Unlike recording giants like CBS they have never diversified into other fields of music, but concentrated on Rock and to a lesser extent Jazz.

However Gillette does not take up the implications of their success. They are big now, their company is a symbol of the maturation of a music that was originally created by persons who lived on the edge of society and has gone on to become the culture of the young middle class throughout the western world. Today small pioneering companies are once again doing what Atlantic did in the fifties - recording musicians and singers whose music lies outside the mainstream of pop culture. Let us be thankful that they are, because the pioneer of yesteryear is now just part of a huge multi-media conglomerate just like the big companies the ‘Indies’ of the fifties pulled the mat from under.

Wexler is, in effect, a conservative concentrating his interests in the traditional sources of the music.

Ahmet Ertegun on the other hand has concentrated his interests on the broader field of contemporary Rock.

He is less involved in the creative process that Wexler, but nevertheless has attracted some of the great talents of the day to his label. It was he who brought Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young to Atlantic, as well as Cream, and who pulled off perhaps the coup of the early seventies in the record business, winning Atlantic the distribution rights for the Rolling Stones.

—Continued from Page 17

Soul guide years later has not dated one bit. Highly recommended. Hear this album and realise where Joe Cocker and all those other English singers got their thing.

S L Y STONE THERE'S A RIOT GOING ON CBS KE30896 FRESH CBS KE 32134 Soul’s equivalent to acid rock. As Sly says his music is about time and space.

The beginnings of spaced out soul, and two albums that Sly has never bettered.

His music has not only influenced most other soul musicians, it has also had an incredible impact on Jazz. Miles Davis has been heavily influenced by him as have most electric jazz musicians. What Duke Ellington was to jazz in the thirties and forties, Sly is to soul. Or at least was.

A very high life style seems to have had its' effect in the last coupleof years, and his later records have been disappointing.

ARETHA LIVE A T FILLMORE KING CURTIS LIVE A T FILLMORE These two albums were recorded on Sunday March 7, 1971. The King Curtis album was the first part of the show, and his group backed Aretha for the second part. Two of the GREAT Soul albums with the Memphis Horns and Billy Preston. The King Curtis album is, I feel, the best instrumental soul album ever made. His electric saxophone play­ ing is just that and Bernard Purdie’s drumming and Cornell Dupree’s guitar weld together to make this album one of soul’s most inspired performances. Add Aretha Franklin to this group and the results are devestating. Her best album, having all the brilliance that only an inspired live performance can give.

THE METERS REJUVENATION REPRISE RECORDS MS2200 The ace New Orleans soul group that comes from a city that has always prod­ uced music with a difference. Their music reflects the influence of local creole music, Reggae from the islands to the south, and draws on a long musical heritage that goes back to Jelly Roll Morton up through Professor Longhair and Fats Domino. At one level it’s simple infectious music. At another, some of the most subtle, rhythmic things you’ll ever hear. Other groups may have a beat, but this group explores time i.e. rythmic metres.

MAX MERRITT AND THE METEORS RCA SL—101891 The Australian Soul group who were years ahead of their time here. No longer on issue but still a few copies in some shops. Max was/is a great singer, and the band has a punch and drive that make some of the local soul groups of today sound a bit thin. Forever a part of the late sixties student riots, getting beaten up by cops on Waterdale Road, Discos.

Basically influenced by Memphis Soul, but not a pale imitation. One of the few bands that matured here that will pass the test of time.

GRAHAM CENTRAL STATION WARNER BROS RECORDS BS2814 (Release Yourself) LABELLE NIGHT BIRDS CBS (EPIC BL 33075) Grouped together because they repres­ ent two of the most innovative groups of today. G.C.S. led by ex Sly Stone bassist, Larry Graham. Very much extension of Sly’s thing, but with a much richer and complex sound. Densely textured choral effects dominated by Young’s rich bari­ tone voice, and brilliant lyrics. Labelle are fantastic. Creating music that cuts in on racism, sexism and gives them the chop. They are as they say; ‘Just an all girl band, dealing with fact and the pain.’

Their stage act complete with orgasms on stage has given them some publicity of late. Lead singer and writer Nona Hendryx is superb in both roles. Album produced and arranged by one of the unsung geniuses of soul, Allen Toussaujt, and backed by the Meters. In all an album that is impenitently and outrageously black— and female,

September 8 - October 6

Page 19

THE DIGGER

Showbags o f stickers and badges

Im pressions o f the w om en and politics conference

by Isabelle Rosemberg On a Sunday afternoon in Sydney someone told us about a feminist house in England where male dogs weren’t allowed in (male children had been barred some time back.) Hours later we were driving through Canberra - the seat of government, Alphaville, formal vistas, banks, insurance companies, airline off­ ices, not a person in sight, the pulse of the nation. Four women on the way to the official opening of the Women and Politics Conference at Parliament House, holding our gold-embossed invitations: “The Prime Minister and Mrs Whitlam are pleased to invite you to etc. etc , . .

Dress: Lounge suits.” Lounge suits? Is this some sort of joke? Should we stop and put our faces on? we ask each other laughing. ***i The Women and Politics Conference is the latest in a seemingly endless series of very expensive women’s conferences funded by the Australian government in International Women’s Year 1975 (hot on the trail of Population Year 1974).

International Women’s Year replaces the clenched fist symbol of womens liberation with the dove of peace.

When you’re in the business of elect­ oral politics public relations is very imp­ ortant and, after all, women are half the population, so the Australian govern­ ment has really bent over backwards, more than any other government in the world, to display its concern about us women in “our” year.

Maybe that’s a bit cynical. Some of them are certainly sincere, but what does it mean when the people handing over the $2 million for our benefit are men and women who are white, middle-class and

reform-oriented? What does it mean when a women’s health collective, for example, can’t get one cent from the government and a conference like this can get over $ 100,000?

*** On the steps of Parliament Ho,use black women are demonstrating. They are angry because this conference doesn’t recognise their special oppression as blacks: “No white women’s liberation without black women’s liberation!” What black woman is going to pay her $10 to come for one week and learn how to lobby, how to stand for pre-selection, how to play the parliamentary game, in a racist country? What black woman is even going to get to hear about it? The ladies filing past with their bouffant hairdos and gold oraton bags and boss husbands are embarrassed to have to walk this gauntlet. Later on, when the black women demonstrate inside Parl­ iament House while Gough Whitlam opens the conference, a woman standing behind them says “I wouldn’t give them any food.”

Black women aren’t the only ones who see the conference as an elitist sham.

Other women are shouting “No women’s liberation without socialist revolution” and “Women and Revolution, not bur­ eaucracy.” Soon “Lesbians are lovely” is scrawled on the toilet wall.

Comment: “Wasn’t it nice to see that demonstration outside. It’s so nice to go somewhere where something is happen­ ing.” No racism, no sexism, no bourgeoise no jabber jabber, no nuttin, so dull.

In Kings Hall, Parliament House, Gough Whitlam opens the conference before an audience o f the very nicest class of people (mainly women) who sip

moselle, munch garlic bread, sycophant gaily and wish that the dissatisfied, dis­ ruptive types would go away or at least stop drowning out Gough’s speech. I pick up a placard saying “Don’t make Timor into another Vietnam” and get elbowed by Margaret Whitlam so she can block the view of the demonstration.

With my nose six inches away from Gough’s arse I wonder where I should butt my cigarette.

Comment: “Where’s Timor?”

Conference perks include subsidised air travel from interstate if you fly TAA (hey, TAA have programmed their com­ puters to say Ms, big deal), a “survival kit” containing toothpaste, a tin of shoe polish, soap, matches and a bandaid. A brown plastic zip-up briefcase with Women and Politics Conference 1975 gold-embossed and full of boring goodies, stickers, badges and three different posters.

Wow. The first day of the conference is an anti-climax to the night before; it is inter­ national heavies’ day, and at a women’s conference where feminist/black/working class/revolutionary women are in a real minority it’s euphoric to hear some o f the most revolutionary, funny and stirring speeches you’ve ever heard by women from America, England, Fiji, Holland and Australia.

One of them, Juliet Mitchell, tackles the question that is to become the central one o f the day — - how do women fighting their oppression, get what they can from within an existing political system (the very one which oppresses them), while remaining critical o f it.

Understanding that the very terms within which we struggle (equality, freedom of

Euan Keddie

choice) are historically and economically determined, (what does the right to abortion mean if you can’t afford it?).

Some of the 800 women in the aud­ ience don’t take at all to this sort of stuff. A lot of them are National Party, Liberal Party and Right Life women.

When Charlotte Bunch (an American feminist) says “I assume that everyone here agrees that women are oppressed”, some women yell “No, we don’t”.

I’m sitting in front of three women who are not my sisters. Muriel Goss, an organiser with the Amalgamated Metal Workers Union, argues that you’ve got to fight for what you want, nothing is given. “No employer ever says, I got good profits this year, I’ll share them with you, to his employees.” The woman behind me: “Yes they do.” “Who, where, when?” we snap at her (I’ve been nurturing violent fantasies towards this woman for a while now). “My husband does.” When a black Australian gets up to say that every overseas woman has talked about racism but no Australian has, and describes the rotten conditions the blacks at, for example, Wilcannia, the woman behind me pipes up with “Tell them to get jobs, they won’t work.”

Late that night I stop at a take-away food place with a friend who’s wearing her conference ID badge. A migrant who’s slogging out his guts in this place for 15 hours a day sees the word politics on the badge and swings into a discussion on the virtues of democracy (Australia) the laziness of the unemployed, the evils of communism, and the natural inferior­ ity of women. He voted for Gough Whit­ lam but next time it’s Liberal.

Comment from the woman behind me: “It’s a free country.”

Euan Keddie

Pickets out in the cold, but not alone:

Bleeding the meat companies

by Grant Evans Bernie Leunig stepped in front of the oncoming car to stop it. He moved around to the window to talk to the driver and was lashed across the face with a chain. And the car roared through the gates. That was the first night of the now two-week-old meatworkers’ strike.

That night six meatworker pickets were arrested by police under the direct­ ion of a detective in a white trench coat, a flunky who the workers marked by calling “Hey Columbo!”

Pickets have been having a rough time lately. During the recent Melbourne printers’ strike quite a few pickets were arrested. The Age transformed the whole thing into a Custer’s Last Stand point of honour - they had never missed a print run in a hundred years. The paper trucks bursting out through the picket lines at top speed were shown like the US Cavalry breaking out of an Indian ambush.

Workers picketing Gilbertson’s meatworks (probably the largest of the comp­ anies affected) have had to cope with news-coverage accusing them of being cruel to animals - that they weren’t being fed . and were dying in the yards. Some people from the RSPCA rang the pickets and accused them of cruelty - presumably for not getting on with the job and killing the animals . . .

Bernie Leunig’s been a meatworker for 45 years and he says they’ve always been a militant union. We talked with him about ten days into the strike in a tin lean-to shed, complete with mobile council dunnie out the back that the pickets had constructed outside Gilbert­ son’s huge slaughterhouse in Yarraville, Melbourne. (They had to get a sturdier construction after their tent had been blown away by a storm five days into the strike).

The strike, he said, was originally

Brian Fleming, drivers delegate; Dave Denilovich; Ted Casey; John Costello, shop delegate; Horse, from the killing chain; Bernie Leunig and Digger Roach. about a $30 wage claim that the workers had put to the company. They’re on an industrial agreement that comes up for re-negotiation about July every year. The guy who bashed Bernie was one of the foremen. Now the workers won’t go back until he is sacked and only if the company gets the charges against the arrested picketers dropped, or pays for their court costs and possible fines.

The company tried to keep the operat­ ion going by using non-union staff on the first Sunday of the strike, they attempted to get deliveries out. A hundred and fifty pickets faced the 30 cops behind the company gates, and it looked as though it could shape up into an even bigger con­ frontation than on the Friday night, when Bernie was bashed. But the comp­ any backed off.

A couple of days later other workers in the factory, firemen and inspectors, came out in support of the picketing meatworkers and brought the slaughter« house to a complete standstill. From then on, as Bernie put it, the company began to bleed badly.

The propaganda against the workers though, was flowing thick and fast. The head of the company, Gilbertson, was presented as a ‘godfearing churchgoer’ on T.V. Picketers say that the stories about suffering animals is bullshit. On the first Sunday they had allowed animals to be taken out to be grazed, and had also allowed food in. The few animals that had died in the yards were no more than normally die given the way they are trucked and penned.

The company also tried to make a philanthropic gesture by supplying low grade meat to charitable institutions. The workers responded to this by helping with the deliveries of it. Tactically they have managed to stay one step in front.

At another large meatworks, Ralph’s, close by, the pickets have had a harder time being .pushed around by thugs hired by the bosses. “We’ll deal with them after this dispute is over,” said Bernie. “We’ve driven other operators who have tried that sort of thing in the past to the wall by blackbanning them.”

“We’ve had no trouble with workers trying to deliver stuff to the company either. They’re workers themselves and they’ve got no quarrel with us.” And while we were there trucks drew up alongside the pickets with a “How are ya,” and soon drove off again.

Somehow strikers are always presented as holding the ‘community’ to ransom.

But invariably whenever you go down to " talk to workers on strike this mythical community which is continually dressed up and paraded in the mass media suddenly disintegrates - because, workers in fact make up the bulk of the ‘comm­ unity’. The workers outside Gilbertson’s and other works were being given grog by local publicans, and had assistance from other unions and other people in small ways. The Altona Council had even supp­ lied them with their mobile dunnie after ‘complaints’ had been received about their sanitary habits by ‘neighbours’ (those inside the factory?)

The picket’s maintained 24 hours.

Mainly at night through to the morning though, because it’s then that deliveries are usually made. And it’s cold.

At the time of writing they’re stillout there slowly barbecuing their meat over the fire which is keeping them warm throughout the strike.

September 8 - October 6

THE DIGGER

Page 20

smotherhood

By Sandra Zurbo Two and a half years ago, after seven frustrating years o f mothering two children, I reached a decision that I could no longer go on. The children went to live with their father from whom I am now separated.

Often during these seven years I had fantasies - fantasies in which the children (and my husband) would be killed, die.

And when these fantasies became too horrible, I just fantasized that they would disappear. Then I would be free to go out in the world and live my life as an indep­ endent, self-activating human being.

These years were also marked with feelings of restrained violence. There were many occasions when I would sit by the telephone wondering if I should call the police to come and take me away because my children were in danger of being beaten by me. Not because they were ‘bad’ but because of my sheer frustration, and what I felt was my inability to cope and be whatever is meant by a ‘good mother’. In fact, I never did bash them, but perhaps the increase of known child bashing in this and other western countries is an indication o f the general situation with women.

You might be thinking at this point that men also have these fantasies and wish to rid themselves of the millstone of their families. This may well be so. But a strong double standard applies here. It is far more acceptable in our society’s terms for men to become involved in sexual relationships out­ side their marriage than it is for women. Men also have the outlets of the pub, the footy game, the union - a variety o f activities which enable them to keep their family at arm’s length when they’ve had enough.

Activity outside the home, unless carried on during the children’s school hours, is considerably less permissable for women unless it has some direct or indirect relation to the family, such as through the school parent teacher association.

Women are condemned for having sexual relations outside their marriage.

Women are often heard to say that despite their miserable marriage, they stay “for the children’s sake” , perhaps not think­ ing that the children are unhappy. And when the stage arrives for one or other partner to leave, it is invariably the man who walks out. If the woman does, she is a bitch.

It is rarely considered that the children should be with anyone else but their mother.

It is of course her ‘natural’ role, and there­ fore she should have them.

these roles (future mothers/wives and future workers). It is up to her to be the authority which prepares children for a life of discipl­ ine and obedience, first in the schools and later at work, and for women as wives. It is also important that she begin the process of sexual repression in her children. She does ithis by outlawing from an early age any form of touching which could be construed as sexual, and by breast feeding for only Ishort periods of time. In this she also denies her own sexuality in relation to the children.

Freud has shown us that children are sexual beings and that for them breast feeding is a pleasant and sexual experience. The sex­ ual feelings of the mother in this experience are denied, rarely talked about and guilt, once again | is associated with this pleasure.

I remember. still the sexual pleasure l got from breast feeding my own children but I also remember feeling guilty because of this pleasure. I thought I must surely be the most obscene, perverted person alive.

How then i s this role of mother rein­ forced in peoples’, and particularly women’s consciousness? One major instrument at work in modem society is the mass media, and most particularly women’s magazines, journals and TV, particularly through advert­ ising and to a greater or lesser extent the socalled family shows, soap operas and film.

Television ads show women, sanitized from head to toe, just as their houses are sanitized from ceiling to floor. Women cop­ ing with the standard two children, always perfectly groomed (if she’s not then she’s the subject of ridicule), calm - even serene smiling, always understanding, always know­ ing what to do in any situation, and selfless to the point of altruism. She carries out these functions in a home that has all mod cons; shiny floors, well cooked meals, whiter than white washing - life is a breeze. A white middle class breeze.

The husband’s role in all this is tnat of provider. Out to the office (in the ads he’s always an office worker of some kind) in the morning and back home at night in time to plant a peck on his wife’s cheek, give the kids a whiz around, eat her meal, maybe rub a bit o f vaporub into the kids chest and read them a story and that’s it. He is the helper and can only be because his life is lived out there in the ‘real’ world.

In film, no matter how independent women are at the beginning, in the end the> succumb to the true and natural role - wife and mother. If you have ever seen the Sand­ piper, Elizabeth Taylor’s role in this is perfect example of the demise of an indep­ endent woman, into someone who believes in the end that her desire for independence was wrong and that to be a wife and be good at it is really possible after all.

“In marriage, the supportive biological theory is the theory of maternal instinct.

The . . . argument for the maternal instinct goes something like this: women need to have children, it’s part of their nature . . . if women didn’t like to have children, they wouldn’t; this proves that women choose to have children. And since they choose to have children in large numbers, having children must come naturally to women. It’s an instinct - the maternal instinct.” Ti-Grace Atkinson, Amazon Oddessy.

Was this an easy decision to make? No, il wasn’t. It involved fears of what family and friends might think of me. I was giving up what is in fact the only legitimate role for women in our society, tnat of neing a mother. And though I was desperate, and the relationship with the children had become unbearable - for all three of us - 1 still felt guilty. This guilt is still there, two and a half years later, as are fantasies some times. These. frustrations and fantasies are common to enormous numbers of women.

What, then, is it about “motherhood’ that creates this kind of situation? Why do women continue to become mothers and what effect does this have on women who do? , The main functions of “mum” within the nuclear family, as I see it, are these: to begin the process of role-definition for the male and female children she has given birth to; prepare them for the functions that with

But what is the reality? What in fact happens to women ( and children in the process) who attempt to live up to the expectations placed on them by society in this way? For those women who leave the workforce to raise children they become unselfconfident, frustrated (yes, sexually as well as generally emotionally), depend­ ent on their husband and demanding on their children. Usually they live their lives vicariously through their husband who is their main link with the outside world..

From their children they demand loyalty and obedience, and as they’ve given up virtually all else to raise them, hang on to them for as long as they can. Witness older women, say round 45, when the children have expressed desires to leave home. This group of women often hang on to the children for as long as they can (tighter for girls than for boys) - because after 20 years of childraising and little else in their

m i

lives, what now will they have left for the next twenty or thirty years? They pour all their love into the children, hoping against hope that the children will stay, but knowing in the end they will leave.

Women try desperately to fulfill the image that they have of what they should be and what is expected of them. But in the terms it is presented to them, most them can’t. How can you be so serene and your house so sparklingly clean when you have; two grubby kids crawling or running about?

How can an individual mother know the solution to every problem? Why indeed should she feel that she should be that calm always, and her house so perfect? But she does.

And increasingly the results are depress­ ion, anxiety, insecurity. The increased rate of suicide and pill taking (barbituate and analgesics) among women for non-specific depression and known child bashing indic­ ates the extreme difficulties women have in trying to meet the expectation people have o f them, and indeed, the expectations they have internalized of themselves.

And what of the children? What effect does all this have on them?

They too become dependent, but almost entirely on this one person — the mother.

They have no independence and their dep­ endence on the mother is fostered for what else does she have in her life but their lives and the family as a whole. Children learn quickly to obey authority, to wheedle and plead for attention, and for money as they have no economic independence. They also learn that their bodies are not things, to be enquired about but to be hidden and ashamed of, and in the case of girls, even afraid of. They see mothers as a service who interacts primarily with and for them, and fathers as people who primarily interact with the world in a way which is exciting and they might wish to emulate - expecially if they are male children. The end result is people who are timid, conformist and unfree.

If there is a problem - and I say that there is - in the myth of motherhood, then are there any solutions? I wish to make clear that I am not suggesting that the way out of this dilemma is for all women to give up having children. What I would suggest how­ ever is that real choices become available to female children and adults to enable them to see themselves some ways forward to becoming fuller human beings other than becoming solely or primarily wives and mothers. Should they choose to work in whatever field they want to (and not in fields determined by their sex) they should be able to do so in a way which is guilt free and free of the nagging doubt that they are not real women because they are not marrying and having babies.

And for those who do decide to have children (married or not), the responsibility for caring for these small human beings is a responsibility which should be shared around a lot more than it is today. This means an enormous increase in the number of child care facilities - both in the local community and in the workplace, it means breaking down the rigid concepts of the nuclear family into more flexible living arrangements made by free choice - poss­ ibly some forms of collective living where the responsibility of child care and raising is the province of the household rather than the individual. It means too an end to the pervasive propoganda through the mass media and the education system which does no more nor less than keep women “in their place”.

For too long now women’s biology has been their destiny. It is only when women see other destinies for themselves when the institutions which oppress them the most those of the family and of motherhood have been eradicated through struggles of people, but by women particularly, that women, and children particularly, the beginnings of relationships which are freely chosen and lives which are lived individ­ ually and collectively in ways we could begin to call equal.

This article first appeared as. a talk on the ABC radio programme “Heresies”, July 4, 1975.

Page 21

THE DIGGER

September 8 - October 6

Galley talks about com m unism , his ignorance, and his killings Another recent recruit to the college lecture circuit is former Army Lt. William L. Calley, Jr., 31, who was recently rel­ eased after nearly three years o f confine­ m ent for his part in the My Lai massacre.

The remarks below are taken from his speech at Murray State University in Murray, Ky. I was sent to Vietnam to destroy comm­ unism. I was given an M-16 to kill a communist. I grew up in the McCarthy era, and of course no one could explain what a communist was because that made you a communist and you were under investigation. But you knew very rapidly that it was something that was bad, it was very horrible. If I’ve ever had a pre­ judice I think I was prejudiced from the word go against communists.

So whether you think you know where you’re at today, you’re a lot more cond­ itioned than you think you are. The government had a handle on me. All they had to do was say, “There is a communist. Kill it.” I was taught, from as early as I can remember, that there is nothing in the world to killing a comm­ unist. But when I killed my first comm­ unist—and it was a she—she was not armed. In fact, I don’t even think she

knew what she was doing there. But for the first time I recognized that communists also do come in human form.

And that did shock me, and it hurt.

To emphasize what I’m trying to say: During my trial many things were said.

But the things that people kept harping about was, “Why wasn’t anybody searched?” And for a big, strong he-man, it’s hard to make an answer. I found m y­ self in a position, and many of my men, that you could not get that close to the people that you killed for the fear that you would recognize them as human beings. You forced yourself, for your own mental stability, to stay distant from your enemy, you stayed with the old fears: the communist was bad, you were doing what was right. These are horrible things to put people under and they’re nothing I’m proud of.

One of the greatest hard questions for me to answer it, “Why didn’t I question the orders of My Lai?” It took me almost three years in prison to strip away my self-defense mechanisms, my ego, and to cut myself open and under­ stand myself. It’s not a matter o f my questioning or not questioning orders.

It was a matter that I was in a situation

that I didn’t know anything about. I did not know who the enemy was. I didn’t know if there was an enemy. I didn’t know if I was—I knew nothing about myself. I became, I was in a vac­ uum and dazed. So one thing that was taught in our military training and it was the only thing I could rely on to keep myself stable, and that was the belief that somebody up above you knew what was going on. And I understood the frustration of the men below me, and it hurts me to say that I had to lie to them but I did.

I didn’t know if the war was bad, what was going on. I gave them the confidence they needed. I drew my confidence from my superior, and he didn’t give me an order that I didn’t make right. My psyche made what he said right because I had no other place to go. And when men with weapons break down to that caliber, you’ve got a very bad situation, a very dangerous situation. It’s fear for your sanity, your morality and everything that you think makes you a person. I can’t testify for every person in Vietnam, but that’s how I was . . .

The Congress gave its power to make war and its main safeguard to keep us safe from our own Army to the President.

I was tried for a crime that is a crime because the government said it’s a crime.

But I was not tried for it, I was asked to stand responsible. I will not stand respon­ sible for the [My Lai] operation. But the government, those in the position to make the policy and give out directives, must stand responsible. I was# asked a long, long time ago by somebody: “Man don’t you think you’be been really screwed?” Well, I don’t. You have been screwed. You are the ones that have been beguiled and tricked. It was your brothers and sons that went to that war and died, maybe under the mask o f national security. It’s the only way that we can legally use the Army for national security that I know of. But those are the things that frustrated me and made me ask questions and I don’t have the answers for you. But I do feel very, very strongly that the Army of ours is there to protect you, and you must control it. It cannot control you, it cannot dictate policy to you nor who your friends are. You have the right as Americans under the Constit­ ution to pick your own friends, to pick your own enemies. It is only the Army’s job to do as you tell it.

-H ARPER'S WEEKL Y

Honduras; case-study o f a banana republic Next to disappear were the Colom­ bian priest Ivan Betancourt, French agronomist Lionel Coleman, professor Jose Antonio Martinez, Maria Elena, Bolivar Vargas and Ruth Argentina Garcia, all supporters o f the campes­ ino struggle.

The Church and the Students’ Union believing these persons to have been murdered, pressured the government to ihyestigate, and the provincial head of the army, his two lieutenants and two powerful latifundists were arrested and interrogated. For 124 hours the army dug a 40-yard deep pit on the land of one of the arrested latifundists. From this pit, on July 18, they brought up the tortured mutilated bodies of the missing people.

Casimiro, who had “escaped and dis­ appeared”, had in fact been removed from the prison and killed by latifundists with the full complicity o f local justice and police forces.

On June 20, the press in Central American countries reported that Hond­ uras was in a state o f alert. Tens of thousands of campesinos (peasants) had stormed a large town, demonstrating for land reform. The next day th§re. was no, mention of the events; Honduras had apparently disappeared off the map.

Censorship is an everyday reality in these countries. The ruling classes, supp­ orted by the foreign (mostly U.S.) inter­ ests that own much of their agriculture and industry, prefer to conceal news of peasants and workers organising against them.

But four days later Honduras was right back in the headlines. On June 25, 10,000 joined in a Hunger March on the town o f Tegucigalpa. An armed group of latifundists (wealthy land-owners) who were helping the army stop this march shot four campesinos. Simultaneously, news filtered through of the arrest and subsequent escape and disappearance of the American priest Jerome Cypher, alias Casimiro: Casimiro, the new Che, the armed priest who’d gone to the mount­ ains to lead a 600-strong campesino guerrilla army.

Honduras has a population of 2,750,000, 87 per cent of whom are campesinos. The majority of these campesinos are landless and many of them are seasonal workers for the two big U.S. banana companies, United Brand and Standard Fruit, and for the one hundred Honduran families that own almost all the land. Mel Zelaya, for example, the owner of the hacienda where the bodies were found, owns 49,500 acres o f the 2,471,000 acres of pineland.

The latifundists claim that “a group o f foreigners and nationals with exotic doctrines such as marxism-leninism have corrupted the clergy, divided the army, submitted the country to economic chaos and divided the campesinos and workers into opposing groups.” All of which, they fear, could lead to the closing-down of the two U.S. corporations whose presence they see as vital to the country. The latifundist offensive against the camp­ esino struggle is vicious; on the trail of the tortures and murders the last few days have brought armed attacks on a small peasant agricultural cooperative.

The peasants, who fought back with their machetes, seized some of the guns (MI rifles, the same as those used by the army) and discovered that they were owned by an ex-provincial governor and by a Rivas Melandez. Three armed men who set fire to another nearby cooperat­ ive were identified as employees of Rivas Melandez.

Land reform has been a controversial

problem in Honduras since 1924, when President Vicente Tosco made the first donation o f family lots to the campes­ inos. This effort failed as the campesinos’ lack o f financial resources and equipment forced them to resell their land to the latifundists. In 1926 a progressive Pres­ ident, Ramon Villedo, outlined a new and massive plan for land reform. That too came to nothing; Villedo was ousted from power a year later in a coup d’ etat by.

General Lopez Arellano. Then when Arellano himself, in 1972, passed a law whereby 14,000 families would have received 86,000 acres o f private prop­ erty, the latifundists put the pressure on until Arellano modified the law to cover only those very few peasants who already belonged to cooperatives. In January o f this year Arellano again gave in to pressure, this time the campes­ inos’, and passed another agricultural reform law. The latifundists immed­ iately set up small armed groups and worked at sabotaging the Arellano government through their pull with the Liberal and Conservative parties. Arell­ ano was thrown out of office in April for accepting bribes from the U.S. banana companies in what now looks like may have been a set-up.

The new military government of Colonel Melga Castro proved to be far

more reactionary than its predecessor.

And it quite clearly had no intention of implementing the new agricultural reform law. Seeing this, the campesinos staged a takeover by 10,000 people o f 109 national and communal properties on May 18, the idea being to force the government to negotiate. When they wouldn’t, the campesinos abandoned the appropriated land in a significantly well-organised manouvre. However the continued intransignece of the govern­ ment on the question of land reform led to further demonstrations of power by the campesinos (occupations of courts, key bridges and roads) and finally to the Hunger March of June 25, annihilated before it started.

Honduras really is a case-study o f a banana republic in crisis. There is no way that the latifundists and the government and army on the one hand, and the campesinos and their supporters on the other, can reach a congenial solution.

Also, the land-owners and government happen to have U.S. imperialism on their side, which isn’t going to help the land­ less any. Still, the peasant struggles in Honduras, along with the recent revival of guerilla activity in Guatemala and Nic­ aragua, are hopeful developments to watch in the struggles o f the Central American people.

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September 8 - October 6

THE DIGGER

Page 22

Gayzette ‘by Martin Smith

All gay information (female and male) should be sent to Box 4, Wentworth Building, University o f Sydney, 2006.

Last year Bill Beaumont and his lover founded a gay congreg­ ation in Adelaide called Christ’s Community Church and this year it became part of the Metropolitan Community Church.

Bill now regrets both actions.

“The US is forcing its ideas on the Australian Church, and this is a dangerous trend,” says Bill in a lengthy letter published in ‘Gay’ no.22. “MCC claims to be a church free of dogma and dictatorship of other denomin­ ations, yet I have never encountered such a dogmatic regime. It is yet another of those myriad American fundamentalist sects that retreat into self-cong­ ratulation from the real, “hostile” world, which, to me, is far more accepting.”

**** David Baker’s production of the movie ‘The Great Macarthy ’ has received some pretty rough treatment at the hands of rev­ iewers, culminating in the unprecedented occurence of an editorial blast in the Melbourne

‘Sunday Press’ Somehow I have to agree.

When Barry Oakley’s novel first came out I remember rev­ iewing it and saying then how refreshing it was to find an Australian writer who could see homosexuals as other than butch dykes and trizzy queens, but unfortunately Baker hasn’t transfered that aspect of the novel to the screen.

The novel provides just enough of Macarthy’s back­ ground to make his noncon­ formist stance credible, part­ icularly in the early hometown incident when the persecution of a homosexual teacher arouses Macarthy’s sense of justice and contempt for mindless attitudes.

But the film encourages the audience to laugh in sterotyped contempt at gays.

♦*** In May, Bishop Clancy (Aux-. iliary to the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal Freeman) rushed ktfcp print saying that “all good parents would shudder at the very thought of the Federal Government’s planned sex clinics.”

Immediately I wrote to Dr. Everingham, Federal Minister for Health, asking him about the clinics.

“The idea of the Action centres (Adolescent Counselling, Treatment and Information Centres) to be established by the Australian Department of Health as a pilot project in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane is based on the Brook Centres in the UK.

“In an era of increased sexual frankness and so-called permiss­ iveness there is inadequate attention to education regarding sexual and personal development of young people, at school, in the home and outside, an a non-permissive attitude to information.

“The aim is to provide a drop in centre where young people may discuss a variety of prob­ lems in a non-moralising, nonjudgemental atmosphere . . . ” * Matters that will be discussed at the centres, according to Dr. Everingham, will be “sexuality including homosexuality” and so I’ve written off asking just what will be taught about the subject.

I’ll keep readers in the picture.

****

BY THE WAY . . . . .

L ’Osservatore

della Domenica

has charged Italian film maker Pier Paolo Pasolini with lying out of ignorance or bad faith in asserting that St Paul suffered from sexophobia and probably was homosexual . . . At the time of writing, the placing on the restricted list o f Frank Moorehouse’s novel The Americans Baby (“Some of the episodes deal with sodomy, homosex­ uality, transvestism, bestiality, fellatio, cunnilingus and freelove with co-habitation and adultery,” according to a rep­ ort from the Victorian Advis­ ory Board on Publications) is still in effect. . . Earlier this

year Chutzpah, the Jewish gay movement, made a submission to the Committee of Inquiry into Public Libraries (critising the lack of good books about homosexuality in public lib­ raries) and since then several councils have written to the group asking for a list of books on the subject of homosexuality.

From small acorns . . .In June Federal Opposition Leader Malcolm Fraser said in an inter­ view with the Catholic Weekly (in answer to the question “What’s your view on legislation making homosexual acts between consenting adults in private legal in the ACT?”) that he thought he was against it, adding: “Well, one can’t poss­ ibly approve of it, but on second thoughts can one legislate effect­ ively about private morals?

Strange that they didn’t consider women as homosexuals when legislation on the subject was first drafted.” Several letters from gay groups to Fraser have gone unanswered. . . GLP 8, due out at the end of August, will include articles on historical materialism and sexuality, Illich and medicine, sodomy and early Australian settlement, the lyric­ ism of Joni Mitchell, other art­ icles on history and sexuality, and four short stories. It costs $1 a copy from P.O. Box A76, Sydney South, 2000. . .

For those interested two books by me are to be published soon The New Homosexual (a sort of personal statement and history

of Australian gay lib) from Outback Press, Melbourne, and the Australasian Book Society, Sydney, are to do Fragments O f Life (some autobiographical pieces about my life between 1942 and 1962) while Stein and Day, New York, are to use that piece by me which appeared in Nation Review con­ cerning my ‘coming out’ in an international gay anthology and Penguins have asked me (and I’ve agreed) to put together an anthology of Australian gay writing; fiction and non-fiction.

Sorry about that ego-rave but thought you’d all be interested . . . . Comedian Kenneth Williams on a TV programme recently attacked fellow com­ edians who used homosexuals for cheap laughs . . . when Quen­ tin Crisp’s memoir, The Naked Civil Servant , first came out in 1968 it caused a storm because it was, until then, the most revealing memoir by a homosex­ ual ever to be published in the UK and now Granada TV are in production turning the book into an hour-and-a-half prog­ ramme. Will we see it here? . . . . . . Nigel Goodwin, a member of the UK Festival of Light’s prestigious Council of Refer­ ence, was fined 45 pounds for committing an act of “gross indecency” in a public place French chef Jacques Morel.

Goodwin claims he’s innocent. .

By ierriman

CD

8-8

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The Ku Klux Klan ain ’t dead

“G ood evening, white patriots.”

by Robert E. Wise

Many people think that the Ku Klux Klan has faded from the American pol­ itical scene. However, racial and econo­ mic problems are causing a resurgence for one particular faction, the Knights o f the Ku Klux Klan.

What follows is a description o f one of the larger rallies, held April 4, 1975, in Denham Springs, LA. Two country bands had finished playing a half-hour before. The gravel parking lot o f the Old South Jamboree Hall in Den­ ham Springs, Louisiana, is filled with car and pick-up trucks. Refreshments are selling briskly.

Political rally?

Church meeting?

Country music concert? The 40 whiterobed figures standing in the rear o f the hall and the speaker’s words —“I like some niggers. Some niggers are alright, but they’ll look a lot better on a ship going back to Africa” —serve notice that this is a rally of the-Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, 1975 style.

Arriving an hour and a half before the rally is scheduled to start, I walk around the grounds and see some changes that modem times have brought to Klan proceedings! The lightweight cotton, robes with the wraparound hoods worn by most Klansmen look suspiciously perm­ anent-press. The “security force” for these rallies, robed and self-consciously wearing large pistols, carry new walkietalkies and crackle “Muskrat 1 to Muskrat 2” to each other across the parking lot.

Crosses have also improved with tech­ nology. The one u§ed for tonight’s-affair stands 40 feet high, is wrapped in burlap

soaked w ith-15 gallons of diesel oil, and then covered with polyethylene to protect it against rain. Some Klansmen are considering building an aluminium cross that can be carried from rally to rally and burned repeatedly. One staunch member has erected a small metal cross behind his house that can be burned for backyard rallies.

Even equal opportunity employment has caught up with the Klan. After des­ cribing the preparation of tonight’s cross, one Klansman ironically notes, “You know, the funniest thing is that a nigger crane operator put it up.”

A major tenet of the Klansman’s oath is that the identity of the membership shall remain secret, but there seems little concern for anonymity this even­ ing. Bill Wilkinson, the organizer for this rally, presses into every available hand an official Klan business card which titles him as “The Giant of Livingston Parish”.

Inside the Jamboree Hall, a small space has been cleared for a photographer who takes protraits of white-robed Klansmen against a brown backdrop. Many members request two shots, one with the hood off, the other with it on. Father-son portraits also prove very popular.

The image o f the Klan as a lawless bunch of night riders grates harshly on most members. Well-known female racing jockey Mary Bacon resents the problems that her affiliation with the Klan causes her at the track. In a soft voice, this striking blonde states, “I want you to know what the Klan is. It is not the illiterate Southern nigger killers that movies make us out to be. The Jews created the image of the Klan.”

Certainly the main attraction tonight defies any fixed stéréotypé of a Klans­ man. He is David Duke, the 25-year-old national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. A recent graduate in history from Louisiana State University, this young Klan leader cannot be dismiss­ ed as an archetypal redneck vowing to send hooded legions rampaging across the countryside. Personable and smooth, Duke has recently been touring the country, appearing on television shows and some college campuses.

The most noticeable characteristic of the Klan in this year 1975 is youth, both in the membership and in those attending the rally as spectators. Many of the robed figures milling outside the hall are under 30.

The same is true inside the hall. A large crowd 6f 1,500—many in blue jeans and long hair—packs the center floor and the bleachers on both sides of the building.

For some it may be Friday night enter­ tainment in a small town; others may just want a chance to howl, but about 150 o f this audience will fill out applic­ ation forms at the end of the evening, pay $15, and be sworn in as Knights of the K la n .........................

Bill Wilkinson quickly sets the even­ ing’s tone with his opening remark, “Good evening, white patriots.” Then follows the chaplain whose bald pudgy head with mindless eyes sits atop a faded yellow satin robe. “Cause us to be man enough and white enough,” is the solemn invocation. “Bring us as white people back as we once was (sic). . . . cause us to be patriotic Americans and to be firm white people . . . cause us not

to marry into other races . . . ” Next is Robert Scoggins, Grand Dragon from South Carolina, who parades a young blue-jeaned mother carrying her baby on stage and dramatically asks, “Who will fight for this child if white people don’t” He warns the audience o f other dangers. “White people in the North are adopting black children for mongrelization,” . and “the new attorney general Edward Levi just a few years ago was a communist leader. Now he is a government leader—and him pn anti Christ Jew.” Two more speakers and then the feat­ ured speaker, David Duke, mounts the stage.

Many of the young people here tonight are having problems finding jobs or going to school, so Duke scores them with how blacks receive preferential treatment for jobs and scholarships. “Tax money goes to the production of millions and millions of little black bastards. . . Who gets the promotion? The person with the black skin.”

Duke finishes his speech to a chanted chorus of “White power, white power, white power.”

When the lights are turned on again, a large number of the audience stay to be initiated as new members. One 22-yearold fills out his application form and thoughtfully explains, “I’ve been think­ ing a long time. Several times I’ve tried to get jobs. Always a black gets it. Both me and my brothel* have tried, but they told us we weren’t the right color.”

-H ARPER'S WEEKL Y

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Page 23

THE DIGGER

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